Chapter 13 Eden #2
“No, she’s a sweetheart.” Charlie drops into a squat, pulling Eden down, guiding his hand towards her side when it’s clear Eden isn’t going to do it on his own.
“Her name is Birdie and she loves pets. Usually, she’s napping around this time—she’s a senior and sleeps quite a bit—otherwise I would’ve introduced you earlier and…
yup, there’s the other half of my elderly duo and my favorite lady. ”
Eden smooths his fingers over Birdie’s fur, watching as a bedraggled cat meanders out from behind Charlie’s sofa. It meows loudly, sounding both adorable and pathetic all at once.
“I’m over here, Agnes.”
Agnes meows loudly until she’s within reach of Charlie who scoops her up, cradling her to his chest. Immediately, she purrs as loud as a vacuum, butting her head up against Charlie’s neck.
“This is Agnes, she’s my little old lady. She’s almost blind and nearly twenty, but she’s cuddly as a kitten, aren’t you, girl?” She continues to purr loudly. “She’s a sweetheart, you wanna pet her?”
“Okay,” Eden says, because what else would he say?
“Do you have any pets?”
Eden shakes his head, surprised at how goddamn soft Agnes’ fur is.
“What about growing up? You have any pets growing up?”
“No.”
Eden’s throat gets tight, and he continues to stare at Agnes, wishing the front door weren’t so far away. This is the part where normal people make normal conversation, but Eden isn’t normal. He didn’t have any pets because he didn’t have a home or parents.
“Never wanted any?” Charlie prompts, still trying.
Eden shrugs. He used to love animals as a kid because they wouldn’t care if he tried to use crayons like makeup or made skirts out of his sheets when no one was looking. Or at least he assumed so. None of his foster parents had animals, and it wasn’t like he had friends.
“We didn’t have any growing up, my parents were so busy, and it just never happened.
But my youngest brother Alec came out of the womb loving animals.
He used to come into the house with lizards and injured birds and stray cats.
Once my parents came home and he’d found a fucking turtle—a turtle—wandering around and turned their bathroom into a habitat.
That’s where all mine came from. Birdie was on the kill list at a shelter because no one wanted her, and Alec called me sobbing and well—then I had a dog.
He found Agnes near the college. We’re not sure where she came from, but we took her to the vet and put up fliers.
No one wanted her, so she’s mine now. I’ve got two more cats who are around here somewhere, one of which you met already, but they’re assholes, so don’t bother trying to pet them unless you’ve got a treat for them. ”
“Why did you keep them?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, did you want them all?”
“Well, not initially no, especially not that fucking hamster, but Alec’s persistent.”
“You have a hamster?”
“Yeah, there’s an enclosure in the other room. Little asshole is named Sweet Cheeks, but there’s nothing sweet about him. He’s the devil. He’s a pain in my ass.”
“Why don’t you just get rid of him?”
Charlie’s expression morphs into confusion. “What do you mean?”
“He’s difficult,” Eden says, unsure why the way Charlie is looking at him makes him feel like he might throw up. “You could get rid of him.”
“I don’t get rid of things because they’re hard, Eden.”
Eden’s eyes burn, and he clenches his jaw so tight his teeth grind.
It’s just a hamster, not a kid, but suddenly Eden can’t stop wishing someone had said the same thing about him.
He can’t stop wondering how different his life might have been if one—just one—of his foster parents hadn’t given up on him and given him back.
Maybe his mom hadn’t given him away. The only thing he knows for sure is what was in the paperwork he got when he was of age and able to get his own records.
A drug addicted baby dropped off at a fire station. Someone working had seen a woman come and leave him there, wrapped in an old, stained sweatshirt and nothing else.
He’s just a more difficult baby than we expected.
He doesn’t play well with other children.
He cries too much. He fights too much. He’s not a good fit for our family.
We can’t quite meet his needs. We think maybe he’d do better in a home without siblings.
We think maybe he’d do better in a group home.
We think maybe someone else can handle him better.
Always someone else. From the moment Eden was born, he’d been given away and shunted around.
He thought he stopped caring, thought maybe most people would’ve done the same if faced with a high-needs baby that became a difficult toddler then grew up to be an argumentative, gender nonconforming queer kid that fit nowhere.
Everyone got rid of what they didn’t like, didn’t they?
“Eden?” Charlie whispers.
It occurs to Eden that he’s crying.
Fuck Charlie for making Eden feel like this. Fuck him.
“You’re infuriating,” is what Eden says.
“Well, no arguments there,” Charlie replies, shuffling closer instead of further away.
He should be running away from Eden, not getting closer.
He continues to slowly scoot closer like he’s afraid if he moves too fast Eden might bolt.
He’s not wrong, the itch is there. It’s only the fear that if he runs, Charlie might not follow that stops him this time.
He shouldn’t care, but he does, and that makes this all so much worse.
To his relief, Charlie doesn’t mention the wetness on his cheeks and holds out his cat instead.
“You wanna hold her?”
“She won’t like me.”
“I would tell you she will, but I don’t wanna lie to you. She has a mixed relationship with my parents and my brothers. She won’t let my mom or dad hold her. She loves Alec. She wants to love Andrew, but he hates cat hair, and she tolerates Jason.”
“How many brothers do you have?” Eden balks.
“Just the three. You’ve met Andrew, obviously. The other two you’ll either love or hate because Alec is like me, and Jason is a fucking puppy. You’ll meet them eventually,” Charlie says before adding, “you know, if you want.”
If you want. As if Eden has a choice. As if Charlie expects he’ll be around and it’ll be up to him to decide if he wants to meet them and not an accident or something to avoid.
“How about it?” Charlie prompts, holding Agnes out midair. Her purring has stopped, but she seems pretty docile about her current position. “You want to hold her? She makes a great cuddle buddy. Though between you and me, I’m better.”
“I’m not going to cuddle you,” Eden grumbles, accepting the cat because it’s the easiest thing to do.
“Relax,” Charlie tells him, because yeah, Eden is holding her like she might explode.
In his defense, he’s never held a cat before, or any animal for that matter.
The closest he’s ever come to pets was the small pet store that used to be in the shopping center he passed on the way to elementary school back in Illinois.
They had all kinds of animals in there, despite being in a tiny little corner store.
Eden used to detour there while walking home from school to stare in their cages, knowing exactly how it felt to be waiting around for someone to want to buy you.
Knowing how it felt to be gawked at and paraded around for potential parents.
Eventually, he was sent to a different foster family in a different part of town and forced to transfer schools. He couldn’t get away with walking across town after school because he’d been deemed a flight risk and got shuffled onto the after school bus before he could escape.
“She loves her head scratches,” Charlie tells Eden, very carefully and slowly guiding one of Eden’s hands to the top of Agnes’ head. He mimics scratching between her ears, and when Eden does it, Agnes lets out a low purr, the rumble of it reverberating against his chest. “Look, she likes you.”
“She obviously has questionable taste, like you.”
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”
Together they pet Agnes, the weight of her in Eden’s arms and the gentle vibrations of her purring soften the sharpest edges of Eden’s unease.
At least slightly. That unease rises when Charlie reaches towards Eden’s face.
For a second, he thinks he’s going to touch his hair, and a knee jerk panic floods his senses, making him squeeze Agnes a little too hard.
She yelps, jumping from Eden’s arms and running away the way he wishes he could.
The look in Charlie’s eyes is impossible to read, and Eden isn’t sure he wants to even, if he could.
“Can I have some water?” Eden asks, needing an escape.
“Sure, you want me to get it for you or—”
“I can get it myself if you tell me where it is,” Eden insists, desperate for a few seconds alone. Maybe if he’s not surrounded by Charlie, he can breathe.
Whether Charlie senses that or just doesn’t mind Eden wandering his home is unclear.
What is clear is that Charlie is too damn nice, offering Eden free roam of his kitchen and house and whatever he wants to eat or drink while he puts the animals to bed.
This apparently includes putting television on for them which is some rich people shit.
Eden didn’t even have his own room until he was seventeen and had been living with Addy for over a year.
He’d taken the couch until he’d been able to make enough money for them to put down a deposit on a bigger two bedroom.
He can’t imagine owning an entire house for one person and a few pets.
Pets that apparently have their own bedroom and television.
Noisily, Eden makes his way to the kitchen, tracking every stray odd and end in the house that screams Charlie, from the random art on every wall to the strange assortment of knick knacks ranging from what appears to be expensive ceramic vases to old tin cans being used as vases with crocheted flowers in them.
Like the rest of the house, or at least the parts Eden has seen so far, the kitchen screams Charlie in every way.
Like the rest of Charlie’s place, it’s clearly older.
Rather than remodeling though, each cupboard is painted a different color making it a vibrantly colored eyesore.
None of it matches, but something about it works in the same way Charlie’s hideous clothes work—because they’re Charlie’s.
As if the cupboards weren’t colorful enough, there’s a garish yellow backsplash on the walls behind the sink and stove. The counters are covered in random shit: from piles of mail, a coffee can filled with soda tabs, and for unknown reasons, the ugliest jeweled chicken statue he’s ever seen.
While everything outside the cupboards is chaos, inside them is a different story.
The first cupboard he opens has matching storage containers with cereal and snacks, all labeled.
The next has alphabetized spices and the third has cups—the top shelf full of ceramic coffee mugs and the bottom filled with various drinking glasses that don’t match but have been arranged by size.
It’s not hard to imagine the why, or rather who, that’s responsible for this.
Andrew. Over the last week, they somehow started texting, and Eden found his over-the-top sarcasm matched with Andrew’s dry humor and endless patience, somehow leading him to acquiescing to the idea of showing up here while he and Charlie were gone.
Andrew’s a persuasive fucker. Or maybe it’s just that Eden likes him, likes them both. Not romantically but deeply nonetheless. Andrew’s big brother vibes are so damn strong that everything about him screams safe in a way Eden has only ever experienced with Addy.
Things get more complicated where Charlie is concerned because Eden’s attraction and burgeoning feelings for the older man make him infinitely less safe, because the possibility of this all blowing up in his face is astronomical.
There’s no way a man like Charlie, with a solid family and job and life, is going to want to stick it out with someone like Eden.
Yet like the misguided, despaired man he clearly is, Eden is here.
Mood suddenly tanking, Eden grabs a glass and fills it with water. He chugs it down, focusing on the ice cold sharpness of the water and not his crashing emotions. It’s not long before he hears Charlie’s incoming footsteps.
So much for getting a moment alone to compose himself.