Chapter 24 #3
And then he rambled about the farm, about the daily work he did with Jansel, the livestock, what they had just pulled off with the wedding, for so long that Emerson’s face heated.
He got the sense, from the half-startled, half-amused looks on his parents’ faces, that Luca didn’t often talk this much at family dinners.
If Emerson hadn’t already believed Luca cared about the farm, from him stomping around the greenhouses to him declaring his intention to take on all the initiatives Emerson didn’t have time for—well, he would have really believed it now.
And while part of his brain told him this was good, that it was wonderful—something in his stomach dropped.
For the first time in many hours, he felt the magic bubble around this day start to thin, threatening to pop.
He and Luca were dating. Luca wanted to help out more around the farm.
This was all great, more than Emerson had ever dared to actually imagine for himself.
But if Luca had truly invested his whole heart in Short King Farms—
Emerson had tried to tell him, so many times.
He supposed Luca would maybe finally, truly see it whenever Emerson shared his spreadsheets with him.
Short King Farms wasn’t solvent. Maybe some of the things Luca had suggested—setting up online ordering, holding more events—would help for a while, but—
Would Luca still want him, if he didn’t have the farm anymore?
“And,” Emerson inserted once Luca finally took a breath, needing to get Luca off this topic, needing to stop thinking about this topic at all—“A new agent asked for his book.”
Now everyone at the table paused their forks.
“You write books, Luca?” Bailey asked with a smile. “What kind?”
Emerson hazarded a glance at Luca. He couldn’t quite regret inserting this news into family dinner, but he still hoped he hadn’t fucked up too badly.
Luca was staring at his plate, face unreadable. Emerson itched to reply to Bailey for him as the silence stretched, but he fought through the discomfort. Luca needed to answer this question himself.
“Um.” Luca looked across the table at Bailey. “I write dystopian-ish fantasy, inspired by the Oregon Coast.”
“That’s wonderful,” she said. “Would it be appropriate for my students, do you think?”
“Bailey teaches high school English,” Jacob supplied for Emerson’s sake, wrapping a proud arm around the back of Bailey’s chair.
“Um,” Luca said again. “It’s for adults, but possibly. But—I haven’t heard back from that agent yet, and even if I do—” He shook his head, eyes returning to his plate. “Actually getting published is a long shot.”
“Still,” Bailey said, pushing forward like this was a normal conversation, even as Emerson sensed that the rest of the family was holding their breath.
“A lot of people say they want to write a book one day, but a much smaller proportion of people actually accomplish it. Would you be willing to speak to my students sometime about your writing process and what it’s like looking for an agent? ”
Luca laughed a little now, obviously flustered, but Emerson still took the laugh as a good sign.
“I don’t know,” he said. Emerson squeezed his thigh under the table again. “Maybe.”
“Well,” Adrian said, a smile growing on his face so deep and so true that Emerson hoped Luca was looking at him. Hoped Luca was really seeing it. “You’ll have to keep us updated.”
Luca nodded, stabbing another bite of chicken with his fork. “I will.”
Conversation moved on swiftly enough after that. Soon they were clearing plates. Leah rested a hand on Emerson’s arm.
“Mr. King,” she said. “Would you do me the honor of looking at my garden? It’s no farm, but—”
“Of course,” Emerson replied. “Every garden is important.”
She smiled, and he helped her to her feet.
The sky was still bright, but the sun was starting to get lower in the sky—each day, a little bit sooner—as he strolled around the Yaegers’ backyard.
It was a small yard, but Leah clearly treated every inch of it with care.
She held onto his elbow as they walked and talked, which made Emerson feel like a classy British gentleman, escorting a beautiful lady around a park.
He tried to hold onto the feeling. It was his first day officially dating Luca Yaeger.
Even if everything imploded, eventually—he could hold onto the bubble a little longer.
Luca leaned against the railing of the back deck, watching them. Emerson was facing away from the house for the majority of the tour, but he felt the heat of Luca’s eyes on his neck the whole time.
“Hey,” Luca said when Emerson and Leah made their way up to the deck after their ramble was done. “Let me show you the rest of the house.”
“Dessert will be ready in thirty,” Leah called as they all walked inside, Emerson and Luca heading down the hall while she split toward the kitchen.
Emerson followed Luca up the stairs and down another hall until they turned into a room on the right, what Emerson could only assume, with a single glance at the Captain America poster on the wall, was Luca’s childhood bedroom.
But before he even had time to feel properly delighted by this, Luca was shoving the door closed and talking.
“I’m sorry for the joke I made when we got here.”
Emerson frowned. Luca stood in front of him with his hands in his pockets, elbows locked, shoulders up by his ears.
“What joke?”
“I said something stupid about me and Jacob trauma bonding by having to share this room. But I regretted it as soon as I said it. I just wanted you to know that like, I know I didn’t actually suffer from trauma, living here. I know how lucky I am.”
“Luca.” Emerson took a step forward. Rested his hands on Luca’s sides.
“And I just hate that you knew you had to take your baby pictures with you when you left for college. That you knew at age eighteen that you would never be able to go back home. And I’m glad you’ve never gone back there, but—” Luca shook his head, still frowning, even as Emerson rubbed his hands up and down the sides of his ribcage.
“I don’t know; it just makes me so fucking sad.
I didn’t move out of this house until I was twenty, and it felt so monumental when I did, but even then I only moved like, fifteen fucking miles down the road.
I never worried about losing my baby photos. ”
“Luca,” Emerson said again. Luca looked away, sniffing. “Luca, it’s okay. We should have talked about it more, before we came here. What it might be like, because of the differences in our backgrounds.”
“But—” Luca shook his head again, wiping a palm angrily under his eye. “What is it like? Because you seem totally fine! Why am I the one who’s—fuck, who’s crying?”
Emerson wasn’t fine. But he could at least soothe Luca about this.
“Because I’ve lived with it a lot longer than you have.” Emerson swiped a thumb across Luca’s cheek. “It’s still new to you. So I’m sorry. But thank you. For caring this much about me.”
He pressed a soft kiss against Luca’s lips. Luca huffed out a breath when he pulled away.
“Okay,” he said, still clearly irritated at himself—or at Emerson’s parents, maybe, or at the world as a whole—and Emerson smiled, taking a step back.
“Come on. Show me your room.”
Luca waved an arm.
“I mean. It’s not much.”
It was, though. It was so much.
Emerson went to the bookshelf first, the one above a small desk, crammed with the cracked spines of sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks, small, yellow-paged ones. His eyes scanned the walls, seeing the other posters and postcards that dominated half of the room: metal bands and Giants players.
“Are your whole family Giants fans?” he asked.
Luca shook his head.
“No. They’re not really into baseball at all.
But I, uh, had a crush on a baseball player in high school,” Luca explained with a small, embarrassed laugh.
“So I got into it. And most people here are Mariners fans, you know, but I don’t know.
I always wanted to be contrary. So I decided to become a Giants fan, because they were the other closest team. ”
“California, though.” Emerson looked back and arched an eyebrow. Luca laughed again.
“I know. Made me an extra traitor.”
Emerson strolled around the small room, his socked feet sinking into the blue carpet.
“Stop sleeping in the guest bedroom,” he said when he’d made his way back to Luca.
“At least—stay, sometimes.” There had been two times now that Emerson had gotten to fall asleep next to Luca, but each time, he’d sensed it was merely because Luca had fallen asleep by accident.
He was always gone by morning. “Move some of your stuff into mine, upstairs.”
Luca stared at him.
“Is that too much?” he asked when Luca didn’t respond. “Too fast? I just—”
Emerson took a breath. He knew it was too fast. Knew it was too much. But each new piece of Luca’s history, each new fact he picked up in this house made panic start to tangle in his chest.
He’d been working on dealing with the possibility of losing the farm for forever, but if having the farm was now wrapped up in having Luca, too—
He wanted as much as he could for as long as he could.
“I don’t want you living out of a suitcase anymore. I don’t want you to be a guest.”
He waved a hand toward Luca’s bookshelves.
“Bring your things.”
Still, Luca just stood there, while Emerson slowly died.
Until, finally, the corner of Luca’s mouth curved.
“I don’t need to bring any of these things. I’m good with them living here.”
Emerson breathed out. Luca’s half smile felt good, but the rollercoaster of the last forty-eight hours, the enormity of the unknowns of the future were still roiling through Emerson’s gut, a massive, slow-moving wave.
Luca craned his neck, staring around at his room like it was the first time he was seeing it.
“I’ll probably move some stuff from my cabin, though.”
His gaze met Emerson’s again, shiny and smiling ever bigger, and Emerson’s chest began to settle, the wave receding, at least a few inches, at least for now.
“Good,” he said, hands resting on his hips like he’d just finished a long day in the fields. “Good.”
“You wanna go see it next, actually? My cabin, I mean. Before we head home. Like a—” Luca waved a hand, and Emerson wanted to reach out and grab it, bite down on Luca’s knuckles.
“A whole Luca Yaeger tour. I mean.” He laughed like he’d laughed back in the car, self-deprecating and joyful all at once.
“I already brought you here, so. Why the fuck not, right?”
“Yes,” Emerson answered. “I would love that.”
And then he couldn’t stand it anymore, and he backed Luca up against the nearest wall and kissed him. Luca kissed back, as aggressive as he’d been in the old barn, reaching for Emerson’s hips, pulling them closer.
“Was it okay,” Emerson said between kisses, “that I brought up Drift at dinner? Sorry if it wasn’t.”
Luca growled, pressing his growing erection into Emerson’s stomach.
“Yeah, it was okay. You are—” But then he kissed Emerson again, both hands clutching Emerson’s face, and never finished his sentence.
“When we get home,” Emerson said a few minutes later, feeling overheated and brave once more, “I want to fuck you again. On our sides this time, like you said.”
“Mm,” Luca agreed, kissing him as he said, “Eat me out first, though.”
“Yeah,” Emerson breathed back. “Yeah. Anything you fucking want, Luca.”
“God, we gotta—” With a groan of frustration, Luca pushed Emerson back. Just enough to have some breathing room—they were still connected at the hips—but far enough. “I haven’t been this hard in this room in like…over a decade.”
Emerson rubbed his thumb against the hem of Luca’s t-shirt.
“You bring a lot of boys back here in high school? Or—” He pulled back another inch, “Girls?”
Luca shook his head with a shy smile.
“Always been boys for me. But yeah, no. Never.”
“Not even the baseball player?”
Luca laughed, still shy, a little breathless, and Emerson wanted to devour him.
“Definitely not the baseball player. You’re, um. The first one.”
Despite himself, Emerson felt his face light up. “Really?”
“Look, there weren’t a lot of options growing up in Greyfin Bay, okay? Even if there were, I shared this room with Jacob. Just trying to find the time and space to jerk off every day was, like, a covert operation.”
Emerson smiled, falling forward to rest his forehead against Luca’s neck.
“Come on.” With a deep breath, Luca pushed off the wall. “My mom made peanut butter brownies because they’re my favorite.”
“I love your mom.”
“Yeah, she knows. She’s very smug about it.”
Taking Emerson’s hand, Luca tugged him out the door. Even from the end of the hallway, the noise from downstairs echoed through the house: voices, laughter, the clatter of plates in the kitchen, the swish of the screen door as the family went in and out.
And when it hit Emerson’s ears now—
Emerson had been honest with Luca about his relationship to his own family. There would always be the scars, the possibilities of triggers. It had taken a lot of time and work. A lot. But he didn’t feel haunted by them anymore.
What stung most now was the disappearance of Yulia and Graham.
The lesson of Yulia and Graham should be making Emerson even more cautious in this moment.
Sometimes found family didn’t last either.
Just as Luca shouldn’t be throwing himself into Emerson’s failing farm as much as it was clear now that he was, Emerson shouldn’t be sinking so easily into this household, its photo albums and homemade meals and warm banter.
But maybe some hopes were more stubborn than others.
Because as they walked downstairs, as brownies were distributed chaotically over heads, across counters and in the midst of five different conversations at once, Emerson found himself with a familiar burning ache in his chest, unable to stop thinking about what Alexei had said, in that moment before his wedding.
I’m so grateful all these wild people are mine.