Challenge

by Quinn Ward

Calming was the last thing I’d call it. For us, me trying to fumble through braiding Sophia’s hair was torture. I was clumsy and half the time made things worse in the process of trying to keep her hair from being a frizzy mess.

  “Do you want me to show you how to do it?” he offered. I almost snapped out a retort that I knew how to braid, but shook my head at my stubbornness. Obviously, Peter had far more experience than I did, and it wouldn’t kill me to take him up on his offer. I sat on the floor next to him, and he turned Sophia slightly so I could see what he was doing. His longer fingers glided through her hair with an elegant grace, every gathered hair laying flat as he explained he was braiding loosely because a tighter braid hurt to sleep in. I’d always done the opposite, figuring a loose braid would come out as she tossed around in her sleep.

  When he finished, Sophia darted out of the room to see his masterpiece. “Oh Peter, it’s beautiful!” she proclaimed. His cheeks pinked and he bowed his head. “Daddy, can Peter do my hair every morning? He’s way better than you.”

  Peter stiffened as he looked to me. What in the hell was that all about? I patted his knee, allowing my hand to linger a moment. It was strange how I’d been so resistant to talking to him earlier, and now, having him in my home felt completely natural. He had been my best friend for two-thirds of our lives and hearing him in pain on the phone earlier had erased the time we’d been apart. Now, if only it vanquished the knowledge I was the reason we stopped talking. I pulled back and swallowed hard. “Honey, he’s going to go home soon and then he won’t be able to drive over here.”

  “But until then he could, right?” she bounded back into the room and climbed into Peter’s lap, looking up at him with those manipulative eyes that could probably get her the money out of a bank vault if she batted them at the right teller.

  “How about this?” he began, stroking a hand down her arm. I smiled when he leaned forward, inhaling the scent of baby shampoo and strawberry soap. His shoulders relaxed a fraction. I knew how he felt, because I’d cuddle with her the same way when I had a shitty day and instantly relaxed. “Whenever I come to see you and your daddy, I’ll do your hair. Does that sound like a fair deal?”

  “Deal.” She turned and kissed him on the cheek before jumping down. Hopefully, all this late-night flitting from place to place would burn off some of the sugar lingering in her system. “I’m going to find Maria and make sure she’s okay. And I need to tell her I’m sorry for forgetting she doesn’t have a mommy, either.”

  Sophia was really hung up on the mommy thing tonight. I’d thought she was doing better because she rarely mentioned Angela anymore, but apparently she was putting on a brave face. I made a mental note to talk to her pediatrician and see if he recommended having her talk to a professional. The very last thing I wanted was to fuck her up long term by pretending there wasn’t a problem.

  Her exit left me alone with Peter for the first time in almost ten years. I pushed off the floor and settled at the opposite end of the couch from him. We were mirror images of one another now, our backs against the arms of the couch, one knee propped on the cushions, an arm draped over the back. If I leaned forward just a bit, I could fold my fingers around his. We stared at one another, neither knowing how to start the conversation that needed to be had. I wound up taking the safe way of breaking the silence. “You’re good with kids.”

  Peter shrugged. “Kids are cool. They don’t expect a lot. They’re easy.”

  All true. That was part of why I didn’t begrudge the amount of free time I spent with Sophia. Some parents complained about losing a piece of themselves when they had kids, but with everything that’d gone on in the past year, time with her was a welcome reprieve. She didn’t ask the tough questions I didn’t want to address. “I was surprised is all. Didn’t think you had much experience with kids.”

  “Just because I’m gay doesn’t mean I live in some kid-free bubble,” Peter sneered, sitting up straighter. Shit. Did he think I was a homophobic asshole like his dad? If he did, that was on me, too. I hadn’t given him any reason to think otherwise. “Sorry, that was stupid of me to say. It’s just that it was a long ass day, and Papa’s making it impossible for me to stay at the house. I look at Maria and want to stick around for her, but then he opens his mouth and I remember why I left.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You didn’t make him the way he is anymore than you made me the way I am.” Peter shrugged again. I’d always hated the way he did that. It was his way of not verbalizing that this was the life he’d been given and he saw no way of changing it. But he had changed it. He’d chased after the life he wanted, and I saw that now. Even through his pain, he was more alive now than he had been as a teen.

  Tonight, he was dressed in a pair of tight jeans, very deliberately shredded across the thighs, and a My Little Pony T-shirt. Seriously. Sophia would’ve gone nuts over his outfit if she hadn’t been so laser-focused on him doing her hair. The Peter I’d known had always worn shades of black and gray. He wouldn’t have been caught dead in ponies and rainbows. I leaned forward so I could touch my fingertips to his. Needed him to look up at me.

  “Peter, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the way you are.” He jerked his hand away from mine. When he opened his mouth to argue with me, I cocked my head to the side, silently asking him to hear me out. This was the good thing about knowing someone for so long; we understood each other’s subtle nonverbal cues. “I’m serious. You’re an amazing man, maybe more now than you were before you left. Almost definitely more, because you’re not hiding who you are anymore.”

  “Yeah, and all it took was me putting as much distance as possible between me and my entire world,” he scoffed. “But seriously, don’t feel like you need to somehow validate me. Moving away and chasing my dreams turned out to be the best thing I ever did. It showed me there are people out there who will love every ounce of me in all my sparkly glory. There, I don’t have to worry about someone making ignorant comments if I walk out of my bedroom wearing a shirt that makes me smile. I don’t have to worry about spying on what was supposed to be a private moment, storming out when they realize I’m a freak. No one’s disgusted by me there.”

  “Peter, that’s not why I walked out that day,” I told him. My heart twisted and my stomach knotted. I knew that’s what he thought, but hearing him say it filled me with yet another layer of regret. I’d helped carve that chip on his shoulder.

  “Really? You could’ve fooled me.” He reached back and yanked the tie out of his hair. I nearly choked as the bleached blond waves fell across his shoulders. When he leaned forward, running a hand through his hair, I realized what he was doing. He was trying to shield himself from the pain this conversation would inevitably cause. “You couldn’t get out of that bedroom fast enough, and then the entire week at camp, you made sure you were paired up with someone I couldn’t stand so I wouldn’t approach you.”

  I didn’t think I’d consciously tried to keep Peter at a distance, but I believed his memories more than my own. Honestly, I’d been so caught up in what seeing Peter made me feel that I attached myself to people who wouldn’t make me question myself. Not him, me.

  “I’m sorry.” God, I was already getting tired of hearing myself say those words. They were insignificant and would never heal what I’d done to him. What my cowardice had done. My fear for what would’ve happened if it’d been one of his sisters who’d walked into the room instead of me.

  “That cut deep, Freddie,” Peter admitted. I wanted to reach out and push the curtain of hair away from his face. Wanted to know if it was as soft as it looked. My brain was quickly filling with so many inappropriate ideas of what I should do. “By the time you caught me, I knew who I was. The hardest part of coming out was admitting to myself that I’d never be who they wanted me to be. I wouldn’t find a good woman to marry and carry on the family name. I couldn’t stay in town and run the bakery, because the longer I stayed here, the more I died inside. As long as I lived under
Papa’s roof, I could never be the person I was born to be.”

  “You should’ve told me,” I responded flatly. “We were best friends.”

  “And look what happened when you found out,” he shot back.

  There was a knock against the wall and both of us turned to see a puffy-eyed Maria holding sleepy Sophia in her arms. “Guys, I’m going to try to get this one settled down.”

  “You can put her in my bed,” I told her. I should take my daughter out of Maria’s embrace and put her back to bed myself, but I worried Peter would completely close down if I left the room. Hell, the way tonight was going, he’d probably decide coming over here had been a huge mistake and be long gone before Sophia fell asleep. Plus, it wasn’t like I was leaving a stranger to care for her. Sophia loved Maria.

  “That’s okay. I think it’ll be better if she’s in her own room tonight.” I blinked a few times, stunned that a teenager was contradicting my parenting decisions. She shook her head. “You know, at the other end of the hall, with her door closed, where little ears won’t hear conversations meant for adults.”

  Oh. That. I’d just been effectively schooled in parenting by a teen. “Yeah, that’s a good idea.”

  “But there’s no TV in my room, Daddy,” Sophia complained.

  “It’s okay, we can watch a movie on my iPad,” Maria quickly responded. She dropped Sophia into my lap on her way to the front door. “Give your daddy goodnight kisses and I’ll be right back.”

  Peter held out the keys. Maria returned a minute later, both of their overnight bags in hand. “I’ll probably snuggle in with Sophia if that’s okay with her.”

  “Daddy says I give the best snuggles,” Sophia proclaimed with a broad smile. “When my mommy left us, I needed lots of cuddling. That’ll probably help you, too.”

  “I’m sure that’s exactly what I need.” Maria sniffled as she hugged her brother. She whispered something I couldn’t hear and he shook his head. She pulled back and the two had a silent conversation with their eyes. Both of them needed this time together, getting to see how alike they were without the toxic poison of their childhood. As I watched them, I knew what I needed to do.

  4

  Peter

  “She needs you here for her,” Freddie declared as soon as we were alone.

  “We both know that’s not possible, Freddie,” I argued, not telling him I’d been trying to come up with a way to stay in the area since minutes after I’d walked through the front door last night. Where Papa seemed indifferent to my return and Lucia acted like I’d personally offended her with my presence, Maria instantly clung to me. But the DC area was expensive and my job was back in New York. I didn’t have much in savings, and staying with Papa, even short term, wasn’t an option.

  “Stay here,” Freddie offered. I gaped at him, positive I’d drifted off to sleep. He’d been disgusted when he found out I was gay and now he was offering to let me stay in his home?

  “Why?” I pushed the hair away from my face and looked directly at Freddie. He was a shitty liar, and if he tried to feed me some bullshit excuse, I was done. Out of here. The one promise I’d made to myself when I left was that I was going to live my life on my terms, and key among them was I wouldn’t do a damn thing out of obligation. I sure as hell wasn’t going to let Freddie do something I bristled at. “If this is out of some misguided need for penance, save it. Shit happened, we can’t change that. But I do not want you offering me a place to stay because you think it’ll erase the past.”

  “I don’t think that at all,” Freddie insisted. “Look, we’re both too tired to get into the myriad ways I fucked up as a friend to you, but I want that.”

  “Didn’t act like it earlier,” I interrupted. “When I saw you come up to the line, all I could think was maybe this was my second chance to make my friend see that I’m not some degenerate just because I like wearing makeup and sucking dick. The whole time you were talking to the rest of my family, I was running through what I would say to you when you reached me, even though I half expected you to stop at Maria and then walk away.”

  Freddie flinched at my admission. Too fucking bad. This was my chance to clear the air, and I wanted him to feel a fraction of the pain he’d caused me.

  “I wouldn’t have done that,” he insisted.

  “You could barely look at me,” I shot back. “What else was I supposed to think?”

  “I know, okay?” Freddie sprang up off the couch and started pacing around the room as he scrubbed a hand over his hair. “Seeing you again fucked with my head, for reasons.”

  “What reasons?” I pushed him. Freddie shook his head. “Tell me, Freddie. Because right now, I can’t convince myself you’re offering me a place to stay out of anything other than either pity or guilt, and if that’s the case, I think it’s time for me to leave. I can come back to pick up Maria in the morning.”

  “Stay.” Before the word was out of his mouth, Freddie had crossed the room and had his hand on my shoulder. His breathing was ragged, and I wondered what he wasn’t saying. “I do want to talk to you, make you see that how I reacted had nothing to do with you and everything to do with me and my own issues. But we’ve both had a long, shitty day, and I don’t want either of us saying things we can’t take back.”

  Shit. I hated it when Freddie made sense. I was already being extra bitchy, and the soft, sad look in Freddie’s eyes told me he was being sincere. “Fine. You’re right. We’ll stay here tonight and talk tomorrow. Do you have to work?”

  Freddie shook his head. “I have to go in for dinner, but Carlos offered to open since I worked a long shift today. I was planning to take Sophia shopping for summer clothes since she’s outgrown just about everything in her closet.”

  Freddie probably wasn’t even aware of the way he smiled when he mentioned his daughter’s name. I was stunned when she told me she was his kid, but only because Freddie never struck me as the type to want kids. He never seemed to like kids when we were younger. He’d often complained about how he didn’t want to hang out at our house because my sisters were a pain in the ass. They were, but I’d always accepted that they were family and I had to put up with them. Now, he came to life anytime his daughter walked into the room and was talking about taking her shopping, which was something I doubted he’d learned to love over the years.

  “Then why don’t we get some sleep now, we can talk in the morning while Maria keeps Sophia occupied, and depending on how things go, I’ll tag along.” Inserting myself into Freddie’s life was a bad idea, yet I couldn’t stop myself from offering. If we got back on steadier ground, it was going to be difficult for me to walk away from him. From them, really, because Sophia had almost instantly wormed her way into my carefully guarded heart.

  “Why would you do that?” Freddie asked. I considered it progress that he wasn’t refusing me outright.

  “Because I was the one who used to drag you to the mall,” I reminded him. “You would’ve been happy with packaged T-shirts and clearance finds from the big box stores and complained every time I forced you to make an effort with your appearance.”

  “Says the man who’d buy anything he found in a shade of black or gray,” Freddie teased. And yeah, I hadn’t had much color in my life back then, but that was because I’d convinced myself I could pull off any look I wanted as long as I wasn’t drawing attention to myself. Color, somehow, equated throwing open the closet door in my adolescent mind.

  “Yeah, but you have to admit, I looked damn good in black,” I countered.

  “You did,” Freddie agreed. The air was knocked out of my lungs as his mouth turned into a wistful grin, taking in my current attire from head to toe. “Then again, you’ve always been able to pull off just about anything.”

  Oh, if he only knew. There were some of my favorite clothing items that were sure to send Freddie running, and if we were alone, the no-holds-barred side of my personality would’ve probably dropped my pants to see if he still thought so when he caught a glimpse
of the royal purple satin hugging my tight ass and massaging my balls. It wouldn’t be the first time, but I decided to behave, not wanting Freddie to think I was going out of my way to offend his sensibilities.

  Freddie cleared his throat and shook his head vigorously. Oh, to know the thoughts he was trying to banish. Perhaps he wasn’t lying when he insisted I’d misunderstood his reaction years earlier. “We can play tomorrow by ear. I don’t want to dominate the time you should probably spend with your family.”

  “Dominate me, please,” I responded, thinking too late about what I’d just said. My entire face heated with embarrassment as I wished for a sinkhole to appear and swallow me whole. Fuck. I really needed to get a grip and remember I couldn’t let my freak flag fly quite as high until I got back to the safety of the life I’d carefully cultivated.

  I watched Freddie’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed hard. Hard. Don’t think about things being hard. Without another word, he started walking through the house, turning out the lights. I grabbed my bag and followed him up the stairs.

  “You can sleep in there,” he said, not stopping on his way to the end of the hall. I followed, wanting to check in on Maria. She hadn’t slept well last night, and I’d spent half my night watching her toss and turn in the sleeping bag she’d rolled out on the floor of my bedroom.

  I peered around Freddie’s shoulder, wondering if he’d be opposed to me taking a picture of my baby sister, sound asleep with his daughter wrapped in her arms. It was the most peaceful Maria had been since my return, and I wished it were possible for her to be content all the time.

  Without realizing what I was doing, I rested my head on Freddie’s shoulder as we watched the girls sleep. “Do you think she hates me for leaving her alone to deal with them?”

  Freddie turned around slowly, wrapping his arms around my back. The tender press of his lips to my forehead stole my breath away once again. He held me against his chest as he spoke. “For a long time, she was confused. You never saw it, but she worshipped you, wanted to be like you. When you left, your Mama worked hard to make Maria see that you didn’t leave because of anything she’d done or because she didn’t love you.”