Tainted Gold (Providence Gold 3)

Frowning, she looked at me and then at her wallet in her hand. “So you’re not robbing us, that’s good to know. Why do you need her age? Shouldn’t you already know this seeing as how she’s carrying your kid?”

“You thought I was robbing you?” She had a fair point about the age thing, but this?

“Eh, I wasn’t sure, but you were in my wallet, so…”

“I need her age because the Mayans say if you add the age at conception with the year it was conceived in, if you get an even number it’s a girl, odd it’s a boy.”

Her eyes widened, and she blurted, “Twenty-two and it’s 2019,” trailing off her eyes flicked to the side before she yelled, “so that makes two-thousand-and-forty-one, and that’s an odd so it’s a boy!”

Feeling my legs sway, I grabbed onto the first thing I could which just so happened to be a statue on the table with something long poking out from between its legs. Glancing quickly at it, I saw what my fingers were wrapped around - fuck’s sake, I was wanking off a statue. Snatching my hand back, I looked back at Beau praying she hadn’t seen it.

Sadly, this wasn’t the case.

Leaning in, she winked at me. “I bought her that when I went to Africa, it’s a fertility statue. You’re welcome!”

I rarely blushed, it was a waste of time when so much random shit happened to your family, but this woman had my cheeks burning. Determined not to give her the reaction she was looking for, I looked down into the bag and saw it – the one thing that both haunted me from my childhood, and made me grin with happiness in adulthood. Cherry Chapstick. It was stupid, and the story behind it was dumb, but it was a bit like smelling your grandma’s cooking and feeling like you were home.

“What’s that look about?” Beau asked, trying to see what I was looking at. “What did you find?”

Sighing, I closed up the bag and tried to figure out how to word it without looking like something out of a stalker or a serial killer movie. Then again, was there a good way to tell this story? The answer to that was no.

“When I was at school, the chick I was dating kept wearing this lip balm that made my lips burn and swell up,” I told her, watching her cringe. “We weren’t that old, but she’d give me a peck on the lips and I’d look like a freak for the rest of the day. We broke up.”

“What’s this got to do with the stuff Lily has? Oh shit, are you allergic to that too?”

“No,” I shook my head, thinking about the rest of the story. To get to the point, I had to go through all of it – fucking great! “This kept happening, no matter what flavor or brand the girls used, until I started dating this one girl in middle school. Come to find out, she was wearing cherry Chapstick.”

“Ah, okay, well it makes sense then. Well done to Lily for using the right kind,” she shrugged, looking disappointed that there wasn’t more to the story.

Oh, was she wrong.

“It doesn’t end there. I started buying it for the girls I was dating and ended up buying so much that…” I fucking hated this part of the story. “People thought that I was gay.”

Beau didn’t say a word, she just blinked slowly at me. Yeah, that was the standard reaction I got when people heard the story and then found out the reason.

“I’m not sure…” she began and then took a deep breath in.

“My parents put up a pride flag and organized a pride parade through Gonzales County,” I rushed the last words out.

That was pretty much the end of it all now, well at least the bits that I wanted to share. My family had been so supportive about it all, but they’d taken it to the next level. Even now, I’d get invited over for dinner or lunch and Mom would tell me about some guy she’d met, or a friend knew, and how they were single. I get why she was doing it – she wanted to make sure I wasn’t hiding it and for me to know they supported me no matter what, but still.

A huge grin broke across Beau’s face and I knew I was in deep shit. “You’re the rainbow sheep of the Townsend family,” she crowed and did a weird dance. “You’re also the reason we have our own Pride celebrations here.”

“Well, my family are the reason for that,” I felt it pertinent to point out. “But they also go to LA for the celebrations there and to lend their support every year.”

This was where I felt nauseous. Not because they did that, I totally supported it, but because two years ago, my mom and dad had imbibed on a few too many shots during the celebrations in LA. That evening, as the news channels updated their online articles, a photo had been printed across all of them – of my parents wearing nothing north of the border apart from a pride flag which had been painted onto them. Obviously, they’d blurred out her boobs in a lot of them, but some of them hadn’t.