The Foster Family (18 page)

I squinted, but even through the haze of poor sight, I could see that the bed was not the same heavy, iron-framed one that I’d slept in the night before. This was a larger sleigh bed with dark wood head- and footboards. The toy cabinet in the corner was gone. Bookshelves lined that wall, all filled with my books, neatly organized by the colors of their spines, from what I could tell without being able to identify them all from their blurry outlines.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Just….” Malcolm straightened and backed to the middle of the room, hands on his hips. “Thought you needed your own space. I figured you should be able to pick your own paint scheme, though. You might not like what I pick out. I always hated moving into a new room, and the foster parents would have it all painted up and made so generically boy I felt like I was in some bad version of an afterschool-special movie set. New fosters were the worst. The ones who’d been around a bit, at least all they did was buy new sheets and throw away all the old toys and games that were broken. There was always broken stuff. Missing pieces. I hated that.”

He sounded a little bit manic.

“Malcolm?” Charlie said, stepping into the room.

“I know, I know,” he said, glancing at Charlie, then back to the dresser he’d just moved. “Your mom”—he shifted to look at me—“she loves this furniture. But she likes the pine shelf bed too. I moved that into her room and put the iron bed Alistair’s mom gave us in that room. She’ll get a kick out of sleeping in it.” He almost giggled, and the sound was so out of place coming from him even I began to worry.

“You didn’t have to do all this,” I said, moving closer to the bed to get a better look at it. The sheets and blankets were all purple and beige—a weird combination that was probably better blurry. It was neatly made, and I got that odd, trying-too-hard feeling that Malcolm had talked about. When you walked into a new foster home, sometimes they tried so hard to make you feel at home it felt more like you were being committed.

“You know, I realized,” Malcolm said, turning to me, “what you must have thought after that first day with the blowjob, and then the shower and the night sleeping in here. I mean, it was obvious what kind of room it was.” He pointed upward. “Hooks? And locked cabinets? Might as well have left the chains on the bed, right?”

“Oh God,” Charlie muttered.

I flushed. “I didn’t mind,” I assured him.

Malcolm nodded. I was too blind without my glasses to see subtleties in his expression, but I saw him square his shoulders. “Don’t worry, Charlie,” he said, and his voice had changed. Gone was the edge of hysteria. “I’m not freaking out.”

“Oh?” Charlie didn’t sound at all convinced.

“I was. I almost did.” He rubbed a hand over his stomach, just above his belt, and Charlie watched the motion intently. It meant something in the same sort of way Lissa’s motion had, but obviously, whatever Malcolm was protecting was something that made them both uneasy and made Charlie’s titanium shield slip a bit.

“But then I realized and I came back.” He fixed a gaze on Charlie, who watched him and was probably studying the nuances in his face I couldn’t make out. “I haven’t lost my temper in a long time.”

“No,” Charlie agreed. “You haven’t.”

“You’ve made everything so easy for me, you know,” Malcolm told his lover. “So easy. I forgot how this feels.”

“How what feels?” Charlie asked.

Malcolm smiled wide. That expression, I could see. Nor could I miss the way his body swayed slightly, his hips loosened, and his feet shifted across the carpet so he was close to Charlie, gazing at him and only him as though I was not only gone from the room but simply didn’t exist in that moment. “Us. How we feel. When we’re here, not just marking time. How life feels when….”

“When you’re not numb,” Charlie said.

Malcolm nodded. “I’m so sorry.”

Charlie nodded. His attention was all on Malcolm, then, his face soft, gaze riveted. Malcolm did it for him. Even through the blur I could see it in the lines of his body and the tilt to his head, hear it in the way he sighed and see how his throat worked. He wasn’t just turned-on. He was in love. He was ready, and all Malcolm had to do was speak.

I instantly understood. It didn’t even matter what Malcolm asked of him. If he asked nothing at all, as maybe had been the case lately for who knew how long, that would be okay too. Charlie was his. Heart, soul, mind, down to the tiniest kernel of his being. Bodies were only the very tippiest tip of that iceberg.

Silently, I let myself out of the room and hurried for the garden. There was plenty to do there to keep my mind off my libido. The plants had arrived from the nursery, so I could deposit those where they were eventually going to be planted. I didn’t need glasses to dig holes, but I was sure I could find someplace that needed a hole. Maybe one big enough I could hide out in it until the pheromones had worn off.

I
WORKED
until it was dark, ordered food in with the two twenties left on the kitchen counter next to the phone with a note telling me to do just that, and went to bed without seeing or hearing from either of them again that night. I didn’t sneak up to their door to eavesdrop on what I might be able to hear. I didn’t go to any lengths at all to find out if they’d eaten or cared to. I showered, ate, and curled under the odd-colored sheets to listen to the house settle. When I rolled onto my back to watch headlights scrape across the ceiling as cars occasionally passed on the road outside, I noticed a discolored patch of plaster up there. The hook was gone.

So the dynamic had changed again, and I had no idea where it left me. Gardener? Roommate? Boarder? Houseboy? Boy toy seemed to be off the table, and while I supposed that was meant to make me feel better, it left me floating in a sea of uncertainty. I didn’t like it there. I’d never been a very strong swimmer.

Sighing, I rolled over and eventually slept. In the morning, I waited in my room until I heard Charlie say good-bye before I snuck to the bathroom.

When I came out, Malcolm was standing between the bathroom door and mine, leaning on the wall, a cup of coffee in hand.

He held it out. “Truce?”

I accepted the offering with a shrug. “Was there a war?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Was there?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Yesterday—”

“Was weird.”

He agreed.

“Can I go put pants on?” I asked. “If we have to talk and sh—everything, can I at least be clothed?”

From that question, he came to the conclusion: “You don’t think we need to talk.”

And I guess he was right. I didn’t. Also, I couldn’t decide if he was asking me that or not, or if he sounded upset about it. Or if he was feeling anything at all. He was confusing, and not being able to see his face clearly was driving me nuts.

“I think we have to go shopping for more bookshelves.” I pointed to the mess he’d made of the living room. “I think I have to find out if I have enough money for new glasses, because I’m going to get headaches without them. And I think….” I glanced through the open door to my room, sipped my coffee, and nodded to myself. “Mauve.”

“Mauve?”

“To match the sheets,” I told him. “I’ll paint the walls mauve to match the sheets you gave me.”

“Oh.” He frowned hard enough I could see it. “I hate those sheets.”

“Thank God,” I said, heartfelt. “Because I was beginning to wonder how crazy you actually are.”

That earned me a look, but he said nothing.

If it was over the line, he let me get away with it. But I didn’t think it was. Charlie said he was fragile. That he broke easily. I think Charlie had the wrong end of that stick. I thought probably, Malcolm had been broken. He gave off the air of a person who had places he would not go because he knew what those places looked like and wasn’t interested in ever visiting them again. But he was not fragile.

“You’re not afraid of me,” he said after a moment.

I smiled at him. “There are a lot of things to be afraid of in the world, Malcolm. You aren’t one of them.”

“How can you be so sure?”

There is never an explanation for a gut feeling. It is what it is. So I didn’t answer him because there was no answer.

“I’ll go get dressed and we can go shopping,” I said instead.

He must have been content with that answer because he wandered back to the kitchen while I went into my room to find clothes.

S
HOPPING
WITH
Malcolm was a lot of fun, it turned out. Finally, here was a place he relaxed, let loose even.

“Your taste in home decor is… tragic.” He waved a hand at the bedside table lamps I loved. “Those are never getting in the front door of my house.”

“We both hated the sheets,” I reminded him, petting the lamp.

“Well, because they’re ugly. Maybe we should get you to the eye doctor before we do this.” He slapped my fingers. “Don’t touch that. You’ll get some on you!”

I laughed out loud, and he stared at me.

“What?” I stared right back.

“I’m not that funny.”

But I couldn’t wipe the grin from my face. “Yeah, you are. Can I have the lamps?”

“No.”

“Please?”

“Oh my God, sugar, move on.”

I laughed again because he called me sugar, and I was hardly even sweet, and he didn’t do endearments or the limp wrist thing in real life, so it was funny to see him lampoon.

My laughter brought out his smile.

“But seriously, there’s an eyeglass place at the mall across the street. Let’s go there. They have that glasses-in-an-hour service.”

“That only works if you have the money in an hour,” I reminded him reluctantly, turning my back on the thousand-dollar-price-tagged lamps and letting go of the game we’d been playing over them. “I’ll get them when Lissa pays me next week.”

“You work for me too, don’t forget. Come on.” He took my arm and guided me toward the store exit. “Consider it an advance.”

“Mal—”

“You’re really going to argue with me on this?”

“Well, no.” Because I was already getting a headache on top of the pain from the day before. I didn’t like being in pain.

“Good. Come on.”

I let him guide me out of the store, and we crossed to the mall where he left me to get my prescription checked and pick out frames while he found a coffee shop. He was back in time to approve my final choice.

“How do you pick out glasses when you can’t see what you’re looking at?” he asked, eyeing my selection critically.

“Or when half my face is the wrong color,” I muttered, studying again the bruising on my left side. “Guess?”

“Well, guess again.” He handed me the coffee he’d bought for me, sat in the chair beside mine, and picked another frame from the rack.

“Not that one,” I said, putting a hand over his before he could remove them from their perch. “The box.” I pointed to the box of economy frames sitting on the counter.

“Don’t be an ass,” he told me, and took the frames down. “Get those hideous things off your face.”

“Insulting my taste—”

“They are the best ones in the box, I grant you, but none of the frames in the box are nice. Trust me on this?”

I nodded. I didn’t have to trust him. I knew the glasses were gross. I also knew they were all I could afford, even if I was to be Malcolm Holmes’s private gardener.

He ignored my protest and set the expensive frames on my face.

The salesgirl sighed and gazed at me with big anime eyes.

“What?” I glared at her.

“They look good on you,” Malcolm said. “Don’t they look good on him?” he asked her.

If she sighed again and said something like “dreamy,” I was out of there.

“They do,” she agreed, “but I have something you’ll really like, I think.” She smiled at Malcolm, cutting me and my opinion completely out of the equation. “They’ll cost a little more—”

“No,” I said, but she had already smelled the money in the water and was shark enough to go after it.

“Be quiet.” Malcolm covered my hand in his when I began to raise it to pluck the frames from my face. “Show me,” he instructed her.

“Malcolm, for Pete’s sake,” I began, but he turned that tilt-head expression on me.

“Will you let me do this?”

“Why?”

He straightened up and squared his shoulders. “I’m not even going to answer that. You drink your caramel latte and think about it and I bet you’ll figure it out.”

“I don’t want to be your boy,” I blurted.

And thank God the woman was on the other side of the room and didn’t hear that gem come flying out of my mouth.

Malcolm turned to stare at me. “Pardon?”

“I mean, I do. I don’t. I—”

He squeezed my hand. “Spit it out, Kerry,” he said softly.

“I can earn my own way,” I said. “I can look after myself.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“I think you maybe think I’m an airhead. Not so smart. I swear, the last few weeks, that isn’t who I am. I have been looking after myself a long, long time.”

“I was a foster kid too, Kerry. I know what that’s like. Can I please be the one to show you that sometimes, there are people out there who want to look after you just because you’re worth looking after? Can you please just let me do this? Today, let me be your sugar daddy, or your man, or whatever it is you want to fill that title out with. Let me make decisions and look after you and buy you things because no one has ever done that for you and I want to be the one to do that. Please?”