Skyler
Already, Skyler knew that he had never met anyone quite like Craig.
On the surface of it, Craig was just the typical jock who had made life hell for Skyler in high school. The pain in the ass who couldn’t take anything seriously, other than making fun of Skyler for everything about him. His quietness, his studiousness, the way he could focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else so that he wouldn’t hear if someone outright spoke to him.
The homophobic comments hadn’t taken long to follow. Of course, everyone as involved with band and choir as Skyler was got it pretty bad from the jocks, but Skyler had had those strikes against him and also his inherent weirdness.
All of that should have made Craig the absolute last person that Skyler would want to be around. But he kept finding his thoughts drifting back to the other man. Honestly, at first, even Malcolm and Logan had made Skyler a bit nervous, with their bluntness and their hugeness. Derrick had been refreshing to Skyler, who had had some fascinating conversations with him. Derrick was huge, but Derrick was as cerebral as Skyler himself was.
Craig should have been no different than his older brother, Malcolm, who was perfect for Kyle but who still intimidated Skyler a little. Or maybe he should have been an even more extreme version of toxic masculinity, having been in the military and everything.
But there was something about him. Something that kept him drifting back into Skyler’s brain. He pushed him away each and every time, because of all of the people to be attracted to, Craig wasn’t a good one. No one thought that Craig would be around long. The assumption was that he was going to re-enlist, as soon as he could do so without being a terrible person.
Maybe he wasn’t attracted to Craig, though. Maybe it was just that he had never known anyone like him. He was not like Malcolm, who was serious to a fault and overly responsible. He was always cracking jokes, always making people around him laugh, and Skyler had so little of that in his own life.
That was probably it. It was just, as weird as it was for Skyler to think it, fun to be around Craig. Every time he thought about Craig pulling him close into that ridiculous tango, it made him smile. That was all it was, and that was fine. That was good, even.
It made it okay that he was looking forward to their outing. It wasn’t romance or sex or any of the things that Skyler had always avoided. Had had a good reason for avoiding.
Just as he thought that his phone rang, and he sighed as he glanced at the call display. Wonderful. Just what he needed. But old habits die hard, and he reached for the phone, pressing the green button on the screen to accept the call.
“Mom, I’m busy,” Skyler told her, without preamble. It wasn’t even untrue. He was. The job of keeping this ranch afloat was largely on Skyler’s shoulders now. He had to track all of the many ways that it seemed to bleed out money and try to stem the tide as much as he could.
It wasn’t easy, his job, but there was no point in telling that to his mother. Not again. She had always been after him to do something more challenging with his life. Even when he had been working for Kyle, the lawyer, that hadn’t really been good enough for her. And working on a ranch was just inconceivable to her.
“Oh, I know, sweetheart,” she replied, her tone dripping the honey that Skyler knew, better than anyone, could turn to pure, bitter bile at the drop of a hat. “And I wouldn’t dream of keeping you from something so important for long, trust me.”
Which was, of course, exactly what she was doing. Skyler waited, though, knowing through long experience that that was the best way to go, just to wait her out. She would get bored and tell him what she wanted soon enough.
He held the phone against his ear with his shoulder, letting his silence speak for him. He even started to peer at the spreadsheets he was working with. Rude, probably, but she wasn’t exactly being polite, either.
Whatever it was, it was clearly important, though, because she started to speak almost immediately. She had been known to wait as long as five minutes, just holding the line in some sort of power trip to make Skyler speak first. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, usually depending on how patient she was.
“Your sister is getting married.”
Skyler hadn’t expected that. He had honestly expected some sort of lecture about how he should come back home, where he belonged, how he should stop, in her words,messing around on that filthy farm. And she didn’t even know the half of it. For instance, she had no idea that his employer was a man who had just married another man. He hadn’t mentioned it, because why would he? What point would there be in that? He tried to tell her as little as possible.
“Hannah is getting married?” Skyler repeated, amazed. Somehow, he tended to think of Hannah as the teenager that she had been when Skyler had left home as a young adult. He had gotten his own apartment, and neither he nor his parents had used the termkicked outbecause he had not been a minor.
“Yes, she is. In six months,” she replied, and Skyler shook his head slightly. He had never thought much about marriage, and here he was, having just come from his best friend’s wedding yesterday, and now hearing about his sister’s.
“Oh. Can you pass her the phone so I can congratulate her?” Skyler requested. He wasn’t sure why he was getting this phone call, rather than Hannah calling him, but there was no reason he saw that he needed to stand for it.
“Hannah has moved out,” she said, and Skyler heard a note of sadness in her voice, one that made his heart give an uncomfortable squeeze in his chest. It made the whole situation so much more complicated when he saw her as a human and a complex one. She had caused him so many problems, but she was his mother, and he couldn’t help but love her.
And there was compassion, too, because both of her children had left home. That had to be hard.
Mostly, though, he was just happy for Hannah. He had worried about her a little as she neared her mid-twenties and was still living at home. Of course, with housing costs being what they were in Seattle, and her wanting to finish her degree, it made a fair bit of sense for her to do it.
“Okay. Then I want Hannah’s number,” Skyler said, his tone as calm and matter-of-fact as he could make it. It was nothing short of ridiculous that he didn’t have it yet. That he and Hannah, who were both adults now, were still being held apart by their mother.
“I’ll give you her number, but only if you agree to do me a favor in the future,” she said, and Skyler frowned, suspecting that this wasn’t a good idea.
“What sort of favor?” he asked, and she gave a soft, bitter little laugh in response.
“Whatever I ask, without question. I mean it, Skyler. This is your sister’s wedding. And don’t think that you can look her number up, either, because she’s living with her fiancé.”
She was actually trying to force him to make a promise or risk missing his sister’s wedding. A promise that was definitely going to be something that he didn’t want to do. And there was no doubt in his mind that she wouldn’t hesitate to withhold his information from Hannah, either. She had been doing so for years.
