“So,” Ed said. “This is...a thing.”
“I don’t know, Dad, is my being gay going to be a thing with you?” His words hung in the air between them.
“I don’t get it,” Ed said finally, and Cooper swayed in place, suddenly and mind-numbingly exhausted.
“No, I didn’t think you would.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Cooper shook his head.
“How is this my fault?” Ed demanded. “You never said anything. I can’t read your mind, Coop. Why wouldn’t you just tell me?”
“Because I didn’t want to give you any more reasons to be disappointed in me,” Cooper said, his voice flat.
Ed’s body went still in his chair and his eyes widened. “What are you talking about? When do you think I’m disappointed in you?”
“All the time. Big stuff like school and the FBI and the BSI—”
“That’s because I know you’re not happy doing that—”
“—but also little stuff like what I’m eating, what I look like, what sports I play, who my friends are. It was always wrong. No”—Cooper stopped himself—“not wrong, but the wrong decision for you.”
He took a deep breath. “This one, this mattered too much to me to hear you say it was wrong, too.”
“I don’t think that,” Ed said angrily. “I’ve never thought that. What have I ever said that made you feel like I did?”
“It’s what you didn’t say, Dad.” Cooper could hear his voice loud and steady, like it had been growing inside him and waiting to burst out for years. “You never even mentioned it. Like it didn’t exist. Like it didn’t even cross your mind that I could be gay or bi or anything else. How was I to know it was okay? I never heard it from you. It wasn’t my job to tell you. It was yours to make me feel like I didn’t have to hide it from you.”
Ed stared at him. “I—” He looked away and blinked a few times. “Okay. Okay.”
He didn’t move or speak. Just stayed staring off for so long Cooper started to shift in place and considered walking away. Was this it? Was this all they’d say to each other? After all these years of hiding and avoiding this moment, it was...disappointing. If he was going to be forced to reveal himself like this he wanted some clarity, some acknowledgement, he wanted something in return.
“...Dad?” Cooper said finally.
Ed’s neck rolled forward as if waking from a trance. He looked down at the bend of his elbow. “Right here,” he said, and then paused. Cooper waited. “You would fit right here in the crook of my elbow. You’d tuck your head under my chin and we’d sit here, in the chair, for hours. Watching the game, telling stories, napping.” He smiled faintly. “Sometimes we just sat here and did nothing at all. I’d just listen to you breathe. You fit so perfectly. Like we knew to make you just the perfect size and shape. How is that possible?”
Cooper didn’t answer. Couldn’t move even if he wanted to.
“Sometimes,” his dad said, still staring at his empty arm. “I look at you, and I can’t believe you ever fit in this tiny little crook in my elbow. Other times, I think if I could just get my arms around you at the right angle, you’d fit there still.”
Ed looked up at him. “It was easier then. With her. Your mom always knew what to do. How to talk to you. I’m not good at this kind of stuff. Not with anyone.”
Cooper swallowed, throat aching, and said, “Me neither.” He hesitated, then, “Dean thinks we’re a lot alike.”
Ed’s head rolled back against the chair for a minute, as if absorbing that. “Hmm, maybe we are. But different, too. And that’s okay.” He met Cooper’s eye. “Oliver. Does he make you happy?”
Cooper bit the inside of his mouth, hard. “Yeah.” Ed was still examining him closely. “He’s uh...you know, he’s good.”
Ed nodded once shortly, and thankfully looked off into space instead. “Good. That’s good. That’s all that matters. That’s all that’s ever mattered to me.” He cleared his throat. “You should get to bed, you’ve got to spring a man from jail tomorrow. You need me to make any calls?”
“No, I already told our boss. Uh, thanks, though.” Cooper shifted in place. “Are you coming up, too?”
“In a minute. I’m just going to sit here a little bit longer.”
He had the weirdest desire to move toward his father, to touch him, but Ed looked so vulnerable he couldn’t predict what would happen if he did. He didn’t think he could take it if Ed got any more emotional or, shit, even cried. That’s something they didn’t warn you about getting older, seeing your parents age too, seeing them as people, sad and afraid and haunted by their own mistakes.
He backed away and hesitated in the doorway. “Goodnight, Dad.”
“Night, Coop.” Ed’s voice was gruff. Cooper started to walk away. “And...” He paused in the dark hall, only able to see his dad’s silhouette now. “I’m proud you’re my son. Every single day. I should have said so. Should have said a lot of things.”
Cooper nodded, knowing his father couldn’t see him. The tears in his eyes crested and fell down his cheeks, and he retreated upstairs before the sniffling could give him away.
Chapter Twelve
The next morning was beautiful. The sun was shining, the sky was clear, and the fall air was crisp but not too chilly. It was the perfect day for a jailbreak.
Fortunately, not a lot of breaking was going to be needed. Despite closing his eyes for a total of maybe ten minutes all of last night, he had still somehow missed Santiago’s call. She’d left a message saying to “pick his partner up as soon as it was convenient” with such a cutting tone that he’d dropped his phone like it was a weapon and rushed into town.
He was leaning against the car when Park finally came out of the station about an hour later. He paused, looked at Cooper, then strolled down the stairs and came to a stop right in front of him, so close Cooper could feel his body heat, but didn’t touch him. “You didn’t call, you didn’t visit, you didn’t write.”
“But baby,” Cooper said, “I waited for you. Promise.”
Park snorted and the sound, unromantic as it was, filled Cooper’s chest with a sort of fluttering.
“I warned you this weekend was going to suck.”
“I’ve had worse,” Park said, echoing their conversation from a couple days ago, which felt years away.
Frankly, he looked like he’d aged a few years since then as well. The dark circles under his eyes had gotten even worse and the baby frown lines at the corners had gotten deeper. They were angry teenage frown lines now. He was still off-color and, unless Cooper was imagining it, had even lost weight. Beneath the scruff, thicker than usual after his night in jail, his face looked more angular than before, sharper.
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” Park said quickly, smiling.
Cooper made a skeptical face.
“No, really.”
“Okay. But you honestly freaked me out yesterday. I think you should see a doctor.”
“Right now I just need some real sleep.”
Cooper nodded and fished an old-fashioned key out of his pocket. He dangled it in front of Park’s face.
“What’s that for?”
“Part of my grand apology for getting you caught up in this. I booked you a room at the Blue Crab.”
“...which is obviously the worst name for a brothel I’ve ever heard.” Park stretched, the hem of his shirt rode up, and Cooper’s eyes were drawn to the revealed skin and the v between his hips. “Damn, it’s good to be out of the slammer. I’m ready to make up for lost time.”
Park snapped his fingers in front of his crotch, and Cooper’s eyes shot back up. He flushed. “It’s Jagger Valley’s nicest hotel. I thought you could take the day and get some real sleep on a mattress that isn’t a bunk bed for children. Or prisoners.”
Park quirked his eyebrow, and a glimmer of his usual sexy ease shone through the exhaustion. “You booked us a fancy room with a big bed? What’s the other part of this grand apology, and does it or does it not involve pants?”
Cooper gave him his best down, boy look and resisted reaching out to touch him. “Rumor has it the room service at the Crab is also the nicest in town. I realized I haven’t been feeding you adequately.”
Park shrugged, less excited about the prospect of unlimited seafood than Cooper had expected, and looked in the back of the car. “Is that my stuff? Are you kicking me out of the house now that I have a record?”
“Stop it, you don’t have a record...do you? Santiago said she’d get the charges dropped.”
“She did. Our friends weren’t pleased. They’re going to be watching you and me more than ever, I think, so we’ll have to be more, ah, delicate with the investigation.”
“I’m done with that.”
Park blinked at him, genuinely caught off guard. As if he’d fully expected Cooper to continue full steam ahead after what had happened. “What? What are you talking about?”
“We should talk.” He looked at the station. “But not here.”
* * *
The Blue Crab was about as nice as Cooper had hoped for a small-town hotel that was really more of an inn. The room was spacious and clean, and the bed large. The colors were light and bright, whites and blue-greens, and the décor, while not outright marine-based, called to mind watercolor seascapes and windswept marshes. The food wasn’t bad either, and was delivered to their room in just enough time for Park to take a much-needed hot shower and change into clean clothes. Cooper ordered lemony crab cakes—not his favorite, but the protein would do his neglected gut well—and Park got some kind of angel hair dish with capers, scallops, lemons, and what tasted like half a bottle of chardonnay.
“Are you sure you don’t want to switch meals?” Park asked, bemused, as Cooper sucked down yet another bite of his pasta.
“No, no. You should eat this. You’ve hardly touched it.” Cooper pushed the plate away from him, but Park just picked at it absently as Cooper finished filling him in on the rest of last night and his conversation with his father.
“How do you feel?” Park asked when Cooper caught up to this morning.
“About which part? The fact that the FBI outed me to my father or that he thought it possible my mother was a murderer?”
Park winced. “Rough night. If you were smart like me, you could have gone to jail instead.”
Cooper bit his lip. “Sorry,” he said, immediately guilty. “Did Santiago say if you’d...are you... Did she say anything?”
“I’m not fired, if that’s what you’re dancing around,” Park said wryly. “And it’s completely my own fault, so you don’t need to apologize. I should have seen what Primelles was doing. I just haven’t been—” He shook his head. “Anyway. I should have been there with you last night, with your dad.”
Cooper waved him off. “No. It’s good we talked alone.”
Even if he didn’t quite know how to feel about it. He had run out this morning, purposefully avoiding Ed. What did they say to each other after all that? Did things just go back to the way they were? Did he want them to?
Park was watching him closely. Cooper said, “I just can’t stop thinking about the fact that she—she died thinking Hardwick left her in her literal hour of need. I mean, maybe he would have left anyway, but she—she just deserved better for her last two years.”
“But she still had you and Dean. What sounds like a good friend in your father. That matters.”
“I guess,” Cooper said. “How old were you when you lost your parents?”
Park stood abruptly and started fussing with the in-room instant coffeemaker. Cooper felt awkward, pushing Park to share something he’d never chosen to talk about before, as if he hadn’t had enough soul-baring in the last forty-eight hours to last a lifetime. As if just because all his secrets were being dragged to the surface he had any right to crack into Park’s personal life.
“Sorry. You don’t want to talk about it, I get that.”
“No. That’s not it,” Park said quickly, but he didn’t immediately continue.
Cooper waited, not moving, and felt a strange trepidation creep over him from the continuing silence and Park’s obvious discomfort. Or rather the aggressively blank stare Cooper had come to recognize as Park’s “I’m uncomfortable” look.
He watched Park move through the familiar process of making coffee for them both. Only when he was seated again, hands wrapped around a warm mug, did he speak.
“When I was seven my parents went out and left the six of us alone in the apartment with my oldest sister in charge. She was eleven.” Park paused, avoiding his eyes. “Sorry, I don’t talk about this a lot. I’m not sure if that’s where the story begins.”
“It’s a start,” Cooper said. “Apartment? You didn’t live with the rest of your family?” During the Florence case, he had gotten the impression that nearly all of the Park pack but Oliver lived on the compound-like properties his grandparents kept in Maine and Canada.
“No. My parents didn’t get along with my grandparents—my father’s parents, that is. We were living very differently then. We moved around a lot. Almost never stuck around long enough to bother going to a school. My parents taught us at home, and since they didn’t hold jobs for long, they were home often. There was no money, no space, we were always in a city. Usually all six of us slept in the living room, if not eight of us. I was a bit too young to shift then, but it must have been...difficult for my older siblings.”
Park pursed his lips, thinking. “My parents were out and my big sisters were fighting and getting on each other’s nerves that night, so they stuck the rest of us in front of the TV. I was old enough to know something was wrong when they didn’t tell us to go to bed, but not old enough to be involved in their conversation. I just knew we watched show after show without my parents coming home. After the younger ones fell asleep, I was still up watching infomercials and straining to hear the others.”
Park squinted out the window. They were on the third and top floor and had a decent view of the bay. The water glittered with sunlight, like a gemstone too shiny to be real. Eliza would have a picture-perfect fund-raiser.
Finally Park said, “We were alone for almost five days. My parents never came back.”
Cooper exhaled softly and closed his eyes, imagining six young children alone and frightened for almost a week. When he opened his eyes again, Park was watching him with concern, which was frankly the opposite of how this should be going.
“I’m so sorry,” Cooper said.
“Don’t be.” Park blew out a harsh, agitated breath. “When we first met, in Florence, I told you I lost my parents and that’s...true. But it isn’t the whole truth.”
“What do you mean?”
He shook his head. “My grandmother showed up on the fifth night. I’d never met her before, but I—I knew who she was. She told us our parents had died in a car crash and we went to live with the rest of the...family.”
“That must have been overwhelming.”
He shrugged. “It wasn’t an unhappy childhood at all. I had my siblings, plus all these new aunts, uncles, cousins. I was suddenly rich and taken care of. Privileged. I’m not sure my younger siblings even really remember our parents. We never spoke about them after that.”
Park put his coffee cup to his mouth but didn’t take a sip, just held the heat against his lips for a moment before putting it down on the table and continuing. “I was teaching at the university in Toronto when my uncle Marcus showed up unexpectedly saying he needed to tell me something. I was confused. I was going to see him, going to see my whole family, in a short few days, for the winter break.”
“You were still part of your family’s pack.” Cooper
whispered the word, but Park still flinched a bit.
“Yes, happily so.” His expression shifted suddenly to one of such concern that Cooper almost looked around the room for a threat. But Park just grabbed Cooper’s hand, nearly knocking over his coffee. “Please know that I didn’t mean to mislead you.”
“What?” Cooper said, too stunned by the urgency in Park’s voice to worry about what he was saying.
“Marcus came to tell me that my father had died.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither did I at first. But he told me that my father had been killed earlier that week. Murdered.”
Cooper twitched and felt Park’s hand tighten over his before pulling away. “So, he’d been alive the whole time?”
“Yes.” Park drummed his fingers loudly on the table. “The crash was a lie. My parents hadn’t died, just...left. My grandparents took over our custody and told us they had died to prevent us from trying to get in touch. They disapproved of their life choices and they never wanted us to know the truth. But after my father really did die, Marcus struggled with his conscience and went against their orders to tell me.”
“Jesus,” Cooper whispered. “So, does that mean your mother...?”
“Is still alive, yes.”
Cooper’s fists clenched. He looked down at his own lap and tried to control his breathing so that he wouldn’t jump up, drive to Maine, and confront an entire pack of werewolves right then and there, which would not be helpful. It wouldn’t. But shit that’s what he felt like doing.
“Cooper. Cooper, please look at me.” Only the pain in Park’s voice could pull Cooper out of his train of thought. He looked up to see Park’s face twisted as he bit at the scar on his lip. “I’m sorry I lied to you. I mean, I didn’t lie, but I didn’t tell you everything and—I just didn’t know when—”
Cooper shook his head and put his hand over Park’s drumming fingers, stilling them, and squeezed his hand. “Oliver, I’m not angry at you. I’m pissed at your grandparents for lying to you. And your parents for abandoning you. And the rest of your family for playing along. Pretty much everyone but you.”
The Wolf at Bay (Big Bad Wolf) Page 23