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I frowned at him, propping myself up on my elbows. “What’s wrong? Tell me.”
“Did you go to Boulder University?”
I nodded. “Mhmm.”
Rome swallowed hard, and I watched his Adam’s apple bob. “And you graduated…”
“Two years ago.”
I turned my gaze to what Rome was looking at on my tree.
“Oh,” I said. “This ornament?”
He was looking at an ornament that I’d made with my roommates in my senior year of college. It was a picture of the four of us in front of our shared house from that year, and we’d encased the picture in a handmade, bronze-painted frame. It was of my buddies Jake, Garen, and of course, my best friend Justin.
“Yeah,” Rome whispered.
“I know my crafting skills aren’t great,” I said. “My frame turned out a little lopsided, but one of the guys’ girlfriends had a party where we all made these in our senior year. It’s me and my friends.”
“So you know those guys well?”
“I lived with all of them, but Justin the most. He’s the one on the right, and he’s my best friend. We’re still really close, but he travels a lot, like I was telling you about earlier.”
Rome’s face was still frozen like stone.
He suddenly moved to grab his boxer briefs, tugging them on before quickly pulling on his pants.
“Was hoping you wouldn’t cover up that perfect cock so soon—”
“Casey,” Rome said, turning back to me with an intense look on his face. “You don’t understand.”
“What?”
He scrubbed his palm over his face, then looked back at me, his gaze steady now.
“I’m Justin’s father.”
The world seemed to stop on its axis in that moment.
I heard the faintest sound of crickets coming in from outside the window.
I heard the hum of my refrigerator from the kitchen.
And most of all, I heard my own heartbeat, rapidly getting faster in my chest.
“I—” I started to say, but my throat suddenly felt tighter, and I had no idea what I was going to say at all.
Memories started flashing through my head in a rush. A flood of things that Justin had offhandedly mentioned to me. Things I’d never given much thought—about his childhood and his parents.
“Justin always called his best friend ‘Case’ when he talked about him,” Rome said, his own voice low and hoarse. “Casethis,Casethat. Case and I went to the football game, Case and I finished our midterms, Case is always there when I need him.”
I swallowed past the tightness in my throat. “Yeah,” I whispered. “That’s… what he calls me.”
“Oh,God,”he uttered.
“He always said his dad was a great guy, too. That his dad gets hired by different townships for all sorts of projects. That his dad was the reason he had the guts to finish college at all.”
Rome and I stared at each other in silence for a moment, each of us realizing the enormity of what we’d just done.
