“Gay?” Christopher asks. “No, sweetheart. I like your pussy too much for that.”
“It’s possible to be bi.”
“Is this sex education night at the St. Claire household? I know what it means to be bi. And I know what it means to be straight. I’m not really any of those things. I’m wasted over a single person, Harper. Over you.”
Goose bumps rise on my skin. Over you. I want to believe him, but it’s hard to be joyful when it looks like Sutton is crushed. When it looks like he’s questioning his sexuality. “You never said that to me.” It pisses me off, suddenly. “Why didn’t you ever say that to me?”
“Because it wasn’t something I could buy,” he says, his voice grim. “And that’s on me, for wasting the time I should have been with you. For letting you be with Sutton.”
My eyes narrow. “For letting me? You don’t own me, Christopher.”
He doesn’t argue the point, but he doesn’t agree either. “You aren’t gay,” Christopher says, his voice thoughtful now. He looks at Sutton as if seeing him for the first time.
“So how do you explain what just happened?”
“Harper happened. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
“That’s the problem,” Sutton says, his voice hard. “Maybe I want it to.” He stands and leaves the room, grabbing his jeans as he goes. The space he sat on the bed is still depressed from his hard, muscled weight. There’s no filling the space where he’s been.
Christopher meets my gaze. “I’m done sharing you.”
There’s an ache in my chest. If he’s done sharing me, does that mean he’s done having me? I’m not sure if Sutton and I are a package deal. “What does that mean?”
“Ask him about the library,” he says, ominous.
“You’re leaving?”
“I think he needs you more. Tonight.”
I follow him down the stairs and watch him pull out of the driveway. Sutton comes to stand beside me, watching the corner where the red taillights disappeared. He looks broken, and I feel bad asking him when he’s like this but I have to know. “The library.”
He sounds almost absentminded. “What about it?”
“The foundation issues. The termites. The plumbing. Is it really fixable?”
“I said it was, Harper.”
“So you’re telling me the truth?”
Sutton looks behind us at the house. I’m not sure what he sees. Does he recognize the Gone with the Wind columns? Or does he only see a place with pumpkin-carved cocks and cookies inside? “Honest to a fault,” he finally says. “That’s me.”
Then he lopes to his car, moving slowly like someone who’s been delivered some fatal blow. As if Gold Rush kicked him in the ribs the last time I went, except I know he was uninjured only a few hours ago.
Sutton may have meant to push Christopher to his breaking point, but I think he found his own instead. He doesn’t look back as he gets into his car and drives away. Only when I’m standing alone in the lightening sky does it feel like I might never see him again.
“Graham.” My mother’s voice is thin as paper, as wavery as the wind.
I stroke her hair and she quiets. I came in to check on her after the men left, and she seemed fine. This morning everything changed. She barely woke up when I spoke to her, even though she’s always been an early riser, doing her sun salutations every morning with a yoga mat on the porch. Her sessions have been shorter and shorter, but this morning she doesn’t even get out of bed.
Guilt suffuses me as if somehow she’s doing worse because I had such a great orgasm bent over the couch downstairs with Sutton last night. I don’t know if the universe really works on such a terrible balance sheet, but if I learned anything from Daddy, it’s that if you’re losing, someone else is winning.
Mom shifts in her uneasy nap, her skin flushed. It seems unfair that she should still dream about Daddy when he humiliated her at the end. He knew the society wives would shun her after being publicly left out of his will. And here she is, missing him and in pain—I suppose those are the same things.
“Don’t go, Graham. Don’t.”
A sharp pain in my heart. “Mom,” I whisper. “Wake up.”
Except I don’t want her to wake up before it’s time to give her another dose of meds. That was the only prescription she accepted from the doctors. They couldn’t save her life, and right now they can’t even keep her comfortable. The nurse showed up this morning and checked Mom’s vitals, but I sent her back downstairs. If she’s going to be hurting, the least I can do is sit with her.