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“I...I’m in kind of a relationship with Quinn Sullivan.”
“You’re in a relationship?” The scream that came through the phone was his sister Jessie, and indicated that Damien had in fact had him on speakerphone.
“Not anything permanent—don’t go getting sentimental. But I got to know her, and I just thought it would be good if people come out and support the opening of the store. Because now I support the opening of the store. You know, by extension of being in a...relationship.”
“Holy hell,” said Damien. “Honey, go outside and look and see if there’s a pig flying in the sky.”
“Knock it off,” said Levi. “I let you off easy when I found that you were sleeping with my sister, so maybe don’t be a huge jerk to me now.”
“No one’s being a jerk,” said Damien. “I’m just surprised. It’s unlike you, all of this. Any of it.”
Yeah. It was. But so what? Yeah, it was unlike him. And so what.
Why couldn’t he be unlike himself?
Maybe he wasn’t actually being unlike himself.
Maybe this was what life would have been like for him if he hadn’t been raising kids for years and years.
Nobody’d ever thought of that, he bet.
“I’m happy for you, Levi,” Jessie said softly. “We worry about you.”
“You don’t need to worry about me,” he said. “I spent all those years taking care of you, and now that you’ve moved out, you suddenly worry about me? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“That’s just it. You spent all those years taking care of us. While we got to grow and change and do whatever we wanted. While we got to grieve. And when did you, Levi?”
That really did suck all the breath from his lungs. And every word from his soul. He couldn’t speak. He felt frozen with it. “I’m fine. I don’t need to do that.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said. “I think you do. And I think that we’ve all been waiting to see if you were going to collapse without us here. Or entrench and become the meanest old man in the history of the world.”
“I’m thirty-six. Your fiancé is thirty-six also.”
“It’s a state of mind,” said Damien.
“Yeah, thank you. Fuck off.”
“I’m not trying to offend you,” she said. “But you were able to take care of other people and not really...”
“I did what I had to do. And I had my own feelings. Believe me.”
Except he knew she was close to truths he’d identified a long time ago. But what did it matter? He didn’t know what to do about it.
He’d had to keep running.
It was all he knew how to do.
“I know you did,” said Jessie softly. “And a lot of distractions, too. And you made it so that we never suffered. But I just wonder who did that for you. Who took care of you. Nobody, and I think we want to rectify that.”
“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’m good.”
“Do you love her?”
That question hit him square in the chest.
He couldn’t say no. In these past weeks, he’d been a strange, bittersweet happy he hadn’t even known existed.
Quinn brought a softness and a sharpness into his life that he hadn’t known he was missing.
