Chloe squished her juice box, clearly testing her ability to get the liquid close to the tipping point through the straw without spilling it over the edge.
“Can I ask you something?” she asked, her voice almost a whisper.
Garrick could feel the vibrations of her heels kicking into the base of the booth seating. “Shoot.”
She looked up at him and then back to the body of the kitchen. “Are you and Mr. Morgan gay together?”
Holy shit. Garrick’s hand compressed. Juice shot out of his straw and rained down on the table. Where’s her mom? He grabbed napkins out of a holder and busied himself with wiping his mess.
“Well?” She looked up at him without blinking. “Are you?”
Careful. Be careful. “That’s a word a lot of people think of as being for adults.” Garrick chose each word deliberately. “Do you understand what gay means?”
The kid rolled her ever-loving eyes at him. “I’m eleven, Garrick.” She sat up straight and tipped her chin up high. “I even know what transgender and transvestite means.”
Garrick propped his elbow on the table and put his chin in his hand. “Do you now?” Better to let her lead this conversation.
“Yes, I do,” she shared. “I heard these two ladies whispering in the grocery store one day. They sounded so nasty and I didn’t know why, so I told my mom what they were saying and asked her why it was making them look so mean.” Little furrow lines appeared between her eyebrows. “She said transgender would be like if God put my soul in Shawn’s body, but I still felt like me, like a girl. When I got bigger I could maybe even have an operation to change it so that my outside matched my insides. She said that’s what transgender means.”
“That’s a good way to explain it. Your mom is very smart.”
“Uh-huh, she is. She said transvestite is like if Shawn might sometimes like wearing my clothes or her clothes when he gets bigger but still feels like Shawn on the inside, like a boy, then that’s transvestite. Or the opposite with me, she said. Like if I wanted to look and dress like a boy sometimes but still know I’m a girl inside.”
She tapped Garrick’s wrist and pointed toward the kitchen. “I think Mr. Morgan wants you to look at him.”
His mind swirling, Garrick glanced up at Devlin, his thoughts still on Chloe, her intelligence, and her one, pointed question that had started it all.
Devlin jerked his thumb toward the oven, and mouthed, Uncover mac-and-cheese for you? Garrick nodded and offered a little smile.
Chloe poked Garrick in the arm again, and didn’t even wait for him to put his full attention back to her before going on. “My mom said people sometimes don’t understand stuff like boys dressing like girls and they get afraid so they act mean to people who are different.” Clouds filled Chloe’s eyes and her mouth turned down. “I’m different cuz nobody knows me every time we move and I have to go to a new school and I have to wait for the teacher to introduce me and see if the other kids are gonna want to play with me when we go out for recess. I don’t like it,” twin dots of color spotted her cheeks as she spoke, “so I don’t think it was nice of those ladies to be mean to someone they don’t even know yet.”
“I agree.” Garrick covered her hand and gave it a light squeeze. “You’re a pretty thoughtful young person, Chloe, you know that?”
Chloe narrowed her gaze. “I know being gay means you wanna kiss and marry Mr. Morgan more than you do my mom.” Her tone remained low, but it didn’t lose a bit of its firmness. “I know cuz you stare at him like Edward looks at Bella in Twilight. It doesn’t matter to me, cuz I know you’re just Garrick, but you should tell Shawn cuz he’s still little. He thinks you’re gonna marry my mom and move into our house and be our dad. I never thought that. Even if you didn’t want to be gay with Mr. Morgan, I didn’t think you would be our dad, but Shawnee’s different.” Chloe stopped and looked to her brother a dozen feet away where he unwrapped a slice of cheese and handed it to Devlin, all the while yakking a mile a minute. Her focus remained on Shawn, and Garrick detected the tightening in her voice. “He’s gonna keep thinking you’re gonna be our dad and wanting you around more and more until someone tells him to stop.”
Garrick closed his eyes as his heart lurched right up into his throat. That he might have misled that little boy for one second, no matter how innocently, churned bile in Garrick’s stomach.
He forced himself to look at Chloe, then Shawn, and find his voice. “Have you told your mom what Shawn is thinking?”
She shook her head. “He said it today while we were brushing our teeth. I think it’s cuz you made us breakfast, and Mom’s not here, so it kinda felt like you live here and were the dad.” When Chloe came back to him, she didn’t have a tear in her eye, but her chin quivered just a hair, and her lips were pale. “Even to me.”
“Jesus, kid.” Garrick leaned in and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “I’m so sorry.” Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. He knew these kids didn’t have a father, but with absolutely nothing even hinted at between himself and Grace, it had never hit him that someone Shawn’s age would still think they could all live together as a family. “I’ll talk to your mom when she gets home and let her decide what needs to be said to your brother. Can we keep this conversation between us until after something is settled?”
Chloe nodded, but Garrick still felt like he’d ripped a puppy out of her hands and stomped all over it. He
