Page 221 of The Storm

My brows furrow while I digest that. As far as I know it’s always been just Nick and his mom.

“Why?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “Want to meet their grandson. Now that they’re starting to get up there in age they’ve apparently decided that they’d like to get to know me and see if I’m worthy of an inheritance, seeing that they have no more kids or grandkids.”

“Those same grandparents who kicked your mom out because she was pregnant with y—” I stop speaking. Nick sends me a tight smile.

We’ve talked about everything. Nothing is off limits.

Except that.

Neither of us has talked aboutthat.

We’ve been postponing the inevitable with some kind of silent agreement. Ignoring the elephant in the room even though we can both see it.

He sighs and pulls me against him, my back to his chest, his chin on my shoulder.

“I think mostly I’m afraid that if we dig it up—the whole thing—if we talk about it, it’ll somehow fuck everything up again,” he says. I blink at the straightforward way he says it. He just lays it out. His fear and my fear, which are essentially the same thing.

I pull his arms tighter around me. He threads our fingers together and squeezes my hand.

“I’ve spent years trying to wrap my head around how I should feel,” I say slowly. “I guess the closest thing might be like suddenly finding out you’re adopted. Because we kind of both were? Just in a way that really isn’t normal at all. And there’s a part of me that thinks I should be more messed up about it, but the part that messes me up isn’t being switched at birth. It’s the consequences. It’s everything that happened after finding out about it. I’m angry because I just… The way it all played out was such a shitshow, so all I can really think about is what if they had all handled it the right way? What if they had just… sat us down and told us? And then, I don’t know, maybe I’m giving myself too much credit, but I feel like I could’ve handled it. I could have handled the truth. But nobody gave it to me.”

He nods, forehead pressed against the back of my neck.

“You have a decision to make,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

He nods at the papers still on the coffee table. “They won’t want to meet me once they learn about the truth. It’s you they want to get to know.”

I let the meaning of those words sink in. Somehow it never even crossed my mind this would be the case.

“You don’t have to decide anything right now,” he says. “There’s no pressure.”

I nod slowly. “It doesn’t necessarily mean they’d consider me their grandson,” I say.

“You can absolutely believe me they consider genetics supremely important when it comes to who they’ll leave their money to. It’s just a fact.”

I shake my head. “Fuck them,” I say.

“Think about it before you decide anything.”

“They don’t get to test you to see if you’re worthy of their time. As long as they don’t get it, fuck them.”

He kisses me again, mouth claiming mine fiercely.

“Blue,” he says quietly when he pulls away, “when’s the last time you talked to your mom?”

I look down at my hands. “The day I moved out.”

He doesn’t say anything, just holds me closer.

I sigh and close my eyes.

His chin is still on my shoulder, his voice in my ear. “We don’t have to do anything.”

“But my parents are the only ones who know the full story.”