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)
Not HIV-positive Tristan.
Not the Tristan who might someday get AIDS.
Not the Tristan who had so much but still felt like something was missing.
I’d asked my fathers not to let on to the family the real reason I was coming home. I suspected they might have told a few of the adults in our family, but they’d clearly respected my wishes because I doubted Brennan would have kept it to himself if he’d known. I wasn’t really disappointed that my time at Julliard had been cut short, since I hadn’t particularly enjoyed the program. Maybe it was the competitiveness of it all, I wasn’t really sure. Music had always been an escape for me and I’d never felt the need to prove it to be anything more than that. Yes, I wanted music to be a permanent part of my life, but I couldn’t see myself traveling the world giving performances. I couldn’t see turning music into something that someday might become a burden or an obligation and that was exactly what school had started to feel like. And while others had said I had a gift, to me my music was just another extension of me. I had brown hair, I was on the shorter side, I played the piano…that was it. No muss, no fuss.
I’d debated with whether or not to keep pursuing music as part of my education, but had finally settled on combining something I loved with something I thought I could easily fall in love with.
Teaching.
It wasn’t something I’d ever even given much thought to until the day I’d been at JFK airport in New York waiting for my flight home for the Christmas break. They’d had a piano near my gate and I’d sat down on a whim to play. I’d managed to gather a nice little crowd of people around me who’d started asking me to play various Christmas carols, but it wasn’t until a little girl who couldn’t have been more than nine or ten had told me she wanted to learn to play that I’d finally found something that had made sense to me. I’d spent twenty minutes teaching her a simple tune and I’d loved every second of it.
I’d talked to my fathers about the possibility of giving up a career as a professional pianist over the holiday. I’d been worried they wouldn’t support the decision since teaching music carried none of the prestige or paychecks that being a well-known pianist did. But I’d underestimated the men who’d raised me, who’d saved me. Because they hadn’t even hesitated for a second to tell me they’d support me in whatever career path I chose that would make me happiest.
Before Logan and Dom had found me, I’d often wondered what I had done to deserve the life I’d been given…to have a mother who wasn’t even aware of me half the time and a father I’d never met. I’d actually thought myself the luckiest kid in the world when I’d ended up in the group home because I’d finally been clean and had had food to eat that hadn’t been half spoiled. And then it had just gotten better because Zane had entered my life and had found me the family I hadn’t even known I’d wanted.
Of course, I hadn’t known that when I’d met the man and I also hadn’t known I’d been sick. It had taken the state and Zane a while to figure out that I’d actually been tested for HIV when I was a toddler and had been started on an antiretroviral therapy program early on while my mother had still been living with her mother. I had no memory of my maternal grandmother, but from what Zane had told me, she’d died when I was eight or nine and my mom had turned back to doing drugs, something she’d been doing before she’d gotten pregnant with me and how she herself had become infected.
After the state had diagnosed me for the second time, I’d been put back on the medication and Zane had started the process of trying to find a family member to take me in. I learned later that there’d only been a paternal great-aunt and she’d had no interest in taking on the burden of caring for a kid, let alone an HIV-positive one. With the prospects of being adopted growing slimmer and slimmer as each day had gone by, I’d been facing a future bouncing around the foster-care system until I aged out at eighteen. And then Logan and Dom had happened.
I hadn’t made it easy for them. Not even a little bit.
It wasn’t that I’d outwardly fought them since that wasn’t my way of doing things. No, I’d shut down. Absolutely and completely. I hadn’t spoken to them for the first three months they’d taken me home. And that had been the least troublesome side of my behavior. In addition to hoarding food and hiding it in my closet until it had become a rotting pile of filth, I’d stolen money so I would have enough to buy food if they’d decided to stop feeding me. I’d refused to take my medication and had often become sick as a result. If the men angered me in any kind of way, I’d retaliated by destroying things of value, but I’d done it in such a way that I could pretend it was an accident. I’d broken pictures, knocked over knickknacks, dropped dishes...and then I’d waited for them to prove that I couldn’t trust them by punishing me or sending me back to the group home.