He desperately hoped his mother didn’t ask him whenhe’dmade friends with Ty. He’d hate to have to give credence to church lady talk.
“You know Mr. Chiu was good friends with Leonard Morris. I’m sure he’s shared stories with his wife. And there were all those rumors that first year that someone tried to burn the school down—”
“Mom. I remember the rumors.” Because unlike his mother, Ollie had attended the school just after the incident. “And there was no attempted arson. It was chickens in the principal’s office.”
“Coooooool,” Mel said. “Mommy, can I bring chickens to school?”
Oh, that was not going to help Ollie’s case. Cassie caught Ollie’s eye over her daughter’s head and glared.
Yeah. As a parent, Ollie should know better now. He mouthed,Sorry.
“I don’t think so, sweetheart,” Cassie said. “Chickens are messy, and some people might be allergic.”
His motherhumphed as though this proved her point. “I just don’t think Theo should be spending time with this man. He can’t be a good influence. I can’t believe the school allows him on the property.”
Truly, Ollie was so looking forward to mentioning he’d moved in with this man his mother apparently hated. “I’m pretty sure the same principal invited him back, Mom.” And then, sensing an opportunity to soften her up, “Besides, his mother had just died. You can’t expect perfect behavior from a grieving kid.”
As he suspected, that got to her. The hard lines around her mouth softened. “Oh, Ollie. Of course you have a soft spot for him.”
What? he wondered, and then he realized she thought he was sympathetic because his own kid had lost his mom.
“Has Theo been having problems?”
Ollie glanced at his niece, but the game had started, and she and Cassie were getting into it, cheering as Peter Chiu struck out the first batter. “No. I mean, not more than the usual expected stuff.” He still had nightmares, and on the drive up from DC, they’d passed a dead deer on the side of the road, and he’d spent five minutes asking questions about what would happen to its body. But they had gotten past most of the argumentativeness and the impulsiveness. “He’s starting to make friends. I think the therapy really helps.” He still talked to Dr. Vaughn twice a month on Skype.
“I’m glad he’s doing well, honey. You’re a good dad. I wish—I wish we’d known sooner?”
Damn it. Ollie wished that too, if only because it would have made his life easier now. Two weeks after Allison died, when Theo was still barely talking to him, Ollie had woken up from a fitful nap in a hospital chair to find Theo sobbing from a nightmare that Ollie had died too and there was no one to take care of him.
Ollie had promised that wouldn’t happen, that he was safe and healthy, but if something happened, there were people Theo hadn’t even met yet who loved him and would look after him. And now Theo was hedging on getting to know them.
Dr. Vaughn thought it might be because he’d decided Ollie couldn’t die if he didn’t have a backup plan, which made Ollie want to curl up for a nap at the bottom of a bottle of tequila.
“I know, Mom,” he said finally. “Things with Allison—it was complicated. I thought if I told you, you’d pressure us to get married, and we weren’t ever like that.”
“You liked her enough to have a baby with her,” his mother pointed out.
Jeez. Ollie’s ears burned. “It’s not like we did it the old-fashioned way, Mom.”
On Mel’s other side, Cassie stifled a snicker. So she was multitasking—eavesdropping and watching the game at the same time. Ollie was so glad he could provide some amusement.
“Well, maybe you could use some old-fashioned romance.”
They should serve beer at high school sports games. She hadn’t even made it five minutes. “Mom—”
“I’m just saying. It’s not like you’d be replacing Allison, since you weren’t everlike that.” He should’ve known she’d throwthose words back in his face. He made a note to stop volunteering information in the future. “It might help Theo feel more stable.”
Using his kid against him was another low blow he should’ve seen coming.
The truth was, Ollie’s parents loved him. They wanted what they thought was best for him. But that had always manifested in trying to plan his life by other people’s milestones instead of what Ollie would have chosen for himself. He was good at football and baseball, so he should have gotten a college scholarship, then either gone pro or put his free education to good use to help send his sisters to school. Ollie liked sports, but he didn’t want to play forever, and he didn’t have a clue what he might want to do after college. The pressure of trying to decide when he wasn’t ready had driven him into the local Army recruitment office.
Somehow that had actually worked out for him, apart from the fact that he was now thirty-two and still didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. But he didn’t think it was a good idea to try the same tactic to avoid having his parents arrange his personal life. What would that even look like? Running away to Vegas with a mail-order bride? Joining a religious order and taking a vow of chastity?
Neither option held any appeal. Ollie could do without sex fine, but he wasn’t going to pretend to be religious about it.
Unfortunately, the third option was telling his parents the truth, and Ollie had never been very good at that either, at least not when it came to his love life. Especially since he didn’t really understand the truth himself.
It had been easier when he was a teenager, a raging mess of hormones attached to a dick that got hard when the wind blew the right way (and frequently when it didn’t). But halfway into his first deployment, that constant level of desire faded. Ollie’d thought he was justbusy. Not dying took up a lot of his time, and it wasn’t like he had a lot of privacy. He had more important things to worry about than why he didn’t want to hump his CO’s leg.
