both and…nothing. They’d both read the messages. They just hadn’t responded. Which I supposed was all the response I needed. I hadn’t just used a safe word, I’d left, and now they were done with me.
And as I wandered through my dad’s house, maybe I needed to be done with them too. Not just them, but here. The house. The town. I mean, I’d made it more “me” than it had been when I’d arrived. The house looked dramatically different from when I’d first moved in. There was less furniture and more color. Not so much stuff on the walls. It looked more like someplace I’d lived than an oversized Airbnb rental stuffed with someone else’s tastes and memories.
But it didn’t feel like home. Not my home, anyway.
I know, I know, cry me a river—I felt trapped in this ostentatious place that had been given to me when there were people who would have given all they had just to sleep someplace warm. I got that. I really did. And I felt like the biggest asshole for not being happy and grateful that someone had given me a gigantic palace.
But right now, all I wanted was to go back to that cramped shithole apartment I’d shared with too many roommates in a noisy part of Los Angeles. Nobody really knew me back there, but nobody had cared who or what I was, and that sounded fucking amazing compared to living in an enormous place full of my dad’s disapproving voice.
And not just his voice—their voices. Aaron’s voice. Will’s voice. I could hear us laughing over something stupid. Hear Aaron’s cries echoing along with the swish of a cat o’nine tails. Hear Will’s low growl right in my ear, giving filthy orders and making sexy promises. I could hear Will telling me what he liked about my art, and Aaron begging Will to let him suck my dick, and—
They were gone now. Not in the same way my father was, but somehow that didn’t matter. They weren’t going to come strolling in through the front door any more than he was. It was over. It was done. They were gone.
Everyone was gone. So why the hell wasn’t I?
No, seriously—why was I even staying here? There was nothing for me in this place except bad memories and worse feelings. What the fuck was I holding on to?
Aaron had gone over my dad’s will with a fine-toothed comb. While the house had been left to me, there was nothing legally obligating me to keep it. Yes, Dad had made his wishes known. Yes, my siblings wanted to hold me to those wishes.
But how much of my life had already been consumed by baggage that other people had foisted on me? In the name of chasing the medical degree my father insisted I should have, I’d given up seven years that I was never getting back. How much closer would I be to finding myself if I’d held the reins that entire time instead of waiting until my third year of medical school to seize control? How much more art would I have done? How much better would my art be if I’d had the time and headspace to pour into that instead of trying to jam my feet into shoes that would never fit?
Breaking away from my dad’s expectations had been great for me, even if it had come later in life than it should have. So wouldn’t breaking away from this house be good for me too?
I looked around the house, and for the first time since I’d walked in the front door after Dad’s death, I was determined instead of depressed. Okay, I was still depressed as fuck, but the determination was like a long overdue second wind.
Why was I staying in this house? Why was I staying in this goddamned town? There was nothing here for me, and my only incentive to hold on to this haunted building was to keep my siblings off my back. What the hell did I care if they weren’t happy about it? They already looked down their noses at me because I wasn’t living up to our dad’s legacy.
Fuck it. Fuck them. Fuck this house.
This was my life. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but here and now I decided I wasn’t going to spend the rest of it in a choke chain made out of my dead father’s expectations.