I stare after him, wheels turning in my head.
It’s time to make a plan.
FORTY-THREE
Oliver
“Hoy, Ollie,”my mom’s smiling face says, during a group FaceTime with my family. “Your birthday is coming,hah!”
“You old as hale, Ollie,” Izzy says.
“We’re planning your birthday party this weekend. Saturday, actually,” Tala informs me.
I groan. “I can’t make it. I’m busy.”
“Pssht. Ollie, we’re done watching you mope around. We haven’t seen you in forever. You’ve been burying yourself in work. I know you’re all heartbroken,hah. Well, pull yourself together. It’s depressing.”
“Jeez, Ma,” I mutter.
“Harsh,” Izzy agrees. “What Ma means to say is, we miss you and we love you and we want to celebrate your special day with you.”
“Agreed,” Tala chimes in. “That’s why we booked a private karaoke room in Flushing. We invited some cousins and a bunch of your old coworkers and weird bro-ey friends.”
I frown. “How big is this private karaoke room?”
Ma rolls her eyes. “Okay, fine. It’s not a private room. It’s the entire bar. We booked the entire karaoke bar.”
“What the fuck?! How expensive is that—” I erupt.
“LANGUAGE, Oliver!” Ma says at the same time.
“We’re not paying anything. We just have to meet a minimum bar tab,” Izzy explains.
“Which our cousins and your finance bro friends will meet in what we’ve estimated to be an hour and a half,” Tala adds on.
I scrub my face. “This seems to be a little extreme for a thirty-ninth birthday party.”
Ma’s face is glowing. The screen is bouncing like she is jumping up and down on her toes. I don’t like the looks of it. “Just make sure you look nice,hah? Wear a shirt that shows off your muscles. And maybe those nice jeans I bought you from Macy’s.”
“This is a lot—” I try.
“Don’t worry, we’re getting it catered by Ihawan. So I don’t have to cook. Filipino food for everybody. So don’t worry about me,” Ma says.
“That’s not what I was going to say?—”
“Okay, Ollie, we gotta go. See you on Saturday. At three. Bye!” Izzy says.
All three Flores women hang up at the same time.
I stare at my phone for a bit, scratching my head.
I wake up Saturday morning, the day of my thirty-ninth birthday, filled with dread, alone in my bed in my fucking apartment in Fort Greene.
I’m washing my face and brushing my teeth when something on the bathroom counter catches my eyes. A single fleck of pink glitter. A relic from that night we went tothat warehouse party in Bushwick. I go to wipe it off, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I leave it.
I go up to the building gym. I start my daily workout routine, which basically consists of exercising so hard that I can no longer feel feelings, or so my misery stems from something more tangible, like my aching muscles.
On autopilot, I head back down to my apartment and get in the shower, where I have a very unsatisfying and depressing jerk to the image of Georgia on all fours on top of my desk, ass red from my palms. I come to the vision of her on her knees under my desk, luscious mouth wrapped around my cock.
