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  Chapter Seventeen

  Caleb was sipping his coffee that Friday morning and scrolling through his work phone, looking at e-mails. It’d been several long months before Ella had been able to stomach the smell of coffee again, but totally worth the sacrifice to have her living with them and knowing she was safe.

  He and Boyd rode to work together nearly every morning, but part of him missed working directly for Boyd despite the precautions they’d had to take back then to try to maintain secrecy. He also missed not seeing as many e-mails slide through his inbox from Boyd on a daily basis.

  Except…this was better. Way better.

  Especially when he caught sight of his wedding band, and the one Boyd wore. Even this many months later, it still made him smile.

  Still.

  He currently smiled at the wedding band on his left ring finger, stroking it with his thumb.

  Mr. Caleb Nyberg.

  It hadn’t felt real until he went to the DMV with all his paperwork and received his new driver’s license. He kept Prevost as his middle name just in case he had any issues with his degree or licensing, but he’d changed over all his bills and even his car title and plate to say Caleb Nyberg.

  Felt damn good.

  Felt even better when he’d posted a picture on Facebook of their hands clasped together, their matching wedding bands plainly visible.

  The caption he posted read: Married the love of my life, our daughter is expecting our first grandbaby, and life couldn’t be sweeter. #livingwell

  And he’d set it to be publicly visible, making it his profile picture just to rub his family’s nose in it.

  Still nothing but silence from them.

  A little more irony Caleb silently relished was the fact that he and his husband had not only given his parents their first grandchild, but were about to give them their first great-grandchild, and they’d never meet them.

  Even though having Ella living with them meant they didn’t have the privacy they once did, it was still wonderful. Especially the way Boyd smiled all the time now, how he proudly told people they were going to be grandfathers.

  When they felt a need to let loose, they either attended a play party at Venture, a private Suncoast Society party, or they were always welcomed at Kent’s, whether he was having a party or not, to enjoy the dungeon-equipped back bedroom. When there was a party in swing at Kent’s, they attended merely as voyeurs, not participants in the debauchery. At least, not participating with anyone else—only each other.

  Kent still loved watching them, and both Boyd and Caleb were fine with watchers. It was fun watching others and revving their own engines before fucking each other silly.

  Ella had told them she didn’t mind if Caleb wore his cuffs and collar around the house, as long as he wasn’t naked—a stipulation the men readily agreed with. So neither man really felt there was much lacking in that area.

  They’d attended Lamaze classes with Ella, all three of them cracking up when people assumed Caleb was the father, but then she called both of them her dads and it confused the hell out of everyone.

  They didn’t bother to explain.

  Perhaps Boyd’s sadistic streak had worn off on both of them.

  Caleb gave up his apartment early despite a penalty in doing so, because the rent he would have paid would be way more than losing half his security deposit. Ella had been working part-time as office staff at a doctor’s office, but the pay wasn’t enough for her to live on her own. Boyd had convinced her to live with them until after the baby was born and she could go back to work full-time.

  For his part, Caleb was looking forward to having their newest addition in the nursery the two men had fun outfitting. They’d also attended as many obstetrics appointments with Ella as they could, both of them crying with Ella when the ultrasound tech showed them the baby on the screen and told them she was a girl.

  Ella had already picked out a name—Lily Lee Nyberg Stinton, Helen’s middle name and Boyd’s middle name, and adding Boyd’s last name, as well.

  Yesterday, at the end of the work day after most everyone else had cleared out, Boyd had locked his office door, closed his blinds, and put Caleb on his knees to blow Boyd, making Caleb wait until after they returned home to get relief.

  They likely wouldn’t repeat it, but it’d been a delicious fantasy both men had wanted to make happen for months.

  He heard a bedroom door open, but it wasn’t Boyd finally making his way to the kitchen. It sounded like Ella’s bedroom door.

  When Caleb turned, he spotted Ella leaning against the kitchen doorway and cradling her belly.

  “Are you all right?” He finally processed there was what looked like a huge wet area on the front of her pj pants, between her thighs.

  She shook her head with a pained smile. “I think this is it, Gramps.” While she called Boyd Dad, she’d playfully taken to addressing Caleb as Gramps over the past several weeks.

  He didn’t mind.

  In fact, he not-so-secretly relished the title.

  Still not fully awake, Caleb wasn’t quite processing. “It?”

  “It. You know, time? Baby time? As in she’s ready to upgrade her accommodations to something with a view?”

  “Time? Oh. Oh, shit! Boyd! Boyd!” He hurried over to her and was helping her toward her bathroom to get her cleaned up when Boyd flew out of the bedroom, shirtless but with his slacks on.

  “What?”

  “Get dressed! The baby’s coming!”

  “Ohmygod!”

  She started laughing. “Gee, Dad, don’t freak out on me now.”

  Considering it was no longer a secret at work that the two men were married, Boyd took care of calling them in as missing the day, and possibly Monday, while Caleb drove them to the hospital.

  After Ella spent nearly ten hours in labor, they welcomed Lily Lee to the world and Caleb and Boyd both cried as they took turns holding her while one of the nurses took pictures for them.

  Before the men left to return home for the night, they had pictures taken of them flanking Ella, with her holding Lily. Caleb assigned one as his Facebook profile picture.

  Caption: Welcome to the world, Lily Lee! Granddad and Gramps love you! #happiestdayofmylife #cutestgranddaughterintheworld

  By the time they’d returned home, he’d had dozens of congratulations and “love” votes on the post.

  And one “angry” one—from his mom.

  “Fuck.”

  “What?”

  He showed Boyd.

  Caleb watched as anger flashed across Boyd’s features before he schooled his expression. “How do you want to handle this?” he asked Caleb.

  Caleb reached to take his phone back and called up her profile. They weren’t friends on Facebook, and he didn’t have the follow feature enabled, so apparently she’d been stalking him.

  He blocked her and showed Boyd.

  “You sure that’s how you want to handle it?”

  “Yep.” He put his phone on the charger. “It’s their problem, not mine.”

  Boyd turned him and pulled him into his arms. “This is one of those times I’m forcing this to be Cay and Boyd, not boy and Sir, or Daddy. Is this really what you want?”

  “Yeah. We have a gorgeous, brilliant daughter, who just gave birth to our beautiful granddaughter. Nothing is pissing on my good mood today.”

  “Okay. If you’re sure.”

  “There’s nothing I’m more sure about.”

  * * * *

  The next afternoon, they brought Ella and the baby home and Boyd felt torn between joy and melancholy that not only was Helen not there to be a part of it, but that he’d missed out on this with Ella.

  As Ella took a nap in her bedroom, Boyd sat on the couch with the baby cuddled against his shoulder, Caleb dozing with his head in Boyd’s lap.

  This is what happiness feels like.

  He took his cell phone and held it up, at an angle, capturing all three of them in the picture.

  It beca
me his new Facebook profile picture.

  Caption: #joy

  Chapter Eighteen

  Boyd stepped out of the Albuquerque International Sunport a little after nine a.m. local time to a very sunny and dry sixty-six degrees. After locating his rental car, he plugged the address of his destination into his phone and set the GPS app to run.

  Barring any unforeseen delays or issues, this was a turn-and-burn trip. He’d fly out at six that evening, back to Tampa, and then drive home from there.

  He’d tell Caleb and Ella about it after the fact. Especially depending on how it went. While he hadn’t outright lied to Caleb about his day, he’d parsed it in such a way that Caleb assumed it was a daytrip for work, that he’d be home very late…and he hadn’t mentioned anything about flying.

  As he drove, his left thumb constantly sought the wedding band on his fourth finger, stroking it, a self-soothing action. The boy was all his, completely and utterly. Life together, both vanilla and kinky, was a sweetly messy perfection. They could talk as equals when they needed it, but Caleb was always eager to dive back into the role of boy, or however Boyd needed him—husband or submissive or slave or boy or willing fuck-toy. Frequently more than one of the above at the same time.

  The woman lived in an aging trailer park in the Alameda area northwest of town. It backed up against an industrial area, and many of the trailers, despite their originally intended color, bore a rust-tinted dusty patina. What little grass there was lay brown and crunchy, like it’d given up all pretenses of trying to live. When Boyd pulled his car to a stop outside the trailer, he almost considered leaving without speaking to her.

  Knowing she’d ended up somewhere like this was nearly sweet enough.

  Except he needed answers and demanded to know.

  There was an older Ford Taurus parked next to the trailer, in what he assumed was its assigned spot. He grabbed his phone and stiffened his spine before heading to the trailer’s front door and knocking.

  The woman who answered looked like she was forty years older than the last time he’d seen her instead of just a hair over twenty. A cloud of stale cigarette smoke drifted out of the doorway as she warily eyed him. “Can I help you?”

  “Lisa Stinton?”

  “Who are you? If you’re one of those debt collectors, I told you people on the phone I don’t have any money, and—”

  He held up his phone, displaying a picture of Helen with newborn Ella. “You don’t recognize me, do you?” Although it was clearly obvious to him that she didn’t.

  Her gaze narrowed. “Who are you?”

  “Name’s Boyd Nyberg.” He flipped his phone around, swiped to the next picture, of him, Caleb, Ella and Lily, a timed photo Boyd had taken of them the week before at his house during dinner. “I was Helen’s boyfriend in high school. I’m Ella’s father. Oh, FYI, Ella is the granddaughter you’ll never lay eyes on, and Lily is her daughter.”

  Recognition dawned. “Helen!”

  “Yeah. Helen. The daughter you assholes threw away—your teenaged daughter. How the hell could you do that?”

  She rebounded fast, he gave her all due credit for that. “You shouldn’t have gotten her pregnant. Is that what you came here to yell at me about? Obviously she found you and—”

  “No, she didn’t. My dad got sent to Germany. Helen didn’t know that was happening because I didn’t tell her. She never found me.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “Helen showed up in Grand Forks just to discover that I was gone. She was unable to locate me. She had to figure out how to survive, on her own, an unwed teenaged mom who wasn’t even old enough to vote yet. She had Ella, and eventually ended up moving out to Oregon.” He went for the jugular. “Helen died in a car accident six years ago when Ella was only sixteen.”

  He paused while that sank in.

  “Helen’s…dead?”

  “Yep. Dead. Leaving a teenaged daughter alone who had to figure out how to make her way, all because you assholes couldn’t be bothered to have the military locate my parents and tell me what was going on instead of throwing her out. Fortunately, Ella was really smart and was able to get emancipated minor status and make it through college. Ella’s a nurse now, by the way. She found me several months ago. Unlike you assholes, I wasn’t about to turn my back on my child.

  “And fuck you, by the way. Hopefully Charles is fucking rotting in hell somewhere for not contacting the military and having them track my dad down so I could have been there for both of them. I sincerely hope you’ll join him there when it’s your turn, which honestly can’t come soon enough for my tastes, you goddamned cunt.”

  He spun on his heel and started back toward his car.

  “Wait!” He turned. She’d made it as far down as the second rickety metal step at her front door. “I want to talk to her. See her.”

  Boyd slowly smiled and flipped her a bird. “She wants nothing to do with you. You tossed her mother out like she was garbage. What the hell kind of parent does that?”

  Anger contorted her face. “If you hadn’t fucking seduced our daughter, and—”

  “I’m gay, lady. Helen was in love with me, and she asked me to sleep with her because she thought she’d never see me again. Apparently the condom broke or leaked or something. We were both virgins. I was a stupid kid, yeah, I admit it. We both were. But had I known I’d gotten her pregnant, I would have supported her and our baby. My parents would have helped us. She was the only woman I ever slept with.”

  “But…” She blinked, her eyes now looking a little too bright. “I don’t even have any pictures of Helen. She took them all with her when she left. We didn’t realize it then, because we hadn’t even finished unpacking. She even took pictures out of the frames.”

  He swiped through his phone and found a particularly poignant picture of Helen and Ella at the Oregon shore, the Pacific Ocean behind them and both of them smiling, Helen hugging Ella.

  “You mean, a picture like this?” He held up his phone as he walked toward her, hoping he was twisting the knife as hard as he thought he was. “Oh, I have lots of pictures of Ella and Helen together, documenting the years I should have been a part of their lives.” He shook his head. “But you have no rights to them.”

  “I-I demand you—”

  He laughed, cutting her off. “Lady, you don’t get to demand jack shit. My next biggest regret, besides missing out on my daughter’s birth and childhood, is that Charles isn’t still alive so I can rub his face in this, too, before I punch him in the fucking jaw.” He turned away from her again and headed to the rental. “Oh,” he called out over his shoulder, “enjoy dying alone and unloved, you fucking cunt. You deserve it.”

  Behind him, he heard Lisa burst into tears.

  Nope. I’m not a nice guy. Not at all.

  He barely spared her another glance as he climbed into his rental and pulled away. She was still standing there when he made the turn out of the trailer park and onto the main highway.

  The rage that had slowly simmered inside him ever since the night Ella dropped the bomb on him at the restaurant finally began to cool.

  And he still had an entire afternoon ahead of him before his flight home.

  He stopped for Mexican for lunch, getting it to go. He ate it sitting in a nearby park and staring east toward the Sandia Mountains. He’d never been to this city before, and suspected he might never again.

  Sorry, Helen. I don’t know if that’s how you would’ve wanted me to handle her, but it’s how I needed to do it so it didn’t keep eating away at my soul.

  He pulled his phone out and looked to see if there was an earlier flight back to Florida. Fortunately, there was, and it left in three hours.

  He switched his ticket and grabbed the wrappers from his lunch and tossed them before sliding into his rental.

  He felt…satisfied.

  There was no way to make right what had happened, to regain what he’d lost, what Ella had lost.

  What Helen had gone throug
h.

  But he was going to be there for Lily and Ella. Him and Caleb both.

  He’d had no other way to get past this.

  Fuck being nice, being conciliatory.

  Fuck being the bigger guy.

  Fuck being a nice guy.

  Fuck Helen’s parents.

  * * * *

  Boyd called Caleb as he sat at the gate and awaited the call to board his flight. Caleb must have been in private when he answered.

  “Hello, Sir. How’s your errand going?”

  “Completed far earlier than I imagined.” He sighed, closing his eyes and rubbing his forehead. “I’m going to be home earlier than I thought.”

  “That’s good. Any idea what time? I can hold dinner for you.”

  “No, don’t wait on me.” He had to admit it, with the tension released and his rage finally sated. “I’m in Albuquerque. At the airport. My flight boards soon.”

  Caleb didn’t respond immediately. When he did, his tone sounded wary. “I don’t know of anything on your work calendar that would take you out there.”

  “Because it wasn’t really for work. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the full truth.”

  Caleb softly swore. “Sir, why did you do that? Why didn’t you take me with you?”

  “Because I needed to do it.” He hated that his voice choked up. “I needed to tell her off because Helen can’t. I owed Helen at least that much.”

  “Sir, Ella doesn’t blame you.”

  “Anymore.”

  Another sad sigh. “Anymore. You’re her dad, and she loves you. We can’t go back in time and fix what happened.”

  “That’s why I needed to do this now. I needed it…purged.”

  “And do you feel better?”

  He stared out the windows. “Not really better. But I feel like I can walk past it now. That’s all I can ask.”

  “What time will you be home, do you think?”

  “I don’t know for sure. You don’t have to wait up for me.”

  But when Boyd pulled into the driveway a little after eleven that night, he spotted the telltale glow of the TV through the living room windows, around the edges of the blinds. And when he walked in, he found Caleb, naked except for his collar and cuffs, sitting on the couch and watching a movie.