by Rachel Kane
"Not with my money!" his father cried hoarsely. "Not while there's an ounce of strength in my body!"
"Jesus, Colbs, you've got him all worked up. Dad, let me get you back to bed. Let's call the nurse."
"To hell with the nurse! Get me the lawyers!"
What did you do to him? He shot Colby a questioning look, but the only response was his brother's grim but well-pleased smile.
"You're going to give yourself another heart attack. You have to calm down."
But the ranting did not cease. His father's face was red as he sputtered more accusations. Betrayal, a traitor in their midst. How could he have ever let Dalton into the fold. Since the time Dalton was a boy, Dad had suspected something wrong.
On and on.
It was like watching a family photo, with a lit match touching the corner. Slowly, slowly, then quickly, the fire crosses the picture, until what had been a captured moment of love and solidarity turns into a blank and wrinkled square of ash.
"I'll get the lawyers out of bed," said Colby, reaching for his phone.
"Oh my god," said Noah. He was no longer luxuriating, but was sitting up, arms wrapped around his knees. "Dalton, seriously? They kicked you out of the company over...over this?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. I left. I wasn't going to listen to it, not for another minute."
"Can they do it? Can they cut you out?"
“There’s this phrase we use in the business, serving at the pleasure of the board. The board of directors can fire me if Dad and Colby tell them to, sure. Whether they’d go that far, I don’t know. I don't care. I really don't. After tonight, I'm not sure I can ever go back. And I'm sorry for what that might mean for this place. I know, without that money, a lot of your plans fall through."
Noah shook his head. "Don't worry about that, god, you've got enough going on."
But his voice was troubled. There had been a short pause there. You've got enough going on. Dalton had almost heard him say we've got enough.
Because something had happened here too. And he had been so wrapped up in his own story, that he hadn't given Noah any chance at all to tell it.
"Your friends hinted at something that happened tonight," he said.
Noah's eyes were unreadable. "They should mind their own business. It's nothing. Nothing compared to what you went through."
"Hey. I thought we were all about sharing our feelings. Wasn't that what you were trying to teach me? Come on. I've blurted out my bad night. Tell me about yours."
Maybe he was moving too quickly. He hadn't given Noah any time to react to this news. And maybe it wasn't news at all, maybe the lawyers had met with Dad, realized what bad shape he was in, realized he wasn't in the right frame of mind to be making any big decisions.
Tomorrow he might he was still CEO of Raines Holdings, still a billionaire.
Or he might find himself penniless, with Colby gloating.
Either way, his offer to help Noah had suddenly become tricky...maybe impossible. And he hadn't given Noah any time to process that.
Noah blinked. He put his hands on the sides of the tub, and for a moment Dalton thought he was going to pull himself out and run away. Not that some part of him would not like that sight--Noah glistening, skin bared--but now wasn't the time.
Instead, he just sat up, his eyes averted. "Dalton...can I tell you a story?"
22
Noah
“Look, you were right all along,” he said. “That day on the bridge…You saw something about me, about my past, and I was so angry at you, because I hate being reminded of it."
Dalton looked like he wanted to say something, but after the night he'd had, and after the way Noah had reacted during that conversation on the bridge, he was wary of saying the wrong thing. Instead, he put his hand over Noah's. Noah stared for a moment, noting the difference in sizes of their hands, the way Dalton's so easily covered his. It gave him the sense of being protected. In this safety, he could be honest.
Hopefully.
"People think it's odd," Noah said, "that I love this house so much. It's not mine, after all. The paperwork is clear; it belongs to Liam. So why did I move down here with them? Why do I care? Is it just a job? I don't want to tell them how much the place means to me. Liam and Judah know. Mrs. C knows. But the rest of the world? I think they see me as a hanger-on, just along for the ride."
"I'll admit, I thought it was some powerful strain of friendship that kept you here. You don't strike me as a small-town boy."
Noah grinned, but there was a sorrow behind the smile that he couldn't hide. "It's true. If we could pick up Superbia Springs and truck it to some city, some place with an actual night-life, some warehouse clubs, some decent shoe stores, it would make me so happy. But no. That doesn't matter. What matters..." He lifted his hand from Dalton's, and knocked against the tub. The metal, full of water, did not resound, but made a thick, muffled thunk. "What matters is solidity. This house has been here for a hundred years, and might be here for a hundred more. There hasn't been a lot of permanence in my life. This is my chance to have some."
Dalton leaned forward and worked the spigot. The water had gotten cool with all this talking, and now hot water poured in, warming them again. And the noise of the splashing seemed like good cover, like it would keep eavesdroppers from hearing them. A little bubble of privacy. Did Dalton know how exposed Noah felt? Was that why he did that, to give him a sense of solitude to tell this story?
And why was it so hard to tell? After all this time?
"I sometimes call Mrs. C my adoptive mom. Not so much Mr. C—that's a whole story in itself, and he isn't with us anymore, and I always got the feeling he didn't like me much. But Mrs. Cooper didn't even question it, when I started spending a lot of time at their house. She just set an extra place for me at the table. She had me try on Judah's clothes when he would grow out of them, because I was always a couple of sizes smaller. We didn't talk about it, and I was so grateful, because it meant I could just be around my friends, be comfortable, be safe."
"Why couldn't you go home?"
He brought his hands up to his face and rubbed his eyelids with his fingertips. The water tingled against his skin, fizzy and light.
"I somehow manage not to tell the story, even when I think I'm telling it. I talk around it, I wander around the borders of it, without ever getting to it. So here's what you need to know about me, Dalton. I come from something that polite people like Violet Mulgrew would call a broken home. It's a misnomer, though, because it implies the home was ever fixed, was ever in working condition, and mine never was. From the minute I was born, everything had already fallen apart, was in a constant state of falling apart, like I was born mid-air during an explosion that never stopped happening. Listen, I'm talking around it again! God!"
Dalton's strong arms were there, pulling him, until he was no longer on the opposite side of the tub, but was lying next to Dalton, face to face, chins just above the waterline. Those strange green eyes were full of concern. "Take all the time you need. I'm not going anywhere."
Was he actually going to do this? Tell the things he’d never told any prior boyfriend?
If he hadn’t seen Tina, maybe he wouldn’t.
But if she’d been here, it wouldn’t be long before she brought Bonnie around. That would change his life forever.
Not in a good way.
So it was a simple choice. Tell him now, or have him shocked later when he found out.
It’s just your family. You can talk about your family.
"My mom— How do I even tell you about her? I have a picture back in my room. She looks so much like a girl version of me. She was a girl. She was in high school when she had me, courtesy of an older guy who had convinced her that she was really special, really the one, and that none of the rules of conventional society mattered. She always used to laugh when she told the story. It was the saddest laugh in the world. I believed him, she'd say, and the minute he got what he wanted, he was gone. That's
the last time she'd ever believe a man with his promises of taking care of her. It'd just be me and her against the world. She couldn't take the ridicule at school, so she dropped out. Got waitressing jobs where she could. Her family was no help. They told her she'd ruined her life, cut her off, sent her packing. She'd go to them for help now and then when things got bad, and her mother would spend an hour yelling at her, telling her not to come back, not to bring that little bastard baby back into their house every again. Then her dad might slip her a little money. That's how we lived. We never had anything. She'd stay with friends, try to work, try to find someone to watch me, and for years, nothing worked out. It wasn't until I started school that she could get out of the house for long enough to get a consistent job, but high-school dropouts aren't in big demand, you know. Still, she did everything she could. Then at some point, I met the Coopers.
"Most of the kids I knew at school hated me. I was this skinny runt, and I already had an attitude. One of my progress reports back then says that while I was only a middling student, I brought a flamboyant flare to every class. So...yeah, everybody knew. And it was the usual thing, bullying, shoving me around, and I'd come home to either the back of our car, or on those rare occasions she was able to scrape together rent, whatever scuzzy apartment she’d found us. I'd try to clean it, I’d try to make it pristine, and nothing ever worked, there was always noise from the neighbors and trash in the halls, and I just hated everywhere we tried to put down roots. But I met Judah out by the swingset at school, and he didn't seem to mind me, and he told me I should come over some time to play video games—an idea I hated, by the way, but that's always been Judah's thing—and anyway, I stepped into their house and it was like walking into a TV show. You probably don't know what I mean, you're used to palaces and penthouses and stuff. But their house was...clean. It made sense. The refrigerator wasn't broken, the cabinets all had their doors. The air conditioning! God, they had central air, instead of a busted window unit like we had, and I swear, I lay down right on the floor next to the vent, and let the cold air wash over me. I thought I'd wandered into heaven. From that moment, I never wanted to leave.
"Of course it helped that we all got along. They liked having me over, and my mom was too busy to care if I stayed there for the night, so we'd watch movies and eat popcorn, and it was paradise."
So far, so good, he told himself. This was the easy part of the story. The beginning is always easy. It's the middle where things get complicated. Very, very few people knew the middle part.
He felt Dalton's arm tighten over his shoulders, and realized that he'd gone silent. Not surprising.
"Things could have stayed like that forever, as far as I was concerned. Having best friends meant I had an easier time at school. My grades got better. We got another apartment, so it was a little less depressing than when we lived in the car. Slightly. But what really made it less depressing was knowing I'd see Liam and Judah again soon. And then one day, my mom met Daniel, and everything in my life fell apart.
"He'd been a customer at the truck stop where she worked. To me, he was always so gross, with this greasy slicked-backed hair, and one of those black leather jackets guys buy when they want to look tough, do you know the kind I'm talking about? White t-shirts, jeans, biker boots. He really wanted the world to think he was a bad guy. Mom loved it. She totally fell for it. Soon they were seeing each other all the time, and when I'd come home to the apartment, it was so lonely. A little note in the kitchen saying she'd gone out with Daniel. Cereal for dinner. Going to bed, hearing them come in at three in the morning, hearing the drunken laughter... Ugh, the other things I heard. I wish I could excise them all from my memory. She really liked him.
"And he hated me. Hated everything about me. You have to understand, by that point, I was unmistakably gay. And not gay in the way that Liam and Judah are, where they're just gay by virtue of liking guys. I was gay-gay. I had opinions on Andrew Lloyd Webber. I owned silk scarves, ones I'd stolen from the mall. So gay. Daniel saw me, this little scrawny queen, and thought what I needed was to toughen up. His theory was that you toughen kids up the same way you tenderize meat, by beating the hell out of them. Oh, he'd make it sound reasonable, right, when my mom would ask why I had a black eye or bruises around my arm from where he grabbed me, and he always had a reason. The shoplifting, the staying too late with the Coopers. I was always breaking some unspoken rule with him. I'm not even sure when he moved in. One minute he was a visitor, the next he was always there. My mom supported him. And I tried to get away as often as I could, back to the safety of Liam and Judah. But things just got worse and worse. I told my Aunt Tina about it, and she tried to make things better by stopping in, because she knew Daniel wouldn’t touch me if she was there. But it wasn’t enough. One night I got in trouble. I’d stolen this concealer. You have to understand, all this stress, my skin care regimen was underwhelming, and I needed to cover all my spots to be able to face the world. So I stole this little tube, and Daniel found it, and told Bonnie, and Bonnie started yelling. She never used to yell at me, before she met Daniel. I just couldn't stand it anymore. I left. It was the middle of the night, I had no ride, no money to take the train, so I walked. Miles and miles and miles, I walked. It was morning by the time I reached their house, and I collapsed on the porch. Mrs. Cooper found me, she took me inside, and after that, I was theirs. Not officially, you know. It wasn't like they'd really adopted me. But she'd seen what was happening. There were some very sharp and pointed phone calls with my mom. Did my mom want to get the police involved? Did she want a visit from social services? Those kinds of questions. Mrs. Cooper can be...very firm, when she needs to be."
"I can imagine. The Coopers were willing to give me hell over trying to buy this place. They're very protective."
"They are. And in a way, they're why this story doesn't have an end. Like, I feel like I should tell you about some dramatic confrontation between Mrs. Cooper and Daniel. Or about the police showing up. Or a screaming match between me and my mom. But that's the sad part. After a few phone calls...everything stopped. I heard a while later that Daniel had moved on to some other woman who took care of him, that my mom was free again, and I thought about going to visit her…but I couldn’t. There had just been too much harm. All my life, she’d tried to protect me, and then suddenly she hadn’t been doing that anymore, and… And, I don’t know. It was over. I just didn't have a mother at all. There was never any closure. I guess in life, there often isn't real closure. Things happen until they stop happening, and then the next thing starts.
"But if anything, that lack of closure made me want certainty even more. Because I never knew, would Bonnie try to get me back? Would she get back together with Daniel, and send him over to catch me? I had so many nightmares. And they faded, slowly, but sometimes they'd come back, and I'd wake up and wonder where I was, was I back at the apartment, was Daniel about to come in and beat me... Sometimes I'd still think that as an adult. And then, suddenly, there's this house. And it's big and beautiful and everything I was never allowed to wish for as a kid. When Liam asked me to move down here to help, I was really hesitant at first. Really hesitant. But the longer I was down here, the more the place grew on me. That's why we fought you buying it. It's too much ours. It's mine, even though it's not mine, you know? It represents something I never had as a kid...and something I'm never giving up again."
Were those green eyes of Dalton's wet? Maybe it was just the steam from the water. Maybe the red rims of his eyelids were from staring at Noah for too long. But when Noah put his head against Dalton's chest, and Dalton squeezed him close, he said, "That was beautiful, Noah. I never knew."
"You sorta knew."
"I had an instinct, that's different."
"Do you think you could ever love a poor boy with nothing to his name?"
Uh-oh.
It had slipped out.
Love.
It wasn't what he had meant to say at all.
He felt Dalton's
lips touch his forehead. "Oh, I think I could," he said.
The next morning, Liam and Judah were clearly surprised to see Dalton. Noah marched right past them, a smug smile on his face. "You'll have to forgive the coffee," he said, pouring out two cups. "We don't have an espresso machine or anything. We'll have to get one before we open, for the guests."
"Noah...?" asked Liam. He'd been slicing a banana for Roo, but paused, staring. Judah just stood there with his mouth open.
There was no better feeling than watching your best friends and new boyfriend blush when they encounter each other.
"I think you all know Dalton," he said.
"Hey...uh...guys," said Dalton.
"Are you...is he...did you...?" Judah did not seem able to put a sentence together.
"I am, he is, and we did, yes," answered Noah.
"Huh," said Liam. "Well, I guess he should sit down for breakfast. How do you like your eggs?"
"Oh, you can't make me anything," said Dalton, "that isn't right. But...do you have a crepe pan?"
The kitchen was enormous, as befit a grand old house, and before long they had turned up the proper pan, and once butter and flour and milk had been secured, Dalton did magic over the stove, and suddenly there were paper-thin crepes with powdered sugar and just a dot of jam.
"I never knew you could cook," said Noah.
"That's it," said Judah, stabbing his fork into the soft crepe on his plate. "He's ours, he can stay."
Roo approved too, beaming at the flavor of the light, crispy treat, breaking into laughter over it.
It was a buoyant feeling, being that accepted. Feeling that sense of belonging. Noah wouldn't have traded it for the world. When he looked at Dalton, he could see that he felt it too. That's just the way it was with the Coopers. All the worry, all the hostility from Dalton trying to buy the place, had evaporated. All they needed was a chance, and everything could be forgiven.