Chapter 15
It took two days, but Lane had a feeling his mom was going to corner him at some point, after she’d had some time to really think through everything he’d said, and sure enough, he’d just finished showering after practice when he got a text from her.
I know you’re super busy, honey, getting ready for the playoffs, but I’d love to grab a coffee tomorrow. Just the two of us!
Lane cornered Trevor when he got back from the showers and tilted his phone towards him. “Told you she’d want to talk.”
Trevor reached out, fingers curling around Lane’s forearm. “It’s going to be okay. I promise. She wasn’t upset. She wasn’t weirded out. She just needed some processing time.”
“I know, but—”
Trevor squeezed. “No buts. I promise. It’s gonna be fine. You love her. She loves you. There’s just a lot of shit to untangle.”
“I’m trying,” Lane said. “I feel bad it took me so long.”
“No. Don’t. You were young and freaked out and it was a complicated situation,” Trevor said. He tucked himself in closer. Tilted his head towards Lane. Not kissing him, or embracing him, but if anyone looked over at them, Lane had a feeling they’d guess exactly what was going on.
Now that their parents knew, it was probably only a matter of time before they started telling the rest of the team.
Probably it was a miracle Lane hadn’t pulled Trevor right in during the aftermath of Sunday’s win and kissed him no matter who was watching. Definitely a miracle he hadn’t leaned in and told Trevor the truth about just how much he loved him.
“Alright. I’ll let her know tomorrow morning before practice I’m free. And tomorrow night? You’re all mine.”
Trevor’s eyes lit up. “Yeah?”
“About time I take you out,” Lane said with a firm nod.
“That sounds really great, actually.”
“Can’t say I’ll be very good at this boyfriend thing, but you make me want to try,” Lane admitted.
Trevor smiled. “Better at it than you think.”
It was hard to say whether it was the date or the coffee he was more worried about but Lane didn’t sleep all that great that night, tossing and turning, Trevor snoring away cutely next to him.
By the time Lane’s alarm went off, he absolutely needed the caffeine hit. Could maybe do without the potential side dish of familial guilt, but Lane knew he’d earned it, at least.
By the time he and his mom settled down at a corner table in Lane’s favorite coffee shop, conveniently partway between his building and the rental their parents were staying in, Lane was feeling a special kind of apprehension.
“Stop looking so worried,” she said first thing, though, laughing under her breath. “I’m hardly going to lecture you in a public place.”
“I know, just . . . I know I didn’t handle everything all that well,” Lane admitted.
“I should have been honest, maybe. Trevor keeps telling me that I shouldn’t feel bad about it, but it’s hard not to.
Especially when in the next breath he tells me that he wishes he had known how I felt, back then. ”
Delia reached out for his hand and took it, squeezing it hard. “I wish you had told me the truth, but I understand why you didn’t feel like you could.”
Lane hadn’t known how much he’d needed that admission until it was out of his mom’s mouth.
“Yeah?”
“Baby, for so long it was just you and me. Us against the world. Really, though, me against the world, because I never wanted you to feel responsible—”
“I did, though, and I’m glad I did,” Lane interrupted. “It wasn’t only you. I never wanted it to be only you.”
“Sure, but I was still your mother,” Delia said firmly.
“And it was okay if it was only me. But the fact is, it was just the two of us, and I thought forever that you would tell me anything. That you did tell me everything. And I began to realize you didn’t, that first summer when you came back after college.
I thought maybe you were just pissed about Tom and me getting married. ”
“No, I was so happy for you. So happy I didn’t want to fuck it up,” Lane said hurriedly. He squeezed her hand back. “And I thought I would. Thought maybe I’d come back, and it would be different. That I’d feel differently, but I didn’t. It was worse.”
“And so you left.” His mom’s eyes went soft and devastated.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” Lane admitted.
“Oh, baby.”
“Seemed better to not be there, fucking it all up.” It was hard to even go back to that time, how hopeless and shitty it had felt. How much he’d wanted to feel anything else.
“You wouldn’t have, you couldn’t have. If you’d told me—” Delia broke off. “I don’t know what I’d have done.”
“Exactly,” Lane said.
“No, I mean, we would have figured something out, and at the very least, if you’d ended up doing the exact same thing, at least you wouldn’t have been alone with it. I’d have been there for you.” She shot him a firm look. “Don’t do that again, okay? Don’t just shoulder something like that again.”
“I won’t, I promise,” Lane said.
It wasn’t hard to promise that, if only because there weren’t any other big secrets he was harboring, but also because he didn’t want to do that again. It had sucked enough the first time, and he wasn’t going to make those same mistakes.
Especially not now that he’d actually gotten the person he’d wanted, so fucking bad, all those years ago.
“And if anything goes south, I don’t want it to tear this family apart—you might not be brothers, but you’re always going to be family,” his mom said.
Lane rolled his eyes but it was easy enough to nod. That was an understandable concern, but he knew, the way he’d always known, that he and Trevor weren’t going to go south.
“And now you have Trevor.” His mom smirked at him. “You wanna talk about it?”
“Ugh, Mom,” Lane complained.
“I mean it, I want to know how it happened.”
“Do you really?” Lane wondered.
“I mean all the nitty-gritty details? Maybe not. Trevor’s kind of become my son, even if he’s not your brother, but I do want to know how it happened. This is a big thing, baby—not just for you and for him, but for our whole family.”
“Right.” Lane wasn’t going to think of it that way, though if he did, he thought maybe it wouldn’t be as awful as he’d always thought it might be. Maybe they could fold their relationship into the greater family structure and that would actually be okay.
Delia took a sip of her coffee. “So, you should tell me.”
“Um, well. Trevor’s gonna have to talk about the part where he realized he might not be straight, but he did tell me, actually, on New Year’s Eve, and I . . . I thought, well, I kinda freaked out, if I’m being honest.”
“Well, of course you did. It was everything you’d wanted, but you didn’t know if it meant he liked you.”
“Yeah, exactly. I might have gone to Nate’s new condo way too early, totally panicking about it.”
She laughed. “How’s he doing? I feel like I barely saw him the other night, at the party.”
“Busy, with football and with his new boyfriend. The guy who owns the bar we told you about? Who plays hockey?”
“Oh, the famous Ramsey. Didn’t you—”
“Not seriously,” Lane said. “Not at all, really, actually. It’s always been—well, you know who it’s been.”
His mom looked at him with a surprisingly reassuring combination of fondness and sympathy. “Yeah,” she said. “So, what happened after you freaked out?”
It was impossible to hold back the flush. “Um, well, you know.”
“Do I?”
“Mom,” Lane whined, even as he realized how good it felt to finally be talking to her about this.
“He wanted some uh . . . practical experience, okay? And I said I’d give him some.”
Her eyebrows skidded upwards. “You’d have been okay watching him move on to someone else once he finished with you?”
“Ha no, but I didn’t think about it—didn’t let myself.
” God, he’d really been in love with Trevor this whole freaking time, hadn’t he?
“And maybe that was better, because I didn’t have a chance to panic about it, not when things got more serious, more intense.
Not when Trevor kept pushing us forward. ”
“It was him, huh?” She sounded amused. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“Because that’s how he is. You think he’s this good, sweet guy. Helpful and kind, all that shit, right?”
Delia nodded.
“And then you realize that’s not fake, not exactly, but he’s maneuvering you right where he wants you. Frankly where you want, too, but he’s also pushing and prodding you, just in ways you like, the whole goddamn time.”
“Honey,” Delia said, “I don’t think that’s what he does with anyone else—just you.”
It was stupid how Lane hadn’t realized he was in love, but it was even stupider to stand back and see that no, Trevor didn’t do that with anyone else.
He wasn’t passive by any means, but it wasn’t the same.
“God,” Lane said, scrubbing a hand over his face, “I’ve been pretty blind, haven’t I?”
She just laughed. Maybe that would’ve stung, coming from someone else, but this was his mom. He loved her, and he knew, better than anything else, that she loved him.
“Maybe a little, but then again, you saw pretty clearly, too, from the beginning.”
“Yeah,” Lane said. He had. From the beginning, it had been Trevor for him, and if he had anything to say about it, it was always going to be Trevor.
“I have to say,” Delia said, “I’m fucking relieved, too.”
“Mom,” Lane squawked, but she just laughed.
“I raised two football players, you think I don’t swear? I swear, okay?”
“What does Tom think about that?” But Lane already knew. He saw how solid their marriage was, and how happy.
She just shrugged. “He doesn’t mind anything I do, you know that.”
And Lane could see himself saying that about Trevor ten, fifteen, even fifty, years down the road.
“Good. That’s what I wanted, though, not all I wanted. When you first met him, I think I was such an ass,” Lane confessed. He’d wanted to be Tom for her, not realizing that wasn’t a position he should ever be. He was her son, not her partner.
But still, he’d wanted so badly to be the one to provide, to pull them—to pull her—out of the daily struggle of making ends meet.