Chapter 22
AREK
Iwoke up in the warmth of another body pressed against mine. Mac’s arm was heavy across my waist, his chest against my back, his breath slow and steady against my neck. His hand rested on my stomach, fingers spread, possessive even in sleep.
I lay still and let myself feel it. His weight. His heat. The scratch of his chest hair against my shoulder blades. The slow rhythm of his breathing, deep and even, the sleep of a man who hadn’t had nightmares.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d woken up like this.
Held. Not holding, but held. The distinction mattered more than I’d expected.
For years, I’d been the one with my arm around someone, the one providing comfort, the one whose body curved protectively around whoever was beside me.
Mac had reversed it without discussion, probably without even knowing he’d done it.
He’d pulled me in during the night and wrapped himself around me, and I’d slept like the dead.
My phone said five forty-seven. Early, but light was already coming through the window, the long May dawn turning the bedroom gold and amber. I needed to pee, but I didn’t move.
Mac stirred. His arm tightened, pulling me closer, and he made a low, half-conscious rumble that vibrated through his chest and into my spine. “Morning,” I said softly.
“Good morning.” His voice was gravel and sleep, and it did something to my internal organs that was medically improbable. His lips found the back of my neck and pressed there once, brief and warm, and the casual intimacy of it made my eyes sting. “What time is it?”
“Almost six.”
“I slept in.”
I smiled. Imagine that. “Good.”
“You’re not gonna tell me six in the morning isn’t sleeping in?”
“It is for you, so that’s good.”
Mac kissed my neck again, then rolled out of bed. “I’ll make coffee.”
It didn’t even occur to him that we could stay in bed longer, and somehow, I loved him for it. “Bless you.”
I crawled out of bed as well and padded to the bathroom.
In the mirror, I looked like a man who’d had very good sex and very good sleep, which was accurate on both counts.
My hair was wrecked, I had beard burn on my neck, and there was a mark on my collarbone that I didn’t remember getting.
I pressed my fingers to it with a stupid, helpless grin.
When I came out, Mac was in the kitchen, dressed in only boxer briefs.
His back was to me—the broad shoulders, the scar across his lower back that I’d traced with my tongue last night, that tight ass I really wanted to explore in more detail.
He moved through the kitchen with the same economy he brought to everything, the coffee assembled with military efficiency.
I leaned against the doorframe and watched him, so full of love that it felt like a physical condition. A diagnosable one. Arek Jacobson, forty-five, presenting with acute-onset overwhelming happiness. Prognosis: terminal.
He turned and saw me, and his face flashed an actual smile, small and real, that reached his eyes and stayed there. “You’re staring again.”
“I told you. I like looking at you.”
He crossed the kitchen and kissed me. Unhurried, thorough, his hand cupping the back of my head. A morning kiss. Our first morning kiss. I filed it in the place where I kept things I never wanted to forget.
Mac threw some clothes on, and we drank coffee on the porch. Our chairs, our view, our silence, but different now. My bare feet were propped on the railing, and Mac’s ankle was hooked around mine. The contact was small and constant, and it rewired something in my chest.
“When do the boys come back?” Mac asked.
“Tyler’s mom is dropping them off around noon.”
He nodded. Drank his coffee. “Are you going to tell them?”
“Yeah, I need to.”
“You don’t need to. You want to.”
The correction was gentle, precise, and exactly right.
I didn’t need to tell my boys anything about my personal life on any specific timeline.
I wanted to because lying to them, even by omission, felt wrong.
Because they deserved honesty. Because Jules was already reading my tells with the accuracy of a polygraph, and Kace was going to figure it out eventually, and I’d rather they heard it from me than pieced it together from evidence.
“I want to,” I amended. “Today.”
“Want me there?”
I considered it, but no. This was my conversation with my boys, in our home, in the language we’d built together. Mac’s presence would change the shape of it, would make it about him instead of about us. “Not for this part, but thank you.”
He nodded with acceptance.
We had breakfast—scrambled eggs, toast, plus the last of Brianna’s pastries—and then I got dressed and packed my bag. I didn’t want to leave, but at the same time, I was somehow eager to tell my boys, to bring this out in the open.
Mac kissed me goodbye on the porch with a deep kiss, long and warm, his hands on my waist. When he pulled back, his eyes held mine with an expression that I was learning to read as something very close to the thing I felt, but he hadn’t named yet.
“Go talk to your boys,” he said.
The boys arrived just after noon, delivered by Sarah Marsh’s minivan in a cloud of teenage noise and the classic odor of boys who hadn’t showered.
“Dad!” Kace burst through the door with the energy of a golden retriever. “Tyler’s dad let us use his axe to split firewood, and I only almost hit my foot once!”
“That’s…wonderful, Kace.”
Jules came in behind him, quieter, his sleeping bag under one arm and a book under the other. He looked at me. A quick, assessing glance—the Jules scan, I called it privately, the rapid visual inventory he performed on every person he cared about to determine their current emotional status.
Whatever he found made his eyebrows lift a fraction of a millimeter. “Good weekend?” he asked, neutral.
“Yeah. Really good.”
“Mm.” He disappeared upstairs with his things.
I let them settle in. Kace showered—a miracle that required no parental intervention—and Jules read on his bed while waiting his turn, then followed suit.
I stood in the kitchen, making sandwiches and rehearsing words in my head, discarding each version for being either too formal, too casual, too much, or too little.
Boys, I’m seeing someone. Too vague.
Boys, Mac and I are together. Too abrupt.
Boys, I want to talk to you about something important regarding my personal life and a significant relationship development. Absolutely not. I sounded like a press release.
I needed to tell them the truth, the way Mac would. Straight ahead, no detours.
I called them down for a late lunch. They sat at the table, Kace already talking about Tyler’s new mountain bike, Jules opening a book and then closing it again when he registered that I had my serious face on.
“I need to talk to you guys about something,” I said.
Kace stopped mid-sentence. His eyes went wide, then narrowed, the diagnostic process of a former foster kid assessing threat level. “Are we moving?”
“No.”
“Are you sick?”
“No, Kace. Nobody’s sick, nobody’s moving.”
“Then what?”
I took a breath. Looked at Kace, fidgeting with anxious energy, ready to fight whatever was coming, and Jules, his eyes on my face, waiting with the patience of a kid who’d learned early that the important information came after the silence.
“I’m seeing someone. Mr. Heald. Mac, I mean. We’re…together.”
Kace blinked. Once, twice. The processing was almost visible, the gears turning behind his eyes.
Then his face split into a grin so wide it looked like it hurt.
“I knew it!” He slammed his palm on the table, making the plates jump.
“Jules, I told you! I told you! After the porch, I said, ‘He painted our porch, that’s not a friend thing,’ and you said, ‘Don’t speculate,’ and I said—”
“I remember what you said, Kace.” Jules’s voice was quiet, cutting through his brother’s noise.
“—I said, ‘Nobody paints a porch at eight-thirty on a Sunday morning for a friend,’ and I was right—”
“Kace.” I put my hand on his arm. “Breathe.”
He breathed. Barely. “Dad, this is awesome. Mr. Heald is so cool. He came to my game. He can build stuff. He taught Jules to paint. Can he come for dinner tonight? Can he—”
“Slow down.”
“Is this why you changed your shirt three times?”
“Moving on.” I turned to Jules. He hadn’t spoken. His book was closed on the table, his hands flat on either side of it as his dark eyes were steady on mine. “Jules, talk to me.”
He was quiet for a moment. The silence had texture. I could feel him weighing his words, choosing them the way he chose everything, with care and intention. “Is he good to you?” he then asked.
The question was so simple and so enormous that my throat closed around the answer. Is he good to you? The question of a boy who’d spent his early years watching adults be bad to each other and who needed, before anything else, to know that his father was safe.
“Yeah, buddy,” I said. “He’s really good to me.”
Jules nodded. The tension in his shoulders—tension I hadn’t consciously registered until it released—dropped a degree. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I like him,” Jules said, as if that settled the matter. “He listens when I talk. And he doesn’t pretend to be happy when he’s not. That’s rare.”
I stared at my son, who had just distilled Mac’s entire character into two sentences, with the accuracy of a seasoned profiler.
“Also,” Jules added, “you’ve been different since he started coming around. Calmer. Less…” He searched for the word. “Less like you’re performing.”
The accuracy of that one hit me in the sternum. He could see the performance. Had always seen it, and had been quietly waiting for the day his father stopped.
“I’m trying,” I said, and my voice was rougher than I wanted it to be. “I’m trying to stop performing.”
Jules’s mouth formed that small, precise smile that he gave out so rarely and that was worth more than anyone else’s full grin. “I know, Dad.”
Kace, who had been containing himself with visible effort, exploded. “So can he come for dinner?”
“Not tonight, Kace.”
“Tomorrow?”
“We’ll see.”
“That means yes!” He was out of his chair, already reaching for his phone, presumably to tell Tyler, and I caught his arm.
“Kace. This stays in this house for now. Mac and I will decide when and how to tell other people. Understood?”
He looked like I’d asked him to hold his breath for a week. “I can’t tell Tyler?”
“No. Mac is… This is new to him. Dating a man. We don’t out people without their permission, okay?”
His expression changed. “I didn’t know.”
“That’s why I’m telling you.”
“Understood. But, Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m really happy for you.” He said it with the straightforward generosity that was Kace’s defining quality. Then he hugged me hard and fast, the fierce squeeze of a kid who meant it, and thundered upstairs.
Jules stood more slowly. He collected his plate, brought it to the sink, and on his way out of the kitchen, he stopped beside me and put his hand on my shoulder. A brief touch. A Jules touch. “He’s good, Dad,” he said quietly. “And you deserve good.”
He left before I could respond, which was probably intentional. If he’d stayed another second, I would’ve fallen apart in front of him. Jules, who understood everything about the architecture of dignity, knew that and wanted to spare me.
I stood in my kitchen with a hand on my shoulder that was already gone, two boys upstairs who knew the truth and were happy about it, and a man on a mountain who kept coming down for me.
I pulled out my phone.
I told them.
And?
Kace wants you to come for dinner tomorrow. Jules says you’re good for me. He’s right.
I’ll be there at six.
I put the phone down, leaned against the counter, and let the tears come. At first, I wasn’t even sure why I was crying because this was a happy moment, wasn’t it? And I was happy, the embers of what Mac and I had shared still burning bright inside me.
But as I wiped my tears away, it hit me.
It was relief. I’d been carrying this, and my boys had told me it was okay.
No, I didn’t need their permission, but I’d wanted their blessing, and they’d given it wholeheartedly.
That thought made the tears come all over again, and this time, it took longer for them to stop.