California Dreaming

1

When I’d left California more than ten years ago, I hadn’t expected to be gone for so long. I’d needed to get away, yeah, but I’d thought I would be back. Maybe in a year or two. But that year or two turned into three, four, and then ten years had passed. By that time, I hadn’t thought I’d ever go back. Then I got the call.

Middle-of-the-night calls were never good.

I was sound asleep, lying on my stomach, face down on my pillow, when the phone sitting on my bedside table screeched to life. My heart pounded as I came almost instantly wide awake. The clock beside the phone declared it was two thirty.

Snatching the receiver of my landline phone, I tried to steady my breathing. “Yeah?”

“Mickey?” My sister Raine’s voice, raspy and thick with tears. No one had called me Mickey since I left California. It had been a family thing. I rarely spoke to family now.

“Yes.”

“It’s-it’s Joe,” she choked out, barely understandable.

I scrubbed a hand over my face. Joe Allen was Raine’s husband and once upon a time my boyfriend. All those years ago. Joe and Raine were the reasons I’d left in the first place. Had he left her? I wouldn’t have been altogether surprised by that. Or anything Joe did, really.

“What about Joe?” I asked.

“Mickey, he’s dead.” She started sobbing.

I swung my legs out of the bed, to the carpeted floor of my bedroom. I turned on the lamp by the bed. My lungs squeezed in my chest, but I wasn’t really sure I had even processed what she’d said. “What?”

“Car accident,” she whispered. “Can you…can you come?”

“I—”

“Mickey, please? Please? I need you.” She sounded so broken. How could I refuse her? Even after all these years, after all these hurts, I could not.

“Yeah, okay.” I exhaled slowly. “I’ve gotta make the arrangements. Talk to work.”

“Okay.” Raine hiccupped.

“I’ll call you later and tell you what’s going on. All right?”

“Okay,” she said again.

“How are the kids?” The kids I’d never even met.

Another quiet gasp. “Not good. I’m not even sure they understand. I don’t think I do.”

I closed my eyes. “All right. I’m gonna come. I’ll call you later.”

“Thank you, Mickey.”

“Yeah. Talk soon. Bye, Raine.”

“Bye.”

I placed the receiver back on the cradle of the phone and then buried my face in my hands. Joe dead? It didn’t seem possible.

I’d known Joe most of my life growing up in Southern California. As I made the discovery I was gay and did some experimentation with my best friend, Joe realized he was bisexual. By the time high school ended, we were a happy couple and I was basking in my first openly recognized relationship. Or so I thought.

A year into college, Joe had come to me and told me he’d fallen in love with a woman. It was quite the bombshell. The second bombshell was that it was my twin sister, Raine. Joe explained they hadn’t meant for it to happen, but they’d been in a study group for one of their college courses and had begun to spend a lot of time together. All they’d done was kiss, but now that they’d done that, Joe knew he had to tell me and end things between us.

The day after their wedding, I’d left California. My first stop had been Chicago, but I found it too cold for my liking, and I’d moved to Florida, where I lived now.

Letting out a steadying breath, I rose from the bed and reached down to straighten the covers. Though it was still the middle of the night, too early to contact anyone from the law firm I worked for, I wouldn’t get to sleep again.

I hit the shower, standing under the warm spray until my skin wrinkled. When I finished, I dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and headed out to the kitchen to make coffee.

Raine and Joe had two kids during their ten-year marriage, Summer and Autumn. My sister had always been something of a free spirit. She’d sent me their pictures when they were born, four and six years ago, and also dutifully in her Christmas cards that I never reciprocated. I wondered what they’d think of their Uncle Mick.

After pouring cream into my coffee, I carried it to the sofa in the living room where I’d left my tablet the night before. I composed a note to my best friend, Zach.

I’d met Zachary Covington in Chicago, where we’d both attended law school. Zach and I had a lot in common, including both of us being gay. We’d clerked at the same firm during the summer months and been hired as associates there once we’d passed the bar.