The Foster Family, page 22
“You’re breaking his rules just to spite him.”
“Fuck off,” he said again.
“Maybe even to hurt him,” I said instead of leaving. “Maybe to leave your own marks on him, like those hickeys he gives you.”
“Kerry.” His voice was all warning.
“Maybe because you want to scar him in ways that won’t heal.”
The big man whirled, and the clippers flew at me so fast I barely had time to duck out of the way. I lifted one hand to deflect them, and the mug I was holding shattered. Shards flew everywhere, stinging bits and pieces crashing over my hand and face, warm liquid splattering over skin. The sharp stings faded instantly, except for one in my hand and one on my face. A glint of ceramic caught the morning light, sticking from the meaty part of my palm where I clutched the broken handle of the mug. Warm, wet stickiness dribbled along my jaw.
Charlie stared at me, horror-stricken, and I did my best not to flinch as I looked at him.
“You see?” he rasped. “You fucking see what happens to me without him? I lose my fucking mind.”
“Stop swearing,” I whispered. “Charlie, just stop swearing. One step at a time.”
He nodded. “Let me look at your face.” He took a step closer and I lowered my arm.
“That cup was yours, by the way.” I carefully sipped my own coffee and grinned a small grin that didn’t move my cheek too much. “Tough luck.”
“God, Kerry, I’m sorry. I’m an idiot.”
“Yes.”
He turned my head to the light and examined my face. “Does it hurt?” he asked softly. Remorse colored his voice.
“My hand hurts more, actually.”
“We should go inside and get you cleaned up.”
“Malcolm is going to freak out.”
He sighed. “You have no idea.” He turned me toward the house, though, and kept a hand on my bicep as we went. “Kerry….”
“I have to go,” I said, anticipating.
“We need you.”
I stopped and turned to face him. “I can’t fix you, Charlie. I wish…. I can’t fix you guys. You need me out of the way so you can fix yourselves.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Please tell me you aren’t really that dense.”
He looked too sad, too frightened to really believe his own protests, though. And then Malcolm saw me as we walked up the porch steps, and the shit hit the fan. It was all I could do to keep him from going completely ballistic all over Charlie.
“You think I didn’t provoke him?” I snarled at Malcolm while he was backing Charlie into the corner of the kitchen counter. “You think it’s all him and I’m some angel who never mouths off—” I forced anger past fear and grabbed at Malcolm’s arm. “Leave him alone!” I’d never seen anyone so fiercely angry in my life.
“Oh, I know you mouth off”—he pointed a finger in my direction—“but he knows he has a temper, and you have never seen him lose it.”
“I have now.”
“You”—he pointed at me—“just hold your tongue and let me deal with this.”
“Because I’m just a stupid kid who needs looking after.”
They both stared at me.
“I never said that,” Malcolm protested.
“You don’t have to. It’s how you behave, taking me under your wing, leading me around like I’m on a leash, lapping up every bit of praise….” I trailed off before I dug myself a nice, deep, comfy grave of truth. Because I liked his praise and we all knew it. I did lap it up and waited at his feet for more. “No wonder Charlie needs his own identity away from you.” I dug at him instead, and it showed in his expression that I’d gone deep enough to hit a nerve.
He turned his back on Charlie. “Help him clean up.” It was all he said to either one of us. He stormed off into his office and slammed the door.
Charlie huffed out a breath. “That could have been worse.”
I didn’t see how. I hadn’t set out to piss them both off on the last day I had with them, but there it was. Just one more reason I had to get out of there before I not only ruined my chances with them, which I was pretty sure I had, but before I ruined their chances of fixing their own relationship.
The cuts weren’t bad. The tiny nick on my face wouldn’t even leave a mark, and the sliver in my hand hadn’t gone very deep. Charlie carefully picked it out and applied a Band-Aid.
“I don’t know how any of this happened,” Charlie mused as he smoothed down the last bit of pink plastic over my palm. “Everything was fine. We were jogging on the beach like we always do, and then there was you.”
I took a deep breath and tried to find the sting of his words, but surprisingly, there was none. “Charlie, my life history reads like… I’m the walking apocalypse, I swear.”
“Don’t be like that.”
“You know what happened to my parents, Charlie?”
“They were fuckups, like the rest of our parents?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think so.” I told him the story of their deaths as I knew it. Of course I didn’t actually remember any of it from firsthand experience. My father was dead before I was born, and my mom—I didn’t like thinking about her. I had a vague notion in my head that Lissa might look something like she would have looked had she made it past the age of sixteen.
“So you see? It started early. As a fetus, I was a menace.”
Charlie cupped my face, and I wondered if I’d told him the tale just to get him to do that, because I did so love it when he did. I closed my eyes and let myself melt into his touch. “You don’t honestly think you had anything to do with any of that,” he said, sounding so certain I knew he didn’t really expect an answer.
Who knew how the universe worked? I just shrugged. The laws of physics and logic said I was of no consequence in the grand scheme of the events that killed my parents. But something deep inside of me couldn’t help thinking if I didn’t exist, they might still be alive.
“A person could go on forever trying to understand the wiles of fate,” I said. Some shrink somewhere along the line had said that to me. He’d also said it was impossible to unravel logic that wasn’t there or find reasons where there were none.
“If you go back to Seattle and Nash now,” Charlie said, “what do I do?”
“With the mess I’m leaving behind?”
He laughed, a short, dry sound and pulled me against his chest. “It would be pretty easy to blame it on you.”
“Blame what on me, exactly?”
“How do I stay?” Charlie asked in the smallest voice I’d ever heard from a grown man. “How do I stay with him, knowing he isn’t enough? How do I tell him he isn’t enough and not crush him completely?”
I pushed away from him, both palms sweaty and planted on his chest to gain my freedom. “How the hell do you live with a guy, sleep with a guy, be in this kind of relationship with a guy for fifteen fucking years and not ever say any of this shit out loud to one another? How do you even do that? Andrew and I talked more than you two do, and he hated my guts. Hell, he hates his own guts. The only pillow talk we ever had was about his girlfriend and how ballistic she’d go if she ever found out about… us….” I blinked at Charlie. “Holy fuck, I’m an idiot. Where’s the phone?”
“What?” He blinked back at me.
“The phone? Where is the phone? I have to call Officer Karl.”
“It’s Sunday. He won’t be working.”
“Then I’ll leave a message.” I found the phone on the kitchen counter and dialed. I got voice mail and left a message for Karl to see if he could figure out what kind of car Andrew’s girlfriend drove. Was it too easy to think maybe she had found out her boyfriend was screwing around on her and with who? I mean, there was that whole stereotype about mean girls being, well, mean. Maybe it was too easy an explanation, but it was a lead just as worth following as any other, wasn’t it?
“You really think she’s behind all of this?” Charlie asked.
Trailing my fingers over my face where the bruise was still a splotchy bit of discolored skin under the new cut, I offered the only answer I had and shrugged.
“You think she put Andrew up to—” He touched my cheek too.
“No.” I sighed and leaned heavily on the edge of the counter. That was definitely all him, the thing at the nursery. “The idea someone would say no to him and actually stick to no is pretty foreign to him. No one ever says no to the football star, the prom king, the perfect bundle of snails and puppy-dog tails they gave birth to, or the son of the woman they sleep with.”
“No one except you, apparently,” Charlie pointed out.
I snorted. “That went well, huh?”
“Point is, you did say no. Step in the right direction, if you ask me.”
I really wanted to tell him I hadn’t asked him, but I kept my mouth shut because I knew he was right about stepping away from Andrew. I just wasn’t so sure the direction of that step, the one that led to their doorstep, had been the right one after all.
Awkward silence fell and I shifted my feet. “Are you going to go out there and fix that bush you hacked up, or should I?”
“You.” He pointed down the hall to where Malcolm had vanished. “I have to go… fix that.”
I definitely had the easier task.
Chapter 18
OF COURSE Monday morning came shrouded in fog, everything outside soggy and drooping. With my luck, the flight would be delayed, or better yet, canceled, and I’d be stranded at the airport. Malcolm, of course, insisted on driving me, rather than letting me take a cab, and Charlie rode along. I anticipated the good-byes at the airport to be excruciating. Even if my stuff was still at their place, I had very little hope that I would ever be back there.
Not that I would stay in Seattle. I’d built a life in Maine, and I liked some parts of it well enough to try and build the rest up to match. I just didn’t think it would be with Malcolm and Charlie. Not after everything that had happened, and especially not after last night being a repeat of that long-ago one when I had found a couple of twenties on the counter for dinner and been left to fend for myself.
It was, I supposed, Malcolm’s way of setting me aside without having to actually speak to me about it. And what Malcolm decided, ultimately, Charlie went along with.
It was for the best. I just had to keep telling myself that until I was convinced of it.
I expected them to drop me off at the departures gate, but Malcolm actually parked in temporary parking and popped the trunk. While he went to the machine to get a ticket for the windshield, Charlie unloaded my bags.
He didn’t say anything as he wheeled them over the pavement toward the doors. Neither did Malcolm. They walked on either side of me in silence. There was no evidence of the smiling, lively men I had met on the beach what felt like a lifetime ago but in reality was less than a month.
Looked at from that perspective, I had to wonder at the way the pending good-byes were twisting inside and tearing holes in my gut. I’d known them less than a month. The good-byes to Lissa and Marcus had been less fraught, and they had been in my life for ages. I’d even called Matt because something compelled me to let him know he hadn’t been forgotten even though that weekend barbecue had never materialized.
He seemed pleased I was taking this trip and wished me luck, even hoped I’d keep in touch. He sounded happy for me, and I thought there was a chance we could be friends. If I came back.
Lissa had only shrugged, hugged me tight, and told me she wasn’t worried. “You’ll be back. You can’t get enough of me.” She’d stepped back and begun ticking things off on her fingers. “You love your job, you love me, you want to be this baby’s proxy uncle, because otherwise, he won’t have uncles, and it’s pretty much your only shot at the position, and—”
I touched her lips. “I get it. I’ll be back.”
Gripping my fingers in a tight but sisterly hold, she’d shaken her head. “You don’t want me to name reasons four and five, fine, but that doesn’t make them go away.”
“That ship has sailed, Liss.”
“Don’t be an ass. They adore you.”
“So not the point.”
“Actually, dunderhead, it is the point. The very sharp point of everything. The rest is all foundation. You build—”
I put my fingers on her lips again. “I don’t want to talk about them. I don’t want to talk about them. I do not want to talk about them.”
“Kerry?” She’d leaned back and taken my hand in hers again. “Do you not want to talk about them?”
“Ha. Ha. We should talk about baby names, because I’m pretty sure I get a say in that.”
“Says who?” She’d looked indignant and indulgent at the same time, and I realized how much I loved her for just being her.
“Uncle privileges,” I’d said.
“Ha!”
“Only uncle privileges?”
“Nice try.” She’d poured me more wine and curled her feet under herself on the couch. “If anyone gets anything past Marcus’s wall of family names, it’s me, and I don’t like even my chances.”
Just like that, we were off and running on a completely neutral topic, and when it had come time to say good-bye, all she’d said was, “Call me when you land.”
Because she was awesome that way. I almost wanted to ditch all the clothes in my bag and take her instead, as backup for when I gave Nash my story. I’d told her as much, and all she’d done was pat up my pocket holding my cell and make a face. “I’m in your speed dial, dipshit.”
“Love you, Liss,” I whispered.
“I know.” She’d hugged me tight then and kissed my cheek and shooed me out the door.
THAT HAD been the easy good-bye. Alone with Charlie and Malcolm at the airport, I hadn’t the faintest idea what to say to either of them. Well, that wasn’t true. I knew I had to say good-bye. I just didn’t know how to say it and have it stick.
They walked me right up to the automated ticket scanner and watched while I scanned my printouts and waited for the ticket and baggage tag to print.
“You guys don’t have to—”
Malcolm stopped me speaking with a hand on my arm and a small shake of his head. In that moment, he had that much control. Or maybe I just needed him to have that much control, because I had none, and I knew if I kept talking, I’d beg him to take me back.
The boarding pass popped into the trough at the bottom of the machine. I took it in numb fingers. The baggage tag came next. I took that too and slipped it through the handle of my suitcase, peeled off the backing, and stuck the ends together. For a moment, I stared at the black block letters spelling out Seattle against the shiny white paper.
“All set, I guess,” I said.
Charlie took me by one shoulder, turned me around to face him, and squeezed me into a rib-cracking bear hug before I got a look at his face. It lasted long enough for his warmth to reach into my soul. Then he backed away, turned on his heel, and all but ran for the exit. Not one word of farewell. Just gone.
Malcolm hesitated a moment, stared after him, then turned to me. His dark eyes had smoky-blue rings around the irises you had to be very close to see. Now, they seemed to glow as he stared at me, but his expression was stoic.
I opened my mouth to say I didn’t even know what, when he took my face in both his hands and kissed me.
I couldn’t deny him the right, or deny his power, or heat, or the way I melted into it. I couldn’t deny him.
When he pulled away, I swear I tried to hold back the whimper. It came out anyway, and he swooped in for one last peck, as though to capture the sound and keep it. He moved back too swiftly for me to make more of that second brush of lips, dragged his gaze from mine, and turned, stalking purposefully out the door.
Gone.
Not a word of good-bye. Like Charlie, just gone.
There wasn’t really much left to say to them, but silence was… well, just that. Silent. Empty.
It was the answer, I suppose, to the question I was too afraid to ask. When I couldn’t see him anymore through the glass doors and heat rising off the pavement outside and the wavering film in front of my view, I hiked up my backpack, gripped the handle of my suitcase, and wheeled it toward the baggage check.
Chapter 19
“DID YOU see his face?” Charlie asked. “Did you?” He fell into step with Malcolm at the edge of the parking lot.
His voice was pitched to exactly the right tone to grate on Malcolm’s nerves and amplify the pounding in his head.
“Of course.” But Charlie had left before Kerry had made that sound.
“We shouldn’t have done that to him.”
“What was left to say, Charlie?”
That got a long silence heaving with temper Charlie barely held in check. Malcolm knew the signs. The twitching spot near his left eye, the repeated running of his hands over his thighs, as though he was trying to keep from making fists, the tight line of his mouth. “But to say nothing at all?” he asked finally.
“What would you have me tell him?” Malcolm nearly shouted, nearly let out the frustration, the bait Charlie would need to explode. He wanted to. He wanted so badly to spill it all out and let the pieces land. Let Charlie flash back at him, rage and shout and give all the reasons Malcolm wasn’t worth it anymore. Let Charlie pick up whatever bits were left after the mushroom cloud of temper had dispersed. But in the back of his head was the knowledge that Charlie wasn’t that far from crushing the crumbs of them to dust under his boot instead. Malcolm didn’t dare take the chance.
“Did you want me to tell him to stay?” Malcolm asked, as he had so many times in the past. “He made up his mind and it had nothing to do with us.”
“He’s hurting.”
Malcolm jerked his door open, then glared at Charlie over the roof of the car. “His choice!”
“He’s scared, Malcolm.”
“Boo-fucking-hoo.” He is not the only one. But that wasn’t the kind of thing Malcolm said out loud. That was the kind of thing a person who couldn’t keep it together said, and he was not that kind of person.
