Page 83 of Marcus in Retrograde
Home. It smelled like a place I wanted to spend the rest of my life.
God, I wasnotgoing to fucking cry again.
I took a minute for myself, and ducked into the bathroom, just to wash my face and compose myself. It felt natural to be in Chase’s space, and I liked that. It felt as natural as being in the old house in Troy.
“Marcus Chastain, come eat and be social.”
I laughed. Mom was a balm for my tired soul. How at twenty-eight was I this exhausted?
She’d left as soon as Vin and Kyle had confirmed the bond was set and the corrections department was on their way to buckle the damn ankle monitor on. They programmed it so I could walk the dog, go to the vet, the grocery store, and work. Anything outside those parameters was grounds for being hauled back in unless I could prove that it was an emergency.
Dawn Romano thought that food solved all problems. While it didn’t, not really, I was not one to turn down the pure country gourmet of her chicken pot pie.
Pure country gourmetmeaning about four thousand calories a bite. It had been my go-to in high school for bulking up. I didn’t need that anymore, but there was more to it than calories. There was love, and caring, and mouthfuls of pure deliciousness.
We sat around the table, scooping out the deliciousness on to our plates, and my mother pulled out three beers and put them in front of each plate. “We all need those,” she said, sitting down.
“We sure do,” I said, swiping it and taking a hardy gulp.
She pushed her chicken, carrots, and crust around the plate. “Chase, I spoke to my husband when I got back here earlier and we’d like to work out a repayment schedule with you for the lawyers.”
“Nope,” he said, simply.
“Chase, this is a lot of money. We had to bond our house last time. I know what—”
“No. No repayment. This is me taking care of my boyfriend,” he said, and put the fork down. “It’s not going to dent the bank account. At all. Let me pay for it.”
“Chase,” I said, “I appreciate that, but I agree with my mother. We need to work out a repayment schedule.”
Casually chewing his dinner, he pulled out his phone and flipped to some app deep in the folders and collections on the screen. He popped it open, and tapped in a few numbers, navigating through the information. Finally, he settled on something and dropped the phone face up between me and my mother.
I looked at the screen, and then up at Chase, to my mother, and back to the screen.
“That’s a fucking load of numbers, Chase…” I whispered.
“A load of them,” my mother echoed. “All in front of a decimal.”
He pulled it back. “That’s just my money market. Would you like to see the checking? The savings? The stocks?” Fingers flew over the front closing things and opening others.
I slipped my hand over the screen. “Stop, Chase.”
“I don’t need the money back,” he said. “I don’t even need to work. But what the hell am I going to do with my free time? Coke and whores?”
Choking on the carrot I was trying to chew, I stared at him wide eyed. My mother started laughing.
“Was that actually an option?”
“No, not really. I was too busy trying to figure what the hell to do with all the money,” Chase said.
“Where did it come from?” I asked. “I mean, your parents’ farm is fantastic, and does well, but it’s not a money maker. Not like that.”
Chase put his fork down and flipped through his phone again. “When I first got here to the city I had no money, no friends, and a scholarship to Cooper Union. That was it. So I took a job as a home health aide. I did the evening shift, and I was assigned to a man named Martin Marsden. He was an older man, with advanced ALS and a serious bug up his ass. But I stuck it out. I needed the money and he would always need an aide.”
He put the phone down and turned it so we could look at it. It was an old picture of an older man with a ton of white hair and a laugh on his face, sitting in a very advanced looking wheelchair.
“I eventually broke through his shit attitude and started to get to the real Martin. He was a nice guy, dealt a shit hand in life. Only child of only children, he’d lost his wife young. There were no children. He’d had a lot of friends over the years, but he was it now. Once the ALS had started to steal his life, he got pissed and curled in on himself.
“He hired me on full time, and contracted with a day nurse to help me while I was in school. But I moved in with him and we basically became each other’s family. He was a good guy and once we started to get to know each other I dragged him to Central Park and a few museums and I made sure that we ate out once in a while. About once a week.
