The Foster Family (28 page)

“Tie me up,” Charlie said. His voice came out flat and breathy. “Tie me up if you’re going to fuck me.”

“Why? So you can’t fight me? Can’t push me off?” Malcolm tugged hard at his cock and squeezed his balls, and Charlie whimpered and growled practically in the same breath. He was fighting giving in, fighting his own desires and instincts, not fighting Malcolm. He resisted his own submission and begged Malcolm to make him do this at the same time.

He wanted what he very much didn’t want, and he wanted it more with every breath.

“Tie me up because you need me bound. Helpless.”

Malcolm pushed his face once more into the curve of Charlie’s neck, searching for his safe place. “I have you helpless, Charlie, because you’ll give me what you don’t want to give.”

“Mal….”

“And I’ll take it,” he said, giving up on finding a haven here tonight. He spit into his palm and greased his shaft inadequately. “And it’ll be hell because we both know…”

That our hearts aren’t in it.

He forced his way inside as Charlie hissed and panted and should have fought to pull away but didn’t. They shuffled and reached and tried, and eventually Charlie was on his knees and elbows, hands clasped against the back of his head, forehead pressed into his pillow as though holding himself down.

He wanted to be made to submit.

Malcolm wanted him to fight back.

Orgasm came indecently fast, blindsiding Malcolm, blacking out his brain and tightening his body until he couldn’t draw breath or move. At the end of the long, flashing tunnel was Charlie, tugging on his cock and making himself come just to get it over with.

For the first time in fifteen years, the pounding and the grunting and the orgasms were empty and pointless.

They lay, side by side afterward under the damp blankets, shivering and not touching. Not speaking. Oh, and Malcolm felt something. If he’d ever doubted his own capacity to feel, now he could lay that uncertainty to rest, because he felt. He felt like absolute shit.

I
WOKE
to an empty house and found Malcolm and Charlie out on the back porch, shivering in the weak sunshine when I brought them coffee. They accepted it without comment and nodded without looking at me when I told them I was heading to the school to get the gardens to a point I could have help from the kids when it was time.

It was like the rain had washed away the veneer of happiness and left two men who lived together but didn’t recognize each other. I handed over the photo album Malcolm had given me, and Charlie took it, looking up at me at last.

“I’m not in there,” I told him.

He nodded.

I waited a minute, but when he said nothing, I sighed.

“I’ll be at the school until lunchtime.”

He nodded again.

What else was there? It seemed I was already gone.

Malcolm did come through with the plane tickets for me. I would be out of their house within the week and my head was spinning. Come Monday morning and a ride to the airport, they’d have their life and their privacy back.

“You want us to bring your things to Lissa’s?” Charlie asked the Sunday before my plane was to leave. The school’s gardens were done, and Malcolm had agreed to look after my cat until I knew what I was going to do. I had a one-way ticket. Looking into his eyes, I couldn’t bring myself to say yes, even though, practically, I knew that would be best. She’d given me a leave of absence, told me Marcus would pick up more shifts and she’d hire a temp until I decided what I wanted to do. If I came back, my job would be here.

“Don’t know,” I told him. At least in this, I could tell him the god’s honest truth. “I don’t know how long I’ll be staying there. He might not want me around.”

It hurt to say that, but I had to be realistic. To me, he might be the closest thing to a father I understood. To him, I was another in a long line of foster kids he’d tried his best to help. If he held every one of us in his heart the way some of us held him, he’d be an emotional wreck of a man. The odds for success weren’t great for kids who aged out of the system. I thought maybe I’d done better than most so far, so maybe I had something to give back to Nash now, when he needed another healthy grown-up around.

“You just let us know,” Malcolm offered. “We’ll leave it all as it is until you come home.”

Charlie shot his lover a hard, angry look.

“If you don’t want my stuff here, Charlie,” I began, ignoring the tearing sounds that probably came from my heart being ripped out.

“I want to have my own goddamned fucking conversation with you without him hovering and giving all the answers. It’s none of his goddamn business.” He got up from the porch and jumped down to the yard, heading for the garden shed.

Malcolm stared after him, as naked in that moment as I’d ever seen him. When he turned that stripped look on me, I understood why he’d bought me a ticket across the country.

“I have to go,” I said.

He nodded.

And suddenly, it wasn’t about Nash needing me or Malcolm not wanting me. Maybe he did. Maybe he and Charlie both did, but I would be the putty, stuffed into the chinks in their relationship if I stayed, and that wasn’t a real fix.

They were coming unglued, and nothing I could do would mend that.

“I should talk to him,” I said.

“You think I haven’t tried?” Malcolm sounded so miserable. His dark eyes were liquid and sad, and everything about him was, as Charlie had always warned me, very malleable and fragile and insubstantial. He held himself together by force of will, but Charlie was the fountain of that source, and he was closing off.

“You’re not me,” I decided, getting up.

“He won’t hear it from you any more than he will from me.”

“Bullshit.” I went back to the kitchen, poured two new cups of coffee, fixed Charlie’s the way he liked, and went out into the garden after him.

He was savagely hacking at one of the low junipers out beyond the gazebo. I approached with caution.

“You’re going to maim the poor thing,” I warned him.

“Fuck off.”

“So Mr. Perfect can lose it after all,” I mused, sipping and watching and trying very hard not to let my heart beat a wildly suicidal path off the edge of the cliff that was falling for Charlie Stone.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You’ve dropped the F bomb more in the past five minutes than you have since I met you.”

He remained quiet, but his snips slowed at least, and fewer living branches fell from the plant as he worked.

“You’re breaking his rules just to spite him.”

“Fuck off,” he said again.

“Maybe even to hurt him,” I said instead of leaving. “Maybe to leave your own marks on him, like those hickeys he gives you.”

“Kerry.” His voice was all warning.

“Maybe because you want to scar him in ways that won’t heal.”

The big man whirled, and the clippers flew at me so fast I barely had time to duck out of the way. I lifted one hand to deflect them, and the mug I was holding shattered. Shards flew everywhere, stinging bits and pieces crashing over my hand and face, warm liquid splattering over skin. The sharp stings faded instantly, except for one in my hand and one on my face. A glint of ceramic caught the morning light, sticking from the meaty part of my palm where I clutched the broken handle of the mug. Warm, wet stickiness dribbled along my jaw.

Charlie stared at me, horror-stricken, and I did my best not to flinch as I looked at him.

“You see?” he rasped. “You fucking see what happens to me without him? I lose my fucking mind.”

“Stop swearing,” I whispered. “Charlie, just stop swearing. One step at a time.”

He nodded. “Let me look at your face.” He took a step closer and I lowered my arm.

“That cup was yours, by the way.” I carefully sipped my own coffee and grinned a small grin that didn’t move my cheek too much. “Tough luck.”

“God, Kerry, I’m sorry. I’m an idiot.”

“Yes.”

He turned my head to the light and examined my face. “Does it hurt?” he asked softly. Remorse colored his voice.

“My hand hurts more, actually.”

“We should go inside and get you cleaned up.”

“Malcolm is going to freak out.”

He sighed. “You have no idea.” He turned me toward the house, though, and kept a hand on my bicep as we went. “Kerry….”

“I have to go,” I said, anticipating.

“We need you.”

I stopped and turned to face him. “I can’t fix you, Charlie. I wish…. I can’t fix you guys. You need me out of the way so you can fix yourselves.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Please tell me you aren’t really that dense.”

He looked too sad, too frightened to really believe his own protests, though. And then Malcolm saw me as we walked up the porch steps, and the shit hit the fan. It was all I could do to keep him from going completely ballistic all over Charlie.

“You think I didn’t provoke him?” I snarled at Malcolm while he was backing Charlie into the corner of the kitchen counter. “You think it’s all him and I’m some angel who never mouths off—” I forced anger past fear and grabbed at Malcolm’s arm. “Leave him alone!” I’d never seen anyone so fiercely angry in my life.

“Oh, I know you mouth off”—he pointed a finger in my direction—“but he knows he has a temper, and you have never seen him lose it.”

“I have now.”

“You”—he pointed at me—“just hold your tongue and let me deal with this.”

“Because I’m just a stupid kid who needs looking after.”

They both stared at me.

“I never said that,” Malcolm protested.

“You don’t have to. It’s how you behave, taking me under your wing, leading me around like I’m on a leash, lapping up every bit of praise….” I trailed off before I dug myself a nice, deep, comfy grave of truth. Because I liked his praise and we all knew it. I did lap it up and waited at his feet for more. “No wonder Charlie needs his own identity away from you.” I dug at him instead, and it showed in his expression that I’d gone deep enough to hit a nerve.

He turned his back on Charlie. “Help him clean up.” It was all he said to either one of us. He stormed off into his office and slammed the door.

Charlie huffed out a breath. “That could have been worse.”

I didn’t see how. I hadn’t set out to piss them both off on the last day I had with them, but there it was. Just one more reason I had to get out of there before I not only ruined my chances with them, which I was pretty sure I had, but before I ruined their chances of fixing their own relationship.

The cuts weren’t bad. The tiny nick on my face wouldn’t even leave a mark, and the sliver in my hand hadn’t gone very deep. Charlie carefully picked it out and applied a Band-Aid.

“I don’t know how any of this happened,” Charlie mused as he smoothed down the last bit of pink plastic over my palm. “Everything was fine. We were jogging on the beach like we always do, and then there was you.”

I took a deep breath and tried to find the sting of his words, but surprisingly, there was none. “Charlie, my life history reads like… I’m the walking apocalypse, I swear.”

“Don’t be like that.”

“You know what happened to my parents, Charlie?”

“They were fuckups, like the rest of our parents?”

“No. I mean, I don’t think so.” I told him the story of their deaths as I knew it. Of course I didn’t actually remember any of it from firsthand experience. My father was dead before I was born, and my mom—I didn’t like thinking about her. I had a vague notion in my head that Lissa might look something like she would have looked had she made it past the age of sixteen.

“So you see? It started early. As a fetus, I was a menace.”

Charlie cupped my face, and I wondered if I’d told him the tale just to get him to do that, because I did so love it when he did. I closed my eyes and let myself melt into his touch. “You don’t honestly think you had anything to do with any of that,” he said, sounding so certain I knew he didn’t really expect an answer.

Who knew how the universe worked? I just shrugged. The laws of physics and logic said I was of no consequence in the grand scheme of the events that killed my parents. But something deep inside of me couldn’t help thinking if I didn’t exist, they might still be alive.

“A person could go on forever trying to understand the wiles of fate,” I said. Some shrink somewhere along the line had said that to me. He’d also said it was impossible to unravel logic that wasn’t there or find reasons where there were none.

“If you go back to Seattle and Nash now,” Charlie said, “what do I do?”

“With the mess I’m leaving behind?”

He laughed, a short, dry sound and pulled me against his chest. “It would be pretty easy to blame it on you.”

“Blame what on me, exactly?”

“How do I stay?” Charlie asked in the smallest voice I’d ever heard from a grown man. “How do I stay with him, knowing he isn’t enough? How do I tell him he isn’t enough and not crush him completely?”

I pushed away from him, both palms sweaty and planted on his chest to gain my freedom. “How the hell do you live with a guy, sleep with a guy, be in this kind of relationship with a guy for fifteen fucking years and not ever say any of this shit out loud to one another? How do you even do that? Andrew and I talked more than you two do, and he hated my guts. Hell, he hates his own guts. The only pillow talk we ever had was about his girlfriend and how ballistic she’d go if she ever found out about… us….” I blinked at Charlie. “Holy fuck, I’m an idiot. Where’s the phone?”