Page 75 of Just Forever

I shrug one shoulder. “You win some, you lose some.”

The loss stings, but most of my brain has been occupied with Lake ever since I got off the ice earlier tonight.

He lets out a soft laugh and throws me a look over his shoulder. “Stop being so mature. You’ll make the rest of us look bad.”

I kiss his shoulder blade and roll off him. Lake lets out a sound of protest, but then he turns around and burrows against my side. I tug the comforter over our naked bodies and hug him even closer.

“How did your meeting with Scott go?”

He’s silent for a while, and I don’t know what he’s thinking. It’s a bit of a rare occurrence these days. Lake’s… He’s my other half, so I can read him like my favorite book. I can guess his thoughts from the look on his face or the tone of his voice. If he has a bad day, I usually notice the moment he comes home, even if he tries to hide it from me.

Now, I suddenly find myself in the dark.

I’m not a fan.

“It was good,” he says slowly before he raises his head a bit and looks at me. He’s frowning. “Yeah, I think it went well?”

Relief. That’s all I feel right now. It’s not that I expected this meeting to be an unmitigated disaster, exactly. It’s not even that I had any real expectations. But there’s a small part of me that was worried about the possible repercussions if it had all gone to shit.

Lake has been let down by too many people in his life already, and he still struggles with trust, so the possibility of Scott jumping in and fucking him up for no reason at all makes me feel violent.

“That’s good,” I say, as neutrally as I can.

“He says he wants to get to know me,” Lake adds with the kind of dubious expression he gets on his face whenever somebody expresses any interest in him as a person. And now I feel violent again.

It’s not just that John abandoned Lake when he found out Lake wasn’t his biological son. No. It goes much deeper than that. By abandoning Lake, he also shattered all the self-confidence Lake had. I don’t even think Lake himself realizes just how much it screwed him up as a person when his father—the man who raised him since birth—suddenly disappeared from his life and made damn sure to show Lake just how much he rejected him.

Lake was so busy trying to survive his messed-up home life for the better part of his childhood that I don’t think he ever stopped to map out the exact ways his parents’ shitty decisions have affected him as a person.

But that’s not really the point.

Lake is happy.

With me, the two of us together, in this life we keep building for ourselves, he’s happy.

I’ll be damned if I let anybody take it away from him or ruin it for him.

“I’m not a hundred percent sure he means it,” Lake continues, still with that frown. “But I guess I’m taking the chance. We went out to dinner, and it was pretty nice. He asked about my life, and I told him about school and where I live.” He sends me a quick look. “Not about us,” he adds quickly, and I hate that he feels the need to do that.

“You could if you wanted to,” I say.

“He hasn’t earned it. At least not yet.”

I leave that topic be for now. On the one hand, I agree he hasn’t earned it yet. On the other, we do need to have that talk. About these secrets we’re keeping and how they affect us in the long run. I can’t keep him hidden forever. It’s so fucking unfair to even ask him that, and the more days pass, the more I feel that it’s unfair to ask me that, too.

But that’s a discussion for another day. Right now, we have a full plate.

“Okay,” I say. “What’s his plan, then?”

“No idea. I mean, he said he’d call next week because he’ll be in town again. Some kind of meeting or something. Whatever.”

His tone is, for all intents and purposes, bone dry. But I can hear the hope. That faint, so, so careful hope that rings through the sardonic edge of his voice.

I hurt because of that tiny increment of hope. It shouldn’t be there. It should be something irrefutable and undeniable and absolute that Lake is wanted. A law of nature.

A law of Lake.

“I won’t get my hopes up,” he says. “Scott’s not exactly known for being reliable. At least he didn’t used to be back when I knew him. He once promised to take me go-karting. It was Christmas, and I was eight, and he gave me one of those gift cards to ourlocal track and promised he’d take me once spring hit. I’m still waiting for that.”

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