Page 10 of Chance's Choice
No. No, thinking like that isn’t going to help me. Not even if I let the voice in my head sound like Cher. Of course, now that I come to think of it, the lyrics to that particular song are more relatable than ever.Hmm…
No. Getting lost in ‘what if’s and regrets will only make it hurt more.
“I was too scared to come out,” the words tumble from my mouth without even connecting in my brain first. This is clearly a behavioral pattern around Chance. “I know I didn’t exactly screamstraightboy, but…”
“Your mom.” Chance finishes for me, his voice soft with understanding.
“My mom,” I agree on a sigh. While I was living under her roof, there was no way I was rocking that boat.
“I get it,” Chance tells me, and he startles me when he reaches for my hand and squeezes it. “Ineverbegrudged you for waiting to come out. Nobody should be forced to do that.”
Slivers of relief pierce through the churning guilt. “I came out the day I moved out,” I explain anyway, and Chance squeezes my hand again. My heart thumps wildly at the realization that he’s not letting go. “Mom took it about as well as I’d expected. But…we’re okay now. It took a few years, but…yeah. We’re okay.”
We’ve never really been that close, Mom and me. My Dad was a Navy man and he died when I was little. Too little to really remember him. Mom did her best raising me, but she never really recovered from the loss. And our ideologies and values never really aligned either.
The fact that I’ve been out and proud for two decades and she’s never once asked me about my love life or whether I’m going to bring someone home to meet her is equal parts a relief and depressing. I’m living my own version of ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ with her, but for the two or three conversations we have a year, it works well enough.
I look up to find Chance’s eyes on me. They’re narrowed, like he’s gauging the truth of my assessment of my relationship with my mother.
My heart beats even faster.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” he says.
I shake my head. “If I can’t apologize anymore, neither can you.”
That earns me a wry laugh, and the sound sets about a thousand butterflies loose in my belly. I haven’t made Chance laugh in twenty years, but the sound is as pleasant as it always was, if a bit deeper and containing more gravel now. His whole Daddy vibe is on point.
“All right, that’s fair,” he agrees, then pulls his hand from mine to offer it towards me for a handshake. “Clean slate?”
Hope blooms inside me for the first time in what feels like forever.
Admittedly, I feel like I’m getting off light here. That his forgiveness has come too fast, too easily. But that has always been Chance. He always was too quick to forgive me when we were kids, as well, not that I ever fucked up as monumentally as that last time. Still, I would be stupid to look a gift horse in the mouth, and I have to trust that he knows what he’s doing.
The guilt starts to fade away as I clasp his larger, meatier palm with mine. His skin is smooth and warm to touch. I grin and nod, “Clean slate.”
* * *
“You didn’t have to drive me home,” I tell Chance later as he pulls up outside my apartment building. I hadn’t driven to the auction as I’d planned on drinking at the event. Now I’m glad I didn’t do either of those things because I have a clear mind and more time with Chance.
If someone had told me that I’d be ending tonight on speaking terms with my former best friend -and my biggest regret- I would have laughed my pert little ass off. But here I am, and so is Chance.
He’s in the driver’s seat of his shiny red truck, and I’m beside him in the passenger seat. This is his baby, he’d told me, and it’s obvious he takes great care of it. It’s not a super new model, but the dash and steering wheel are practically gleaming from polish, and there’s not a speck of dust to be seen. The leather seats are also well conditioned, with no scuff marks, tears, or cracking.
Chance’s suit jacket is discarded on the bench seat between us, and he’s already unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled his sleeves to his elbows. I feel like a Jane Austen character, getting giddy at the sight of exposed, masculine forearms – thick, strong, and covered in cinnamon colored hair.
Flash me some ankle, Daddy…
I smother a chuckle at my absurd thought, then swallow the panic over my brain’s choice of title. Chance is a Daddy, yes. But he’s not my Daddy and I, more than anyone else, have no right to think of him that way, forgiven or not.
But I can’t help acknowledging just how attractive he is.
When we were kids, I’d tried to ignore my attraction to him. I’d tried not notice the flecks of gold in his eyes, or thealmostdimple in his left cheek, now hidden by a thick, rusty brown beard which glints with copper when the light catches it right.
God, that beard. Chance was a handsome eighteen-year-old, as far as any gangly teenager can be considered handsome when you are also a weedy young adult. But his aging has been beyond good to him. He’s filled out, the lean abdomen of his teens now a soft paunch, his face rounder, and his thighs and arms bigger. He’s the perfect build for a Daddy in my estimation: an alluring mixture of masculinity and comfort.
“I wanted to, Kade,” he says, and I frown.
“What?” I let myself get distracted, so it takes me a second to realize that he’s responding to what I said a few seconds ago. “Oh. Right. Yeah. Thank you.”
