7. Jaime
SEVEN
jaime
T he irony wasn’t lost on me. In less than a week, I was again banging on someone’s door while thinking they were going to kill me. I brought an apology gift this time, though, and I’d texted to let Sergio know I was coming. It was progress.
It didn’t make me any less nervous when he finally opened the door.
“Hey!”
He hadn’t finished uttering his greeting when I shoved one of the two boba teas toward him.
“Hey.” Fuck, my throat felt too dry. “That’s for you. I went to the café you like, the one with the milkshakes, but they had some issue with the vendor that sends them their to-go cups. I didn’t just go straight to the boba place because it’s superior.”
Sergio cocked his head to the side before watching the milk tea with tapioca pearls. I got him the classic oolong one with brown sugar. I figured the extra sweetness would help. I got taro for myself. Sergio liked the color of mine better, but not the flavor. When he was feeling really Little, he complained a lot about how unfair it was.
I was thoughtful.
“You didn’t tell them to add half the sugar?” Sergio’s voice rose to a higher pitch as he read the label on his cup. He looked up at me with stars in his eyes. So that’s where his head was at. I was definitely dying today. “Daddy’s gonna kill you, but I love you.”
Yeah, if only he knew the actual reason his Daddy, Abel, was going to kill me.
“It’s just you?”
Abel usually worked the afternoon shift at Erika’s gym, but I hadn’t asked when I’d texted Sergio during my lunch break. I couldn’t figure out how to phrase the question in a way that didn’t sound sus as fuck, and I knew there was no way Sergio would let it go if he thought something was up.
“Yeah?” Sergio frowned. “Are you okay? You look a bit pale. Do you need to sit down? You can help me pick a cat. That’s what I was doing. Daddy says I should just wait until we go to the shelters to meet the cats, because personality or whatever, but I think that’s nonsense. Did you know there are, like, three different cat shelters around here? So many cats.”
I blinked.
He hadn’t even taken a sip of the drink yet.
“You have to shake the cup first before punching the straw in,” I remembered to say. It was almost robotic, but it was what came out. “So the brown sugar isn’t all stuck at the bottom.”
I was obsessed with all flavors and types of boba tea. There was only a tiny place here that sold them, and I’d already filled out my loyalty card so many times, I was sure their boss was questioning their business model.
“Okay.” Sergio shook it hard enough I was this close to taking it from him. Thankfully, there were no spillages or broken plastic. “But seriously, what’s up with you?”
“Um.” I glanced around. No, it didn’t escape me either that, just like at Tony’s, I was stuck by the door where everyone could see me completely lose my marbles. The house Sergio and Abel had bought wasn’t as big or suburb-like as Tony’s, but it was still one of those half-attached things in a neighborhood where all the houses looked the same. I trusted apartment buildings more. “I deepthroated Tony. Yesterday.”
“Um.” Sergio blinked. Twice. “Congrats? Daddy’s dick is bigger.”
“Huh?”
What the fuck?
Before he answered—and while I was trying to figure out what was going on, Sergio stepped aside. I walked in and followed him to the living room in a trance. The distribution of the place was strange. The kitchen was before the living room. It was the other way around in every other place I’d been in.
Sergio plopped down on the monstrosity of a couch he’d been so proud of snatching from some local store. “You said you deepthroated Tony like that’s a big thing. But Daddy’s dick is bigger, so… it’s not that big of an achievement. Sorry not sorry.”
He sucked in a few pearls through the straw while he watched me. I swallowed. When he was feeling more Little, I struggled to tell if he was being obtuse on purpose or if he really didn’t see it.
“It’s not about deepthroating.” I didn’t mention that I’d deepthroated his Daddy, too, thank you very much, so if he was implying he was better than me at it, he could quit it. “I need you to focus, okay? I’m freaking out enough already.”
For a few seconds, I thought it would not happen. Sergio just looked confused as fuck.
Eventually, he blinked a few times and shook his head. “Why are you freaking out?”
“Why aren’t you?” I huffed.
Sergio just cocked his head to the side while drinking more of his boba tea. I hadn’t even punched the straw in mine. “I think you’re the one who needs the extra sugar. Why should I be freaked out? I mean, I’m questioning your taste in men, because ew, but like… your body, your choice and all that.”
Since when was Sergio the voice of reason?
I narrowed my eyes. “Because he was shit to you and we don’t like him?”
“Well, you clearly like him,” Sergio teased. Then he lowered his drink. “I mean, you liked it, right? He didn’t force you?”
I punched the plastic cover of my boba tea with the pointy straw and took a sip before I answered. “I did, and no, he didn’t. It was strange.”
“Okay, good.” Sergio breathed out, sitting cross-legged on the couch. I pulled my knees closer to my chest. “Is this where you finally give me details so any of this makes sense?”
I groaned. “Do I have to?”
Just because I was usually the one asking for those details didn’t mean I liked being on the other side of it. Definitely not while I was still in… shock. That had to be it. I’d expected at least three different reactions from Sergio when I’d planned out what I wanted to tell him. All of those had included some degree of anger, shock, hurt, disgust. Some how dare you s had been tossed in there. None of them had included Sergio asking for details and leaning forward as if we were just about to spill the tea.
Heh. Pun not intended but one hundred percent owning it now.
“Yes.” Sergio bobbed his head. “I won’t let you see kitties until you spill. So.”
I rolled my eyes. Right. Sergio was apparently looking into adopting a cat now. I wanted and didn’t want to ask how cats had been brought up in the first place. Last I checked, neither he nor Abel were big animal people. Then again, I’d never actually asked. We hung out plenty, but it had never come up. Or I didn’t remember. Most of the time we talked pets, it was the human variety.
Or Mónica’s cats. Now that I thought about it, Sergio had been crushed when he met the pair, and he couldn’t pet one of them once.
“There’s not a lot to spill.” I took another sip.
The sugary milk tea did help. It soothed the need to scratch my skin, too.
“And I’m supposed to buy that?”
“Whatever.”
I needed more yummy tapioca pearls in my system before I could talk, but I gave a good enough summary of the events surrounding the day before. Didn’t leave anything out, either, even if talking about how I’d brought him up several times made me cringe.
The thing about telling Sergio anything? He was stupidly expressive. It made for a great audience when I was ranting about something that happened in class or when I needed someone to validate my—admittedly petty and scarce—fights with Cece. The downside of it? When the story involved him, he was just as equally expressive. I should’ve brought him more boba teas. I had filled my fridge with Indian takeout after all. I could afford a few more of the overpriced drinks.
I was pretty sure they did delivery. I could set it up so he got a surprise boba tea for the next… week? Yeah, I could handle the next week. I’d come up with something less expensive later if I needed to grovel some more.
“So. Are you hooking up again?”
I blinked. The tone was wrong. It had to be. Anyone else, they would’ve made the question sound poignant, the kind that was only expecting one answer—in the negative.
The asshole—yes, Sergio was an asshole now—only sounded curious. Not full-on curious, either. Just casual. Eerily so.
I’d clocked the confusion, and the hurt, and even the tiniest bit of anger etched in his face as I went through the events involving Tony. There was no way he didn’t have some big thoughts, opinions, and whatever else about it. I had no idea who he thought he was fooling, but it wasn’t me.
The problem? I didn’t know how to call him out on it.
Or how to answer the question.
“Um. I don’t know?” Squeaking was probably not the way. I cleared my throat. Discomfort settled in. I didn’t like when I went that high pitched. It sent the bad shivers down my body. “He hasn’t texted or anything.”
Granted, neither had I, but I also didn’t have his number. The only way I had to reach out was through the club’s app. Or I could use his official university email address, but that felt very icky. He’d reminded me I had to send him the drafted email thing before I left, though. I would’ve been panicking about it, so it was a good thing that he mentioned it.
Sergio scrunched up his nose. “He’s never seemed like the kind of Dom who’d text first.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
Later, I’d wonder why the fuck Sergio was hypothesizing over the kind of Dom Tony was, and why he wasn’t calling me out for not using my brain the second I got horny.
“Like, he has that whole Oooh, I’m a big bad scary Dom, and subs have to chase after me and beg if they want my attention vibe.”
He lowered his voice to a deep level I didn’t even know he could reach up until today. It was comical in a situation that should be everything but.
It still made me chuckle. For a second. I sobered up right away.
“Can we be serious now?”
Sergio stared at me in that owlish way he did when he was genuinely confused. “I don’t know what you want me to say, dude.”
I huffed. “You can say I’m the shittiest friend to have ever been shitty. Or something.”
“You… aren’t?” He dropped the cup of tea on the coffee table. Oh, fuck. That meant he was ready to lunge himself at me, didn’t it? “Stop looking at me like that!”
“Looking at you how?”
“I don’t know!” he complained. “Like I’m about to maul you or something. In the cannibalistic way. Not the fun way.”
“Fuck me sideways,” I muttered.
“Not sure if that’s possible?” Sergio pursed his lips as if he was trying to figure out the logistics of it. “And we already covered I’m not a good top. So. Moving on.”
“Right.” Because I was the one going off topic here. “Um. Moving on to what?”
“To getting it through your brain that I’m not going to kick your ass or whatever it is you pictured happening here?” Sergio tried to sound angry. I’d give him that. When he frowned, the slit he’d shaved in his eyebrow deepened somehow. It just didn’t give the intended effect. Everyone who spent five minutes around the guy knew he wouldn’t hurt a fly. “I’m fine, and I’m not your handler. Thank fuck.”
“You’re not supposed to curse.”
Kara cursed. He didn’t. It was one of their big differences in how they behaved as Littles.
Pointing it out made him splutter. “Well, you deal with it.”
I hummed. I supposed it was better than the bruises I’d pictured him giving me when I’d thought he was going to throw himself at me. He was notoriously brutish. Everyone in our group had ended up sporting a bruise or two after hanging out around him for a while. At this point, it had to count as a rite of passage. You were one of us when you were elbowed, kneed, or otherwise injured by a hyperactive Little by the name of Sergio.
It could work as a slogan. A longish one.
Maybe not.
“You freaked out when the whole outing thing happened last year.”
Maybe bringing up The Incident TM would get him to be serious about it. After Tony was accidentally—or not so accidentally—outed by a local newspaper discussing sex and relationships between professors or some bullshit like that, we’d all met up a few times to talk about it. One of those meetings had Sergio, Kara, Marga, and Jen playing in the Littles’ room to distract themselves. Sergio blew up at them when they mentioned breaking up with Tony, the girls retaliated, and Sergio ended up in the ER because one of them hit him in the eye with a LEGO block.
It had been a whole thing. Afterward, Sergio had been as down as I’d ever seen him and blaming himself for the altercation. That was when he told us about what happened when he was a freshman and Tony was a TA. He’d made it sound like it wasn’t a big deal, but it didn’t change the fact that he’d blown up and almost destroyed two friendships over it. I might not be studying psychology or anything in that field, but even I knew one didn’t explode over things that had no importance whatsoever.
“I didn’t freak out .” Sergio made air quotes as he spoke.
I scowled.
Was this really the time to make a point about language? “You know what I mean.”
“Do I?”
Note to self: Never try to confront Sergio about anything without his Daddy present. Abel was good at keeping him on track and reasoning with him. I was good at stooping as low as he did and being just as petty.
It took a lot of breathing exercises to bite my tongue and not say what I really wanted to.
“I care about you,” I ended up saying. I deserved a reward. “And it might be a one-time thing, but I don’t want you to pretend this means nothing and then completely implode and drive a wedge between us. Forgive me for giving a fuck, asshole.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. That last part might not have been the best after my I’m going to take a breath and be calm inner monologue. Whatever.
It left Sergio speechless for more than five seconds. I took it as a win.
“I’m sorry.” He looked sorry, too—on the verge of tears, really. “Can we just look at pictures of cats?”
“Do I look like I want to look at pictures of cats?”
Sergio chewed the inside of his cheek. “The shelters have puppies, too.”
“Sergio.”
How did Abel deal with twenty-four hours of this without yanking his hair out?
“What?” He squirmed, having no problem letting his voice go as high pitched as he wanted. On the days I felt especially uncomfortable, those small details became more noticeable. “I hear you, okay? But I need to process. So. There.”
“Right.”
“Yeah.” Sergio played with the hem of the ratty shirt he was wearing. It had to be one of the old shirts he’d stolen from Abel. Last time I checked, Sergio hadn’t had an interest in firefighters until him. Plus, it looked big on him. “But I also don’t want to be alone until Daddy comes back, so… you can keep me company. Consider it your penance or something.”
“Fine.” It was stupidly impossible to stay mad at him when he had a way of looking so fucking vulnerable. I wanted to wrap him up in blankets now. “I’ll stay and judge cats with you.”
“Excuse you, I said nothing about judging!”
It wasn’t his usual bratty tone, but it was close. I had to remind myself that Sergio bounced back quickly. And we still had boba tea to finish. Milk tea and tapioca pearls solved all problems.