I remembered him saying he never went back to college, and now I knew why. It broke my heart, thinking about what he must have gone through. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and take away some of the pain, but I could also tell he wasn’t done yet.
“What happened then?” I asked.
He sucked in a breath. “Then I quit school and became his full-time caretaker.” After a long pause, he added, “He hung on for two years, but… eventually it got to him, and he just couldn’t fight it anymore. He died a few days before his sixtieth birthday.”
I set my knife down and went around the counter, relieved when Alex welcomed my embrace. It was the most he’d shared with me about his past, and I half expected him to shut me out when I hugged him. But he didn’t.
Dipping his nose into my hair, he drew in a quick breath. “You remind me of him,” Alex admitted quietly. “The shampoo, I mean. It smells like something he used to use.”
Guilt washed over me. Here I was, thinking he had liked the scent of my shampoo, when actually I’d been taking him back to a painful time in his life.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
He shook his head. “No, Vaughn. You misunderstand. It’s… comforting to me. Remembering him. I think it’s something I need to do more often.”
I pulled back, needing to see his face to know if he was telling the truth. There was nothing but kindness and honesty in the deep blue of his eyes, along with something else. Something… raw and unreadable. Something I didn’t dare name.
“Can you tell me more?” I asked. “What about your mom?”
He took a deep breath and reached for the cutting board to scrape the pepper and onion into the pan. “Mom abandoned us when I was a baby. Dad used to tell me postpartum depression is what drove her away, but I figured out later she had a deep love for the bottle.”
“She drank?”
He nodded. “Always had. As long as he’d known her. I think Dad didn’t want me around that and kinda gave her an ultimatum. But I don’t really know for sure.”
For as much as I wanted to know about Alex’s past, I also hadn’t been prepared for how much pain he’d endured.
“Is that why you don’t drink?” I asked. He whipped his head up, eyes wide. “Sorry, it’s just something I noticed. You haven’t touched the beer in my fridge at all.”
“Oh. Um, yeah. That’s part of it anyway,” he said. I could tell that was the most he was willing to say on the subject, so I let it pass. “I was in a bad place after my dad died,” Alex said.
“Yeah, I can imagine. You lost the only person who cared for you.”
He shook his head. “Not only cared for me, Vaughn. Dad was the only person who really knew me. He was my best friend. Even as a kid, we just had a special relationship, you know? Sure, we had our moments just like anyone, but things had always been different for us than it had with my friends.”
I nodded. “I get that. That’s what it’s like for Brianna and me,” I said, then let out a small laugh. “She and I couldn’t be any more different, but at the end of the day, she’s the one I always call first if I need something.”
He smiled. “Yeah. That’s how it was with Dad. He never judged or expected me to be someone I wasn’t. He just loved me, like a dad should.”
“Did he know you were gay?” I asked.
“Yeah. Always said it didn’t matter to him. Just wanted me to be happy, first and foremost.”
After another minute, Alex drained the noodles in a colander, then dumped them into the mixture while I got some bowls out from the cupboard. We ate his annoyingly delicious concoction in silence on the couch, watching another movie. Or at least, Alex was watching. I had no idea what was happening on-screen because my mind kept drifting back to all that he’d shared. When we finished eating, I set the empty bowls on the end table and reached across him to pull the footrest up again. Alex laughed, but spread the blanket over us so we could settle back in.
“Thank you for telling me about your dad, Alex,” I said softly, folding my arm across his stomach. “It means a lot to me that you trust me with that.”
He was quiet for so long I wondered if I’d sent him down a dark path again, but then I felt his nose in my hair, followed by a tender kiss to my head.
“I trust you, Vaughn. More than you realize.”
It was all I needed before drifting off to sleep.
16
“Hey, Vaughn!”
Alex and I both jumped at the sound of a voice coming in through the front door, and he nearly threw me off him in an attempt to sit up. Roxy, who had at some point jumped up to sleep on Alex’s lap, yelped as she fell to the floor, landing wrong on her injured leg, and Alex quickly scooped her up.
