Homecoming

*37*

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Telling It Like It Is


Justin

I walk in the door, and he gives me this really sheepish look.

So he fucking should.

But there's no point in staying mad at him. He's admitted he was wrong, well, as far as he's ever going to, and he's even kind of apologized.

I have to remember that I'm dealing with someone who has totally no idea how to behave like a normal human being when it comes to relationships. He's never been given the chance to learn. So it's almost like training a puppy. You let him know when he's done the wrong thing, and when he does the right thing, you give him a reward.

So I walk over to him and give him a really straight in the eye 'you fucked up' look. But when his eyes go all guarded and his mouth tightens I realize that now I'm the one on the verge of fucking up, so, letting myself gently touch his face, I smile at him and repeat the words I said on the phone.

"I love you," I whisper as I brush his lips with my own. "You're the most aggravating man on the whole fucking planet, but I totally love you."

He huffs, and then lets his tongue slide into my mouth and we're about to get lost in each other the way we do when we hear Gus's voice from the top of the stairs.

"Daddy!"

He sounds upset, so we let go of each other and Brian strides over to Gus and lifts him up.

"What's the matter, Sonnyboy?" he asks, but even as he does we both catch the whiff of urine and realize that he's wet the bed.

Brian kind of freezes, and even knowing how much he wants to be the total opposite of his father, I wonder how he'll react to this. His bed is sacrosanct to Brian. I remember him totally freaking out that first night when I came all over his precious damned duvet. And heaven help anyone who wants to eat – or even drink coffee – in its hallowed precincts.

I'm all braced to step in, but I needn't have worried. Brian, as he does more often than anyone, even me, gives him credit for, handles the situation perfectly.

"What happened, Sonnyboy?" he asks gently. "Did you have a bit of an accident?"

Gus nods dolefully. He's obviously upset, and maybe even a little scared.

"Never mind," Brian says. "We'll clean it up. But we need to get you fixed up first. Justin … can you look after Gus while I change the bed? Then I think we might all have some pizza for dinner. What do you think, Sonnyboy?"

Gus hugs him, clinging to his father for just a minute, and then lets me take him.

We go into the bathroom and I get him under the shower. When I go out to fetch clean clothes for him, Brian is standing still next to the bed. He'd started to pull the sheets off, but now he's just standing there.

I go up to him and kiss his shoulder. "You did good, Dad," I tell him. He really does need that kind of positive reinforcement. He's so unsure about his ability to be a decent father.

He gives a stiff little nod, then jerks into movement and finishes stripping the bedding off.

But not before I catch a glimpse of his face. He was fighting back tears.

Fuck!

I bet I know what that's about.

I can just imagine his fucking father's reaction if ever Brian had wet the bed. And all kids do, I guess, one time or another.

But I can't say or do anything to acknowledge any of that without triggering Brian's self-defense mechanisms, so I just fetch Gus' clothes and go into the bathroom.

By the time he's dressed, Brian has a whole new set of fresh bedding ready to go on. Fortunately, Gus's accident seems to have been more of a trickle than a flood, and it hasn't penetrated the mattress protector, so between us we get the bed remade in record time. Brian gives Gus the new pillowcases to put on and it really does help him feel better about the whole thing, because he's soon chattering away about how quickly we're getting things fixed and how good he is at helping and it's not long before we're ready for pizza.

To my surprise, Brian elects to go to the Italian place down the street rather than have the pizza delivered.

Gus doesn't seem to mind. I think he kind of likes being out and about with us. I'm not sure that he got a lot of that with Mel and Linds. I mean, with the baby and everything, I suppose even going out for a meal would have been a bit of a drama – organizing all the baby's stuff and everything, but anyway Gus obviously enjoys going with us. He skips along beside us, and wants us to take his hands so that he can swing between them. I guess he's getting a bit big for that now, and Brian is so much taller than me that it makes us a bit lopsided, but we're all laughing, so who cares?

We have a nice meal; when they bring Gus a napkin to wrap around himself he looks a bit put out, so I ask if we can all have them. That means that I can have pasta and not worry about dripping sauce all down myself. Brian gives me one of those tongue in cheek looks of his, but he goes along with it.

We have a glass or two of wine (Gus has cranberry and apple juice which is nearly the same color so he's happy) and Brian breaks his damned no carbs rule to share some of Gus' pizza as well as having his inevitable salad. I wind up having a slice or two myself, because Gus can't eat it all. We finish off with tiramisu - well, I do, anyway. Gus tastes it and doesn't like it, so he has some strawberry gelato instead. Brian has lemon gelato – and Gus gets most of that as well.

It's all just so relaxed and comfortable and it's like we've been doing this kind of thing for years, because there's no drama and when Gus starts to get a bit noisy it only takes one look from Brian for him to settle down; not because he's scared of his Dad, but just because he knows he has to behave like a big boy because we're in a big boy's restaurant.

Gus is starting to slow down, though, by the time we leave, so Brian hoists him up on his shoulders and gives him a piggy-back back to the loft. Then he asks me if I can stay with Gus while he goes to the drugstore.

Gus and I watch TV for a while, and when he comes back, Brian goes right up to the bedroom. He rustles about in there for a while, but it isn't long before he's back down with us.

I find out later that he'd bought a plastic sheet to put on the bed, but he hadn't wanted to make a big thing out of it, so he'd just slipped it on when Gus wouldn't notice – under the sheets, and even the mattress protector, so that Gus wouldn't even feel it, but it would still protect the mattress.

Apparently the woman in the drugstore told him that kids Gus' age can have this problem and it's no big deal – especially if their routine has been upset. But that if it carries on he might want to get it checked out with Gus' pediatrician.

Poor little guy. If this sort of incident can be triggered by upset and stress, then it's no wonder that it happened. He's been through so much of both in the past few days. Well, I guess the past months, really.

 

*****
 

Brian

We haven't really talked about it, but really, it makes sense for Gus to have the bed, and us to bed down on the futon.

It's only for a few days – at least I hope it is; provided the fucking builders get the work done as fast as they've promised.

And at least this way we can use the computer or watch TV or whatever without disturbing Gus. We've pulled the privacy panels closed, so now he has his own little room. Justin must know what I'm thinking, because while I get Gus ready for bed he pulls out the extra bedding we'll need to make up the futon.

Gus doesn't want to get into the bed, but I remind him about how he needs to sleep because we have to go to the store tomorrow and pick out furniture for his new room; and that I'm relying on him to help us when we get to the house. I tell him that someone is meeting us to discuss what changes we're going to make, and we need his advice.

Finally, he gets to the real reason he's reluctant to get between the sheets. "I'm sorry, Daddy," he whispers. "I couldn't help it."

I know what he's talking about, and I sit down and pull him onto my knee. He'll be too big for this soon, he won't want to cuddle up with his old man, but right now he snuggles into me and I feel something tighten around my chest; I'm overwhelmed with the need to protect him from the whole fucking world if I have to. I realize finally that I must be completely different from my own fucking father who was usually the first in line when the hurting started, because I would seriously be ready to kill anyone who tried to hurt Gus.

I stroke his hair, and say as gently as I know how, "It's okay, Sonnyboy. Sometimes these things happen."

"Moma gets real mad at me. Even Mommy does. But I can't help it. Moma hit me once. But Mommy yelled at her and she stopped. But she yelled at me too. She yelled at me a lot."

I feel myself go cold.

Fuck!

I let them take him. I fucking let them take him all that way away from me, and I wasn't there every other week insisting that they let me see him and making sure he was okay and all the while this sort of fucking shit was going on.

I try to master my voice, so he won't hear the anger, won't think it's directed at him.

"Well, Moma was wrong to hit you. I …" I swallow hard. "I would never do that, Gus. You don't have to be afraid that I would ever hit you. You understand?"

He nods and I feel him relaxing against me.

"I know, Daddy. That's why I like it better here with you and Dus."

He yawns.

"I think I'll go to sleep now," he announces; and just like that he's out like a light.

I tuck him into bed and go down to where Justin is sitting on the couch. By the look in his eyes he's heard at least the gist of that.

"Fucking cunts," he murmurs, coming into my arms and wrapping his around me so tight it feels like he's been taking lessons from Deb.

 

*****
 

Justin

Brian needs to go into Kinnetik for a meeting first thing – just some admin stuff, but he really needs to be there. So Gus and I take ourselves off to the diner for breakfast.

We're going to meet Brian later at the house to talk to the architect he wants to work on the downstairs stuff and take some measurements. Then we're going looking for furniture.

The builder he arranged to do the bathroom refit called first thing. They're already on site and think they can have it done by tomorrow night. I can hardly believe that, but given that Brian is willing to pay them a few grand in bonuses if they manage it, I guess they'll work all night if that's what it takes.

Apparently they've worked out that they can put in a door without moving the toilet itself (which was going to be the big job, because it would have meant major re-plumbing). They're just going to swap the positions of the vanity and the shower which means re-tiling and stuff (so Gus will need to use our shower for a few days), but won't require major plumbing work, just a bit of finessing about changing the pipe fittings. And they've recommended putting in a sliding door because it will take up less space.

It's all just so amazing. I mean, I was thinking that by the time we got all the work done on the place, we would be lucky to be able to move in before summer was over, but now we're going to be in there by next week. That means that we'll have to live with the mess while they do the downstairs renovations, but as Brian says, we can just close off that part of the house and live in the rest. We can get the entertainment room set up anyway; and Brian's office come study in the front room; and we'll have the main space at the back, of course. But no kitchen – so I guess we'll be living on takeout. Well, that's okay. Thanks to Brian's food fetishes, we've got the menu for every healthy take out place in town. No one will need to complain that we feed Gus rubbish. In fact, if we can get a small bar fridge set up in the entertainment room like we were planning, I can even keep stuff in there to make his school lunches every day.

That's another thing on the list for today.

He's been enrolled in a school not far from the apartment Mom found for Lindsay, but we need to meet with the school principal and Gus' home room teacher to make sure they know about the legal stuff, and that only the two of us, and my Mom, are authorized to pick Gus up from school. They have to know that they shouldn't allow him to go with anyone else.

Especially not Lindsay.

Or, Heaven help us, Melanie.

But first things first, and as I push open the door to the diner, I hear Debbie's voice and brace myself.

 

*****
 

Brian

He's almost incoherent when he calls me. I'm just leaving the office and getting into the car, but by the time I can understand what he's saying, I realize that he's not angry, he's trying to stifle what sounds like almost hysterical laughter.

He keeps saying, "It's not funny", but he's still laughing when I pull up at the diner a few minutes later.

Gus is happily munching his way through what looks like a shit-load of pancakes, all of them not so much smothered as soaked in syrup. He'll have such a fucking sugar high. I could willingly brain Debbie who fed them to him, countermanding Justin's order for oatmeal and toast.

She's fucking lucky that the story she regaled Sunshine with as soon as he appeared (taking him into the back, first, thank God, and leaving Emmett to watch Gus) has put her in my good books for at least a day or so.

Apparently Lindsay turned up at Deb's place last night, all woebegone and looking for sympathy. She sniffled her way through her tale of woe, convinced that Debbie, as another single mom would naturally be on her side and ready to come out punching on her behalf.

What had struck Justin as totally hilarious was that Lindsay, knowing that he is Deb's blue-eyed boy and she won't hear a word against him, focused all of her vitriol on me.

Fuck! Did she get her timing wrong! Because among the million other phone calls I made yesterday, I called Mikey and persuaded him to let me fund a trip to Toronto so that he could sit down with Mel and discuss JR without Lindsay there to stir her own brand of poison into the mix. He left this morning, armed with the agreements about JR that everyone had signed before the girls headed north, and with an appointment already organized with a solicitor in Toronto who does pro bono work for these sort of cases (courtesy of his own attorney who handled the matter down here). His attorney even spoke to Mel's hubby/ wife/ whatever and all the indications are that he'll be able to set up some regular visitation schedule with JR without too many dramas.

Apparently someone has managed to convince Mel that if she wanted to keep her daughter at least, she needs to start acting like a fucking rational human being. She seems to have finally grasped the fact that if she keeps acting like a psycho, the courts, even in Canada, might well decide that she can't be trusted to look after her own kid and either take JR into care, or give her to Mikey – given that he's never given up his rights, and he has court papers to prove it.

Anyway – things look like they're sorting themselves out for Mikey and although all I did was to cough up some spare change, for once I'm the fucking hero and so all of Lindsay's wailing about what an asshole I am fell pretty much on deaf ears.

Apparently, according to Deb anyway, she got sent off with a lecture about how she'd made a whole batch of bad decisions and had deliberately misled all of us over what was going on between her and Mel and it wasn't surprising that now no one was willing to trust her – least of all with Gus.

But that wasn't the end of it. Seems she went to Mikey next, going on about how she had only been trying to make sure JR was alright and all that shit, and all she got out of that (again according to Deb who got it from Mikey) was to be told that if she'd really been worried about JR she would have told Michael what was going on with her and Mel months ago, instead of pretending that everything in Canada was just rosy.

When she started in on how it wasn't really my fault, it was all Justin's doing, Mikey apparently told her that if that was the case he was fucking glad Justin was back because it meant that, instead of Linds being allowed to manipulate me into doing whatever she wanted, someone was actually standing up to her and making sure that the first priority was Gus, and seeing to it that he got the care and support he needed.

Then he told her that she needed to leave because he had to pack and didn't have time to deal with her shit, and he went upstairs to do that and left Hunter to show her out, who pretty much told her to go fuck herself when she tried to get him to persuade Michael to help her.

So then, (by the time he gets to this point in the story Justin is getting the giggles again – I think it's some kind of hysterical reaction to all the fucking stress) she apparently called Ted (who reported it to Emmett, who told Justin while Deb was distracting Gus by getting him to help her carry his milk to the table). Ted apparently told her that he'd had time over the last couple of years to assess his priorities and work out who his real friends were. Seems neither she nor Mel were high on that list, given that they've pretty much shrugged him off since his flirtation with crystal. They don't like Blake, for one thing, and made it pretty clear that they didn't feel comfortable having a couple of ex-addicts round the kids. Which I guess is fucking understandable, but didn't make Theodore in any way inclined to put up with Lindsay's shit now.

Besides, Theodore and I … I guess … anyway …

After all of that, she headed for Emmett's and that's when she really got fucking dumped on because Emmett, for all his campy queening is pretty fucking shrewd where people are concerned, and while he doesn't necessarily run off at the mouth over everything he observes, when he does he pretty much tells it like it fucking is. So Lindsay, instead of getting the warm and fuzzies from him, got told that she needs to get a grip and stop thinking about herself.

What Emmett tells me when we take our coffees to a table in the back away from where Gus is finishing off breakfast with some fruit, is that he told Linds that she needs to think about who is the most important person in all of this.

"Sugar," he says, "I told her that my Aunt Lulu always said that you know who and what is really important to a person by what they're prepared to do to protect it.

"For you – that's Gus and Justin, and you would do just about anything to save either one of them from even getting their feathers ruffled.

"For me, it's my clothes and my recipes and, I'd like to think, my friends.

"I told Lindsay that as far as I could tell, all she was interested in protecting was herself. That she didn't even seem to consider Gus at any point, because if she had, she'd have been on the plane back to Pittsburgh as soon as things went bad up in Toronto. In fact, she'd never have left.

"The whole 'we're afraid of losing our kids' stuff was total bullshit. No judge would have taken her kid away from her, they'd have had no reason to; that only happens where there's a straight daddy demanding his rights; and sometimes the courts agree with them. Not saying that's right, but it's not how things were for Mel and Linds.

"They really left because the older Gus got, the more he got like you, and the more he wanted to spend time with you, and Mel couldn't handle it, and Linds couldn't handle the risk of losing Mel. If you'd been prepared to take her in and support her full time she would never have gone back to Melanie. But as things were, she needed Melanie so that she had someone to look after her. That's what Lindsay has always wanted. She's never wanted to have to stand on her own two feet.

"So that's what I told her. And I told her that as far as I was concerned she was a selfish cunt for even thinking of herself when what she should be doing was worrying about how Gus was, and what she could do to make things easier for him, not throwing more drama his way."

He blinks at me and gives me a little grin, his gap-teeth gleaming for a moment. "She didn't like it much," he finishes.

 

*****
 

Justin

So basically, Lindsay has been running all over town to everyone we know trying to get them to support her and persuade big bad Brian to "do the right thing and give Gus back to her".

What I find absolutely hilarious in all of this is that the problem for Lindsay is that she just hasn't caught up with all the changed dynamics in our little group.

She's operating as if it's five or six years ago, when I was the know-nothing twink who just went along with whatever Brian wanted, and everyone regarded Brian as the world's biggest asshole.

But it hasn't been like that for a long time now, and Lindsay just doesn't seem to realize it.

Ted and Brian are really tight, for one thing (although Brian would probably deny that with his dying breath).

And Emmett has seen Brian really differently since the whole crystal-queen thing. Both because of how he looked out for Emmett while Ted was going through that, and because of how he helped Ted afterwards.

Things have blown hot and cold with Michael, but at the moment Brian is definitely on the 'good guys' list with both Michael and Debbie because he's really helped Michael out financially. He's even put out feelers to try to find Ben a job when he gets home, which will be pretty soon, probably.

So running round to all of these people who have really good reason to know that Brian is not a selfish asshole, that he's one of the most generous people you could ever meet – at least with his friends (even if he'd die rather than admit that either) didn't do anything except get everyone all riled up to protect Brian.

And Gus.

Because, really, everyone gets it that it's not about deciding whether to be on Brian's side, or Lindsay's. It's about being on Gus's side, about deciding how to do the right thing for him.

And Lindsay's antics have totally made it clear that the right thing for Gus is not to risk him having to go back to a mother whose only concern is that she isn't getting her own way. Well, that and the fact that she won't be getting any support payments for the next month while Gus is with us.

Apparently she was wailing to Debbie about that as well, and about how she wasn't going to be able to afford the next month's rent on the apartment. Of course, that kind of came unstuck when she had to admit that Brian had paid the first month's rent and the security deposit.

Debbie apparently told her that if she needed the money so bad, she'd just have to get a job like everyone else does.

But the clincher, the thing that just made me totally lose it, was that when Linds whined about how hard that was going to be Deb told her that they were a waitress short and she could have a job here.

Just imagining the look on Lindsay's face when Deb suggested she should be waiting tables in the diner is enough to make me burst out laughing every time I think of it.

Fuck! I bet she's even more pissed with Debbie than she is with Brian right now.
 

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