by JQ Jones
“Willie has Bette Davis’s eyes,” Linc said. He sipped some of Jeff’s Earl Grey from where it sat cooling slowly on the side table. He leaned close into his lover, enjoying the cool, crisp smell of his longtime companion.
“No, Willie’s eyes are softer and not as round. She tells a whole story with just her eyes. Cyn is driving in this? It’s been bad out there for almost a week. Is she leaving tonight for the condo?”
“No, she doesn’t have to be back in DC for another ten days. She said she’s handling some private negotiations for a new friend. You know how closedmouthed she is about her clients,” Linc said. He lay propped against the opposite arm of the couch. Watching the light from the reading lamp play off Jeff’s deep-brown hair, they smiled softly at one another.
“What else did you guys talk about?”
“Willie Mae Dollar again, of course. She thinks we, but especially me, are stupid and will regret not having her in our lives until we die. Which we will do soon in agony and remorse,” Linc said.
“She’s more pessimistic than usual.”
“Comes from her being a spinster.”
“Seriously going to use the word spinster?”
“It’s just that she irks me when she’s right. Just because she’s beautiful, intelligent, and usually right doesn’t mean that she should act like she’s beautiful, intelligent, and usually right. It’s just not cool.”
“You are a foolish, foolish man, but I love you more than I can ever say,” Jeff said. He curled up beside Linc, sharing the warmth from his body as they watched the movie. They watched silently, not speaking but close together, sharing one another’s warmth. Jeff reached under Linc’s layers of clothes to rub his lover across his chest, caressing him until Linc forgot the movie and moved in for a warm, wet kiss.
They slowly removed the layers of shirts, sweaters, and thermals that kept them warm in the face of the howling wind that picked up outside. Their well-insulated home offered them the same seventy-six-degree temperature year round, but the shriek of the wind made it seem as if it were colder in the room.
Jeff sank to the floor between Linc’s legs and licked his way up to his lover’s straining dick, now leaking moisture all over his hardness, slicking it and making Jeff moan as soon as his tongue touched the tip. Jeff swirled the taste around his mouth, enjoying the texture as it coated his tongue.
Linc gasped in a hiss as Jeff sucked in his entire length down his waiting throat. Linc rubbed every inch of flesh that he could reach on his lover’s body, finally using both hands to hold his head tight against him as his stroked in and out, savoring the searing warmth of his mouth. He pulled Jeff off before he came.
Using pre-cum and spit, Linc jammed himself into Jeff’s waiting ass. This time it was Jeff who hissed as he took the entire length until they lay connected. Linc did not move, reveling in the feel of Jeff’s inner muscles as they massaged his dick. Linc lay with his head relaxed back on the sofa, speaking soft words of encouragement to Jeff.
Jeff slowly undulated, loving the feel of the girth and length sending electric pulses through him each time it hit his prostate. He gasped as Linc’s hand began to stroke him in the same rhythm he used as he bucked on to a great orgasm. They came together, kissing deeply as they lay sweating in each other arms.
“I love you,” Jeff said.
“I love you, too. Let’s go get our lady,” Linc said.
“I thought I was going to have to go without you.”
* * * *
Willie Mae gave up on lying in the bed at three in the morning. She’d gone to her room at eleven after another unsuccessful attempt at talking to Abuela. Watching TV with her parents had been a disaster as the telenovela that her mother adored had a storyline where the heroine was waiting patiently for her man to decide that he loved only her. It cut too close to home so she made her excuses, declined her mother’s offer of ice cream, and took a long, long hot shower.
Finally in her favorite pj’s, she lay for hours alternatively missing her men and being mad at them for not calling her. The dream-like quality of the last week made it harder for her to get a grasp of what she should do next. How do you plan a next move when all the previous ones had been done by simple feel? So it was that at three she got up to get a bowl of the cherry-vanilla ice cream for the kitchen.
As she stood at the back door looking up at Abeula’s apartment, Moises pulled up in his truck. He ran around to open the door for the passengers. Mo was a taciturn man who never remembered the niceties for most of the women in his family. He loved Adriana and Willie. He and Manny had grown up like brother and sister and he had a very good relationship with Iona, but he saved most of his chivalry for Abuela. The night was crisp, in the low thirties, with an almost full moon. The bright moonlight still only allowed Willie to see Mo helping a small figure out of the front seat before he turned to help a younger woman from the back.
The age differences were apparent from the footwear. The woman from the front—it was a woman dressed in a long flowing dress and what looked like a veil—had on sound shoes. The woman in the back had on at least a four-inch heel, making her just a little shy of Moises’s six feet. What he did next really made Willie pay attention. Moises held out his arm for each woman and walked them to the bottom of the steps of Abuela’s apartment.
He paused as the automatic chair slowly descended down to allow him to place the smaller woman into the seat and start the chair back up the steps. The other woman walked up the stairs, keeping pace with the chair. Moises walked behind the younger woman about three steps ahead of him. Even with the distance and the dark, Willie could tell from just the tilt of his head that he had his eyes firmly glued to the woman’s butt as she walked up. Once at the top, Abuela opened the door and hugged both women, hustled them inside, and shut the door in Moises’s face.
He ran down the steps and entered his truck without a glance back and none at all over to the main house. Willie finished her ice cream and went back to bed with more questions than when she went down.
* * * *
Willie Mae woke up abruptly three hours later when Moises threw her boots onto the bed. She sputtered awake, not remembering when she had finally gone to sleep.
“Ride the fences with me today. I’ll wait downstairs,” he said.
Willie contemplated leaving him to wait until she was fully awake just because he pissed her off, but she was dying to know who the two strangers visiting Abuela were and why they were there. She dressed in record time, throwing on the jeans and shirts she’d worn yesterday and only stopping to wash her face and brush her teeth.
Adriana and Ernesto were in the kitchen as she flew past, ignoring her mother’s invitation for breakfast. Moises had her horse ready and waiting. The day was a repeat of the one before, bright, crisp, and sunny as she and her brother rode out to the approximate place she and her father had left off the day before.
Moises was like Papá and talked only when he had something he wanted you to know. His chosen profession of glaciologist allowed him to go for days and sometimes months without human contact or the need to speak. So usually when Willie rode with him or on the occasions when she traveled with him around the world, she kept up a steady stream of her one-sided conversation. Today she said very little, trying to wait for the right time to ask him the question that had plagued her from the moment she had seen it in the early-morning moonlight.
At first, the image of Moises helping a small figure shrouded in black into the automatic seat that Papá had installed so that Abuela could easily get into the second floor apartment was simply him doing just that, helping Abuela to her apartment. But two things threw that idea into the trash—her grandmother considered the seat only for “old people,” and the younger female who jauntily bounced up the steps. It hadn’t been her grandmother, but she didn’t know who it could be.
Willie thought and discarded several ways to coerce the information she needed out of Moises, but as the morning went on the conversatio
n was harder to start than she thought it would be. It was never hard for her to talk about anything, but somehow this felt too important, maybe too raw for her to be as casual as she usually was.
Her horse, Pax, a dun quarter horse she’d raised from a colt, followed closely behind her brother’s gray gelding, but they rode in total silence for the first forty-five minutes. Moises was the one who broke down.
“Why did you get up so early?”
“I usually get up this time anyway. It’s not like I lie around doing nothing until ten or eleven,” she said. “Unless I’ve been traveling or something. Oh, I forgot, I have been traveling, and you and the pack swooped me back home for Abuela to play games with me for the past few days.”
Moises used the diversion of a drooping fence line to stifle the need for more talk. They worked as a team to secure the line of fencing. She began sweating and pulled off her first shirt.
“I can’t take it anymore. I saw you this morning with the two people who went up to Abuela’s apartment. Who are they? I didn’t get a good look at them but one of them looked like a little old lady and the other was way younger. Abuela needs them for something but I can’t figure out what it is. Unless Mamá is right and Abuela is a bruja and she called in more witches for a full coven. Depends on if they were Mexican or not though. Where are they from?” She stopped to watch Moises shake his head.
“So if they aren’t from Monterrey what does she need them for? Maybe they’re just some friends from the area but I don’t remember any old friends she has in the area. She’s not the new-friends type and that other person was way younger than I’d expect for Abuela to be hanging out with. Did they say anything to you when you brought them to the ranch?”
“A little.”
“Like what? Come on, Mo, I need to know this so I can know what she has planned for me. What exactly did they say?”
“The older one said ‘good evening’ and the younger one said ‘nice to see you,’” he said.
Willie kicked a bag of tools and spent the next few minutes jumping around cursing. Moises cleaned up the area and helped her limp over to Pax.
It was a little before ten when he called a halt to their work. They rode back to the ranch single file with Willie once again speaking to her brother, this time to his back.
“I’ve never been this confused about anything in my life. I’ve been with other men and it was okay, nothing to write a sonnet about but I got off, he got off, and everybody was happy but with Jeff and Linc it’s so raw and deep and real that it touches something that I’ve never experienced before. I’ve never done anything close to what we do together, but the sound and taste and the wetness is just too, too good.” Willie halted her monologue because Moises had stopped along the trail and turned in his saddle to look at her.
“First, way too much information about your sex life, and second, are you having unprotected sex?”
“Well, yeah but it’s not like I did it on purpose. Jeff and Linc are in a long-term committed relationship so they don’t have any condoms around their house and I don’t carry any because I’ve been on a kind of celibate thing for the past eighteen months. Besides”—here she grinned broadly at her brother’s frowning face—“I’m a good girl.”
“You’re a stupid girl. You’re too fucking old for me to lecture you about disease and pregnancy and all the stuff you should have thought of before you spent three days having sex with strange men.”
“They aren’t strange men. One is Iona’s brother and the other is his partner of over twenty years. Second, they’re both doctors and, I know it’s an assumption, but they care too much about their health not be regularly tested like we do at Okey.”
“Like seemingly gay doctors can’t have diseases, and you didn’t say anything about the pregnant part.”
“I wouldn’t mind having a baby by either one of them but you didn’t let me finish my points. Third, I can’t think when I’m around them. It’s like Mamá used to say about you guys, my little head thinks for my big head when we’re together.”
“Sometimes, baby sis, you simply don’t think at all.”
Chapter Twelve:
Tossed My Coin
By the time the evening came, Willie was upstairs in her room staring at the ceiling. She could hear the murmur of Mamá and Papá talking in the kitchen. They were fighting in English and Spanish. About what she could not tell, but it was a doozy of a conversation. Willie had seen Mortez and Miguel running from the house, actually running as if the hounds of Hell were after them, over three hours ago. They hightailed it to the stable and rode out to find something to fix or do until dinner. The sound of dishes slamming back into the cabinet testified to Adriana’s continuing displeasure over something. Fifteen minutes ago her brothers returned and tiptoed through the front door and up the stairs without going near the kitchen.
Willie didn’t have the energy to get up to help her Mamá or to, in honesty, be nosy about what the fight was about. Her parents loved as passionately as they had when they were young, which meant that tonight Willie would sleep with her headphones on to drown out the sound of their lovemaking.
Maybe she got the way she made love from them, in full voice and entirely integrated into the deed. Willie flopped onto her stomach, not wanting to think about the very, very short time she had spent with Jeff and Linc. Each man made her moist but in different ways. Jeff made her oh and Linc made her ah, and together they made her oh ahs turn into “oh my God.”
After an hour of not listening, she couldn’t take it anymore. Lying around until one was too self-indulgent didn’t get her any closer to her guys. She pushed off the bed and stomped into the kitchen. Without interrupting the now postponed fight, she began to gather the plates to set the table, including laying a place for Abuela and her guests without being told.
Willie noticed the huge pots of bubbling food. A quick look into one showed that it was complicated dishes that smelled great and spoke of all-day cooking.
“Mamá, you should have called me to help you put all this together sooner. You must have been working since the break of dawn. I’m sorry I’ve just been out of it all day. I’ll be better tomorrow, I promise,” Willie said.
“Don’t worry, Niña, Manuela made most of this at the ranch house. Abuela made a special request that she cook for the guests upstairs. My food is slop to be fed to the pigs. Her guests, whoever they may be, are too special to suffer from the folly of my plain stuff, and she had to get Manuela to do it. I’ve been cooking for her son and grandchildren for almost forty years, and suddenly because of her new friends I get treated like a mesera at a whorehouse in Tijuana,” Adriana said as she slammed down a serving dish on the counter and pointedly placed bruschetta on it, arranging them into a starburst on her best platter. She muttered in Spanish using words that Willie had never heard her use before.
Willie’s bewildered glance caught Ernesto standing close to the door as if looking for a chance to escape. Adriana caught him as he turned the knob and he turned the movement into a head scratch.
Willie sidled out of the kitchen to the dining room. Adriana’s best china lay on the sideboard of the hutch. The silverware, passed on from one generation to another, was in a cloth-lined basket waiting to be properly placed.
“I’ll finish setting the table. Why are we using the good china and silver?” Willie said. She spoke louder than normal as the argument commenced. She didn’t get an answer to her question. She struggled with the table extenders to lengthen their normal eight-place table setting to double the amount of people.
Her brother Mano slammed into the room with his usual noise and vigor and began helping her.
“Who’s here?” he asked as the extra pieces clicked together.
“Don’t ask,” Willie, Adriana, and Ernesto said together.
* * * *
It was still early, around two, and Willie had nothing to do for several hours. She wandered around the house, finally settling down in the swing on the fr
ont porch. Dinner was to start at seven, another five hours. Adriana issued a “dress nice” command to each of her children. The sun was out and shining strongly, but a chill was settling in from the north. She needed to stay outside as long as possible. The fresh air made her think. Tomorrow she would go back to her guys. Whatever Abuela wanted from her, she could get from the telephone. Maybe they didn’t want her, but she could talk them into it.
As she debated the pros and cons of throwing herself at not one, but two men, a car came down the road. It was going too slow to be one of brothers or anyone from the ranch. Breakneck speed wasn’t considered fast enough to them. When the car stopped in the driveway, an older couple got out. The woman was around fifty with large blonde hair that held its shape due to a whole lot of hairspray. She was snuggled in a full-length mink coat that touched the tops of her five-inch high-heeled black leather boots. A large bright-red purse hung from her left arm. The man, a little taller than the woman but broadly built, wore a black leather trench coat with leather gloves. He protectively held the lady’s arm as they picked their way across the gravel walkway from the car to the porch steps.
Willie assumed they were lost, and the woman’s voice, carrying all over the yard, had a twinge of irritation that couldn’t be mistaken. The man merely shook his head in time to her complaints.
“I told you that this was a mistake. Just because your mother demands that we drop everything and come through a huge snowstorm to have dinner with people we don’t even know is beyond me. That old strega does things to make me crazy,” the woman said. The man nodded again.
