Page 31 of Like the Season
Chapter Ten
Monday morning, Caleb felt weird getting ready for work alone. In a very short amount of time, he and Boyd had developed a shared routine, deftly stepping around each other, a kiss here or a touch there before leaving for work. Always careful to park away from each other in the employee lot, for now, and careful to let a few minutes spin out one way or the other between their entries to the building.
Still no word from his parents, though. Caleb wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.
What he kept repeating to himself was that he didn’t live anywhere close to them, and by not talking to him, it meant he didn’t have to talk tothem.
Of course he loved them. Except ever since he’d come to realize the truths about his sexuality, he fully understood his family’s love for him was completely conditional and situational. As long as they didn’t know he was gay, they’d love him, even if that love came with backhanded compliments and grumbles about his choices in school and career, and poorly founded, inaccurate assessments of the kind of person he was by choosing to set his sights higher. A stereotypical response from his family, who insisted they weren’t “liberal stereotypes of conservatives.”
But he was, in their eyes, also one of the hated “them”—not just an educated “elitist,” but also gay. At least in his mom’s eyes now, even if she hadn’t spilled the beans yet.
Maybe he’d subconsciously factored that into his move, figuring the eventual reveal and accompanying rejection would sting less if he lived farther from them. Easier to make excuses why he couldn’t come home to visit.
It certainly helped his comfort levels.
Monday evening, after returning to Boyd’s, Caleb cruised Facebook to look at the pictures Boyd had posted of him and Ella together.
There was no mistaking that Ella was Boyd’s daughter, even without the picture captions proudly proclaiming her as such. She looked just like him.
Caleb clicked thelovebutton on every picture, even as his heart ached that he wasn’t there with Boyd. It was tempting to call Boyd to see how the talk with the guy had gone, but he didn’t want to interrupt them if they were still talking, and he didn’t want Boyd to think he had some sort of emergency and needed to speak to him right then.
He’d wait to hear from Boyd.
Just a few more days, then they’d be together again. Eventually, Boyd would be able to post pics of the two of them together, but not yet.
Not when they were still hiding the truth from everyone at work. Boyd only had a couple of people friended from work, people he knew were also kinky or, at the very least, openly accepting of alternative lifestyles. Had Caleb friended him on Facebook months earlier, he would have been able to put together the obvious clues that Boyd was not only gay, but kinky.
But eventually…
Eventually.
He could wait for that. He was happy to wait, because on the other side of that wait lay Boyd and his own happiness, and finally being accepted for who and what he was.
* * * *
Boyd and Ella stopped at the grocery store on the way back to Ella’s apartment. Boyd wanted to fix them dinner and knew neither of them felt like going out to eat.
Besides, he wanted alone time with his daughter. While he’d missed countless dinners with her before, at least this was something he could have a memory of.
Making his mom’s beef stew with her was a good start.
As they cooked and talked, it took every last ounce of willpower Boyd had not to start listing all the reasons Ella would be better off moving to Florida.
He considered that a parenting win.
Instead, he listened to her, let her ask countless questions about his family, his life growing up.
What little he knew about her mom.
In this way, too, he felt like a failure. That he couldn’t give her more information about Helen except what his foggy teenaged brain had somehow managed to save on his mental hard drive. When Helen had left home, apparently she’d managed to take all the pictures she could grab of herself, rightly assuming she might never see her parents again and wanting her child to have a sense of family history. Boyd had been able to identify a few people in the pictures, but not many.
Not nearly enough.
“I’m going to document the hell out of everything,” Ella said. “I want my baby to know who these people are.”
“Good plan.”
She laid a hand on her still-flat tummy and stared at it. “Any news about her parents yet?”
