8
" My mom says, " Do you know what the AIDS memorial quilt is all about?" Jump to how much I hate my brother at this moment.I bought this fabric because I thought it would make a nice panel for Shane," Mom says. " We just ran into some problems with what to sew on it." Give me amnesia.Flash.Give me new parents.Flash.Your mother didn't want to step on any toes," Dad says. He twists a drumstick off and starts scraping the meat onto a plate. " With gay stuff you have to be so careful since everything means something in secret code. I mean, we didn't want to give people the wrong idea." My Mom leans over to scoop yams onto my plate, and says, " Your father wanted a black border, but black on a field of blue would mean Shane was excited by leather sex, you know, bondage and discipline, sado and masochism." She says, " Really, those panels are to help the people left behind." Strangers are going to see us and see Shane's name," my dad says. " We didn't want them thinking things." The dishes all start their slow clockwise march around the table. The stuffing. The olives. The cranberry sauce. " I wanted pink triangles but all the panels have pink triangles," my mom says. " It's the Nazi symbol for homosexuals." She says," Your father suggested black triangles, but that would mean Shane was a lesbian. It looks like female pubic hair. The black triangle does." My father says, " Then I wanted a green border, but it turns out that would mean Shane was a male prostitute." My mom says, " We almost chose a red border, but that would mean fisting. Brown would mean either scat or rimming, we couldn't figure which." Yellow," my father says, " means watersports." A lighter shade of blue," Mom says, " would mean just regular oral sex." Regular white," my father says, " would mean anal. White could also mean Shane was excited by men wearing underwear." He says, " I can't remember which." My mother passes me the quilted chicken with the rolls still warm inside.We're supposed to sit and eat with Shane dead all over the table in front of us.Finally we just gave up," my mom says, " and I made a nice tablecloth out of the material." Between the yams and the stuffing, Dad looks down at his plate and says, " Do you know about rimming?" I know it isn't table talk.And fisting?" my mom asks.I say, I know. I don't mention Manus and his vocational porno magazines.We sit there, all of us around a blue shroud with the turkey more like a big dead baked animal than ever, the stuffing chock full of organs you can still recognize, the heart and gizzard and liver, the gravy thick with cooked fat and blood. The flower centerpiece could be a casket spray.Would you pass the butter, please?" my mother says. To my father she says, " Do you know what felching is? "
15
" Against FateHey, Fate! When you fail a man, you spendall your time digging a well to trap him.Then you untie the well's wheel rope so that it can roll.And you keep the poor mortal struggling up, only to fall back.You show him a bushel of means and say" This is it. Worry about it, and dream." Meanwhile you spin the wheel of fortune and fill the house of the wicked with jewels,while you force the just and scrupulousto sweep up the pieces.And the man who should not even tend pigsrides a horse as a cavalier.And without a shovel, you scoop ruin onto the houseof the honorable and the just.Fate, if I speak evil of you, you'll claimthe man is jealous and confusedBut why do you look crossly at the learnedand make the ignorant the landlord?Hey, why toss the bread of the wiseso far down the valley?And why should I believe in your justiceWhen you don't serve it to anyone important?Not that you keep either oath or bargain, treacherous one.Whomever you love today and who is raised to a golden throne,tomorrow may be sitting in ashes.How can such a fraudulent judge make a just decision?Fate, friend of the deceitful and devious, you are harsh to the honest.What more can I say except that someday I expectyou to mix up sky and earth and sea. "
16
" At the unexpected sight of Spence, Colbie startled hard. How was it that he was the one who needed glasses and yet she’d not seen him standing against the window? “No, I don’t kill a lot of people,” she said cautiously because she was wearing only a towelin front of a strange man. “But I’m happy to make an exception.”
He laughed, a rough rumble that was more than a little contagious but she controlled herself because, hello, she was once again dripping wet before the man who seemed to make her knees forget to hold her up.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said and pushed off the wall to come close.
She froze, but he held up his hands like, I come in peace, and crouched at her feet to scoop up the clothes she hadn’t realized she’d dropped.
Leggings, a long forgiving tee, and the peach silk bra-and-panty set that hadn’t gotten so much as a blink from the TSA guy.
But it got one out of Spence. He also swallowed hard as she snatched them back from him.
“Hold on,” he said and caught her arm, pulling it toward him to look at her bleeding elbow.
“Sit,” he said and gently pushed her down to a weight bench. He vanished into the bathroom and came back out with a first aid kit.
It took him less than two minutes to clean and bandage the scrape. Then, easily balanced at her side on the balls of his feet, he did the same for both her knees, which she hadn’t noticed were also scraped up.
“You must’ve hit the brick coping as you fell in the fountain,” he said and let his thumb slide over the skin just above one bandaged knee.
She shivered, and not from the cold either. “Not going to kiss it better?” she heard herself ask before biting her tongue for running away with her good sense.
She’d raised her younger twin brothers. Scrappy, roughhouse wild animals, the both of them, so there’d been plenty of injuries she’d kissed over the years.
But no one had ever kissed hers. Not surprising, since most of her injuries tended to be on the inside, where they didn’t show. Still, she was horrified she’d said anything at all. “I didn’t mean—”
She broke off, frozen like a deer in the headlights as Spence slowly lowered his head, brushing his lips over the Band-Aid on her elbow, then her knees. When he lifted his head, he pushed his glasses higher on his nose, those whiskey eyes warm and amused behind his lenses. “Better?”
Shockingly better. Since she didn’t quite trust her voice at the moment, she gave a jerky nod and took her clothes back into the bathroom. She shut the door and then leaned against it, letting out a slow, deliberate breath. Holy cow, she was out of her league. He was somehow both cute and hot, and those glasses . "
― Jill Shalvis , Chasing Christmas Eve (Heartbreaker Bay, #4)
