Half of surveyed couples report dissatisfaction with their in-laws.
Everything you need to know about the latest addition to the Holt family!
Sario blinked. His mind moved so slowly as it processed what the woman standing in front of him had just said. "I'm sorry, what?" He tried to keep his tone polite, but he was too shocked to pay close attention to it. "You're saying you're, what, his parents? He hasn't talked to you in fucking years!" At the two surprised and somewhat offended expressions staring back at him, he quickly apologized, "Sorry, excuse my language."
The man, Luca's father apparently, relaxed and nodded while the woman, Luca's mother by default, pursed her lips like she was disappointed in Sario. How could she judge him so quickly? She had just met him for the first time!
Then it hit him like a sledgehammer. Luca had said his parents were Catholic. Oh, shit. This was about to be real interesting.
Sario slapped his public smile onto his face and turned on his camera persona, hoping it wasn't too late to remedy the situation. "So, Mr. and Mrs. Marlowe, you're here to tell me that, after your son not contacting you for years, you're completely comfortable showing up unannounced and uninvited at his home?"
Mr. Marlowe shifted, looking anything but comfortable, but Mrs. Marlowe lifted her chin in a way that said she was going to double down. Wonderful. "Do you have any idea how we've lived for the past thirteen years? Thinking he was dead? Or worse? He just disappeared from our lives. No sign of where he had gone. No clues. Nothing. All the police could tell us was that he was gone, off the grid, and we would probably never see him again except maybe as a corpse if we got lucky. Do you know what something like that does to a mother?"
Sario closed his eyes for a brief second and then looked into her eyes as he replied, "I don't know. I imagine it must've been difficult. But none of that gives you any right to show up here and demand to see him."
"There's no demanding going on," she retorted, looking offended. "At least not with you. We're here to see our son."
Sario raised one eyebrow, finding it almost ridiculous that this woman would insult him. If she had read the newspapers, she knew who he was, so what was all this? "For your information, no one gets to my husband except through me first, so you are going to have to deal with me. And I am not letting you into this apartment without getting his honest answer to the question of whether or not he wants to see you." Without warning, he held his phone up and snapped a picture of them. "If you are who you say you are, he'll recognize you. Now, if you'll excuse me for just a moment…" He shut the door, locking it for good measure, and padded back into the kitchen. "Hey, Luca?"
Luca turned, holding out the honey jar. "The lid's stuck. Can you get it please?"
Sario took it and opened it after a bit of a struggle. "Yeah, that's sticky. Maybe clean it before putting it back on?"
"Hm." Luca dipped out a spoonful of honey and stirred it into his tea.
"Kitten?"
Luca's head snapped around. "What the hell did you just call me?"
Sario gulped. "Kitten," he repeated quietly, thinking of all the ways Luca could hurt him with the spoon clenched in his fist.
"And I trust there's a reason behind this new development?"
Sario swallowed even harder, feeling his ears begin to burn. "It's, um, that you made this, uh, kitten-like noise while we…" God, this was awful. "It was during sex," he finished in a rush.
Luca immediately turned crimson. "Why the fuck—" He cut himself off with a fierce shake of his head. "You know what? I'm not in a capable enough mood to deal with this right now." He pointed his spoon at Sario. "But don't think I'll forget about it. I'll remember, and I'll deal with it then." He tossed the spoon into the kitchen sink and wrapped his hands around his cup of tea. "Now, what were you saying?"
Sario pulled up the photo he had taken and showed it to Luca. "Do you recognize these people?"
Luca's eyebrows came together. "Yeah…" he replied slowly. "Those are my parents. Haven't seen a super recent picture in a while, but that's logically what they'd look like." He squinted at the picture. "Is this…in our hall?"
Sario nodded when Luca turned a suddenly vulnerable look on him. "Yes. They're, um, outside asking to see you. I told them it's whatever you want, so you don't have to see them if you don't want to."
Luca held Sario's gaze for a long moment and then squeezed his eyes shut. "I'll see them." His voice was so soft that the words seemed to barely make it past his lips. "I'll be sitting in the living room." He walked out of the kitchen to the aforementioned room and sat down on the couch, still cradling his cup of steaming tea.
Sario returned to the door and opened it. "He's agreed to see you," he told the obviously disgruntled woman waiting there. "But it's not a family reunion. Don't hug him, don't get physically close to him unless he invites it. Got it?"
She nodded hurriedly and practically scurried past Sario as soon as he opened the door wide enough to admit them.
Her husband inclined his head to Sario in what seemed like a combination of a greeting and an apology as he also passed Sario and followed his wife into the living room.
Sario shut the door and trailed after them, taking a seat on the couch next to Luca. He sat close enough to feel his leg brush Luca's, and he stared down the parents sitting on the opposite couch as politely as he could. He wanted to kick the mother out already, even without the teary way she was looking at Luca.
She reached out her hand as if to touch Luca, glanced at Sario, and quickly thought better of it, lowering her hand back into her lap. "Augustine," she whispered, her eyes cataloging every difference between the current state of her son and the boy she must have still been picturing all these years.
Luca flinched at the name. He was choosing to look into the depths of his dark drink instead of meeting his mother's eyes, and Sario did not blame him.
"Where have you been? Why did you leave?" She clutched her purse with both hands like a scandalized millionaire's wife. "And why haven't you ever come home?"
Luca continued staring at his tea. "I've been a lot of places since I left," he replied flatly, his voice deader than many corpses Sario had seen. "And I left for reasons you are well aware of."
Mrs. Marlowe scowled. "Reasons? I hardly think that denouncing your sinful tendencies is a reason to abandon your family and faith without a word." What the fuck did she just say?
Luca's hand came down on Sario's knee and squeezed, silently telling him to stay seated and keep his mouth shut. "You know I was the most faithful of all your children, Mother." What fucking family actually used the term Mother? "After one doctor's appointment you suddenly turned on me. All because I turned out to be an omega, despite all your years of research and careful planning."
Mrs. Marlowe quite literally turned her nose up. "I will not support my child leading a life of sin."
"But I wasn't!" Luca snapped, looking up at her for the first time. "You know I wasn't! I went to Mass every Sunday and every holiday! I went to confession! I was the best student in my confirmation class, the priest told you so! I went to the best private Catholic school in the entire state and got fucking awards for my exemplary conduct! And you had someone watching me every fucking second of my fucking life!" He blinked rapidly, and only Sario could see the tears he was trying to hold back. "I was the perfect son! And for what? Why did I try, even after you practically disowned me just because of something I couldn't control?"
His mother sniffed and looked away snootily. "So you ran away because you needed more attention?"
That was it.
Sario stood up. "Hold on, where the hell do you get off telling me a sob story at the door and then insulting my husband to his face?" He held up a finger when she opened her mouth to retort. "Nuh-uh. You're done talking." He looked at her husband. "Mr. Marlowe, would you like to try instead? You seem to be much more…caring."
Mrs. Marlowe's jaw dropped, but her husband nodded quickly. "Charlotte wasn't lying." He was talking rapidly, like he was scared his wife might interrupt him at any point. "We were so worried when you left home so suddenly, Augustine. We thought you'd come back, but you didn't. For days. So we went to the police. They told us that you weren't the only high schooler to suddenly go missing. That six other sophomores had gone missing from three other schools across the city around the same time you did. They told us to never expect to hear from you or even see you again. Four of those six boys turned up dead, and the police said you and the other two probably weren't far behind. But there was no body. For weeks. Months. Years. We were so sure you were dead that the wedding announcement scared us out of our minds. We thought, 'It can't be' but there you were in full color, looking older but still our son."
Luca snorted, having held his peace throughout his father's entire story. "'Our son'? Do you even hear yourself? I was disowned! Cast out! Made to feel ashamed of my every atom in my body!" His hands clenched tightly around the mug set on his knee. "I was a good kid! I was smart! I was…beyond just smart! I was fucking brilliant! I had a future at so many different universities! I had my pick of life, and you ripped it away from me. I was outcast, bullied, scorned. I went from best student to worst person in the world overnight, so yeah, I ran away. I made the dumbest decision of my life, but I'm here now so I must've done at least one thing right walking out of that overpriced mausoleum of a place you call home!" He shoved up from his seat, slammed his mug down on the coffee table, and stormed into the bedroom, shutting the door with more force than its maker would have recommended. From the other side, he screamed out a solid minute of profanities before muffling them with what sounded like a pillow.
Sario smiled awkwardly at the two people sitting across from him who were staring in shock at the closed bedroom door. "Well, thank you for stopping by. Please leave."
Mrs. Marlowe opened her mouth to protest, but her husband grabbed her by the arm and practically dragged her out, his eyes holding the sad expression of a scared parent. He was the only who cared about his son, but he had never been brave enough to show it.
At least, that was what Sario guessed as he shut the door behind them and turned both locks. He cleaned up the tea spilled on the coffee table and then knocked on the bedroom door before carefully easing it open.
Luca was draped over the bed on his back, a pillow abandoned beside him. He lifted his head when the door clicked shut behind Sario. "I'm sorry."
"No, don't apologize." Sario sat down in the corner of the bed. "I should be the one apologizing. I'm sorry about your parents. I shouldn't have let them in."
Luca propped himself up on his elbows. "I told you to let them in. How is that your fault?"
Sario shrugged. "I'm supposed to protect you, and I just did a really shitty job of that."
Luca's lips twitched in what might be the beginning of a smirk. "I think you did just fine." His hands were suddenly linked behind Sario's neck, pulling him down until he had to catch himself with his forearms to avoid crushing Luca beneath him.
"Luca…?" Sario had no clue what was going on or what his husband even wanted.
Luca's breath puffed hot and moist on Sario's cheek as he whispered, "Fuck me."
Sario felt his whole being freeze from the inside out. At first, he didn't believe his ears. Then he realized he had heard right when Luca kept gazing up at him expectantly. "Luca," he started, trying to keep his voice calm and soothing, "I can't. You know I can't. Noah said to wait at least a month, and it's barely been three weeks." He ran the back of his hand down the side of Luca's face. "I could hurt you. And I don't want to hurt you."
Luca simply tipped his head, eyes gleaming in a way Sario normally would have called evil. "Then fuck me gently, Mr. Ethics and Morality." His hands clasped tighter around Sario's neck, and the sarcasm left his voice. "Please, Sario. I need to forget it, forget them, forget what they said. Please."
Sario pulled up his voice notes app and pressed record. "Say it again so when you get mad at me I have proof this was your idea."
Luca rolled his eyes but complied, albeit very sarcastically. "I, Augustine Lucas Marlowe Holt, request on this twelfth day of June that you, Sario Gabriel Holt, fuck me. Is that good enough for you, Mr. Lawyer?"
Sario ended the recording and slid his phone onto the nightstand. "It's perfect." He pressed a soft kiss to Luca's sweet little button nose. "Just like you."