Chapter 31 #2
“What the fuck is wrong with you today?” I arch a single brow and give Marcus a dubious look. The fact that he’s acting so skittish is weirding me out.
“I’m sorry.” He groans, running a hand through his hair aggressively. “I know I’m being fidgety. It’s only that I’ve been meaning to ask you a favor, and you know I’m not good at that.”
As I watch my best friend struggle to control his normally cool composure, I finally understand where his restlessness is coming from.
All at once, it makes sense. There’s never a time that Marcus is more awkward than when he wants to ask to borrow money.
I should have figured that’s what was making him so tense.
With anyone else, that may have bothered me.
But with Marcus, I know that his hesitance to ask for it comes from the fact that he doesn’t want to be perceived as greedy, taking advantage of the fact that he’s one of the few people who knows my situation, even though I would have gladly shared the lot of it with him.
The number of times he’s outright refused to take anything from me to the point of physical violence as I tried handing him a check is almost comical.
But in times like these, when he feels like he has no other option, he always feels weird bringing it up. I guess some things never change.
“You know you don’t even have to ask, dude.” I shake my head, giving a small smile. “You’re entitled to anything you want after the shit you’ve seen me through.”
“I’m really not.” Marcus scoffs. “I hate when you say that, you fucking prick.”
I grin. “How much do you need?”
Marcus furrows his brow and looks very uncomfortable, his eyes on everything but my face. “Fifteen thousand.”
“That’s it?” I snort, and he rolls his eyes at my incredulous tone. “I’ve got that upstairs in the safe. Are you sure you don’t want more?”
“I hate you sometimes,” Marcus laughs, shaking his head.
“Not that it makes a difference, but why do you need it?”
“For Ryder.” Marcus smiles slightly, though it looks a little sad. I understand a bit of that sadness and where it comes from. How could I not after all our years of friendship?
Ryder is Marcus’s firstborn, the only child he had with his first wife, Corrine, when they were both nineteen and barely ready to be adults.
When they found out that they were pregnant, Marcus proposed on the spot, and they got married shortly after in her parents’ backyard in blue jeans and sneakers, without a penny to their names.
Their marriage barely lasted a year, full of tension and fighting.
And Corrine, it turned out, wasn’t suited to be a mother.
She was neglectful of the baby and downright cruel in her parenting methods, to the point that Marcus felt it wasn’t safe to leave the two of them alone together.
I remember their last vicious fight, the one that broke things off with them for good.
Corrine had told Marcus she was jealous of Ryder and how much he seemed to love their son more than her.
She screamed about how much she hated the baby—hated looking at his face and how she never wanted him in the first place—before she admitted that she had gotten pregnant on purpose, poking holes in their condoms and skipping her birth control, as a means of trapping Marcus.
He had been so furious with her, but horribly sad about it as well, mainly for Ryder’s sake.
To have a mother who loathed her son’s existence so viciously was the greatest sadness he could ever imagine.
So, he packed all his things, picked Ryder up from his crib, and walked out the door, never to return.
Corrine never attempted to see Ryder again after that.
But ever since then, Marcus has always felt a sense of personal responsibility for ensuring that his son’s life was full of so much love and enrichment from everyone around him that he’d never miss the absent mother who didn’t want him.
It’s part of why he spoils him so much. He wants to erase the bad memories and replace them with nothing but joy.
Personally, I think Ryder was too young at the time to have any conscious memories of Corrine.
He was still an infant when they left, and Marcus had started dating Heather shortly after.
He married her before Ryder was even two years old, so if anything, he has more memories of her being his real mother than not.
Having four siblings between Heather and Tiff, I think it’s safe to say there’s no love lost in his life.
It’s still one of Marcus’s biggest fears, though—that Ryder will resent him for all this history and broken family nonsense as he gets older, feeling more like luggage being dragged around rather than a fully enmeshed part of any one unit. I don’t think that day will ever come.
“Are you planning on giving him $15k in cash to joyride around town with?” I ask Marcus skeptically.
“No, uh…” Marcus replies with a smile. “I’m buying him a car for his sixteenth birthday—one of those old-style Volkswagen Beetles. I found one for sale on the west side of the state, and the guy’s bringing it up today. It’s going to be a surprise at the party.”
“Seriously?” I can’t help but grin.
“Yeah. He found a bunch online that he fell in love with.” Marcus shrugs one shoulder.
“Apparently, this couple in Alabama totally vamps them out for shows and stuff. One, in particular, he fell head over heels for. They gutted it, reupholstered it with pink rose-patterned material, and then they painted the outside this shimmery pearly pink. I think it was called Rose, actually. Well, anyway, he was dying over it, but they weren’t selling that car, so I thought we could try to recreate it together. ”
“Pink and all?”
“Pink and all.”
“That’s really cool.” I grin. “I didn’t realize he was into that sort of thing.”
“I’m discovering rather quickly that there’s a lot more he’s interested in that he’s been keeping from me,” Marcus says, his face dropping slightly as he looks at me.
I feel a twinge of guilt run through me, thinking that his statement could easily be meant for me if he only knew what I was keeping from him. Marcus sighs, turning his head to look back out at Luke’s truck in the driveway.
“He came out to me recently, you know,” he says after a moment. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you yet, but he’s gay.”
I can feel my brows rise in shock. “Ryder? Seriously?” What are the fucking odds of that?
Marcus nods, swallowing hard. “He’s known since he was twelve, apparently.
But he told me for the first time last month.
He’s got a boyfriend, too—a kid from a different school.
I don’t even know how they met. Snapchat, I think?
They’ve been dating for the last six months.
A secret boyfriend. Can you believe that? ”
My face twitches slightly, and I’m hyper-aware that my very own secret boyfriend is just beyond the door at my back.
“He said he was terrified to tell me about it,” Marcus continues, looking at me again, and I see tears in his eyes.
He smiles, but there’s pain hidden beneath it, so much so that my chest tightens.
“He was worried I’d hate him for it. Kick him out, even.
All the worst possible reactions a parent could have after learning their child is gay.
He honestly believed I could love him less for this. That shit broke my heart.”
Warmth floods my cheeks, and I drop my gaze to the floor.
Now, I’m too cowardly to meet his eye. I know he’s not talking about me, but he might as well be with how viscerally his words tear through my chest. The sting of betrayal is plain to see, mixed with the fear that he’s done something wrong to deserve the secrecy. Suddenly, it feels hard to breathe.