Gage shook his head. “We’re best friends. You can’t break our bond.”
Rolling his eyes, Fenton put up his hands in surrender and took a step back. “I concede. But you want some water or something? Every time I have to take a Xanax, I have the worst cotton mouth.”
Gage tested his tongue and grimaced. “Yeah. That would be good.”
Fenton shot him a salute, turned toward the door, then froze and looked back. “Fallon’s on his way. Frankie didn’t tell him while he was at the shoot. Didn’t want to stress him out. But yeah, he knows now.”
Gage knew he was in for some aggressive comfort, but in reality, that’s all he wanted. He still felt a bit raw and tender in spots he’d been trying not to poke, but he also felt oddly unburdened. God, had he really been hanging on to his fear about being a shit dad for so long?
“Did you cry?” Elodie asked. Her tiny fingers poked at his cheeks, her big eyes blinking at him.
He sighed. “Yeah. I did cry today. I think.” He wasn’t sure, but he had the ache in his head like he had been at least a little weepy. “Did you cry today?”
“Yeah. I cried at school because Carter…he, um. He taked my seat. Because I have the red seat, and I like it. And it’s my seat because I can see it, but I don’t see the other seats.”
“It sounds like Carter needs to keep his hands on his own stuff.”
“Yeah,” she said. “You could come yell at him.”
Gage laughed. “If I get time off work, I will. No one messes with my best friend.”
“Okay.” She wriggled out of his arms and hopped down. “You want chiten nuggets?”
“I’m good. Maybe later.” He watched her leave the room, better balanced with her orthotics than she had been a year ago. She walked like Lucas, with one hand on the wall to keep herself straight and on to where she wanted to go, and he realized this was the perfect house for his best friend.
Pinching the bridge of his nose, he massaged until he felt the pressure in his sinuses start to give a bit, and by the time he was breathing through both nostrils, the door was opening again.
It wasn’t Fenton this time.
Fallon was a little pale, and his brow was furrowed deep with worry. He took a few steps into the room, his own eyes wide behind his glasses, and in that moment, he looked a lot like his little sister.
“You’re okay,” he said.
Gage nodded. “I’m okay. It was a bad day.”
Fallon walked over and pressed a tepid glass of water into Gage’s hand. He gulped nearly all of it, swiping his mouth with the back of his hand, then set the glass down and shifted over to make room for Fallon. He curled up immediately, pressed against Gage’s side.
“Is it me? Am I stressing you out?”
Gage closed his eyes. “The situation is.”
“If it’s too much for you?—”
“No.” Gage turned slightly and tipped his chin up. Fallon looked terrified, and Gage hated himself for the few moments Fallon might have thought he was too much. “Don’t give me a way out, sweetheart. I don’t want it. I need to sort myself out because I want to be good for you.”
“Is that what you’re worried about?” Fallon quickly took his hand and began to trace the lines on his palm the way he always did when he was anxious.
Gage watched the motion for a few moments before answering him. “There’s a part of me that worries everything that happened at school broke me. Like…like that it fundamentally ruined something inside me that I need to be a good partner and a good parent.”
Fallon said nothing.
“It’s something I plan to work on in therapy. This whole…thing—this recovery and coping thing—it’s not going the way I thought it was going to go. All the trauma I had before this was…I don’t know, textbook, I guess.”
“What do you mean?” Fallon asked quietly.
Gage nestled in closer. “The identity crisis I had when I was a kid about being visibly mixed race, though no one could really pinpoint which race I was, even me. I felt like an outsider all the time, and it didn’t help that my dad loved me as much as he did. I was angry until I wasn’t, and sad until I wasn’t. And finding out where my bio parents came from made me feel a little better, even if it didn’t answer any of my questions. I cried, I raged, then I coped. Just like the therapist told my dad I would.”
Fallon started to play with the hem on Gage’s jeans.
