Page 47 of House of Kallan
He sighed. “Don’t get too excited. The idea of leaving the house gives me a lot of anxiety. I’m definitely not saying I could do that.”
“There are things you can do that don’t require you to leave the house,” I pointed out.
“I know. I’m not qualified for most of them.”
“Okay, then get qualified. You can acquire almost any degree online now,” I said. He looked at me thoughtfully. “Again, I wantto emphasize that I’m not pushing you one way or another. One of the first things you told me when we met was that you like hobbies that keep your mind occupied. Education is a great start to that.”
Aden stared at me for a minute before a smile climbed his face. “Yeah. Thanks.”
I met Hawthorn’s eyes from over Aden’s shoulder and I could practically see the smile in them.
“As you can imagine, I don’t like to talk about my childhood,” Aden said. “When I do, I usually ask one of my husbands to hold me. Just so I don’t get too lost in that darkness and I can feel that there’s someone here who loves me for being gay.”
“I don’t love you because you’re gay,” Hawthorn said with a huff.
Aden grinned. “Despite me being gay?”
“No,” he said, and bit Aden’s shoulder. Aden laughed and looked over his shoulder. “Your sexuality plays zero part in our love for you, Aden.”
“I know that,” Aden said. “I just meant that… after being hated for it for so long, that now I’m… loved for it?” He frowned. “I guess I can’t really put into words what I mean.”
“How about this?” Hawthorn said. “After your sexuality defined you for so long, it’s no longer a consideration at all. You’re not Aden-the-gay-guy. You’re Aden Malak. That’s it.”
“Just Aden,” Aden said, smiling. “Yeah, I like that.” He paused for a minute. “Besides, I’m nottechnicallygay. I’m bi. But sometimes it’s easier to quantify it as ‘gay’ since I have like a hundred husbands and tend to be attracted to men over women most of the time.”
Hawthorn snorted. I grinned at his snarky remark.
We were called down to breakfast shortly after, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what Aden shared. Of course, I knew that places like that existed. But it was easy to look the other way when you had ‘more important’ things going on, like the abuse of these women that Silence had taken.
However, I thought kids like Aden needed rescuing just as much.
Hawthorn pulled out Aden’s chair for him and mine for me. I found we were in the same configuration as we had been for dinner the other week. Wow, how long had it been since I was last here? If there was ever something to emphasize the fact that work dominated my life, it was this.
“Okay,” I said as I stared at the food on my plate. “You know all about my job. Tell me about yours.”
“I’m a househusband,” Aden volunteered, giving me a glib smile and turning to the rest of the table. “I can now just sit quietly and listen to you guys brag about what you do.”
Have I said how much I loved the way they looked at Aden? But as we ate breakfast and then carried the conversation on into the family room, where we spread out on the furniture with blankets and hot drinks, I realized that those looks weren’t just for Aden. They were shared with everyone.
The love in this house was deep and vast. They did nothing to dampen it. While their words weren’t flashy and showy, their emotions rang loud and clear in their eyes.
This was the exact place I wanted to be for the rest of my life.
More than that, this was the kind of place I wanted to show the women who we currently housed within Haven. And the children. This was what a house of monsters looked like. These were the kinds of men that monsters were.
Not those which brought them into this life. Not those that hurt them, presumably from the day they were born.
After a while, I said, “With how involved you are with The Harem Project, I’m surprised that none of you work there.”
“Our involvement is on a more personal level,” Hadrian said. “Within our close-knit group of friends, we’ve suffered personally at the hands of Silence and ORKA. Almost every single one of our friends’ families has been through something traumatic and all of our houses are on Silence’s hit list.”
I looked at Cobalt. “Our world was rocked when you and the rest of the prisoners walked out alive. It was like, for the first time, everyone saw that there was an actual reason to fight. You weren’t all dead as presumed, but living in a state worse than death.”
Cobalt nodded. “I saw a lot of death during the years I was there. This might sound surprising, but after a while, when they started bringing me the tortured monsters they were experimenting on to heal them, I thought it would be kinder to let them die. Then they wouldn’t have to face that every day. Eventually I reached a point where I’d much rather be the one being tortured than to see what they did to people as they tossed them on my cell floor and expected me to fix them.”
I shuddered, shaking my head to dislodge the images that popped up. Lazarus shifted on the couch to lie against Cobalt, making the latter grin and wrap his arms around Lazarus.
“I’m fine,” Cobalt said quietly. “It’ll never go away, but I’m truly fine. Coming home was the instant healing I needed. Besides, they hadn’t actually touched me in a couple years. As much as I thought they wanted to, what I could offer them in healing their victims was much better. They didn’t have to keep so many monsters alive if I could just keep healing the same one over and over again so they can keep using the same test subject.”
