“Oh. Well… I will listen if you want to say anything. And nothing will leave the thin plastic walls of my greenhouse.”
I smile, despite the heaviness on my chest. For a minute, I concentrate on the planter I’ve been working on. “I’ve spent most of my life alone,” I say. “I’ve been happy. I enjoy my life. I’ve never felt like I’ve been missing something. But then this guy walks into my life and everything changes.”
“That’s good.” Kellan smiles.
I nod. “It’s not, though. Literally any other person in the entire world would be better. This isn’t just complicated. It’s going to be the bad kind of explosive when the world learns of it. Which I think makes it sound like I’m having an affair. I’m not.”
He shrugs. “Right now, I’m a vault. It can be a cat, and sure, I’ll silently judge you, but nothing will come out of my mouth.”
I laugh. “Thanks.”
“It’s not a cat, right?”
I shove him. “Ew.”
Kellan grins. “Cool.”
We’re quiet for several minutes.
“You’re worried about the explosion.”
“I’m worried about what life looks like after the explosion. I think we can endure that. It’s what comes after that I’m worried about. I keep trying to put myself in the other position and wonder how I’d feel. How I’d react. But the problem is, I know the outcome I want. The one we need. And bottom line, I’m not in that position. I’m in the one I’m in. So, it’s easy to say what I’d do when I don’t know if that’s the truth at all.”
Kellan nods. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you want?”
“Ideally—”
He shakes his head. “No. Just the question. No criterion. What do you want?”
The question hangs in the air for a very long time. “Him,” I whisper. “But…”
I don’t finish the but because that’s not his question. It doesn’t change the fact that there’s a very long but.
Kellan stays with me for a while, even though I don’t say anything more. Eventually, he leaves me, clapping my shoulder with his dirt-covered hand, and leaves me to the silence of the greenhouse.
I spend the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening with my hands in the dirt. I’m not sure I do anything but make a mess and maybe create more work for Kellan tomorrow. When I finally leave, the sun is on the way down. I don’t go home, but head in the opposite direction toward the ferry.
My feet walk past the docks, and I end up on the beach where I wander and think. I walk around Bane Island along the shore, making three entire revolutions as I think about my conversation with Kellan. My loyalty or my heart. Which do I follow? Which do I make right?
It’s difficult to explain my situation without giving it away. Too many details would blow the whole thing wide open as if I’d dropped names. Everyone knows that Nason and I have been friends since childhood. Everyone knows we came here together. Everyone knows I’ve been practically a third parent to Lie as he grew up.
But that little boy is an adult now. Ineverhad inappropriate feelings about him. Not even when he began flirting with me when he was sixteen. It was funny. I figured this was a rite of passage, right? Learning to flirt, and I was someone he knew. Someone he was comfortable with. Someone not technically family to try out his skills and come into his own.
It wasn’t until he came home from college this last time that I looked at him and thought,wow.As if I’d never seen him before in my entire life.
He wasn’t little Elijah, Nason’s son. He was Elijah Cain, a young man with adult thoughts and passions and an ass that I was quickly obsessed with.
I can’t remember a time I’ve ever looked at Lie’s ass before that day. He was simply assless. He left a twenty-year-old kid last fall and somehow returned as a twenty-year-old adult.
It was all a mistake. I shouldn’t have flirted. I shouldn’t have let him see how fucking enamored I am with him. How completely and totally drooling of his perfect ass.
I shouldn’t have kissed him. I shouldn’t have held his hand. Ishouldn’thave put my dick in him.
I shouldn’t have let feelings get involved. At the very least, I should have steeled myself against emotional involvement and let this be nothing but physical.
