Page 36 of Nicks and Cuts

“Have I missed your birthday?” Why hadn’t Shannon said anything?

Shannon smiled and shook his head. “It’s next month.”

“Can I ask how old?”

“Twenty-seven.”

He was glad he hadn’t missed Shannon’s birthday and that Shannon wasn’t handing out his address to anyone and everyone.

“If I’d known they were coming, I would’ve said something.” Shannon tucked in the edges of the blanket. “It’s a long way to come just to stop in and say hi.”

“Did they used to drop in unannounced?”

“Sometimes, usually they’d invite me around for dinner and ambush me.” He didn’t say it with malice, but there was something in his tone that didn’t sit right with Dante.

“I’d give anything for my parents to turn up and ambush me.” Not that his parents would. They’d always let him know if they were coming to see him, but mostly he used his leave to come home and see them.

“I know, I’m being a dick.”

“I didn’t say that.” Shannon knew his parents better than anyone else.

“You didn’t need to. I’m bitching about my parents driving over eight hours to come and see me.” He grimaced. “If they’d call to tell me, that would’ve been different.”

“Why?” Dante placed two fresh towels on the end of the bed.

“Mom is going to want an extra towel for her hair.”

Dante fetched a third towel. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Because I’m trying to think of an answer that makes sense instead of just vibes. I think it’s because instead of giving me the chance to say no, or this weekend doesn’t work. How about next weekend? They just assume that I can drop everything for their emergency.”

As far as Dante could tell, there was no emergency, yet for Shannon to be reacting like this, there was clearly an old wound. “Do you usually drop everything?”

Shannon crossed his arms and pressed his lips together. “I did it first. I was still living at home, and I had a proper full-time job, so of course if an unexpected bill came up or they just didn’t have the funds, I dealt with it.”

“Were you paying board?”

“Yeah. I’d been paying board since I had any kind of job. It was all part of contributing to the family—everyone chipped in. It’s how we made it through some very lean months when the housing market was shit, and Dad hadn’t sold anything, and Mom hadn’t pulled any commercials or voice-overs. We weren’t poor; we always had a house and some kind of food…but we were always juggling, and it wasn’t until I was sixteen that I really started to understand most people didn’t live like that. I had friends who had it better, and I also had friends who had it way worse. I was always in this weird spot.”

It sounded chaotic. It was no wonder Shannon thrived in a job which needed calmness when everything else was falling apart in catastrophic fashion.

“I sound like an ungrateful shithead, but it feels like they’ve turned up unannounced to shake up whatever stability I’ve been trying to build. They expected me to fail and come home weeks ago.”

“Did they tell you that?”

Shannon snorted. “Yes. They said I wouldn’t be able to hack small-town life as it wouldn’t suit my lifestyle. That’s because they’ve only seen me date people who are chasing their dream, just like them. The whole point of getting out of LA was to break old habits. To start over and grow some balls and learn to tell people no. And I failed on my second day in town.”

“Pride.”

“Yeah.”

“They don’t know about…” Dante indicated between the two of them.

“No, I would never out someone.”

Dante hadn’t been worried about himself, more that if his parents expected him to fail, he was willing to help Shannon prove them wrong. “So we just act like landlord and tenant.”

“I want to ask them why they’re really here.”