After two hours with the county courthouse property records, Sullivan grabbed his keys.
Benjamin Spratt owned a townhouse roughly ten minutes away in Capitol Hill.
* * *
Sitting in the car was delicious torture.
Tobias’s buttocks were sore. Like, absurdly sore. And if he rocked his weight without thinking, the sudden remembrance of why the pain was there sent heat flooding through his whole body. At this rate, he’d be hard half the day.
Or maybe not. As they drove downtown, his phone rang. His manman.
“You gonna get that?” Sullivan asked, turning the radio down. More of that gritty seventies stuff he liked.
Tobias stared at the screen. He was still enjoying the centered stillness he’d gotten from the scene last night, and he wasn’t sure he was up for more argument. “No. I think—no. Should I?”
“That’s up to you, sweetheart.”
That—he glanced at Sullivan, startled. He’d called Tobias sweetheart before, of course. A bunch of times, by this point. But never outside of the bedroom. Never like this, casually, like the pet name was more than a tool in their BDSM toolbox.
Sullivan was startled, too, his brown eyes going wide where they were watching the road. The silence grew awkward until they hit a red light, when Sullivan looked over, his eyes tracing Tobias’s expression. “I didn’t—that just came out. Sorry.”
“No,” Tobias said quickly. “I don’t mind.”
“No?”
“I like it when you call me that.” Tobias’s heart was thundering, warmth crawling up into his face. He liked it a lot, and never more so than here, in completely ordinary circumstances, as far from the bedroom as they could be. “Don’t be embarrassed, please.”
Sullivan cleared his throat. “Cool.”
Tobias grinned, then glanced at his phone. She’d left a voicemail, and maybe he couldn’t handle arguing, but he could at least listen, couldn’t he?
He put in his code and held his breath. Her voice was tinny over the line and she sounded tired. Resigned, maybe.
“Tobias, it’s me. I wanted to speak with you about what happened on the phone with your papa yesterday. I—” She broke off and sighed. “We’re at such cross-purposes these days. It seems like we can’t stop hurting each other, doesn’t it? But I want you to know that we aren’t going to stop trying. We love you, and if you have things you want to tell us, we’ll listen. We can’t promise we’ll understand or agree, but we’ll listen. I hope... I hope you’ll call, cheri.”
She hung up, and Tobias lowered the phone to his lap.
If he looked back on the call with his papa logically, he could admit that a big part of the meltdown that followed had been about the fear of rejection. He’d learned about it in therapy, not that it took a genius to figure it out. Lots of adopted kids struggled with that, and he was no different. One of his earliest memories was—embarrassingly—of having a tantrum when he was four or five because his parents had closed their bedroom door in his face without realizing he’d been following them inside. It’d been such a tiny thing, entirely accidental, but he’d broken down completely, too young to know why he was so upset.
He also remembered Manman singing “Dodo Titit” to him, drying the tears from his cheeks with kisses and brushing his hair away from his hot face. He was loved, he knew it. His papa hanging up on him had hurt him in a place he was vulnerable, yes, but he’d never have done it if he’d realized how deep it would cut. Besides, Tobias couldn’t expect the world to rotate around his issues; that was his responsibility and no one else’s—his responsibility to make clear, and his responsibility to cope with.
For a moment he felt such a visceral longing for her and Papa and home that his chest tightened. He saved the message and thought, later. They might not be good at listening, but they would try, and that was all you could ask of someone, really.
And if worse came to worst and they pressured him to resume his studies for medical school, he’d say no. It wouldn’t be easy, and it might change things irrevocably, but Sullivan had been right last night. Maintaining that boundary didn’t make him wrong, and it didn’t make him cruel. It made him himself, and if they truly loved him, they would love him even like this.
Sullivan was also right that it was unfair to expect them to change their behavior unthinkingly when he’d never set boundaries before. Unfair to get angry when they did as they had always done, what he had never protested.
Yes, they had made decisions for him as if he were still a child.
But he had let them. For far, far too long. He wished he knew why. Why had it been so impossible for him to stand up for his own hopes and interests? He’d known he was loved. When they’d realized they couldn’t have the children they wanted, the children they could make together, his parents had done an amazingly decent thing to adopt him. They loved him. They wouldn’t kick him out of the family for being too much trouble now that their legal responsibility to him was done.
He knew that.
He’d never trusted it though. Despite all the evidence, he’d never stepped out onto the uncertain ice and trusted them all to remain intact.
None of them were guiltless.
In fact, there wasn’t a single relationship in his life where he’d done that, he thought now. No one in the whole world where he’d just been his entirely messy self and trusted that the other person wouldn’t walk. Church probably came closest, but even with him, Tobias still watched that line. He wasn’t himself with anyone except for...
Sullivan.
Tobias had done and said exactly what he wanted over the past two weeks with Sullivan, and Sullivan had
