Jace was curled into a tight ball near the far wall, under one of the windows. Vapor puffed away from his pale face, and his entire body was shaking from the cold. He was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, and a pair of fucking slippers. He didn’t turn his head to see who’d found him.
“There you are.” Gavin climbed into the tree house, barely mindful of his tall body in such a cramped space. He draped the coat over Jace, then pulled the entire bundle into his lap. For a moment, Jace didn’t react at all. He remained a limp, shivering lump. And then his arms shot out and wrapped tight around Gavin’s waist, and he tried to bury himself in close. Gavin held him, so relieved his eyes stung and his throat hurt with it.
“This where you ran away to when you were a kid?” he asked after a while. “All the way to the tree house?”
Jace snorted laughter, the sound tickling Gavin’s chest. “Sorry.”
“For what? Giving everyone who cares about you a collective heart attack?”
His body shifted in what Gavin guessed was a shrug. Without moving too much, he retrieved his phone and sent Rachel a quick text: In tree house, warm some blankets, coming down soon.
Almost immediately she sent back a smiley face and several exclamation points.
“Can you walk, babe?” Gavin asked.
“Think so. Why?”
“Because unless you’re up for rappelling, we need to climb down the ladder so we can go warm you up. It’s fucking freezing in here.”
“You’re predisposed to warm climates.”
“Yeah, and you’re practically naked. Come on.”
Jace was also slightly out of it from the cold, and Gavin wished he knew the signs of hypothermia. They inched their way to the hatch, then paused long enough for Jace to shrug into the coat—his father’s coat, apparently, because it was about five sizes too big on him, but it was thick and warm. Gavin positioned himself on the ladder, then pulled Jace down, keeping them only one rung apart, Gavin’s body pressed close in case Jace fell. It took a while to get all the way to the bottom, and Rachel was waiting with a wool blanket still warm from the dryer.
She tucked it around Jace. His legs gave out. Gavin scooped him up before he fell—not the easiest thing in the world to do, despite how it looked in movies—and carried him into the house. By the time they had Jace on the couch, wrapped up in several warmed blankets with his feet under a heating pad, the front door burst open. Rachel raced down the hall to shush them and give a report before the mob could descend.
Gavin knelt on the floor next to Jace’s head, being a presence even though he couldn’t touch him through all the blankets. Jace was awake, which was a good sign, but he wasn’t talking. He looked exhausted and ashamed, and Gavin didn’t know how to make those things stop. He was also a little nervous about facing the rest of Jace’s family when they arrived, and his shiner wasn’t making him feel any less like an outcast. How was he supposed to explain what happened with his sperm donor last night without sounding like the trailer trash he was?
He caught Jace staring at his face, and he winked. “Looks worse than it is,” he said, which wasn’t quite true. Being out in the cold had made his cheek throb more, not less, but he didn’t need to throw last night’s episode of “Trailer Park COPS” onto Jace’s shoulders right now. Jace had enough of his own shit to deal with first.
Keith and Becky Ramsey came into the living room as a unit, moving slowly like hunters afraid of startling a deer. Becky looked ready to burst into tears. They acknowledged Gavin with nods, but their direct attention was on Jace. Rachel and Lauren lingered behind them in the archway, clutching each other’s hands. Gavin knew he was in the middle of what should be a family moment, but he couldn’t make himself move from Jace’s side.
“Oh, baby, I’m so sorry,” Becky said. She circled around to sit on the edge of the coffee table, across from Jace. “I’m so sorry about this morning. We never meant for you to feel judged.”
Jace’s gaze shifted from his mom to someone behind her, then back to the floor.
Keith came closer. “I’m sorry, Jace,” he said. “We were worried and we handled it wrong. You surprised the hell out of us.”
Some humor lit up Jace’s eyes when he looked at his dad. “Surprised myself a little. Didn’t want to tell you like that.”
Keith squatted down to eye level, and the serious tension in his face made Gavin squirm. “It’s true, then?”
“It? Use your words, Dad.”
Gavin bit back a smile.
He glanced at Gavin, then looked right at Jace. “Are you gay, son?”