by Alexa Land
“What, this dog and pony show? You proud of this? I seen better at Ringling Brothers. And great, you got a queer boyfriend, good for you.” My father crossed his arms over his chest.
“You know, if I even sort of gave a shit about your opinion, that might have hurt. But nothing you say matters to me.”
“You don’t give a shit about what I think? Yeah, right. Come on, the only reason you gutted your trust fund and sent it to the fucking homeless was so you could deliver a nice, big fuck you to your old man,” my father growled.
“That had nothing to do with you! I sent that money to Havilland House because they needed it, and I was never, ever in a million years going to use it for myself.”
“Like hell you weren’t! It was just a matter of time. You thought you were being tough, you thought you were sending me a message by letting the money sit there. But there would have come a time when you needed it, and you would have dipped into that fund. As soon as times got desperate, you would have realized you weren’t too good for your old man’s ‘dirty money’ after all. I know you would have caved.” He looked so smug.
“As soon as times got desperate? Where do you think I’ve been living all this time, Disneyland? I sent that money to the shelter where I used to sleep on the floor each winter, down the street from where I used to sell my body as a prostitute. You don’t think I got to desperate years ago?”
My father looked absolutely stunned, all the color draining from his face. When he finally spoke, he said, “That’s how much you fucking hate me? That you’d rather…rather do that than take my money?” I just stared at him.
He shook off his shock and glared at me as he said, “I didn’t kill your mother, Chris. I know you think I drove her to suicide, but I didn’t. She was unstable, she—”
“Don’t you ever fucking talk about my mother.”
He stared at me for a long moment, then growled, “You know, I’ve had about enough of this bullshit. We’re getting out of here, and you’re coming home with me.”
“No chance.”
“What else you been doing besides whoring yourself out? Drugs? You’re skinny as a heroin addict. You’re coming home, and we’re getting you help. End of discussion.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Oh, I think you are.” My father pulled a compact black handgun out of a shoulder holster and pointed it at me. Fear slid down my spine as he said, “You need help, Chris, you need to come back to the family. This is for your own good, you’re obviously not making rational decisions.”
That instantly flipped Kieran’s cop switch, and he said, “Why don’t you put the gun down, and let’s all talk about this.”
I swallowed the sudden dryness in my throat and said, “Even you aren’t enough of an asshole to shoot your own son, Reggie.”
“No, you’re right,” my father said. And then he swung the gun around and pointed it directly at Kieran. Panic welled in me, my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest. “But I’m definitely enough of an asshole to shoot my son’s faggot boyfriend.”
Without even thinking about it, I stepped between Kieran and the gun, as Kieran exclaimed, “No Christopher, stay back!”
In the next instant, Reggie Longotti was crumpling to the ground, his eyes rolled back in his head. As he fell he revealed Nana behind him, holding her big silver revolver by the muzzle, having just used it like a hammer to knock my father unconscious. “Faggot is such an ugly word,” she said.
My knees started to buckle, but Kieran caught me and held me securely. “Oh God, Kier, I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Why are you apologizing?”
“For putting you in the middle of that.”
“It’s not your fault, baby.” He sat down and pulled me onto his lap as he said, “And by the way, I think we should take your father off our Christmas card list. He’s kind of a douche.” I smiled at him, and he kissed the tip of my nose.
“This is the best party ever,” someone said, and we all glanced toward the buffet table. I’d forgotten Olaf was even there. He grinned at us happily, his mouth full, a tray of hors d’oeuvres in his hand.
While we’d been talking, Dante had snapped into action, disarming first Reggie and then his grandmother. As he took Reggie’s pulse, Nana asked, “Is he dead?”
“No, but he’ll most likely have a concussion, maybe even a fractured skull. We should get him to a hospital. I don’t think an ambulance will make it up the street with all the congestion outside, so I’ll take him in my car.”
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
“No Christopher, stay and enjoy your party,” Dante said. “I’ve got this.”
“I’m not really in the partying mood after this.”
“By the way, you had a bit of a situation downstairs,” Mrs. Dombruso said. “A couple thick-necked thugs were leaning on Bobby the security guard, Dante. I took care of it.”
“How?”
“I kicked one in the nuts while I hit the other one with my purse. In the nuts. I had a couple members of your security team with me, but I did all the work. They just detained ‘em when I was done with ‘em. I think the thugs were taken to that office at the back of the building.”
Dante fought back a smile and said, “That was a dangerous situation, Nana. Next time, just let the security team handle it.”
“Fuck that!”
Dante had been patting down my still-unconscious father, and so far had pulled two more guns from him. “Shouldn’t Kieran be the one to do that?” I asked Dante.
“He has his hands full,” Dante said with a grin. Both of Kieran’s arms were firmly around me. “Besides, I’ve done plenty of pat-downs, I know what I’m doing.” He pulled my father’s wallet from his pocket and flipped it open with one hand, his other full of weapons. “Huh,” he said as he read the ID, his eyebrows raised. Then he returned the wallet to its jacket pocket.
“What does it say? Who is this dirt bag?” Nana wanted to know.
“My father,” I said.
“Reginald Andrews,” Dante lied. He was obviously keeping the mob connection under wraps.
“What kind of father pulls a gun on their kid and his boyfriend? Was this a hate crime? Does he not accept you for being a gay homosexual? It’s a damn shame,” Nana said. “And he was kinda sexy, too. I would’ve slipped him my number, had I not known he was a total asshat.”
“Man, and I thought my dad and I had issues, but he stopped short of ever actually pulling a gun on me. I mean, that is some epically bad parenting,” Hunter said.
Several of Dante’s male cousins came barreling up the stairs then. They all none-too-subtly had their hands inside the lapels of their jackets. Did the crowd downstairs really not know any of this was going on?
One of them, Louie maybe, said, “We got a situation downstairs. The security team apprehended a couple guys, turns out they’re Reggie the Roach Longotti’s men. We think he’s somewhere in the building.”
Dante looked up from my father’s prone body and raised an eyebrow. “Ya think?”
“Oh,” Louie said, relaxing his posture.
Nana exclaimed, “First a hate crime and now Reggie the Roach! What the fuck is with this night? Dante, give me my piece back, I gotta go help these boys look for the Roach.”
“Over my dead body.” My father stirred a little, and Dante asked, “Kieran, do you happen to have your handcuffs with you?”
“No, sorry, I’m off duty,” Kieran replied.
“What difference does that make?” Hunter asked, pulling a pair of cuffs from the pocket of his black leather jacket and handing them to Dante. “I’m off duty too, but you never know when you might need to cuff somebody.” He gave Kieran a flirty wink, and tossed me the keys.
After Dante cuffed my father, he stood up and hoisted him over his shoulder like he weighed nothing. But Kieran chimed in, “I can take him to the hospital, Dante. You have a lot going on here that needs your attention. I’ll call for the car.”
We got up too, and he pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed a number, then plugged his opposite ear and spoke into the receiver.
When Kieran disconnected, Dante said, “Take him to Rosewood Hospital, I’ll call ahead so they’ll be expecting him.” They threw a coat over my father, and transferred him to Kieran’s shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
“Please make sure Christopher gets home safely,” Kieran said to Dante. And to me he said, “I’ll call you from the hospital, baby.”
“Oh no. I’m coming with you,” I told him.
“You should stay and enjoy this. Don’t let your father ruin your first art show,” Kieran said.
“I want to go. And my show’s far from ruined. Thanks to Dante, my paintings are reaching a huge audience, and I might find an agent after all of this exposure. Really, my being here doesn’t add much.”
“Still, you could just stay and have fun.”
“Reggie’s my problem. And if he comes to and starts giving you grief, I’m damn well going to be there,” I said.
We said goodbye to our friends, and went down a rear staircase and out the back door. After cutting through an alley, we emerged onto a busy side street. A lot of people gave us strange looks, but Kieran just nodded at them and said, “Hell of a party.”
Ed the driver was waiting right where he said he’d be, and when we arrived at the private hospital a few minutes later, a medical team met us in the parking lot and loaded my father onto a stretcher. He’d come to several minutes ago, but had done nothing besides moan and complain about his headache. I handed over the handcuff keys to a doctor, and she unhooked them from behind his back, then cuffed him to the railing of the stretcher. I wondered what Dante had told the hospital when he’d called them.
When they’d wheeled him into the building, Kieran asked, “Do you want to wait while they admit him?”
“I…don’t know.”
“Let’s go home. You’ve had a rough night, and you were already tired to begin with.”
I nodded and let him lead me back to the town car. We curled up in the back seat, Kieran’s arms around me as Ed drove us back to the Sunset. After a while, Kieran asked, “Are you going to press charges?”
“I don’t know. Are you?”
“It’s really your call. Whatever you decide, I’ll back you up.”
“Believe it or not, that wasn’t the first time he pointed a gun at me,” I said quietly. “Not that you ever get used to something like that.”
“No, you really don’t. I’ve been drawn on a few times in the line of duty. It never gets easier.” He tightened his grip around me and said, “What were you thinking, stepping between me and that gun, Christopher?”
“I needed to protect you.”
He sighed and rested his cheek on the top of my head. “Baby, I’m a police officer. You didn’t need to protect me, you just needed to keep yourself safe.”
“I get that you’re a big, tough cop, Kieran. But you’re also the most precious thing in the world to me, and I’ll always try to protect you.”
“I’m the most precious thing in the world to you?”
“Of course.”
He smiled at that, and said softly, “I’d say the same about you, you know.” I kissed him gently, and he added, “That’s why it’s so hard to watch you putting yourself in harm’s way.”
“I get that.”
After a couple minutes, he said, “So. Thirty-two million dollars, huh?”
“It’s blood money. I would never have used it for myself.”
“Havilland House is a great place, it fills a real need. I’m proud of you.”
“Did Jamie not tell you about the trust fund?”
“Jamie knew?”
“Yeah. It came up in that conversation he and I had a couple weeks back.”
“Sounds like a heck of a conversation. I’m sorry I missed it.”
“I think you’re all caught up now,” I said, nestling into the space between his neck and shoulder.
I ended up lying awake half the night, staring at the ceiling and thinking about the confrontation with my father. Kieran was asleep beside me, his warmth and his presence a comfort, and I caressed his back as he slept, reassuring myself that he was ok.
I’d been horrified when Reggie pointed the gun at Kieran – that had been vastly more troubling than having the gun pointed at me. I had known for a while now that I was falling in love with Kieran, and the full depth and breadth of my feelings for him were spelled out so clearly the moment he was threatened. Stepping between him and the weapon was automatic, instinctual: protect what you love. Protecting Kieran was as natural as breathing.
I’d had so many fears about entering into a relationship with someone. I had really thought I might be so broken that it wasn’t even a possibility. But being with Kieran just felt so incredibly right on every level. Trusting him also came naturally. He was good and kind and decent, and would never hurt me. He’d protect me, the same way I protected him. I was sure of him.
I thought about my father too, as I lay awake. He’d flown across the country because I pissed him off. But instead of telling me off, what he’d actually tried to do when he got here, in his own misguided, incredibly fucked up way, was help me. The fact that I neither needed nor wanted help was obviously lost on him.
Our relationship had always been strained, as far back as I could remember. And maybe it never had a chance to be anything but. When my mother killed herself, she left both of us gutted to our core. My father and I were like two guilty survivors of a war, both blaming ourselves and each other for things that weren’t our fault, shell-shocked and scarred, unable to ever fully recover. We’d turned on each other when there was no one else to blame. Neither had it in us to blame her.
When I’d run away from home, it wasn’t just to get away from him, though that was part of it. I thought he hated me, I thought maybe he’d be glad I was gone. I knew I reminded him of her, I looked enough like my mother to make it tough for him to be around me. He’d purged the house of every picture of her, after all, every reminder she ever existed, except for one: me.
But after I left, he kept finding me, kept dragging me back home. He never came himself to get me, he sent an employee. In my mind that reinforced the idea that he was just bringing me back out of spite, not because he actually loved me or cared about me. But he kept doing it, again and again, up until three years ago, when I finally came of age and threatened him with kidnapping charges.
He’d called me a few times over the last three years, but I never picked up when I saw it was him. The last call was almost six months ago, and since then I’d figured he’d finally given up on me, that he no longer cared what I did or what happened to me. But now, all of a sudden, here he was, ostensibly because he was mad about my trust fund (and, ok, he probably really was furious about that).
Instead of just yelling at me and calling me an idiot, though, what did he do? He tried to make me come back home. His reasons for doing so and his method of choice where indisputably fucked up, in true my-father fashion. He was used to using threats, violence and intimidation to get what he wanted – it somehow never occurred to him that there might be something wrong with applying his usual thug mentality to his own child.
Yet if I could somehow look past all of that (yeah, a lot to look past, I know), in his own fucked up way, he actually was trying to help me. Not that I was justifying his actions. I was furious that he’d threatened Kieran, and none too thrilled that he’d threatened me. Still though, despite layer upon layer of fucked up and dysfunctional, I could see a father underneath all of that who still thought his son was worth saving.
After much deliberation, I went to visit my father the next morning. I didn’t really expect him to listen to anything I had to say, but I needed to say it anyway, for my own benefit.
Reggie didn’t notice me for a moment, so I paused in the doorway to his hospital room and studied him. He was propped up in bed, looking pale, thin and t
ired, staring out the window. He usually didn’t look his age, but he did right at that moment. The cuffs were gone, and I was actually kind of surprised he hadn’t checked himself out of the hospital yet.
When he finally noticed me standing there, he sat up a bit straighter and raised his chin. “Come to gloat, Chris?”
I said quietly, “It’s Christopher Robin. Not Chris. My mother gave me that name, and I want you to use it.”
He rolled his eyes at that, then winced in pain. He obviously still had a headache. “It’s a fruity name. I never liked it.”
“Tough shit. Use it anyway.”
“What are you doing here? You wanna kick me when I’m down? Is that it?”
“No. I wanted to talk.”
“So go ahead,” he said.
I wasn’t quite sure what to say, so I fidgeted with the strap of my backpack for a while and finally just asked, “How do you feel?”
“Like I got hit on the head with a sledgehammer. Who clocked me, anyway?”
“An eighty-year-old woman.”
“Bullshit.”
I crossed the room and sat in the chair near his bed, setting my backpack on the floor beside me. I was still scrambling to figure out what I wanted to say to him, and ended up blurting, “You know, normal people don’t pull guns on their children and their loved ones.”
“Yeah? Well, you gave me no choice.”
I knit my brows at that. “Really? You think that’s a rational response to an adult son telling his father no?”
“It was for your own good. You need help, and you won’t come home with me willingly.”
“First of all, I don’t need help. And secondly, Georgia isn’t home anymore. This is.”
“Of course you need help! You’re skin and bones, you’re obviously using. And now I find out you been working as a hooker to support yourself! If I’d known that, I would’ve come here sooner and forced you to come home. I would’ve checked you into one of them rehab clinics.”
“Hooker rehab?” I said flatly.
“No, smartass. Drug rehab.”