It's Not Shakespeare (11 page)

“I don’t remember anything besides the blow-job I think he gave me. I was pretty drunk at the time.”

Rafael burst into raucous laughter. “Who was giving,
papi,
because you’re pretty good at those. It shouldn’t have pissed him off that bad!”

James grinned and put the key in the ignition. “He was giving,” he said, embarrassed. “All I kind of remember was coming and then asking him if he learned that from his wife, because she seemed to think he was straight.”

“Oh no you
didn’t!
”

James couldn’t even look at him. “Maybe I didn’t!” He shrugged. “I’ve never been that drunk in my life. I think I was trying to be funny. I didn’t know it was a sore spot.”

As Rafael howled in laughter and Marlowe settled down, James turned the key in the ignition, waiting for the absurdly loud engine to start up.

He put it in reverse, tapped on the gas…

And was astounded when the thing growled backward like it was stalking a Honda to eat for lunch. James knew his eyes got really big. He pushed his glasses furtively up his nose and felt a tiny, power-hungry grin start to push at the corners of his mouth.

“How much horsepower did you say this has?” he asked with some caution.

“Does it matter?” Rafael asked, still chortling over the blow-job thing.

“No,” James decided, then threw the thing into drive and gunned it.

Oh, wheaowwwwwwwwwww….

It was like being a
god!
That car… it could have gone
anywhere…
and it could have gotten there at light speed. Sitting at an intersection felt like being an ADD grade-schooler in the last few minutes of school. James found himself bouncing up and down on his ass in anticipation of hitting the gas again.

It was almost depressing that they were only going to the dog park. Hell, it was only a fifteen-minute drive!

“Can I drive home?” he asked when they got there, and Rafael gave a wicked, full-body grin.

“Baby, as long as I’m the only man giving you blow-jobs, you can drive me anywhere you want!”

Marlowe was especially happy this day—he frisked and growled at the little ball and danced around James’s hand as he went to throw it again. James finally gave up on the ball and just sank to his knees and rubbed the little dog all over until he ran around in circles, chasing his own tail, before collapsing happily at James’s feet. James picked the little dog up and got his daily ration of face licking, and he caught Rafael looking at him oddly.

“What?”

“I’m just doing a timeline, that’s all. Your ex dumps you, you come here, you get drunk and…
weird
things happen with that asshole in the douche-mobile, and then you get a dog?”

James blushed. “Named Marlowe,” he said quietly.

Rafael thought about it, put the pieces together. “Named Marlowe,” he agreed. “Who needs to be loved just for being Marlowe.”

Marlowe licked James’s chin. “A student brought him to school one day. She was going to sell him to her friend, she had the papers and all the stuff in her car, but her friend bailed, so there she was, stuck with this little dog. And I picked him up and he licked my face, and she said, ‘Geez, Professor, he really took a shine to you!’, and I knew it. He liked me for me.”

Rafael looked at him impulsively. “What are you doing for Easter?”

James shrugged and blushed. “Calling my mother, talking to my sister. Waiting for you to get done with your family.”

“Come with me.”

James looked around Marlowe’s head, which was bobbing in his vision in time to the dog’s panting. “To see your family?”

Rafael blushed—even with his espresso-colored skin, James could see it. “You could be a friend that Sophie introduced me to. My moms is crazy about Sophie—keeps trying to fix us up.”

James grimaced. “Poor Sophie.”

“Yeah, well, woman’s got it coming, after how she decided to put you and me together. I mean, not that I don’t want to thank her and all, but still….” He shrugged.

“Cold,” James agreed, getting a feeling for Rafael’s vernacular. “Stone cold.”

Rafael grinned and then sobered. “So, will you?”

James wanted to say no. He did. It wasn’t that he wasn’t conscious of the honor—in fact, it was terrifying. But there was more to it than that. He had literally not been aware, when Rafael had first walked up to him, of the culture gap between the two of them.

Every now and then, Rafael made it clear to him, like an ice sculpture dildo up the backside, that when they were together, they alone formed a slender bridge where two people meet.

“Oh, geez—God, I can’t watch politics anymore!” James complained one night, when the news was on before bed. Rafael, who had been reading a car magazine on the other side of the couch, looked up disinterestedly.

“’S’all white people, Jimmy. I don’t pay any attention anyway.”

“You don’t mean that?” James half laughed.

Rafael shrugged. “Look at ’em, Jimmy—you see any of those people who look like me in that box?”

And that had been that. And politics weren’t the only place Rafael caught him by surprise.

“I need to get a cleaning service,” James had complained the weekend before. He was lying on his stomach and looking at the corner of the room one morning. He knew they didn’t cost much, and he was
so
absentminded sometimes. His dust bunnies were about to grow fangs and co-opt the silverware as weaponry.

Rafael nodded in agreement next to him. They had just made love, and they were still catching their breath, talking silly nonsense things until their breathing stilled and they felt ready to hit the showers. “Make sure you get a Mexican or a Filipino. They do it right. Don’t get no white people, Jimmy—they clean your house like you owe them.”

James had gaped, not even sure his politically correct liberal conservative soul could possibly grasp all the levels of wrong that statement was.

“I can’t believe you said that!” he managed after a minute, and Rafael shrugged and looked longingly at James’s end-table drawer.

“It is what it is, my man. Hey—I saw some toys in there… when we gonna use them?”

“When we get tired of our own personal toys—seriously—do you believe that?”

Rafael looked away from the toy drawer with a sigh. “Baby, why do you think there’s so many Mexican housecleaners?”

“Because institutionalized racism has made them believe a college education isn’t within their grasp and they apply their skills and business acumen to an easily accessible business medium?”

Rafael blinked for a minute. “Well, whatever you said, it means we clean a damned good house.” He smiled wickedly and reached into the drawer, bringing out a medium-sized plug and the bottle of lubricant. With a languid hand he started rubbing James’s bare bottom suggestively, and James looked at what was in his other hand and felt himself grow—against all odds—hard.

“I think I got a good use for this. What you say, Jimmy? It’s Sunday, after all.”

James had blanked out after that part—there was hot monkey sex and
somebody
(James) had been penetrated by one of the largest plugs in the drawer, while
somebody
(Rafael) had straddled James’s hips, impaled himself, and rode James like a much younger horse. By the time they were spent and sticky and laughing and flopped back on sheets that
definitely
needed to be changed, James had ceased completely to worry about the difficulties of an interracial relationship in America and focused instead on the limpid joy in Rafael’s big brown eyes when James thrust hard inside his body and stroked that amazing cock with a firm hand.

But now, Rafael had asked him very sincerely to jump in with both feet into that big interracial problem and was looking at James with big limpid dark-fringed sloe eyes and James was going to have to say…

“Yes,” said someone in James’s skin, while James lost himself in those damned eyes. “Sure. I’d love to meet your family.”

Rafael laughed with exaggerated relief, wiping his brow theatrically with the back of his hand. “Whew, Jimmy—for a minute there, I thought you were going to say ‘no’!”

James found himself smiling into Rafael’s eyes with a sort of goofy, besotted expression he couldn’t ever remember sporting before.

“No! I’d love to meet your family! I’m sure I’ll adore them!”

Rafael rolled his eyes. “Honestly, Jimmy? I’ll call this a success if you don’t go running for white-people hills after an hour, okay? Don’t hurt yourself not being white. I just appreciate you giving it a try.”

James blushed—and wondered if there was possibly a suburb more white than the one he lived in.

If there was, it was nowhere near Rafael’s house on Easter Sunday.

Chapter 6

Noni and The Fool

T
HE
house was
decorated—
not just with little pastel tchotchkes, but with brightly colored streamers, big banners featuring the crucifixion, and a star-shaped piñata hanging from the tree in the front yard. There was mariachi music being played
very
loudly from the back yard, and James knew his eyes were a little wide as they got out of Rafael’s car.

Rafael grimaced. “Sorry—I don’t know if you knew this, but we’re Mexican, right?”

One corner of James’s mouth pulled up. “I never would have guessed,” he said, but he made sure his eyes crinkled at the corners when he said it. He looked behind him, where Marlowe was sitting on the front seat of the Charger, looking out at that noisy, bright, unfamiliar place with the slightest bit of reproach in his eyes.

Rafael saw the dog’s uncertainty and beat James to the seat to pick him up. As he passed near, James could smell the product in his hair and his aftershave, and his skin in the late-April sun. For a moment, the whole scary “meet the big Mexican family” thing disappeared. When Rafael turned around, talking quietly to Marlowe about remembering he was a big
papi
and how he could walk into that “beeg skeery house like a
man!”
James’s heart started beating higher than his throat and lower than his chest. Rafael was wearing dark-brown jeans this time, with a brown tank top and another large white button-up shirt. His hair was pulled back in its queue, with the short wedge of hair around the long part trimmed up special. In that moment, watching this very ethnic, very beautiful man hold James’s dog and smile nervously, James couldn’t imagine how he’d spent all of those bland Sunday afternoons with Austen, shopping, or worse, (shudder!) antiquing.

“Well,” Rafael said, setting the dog down with dignity, “here we go! Now let’s go in and meet Moms!”

“Moms” was in the kitchen, chopping expertly at a cutting board and turning what looked to be twenty pounds of tomatoes, onions, and cilantro into salsa. She was a tiny woman with a round face, a cotton apron over a black and white Sunday dress, and pink-painted toenails at the ends of tiny toes, sticking out of black open-toed sandals like little painted sausages. Her hair was pulled back into a bun and was the same blue-black as her son’s, and James couldn’t spot a strand of gray in it, although he was
sure
there must have been if even
half
the stories Rafael had told about his brother and sisters were true. Her lips were painted the same pink, and she left a big lipstick smudge on her son’s cheek when she stood on tiptoe to kiss him.

Rafael grimaced and then introduced her to James.

“Jimmy, meet Maria Rosie Agnes Ochoa. Rosie, meet Jimmy.”

Maria Rose Agnes Ochoa smiled at James with not quite as much warmth as she smiled at her son and then reached up and kissed his cheek anyway.

“Jimmy? Are you a roommate?”

James blushed and shook his head. “Uhm, no. I’m a friend of Sophie Winchester.”

Mrs. Ochoa pursed her lips. “Well, you are too old for Sophie. You’d better just be a friend.”

“He’s her professor, Mommy—he’s supposed to be old.”

Rosie bent down then and let Marlowe lick her face in introduction, while keeping her hands carefully off of his sleek black and white coat. “Are you his dog?” she asked Marlowe. “Because if you are, you certainly speak well of him.”

“See—he’s got a dog. He’s not an asshole. Can he stay for dinner?”

“Of course, Rafi. Your friends can always stay. You introduce him to the family, okay, and don’t forget Noni’s in the shade outside. She likes dogs too. She maybe needs some company after you bring your sister to sense.”

“You should leave her alone, Mommy. Liliana is a good girl!”

“Yeah, she’s a good girl, and she keeps telling me she don’t want no keensay—you need to tell her good girls get keensay, okay?”

Rafael grimaced. “Me? Why me?”

“She listens to you. That girl has got no sense.” Mrs. Ochoa nodded and gave a polite smile to James. “Maybe you can talk sense into her, okay? You’re old and smart. Go tell her that good girls have a keensay, okay?”

James nodded dumbly. He had
no
idea what she was talking about, but he didn’t hesitate to ask as he was following Rafael down the hallway, Marlowe trotting at their heels. James had a flurried impression of the house—respectable heavy furniture in bright burgundy; tiny, breakable figurines on every available space; several specially made shelves; and a huge, dominating picture of the Crucifixion over the mantel. Probably not his mother’s idea of decorating, but it looked homey enough. James wondered what it had been like for Rafael, growing up under that picture of the martyrdom of Christ. Now
that
could have a serious impact on a young mind, but it didn’t seem to have inflicted one iota of shame in Rafael. James could respect that in a lover—and he’d certainly been enjoying enough of it, hadn’t he?

The house was small—there were three bedrooms, two of them smaller than James could imagine—especially when being shared with another human being or two. One of the bedrooms was being used as a guest room now. It had a crib in it though, probably for Rafael’s niece. The other one had been turned into a craft-room/study, and was overflowing with acrylic yarn, paper punches, and decorated pieces of paper. Rafael, seeing where James had been looking, snorted.