Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DONOVAN
The flowers are fucking me up today.
I keep opening the text message with the picture, staring at the blue blossoms where they sit against the backdrop of silvery granite that her headstone is carved from.
I sent a response and a repayment to Oakley’s step-mom for placing them there for me earlier this morning, but it doesn’t feel like enough today.
It’s been six years now without her.
I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about it anymore.
All throughout practice earlier, I felt disconnected, but now that I’m home I don’t quite know what to do with myself.
Grief comes and goes in waves, and this day doesn’t have a tight hold on me anymore, but I still feel like I’m supposed to be crying or something.
I would have been if this were last year.
Five felt like a monumental number and I ended up crying in the shower by myself until the water went cold.
Isn’t that the expected reaction on the anniversary of the death of someone’s only parent, though?
Tears and sadness? Immeasurable grief knowing it’s been so long without her?
Then again, she wouldn’t want that. For me to be all fucking mopey and despondent on this day. Mom was a bright light, and carrying on with wounded grieving seems like a disservice to her memory despite how it hit me last year.
I don’t know how to do this day, but luckily I don’t really have to.
Shiloh sits on the couch beside me, his legs crossed and a thick textbook propped up on his lap.
Instead of engaging in some kind of melancholy, I’ve simply been watching Godzilla movies while he hums under his breath beside me, swiping his highlighter across lines of text as he reads.
He’s a distraction for my uncertain brain today, and I smile as he scowls, jabbing his finger against a particular section and huffing a disgusted sigh.
“Did that sentence offend you?” I ask, watching as he jumps at the sound of my voice.
“I missed this before,” he grumbles, scrawling a careless line of neon yellow over the words in question.
“And it’s important?”
He nods, tapping the highlighter on the spot he just found and tilting his head down toward the page, dismissing me as he goes back to huffing noises under his breath.
He’s tracing the lines with his fingertip and mouthing the words out loud as he reads now so he doesn’t miss anything else, and I’m fascinated with the way his plump mouth moves in silence.
Midterms are coming up, and though he still helps himself to my apartment as often as he wants to, he’s been bringing textbooks with him these past few days.
“Can I help you study?” I ask, gesturing at the book.
“How?”
“I… don’t know.”
His lips quirk up slightly in a half smile before falling again as he turns back to his textbook, leaving me alone to once again pick up my phone and open the text message with the flowers.
Blue.
Silver.
Soft petals and hard stone.
The things that now mean my mother. I swallow as I touch the image with two fingers, spreading them apart to make it bigger, noting that dirt clings now to the letters that carve her name through the face of the granite.
If I were there, I’d clean it, and I’m tempted to reach back out to Oakley’s mom with an offer to pay her to wipe down the headstone for me, but I don’t.
I let the image go, watching as it pops back to the full picture of flowers and granite.
“What’s that?” Shiloh asks, startling me.
I glance up to find that he’s shuffled close to my side on the couch, his textbook placed on the floor beside the coffee table.
He peers down at the picture, then looks up at me expectantly.
“It’s the anniversary of my mom’s death.
That’s her headstone. Oakley’s step-mom took flowers there for me this morning. ”
“Oh.” He opens his mouth like he wants to say something, or ask a question, but then closes it, offering a shrug instead.
“It’s been six years,” I offer in case that’s what he wanted to know.
“Are you… um… sad?” He stumbles over the words as they tumble uncertainly from his mouth.
“Not really. I don’t know. I should be, I guess, but I’m… I don’t know what I am. I’m not gonna like start sobbing or some shit. It’s just weird knowing she’s been gone for so long.”
“My mom died,” he offers, eyes darting between my face and the phone in my hand. “A while ago.”
I put the phone down on the coffee table and sit back on the couch, scooping him into my arms and pulling him into my side.
He doesn’t fight my pull, but there is a tiny moment of hesitation, like after going far enough as to have my dick in his actual mouth, he’s still unsure about touching me for some reason.
Or maybe he’s unsure about me touching him.
I push that thought to the back of my mind as he settles into my side, leaning his head gently on my shoulder.
“Was your mom sick?” I ask, reaching up to brush a lock of hair off his cheek.
“Was your mom?” he asks, deflecting the question entirely and placing it back on me, as he does often.
“Yeah. She had cancer. I was playing major junior in Ontario when she was diagnosed. That was such a shitty year of hockey for me, I never thought I’d recover.
” I pause, weighing my own words with a frown.
“Not that hockey is what was important. It’s just…
hockey made my mom proud. I wasn’t the smartest kid in school, but when she came to watch me play, she got to be as proud of me as the other parents were when their kids got like academic awards and shit.
I didn’t want to let her down while she was going through chemo, but I sucked shit that year so hard. ”
“I’d imagine she probably understood?” he replies, like it’s a question instead of a statement.
I nod, leaning down to press my lips against his forehead. He jerks slightly, but I feel him melt into me the tiniest bit more, his head a heavier weight on my shoulder now. “She understood, that’s what she always did. She understood everything about me.”
She understood that hockey was my ticket out of Bow Island, and that once that ticket was punched, how much I desperately missed my hometown.
She understood that late nights traveling for tournaments made me wild and angry, lack of sleep turning me into a feral monster.
She understood me in all the ways she could and saw everything I tried to hide for so long.
“Was she a good mom?” Shiloh asks, his voice small and wistful in a way I haven’t heard it before.
“The best. Was yours?”
He hesitates, then shrugs. “She could have been, I guess. I’ll never really know.”
The melancholy hits me then as he curls into me the tiniest bit. “You were little when she died?”
“Yeah.”
Silence stretches between us like a cat, and I press another kiss to the soft skin of his forehead, nudging him under the chin with a crooked finger until his head tilts up to mine.
I smile, turning slightly on the couch so I can lean in and kiss him.
My lips meet his and, as always, there’s a moment of hesitation before he kisses me back like air doesn’t need space between our lips.
He sighs into the kiss and lifts a hand, apparently feeling bold enough now to grip my shirt in his fist and hold me exactly where he wants me.
I grin in response, my tongue tangling with his as he delves into my mouth with his own, and I’m content.
There’s a rush of heat rippling through me as he devours my mouth, and though I can feel my body tensing, cock hardening, I don’t need more.
I just need this.
I could spend the rest of this shitty, strange day attached to his lips and it would be perfect.
Except, of course, that’s when my phone starts ringing on the coffee table, jittering and buzzing against the wood grain. Shiloh pulls away, ending the kiss before I’m anywhere near ready, and I grumble, staring into his beautiful gray eyes.
“Ignore it,” I mutter, reaching up to cup his cheeks in my hands. “They can leave a message.”
He leans in and kisses me again as the phone stops ringing only to start again. Shiloh again pulls back, and though I lean forward to take a kiss from him this time, the phone stops ringing and immediately starts up again.
“Fucking hell,” I grumble, as Shiloh smirks slightly at me. He leans back to give me space to answer, gesturing at the phone on the table. I dive for it to turn off the damn ringer so I can go back to making out with my hot boyfriend.
Boyfriend?
Person of interest?
No, that makes him sound like a suspect in some crime or some shit. I don’t know what he is, we haven’t labeled it, but he’s my… Shiloh. My Shiloh.
There.
I turn the phone around as it stops ringing, but when it starts again, I nearly drop the damn thing on the floor. “Jude?”
“Jude?” Shiloh repeats, cocking his head to the side in question.
“Jude,” I confirm, staring at the name on the screen.
I haven’t talked to him in years. Not since…
Well, not since he and Oakley had some kind of thing happen between them that somehow labeled me as someone Jude didn’t want contact with anymore.
My heart leaps into my throat as I consider what day it is, and that if he’s calling me, it could mean more bad news is on the way.
I offer an apologetic look to Shiloh, because I have to answer this call and I hope he understands.
He nods once, then leans away from me like he’s giving me space, and I answer the call, my heart pounding like a drum.
“Jude?”
“Donovan,” he says, his voice smooth as butter on the other end of the call. “I didn’t think you were going to answer.”
“You called like seventeen times. What’s up? Are you okay? What happened?”
Jude’s soft laugh meets my ears. “Does something have to be wrong for me to call you? I know what day it is. I wanted to check on you.”
“Oh. I’m okay. Thank you.”
Jude is silent for a moment before he clears his throat and speaks again. “I also called because I’ll be in Boston in a week. We’re playing at the Dome.”
“Woah,” I breathe. “What?”
“My band. Dragonfly. We’re playing at the Dome next Thursday.”
My brain explodes a little bit. The Dome is the same place the NHL team I’m contracted to plays their games.
It’s the big arena in town that all the biggest shows get booked into.
How the hell can Jude be playing at the Dome of all places?
I don’t even get to play there yet. “Dude. Oakley said you were living in some garage, making music and working at some burger joint.”
He snorts a derisive laugh. “Of course he’d fucking say that.
Oakley is too self-absorbed to realize that other people moved on too.
” I don’t say a word, because I don’t trust myself not to try and dig details out of him that he clearly doesn’t want to give.
“Do you play that night? If not, would you like to come to the show? I’ll leave backstage passes with security for you so you can watch without anyone bothering you. ”
“Hell yes,” I reply. Aside from getting to watch a concert, I haven’t seen Jude in years, and we used to be pretty close.
Not like me and Oakley, but close enough that I used to consider him like a little brother.
I glance over at Shiloh, a smile forming on my lips as he stares at me in confusion and question.
“I’ll be there, but can I get two passes? ”
“You can’t bring him. I don’t want to see him, Donovan. If he shows up, I’ll fucking kick you both out and never call you again.”
“Not Oakley,” I blurt, as his breathing on the other end of the call turns a bit panicky and I can tell he’s freaked out. “I want to bring… someone else. My… uh…”
Shiloh raises his eyebrow at my hesitation and sits back, arms crossed and a small smirk playing on the edges of his lips.
“Boyfriend?” I squeak out as he huffs a small noise at me from the other end of the couch.
“Boyfriend?” Jude sounds happy. “You finally found someone.”
“Oakley said the same thing.” The words leave my mouth before I can really think them through, and I’m rewarded with a sharp inhale of breath on the other end of the call.
Somehow, I’ve again fallen into whatever the fuck this is between my best friend and his step-brother.
I wish there weren’t so many damn landmines in these conversations.
“Sorry, Jude. My bad. But yeah, I found someone.”
“Two passes,” he comments. “It’ll be good to see you again, Donovan. I… miss you.”
“I miss you too, Rudey Judey.”
He snorts a laugh at the old nickname, and we end the conversation promising to see each other soon. When I’m off the phone, I turn to Shiloh and grin.
“What’s that for?” he asks, his tone flat though slightly suspicious.
“I’m taking you on a date,” I comment, leaning back against the couch. “My old friend Jude’s band is apparently playing the Dome on Thursday.”
Shiloh hums thoughtfully under his breath, but he doesn’t ask anything I anticipate him asking. Instead, he hits me with, “Your boyfriend, huh?”
“Yeah. If you want. I don’t… definitions suck shit, right? But people want to know who you are to me, and I want to tell them we’re together. Or dating. Or… I don’t know. Something.”
“But not everyone, right?” he offers.
I inhale a deep breath, but I have to nod. “Not everyone. I’m sorry. It can’t be everyone, Shiloh. I wish it could, but it can’t right now.”
“It’s fine by me,” he comments with a shrug. “We all have secrets, Donovan. I’m not going to begrudge you yours.”
I nod, because he’s not wrong at all. Some of us have more than others, though, and as Shiloh picks up his book off the floor and stands like he’s getting ready to leave, I can’t help but wonder how many skeletons hide in his closet.