AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I scowled at him before grabbing his love handles and giving them a jiggle. “What’s this about?”
“Gosh, I’ve missed you,” he said, pulling me for another hug. He leaned in, lowering his voice to a whisper. “We gonna like this talk, kiddo?”
“I hope so.” I loosened my grip, but he just held on even tighter.
“Just a few more seconds. Got twenty years’ worth of hugs to catch up on.”
“He loves you,” I said as quietly as I could manage. I didn’t want Gray to hear me. He didn’t need to know I was pleading for his father’s acceptance on his behalf. Having lost a father under the same circumstances, I knew what that could do to a person. It’s a deep wound of betrayal that never fully heals. I didn’t want that for him. “He’s your son, and he’s going to need you.”
He pulled away, staring at me curiously with a question half-formed on his lips.
The front door opened, pulling us out of the moment. I turned around and saw the most unwelcome of sights. Sarah Thistle stood in the doorway, having entered without knocking.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Esther said to Gray. She held open her arms for Sarah, inviting her in. When she broke away, Esther’s eyes locked with mine. “I thought we ought to go ahead and smooth things over now so we can get to planning the wedding.”
“There’s no patching anything up.” He looked past Esther, directly at Sarah. “We broke up. We talked about this, Bunny.”
Sarah looked like a balloon someone had let half the air out of. Her sad, droopy eyes. The way her lips formed into a halfhearted frown. It seemed like she hadn’t slept in a week. She held her bible in her hand, her thumb stroking the cover delicately.
“You promised—” Before Sarah could finish whatever it was she was trying to say, Esther cut her off.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Grayson. You two are always breaking up. Then you get back together a few weeks later. I just figured we ought to go ahead and speed the process up a little so we can get all of this wedding business taken care of.” Esther turned back toward the kitchen but stopped in the archway. “Kent, honey, would you mind helping me set the table? It’ll give us a chance to catch up and give these two little lovebirds some privacy so they can get this all sorted out before dinner.”
I turned to Gray, trying to gauge his reaction. He was still staring at Sarah. She walked over and took his hand. I waited for him to pull it away. To reiterate that it was over. He didn’t. He just stood there, letting her wrap her fingers around his. Her hand reached up, rubbing his biceps, and I let out a low, guttural growl. Sarah stared at me, a look of confusion plastered across her face.
“You alright over there, Kent?” she asked.
Gray’s breathing became heavier and his eyes didn’t move from their intertwined fingers. Before I could say a single word, Esther grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward the kitchen. Marty’s eyes flickered back and forth between Gray and myself like he was putting together a puzzle in his mind, but he couldn’t get the pieces to fit. As Gray and Sarah made their way to the hideous, lime-green sofa, Marty stared at me like he was studying scripture.
I set the table in silence, peeking out through the archway each time I passed by. Gray and Sarah sat on the couch, her nuzzled up next to him as he tried to inch away. Marty sat in the recliner next to the sofa, lost in thought.
Esther yammered on about her trip to Guadalajara for fifteen minutes, telling me stories about every soul she’d saved along the way.“Even managed to save one of your kind,”she had said. It would have gotten more of a reaction out of me had I not been busy sneaking glances at Sarah Thistle, who looked like she was ready to ride Gray like a Ferris wheel. As much as I wanted to scowl at Esther’s blatant homophobia, I wanted to find the damn transformer and shut Sarah’s little carnival of pre-marital bliss down even more. Still, I would need to try and get the name of this recently converted Guadalajaran from Gray when the night was over. I wasn’t going to let another lonely little gay boy waste twenty years of his life because of religious homophobia. Hell, who knew, maybe Mom would take him in.
Once the table was set, I made my way toward the living room. As I passed Esther, she grabbed my wrist. I was getting really tired of all the grabbing and tugging going on at the Collins household. Her grip was tight—tighter than it ought to be.
“Kent?” She shook her head, as if warning me away from the living room. Motioning toward a barstool by the kitchen island, she said, “Let’s have a little chat, honey.”
I wasn’t sure what could be more important than the fact that Sarah was essentially giving Gray a lap dance on the living room sofa. “Yeah. Yeah, we can talk. I just need to ask Gray something real—”
“Sit down.” It hadn’t been a request, it was an order. Her voice wasn’t necessarily rude, but there was a scolding tone attached to it that made my stomach spin. I took a seat on one of the wooden barstools.
“It’s really good to see you again,” I said, trying to cut through the tension that had enveloped the room.
Esther leaned back against the counter, crossing her arms against her chest. “I’m going to have to ask you to cut this out.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I’m not blind. You and my son—It’s enough now, Kent.” Stepping away from the counter, she reached across the island and grabbed my wrist, her fingernails digging into my skin. “What you get up to in your private life, that’s between you and God, but I’ve got to protect my boy. When Martin said he’d talked to you on the FaceTime thing, I was a little worried, but I pushed that worry down because the good people of Guadalajara needed us. There were souls to be saved. Then Trevor called me saying things were getting complicated again.”
“Again?”
“He said that you’d been coming between Gray and Sarah. I know you’ve always felt like you …” Esther swallowed, looking like she was going to be sick. “Like you havefeelingsfor him. But my son isn’t like that.”
“Gray is a grown man,” I said, swallowing the lump in my throat. “He can do what he wants.”
“You’re walking on real shaky ground. Steady, now.”
“Excuse me?” I shook my head. What the hell was that supposed to mean?
