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My anger is starting to burn out, leaving only desperation in its wake.
After a few minutes, I get off my bike. It’s not the most comfortable thing in the world, so I sit on the curb instead, staring at Myron. Though he’s looking straight ahead, I know he’s watching me.
I sit there for hours, I think, but finally, I climb back onto my motorcycle. Myron tilts his head in goodbye, and I wave at him forlornly.
I ride home as the sun’s coming up and head straight for the bar when I get inside. I pour myself a bourbon and flop into a chair with a heavy sigh. “Well, fuck.”
“Ahh!”
The loud scream comes from the pile of blankets on my couch.
“Jayme?” I scramble to set my drink down and pull the blankets off, but instead of Jayme, I find my sister. “Toni? What are you doing here?”
My hope that it’d been some wild misunderstanding and Jayme was here all along while I was at her place is dashed as Toni wipes at her bleary eyes. I sit back down in my favorite chair, pouting.
“Where’ve you been?” she mumbles, still half asleep.
“Jayme’s.” Though not technically true, I’m not going to tell her that I’ve been hanging out on the street all night like some love-struck stalker.
“You made up?” she asks, looking hopeful and considerably more awake.
My eyes narrow. “What do you mean? What do you know?” I don’t mean to sound so accusatory, but . . . actually, yes, I do. How does Toni know what’s going on with Jayme and me when I don’t even know?
Toni rolls her eyes. “Duh, you two are attached at the hip and then suddenly, you’re on stage giving a speech and she’s nowhere to be found. What’d you do?”
“You assume I did something?” I snap.
Toni drops her chin, frowning at me as if I said one plus one equals pizza or something else equally stupid.
“Fine. I might’ve overreacted to something she showed me. I mean, told me.” I’m not going to out Jayme’s secret to anyone, least of all my sister whose version of keeping something on the down low means not posting it to Instagram.
“Showed you? Told you?” Toni echoes, much more interested now. “Are we talking like a third nipple or that she likes her toes sucked? Because really, Carson, you shouldn’t kink shame people or give them a hard time for something they can’t help.”
“What?” I shake my head, trying to make sense of anything Toni just said, but I was focused on how I acted while meeting Jayme’s parents. “No, it’s not . . . that. What?”
Toni laughs. “Okay, so not kinks. What did you do, really?”
She finally seems more serious. I take a slow swallow of my bourbon, thinking.
“She told me something important, and I was caught off-guard. Really off-guard.” I laugh bitterly. “I didn’t take it well.”
“What’d she tell you? Is she a sleeper Russian spy?” Surprisingly, she’s not kidding. Toni’s being dead serious.
“No,” I sigh. “I can’t tell you what it is. It’s her business, her story. But she should’ve told me a long time ago, not let me find out accidentally tonight.”
“Or she should’ve told you whenever she was damn well good and ready. You literally just told me ‘it’s her story’,” she mimics me, apparently thinking I sound like a whiny toddler, “so you don’t get to dictate when she tells it. You dick-tator.”
I blink in confusion, trying to suss out the actual advice from Toni saying dick repeatedly because now she’s singing, “Dick-tator, dick, dick, dick, dick-tator. Hey, do you have any hashbrowns? Potatoes sound good.”
She gets up and helps herself to my freezer, shuffling stuff around. There are no hashbrowns there, but I let her look while I mull over what she said. Somewhere in the craziness that my sister spews might actually be some good advice.
I set my bourbon down and let my head fall back, staring at the ceiling. “Fuck! I fucked up bigtime, Toni.”
She claps, the sound echoing off the inside of the refrigerator where she’s now looking for food. There are no potatoes there either. “At least you realized it fast. Go talk to her. Grovel and beg, maybe throw in that toe sucking and see if it does anything for her, and apologize.”
I scrub at my jaw, the stubble getting rough, and ignore the parts Toni adds in for shock value. “I spent all night outside her place, but they won’t let me in or even tell me if she’s there. I called her, but it went straight to voicemail. I left a message, but she hasn’t called back.”
Toni sits down on the couch with a bag of chips she found in my pantry. “How desperate are you?” she questions.
I laugh bitterly. “Scale of one to ten? A fifty-seven.” Toni looks impressed at my level of desperation. “I love her.”
