Page 38

My therapist gave me a lot of great stuff to prepare for if I saw Dav again, but I need to resupply.

Figure out what it is I'm actually feeling , and how to articulate it.

I book an appointment for tomorrow morning, then hang up, and start scrolling through the endless pages of messages in the family group chat.

They all basically amount to: What did you do?

Where are you? Are you okay? Answer! What's going on?

And, from Stuart, one of the last messages:

If you don't answer in the next two hours I'm driving down there and kicking your dipshit ass.

I run my free hand through my hair, turn my face up to the sky, wish I had remembered to put on sunscreen, and hit 'call'.

"The fuck is wrong with you!" is how Stu answers.

"I'm fine," I deadpan back at him. "By the way."

"I know you're fine, you're calling me. But Mum is losing it . Some photographer caught you leaving your apartment, and now you're in Hello! You're in People! Christ, Colin, you're on the goddamned news . And not like Entertainment Tonight. Real news."

"Oh," I say softly. "I didn't think they’d call out a manhunt for a missing person that soon."

"Manhu—Colin, the CBC is losing its shit about a royal wedding! Mum is boycotting Entertainment Tonight on principle."

"You know the celebrity gossip shows, Stu-pid. Mountains out of molehills. Besides, Dav's just a peer."

"Still a Tudor, though!" Dav calls from the patio. I flip him off and deliberately walk down toward the barns.

"Wait, what, is he in line for the throne?"

I groan, and scrub at my face, and explain that Dav is so distant a cousin that most of the British Royal Family would have to die for him to get anywhere near that crown.

And thank god for it, too. But the thought that my family only knows the man that I will be spending the rest of my life with through shitty grocery store magazines curdles my breakfast.

"Hey, how about we set up a video chat soon, huh?" I ask. "You can meet Dav properly?"

"We could drive Mum down this weekend?"

"Uh. Maybe, um, maybe not just yet," I hedge. "Let me, um, talk to Dav about it."

"What are you hiding?" Stu asks, voice soft. He sounds like Dad.

Royal weddings. My forever person. And Dad's not here for any of it.

He'll never be here for any of it.

Fuck.

"Nothing! Just… we’re getting caught up, okay? At his place. I've been…" Acclimating to the reality that my boyfriend's people are going to see me as little more than a glorified pet. "…hiding from the press. He's got a farm, with these tall walls. It's nice—"

"Yeah, I know," Stu snarls. "They keep replaying a clip shot through the bars on the gate of you standing in some second floor window looking wistful and shit."

"Say what?" I ask, head swiveling around to see if I can spot the glint of sunlight off of a telephoto lens.

I can't see Dav's expression from here, but the line of his shoulders as he stands and marches into the house makes me think his hearing is better than he let on.

Also, that somebody in security's about to get a strip torn off them.

"Wait, is there like, a media circus parked outside of our front door? "

" 'Our'? " Stu echoes. He's been talking on speakerphone as he drives, but now he's pulled over. He cuts the engine of his pickup and the world goes strangely quiet and echoey.

"I… it's complicated," I say miserably. "Dragons."

"Yeah," Stu says. "I'm getting that. Hey… do you need me to come down there, mo leanbh ?" He's trying to make light, but behind that I can hear the big-brother offer to beat up someone on my behalf.

"I'm fine." I mostly mean it. I can't imagine what might happen if Stu did take a swing at Dav. Dav would probably let him, in all honesty. And I do mean let him—Dav'd be able to block or duck away, before Stu had even finished swinging at my boyfriend.

Boyfriend?

Husband?

Keeper?

"And you do still love him? Even after the disappearing act? And all this media bullshit?"

I look back up at the patio, at our abandoned coffee cups and the side plates scattered with croissant crumbs.

Then at the other wrought iron tables gathered around the kitchen door, where Dav eats beside—lives beside—the people he's hoarded, the humans who run his life, but who don't live their own subservient to his.

For a brief second, I wish Dav wasn't inside so he could hear me when I say: "Yeah, Stu. I still love him. Like, a gross amount."

"Okay. Fine." He blows out a sigh. "Call Mum. And if there’s a next time, don't leave us hanging so long."

We say our goodbyes, I promise three more times to actually respond to the group chat, and then I repeat the song-and-dance all over again with Gem. Same accusations, same admonitions, same apologies, same promises. Same parting blow: "Call Mum."

Well, with my siblings building it up so much, now I'm nervous .

To buy myself time, I make Hadi the next stop on my Apology Tour.

"What," Hadi answers flatly.

"I'm a prick."

"Yes, you are."

"Am I still welcome at Beanevolence, or will you throw a pot of coffee at my head?"

"Are you going to come to apologize?"

"Yes."

"Then you're welcome. Dav too."

"Thank you."

"Should I have an apron ready for you?"

I look back up at the house. Dav is at our table again, sipping a fresh mug of coffee and staring off over the vineyards, pretending like he doesn't have his ear angled right at me.

"Not yet?"

" 'Not yet' implies a 'maybe soon'. Or is the Marquess Niagara hoarding you like a Kept Man?"

I swallow hard, the jibe hitting closer to home than I like. Dav hunches down in his seat. "That's a conversation for… for later. I'll text you when I know we're coming, okay?"

"Okay."

"I'm sorry, again."

"… me too," Hadi says softly. "For… for not stopping Pedra from taking the beans."

"That was a miscommunication."

"Min-soo is wrecked over it. And I should have talked about Pedra coming in with you—"

"It’s your café, you can do what you want."

"It was still shitty to go behind your back."

"It was. But I forgive you."

"Thanks."

"Okay."

"Hey... you're safe, right?"

"I'm safe. I'm okay. I'm… fuck, I'm even kinda happy?"

"Okay. Shit. Wow. Okay. Talk to you later. Bye."

"Bye."

The call with Mum is harder, filled with tears and grovelling on my part, because I’m not the only one still suffering the trauma and grief of losing dad suddenly.

The worry in her voice, the way she describes her desperation to get in contact with me, makes every organ I possess twist with guilt and nausea roil in my gut.

I promise to never vanish on her like that again, and when she hangs up, I feel only marginally less like the shittiest son on planet Earth.

A few minutes later, Dav finds me leaning on the fence of the coop, watching the chickens and wiping my face dry.

"I like your farm." His arms wrap around my waist, his chin rests on my shoulder. I don’t want to talk about the calls, and he lets me change the subject. "I like what you've done. The aquaculture is fascinating. I read an article about…" I trail off, clear my throat. "Sorry."

"Why sorry?"

"Uh, I get ranty about my hyperfocuses?"

"Colin—you don't think I know that?" Dav presses a kiss into my hair. "I’ve been going to the café long enough to be there while you were still studying. "

"Oh god—" I groan, letting my head drop forward both because of the way Dav's mouth is playing at the back of my ear, and also because I am mortified. "All those times I read my thesis to Hadi while we were slow."

"It was fascinating. You've got a flair for word-crafting."

"It's all the romance novels. Sorry."

"It was a delight." Dav says, and pulls the lobe of my ear between his teeth, gently. "I wouldn't have come back if I hadn't enjoyed it."

I turn in his arms, slide my own hands through his hair, and kiss him quiet. Or at least, I try to.

"The thing you said in the first chapter, about serving the community by serving the world—"

"You kinky motherfucker," I laugh.

"It's noble," Dav protests, but he's leering.

"I don't think there's a lot noble about basically shouting for three hundred pages straight—"

"I do," Dav interrupts. "And Luiz agreed."

"That's flattering but— wait , hold on." I push him back to meet his eyes. "Say what ?"

"I did my best to remember everything you said," Dav explains, as if he's talking about the mundanities of reporting a boring office meeting and not reciting my thesis to an actual winemaker .

"But I made rather a hash of it. Too much staring and not enough active listening.

Luckily, I was able to obtain a copy after the university published it.

Luiz was quite impressed with your diagrams for an aquaculture bed for… what's wrong?"

Jesus.

Fucking.

Christ.

No wonder I find his farm fascinating.

It's a living, breathing, working model of what I had laid out in my goddamn thesis.

Well, as much as it could be, when imposed on top of a pre-existing geography and… and… "Wait, wait, so like, all of this? You what, you did all this because…?"

"Because it was clever. And it sounded like it would work."

"You do the goat thing because I love the goat thing?"

"Precisely."

"This isn’t just to get into my pants?"

"That was part of it," Dav says, and slides said hands down the back of said pants, giving me a healthy squeeze.

"But I never could quite figure out how to broach the topic.

'Oh, pardon, Colin—I've barely spoken a paragraph to you, but would you like to come to my farm, which I've redesigned wholesale to fulfill your designs for an eco-conscious utopia?’ That's a step beyond 'creepy regular'. "

"Yeah, maybe." I scan the horizon, taking in all the vegetation, the smell of the barnyard, the sounds of the goats tinkling their way to the back fields, the soft cluck of the chickens, the warmth of the growing heat of the day on my face. "But, man. This is…"

"Is it a grand enough romantic gesture for you, Colin Levesque?"