Do you have any brothers or sisters? Nieces and/or nephews?
No, I’m an only child. No real family left, since my parents are gone.
Apparently, I had no willpower when it came to this man.
What I couldn’t tell him was that my parents had been too afraid to have any other kids after they realized I wasn’t like other children. I never did find out if it was because they were afraid they’d be like me or if they were afraid I’d hurt them.
Either way, it was probably the right call on their part.
One of the few right things they did.
My foot tapped on the floor, a strange sense of anxiety shooting through me as I tried to decide if I should leave it at that or tell him more. It was almost too easy to talk to him and tell him what I was thinking.
It was dangerous.
Because while my parents had been good people, as far as I could tell, their fear of me had made my life isolating. I didn’t have friends or learn how to mask most of my behaviors and idiosyncrasies until I was older. It made things difficult for me as a child.
Though, it made being gay easy. I didn’t have to worry about passing on any genetic predispositions to a child. And I never thought I would have a long-term partner that I wouldwant to have a child with to worry about surrogacy and which of us would be the donor.
But I found that Aiden made me think about a lot of impossible things.
Aiden
Oh, that sucks. I’m sorry. What happened?
Forget that. You don’t have to answer that, if you don’t want to.
It’s fine.
They were in a car accident. Hit by a drunk driver when I was 24.
Aiden
Did they catch the guy?
The police were never able to find him.
Of course, I didn’t explain that the police would never be able to find him because I found him first. I may not have many feelings, or feel things the way other people do, but a part of me had still cared that they were my parents and that some asshole had taken them from me.
They’d been my shield against society, and the law, and once they were gone, there had been a lot of hard lessons I’d had to learn on my own about how to use my family’s name and money to keep myself out of trouble.
It hadn’t always been easy, but I had always been resourceful and I’d do whatever I had to do in order to keep myself out of prison.
Or worse.
I didn’t want him asking too many questions about my family. It wasn’t that I wanted to hide who I was, but it wasn’t something I wanted to get into. Considering I’d given Aiden my real name at the wedding, he could have easily looked me up. Iwas surprised he didn’t. Part of me wanted to ask why, but I also didn’t think I should press my luck.
Then again, he could have been doing what I had been doing, and asking questions he already knew the answers to. Maybe he had even been trying to catch me in a lie.
Or he wanted to ignore all his instincts when it came to me, same as I was doing for him.
From a block away, I watched as Clint slipped through the doorway into his run-down house that had seen better days. The porch sagged under his weight and I wondered how he hadn’t gone through any of the rotted boards yet. I’d rummaged around the inside a couple times already, and I knew it didn’t fare much better than the outside.
The cockroaches were right at home.
I waited back a few minutes before I wandered to the vacant house across the street and snuck into the backyard to minimize my risk of being seen. It had been condemned months ago, so I snatched it up through one of my shell companies when it went up for auction. Eventually, it would be one of my renovation projects, but for the time being, it was the perfect place to set up surveillance on my next victim.
Most of the house remained as-is from the purchase. One of the few exceptions was I had a generator hooked up to supply power to the wall of monitors I set up in one of the upstairs back bedrooms that I turned into an office. That was where I could sit to be close while monitoring Clint.
