Coffee and Cafés - Book Two of the Café Latte Trilogy

Café au Lait

"Oh, you have a boyfriend," Savannah sounded pleased. "What's his name?"

"Angelo," I replied.

Thomas grinned and said, "He's our age."

"He's four years younger than you," I corrected quickly. "But y'know, near enough."

Savannah blanched, and then hastily added, "Well, I suppose we can't exactly claim we're that much older than you. How long have you been together?"

"Oh, not long, about five months," I replied. "It feels like I've known him much longer, though."

Savannah smiled. "Ah, uhh, how are your mothers?"

I felt some of the tension leave the room as we addressed the elephant residing within it. "Oh, they're really good. Lucie owns a café and Jenny owns her own decorating company. They do most interior but some landscaping too. If you're ever in Brighton, they'd love to meet you properly. And Susie."

"Susie would enjoy that, especially as it's by the sea," Thomas said. "She's obsessed with mermaids at the moment."

"Weren't we all?" I said in amusement, forgetting momentarily that I was in fact with a cishet dude that probably had grown up in a time where mermaids were not considered appropriate toys for boys.

However, he smiled and said, "I was more of an Action Man guy, but my sister had hordes of mermaid dolls. That collection will come in handy when Susie is old enough to have plastic dolls without being at risk of you know, eating half of it."

I grinned. "I know next to nothing about kids. I was going to bring her a present and then realised I had no idea what a three year old even looks like."

"I was going to say you're not old enough to have spent much time around kids," Savannah said thoughtfully. "But then I remembered you're nearly ten years older than we were when I had you."

That threw me for a moment. I pulled a face and said, "I cannot imagine having a ten year old child now." Then I added, "But to be fair, most of my friends are older than me. Jasper's only a year older, but my other close friends are in their mid-thirties. They're not planning on kids, though."

"Are you?" Thomas asked, and then hastily said, "Sorry, I'm really nosy."

"Oh, so that's who I get it from," I teased, and then said, "I don't know about kids. I like them, but I'll probably just do what my mums did. They provided their spare rooms as a sort of safe place for LGBT kids that got kicked out. That's why my friends are older than me - when I went to live with them, they had Harper staying with them, and he was eighteen at the time. Ross and Edward, my other friends, lived with them for a couple years prior to that."

Thomas and Savannah exchanged a look, and Savannah said, "Your mothers always were very kind."

"Did you meet them?" I asked. I'd asked Jenny and Lucie a few things about my parents, but never really anything about the adoption process. I hadn't been all that interested.

"Once, yes," Thomas nodded. "You'd been in a care home for a couple of years though, at that point, so we... well, we didn't really know you anymore. We were just glad you were going to a stable place."

Savannah guiltily added, "At the time, we were both in rehab, so we weren't involved in a lot of the process for your sake."

"Ah," I replied, and then awkwardly added, "You did good though. Getting through the addiction, dealing with it, moving on from it. Not everyone gets to do that, with support and all. I'm glad you got through it."

Savannah looked like she was going to speak, but her mouth closed and she just nodded. I realised, to my horror, that she was welling up with tears. Thomas smiled and pulled her in for a hug. "Daft thing," he told her. "It was a long time ago." He looked at me and said, "Vanna has a rough time sometimes, letting go of the past. Of the guilt."