Chapter 18
AREK
Ichanged my shirt three times, which spoke volumes.
I was a man who grabbed whatever was clean and closest and went about his day without consulting a mirror beyond the basics of shaving and making sure I didn’t have toothpaste on my chin.
Clothes were functional. They covered the body and had to be comfortable, and that was the extent of my relationship with them.
But tonight I was standing in my bedroom with three shirts on my bed and a fourth on my body, and I was looking at myself in the mirror with the critical assessment of a man who had, apparently, regressed to seventeen.
The blue brought out my eyes. Did I want to bring out my eyes?
Was that trying too hard? The gray was casual, safe, the shirt equivalent of “I didn’t put any thought into this.
” Except I was putting thought into this, an embarrassing amount of thought, and wearing the gray would be a lie.
I’d spent enough time lying to myself lately.
I put on the blue.
Downstairs, the kitchen was in motion. I’d decided on chicken parmesan, which was ambitious by my weeknight standards, but not so elaborate that it screamed I was trying to impress someone. Well, it whispered it.
I used the good parmesan, freshly grated. Made the sauce from scratch instead of a jar. I’d picked up bread from Brianna’s on my way home from the clinic, where I had walked past the hallway where Mac had stood six hours ago and said, “Just the boys?” My cardiovascular system had not yet recovered.
“Dad.” Kace materialized in the kitchen doorway with the sudden, startling appearance of a teenager who’d been summoned by the smell of food. “Are you making chicken parm?”
“Yes.”
“On a Tuesday?”
“Chicken parm isn’t day-specific, Kace.”
“We never have chicken parm on weekdays. We have chicken parm on Fridays when you’re in a good mood.” He studied me with narrowed eyes. “Why are you in a good mood on a weekday?”
Why had I ever thought I could get anything past my sons? “I’m always in a good mood.”
“You’re in a functional mood on weekdays.
This is different. This is a Friday mood.
” His eyes swept the kitchen, taking in the evidence.
The good parmesan, the fresh bread, the sauce pot simmering on the stove.
Then they came back to me, and I watched the calculation happen in real time. “Is Mr. Heald coming for dinner?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you’re wearing the blue shirt?”
“I’m wearing the blue shirt because it was clean.”
“The gray one was clean too. I saw it on your bed.” A beat. “You changed shirts.”
“Kace.”
“I’m just observing.”
“Observe somewhere else.”
He grinned and retreated to the living room. I heard him say something to Jules, too low to catch, and Jules’s murmured response, and then Kace’s laugh, which carried a delight that I chose not to investigate.
I went back to the sauce and tried not to think about the fact that my fourteen-year-old had read me in under thirty seconds.
The table was set for four. I’d used the regular plates, not the good ones.
That would’ve been the equivalent of a formal declaration in front of my kids.
But I’d wiped down the table and put out cloth napkins instead of paper ones.
A compromise between casual and careful that probably fooled no one, least of all my boys.
At five fifty-eight, headlights swept across the front window. My pulse kicked up, and I stood at the stove, needlessly stirring sauce and listening to the truck door close, the boot steps on the porch—my freshly painted porch—and the knock.
Kace beat me to the door. “Mr. Heald! Come in. Dad made chicken parm, and he changed his shirt three times.”
“Kace!”
“What? You did.”
I was going to ground him until college… If he survived that long.
Mac stepped inside. He wore a clean dark-blue Henley and jeans without paint on them. His hair was combed and he smelled amazing. Some kind of eau de cologne I’d never smelled on him. The effort registered in my chest the same way his combed hair at the basketball game had.
He’d cleaned up. For dinner. At my house.
His eyes found mine over Kace’s head, and the hallway moment was right there between us, the charge of it, the unfinished quality.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.” His eyes dropped to my shirt for a fraction of a second, then came back up. “Blue looks good.”
Kace made a sound that I chose to interpret as a cough.
“Thanks. Come in, sit down. Dinner’s almost ready.”
The meal was good. The chicken parm worked, the sauce had depth, the bread was perfect, though no surprise there.
Brianna’s bread was always perfect. Kace talked about school, about Tyler’s latest plan to build a ramp for his bike that sounded structurally unsound—Mac agreed with me—about the upcoming game.
Jules ate methodically and contributed occasional dry corrections to Kace’s more extravagant claims.
Mac ate with gusto, complimenting the food without fanfare—“This is really good”—and it landed the way everything Mac said did, with a weight that exceeded the word count.
And underneath all of it, the current.
It was in the way Mac’s eyes kept finding mine across the table. These weren’t the guarded, sideways glances I’d grown used to, but direct, sustained, a man looking at someone he wanted to look at and not pretending otherwise.
It was in the way his hand rested on the table, six inches from mine, close enough that the space between them felt charged.
It was in the way he listened to Kace with that focused intensity and then looked at me, and something in his expression softened, like the boys, the food, and the table were all part of something he was letting himself want.
I felt it in my skin. Every glance, every almost-touch, every moment where the air between us went thick and warm.
I’d spent weeks training myself not to read these signals, not to trust my own perception, not to hope.
And now the signals were so loud they drowned out every rational objection I had, and the hope I’d been sitting with since Fir’s breakroom was blooming into something I could barely contain.
After dinner, Kace disappeared upstairs, having fulfilled his social obligation and eager for his phone. Jules helped clear the table like he always did, and I told him I’d handle the rest.
“You sure?” Jules asked, his eyes moving from me to Mac and back.
“I’m sure, buddy. Go read.”
He nodded. At the kitchen doorway, he paused and looked at Mac. “Thanks for coming, Mr. Heald.”
“Thanks for having me.”
Jules studied him for a moment with those assessing eyes. Then he nodded again, a nod that seemed to contain a conclusion he’d arrived at, and went upstairs.
The kitchen was quiet. The sounds of the house settled around us—Kace’s muffled music through the ceiling, the creak of old timber, the fridge humming.
I stood at the sink. Mac stood next to me, and without discussion, we fell into the routine—I washed, he dried, our elbows close in the small space.
His forearm brushed mine and I felt it everywhere.
“I texted Boden today,” Mac said.
I turned off the faucet and looked at him. “How did it go?”
He was drying a plate with careful attention, not meeting my eyes, his jaw set in the way it got when he was about to say something that cost him. “He responded. Fast.” A pause. “He’s angry. Really angry. He has questions. A lot of them.” Another pause, longer. “He called me Dad.”
The last word came out rough, and Mac’s hand stilled on the plate. I watched his throat work with a swallow that looked painful. I wanted to touch him. My hand actually moved, a half-inch toward his arm, before I caught it and redirected it to the faucet. “That’s huge, Mac.”
“Yeah.” He set the plate down. “I talked to Dr. Everett about…other stuff. I’m going to try therapy again.
EMDR, with a specialist in Monroe. Dr. Everett is gonna set it up for me.
” He finally looked at me, and his blue eyes were clear and serious.
“I didn’t ask you because I didn’t want to blur the lines. You’re not my doctor.”
“I know.”
“You’re…” He picked up another plate, dried it, set it down. The silence stretched, and I let it. Whatever was building in the space between his words was something I needed to let him find on his own.
“I painted your porch,” he said.
The non sequitur threw me. “Yes. You did.”
“I spent a long time picking out the right shade of gray. I drove down the mountain on a Sunday morning to paint. I don’t do that. I don’t like coming down my mountain.”
“Mac…”
“I built you a chair. I bought you coffee and pastries. I made you stew. I took you hiking because you needed exercise and company.” He set the dish towel down and turned to face me.
His eyes were doing the raw, undefended thing, the blue stripped of every layer of granite.
“I told you that you mattered, and I meant it in a way I’ve never meant anything.
When I touched your face on Sunday, my hand didn’t want to move, Arek. It didn’t want to leave.”
I couldn’t breathe. The kitchen was very small and warm, and Mac was standing two feet away, saying words that came out rough and halting and so honest they hurt to hear.
“I don’t know what I am,” he said. “I don’t have a word for it. Fay was… I loved her, and I’ve always been attracted to women. I’ve never thought about a man this way in my life. But I think about you. All the time. And I don’t know what to do with that except tell you.”
I was shaking. My hands, my steady doctor’s hands, were trembling at my sides.
Not from fear. From the effort of standing still while every cell in my body strained toward the man in front of me.
“You don’t have to have a word for it,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.
“You don’t have to have it figured out.”
“I don’t have anything figured out.”
“That’s okay.”