CHAPTER TWO
FALLON
He had absolutelyno idea what Gage was upset about, but he also knew it was something gutting because Fallon had a feeling that it took a lot to make Gage shatter like that.
He didn’t know him well, but he’d always had a good sense for people. He’d been drawn to Gage since meeting him in the hallway the night Charlie attacked him, and as much as he knew he was in no place to start anything, he also couldn’t seem to stay away from the other man.
He found excuses to go over to Frankie’s house, knowing that there was a good chance Gage would be at Lucas’s, and he was.
For a while. And then he stopped turning up.
Fallon thought maybe he missed the chance to get to know him better and take him up on the offer to learn D&D, but then Gage had spotted him walking to his car after a shoot and had run over to chat.
Now, Fallon was cradling him in his arms, listening to an info dump about Magic: The Gathering, even though he’d lied and said he was unfamiliar with it. In truth, Fallon knew the game inside and out. He’d never played it, but Fenton had been into it for years, and a bit like osmosis, Fallon had absorbed it.
Gage didn’t need to know that though. And with each sentence he spoke, the tremble in his voice started to fade, and his body had relaxed.
“…and that was how I built my fairy deck. It’s probably my favorite, though I don’t win with it that often.” Gage stopped, then laughed. “Sorry, I can’t believe I just spent an hour talking about cards.”
Fallon shook his head and shifted back a little, glancing up into Gage’s eyes. They were so brown and so pretty. He had short lashes, but they were very, very dark, and he had a single freckle in the corner of his left eye.
He lifted a hand and traced his nose. It was round at the tip, and beneath it was a very well-defined cupid’s bow. His lips were full, and his jawline was sharp, making his face heart-shaped. Fallon could have stared at him for hours.
He could have taken a thousand pictures in every single pose he could think of and not get tired of looking at him.
“Are you Chinese? Do you even know since you were adopted?”
Gage blinked, and Fallon felt his cheeks go white-hot.
“Sorry. God, that was super rude, wasn’t it?”
Gage snorted and shook his head. “I mean, it’s better than asking, ‘Hey, bruh, what are you?’”
Fallon wrinkled his nose. “People say that?”
“And worse.” He was quiet for a beat, then said, “But, uh…yeah, so I did a DNA thing in one of my classes years ago. I was thinking about becoming a forensic detective.”
Fallon’s brows rose. “A cop?”
Gage shrugged and tried to hide a small grin. “I was really into detective shows when I was younger. Anyway, I was given the chance to get a full workup done. Not like that ancestry shit that’s stealing everyone’s data.”
Fallon had no idea what he was talking about, but that happened to him a lot. He was distracted by his own special interests enough to ignore what everyone else was doing. “Because you were adopted?”
“Yeah. I was curious. It was a closed adoption, and my dad didn’t get any of my records. I always kind of wondered about my biological parents, but for a long time, I didn’t want to know. I thought it might change the way I felt about my dad.”
“Did it?”
Gage shook his head, his face softening. “I always felt like…like there was a space inside me that would never be filled because that was the space meant for my birth family. But it wasn’t big enough to consume me. My dad had me in group therapy for adoptees when I was a kid. He thought my shitty attitude was because of that. And while I did totally have trauma, it turns out my shit attitude was a nice, healthy dose of untreated anxiety from undiagnosed ADHD.”
Fallon wrinkled his nose. “Was the group therapy thing hard?”
“It was interesting. Some kids were chill. Some kids were angry. I had a pretty solid family, so it didn’t bother me enough to feel like I needed to trauma dump, you know?” He took a breath. “Anyway, the tests came back that I was mostly Italian with a tiny bit of German on my dad’s side, and Korean and Chinese on my mom’s side.”
Fallon reached out to touch him again, scraping his fingers through the scruff on his cheeks. It was a little sharp, but it felt good. “How did it make you feel?”
“Fine,” Gage answered. “I mean, I knew I was Asian. My friends used to take bets which country my parents were from, but I stopped talking to a lot of them way before I got the answers.”
“Did it help? Knowing the results?”
