by Fiona Zedde
But that was never going to happen.
A sudden pain lanced through Sage’s chest, and she bit back a gasp. “I think you should go,” she said, abruptly exhausted. “It wasn’t smart of you to come here.”
Outraged heat flared in Phil’s eyes, and Sage was almost glad to see it. “Are you calling me stupid now?”
“We both know the answer to that question.” Phil was by far the smarter of the two of them, and she had her Ivy league degrees and Mensa membership to prove it.
“Then what are you saying to me exactly?” Phil demanded.
The words were stuck in Sage’s throat but she managed to cough them up. “I’m saying I just can’t—can’t be with you right now.”
“At all?”
“At all.”
The air hissed from between Phil’s teeth like a balloon deflating. Then her crossed arms formed a barrier over her chest, across her heart. Slowly, her face rearranged itself. Became cooler, then cold. And the tears that had been gushing up from the edges of her eyes stopped like they were being sucked back in.
“We still need to talk,” Phil said finally, her voice low and measured. “We have to resolve this.”
Sage shook her head and took an uncertain step to the side and away from Phil. Everything she’d built with Phil over the past twelve years was really gone. The thought struck Sage like a blow to the chest. If she hadn’t been leaning against the soundboard she probably would have fallen over. Her mind flew through all that had happened in the last day and a half.
And now her parents would be here too.
Her parents. And Miss Opal.
It was too much.
The breath churned in Sage’s lungs. Her stomach roiled, but she fought for control and swallowed hard. Her tongue dragged heavily across the sandpaper dryness of her lips. “If… Can you leave the house for a few days next week? That’s when my parents are coming.”
Scorn flashed in Phil’s eyes obliterating any trace of hurt. With a sneer, she pulled herself up to her full height, her chin jutting out. Sage braced herself for the full blast of Phil’s temper only to watch Phil quietly turn around and walk out of the studio.
In the shocked silence, Sage realized then that Phil’s feet had been bare. The slap of her lover’s naked soles against the smooth hardwoods echoed, empty and loud, long after the door closed behind her.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
After leaving the studio, Sage got a room at the Four Seasons for the next few days.
She tried to convince herself it was to give Phil time and privacy to pack up her stuff and leave, but the reality was that Sage was too much of a coward. Even though this was what she wanted, the thought of watching Phil separate herself from the home they’d built together made her feel sick.
She’d done this before with Phil, asked her to take off and leave their house for the brief length of her parents’ visit. Phil never liked it. And she’d always used those times to reason with Sage about coming out to her family. This time, Sage wouldn’t have to deal with that aggravation or worry about whether or not Phil left remnants of herself at their house. She wouldn’t have to deal with anything where Phil was concerned. Not anymore.
Barely an hour into her pity party for one at the hotel bar, Sage’s mother finally called her about their Miami visit.
“Opal can’t wait to live in the same house with you again. Even if it’s only for a week.” Her mother opened with that when Sage answered the phone.
“Good morning to you too, mother.”
“Don’t be a smart ass, Sage Danielle.”
As if she’d dare at this stage of the game. Sage balanced her phone between her ear and shoulder and nodded her thanks to the bartender when he slid her a second rum and Coke in anticipation of her finishing the one in her hand very soon. Someone bumped into Sage with a laugh, one of a group of suits who looked like they were celebrating an early morning something.
“Sorry,” the suit said with a laugh and went back to her companions without waiting for Sage’s response.
“Are you at a bar?” Sage could hear the outrage in her mother’s voice even from so far away.
“It’s way too early to be drinking,” Sage said, neatly sidestepping the actual question. She’d had lots of practice with that over the years. The bartender passed her with a vaguely upraised eyebrow. Sage ignored him. “What’s going on, mother?”
Puttering sounds in the background and snatches of a nearby conversation reached Sage though the phone. Good, her mother couldn’t give her full attention to giving her shit for living her life. “No, Trevor, not that one. Wait…Sage!”
“Yes, mother.” She took the last swallow of her first drink and slid it toward the bartender, then reached for the fresh one he’d just dropped off. “I’m still here.”
“We’re coming in on Saturday afternoon. Do you have time to pick us up or should we get a taxi?” It wasn’t a real question. If Sage even hinted that she was too busy to pick her mother up from the airport, she’d be hearing about her failings as a daughter all the way to the grave.
“I’ll come pick you up. No problem. Do you have the flight information?”
Her mother gave Sage the same details that Miss Opal had provided. “Got it. I’ll be meet you once you get through customs.”
“Good.”
And that was that.
“We might be too hungry to wait for you to cook so you can just take us out for a nice early dinner.”
Good to know she was already planning Sage’s day and evening too.
“Of course.”
One of the suits was paying far too much attention to Sage’s conversation, or maybe just to her, eyeing Sage over the rim of her martini glass while the others in her party chatted on about some business deal or other.
The woman looked uptight, her hair in an up-do that pulled at the edges of her face like an instant face-lift. The navy suit she wore wasn’t doing her body any favors, but her face was interesting enough with its fat, red lips and the mole at the corner of one eye.
“I have to go, mother. My friends just got here.” Sage kept her eye on the woman who didn’t look the slightest bit embarrassed to be caught staring.
“Okay, honey. See you Saturday.”
“All right, Love to Daddy and Miss Opal.”
Once her mother hung up, she slid the phone in her pocket and leaned her forearms on the bar. The condensation from her drink soaked into the coaster and the drink itself was steadily on its way to becoming half water and ice. Although she’d badly wanted a drink when she came down to the bar, now the thought of getting drunk had lost some of its appeal.
Her parents were coming. Phil was gone. If she kept going, she’d only give herself the sweet gift of a hangover the next day. A pounding head and a trick stomach would only compound the misery of having to pretend not a big, butch dyke once her parents and Miss Opal got into town.
“Fuck…” she muttered.
“That would be nice right about now, wouldn’t it?”
The suit was closer to Sage than the last time she looked, having taken the place of the one who’d stumbled into Sage during her phone call. The stranger licked the rim of her martini glass and gave Sage the most thorough eye-fucking she’d had in a long time.
Sage decided to play dumb. “What would be nice?”
The woman didn’t allow her to play dumb for long though. “A nice, long fuck.” She took a slow sip of her martini, her tongue pressing into the glass, long and flattened enough to show off the silver stud piercing through it. “I have a room upstairs.”
The glimpse of silver in the woman’s tongue kicked a sharp response in Sage’s belly. But probably not the one the woman wanted.
Phillida. Her ring. Her promise.
Sage squeezed her thighs together and the curve bar through her clitoral hood pressed back, sending a bolt of pleasure straight to her core. They’d gotten the piercings together, an unofficially-official sign of their commitment only they knew
about. They were both made of titanium and, when Phil went down on her, she loved to flick her tongue to click the metal balls together. She said it was their own special music.
Sage swallowed the burning lump in her throat, then took a long sip of her drink when that didn’t help. She cleared her throat, glanced at the woman once before turning back to face the bar and the bartender who hovered nearby, watching the sparse bar crowd and polishing glasses now that there was no one around needing fresh drinks.
“Good luck with finding that morning fuck,” Sage said. “This seems like a good place for it.” She knocked back as much of the drink as she could in one swallow and walked away from the bar.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sage saw her parents before they saw her. They came out of customs, her father pushing a luggage cart loaded down with three suitcases that looked over-weight from where Sage was standing. Food from Jamaica, most likely. Even after all these years, they had Jamaican friends who lived in Miami and asked them to bring back what they probably thought of as the best part of Jamaica. Food. Fried sprat. Roast breadfruit. Chippies banana chips. The chocolate candy Sage used to love as a kid but couldn’t stand the taste of now.
She pushed away from the column, sent off one last text to Nuria to wrap up the distracted conversation they’d been having about Sage’s so-called biphobia and tucked her phone away in her back pocket. She lifted her hand to wave the same moment her father wheeled the cart in her direction.
“Sage!” His big voice boomed out through the busy concourse.
Being away from him, away from them, it was easy for Sage to forget what a forceful man he was away from his wife. His wide chest, powerful body, and carrying voice hinting that he was a man in control of all things in his world. And away from his wife, he took up more space than when he was with her. A case of a powerful man ceding control to someone smaller than himself by choice. It was an interesting dynamic if Sage allowed herself to think about it. But she purposefully did not.
“Daddy.”
He deftly maneuvered the cart through the thick weekend crowd, his smile wide and very much pleased. At his side, his wife, pretty and conservative in her “airport clothes” which consisted of a black skirt suit and low-heeled shoes, had her phone in her hand and used it to wave at Sage. Miss Opal, who Sage hadn’t seen in years despite talking with her at least once a month since she left Jamaica as a child, looked like she was going to church in her wide yellow hat, white dress, and yellow shoes.
She held a plate wrapped in tin foil in front of her like a shield while her wide-eyed gaze bounced around the airport. But once she saw Sage, her eyes focused like a laser beam and her smile nearly split her face in half.
“Sage! My honey child.” She rushed through the crowd, miraculously avoiding getting shoulder-checked, to wrap her arms around Sage. The edge of the plate dug into Sage’s back as they hugged. Miss Opal smelled like rose water and cooked ackee. Like home.
“I hope we didn’t keep you waiting too long,” her father said. “That immigration line was murder.”
“No, not at all. It was no problem to wait,” Sage said over Miss Opal’s head, still squeezing the woman who’d managed to shrink at least two inches since they’d last seen each other but whose affection had only grown. “I keep myself occupied.”
“You look good, babes,” Miss Opal said. “A little skinnier than last time, but still good.” She plucked at the neckline of Sage’s shirt.
Despite the heat, Sage wore a long-sleeved button-down shirt and slacks, keeping everything covered except for the V of skin revealed by the two open buttons of her shirt. Her parents had seen her since the last set of tattoos, but Miss Opal hadn’t. She didn’t want to spring them on her just yet.
“You have a man here treating you right?”
Sage winced. “No man…”
Did she imagine it or did her parents just share a look over Miss Opal’s head?
Her mother breathed a gusty sigh that lifted the cloth over her significant bosom. “All right now. Everybody ready?”
After exchanging a quick set of hugs with her parents while keeping her arm firmly around Miss Opal, Sage escorted them to her parked car. Once they were buckled in, she navigated the hectic airport traffic and streamed out onto I-95 with the rest of the cars fleeing the airport. She didn’t know which traffic was worse, coming or going.
“You guys want to eat first or freshen up at home before heading out to eat?”
“Let’s drop off these bags,” her mother said. “I don’t want some worthless criminal to break into your car and steal our luggage. It took Miss Opal nearly all day to bake the plantain tarts.”
“Plantain tarts?” Sage perked up. From the passenger seat, Miss Opal gave her a wink. Plantain tarts were, hands down, Sage’s favorite of all the delicious things Miss Opal made. “We definitely don’t want that,” she said, and turned the car toward home.
Since they weren’t going to stay long, Sage didn’t bother opening the garage door to park inside. Her insides tripping with near-anxiety, she pulled up to the house and parked the car in the circular driveway. The street was quiet and the tall palm trees around their property gave the front yard a feeling of privacy, despite the actual close proximity of their neighbors.
“Wow! This is nice!” Miss Opal tumbled from the car, still clutching the foil-wrapped plate. She looked around with awe written all over her face.
Sage tried to see the house through Miss Opal’s eyes, a home that was smaller than where her parents lived. The two-story, Mediterranean style house with a sleeping porch on the second floor and an explosion of purple flowers trailing up the driveway, flowers the landscaper was paid well enough to take care of. Purple was Phil’s favorite color.
“Come on in. The inside is even better.” It had the A/C on for one thing.
With her mother’s massive Louis Vuitton bag dragging down her shoulder, Sage unlocked and opened the door, moved through the brightly lit foyer with light streaming in through the stained-glass mosaic over the front door. “I’ll just put your bags in your rooms and you can freshen up, or do whatever you need. We can leave whenever—” both her feet and words stumbled. “—you’re ready.”
Her brain couldn’t process what she was seeing, or what she wasn’t.
From her long-legged sprawl on the couch, Phil stretched and yawned and the top of the pajama pants set she wore—white and silky—rode up to show her flat stomach and the platinum belly chain curved just beneath perched her navel. Her laptop was open next to her and her cell phone sat on the ottoman next to her feet.
“Hi there.” She leveled a challenging gaze at Sage before turning a smile to her parents.
“What are you—?”
“Phillida! What a nice surprise to see you.”
Sage’s father dropped his bag in the middle of the living room floor and crossed to where Phil was gracefully getting to her feet. His grin was wide and happy.
“It’s good to see you too, Papa Bennett. I didn’t know you were getting in today.”
A pulse thudded wildly in Sage’s neck and she gripped the strap of the bag over her shoulder like she was trying to strangle it to death. Better the bag then Phil’s damn neck. She couldn’t help but notice her mother who stood at the entrance to their wide living room looking like she’d just sucked on a lime, her lips puckered and disapproving, while she looked anywhere but at Phil.
“That’s fair since we didn’t know you’d be here,” Sage’s mother said.
“That makes two of us,” Sage muttered.
Apparently unbothered, Phil practically floated from Sage’s father and his warm welcome to stand in front of Miss Opal. “You must be the most amazing woman alive,” she said to Miss Opal, her smile genuine and setting her brown eyes to sparkling. “I’m Phillida, Sage’s very good friend.”
Sage nearly jumped out of her skin, but Miss Opal was preening under Phil’s skillful seduction. Her oak skin gleamed with pleasure and the denture-ba
ring smile made her seem almost like a child.
“Mr. Bennett talks about you sometimes dear. You’ve even prettier than he said,” Miss Opal said.
Another sound from Sage’s mother. Which Phil ignored as she shared a hug with Miss Opal like she was a fond and long-lost relative. When she pulled away, Miss Opal followed her with her eyes, looking pleased indeed, as she made her way to Sage’s mother who still looked like she smelled something long dead and rotten.
“Mrs. Bennett, it’s good to see you again.” They didn’t so much as exchange air kisses.
“You look…comfortable, dear heart.”
Phil’s smile didn’t falter. “I try to be as much as possible.” Then she spun around, the white silk moving gracefully around the lines of her tall and elegant body. She must have been wearing underwear because the tips of her breasts that usually made themselves eagerly known in the silk were noticeably absent.
“Sage, you can show your parents to their room and I’ll take Miss Opal’s bags to the other guest room.”
Her father blinked in confusion, but Sage did the only thing she could do, which was what Phil said. The bag on her shoulder suddenly felt ten times as heavy, especially with the added weight of her mother’s suspicious stare. Her parents followed her down the hall.
In the guest room, done in shades of brown and sapphire blue, she put down her mother’s bag and the massive rolling bag of her father’s that she carried.
“Here you are.” She swallowed past her dry throat and fought the age to clear the massive lump that had formed there in the last few minutes. “The bathroom’s through there if you want to tidy up before we leave.”
And she thought that was going to be that, but she should have known better, at least from her mother.
