Page 87 of Mimosa

For the briefest of seconds, his smile faded, and Mims saw genuine fear in his eyes.

“Mims, you okay?” he heard from across the apples. He turned to see Taran.

“Yeah. I’m fine, Agent. I’m just fine.”

He left the rest of the items in the cart and left with Taran, who got him into his car and started to the pub. “What was that all about?”

“Wanted to tell me he knows about us knowing about the BBC. He also figured out we know where Sonny is, but I think if he knew where Sonny was, he’d have already gone there.”

“No more going to see him, Mims. It’s too risky. We don’t know how many they have, who they are, and who might be watching you.”

Mims’s heart broke, but he stiffened he neck and said, “For Sonny’s life, I’ll stay away from him, but, Taran, I want to get them. I’m done with this. Done!”

“I am too. If they know about Cosmo and me, they’ll hurt one of us to get to the other. It’s how they work.”

“So Eazy needs to go, too, with Tally.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

“Should we close the pub?”

Taran shook his head. “No. Then they win.

Mims would never let them win.

For the next few weeks, Mims and Sonny spoke on the phone daily and could see one another now and then, if someone intervened and helped get them both to a motel.

Mostly, however, Mims spent the time he couldn’t with Sonny at his parent’s house.

His father was failing fast, and though he never apologized, he and Mims seemed to have come to a simple, silent peace. Mims sat next to his father’s bed and read to him from the newspapers he still had delivered every day and he’d listen until the pain became too much and his mother came in to give him more of his morphine.

The day he passed, Mims was lost. He had finally gotten his family back, only to lose his father again.

All his friends from the pub attended the funeral, and Mims held his sister for a long time in the cemetery. His heart was broken. Not only had he lost his father, but it felt as if he’d lost his boyfriend too. It had been two weeks since they’d seen one another, and with the death and funeral arrangement, even their phone conversations had suffered.

That was why, when Cosmo dropped him at the Rodriguez house, after circling the same six blocks for more than half an hour, assuring they weren’t followed, he ran into the cottage and into Sonny’s arms, crying until he was hoarse and dizzy.

On the comfortable sofa in the small living room of the cottage, Sonny held him through that night, not speaking, not telling him to stop crying. He was simply there, a steady rock for Mims.

Mims fell asleep there, and woke with a blanket over him and the smell of coffee in the air.

“Sonny?”

Sonny appeared over the back of the sofa. “Hi, sweetheart. Hungry?”

“Actually, yeah, starving.”

“I made some pancakes, eggs and sausage. Come to the kitchen after you shower.”

“I don’t have clothes,” he whined.

“Borrow something of mine,” Sonny called, always fixing every problem.

After the long, hot shower and a change into sweats and a T-shirt, Mims made it to the kitchen, sitting gently at the table.

“How are you this morning?”

“Cried out. Sad. I don’t even know.”

---