Family Man (19 page)

Trey pressed a soft kiss in the center of Vince’s bare chest. Then he said, very quietly, “I love you.”

Vince didn’t move.

“I love you.” Trey lifted his head and looked Vince in the eye, touching his face, his blue eyes radiating calm and peace and…well, love. “I don’t want to make you lose your family. I wouldn’t blame you if you chose them over me, and I’ll understand if you have to. But I do love you. And I know it sounds like a bad line, but I think I always will, at least a little.” His fingers traced a circle over Vince’s heart. “No matter what happens.”

Vince could barely breathe. His head was a riot of thought, of memory, of those sharp, terrible moments when he’d known, when he’d pushed away, when he’d been so sure that if he ever let that part of him out, the world would end. Those old ghosts rose up, trying to scare him back into place, but Trey’s words cut them down one by one.

Maybe,
they whispered.
Maybe, just maybe, you can be you and not have to be alone.

Vince let the terrifying hopes take root, sure they would die off, but they only became stronger. So strong that eventually he couldn’t take it anymore. With a relief he hadn’t even hoped to know sliding over him, he bent down, rested his forehead on his lover’s chest and cried like a little boy who had found his way home.

Trey put his arms around Vince, kissed his hair and promised over and over again that everything would be okay.

Chapter Twenty-Two

I don’t know why I was so nervous for the guys to meet Vin, but I was.

I guess it was because they didn’t know him like I did, or Gram, and they were the first people I cared about who might not like him or understand him. I feared they’d think he was too old, too closeted, too Italian or too something else I hadn’t thought of yet. While I knew their reservations would come from wanting to protect me, the meeting Tara had insisted on having still had my stomach in knots.

Weirdly, Vinnie himself seemed fine about it. Not only that, but he took it seriously. I could tell, because he dressed up—but not too much—and left the gold chain at home. When we went into the coffee shop Tara had picked, Vinnie stood straight and tall, deferring to me to make introductions but playing older man next door to the nines as soon as I’d presented him. It wasn’t until he held out my chair for me to sit down that I realized why he was so comfortable: Vin had met the family before. A lot.

I was his first gay family, though, which made me feel special.

Still, it didn’t matter how smooth he played it to Tara. She gave him the tenth degree.

“So you’re not out,” she said, leaning forward to regard him cynically over her steaming latte. I tried to kick her under the table, but she moved her feet out of the way and kept her focus on Vin.

Vin, to his credit, nodded, looking only a little stiff. “Not yet. This is all sort of new to me.”

“I hear it’s different for your generation,” Dillon said, more of a dig at Vin’s age than an expression of empathy. He, unfortunately, was too far away to kick.

I came to Vin’s rescue instead. “He comes from a huge Catholic family too, and they’ve made it clear it isn’t cool to be gay. Besides, Vin hasn’t been out to himself very long.”

He gave me a look that was part amusement, part
I got this
. “I’m going to come out, even to them. It’s just a matter of figuring out how best to do it.”

Josh was dubious. “How can you be as old as you are and not know you’re gay?”

“He’s not
old
,” I shot back.

Dillon spoke before Vin could. “Well, it’s not as simple for everyone as you’re trying to make it out to be,” he said to Josh. “That Catholic shit can be brutal. Haven’t you heard that bullshit the Pope has been spouting lately, all those edicts to crack down on the evil gay?”

“My church isn’t that bad,” Vin interjected. “Though honestly, I go as little as I can get away with. I don’t care what the Pope thinks, though. I care what my family thinks. I want to believe they’ll come around when it’s gay Vinnie they’re dealing with, not some abstract bastard up in Boystown, but I can’t say for sure that’s what will happen.” He shrugged with more nonchalance than I knew he felt. “It will be what it will be.”

“But you are coming out?” Tara pressed. “For Trey?”

“God, you guys, lay the fuck off,” I said, unable to take any more.

Vinnie put his hand over mine under the table, but he didn’t look away from Tara. “No, not for Trey. For me.”

Dillon leaned back in his chair, nodding in approval. “Good.”

I rolled my eyes at the idea of Dillon being Gay Guru, but somehow this closed the grilling and let us move on to other topics.

“You’re all in school?” Vinnie asked.

“I’m in grad school,” Tara supplied, “but the guys are out. Dillon works at Logan Enterprises downtown.”

“I push paper around,” Dillon clarified with a wry grin.

He did more than that, but Josh spoke before I could. “I work at the Southside Society. A homeless shelter,” he added, a bit of challenge in his voice. Josh was a pretty big bleeding heart. “And you’re a plumber, right?”

Vince nodded, unashamed. “At the moment. I’ve done a little bit of everything.”

“He’s an MBA,” I supplied, not without pride. But this only made them wrinkle their noses.

“Why are you a plumber if you have an MBA?” Dillon asked.

Vinnie shrugged, but there was a twinkle in his eye. “You got something against plumbing?”

Dillon faltered. “Well, no, but—”

“Get the plumbing in something wrong, and you’ll be sorry fast. Plus, plumbing never gets boring. Dirty and gross, yes, but never boring.”

Josh smiled. “But numbers do?”

Vinnie nodded at him, smiling back. “They do.”

The whole thing went pretty smoothly after that. While Vin didn’t exactly slide into our groove, he played along well, and actually I was pretty proud of him, how he handled what had been at times open hostility. When we finally wandered back to the EL to head home, I felt upbeat, and I grabbed his hand and cuddled openly against his arm.

We were still close to Little Italy, and usually unless it was dark we were pretty circumspect about touching this close to people who might recognize Vinnie. He didn’t shove me away, but he did tense up just a little, and I started to back off, not wanting to push him when he’d already done so much for me. To my surprise though, he didn’t let me go. Instead, he pulled me closer and brushed a kiss against my hair.

“You don’t have to,” I said quietly, though I was loving every second of it.

“Maybe I want to.”

“Are you really going to come out? To your family and everything?” I asked as we turned onto Loomis.

“It’s either that or live two lives, and I don’t want to do that.”

“What if they don’t accept you?”

He shrugged. “Then I try to change their mind. Or mourn them and find my own way.”

It was such a far cry from his despair of the week before, but it fit with his demeanor at lunch and a calmness I’d felt in him lately in general. We didn’t say anything more, but he kept me close all the way to my front door, where he gave me a long, sensual kiss on my front steps before waving me inside.

I lingered, wanting to invite him in, wanting to take him directly up to my room and continue the kind of exploring we’d done that one day when I’d been so angry, the things he’d begged me to do to him when he was drunk. I’d thought about sex with Vin a lot. I’d admitted I loved him. I’d decided he was going to be my first. Yet something in me kept holding back, dragging the moment out. I was starting to think it might be fear, though what I was afraid of I couldn’t figure out. I wanted Vin, and he wanted me. I wanted sex period. Everything was lined up and ready. What was I waiting for?

I let him go, smiling at him as I watched him disappear up the street. Then I went inside and closed the door.

Mom was passed out on the sofa.

Not just sleeping.
Passed out.
Drunk and high, drool congealing in the corner of her mouth before it dripped onto the cushion. Her hair was unkempt and greasy, and her housecoat was stained, sagging open at her neck to reveal the pasty, unhealthy flesh above her breasts. She snored softly, but even this sound seemed off, not right.

In her hand was an empty brown medicine bottle, and the stench of sweat and sticky-sweet-raspberry flavoring hung in the air.

I turned away and headed up the stairs, shutting my door with angry force, though I knew it wouldn’t wake her. I paced around my room a few minutes, telling myself I was getting rid of my anger before I settled down to work, but I kept smelling that smell stuck in my nose, kept seeing her lying there.

They’d warned her about the cough syrup before. I never asked if Gram told them about it this time in the ER, but I assumed it was on her chart. Of course, once upon a time I’d assumed someone who abused alcohol and medicine like she did wouldn’t be allowed to go home, but that was a long time ago when I was still naive about addiction.

Disease.
My jaw got tight whenever I thought about the word. I hated that they called it that. Like that somehow made it okay to have. Like it made her a victim. I have heart disease. I have diabetes. I have colon cancer. I have depression. I have anxiety.

I have the uncontrollable desire to waste my family’s money and time and affection and spend it on cough syrup and vodka while I lie to them about it.

She
did
have depression, and she had horrible anxiety, I reminded myself, the old guilt coming back. Though this time it mingled with Vinnie’s outrage over the grocery-store story, and it was weird how it didn’t make me feel better. I lay down on my bed and thought about that instead, trying to focus on my reaction to Vin’s defense of my younger self rather than my despair over my current situation, of the havoc my mother had wrought in my life. That was what made it weird, actually. Why was I so angry with her now, but being angry with her for putting me through that in middle school felt like panic?

Is it gonna break you in half to admit they fucked you over?
Vin had asked me. I didn’t know, but sometimes the answer felt like yes. Yes it would. I could be angry about it now. I could be angry at her for being so selfish in general. But when I thought about sitting in that car, watching her get drunk—no, I couldn’t be angry about that. I couldn’t be anything about that. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to run.

I wanted to run to Vin.

I had my phone in my hand before I realized what I was doing, although I almost didn’t call. I hung up twice before it could ring and put the phone on my dresser for a full minute before I dove for it a third time. I clutched it desperately and made myself stay on long enough to hear Vin pick up.

“Hey, honey. I’m glad you called.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to call you, but couldn’t think of a reason.”

I laughed, but even to my own ears it sounded off, and he immediately asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“I can tell you’re lying. Did something happen?”

Yes, something had happened. I felt turned inside out and vulnerable, and I wanted to run and hide. “Do you think it would be okay if I came and did my studying at your place tonight?”

He didn’t even hesitate. “Sure. Want me to pick you up, drive you over?”

“No,” I said just as quickly. “I’ll take the EL.”

I was so out of sorts, I nearly forgot my backpack. All the way over, I felt something like panic, although I didn’t know why. I really did need to study, but my brain was too full of confusion, rattling with Tara and Josh and Dillon’s questions, Vinnie’s easy confidence, and all of it interspersed with shutter-shots of my mom passed out on the couch.

Normal, I realized. There was so much normal all around me, introducing my boyfriend to my friends, walking with him down the street, wondering about when I was going to have sex with him, but every time I tried to go past it there was my mom, reminding me normal was as far from me as it could get. I wasn’t done with school because of my mom. I worked two jobs because of my mom. I couldn’t do my homework in my room because of my mom. I didn’t think I was one to blame other people for my problems, but every time I tried to move forward in my life, there she was, fucking it up for me again.

As I sat in the quiet
rickety-clickety
EL car, we slipped into the underground and I fell into the past, the foul, sharp scent of cheap beer assaulting me as my mom dropped the first can and picked up the second.

When I should have changed trains at Jackson, I grabbed my backpack and headed to the street instead, hailing a cab to take me the rest of the way to Racine. I felt jittery and unsettled and more nervous than I should have been. It was just Vinnie—Vinnie who had come apart and sobbed in my arms. Surely I could get away from a bad afternoon at his place without feeling like I was crossing a forbidden line? It did feel that way, though, all the way to his door, where my hand shook as I knocked. As it swung open, my heart swelled into my throat, not with love or eagerness but with white-hot fear, that imaginary line suddenly all too real in my mind.

Then there he was: my Vinnie. Tall, dark and strong. He looked down at me with concern, ready to fix whatever was wrong, ready to comfort me. Ready to let me spend the afternoon studying or talking or whatever I wanted. Ready to distract me or leave me alone. Ready to meet my friends and family. Ready to come pick me up or let me make my own way to his place. Whatever I needed. Whatever I asked for.