“You didn’t make him the way he is anymore than you made me the way I am.” Peter shrugged again. I’d always hated the way he did that. It was his way of not verbalizing that this was the life he’d been given and he saw no way of changing it. But he had changed it. He’d chased after the life he wanted, and I saw that now. Even through his pain, he was more alive now than he had been as a teen.
Tonight, he was dressed in a pair of tight jeans, very deliberately shredded across the thighs, and a My Little Pony T-shirt. Seriously. Sophia would’ve gone nuts over his outfit if she hadn’t been so laser-focused on him doing her hair. The Peter I’d known had always worn shades of black and gray. He wouldn’t have been caught dead in ponies and rainbows. I leaned forward so I could touch my fingertips to his. Needed him to look up at me.
“Peter, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the way you are.” He jerked his hand away from mine. When he opened his mouth to argue with me, I cocked my head to the side, silently asking him to hear me out. This was the good thing about knowing someone for so long; we understood each other’s subtle nonverbal cues. “I’m serious. You’re an amazing man, maybe more now than you were before you left. Almost definitely more, because you’re not hiding who you are anymore.”
“Yeah, and all it took was me putting as much distance as possible between me and my entire world,” he scoffed. “But seriously, don’t feel like you need to somehow validate me. Moving away and chasing my dreams turned out to be the best thing I ever did. It showed me there are people out there who will love every ounce of me in all my sparkly glory. There, I don’t have to worry about someone making ignorant comments if I walk out of my bedroom wearing a shirt that makes me smile. I don’t have to worry about spying on what was supposed to be a private moment, storming out when they realize I’m a freak. No one’s disgusted by me there.”
“Peter, that’s not why I walked out that day,” I told him. My heart twisted and my stomach knotted. I knew that’s what he thought, but hearing him say it filled me with yet another layer of regret. I’d helped carve that chip on his shoulder.
“Really? You could’ve fooled me.” He reached back and yanked the tie out of his hair. I nearly choked as the bleached blond waves fell across his shoulders. When he leaned forward, running a hand through his hair, I realized what he was doing. He was trying to shield himself from the pain this conversation would inevitably cause. “You couldn’t get out of that bedroom fast enough, and then the entire week at camp, you made sure you were paired up with someone I couldn’t stand so I wouldn’t approach you.”
I didn’t think I’d consciously tried to keep Peter at a distance, but I believed his memories more than my own. Honestly, I’d been so caught up in what seeing Peter made me feel that I attached myself to people who wouldn’t make me question myself. Not him, me.
“I’m sorry.” God, I was already getting tired of hearing myself say those words. They were insignificant and would never heal what I’d done to him. What my cowardice had done. My fear for what would’ve happened if it’d been one of his sisters who’d walked into the room instead of me.
“That cut deep, Freddie,” Peter admitted. I wanted to reach out and push the curtain of hair away from his face. Wanted to know if it was as soft as it looked. My brain was quickly filling with so many inappropriate ideas of what I should do. “By the time you caught me, I knew who I was. The hardest part of coming out was admitting to myself that I’d never be who they wanted me to be. I wouldn’t find a good woman to marry and carry on the family name. I couldn’t stay in town and run the bakery, because the longer I stayed here, the more I died inside. As long as I lived under Papa’s roof, I could never be the person I was born to be.”
“You should’ve told me,” I responded flatly. “We were best friends.”
“And look what happened when you found out,” he shot back.
There was a knock against the wall and both of us turned to see a puffy-eyed Maria holding sleepy Sophia in her arms. “Guys, I’m going to try to get this one settled down.”
“You can put her in my bed,” I told her. I should take my daughter out of Maria’s embrace and put her back to bed myself, but I worried Peter would completely close down if I left the room. Hell, the way tonight was going, he’d probably decide coming over here had been a huge mistake and be long gone before Sophia fell asleep. Plus, it wasn’t like I was leaving a stranger to care for her. Sophia loved Maria.
“That’s okay. I think it’ll be better if she’s in her own room tonight.” I blinked a few times, stunned that a teenager was contradicting my parenting decisions. She shook her head. “You know, at the other end of the hall, with her door closed, where little ears won’t hear conversations meant for adults.”
Oh. That. I’d just been effectively schooled in parenting by a teen. “Yeah, that’s a good idea.”
“But there’s no TV in my room, Daddy,” Sophia complained.
“It’s okay, we can watch a movie on my iPad,” Maria quickly responded. She dropped Sophia into my lap on her way to the front door. “Give your daddy goodnight kisses and I’ll be right back.”
Peter held out the keys. Maria returned a minute later, both of their overnight bags in hand. “I’ll probably snuggle in with Sophia if that’s okay with her.”
“Daddy says I give the best snuggles,” Sophia proclaimed with a broad smile. “When my mommy left us, I needed lots of cuddling. That’ll probably help you, too.”
“I’m sure that’s exactly what I need.” Maria sniffled as she hugged her brother. She whispered something I couldn’t hear and he shook his head. She pulled back and the two had a silent conversation with their eyes. Both of them needed this time together, getting to see how alike they were without the toxic poison of their childhood. As I watched them, I knew what I needed to do.
4
Peter
“She needs you here for her,”Freddie declared as soon as we were alone.
“We both know that’s not possible, Freddie,” I argued, not telling him I’d been trying to come up with a way to stay in the area since minutes after I’d walked through the front door last night. Where Papa seemed indifferent to my return and Lucia acted like I’d personally offended her with my presence, Maria instantly clung to me. But the DC area was expensive and my job was back in New York. I didn’t have much in savings, and staying with Papa, even short term, wasn’t an option.
“Stay here,” Freddie offered. I gaped at him, positive I’d drifted off to sleep. He’d been disgusted when he found out I was gay and now he was offering to let me stay in his home?
“Why?” I pushed the hair away from my face and looked directly at Freddie. He was a shitty liar, and if he tried to feed me some bullshit excuse, I was done. Out of here. The one promise I’d made to myself when I left was that I was going to live my life on my terms, and key among them was I wouldn’t do a damn thing out of obligation. I sure as hell wasn’t going to let Freddie do something I bristled at. “If this is out of some misguided need for penance, save it. Shit happened, we can’t change that. But I do not want you offering me a place to stay because you think it’ll erase the past.”
“I don’t think that at all,” Freddie insisted. “Look, we’re both too tired to get into the myriad ways I fucked up as a friend to you, but I want that.”
“Didn’t act like it earlier,” I interrupted. “When I saw you come up to the line, all I could think was maybe this was my second chance to make my friend see that I’m not some degenerate just because I like wearing makeup and sucking dick. The whole time you were talking to the rest of my family, I was running through what I would say to you when you reached me, even though I half expected you to stop at Maria and then walk away.”
Freddie flinched at my admission. Too fucking bad. This was my chance to clear the air, and I wanted him to feel a fraction of the pain he’d caused me.
“I wouldn’t have done that,” he insisted.
