Page 115 of Unstitch

‘You just want to get to the halfway house and stuff your face,’ Zach retorts without taking his eye off his ball.

‘Quite right. I won’t play well until I have a bacon roll in my stomach,’ Cal says.

‘Thought you didn’t do carbs,’ Zach points out.

‘Golf course carbs don’t count. I’ll do twenty thousand steps today.’

‘Can’t wait to see you smash the back nine, then,’ Rafe says. ‘You know,’ he whispers to me, taking a step away from Mr Concentration, ‘if the uphill battle ever gets too much, you can always join Cerulean. We’re still tiny—it’s mainly our money and our mates’ funds, as you know—but we’re seriously considering trying to grow this thing properly. Everyone wants to ramp up their family time these days, so bringing more hands on deck makes sense, and there’s no better person I can think of than you to lead the charge.’

‘Thanks, mate,’ I say, genuinely touched. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ True, Cerulean’s assets under management are a drop in the ocean right now, but their performance across asset classes is fucking impressive, and it would be a fun challenge to see how much they could grow their assets without sacrificing performance.

It’s definitely an option to tuck away for the future. It’s hard enough seeing Darcy and Max as it is with all of our crazy schedules. I can barely allow myself to imagine a time when we might be fully committed to each other, practically as well as emotionally. I want it too badly, and it hurts too much given what I need to do to get us there.

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘You’re family now. Oh, Jesus fuck.’

The last is in response to Zach’s eventual, perfectly executed putt. The ball rolls obediently into the hole, Zach punches the air, and the rest of us groan.

Cal steps up to his ball to forge bravely on with his putting despite his empty stomach. He hits it far too hard and it rolls straight past the hole.

‘Fucking useless,’ Zach crows.

‘Speaking of family,’ Rafe continues with a sideways glance at me as he lines up his shot, ‘have you had any more thoughts on what you’re going to do on that front?’

I understand him perfectly. I had a good chat with him and Belle about it a couple of weeks back when they kindly came over to the City for a midweek supper.

‘I thought I might get you to fill Dad in,’ I quip. ‘You’re far better with him than I am.’

‘Happy to,’ he replies, his tone smooth as he chips the ball onto the green, but it lands a couple of inches from the hole. ‘Shite. But I don’t think he’d appreciate my delivery.’

‘I know,’ I say in a small voice.

He nudges the ball into the hole, retrieves it, and walks with me to my ball. ‘Is that your way of saying you’ve decided to come out with it all?’

I eye up my shot as I consider my response. I won’t get it in one, but I should be able to make the next shot a dead cert.

‘I know what I have to do,’ I say as I take my shot. As I predicted, it lands a couple of feet from the hole.

‘Yeah?’ is all he says.

My situation has gone around and around and around in my head like clothes trapped in an endless washing cycle, and I’m so fucking exhausted. I pride myself on being a strategic thinker, a problem solver, but this one has me beaten.

‘I’m not missing anything, am I?’ I ask the guys now as we haul our golf bags onto our shoulders and trudge towards the next tee. ‘This isn’t a false binary?’ I’m so well educated and intellectually superior that I loathe false binaries—situations where you think there are only two options and there’s actually a third way.

‘You know your parents far better than we do,’ Zach says, ‘except for maybe Rafe, so I don’t want to speak out of line. But it seems to be this is a real dilemma, mate. The only compromises are so risky or so unsatisfactory that you’re most likely better off taking charge of the situation yourself.’

‘Talk me through them,’ I say, and while a part of me despises myself for asking the advice of people I don’t know all that well, I also know I’m far too close to this, and far too emotional over it, to turn down additional perspectives from these guys. They’re smart, they’re family, they care, and they understand these things.

Rafe’s lived through it with my sister; they’ve all seen how Gen was apparently ostracised over the years, because she dared to run a sex club, and I know Zach has come a long way on his journey from grief and guilt to embracing a less orthodox lifestyle, largely thanks to Maddy.

If three guys educated at Loyola, a Catholic school even more conservative than my own school, Ampleforth, can untangle themselves from the bounded, doctrine-heavy form of love they were taught throughout their formative years and emerge whole and healed and happy, then so can I.

‘The way I see it, coming out publicly and to your parents is the only viable option other than breaking things off with Max and risking losing Darcy, too,’ Rafe says bluntly. ‘The compromises Zach mentioned are inadequate. Come out and know that your dad will hear about it on the City grapevine?’

He sucks a sharp breath in through his teeth. ‘Risky. Or fudge it for as long as you can and keep a low profile, but from what you’ve told me, Max won’t go for that at all.’ He stops walking and looks at me. ‘But more importantly, mate, this is your fucking life. Forget what you owe Max and Darcy for a sec and think about what you owe yourself.’

It’s so similar to what Max said about choosing myself that it gives me pause.

‘It doesn’t sound like a fair playing field,’ Zach says. ‘No offence, but your Dad’s not a rational entity, so the game is rigged. From what I know, he won’t be happy unless you marry a nice Catholic girl, produce lots of Catholic babies and spend every Sunday going to Mass. But even then he probably won’t be happy, because you’re not praying enough or being Catholic enough—he’s a bottomless fucking pit, so you need to be the one to set rational, healthy boundaries that you can live with, because he sure as hell won’t.’

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