“Oh my God. Oh my goodness,” Cathy was saying behind us. I lifted Sam back up again. “What in the world—how—you didn’t tell us?!”
Sam smoothed out his hair, looking over to his mom. “There is… something Fox and I have to tell you all.”
“I think you already did!” Dad shouted. He let out a long laugh.
Relief washed over me like a waterfall on a hot day.
It was okay. The world hadn’t ended. Cathy’s jaw may have still been on the floor, but no one was throwing me out of the damn hotel room.
“Mom,” Sam said, going over to give her a big hug. She was still stunned for a moment, but then she reached up, squeezing Sam tight.
“All right, you two,” she said, waving her hands through the air as she paced the room. “We’re going to have to have a long talk about keeping secrets from me. How long has this been going on? Why am I the last person to know?”
“You’re not going to disown me, are you?” Sam said.
“I just want you to be happy, sweetie,” she said. She turned to me suddenly, giving me a fierce stare. “You know what this means, right? You can never hurt my baby, Fox. I don’t care what happens, but you better be kind to him. He deserves the whole world.”
I swallowed hard. “He does deserve the whole world. And I’m going to do everything I can to make sure he’s happy.”
Finally, Cathy relaxed, the signature mischievous smile returning to her face. “You’re adults and you can do whatever makes you happy,” she said, “but you know we’re never going to let you live this down.”
“Live what down?” Sam asked.
“Pretending you hated each other,” she said. “Oh no, we fell asleep together by the pool. Greg, the kiddos are in love!”
Cathy hugged my dad, the two of them still looking like they’d just been told aliens landed on Earth.
“Well, this trip sure was informative for all of us,” Jim said. He and Laura didn’t seem too fazed by it at all. They were still lounging on the tidy bed.
“Does he make you happy?” Cathy said to Sam, her voice low. She placed both of her hands on Sam’s shoulders.
“Very. Believe it or not,” he said, smiling at her.
“Then that’s all I need to know,” she said.
Sam came over and wrapped his arms around me in a hug, and for the first time, I was able to hold him in front of the whole family, not worrying about a damned thing.
“Gross,” Logan said, an amused look on his face. “Not, like, because you’re stepbrothers. Just because you’re clearly so into each other.”
Sam laughed. “I can’t argue with that,” he said.
There was a definite buzz in the room that hadn’t been there before, but the remarkable thing was that pretty soon, the day continued on again as normal. I was still waiting for something to shift, for someone to come along and tell me I couldn’t do what I was doing. To tell me I was wrong.
But there was none of that here. Everyone was accepting of me. And while I knew that wouldn’t be the case for the whole world, I didn’t care anymore. Why did my public image matter if I wasn’t happy with who I was on the inside?
For the first time in my life, I was focusing more on what made me happy than what I thought was right.
As we were all walking out of the hotel, Dad found me in the lobby and stole me away for a moment by the front doors.
“I just wanted to tell you,” he said, looking me in the eye, “that your mom would be proud of you, Fox.”
“Dad, you don’t have to say that.”
“It’s true,” he said. “She wanted you to be happy, no matter what. Gay, straight, shacking up with your stepbrother, any of it.”
I snorted. He gave me a wicked grin.
“And I haven’t seen you this happy since… well, since she was still around,” Dad said.
The tightness in my throat was back again with a vengeance. “I was gone for so long,” I whispered. “I never want to be away from you all that long again.”
“We’re always here,” he said, pulling me into a tight hug. “I love you, kid.”
“I love you, too.”
Sam and the others walked up behind us. When I turned to look at the group, Sam was waving around the big orange bottle of sunscreen as usual, making sure everybody had put some on.
“Do you all have water for the road? We’re not stopping until we’re in Fresno.”
“Got it,” Logan answered.
Everyone filtered out, and I hung back with Sam, reaching out to grab his hand.
I wasn’t just holding Sam’s hand in secret. I was holding my boyfriend’s hand, in public, without a care in the world.
I felt like a new person. A person I might really, really like.