“I don’t know,” I hesitated. “I really don’t want to run into my father. And plus, we still have the graduation celebration that we can hang out together.”
“I won’t be able to go to that,” David said quickly.
“But didn’t you just say that you were here on campus for—”
“Come on, just one dinner? I feel like we’ve barely gotten to spend any time together since we were kids. And even that, I only remember bits and pieces of. Besides, Jack probably won’t even be around.”
I really didn’t want to ask about my father, but I also didn’t want to agree to come to dinner if there was any chance that I’d run into him.
“Why not?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes. “He’s been distracted with some big project lately. He’s hardly been around at all.”
I hated to imagine what sort of big project my father could be working on. I’m sure it wasn’t anything good.
“Well…” I stalled.
David looked at me with big blue puppy-eyes. His eyes were a lot like Michael’s. He must have gotten the eyes and hair from his mother’s side. I’m not sure what he got from our father’s side; he didn’t look anything like him at all.
“Okay,” I relented. “Since you won’t be at the graduation celebration, then I guess it’s important. I’ll let the guys know, and I’m sure they’ll be fine with it too, considering it might be the last chance we have to all see each other.”
“Great!” David said. “Meet you at the tree tomorrow night,” he said.
“Okay,” I smiled.
He leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. It felt super uncomfortable since we’d never even done so much as a hug or handshake before. I was glad to see that he seemed happy and wanted to connect, but I still felt like there was something a little off about him.
I tried not to second-guess my acceptance to dinner as I walked back to the apartment. A couple hours at dinner wouldn’t hurt, and besides, the guys would be there. Things were different now, and I wasn’t as scared of being hijacked or otherwise troubled on the Lineage campus as I once would have been.
“You told him what?” Michael said right after I had walked into the apartment and told them about the dinner invitation.
“It’s just one dinner,” I said.
“You do realize what’s happened at some of these dinners in the past, right?” he asked me.
Of course, I did. I nearly met my death at half of them.
“He’s part of our family,” I said. “And it might be the last chance we ever get to see him.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Michael murmured.
Adam laughed under his breath.
I rolled my eyes at him. “Please?”
“Fine,” Michael said as he picked me up and whirled me around in his arms. “But at the first sign of trouble, we’re out of there. We’re too close to blowing out of here to get involved in any other drama. Deal?”
“Deal,” I said as I leaned down in his arms to kiss him.
That night we all hung out on the couch together and watched a movie. It was one of my favorite things to do when all three guys were cozied up around me, and everything seemed right in the world. Just before I fell asleep on the couch, with my head in Adam’s lap as he stroked my hair.
My waist sat in Michael’s lap as he held his arm around me, and my hand dangled off the couch, holding onto Julian’s shoulder as he sat on the floor in front of us, leaning up against the sofa.
I thought about how perfect it would be if it could just stay all four of us together.
And I knew then and there I had my answer to the question Michael asked me before.
33
I should have known that dinner was too easy. I should have listened to my gut when I got all the strange feelings and signals that something wasn’t right with him.
The night before the dinner was wonderful. I was lying in bed with Adam and had fallen asleep in the most perfect way with my hand on his chest and my head nestled right in the nook of his shoulder. He had told me that he loved me again before he fell asleep, and that time I almost said it back to him.
And then I had one more dream.
That dream was different than the ones I had been having in the weeks before. The past several days had been full of trivial dreams of happy things that seemed to suddenly infiltrate my subconscious. They were things like picking out our new apartment when we got to wherever it is that we were going, and then watching all the guys sitting around the table pouring whiskey into glasses. They were dreams about what I wanted to happen. But in that dream, I was with my mother again. And instead of the happy smile that she always tried to wear even if she didn’t really feel it, she had the most terrifying expression on her face.
She didn’t look afraid, or angry, or in pain; she looked blank. Blank like the kind of look that David had the night he had been there at the apartment with us. I’d never seen my mother like that before. She was always thinking about something and always had something creative going on behind her eyes.
But in my dream, she looked like a drone. A mindless and emotionless robot. She got up and walked away to another room, and I followed her. Sometimes in my dreams, the setting could change without me even realizing it. One minute I'm out in a garden. and the next thing I know I'm inside a room somewhere.
That’s what happened in my dreams.
Suddenly, though, I was standing with my mother in the storage room at the halfway house again. She was looking down at something on the floor. And when I looked there as well, I saw that it was her body on the night she died. I was scared but I also wanted to know if she was trying to show me something.
I looked back up at her, but when I did, it wasn’t her anymore.
