Page 4 of Their Little House Tristan (Five Little Roommates #2)

Tristan

I should’ve known better than to apply for and then accept a job at Chained while living in my parents’ house. It wasn’t like I could keep it a secret for long, but that’s exactly what I did.

The money was good, it came with a membership to the club, and I was surrounded by people who understood me. It felt like it was worth the risk, but accepting that there was risk was one thing, dealing with the fallout another.

From the beginning, I accepted the fact that I was on borrowed time. My parents would figure out that my “restaurant job” wasn’t actually at a restaurant at all. Sure, I was doing dishes and prepping food, but it was at a sex club, something they very much would not understand.

I was honestly surprised I got away with it for as long as I did. I’d been there a couple of months without so much as a hint from them that they didn’t believe my lie. But the second I came home from my shift tonight and saw them still awake, I could see in my mom’s eyes that they’d figured it out and braced myself for the fallout.

“And where did you say you worked again?” My father sat in his armchair, staring at the fireplace, not meeting my eyes or even looking in my direction yet. That would come. It was all a part of his locus of control.

There wasn’t even a fire burning, but it was the position he took whenever he wanted us to know we were in real trouble. I’d received countless groundings with him in this exact pose. I hadn’t been a bad kid or anything, simply not the perfect son they wanted. Still wasn’t.

And he didn’t save this setup just for me; he did it to my mom as well. This was the authoritarian bullshit of his belief system in action.

“What do you mean?” Feigning innocence wasn’t going to work, but it would give me time to brace myself for whatever consequences he was planning.

“You know exactly what I mean. Your mother and I went to the restaurant today, and you know what was there?”

I did know. There was nothing there. The restaurant I claimed to work at? It had closed down, in its place a razed building, soon to be a parking garage.

“You have two seconds to tell us where you’re working, or to get your things and go. And don’t say, ‘I don’t have a job, I’ve just been looking,’ because I checked the credit card, and you haven’t been charging any gas to it, which means you’re getting money from somewhere.”

Fuck. I’d been so careful. If I’d thought about it, I would have just kept charging gas to fill the car I’d been borrowing from them instead of trying to be responsible. Of course, that, too, would’ve had consequences. I’d been in a no-win situation.

“Fine.” I walked between him and the fireplace. If we were going to have this conversation, I wasn’t going to hide. “I’ve been working at Chained.”

“Excuse me? Chained? Is that…fencing?” My mother was so naive or at least pretended to be. More than one person at Chained had a story about an unexpected club member they encountered from their non-work life, including a little old lady from next door, a kindergarten teacher, and an aunt.

“No, Mom. It’s a club. For adults. Adults who like participating in bedroom activities that are not just for procreation.”

Was I really having this conversation with my mom?

“You mean…a gay club?” she gasped.

“No. I mean—yes, some people there are gay, but some are straight. Some are bisexual. Some are pansexual. Some are even asexual.” I left it at that. I’d already given my mom too much information to process.

“Oh, don’t with your rainbow crap. You’re saying it’s a sex club.” My dad wasn’t one to mince words.

“It is.”

“Well, you have to quit,” Mom said as if she’d solved a big problem for me.

“No, Mom. I don’t have another job. Nothing else has come through yet.” Nor would it because I wasn’t applying for anything. But she didn’t need to know that.

“You’re not working there,” Father insisted. “How are you to find a proper wife if you’re doing that? Have you thought—”

“Maybe, this time, listen to me tell you I don’t want a wife. I’ve told you repeatedly for what? Seven years. No wife for me—proper or not.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” He stood up.

As a kid, that would have scared me. Now, I just braced for whatever wrath he was going to unleash. To my surprise, there wasn’t any.

“You have a week to make your choice. You either need to quit or move out. We will not assist you in this depravity.”

“Working is depravity?”

He held up his hand. “Do not test me.” And out of the room he went, leaving just my mother and me.

“Why do you do this…all this rebelling?” She swished her hand in the air, as if that somehow made her words true. “It’s time to grow out of your teen angst or whatever this is.”

“I’m an adult, Mom. I’m not a teen. This isn’t angst. This isn’t rebellion. This is who I am.”

“Then who you are needs to go someplace else.” And she followed my father, leaving me all alone to figure out what to do next. I didn’t want to quit—but, also, I had nowhere to go.

The next day, when I went in to work, Miss Lily recognized right away that I was stressed and pulled me aside.

“Hey, you’d tell me if any of the members were inappropriate with you, right?”

She thought it was a member, not that I had much interaction with them. I loved how she was always looking out for us.

“No, everyone here has been great. Fabulous, even. It’s just…you know, I came here because I had to leave school.”

She nodded.

“The only place I could stay was my parents’, and I’ve been saving money to move out, but they discovered I am working here, so that timeline’s moved up a little bit.”

She took my hand and dragged me to the little bulletin board.

“Please, I apologize if I’m assuming incorrectly, but you’re a little, right?”

I hadn’t been able to take advantage of the club yet. Goodness, I didn’t even have any little clothes to wear. I’d trashed them all when I moved back in with my parents for fear of being found out.

“Yeah…”

“Here.” She pulled off a tab and handed it to me. “This is a rental. It’s not a full apartment. Everybody has their own room, and everyone there is little. They even have their own playroom. It’s pretty fabulous, from what I hear. And quite a few club members live there. You should check it out.”

“Thanks. I will. I gotta get back—”

She shook her head. “I mean, call now. Even if your parents gave you time to move out, do you really want to chance that they won’t move that timeline up?”

“Thank you, Miss Lily.”

I ducked into one of the dressing rooms that wasn’t booked for the night and made the call.

The next morning, I went and checked out the place, signing on immediately. It was everything I wanted it to be. The bedrooms were nice. The couple of people I met on my tour seemed genuinely happy to see me. And the playroom was…everything.

I dropped my suitcase off and took a trip to a store where I could buy some little clothes. If I was gonna have a playroom, I was gonna dress the part. Thankfully, the rent was low enough that with the money I’d saved, I still had enough to get a couple of pairs of pajamas, some onesies, a paci, and a new stuffie.

I missed my old things. But this was a new beginning—and they were new to signify that.

The first thing I did, even before I unpacked, was to throw on some little clothes and head to the playroom. I’d started to explore the different toys when another little came in—one I didn’t recognize.

“Hi, I’m Bellamy, and you are Tristan?”

I nodded.

“Do you want to play?”

“Yes, please.” More than anything. “I’m looking for the cars.”

“Oh, they’re over here.” He led me to where the tracks and the Matchbox were, and we made a huge track and raced our cars round and round and round. I couldn’t remember having this much fun.

But, soon enough, the day caught up with me and I needed to go to bed.

“Hey, Tristan?” He dropped the last of his Matchbox in the bin. “Have you ever gone to Chained?”

“I work there.”

“That’s so cool. I thought maybe we could go together one day.”

“I’d like that.”

His face bloomed into a smile. And had we not been little and in this room, I’d have thought maybe it was an invitation—one I wanted to take him up on. To press my lips against his, to caress his cheeks, to lean in to his touch.

But he was little. And my roommate. And he was…I wasn’t… Neither of us was a daddy. No point going down that path. Especially not on the day I met him.

“I’d like that a lot.”