Total pages in book: 125
Estimated words: 118592 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 474(@250wpm)___ 395(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 118592 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 474(@250wpm)___ 395(@300wpm)
“Yeah,” I said absentmindedly as I made sure I had my keys and wallet. I turned back to Tristan and felt my chest constrict painfully at how right he looked sitting on my bed. I did something then that I probably shouldn’t have, but my common sense was already shredded so I didn’t think too much on it. Instead, I put my knee on the bed and leaned across it, wrapping my arm around Tristan’s shoulders and hugging him hard. “I’m glad you’re home,” I breathed against his neck and then I kissed him on the temple before I hurriedly left the room. But I wasn’t sure if I was getting out of there so fast because I needed to get to Memphis or because I was afraid the next kiss I gave Tristan would be anything but brotherly.
I suspected it was a little bit of both.
Chapter Seven
Tristan
I wasn’t sure what bothered me more – Brennan’s kiss or the fact that he’d lied to me.
Sure, my skin was still tingling as it was prone to do whenever Brennan touched me, but the pain in my belly was more prominent.
I hadn’t actually seen the text message Brennan had gotten before he’d taken off, but even I knew what the color that had flooded his face and the ticked up breathing meant. And I hated it.
My appetite gone, I got off Brennan’s bed and turned off the TV. I made my way back to the kitchen and put the ice cream away before going to my own room to try to focus on unpacking. While I hadn’t taken much stuff to New York with me when I’d left for Julliard a year earlier, my fathers had packed up a lot of my stuff from my bedroom in their apartment in downtown Seattle and brought it to the new apartment Brennan had picked out for us so that it would be here when I got home. I had no doubt it had been tough on both of my dads to empty out my childhood room, but they’d made it clear that the room would always be there and I knew that to be one hundred percent true.
For all the shitty things that had happened in my early years, I’d never lost sight of how lucky I’d been to have found the two men who would change my entire life. In truth, they’d found me, but it was actually Brennan’s older brother who I had to thank for that. I still remembered the day the tall man with the dark hair and fancy suit had come to visit me in the group home I’d been placed in when I was ten years old. Surprisingly, I had more memories of Zane Devereaux in those days than I did of my own mother. But I suspected that was because I’d locked away much of what my life had been like for the first ten years far away in my mind in a place where those memories could never touch me again. Unfortunately, there had been some memories and tendencies I hadn’t been able to escape.
Like my incessant fear of the dark and my need to keep things clean – not obsessively clean, just enough that I wouldn’t have to worry about moving a dirty dish only to find a cockroach had taken up residence beneath it. My roommate at Julliard had found it humorous that, at nineteen years old, I still needed to leave a light on by my bed as I slept. I hadn’t bothered to tell him it was the only way I could be sure there weren’t any rats crawling on me in those moments when my body was trying to convince me that there were. I doubted the asshole would have understood anything of what it was like to grow up with a mother who’d been more concerned with getting her next fix than keeping a clean apartment, feeding her kid or making sure he at least had a bed to sleep in that wasn’t infested with vermin.
Luckily, I’d only had to deal with the jerk for the first half of the year because the moment he’d found out I was HIV-positive, he’d contacted the school and insisted on being moved to a new room. Unfortunately for me, he hadn’t heeded the school’s warning not to disclose my condition to other students, and within a matter of weeks upon returning to school after the Christmas break, nearly everyone in my classes had known. I hadn’t been prepared for their reactions.
At all.
Most of the kids had avoided me and had only said something in hushed whispers as I’d passed. Some had actually reacted like my roommate had and had asked to be reseated or gave me a wide berth when they saw me coming. A handful had become aggressive and had taunted me with jabs about getting AIDS because I was a fag; others had openly voiced their disapproval that I was even allowed to be in the same room with them. The furor had lasted almost a month, and at one point my fathers had had to step in with the threat of bringing a lawsuit against the school if they couldn’t ensure both my safety and that I’d be treated with respect. My fathers were wealthy and powerful enough that the school had heeded the warning and a couple of the kids were warned to tone down their behavior. Most had, a few hadn’t and they’d been expelled. By early spring, I’d known that my time at the prestigious school was over and I’d decided to go home where I could go back to being just Tristan again.