“Well, I’m about to be home. I’ll call you tomorrow. You comin’ over to Mami’s when I get there or what? I need to hold my niece.”
“You can hold her, change her, feed her, and whatever else allows me to have a nap. So yeah, I’ll be there.”
I chuckle. “Okay. Love you. See you tomorrow.”
“Love you, too.”
When I pull up to my house, my phone dings with a text message.
Lili: Don’t think you got away with not answering my question. I’ll bug you about it manaña.
She has the nerve to end it with an angel emoji.
I wish I could tell her what happened, because maybe then she’d understand and not keep questioning me about it.
But telling her the truth would drudge up a lot of memories I’d rather stay buried.
8
Alejandro
6 Years Ago
Hours after our encounter in the alleyway, as I’m asleep in my bed, my phone goes off incessantly. Text message after text message keep popping up, lighting up my room and filling it with that annoying high-pitch bing-bong sound.
I snatch it off the nightstand and start looking through the messages. Clearly, Merrick’s been drinking, and now he’s drunk texting me.
Kingston: I’m sorry.
Kingston: I wanted together
Kingston: To do this together. Everything togerther
Kingston: You have a boyfriendd and I justw ant you
Kingston: I may be drunk buut I want to tel l you something.
Kingston: I’m gonna tell everyone. Right now. I’m about to telll them all the truth.
Kingston: Party at my brothers. Everyoness here so I mightas well.
“Oh God, oh God,” I murmur, yanking the covers off me and hurrying out of bed. I hit speaker and call his phone while I shove my legs through a pair of jeans. It goes to voicemail. I hit redial while I’m putting on a shirt. It goes to voicemail again.
“Fucking, Kingston.”
He shouldn’t do this now. Not when he’s drunk. I grab my car keys and hurry to Elijah’s house and hope I’m not too late.
When I pull up, there’s several people in the garage.
“Hey, Alejandro! You lookin’ for Merrick?” Sky asks.
My heart seizes up. I wonder if he already told them. “Yeah, where is he?”
“Went inside. He’s pretty wasted. Was saying all kinds of shit.”
Oh no. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Who knows, man. You can probably find him in his room.”
“All right. Cool. Thanks.”
Sky goes back to talking to the girl he had his arm around, and I find a few more people inside. One of them being Elijah.
“Hey, E. You seen Merrick lately?”
Elijah spins around. “Oh, hey. Yeah, I saw him a little bit ago. Maybe upstairs? I don’t know for sure, but if you find him, tell him he’s helping clean this mess tomorrow. I told him a few people, not twenty.”
“Okay. Will do.”
I jog up the stairs and head straight for his room. When I open the door, I expect to find him passed out on his bed. What I don’t expect is to walk in on him in bed with a girl.
Okay, he’s in bed, she’s getting out of it.
“Um, knock much?” she asks, pulling her shirt down over her breasts.
“Sorry. I was looking for. . .” I trail off and point to Merrick.
“Well, I was leaving anyway.”
After she’s gone, I try to get him to wake up, but he’s pretty out of it. He already has his shirt off, but his jeans and shoes are still on, so I remove them and get him under the covers.
I make the decision to stay in his room so I can talk to him when he wakes up. I push the chair he has in his room closer to the bed and prop my feet up on the end of the mattress and sleep the rest of the night uncomfortably.
“Ali. Ali.” A hand on my shoulder shakes me. “Ali, wake up.”
I move to straighten up, but the angle I was sleeping in has my neck and shoulders stiff. “Ow, shit.”
“What’re you doin’, man?”
I put my feet on the ground and tilt my head from side to side, feeling the ache in the back of my neck. “I came here because you sent me a hundred texts talking about how you were about to tell everyone everything.”
Merrick drops back to his bed, rubbing his head with his hand. “Oh shit.”
“Yeah, oh shit. I didn’t think you should do that drunk. Do you know if you said anything to anyone?”
“I don’t think so. God, I feel like shit.”
“Do you remember being with a girl last night? Because I walked in just as she was getting dressed and leaving.”
Merrick looks at me with confusion and concern etched on his face. “A girl? Naked in my bed?”
“Yep.”
“Fuck, I was really messed up. Pretty sure I didn’t fuck her, though.”
“Pretty sure?”
“Did you fuck your boyfriend last night?” he counters.
I roll my eyes. “Anyway, you had your pants and shoes on when I came in, so unless you fuck with everything but your shirt on, you probably didn’t. I don’t think you would’ve had it in you to do much anyway.”
He snorts, then angles his head up at me and grins. “I would’ve if you were here with me.”
“Sure.”
“I can guarantee my dick would get hard for you no matter how drunk I was.”
My cock twitches. Fucking Kingston.
“So, you still planning on telling everyone now that you’re sober?” I ask, getting off the subject of his dick.
With a sigh, he flops onto his back and rests his arm over his eyes. “Fuck, man. I don’t know.”
“Yeah, I figured that would be the case. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t do something you’d regret when you were sober.”
I head for the door, but his voice stops me.
“Ali, wait.”
“What?”
“I want to tell them.”
“But you’re not ready. I get it.”
He sighs. “I still want you. I mean it. I want a future together.”
I laugh. “And be like Bert and Ernie? Living together and having people question what our relationship is?”
Merrick chuckles. “People have roommates.”
“We’d pretend to be roommates
