Page 86 of Regal Feather
“Hi, Marco, how are you?”
The last thing I needed after throwing the Hi, I love wearing skirts and women’s clothes to my parents was to prove them how useless I was. Marco was one of the head gardeners for the estate, and he only bothered to interact with me when it was anemergency. He was also quick to rat me out to my parents if I didn’t act fast enough.
Shit.
Okay, I could pretend my heart wasn’t trying to get out of my chest while I scrambled for some clothes, and then I’d just have to go downstairs and deal with whatever emergency it was this time.
“Hey, man, are you home? I need some shit signed.”
Oh.
Well, that wasn’t that urgent.
“Yeah, give me five and I’ll go meet you.”
“Sure, bud.”
I ignored the discomfort that came with the condescension in his voice and ended the call. He really usually called about urgent stuff. No idea why I had to sign something, either, when usually his signature was allowed, or my parents pre-signed stuff beforehand, however that worked. Part of me wondered if I should call my mother and ask, but that would go against the whole proving that I could handle things on my own and the clothes weren’t a deterrent. Or the man I was leaving alone in my bed.
I supposed there was a chance that I could come back before he woke up.
It had been a beautiful thought while it lasted.
Of course, the second I was out of the house and following Marcus so that I could sign the delivery for some repair my mother hadn’t informed me about, it turned out that there were more issues I had to sign on to and direct them around. I cringed every time I leaned on Marco to guess what I had to say. I never really understood why me—or my parents, for that matter—had to oversee anything. None of us had the studies, or the knowledge. My father had spent one summer working at a landscaping company, and he thought he could keep up withall the workers now. I’d tried once, and my mother had quickly decided manual labor wasn’t my calling.
I’d agreed, but it meant that I felt like a marionette being paraded around. And blamed for everything that went or could go wrong. That last part was fun, and it went on, and on, and on, while I pretended that I gave a fuck about a property that should be used to house people, and not just for decoration and, maybe, occasionally, a background for a movie or historical show.
Right now, it also meant that I was being paraded around, while Santos was alone in the house, and he was going to wake up alone in a cold bed, which would be fine any other day, but today was surely not the day. Last night had been relevant. It should have led to a lazy morning in bed, and more confessions and soft words and mushy stuff.
Now by the time I got home, he’d be up doing something, and the vibe would be off.
Or he wouldn’t even be home, as it happened. He texted. He’d gone on a grocery run. It wasn’t anything concerning, but it bothered me. I had a right to be in a grumpy mood if I wanted to.
Then again…
No, I had to work all this energy out somehow. Santos would freak out that it had to do with him—I would—and that wouldn’t do. I really wanted to support him. It bothered me that he was keeping more than half of it from me. I got it. That woman had abused him in ways that made me want to rage, details or not, and it had to be worse because of all the abandonment issues he had we didn’t talk about often, and he didn’t have to tell me everything, but I should be a safe space.
“What are you doing on a treadmill?”
Fuck!
I yelped. Badly. It wasn’t a good look, I was aware.
“How long have you been standing there?”
Between how badly I was panting because I hadn’t realized how out of shape I was, and the fright he’d just given me, my heart was not recovering from this. I was totally going to make it into one of those Embarrassing Ways To Die shows. Were they still filming new episodes? I watched way too many when I was a teenager and had nothing better to do with my time, but it had been a long time since then.
“Since when do you have a treadmill?”
“My mother went through a phase in between fad diets, I don’t know.”
Just as I didn’t know how I’d remembered it was in the attic upstairs. Or how I’d remembered she’d bought this one specifically because they had marketed it as so lightweight and easy to move.
I’d say it was false advertising—I kept thinking I was one wrong move from breaking something on the way down—but I’d been determined, and now it was plugged to the side of one of the studies that never got any use.
And I was sweating more than I had in ages.
“Okay…” The total confusion on his face was replaced by a teasing smirk. I liked how it looked on him. I just wasn’t sure it was going to play in my favor. “Did it go okay with the landscaping company?”
