Harm Reduction
Three Meetings in Sara D. Roosevelt Park
Heidi Belleau & Violetta Vane
Published by Storm Moon Press LLC at Smashwords
Copyright © 2012, Heidi Belleau & Violetta Vane. All rights reserved.
Publisher's Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Cover by Dare Empire eMedia Productions
2012
One second, and everything was fine, just a four-man pickup game played slow and sluggish in the crackling cold—puffs of breath like plumes of steam, the occasional rattle of the ball against the high chain-link fence—and then one of the other kids had to start talking shit.
If Julio's foster son Jay had shaken it off, turned it around, they could have kept playing and things would have gone on like they were going. But Jay wasn't good with words like that, and he wasn't too good at shaking shit off, either. Always walking the line between changing and staying the same—Julio and Jay and this court and the Lower East Side and the whole damn city—and even if change could be for the better, it was like they were always one minute from midnight on the doomsday clock, just one word away from some kind of apocalypse.
Julio grabbed his upper arm and moved fast. Marched Jay off the court before he could struggle and fly at them. "Not worth it," he advised in his lowest, bitterest voice—the one that meant commiseration.
Tick, tick, tick. Counting closer to midnight. No, it was the rhythm of the ball being dribbled like a war-drum.
Words trailed off into the distance behind them: "You go on home with your bitch-ass daddy!"
Jay's whole body convulsed at the taunt's electric shock. "Let go," he gritted out. He wasn't fighting anymore, so Julio relaxed his grip. Slowed down, now that they'd walked at least a block up the long length of Sara D. Roosevelt Park and the danger was past. He leaned to block Jay's line of sight back to the court, making a wall of his body.
Jay was shivering so hard that the sharp outlines of his face blurred. The cold. Adrenaline. Julio examined him calmly, clinically, isolating his own hurt and stuffing it down somewhere with the memory of another boy, so many years ago, who'd vibrated just like this. "You're gonna be fine. The way you feel right now? It's bad, but it's not gonna last. You got to take care of your body. Let's go get a hot chocolate or something."
"Fuck you, man. Hot chocolate? The fuck you think..."
Julio reassessed the situation. Jay wasn't ten anymore, and with his pride wounded as it was, hot chocolate wasn't comfort, it was an insult. Okay. Jay could still come back from this. Misstep, recover. "We got two choices. We can replay the situation, talk about it, get ready to make it better next time. Or we can move on. It's up to you. And if we move on, we can always come back to it later."
That seemed to help Jay focus. "Move on. Yeah. I just wanna get the fuck out of here, know what I mean? Don't know why we came here anyway. We always come here. You always make us come here. How come we ain't playing indoors? Look at these fingers. Fuck!" He threw shivering fingers in Julio's face, the brown skin around the knuckles ashy from the cold, dry air.
Moving from shock to parental blame? Julio could deal with that. He'd asked Jay to bring gloves, of course, and been ignored. Pointing it out wouldn't help the situation, so he didn't.
Why did he always bring Jay here? Good question, he chided himself, and then lied. "I thought you liked this court. I thought because it was on the way to your grandma's. Let's go somewhere warmer for your hands."
"Can we go to Grandma's?"
Julio shouldn't have mentioned her. "I don't think so, not right now," he said, carefully. Jay's grandma was a good woman, pretty much best-case scenario when it came to bio-family for foster kids like Jay, but she wasn't so great at dealing with Jay when he was on edge like this. One trip-up from Jay, one well-meaning but wrong-footed response from her, and it would all go to hell. "We'll call her when we get back home. Maybe you can visit her next week."
Jay went very, very quiet.
Julio stuffed down the anger along with the hurt. All the rules and the boundaries he'd put such careful, compassionate thought into building were about to be shattered—he could see it happening—and he was so tired of it.
"Fuck you, man, that's my family. I'm out." And he ran for the Second Avenue F stop. Disappeared down the stairs and into the belly of the city.
Julio sighed. He turned back to the court in a compulsive way, feeling like a sea creature swayed by inexorable currents. The two kids had already wandered away. He found a bench, sat down, and started the work of texting. To Jay, to Jay's grandmother, to the caseworker—he paused before sending the last one, considered current regulations, and decided that waiting until the next day could be acceptable.
The court was empty. The chain-link fence divided the emptiness into pristine diamonds. Twenty years ago, at this time of morning, around the very bench he was sitting on, there'd have been young junkies huddling against each other for warmth, and right next to them, elderly Chinese prolonging healthy lives with Tai Chi exercises, their stately, slow motions paralleling the sleepy nodding of sick, heroin-flushed bodies. Two different worlds existing in the same space and time, staring right past each other.
The park was a little more upscale now. The Whole Foods around the corner was advertising Valentine's Day specials on organic flowers. Julio couldn't understand buying organic flowers. Or organic anything, really.
When the cops had come to sweep the junkies away, sometimes there'd be one that couldn't get up anymore.
Julio hadn't said the boy's name in twenty years. He didn't event want to think the name. But when he blinked his eyes against the fierce cold, the outline of that face flared against the blackness. The image was too beautiful to fade away, yet too fragile to live in the light.
1992
The men sitting next to Julio on the F Train talked about the NBA All-Star game from Rockefeller on down.
"That shiny-pants motherfucker Vanilla Ice gonna do the halftime show."
The other man shrugged. "I just wanna see my man Magic do his thing. Halftime don't matter."
"He gonna be weak as shit with that AIDS in him. And he gay. He should have stayed out the game. What if he get a cut? Michael Jordan gonna get AIDS too?"
"Could you possibly be more ignorant? Come on! Tell me the earth be shaped like a burrito, cause you on a roll, man." An agitated huff of breath from the other man. "Let me communicate some scientific motherfucking facts."
Julio didn't have to intervene after all. He could have. He was good at it. He looked like the men next to him, understood the rhythms of their speech, could even dial his Puerto Rican cadence to line up with African-American English.
It was just that right now, he wasn't anywhere near an educating headspace.
By 2nd Avenue, Magic Johnson's heterosexuality and basketball skills had been vigorously established; routes of HIV transmission, explained. And at the first pneumatic hiss of the doors, Julio broke away from the train, shoved through the turnstile, and stalked upwards into the light.
Everything he was, everything he'd fought to become, and one boy could take it away from him.
Traffic was at a standstill. He wove through the cars in an instinctive pattern, not even really seeing them, eyes focused instead on the basketball court beyond the chain-link fence and the looming, leafless trees.
He'd crossed the boundary. No. He'd let the boy tear it down. This wasn't his fault. None of it was his fault.
A block away, and Julio could see him at the court already. The hair was impossible to mistake: a light auburn brown, dense and kinky, but with a lightness to it like seafoam.
Julio would have to call his name. The first time they'd met, it had been a false one, but that soon changed.
"Linley," he said, and once he had, realized he'd barely spoken above a whisper. Which didn't matter, because the boy still turned.
Wearing too few clothes, again. Even on this harsh February afternoon, dirty snow choking the sidewalks, here he was out on the court in nothing more than a plaid flannel shirt and worn canvas jeans with holes at the knees. The same clothes a lot of kids in his position wore, but different, somehow. Perverted, as if he were playing dress-up: an older boy dressing like a younger boy dressing like an older boy again, and somewhere in the middle of it all, somebody watching. He didn't look tough, just small and fragile and hungry for something you couldn't eat. But then, that was probably the effect he was going for, at night.
Julio would keep the fence between them, so they couldn't touch.
"Linley," Julio said, louder. Across the court, eyes flinched. Linley's eyes were amazing. Set deep, like white people, but carved according to a completely different symmetry of heritage. When they widened, like now, something raw and unbearably intense shone out from them. It was easy to fall in love with a face like that, and despite the effort he put into his appearance otherwise, Julio didn't think Linley even realized it.
After half a minute's hesitation, Linley ambled over to the fence, caging his fingers around the warped diamond shapes of the links. "They don't know me by that name, here," he warned and scrunched his nose up in an unconsciously childish show of agitation. The West Indian lilt in his voice seemed tentative; perhaps he was trying to speak without it. He had a scatter of small freckles across the bridge of his nose, growing sparse over high cheekbones. "You changed your mind about us?"
Be strong. Be firm. "No," Julio said, but goddamn, the question mark still snuck in at the end. "There is no us. You got it all wrong. What you got... it's an unhealthy emotional attachment."
Linley's face shivered for a second, and his lips twisted slightly. "You think you can read my mind?" The hurt spread from his lips until it lay along every line of his sharp-boned face.
Julio began to ache for him. His whole body hummed with some unnameable need, like a guitar string about to snap, and he knew it wasn't all innocent. "Yeah. Because I seen it all before. You think you're my first?"
"You can't," said Linley, pulling his body closer to the fence until they were almost touching.
You can't what?
You can't read minds. You can't be saying this. You can't leave me.
"I'm not gonna rescue you," said Julio. "You got to do that yourself. This whole... you think I'm a hero and I'm not. It's not love, it's hero-worship." He found himself rattling at the fence. For emphasis, maybe, or because he wanted to fucking tear through it or rip it down, rip the whole damn world down.
"No."
His normal calm, analytical self disappeared. Right when he needed it, of course. "No? The fuck you mean, no? Do you want to die?" He wondered how many times Linley had heard it, from guys like Julio: you will die. This will kill you. Threats that sounded empty, but weren't. Not anymore.
Linley just stared, opened his mouth to try to speak, and closed it again.
He imagined them stuck like this forever, the moment frozen in eternity, in agony, bound together and apart. And he didn't want to end it. Didn't want to say goodbye.
Everything you are. Everything you've fought to be. Don't let him kill that.
Julio spoke slowly, with great precision and formality, so Linley couldn't misinterpret a single word. "You need to stay away from me. You're a boy. A little boy. And I don't fuck boys. I wanted to help you, but I can't. Not like this." He let his hands fall away from the fence and made a gesture of release, fingers flying open into the bitter cold air.
Linley's response was hysterical and calm all at once, words low but tumbling into each other like dominoes. "You think I'm in love with you? You're the one who's crazy, you fucking homo, I just do this for money. You're one who's in love. I don't need no help. I don't need no help from no one, I don't need it from you, and since I don't need your goddamn money maybe you need to stay away from me." His snarl contorted his whole perfect, pretty face, and that was it. Linley, lost.
He was lost, and there was only one thing left to do. One last desperate gamble. Julio dug into his pocket, hand closing around the folded accordion stack of condoms. He balled his fist up as small as he could, shoving his first couple of fingers and the condoms through the fence. "Just... just take these. Just use them. And if you need—" not me, not anymore "—anybody, anything, you come down to thirty—"
"Save it," Linley snapped in reply, turning his back on the condoms and Julio, and on his life, too. His shrill pubescent voice wasn't even angry anymore. Just sad.
2012
The wind died down, and the sun came out, so Julio decided to wait on the bench while he texted back and forth with Jay's grandma. The last message sent -- just call me when he shows up thx -- he leaned back, burrowed his hands deeper into his fleece-lined coat pockets, and people-watched.
A cluster of young mothers with toddlers in strollers. A couple who were trying hard not to look like tourists, but hadn't quite mastered the New York method of seeing without seeming to see: they flicked their eyes, pointed discreetly and often turned to each other in delight. An Asian dude with facial tattoos wearing a Viking helmet who might be either a homeless junkie or a rich conceptual artist with a million dollar loft.
The phone rang.
"I'm sorry, dad." Jay himself, not his grandmother. "I was gonna get on the N train, but I could turn around here."
Julio smiled to himself at the chastened maturity in Jay's voice. He was doing that a lot more lately: turning Julio's annoyance and frustration into pride. "It's okay. I talked to your grandma. You can stay with her tonight, if that's what you need. Of course, that means we don't go shoe shopping."
"Yeah, I can deal. So it's okay? I mean... you're not..."
"Be back by eleven tomorrow. We're cool."
The breathless relief of resolving conflict, ending a fight on good terms. It never got old. Julio wondered if it felt this good for normal people, who got second chances with each other all the time. Who didn't have people disappear from their lives overnight without a trace.
Twenty years. The world moved on, and Julio stayed in place. He kept in shape, dressed mostly the same, and still owned only two pairs of shoes at a time: a pair of Timberland boots and a pair of black oxfords strictly for balls, weddings, quinceañeras... and funerals. There had been a lot of those, back then.
Twenty years of the fire inside him diminishing slowly.
"Julio," someone called. Quietly, in an inside voice.
He looked up. "I know you?" he asked.
The man was dressed well; he didn't look out of place in this newer, richer Bowery. A smoke-gray leather jacket, belted like a trenchcoat but shorter, a knit cap, and sunglasses. There was a lanky, androgynous grace about him.
The man took off his sunglasses and smiled. "Maybe not anymore," he said.
"Holy fucking shit, you're alive," Julio shouted and jumped up and wrapped Linley in a bear hug. He shook with bright laughter, every cold feeling gone, just like that. He'd seen enough human misery to know that miracles should always be accepted with open arms. "You're alive. You're alive." He fell back and held Linley's shoulders. "And you started eating right. You look good."
Linley laughed too, and even when their half-embrace should have turned awkward, he kept hold of Julio's upper arm, like he couldn't bear to part with him. "Thanks. You too. Still hanging around here. Still saving the world."
"Shit, nobody here needs saving. Not unless they go shopping at that Whole Foods. Organic flowers for Valentine's. Shit. Organic flowers."
"I, uh, saw you with that boy."
"That's Jay. He's my son. Foster son, maybe adoptive if we work some things out with the system. He's going through a rough patch right now. He's staying at his grandma's tonight, so I'm gonna miss him saying Fuck you, man every couple minutes."
"Are you..." Linley trailed off. He never was good with asking questions. He looked more confident now, more centered, but that skittishness hadn't changed.
"Still gay? Married? Yeah and no. I got into fostering with my partner, but things didn't work out. It's just me and Jay now. Got a one-bedroom in Washington Heights I turned into a two-bedroom. We do okay, most of the time. So tell me about yourself, man. Come on, sit down."
He sat down and patted the bench beside him, and Linley came to him. There were little crinkles at the corners of those amazing eyes, and Julio tried not to stare at them in fascination. Never in a million years would he have guessed Linley would live long enough to get laugh lines. The thought filled him with a sweet, irrefutable warmth. For once, he felt like the world was on his side.
Linley smiled and spoke. Julio noticed that his accent was almost gone, shaped into a subtle neutrality. "I work at a studio in Long Island City. We do set design for home shopping shows. I live in Brooklyn with some roommates. And yeah, I'm alive."
"I always hoped you were."
"Did a lot of... the people you met here die?"
"Yeah," Julio admitted. He lifted his head again, staring into some middle distance, looking for shadows. So many men and women. Disease. Overdose. Suicide. Murder. Exposure. They'd all had names, faces, and Julio felt their loss every single day, until the weight of them nearly crippled him. But none had hurt as much as Linley's had... and now, improbably, Linley was alive, after all. Not just alive. Well. Maybe even happy. "I come here to think about them, sometimes. It's too many graves to visit, so I just..." He trailed off.
"You were right," Linley said into the silence without prompting, his tone at peace with the whole world. "About me. About everything, but about me. I was a boy. I was sixteen when we met."
1992
Some of the sleepers clustered around the benches noticed Julio peering at them. They started awake, clutched their belongings to their chests, snarled and hissed in fear.
He was a tall black man who dressed a little like a thug. That let him walk in many places, and people stepped aside for him. But sometimes that very fear was a danger to him, and he didn't like to go through the park this late at night.
He'd make another run in the early morning, he decided, and walked streetwards. Once he was out from under the shadow of the gaunt, leafless trees, he took a deep breath of relief. He walked up towards the F stop, passing the basketball courts on his left. Most of the streetlights had been busted out; only the vaguest of shapes wavered in the pool of darkness that lay beyond the chain-link fence.
There was a boy standing under the one working streetlight.
Julio made eye contact and walked towards him. It was all right if the boy thought he was a john. At least then he wouldn't run away. How fucked up was that, that he'd run away from an outreach worker but go willingly to a man who was as likely to kill or beat him as he was to fuck him.
He'd thought the boy was white, at first, because his skin was pale under the uncanny glare of the streetlight. The wild hair, the shape of his eyes and his full lips—now slightly pouted in an artificial smile—told otherwise. And he was thin. Very, very thin.
Why him, over any of the other shapes moving in the darkness? Maybe it was because the spotlight let Julio see his face, see him as a distinct person, impossible to ignore. Maybe because—no. Totally inappropriate.
"Hey," he said. "My name's Julio."
"I'm Blake. You looking for a good time?"
This was it, the make or break moment. Lie and string Blake along, maybe just long enough, or tell the truth and risk spooking him. Evade. "Let's talk about it, okay?" He'd ask Blake to sit down with him, but all the benches were either claimed by sleepers or covered in filth.
"You still got to pay for talk," Blake said, a trace of the islands in his consonants. His beautiful eyes flashed suspiciously.
"I'll tell you about myself. About what I do. And then you can decide whether you want me to keep talking or not. Okay, man? It's all up to you. And what I do, it's gonna blow your mind. I'm on the wrong side of the law. I got to run from cops, just like you."
Oh, he had Blake now. There was a coy, curious curve to his lower lip. He was so young, to be falling for talk like that. If he didn't wise up soon, he was already dead.
"Drugs," said Blake.
"No. Needles. I'm a clean needle smuggler, man. We go into these situations, these parks, me and a partner. They keep watch and I break out the gear. I take dirty needles and give out clean ones, cookers and cotton too. And knowledge. We got these flyers..."
Blake started at that, shivering with some kind of flight impulse as Julio reached into his pocket. Too soon. Julio backed his hand out, spreading it to show he held nothing.
"Chick tracts, that it?" Blake asked.
"Not religion. Science. If you got to live like this, there's ways to be safer. I'm not here to recruit you, man, or tell you what you're doing's wrong. I just want to save your life. You don't believe me? I'll tell you right now: I'm a gay man. I've seen people—my friends—die from HIV AIDS." Blake narrowed his eyes at the presumption, but Julio caught himself quick. "Not that you have to be gay to get it. You heard about Magic Johnson, right? I don't want it to keep happening. Not to no one. That's the only reason I'm out here."
"Why me? Magic Johnson—shit." He leaned back against the fence hard, the sagging metal cushioning him.
"Because you matter," Julio said, taking a chance, reaching out to cup the kid's shoulder and hold it, like his touch could make the truth of his words sink right into that fragile body, and give him strength for all the hard days to come. "You matter to me."
Blake's eyebrows crumpled, and Julio thought he'd flinch away or lash out, but instead he just closed his eyes, reaching up to cover Julio's hand with his own. His palm was cold. Trembling.
"Do you need a place to stay tonight?" asked Julio, and it came out all wrong, or at least it sounded that way to his own ears. "I can find you a shelter bed."
"How about..." Blake said. Petered out for a second. Opened his eyes and tried again, full of new resolve and peering at Julio up from under long eyelashes. A shadowed little dimple appeared on his left cheek. "How about we share one instead? Not for money, I mean."
Julio spoke with great precision and formality. He was drawing a line, here, without pushing Blake away. "Sex is a powerful thing. It's not bad, but we get a lot of bad ideas about it. Wrong messages, you know? You come to a payphone with me, I'll find you a shelter bed. Take you there. And I'll give you a card along with the flyer. You call my beeper anytime, and you come visit me where I work, okay?"
Blake had freckles, Julio noticed for the first time, as the boy's sad, gaunt face twitched in confusion. "I'm... I'm eighteen," he protested, weakly, although Julio had the sense he knew that wasn't the point.
"You're strong," said Julio. "You're gonna be just fine. Come on. Let's go to that payphone. I'll tell you some crazy-ass stories on the way. Bet you a dollar I can make you laugh."
Blake looked like he hadn't laughed in a long, long time.
"Okay," he said.
Julio took him by the arm.
2012
"You were right about me," Linley repeated, staring off into some middle distance himself. "I did have to save my own life, in the end. Took me a couple years, but I got there. Thought about you all the time. Hating you, mostly." He still had that dimple when he smiled mischievously.
"Can't get over how deep your voice is, man. You sound great." Julio could have gone on for a while babbling out compliments, because damn was Linley fine—the way he put himself together, inhabited his body, sounded, moved, everything. "And yeah, that day... I could have handled it better. I was young myself, even if I didn't like to show it. I was trying to get a degree in social work, but life kept getting in the way. There was a lot of heavy political stuff going down. Things that could really make a life or death difference."
"And I was messing that up for you."
"Naw, it wasn't like—"
"Yeah. It was. I came on to you at your work. That was fucked up. I just—my head was all messed up. You looked so good, you looked right in my eyes, and... you nailed it when you said hero worship. I was in love with you." As he spoke, Linley's voice was thick and vibrant with strong-swelling emotion. Fighting to hold something back, or maybe fighting to defend an ever hazier line between the past and the present.
Julio was the one who finally turned his eyes away. The air seemed too thin, as if there wasn't enough oxygen to fuel his cold-raw lungs, his pounding heart. "I wasn't one hundred percent innocent, myself. That's why I was so hard on you, maybe. I kept telling myself you were just a kid, not to— Shit. I'm glad you're okay. I'm glad I didn't fuck you up."
"The opposite. You were like... somebody I could be. Helping other people out. Not being selfish, but living for yourself, too: no apologies, totally honest, totally real. That's what you meant to me."
"You can't see it, but you got me blushing, man."
That dimple was back. "Oh yeah?" Linley pointedly pulled the fingers of his glove off his hand one at a time and reached out, pressing his bare palm to Julio's hot cheek. "Yeah, you are. Cool. Uh, sorry." He drew his hand back and pulled the glove back on. Backwards. Wrong fingers. He reversed it, laughing shyly.
This was actually something that could happen, Julio realized for the first time. All these years and all these regrets, and Linley had just touched him, just like that.
Linlet recovered quickly, his laugh fading to a steady smile. "So why this basketball court, man? I mean, this can't be the only place you came to pass out your literature."
Julio stood on a precipice, on the edge of something big. Life-changing big. Linley was alive, and he wasn't messed up anymore. He'd touched Julio on the cheek, and Julio could grab this and take it to the next level—or he could play it safe and shy away again.
Evade. Figure out where the lines were. "Did you ever look me up?" No, no, no, fuck, he was teasing Linley now, not what he'd intended at all.
"Yes," said Linley, with no hesitation. "After I—" Then he paused. Julio was almost certain what letters lay in that blank space of language, but he waited patiently. "Yeah, I looked for you. But there's a lot of Julio Torreses—that how you say it?—in New York City. I even had a Facebook search set up."
"Oh God. I'm allergic to the social media thing." Julio let his mouth run on autopilot to avoid the bittersweet thought of Linley's years of searching. "Always want to talk to people face to face, you know? Someone made a page for me, but I never put up a picture. Twitter gives me a headache. I got a Youtube account so I can leave comments when people I know do videos, and that's about it." He swallowed past a dry throat. "I looked for you in my own way. I came here. I..."
"You came here looking for me?"
"So many times. I told myself you were dead, but I couldn't stop. It was like a compulsion. We stopped doing the same kind of needle runs—a lot of common sense shit finally turned legal that year—but I still came." He'd wanted Linley to be okay. But more than that, he wanted... he wanted to see him, get a second chance to know him. To look at him not just as a body in sickness, or a boy needing protection and guidance, but as a man. And Julio would cross that line, run his fingers over those tight auburn curls, kiss him, bend him closer, and promise that he'd never walk away again.
Gasping, he rounded on Linley, knowing he probably looked wild-eyed and crazy. "Tell me why you were looking for me. Tell me." He grabbed Linley's shoulder, but didn't go so far as to shake it. "Don't think about it, just say it."
"I wanted a second chance." Second chances. Linley, who'd come so far, was obviously an expert in those. "With you."
"You got it. Let's go."
It was Linley's turn to go wild-eyed, and he drew in a gasp so deep he coughed at the last of it, and a plume of breath rose into the cold. But he was smiling, too, really smiling, and it was the most beautiful sight in the world. "Is your place okay? I mean, if your son, I mean Jay—"
Julio had already bounded to his feet, and he extended a courtly arm to Linley. "His grandma's gonna call, but yeah, he'll be gone. You know, we could walk over to the West Village on the way. Have a date. Some coffee." And he winked, now that his confidence had started to rush back, invigorating him. "Get to first base. Aw yeah, made you blush. You okay with a little PDA?"
"After waiting twenty years? Sure I am." Linley grinned, an expression Julio had never seen before and knew he'd do anything to see again.
It didn't feel right to hold hands here, not yet, but Julio kept a light touch on Linley's arm as they walked north to East Houston and turned left at the corner. Linley's leather jacket felt wonderfully warm and smooth. "We can take our time," said Julio, feeling like he owed Linley an explanation. "But I'm not gonna make you wait anymore, either."
Linley shivered, at that, and Julio knew it wasn't from the cold.
They came to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk and Julio was about to slip his hand up under Linley's knit cap, to touch the back of Linley's head and that gorgeous hair he'd loved and wanted to get his hands on since the first time he'd seen it, but Linley slipped out of his grasp suddenly. Skittish, maybe. "You think you'll keep coming to the court?" he asked.
"Naw," Julio said and cast a look over his left shoulder, to the Whole Foods storefront with its frothy display of red and pink carnations. "Not unless I need organic flowers, I guess." They both shook their heads, giddy with rueful yeah-but-what'll-you-do laughter. "Anyway, Jay's happier playing indoors."
When he looked back again, Linley had darted closer suddenly—God, the way he moved—and kissed him, lips cold, of course, but with just a hint of sweet warmth. The kiss was quick and sure, free from all the weight of their pasts, and blooming with promise for their future.
Was Julio coming back to the courts at Sara D. Roosevelt Park?
No.
I found what I came here looking for.
About the Authors
Heidi Belleau was born and raised in small town New Brunswick, Canada. She now lives in the rugged oil-patch frontier of Northern BC with her husband, an Irish ex-pat whose long work hours in the trades leave her plenty of quiet time to write. She has a degree in History from Simon Fraser University with a concentration in British and Irish studies; much of her work centred on popular culture, oral folklore, and sexuality, but she was known to perplex her professors with unironic papers on the historical roots of modern romance novel tropes. (Ask her about Highlanders!) When not writing, you might catch her trying to explain British television to her newborn daughter or chasing her cats off her Christmas tree
You can find her tweeting as @HeidiBelleau, email her at heidi.below.zero@gmail.com, or visit her blog: http://heidi-below-zero.blogspot.com.
Violetta Vane grew up a drifter and a third culture kid who eventually put down roots in the Southeast US, although her heart lives somewhere along the Pacific coast of Mexico. She's worked in restaurants, strip clubs, academia and the corporate world and studied everything from the philosophy of science to queer theory to medieval Spanish literature. She homeschools her eldest son and has a passion for political activism. You can find her blogging at http://violettavane.blogspot.com.