I was sittingon a bench in the crowded—relatively speaking, anyway—Green Bay airport, waiting for Noah and Lulu to deplane and come out through security. There were quite afew people, and the harried expressions of the TSA agents and coffee shop workers told me this was insanely busy for them—even though there were far fewer people than I’d expect in even Richmond’s not-terribly-large airport.
I yawned, my body and brain still tired after a night of not-enough sleep and a morning of scrubbing the living shit out of the carpet by the door. I’d mostly gotten the blood out.
Mostly.
If you knew where to look, you could see the discoloration. It didn’t screambloodanymore, but I was pretty sure Taavi would be able to smell it. God knew I still could.
Which meant Noah would, too. And probably Elliot, although his sense of smell wasn’t quite as strong as mine.
Merry Christmas, smell the blood.
And then I felt like a horrible person, because here I was, bitching internally about the fact that my brother and Lulu were coming to a house that had a plywood-covered door and bloodstains on the floor, and I’d completely forgotten that this had happened to Elliot last year, too, when he’d been attacked and dragged out of the house and almost murdered.
I love you.
I love you, too.
What spurred that?
Just thinking about you.
I wasn’t going to remind him what had happened last year.
I think I’m going to redo the whole patio door thing.
Maybe build a porch.
That door and I do not have good history.
I wasn’t going to be the one to suggest it.
Maybe next year we do Richmond for Christmas.
Unless your brother has a patio door.
No.
But he’s gonna move in with Lulu.
Who has a back deck.
As long as no one uses it to break in.
It’s up a floor.
Great. Next year, Christmas in Virginia.
I didn’t actually know anything more about Lulu’s deck. I knew Noah had talked about the deck—Lulu had one of those houses that was ground floor on the front but second floor with an exposed lower level on the back. There was also a hot tub, although I wasn’t clear if that was on the deck or down on the ground.
But I did like the fact that Elliot was talking aboutnext year. That meant that he was thinking about being with me for at least that long. It made me feel as though I wasn’t just the guy he was with now—I was the guy he wanted to stay with.
I supposed I had plenty of evidence that was true—the fact that he wanted me to live with him, that he trusted me to help him clear out his dad’s office, that he let me see past the stoicism, and, if Hart was to be believed, that he let me use his tools.
But he’d also triednotto date me for so long that I couldn’t help but wonder if he hadn’t just given in because it was easier than arguing about it.
Okay, I was pretty sure that wasn’t true. But there was that niggling little voice in the back of my head that I was starting to recognize might have been my father’s. The one telling me I was unworthy. That I was a failure. A weakling and a coward. Not enough of a man.
Usually, I deal with my past—the one Noah and I share—pretty well. I don’t wallow in self-recrimination and I don’t consider myself a corrupt sinner. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the whole concept ofsin, at least as my father defined it, was just a means of control and manipulation.
