he started to hyperventilate. His father had been there, of course, as he always was when Nick lost his mind a little bit. He sat next to Nick, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and waiting until his son’s head started to clear.
They didn’t say much after that. Bell men weren’t the greatest when it came to feelings, but Aaron Bell had made it clear, perverts were everywhere, and that while some of the people Nick interacted with online might be nice, they might also be men in their late forties still living in their mothers’ basements, waiting to lure in an unsuspecting sixteen-year-old for nefarious deeds like making their victims into hand puppets or wearing their skin.
And while Nick didn’t think that would happen to him, he wasn’t sure. He was a cop’s kid. He knew the statistics, had grown up hearing stories of some of the terrible things Dad had seen on patrol. He didn’t want to end up as someone’s hand puppet, so he didn’t reblog porn anymore, no matter how tasteful it was.
(Which meant he’d also had to scrub his other Tumblr page which was considerably more adult, but the less said about that one, the better.)
And that was how he’d come out to his father at the age of fifteen.
Because of Extraordinary porn.
He’d been so young, then, so naïve. He was sixteen now. A man. Perhaps he was a man who once bought a pillow off Etsy with Shadow Star’s face on it. He had tracked the delivery at the top of every hour, making sure that the moment it was on their doorstep, he was the one who got to the door first. It wasn’t that he was embarrassed by it (even if it was now hidden under his bed), it was just … there’d be a lot of questions, and Nick hadn’t been in the mood to answer said questions.
(It does need to be said that three days after receiving the pillow, he kissed it—even though he knew it wasn’t exactly normal.)
But Nick was still a man. He’d promised to make good decisions this new school year, a clean slate for both of them. New day, new dawn, blah, blah, blah.
He was shoving his feet into his beat-up Chucks when there was a knock at the door. That too had been part of their agreement. Nick would be trusted to have his door closed if he was responsible enough to do his own laundry so his father wouldn’t see any evidence that Nick had been … exploring himself. Nick loved his dad, but his singular talent for making Nick’s life excruciating was something that needed to be addressed.
“Breakfast,” Dad called through the door. “You better be getting ready, Nicky.”
Nick rolled his eyes. “I am.”
“Uh-huh. Stop your Tumblring and get your butt downstairs. French toast waits for no man.”
“Be right there. And it’s not Tumblring, you philistine. God, it’s like you don’t know anything at all.”
He heard his dad’s footsteps retreat down the hall toward the stairs. The floorboards squeaked, something they’d talked about fixing for years. But that was … well. That was Before. When things had been right as rain and everything had made sense. Sure, his dad had worked too much back then too, but she’d always been there to rein him in, telling him in no uncertain terms that he would be home for dinner at least three times a week, and they would eat as a family. She didn’t ask for much, she pointed out. But it was understood by all that she wasn’t asking.
Dad still worked too much.
Nick pushed himself off the bed. He turned his phone to vibrate (muttering about Tumblring under his breath) and crossed the room to his desk to slip it into his backpack.
She was there on his desk, as she always was, trapped in a photograph. She smiled at him, and it hurt, even now. Nick suspected it always would, at least a little bit. But it wasn’t the ragged, gaping hole it’d been two years ago, or even the constant ache of last year. Seth, Jazz, and Gibby didn’t walk on eggshells around him anymore like they thought he’d burst out crying at the slightest mention of moms.
Dad had taken the photo. It’d been on one of their summer trips out of the city. They’d gone to the coast of Maine to this little cottage by the sea. It’d been weirdly cold, and the beach had been rocks instead of sand, but