His father’s lip curled. “I knew you were alive. They told me when you went to the cops.”
“What?” That punched the starch out of Keats. “They told you?”
“Yeah, I told them you owed me my best gun and the money you stole from me, but they didn’t do a damn thing about it.”
The news that his father hadn’t bothered to come look for him shouldn’t have surprised Keats. Alan Keats wasn’t the kind of man who chased. He would’ve been waiting for Keats to crawl back and admit he couldn’t make it on his own.
That was probably what he thought this was. Keats coming back to admit defeat and ask for help.
“Can we come in?” Keats asked, holding his ground.
“Why?” his father groused.
Georgia made a little noise of disbelief, and Keats almost smiled. She was kind of cute when she was pissed on his behalf.
“We need to talk. It’s not about money. It’ll only take a few minutes.”
His dad didn’t look pleased at all. “And who is this, anyway? I don’t let strangers in my house.”
“This is Georgia, my—”
“His girlfriend,” Georgia said, taking Keats’s hand and surprising the hell out of him.
His father’s heavy eyebrows shot up. “You into women now?”
Keats knew that Georgia was posing as his girlfriend to help him out, to let his dad see he was wrong about Keats’s preferences. But Keats found that he no longer gave a shit what his father did or didn’t think. “I date both.”
His father’s face twisted in disgust. But he opened the door and let them in, muttering to himself the whole way.
The house was simple on the inside, utilitarian. His father had never had much of an eye for nice things. It was as if he wanted to live his life like he was still in the Marines—neat corners and neutral colors.
They all sat in the living room, his dad in a worn brown recliner and he and Georgia on the couch. The room had a stale smell, like microwaved soup and faded Pine-Sol. Keats had the intense desire to be anywhere but there.
But the urge to leave wasn’t about fear anymore. As Keats watched the man sitting across from them, he no longer saw the larger-than-life football coach who could make him cower with his booming voice and intimidating presence. Instead, he saw an aging man with a toxic personality in a lifeless house. A man who didn’t know how to love anyone.
Maybe his father had been different once upon a time. Keats’s mom had died when he was three, so he didn’t really know if his dad had loved her. But whatever the case, this man was a bitter and miserable person now and would die that way. So Keats could only muster up one emotion for his father now—pity.
“So what is it you want?” his father said finally. “I don’t have all day.”
Keats’s anger flared at that, all that resentment bubbling to the surface. “I want you to shut your mouth and stop lying to lawyers about Colby Wilkes.”
“Now, wait just a minute,” his father said, leaning forward. “If you think you can walk in here and talk to me like that—”
But Keats wasn’t going to stop. He’d shut up at his father’s request too many times. “No, you need to hear this. You have no business stirring up shit for Colby. That lawyer is grasping at straws and you know it. Colby Wilkes never did anything wrong to me.”
“Right. ’Cause two gays hanging out after school every day was all about the guitar lessons. That school needs to own up to its negligence.”
Keats’s fists balled against his thighs. “Are you serious? Is that what this is about? You’re trying to get a court case going for yourself?”
“They put that man in charge of children and look what happened.”
Un-fucking-believable. This was about money? Keats had read in the news stories after he went missing that his father had threatened to bring a suit against the school, but there hadn’t been enough there for him to go through with it. Now the guy was looking for a new angle. “Colby Wilkes was the only decent adult I knew back then. I sure as hell couldn’t count on you.”
“He put those disgusting ideas in your head.”
Keats scoffed. “You think he turned me bisexual? Come on, Dad. Even you can’t be that dumb.”
“I’ve heard enough. I won’t be insulted in my own home.” His dad’s voice was going in