He was wearing a baseball hat and sweats, which told Gage he’d probably been running the track earlier, and he tipped it up to see who was invading his house.
“My favorite nephew!”
“Technically, I’m your only one,” Gage reminded him as he flopped beside the other man and leaned in for a half hug. “Mind if I sit for a while?”
“Never. I’m going to guess this isn’t a social call,” Bowen said, leaning forward to grab the remote so he could pause the TV. “You know Monty talked, right?”
Gage rolled his eyes. “How long did it take him?”
“He held out, I think, about six days,” Bowen said. “New record.”
He figured he should be annoyed, but it was what it was. So long as no one harassed Fallon about it, he was happy to let it go. “We’re still waiting on the results, not that it’s going to change anything.”
Bowen gave him a careful look. “So, you’re really in this?”
Biting his thumbnail, Gage twisted sideways on the sofa and stared at his uncle. For a brief moment, he wondered what it would be like to stare across at a relative and see himself in their features. Would it be like that for Mango and him? When the child he considered his own looked at him and didn’t see anything of themselves in his face?
“Was it a hard choice for you?”
Bowen’s eyes widened. “Was what a hard choice?”
“Briar.”
It took his uncle a second to catch on, and then he laughed and rubbed the back of his neck. “Shit. You know, I still forget sometimes she’s not mine?”
“Yeah?” Gage bit his lip. “You ever think my dad looked at me and thought about how I wasn’t, you know, biologically his?”
“No,” Bowen said. When Gage scoffed, he sat up a little straighter. “I’m being serious, kid. I mean, it could be like that for some people, but that’s not usually a parent thing. They had the choice, you know? You didn’t.”
Gage fiddled with the hem of his sleeve. “So you don’t think it would feel different if you and Lane had a baby together?”
Bowen shrugged. “I mean, Briar was a whisp of a dandelion seed when I met her. She was just figuring out three-word sentences, you know? I don’t think she remembers much about life before I was there. But it was also different for me. I was her nanny.”
“Her manny,” Gage said, knowing how much that term pissed his uncle off.
Bowen narrowed his eyes, but he sidestepped the mocking. “We had a sort of caregiver-child relationship going before Lane and I figured shit out. Are you worried? Are you having second thoughts?”
Gage let out a sigh. “No. Just…when this was happening to me before. You know?”
Bowen’s face darkened. “Yeah.”
“I was feeling all this dread and…and I don’t know, resentment? Regret for ever setting foot on that fucking campus. Resentment toward myself for ever giving Jonny the time of day. I kept thinking that I could probably love my child, even if they came from fucked-up circumstances, but I didn’t want it. I didn’t want a living, breathing reminder of what happened.”
Bowen’s hand twitched, and then he lost the war with himself and reached out, squeezing Gage’s shoulder. It was a welcome touch.
“With this baby, I want this so badly. And not just the baby, obviously. I’m so ridiculously in love with Fallon. It wasn’t how I pictured my twenties going, but this whole idea of making a family with him? Even if I wasn’t genetically part of it?” He went quiet for a beat. “I don’t really know how to explain how it feels.”
Bowen squeezed his shoulder again. “I get it. Trust me. I would do unspeakably dark things to protect my family’s peace. I have never once given a single fuck that I didn’t help Briar get here. She’s still mine.”
Gage stared down at his hands. “I just need to know I’m not some freak. Or, like, displacing my trauma onto this situation. My therapist says I’m not. He says I’m allowed to have trauma and also want all these things. They don’t have to be related.”
“Sounds like a smart guy.”
Gage laughed. “Yeah. He’s pretty good at his job. But I think I just needed to hear it from someone else who didn’t walk onto the scene where a whole teenager was already living. I mean, Kash has been around since I was a baby, but he wasn’t really here until right before I was ready to leave the house. I know he loves me, but I think it’s different.”
“Yeah,” Bowen breathed out. “I think Kylen probably gets it if you want to ask him too. But I’m fairly sure he feels the same way about Audra as I do about Briar. And you do about…”
“Mango.”
