9. Chapter Eight
Chapter Eight
J oe sat cross-legged on the bed.
It had been made two hours ago, before a giant cat and three kids had their way with it. Now the sheet was in a knot somewhere under the rucked-up blankets and the aforementioned cat had taken a break from rioting to have a nap on the pillows.
Joe could have made the bed again. Instead, he’d gotten out his ‘photo albums’.
Packets of photos he’d had printed off his phone and shipped with plans to mount them properly in books and frames.
They’d ordered them when they’d got the news the surrogate was expecting, with half-baked plans to give both her and Cody a copy so they’d know what sort of family they had.
Not tidy. Not traditional. Not always easy, but the sort of family that might be ‘like that’ but still took the trouble to put together baby's first photobook.
The prints had arrived a month after Alan died.
By then, Joe had been lucky to scrape together the executive function to buy diapers and formula in the same grocery run. Crafting had been right out of his capabilities.
But he’d had an hour after work today and, halfway through clearing out the storage room for Jessie’s new cat business, he’d found these stuffed in a cupboard. They’d not even been opened. For some reason, he’d decided that it was a good idea to ( hurt himself?) go through them immediately.
He was pretty sure there was nothing deeper behind that decision. No recent, emotional engagement over the last few months that had dredged up… stuff… and made battering himself with old, happy memories seem like what he deserved.
No guy who turned up and was nice to him. Who was honest about what he wanted, but not pushy—not nearly pushy enough—about it.
No. This was absolutely normal spring cleaning.
He organized the prints into piles as he went, categorizing them by either date or vibe depending on how they struck them.
“Look at that,” he said over his shoulder as he paused on one photo. “We used to have a dog.”
He showed Angus the photo of him and Alan in some—at this point, he couldn’t remember where—random National Park with their arms around Frank, the Labrador. Angus blinked at it, decided he could have taken Frank, and rolled onto his back.
Joe looked at the photo, at his face and Alan’s, and tried to feel it again.
He couldn’t.
The Joe in the photo wasn’t him. That Joe had still been a graphic designer; he might have known Alan had a kid, but he’d not met her yet. That Alan hadn’t come out to his parents yet, not been so shocked by their reaction that he’d never been quite ready to push them again.
And, of course, now he was dead, and Joe felt…
Not nothing. Lots of things, just not the same as he used to. That was what scared him… He paused as he set the photo back down on the bed and frowned. It wasn’t fear. Fear was just the easiest thing to blame it on. There was no weight to it.
It was guilt.
What if he’d met Quentin back when he was that Joe?
Or if Alan had decided that he didn’t need to drive a badly maintained mustang down a country road into a moose.
Were all those years together just a holding pattern until the minute Joe made eye contact with a dark-haired, ruthlessly kind pilot on the runway?
If it had come to that, would he have picked Alan or Quentin?
“The best part about that question,” Joe said out loud as he put the photo back down on its appropriate stack. “Is that whatever I answer, the guilt wins.”
Angus ignored him.
It was all Joe deserved. No one liked self-pity, least of all a cat who’d travelled 60 miles through the Alaska wilderness just to fuck up a bear.
At least, that’s what Cody’s latest fridge masterpiece implied.
Of course—Joe abruptly lost his patience with the project and shuffled all the stacks back together—all of that assumed that this thing with Quentin was real.
Love at first sight wasn’t real. It was a Hallmark shortcut to pack the whole romantic process into a 120-minute runtime across a holiday weekend.
Love was time and work and dealing with all the things you didn’t like about someone.
What was there to even dislike about Quentin? The man was perfect.
Joe caught the little wistful note on the end of that thought. He gave his brain a disapproving flick as he started to stuff the prints back into their case for…some other time. There was enough mooning over Quentin in this house. None of them needed any encouragement.
A print fell out of the stack. Joe reached for it to stuff it in with the rest and paused.
Lust at first sight? That was real, but that was for the Joe who’d posed on a pier in a cut-off band tee, all scruff and sweat and hair that had actually been styled. It would make sense for Quentin to chase someone like that.
What the hell was Joe supposed to believe Quentin saw in a man with spit-up on most of his shirts and whose last haircut had been ‘just take the ends off’ while he straddled a fake lion in a kids’ hairdressers?
Before he could hurt himself more by coming up with any answers to that, a door slammed downstairs.
“Joe?!” Jessie yelled from downstairs. He heard the familiar three thump pattern that was her backpack being dumped and boots kicked off. “Did Angus miss me?”
Before Joe could yell back, ‘He’s been fine,’ Angus gave a plaintive mew from behind him, jumped off the bed, and ran to shoulder the door open. The ba-dum-dum of his feet hitting the stairs echoed through the house as Angus raced downstairs so he could be reunited with his girl.
Joe shook his head. “Traitor.”
He resealed the envelope and leaned over to drop them onto the bedside table.
They could go through them later. Jessie would probably enjoy that more than he had.
Somewhere in the house, the noise woke Cody, who started to wail, either because he was hungry, grumpy, or thought he was about to miss out on something.
Joe swung his legs off the bed and slid off it.
He stretched, scrubbed his hand through his hair, and snorted to himself as he admitted that even a clean shirt and a good haircut wouldn’t make him 25 years old and unencumbered again.
Not that he wanted to be, he hastened to add before he ended up overfeeding the guilt, but there was no point in pretending he had a choice.
Although he supposed, as he headed downstairs, that didn’t mean he couldn’t be a thirty-something-year-old parental guardian of three with an actual haircut.
I mean, that was what he’d do if this thing with Quentin was at all real. Or if he was going to do anything about it. Which it wasn’t, and he wasn’t. Obviously.
He got Cody and headed downstairs. Jessie was sitting on the rug in the hallway, whipping a feather on a stick in a big circle around her.
The rug rucked up under Angus’ feet as he pounced after it.
In Joe’s arms, Cody tried his hardest to flip himself upside down as he groaned and made grabby hands at the cat.
“Benjy’s at Clary’s,” Jessie rhymed off without looking up. “His mom picked them up at the stop, so he’s not out on the streets committing crime.”
“Try not to sound disappointed.”
“At least crime would be interesting,” Jessie said. He couldn’t see her roll her eyes, but he could tell she had. “All they do is homework. They don’t even kiss.”
Annnnnd thank god for that, Joe thought. He really hoped Tess would be out of rehab before that became a thing.
“Did they not ask you to go?” he asked.
“No,” Jessie said. “Why would they? He’s not my friend.”
“She could be.”
This time, Jessie turned so he could fully appreciate her look of disapproval. “They do homework,” she said. “And their mom doesn’t believe in sugar.”
Oh, a one-two punch to Joe’s already shaky parental esteem. “I make you do your homework,” he said weakly.
Jessie turned back to Angus. “Besides, Angus needs attention. I took on a responsibility , Joe.”
“OK,” Joe said. He started toward the kitchen, the usual routine of ‘what do you want for dinner’ lined up in his head. Instead, he paused and asked, “Once you’ve enriched the cat, though, do you want to pick up Benjy and go–”
To the mall. He’d get a haircut, in a chair and by a man that wasn’t wearing Disney clothes, and they’d get food court food. Before he could finish the offer, though, Jessie waved her hand at the bag.
“Coach sent home a permission slip for regionals,” she said without looking around. “She said we don’t have to pay in full yet, just the deposit.”
“Oh,” Joe said. He kissed Cody’s head and breathed in the baby shampoo sweetness, cut just slightly with the astringent smell of medicated eardrops to remind him he’d need a refill soon, of soft curls as he put the rest away. “OK. I can sort that. What do you want for dinner?”
****
She’d wanted lasagna, but had to settle for sandwiches.
Two days later, and the range was still broken.
“But Angus only gets raw food,” Jessie assured Quentin anxiously. “So he’s been OK.”
“Of course,” Quentin said as he patted her back. “And if there is a problem, just let me know. We can fix it.”
“Oh,” Jessie said. She screwed her face up and then wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “I thought you might be mad. Like at the other place.”
“They were stupid,” Quentin told her. “And they lied to me to try and cover it up, which was even more stupid. You can’t give stupid people a second chance. They don’t know what to do with it.”
OK, that had gone off track in a way that Joe hadn’t expected. He spat the screw he’d been holding in his mouth out to say something. Before he could, Jessie nodded seriously.
“Oh,” Jessie said. “OK.”
“No,” Joe said. “What don’t we do, Jessie?”
She stared at him blankly. Years of socialization gone in one pithily delivered soundbite.
“We don’t call people stupid,” Joe reminded her. “It’s not kind.”
“What if they are?” Quentin asked.
“...you don’t have to point it out,” Joe said. He wasn’t sure that was the right answer, but he’d not expected a quiz. “Just work around them.”
Quentin looked dubious.