The Foster Family (19 page)

I stared at him a long moment. I suspected the sales girl was taking extra time choosing frames for us to look at because she seemed to be really good at her job, and it was pretty obvious we were having a moment she needed to stay out of if she was going to make the really good commission.

“Promise me this isn’t about the gag thing yesterday,” I said.

Malcolm looked blank.

“Just… I don’t want you to think you have to take me out and buy me sh—stuff, pamper me or spoil me as some sort of apology for stuffing that gag in my mouth yesterday.”

“You do understand I was out of line.”

I tipped my own head. “What were you planning on doing to me when we got home? When you took me aside at the nursery and gave me the speech about cause and effect? You were planning something then. So what were you going to do?”

He looked a little chagrined. A crooked smile slid across his face. “Gag you for a while.”

“So?”

“So what? I acted in anger.”

“I get that. We all lose our temper once in a while. If you were out of line, it was only because you acted without setting the ground rules first,” I chanced. “You would have sat me down, told me the rules, the punishment for breaking them, make sure I accepted all that, and then you would have done exactly what you did. Maybe more gently.” I stared at him, waiting, sure I was somewhere close to accurate.

Finally, he nodded.

“And I would have done exactly what I did, Malcolm. I would have opened my mouth and chosen to take my punishment. Because it was fitting and I broke the rule. It was what should have happened. I am not going to hold a temper tantrum against you. Trust me.” I turned to face the mirror. “I am not the one to be tossing bricks at that glass house.”

There was no more time to talk about it, though, because our sales rep came back with a selection of frames that looked like they cost a fortune.

“Try these.” She slipped a pair on my face and I squinted at my reflection.

I had to lean close to see myself clearly, but even before I did, I knew these frames looked a hundred times better than anything I’d tried so far.

“Perfect,” Malcolm decided. “We’ll take those.”

“Mal—”

“I thought we decided you were going to let me do this.”

“These are too much.”

He spun my chair around so we were sitting knee-to-knee and looked me in the eye. Both his big hands came from the fuzzy gloom of my nearsightedness to settle on my face, cupping it and giving me no chance to look away. “I can’t think of a thing that is too much for you.”

I blinked at him. “Y-you barely know me.”

“I think you barely know yourself, Kerry.” He straightened the glasses frames and smiled. “These look good on you.”

“Thank you.”

His smile was so kind. “You’re welcome. Now give them back to her so we can order the rest and go eat.”

“Then shop some more? We still haven’t found new shelves for the living room.”

He made a noncommittal sound as he turned to the salesgirl, and we finished picking out options for my glasses. Wonder of wonders, he actually listened to my opinion about which options would suit my lifestyle best and ordered what I wanted, not just the top-of-the-line everything simply because he figured price made it better. I walked out of there with the promise of eyewear that was not only stylish, but useful and warrantied out the wazoo.

“You need better clothes,” Malcolm informed me as we sat down in the restaurant to eat and wait.

“I’m a gardener,” I reminded him. “I don’t need nice clothes.”

“You need better clothes,” he said again.

“How much do I let you give me before it’s too much?” I asked.

“Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t like being pampered.”

I wasn’t about to lie to him, so I shook my head. “Everyone likes it. Just that I don’t deserve—”

He placed a finger over my lips. “I’ll be the judge of that. Now no more. If I want to buy you something, all you have to say is thank you.”

“Can I have the lamps?”

“No.”

I pouted, which earned an indulgent smile, but I guessed I was going to have to find more reasonable lamps.

P
ICKING
OUT
shelving for the living room went a lot more smoothly than either the lamps or the glasses. Malcolm thought maybe that was because all Kerry had to worry about was helping him decide what would go with the furniture he already had. There was no personal stake in this for the younger man. Maybe that made it similar to picking flowers, deciding what would go well with what. Whatever the case, when Kerry spotted the perfect pair of units in the discount section of Malcolm’s favorite store, Malcolm grinned. Kerry looked as though he’d won some sort of prize.

“One on either side of the TV,” he said, “and we can get that cabinet you liked over at the first place.” He was animated with his discovery, already planning ahead to how the room would look finished again.

“We are not going back to pick out those disastrous lamps,” Malcolm warned, teasing and hoping he wasn’t stretching the game past the breaking point.

Kerry offered a tragic sigh. “I’ve been doomed to suffer inferior lighting. However shall I cope?” Then he stuck his tongue out and laughed.

Malcolm’s skin prickled with heated pleasure at the sound. His breath caught when Kerry faced him, all grins and excitement. The bruising and swelling disappeared under the glow.

“God, you’re adorable.” In self-defense, he turned back to the shelving units. “I already ordered the cabinet at the other store. They’re delivering that and the rug you liked for your room next week. Oh.” Annoyance slivered his voice, and he tried to pull back from it and the looming thicket of emotions he too easily could get caught in.

“Oh what?” Kerry asked, bending to look at what Malcolm had discovered when he studied one of the units more closely.

“It’s broken,” Malcolm said. Disappointment turned the skin prickling to a cold shiver. “I can’t buy these.” He didn’t care so much about the shelves themselves as about how pleased Kerry had been to find them for him and how beautifully he’d responded to Malcolm’s approval. It had been instinct. Pure. Nothing contrived or practiced in Kerry’s joy at getting Malcolm to smile. And Malcolm was painfully aware how difficult a feat that could be.

Malcolm stepped back and crossed his arms in front of himself, wishing he hadn’t seen the damage to the furniture.

Kerry examined the shelf closely, squinting, his face a few inches from the wood. After a moment, he straightened and his grin was huge as ever. “I can fix that,” he announced. So sure of himself, his eyes bright, his cheeks flushed. He was like a kid but not. And he pushed buttons Malcolm had forgotten he even had.

“You can?” Malcolm almost couldn’t believe him, but there was no mistaking the confidence in the set of Kerry’s shoulders. Malcolm had seen him unsure, and this was not the same. In this moment, he knew what he said was true. “You can,” Malcolm said, accepting Kerry’s surety at face value.

“Sure I can. It’s real wood, not that particle-board crap, so all it needs is a bit of wood glue and some clamps to fix the splits. Then you stuff the old screw holes with glue and sawdust, let it all dry, drill new holes, and reset the brackets. Voila”—he spread his hands wide—“fixed. Better than new.”

“Just like that,” Malcolm said, staring at Kerry.

“Pretty much.”

“How do you know all that?”

Kerry shrugged, bending to squint again at the cracked shelf. “Had a foster dad who was a woodworker. He let me sit in his shop with him when he was working.” He picked gently at the splinters as he spoke. “Even bought me some gardening tools and helped me build a potting shed and this cool wooden wheelbarrow-wagon thing. I really liked that thing.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing.” His voice dropped to a low almost-whisper. “I aged out of the system.”

Translation: the family had one room, and Child Protective Services encouraged the man not to waste it on someone who wasn’t one of theirs anymore. It was an ugly lesson. One Malcolm had also learned the hard way. At least the last home he’d left hadn’t been one where he felt in any way at home. It didn’t sound as though that had been the case for Kerry.

“And what happened to the stuff he built with you?” Malcolm asked, almost afraid to know what other misfortune might have befallen his new, hapless charge in the past.

“I guess he still has it. I don’t know.”

“You didn’t take it with you when you left?”

“I came halfway across the country, Mal. I was headed for college and I didn’t even know where I was going to live. Besides, he had a kid there when I left who loved his shop as much as I did. I left the stuff for her.”

“That’s really nice of you.”

“She was so shy. Really quiet, but she loved the woodworking and wanted to take care of my garden for me, so I left her my tools. Thought it might help her. Give her something to occupy her, you know? Other than getting into trouble. She was in rehab and pregnant and she needed something to keep her busy.” He shrugged, but his expression was sad, almost bleak. “Made sense at the time.”

“Sounds like this guy you lived with is one of the rare ones.”

“I guess he really was.”

“Was?”

“Lacy, that’s the girl, she was going to be his last foster.”

“Why?”

He smiled. “He met someone. He’s, like, almost fifty, you know? Getting old. And he met a guy he really liked. He just thought it might be time to do something for himself for once. I hope it worked out.”

“You don’t keep in touch?”

The last curl of Kerry’s smile melted away. “He knew Andrew.”

“So?”

“So.” He traced the edge of the cracked wood with a finger again. “I wasn’t exactly itching to tell him the guy who used to harass me in school was… well. I just wasn’t going to tell him that I was bending over for the guy he went to the mat to protect me from when I should have been grown enough to look after myself.”

Malcolm watched him, but he didn’t say anything. He was still trying to get a handle on what that relationship with Andrew had been.
Why
it had been, and how it affected Kerry’s instinct to submit.

“So it’s been a year or so since I’ve talked to Nash,” Kerry said. “That’s his name. Nashville Jones, do you believe that?”

“Huh,” was all he said. Then after a few minutes, “Think about something for me.” He pulled Kerry’s hand away from the cracked wood and gently rubbed the tips of his fingers as though checking for splinters. “Think about if you would tell him about Charlie and me.”

“Well, I—”

He held up a hand. “Think about it. That’s your assignment this week.”

“My assignment?”

He went on as if Kerry hadn’t spoken. “You think about if you would be willing to introduce the
two
men in your life to the only almost-parental type you’ve ever had and then see how that makes you feel. Next Sunday, you’re going to call him.” Maybe he was sealing the fate of the relationship before it even went anywhere. He’d never been accused of jumping into anything spontaneously, that was for sure. Well. Nothing as deep as Charlie. Not in a very long time.

“And tell him what?” Kerry asked, the beginnings of panic in his lovely blue eyes.

Malcolm lifted an eyebrow. “And tell him you’re still alive, doing well. Tell him you thought about him this week while you were fixing a cabinet for a friend. Tell him you have a good job you love, that your boss is pretty awesome, and you like where you’re living. Tell him you’re thinking about starting up a little landscaping company.”

“I am?”

“Aren’t you? Is mine the only grass you’re going to cut? Think about it. Walk down a street in this town and tell me there aren’t a hundred gardens you want to get your hands on.”

Kerry flushed, a gorgeous color that had no business on a young man with shoulders like that, and hands that were probably calloused and had dirt ground into the creases.

“I did think about it,” he confessed.

“Good.” Malcolm narrowed his eyes. “Tell him you dropped out of college?”

Another flush, this one deeper and accompanied by the flutter of lashes as Kerry looked at the ground.

“So you haven’t told him that.” It was merely the confirmation of a guess, but it was still confirmed.

“He’d be disappointed. And I’d have to tell him why. He’d want to know.” And that brought up Andrew again, and just the thought of that asshole made the boy shiver, broad shoulders or not.

Malcolm reached out and laid a comforting hand on Kerry’s shoulder. “You don’t think Nash deserves the chance to offer his advice? His help?”

“I think he’s had Lacy to worry about. I’ve been just fine….”

“Think about it,” Malcolm said. No need to offer a laundry list of the ways Kerry’s life wasn’t fine. “Sunday you will call him.”

“I will.” Kerry snapped his head up. His eyes were huge, his mouth partly opened, as if he was about to say something he’d suddenly forgotten, or as though he was trying to pull in breath. He was unnaturally still.

Malcolm nodded agreement and squeezed his shoulder in reassurance. When Kerry didn’t move but just stared like a deer caught in his gaze, Malcolm smiled and nodded. “You’ll call him Sunday.”

“These are not the droids you’re looking for,” Kerry muttered. But his tense muscles relaxed ever so slightly under Malcolm’s hard grip.

Malcolm smiled because the joke was funny and because he was pleased with Kerry. And, he had to admit, pleased with himself. He wasn’t completely without conscience. If he could admit he wanted Kerry, he could also admit he wanted what was best for the younger man. Did it make him an ogre if he hoped what Kerry wanted and what was best for him coincided with his being very well taken care of by one man who had the monetary means and another who had the emotional means?

Drawing in a deep breath, he gave one final, strong squeeze of Kerry’s shoulder and let him go. “Let’s find a salesperson, then, shall we, Mr. Fix-It?”

Kerry’s grin was wide, and he practically bounced in place and nodded. “Yes, sir!”

And there went Malcolm’s Dom radar again, blipping wildly to get his attention. Kerry’s enthusiasm heated him from the inside out. He knew the sight of a man happy to please, and that gleam in Kerry’s eyes was it. He used to see it constantly glowing from Charlie’s pores, but lately… were they just too old and worn out to see that in each other anymore? Was that part of them dead and gone?