Page 101 of Mine

“Of course not,” I assured him, my voice bottoming out.

His smile made my stomach hurt.

I didn’t understand Cece Carter running away, taking a vacation like her family had not come apart at the seams, but Landry reminded me that as nice as she was, as warm, as kind, she was also the woman who had let him walk out of her life for eight years. She was not as emotionally invested in her children as my mother was in me or my sister.

“But that doesn’t make her a bad person,” he told me. “It just makes her different. You can’t judge her based on your mother.”

“This isn’t what you said when this all began,” I reminded him. “You said she didn’t care about you, didn’t love you, and that’s why you didn’t want to even come.”

“And I was wrong,” he confessed. “I forgot what she was like, and I blamed her and my father for the separation, but the truth was it was just as much my fault as it was theirs. You can’t get blood from a stone, you know? All my life, I was searching for more. I needed more, and I wasn’t even sure what that was before I met you. But now I know that what I needed was to feel love, to hear it, taste it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean your family—Jesus, Trevan, I get mauled every time there’s a get-together at your mom’s place. Your uncles make me sit by them, your aunts drag me into the kitchen and make me taste food, your cousins make me play baseball in the street or show me their new videogames or try and shock me with what they posted on their blogs. Your mother makes me play Escoba with them, and I’m still lost most of the time.”

I chuckled, my hands closing around his wrists, and stared into the gorgeous blue-green eyes that I loved.

“At your grandparents’ place, your aunts ask me to help in the kitchen, your grandmother sits and shows me her photo albums, and everyone includes me, and they’re loud about it, and they grab me and hug me… it’s amazing.”

I nodded. My family, on both sides, they all loved Landry Carter.

“I’m accepted and loved and no one gives a shit that I’m gay. The only thing they see when they look at me is Trevan’s partner. I’m the same as a wife or a husband. I’m just a part of the family to be loved and pushed around and told to get ice because no one else remembered to get it and we were the last ones there.”

I nodded, too choked up to speak. He loved me, he loved my family… what the hell else could I ask for?

“God!” he yelled suddenly, letting me go, hopping off the bed, starting to pace again. “Seriously! I want to go home!”

I went to the nurses’ station to find out if anyone knew when the doctor would be in. Landry was very close to just leaving. They promised they would page Dr. Han again.

He was fuming when I returned. “I have a life to get back to.”

And he did. He was overdue to be leaving. He had wanted to be out of Vegas that morning, Sunday morning. In his original timeline, he was supposed to be on a plane instead of sitting in a hospital room. What was worse was that he was being kept from going, and Landry caged was never a good thing. Since Detective Baylor had given us the okay to leave town, he wanted to bail.

When the doctor finally came in twenty minutes later, I thanked him profusely.

There were a few quick questions for Landry, and then, finally, he was discharged. He was walking out the door as I thanked the doctor, grabbed his garment bag—he had grabbed his duffel—and ran to catch up with him at the elevator.

Downstairs, I put him in a cab and we were on our way to McCarran Airport.

“You okay?” he asked me, worried, like I was the guy who had been kidnapped and not him. “You don’t seem like yourself.”

But I couldn’t talk, so I grabbed him instead and held him close, kissing his cheek as I shivered beside him. “I just wanna go home.”

“We’re going,” he assured me. “Everything’s okay. But we might be there a long time depending on what flight we can get on.”

“It’s fine.”

“You just want to hang out at the airport?”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “I just wanna be right there, ready to go.”

“Okay, baby. I like that plan too.”

I would be better once we were on the plane and gone. If I never got back to Vegas it would be too soon.

WE ENDED up spending the entire day at the airport, walking around, eating, but mostly just talking which was nice. Landry and I never ran out of things to say to each other, and I told him about Gabriel and his family and he told me about Koa wood that he was thinking about having shipped from Hawaii. We bought magazines and made out in a bathroom stall, and shared ice-cream. It was a great day of hanging out. Getting on the plane was sort of anticlimactic.

LANDRY was very concerned with the smell emanating from the refrigerator when we got home early Monday morning, just after nine.