Chapter Three
Chapter Three
Xander
“You’re such an old person,” I complain as I hold the wool Auntie Aggy is using. The knitting needles clack together as she works on what I can only assume is a sweater that belongs to a blob creature.
“Shush and help me.”
I eye the blue, lumpy … whatever that is. “I don’t think you’re very good at this.”
“You’re ruining my concentration,” she snaps.
“And you’re ruining a perfectly good ball of wool.”
Aggy huffs and sets the monstrosity aside. She’s in her late seventies and sharp as a tack. Ever since our ragtag group moved in next door, she’s called us her lost boys and unofficially adopted us as her honorary grandchildren. Or great -grandchildren. She is very old. “I’ve never knitted before.”
“Then why are you knitting now ?” I wrinkle my nose .
“Because there’s a man at the nursing home who likes unflattering knitted sweaters.”
“You have the unflattering part right.”
“This is not my wheelhouse.” She runs a delicate, veiny hand over her forehead. “I could swing dance that mother fucker to death, but a sweater? Still, when you’re my age, you work with the options you’ve got.”
I sigh and grab my phone, opening a video on how to knit. “This really is Rush’s expertise,” I tell her. “Why don’t you ask him to knit one and pass it off as your own?”
“You really think so little of me?”
I give a flat look to her fake-offended tone. “Have you forgotten that I was here when those religious missionaries showed up, and you told them that you already signed the contracts for your soul with Satan and that God should have come knocking ten years earlier? Then offered to put them on a waitlist?”
“Okay, so maybe I’m going to hell for that one, but that doesn’t mean I need to get the big man any more offside by lying. Ah, more .” She leans toward my phone. “What’s it saying?”
“That you’re a terrible knitter.”
She waves a hand. “What else is it saying?”
I watch the video tutorial for a few more seconds and glance from the screen to her mess and back again. “Yeah … we’re going to have to start over.”
“Of course we are.”
I spend the morning with Aggy, helping her learn how to knit a hideous sweater while she tells me about Gerald. The man’s name is Gerald . I will definitely have to die before I turn eighty because the dating pool sounds bleak.
“You had another episode yesterday?” she asks casually.
“What of it? ”
“I told you, boy, you’re not allowed to die before me. I have dibs.”
I scowl. “You really think I want to see you die?”
“Well, I flat out refuse to see you die, so you better take your vitamins because if you try to leave first, I’ll dig you up myself and recreate Weekend at Bernie’s .”
“That’s a fucked-up movie.”
“It is, and I’d prefer not to spend my last years in jail, so cool your jets and stop wishing for the end.”
“I don’t wish for it.”
“Oh, yeah? Let me see your search history on the Google for today.”
There’s no way that’ll happen. “How do you even know that’s a thing?”
“I’m still incredibly hip.”
“And then you said that.”
She scowls, tugging at the wool. “Tell me you haven’t looked up anything medically related today and I’ll drop it.”
Would are consistent hiccups something to worry about and the veins in my hand are super bright blue be considered medically related? Thankfully, I have no issues lying to an old lady.
“Nothing.”
Unfortunately, she has no issues calling me out on it either. “Bullshit.”
“Aren’t old ladies supposed to be sweet and bake cookies?”
“Molly and I are baking cookies later. I happen to be multifaceted.”
“Choc chip?”
“Since I’m such an old lady, I’ll throw in some raisin ones too. Just for you.”
The devil’s cookies. “Come on, you’re not that old. Barely look a day over seventy-five.”
She stares at me with all the disappointment she’s capable of. “Have I taught you nothing? Can’t even suck up right. What is the world coming to with the youth these days?”
“And now you sound ninety.”
When I first met Agatha, I was more careful about what I said. I used to be desperate for her to love me and always craved her attention, but then one day, she asked if I’d taken up people-pleasing as a sport. I wouldn’t normally suggest to an old lady that maybe we could swap, and she could be the one with a backpack full of trauma while I’m the one with a backpack full of judgment, but it made her laugh. So now I’m convinced Aggy is as fucked-up as the rest of us, and I’m not sure where the stereotype of easily offended old people came from, but it missed her.
I’m grateful. My roommates might be my brothers, but she’s like the matriarch I never had. She gives me the attention I crave, never makes me feel like I’m an imposition, and she genuinely loves us all. She’s adopted us as much as we’ve adopted her, and it’s yet another reason why I’m so scared of change.
What happens to Aggy if some of us move out of Big-Boned Bertha? Does she replace us with the next lot of shitheads who move into the house?
Feathers of panic brush my heart.
“Aggy … what would you do if Seven and Molly moved into their own place?”
She’s focused back on her knitting. “Buy them a toaster and pray they don’t burn it to the ground?”
“But they’d be gone.”
She glances up. “From Seattle? Where are they moving to?”
“Well, nowhere. But they might. They probably will—Molly’s dad lives in Massachusetts—and then where does that leave the rest of us? ”
She fixes me with one of her stern looks. “Happy for them. That’s where it leaves us.”
“I don’t know if I will be.”
“You will.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Because you’d never do anything to hurt either of those men.”
She’s got me there. Seven deserves the world, and I’d been—and still am—so happy that he found Molly. Molly is the pure sweetness neither of us ever had in our lives, and I love him to death, but they scare me. There’ll eventually be a day where it’s not Seven and Molly and Xander, just Seven and Molly, and I’ll never survive it.
“And they wouldn’t hurt you ,” Aggy says, pulling me out of my funk. “No one is moving to Massachusetts.”
She gazes at me with murky brown eyes, and I gaze back.
“You have a lot of cataracts,” I whisper.
“And you have a lot of nerve,” she whispers right back.
“Can you promise to live for another … fifty years so that I never have to be alone?”
“Nope. Come and teach some art lessons at the nursing home, then you’ll never be short on old people to dote on you.”
“I hate everything about that idea. Take one for the team, won’t you?”
She squeezes my knee. “No. Dear god, no. That sounds horrendous. But I will promise not to leave until I know you’re looked after. So, if you could get moving on that, it would be much appreciated.”
My thoughts drift to Derek and his gorgeous face and the way he both gives my heart little wings and makes me want to poke out his eyes, all at the same time. Emotions are complex, do not recommend.
It’d be so much easier not to have any.
I never learned that skill. My emotions are either happy or sulky or kill them all , and there’s no in-between. There’s also very little pre-warning, which will come out from one minute to the next. I can be having a great day, and then suddenly, everything will be shit, I’m shit, everyone is shit, and I take a very deep dive into a very shallow pool. I try to be cute and happy like Molly, but that sunshine doesn’t reach the swampy marshlands my brain bobs along in.
“Bit hard to do that when the man I want doesn’t want me back.”
“Your nurse friend?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I should think not.”
That surprises me. “What do you mean?”
“There are rules about patients and the people treating them for good reason.”
“ Really ?” I eye her skeptically. “You’re all about breaking rules.”
“Only when it makes sense. I don’t believe in breaking rules just to break them. People who make stupid rules are stupid to believe they won’t be broken, and that’s on them as far as I’m concerned.”
“Well, I think the rule about patients is stupid.”
She watches me for an uncomfortably long time. “I love you, but you’re being shortsighted. Your own damn community has been accused of being predatory for too long and fought too hard against that image for you to play with that man’s job. He’s a gay man in the medical field, and you’re the person he’s treating. What do you think people would say and assume if something happened between you when there’s such a clear imbalance of power?”
No one could ever say something horrible about Derek Knight. “There isn’t though. Derek doesn’t have any power over me. I know what I want, and I go for it.”
“And while that’s one of my favorite things about you, not this time you don’t. I mean it. You’ve had your brain addled by far too many people who should have done right by you, and until you put some effort into fixing the damage they did, you can’t claim to be in your right mind about anything.”
“Oh, fuck you.”
She laughs. “What’s wrong? Are you going to throw a tantrum, sweet pea?”
“Don’t you know that you can’t talk to people like that these days?”
“Yes, I do find people these days struggle to tell the truth.” She studies me. “Help me out here. Which part of what I said don’t you agree with?”
“I’m not an idiot. I know what I want.”
“What you think you want.”
I scoff. “You’re an expert on me now?”
“My baby boy, I’m team Xander. I’m team you do whatever you need to. I’m not pushing you either way when it comes to therapy, but I will when it comes to your nurse. I forbid it.”
“You forbid it?” I tug at the sweater. “Does Grandaddy Gerald forbid it as well?”
“He will if I ask him to. I know you’ve never been given a boundary in your life, but this is me giving you one.”
The funny thing about never having boundaries? I don’t know how to have them. So I hear Aggy speak, but an angry little gremlin catches the words and filters out any meaning.
Derek’s the one I want, and if he’d stop talking about goddamn therapy every time I saw him, he’d be the perfect guy.
Aggy either wants me happy, or she doesn’t.
Boundaries or no boundaries.