Page 87 of A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

“It’s incredible—I don’t feel self-conscious about linguitching around you. It’s nice not having to worry about tripping myself up with extinct slang. Usually, I open my mouth and I fear a pterodactyl will come flying out.”

“I’m just waiting for you to call me a jive turkey,” Ricki said, laughing.

It was a sound now more familiar to him than anything lodged in his endless memory. He let his eyes shut, soaking in how deliciously safe and secure he felt holding her. Memorizing the moment. Basking. This was the only place he ever wanted to be. Time seemed to yawn and stretch, and then, for the first time in the last four days, reality started to creep in.

She must’ve felt it, too. She stiffened a little in his arms.

“Ezra?”

“Little Richard?”

“I can’t die before I’m thirty,” she whispered, barely audible. “I can’t leave you here alone. Without me. And I’m… just not ready to go. It’s not my time.”

It was The Thing They No Longer Discussed.

“I won’t let you,” he said simply. “I won’t let you leave my sight. I’ll check you in to the ER on the twenty-eighth. I’ll dosomething.”

“Short of committing a blood sacrifice, there’s nothing you can do. We’re not killing anyone.” Ricki turned herself around in his arms so that they were facing each other, almost nose to nose. “I had a thought, though. What if you make me a Perennial? Then we could both live forever.”

“Can’t,” he said, his brow pinched. “It doesn’t work like that. Immortality is something done to you; you can’t seek it out or ask for it. Dr. Arroyo-Abril told me that the day we met.”

“How did she become immortal?”

“You really want to know?”

“So badly.”

“Well, she was a grifter. Too bad this all happened in 1883, or I reckon she’d be the subject of a Netflix docuseries. Anyway, she conned her way through Europe and then somehow ended up in Florida. Saint Augustine. Heard of it?”

“Yeah, it’s where that Spanish explorer, Ponce de León, decided some little spring was the Fountain of Youth,” said Ricki, putting her minor in American history to good use.

“That’s the place,” said Ezra. “By the 1880s, locals no longer believed the well had magical anti-aging properties. But tourists did. And Pilar sold them bottles of the spring water at a roadside stand. One day, she accidentally fell into the well, broke her neck, and drowned.”

“Stop.”

“Well, she should’ve drowned. Instead, she came to, popped her neck back in place, climbed out the well, and she’s been fifty-seven years old ever since. Turns out the Fountain of Youth? Not fake,” he explained. “Trying to game nature rarely works out in your favor.”

“Is she still a grifter?”

Ezra kissed the tip of Ricki’s nose. “Depends on if you believe in life coaches.”

He looked at her for a long time, trying to reconcile the depth of his longing for her with the grim reality of their situation. It felt impossible to face. Maybe he should’ve been used to loss by now. All that practice should have made it easier. But this pain was excruciating, like nothing else. He was going to lose her. Just like his family, and like everyone he ever knew.

For a long time after he became a Perennial, he’d spy on his contemporaries. When he was in Harlem, he’d follow them around—on foot, in a car—wishing he could be living his regularlife with them instead of watching them from blocks away. Or he’d track their progress inEbonyorJet, filled with envy and longing. Lo opened a fancy dance studio—still one of the country’s finest—and moved in with a ballerina she pretended was her “friend” till they died of old age, six months apart. He saw Duke go from a glitzy upstart to Establishment to a well-paid nostalgia act. A brain tumor killed George Gershwin a few years after he composedPorgy and Bess. Mickey Macchione became a wholesale flower trader and never set foot in another cabaret after Eden Lounge burned down. As time flew on, Ezra saw Josephine’s, Bessie’s, Zora’s, and Langston’s names loaned to art schools and scholarships, their legacies now the subject of biopics and documentaries. Today, they were icons, but to him, they were people he’d traded dreams with, caroused with, borrowed and lent a few coins to, run into at the dry cleaner’s. Back then, they were all drinking from the same water. As time marched on, he remained frozen in amber, while they stretched and blossomed and, eventually, wilted. Like normal people do.

He ached to be normal with Ricki. To have a family, put down roots. Go gray, get paunchy, spoil their grandchildren. Sometimes, he even wondered what it would’ve been like if he’d met Ricki a century ago. Who would she have been?

“Who were you, in your heyday?” asked Ricki, mirroring his thoughts. “I’ve been stalking these vintage newsreel accounts on TikTok, hoping to spot you in the background of some glitchy black-and-white clip. I can’t imagine you living in such a buttoned-up, old-fashioned culture. Like, mayhem ensued when a lady exposed a knee!”

“It wasn’t like that, though,” he said, chuckling. “The teens and ’20s were decadent.”

“It’s wild to think of old people being young, doing young things.”

“Is it? Old people are always dismissed as neutered, benign.Like teddy bears. But when I pass an elderly lady on the street, I wonder who she used to be. ’Cause the women I knew?” His expression went wicked. “I could tell you some secrets about these memaws out here…”

Ricki yelped, nudging him with an elbow. “Spare me the details of your ancient ho-ing!”

“Are you really slut-bullying me in 2024? We’ve come too far as a culture.”

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