Chapter 1
The house was quiet when Wyatt climbed out of bed and headed downstairs for breakfast. It was only eight, but the Abbots were early risers. Justin started work at what Harper called stupid o’clock every morning, Dad was in LA for a few days for meetings, and Lettie got up early every day to take the dogs for a run before school. Harper had always liked to sleep in as late as she could, but she hadn’t lived at home for a few years now. First she’d had college, and now she had just started an internship at a non-profit in San Francisco that assisted immigrant families. Wyatt missed her, but they still talked at least once a week, and texted every day. She was still his biggest cheerleader, despite the fact she wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing with his life.
Well, that made two of them.
Wyatt was turning twenty in a few months, and he still hadn’t figured it out. Dad and Justin were happy for him to take his time, but his unofficial gap year had stretched on to about eighteen months already, and Wyatt was starting to feel like he was mooching. He wasn’t—not technically at least, since he helped Dad out with his show, and helped Justin out in the greenhouses—but it bothered him that he hadn’t done anything for himself yet. He’d had it all handed to him. Not like Harper, who’d got her internship all on her own. She was forging her own path, and Wyatt was still getting carried by Justin and Dad.
Wyatt shuffled into the kitchen. It was spotless, as always, except for Justin’s breakfast things sitting in the sink. Wyatt rolled his eyes at that and put them in the dishwasher. Dad hated when things were left in the sink, but even after fifteen years together Justin was still doing it. Which was fair, Wyatt supposed, since Justin was always on Dad’s case about leaving damp towels on their bathroom floor.
Wyatt grabbed the cereal from the pantry and the milk from the refrigerator, and ate leaning up against the counter.
One of the perks of being a kind-of celebrity’s kid was that he didn’t have to explain their family dynamic to many people. He called Dad his dad, but really Dad was Justin’s husband, and Justin was Wyatt’s big brother. Most people got their heads around it, eventually.
And one of the downsides of being a kind-of celebrity’s kid was, well, everything else. Wyatt had loved being celebrity chef Del Abbot’s cooking partner on the YouTube channel Dad had started when Wyatt was still a little kid. He’d even come up with Dad’s catchphrase: buh-bye. It had been cute when he was four. Wyatt had never been great at talking to the camera the way that Dad was, but he hadn’t needed to be. That was Dad’s thing. So they’d done the YouTube channel together, and a few specials and things for cable TV for the holidays, and there were even some family photographs in some of Dad’s cookbooks and stuff.
Then, when Wyatt had been fifteen, one of the kids at school had showed him this website. It had a counter on it, counting down the days until Wyatt turned eighteen. And the comments underneath it had said exactly what people wanted to do with him when he was legal. Some of them had made him blush, but some of them had been much, much worse than that.
Wyatt hadn’t wanted to be in the next cable TV special after that.
So he was pretty sure that he didn’t want to follow Dad into the world of TV shows and autographs and appearances and celebrity. He still loved cooking though. He’d loved it ever since Dad had taught him. He’d always liked making desserts more than mains, and had gone through a stage of wanting to be a pastry chef. These days though, he had a thing for cakes. Cupcakes. Not like the gross ones that were double their own height in frosting. Just nice ones. Plain ones, he supposed. Nothing Instagram-worthy at all, but they tasted good.
He hadn’t figured out a way to tell Dad that maybe he didn’t want to be a pastry chef after all. He wasn’t even sure himself, not really. He wasn’t sure of anything.
Story of his life.
Wyatt put his bowl and his spoon in the dishwasher and wiped the counter down before heading back upstairs again.
He showered and shaved and then used the fancy moisturizer that Dad had been given in a gift pack at some awards night he went to, and had taken one whiff of before turning his nose up at it. Wyatt liked the smell of it. It was a little citrusy or something.
Wyatt dressed—jeans and a T-shirt today—and then looked for a hairband to tie his hair back. Some days he liked to leave it loose. Some days he even played around with a blow dryer and product to make it fall in loose curls, or give it waves, but today he just pulled it back into a messy bun. Today was definitely what Wyatt was coming to think of as a boy day.
His stomach clenched as he popped the elastic around his hair.
Not that…
Not that his other days weregirldays. They were just softer days. Or something. They were days when he added some eyeliner, or some lip gloss, or wore a shirt that maybe looked like it came off a rack from the other side of the store or something. He was softening his look, he wasn’t being a girl. He was…he was just beingWyatt.
The family didn’t care. One bonus of being raised by two gay guys? It hadn’t been an issue when Wyatt, thirteen years old, had told them he was gay too. So they thought that sometimes he was experimenting with his look with the clothes and the eyeliner and the lip gloss, except Wyatt knew that’s not what it was. He was…he was maybe not exactly a guy at all on those softer days. Not a girl, but maybe not exactly a guy.
It was confusing.
He was Wyatt, and that should have been enough, right? His family would tell him that was enough, but Wyatt felt it somehow wasn’t. Not when he was still figuring out who Wyatt was.
Wyatt stared into his dark eyes in the reflection of his bedroom mirror and wondered if he’d always feel a little like there was a stranger staring back.
* * * *
Wyatt was downstairs with one of Dad’s old YouTube episodes on in the background when Lettie burst into the house surrounded by her pack of dogs.
“Don’t let them in the kitchen!” he called to her.
“I won’t!” She sailed through the house with the dogs barreling along with her.
Lettie was a sophomore in high school, and she was in perpetual danger of failing a bunch of classes. It wasn’t that she wasn’t smart. She was on the spectrum though, and she tended only to be interested in things that, well, interested her. And schoolwork was not one of those things. Dad and Justin had tried to tell her that if she wanted to start her own business training dogs when she was finished with school that she’d at least need to know how to do her own books, but Lettie didn’t seem bothered. Wasn’t that what accountants were for?
Wyatt paused the video. Dad wanted help planning the next series, which meant Wyatt was writing his ideas down. Listening to Dad’s voice in the background helped, for some reason. When he was little, and Dad had spent a few nights away here and there with work, Justin used to let Wyatt go to sleep watching Dad’s videos. Though looking back, Wyatt suspected it had been an excuse for Justin to watch them too.
Wyatt didn’t remember much about before they came to live in California. He had vague memories of going to visit Del, now Dad, and of Dad being one of the first adults he really felt safe around, but everything else was hazy. He didn’t remember his mother, not really, and sometimes felt a jolt of panic when he tried to remember her. He didn’t know how much of that was his actual memories, or if it was just a reaction from what he’d learned much later had happened: when she’d overdosed, Wyatt had been sitting on the couch with her. Nobody knew how long it was until Harper had got home from school to find them there.
