Oliver Loves Carson | ✔️

chapter nineteen

Quite frankly, Oliver wasn't sure if he regretted anything. It wasn't his fault. He walked out. What else was he supposed to do? Stay still while Carson was accusing him of withholding information and every kid in their high school watched along?

Plus, was it really withholding information if it wasn't even information that mattered? So what if he didn't tell Carson about Kale? So what if he didn't tell him about a dumb mistake he made when he was younger? So what if he didn't know about his family?

Why did he need to know?

Oliver had always gotten used to keeping this information to himself. There were never people that had gotten this close, never people that wanted to know this much about him. Celia didn't. She didn't care much about his family or his past or his name. After everything she'd done, Oliver was doubting if she even cared about him at all.

But now, he had met someone who did care about all that, and Oliver didn't see the point of it. Did it really matter what name he went by? Who his siblings were? What his favorite pastime was? That was all superficial knowledge, and for the life of him, Oliver couldn't figure out why it mattered so much.

A knock shook him out of his thoughts.

"Come in," Oliver announced, only for Kale to walk into the room. He gave Oliver a small, unsure smile. "What're you doing here?" he asked.

"Came to see you. We haven't talked much, at all."

"Yeah, we haven't," Oliver echoed. "What'd you wanna talk about?"

"Family."

"What about family?"

Kale sighed. "I feel guilty. Ellie and I, we came here and we totally invaded your home and everything and-"

"It's cool, okay? I mean, we don't exactly see eye to eye but... well, if my mom took you in happily, a woman who's not even your birth mother--and you know her, she finds a reason to get pissed at anything--then why can't I? I guess I've just blamed myself as much as you've blamed me."

"No, no, Dom, no," Kale said, "I'm the older one. I'm supposed to be more mature. The truth is, you have nothing to do with anything. It all happened before you were even born, for fuck's sake. But the way I saw it--through all the anger that was instilled in me by my mom--it was your family's fault. The way I saw it, we would always be separated. It would always be you before us. But it's not like that, is it? I mean, your family took us in without a problem. They're not mad at us, we were just mad at them." Kale sighed. "You know... maybe we were the problem. We were holding all that anger and... I don't know."

Oliver kept quiet, not knowing what to say.

"My mom's back," Kale blurted out. "So's her idiot of a boyfriend. I didn't think they'd be back so soon."

"What're you going to do?"

"I don't wanna go back. Ellie deserves better than me having to explain every couple of weeks where mommy and daddy are. But I don't know if I have a choice. It's not like I have any money for an apartment or anything. Plus, what am I supposed to do? Get custody or something? Yeah, right. All of that's too messy. Lawyers and arguments and years of headaches. I don't have the time or the means for that."

"You can always stay here," Oliver offered tentatively. "There'll be a place for you," he said, trying to comfort the man that he'd never really known that well.

Kale let out a sigh of relief. "Thanks, Dom." He looked down at his hands before looking back up. "You know, I'm glad we had this talk."

"Don't make it weird, dickhead."