It's been a year since Clay, otherwise known as Porkchop, planned the graduation event in Newport Beach. The event where a handsome Tyler Hamilton caught Clay off guard by kissing him. Clay, up until that day, had never kissed a boy before.
At 24 ye...
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SO I know I was kind of blessed in the family department, even if my siblings and parents still got on my nerves frequently. That's just a part of the whole family thing. You piss each other off, even when you don't mean to. You love each other, but god is it easy to hate each other sometimes.
Though, even with how much I occasionally fell into the latter of hating my family (a lot which had to do with my quick-to-anger issues), I could acknowledge that things were mostly good. I hated saying things like this, but we were practically a perfect family. We all had our flaws, but I liked to think that when you put us all together, as one unit, we were a pretty good example of a supportive, loving family.
My parents loved me and my sister and brother undeniably, with no boundaries. They loved me when I was a little bitch, loved Alex when she was hyped up on anxiety, and loved Ethan even when he was a little bit of a control-freak. And I loved Alex and Ethan, and they dealt with me, and chose to love me even through the bullshitty times. It's what family does, if you're doing it right.
Clay didn't have siblings, but he had his parents. It dawned on me that we'd never really talked about his family, and I never would have thought of it as a slightly weird thing until the night of Thanksgiving, the first time he brought up his parents. I'd never been super perceptive before, but I guess I was growing. I'd always been good at being able to read people like Alex, but she was my sister, so I kind of knew her better than anyone else. Even dating Alexander, I found it hard to perceive correctly what was going on in his head.
With Clay, maybe it was easier because I was growing, and also because it was obvious. When he wasn't being as loud, holding the same excitable energy as usual over dinner. When he kept looking down, avoiding eye contact, avoiding holding his head higher. It became undeniably obvious when Clay was building a fort with Hunter and Rose, and he didn't even sing along to the Barbie songs that were still playing on the TV. And I knew that dude too well. Barbie was life. Even Cayden was singing, and Noah's sister Amelia was literally doing interpretive dance. And Clay was just ... building a fort with joy, but not the overwhelming noticeable joy he always felt.
It was just some of the things he said in regard to his family. How seemingly nothing had happened, yet he hadn't spoken to his parents often, or seen them since graduating high school. And then he said that his parents moved to Maine, fucking Maine of all places, when Clay was going to come back to Georgia after finishing up at UCLA.
That was the key detail that kind of fucked with my mind, turned on a switch in there that was like, Hey, maybe something really is weird about this situation.
I didn't think Clay was hiding anything from me. In fact, I knew he wasn't. I trusted him with that. Except, in this situation, I would have rather preferred it if he were keeping some sort of secret from me. Because the worst part about this was that I was picking up on the weird vibes, some sort of uneasy energy going on with his family, and I was one hundred percent sure that Clay was oblivious.
