by Julia Kent
“Excuse me?” the man asked again. “Mikey? Is Mikey in here?”
Mikey? Dylan mouthed to Laura.
And then Laura got it.
Apparently, her wedding invitation had made it to Mike’s parents after all.
And this was how they had RSVP’d.
A helpless look shimmered across Mike’s face, his hair flopping over his eyes, his skin suddenly pale.
“Who’s Mikey?” Dylan asked, offering Mike his shirt, which had been resting on a chair next to the bed.
Mike tore into it, giving Dylan a raw look that made Laura fill with an adrenaline rush of regret. “The only people who ever called me Mikey were my parents.”
Like owls, both men’s heads swiveled with an aching slowness that upped the sense of regret in Laura.
Mike spoke first.
“Laura?” he said, her name tripping off his lips, the last syllable turned up in question.
“Yes?” she replied, looking at blue eyes that had turned the color of a churning sky.
“What have you done?”
The next two minutes went by in slow motion for Laura, as if someone freeze-framed every single second, all one-hundred-twenty of them snapshot images saved on a camera phone, scrolled through in rapid-fire slices of time, strung together to make a whole. Mike pulling on his pants. Dylan searching for his underwear. Being handed her bra. Having Mike put on Dylan’s shirt by accident. Seeing it barely cover his navel. Watching him rip it off and fling it in Dylan’s face. Dylan’s sudden anger at the intrusion, and then his retreat as he realized Mike’s position. Laura finding Mike’s shirt and tossing it to him. His grunt of fury as he glared at her.
The sound of his dad shouting, “Mikey? Did we get the wrong cabin, Mary?”
Mike’s groan at the mention of the woman’s name. Laura knew his parents were Mike and Mary.
It really was them.
The finality of realizing they were here, the sudden rush of fight-or-flight blood pounding to her limbs, made her just turn into a buzzing machine on autopilot.
Step One: get dressed.
Step Two: deal with Mike’s parents.
Step Three: ???
She couldn’t think beyond Step Two.
“Did you invite them?” Dylan asked softly, his voice neutral.
She cringed, even though there was no anger or incredulity there. When she forced herself to meet his eyes, she saw an endearing compassion, his eyes flitting from hers, searching for whatever reaction he could calm.
All she could do was nod.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this, though,” she whispered. “They never replied, so I figured...” Her voice trailed off and she shrugged, shoving her head through the neck of her shirt. Dylan nodded and stood, buttoning his pants and walking with firm determination toward the door.
“Where the fuck are you going?” Mike growled.
Laura’s eyes flew wide open, her skin an open flame, this time from fear and not from passion. She’d never heard Mike speak like this before.
Ever.
Dylan gave him a look that made it clear he had, though. Their shared history flared up again. She knew less about each of them than they did about each other. Hopefully Dylan could draw on that and they could find a way through this.
Tap tap tap.
“Mikey?”
“Don’t panic,” Dylan said to her, then turned to Mike. “Want me to go out and talk to him?”
Mike snorted with disgust. “You really think that’s a good idea? Last time you saw him—”
“I know.” Dylan kept his words simple, Laura saw, talking in short sentences and staying centered.
“No.” Mike glared at Laura. “I’ll deal with this mess.” He took long, furious strides toward the door and disappeared through the threshold, leaving Laura on the bed feeling like a ripped-open down pillow in a room full of fans.
Dylan sat on the bed next to her and took her hand in his. The warmth radiating from his palm contrasted with her ice-cold fingers. Shock could do that, right? Shut down the circulation and—
“You reached out to them from a loving part of you.”
“I’ve ruined the wedding,” she muttered, her voice choking.
“No, no,” he soothed, but she could tell he was grasping at saying whatever it took to keep her calm. “Mike’s just—” Dylan blew a long breath out through pursed lips. “Shit. There’s a long history here, and it would have been helpful if you’d talked to me before doing that.”
“I am so sorry.”
“Shhhh. We can’t undo it. Mike’s just—they cut him off. Shunned him. He’s stunned they’re here, and probably terrified his dad will make a scene.”
The low murmur of conversation on the porch caught Laura’s attention. The men’s voices were quiet and polite, while a higher, older woman’s voice punctuated the conversation with exclamations of breathy happiness.
Laura held her breath.
And then—
“Mama! Papa! Daddy!” Jillian’s unmistakable shouts filled the air outside. “Wook at all the shells we got!” The pitter-patter of little feet stampeded the porch, and then the woman’s voice outside lifted with a kind of joy that made Laura cry in deep, painful sobs.
“Mikey! She’s the spitting image of you!” Mike’s mother gushed.
Dylan closed his eyes and drew Laura into his arms, his hot breath against her cheek setting a rhythm that forced her to remember to breathe.
“Uh, Ma...this is Jillian. Jilly, this is—” Mike’s deep voice halted. Just....stopped.
An alarm went off inside Laura and she wiped her eyes fast, pulling on the hem of Dylan’s t-shirt to make fast work of clearing her tears.
She stood. She walked out to the porch.
Because she was the one who’d created this mess.
And Mike’s eternal pause made it clear he needed help figuring it all out.
Chapter Twelve
Mike Pine
Few men were his height, but Michael Pine, Sr. was damn close. Time had aged his father, who stood before him with a slight stoop, his blond hair more grey than golden, his eyes more wrinkled, the eyelids sagging. But he still looked like his Pa, and while his mother had gained some weight and a new dye job that made her blonder than Mike had been as a towhead child, she was Ma.
Ma and Pa were here. Pa still dressed in simple polo shirts and jeans, sneakers and baseball hats. Ma looked like she bought every stitch of clothing from the L.L. Bean catalog—because she did. Pa was pale and looked extremely uncomfortable, and Ma’s face was lit up with a kind of hope that made Mike’s stomach turn.
A massive dose of unreality made the air around him ripple, like the heat of a jet engine against the tarmac on a hot summer day. His worlds were colliding—past and present—and he didn’t like it.
Not one damn bit.
Laura had done this. Why? Why today, of all days? What motivated her to reach out to people who had banished him from their lives with a kind of vicious judgment that turned their hearts against him simply because of how he chose to love?
He saw the yearning on his mother’s face as her eyes tracked Jillian. A grandchild she’d never met. Wait until the twins appeared, because she had three grandkids she didn’t know about—
Damn it.
His parents wouldn’t consider Adam and Aaron “his.” Hard-hearted enough to pretend their own son didn’t exist, of course they would repudiate the twins. In their minds, the boys would be Dylan’s, and Jillian his. Their love calculus used different formulas than his, Laura’s and Dylan’s.
All of these thoughts raced through his mind at the speed of light, until he found himself standing next to Laura, who was shaking his father’s hand and introducing herself. A forcefield surrounded Mike, an emotional pulse that made him sick.
“Laura Michaels. It is so nice to finally meet you both. Welcome! We’re so glad you’re here.” Laura’s eyes were red and puffy, her recent crying obvious. Good. She should cry. He
ll, he wished he could cry. This was a nightmare, all triggered by her. Why?
WHY? The word chanted through his mind until it became his pulse, filling his heart with so many questions that coursed through him.
Rage sent him into a mental spiral he couldn’t control. His blood boiled through his veins and his mind struggled to stay in the moment. Eyes darting all over the place like a gyroscope spinning through space, Mike couldn’t concentrate. His mind felt splintered. The blood that filled his muscles in anticipation of fleeing, or fighting, needed to be released with a ten-mile run.
Twenty miles, at this point.
Only his mother’s question cut through his sense of total chaos.
“I thought you were already married, Mikey?” His mom’s sweet blue eyes, so much like his own, peered up with him with a hopeful hesitance, as if the fact that she asked the question were enough of an apology.
Dylan looked at Mike with as blank a face as he was capable of producing, and crazy eyes that asked, silently, What the hell does she mean?
His dad cleared his throat. “What Mary means, son, is that we read about you and Dylan....”
Mike didn’t think this moment could get any worse.
And then it just did.
The woods, with their tall pines poking up at the sky like spears, rippled with an unreality that made Mike start to gasp for air, as if he were running and hit his wall.
Maybe that was a good comparison.
This conversation was his life’s wall.
“You told my parents about me and Dylan getting married?” he choked out, giving Laura a look he knew he would later regret, but couldn’t help but deliver right now.
She flinched and started to respond, but his dad—Big Mike—interrupted.
“No, Mikey. We read about it in the paper.”
Mike idly wondered which paper, but he knew the answer already. The local paper back in Pennsylvania, on the tiny town in the middle of nowhere that he’d escaped. It was the only one they read. The paparazzi had been out that day two years ago, but he’d never imagined news would travel back to his tiny little home town.
“And we know all about your money,” his dad added.
“We’ve been reading about you,” his mom added in a breathy voice, as if standing here on the porch of the rental cabin where he’s just had frantic, interrupted sex with his partner and wife and bisecting his life in two somehow erased more than a decade of exile.
All that rage that welled up with the knowledge that Laura had invited them needed a new victim.
Victims.
Big Mike and Mary.
Laura’s steady hand on his biceps made him shiver, like electricity had been transmitted from her body into his, a calming current designed to stop his fury. He felt dazed, as if a halo of static electricity revolved around his entire body, and the pulse of blood through his body slowed, the throb no longer a painful slam against his veins, but slowing to a dull roar of the past.
The past.
All those years couldn’t be forgotten, but those same ten years didn’t have to ruin what was supposed to be the best day of his life.
He wouldn’t let the past ruin this moment.
But fuck if he knew how to do this.
“Mike,” Laura asked, her voice a little too focused, a little too centered. “Can you go help Dylan with the twins?”
“Twins?” His mom’s voice couldn’t get any higher in the sky if it were a rocket. “So the picture...?”
Picture? He looked at Laura in alarm. She’d sent a picture of the children?
His ma’s eyes skimmed Jillian, who was playing with a doll at Laura’s feet. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Dylan had stepped away, probably when his mind had gone red with primal rage, and Cyndi and Ellie were helping him.
Dylan didn’t need Mike one bit.
“We have three kids, Ma,” Mike answered. Ma. He hadn’t said that word in so long that it felt like a foreign language, like digging up his old high school Spanish and saying a word out of nowhere.
“How old?” his mom asked Laura.
“She’s three and a half, and the boys are fourteen months,” Laura answered with a smile, making Mike wish he could be so normal. How could Laura stand there chit-chatting with people who broke him in half all those years ago? She was a traitor and she didn’t even know it.
No, he corrected himself. No. She’s not a traitor. Not to you.
She’s just being kind. It’s all she knows.
As he talked himself down in his thoughts, Dylan called out, “We need to change the boys!”
“Adam fell in a puddle, Mama,” Jillian explained with wide eyes. “He’s muddy. He needs a baf.”
“Baf,” his mom repeated, chuckling, looking at Mike with wary eyes. “You said it that way, too, Mikey. When you were little.”
“That was a long, long time ago,” he grunted.
“I can’t imagine Mike ‘little’,” Dylan joked, giving Mike a pleading look, half-sympathetic, half panicked.
“He was born a babe like all of God’s creatures,” Mike Sr. said, his eyes steely, his voice cold as he looked at Dylan.
Mike’s rage came flooding back. Dylan carried one toddler on each hip and before Mike could punch someone or something, Dylan smoothly handed Aaron into his arms, giving him a look.
“Make yourself useful,” he said in a voice that was meant to be joking, but Mike knew was an order.
“Will do. Got to change a diaper,” he said, sounding like a robot, his job obvious.
As he turned away from his parents and carried a happy Aaron into the bedroom, plopping him on the bed to squeals, Mike’s head felt like a balloon on a string someone just released.
“Fuck,” he whispered.
“Uck,” Aaron said.
“Men didn’t change diapers in my time,” his ma said, in a chiding but amused voice, the sound floating in through the screened window.
“When you have three in diapers, it’s a requirement,” Laura said, her voice rising above the chaos outside as Jillian began singing that damn Elsa song, Laura adding a chuckle in a polite manner.
“She’s not potty trained yet?” His mother’s voice held a tone of disapproval, and Mike gritted his teeth. All these years of feeling isolated, bereft, abandoned by parents who considered him an abomination against God for who he loved had left him bitter.
But the upside to being shunned: no one had been the voice of the overbearing parent butting their nose into how he raised his kids.
Laura’s response carried a note of surprise in it. “We’re working on it.”
He wanted to jump to her defense, to parse out all the successes with Jillian, to explain that she only wore a night diaper, to defend against that fucking tone his ma used.
I’m being triggered, he thought to himself, drawing on the language of therapy.
No shit, said a different voice in his mind. The one who lived in the real world.
Cyndi’s no-nonsense voice interrupted his mom as she started to reply. “We need to get everyone unpacked and settle the kids down for dinner and baths, Laura.”
“Are you their other grandma?” his mom asked Cyndi, and Mike wished, as he wiped Aaron’s bum and did a quick wet-diaper change, he could have seen Cyndi’s face for that question.
“My mother’s dead,” Laura said bluntly, her voice gaining strength as she picked up on the kind of person his mother could be. Never underestimate the level of judgment Mike and Mary Pine could disseminate.
Infinite. They could judge forever.
And did.
“I’m so sorry, dear!” His mother’s voice was sincere. “How awful! So the children have no grandma?”
“They have my mother,” Dylan cut in, his voice tight.
Now he really wished he could see everyone’s face.
“Your mother—you—she’s Mike’s daughter’s grandmother?”
Even Mike got dizzy overhearing that. Aaron stayed surprisingly still through
the diaper change, and as Mike finished up and wiped his hands with a baby wipe, his son wiggled off the bed and toddled out the door, headed toward the sound of Mama and Daddy’s voice.
“Sure am!” The boom of Dylan’s mother’s call made Mike wince.
Here we go.
Rose and Paul Stanwyck were here. Dylan’s parents. His mom was a loud, greying woman who talked with her hands and did more lecturing than listening, but she was a whirlwind of energy. Dylan’s dad was opinionated and a man’s man, but had never held his son’s unconventional love choices against him. Rose and Paul hadn’t welcomed their threesomes over the years with open arms by any stretch, but their quiet tolerance and lack of judgment had been a far cry from Mike’s parents’ reaction.
Once they had Jillian, though, Rose and Paul had become official grandparents, and that changed everything. Tolerance had evolved into acceptance and appreciation, as time showed that he, Dylan and Laura were a forever triad, fused by love and children into a family overflowing with joy.
Joy that felt completely gone right now.
With heavy legs, he walked out to the porch to find Rose kissing Aaron into giggle fits, Paul shaking hands with his own dad, his ma giving him looks of confusion, and Laura in the middle of it all, a thousand live nerves jangling in her eyes. He wanted to comfort her, but he was too livid.
And way, way too overwhelmed.
“You’re her grandma?” his ma asked Rose, the look in her eyes tearing him apart. He felt the tingle of angry blood in his arteries, like soda pop poured in, and he needed to run. His glutes tightened and released, the clench of calf muscles an attempt to contain the roaring pain inside him. His nostrils flared, his ears burned, his jaw so tight he could feel his tongue mold against his teeth.
“And so are you,” Rose said kindly to Mary, the words shattering every piece of self inside Mike.
He bolted.
The first step he took felt like he was drowning. The second was a longer step, fueled by the punch of extra power required to overcome inertia. By step four he was running, and within seconds he was in full flee. Instinct made him search for an opening in the woods, path or not. Between two branches he darted, bushes ripping into his bare skin, long scratches like a gauntlet he didn’t know life would expect him to run.
