“It’s bad enough that one family didn’t want you,” he said. “At least foster families aren’t meant to be forever. Those people were all desperate for kids, just not me. Besides, I figured the DNA would be enough, and I wouldn’t have to….”
Boyd reached over the table and took his hand. He rubbed his thumb lazily over the underside of Morgan’s wrist, and Morgan wondered if he could feel the kick of blood under his skin. It was uncomfortable. Morgan had always been aggressively upfront about the fact that he liked to fuck guys, but it was different to besoftabout it. The urge to pull back was checked by… he didn’t want to.
“It’s okay,” Boyd said. “But Morgan… if you don’t remember anything before that man…?”
Morgan cringed. He knew what he was, a car thief and a crook, a problem people usually wanted to get rid of. Sometimes it meant he couldn’t care about who he hurt. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have a soul, that the thought of lying to some poor, grieving old woman didn’t turn his stomach.
“Don’t,” Morgan said. He might have to tell this lie—he couldn’t go back to jail, he’d barely survived last time—but he was only going to do it once. What he needed from Boyd was reassurance that, somehow, it was the right thing to do. “I’m not… and it’s for the best. What the hell do you think would happen if I were? She’d get her son back and then lose him again? What would that do to her? It’s not like I remember her or that I’m going to stick around this hole once Mac’s done with me.”
Boyd studied him. “At least she’d know, even if you left,” he said. “I mean, of course you would. It’s not like there’s anything you’d want to stay here for.”
“Nothing,” Morgan agreed. He might have to hurt these people, but maybe he could make it hurt less if they knew what an asshole he was. “Anything here I can find more and better somewhere else.”
He waited for Boyd to call him out on what a liar he was. Instead he just took his hand back.
“I guess you can,” he said as he looked away. “Lucky you’re not him, then, right?”
Yeah. Morgan watched Boyd dig into his hot dog. That was what he was—lucky. Thank God he wasn’t actually wanted.
Chapter Thirteen
IT HADbeen a three-hour drive to Morgantown—should have been two, but a Chevy fishtailed into a truck, and the crash caused a traffic jam—and the only slot the union rep could get for Boyd this month. So he should probably pay attention to what Tara Martinez said.
Boyd bounced his knee under the table and watched Tara’s mouth as it moved up and down. What came out was mostly white noise.
“Obviously serious accusations….” The cafe’s playlist had flipped back to the Bossa Nova cover of “Fever” for the third time. “… stellar record to date despite….” The student outside, in his camo jacket and Converse, was eating packets of sugar like candy, and that sounded good. “… any need for accommodations is always….” Should he have called Mac this morning and told him what Morgan said? Was that up to Boyd? Would he even have asked that a month ago, or would his loyalties have been… easier? “…based on the information you have, even if they won’t repeat it, you might need to consider your options.”
She finally stopped, took a quick sip of her coffee, and raised her eyebrows expectantly at Boyd as she waited for him to respond.
Shit.
Boyd looked down at his notebook. Before she’d taken his pen away from him because he was tapping it on the table, he’d written down her name and doodled a stick figure version of her in a firetruck. Useful. He flicked the book closed before she noticed and grabbed on to the last thing she’d said.
“What options?” he asked.
She sat back in the narrow chair and pursed her lips. “Off the record?”
Boyd shrugged. “Sure.”
“Transfer.”
Boyd closed his mouth, the click of his teeth loud inside his head, and stared at Tara for a moment. She tucked her hair, gray threaded through the black bob, behind her ear and let him absorb that.
“That’s not the advice I expected.”
“It’s not the advice I’d give everyone,” Tara said. She cupped her coffee cup in both hands, halfway to her mouth, as she talked. “And it’s not the advice I’ll give you on the record, but based on what you told me? Get out of there. Take it from a lesbian with the last name Martinez, you can fight, but you won’t win, not long-term. Even if you get them to back down on this, they’ll come after you again and again.”
“If I don’t stand up to them,” he protested weakly, “they’ll just do it again, to someone else.”
Tara nodded slowly. “If you want to fight them, I will back you up and respect the hell out of you,” she said. “But you have to go in with your eyes open about what you’re going to get. Justice, maybe. A career as a firefighter, probably not.”
“I can’t just transfer,” Boyd said. “Cutter’s Gap is my home. It’s—”
What? He’d bristled last night when Morgan said there was no reason for him to stay in Cutter’s Gap. But why should Boyd?
It wasn’t where his family lived. His mom was in Florida selling condos to snowbirds, and his only living grandparent was in Charleston, and no one had talked to her in twenty years. He had friends in Cutter’s Gap, but not really. It was always too hard to get that close to anyone, not with everyone in town ready totuttheir tongues at his disloyalty to the tragedy. Boyd wasn’t supposed to have other friends or be happy. He was meant to be the tragic little boy forever.
He’d stayed for the same reason he did most things in his life. Maybe that needed to change.
