Operation Fake Relationship

“Why?” Nick asked, his face intent. A strand of bright hair had fallen over his forehead. “Why would you bother?”

Reg shrugged. “We put a lot of work into making it. It seemed a shame to let it rot. Seth might want to play in it when he’s bigger, and maybe there’ll be other grandchildren eventually.”

“Not from me.” Pete wrinkled his nose. “I don’t think I have a paternal bone in my body. But I’m sure Maria and Adrian want more sprogs. How about you two?” He glanced from Nick to Jackson and back again as he asked casually, “Do you want kids?”

Jackson’s heart skipped a beat.

“We haven’t talked about it yet,” Nick said smoothly. “But who knows? Maybe one day.” He smiled, a sweet intimate smile that made Jackson’s chest ache with all the things he’d been secretly longing for and never known about. His heart felt as if it had been torn wide open and all those hidden desires were flooding out like a river, threatening to sweep him away.

Somehow he managed to force himself to smile back.

“Maybe,” he said.

Eight

Nick was in the living room with Jackson, Seth, and Maria. The Queen was on TV making her annual Christmas speech. “She’s amazing, isn’t she?” Nick marvelled at Her Majesty. “I swear she doesn’t seem to have got any older since I was a kid. How is that possible?”

“Portrait in the attic?” Jackson suggested.

“Good genes?” Maria said. “The Queen Mother was incredible too.”

“Nick?” His dad’s voice from the doorway tore Nick’s attention away from pondering on the Queen’s miraculous longevity. “Can I have a word?” Something about his tone made Nick’s anxiety spike. “In private,” he added.

Nick’s stomach lurched. “Yeah, okay.” He kept his voice deliberately casual as he stood and stretched, before following his dad out of the room.

“We’ll talk in my study.”

Those words had Nick’s muscles tightening defensively. As he crossed the threshold into the forbidding gloom of the study, the dark wood-panelled walls seemed to close in around him, resonating with layer upon layer of unhappy memories of all the times his school reports had been unsatisfactory—so probably at the end of every term.

This isn’t good enough, Nick.

You need to buckle down.

Don’t you want to go to a good university?

Stop wasting your potential!

He shoved his hands in his pockets and stood, waiting for his dad to take a seat behind his desk. But instead, he surprised Nick by leaning on the edge of the desk so they were face-to-face. A muscle ticked in his jaw and he looked down for a moment. He seemed to be even more nervous than Nick.

“Nick,” he began. “I’m glad you’re here for Christmas this year.” He looked up and met Nick’s eyes. “It’s been too long, and I hope this will be the first of many more. I know you’ve been angry with me for a long time, and I don’t blame you. My drinking made me a difficult person to live with. I was stressed and unhappy and I took that out on the people I loved.” Nick held his gaze and waited, wondering what else would be forthcoming. “And I’m sorry that I wasn’t more supportive when you came out. I was shocked, honestly.” He shrugged. “I never saw it coming, and I didn’t know how to react. I didn’t disapprove, I was just… blindsided I suppose, so I didn’t know the right things to say.”

“Yeah. You really didn’t,” Nick said bitterly.

Are you sure?

Maybe you’re just confused.

How can you really know at your age?

Have you ever tried it with a girl?

None of those things were on the list of supportive things to say to a gay son when he came out of the closet.

“I let you down, and I’m sorry. I love you, Nick, and I’m so proud of you and what you’ve done with your life. It’s wonderful to see the success you’ve made of your business, and now in your personal life… settling down with a lovely man like Jackson.”

His dad’s expression was painfully genuine, and somehow that only made Nick’s anger burn more brightly. He clung to his fury, reluctant to let it go, feeding it with all the dark echoes of the past that had been stirred up. “I don’t care what you think!” he flung the words out like sharp things that could wound. “I don’t need your approval now. I don’t need you to be proud of me. Your opinion means nothing to me because I stopped caring what you thought of me a long time ago.”

He clenched his fists into furious balls, shouting now and not caring who might overhear. “It’s too fucking late! I needed it then, not now. When I was growing up I was never clever enough, never hard-working enough, never sporty enough. Pete was the golden boy and I was the one who never lived up to your expectations, who never achieved his full potential, just because I wanted to study art instead of maths, and I didn’t want to be a bloody accountant or financial advisor or whatever else you wanted me to be. I was never allowed to follow my own dreams. You made me feel like shit, like I was never good enough. I needed you to love me for who I was, to accept me as I was, and you didn’t, and you can’t go back and fix that.”