Liam tried to fight back a smile, but he couldn’t stop. His lips could barely hold in the laughter.
“Is that a smile? I think that’s a smile. I think that means you find me funny.”
Liam flipped him the bird.
“All right then.”
Liam got the silence he requested. Nathan held the ewes as Liam chopped. They made a good team. Nathan liked watching Liam work with each ewe. He was firm in his job, but he showed tenderness in how he handled them. He fixed his steely gaze on shearing, and Nathan imagined that look on him. It was a shame Liam was straight, pining over that blonde on his computer. A part of him thought Liam was going to kiss him on the couch earlier, but Liam bounced right off before anything could lead to anything.
“Looking good bitches,” Nathan said to the row of ewes. He waited for a comment from Liam about how unprofessional he was, but it never came. They locked eyes for a split second, and Nathan wondered just how straight Liam was.
He wasn’t going to try any funny business, though. As much as he would love to be one of those guys who fucks the boss, he wasn’t going to do anything else to jeopardize his relationship to this family. No matter how sexy those shears made Liam seem.
Chapter 9
Nathan
After showering, Nathan lay on his bed with a warm washcloth on his forehead. His hands kept shaking, his head kept pounding. The aching of his muscles from manual labor amplified its pain. Damn withdrawal. It only got this bad in rehab, but he would eventually tough it out. (Or fuck it out.) It would pass like a storm. Eventually.
He crept into the living room and put his hand on the cabinet. What if Mark or the kids caught him? Or Liam. He couldn’t take that chance. He summoned every ounce of willpower to hold out. The withdrawal would pass. He just had to keep busy.
Nathan ambled through the house, up the stairs and past Mark and the kids’ bedrooms. With its lived-in furniture and walls piled with pictures, the Foster house was like a family hug in architectural form. The only pictures hanging in his dad’s flat were stiff family photos. He stared at the closet in the master bedroom, a closet used by his mum. Was there any of her stuff?
He took a step into the room but stopped himself. His eye caught a row of framed pictures hung on the far wall. Each frame had one or two theater programs with a still of Mariel on stage.
There she was as Desdemona inOthello, and as Nora inA Doll’s House, and as Elizabeth Proctor inThe Crucible.My mum was a star!She signed each program, her cursive loopy and playful.
She reigned supreme among her castmates. In one picture, she toppled over vases with glee as Stevie inThe Goat or Who is Sylvia?Another had her Roxie Hart inChicagotaking a bow with Velma Kelly. Nathan wondered if he caught the acting bug from her, if she had passed it down in her genes. He definitely considered himself more of a Velma than a Roxie, though.
“You are beautiful,” he said to a candid picture of her backstage smiling at the camera. He noticed no program from London hung on the wall. He wondered if she dropped out of RADA before she could act. And then he thought about what she was doing in London for those months. It seemed like she didn’t come home to New Zealand or else Mark would’ve seen her knocked up.Did she wander through London by herself under I was born, and then left the bloody continent as fast as she could?
He didn’t have time to dwell on this question because he heard the front door open. Nathan scrambled out of the master bedroom. He waltzed down the stairs just as Franny came up them, her face a red, blotchy mess.
“Hiya,” he said as she brushed past him. “Franny?”
“I’m good,” she said in that mucus-clogged voice one gets mid-cry. She went into her room and closed the door.
Nathan turned to go back downstairs, but paused on the top step. He knocked on her bedroom door. “Franny.”
“I said I’m good.”
“We both know that’s bollocks. Do you want to chat?”
A few seconds later, she opened the door. Her cheeks puffed with redness and were streaked with tears.
“I’m going to get you a washcloth.” Nathan darted into her bathroom and pulled a cloth from the linen closet. He soaked it in warm water under the sink.
“A warm washcloth on the forehead is like a bath for the brain,” he said as he dabbed her forehead.
“Thank you.”
He wiped her cheeks. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“It’s these girls at school. They made fun of my hair. I dyed my hair brown because they made fun of me for being a redhead.”
Nathan had been there plenty. “Let me guess. They called you ginger, or carrot top, or firecrotch.”
“Firecrotch?”
