When I had agreed to help him with Cai, he responded by initiating sex. No, not just sex, intimacy. Peter had been intimate with me. He’d shown me patience and warmth.
The same thing just happened downstairs when I asked him if he wanted to stay here. Immediately I was dragged up to my room and attacked.
Most people showed gratitude or happiness in a smile or a bouquet of flowers—Peter sucked cock.
Not a whole lot of debate on which of those choices was my favorite.
Not a big surprise, either, that as I jogged down the steps a few minutes after him, I considered all the ways to make Peter grateful—frequently. But at the resounding slap I heard, my feet skipped the last three steps in one bound, my smile crumbling simultaneously with my landing ‘thud’.
Peter stood in front of Cai’s mother, his cheek slowly reddening even as the rest of his skin paled. His jaw clenched, his nose gave a slight tick; and then his face became blank with a single blink of his eyes.
“You take my boy from me, Petya! Whore yourself? This is what you do with my child and your life?”
“Hey,” I intervened, standing between them, my back to Peter. “You hit him again, and I’ll arrest you.”
“Stay out of this, prettyboy,” Darryl said, somewhere behind me. I didn’t bother to check, but I knew he was next to Peter.
“You are not family!” Rosa glared at me.
“It doesn’t take family to understand that blaming a boy who was twelve years old, is on the wrong side of insane.” I wasn’t going to ask which kind of ‘family’ she meant.
“We did what we had to do,” Peter said, a repeat of his earlier assertion to me.
“You did what you had to do? You sell your body when your mothers cry our hearts onto your empty beds?”
Peter said nothing in defense of himself or Darryl.
“Mama Rosa,” Darryl began in a stern voice, “We couldn’t stay. Not after what happened. Would you rather Cai go to juvie?”
“Nikë is better now? Raped by drug dealer? Taking test for AIDS? Going to jail for murder? What have you two done?”
“That’s hardly his fault,” I said, but Peter seemed to disagree.
“It’s my fault, Rosa. I—”
“You. You are a stupid boy! I should slap the backend not the face.” She stepped around me and pulled both Darryl and Peter into a hug. She was taller than Darryl by an inch, and Peter was a few inches taller than she, but Rosa seemed to dwarf both of them. “Stupid boys.” Each “boy” had his chin in her hands as she looked them over. I summoned all my detective skills to handle the scene I was witnessing. Nothing. For all my experience, I threw up my hands in defeat. There was no understanding these people. “You go call your mother,” she told Peter.
“Does she know?” Peter asked, lip white under the force of his teeth.
“I tell her some. You tell her everything. She is flying here soon. Go now.” She turned to Darryl as Peter slipped off with his cell phone tucked against his stomach. “You, help me cook.”
I was left standing there as Darryl trailed after her into my small kitchen. “What the hell just happened?” I asked the empty room.
Darryl called from the kitchen, “You just met an Albanian mother.”
From my point in the living room, I watched Darryl and Rosa pull things from the cabinet and fridge, until Rosa looked up and raised her brows at me. “Vendosur tabela.” Rosafa flitted her hands in my direction. Having not had interaction with a mother—other than Dave’s, who was a soft spoken and soft-all-over woman—I didn’t know what Rosa expected. I checked behind me in case someone there was the something I was supposed to do. “You fix table,” she ordered.
“I don’t have table,” I replied, still reeling from the questions battering around in my head from these encounters.
“What kind of person has no table for eating?” She tsked.
“The kind that lives alone and eats drive-thru food?” I retorted.
“Maybe you live alone because you eat garbage. You think of that?” She appeared to be massaging someone on my counter. I leaned over the half-wall which served as a breakfast table to see her rolling dough, not noticing Peter until he leaned against me, sending a thrill of heat down my neck.
“I live alone because I’m an asshole. Since my fiancée just found out I like cock, I’ll continue to live alone” The word emphasized around a mild sentence sounded even more harsh. I didn’t care. I was hoping the shock of my words would shut her up.
“Elton John does not live alone. Doogie Howser does not live alone.”