Coffee, Grit, and my Dad's Best Shoes 3.1

second part of the first scene of chapter three which i am posting on the same day because i'm a bad person. enjoy!

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I pulled the packaging off the liners first, testing all four on the back of one hand, trying to bite back a grin of epic proportions. Not that anyone was around to see me grinning like a fool over makeup, mind, but I still felt like an idiot for being that happy about it. I decided against doing anything elaborate, because I was in all honesty a little embarrassed at the idea of walking out with anything flashy on my eyes, and drew a thin strip on my upper lids with the grey, careful not to venture too far from my lash-line. It went on easy and even, and when I looked up to examine it, I felt five thousand times happier than I had been a few minutes ago.

She'd bought me makeup. I mean, that shouldn't have surprised me. Aunty Leanne was a diva among a nation spoiled brats who didn't deserve the status, and she'd always indulged my streaks of obvious, though largely unspoken, camp tendencies. The first time I'd made a fuss over shoes, she'd looked at me like I was the Holy Grail and she was Indiana Jones, only in a skirt and with a lot more lipstick.

But heaven above, the woman had surprised me, and I really, really appreciated that.

"How's it going?"

I startled at her voice, nearly losing the chapstick to the drain, and let a hand flutter to my chest. "Well. It's going well." I cleared my throat and recomposed myself. "This stuff goes on really, um, nice." I shouldn't have felt quite that awkward talking about makeup with her, but I did.

She nodded, and I watched her reflection in the mirror closely. Unreadable expression, distant eyes. Obviously, she wasn't thinking about the makeup anymore.

"So..." she said after a couple seconds, "Brazil."

Oh God please no.

"When's he out of the hospital, again?"

Please don't be this intuitive. "If all goes according to plan, Friday. We won't know for sure until Wednesday or Thursday, though." My voice came out unwavering, which was good. The mirror was telling me that my cheeks had flushed, which was slightly less good. I swallowed. "You're invited to the mini party."

"You told me that."

I licked my lips. "Oh. Right." It was probably pretty bad that I almost didn't want her to go. If she even saw me look at that boy...

"Is he cute?"

I blanched, and then the blush was back five times as strong and I kind of wanted to to melt into the bathroom tile. "Is he... what?" My gaze flickered from her reflection to my own, focusing on my own eyes. I could barely even see her in my peripheral. "I mean, I... think you could call him handsome, objectively, but-"

Apparently, I could see her in my peripheral enough to see her roll her eyes. "Oh please, Parker." It was the tone. The I-know-all-your-little-secrets-already-so-cut-the-crap one that always managed to make my throat feel dry. I really hated that tone.

"He's fucking gorgeous," I muttered, well under my breath, and bit down hard on my bottom lip. Did this count as outing myself? I felt kind of like this counted as outing myself. And suddenly, I was a little nauseous again.

"F-bomb worthy. I'm impressed. I wouldn't have asked- I mean, I know what he looked like a while ago- but a lot can happen to a face and a body in the teen years." She shuffled in a few more steps and lifted her hands to my shoulders, and I was pretty content to melt into the massage she started doling out. It was funny, because you couldn't even see her anymore. She wasn't even a short woman; I was just freakishly tall.

"Yeah," I said, voice barely a murmur. I paused, deciding to take this whole thing one step further. Just to make myself clear. "From what I remember, he's a good kisser, too."

Her hands paused, and I tensed until they started moving again. "You were together?"

I took a deep breath and nodded. "Yeah. Almost the whole time we hung out." She was going to ask. She was going to ask what had happened. We'd been such good friends, after all. And now that we'd been dating? She wouldn't go for the 'we just had a falling out' excuse I'd given her when I'd stopped seeing him. She was going to ask, and I was going to have to give her the full story. I'd have to go back to how shocked he'd looked. See his eyebrows knit and his lips curl down, back against the wall.

I'd have to remember the fact that he didn't say anything. That he never, not once, screamed that I'd been the one to instigate. He hadn't fought. Hadn't yelled that I was a coward. Hadn't told them that we'd been together for months.

He'd let me go.

"What happened?" There it was. She must've saw the look in my eyes, because her voice came out soft. "Did you just... break up?"

Jeez, it would've been easy to say yes to that. I mean, we'd been young. Young enough that, had nothing happened, it would've been a miracle if we were still together. 'Just breaking up' would've been normal. Expected.

I blew my breath out through a pocket in my lips and shook my head. "No." To hell with it. Fessing up was probably good for my spirit or something. "I mean, like-" I combed a hand through my hair, twisting away from her to put the toilet lid down and sit on it. My gaze zeroed in on the lavender bathroom mat she was standing on.

"We were supposed to meet up for lunch one day," I started. My voice shook a little, but not badly enough to dissuade me from continuing. "Had this stupid regular place and everything, but he was- I mean, the guy's been out since he was twelve. He had his bullies." Still did, from the looks of things. "I dunno, he was- he was pretty freaked out when he got there, because they were following him around. So I took him to the music room, 'cause I had a voice lesson midway through lunch, and I knew that my teacher wouldn't mind if he sat in for it." There was a lump gathering in my throat, and I had to pause for a second to get it under control.

"This doesn't sound like it's foreshadowing a breakup," Aunty said, walking around to sit on the edge of the tub. One of her hands found my shoulder again, rubbing smooth, up and down patterns. It didn't sound like I was foreshadowing a breakup, but she obviously knew that it wasn't something that I liked to look back on.

I licked my lips, pulling at a thread that had come loose on the leg of my jeans. "Yeah, well. I calmed him down. Like, freaking danced him around the room. And I kissed him. And the guys he'd been trying to avoid walked in and saw." My voice clipped when her fingers curled around my shoulder and squeezed.

"Oh, Parker." The dread in her voice was unmistakable. Not necessarily accusatory, but close enough. Which was fine. I kind of totally one-hundred percent deserved it.

Both of my hands came up to cover my face. "Yeah." I swallowed hard, pressing my fingers into my forehead the second the tears started. "I told them that he'd just grabbed me. That I'd just wanted to make him feel better, and he up and kissed me." She didn't say anything, and I took the two-second pause as an invitation to keep going with a shaking voice and trembling hands. "They didn't even believe me. I just... I don't even know how. I just got out. I left him there to take my beating. And he did. For fuck sakes, I didn't even talk to him after. Wouldn't touch him with a ten-foot pole until his dad got caught up with that stupid fucking gang and went missing."

There was plenty more that I wanted to throw onto the end of that. That they'd confronted me later. That I'd had a chance to fess up and take my stance at my boyfriend's side and start to somehow make up for the fact that I'd left him there a few hours ago. But I hadn't. I'd denied it. I'd polished up my story. Used my mass amounts of charisma and a few slurs to convince them that I was clean of any and all intentional homosexual activity. None of it would come out. My throat had gotten too constricted for that.

"I don't even know what to say to that, Parks," Aunty murmured. At that point, my shoulders were shaking a little, and her hand had tightened its grip. Not harshly. Reassuringly. "I mean, it was... that's pretty bad. I can't even tell you that it wasn't a terrible thing to do without being a bad role model."

I shook my head, pulled my face out of my hands, and wiped my palms on my knees. "I'd actually be kinda pissed that you'd belittle his importance level that much if you didn't tell me that it was a terrible thing to do." Deep breath. A sniff. A few blinks to get the rest of the tears out. "But... I just... I knew that I should've grown a set a long time ago, but I kept getting scared, y'know? Like, every time I made up my mind to apologize, I remembered how cowardly that was. How incredibly ridiculous it was that I threw him to the lions like that." I wiped my cheeks and sniffed again. "And then he goes and says that he's happy that I showed up." That time, I laughed a little. Under my breath and with a disbelieving head-shake, but I laughed.

And Aunty chuckled with me. "I'm not going to lie to you, Parker. He sounds like quite the kid. Kind of makes me wish I'd taken the initiative to familiarize myself with him a little better."

"Yeah," I said softly. "'Quite the kid' is a pretty drastic understatement." I caught myself smiling. "Like... one time, this girl walked up to him and started yelling at him about how 'fags go to hell' or whatever, and when he said he didn't agree- like, in the calmest, most respectful tone- she spit on his feet. So you know what he does?"

"What?" She asked it like she was wary to know the answer.

"He asked her if she wanted to go for a coffee so that they could discuss it further. On him."

"Wow." She paused for a second, and I heard her hair swish as she shook her head. "I can't decide if I'm extremely, extremely impressed with him and his parents- for raising a kid like that, I mean- or if I wanna smack 'im. I would've ripped the bitch's throat out."

I sighed, deciding that now was as good a time as any to leave. "Yeah," I said as I got up. "He's a weird guy." Unfortunately for the state of the world, Brazil Lius were a rare specimen.