Page 75 of Bull's Boy

When he turned back to her, her eyes were huge as they took in Bull. Her surprise reminded him that no one at the party knew who Bull was, so for the first time since they’d started seeing each other, he actually had to introduce the man.

“Oh, sorry, this is my boyfriend, Bull. Bull, this is my cousin Sarah.”

“Nice to meet you,” Bull said, slipping his hand back into Malcolm’s.

“Boyfriend,” she repeated weakly, her eyes still glued on Bull. After a second, she seemed to shake herself out of it and turned back to him, pulling him into another, tighter hug. “Good for you, sweetie,” she said softly. “But dear lord, thesizeof him.”

Malcolm laughed so hard he snorted.

It took almost half an hour for them to finally get his parents alone. Every time they’d moved closer to them, his mom or dad would notice someone else theyhadto go talk to, and they’d skirt away.

Malcolm was pretty sure Bull had been about to throw one of the white folding chairs that surrounded half a dozen eight-foot-long tables in the yard right over the fence to get their attention when his parents went inside to grab some refills for the food.

Grabbing Bull’s hand, Malcolm excused them from a conversation with someone he was pretty sure Evan worked with—though the guy hadn’t actually said when he’d walked up and started talking to them—and hustled them across the crowded space, smiling at the couple of people who made eye contact with him.

As soon as they were in the kitchen, sliding the door closed behind them, his nerves bubbled up inside him, and he thought for a second he was going to be sick right there on the hardwood floor.

His mom glanced over at them and then went back to digging through the fridge. His dad was cutting up half of a watermelon and didn’t look up from what he was doing. Bull’s hand tightened around his, and he knew that he noticed.

“Mom, Dad, I wanted to introduce you to someone.”

“Oh?” his mom said, pulling out a large tub of what looked like potato salad and setting it on the island near where his dad worked.

“Yeah.” When neither of them stopped what they were doing, he lost his patience. “Can you both look at me, please?”

They sighed almost identically, like it was the most inconvenient thing in the world.

“What is it?” his dad said, while neither one even bothered to look at Bull.

“I wanted to introduce you to my boyfriend. This is Bull Eaton. Bull, these are my parents, Michelle and Dave.”

His mom squinted at him, looking a little confused, and his dad finally glanced at Bull and then went back to cutting the watermelon.

“Okay,” his mom said slowly, then picked up her tub of potato salad. “Is that it? I need to get this outside.”

He tried not to let it hurt him. He almost wished they would have gotten mad or that they would have railed at him about how he couldn’t be gay, how no son of theirs would date a man. Instead, they just… didn’t care. Like with everything else in his life.

His mom walked over to the door, and Bull moved out of the way, still opening it for her despite looking like he was about to crack a tooth.

“Wait, did you say Eaton?” she said and glanced at Bull once more. “Are you Sally Eaton’s boy?”

“One of them,” Bull said tightly.

She glanced at Malcolm and shook her head. “His family owns the restaurant you work at, don’t they?”

Malcolm’s spine straightened at the disgust in her voice, and he took back his wish from a moment ago. He wasn’t sure how she knew that. Sure, Knotting Pine was a small town, but it wasn’t like his parents came into Bo’s. At least, they hadn’t since he’d started working there.

He tilted his chin up, refusing to be ashamed when his relationship with Bull was the most caring and loving of hiswhole life. “Yes, that’s how we met and became friends before we started dating.”

“Typical,” she said under her breath as she stepped outside. “Always looking for the easy way out.”

He stared at her, gaping, and then made the mistake of glancing at his dad, some primal instinct looking to him to defend him. But he knew better, or at least he should have. It didn’t seem like his dad was paying attention. Or he was pretending not to have heard what his wife had said to their son and the implication of it.

“Let’s go,” he said softly, and Bull was practically dragging him across the house a second later.

He shouldn’t have come. He definitely shouldn’t have let Bull come with him. He didn’t even know why he had insisted on it anymore. They’d been there half an hour, had only seen his brother in passing, and he’d been called a whore for the second time that day—third, if he counted Bull teasing him about his dick sucking skills.

This was somehow even worse than his landlord propositioning him.

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