Page 35 of Flagrant Foul (Totally Pucked #3)

“I don’t know what to tell you, Teddy,” he says eventually, voice far away and devoid of life. “It is what it is.”

Fury and pain rise with such force that I couldn’t hold them in even if I wanted to. “No, it fucking isn’t what it is! I’m not having my entire fucking life ruined on the whim of my brother. That cannot be it. I won’t fucking allow it to be it. Why do you care so much what he thinks?”

Sev has gone quiet and still, leaving him no more than a mute statue of himself, so of course, he doesn’t answer. I’m angry and upset, but I know this is his way of dealing with things that feel big to him .

I steady myself before asking the question that, for me, has festered under the surface of every interaction we’ve had over the past five or six years. “Are you and Nate a thing? Have you ever been a thing? Is that what it is?”

It’s my worst nightmare. The product of my worst fears and greatest dread.

The bone-chilling answer my sleep-addled brain spits out at me on nights when I’ve lain awake for hours, wracking my brain for ways to explain why I’m almost positive Sev feels the same way about me as I feel about him, and yet he always, always pushes me away.

He looks at me as if I’ve taken leave of my senses. “No!”

“Do you want to be with him?”

“No!”

“Does he want to be with you? Is he in love with you?” I’m not sure which option is worse: Nate wanting Sev or Sev wanting Nate.

I go back and forth on it whenever I let myself think about it.

Right now, the thought of Nate wanting Sev makes me feel more unhinged than the alternative.

“Because if he is, fuck him, you’re mine . ”

“Teddy,” Sev says sharply, “Nathan is straight. He’s not into guys, and I’m not into him. It’s not about that.”

“Then what’s it about?” My voice cracks as years of doubt and uncertainty crash into me.

I’ve lived with our situation for so fucking long.

I think about it all the time, despite trying not to.

It kills me and breaks me because no matter what happens on the surface, I know there’s more to it.

“Please tell me. Just tell me. Whatever it is, just tell me. I can’t live with not knowing anymore. ”

Sev plants his elbow on the arm of the couch and looks away. My heart beats and sinks and flutters with hope, and then sinks again. It does everything a heart can do in a few seconds. A few seconds that determine whether I’m going to know peace in my future or not.

Eventually, he speaks. “You know how, when people say ‘found family,’ you always imagine a group.”

I’m not sure I follow, but I nod all the same.

“A lil’ motley crew of people you found on your journey, you know? A queer couple, maybe. Someone who’s nonbinary or ace or trans or something completely different from you, but they feel like family?”

“Yeah.” I get it. I have friends with found families, and many of them fit Sev’s description.

“And maybe a random straight person thrown into the mix,” he continues. “Someone you worked with years back, a colleague or something, who has a husband, two kids, and a cat, and a totally heteronormative life, but she’s ally as fuck?”

“Yeah,” I say again .

“Well, my found family is nothing like that.” He smiles weakly and flicks his gaze to my face, pausing at my lips and dropping it before meeting my eyes. “It isn’t a group of people. It’s not a collection of souls I found as I bumbled through life. It’s one person.”

He pushes the blanket off his legs and onto the floor, turning and leaning against the arm of the couch to get a little more space from me. He opens and closes his mouth as though he’s deliberating whether to go on.

“Did Nate ever tell you about my dad?” he asks when the decision is made.

I think back. “No, not really. Just that he’s an asshole.”

He snorts humorlessly and bobs his head.

“Yeah, he’s an asshole for sure. He was always an asshole.

For the first seven or eight years of my life, he was an asshole who drank too much now and again.

Then he became an asshole who drank all the time.

Not long after that, he became a violent, abusive asshole. ”

My insides clench violently. Painfully. I understand the gravity of what he’s saying, and more than that, I feel it. I feel his pain in every joint in my body.

Guilt that I had no idea how bad his home life was makes my bones feel brittle and my teeth ice cold.

“My mom did her best for a really long time, but a couple of years before I met Nate, she just…gave up, I guess, and started drinking too. I, uh…it was…not a good feeling. Nothing was ever predictable in my house again. There were days when everything was a party and everyone was happy, and days when it was a warzone and my mom and I were wounded.” My chest aches from how much I hate what he’s saying.

“There were times when it was both of those things in the same day.”

I want to take him in my arms and hold him, and I want to fly to Alabaster right the fuck now and kick the shit out of his father. “I’m sorry, Sev. I didn’t know.”

“It’s not your fault. I didn’t want you to know, so I went out of my way to make sure you didn’t.

” He smiles wistfully. “When I first started coming over to your house, I couldn’t believe how different it was from mine.

It took me a really long time to trust the status quo, and especially to trust your dad.

I remember this one time he got home from work, and your mom had been out and about, and she’d done a big grocery shop.

There were bags and food all over the kitchen counter when he got home. I felt that…”

He spreads a hand over his chest and digs his fingers in, clawing at his heart.

A lifetime of fear and uncertainty accurately represented in a single hand movement.

“At my house, my dad would get super pissed if there was no food in the fridge… But he'd also get pissed if he saw a to n of food out because that meant my mom had been spending ‘his’ money. I knew it was weird and fucked up on some level, but I guess I’d never really given it much thought. It was just the way it was, you know? Anyway, your dad got home that day, walked into the kitchen, ruffled Nate’s hair, gave your mom a kiss, and said, ‘Wow, Tish, you got so much done today. I don’t know what we’d do without you. ’”

He laughs ruefully, and it’s the emptiest, loneliest, worst sound in the world.

I want to reach for him, take his hand and hold on as tightly as I can, but I don’t because I know this moment is important and significant to him.

There’s a heaviness in my chest that lets me know that, for him, it was a crossing. A watershed moment.

“It blew my mind,” he says, “because it was so far removed from anything I’d ever experienced.

I didn’t know how to react. It happened years ago, but I still think about it randomly sometimes.

You know that stool Nate likes in the kitchen?

The one near the window?” I nod. “Well, Nate was sitting on it, and when your dad stopped talking, he said, ‘Thanks, Momma, I love you.’”

He smiles to himself in genuine amusement, but more than that, in deep, true fondness.

“The funny thing was, I knew he was going to say it. I knew it before he even opened his mouth because that’s one of the things I love about Nate.

He’s predictable. It sounds like an insult, or that it makes him boring or something, but it doesn’t.

To me, it’s the highest compliment I could ever give anyone.

Nate is always the same. He’s steady. I know exactly what to expect from him, and he never lets me down. ”

We’re both quiet, and I watch motionlessly as Sev worries a seam of the couch. He uses the nails of his forefinger and thumb and a quick, picking motion. He doesn’t do it hard enough to make the seam come undone. Just hard enough to give him something to hold on to.

He smiles at me and shrugs, eyes a dark mass of rippling shadows. “Nate says I’m an elephant.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know those stories about captive elephants, right? The ones where they take a baby elephant and chain it to a big post. The baby elephant fights and struggles and tries to get free, but it can’t because it’s small and the post is big.

Eventually, it gives up. Time passes. The elephant gets bigger, and the post stays the same.

By the time the elephant is fully grown, the post is insignificant in comparison to the size and strength of the elephant.

It could easily push it over and escape, but it doesn’t because it doesn’t think it’s possible. ”

I’ve heard the elephant story before, and I passionately hate it as a story about elephants, but I hate it ten times more as part of Sev’s story.

He places his hands neatly in his lap and looks down at them.

“I never raised a hand to my dad, d’you know that?

Not once. Not to defend myself, not to stop him, not to attack him, and God knows he fucking deserved it.

I was half a head taller than him and a professional hockey player by the time I left home, and I was still scared of him. ”

“You’re not supposed to attack your father, Sev. It’s not a weakness that you didn’t. It’s how it’s meant to be. We’re not made to be like that.”

“I know, and I get what you’re saying, but I should’ve been made like that because it was required of me. I was supposed to fight back, and instead, I ran. Do you remember how I used to crash at your house all the time?”

“Yeah.”