Page 24 of Lace

“Reliable enough to put a roof over my head when I was fourteen fucking years old. When you refused to. When my motherdiedand you left everything I owned on the front lawn. Reliable enough to give me a home for the last nine years.”

And well shit. Didn’t saying all that out loud suddenly make him feel all kinds of ways towards his Uncle Jase that were new and made his chest hurt down deep where even his asthma didn’t reach.

“No,” he blurted at his father, finger poking against his silk tie. “No. You don’t get to talk about him.” When Robert would have dodged around him, Caleb planted himself in his father’s path. “I have a right to know.”

“Out here?” His father glanced around, back over his shoulder, as if all the neighbours would be pressed to their windows, trying to hear their conversation. He even peered through the hedge at the neighbour’s yard. “On the front porch?” he asked in a hoarse stage whisper.

“Didn’t seem to bother you when you were chucking my shit out of your precious house,” Caleb reminded him. “When you kicked me out. Remember? Just after Mom died? I was fourteen. You let me think you were disgusted by me because I was gay, while you watched her fuck every college-boy lodger that came through here.”

Air hissed through his father’s thin nose as he sucked it into his lugs, puffing out his chest and squaring his shoulders. “Maybe I handled things badly?—”

“I wasfourteen!”

“And I… was in shock.” His pale fingers twitched around his keys. His nervous gaze darted past Caleb to the door, then back over the hedge.

“Four… teen!”

“You couldn’t begin to understand what things were like for me. She?—”

“Was dead,” Caleb shouted. “Less than a month!” He drew in a deep breath, combating the tightness in his chest. “You kicked me out,Dad. And let me think, all these years, that you hated me.” He shifted so he stood squarely in his father’s line of sight. “But it never had anything to do with me, did it?”

“I couldn’t look at you and not see… her.”

“Oh my God. You both…” Caleb shook his head, tingles of disbelief sizzling over his skin. “You both… you let her fuck her way through every lodger that ever came through this house! And you put me—a child—homeless on the street because she had an affair? Because Ilook like her?How…? Fuck! How does that even make sense?”

“It wasn’t that she slept with other people. We had an open agreement, as long as she was discreet. But she had anaffair.”

Because that made infinitely more sense. Caleb’s skin crawled. “So, what? She slept with this guy more than once, and that made it wrong all of a sudden?”

“She had arelationshipwith him. Fucking is not a relationship. We had an agreement, and she broke it.”

“So how does it follow that I had to pay for it? Assuming anyone had to pay for anything, how did it end up being me?” He couldn’t make something so ridiculous, so fucked-up and hurtful, make sense. He couldn’t believe he was standing herethinking that at least his uncle’s outright control issues and awkward inability to accept Caleb’s oddities, was honest. He knew—or thought he’d known—what that sentiment was, and where it was aimed, even if he couldn’t deny that it hurt.

Sunshine glimmered off the car, bounced into Caleb’s eyes and turned his father’s hair a golden shade as they stood in silence, and it occurred to Caleb how very different he looked from this blond—now going grey—stocky and non-descript man. Even his mother, had been a redhead, freckled and green-eyed. His own dark eyes and nearly black curls had come from somewhere else, and he’d never questioned it.

“So, who was he? My father? What was his name?” Caleb asked at last, realising his not-father was not going to volunteer any information at all.

Robert shrugged. “She didn’t even know, Caleb. It wasn’t me, and it might not have been the guy she said she loved. Could have been anyone.” Without even looking him in the eye, his father sidestepped him, opened his front door, then walked through and closed it quietly behind him, leaving Caleb alone on the porch.

And somehow, that hurt worst of all. That he was the result of some anonymous fuck, that two relationships in his mother’s life at a time were not enough to make a difference. That Caleb Driver’s very existence boiled down tocould have been anyoneand a closing door.

Nine

Caleb arrived back at the bus stop at the same time as the bus, and he rode it back to campus instead of home. What was there to say to his uncle now? They weren’t family, either. Not really, and Uncle Jase had made it perfectly clear—the way he’d tried to change everything about Caleb, from his clothes to the food he ate, even to talking him out of the music program and into business—that he preferred it if Caleb hid most of his freakishness.

By the time the bus arrived back at the college, Caleb was more than ready for even a glimpse of a friendly face. He hurried up the path to the main doors and went inside.

The colourful scarf tied around his waist floated along like an exotic tail as he ran through the mostly deserted hallways to the second floor, through the Great Hall to the Council office.

Caleb burst in the door to find Levi slumped behind his desk staring at nothing.

“Lev.”

“Caleb!” scrambling to his feet, Levi crossed the room in two strides, and Caleb all but threw himself into the other man’sopen arms. “Cally,” Levi whispered, lips and words obscured in the hair behind Caleb’s ear. “Where were you?”

“Class.” He wrapped both arms around Levi’s waist and held on. “Home. Everywhere…nowhere… Just…” Breathing in deep, aware that he finally could breathe freely, he savoured the scent of his lover, of the room, of the one place he’d found where he almost felt he belonged, and buried his face in the crook of Levi’s neck. “I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry for,” Levi assured him. “Nothing.” He ran his hands up and down Caleb’s back for a few seconds more before he stepped back. “You okay?”

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