“Stop right now.” Daryl’s sternest voice was still full of gentle, wrapping around Kyle and soothing him the same way it always had. “You’re upset, and that’s understandable. But let’s back up before you start undoing what to my mind is a positive, good relationship despite whatever differences you might have between each other, age and otherwise. Especially over something you had no part of.”
Jane had her arms full of a tearful Linda Kay, who always wept when someone else did, but she managed to comfort her daughter and speak to Kyle at the same time. “If you’re guilty of anything, it’s being unable to stand it when other people hurt. You’re always at your worst when someone you love faces something you can’t fix. Plus those fools who burst into the meeting hurt you too.”
“I want to go yell at them, but Arthur says that’ll only make it worse.”
Daryl nodded curtly. “He’s right. The way to fight hate is with love.”
Kyle tensed. “I
don’t
love them. Not right now. I don’t know if I ever can. I was all set to get to know them for Paul’s sake, but I don’t know that I can. Not now.”
“Not
right
now, no.” Jane smoothed Linda Kay’s hair. “Let’s focus on getting you put back together right now. The Jansens can wait. All of them but Paul. Take a moment and text him, sweetheart.”
The thought made Kyle queasy. “I don’t know what to say. I feel ridiculous now, leaving. He probably thinks I abandoned him.”
“Then tell him the truth. You got overwhelmed and sensed he needed his space. Tell him you love him, that you’re here for him if he wants to talk with you. Or simply be with you.”
Kyle got out his phone.
I love you. I’m sorry I had to go. I thought you needed space, but if I’m wrong, tell me and I’ll be over in a heartbeat. I do love you. So much. We’ll get through this. I’ll be with you all the way. I love you.
He put the phone down, sure he wouldn’t get a response, which was why he was so surprised when his phone buzzed less than thirty seconds later. Paul’s response was brief, but warmed Kyle all the same.
It’s okay. Thank you. I will. I love you too.
When he relayed the message to his family, they smiled. “See?” Daryl ruffled Kyle’s hair. “You two kids will come through this just fine.”
Kyle wasn’t sure how, exactly, that was going to happen right now. But when Linda Kay slid her chair over, wrapped her arms around his midsection and squeezed, Kyle shut his eyes and leaned into her and let himself trust somehow, some way, it would.
Chapter Seventeen
P
aul put his phone on the coffee table, Kyle’s text still visible on the screen for a few seconds longer before fading away. Arthur had been monologuing reassurances, but when he saw the phone, he stopped. “Everything okay?”
Okay? Paul huffed a bitter laugh. “Yeah. Everything’s great.” He stroked the phone, though. “That was Kyle.”
“Where did he go?” Marcus looked around with a frown. “I thought he was here.”
Gabriel started to answer, but Paul spoke over him. “He got overwhelmed and needed to be alone. Which is what I’ve been trying to tell you all for an hour is what I need too.”
Arthur scowled and folded his arms over his chest. “If you think we’re leaving you alone after your family pulled a stunt like that, you’ve got another think coming.”
Paul pinched the bridge of his nose and forced his breath out in a measured release, not a sigh. “I appreciate the support. But I really do want to be by myself right now.”
It took another hour to convince them he was fine, or at least that being alone was the medicine he needed. Frankie was the one who got them to go, urging everyone to give Paul space, giving him a sad smile over his shoulder as he herded them out the door. Once they were gone, Paul let the quiet press against his ears for a moment. Then he leaned forward far enough to gather his remotes.
He’d left one of the ten-pack Christmas romance DVDs in the player, and he fired up
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.
He only half-watched, mostly trying to absorb the happy Christmas feeling, to get enough of a hit to bleed off the pain of the afternoon. When it failed, he pulled out
A Christmas Kiss
, and soon after that,
A Boyfriend for Christmas
. In the middle of the prologue flashback where the hero and heroine met first as teens, he snapped off the TV and picked up his phone. Kyle answered before the first ring finished.
“Hey, you.”
Paul shut his eyes, the beautiful sound of his boyfriend’s voice welcome even as it, like the movies, made everything all too real. “I’m sorry I couldn’t…react right today. It had nothing to do with you.”
“I know. I’m sorry I had to leave.”
Paul sank into the couch, reveling in how much Kyle’s voice was
home
. He wasn’t sure when that had happened. It felt dangerous. And wonderful. “Sometimes…when I’m upset, I need to be by myself. You leaving was actually good. I wish the others had listened like you did.”
“I’m so sorry, Paul.” Kyle sighed raggedly, gathering himself. “I’m sorry they did that. It was so hurtful to you. It makes me so angry. But mostly—” His voice cracked. “I just…God, I want to make it all go away. I want to be everything for you. I want to be your white knight. But I can’t. Not all the time. And I hate it.” He made a frustrated noise. “Sorry. I’m making this about me. As I said, I suck at this.”
No, he didn’t suck at all. Paul shut his eyes and gripped his phone tighter. “You
are
my white knight, Kyle. My beautiful, swishy, fierce, toppy, tenderhearted white knight.”
“I hate when you hurt.” Kyle wept now, drowning in all the rage and helplessness Paul was too numb to feel. “I want you to have your Christmas movies in real life. I want to help you find the plot device in the last ten minutes that fixes everything and makes what was horrible okay.” He choked on a sob before forging forward. “But I can’t. I can’t, because life isn’t a movie, and even men with money and power and abs like Dale Davidson can’t erase people who hate and families who disappoint. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I can’t be magic enough to give you that.”
Tears ran down Paul’s face, and he had to swallow a lump in his throat before he could continue. “I never asked you to do that.”
“I know.” The despair and frustration in Kyle cut Paul so he could bleed with his lover. “I know you didn’t.
I
asked me to. But I can’t.” He paused to blow his nose, then whispered, “I love you so much, Paul.
So much.
”
The words wrapped around Paul, tugging him open and pouring love into the place he’d been trying not to notice was so full of pain. “I love you too, Kyle.”
“When you’re done being by yourself, you come find me, okay? You come be with me. I’ll be your family. For as long as you’ll have me.”
Despite the tears still falling, Paul smiled. “I will. I promise.” He swallowed. “Thank you.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
Once he hung up, Paul sat in the silence again. He stared at the movie screen, which was frozen in the middle of a scene. He replayed Kyle’s words in his head. Shutting his eyes, he willed them to do what the movies had failed to do, to override the pain.
It worked, but something else happened, a side effect the movies had never given him. Paul felt better, but he also felt
angry.
Betrayed. Cheated.
Hurt. He felt so, so
hurt
. And for the first time in his life, he felt that pain, held it in his hand, and said,
I don’t deserve to feel this way.
He got off the couch and paced to the small tree, beneath which were all his presents for his family. Gifts he’d purchased, like a fool, out of duty and even a small bit of love for the people who had humiliated him that way, hurt him and his friends. People who had never and would never call him up to bleed with him the way Kyle just had.
That is not a real family.
Paul picked up his mother’s gift—a music box she’d been eyeing, which he’d spent fifty dollars on—and threw it against the front door with a roar. He heard it shatter, but that wasn’t enough. He stomped on it, ripping the paper, destroying the box, pulverizing the beautiful china into dust and the music box apparatus into broken gears. He yanked on the silk scarf he’d ordered for Sandy until it tore, using his teeth and then scissors when it didn’t want to yield. He couldn’t destroy the tool set he’d bought for his brother-in-law or the fancy level he’d gotten his father, but he threw them out the front door into the snow, watching the wrenches and the ruler sail into the drifts, knowing they’d rust and ruin before anyone found them.
It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough.
He tore through the house like an animal, ripping apart magazines his mother had given him, cutting up the blanket she’d crocheted for him, taking a hammer to photos in frames, breaking hand-me-down plates and crockery—anything his family had given him, he tore into with all the rage and hurt he’d never allowed himself to feel until there was nothing left to destroy.
The rage died away, but the hurt and the pain lingered as an ache he feared would never go away.
He tried to go to Kyle. He got in his car, armed with an overnight bag and a toothbrush he intended to
leave
at the Parks house. But when he got to the edge of town, when he saw the care center, his car turned into the lot almost as if Paul had no say in the matter. He wasn’t even sure where he was ultimately headed until he saw the nurses’ station.
“I’m here to see Edna Michealson.”
She was in her room, lit by a lamp Paul recognized as one from her side of the duplex, which Kyle must have brought over. The TV was on, but when she turned blearily to Paul, he knew she hadn’t been watching it. Only keeping it on for company.
Edna frowned at him. “Paul? What in the world are you doing here? Your young man isn’t working tonight.” Her tone said she understood Kyle couldn’t work every night, but she resented his absence all the same.
“I came to see you, actually.” Paul braced a hand against the doorway. “I had a pretty terrible afternoon and evening. I’ve spent the last hour tearing my house apart, wrecking everything my family has ever given me and everything I intended to give to them, but you know, it didn’t really help. I still feel pretty lousy.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “Oh? What did those fool Jansens do now?”
Paul shook his head. “I don’t much care to talk about it, if you don’t mind. I came here…” He let out a heavy breath. “I’ve decided I need a new family. And I came here to see if you were at all interested in being part of that.”
Edna stared at him for a long time. He thought, briefly, her eyes might have glazed over with tears. Then she blinked, sighed as if very put upon, and motioned to her dresser. “Bring them over, and we’ll see how well you play gin.”
After grabbing the cards, Paul brought over a chair and sat. As Edna pulled over a rickety hospital bed table, he frowned. “That thing is a piece of junk.”
She rolled her eyes. “They keep telling me they’ll fix it, but they never do.”
“I’ll bring my tools the next time I come. But that’ll only be a patch job. I could build you something better than this in a long weekend.” He shuffled the cards and laid them on the stand. “Cut?”
Smiling, a little sadly, a little happily, Edna waved the offer away. “Deal.”
Paul did.
When the knock at the front door turned out to be Paul, Kyle dropped his knitting and ran to throw his arms around him. They hugged, they wept, they kissed each other until Kyle’s mother scolded him to let the poor man come in and sit down, and did Paul get dinner? Because she had some beef stew still left in the Crock-Pot.
Paul looked weary, but much better than he had when Kyle had left him. He let Kyle touch him too, first in the kitchen as he ate, snuggled together as they let Linda Kay force a viewing of
South Pacific
on them, and finally as they went to bed together, they touched like crazy as Kyle made sweet, tender, then intense love to Paul. Afterward, Kyle held Paul close, until the gentle up and down of Paul’s chest told Kyle his boyfriend had gone to sleep.
Kyle, however, found he couldn’t easily follow.
In the quiet of the night, fears rose like shoots from dark ground. He worried about how easy the lock on the butcher’s was to cut off, how simply someone could get inside and destroy his week’s worth of work on the snow sculptures. He worried what Paul’s family and their horrible companions would do during the festival—because they’d absolutely do
something.
He worried Dale was disgusted with Logan and already writing them off.
Most of all, he worried Paul’s family would find new ways to hurt him, that they’d find a wound they could make fatal and drive Paul back into his cave, no longer willing to let Kyle or anyone else in.
He knew, intellectually, that last one wasn’t going to happen, but in the darkness with the wind howling outside, it was hard for him to trust that truth emotionally. His fears scrambled and drifted inside him like the Minnesota snow, until he had to get out of bed and into his clothes or risk drowning.
His intention had been to drive into town and double-check to make sure the lock hadn’t been damaged. He figured the outing would put to rest his paranoia, and the drive would wear him out enough he could sleep. Once he got to the shop, though, he couldn’t leave until he didn’t simply see the undamaged lock, he had to open the door and check the statues for himself.
The butcher’s locker wasn’t huge, which meant the statues were all crammed in tight, hardly any room to move between their wooden platforms. They were ready to roll out at eight the next morning to be stationed around the square. The mayor wanted to make it a big reveal, so the plan was for Marcus and the mayor and a few other men in town to wheel them into place before putting up a big canvas curtain on a PVC structure around the perimeter—a curtain Kyle had helped stencil and paint with Dala horses. Standing in the locker, Kyle saw for himself the statues were safe. The Concerned Citizens for Logan would have to find some other way to embarrass themselves, some other way to spread hate.
Kyle was about to leave, but to get out, he had to navigate around his masterpiece, the snow queen’s palace. True to his promise, he’d made no reference to
Frozen
and hadn’t named the beautiful snow queen Elsa, but anyone who’d seen the movie would know who she was. Kyle smiled at her frozen sassy expression as he passed, remembering how fabulously fierce she’d been in the movie. Remembered how good the movie had been, right up until the commercialization had made every adult on planet Earth set their teeth every time they went through a department store. He kept thinking about his conversation with Paul.
If only he
did
have magic like the snow queen. If only he
could
melt those bigots’ frozen hearts. With love, or a blowtorch, or
anything.
And then, standing there in front of his butcher’s locker full of statues, he had an idea. A crazy, barely conceivable idea. One that might work, or it might not. But it would sure as hell be fun to try.
He grinned back at Elsa, meeting her sassy smile and raising her a smart salute and click of his heels. Then he stacked the last four pallets on top of each other and pushed them off into the night.