Page 58 of Freedom
Tobias hunched his shoulders. “It’s not good—even if you say I’m not a, a—there are b-better people for you to be around. Who w-want you.”
“Toby.” Jake closed his eyes for a moment. “Look, leave that to me, okay? I know who I want to spend time with, and right now it’s you. Not that we’re gonna start doing anything different,” he added quickly.
Toby studied him with an intensity that was almost painful, like he could see through Jake’s words to every time Jake had wanted to touch Toby’s lips, an urge he hadn’t wanted to admit even to himself. “Okay,” he said at last.
“Okay.” Jake tried another smile.
They got into bed a few minutes later, but Toby turned tight in on himself on the edge of the bed, and Jake respected his space. Like he always would. That was a promise as sacred as the one he’d made to get Toby out of Freak Camp.
~*~
When the phone rang, Jake checked the caller ID out of habit. His greetings for Roger and Alex were vastly different from those reserved for girls he had been drunk enough to give his real number. And lately, he’d had problems with hunters who thought his cell was a good way to harass him and Tobias. Fucking hunter gossip traveled worse than any group of snotty suburban soccer moms. A bunch of his contacts now had asterisks next to them (asterisk forasshole), and Jake didn’t pick those up. Most of them only got up the courage to call after they were drunk enough to forget that he’d remember their names in the morning. If they needed his help so goddamn badly after what they had said about Tobias, then they could damn well call Roger.
Maybe this was how Leon had started, gradually weeding people out of his life after they made one too many comments about Sally or his personal obsessions. Jake couldn’t decide if trimming his contacts list was petty and vindictive or a completely logical decision. Tobias mattered to him more than anything, more than breathing and guns and double bacon cheeseburgers, but he couldn’t think about the way he felt about Tobias or the way Dad had loved Mom—obsessive, compulsive, angry, ardent—without feeling a little queasy. He’d loved his mom, but loving Mom and living with the hole she’d left in his dad were two different things—or supposed to be, but sometimes they got kinda tangled up.
And the name flashing on the phone now wasDAD.
Jake stared, shocked. They hadn’t talked in a hell of a long time, not in person since... no, not even by phone since the miserable six months when Jake had been waiting for Tobias’s paperwork to go through. Leon had called once every few weeks—more if he had been drinking—and every conversation had left Jake wanting to shred something, beat the shit out of someone, shoot something.
And since Tobias, silence. A silence that Jake knew didn’t mean Leon had forgotten or forgiven—fuck, when had Leon ever forgiven anything?—but that he couldn’t or wouldn’t bring himself to communicate in any way with the son who had turned his back on him.
Jake hit the answer button on the phone.
“Dad?” he said. Tobias looked up. Jake suddenly, painfully, wished that Tobias were not there, were anywhere but here. He could feel it coming, the bile and anger rising in his throat, the way his hand clenched on the phone.
“Jake, tell me it’s not goddamn true.” Leon’s voice was exactly as he remembered it. Rough, angry, cutting.
Jake’s old anger surged. Easy to forget Leon when Tobias slept safe beside him every night, when he had the Eldorado, hunting, Roger, and the road—fuck, when did it get easy to forget Dad?But it was easy to remember how it felt to want only one thing in his life and be told over and over again by the only person he had always trusted with everything that it was dirty and horrible and twisted to want it.
“Tell you what’s not true?” he asked. There were a lot of things Leon could mean.You sleep with that kid? You get hot looking at him? You put him in danger?
“Tell me you didnotlose your goddamned head so far as to give thatfreakour name!”
Tobias was clearly trying not to listen, but Jake knew that he heard everything. Hell, Leon was shouting loud enough that Jake could have held the phone at arm’s length and still heard every word just fine. Which meant that Tobias heard every word. Jake saw the flinch, a big one, and abruptly wanted to kill something. And the only thing he could break in the room was the phone.
Tobias stood, gesturing at the door. “I’m going to... I need...” Shaking his head skittishly, he grabbed his coat and a door key and let himself out.
Jake was dimly glad that Tobias had remembered that much. It wasn’t that cold yet in Alabama, but he hated it when Tobias didn’t care about himself, didn’t seem to realize that cold and heat and rain and sun were things that he could and should protect himself against.
With Tobias out of sight, Jake’s attention snapped back to what Leon was shouting into his ear.
“I thought it was just sons of bitches messing with me the first couple times with ‘Jake named his pet after you’ and ‘You giving freaks your blessing now, Hawthorne?’ But then I went to the fucking Crossroads Inn and fucking Alan Dubois told me that he heard you’ve been introducing the freak using our name.”
“Tobias is not a freak,” Jake snapped. “And he’s mine. I got him out. So thatishis fucking name.”
Leon showed no sign of listening or even pausing while Jake spoke. He never listened, and Jake had never seen that before because it had never occurred to him that Leon should listen to him, because he had always beenDad.
“Tobias fucking Hawthorne, Jake? That’sourname.That was your mother’s name.”
“Really?” Jake said. “Because it seems to me that her name was Sally fucking Dixon. That’s what the textbooks say.”
“You do not swear with your mother’s name, you ungrateful little bastard,” Leon snarled. “Not when you’ve been fucking a freak that killed her.”
“Tobias isnota freak, and he was less than a year old when—”
“I don’t care what perverted things he does to you. That boy creature is a monster, and that’s the fucking enemy.”
Leon was wrong and stupid andwrong.They’d done nothing. Tobias had done nothing. Jake tried not to even think of kissing or anything else because it had to be wrong (when, despite all the progress and all the bickering about how important homework was, he was afraid that Toby would sure as hell still do anything he said if Jake asked the right way).
