Page 66 of Deceiving Grier

“Fine.” Mom drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, as if struggling to stay calm. “Paisley, you and your brother can set the table.”

Paisley went to the cupboard for the plates while I went to the drawer for the flatware. Before I followed Paisley to the dining room, Sawyer leaned closer. “Where’s the bathroom?”

“It’s the door at the end of the hall,” I told him. He nodded and slipped out of the kitchen.

In the dining room, Paisley set out the plates while I put out the knives and forks.

“I’m glad you’re home,” Paisley said. “I really missed you.”

“Me too,” I admitted, and it was true. I was always closer to my younger sister than Fiona. I used to think it was the age gap—five years was a lot, and we’d never really had anything in common, but there were four years between Paisley and me, and we got along fine. Now though, I felt certain my father’s insistence that only I could take over and run his business had been the real wedge in our relationship, making Fiona feel as if she had to compete with me in a rigged contest she could never win.

“Your boyfriend’s cute,” Paisley said, grinning across the table.

“Yes, he is,” I said with a smirk. “So is yours.”

Her grin widened, then dimmed a little. “I know Mom’s being a lot right now.”

I sighed, doubt coiling inside me, tangling around my insides. The woman had just lost her husband. I’d been wrong to tell her the truth about Sawyer and me. Again, that shimmering fissure of resentment. Why should I have to pretend? Sawyer and I were at the start of something real. Why didn’t the people who claimed to love me most want that for me? Had my mother and father really just believed I would come back to this town, run their company, and live alone for the rest of my life? Or maybe they assumed if they ignored who I was long enough, I would miraculously turn straight, get married, and buy a house in the suburbs like Fiona.

“She’s dealing with a lot,” I said.

With the table set, my mother and sister brought out the food. Marty and Ethan emerged from the living room, but Sawyer hadn’t returned from the bathroom. Maybe he was pissed that I’d told my family about us without discussing it with him first.

I left the dining room and went in searching for him. I found him standing in my childhood bedroom, admiring the collection of soccer trophies on the shelf over my desk.

He grinned at me when he saw me. “Sorry. I saw your old room and got sidetracked.”

I glanced around the tidy space, looking at it the way a stranger might. The twin bed, covered in a blue plaid comforter, pushed up against the wall. High-boy dresser, surface entirely bare. A desk as empty as the dresser pushed up against the wall. It looked like a generic boy’s room that could have belonged to anyone. Except for the trophies and a few old paperbacks crammed into the cabinet under the nightstand, there was almost nothing of me in this room.

I suppose I could have argued that the room was generic because I didn’t really live here anymore, not since I left for college—except my room back in The Square looked the same; generic, with no evidence of who I was.

“What doesyourold bedroom look like?” I asked.

He snorted. “For all I know, Carl cleared my shit out after the fight we had the last time I was home.”

“Before that though, when you were living there.”

He shrugged. “It was smaller than this, and it was never this clean. I had a lot fewer trophies too.”

“I always played,” I told him, turning to the row of faux wood pedestals with plastic gold soccer players mounted on top. “My dad wasn’t the kind of dad who would have been proud of a participation ribbon. Then, after I came out, I knew they didn’t want me to be gay, that I had let them down. I just wanted them to see that even though I’d let them down, I could still be a good son. The son they wanted.”

“You know you were always a good son,” Sawyer said, facing me. “Gay or not, and if they don’t see that, it’s on them.”

I love you. Those words didn’t cross my lips aloud, of course. I didn’t want to scare him, but I also didn’t want to say them here in this space where I’d felt I had to hide myself for the bulk of my life.

“C’mon,” I nodded at the door, “Awkward family lunch is being served.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Sawyer

Istareddownatmy suit spread out over the bed while trying to decide what to wear. I’d only brought one suit—in part because I only owned one suit—not thinking about the visitation at the funeral home tonight. Maybe if I wore the pants and dress shirt tonight and saved the tie and jacket for the funeral, no one would notice I was wearing the same clothes two days in a row.

The bathroom door opened, and Grier emerged looking pale and exhausted. Not that I should have been surprised. Since his sister had called with the news about his father, Grier and I had probably gotten maybe three hours of sleep, and that had been on the flight from Portland to Green Bay. And that lunch with Grier’s family hadn’t helped. I could almost see his mother draining Grier like an energy vampire.

The woman was clearly furious with him, and if looks could have killed, I would have been dead ten times over after the woman had spent most of the meal glaring at me. Coupled with his younger sister asking me twenty questions—everything from how we’d met to what I was studying at school—I felt as though my head was spinning. When Grier had suggested we get out of there and head to the hotel, I don’t think I’d ever been so grateful to leave a place in my life.

His mother hadn’t been happy about that either, but she hadn’t argued for us to stay. Instead, she’d reminded him that his father’s lawyer would want to meet with him tomorrow after the funeral to go over the succession plan. He'd nodded, but I could tell by the tension gripping him, along with his unusually blank expression, the idea had all the appeal of a sharp stick to the eye.

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