Summer Son (21 page)

“We didn’t go out last night,” I said, filling in some of the gaps for him. “Harrison goes to bed about seven. I put him to bed last night because Zane was working in here. We both worked for a couple of hours, then went to bed at about eleven.”

“We made love first,” Zane said, still not looking at the police officer. “That might not be important to you, but it is to me. Will you tell me now why I have to give all this information to a person I’ve never met before? I’m guessing something happened.”

I gave Detective Western a few more mental points for not even flinching at his words. “The man who was convicted of your brother’s murder was found dead at eleven o’clock last night.”

About the time I rolled you onto your side and spooned up behind you
, I thought.
You let me hold you when we made love. You were whispering my name when I was inside you
.

“Oh.”

“Can you tell us anything else?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Not at this time. It’s an active investigation. I can keep in contact with you, though, if you’d like.”

“Yes, please.” I took a card out of my wallet and passed it to her. “Are you seriously looking at Zane for this?”

“Seriously? No. But it’s nice to scratch him off the list and move on. I’m going to ask the building owner for the security tapes just to verify. That’s for your safety, not mine. No, I didn’t think you had anything to do with it.”

“That’s nice to hear,” Zane said. “That’s green, baba. Green.”

For a moment, Detective Western looked like she was going to say something else. Instead she stood, nodded at Zane, even though he wasn’t looking at her, and let me lead her back to the door.

“I’m sorry about him,” I said. “We’ve got other things going on at the moment, and finding out Sabri’s murderer had walked free on top of everything else… it’s just a lot. For anyone.”

She shook her head. “For what it’s worth, Mr. Broad, it was not me who put your partner on that suspect list in the first place. He’s a lot safer now that we’re looking out for him.”

“Calling him Hadlin went a long way toward making him trust you,” I said.

“Thank you for your time.”

“You too, Detective.”

He was in the same place when I returned, helping Harrison smear colors together over the vast sheet of paper. My son looked happy. Zane looked like he was being tortured.

“Zane,” I murmured.

He shook his head sharply.

Words would be no comfort to him. I went and sat down just behind him, letting him lean back against my chest. Very slowly, very carefully, I ran my hand up and down his arm, steering clear of his paint-covered hands. Then I kissed his shoulder and whispered my “I love yous” against his skin.

“How could they think I would do something like that?” he said softly.

“Only a person who didn’t know you at all could think that. Someone who doesn’t know the first thing about you.”

“Ellis?”

“Mm?”

“Love you too.”

I closed my arms around him and tilted his head back with a flick of my finger under his chin. The kiss was at a weird angle, and nice for it. Words of reassurance didn’t feel appropriate, but this—this physical reminder of our relationship—seemed to encourage him to relax.

Since he seemed to be calmer when he was painting and when he was hanging out with Harrison, I left the two of them alone to make some great works of art and fired up my computer to get some work done.

Instead of opening the design program, though, I pulled up the Internet and did a quick search for reports of violence in the local area. There was too much to go through, a depressing amount that just served to remind me of the dangers of living in a big city. It was all I knew, though.

I glanced over at Zane quickly. He was absorbed with his task, so I did another search, this time for the name of the gang he was almost a part of.

There wasn’t much: a Wikipedia entry under street gangs of New York City, a couple of lines about rivalries, and no more. Apparently the gang wasn’t as prominent as it used to be. I wondered if that was a good thing or not and decided not to look any further.

I’d thought a lot about whether Zane’s past was actually anything to worry about now, or if I was just concerned about the fourteen-year-old version of the man I loved. In reality, if someone was desperate to track him down, it wouldn’t really be difficult to do. But after nearly a decade of living in Vermont, he couldn’t be on the radar of many people back here. Since he’d changed his name too, there wasn’t much to link the Zane Al-Jazari, youngest brother of a murdered gang member, and Zane Hadlin, the inspired young art student.

That was what I hoped, at least.

W
HEN
SOMEONE
pressed the buzzer to be let in downstairs, I seriously considered not answering it. It had been a fucking terrible morning, complete with stressed baby, tired daddy, and compromises that were really just me giving in.

Still, I had been raised to be polite, even when it grated, and I pressed the button next to the phone without picking it up to ask who was there.

That was my first mistake.

The second was not looking through the peephole before opening the front door.

The third was not slamming it shut when I saw Oliver standing in the hall.

“What do you want?”

I couldn’t make my voice angry or disdainful—I was bone tired and didn’t have the energy.

“To talk,” he said simply.

A quick glance over my shoulder told me Harrison was playing quietly for now, so I suppressed a yawn and leaned against the door for support.

“So talk.”

“Are you going to let me in?”

“No.”

“Ellis. Come on.”

“You wanted to talk,” I said, feeling childish. “You never said where.”

He sighed heavily and looked away, like he was exasperated with me already. Not that I cared. A little part of me wondered what he wanted, and another bigger part said I was probably better off not knowing.

Oliver was handsome. Objectively, I could still see that. These days he looked too polished, though, too refined and put together, especially when I compared him to the scruffy artist who currently shared my bed.

He was wearing smart jeans and an Oxford shirt, open at the throat to show off the hair on his chest. He didn’t have a lot of chest hair, but he did like to get the little he had out on display whenever he could. The dark blond hair on his head was neatly styled back from his face for maximum jawbone and cheekbone display.

I couldn’t help but think that if things were different, if we were still together, by now it would be painfully obvious that Harrison was my son, not his. The curls were the first giveaway, then the dimples, then the color of his eyes. He was practically my reflection.

“I don’t know how we got here,” Oliver said, pulling me out of my what-ifs.

I gave him a long, even stare.

“I never meant for it to be like this,” he continued. “You have to know that, right?”

“It’s pretty simple to me, Oliver. You divorced me, left Harrison with nothing but a child-support second father, then fucked off out of our lives with not so much as a backward glance.”

“It was never that simple.”

“Go on, then. Explain it to me.”

He rolled his eyes at me and sighed. “I was waiting for you to object,” he said eventually in a small voice.

“What?”

“You never said no. You never told me to stay or said that you still wanted me.”

“Hold up—” I started.

“I kept waiting for you to ask me not to leave, for you to say that you still loved me and wanted us to make it work, for the sake of our child, and you just shrugged it off, Ellis. Like I didn’t matter, like you didn’t care that your husband was leaving you.”

“This is….” I shook my head. “So fucked up. This was all supposed to be—what—an ego boost for you?”

“I needed to know if we were doing the right thing. If it was the best thing for all of us, for our whole family.”

“So you filed for divorce and waited for me to beg you to stay? I’m not some beaten wife, Oliver.”

From inside the apartment I heard Harrison shriek. “Stay there,” I told him and went to rescue a train from the sofa, where Harrison couldn’t reach it.

When I returned, Oliver was hovering just inside the doorway.

“Can I see him?” he asked, turning on the
please
eyes that I’d fallen for so many times in the past.

“We’re not done talking.”

“What else do you want to know?”

I’d always wondered what it was about Zane that had sparked the whole thing with Oliver and his demand for custody. There was a part of me that insisted it wasn’t racially motivated, although there was no way of knowing if I was right. Even if I asked, he’d probably lie.

“Why now?” I asked. It wasn’t quite what I was trying to say, but it would do. “You can’t seriously think that Harrison is being mistreated.”

Oliver’s lips hardened, a gesture that was almost impossible to see except if you knew what you were looking for. I did.

“We had a baby to be raised by the two of us,” he said.

“Yeah, and you left,” I countered.

“You weren’t ever supposed to raise him with someone else. He’s my son, Ellis. You can’t deny me that.”

“I’m not denying you anything! You decided you didn’t want him!”

“I was wrong, okay?” Oliver snapped. “Is that what you wanted to hear? I was wrong, Ellis, wrong. You were right. Let’s just… can we just forget the past few months? Start over?”

My mind boggled. “What about your boyfriend?”

It wasn’t the best question to ask. What I was really thinking was,
What about mine?

“Josh is a great guy. But he’s not you, El.”

He reached out, touched my arm, and squeezed it lightly, and I noticed he’d put his wedding ring back on. It turned my stomach.

“Zane is a great guy too. And he’s definitely not you.” I looked up and met his eyes, feeling icy hot all over. “And I love him, very much.”

The hand on my arm fell away.

“You can’t make me the bad guy for wanting to fix our family,” Oliver said. Just like that, the spiteful, hard man was back.

“There’s no family to fix anymore.”

“Right. You have a new one now.”

“I have one that came together on its own, Oliver. If there was any chance of us getting back together, that time has long since passed. I’ve moved on. I had to.”

“I can’t believe you,” he muttered, rolling his eyes as he turned away.

“What did you expect me to say?” I demanded. I was suddenly angry with him and wanted answers to all the questions I hadn’t asked last time. “That of course you can move back in, I’ll just kick my current boyfriend out to fend for himself? That I want you back? Well, I’m sorry, Oliver, but my life didn’t stop when you walked out of it.”

“I want to be with my son,” he said hotly. “That doesn’t make me a bad person.”

“No. It doesn’t. But you’ve had months to come to that decision and ample opportunity to spend more time with Harrison if that’s what you wanted. Zane is my partner now, and nothing in this world—including you—is going to change that.”

When I was done ranting at him, I asked him to leave in the politest terms I could manage, which still included a request for him to kindly fuck off. I wanted to rant and scream at him some more, but I was out of words. He’d literally rendered me speechless.

That night when Zane got home, I told him that Oliver had been over and gave him details in the broadest possible terms. He didn’t buy it.

“There’s more,” he said simply as he lay back against my chest, legs dangling off the side of the bed while we watched TV. Harrison was asleep, apparently unfazed by the events of the day.

“Some. Yeah. But nothing important.”

“He upset you, though.”

I hummed under my breath in agreement and smoothed his dark hair back from his face. He was growing it out, and it was almost long enough to tie back. A few more weeks and he’d be able to pull it into a stubby ponytail.

“I don’t let Oliver upset me anymore. I try not to, anyway. I’m not sure how often I succeed. He’s a very irritating man.”

Zane snorted with amusement. “Do you want me to go over and rough him up? I might be little, but I’m tougher than I look.”

“I don’t doubt that. It’s a nice offer, but I don’t want you getting into trouble.”

“All right. There’s no time limit on it, though. If he ever needs to be shown who’s boss, just let me know.”

The thinly veiled threats of violence were actually fairly comforting, and I snuggled into him further, content in the knowledge that Oliver knew nothing about this. Nothing at all.

When Zane started fussing with his sketchbook, I left him alone. We didn’t have a routine beyond putting Harrison to bed, but I liked to chip away at my work in the evenings and spend the bulk of the day looking after my kid. With Zane helping out with the daytime stuff, it meant I wasn’t nearly as tired as I had been before, which was nice. I was far less stressed.

“I’m mad at you,” Zane said, storming into the living room an hour or so later.

“What? Why?”

Even though I was engrossed in my work, I spun around in my chair to look at him. He was waving a large glass dildo at me.

“This used to be my most favorite toy in the whole world. It was fucking expensive, and I love it.”

“Is that thing clean?”

“Yes. But it doesn’t work anymore. I tried getting off and… nothing.”

“You’ve been in there masturbating? I thought you were working, you little shit.” I couldn’t help but smile, despite my words. He was… beyond.

“You ruined my favorite dildo! It’s not good enough now!”

I leaned back in my chair and tucked my hands behind my neck.

“Don’t you give me that look, Ellis Broad,” Zane said, waving the dildo at me demonstratively.

“Sorry, baby. Have I stretched you out?”

“I’m mad at you.”

“Come here.”

He did, sitting awkwardly on my lap, his thighs spread over mine. The dildo was tucked safely between us.

“How about,” I suggested, kissing his neck, “if I were to use it on you?”