“That sounds really great, actually.”
“Can’t say I’ll be very good at this boyfriend thing, but you make me want to try,” Lane admitted.
Trevor smiled. “Better at it than you think.”
It was hard to say whether it was the date or the coffee he was more worried about but Lane didn’t sleep all that great that night, tossing and turning, Trevor snoring away cutely next to him.
By the time Lane’s alarm went off, he absolutely needed the caffeine hit. Could maybe do without the potential side dish of familial guilt, but Lane knew he’d earned it, at least.
By the time he and his mom settled down at a corner table in Lane’s favorite coffee shop, conveniently partway between his building and the rental their parents were staying in, Lane was feeling a special kind of apprehension.
“Stop looking so worried,” she said first thing, though, laughing under her breath. “I’m hardly going to lecture you in a public place.”
“I know, just . . . I know I didn’t handle everything all that well,” Lane admitted. “I should have been honest, maybe. Trevorkeeps telling me that I shouldn’t feel bad about it, but it’s hard not to. Especially when in the next breath he tells me that he wishes hehadknown how I felt, back then.”
Delia reached out for his hand and took it, squeezing it hard. “I wish you had told me the truth, but I understand why you didn’t feel like you could.”
Lane hadn’t known how much he’d needed that admission until it was out of his mom’s mouth.
“Yeah?”
“Baby, for so long it was just you and me. Us against the world. Really, though,meagainst the world, because I never wanted you to feel responsible—”
“I did, though, and I’mgladI did,” Lane interrupted. “It wasn’tonlyyou. I never wanted it to be only you.”
“Sure, but I was still your mother,” Delia said firmly. “And it was okay if itwasonly me. But the fact is, it was just the two of us, and I thought forever that you would tell me anything. That you did tell me everything. And I began to realize you didn’t, that first summer when you came back after college. I thought maybe you were just pissed about Tom and me getting married.”
“No, I was so happy for you. So happy I didn’t want to fuck it up,” Lane said hurriedly. He squeezed her hand back. “And I thought I would. Thought maybe I’d come back, and it would be different. That I’d feel differently, but I didn’t. It was worse.”
“And so you left.” His mom’s eyes went soft and devastated.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” Lane admitted.
“Oh, baby.”
“Seemed better to not be there, fucking it all up.” It was hard to even go back to that time, how hopeless and shitty it had felt. How much he’d wanted to feelanythingelse.
“You wouldn’t have, you couldn’t have. If you’d told me—” Delia broke off. “I don’t know what I’d have done.”
“Exactly,” Lane said.
“No, I mean, we would have figured something out, and at the very least, if you’d ended up doing the exact same thing, at least you wouldn’t have been alone with it. I’d have been there for you.” She shot him a firm look. “Don’t do that again, okay? Don’t just shoulder something like that again.”
“I won’t, I promise,” Lane said.
It wasn’t hard to promise that, if only because there weren’t any other big secrets he was harboring, but also because he didn’twantto do that again. It had sucked enough the first time, and he wasn’t going to make those same mistakes.
Especially not now that he’d actually gotten the person he’d wanted, so fucking bad, all those years ago.
“And if anything goes south, I don’t want it to tear this family apart—you might not be brothers, but you’re always going to be family,” his mom said.
Lane rolled his eyes but it was easy enough to nod. That was an understandable concern, but he knew, the way he’d always known, that he and Trevor weren’t going to go south.
“And now you have Trevor.” His mom smirked at him. “You wanna talk about it?”
“Ugh, Mom,” Lane complained.
“I mean it, I want to know how it happened.”
