Chapter Eight
The Interest Rate of Borrowed Trouble
It didn’t matter that no one was hurt and nothing was damaged, or that one of the firefighters offered to stay at the house until Robbie’s return—he couldn’t relax until he had Sawyer in his arms. His heart started racing the moment he picked up the call and heard the beeping fire alarm, which Sawyer couldn’t shut up, and he knew it wouldn’t settle until he could confirm everything with his own eyes.
“Oh my God,” Sawyer complained when Robbie insisted on a ten-point inspection. All fingers accounted for—not even a blister. “Robbie. I’m fine. I’m just like… hungry.” He huffed, refusing to meet Robbie’s eyes.
Robbie narrowed his own. Sawyer was acting “sus,” as he would say. Not the high kind of sus, but the up to something kind. But Robbie knew this kid too well to approach it head-on. He could bide his time.
Sawyer might have escaped unscathed, but the same could not be said of the oven, which was going to need serious work before anything edible could be cooked in it. Definitely not a job for tonight. “How do we feel about Chinese?” Robbie asked.
“I want extra green-onion pancakes.”
Robbie was raising such a sensible child. “Obviously. What is this, amateur hour?”
He was pretty sure the hug he got in return wasn’t for the takeout, but he didn’t have to tell Sawyer his cover was blown. “Come on. Let’s see if I can still beat you at Mortal Kombat.”
While Sawyer set it up, Robbie ordered dinner, then took an extra few minutes “ordering dinner” to text Finn instead.
Crisis averted, Chinese on its way. Finn didn’t need Robbie to dump his worries on him. Besides, he wanted to ease back into the conversation they’d been having earlier.
But how to word that was… tricky.
The truth was, like any professional athlete who’d been unattached in his prime years (and many who weren’t), Robbie’d had more than his fair share of sex.
He liked sex. Sex was fun and felt good and cleared the mind.
People would joke that Robbie’s mind didn’t need clearing, but people rarely knew what they were talking about.
Anyway, the point was that Robbie enjoyed recreational sex.
But people were obsessed with it, and he’d never gotten that part.
Not until he kissed Finn and lost whatever was left of his mind.
Robbie might be physically present in his own home with his kid—and he’d never regret leaving the hotel; he’d needed to know Sawyer was okay.
But now that he’d done that, mentally, emotionally, he was back in the suite, on the couch with Finn on his lap, negotiating the details of their relationship.
This was so much easier when he had Finn in front of him to gauge his reactions. Also significantly more fun. But as the great bards once said, you can’t always get what you want. Still….
Robbie glanced around. Sawyer was still in the living room, setting up the video-game emulator.
He leaned back in the armchair in the front room and arranged himself so the effects of thinking about Finn were obvious, then snapped a picture and sent it.
Wish you were here. On Robbie’s dick specifically.
He was pretty sure Finn would get the subtext.
Then Robbie composed himself and headed downstairs. “Ready to lose?”
Sawyer squawked. “When have you ever beaten me at this game?”
“Uh, last week, if I’m remembering right?”
“Okay, that doesn’t count. You took the batteries out of my controller—”
“Excuses,” Robbie dismissed.
Sawyer elbowed him.
In Robbie’s pocket, his phone vibrated.
The starting screen hadn’t loaded yet. Probably Robbie should upgrade this system if it was taking this long, but on the other hand, maybe dealing with old computers would teach Sawyer a valuable lesson in patience.
You’re a menace, Finn’s text read. I’m at the grocery store.
Robbie texted him an eggplant. Then, Bonding with Sawyer. Text you later? You can tell me all your fantasies and how you want this to work.
Then he forced himself to put the phone on Do Not Disturb for half an hour of quality video-game time. Sawyer thoroughly trounced him. It was possible Robbie’s head was not in the game.
Dinner arrived, and Robbie and Sawyer decamped the basement to the kitchen to eat, because it meant they had to talk to each other instead of watch TV.
Robbie had instituted the rule and thought it was probably good practice, or at least it had been until today, when Sawyer looked at him over a carton of lo mein and said, “So where’d you go today? ”
“Gym,” Robbie said, because he hadn’t been a closeted bisexual professional athlete for twenty years without learning to lie unflinchingly.
Sawyer stabbed a noodle, frowning. “I thought you had Tuesdays off.”
“From the show,” Robbie said. “Not from life.” Ugh. Was he going to have to start coming up with better lies? That would be a drag.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. Sawyer narrowed his eyes like he could hear it. Fucking teenagers were like dogs or something. Sawyer needed to go to a few rock concerts, take the edge off that sharp hearing. “Is that your trainer?”
“What am I, clairvoyant?” Robbie shook his head.
“No phones at the table. You know the rules.” He was kind of feeling like Sawyer wanted to look over his shoulder, but he had the vague idea that you weren’t supposed to tell kids to mind their own business, which was unfortunate because it was a lesson Sawyer could stand to learn.
Of course, the same rule didn’t always apply to parents—or parent-like persons—and now that Sawyer was relaxed and less defensive, Robbie picked up a noodle and casually asked, “So what had you so distracted you forgot about pizza?”
Sawyer’s head shot up. Bingo.
“What?”
“It’s pizza, kid.”
He looked down and his shoulders slumped. Robbie doubted he had wanted to keep this from him, but teen pride could be a bitch.
“Dad. He says Clive and Deborah are talking about grandparents’ rights.”
Robbie froze. Sawyer had started calling his grandparents by their first names, rather than Grandma and Grandpa, once they made it clear they wouldn’t respect his chosen name.
They’d never been very good about “nicknames,” and Robbie had always grated under their use of Robert, but to refuse to use Sawyer because it wasn’t on his birth certificate was just cruel.
(They turned a hilarious shade of red when Sawyer pointed out that it was, in fact, on his birth certificate as part of his mother’s name.
Robbie would cherish that memory as part of the last time he had voluntarily escorted Sawyer to their house.)
“Grandparents’ rights,” Robbie said slowly.
“Dad says they think he’s, like, keeping me from them.” That was so fucked up for so many reasons, not least because why the hell was Vince texting Sawyer this and not Robbie?
“Right, and you staying away from them has nothing to do with their crappy behaviour.”
Sawyer snorted, but his mouth turned down. “I looked it up. If a judge says so, then they’d get visitation rights, like divorced parents.”
Robbie took that in. “Did the internet also mention whether or not the judge would care about your thoughts?” His own research into custody law over the past few months indicated that most judges considered what the kids wanted, especially ones Sawyer’s age.
“Maybe.” He poked his pancake with chopsticks.
“Well, it doesn’t sound like they filed yet.” Sawyer shook his head. “So, no sense borrowing trouble tonight. But I’ll text Vince to see what they said and Eugene to get the downlow on grandparents’ rights and give him a heads-up.”
Some, but not all, of the stress eased out of Sawyer’s face. “Yeah?”
“Of course.” He reached out, unable to not touch, and smoothed his hand over Sawyer’s hair. “Leave the worrying to the adults, okay?”
“So where’s the fire?” Eugene asked when he finally obeyed Robbie’s 911! call tonight! text.
Robbie snorted at the irony. “It was in my oven, sorta, briefly.”
“What?” Eugene almost snapped. Robbie had never heard him sound so urgent.
“We’re fine. I might have to sacrifice my oven to the gods of cleaning and air freshening, but the damage was limited to one very burned frozen pizza.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. Sawyer got distracted by a text from Vince. The troglodytes want grandparents’ rights.”
“Shit.”
Robbie updated him, and Eugene listened and hummed.
“Look, we can talk more details in a day or two, after I’ve done some research and hopefully have their request. But the long and the short of it is that Sawyer’s opinion matters.
The judge will want to hear a fourteen-year-old’s perspective.
Unless we get a transphobe, I can’t see them having a chance in hell. ”
“And if we do get the transphobe?”
“Then we appeal the hell out of it.”
“Okay. Okay.” Robbie tried to take deep breaths and calm down. He rubbed his face and sighed. “This kid. He’s gonna make me go grey.”
“You’ve already got some, brah. Perks of being forty.”
“Almost forty. And rude. But also, he’s increasing the grey. Trying to burn down my house. And did I tell you about his stint in fraud?”
“Do I want to know?”
Okay, maybe this was a conflict of interest, but Eugene was pretty good at walking the line between best friend turned uncle and family lawyer. “He emailed Dance Your Ice Off and told them he was my agent and that I wanted to be on the show.”
“He didn’t,” Eugene laughed.
“Oh, he did.”
“GOAT! I knew I loved that kid for a reason.”
Robbie gave in to the urge to slump and press his forehead to the table. “Do not tell him that. Do not encourage his crimes.”
“I’ll encourage what I want. Boy slays and you know it. I’m not turning the future leader of the world into my opp.”
“Oh God, they’re going to hunt me down in the old folks’ home and interview me in my rocking chair about whether I knew he was destined for great things.” Most of the time, Robbie couldn’t be prouder of the fact that Sawyer was a baby genius. Sometimes, though… sometimes he worried.