I hadn’t even gone up to his office, but somehow just meeting him outside the building caused every gossip in the immediate vicinity to have their radar ping. It was confusing and Ferris hated that I couldn’t find a logical way to explain their insanity or the strange questions they kept asking him.
He didn’t want to hear that it boiled down to him being attractive and them wanting to stick him in a dirty romance novel.
He was one weird comment away from going to HR...again.
“Do you want a way to tell them to mind their own business, do you want an answer for them or do you want an answer for you?” It was a lot of options at one time but his brain was going so fast it seemed like the best way to slow it down.
“Oh. Um.” Going still, he sank back into the passenger seat and frowned. “I...”
Didn’t know the answer.
It kept him busy as we got closer to the therapist’s office, though.
The doctor wasn’t focused on autism but he was supposed to be really good with kink and interesting subs, which felt like a better starting point for Ferris. He talked about kink a lot easier than he talked about ways he might not be neurotypical, so I was hoping he’d open up a bit with the unconventional approach.
Conner wasn’t so sure about the plan, but we’d managed to have another trip to the club where Ferris was polite and not a pain in the ass. I called it a win but Ferris said I needed to have higher standards for him. Conner agreed, which actually made Ferris like him better.
They were both insane but it’d given them something to bond over.
So...still a win.
“I want to tell them not to ask about my personal life because that’s always been the rule and there is no reason for it to change.” He peeked over at me, obviously worried about my reaction. “I keep work and my personal life separate.”
It was logical but I knew he’d hate hearing that.
Someone online had told him that made him homophobic, so we’d been going back and forth about that for the past week.
“Because it’s not their business what you do in your time off, and they’re strange, so you don’t have to share information with people who make terrible decisions.” There was no reason to give them any information about who he was dating when just switching up what he ate for lunch had them running around like startled chickens.
Ferris nodded but he kept stealing glances at me as my GPS announced the next turn. “That’s what we decided.”
He’dloudlydisapproved of that, but I’d won, so he’d settled into just huffing anytime he managed to bring it up in a conversation.
“That’s correct.” Knowing we had about five more minutes, I decided a change of tactic was in order. “But my favorite is the way you told the lawyer I was your happiness. That’s the title I want.”
And he was off.
Filling up the rest of the drive with a lecture about how I needed to protect my interests better and not be so willingto move into his grandfather’s house. Another strange person in my sweet boy’s life who made confusing decisions, but even dead, he could be forgiven because the guy hadn’t known Ferris existed until about a year before he’d died. DNA testing sites were helpful in some cases and cautionary tales in others, but for Ferris, it’d given him some answers about how he’d ended up in the system.
Several generations of people who didn’t connect well with others and who made truly terrible decisions.
Ferris was more upset that he was glad he was the smartest one out of nearly every relative he’d found than upset he’d been ignored to begin with. In his head, feeling proud about that made him a terrible person. I figured that was something we could get to eventually in therapy, but it wasn’t our starting point.
Labels and my inability to put myself first were.
I let the lecture go until we pulled into the parking lot, but as I turned off the car, I leaned over and gave him a quick peck as he started in on explaining the value of my house. “Let’s go. You’re not going to win right now. I’m moving in with you in three months.”
He’d get used to it eventually.
I managed to get out of the car before he could disagree with me, because he was ready to brat out about any number of things, and that just made his drama even worse. He stomped all the way to the door, but waited patiently for me to open it because that was the rule. “Thank you, Master.”
He liked rules more than he liked pouting.
He liked pouting more than he liked having reasonable conversations.
He liked reasonable conversations more than dealing with his coworkers.
But since none of those were easy for him, we were at therapy and that just gave him new reasons to be dramatic.
