Chapter 15
TIAGO
I wasn’t a hundred percent sure my PT team would approve of me walking on the beach without my brace, but it didn’t feel too bad.
I brought my walking cane with me and leaned heavily on it, taking it slow where the sand was loose and deep.
But the hard pack wasn’t too far from Aravind’s backyard, and he didn’t take us far.
He hefted a massive bag over his shoulder and let it drop a couple of feet from where the waves were lapping at the shore, then spread out a towel so we could sit.
Leaning back on my arms, I tipped my face up toward the sun and let the warm rays settle over my skin. I needed this desperately. I hadn’t realized how far away from life it would feel to be sitting beside the ocean, but it was almost like I was in another world.
“Could you live out here?” I asked when I heard Aravind shuffle back to the towel.
He hummed as he rummaged around the bag. I couldn’t see him from where I was sitting, but I could hear the gentle clacking of plastic sandcastle molds. “I think this place is too small for me.”
“I could see that.”
He stilled. “Yeah. I mean, if I’m too much for fucking Boston—”
“Aravind.”
He went quiet.
“I’m not saying you’re too much. I’m saying this place isn’t enough.”
He didn’t say anything for a long, long while. Eventually I felt his warmth as he sat down beside me, and after a beat, he knocked his knee into mine. “What about you?”
“I’ve always been small.”
“Ha. Not that I’ve seen. And I got a really good look at you this morning.”
I felt my cheeks flame hot. “I’ve never actually done that before, for the record. And I’m still mortified that I scarred that cleaning lady.”
“I doubt she’s scarred,” he murmured. His temple fell against my shoulder. “She gets to go around telling all her friends she saw one of the nicest hockey asses in any league.”
My cheeks heated. “Did you call your dad about it?”
He huffed a noise between a laugh and a sigh. “No. I wasn’t really sure how I was going to open that conversation, so I figured I’d deal with it if he brings it up. So far, no word.”
I wondered if maybe he had heard something, but Rohan didn’t want to embarrass his son. Fuck, was I going to get some kind of talking-to when he got here? I’d never done the whole meet-the-parents, shovel-talk thing. I’d never been in a relationship long enough to even go there.
“So. Sandcastles?” Aravind asked.
That perked me up. It felt a little ridiculous to be doing something meant for toddlers, but I hadn’t exactly been given a kind childhood.
My brothers had been more interested in beating the shit out of each other in the shallows, my dad was probably hoping I’d drown, and my mom spent her time trying to make sure we all looked good.
Like one of those creepy vacation families on gas station postcards or in photo frames.
“If you don’t want to,” Aravind started, and I realized I’d been quiet for way too long.
“No, it sounds fun. I never got beach toys when I was a kid.”
“What the fuck?” he whispered under his breath. Clearing his throat, he shifted away from me, and I followed him to the edge of the towel where he had everything set up. “Why didn’t you get beach toys when you were a kid?”
I bit my lip. I wasn’t sure I wanted to trauma dump all that on him. This was meant to be a fun summer fling. It wasn’t supposed to be heavy. It was bad enough he saw how shit my family was and would see how much worse they could get as soon as we spent any real time with them.
But he was asking, and I didn’t want to lie. “I’m not exactly the family favorite, as you may have seen.”
“Which I do not get. Your brothers have all aged like raw milk. They’re not that much older than you, are they?”
“Thierry’s younger,” I said, trying to bite back a smile. “He knocked his wife up when they were in their senior year.”
“Fuck’s sake.”
He cleared his throat. “So, is it just because of your RP? The reason they’re shitty?”
That was a complicated answer to a complicated question. “Uh. Well.”
I dug my fingers into the sand to give my hands something to do. God, I don’t know why this always made me feel ashamed. Like somehow, I was the one who made the fucking choice to have an affair.
“Sorry if it’s tender,” Aravind said quietly. “Or if I’m being too nosy.”
I shook my head. “No. It’s not you.”
I dug my fingers deeper, stopping when they hit something hard, and I dug around it. I couldn’t see it. The sun was too bright, and it was kind of a shitty eye day, but from the way the sides felt, it was a broken clamshell.
“I’m not biologically related to my dad,” I said from behind a heavy breath.
“My mom had an affair. He knew about it. They both decided it would be better for the family if they just pretended I was his.” I twisted the shell between my fingers.
“I didn’t find out about it until one night when my dad got shit-faced and started throwing insults at me about me not being his.
” That memory was sharp, and I was still tender.
“My mom denied it and said he was being a drunk moron, but in all honesty, it confirmed what I always suspected.”
Aravind was quiet for a long moment. “You don’t look like them. Like any of them.”
I couldn’t help a small laugh. “I know. I asked them both to do genetic testing for RP a few years later. There was a treatment available, but it was for a specific type. My mom refused, and my dad laughed in my face and said there was no point since I wasn’t his, so it couldn’t have been his problem. My mom didn’t deny it that time.”
I hated that in the silence, I couldn’t tell what Aravind was thinking. He was so…so still. Then suddenly, there was a warm touch on my wrist, then fingers between mine.
“Honey? That is so fucked.”
I froze, then burst into laughter. I’d told a handful of people my story. Some guys on the team, some friends. A drunken night with Bodie, Tucker, and Ford once where we toasted fucked-up childhoods.
But I had never been so raw and vulnerable before. Or sober.
I squeezed his fingers back. “Yeah. It is very fucked.”
“Can I ask a super-blunt question?”
Biting my lip, I reached forward and eventually found a shovel and a couple of bits of plastic molds that felt like they were towers. This conversation would be easier building a sandcastle. “Go for it.”
“Why are you here? Like, why subject yourself to shitty family like this?”
I blew out a puff of air as I filled the first tower and packed it down. “Because I’m a sad sack of shit who still craves acceptance, even though they’ve made it clear that I’m the walking icon of family shame.”
“You are not a sad sack of shit,” Aravind said quietly.
I could hear him shoveling his own sand now.
“I get the craving acceptance thing. I had a rough patch with my dad when I was a teenager. He was kind of the, you know, frat-boy type. He was really into assimilating into white hockey culture. He didn’t want to speak Bangla at home, so I wouldn’t default to it.
He didn’t want me to be a silk-loving queer kid who wanted to kiss big-muscled guys twice my age. ”
That didn’t sound like the Rohan I knew, though to be fair, I didn’t know him well. But I could hear the hurt in Aravind’s tone. “What changed?”
“My mom died. Which is a super-fucked-up thing to say, you know? It’s like those horrible made-for-TV movies or comic books where the wife has to die so the hero can have motivation to finish his journey.”
“You’re a comic book nerd?”
“Fuck off,” he said with a genuine laugh, then snatched the small cone-shaped mold out of my hand.
I let him take it, and then I felt along my tower to make sure it wasn’t crumbling to bits before I found the one shaped like a wall.
“I’m a huge comic book nerd. I about lost my goddamn mind when they gave Clark Kent a bisexual son.
But the point I’m trying to make is that as much as it fucking sucks, when my mom died, my dad was forced to pull his head out of his ass.
In our little family, it was just her, and him, and me. And now there’s just the two of us.”
“You must miss her.” It felt like a terrible and obvious thing to say, but I didn’t try to walk it back.
“It’s hard to describe how bad it feels.
” He was quiet apart from the sound of him packing his sand molds.
“Missing her doesn’t really cover it. It’s like…
having a phantom limb. I keep picking up the phone to call her or saying her name around corners like I’m expecting her to be there.
And it’s been years since she passed. Someone once told me that your grief doesn’t get smaller, but the place you hold it in gets bigger over time. That feels pretty accurate.”
I wanted to pull him into my arms and kiss him until his tone lost that twinge of pain, but I didn’t. Maybe he needed to feel it.
“Was she—ah…different than your dad? About you wearing pretty things and not being straight?”
He huffed a small sigh. “Not right away. She had her own ideas about me getting married and giving her grandchildren, but she was also Pakistani, and I don’t know if you know about the clashes between India and Pakistan, but neither family was thrilled about the match.
She got cut off from her family for marrying my dad, so she was a bit more understanding about choosing happiness over social propriety or whatever. ”
I didn’t know what to say, but his tone was also a little dismissive, like he was wordlessly asking me to drop it.
“Anyway,” he went on, “that was a very clever way to pivot the conversation, Tiago.”
I grimaced. “Sorry.”
He laughed. “Say that again.”
Dropping my shovel and mold, I reached for him and managed to catch him on the first try. Rolling him to the ground, I pinned him and stared down at the blurry bits of his face that I could make out with my back to the sun.
“Sorry. Let me borrow your mouth for a second, eh?”
He laughed harder. “I love it.”