Page 25 of Outside the Lines

"Would she be our daughter?"

Trin ran their hand through their long white hair. "Are you asking me if I would want to adopt her if I could?"

"Pretty much."

They pursed their lips. "I don't know. She can be a handful. I know I said I wouldn’t tell you anything more than what she told you when we were eating tacos, but this is different since now you’re talking about her living with us. There are things you need to know about her so that she doesn’t end up needing to leave yet another house. If she moved in with us I would need it to be the last place she ever moved. We would be her final family. She doesn't have a good history. It's worse than mine. She doesn't like showers, or baths, and she will only get clean on her schedule and when she is absolutely the safest that she can be. She's demanded to have added locks put on the bathroom doors and she's gone without bathing for so long that foster families have been accused of neglect. Sally needs absolute patience, and that's hard to expect someone to have with her."

While Trin had been speaking, I'd been putting pieces together. I wanted to go punch whoever had hurt Sally too. I sighed. "I want one kid we know to have a happy story. Just one."

Trin laughed unhappily. "One of the counselors I share a practice with has a kid who just got a B in advanced chemistry, and now he's afraid he won't get into his top choice college and his life is over."

"If only the kids we know had those kinds of problems."

Trin nodded. "If only." They put their foot down and pushed their pizza aside. It seemed we were both done eating for the moment. "Could you handle a child like her? Or like the next one after her I'd want to foster if we had the room to? You deal with kids all day at the shelter. Wild, ruthless kids with bad histories and terrible coping skills already. I remember the type. I was just like them. I don't want you to hate coming home at the end of the day. What if there's something horrible waiting for you at home? Some emergency that means that you don't get your quiet time on the deck?"

"And what if our family evenings could be you, me, Andy, and whatever kids we're fostering or that we've adopted all sitting around the living room watching Disney movies?" I countered. It could be perfect, or it could be horrible, and I was sure that it was going to be some mix of the two. "I'm sure not every day will be perfect, but what if most of them were?"

"Less than a week of knowing me again, and already you're rushing in to save me and the people I care about. You haven't changed a bit, Alex." They smiled at me, and I knew things were going to be okay.

"So you'll think about it?"

Trin gave me a slight nod, as if they couldn't really believe what they were agreeing to either. "Yes. As long as you get approved to be a foster parent. I'll get you all the information you'll need. There are classes and interviews and background checks."

"And that I've worked with homeless kids for years now probably won't let me bypass any of it, right?"

Trin snickered. And then they grabbed their piece of forgotten pizza and started eating again. "Not even a little. You sure you're going to be okay with a man who shows his breasts a lot, a girl who will refuse to take a bath, and me all sharing a house with you?"

I was. Absolutely. "Andy might want to hold back on being nude a bit. Not sure how foster agencies would feel about a topless person."

"Oh, he'll love that," Trin said sarcastically. "He'll probably throw a fit, at first, but once he realizes that I'd move in with you without him if I had to, then he'll come around. He can be immature, but he's not stupid. And I like having him around too. I like knowing that he's okay and he's not making bad decisions and he's not letting shortsighted people hurt him."

"Do you think it'll always be the three of us plus the foster kids sharing the house?"

"No. Not always. And probably not even for that long anyway. He might be at the point that he wouldn't need to live with us anyway by the time that you got approved to be a foster parent. It can take a while, after all. He's improving a lot all the time, and maybe by then he will be strong enough to live on his own and be healthy and safe. But right now, that isn't the case, and I wouldn't be okay with him not moving with me."

I got up from the table and came around the side to kiss Trin on their cheek. While they were blushing, I crouched down next to them. "I admire you so much for how protective you are of your friends and how deeply you care about them."

"Please don't propose right now."

I hadn't realized how much I was scaring Trin until they looked down at me and I saw their wide, frightened eyes. I quickly got up. "I wasn't planning to. I'm sorry."

Trin took a deep breath and curled their fingers over the dining room table. "I'm sorry too. It's just that it would have been too fast. I feel good when I'm around you. And safe. But I'm also trying to connect the person I was with who you are now and who you were with who I am. If that makes sense."

I chuckled. "It does actually. It absolutely does. I'm trying to convince myself I wasn't in love with you when you were a child. Kim talked me through it, but it's going to take some work."

Trin leaned back and frowned up at me. "I don't care if you did love me back then. Would you have raped me?" I opened my mouth to instantly deny it, but they beat me to it. "I know you wouldn't have. I cared about you. You cared about me. I don't mind if you liked me more than a counselor should have. I wasn't really a child anymore. I looked at you like someone who was older than I was. But I didn't feel about you back then like I do now. I idolized you, and sometimes I even worshipped you. You were my safe place for four years. You can love someone without being a pervert just as I could idolize you without it being inappropriate."

I still wasn't completely sure about that. "I was so terrified of hurting you. If you had come to live with me when you were eighteen, I don't know if I could have been the right person for you."

"And if I hadn't lived with Kim and then gone off to college, I would have never become Trin. You would have been with Socks. And as much as I liked being Socks, as good as I tried to be when I was them, I was not a good person for you to be with. I would have never hurt you or cheated on you, but I only recently figured out how to love myself. That might never have happened if I hadn't been through college and had the experiences I did. And if I couldn't have loved myself, there was no way that I could have loved you. Not like you would have deserved anyway. So as hurt as I was when you made that choice, as betrayed as I felt, I understand it now. I'm glad that you made the choice that I wasn't strong enough to. You were my only safety structure at that point. I would have clung to you until we both sank. Now I'm my own, and I can be that person for other people like Andy, and Sally, and all the other kids I deal with on a daily basis."

I leaned down and I kissed them. First on the cheek and then on the lips. "I missed your fire so much."

"I missed my best friend," they quietly replied.

"I should have kept in touch." I knew that now. There would have been no harm in talking to Trin again over those years that we had been apart.

"I could have stopped being angry about you abandoning me and instead asked Kim to arrange play dates for us." I was going to argue about how I hadn't actually meant to abandon them, but then Trin rolled their eyes. "I was eighteen and feeling like my best friend, and the only person I could trust in this world, didn't want me around anymore."

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