The Foster Family, page 14
“You didn’t have to do all this,” I said, moving closer to the bed to get a better look at it. The sheets and blankets were all purple and beige—a weird combination that was probably better blurry. It was neatly made, and I got that odd, trying-too-hard feeling that Malcolm had talked about. When you walked into a new foster home, sometimes they tried so hard to make you feel at home it felt more like you were being committed.
“You know, I realized,” Malcolm said, turning to me, “what you must have thought after that first day with the blowjob, and then the shower and the night sleeping in here. I mean, it was obvious what kind of room it was.” He pointed upward. “Hooks? And locked cabinets? Might as well have left the chains on the bed, right?”
“Oh God,” Charlie muttered.
I flushed. “I didn’t mind,” I assured him.
Malcolm nodded. I was too blind without my glasses to see subtleties in his expression, but I saw him square his shoulders. “Don’t worry, Charlie,” he said, and his voice had changed. Gone was the edge of hysteria. “I’m not freaking out.”
“Oh?” Charlie didn’t sound at all convinced.
“I was. I almost did.” He rubbed a hand over his stomach, just above his belt, and Charlie watched the motion intently. It meant something in the same sort of way Lissa’s motion had, but obviously, whatever Malcolm was protecting was something that made them both uneasy and made Charlie’s titanium shield slip a bit.
“But then I realized and I came back.” He fixed a gaze on Charlie, who watched him and was probably studying the nuances in his face I couldn’t make out. “I haven’t lost my temper in a long time.”
“No,” Charlie agreed. “You haven’t.”
“You’ve made everything so easy for me, you know,” Malcolm told his lover. “So easy. I forgot how this feels.”
“How what feels?” Charlie asked.
Malcolm smiled wide. That expression, I could see. Nor could I miss the way his body swayed slightly, his hips loosened, and his feet shifted across the carpet so he was close to Charlie, gazing at him and only him as though I was not only gone from the room but simply didn’t exist in that moment. “Us. How we feel. When we’re here, not just marking time. How life feels when….”
“When you’re not numb,” Charlie said.
Malcolm nodded. “I’m so sorry.”
Charlie nodded. His attention was all on Malcolm, then, his face soft, gaze riveted. Malcolm did it for him. Even through the blur I could see it in the lines of his body and the tilt to his head, hear it in the way he sighed and see how his throat worked. He wasn’t just turned-on. He was in love. He was ready, and all Malcolm had to do was speak.
I instantly understood. It didn’t even matter what Malcolm asked of him. If he asked nothing at all, as maybe had been the case lately for who knew how long, that would be okay too. Charlie was his. Heart, soul, mind, down to the tiniest kernel of his being. Bodies were only the very tippiest tip of that iceberg.
Silently, I let myself out of the room and hurried for the garden. There was plenty to do there to keep my mind off my libido. The plants had arrived from the nursery, so I could deposit those where they were eventually going to be planted. I didn’t need glasses to dig holes, but I was sure I could find someplace that needed a hole. Maybe one big enough I could hide out in it until the pheromones had worn off.
Chapter 11
I WORKED until it was dark, ordered food in with the two twenties left on the kitchen counter next to the phone with a note telling me to do just that, and went to bed without seeing or hearing from either of them again that night. I didn’t sneak up to their door to eavesdrop on what I might be able to hear. I didn’t go to any lengths at all to find out if they’d eaten or cared to. I showered, ate, and curled under the odd-colored sheets to listen to the house settle. When I rolled onto my back to watch headlights scrape across the ceiling as cars occasionally passed on the road outside, I noticed a discolored patch of plaster up there. The hook was gone.
So the dynamic had changed again, and I had no idea where it left me. Gardener? Roommate? Boarder? Houseboy? Boy toy seemed to be off the table, and while I supposed that was meant to make me feel better, it left me floating in a sea of uncertainty. I didn’t like it there. I’d never been a very strong swimmer.
Sighing, I rolled over and eventually slept. In the morning, I waited in my room until I heard Charlie say good-bye before I snuck to the bathroom.
When I came out, Malcolm was standing between the bathroom door and mine, leaning on the wall, a cup of coffee in hand.
He held it out. “Truce?”
I accepted the offering with a shrug. “Was there a war?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Was there?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Yesterday—”
“Was weird.”
He agreed.
“Can I go put pants on?” I asked. “If we have to talk and sh—everything, can I at least be clothed?”
From that question, he came to the conclusion: “You don’t think we need to talk.”
And I guess he was right. I didn’t. Also, I couldn’t decide if he was asking me that or not, or if he sounded upset about it. Or if he was feeling anything at all. He was confusing, and not being able to see his face clearly was driving me nuts.
“I think we have to go shopping for more bookshelves.” I pointed to the mess he’d made of the living room. “I think I have to find out if I have enough money for new glasses, because I’m going to get headaches without them. And I think….” I glanced through the open door to my room, sipped my coffee, and nodded to myself. “Mauve.”
“Mauve?”
“To match the sheets,” I told him. “I’ll paint the walls mauve to match the sheets you gave me.”
“Oh.” He frowned hard enough I could see it. “I hate those sheets.”
“Thank God,” I said, heartfelt. “Because I was beginning to wonder how crazy you actually are.”
That earned me a look, but he said nothing.
If it was over the line, he let me get away with it. But I didn’t think it was. Charlie said he was fragile. That he broke easily. I think Charlie had the wrong end of that stick. I thought probably, Malcolm had been broken. He gave off the air of a person who had places he would not go because he knew what those places looked like and wasn’t interested in ever visiting them again. But he was not fragile.
“You’re not afraid of me,” he said after a moment.
I smiled at him. “There are a lot of things to be afraid of in the world, Malcolm. You aren’t one of them.”
“How can you be so sure?”
There is never an explanation for a gut feeling. It is what it is. So I didn’t answer him because there was no answer.
“I’ll go get dressed and we can go shopping,” I said instead.
He must have been content with that answer because he wandered back to the kitchen while I went into my room to find clothes.
SHOPPING WITH Malcolm was a lot of fun, it turned out. Finally, here was a place he relaxed, let loose even.
“Your taste in home decor is… tragic.” He waved a hand at the bedside table lamps I loved. “Those are never getting in the front door of my house.”
“We both hated the sheets,” I reminded him, petting the lamp.
“Well, because they’re ugly. Maybe we should get you to the eye doctor before we do this.” He slapped my fingers. “Don’t touch that. You’ll get some on you!”
I laughed out loud, and he stared at me.
“What?” I stared right back.
“I’m not that funny.”
But I couldn’t wipe the grin from my face. “Yeah, you are. Can I have the lamps?”
“No.”
“Please?”
“Oh my God, sugar, move on.”
I laughed again because he called me sugar, and I was hardly even sweet, and he didn’t do endearments or the limp wrist thing in real life, so it was funny to see him lampoon.
My laughter brought out his smile.
“But seriously, there’s an eyeglass place at the mall across the street. Let’s go there. They have that glasses-in-an-hour service.”
“That only works if you have the money in an hour,” I reminded him reluctantly, turning my back on the thousand-dollar-price-tagged lamps and letting go of the game we’d been playing over them. “I’ll get them when Lissa pays me next week.”
“You work for me too, don’t forget. Come on.” He took my arm and guided me toward the store exit. “Consider it an advance.”
“Mal—”
“You’re really going to argue with me on this?”
“Well, no.” Because I was already getting a headache on top of the pain from the day before. I didn’t like being in pain.
“Good. Come on.”
I let him guide me out of the store, and we crossed to the mall where he left me to get my prescription checked and pick out frames while he found a coffee shop. He was back in time to approve my final choice.
“How do you pick out glasses when you can’t see what you’re looking at?” he asked, eyeing my selection critically.
“Or when half my face is the wrong color,” I muttered, studying again the bruising on my left side. “Guess?”
“Well, guess again.” He handed me the coffee he’d bought for me, sat in the chair beside mine, and picked another frame from the rack.
“Not that one,” I said, putting a hand over his before he could remove them from their perch. “The box.” I pointed to the box of economy frames sitting on the counter.
“Don’t be an ass,” he told me, and took the frames down. “Get those hideous things off your face.”
“Insulting my taste—”
“They are the best ones in the box, I grant you, but none of the frames in the box are nice. Trust me on this?”
I nodded. I didn’t have to trust him. I knew the glasses were gross. I also knew they were all I could afford, even if I was to be Malcolm Holmes’s private gardener.
He ignored my protest and set the expensive frames on my face.
The salesgirl sighed and gazed at me with big anime eyes.
“What?” I glared at her.
“They look good on you,” Malcolm said. “Don’t they look good on him?” he asked her.
If she sighed again and said something like “dreamy,” I was out of there.
“They do,” she agreed, “but I have something you’ll really like, I think.” She smiled at Malcolm, cutting me and my opinion completely out of the equation. “They’ll cost a little more—”
“No,” I said, but she had already smelled the money in the water and was shark enough to go after it.
“Be quiet.” Malcolm covered my hand in his when I began to raise it to pluck the frames from my face. “Show me,” he instructed her.
“Malcolm, for Pete’s sake,” I began, but he turned that tilt-head expression on me.
“Will you let me do this?”
“Why?”
He straightened up and squared his shoulders. “I’m not even going to answer that. You drink your caramel latte and think about it and I bet you’ll figure it out.”
“I don’t want to be your boy,” I blurted.
And thank God the woman was on the other side of the room and didn’t hear that gem come flying out of my mouth.
Malcolm turned to stare at me. “Pardon?”
“I mean, I do. I don’t. I—”
He squeezed my hand. “Spit it out, Kerry,” he said softly.
“I can earn my own way,” I said. “I can look after myself.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“I think you maybe think I’m an airhead. Not so smart. I swear, the last few weeks, that isn’t who I am. I have been looking after myself a long, long time.”
“I was a foster kid too, Kerry. I know what that’s like. Can I please be the one to show you that sometimes, there are people out there who want to look after you just because you’re worth looking after? Can you please just let me do this? Today, let me be your sugar daddy, or your man, or whatever it is you want to fill that title out with. Let me make decisions and look after you and buy you things because no one has ever done that for you and I want to be the one to do that. Please?”
I stared at him a long moment. I suspected the sales girl was taking extra time choosing frames for us to look at because she seemed to be really good at her job, and it was pretty obvious we were having a moment she needed to stay out of if she was going to make the really good commission.
“Promise me this isn’t about the gag thing yesterday,” I said.
Malcolm looked blank.
“Just… I don’t want you to think you have to take me out and buy me sh—stuff, pamper me or spoil me as some sort of apology for stuffing that gag in my mouth yesterday.”
“You do understand I was out of line.”
I tipped my own head. “What were you planning on doing to me when we got home? When you took me aside at the nursery and gave me the speech about cause and effect? You were planning something then. So what were you going to do?”
He looked a little chagrined. A crooked smile slid across his face. “Gag you for a while.”
“So?”
“So what? I acted in anger.”
“I get that. We all lose our temper once in a while. If you were out of line, it was only because you acted without setting the ground rules first,” I chanced. “You would have sat me down, told me the rules, the punishment for breaking them, make sure I accepted all that, and then you would have done exactly what you did. Maybe more gently.” I stared at him, waiting, sure I was somewhere close to accurate.
Finally, he nodded.
“And I would have done exactly what I did, Malcolm. I would have opened my mouth and chosen to take my punishment. Because it was fitting and I broke the rule. It was what should have happened. I am not going to hold a temper tantrum against you. Trust me.” I turned to face the mirror. “I am not the one to be tossing bricks at that glass house.”
There was no more time to talk about it, though, because our sales rep came back with a selection of frames that looked like they cost a fortune.
“Try these.” She slipped a pair on my face and I squinted at my reflection.
I had to lean close to see myself clearly, but even before I did, I knew these frames looked a hundred times better than anything I’d tried so far.
“Perfect,” Malcolm decided. “We’ll take those.”
“Mal—”
“I thought we decided you were going to let me do this.”
“These are too much.”
He spun my chair around so we were sitting knee-to-knee and looked me in the eye. Both his big hands came from the fuzzy gloom of my nearsightedness to settle on my face, cupping it and giving me no chance to look away. “I can’t think of a thing that is too much for you.”
I blinked at him. “Y-you barely know me.”
“I think you barely know yourself, Kerry.” He straightened the glasses frames and smiled. “These look good on you.”
“Thank you.”
His smile was so kind. “You’re welcome. Now give them back to her so we can order the rest and go eat.”
“Then shop some more? We still haven’t found new shelves for the living room.”
He made a noncommittal sound as he turned to the salesgirl, and we finished picking out options for my glasses. Wonder of wonders, he actually listened to my opinion about which options would suit my lifestyle best and ordered what I wanted, not just the top-of-the-line everything simply because he figured price made it better. I walked out of there with the promise of eyewear that was not only stylish, but useful and warrantied out the wazoo.
“You need better clothes,” Malcolm informed me as we sat down in the restaurant to eat and wait.
“I’m a gardener,” I reminded him. “I don’t need nice clothes.”
“You need better clothes,” he said again.
“How much do I let you give me before it’s too much?” I asked.
“Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t like being pampered.”
I wasn’t about to lie to him, so I shook my head. “Everyone likes it. Just that I don’t deserve—”
He placed a finger over my lips. “I’ll be the judge of that. Now no more. If I want to buy you something, all you have to say is thank you.”
“Can I have the lamps?”
“No.”
I pouted, which earned an indulgent smile, but I guessed I was going to have to find more reasonable lamps.
PICKING OUT shelving for the living room went a lot more smoothly than either the lamps or the glasses. Malcolm thought maybe that was because all Kerry had to worry about was helping him decide what would go with the furniture he already had. There was no personal stake in this for the younger man. Maybe that made it similar to picking flowers, deciding what would go well with what. Whatever the case, when Kerry spotted the perfect pair of units in the discount section of Malcolm’s favorite store, Malcolm grinned. Kerry looked as though he’d won some sort of prize.
“One on either side of the TV,” he said, “and we can get that cabinet you liked over at the first place.” He was animated with his discovery, already planning ahead to how the room would look finished again.
“We are not going back to pick out those disastrous lamps,” Malcolm warned, teasing and hoping he wasn’t stretching the game past the breaking point.
Kerry offered a tragic sigh. “I’ve been doomed to suffer inferior lighting. However shall I cope?” Then he stuck his tongue out and laughed.
Malcolm’s skin prickled with heated pleasure at the sound. His breath caught when Kerry faced him, all grins and excitement. The bruising and swelling disappeared under the glow.
“God, you’re adorable.” In self-defense, he turned back to the shelving units. “I already ordered the cabinet at the other store. They’re delivering that and the rug you liked for your room next week. Oh.” Annoyance slivered his voice, and he tried to pull back from it and the looming thicket of emotions he too easily could get caught in.
