Sugar and Spice Page 17

  Jesse used the aux cord to fill the car with sounds of Oscar’s favorite nerdy podcast and drove the nearly thirty minutes to their destination. Oscar stayed quiet the entire time.

  Jesse pulled up to a small, secluded, and perfectly manicured house nestled in the mountains of Laurel Canyon. He parked the car in the driveway and helped Oscar out, allowing the taller man to cling to his elbow.

  “Can I take off my blindfold now?” Oscar pleaded.

  Jesse shook his head before realizing that Oscar couldn’t see him and then said, “No. Just a little bit farther.”

  Jesse led Oscar across the winding stone walkway and onto the porch where he dug around in his pocket for the key.

  “I think I changed my mind,” Oscar said as Jesse fought with the security door first and then the regular one. “I don’t trust you after all.”

  Jesse finally got both doors pushed aside and pulled his complain-y boyfriend in after him. Then he came around behind Oscar and wrapped his arms around his waist.

  “Okay,” Jesse whispered into Oscar’s ear. “You can take it off now.”

  Oscar shifted in Jesse’s grip and reached up to slide the loose blindfold down his face, where it came to rest against his neck. He turned his head from one side to the other, taking in his surroundings. He didn’t say anything at first.

  “What do you think?” Jesse asked, testing the waters. It was possible that he was even more nervous than Oscar was.

  “It’s… an apartment,” Oscar tried.

  “It’s actually a house,” Jesse corrected.

  Oscar pulled free of Jesse’s embrace and started to look around the furniture-less space.

  “And uh, what are we doing here exactly?”

  Jesse grinned and proudly put his hands on his hips.

  “Because I bought it.”

  “Oh,” Oscar said, still looking confused. “...are you going to live here now?”

  “Yes,” Jesse said slowly. “Yes I am.”

  Oscar didn’t catch the double meaning behind his words. He just continued touching the walls and taking everything in.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to move?” He asked. “That definitely seems like something that should have come up at some point.”

  “I wanted it to be a surprise,” Jesse answered. “Don’t you like it?”

  “It’s beautiful,” Oscar admitted, “but it’s hard to tell what it’s going to look like once all of your furniture gets here.”

  Jesse’s smile broke. He knew he wouldn’t be able to keep up the charade very much longer.

  “Well I was hoping we could take some from each of our apartments and pick out some new things, together, like that bed for instance…”

  Oscar spun around and faced him with a perplexed look.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, voice dead serious.

  Jesse walked over to him and took hold of Oscar’s hands.

  “I bought this place for us,” Jesse said. “I was hoping we could live here together.”

  Oscar looked at him in disbelief.

  “We...for us?”

  “Yes,” Jesse confirmed, ”but only if you want to of course.”

  Oscar’s breathing quickened, and Jesse started feeling a niggling thread of doubt. Best to get the actual question out in the open.

  “Oscar Hernandez Vega,” Jesse intoned like he was proposing marriage. “Do you want to move in with me?”

  Oscar looked around the empty home, refusing to meet his gaze for what felt like an eternity. Then he turned back to Jesse and pulled him into a long kiss.

  “Is that a yes?” Jesse asked breathlessly when they finally broke apart.

  “Yes, I want to move in with you, but...” He trailed off.

  Jesse rubbed soothing circles into his arm.

  “What’s wrong, love?”

  “What if I’m not ready?” Oscar asked, chewing his lip. “Are you sure you want to move in with me?”

  Jesse kissed Oscar’s jaw.

  “More sure than I’ve ever been of anything in my entire life.”

  Oscar closed his eyes and nodded, more to himself than to Jesse.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “Let’s do it.”

  Jesse’s heart seized in excitement. He let loose his megawatt grin and looped his arm through Oscar’s.

  “In that case,” he said. “Let’s go take a look around.”

  “I was thinking we could put a couch on that side, near the electric fireplace,” Jesse began as they walked through the living room, “and maybe this area over here could be an office space or something. Your treadmill could go over there...”

  “Do I get to stop and look at the fireplace?” Oscar quipped. Jesse was pulling him through without stopping. He was just too excited.

  “We can come back to the living room later. What I really want to show you is…” He pulled Oscar into the kitchen. “This.” He spread his arms wide to show off the room like a sparkly dressed game show girl. “This is all for you. There’s a huge pantry. We can upgrade these appliances so that-—”

  Oscar interrupted him with a laugh.

  Jesse stopped in his tracks.

  “What? You don’t like it?”

  “I love it,” Oscar assured him. “Jesse, this is... this is all too much. This kitchen, this house, you, it’s all beyond wonderful.”

  Oscar had punctuated the sentence with a happy little sigh.

  “Only the best for my TV chef,” Jesse said with a grin.

  “You’re really excited about this, aren’t you?” Oscar asked.

  “How could I not be excited about spending every day with my sexy boyfriend?” Jesse pushed up onto his tiptoes and went in for another kiss. “About waking up next to him every morning?”

  “That does sound pretty amazing.”

  They continued on with the tour until they finally made it to the master bedroom.

  “I think it’d be nice if the bed faced the window,” Jesse suggested.

  “Mmhmm,” Oscar agreed, wandering into the connected bathroom.

  “This is a pretty spacious shower,” he called back suggestively.

  Jesse felt himself blush. He loved the idea that they now had a whole new set of rooms to have sex in for the very first time. It reminded him of the very early days of their relationship when they’d spent entire days holed up and naked in Oscar’s apartment, constantly moving the party from room to room. That had been when they were both touch-starved and lonely though. They’d learned to keep things simple since then, but the house was so fancy and beautiful and theirs. It would be a crime not to christen it just a little bit.

  Jesse followed Oscar into the bathroom.

  “This entire house is pretty damn spacious,” he remarked, leaning in for a kiss. Oscar sighed against Jesse’s lips contentedly.

  Jesse stepped back a fraction of an inch and placed his hands on Oscar's chest, slowly moving downward until they reached his fly. Oscar’s breath hitched and he reciprocated by running his hands through Jesse’s hair, tugging lightly. Jesse prodded under Oscar’s waistband with his thumbs. Oscar shuddered and pressed into Jesse’s hips. Jesse growled in approval.

  “God, I love you,” he said, imagining what Oscar might have been thinking about to get him aroused so quickly. He didn’t get to linger on it for very long though. Oscar bent his head and kissed his way down Jesse’s neck, making him gasp.

  That was it. They were doing this. Jesse pushed himself between Oscar’s legs, wrapped his hands underneath his ass and lifted a bewildered Oscar, never losing eye contact as he carried him to the counter on the other side of the bathroom. The firm grip he was keeping on Jesse’s shoulders was desperate and almost painful.

  Jesse set Oscar down, and Oscar immediately reached to unbutton his jeans and relieve some of the pressure. Jesse did the same, but didn’t stop at just the button. He pulled his pants and boxers all the way down to the floor. Oscar whistled in appreciation and lifted his chin as an invitation to kiss.
Jesse was more than happy to oblige.

  “Do you trust me again?” Jesse asked playfully between kisses.

  Oscar hummed his consent eagerly into Jesse’s mouth. Jesse grinned devilishly and hooked his fingers around the blindfold that was still wrapped around Oscar’s neck.

  “I’m gonna need you to put this back on.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Oscar thanked his driver and then stepped out onto the gravel, slamming the car door shut behind him. He watched the taxi pull away and then closed his eyes, focusing on his breathing just like Connie had taught him.

  With the LA traffic, it had taken nearly three hours in the car to get here. Oscar had remained stiff with clenched fists the entire time. He knew he’d be paying for that prolonged tension here shortly, but for now, there was something that he needed to do.

  Oscar turned around and opened his eyes, taking in the vast expanse of green grass before him, systematically pockmarked with hulking slates of grey. Oscar shoved his hands in his pockets and ventured into the cemetery, keeping his eyes focused on the path ahead and not on the dead people down below.

  He walked in a straight line for what felt like ages until he finally reached the plot he was searching for, marked off by a square border of planted blue, white, and yellow desert flowers, that thanks to the groundskeeper were mostly still alive, even after all these years. Oscar stepped over them and stood before two massive headstones. Then he reached up and pulled down his hood.

  “Hi Mom. Hi Dad.”

  The tombstones didn’t respond, obviously. Oscar took a deep breath and crouched down in the tiny space between the two graves and ran his fingers along the thick letters of his mom’s headstone before moving onto his dad’s.

  At fourteen, Oscar hadn’t really known what to put on his parents’ headstones. With the way things had ended, he wasn’t even sure that burying them together was a good idea, but it was the first thing the funeral director had suggested, and Oscar was too young and too heartbroken to speak out against the idea. As far as the inscription was concerned, he’d opted to just keep it simple. Just their names, Carmen Hernandez Vega, and Arthur Hernandez Vega, respectively, along with the day they’d both died.

  Oscar could vividly remember standing in nearly this exact same spot during the graveside service, with nobody but the priest and gravedigger to keep him company as he paid his respects. Oscar had known that he’d had at least one living uncle back in Mexico, but as a fourteen-year-old American boy who didn’t speak a word of Spanish, he’d had no idea how to contact them. Even if he did, he probably would have chosen not to, out of fear that the state of California would deny his emancipation request and force him to live with this random stranger.

  It sounded incredibly dumb to his adult brain, but back then he hadn’t known any better. The only thing he could do was throw himself into work and school. He’d studied for, and gotten, his GED only a few short months after his parents had died. It was much better than just sitting around in his empty house and being alone with his thoughts.

  Looking back on it, Oscar realized that he had dealt with his parents’ death the way that he dealt with most things that scared him, by avoiding it altogether. It was one of the many reasons why he was so incredibly messed up in the head. He had never moved on. Never gotten closure. He knew he needed to fix that. Not for Jesse or Connie—they didn’t even know he was here—but for himself.

  Oscar turned around and positioned his body so that he was laying down with his head rested between the two headstones. It was the exact same configuration that they used to sleep in whenever they’d come to LA for an audition and book a hotel room with only one bed. Mom on the left, dad on the right, and tiny Oscar snuggled right between them. It was so easy to lose himself in the memory. If he closed his eyes, it was almost like they were still here. He forced them to remain open, hardly daring to blink.

  “I miss you guys,” he said into the empty air. He felt ridiculous lying there talking to himself, but once the words started pouring out, it became impossible to stop them.

  “I miss you, and I’ve always missed you. I’ll never stop missing you. I didn’t have anyone during the time in my life when I needed someone the most. I had my childhood taken from me. I had to learn how to manage an estate, and pay my own bills, and get my taxes done. I had to become a legal adult four years too soon.”

  Oscar sucked in a deep breath and wiped the tears out of his eyes.

  “I had to sign all kinds of non-disclosure agreements with my network to keep my job and go in to work every single day for three years and look at the person who took you away from me. Only, I realize now that Mikey Anderson didn’t actually do that. We all make our own choices. I couldn’t have stopped them if I tried. Hating that guy doesn’t make anything better. It's not going to bring you back. He’s so insignificant to me that he died, and I didn’t even know about it until years later. I guess that he paid for his sins in his own way.”

  Oscar threaded his fingers through the soft blades of grass beneath him. It shouldn’t be possible for such perfect grass to grow out here in drought-ridden California, but then again, dead things did supposedly make good fertilizer. The thought was enough to make him return his hands to his lap.

  “Mom,” he said softly, voice breaking on the word. “I just wanted to tell you how much your love and support meant to me. How much I love you for nurturing my talent and supporting my dreams by any means necessary, for taking that dream and carrying it around on your own shoulders and making it your own. I can never thank you enough for that.

  “There’s also this part of me, a huge part of me, that resents you, hates you even for what you did. You were irresponsible. You continually made bad choices and used me as an excuse to make yourself feel better about them. You were weak-willed, and because of that, I lost both of my parents instead of just one. When I think about that...let’s just say, it makes me feel incredibly hurt and frustrated, but mostly angry. I’m angry because you didn’t have to die. Dad made a choice to get on the road, that day, yes, but he had no way of knowing that some drunk monster would decide to drive the wrong way. You knew when you took whatever you took, that it was bad for you, that it could kill you, and you did it anyway.”

  Oscar’s voice was ragged, and threatening to go out, but he still had so much to say. He turned his head slightly so that he was facing his father’s tombstone.

  “Dad,” he began. “You had good parts and bad parts, just like my Mom. I remember that you were always the practical one, and yes, that did make you seem boring a lot of the times, but I also loved that about you because it meant that you took care of the big stuff. I never had to worry about where I was going to sleep or what I was going to eat, or how we were going to make it through the rough patches. You worked hard and got us through that. I never even had to lift a finger.

  The thing I hated most about you when you were alive was that you got so caught up in being a hard worker, that you missed out on spending time with your family. Even when I was making millions of dollars per episode, you were still never around to enjoy it. You were too proud. You couldn’t stomach the idea of me paying your way, and because of that, I missed out on so much precious and valuable time with you. I’m angry at you for not noticing the affair sooner. It was obvious. You could have figured it out like everyone else did if you’d been paying attention. I’m angry that you put me in that car with you, even though I know it’s irrational and that it isn’t really your fault. I’m mad that I can’t travel in a moving vehicle or even get to sleep sometimes without seeing your dead face.”

  A deep breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

  “I’ve been carrying all of this hate and anger around with me for all of these years because I felt guilty and ashamed about it. As though the fact that I was angry somehow negated my love for you both… but it doesn’t. I know that now.”

  The tears were back in full force.

  “I love you guys. I wish
you were here. I wish you could see how hard I’m fighting. I wish I could sit you both down and have this long and awkward conversation about me liking boys and Mom would probably cry and Dad would say that he never should have let me move to Hollywood. Things would be strained for a while, but eventually you’d both come around. I’d introduce you to Jesse, and the two of you would get along so well, Papa, because Jesse is the most hard-working person I know.

  “I could invite you both to our wedding, and you’d sit among so many famous reality stars that you wouldn’t know what to do with yourselves. You’d support us through the adoption process, and Mama, you’d probably force our children to call you tía or something, because abuela would make you feel too old…”

  Oscar had to stop for a second and mourn the loss of this life that he’d never gotten to have. He had to sit up so that he wouldn’t choke on the extra snot he was producing. He peeled off his hoodie and blew his nose into it, waiting for his vision to clear.

  “I just wanted to come here today to tell you both that I forgive you for not being perfect people and for making the mistakes that you made. I don’t want to carry around the weight of hating you anymore. I want to learn to accept what happened and move on. And to do that, I knew I needed to be honest with you and with myself. I’m going to be a thirty-year-old man soon. It’s time for me to drop some of that fourteen-year-old baggage and try to focus on the good times we had. I think that you’d both want me to be happy and look toward the future, so that’s exactly what I’m gonna try and do.”

  Oscar closed his eyes and searched his brain for the perfect words to leave off on.

  “Thank you for giving me this life. It’s been hard and I haven’t always used it well, but at least for right now, I’m happy that I have it.”

  Oscar sat there for several more hours and let the truth of everything he’d just said wash over him, making him feel lighter and freer. He had never been a very religious person. He hadn’t been brought up going to church or anything, but he liked to think that he could feel his parents with him in that moment. That they knew how much he loved and missed them, even to this day.