Everett grinned, picturing Caleb and Jayne both while he considered it.
Commitment was supposed to be hard, but with tonight’s conversation still fresh in his mind and Jayne’s touch still warming his skin, it didn’t feel all that difficult.
37
Caleb
When the streetlights blinked on, Aurora’s suburban sidewalks rolled up. Mom-and-pop businesses shuttered their storefronts early, and one by one, vehicles disappeared from the streets until the rush of a passing car was a disturbance rather than a facet of the environment. During Caleb’s teenager years, he’d detested how sleepy and quaint his neighborhood was in comparison to the downtown core. All of the coolest people, he’d ardently explained to his fathers on more than one occasion, lived downtown, threw parties downtown, and met all their friends downtown. With his dad commuting into the city for work every day, and his father retired, it didn’t make sense to stick around their boring suburb.
Life was happening downtown, and they were missing it.
At the time, it had frustrated him to no end that his parents were happy to stagnate, but as Caleb rolled through the same deserted, sleepy streets he’d known in his childhood, he thought he might have figured it out. Life now wasn’t the same as it had been when he was sixteen. Hell, it wasn’t even the same as it had been last week. The frenetic energy of the city was every bit as invigorating as it was draining. Out here, separated from the millions who lived in too-small spaces in the hopes that the city wouldn’t bleed them dry, Caleb’s mind shifted gears. Every house he passed, with their bright windows and full driveways, served as a reminder—the city hid humanity; the suburbs celebrated it.
It felt like an affront to admit it. As soon as he’d been able, Caleb had left home for the city and never looked back. For years, he’d chased good times and better company, partied with the best, and had fallen in and out of favor with the people he’d always thought had mattered, but looking back, the dream sixteen-year-old Caleb had vehemently defended as truth proved nothing more than a deception. Parties ended. Friendships faded. After the music stopped and the lights went out, all that was left was to go home to a lonely apartment surrounded by nameless neighbors who communicated only through stomping feet, blaring televisions, and wall-shaking arguments.
It was what he’d thought he’d always wanted, but now, Caleb wasn’t so sure.
At a crawl, Caleb rounded the corner by the cluster of old beeches that had grown so close together, their slender trunks resembled one massive tree. As children, Caleb and his sort-of cousins had scaled its heights and dangled fearlessly from its limbs, feeling like they owned the world. Caleb and Everett in particular had fought for the top spot, always doing their best to one-up the other. As Caleb glimpsed the trees in his rearview mirror, the memory pinged his heart and made him ache for how things had once been.
Down the street from the cluster of beech trees stood the Alcrest family home. Its large, well-maintained lawn, sleek slate facade, gray gable roofs, and proper white trim belied the nature of the family who lived inside. While the place was always kept neat and the furniture was in good repair, it wasn’t the kind of house where no dish sat in the sink for longer than half an hour, or where the rugs were vacuumed every day. Almost three decades ago, a legion of children had made the house, its sprawling lawn, and the in-ground pool in the backyard their plaything, and with those children now grown up and having children of their own, Caleb figured it was only a matter of time before the next generation did the same.
Caleb pulled into the driveway. His father’s car—a beat-up Mazda with a crooked license plate—sat in the top spot near the garage. It was the same one Caleb had last seen when, in anger, he’d left and had vowed never to come back. At the time, its very existence had enraged him further. The car was over a decade old, and his fathers could afford to replace it, but they wouldn’t. To Caleb, who’d just come to learn a startling truth about his family’s medical history, it had been the final straw. Not only were his parents deceptive, but they were lazy and ignorant, too. The house, the car, their health… all of it had been some degree of fake, and Caleb had taken fault with all of it. But that had been his anger speaking, hadn’t it? He’d nitpicked every detail. Nothing was so simple.
Emptying his lungs in one satisfying sigh, Caleb turned off the engine, but left the battery engaged. What Jayne had told him earlier that day haunted him.Nothing gets solved if you don’t take actionable steps to solve it.It seemed simple in retrospect, but Caleb had spent so long avoiding his emotions that confronting them almost felt impossible.
Tap tap!
The noise startled Caleb, who jumped and slammed his thighs into the bottom of the steering wheel. Cussing at the dull pain now radiating through his legs, he glanced out the window to find his father standing on the other side. Caleb’s already racing heart doubled its speed. He undid his seatbelt, then opened the door a crack, not wanting to hit the man he’d come to make amends with. “Dad?”
Marshall Alcrest, Caleb’s alpha father, did not try to open the door any farther. Rather, he stooped down so that he could better speak into the gap. “Hey, kid.”
“Dad.” Caleb swallowed hard. On the drive over, he’d agonized over what he would do and say once he arrived at his parents’ doorstep, but now it seemed that it wouldn’t matter—his father had come to him. A familiar dread clenched in his chest and sent his brain scrambling as it tried to figure out the best method of approach. Caleb did his best to quash it. A reaction made in haste and out of fear would only make things worse. “I wasn’t expecting you to come to me.”
His father eased back from the door, moving stiffer than he had a year before. The unease already stirring in Caleb’s chest intensified.
“I wasn’t expecting it either,” he admitted. “Your dad told me that he’d be going out tonight, but he canceled his plans abruptly, and it took me by surprise.”
“Dad doesn’t know I’m here?”
“No.” For a moment, his father looked pained, but almost as soon as Caleb noticed, the expression faded from his face. “I thought it would be better if we kept this between us for the time being.”
“I understand.” Caleb looked past his father at the house. While he didn’t have a direct line of view, he could tell that there were lights on. The longer he stayed where he was, the greater the chance his dad would notice he was sitting in the driveway. “If that’s the case, it’s probably not a good idea for me to stay here. We should head somewhere else.”
“The dock.” Marshall cast a glimpse at the beater car. “We’ll have privacy there.”
“Dad’s not going to notice you’re gone?”
“No.” Marshall cracked a hesitant smile. “Since he announced he was going to stay in tonight, he’s been dropping hints about how nice it would be if only he could, in his words, ‘laze on the couch in his pajamas like a human slug and feast on popcorn.’ Since I knew you were coming over, I volunteered to go out and find some for him.”
“And he’s not going to be suspicious if you end up being gone for longer than a snack run should take?”
Marshall shrugged. “It’s your dad. If there are snacks, he’s not going to ask any questions.”
Caleb snorted. “You’re right.”
Times had changed, but some things always stayed the same.
* * *
