Page 76 of Collin: Episodes 13-15
Dana nodded. She looked back to Alice. “Can we have cookies now?”
Collin and Alice dared to step into the guest bedroom, just off the living room, leaving the door open while Dana ate cookies and drank tea with Émeric and Richard. For a long moment, all they did was hug, foreheads pressed together.
“I was so scared for you,” Collin said.
“I was scared for you. Ash didn’t tell me till the next day. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been okay.”
“You would have done exactly what you did. You would have taken care of Dana.”
Alice blinked back tears. “Half the time I don’t know what I’m doing. Hypatia says that’s normal.”
“I’d trust Hypatia.”
Alice smiled through tears. “Yeah, she’s good that way. Gah, I feel so old, Collin. It feels like it was a year ago when I was last here and we were eating breakfast over there and I told you I was going to go to the airport on my own.”
Collin pressed his lips to her forehead, squeezing her shoulder with his good hand. “Same.”
“Mom told me she’s selling the house. I told her good.”
“So did I.”
“And I’m done with Grandma.”
“Same.”
Alice nodded. She wiped away a tear. “I’m going to drop out of my university. Finals are almost here, and I can’t even imagine trying to study right now. It just seems so unimportant, compared to everything else.”
“Someday it might feel important again.”
“I know.” Alice closed her eyes and breathed. “Right now, I just want to get Dana settled. Damian’s offered me therapy, and I probably need it, if only to help Dana, but there’s a shit ton of other things in my head with our family. Matthew and Hypatia have been awesome. I don’t think I’ve ever talked so much in my life.”
“You probably know them better than I do now.”
“They probably know me better than Mom, at this point, but that’s okay. Ash probably knows me better, too. He’s adorable, but, Collin, he was so, so good. When I needed him. He didn’t even know half of what I was asking him for when we were getting out of California, but he found a way. And the whole time, he thought you might die, and he stayed with me. Even when I was driving and crying through the mountains to Reno with Dana in the back seat, thinking I’d killed someone, he just listened and then told me jokes. I think he just found a joke website and read them to me until he found ones that made me laugh.”
“He’s a good kid.”
“The best.” Alice bit her lip and smiled. “Fuck…I’m totally going to mess up and call your men Uncle Richard and Uncle Émeric. We’ve been telling Dana about them with those names for so long it’s stuck in my head.”
The courts assigned Linda and Richard joint custody of Dana the next week. Linda had a designer and decorator in and redid a room in her apartment for Dana and another for Alice. They were small by necessity. Linda hadn’t planned to make her place a three bedroom, but neither Alice or Dana felt the pinch. It wasn’t like they were trapped there. The city was their playground, and Ellisandre’s place was just one floor below, where Ash was also now living, and The Residency and Hypatia and Matthew’s place were open to them. With a security guard watching over them, they had the run of cafés, museums, parks, the aquarium, libraries, and shops. Sometimes Ash joined them after work hours, popping up in the feed of photos Alice dropped in the group chat with ice cream on his face or Dana giving him bunny ears from behind.
“Is it strange, mon amour,” Émeric murmured to Richard, looking at the latest photo on his phone, “that I feel like they finally get to be children now that none of them are?”
“No, they are fae children, ma raison d’être. They have the choice and the wisdom to use it.”
Collin had to look away then and stare hard out of the window to stop the tears that came all too easily these days.
His therapist had made a house call and had agreed to come again the next week, or even before, if Collin wanted. He said it was good that Collin could feel, that he was expressing himself, that there was nothing wrong with the tears that came and went.
Émeric had taken to sketching for hours. One day, he left his pad on the coffee table, and Collin saw it. It was a drawing of him crying.
Collin had stared at it until he felt like a benediction had sunk into his skin and fused with something deep inside. What his sir saw when he cried wasn’t ugly; it was beautiful
Tears meant he was alive to cry. Tears meant he was safe enough to feel. Tears meant he had the luxury to feel.
When he thought back to his life before his Master and his Sir, the memories felt dry or bottled up, either too full or too distant. But now, for pain or pleasure, he was awash in being alive. He felt everything.
“I think I have a decade of tears to cry out before I catch up,” Alice confided in him one evening over text.
