CHAPTER 12
SIXTEEN
Vanessa insisted on a cake, small and store-bought but lit with candles all the same, the apartment smelling like sugar and reheated dinner the night Varnell turned sixteen.
Demarcus came by for it, dropping off a card with more money folded inside than either of them commented on directly, and even Chucky J stopped through for a slice before heading back out to handle something on the block.
"Sixteen," Vanessa said, watching him blow out the candles, something bittersweet moving behind her smile. "Feel any different?"
Varnell thought about the Pine Barrens, about Moose's cold arithmetic in that Miami diner, about a body that some mornings felt like it belonged to someone twice his age. "Feel like I skipped a few numbers somewhere."
Vanessa's smile faltered slightly at that, though she recovered quick, pulling him into a hug instead of answering directly, holding on a beat longer than birthdays usually called for.
Demarcus, watching from across the room, said nothing, though something tight passed briefly over his face too — the particular grief of watching a boy's age and a boy's mileage stop lining up the way they should.
Sixteen didn't feel like a number so much as a marker, proof that time was still moving forward even while so much else about Varnell's life had stopped following any timeline a normal sixteen year old's would.
? ? ?
The napkin sat in a drawer of Angellisa's apartment for two months before curiosity finally won out over her better judgment. She told herself it was boredom, or gratitude finally catching up to her, though some part of her had known since that night at the bar that she'd use it eventually.
The first text was short, uncertain. *This Varnell? It's Angellisa. From the bar.*
His reply came fast enough to surprise her. *Was wondering when you'd use that.*
Don't get cocky.
Too late.
What started as sparse, cautious exchanges built slowly into something more constant — late-night conversations that stretched longer than either of them intended, a rhythm developing between them that neither fully acknowledged as courtship until they were well inside of it.
She learned pieces of him carefully doled out, enough to paint a picture of someone steady and composed beyond his years, though the actual number of those years stayed conveniently vague between them, an omission Varnell let stand less out of deception and more out of not wanting to lose the one part of his life that hadn't yet been complicated by everything else weighing on him.
Months in, what had started as texting turned into actual dates — dinners at places quiet enough to talk, walks that stretched longer than either of them planned, a closeness building between them that felt, to Varnell, like the first uncomplicated good thing he'd let himself have in longer than he could remember.
"You're different than the guys I usually deal with," Angellisa told him one night, her head against his shoulder on a bench overlooking water neither of them could name the exact spot of. "Calmer. Older, somehow."
Varnell just held onto her a little tighter, choosing silence over an answer that would've complicated everything neither of them was ready to complicate yet.
? ? ?
Ivo's call came on a Tuesday, hesitant on the other end of the line in a way that made clear how much the man had rehearsed it before actually dialing.
"I'd like to take you to lunch," Ivo said, no preamble, like he'd practiced getting straight to it before he lost his nerve. "If you're willing."
Varnell let the silence stretch longer than was comfortable, old resentment and old curiosity both competing for space in his chest. "Why now?"
"Because I've had time," Ivo said. "And because avoiding this isn't fair to either of us, no matter how much easier it feels."
Varnell stalled for two full weeks before he finally agreed, some part of him needing to sit with the offer before deciding whether accepting it meant forgiveness or just curiosity finally winning out over pride.
When he finally called back to say yes, Ivo's relief was audible even through the phone, quiet and real in a way that softened something in Varnell despite himself.
They hadn't set a date yet by the time other business pulled Varnell's attention elsewhere, the lunch sitting on the calendar of his life like a promise he intended to keep, once there was room to keep it.
? ? ?
That room came reluctantly, a call from Chucky J pulling Varnell's focus back toward Miami before Ivo's lunch could happen — a routine check-in on the operation, numbers to review, tension with the Cuban faction that needed monitoring even months after the truce had settled into something workable.
The flight down felt different than the first time, less like stepping into the unknown and more like checking in on something that had become, however strange it felt to admit, genuinely his.
He walked the same streets with more confidence now, met with the same players with the ease of somebody who belonged there instead of somebody trying to prove he did.
"Operation's solid," Chucky J confirmed, going over the numbers with him in a rented apartment that served as their unofficial Miami office. "Toussaint's people still cooperating. Cubans quiet, for now. You built something that's holding."
"For now," Varnell echoed, unable to fully shake the awareness that everything he built carried the same fragile impermanence his own body did these days.
He didn't stay long — a few days, enough to confirm what needed confirming, enough to remind the people down there that the operation still had eyes on it even from a distance — before heading back north, Angellisa and Ivo and the rest of his tangled life waiting for him same as he'd left it.
? ? ?
Before he left Miami, he stopped at a small shop near the water, racks of postcards turning slow in the ocean breeze, and picked one out without much deliberation — a simple shot of the skyline, palm trees framing a sunset that looked almost too perfect to be real.
He wrote it out sitting on a bench near the shop, keeping it short, knowing Rodney's situation didn't leave much room for anything but brevity anyway.
Miami's wild, man. Wish you could see it. Turned 16 without you here to clown me about it. Things getting bigger than I thought they would, good and bad both. Hold tight. Almost your turn to breathe again, I hope. — V
He mailed it before he could second-guess the wording, watching it disappear into a mailbox slot, another small thread stretched thin across the growing distance between the life he was building and the life he'd left behind.