“Yes, sir. No one lets me have any fun around here. Did you even hear the dad part?”
“You always had a dad, amore, but I know the title is important to you. I’m glad. Is there any hope at all he’s going to let me make you Mr. Randall-Vincenzo? Or has this new title lowered my chances?”
“Oh no. We talked about that too. You’ve impressed him.”
“Really? In that case, let’s order in. We’ll have a pre-celebration to milestones achieved.”
“And then sex?”
“Definitely. Lots and lots of sex.”
ChapterThirty-Four
Darius April ~ May 1987
On that note, I’m going to pull us back to the summer of nineteen eighty-seven. I’d just turned fourteen. It was satanically hot that May for some reason. I sat on the edge of the dock, my feet hanging off, watching Asher dunk Jennings under the water.
“Yah just gonna sit there? Come in.”
“So you can drown me? No thank you.”
I kicked back on the dock and stared at the blue sky. I was mostly there to keep an eye on Asher. We’d spent a year making out, fighting, making up, and repeating the cycle. Want to know what’s fucking volatile? Two teenagers with abandonment issues.
We’d cling to each other by pretending that we didn’t fucking need each other, which then made it necessary to keep an eye on one another “secretly”. We were angry. We didn’t trust anyone—certainly not each other—and yet we were intensely dependent on each other. But the keystone that made our abandonment attachment styles textbook, was how often we rejected each other—reject before you can be rejected. That was our motto.
I’ve never been jealous in a relationship with anyone besides Asher. He’s always been gifted all my suspicion.
“If you were a real boyfriend, you’d get your pansy ass in here,” he said.
“If you were a real boyfriend, you’d leave me alone.”
We didn’t know how to be boyfriends—we made it up as we went along.
I didn’t want to be in the hot sun, I wanted to go inside with Simon. We’d spent enough time working and I wanted to do fuck all. That was a burr in my side too. Children weren’t supposed to work that hard. At home, I’d had to do chores and stuff, but even then, most of those chores came up because of Mama’s illness. We finally had a day off and I wanted to do as any teenager was supposed to at the dawn of Nintendo—sit in a stuffy room on my duff playing Super Mario.
“Know what. Fuck you, Asher. I’m going in.” I stood and turned without looking back at him or waiting for a reply. We always did what he wanted. He was older. He considered himself “the boss”. When I was a pining thirteen-year-old, I rolled with it, but I was fourteen now. I wanted different things. I also never wanted him to know how I felt about him.
I was desperately in love. Every time we broke up, I wanted to stop breathing.
I never made it off the dock. Wet feet slapped on wood and his water-logged shorts unloaded a waterfall onto the dock. Grabbing my wrist, he spun me around. “Get your fucking ass back there, Ari.”
“No.” I yanked. He yanked harder. We devolved into a stupid brawl on the freshly stained plywood. I punched and kicked with no plan, he methodically trapped my wrists over my head and sat on my hips so I couldn’t move.
“Let me go, dickhead.”
“If you don’t be quiet, Terry’s gonna come out here.”
“Good. I hope he beats both our asses.”
I fought and twisted. He held me captive. As much as I wanted to be away from him, I wanted him to chase after me. I wanted him to show me I couldn’t escape him. I also wanted to tear his nuts off.
Giving up, I panted beneath him, stared into his green eyes, and let his hair drip onto my face. If you stared at him long enough, he gave himself away. His expression faltered, his mask flickered away, and I knew his outburst wasn’t really because of me.
“I want you to stay with me,” he said, his voice a whisper.
“I don’t want to be outside. Come inside.”
“How come you don’t want to be wherever I am?”
