One Saturday morning, as Keith and Lance descend the stairs on their way to the kitchen — as Keith practically carries a still half-asleep Lance, that is — Marcela whips towards them, points a scolding finger in their direction, and says, “I am tired of checking in on you two at night and seeing my son, sprawling over half the bed, while poor Keith clings to the edge. No more.”
Keith’s heart drops to his toes, pounding all the way down. His ears billow out and then fade slowly, like someone turned the volume down. He feels like a beyblade someone just spun and dropped onto the pavement, dizzy and sharp and sparking, trembling to a stop. For several horrifying moments he’s convinced that this may very well be it, and he’s shocked by his own surprise. He’s usually so prepared for the eventual end of someone’s affection, for the patience to run out, for the boot to kick him on the way out the door. It’s startling to realise how far he’s let his defences drop with the Esposita-McClains.
Dangerous.
But then Keith processes the entirety of her sentence, hears past “I’m tired of” and “Keith” in the same sentence. He sees her narrowed eyes and chiding finger and playful exasperation pointed at Lance’s guilty grin, not at Keith, and he realises she is exasperated by the fact that Lance takes up the whole bed every night Keith sleeps over, not that Keith sleeps over at all.
He unclenches his fist from the hem of Lance’s shirt. He’s not sure if Lance does it on purpose, but he leans farther into Keith, and the pressure helps ground him, helps him breathe again.
“I really don’t mind,” Keith mumbles. He keeps his eyes averted, unwilling to meet her knowing ones. “Lance isn’t that bad.”
Marcela snorts, ruffling his hair as she walks by to set the milk on the table. “Please, Keith. He’s a nightmare to sleep with and he knows it. He had to have those little toddler rails on the sides of his bed until he was seven years old because he kept falling off.”
Lance makes a noise of protest at the embarrassing anecdote. Keith smiles, patting his back slightly.
“He does drool.”
“And kick,” says Lance’s older sister Veronica, ducking into the kitchen to grab an apple. Rachel, his other sister, is right behind her, and she pipes up too.
“He also grinds his teeth!”
“And mutters freaky things. He said he was going to curse me once.”
“Oh, yeah, and there was the deal with the sleeping sitting up!”
“And there was —”
“Alright, girls,” Marcela interrupts, leaning over to hold down the hand Lance has clenched around a fork before he has a chance to launch breakfast at his sisters. She looks to have intervened in the nick of time, which makes Keith smile into his cereal. “Let’s not make your brother homicidal.”
Both girls leave the kitchen snickering. Lance’s face promises revenge. For their sake, Keith hopes they find a way to lock their room door, but somehow he doubts it. A part of him is intrigued about whatever scheme Lance will inevitably rope him into.
“I really am fine, though,” Keith repeats once calm has returned to the morning again. “I once had to sleep in a home that usually had more kids than beds, so Lance’s kicking is a significant improvement from a sleeping bag on the kitchen floor.”
He hadn’t meant for his comment to be upsetting. It wasn’t great, sure, but he’d had a roof over his head and food to eat, and he’d only been there for a couple days. The whole situation was funny in hindsight, hilarity inherent in the absurdity of his neon green sleeping bag next to the magnet-covered fridge, and that’s how he’d meant the comment. A joke.
But Marcela looks horrified, and Lance leans over to rest his head on Keith’s shoulder and wrap their hands together, and Keith realises he’s most definitely made a mistake.
“Kidding,” he tries anyway, but the damage is done. The determination in Marcela’s eyes becomes even more apparent, and she nods twice as if reassuring herself. Keith could kick himself.
“Be ready in twenty minutes,” she says resolutely. “We’re going out.”
———
In twenty minutes they’re in the car. Lance almost has his voice back by then, too, which is great, because Keith feels like he’s going to lose his — he’s expecting a fancy air mattress, really. At most he’s expecting to be delegated to his own space in the pull out couch or something. And even that is more than he ever thought he’d get. It’s not that he doesn’t think he deserves it, or anything like that. He knows that some of his living situations have been less than ideal, in the past few years.
But he…he’s not part of this family. He’s not supposed to be, anyway. He’s someone Lance dragged home someday, someone Lance latched onto and then everyone else seemed to follow his example. Keith knows his current foster family gets a cheque for an amount he’s too afraid to find out every month. He knows the state government pays people to home and house and feed him because no one else will. That’s how it’s been since that’s what it had to be.
He cannot understand what logic has inspired Marcela and Lance and all the Esposita-McClains, really, to home and house and feed him. He doesn’t understand.
He’s not expecting a forty minute drive to Ikea. He doesn’t understand why so much is being extended for him. He’s not expecting the determination in Marcela’s face and the way she holds Keith in one hand and Lance in the other, tightly, as if both are her children, until Lance whines and pulls himself free to come hold Keith’s other hand, as if he’s the commodity.
Keith doesn’t understand.
This is not how things are supposed to go.
This is never how things end up going. Not ever in a million years or even less.
“We should get a bunk bed!” Lance says excitedly, pulling Keith out of his thoughts and in a random direction. Marcela squeezes Keith’s hand once and lets go to allow it, stepping to the side to grab on of the boxy blue shopping carts.
Lance brightens even further when she brings over the cart, hopping onto the end of it and gesturing for Keith to do the same. Keith looks at the cart, then at Lance, then at the wheels, then at the total lack of space beside him, and imagines Marcela hitting the tiniest bump as they cram onto the little ledge and then them going flying.
He wisely chooses to walk over and grab the handlebar next to Marcela. She extends her pinky to rest next to Keith, which makes several emotions that he refuses to identify rise up in his throat.
“Let’s maybe consider our other options,” Marcela suggests as she pushes the cart farther. “You remember when we stayed over at your primo’s house when we first moved? You hit the ceiling every single morning because you could never remember that it was there. I don’t think bunk beds are for you, mijo.”
“And the toddler rail thing,” Keith adds. He’d meant it seriously — Lance has genuinely fallen a few times and Keith has had to drag him back up — but Lance huff-laughs in the way that he does when Keith teases him and he’s annoyed that he finds it funny, and Marcela straight up laughs. Keith meets Lance’s eyes and smiles to soften the unintentional dig.
“Fine,” Lance laments, dramatically leaning backwards on the rail. “We’ll just get boring normal beds I guess. Ooooou, we should get some bookshelves! Then Keith has somewhere to put all his nerd things.”
Marcela turns the shopping cart so quickly it screeches and nearly flings Lance right off, speeding towards the shelving area. Keith hurries to keep up.
“Excellent idea, Lancito. Bribing him to stay for longer. You’re so smart.”
Lance preens. Keith looks rapidly between them both, trying to find the joke, but there isn’t one. They, genuinely and truly, want to redesign Lance’s entire room to entice Keith to stay. However much it will cost, and Keith knows it will be a lot, they are doing more than what is reasonable to ensure they (not just Lance! All of them! The household!) can spend more time with Keith.
It’s baffling.
Try as he might, Keith simply cannot find a motive. He watches, gobsmacked, as Lance and Marcela hem and haw their way through the biggest furniture outlet chain in the world, comparing sturdy wooden shelving and colourful bean bag chairs and dorky spaceship themed beds, redesigning a whole room from scratch.
He startles out of his thoughts at Marcela’s beckoning, walking over to the display table she and Lance are illegally sitting at (there is a giant FOR VISUAL DISPLAY ONLY sign on it that they have ignored), half hunched over her cell and a pad of paper. “Keith, rojo, come here. We need you to sketch out the basics of Lance’s room so we know what fits. Marco is measuring the walls and everything right now. Don’t worry about anything that’s already in there, I think we’re taking it all out to paint it anyway. You like blue, right?”
Keith swallows roughly. He does like blue. He’s never painted his own room before.
“Yeah,” he manages, finally squishing down next to Lance on his chair.
Following Marco’s directions, he sketches out the foundations of the bedroom, marking the big window and weirdly narrow door and closet that Lance never uses because he has it piled full of stuff he doesn’t use but can’t bring himself to give away. The sketch is then used as a sort of map as they wander around the outlet, holding it up to various pieces of furniture and assessing how they would fit. It takes Keith some time, but after several hours of Lance’s energy and Marcela’s excitement, Keith starts to get hyped.
“Gasp!“ Lance says out loud, because he is a dork. He reaches a flapping hand over to Keith’s without looking, slapping him on the shoulder several times before finally managing to grip onto his sleeve. “Keith! Keith! Look!”
Keith squints in the direction Lance is emoting at. “A couch,” he says slowly, trying to figure out what warrants the intense excitement.
Honestly, it might be the couch. Lance got super excited about bar stools, earlier, so anything really goes.
“No no, farther!”
Keith squints harder. “The countertops?”
“Farther!”
“The…vases?”
“No! Farther!” Finally Lance gets frustrated enough to step behind Keith, gently pressing his palms to Keith’s cheeks and guiding his head in the right direction. “Now squint really hard and get excited with me.”
Keith tries. He sees grey blobs and says nothing, allowing the silence to speak for him.
“The stuffies, Keith! They’re sharks and hippos! Mama, Keith needs glasses.”
“I know,” she says at the same time that Keith says “No, I don’t.”
They stare at each other for several moments.
“As soon as you’re on the insurance,” she says levelly.
“I will feed them to a creek,” Keith promises.
He has never been this stubborn to Marcela before. He didn’t even mean to. If he had known he was going to say it he would have kept his mouth shut, but the words kind of bubbled out of him. He waits for her eyes to harden, her shoulders to square, for the annoyance to become evident at his insolence.
But she only snorts, leaning over to flick him on the forehead. “I got Marco to wear them. I got Lisa to wear them. I got my mule of a husband to wear them. If you need them, you will not out-stubborn me, toro.”
Keith shrugs. If she’s that hellbent on getting to know him, she’ll learn, he supposes.
By the time the time they break their intense eye contact, they realize that Lance has already wandered off towards the stuffed animals, and hasten to follow him (he gets lost easy). Lance is already halfway into this big bucket, digging for something specific.
“This is for you,” he says when he finally unearths himself, handing a hippo to Keith. “Smaller than the others, like you, and the fluff is a little matted but it’s softer than the others. The shark is for me because it was stuck on the hippo like I’m stuck on you.” He playfully checks Keith’s hip, giggling at his own joke, but Keith’s eyes are totally glued onto the wonky little hippo plushie in his hands. He holds it loosely, afraid of crushing it, and stares intensely at the matted fluff on the one side, the tangled mess of the little poof at the tail. He tries three times to swallow and fails each time, lump in his throat taking up too much space.
“We’re too old for stuffies,” he finally manages. He gives himself away by how tightly he holds the soft things in his hands.
Lance snorts. “Yeah, well, you’re a massive dweeb, so I think we’re fine.”
“I think they’ll be wonderful additions to your room,” Marcela says with finality, and that is that.
———
By the time they make it out of the maze that is Ikea, pack up the car, and set out on the ride home, it’s well after eight thirty. And Keith isn’t a baby, and neither is Lance, and they have a later bed time than that, but…
They’ve been walking around all day. There has been a lot of expended energy.
They’re tired.
Keith remembers being finagled into playing double-o seven with Lance in the back seat. He remembers losing. He remembers poking Lance in the cheek as he yawned just to hear him squawk.
He remembers nothing but the feeling of Lance’s warmth pressed against his, after that, and the seatbelt digging into his neck, and the numbness of his legs. Then he remembers nothing until he felt the familiar bump of the Esposita-McClain driveway, until he cracked open his eyes to see that they were home and closed them quickly again, hoping he wouldn’t be made to get up, still mostly asleep.
“Should we bother setting up the new beds?” comes a whispered voice, deeper and male.
“No, no,” comes another, higher and softer. “They can sleep together for tonight. You take Lancito. I’ll take Keith.”
He is awake enough to feel soft fingers brushing through his hair, then jostling, then heavy breathing beside his ear and the swaying of being carried. He falls fully asleep again against Marcela’s shoulder, leaning his weight onto her fully, forgetting to keep awake for the walk to their room. He stirs slightly again as he’s set down onto something soft, as he feels the familiar tug of Lance’s finger’s against the fabric of his shirt, the sound of his slow breathing.
“Goodnight, estrellitos,” comes the same whispered voice from earlier, and it’s the last thing Keith remembers before he slips away into sleep.
———
other parts in this universe: 1 2 3
