Chapter 28 Callum
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CALLUM
Ian disappears back into the ballpark, leaving me with the remnants of our scorching kiss on my lips. It was a little peck. A chaste, PG-rated moment that still left me craving more and undressing his departing figure with my mind.
Sometimes, I still can’t believe that I’m all his.
I grin to myself, grounding myself in the moment and keeping calm.
While I don’t have eyes on the back of my head, I can still tell that people are at least noticing the name I’m wearing.
While I’m not sure how well student athletes are known on campus, we’re at a baseball game—most of the crowd is gonna know who Ian is, and we’re precisely where an athlete’s hoodie is gonna stand out.
They don’t sell them, and the team colors are distinctive—dark blue with gold lettering and subtle green accents.
I smile, knowing that I’m Ian’s, and that it shows.
The semester is wrapping up in a few weeks, and if I went back in time and told January Callum that I’d not only have a boyfriend, but that I’d be wearing clothes that basically say “Property of Ian Scott” on it, I think I’d send my past self into a spiral.
Oh, I think someone’s calling my name? They’re pretty far away, but—
“Callum.”
My first instinct to hearing my name is that it’s Sabrina or Laura, but their voices aren’t as—
“Callum! Look at me.”
My blood runs cold, all the warmth leaving my body in a single, shocked breath.
I recognize that voice.
It’s Mom.
My parents found me for real.
I ball one hand up into a fist and put the other in my pocket, palming my phone as I steel myself to face them. If I need to call campus security on them, I will. I have half a mind to make a break for it right now and do that.
But what would I even say?
Fighting every instinct in my body, I force my feet to turn my body around, and I swallow my nerves.
Both of them are no more than ten feet away from me.
The crowd of students falls silent and steps back, forming a kind of oval around my parents. While I could walk with them and try disappearing into the crowd, my parents are already here. They’ve already seen me.
It’ll be better if I deal with them now and try to make them leave, if that’s even possible.
I stay still, and now, the three of us are surrounded like a clearing in the woods.
Every last one of my instincts tells me to shrink down and hide. My mom is fixing me with a withering, disgusted stare, one that I got well acquainted with when I was a kid, and I have to take a breath to keep myself stable. Well, a couple of breaths. One isn’t nearly enough.
“Okay, you found me.” I keep my voice level. “What do you want?”
Mom’s nostrils flare, her face reddening. “How dare you speak to me like that?”
I wince. Nobody’s raised their voice at me since I left, and before I have a chance to respond, she lunges at me, forcing me to take a large step back. She doesn’t stop approaching, and I keep walking backward.
“Are you going to keep chasing me in a circle?” I ask, raising my hands in a questioning gesture.
Oh, thank god, she stops.
Mom stays still, huffing breaths in and out, before she purses her lips. “What on earth were you thinking?”
I shrug like the bad son I already am. “What on earth are you referring to?”
For the first time since I saw him today, Dad speaks up. “Everything. Callum, you absconded in the night and left your family, just to run amok and commit every sin under the sun.”
And I was having a great time doing so, at least until you guys showed up.
“It’s what I needed to do,” I reply, and I hold back from apologizing. “I couldn’t live the life you wanted for me, so I had to leave.”
“The life we wanted for you was respectable, Callum!” Mom yells. “How could you treat your family like this? Why did you have to throw everything away?”
A small, familiar tendril of guilt snakes into my throat, and I swallow it down.
“Because it wasn’t respectable to me!” Never before have I raised my voice around my parents, but fucking hell, it was a long time coming.
I take a much-needed breath to calm down.
“Not that either of you cared, but I was miserable. What did you expect me to do, suck it up and hate my life?”
“You don’t seem to have a problem sucking something else, do you? You were my perfect, pure boy! Why did you have to go run around and corrupt yourself like it’s normal?”
I almost laugh. Almost. Now that I’ve finally gotten away from my parents, seeing the way they’re acting…
How did I ever think their behavior was normal?
The fact that I was ever used to their thinking makes my stomach churn.
Feeling more frustrated than anything else, I rub my temples, resolving to end this. It isn’t worth my time or energy to keep engaging with my parents, and in the long run, the three of us will be way happier if we part ways now.
“Do you even have a plan beyond driving for twenty hours to shout at me on the street?” I wave my hands, realizing a little too late that I’m doing so exactly how my mom does, and I stick them into my pockets.
“What now? Are you going to kidnap me and shove me into a car in front of hundreds of people?”
I gesture at the crowd around us. Some people are filming. Good for them. They’ll capture my delusional, dumbfounded parents.
Dad crosses his arms. “Your behavior has been nothing short of disobedient and reckless.” He pauses, and I use the last remaining bits of my tact to avoid rolling my eyes in the silence. “You’ve gone against everything we taught you.”
“Like what? That existing in public was basically a shortcut to hell? That no woman would ever be good enough for Mom’s special little boy, to the point where I was forbidden from even thinking about girls?
” Or having any kind of sexual thoughts, lest I act on them.
I scoff out a dry, humorless laugh. “Well, you specified a woman, but I found a man, and he’s too good for me, so I don’t know why you’re so mad. ”
Am I poking the proverbial bear? Absolutely. I know Mom’s problem is with me dating and having sex, no matter who it’s with. Add that to her hatred of gay people, and that’s a recipe for pure rage.
Mom points at me, her lips curled into a sneer. “Look, he’s wearing that degenerate fruitcake’s sweater.”
She called Ian a what? How unhinged is she? Is that how she’s going to deflect—
“Grant, our son really is a fucking f—”
Are you fucking kidding me?
What surprises me is that I’m more insulted by my mom referring to my boyfriend as a degenerate fruitcake than her calling me an actual slur.
“You aren’t wrong,” I say, ignoring her insult and keeping to a monotone. “I’m gay.”
I expect my parents to do a dramatic recoil, but their faces screw up in disgust instead, not that I care.
“And I’ve known since I was fourteen,” I continue.
“That was before I learned about it in school. Oh, and guess what—pulling me out of school did nothing to change that because they didn’t even teach us what being gay was by then.
” I let out a frustrated chuckle. “Sorry, but there’s nothing that could have changed me. You failed.”
I have enough restraint left in me to not tack on “as parents” to the end of that sentence.
“You have some nerve, don’t you!” Mom raises her hand and jabs a finger in my direction. “Do you even care about how this looks on us?”
“No, Mom, I don’t,” I deadpan.
“Was four months all it took for you to forget everything we taught you?”
Again, no, but it was enough for me to stop caring as much.
“Are you going to say something?”
“Why should I?” I shrug my hands, making both of my parents blink in surprise. “I have nothing to say to anyone who wants to make me hate myself. We’re done here.”
“No, we aren’t!” Mom spits out.
“Yes, we are.” I point my thumbs to the entrance of the ballpark. “Yeah, I’m gonna…like, head out now.”
Wishful thinking on my part, because I don’t make more than two steps back before Mom reaches to her rear and—
My veins turn to ice.
She unholsters a gun.
Fuck, I didn’t think to check for one on her, I thought she got her license revoked—
None of that matters. She has a pistol in her hands, and she’s pointing it straight at me.
I flick my eyes between her and Dad, blocking out the panicked, scattering students in my peripheral vision. Dad looks as shocked as I am.
Mom’s hands shake. “We’re taking you home, no matter what. You need to be saved.”
My brain must not be fully online, because it’s apparently still in fight, not flight mode. “You’re trying to save me by…pointing a gun at my head?”
Shut up, Callum. You’re gonna get yourself killed.
The expression on Mom’s face makes me believe I just signed off on my own death sentence.