What if he leaves me too? The thought made Aaron seize, but before panic could take hold, Giles began to shush him and held him closer, promising he wasn’t going anywhere.
Part of Aaron’s brain worried he couldn’t count on that, but Giles kept drowning it out, touching him, kissing his hair, his forehead, his nose. Saying over and over and over that he loved Aaron and wouldn’t ever leave him. Not unless Aaron wanted him to go, but even then he’d probably sit in the driveway.
Against his better judgment, Aaron sank into those promises, let them take the edge of the cold away.
He might have slept—he wasn’t sure, because time felt funny, like it got longer and shorter or just didn’t matter anymore. At some point he sat up and held a hot mug of something chocolatey. He sipped at it, but it was like the sweet had to burn through the fog too, and after a little bit he got tired and gave it away. There were cookies, some kind of snickerdoodle. They were pretty good. Mrs. Mulder beamed, watching him as he ate, said something about her medicine always working. But then she disappeared, talking animatedly to her husband about vegan substitutions and some friend of hers she needed to call about flax eggs.
Giles never left his side, never stopped touching him, holding his hand, rubbing his back and shoulders.
When Walter arrived, everyone came into the living room and started talking. Still holding Giles’s hand, Aaron watched Walter move around the living room. He still couldn’t really talk, and it was starting to scare him, the not talking. He stared at Walter, gripping Giles’s hand as he focused.
“Walter.”
As soon as his name was out of Aaron’s mouth, Walter crouched in front of Aaron. “Hey, tiger.” Walter stroked Aaron’s hair, his smile never wavering. “How are we doing?”
Aaron stared at him, thinking that was a pretty fucking stupid question.
Walter laughed. “Sorry.” He kept touching Aaron’s hair, and every stroke felt like a frizzle. “This is a nice setup you have going here. Your man beside you, a woman who knows her way around a snickerdoodle, and a doctor on tap. Well done.”
Aaron swallowed. Fumbling for Walter’s hand, he tried to squeeze.
Walter met him halfway and gripped him in a tight hug. He glanced at Giles. “Sweetheart, can we use your bedroom a minute? You can come too, but I need to talk with your sexy boyfriend.”
They couldn’t talk here? Aaron frowned, but nobody looked at him. They just grabbed his arms and moved him around until he was standing and walking, Walter on one side, Giles on the other, as they headed for the stairs. Aaron went docilely, feeling out-of-body until they were in Giles’s room. He felt better here. It was familiar, and it really smelled like Giles.
Of course that might have been because Giles had his arm around Aaron’s waist.
Aaron was getting confused. And tired.
Walter and Giles talked for a moment, their voices hushed, and Aaron couldn’t focus. The next thing he knew, he was sitting on Giles’s bed, being encouraged to lie down. It wasn’t Giles who lay beside him and pulled him into a full-body embrace, though. It was Walter.
Confused, Aaron tried to lift his head. He got a chance to see Giles settling in by his feet before Walter pulled him back down.
“Nope. This is my time, buddy. You’re going to snuggle in here, let me hold you and listen to my story. Then I’m going to cry like a baby and make you a bunch of promises, and you’re going to nod and say you feel better now. Got it?”
Aaron didn’t. Why was Walter going to cry?
Walter smelled good too. Spicy and sexy, like fancy leather. Except Aaron didn’t want to have sex with Walter anymore. He appreciated Walter, but he was the wrong thing on the menu. Maybe fancy steak was popular and tasted great, but Aaron liked cozy pot roast more.
He shifted his foot so it brushed Giles’s leg, and he felt pretty good when Giles caught his foot and began to massage it.
Walter kissed Aaron’s hair, held him tight. “So, my mom is sick. She’s on meds, but they don’t make her magically okay. She’s manic-depressive, and she’s probably never going to learn to manage herself right because she doesn’t want to. She’s Russian roulette. You might get a hug and a smile. You might get a bullet in the face. Never know until you pull the trigger.”
That wasn’t Aaron’s mom. She was mostly quiet and ineffective. Aaron couldn’t imagine the yo-yo Walter was describing. It had to suck.
Walter kept talking. “My parents are divorced too, but my dad’s never really been there. He checked out around the time I was seven, and he was totally gone by the time I was ten. I think of him largely as the bank. He’s got a lot of money, which is nice, mostly. Every so often I have to kiss the ring, but pretty soon I’m hoping to not have to do it anymore. The thing is…I was pretty fucking lonely growing up. College was awful. I told you how I went to a pile of them? I went to that many because I sucked at it. I dropped out to help my mom for a while, which was a disaster, but mostly I was lonely. I’ve always been lonely. I think I’ll always feel it a little at this point, because a part of me never figured out how to connect with people.”
Walter’s voice was rough the whole time while he spoke now, and it upset Aaron. His hands were pressed to Walter’s chest, and he slid them around to his back.
Laughing softly, Walter squeezed him and kept talking. “I knew when I first saw you that you were lonely too. When I saw you in your corner all curled up, though, it got to me because you looked like I still feel inside most of the time. It was like I had to get you out of there, had to take you to lunch, had to keep in touch with you, because everything about you felt like this big chance to take care of someone the way nobody ever did me, not until Kelly. I think if Kelly weren’t so awesome, didn’t know where this all came from, he’d be jealous. He does know, though, and he gets how taking care of you is like taking care of the little brother I never had or an alternate version of me.”
A bud of warmth bloomed in Aaron’s chest. He breathed slowly, deeply, trying to feed it.
Walter kept speaking, his voice watery now, and he had to stop a lot to collect himself before moving on. He also held Aaron so tight it almost hurt. “Your parents suck. You don’t need them, baby. I already sent a text to my grandmother, and she says she’ll help. I bet we could get her to cover tuition if the school doesn’t give you a full ride—which I bet you they do, as much as that place loves you. If you don’t want to shack up here with Giles for the summer, you’re staying with Kelly and me. In fact we are your second home, forever, full stop. You need milk money, somewhere to wash your clothes? You come to me. You need clothes? Me. A hug, a smile, a night at the movies—me.” He crushed Aaron’s face into his neck. “Sometimes we need a place to be completely safe, somewhere boring that isn’t about sex or adventure or wild hairs. I am that place for you. As long as you want it, for ten minutes or ten hours or ten thousand years: I am your safe place. No matter what happens, no matter who leaves you or hurts you. I am your safe place.” Walter lifted his head, freeing one hand from Aaron to wipe at his face. “Shit.”
Aaron knew Giles moved behind him before he felt the press of his body. He smelled him, his sweet, comforting scent mingling with Walter’s.
Damn, that’s kind of nice, a sleepy part of his brain murmured. Thankfully, his cock was way too shut down to pay attention.
Giles reached over Aaron, dabbing at Walter’s eyes with a tissue. “Walter Lucas, you’re a big old softy.”
Walter took the tissue and blew his nose loudly. “Now you know why we had to leave the living room.”
Time did that funny bubble thing again. Aaron heard Giles and Walter talking, knew sometimes they were speaking to him, but he was so warm and sleepy, he couldn’t help falling back. He dreamed: he lay in a cave, except it wasn’t cold and wet but lush and lit by a soft fire. Warm arms moved around him when he shifted his body, and everything smelled amazing. Like sni
ckerdoodles.
And pot roast.
When he opened his eyes, it was dark. He lay in Giles’s bed, Giles in the place where Walter had been. Giles held him differently than Walter had—tight, yes, but his leg went over Aaron’s, pulling their groins tight together. When Giles saw Aaron was awake, he smiled at him, stroking his face.
“Hi there.”
Aaron slid his hands around Giles’s waist, pleased to discover Giles wasn’t wearing a shirt. He tucked his hands into the waistband of Giles’s pajama pants. “Hi.”
Giles kept touching Aaron’s face. “Feel better?”
Yeah, Aaron did. Nodding, he kissed Giles softly on the lips. In his jeans, his cock woke all the way up.
Giles nuzzled him. “I want you to know—everything Walter said, about being a safe place, about giving you anything you needed? That’s me too. I don’t mind you ever going to him for help, but I want you to know I’ll always help you too.” His hands moved to the back of Aaron’s head, and he kissed him, carnal and deep. “I love you. I’ll always love you, Aaron, no matter what happens—for the rest of my life.”
Aaron forced the words beyond his lethargy. “I love you too.”
Giles kissed him full on the mouth. Aaron opened his legs, pressed his rigid cock against Giles’s as he pulled his boyfriend down for another kiss, the warm bubble inside him now flowing freely, a wellspring of love and safety carrying him away.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Giles had always been pretty fond of his parents, but he hadn’t been aware of how much he’d won the family lottery until he watched them rescue his boyfriend.
Never in a million years did he imagine Aaron’s parents would kick him to the curb. How could anyone do that to a human being, let alone their own child?
“I suspect his mother would have kept coming after him had you not been there to collect him,” Giles’s mother said when he asked her the next morning. Everyone else was still in bed or out. Giles had fucked Aaron back to sleep and met a sleepy Kelly shuffling to the guestroom after a trip to the bathroom. Giles’s dad was running an errand. “I called her last night to let her know he was with us.”
She didn’t clarify further how that conversation went, and Giles wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He sipped at the French vanilla cappuccino his mother had made him in the Keurig. “You wouldn’t have stopped chasing me the way she did. You wouldn’t have stood on the sidewalk and cried. You’d have tackled me and dragged me into the house by my hair if I’d tried to leave.”
“Sweetheart, if your father threatened to kick you out of the house with a grand in your pocket and a car waiting on a pleasant day in July, I’d deck him before he finished the sentence.”
This was true, except his father had raised his voice to him exactly three times in his life, and two of those times had been when Giles was a distracted teenager nearly walking into traffic while he texted Mina. The idea of Tim Mulder kicking anyone out of his house was as weird as Giles bringing home a girlfriend.
But when Tim returned from his errands, Giles discovered his father had been concealing hidden depths of badass.
Tim had gone to Aaron’s house, where he’d reclaimed three reusable grocery bags of clothes. Aaron’s backpack with his computer wasn’t present, nor was Aaron’s cell phone or any of his precious headphones. When Giles asked him what had gone down, Tim grew stoic and would only say he’d “had a talk” with Aaron’s mom.
“But what about his dad?”
“Aaron’s father returned to his home in Eden Prairie last night.” Tim retreated behind his laptop, his body language telegraphing the matter was closed, but Giles couldn’t let this dog go.
“But is he still cutting Aaron off?”
Tim’s lips went tight as he keyed in a web address. “As far as I’m able to tell, yes.”
“And Aaron’s mom is letting him?”
“I’m quite certain your mother could use your help in the kitchen.”
Giles gave up, because his dad had turned into the kind of brick wall he was used to. When Giles got to the kitchen, Walter was already there, making breakfast with Vanessa.
Walter had his mother’s apron on, and he and Giles’s mom were in an intense discussion about egg replacers and vegan pancake recipes when Giles appeared. They immediately put him to work whipping up batter for dairy-and-egg-free blueberry muffins while they went back to refining the particulars for a sausage-and-tofu scramble with roasted red pepper and onion. It felt a lot like Thanksgiving with all the food flying around, and it was pretty cool that this was all for Giles and his boyfriend’s friends.
Soon after Giles got the muffins into the oven, Kelly wandered downstairs, still in his pajamas. He blinked at all the food, gave his fiancé a sideways look as if to say, Are you behind this? but Walter immediately began talking up how amazing a cook and hostess Vanessa was, how he’d offered his help but she’d had everything running like a ship even before he showed up. Kelly fell immediately into line, thanking her for her generosity, praising her home and her son and anything else he could latch on to. No shocker, Vanessa ate this up with a spoon and declared Walter and Kelly had to come back again soon or she’d hunt them down.
“You’ll have to come to our wedding in June,” Kelly said.
Vanessa lit up like a Christmas tree. “You’re engaged? Oh, that’s wonderful, congratulations. Where are you getting married?”
Walter popped a piece of fruit in his fiancé’s mouth. “Windom. Southwest of the Cities.”
“A lovely town. A friend of mine in college was from there.” Vanessa leaned over the counter, eyes dancing. “What kind of theme are you having? And how are you doing the processional? I love the way kids are renegotiating the ceremony these days, same-sex and opposite couples both. Tell me you’re doing something clever like those people who danced down the aisle on YouTube.”
Giles wanted to die of mortification for his mother’s exuberance, but Kelly basked in it. “We still haven’t quite worked out how we’re coming down the aisle. Walter doesn’t want anyone standing up front waiting for the other one.”
“No cattle or chattel delivery,” Walter murmured into his coffee mug. He watched his animated husband-to-be with a happy smile. “I’d love something simple and modern, or at least different and us. The problem is, Kelly wants a Disney wedding, but he keeps pretending it’s not a big deal. I told him he can carry flowers if he wants to.”
“I’d look stupid.” Kelly’s tone made it clear he really wished he could carry flowers.
“Why couldn’t everyone carry flowers?” Giles suggested. “Maybe…maybe everyone has a stem, and you have a bigger bunch or something. You could be carrying half and give it to Walter when you meet him.” Giles faltered. “Oh God, forget it. That’s the chattel/cattle thing.”
“No, not quite.” Walter had a soft, thoughtfully melted look as he regarded Kelly. “That…would be very us.”
“If we do, we’re back to you as the boy and me as the girl again, which you said you didn’t want.”
Vanessa made a pffft noise. “Boy, girl—it’s all in your head. I took my husband’s name, let my dad give me away. I would have kept my name, but then either I’d have a different name than my family, my husband would, or Giles would be a Christofferson-Mulder. Can you imagine him trying to spell that in kindergarten? And what if he got married and hyphenated his name? Christofferson-Mulder-Smith? But if you ask who runs this house, my husband would answer you, dear without blinking. You can’t let social symbols define you, but you shouldn’t stifle your life by wrapping yourself up in too much effort to show you’re politically correct, either. If you want to walk down the aisle like a Disney princess, Kelly, it doesn’t make you a girl. It makes you an openhearted, empathetic man who doesn’t let stereotypes define him. You might get some eyebrows at a poofy dress, but if you want it, forget the haters and do it.”
“No. You do.” Walter had a funny look about him, like he’d opened a puzzle box and found a universe inside. “Or, you would if everyone hadn’t told you for twenty years a dress was horrible and embarrassing to wear. You want to wear something dress-like that makes you feel like a Disney princess.”
Poor Kelly looked as if he wanted the floor to open up and swallow him. He stared fixedly at the ceiling, his face so red now it was blotchy. “Can we talk about something else?”
Giles’s mom hugged Kelly and brushed a kiss on his cheek. “So much of our lives are decided for us by other people. Be glad you’re marrying a partner who wants to help you be yourself, no matter what the world tells you to be.” She patted his arm. “I bet we could find a way to give you your show without making you feel embarrassed about it.”
They poked around online, but once Aaron woke, Giles, Aaron and Kelly went with Vanessa to go shopping in real time. Walter elected to stay at the house with Tim, and from the look of the two of them, they had schemes afoot. When Giles complained about being sent to the kiddie table, his dad told him his place right now was with his boyfriend.
Aaron protested too as he and Kelly herded him to the car. “Dr. Mulder brought over everything I need.”
Giles’s mom waved his objection away. “I love shopping. You’re just giving me an excuse.”
This was true, but the kind of money his mom dropped wasn’t small change. A top-of-the-line cell phone on the Mulder family plan, a tablet—Giles hadn’t gotten this much for Christmas. She tried to get a laptop, but Aaron wouldn’t let her, insisting he could use Giles’s or something in the music computer lab. He wouldn’t take anything but thirty-dollar headphones, either, and he got annoyed when Giles pointed out he was used to Bose.
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