Chapter 14 Knox
KNOX
After I’d left Lucy in his bedroom to get packed, I started second-guessing my plan.
As I packed my clothes into my duffel bag, as I stuffed an emergency first aid kit beside it, and especially when I slipped three condoms into the small pocket just inside where they would be safe—was I making the right choice?
But what other choice was there but to make the most of every moment I had left with Lucy? As much as there seemed to be a spark between us, one growing the more we spoke to each other, the more quiet moments we found together, I knew that there were no guarantees. We were from different worlds.
When Lucy emerged from his bedroom, his blush was back, and he wouldn’t meet my eyes, but there was a smile on his face.
I packed us up into my car, and I drove us to my nana’s house.
Lucy blinked from the passenger seat. “Where are we?”
He glanced around, clearly not used to an older neighborhood on the outskirts of town instead of a modern condo in his apartment unit in the center of the city.
On the bright side, he sounded curious, not judgmental, but the confusion was definitely there. I’d all but promised him the sexiest night of his life, and here I was parking in front of a two-bedroom yellow house with dead plants in a garden that hadn’t been tended since Nana’s diagnosis.
“Lucy,” I cleared my throat, feeling the emotions coming up already. I recalled kneeling in the garden with Nana, planting seeds from my morning apple snack, hoping they would grow into a giant apple tree. “Welcome to my Nana’s house.”
Lucy gasped. “What? Really? Is she here?”
A knife to my chest. “Uh, no. No, she passed a couple of years ago.”
“Oh,” Lucy deflated. “I’m so sorry, Knox.”
“I miss her, but she left me this place once I came home from school.”
I wasn’t sure why I was telling him all of this, but I heard it falling from my lips like a confession anyway. He was far too easy to talk to. Those eyes—brown today, because he hadn’t put his blue contacts in—were enough to break down even the strongest man.
I don’t think I could say no to Lucy. And that was dangerous.
“But you’re not living here?” Lucy asked, pivoting in his seat to face me.
“Not yet, no,” I replied carefully, but honestly. I didn’t want to get into the fatherly drama of it all, but I didn’t want to lie to him either. “There are some things I need to handle first. Things with the will.”
“Why did you bring me here?”
I smiled. “Well, that’s the fun part. Come on.”
I flung open my door and rounded the car to pull him out, too. “She has camping supplies in the garage, and I have a key.”
Lucy’s eyes widened. “You’re taking me camping? In February?”
I snorted. “I also have a portable heater. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t let you freeze.”
I kissed his left cheek, then his right, then the tip of his nose.
He laughed, tension oozing out of him, and it felt like it could have been by my kisses alone.
That kind of power was dangerous for a man like me.
“Come with me. I’ll set everything up for us.”
By the time I’d swiped what supplies we needed from her garage and stationed the heater by the outlet on the back porch, Lucy had pulled over the chairs and spare blankets.
The back porch was large, since Nana had had it built to host neighborhood barbecues.
Since Mom died and Dad left, they’d done everything they could to involve Nana and me in those community events.
I already knew I was going to bake cookies for all of them one day soon, once I was approved to move back in, as a small thank you for everything they’d done for us, especially after she was too weak to host anything properly.
Now, though, the porch was perfect for an impromptu camping trip. There was a fire pit in the cement near the end, and a flat spot large enough to set up a standard-sized tent.
“Have you gone camping before?”
Lucy paused in his efforts to load the sleeping bags into the tent. “Uh, no. Not really.”
I whirled around, catching him with that guilty expression again. “Why?”
He shrugged. “We never had a back porch. And Dad couldn’t leave cell range or be more than an hour away if he had to answer a work call and drive back in.”
“Nobody else took you? School friends?”
Lucy shook his head. “I went to a private school. Everyone else had parents like my dad, too. No camping for any of us.”
“Fuck,” I winced, sitting beside him, “Lucy, that’s sad.”
He just laughed, a small, brittle thing that made me want to pull him into my lap. “Is it? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Lucy…”
“No. Just,” he sighed, “I get it, okay? I don’t really have room to complain about my life. I always had what I needed, every toy I wanted. I did sports, had all my paints and art classes paid for, and never had to get a real job. I have a great life.”
Oh. His face was downturned again as he fiddled with the zippers on the sleeping bags.
I’d said that to him, hadn’t I? With all the hatred I held toward people like Mr. Sterling, I never meant for that to hurt someone like Lucy.
I didn’t even think people like him existed—people who were rich and sad, and who deserved better than what they got.
“Hey.” I reached for his hand. Thankfully, he let me take it. “You’re allowed to have struggles, and you’re allowed to be upset for things you missed out on. Maybe I haven’t really helped that. I didn’t understand people like you until I met you.”
“People like me?”
“The kids of rich assholes,” I clarified.
That, at least, got Lucy to raise his head, shooting a suspicious glare my way.
“I thought all of you were horrible. I always have,” I admitted.
“It got worse when… Nevermind. My point is, I never considered what it would be like to grow up like you did. I wish I could have dragged you camping when we were kids. You could have toasted marshmallows, swam in a lake, and had to share a tiny tent with ten of your closest friends and enemies.”
Lucy snorted. He scooted closer to me, our knees colliding as we sat cross-legged on the cement in front of the fire pit.
“You said it got worse?” He slid his hand to my thigh and squeezed gently. “You can talk to me, you know? I’ll try to understand.”
I fiddled with the lighter. Then I leaned forward and ignited the newspaper and kindling I had stacked up to start the fire.
The paper burned, and soon we had a small fire. I added a few small logs in the silence before I answered him.
“My Nana was my favorite person in the world.”
Lucy hummed, a quiet comfort, some encouragement maybe.
“She took me camping all the time as a kid. She got me this tent, actually, when I reached middle school and I didn’t have to share anymore with the other kids. We’d set it up out here, just like we are now, and I camped out every weekend.”
“She sounds amazing.”
“She was,” I agreed, grateful when I felt his arms wrap around my forearm and his fingers tangle with mine, “but then, when I was seventeen, she got diagnosed with stage four cancer.”
Lucy’s grip tightened on my arm.
“All of a sudden, nothing else mattered but getting her better. I tried everything I could, but she refused treatment once she got too weak to walk to her car. We tried every program they had to fund treatment—she never had health insurance; she always said it was a government trick. And we got some donations.”
I sighed and tugged Lucy closer by his hands.
He scooted so his shoulder was pressed against my side and his chin was on my shoulder.
“These guys who’d given the donations, they were a bunch of—”
“Rich assholes?” Lucy guessed.
I smiled and rested my cheek on his hair.
“Yeah, exactly. They were a bunch of rich assholes, and they were patting each other on the back for saving the poor old lady with their hearts of gold. Their intentions were so pure that each and every one of them got an article in the newspaper praising their altruism. It was a bunch of bullshit!”
I jabbed my right hand at the air for an offense it didn’t even cause.
Lucy’s hand reached out and covered mine. “That’s why you hate my dad.”
I shook my head. “It’s why I hate rich people. I thought you were all like that, but I was wrong.”
Lucy sighed. “You’re not wrong, though. I might have done the same thing they did.”
“But you wouldn’t have called the press so you could brag about it, right?”
I knew the answer before he shook his head.
“You’re good, Lucy.”
“I’m not. I’m playing their game with the exhibit, remember? It’s the same thing.”
“Maybe,” I agreed, “if you weren’t tearing your hair out trying to please your dad.”
“I can’t help it,” he sniffled and wiped at his face, “he’s my dad.”
I scoffed. “Yeah, dads kind of suck, too, don’t they?”
Lucy sat up and scooted forward so he could meet my eyes. “Your dad?”
I softened at the concern etched all over his face and in the grip he still held on my hand. “Yeah. My dad.”
“What happened to him? I’ve never heard you talk about him.”
I groaned. What perfect, sexy, date night talk this was turning out to be. “Honestly, Lucy, he’s the biggest dick I’ve ever met—and that includes those idiots who were donating to become famous.”
Lucy’s eyes widened. “That’s…pretty intense.”
“It is, yeah.” I tugged him into my lap, glad when he just came instead of arguing.
He wrapped one arm around my neck and kept his grip on my hand with the other. I slid my arm around his waist, keeping him in my space as much as I possibly could.
“What did he do?”
“What didn't he do, more like. He ditched my mom and me before I was even born. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about us.
He just wanted the pretty girl, and when that girl came with consequences, he didn’t want to pay them.
He left, disappeared into the wind, and for some reason, she never went after him for child support.
She lost her job, moved in with her mom, and did everything she could with limited capabilities.
She died in an accident when I was a kid, and that left me with my Nana. ”
Lucy nodded, now tracing lines over the back of my hand. “Did he ever reach out to you?”
“Once Nana was dead and he found out she had money and a house he could steal, he showed back up.”
Lucy gasped. “No!”
I nodded. “This house—my Nana’s house—was left to me in her will, along with everything else she owned. Her money, her photo albums, every legal document she’d ever signed. But she put a stipulation in the will.”
“Why would she do that? If she wanted all of it to go to you.”
I smiled sadly, lowering my head when Lucy brushed his fingers under my eye, coming back suspiciously wet.
“I had plans to go to culinary school. We had savings set up by the time I was in my senior year. But then she got her diagnosis, and I had to stay here and take care of her. I would have never let her die alone, Lucy. I couldn’t. ”
“I know,” he soothed, being unreasonably understanding about me spilling my guts to him after only a few weeks.
“She said I would get everything as long as I finished my culinary degree. As long as I went to that school in New York, and I finished my courses, I would get her house, her albums, everything. It was all mine, because she left it for me.”
“And your dad?”
“He’s here,” I admitted. “I don’t know if he’s gone far, even while I’ve been at school. He’s ringing lawyers’ doorbells, shaking any tree he can find to take everything she left for me. He’s looked for every loophole possible, and now I’m under a timer.”
“A timer?” Lucy asked, hesitant.
“They stayed the transfer of assets while I was at school, but now that I’m back here and I’ve graduated, I have this weekend to get a job in my field, or everything could go to my dad.”
“What!” Lucy jumped to his feet, anger blazing in his kind eyes. “How could they do that? It belongs to you!”
I laughed, stunned at the intensity of his reaction. “Lucy…”
“No, Knox! This is crap! What kind of lawyers are these?”
“Rich lawyers, because my dad is paying for them.”
Lucy scoffed, throwing his hands into the air. “Why is he doing this to you? You’re his son!”
I stood and tugged Lucy back into my chest. I wrapped my arms around him, even as he grumbled complaints and tucked himself into me. “I’m not his son. Not in all the ways that count. But that’s why I’ve been so focused on these interviews, why I’ve been disappearing when you get to painting.”
“I’ve hardly noticed,” Lucy grumbled.
“I know you’re lying, Lucy.”
Lucy huffed. Then he pulled back enough to meet my eyes. “I’m sorry about your Nana. And your ass of a dad. You deserve better than what he’s doing to you.”
“I know.” I smiled. “But thank you for saying that. For listening to me.”
Lucy softened, his cheeks still pink—whether from the cold or from his shyness, I wasn’t sure.
“How about we think about something else?” I suggested, sliding my hand along his jaw to thread my fingers into the hair at the base of his skull.
Lucy let me tilt his head back further. “Something else? You don’t want us to figure out how to get rid of your dad?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t want to think about him anymore.”
“But surely there’s something we can do–”
“I said no, Lucy.” I tugged his hair sharply.
Lucy gasped. His hands stilled against my stomach, his eyes searching mine, before he swallowed roughly. “You’re trying to distract me.”
I leaned down to nip at his throat. “Is it working?”
I traced the top hem of his pants, then dipped just below them on his lower back. Then I bit a bruise into the base of his neck, and I felt him melt, giving me all his weight.