Page 33 of Be My Endgame

“For someone who’s got everything going for him, you sure suffer from selective imposter syndrome.”

“Early conditioning.” Alex affected a devil-may-care grin that Lee was unlikely to buy and strove for a bad impression of his father. “‘Speak more succinctly, Alexander. Do not slouch. Modulate your voice—children should be seen, not heard. Comb your hair. Straighten your collar. Stop being so …you.’”

The corners of Lee’s mouth pulled down. “Well, fuck your dad. What about your mum?”

Alex bit down on the impulse to defend his father. “She’s not the kind of person who’s given to displays of emotion. Kind of just follows my father’s lead, you know? I assume it’s how she was raised, too.”

“So what? If you decide to have kids, it’s your bloody responsibility to treat them right.”

Alex wasn’t sure they were still talking about him, or at least not exclusively. He sat down on the edge of his bed and studied Lee across the gap—sprawled in bed, on his side with the sheet pushed down to his waist, morning sun lighting sparks his dark eyes. Alex took a measured breath. “Was your mum ever in therapy?”

Lee’s brow crinkled. “Yeah. Not until I hit twenty, though. That’s when I started reading up on some stuff and realised that she ticked just about every box for bipolar disorder. Was just harder to see it behind the substance abuse.”

Okay, wow. Alex tucked his hands between his thighs and lowered his voice. “That’s people who swing between mania and depression, right?”

“There’s two types.” Lee sat up, his gaze skirting past Alex. “Second type swings between depression and baseline, with shorter periods of hypomania—so the mania is not as severe and doesn’t last as long. Like, no more than four days.” He sounded calm, almost as though he was reciting information that didn’t concern him. “Type I, on the other hand, tends to spend a bit more time at baseline and a little less in a depressive state. But it’s all averages, right?”

“Right,” Alex echoed softly, and Lee shot him a vague smile that faded almost immediately.

“Yeah. But when a manic episode hits? It’s longer—like, a week and more. So the person doesn’t sleep, and stays out all night partying, and talks like they’re a verbal machine gun. And they run around buying four new fridges because the door on ours doesn’t close properly.”

Jesus, and Alex had been complaining about how Daddy hadn’t praised him enough as a child.

“What did you do with the other three fridges?” Alex asked after a moment. It must have been the right reaction because the tension around Lee’s mouth relaxed.

“My grandmother got a couple of neighbours together, and they put them in the back of a van and drove them back to the store.” This time, the smile touched Lee’s eyes. “She was not the kind of lady who took no for an answer.”

“You really loved her, didn’t you?”

“She was the one adult in our lives that the girls and I could always count on.”

“You were eight when she took you in, right? After your stepdad packed up and left?” Alex countered Lee’s surprised look with a shrug. “Hey, I listen when people tell me things.”

“Duly noted.” Lee nodded. “And yeah. My mum was around, mind, and she was a normal mum some of the time, and some of the time she wasn’t. When Nan died, I was thirteen, and it just… There wasn’t anyone else who could take care of the girls whenever Mum took a trip to Crazytown, so…” His self-deprecating shrug just about broke Alex’s heart. “There went my good grades.”

“Because you were a thirteen-year-old boy who was raising his baby sisters,” Alex said. “And, oh! Also training hard enough to go fucking professional.”

“Football was my happy place.” Another self-deprecating shrug. “Back then, it was the only thing that made me feel good about myself, you know? Like, school sucked because I didn’t do the homework, and my sisters were eight and five, so I was mostly just focused on screwing up a little less than our mum did. Make sure they had a proper breakfast and something clean to wear, that sort of thing.”

“You’re amazing.” Under normal circumstances, Alex would have reviewed and edited the words before they slipped out. The way Lee ducked his head to hide a smile prevented Alex from wanting to take it back.

“You really think so?” Lee asked, and it wasn’t coy, just surprised and cautiously pleased.

“Yes.” Alex waved one hand in the air. “And your sisters clearly think the world of you.”

“I’m probably for them what Nan was for me.” Lee shook his head, a smile still playing around the corners of his mouth. “Anyway, enough about me—let’s get some breakfast.”

Alex still had so, so many questions, like how Lee had managed to stay sane and whether he was afraid that he or his sisters had the same disposition, whether he’d ever tried to find his biological father. He watched Lee roll out of bed and pause to stretch on his way into the bathroom. Alex realised he was staring at the muscular expanse of Lee’s back and pulled his attention away.

“Hey, just … your mum. Is she stable now?”

“Mostly.” Lee glanced over his shoulder, a small crease between his eyebrows. “She’s on a combination of meds and therapy, and for the most part, yeah. She’s pretty stable. It’s just hard, you know. Trusting that it’ll last when it’s like… I know she’s ill. But it still feels like she failed me because every time—when I was young—every time after an episode, when she went back to normal… I never stopped hoping that it would last. Stupid, yeah?”

Oh, for heaven’ssake.

Alex rose from the bed, crossed the two steps that separated him from Lee, and drew him into a hug. It took a second for Lee to relax into it—just long enough for Alex to notice that Lee was warm against him, all smooth skin and hard muscle. Then Lee wrapped a tentative arm around Alex's back, and for a couple of seconds, they simply stood like that, easy silence spinning out around them.

“Not stupid,” Alex said eventually. “Just human.”

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