Chapter Twelve #2
“They’re evil!” he declared, scrunching up his nose. “Do you know that they hiss as well as honk? Because I didn’t until it started hissing before it chased me!”
“It probably wanted the bread,” I remarked.
“Oh, it did,” Callen said. “But Payden wouldn’t hand it over. He insisted that it was only for the ducks, since they were smaller and he felt like the geese were picking on them.”
“How’d the chase turn out?” I asked.
His father chuckled, and there was that same fond look again as he shifted his gaze to Payden. “After he ran around screeching like a banshee, collecting more geese along the way, he made a beeline for his mom, which is how I wound up with this shot right here.”
He pointed to a different one now. Of Payden in his mother’s arms, bread still clutched in both fists, a swarm of geese around her feet, necks extending, one of the birds with wings mid-flap, feet almost a foot off the ground as it snapped at the bag holding the bread.
“They only let me get a couple shots off before insisting I rescue them from the “demon birds,” his mother’s words, not mine. I was having too much fun waiting to see what happened next,” he admitted.
“If it had been left up to him, those geese would have eaten the bread and us too,” Elise said as giggles bubbled up and spilled over. “Going to the park with these two was always an adventure. Where is the one with Payden…oh yes, there it is.”
She drew my attention to one of Payden lying beneath a tree, surrounded by bluebells, only something didn’t quite look…
oh shit, that wasn’t a stuffed animal perched on his chest. Nope, it was an actual chipmunk, standing there looking around while Payden slept.
The picture sharing a frame with it looked like it had been taken a while later, after the chipmunk had curled up and settled in for a nap.
“So adorable,” I muttered, gazing from it to Payden's grinning face. “I see nothing has changed."
His face lit up even brighter before his mother cleared her throat.
“Payden, why don’t you help your dad get everything moved from the kitchen to the picnic table?” she suggested. “We’ll be with you in a moment.”
I did my best to school my features and pretend that she was a nosy reporter with an intrusive question I had no intention of answering and didn’t let my discomfort show when Payden nodded and reluctantly let go of my hand.
“Okay, Mom, but please don’t keep him too long. My stomach is growling, and I can smell all the yumminess from here,” he declared before following his father, while leaving me in an entryway that felt much too tight and cramped once they were gone.
“Do you know that you’re the first person he’s ever brought home who really stopped and looked at this wall?
" she said when he was out of earshot. “I used to watch some of the so-called daddies he brought through here, they’d glance up at it, shake their heads, and look away just as fast. But you lingered. Why?”
Well, shit… Now what?
Shrugging, I just looked up at the wall again to see more candid images of Payden in action, a little older but not a teenager yet, stretched out on the floor with a giant cork board in front of him, filled with drawings and written pages, a half-finished drawing beside him in a sketchbook.
“What was he doing there?” I asked, hoping to delay answering long enough for me to come up with one.
“Working on a story,” she explained, stepping up beside me and pointing out a nearby image of Payden holding a colorful book in his hands, with a cover that looked like it had been colored on poster board, spiral rings holding it all together for him.
“We had it bound for him after he finished with it. He still has it somewhere, and the others he dreamed up too.”
“I-I guess I paused because it was a chance to learn more about him,” I finally admitted. “Things no one else would see or know about, but you saved all the memories, which is awesome. The whole wall, is that your wedding picture up there"
“It is,” she said after I’d pointed to the one highest up on the wall. “Everything else stems from that one moment…well…and all the ones that led to it.”
“I’ve never dated before,” I blurted. “It wouldn’t have been fair with the life I led.
So I've never met anyone’s parents before, and honestly, I feel like this is the worst time in my life to do it, because I’ve been living on the streets for the past two years since my band fell apart, and I’m no one's catch. I won’t even try to put up a front with you guys and pretend to be.
But I’ve fallen in love with your son, and I’m going to figure out how to be the best me I can be for him.
All of this is just proof of how special he truly is and how much he deserves to hear that from someone every day. ”
“You’re right about that," she replied. “He does deserve to hear it. He deserves to feel it and know it too, and from time to time I’ve been upset with the fact that he couldn’t see that for himself when he was with some of the weasels he clung to.”
I wanted to ask about why Payden had felt the need to ask me if it was okay for him to contact them, but I hadn’t addressed it with Payden yet, so I kept my mouth shut on the off chance that she hadn’t been made privy to that bit of information.
“Don’t turn out to be a weasel,” she declared. “Now let’s go eat.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied, and followed when she turned to lead me to the kitchen.
What else could I do?
She’d have her eye on me, that much had gone without saying, but at least I hadn’t been ordered down the road.
Thank fuck for that.