by Roxy Harte
Just whose idea was it to power walk the neighborhood at six in the morning? Garrett is no help, having sprinted ahead in a jog that made it appear he was training for the Boston Marathon. He is no longer even in sight.
“So what’s the story between you and my son?”
I choke on my own saliva, and stop in my tracks, doubled over, making a big deal of breathing. I peek at her tidy figure draped elegantly in white, not a drop of sweat visible, wondering how a woman of sixty manages to look so good.
“Well?” she asks, not forgetting what led up to my wheezing attack.
“There isn’t a story. We’re dating,” I manage. Her eyes narrow.
“Really? My son’s gay. He owns a lewd sex club. What he does cannot be called dating.” She power walks away.
I jog to catch up. “Fine. We’re not dating. We live together,”
She stops dead in her tracks. “My son is gay. I don’t know what kind of trickery you’re playing at, but it’s taken me a very long time to accept that my only son will never give me grandchildren, so how dare you taunt me with lies.”
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t taunting you,” I protest.
“Did you know Tony?” she asks, not waiting for my answer. “He was a lovely young man. He sure charmed the pants off Garrett. My husband hated Tony with a rare passion.” Her voice catches, but only for a moment. “He hasn’t spoken to Garrett since the day Garrett left med school to be with Tony.”
I can’t speak, not knowing what to say.
“My family was destroyed by Garrett’s unnatural inclinations. So, whatever game is going on between you and my son…take it back to San Francisco. I will not let you destroy my husband by giving him false hope that he didn’t raise a queer after all. Did you even consider that Garrett only brought you here to meet his parents for one reason? Maybe to get back in his father’s good graces? Does he need money? Well, he won’t get that. My husband wrote him out of the will years ago. So take my son back to San Francisco and that horrible sex club he calls home.”
I blink, shocked.
I expected her to be offended by me—but for the sake of me—not because of hostility toward her son and especially not because of his sexual preferences.
“I don’t think Garrett brought me here to meet you for any other reason than for us to meet,” I say, defending Garrett. “And he sure doesn’t need your money!”
Her laugh is cold and bitter. “He may have money, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t need more.”
My mouth opens and shuts but no words come out.
“Such a dear, sweet girl. So young, so naïve, so innocent, but then Garrett mentioned that your father was a minister. It may be hard to accept, but once you start seeing the truth for what it is, you’ll be much happier with your life. The truth is, there is always an ulterior motive, a reason behind every word, every look, every touch. Soon, you will know why Garrett brought you here. Why he had to choose this path to break your heart, I don’t know, but believe me, my son will break your heart. It’s what he does. He breaks the hearts of everyone who falls in love with him. He always has. So be ready, Celia Brentwood, because he will break your heart and you will never, ever be the same after he does.”
Garrett is towel drying his hair when I finally manage to stumble back inside the house, still shaken from my walk with his mother. She left me at the foot of the hill, leaving me to my own devices to find their house in a row of nearly identical stately mansions. Still not smiling, he winks at his mom as she breezes by. I see it as an improvement in his disposition as I collapse in the nearest chair.
“Did the old bird wear you out?” he asks, dropping a kiss on top of my head. It is a definite improvement. I open my eyes to find him squatted before me. He is wearing frayed jeans, still unbuttoned at the waist. Just jeans, but so damn hot, I am torn between staring at his sexy chest and his sexier toes. Toes win.
“She loves you.”
“You’re delusional. I didn’t get that impression.”
“She was testing your mettle.”
“You weren’t there. You don’t know the horrible things she said.”
Garrett winks. “But I know my mother.”
His ringing cell phone draws his attention away from me and he walks into the kitchen, and sits in a small breakfast nook overlooking the barren backyard. I follow, sitting at the table across from Garrett, not about to take the chance of another lone encounter with his mother. Garrett maintains eye contact with me while he talks. He’s making flight arrangements, but I can’t discern if he is talking to George, Jackie, or Thomas.
I am suddenly distracted by the horrid wallpaper, a blue and green Scottish plaid, and an even worse wallpaper border crowning the chair rail, English huntsmen mounted on horses, pursuing foxes, also pursued by really ugly mutts. And it dawns on me, very clearly in fact, why Garrett’s condo is all beige. My eyes fly through the doorway and land on the floor-to-ceiling gnarled branches of unnamable flowers in even worse hues of blue, green, and gold that make up the living room wallpaper.
Beige is good. Beige is very, very good. Beige just may become my new favorite color.
Garrett is watching me, having hung up the phone.
“I’ve been horrible to you. I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ve been so trapped in my own head, I haven’t been any emotional support to you at all.”
“It’s okay. I had…”
I don’t finish the sentence, stopping myself from being mean, stopping myself from saying that I had Thomas and Jackie and George to lean on. Actually, even Lion was more emotional support than Garrett has been.
He caresses my cheek, making me look at him. “It wasn’t okay, not at all, Celia.”
It doesn’t escape my notice that, even in private, he still calls me Celia, not Kitten.
“Okay, you’ve been a jerk,” I say, smiling to soften the sting of the truth. Surprisingly, Garrett smiles back, the first real smile I’ve seen in days. Quite suddenly, the barrier that has held us distant crashes, and his arms go around me. It is good to feel his arms squeeze me and as we fall into each other, it is hard to discern who is comforting whom, but it is good. I rub my face into his shoulder and inhale his scent. It is both spiritual and tragic when his lips find mine. It is not as before. It is different. For better? Or for worse? Only time will tell.
He stands, pulling me with him and leading me down a hallway and up a flight of stairs. I find myself standing in the center of the bedroom of his youth. The room is tidy and so very obviously his room, not a guest room. “Your mother?”
“She went to the gym.”
“The gym?” I ask, unbelieving, taking in the view of Garrett’s bedroom. “After that walk?”
He shrugs. “It’s how she stays sane.”
When he bends to kiss me, I let him and I don’t stop him when he unzips the warm-up jacket I borrowed from his mother and pulls it off. He follows with my T-shirt, and finally, with infinite care, unties the drawstring of my pants, lowering searing kisses to skin cooling as it is exposed, belly, clit, thighs, centering finally on my clit, making me ache with need in seconds. He is not manic, but slow and tender as he licks and kisses, using fingers and tongue to tease and probe. He is so tender, my eyes mist and I have to force myself not to cry for the intimacy we share now, praying we can keep this, because I don’t want to lose this man and for days I have worried about it so much. His mother’s words taunt me. He will break your heart.
I am so distracted by her voice in my head, I cannot enjoy the teasing circles his tongue makes in a very real attempt to drive me insane. Softness. He is gentle—gentle will not drive out his mother’s voice.
I close my eyes against light blue wall, plaid curtains, plaid bedspread, and shut out his mother’s voice only to hear my father. Sinner. Fornicator.
Oh God, gentle will not drive the sight of my father lying in a coffin from my brain.
“Hurt me,” I whisper. Leave me alone, Dad, I mean it!
“No, Celi
a.” Garrett sits up, pulling me with him so that I am straddling him.
I can’t interpret the look on his face. “Garrett?”
“I think I’m done, Kitten,” he says.
“Done?” I hump his thigh, hoping he’ll lay me down on the bed of his youth and take me fast and rough. Tracing the length of his semi-erect penis, I tease, “We haven’t even started and I know I can get you a lot harder if you let me.”
Hugging me close, he says, “I’ve given up so many dreams, Kitten. I can’t give up the dreams in my head of you.”
He holds me, but doesn’t look at me. My heart crashes in my chest like it hit a speed bump, but then it is pounding and I am filled with the fear that this is the real good-bye, the one I’ve been waiting for, his mother’s voice in my head a shrill warning. He will break your heart, and you will never be the same.
“I don’t understand,” I whisper, staring at the things he collected during his youth. Bookcases line the walls, filled with books from all stages of his life, from Disney to college in row upon row. Trophies stand guard over the books and I wonder why it never occurred to me that Garrett played football. Or that he may have once had a fiancée, as the too perky blonde framed on his childhood desk comes into focus.
“I want babies with you.” He still doesn’t look at me. He just holds me and whispers in my hair. “I want the house in the suburbs and a big backyard, and a dog.”
Stunned into silence, my heart in my throat, I stare at him when he pulls away from me to look at my face.
“I want this life. I know I walked away from it, but everything I gave up is in my face when I come here, and I always run back to San Francisco thinking I need what I have there, but I’m beginning to think that I need this more.”
“You want to live in Cincinnati?”
“No, not necessarily,” he says, shaking his head. “But, I want this…a home in the suburbs…”
I’m sure I’m looking at him like he’s grown a second head, but I never saw this coming. I thought we were breaking up, or better scenario making up. Either way, making love was definitely on the agenda for two point five seconds.
“…marry me Celia, make babies with me.”
Chapter 29
“A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.”
-E.M. Forster, Howard’s End
Garrett
Did I really expect her to say, yes? Did I really think she would jump up and down, excited about the prospect of marriage and babies? No. Did I even consider her reaction? Never even thought the thought, does she want marriage and children? Like a fool, I just blurted it out.
I’m not surprised she ran from the room.
Even less surprised that she called a cab and raced back not only to the hotel but to Thomas. I am a fool. The surprise was Jackie pounding up the stairs to my old bedroom in her four-inch stilettos, more furious than I’ve ever seen her. The bigger surprise was Jackie dragging me down the stairs with a mean-ass grip on my ear. “What in the hell did you say to that girl to scare the shit out of her? She thinks you need an intervention, or to be committed, or both, and I’m not sure I disagree with her at the moment. Tell me you did not tell that girl you wanted a house in suburbia!”
Jackie buckles me into the passenger side, not that I was going to fight her, at least not while she had hold of my ear.
“Suburbia?” she shrills, repeating it again. “Suburbia?”
We drive, neighborhood after neighborhood, and I listen to her sarcasm until I am ready to puke with it. She points at two women taking a walk. “Ahhh, how sweet, two little mommies all dressed up in their cute, little vanilla sportswear to push around their little vanilla baby carriages and talk about all the very vanilla designer clothes they just charged to their very vanilla, missionary-position-only husband’s credit cards.” Facing me, she smiles, but it is too wide, spreading her face into an ugly, mean look. “I’ll bet you can find Kitten a little mundane aerobics suit that won’t clash too badly with her collar. It might be difficult though, explaining the collar at Parent-Teacher meetings.”
She lifts her brow at me, but I keep my eyes on the road, wishing an end to this insanity.
“I can’t wait to come and visit you in your cookie-cutter house with its cookie-cutter yard and little white picket fence…maybe we can play naked croquet on the front lawn or have pony races out back…”
“And your point, Jackie?”
“My point is, Garrett, that you can take the boy out of the dungeon, but you can’t take the dungeon out of the boy. You can buy the house and go to work every morning, but somewhere around lunchtime after your third month without any real game time and you are going to get flashback fever so bad, you’ll be stopping at the lumber yard on the way home from work to build a St. Andrew’s Cross in your basement while the little woman is upstairs cooking dinner. Tell me, do you have a little woman picked out yet? Oh, don’t worry, there’s a country club up ahead, we’ll just pick one…one’s the same as the other.”
I didn’t think she’d do it, but she does, pulling into the Country Club parking lot, rolling down her window and addressing women as she drives by. “This is my friend, Garrett Lawrence. I know he don’t look like much right now, but he cleans up real good, has a wad of cash that would make your daddy’s eyes go big, and he’s looking for a little woman to share the suburban dream with.”
“Jackie, that’s enough!” I hide behind my hand.
“Oh, oh, there’s a good one, blonde, like the one you left standing at the altar for Tony.” She hits the accelerator hard, speeding up to cross the parking lot at an unsafe speed. Thankfully, the blonde has already ducked into her Audi and is pulling out of her parking space by the time Jackie skids to a halt.
“I didn’t leave anyone at the altar. I wish everyone would stop saying that! We broke up! And I’m not looking for anyone. I happen to love Celia. Did she neglect to tell you that part? That I asked her to marry me?”
“And make babies with you in suburbia?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever think that maybe she doesn’t share the dream? My God, Kitten just found herself, do you really think she’s going to want to put the mask back on so soon?”
“I’m not asking her to put a mask on. She could live this life with me.”
Jackie snorts. “Oh, I’m sure she could, but would you ask her to, keeping in mind that this is the same girl who disappeared from what the world considers normal, ended up in San Francisco, became the celebrated sub of the most notorious Dom our side of the Mississippi, increased her notoriety by being The Little Lost Kitten, and in doing so, became brave enough to ask you to share her with your best friend? Will you ask her to stop being herself just so you can be who you think you want to be?”
“We could make this work and she could still be who she is!” I pound my thigh in frustration, watching the mommies we just drove by push their baby carriages past the van. I imagine Celia pushing a carriage, me at her side. We could fit in again. We could!
“So there’s no problem with her crawling through the neighborhood IGA in her bright red latex g-string and corset set, pushing the little handheld grocery basket with her nose here in Cincinnati? Because that, Garrett Lawrence, is who Celia became when you weren’t paying attention—Kitten. And Kitten is a walking, crawling, teasing, undulating photo opportunity at every turn and she likes it that way.”
I don’t follow Jackie into the hotel, opting instead to walk over to the outdoor pool patio. The pool has been winterized, covered with a dark, rubber pool cover, the kind that can supposedly support the weight of an elephant. Not much of a view really, but the only view that came with a nearby seat.
I’m still not seeing what the big deal is. I think that Celia and I could do the suburbs. It would be quiet, relaxing, and admittedly, if we needed a night out to play, we co
uld get a sitter and go out and play. But in my rush to ask her to marry me, I did leave that part out…the part that I didn’t want to give up the lifestyle entirely, just change our lifestyle to be more socially acceptable, so that we don’t lose our children to Social Services.
Pulling my cell phone from my pocket, I text her. Come out to the pool so we can talk.
What seems like an eternity later, Kitten comes outside to find me sitting in a bright pink plastic chair poolside. She is not only dressed for the weather but also the duration of waiting me out. Sweater, leather coat, and wrapped in the hotel’s thick bedspread. I think she went overboard with the layers. The rain, ice and snow from the earlier hours left a bright sunny afternoon in their wake, the air cool and crisp but not frigid.
“Are you freezing?” she asks.
“No. It’s not too bad.” I pat the seat of a matching pink chair. “I didn’t feel like being part of a crowd.”
She nods and sighs, sitting beside me. “We actually have a private room tonight. Jackie and George caught a taxi to the airport. Thomas said that he would see us in the morning.”
“Really?”
“We are officially alone.”
“Thomas didn’t say where he was going?”
“No, I thought he’d tell you. Didn’t you see him out here?”
“No, but then that’s not surprising. Did you want to go with him?” I regret the question, because it comes out sounding bitter and jealous though I didn’t mean for it to. By the look on her face, I know I hurt her.
“I wasn’t invited, but then I was actually looking forward to some alone time with you. Is that so hard to believe?”
It’s obvious by her red eyes and the shredded Kleenex squeezed in her fist that she’s been crying. I suddenly remember the reason we are here in the first place. I reach out my hand, knowing she needs to talk about her father, about his death, not knowing how to get the conversation started. Knowing also that we need to talk about us…the mess we left in San Francisco, the bigger mess I made at my mother’s. Although, I don’t know how to begin any of the topics started. “I’m sorry. I know you’re aching terribly, the funeral was nice though, lots of supportive friends…”
