“You did not!” She totally did.
“I did too! I said to Sandy, ‘Put them in a room with condoms and lube and big dildos, and I guarantee by the end of the trip, they’ll be balling each other.’”
“That was you?” I say with a scowl.
“Well, yeah. Sandy doesn’t really have a bowl full of condoms and, like, sixty different kinds of lube sitting out normally.”
“The sex dungeon was staged?” I don’t know why I’m so outraged.
“Completely,” Kori says. “Sandy would never do that. A classy queen, that one is.”
“Oh, yeah. Nothing says classy like a two-foot rubber penis.”
“That’s not hers,” she says. “That’s Paul’s. All of them were.”
“You’re fucking with me.” Paul? Paul Auster has a dildo collection? Bullshit.
She shakes her head. “Apparently he has a box of them under his bed. Who knew, right? At least we know they work.”
“We didn’t use them!” Of course, I won’t ever be able to get the image of using them out of my head for the rest of my life. You know. Because I actually needed more psychological scarring and all.
“No, I forgot,” she says. “You just kissed. Leave it to you to turn something I wanted to be tawdry into something sickeningly sweet.” The smile fades from her face as her eyes grow serious. “You sure about this, Ty?”
“What? Dom? Going to Idaho? Tracking down my mother? Life in general?”
“Sure. Why not. All of the above.”
“I’ve never been less sure about anything in my entire life.”
“Well, as long as you’re not just half-assing it and all,” she says.
I rub my hands over my face. “Is it just me or is my life more than a little nuts?”
She laughs and kisses my cheek. “Honey, that’s what makes you you. You are so much bigger and stronger than you know. Anyone who has been through all that you have and can still stand on their own two feet is miraculous in itself. But to do what you’re about to do? Tyson, you’re amazing.”
I shake my head. “Or a glutton for punishment.”
“You’ll never know unless you try, right? And if it blows up in your face, you have all of us to make sure you can stand again. I promise.”
“I’m going to miss you,” I say, blinking away the tears. “Without you, I wouldn’t be here.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she says, hugging me tight. “You call me, day or night. And I’ll be up to visit Seafare, and you can come back down here and bring your big, sexy brute of a man. Best friends don’t say good-bye, Ty. Especially not you and me.”
“You going to be okay here?” On top of everything else, I’m worried about leaving her here. Corey hasn’t come out since before we left for Tucson.
She nods as she pulls away. “I think so. I hope so. I’ll stay with Sandy for now, until I figure things out.”
“You will,” I tell her.
She wipes her eyes. “Look at this,” she scolds me. “You’re ruining my makeup. If you ever tell anyone you made me cry, I’ll punch you in your taint.”
I laugh. “Yeah, I think you’ll fit in here just fine.”
“Ty?”
“Yeah?”
“No matter what your mother says, can you remember something for me?”