Chapter 11
MARC
I poked the fire, squinting between the logs where the flames were growing.
Now they were catching the smaller twigs and sticks we’d used as kindling.
It was probably a good thing we weren’t trying to truly ‘rough it’ because I’d struggled for almost fifteen minutes to get this much of a fire going, and that was with a lighter.
It would have been dawn by the time I even got the tiniest flame if I’d been forced to use a flint and steel.
“Oh, hey, you managed it,” Jude said as he crouched beside me. “I thought we were going to have cold ravioli or use a Sterno.”
I straightened and stared at him. “I…Sterno? There were…the whole time?”
My son blinked at me. “I thought you were just trying to do it the old-fashioned way.”
“The old-fashioned way would be some metal and a rock, or a stick and a whole lot of rubbing,” Reggie told him as he stared at the fabric that was meant to be our tent.
Though from the looks of it, he and I might be sleeping under the stars tonight.
I watched as he stretched, looked at the ground, then grunted, only to straighten up immediately, giving me a pointed look when I snorted at him.
Before I could be confused by why he was being so sharp with me, Jude whispered. “Did he pull something?”
I glanced at him. “What?”
He nodded toward Reggie. “He’s been…kind of stiff and, I don’t know, walking a little funny? It’s like he pulled a muscle or something.”
“Or something,” I said in the most neutral tone I could manage so I didn’t burst into a fit of laughter that would have brought Reggie’s wrath down on me.
I didn’t want to say it, mostly because it felt like paranoia, but Reggie had been strange ever since we’d left Arete.
He wasn’t grumpy per se, though his irritation was showing now he was fighting with a tent that clearly did not want to cooperate, but he had been unusually quiet.
I’d tried to talk to him a few times, and while he was fine, it felt like he was off in his own head rather than in the moment, which was more like me.
It didn’t help that I’d been wondering when I was going to find the courage to have a frank conversation about the two of us.
It would do us good to know exactly where we stood, and I owed him a few truths, not just the fact that I was enjoying the sex.
But I also felt he deserved better, more than just sex from me.
Yet every time I geared myself up to talk to him about it, I lost the will to step up.
Which was a major problem because, as much as I was enjoying myself, and I was enjoying myself, I was also feeling the guilt racking up.
Reggie hadn’t said or done anything to make me think he was waiting for me to say something, but surely…
surely, he had to be. He said what he wanted when he wanted it, so for him to not say he wanted more than sex, or if he wanted just the sex and comfort we shared, it meant he was waiting on me to do something, or at least bring it up.
I also knew from personal experience what happened when someone felt they had to wait in order to take the steps to get what they wanted.
I had watched it with Charlene, and watched it break our marriage.
She hadn’t always been so harsh with me, so short and impatient; she had loved me, and I had loved her until the end.
Yet although it had been her who had stepped out of our marriage rather than address her problem, I was the one who had slowly but inevitably pushed her away.
I didn’t want history to repeat itself, but I didn’t know how to stop it.
More time, that was all I needed, but now I wondered if my timer was ticking down.
Jude frowned at me. “Something funny?”
“Not at all,” I told him as I eyed the fire and cursed when I saw it was dying down.
I bent to grab the pile of small sticks we had collected earlier to build the fire back up so it would eventually catch the larger sticks and grow into a proper blaze.
The sun was already making its way to the horizon, and while the area was relatively safe, I didn’t want to spend the night in darkness with nothing but lanterns and flashlights.
A little fire was good for more than just warming up food. “Shit.”
“You’re as bad at keeping a fire healthy as you are at keeping plants alive,” Jude said with a sigh.
“Perhaps agreeing to let Reggie be your Guide was a poor idea,” I muttered as I poked at the fire.
“Dad,” he said, and nudged me out of the way to take over the fire. “I know you asked him, and no, get that look off your face, he didn’t tell me. Well, he did, but I already knew.”
“You realize we’re not alone,” I said, glancing at the group of guys who had joined us.
A couple of them were trying to figure out how high up the tree they could get.
Of course, the problem was that both weighed over two hundred pounds, so the chances of a branch breaking was high.
I didn’t want to end this trip by having to make an emergency dash to fix someone’s broken skull, but Reggie had already waved me off and muttered that if someone broke an arm, we had liability to cover it.
Not…the most comforting of responses, but sensing his terseness, I had dropped it.
“Everyone knows,” he said with a snort, and I watched with annoyance and pride as the fire actually grew under his care, licking at the underside of the thick branches and the larger logs.
“I mean, it’s not hard to put together. They were asked permission for me to be here?
My age? That even if they never saw us side by side, enough of them have seen you to see the resemblance. ”
“I guess that…was one flaw in the plan,” I admitted begrudgingly. “Have any of them—”
“Treated me differently? Nah,” he said with a shrug as he carefully moved something I couldn’t see in the firepit. “I mean, I was worried about it at first, about being here.”
“Really? You seemed enthusiastic,” I reminded him. “After all, you went head to head with your mother and came out the victor.”
“She was…pretty mad about that; she might have forgiven me when I go back,” he said with a snort.
“She might have been mad, but she was mad because she realized you’re not the little boy she can keep an eye on anymore,” I told him gently, giving up on the fire and sitting back on a large rock, staring up at the sky.
“It’s hard being a parent. It’s always hard, but it’s always a different hard too, in different ways and at different times.
It was hard when you were learning to walk and you cracked your head open on the dining room table that your mother swore you were going to hurt yourself on, and I had to move into storage because I wasn’t going to throw it out. ”
He reached up, unconsciously running his fingers through his dark hair where the old scar sat. “You still have it?”
“No, I gave it to Malcolm and then, within six months of Reggie moving in, it was broken,” I said, raising my voice and peering over my shoulder.
“I told you! I was trying to put a shelf together, I hit my hand with the hammer, and the next thing I knew it was broken,” Reggie said, having found his good mood again now he had the foundation of the tent put together with the poles.
Jude stared. “That…that makes no sense.”
“I tried telling Malcolm that and he shrugged and said that’s the story he was told. It’s the story your uncle has maintained the whole time as well,” I said with a wry glance at Reggie.
Only for Reggie’s expression to tighten, and Jude to look away.
I raised a brow, and Reggie gave a huff.
“Fine, it was hideous, alright? The thing looked like it had been colored in the seventies, then hacked at by a blind man having a seizure. Malcolm hated it but didn’t have the heart to get rid of it because he knew you loved it.
So I did what he couldn’t and broke it while he was out one day.
Except he came back too soon, and I didn’t have a good cover story, so I went with that and he just… let me.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” I said with a frown.
Jude frowned. “Was it that table I saw in a picture once? Orange and teal? Kinda shaped funny, like a rectangle that was missing chunks?”
“Yes.”
“Dad? That thing was uglier than sin.”
“At least your son doesn’t share your taste,” Reggie said, and a spasm pulled at his mouth before he turned and stared at the next set of poles. “Oh, fuck my life, I didn’t—”
Sensing it was time to leave him to what he was doing, I turned back to Jude.
“And it’s hard being a parent other times too.
Like when you went through a stage where all you did was scream because you didn’t want to go to bed.
It was only a couple of months, but that wasn’t fun.
Or when we had to send you to school for the first time and we realized we didn’t have to alternate days working from home because…
you weren’t going to be there for the day.
Or when Bradley down the street stopped being your friend, and you tried to act like it didn’t bother you when we knew it broke your heart.
Or when Jen decided after a couple of months that you weren’t a good boyfriend for her.
And now? Now you’re legally an adult, and it’s time we let you go out into the world… and it’s hard.”
“Mom’s a hard woman,” he said, but there was no heart in his words.