40. Damien
FORTY
damien
NOW
I found a quiet corner in the bar and sat next to Callum in a booth.
The urge to be close to him still hadn’t gone away.
Bowie would tell me I was being a lovesick idiot.
He’d tell me a lot of things. He probably wasn’t wrong about a lot of them.
Callum Weeks was a habit I didn’t want to break.
I couldn’t fix his family. I couldn’t unfuck the mess that we’d just learned about.
I couldn’t bring Sam back from the dead so we could punch him in the mouth.
But I could order us both a couple of drinks and some dinner to go with it.
“I’m not hungry,” Callum said after the server left with our order.
“Did I ask? We haven’t eaten all day. Hungry or not, your body needs fuel, and no, booze does not count.”
He looked over at me and frowned. “When did you get so bossy?”
“I’m not bossy. I’m just right.”
Callum scoffed, but a hint of a smile betrayed his determination to stay in a bad mood.
Honestly, I could understand why he was hurt. No one likes being lied to. But if my feet were in his parents’ shoes, I’d be hesitant to tell my kid his origin story.
“Swingers.” Callum said, shaking his head. “Can you believe it? I mean, it makes the most sense if you think about it.”
“What a wild world to live in where your parents being swingers is the thing that makes the most sense.”
Our server arrived with our drinks, and I ordered a couple of beers to be brought over with our food. For now, we had the Jack and Coke I’d ordered, thinking Callum needed something with a bit of kick to start with.
“What are you going to do with this information? Any ideas?”
Callum downed half his drink with a grimace. “Honestly, no idea. I mean. They fucking lied to me my whole life. Even Sam knew.”
“And he used it against them,” I offered, trying to keep things in perspective for him.
“What was it with him? Why did he have this magical fucking power of manipulation? I mean, he was a shitty person. And the older he got, the shittier he got. All because why? Because he wasn’t an only child?
Because Mom and Dad raised me like their own?
Fucking territorial shitbag. If he wasn’t dead, I’d kill him myself.
” Callum downed the rest of his drink then sat there, chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath.
“The worst part,” Callum said after a minute of thick silence.
“The worst part is that if I blame them for letting Sam manipulate them, I have to blame us for the same thing.” He scrubbed a hand down his face and looked around for the server, probably hoping for another drink. I slid mine over to him.
“Are you sure?”
“Go ahead,” I told him. I fully intended to stay reasonably sober anyway so I could keep an eye on him.
The last thing Callum needed was for me to get raging drunk.
When I was drunk, my emotions tended to go a little haywire.
I couldn’t count the number of times I’d gotten wasted and ended up in a corner crying about him. Those weren’t fond memories.
Callum took a sip of my drink and then set it down.
He seemed to fluctuate between wanting to get shitfaced and wanting to pace himself.
Or maybe he’d just needed that first drink to take the edge off.
If he wanted to get absolutely hammered, I wasn’t going to stop him, but part of me hoped that wasn’t the case.
I didn’t think it would help much in the long run.
“So what now?” Callum asked. “Do I just… go home and pretend everything isn’t fucked to shit?”
When I didn’t say anything, he looked at me. Annoyance flashed in his eyes.
“Are you going to say anything? Anything at all? You have no opinions on this?” Callum was angry, and not at me, but I was the nearest target.
“I have plenty of opinions,” I told him, weighing my words carefully. “But I don’t think they’re of any help because it doesn’t matter what I think. The thing that matters is how you feel.”
Callum scoffed and took another swallow of the drink I’d given him. He looked, in a word, fucking miserable. I tried to imagine finding out that my parents weren’t my parents, but they were so shitty to me that the idea wasn’t unappealing.
Our food arrived and with it the beers I’d ordered.
I wasted no time draining half my beer before digging into the burger.
Our plates were identical except for the sides.
I’d ordered one burger with fries and the other with onion rings so we could trade.
Callum ignored the burger and started picking at the onion rings.
I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist them.
“This is a nightmare.” He sounded dejected. Not angry or confused, just quietly miserable.
“I know.”
He didn’t say anything for a while. He sat in silence picking at the fries and onion rings while I ate my burger. By the time I was done mine, Callum had woken up his appetite enough to make him want more food and he devoured the burger in two minutes flat.
“I was hungrier than I thought,” he admitted, somewhat sheepishly. “God, I feel like such a bitch. I had great parents who loved me. They did their best, you know. And all I can think about is how fucked up they are for lying to me.”
“Lying is fucked up. But I can see why they did.”
Callum looked at me and his eyebrows climbed up his forehead, reaching for his hairline. “You can?”
His face morphed from shock into disbelief, and maybe even disgust.
“I mean, lying is bad. And they shouldn’t have done it.
But imagine having a kid and having to tell that kid that he’s not really their kid.
That your parents were their horny best friends who died when you were a baby.
And for years, they were operating under the assumption that your dad might have been your dad.
I don’t think they ever intended to find out for themselves. ”
Callum shook his head. “You don’t get it. They lied to me, Damien. My parents. For my whole life. You don’t know how much that hurts.”
“You’re not the only one with a fucked-up family, Cal.
My parents might not have lied to me, but that’s because they don’t talk to me.
I’ve been invisible to them since I could forge my mom’s signature on school forms and feed myself.
So yeah, they didn’t lie to me, but they sure as fuck didn’t love me. ”
“And love makes it okay?” The vein in the side of Callum’s head bulged out.
“No, it doesn’t. But you being hurt now doesn’t mean other people have never hurt before.
Or will never hurt again. You’re hurt, but you’re not the only person in pain.
” I took a deep breath and lowered my voice.
“Sam told them you’d hate them if you found out.
Was he right? Were their fears founded?”
His jaw snapped shut and then he glared at me. “Fuck you.”
“They stayed quiet because they didn’t want to lose you. And you’re proving that their fears were justified. I’m not saying you have to forgive them now, or ever.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that you’re not the only person who’s fucked up about this.
They’re just as messed up over it as you are.
Maybe more, because they’ve had this sword hanging over their heads for years.
That’s a lot of stress and a lot of sleepless nights.
They kept that secret a long time. Remember when we had a secret? How it ate us up inside?”
That stopped Callum dead and he stared at me for a long time, like his brain was buffering trying to process everything I said. His shoulders slumped, and he let out a sigh.
“I am too sober for this.”
Before I could flag down the server, the woman Cal had been sitting with the last time I was here plunked down on the other side of the booth with a bottle in one hand and a few glasses in the other.
“Ginny!” Callum grinned at her, and his smile only widened when someone sat next to Ginny. “Zeke!”
“Hey, butthead. Heard you were in town a while ago and had drinks with Ginny, but fucked off before I could get my ass down here.” Zeke took the bottle from Ginny and cracked it open. “I’m Zeke, by the way.”
“I know who you are.” I’d recognized him from high school. He hadn’t changed much, really. He’d filled out and gotten a little better looking, like he finally grew into his features.
Zeke looked at me and squinted, then his face split into a huge grin. “Damien Flynn, as I live and breathe.”
His face went through several emotions all at once. “Are you two back together?”
I wanted to say yes, but were we? Callum and I had reconnected, but we hadn’t had enough time together to get to the part where we started talking about our future. How could we when we were still dealing with the past?
From the corner of my eye, I saw Callum shrug and Zeke carefully steered the conversation out of the awkward corner he’d just driven us into. Well, at least he tried. It wasn’t his fault that he picked the exact wrong thing to say.
“How are your parents holding up?”
Callum reached for his drink. “Funny you should ask.” He tipped the glass and drained it, then set it on the table and motioned for Zeke to give him another one. “Turns out, my parents were kinky swingers and I’m not even their real kid.”
Zeke’s arm jerked and he barely managed not to spill booze everywhere. “What?”
“Yep. My parents were swingers with their best friends, who tragically died just after I was born. I don’t think Mom even said how old I was. Not very old.”
Ginny and Zeke gaped at Callum.
“Holy shit,” Ginny said, topping up her drink.
“You can say that again.” Callum started to lift his drink but set it down after a moment of hesitation.
“Holy shit,” Ginny repeated.
That almost made Callum smile, but he ended up letting out a huge sigh. “Everything is fucked up.”
I tried not to take that to heart because, to him, his world was falling apart. The news he’d gotten had been terrible. Sam’s death had essentially robbed Callum of his entire family. I wasn’t sure how he was still standing. I’d have been in a corner rocking back and forth by now.
But it still stung that after all that time apart, we were finally together, and we couldn’t even enjoy it. The worst part was that I didn’t know how to make things better for him, and I was terrified of making them worse.