Counting Minutes | Gay MxM |

Epilogue

-Blake-

The following weeks were quite hectic in our lives, and most of the times it wasn't the good kind of hectic. There was so much going on with me, my parents, my kidnapping and my crimes that I found myself regretting my decision to let people search for my parents more than once. It was taking its toll on me, but it was a hell of a lot worse for Jordan.

There were days when he was too exhausted to even get out of bed, and I was the reason for it. I had to leave him all alone way too often, and the stress of not knowing if I'd end up in jail after all was making things so much worse.

And when the media found out about my story...

It was hard. Those months were hard. Harder than I thought they'd be. I wished so badly I could go back in time and change that...

But we made it through. I got so much help with so many things, and not just from Julia, but from complete strangers, and my own parents. One by one, all my problems were made to vanish either by my great lawyer, or by my parents settling things outside court. I hadn't even met my parents in person yet, but they still helped me anyway they could.

It took months, but in the end, I was a free man. I was still missing a citizenship, but my lawyer was working on that.

None of this was on my mind that day, however. There was no outside world, nothing that could distract me from what was going on inside the house.

After weeks and weeks of practicing, falling and getting back up again; after sleepless nights and hours spend crying on the couch; after so many steps down the stairs and so many steps I had to carry Jordan back up after he got overwhelmed...

After so many times Jordan interacted with his family outside his room, sometimes succeeding and sometimes running out of strength...

It was time.

We were going to have a family dinner, the entire family present in the dining room, on the first floor.

I held Jordan's hand tightly in mine when we stopped almost at the bottom of the last flight of stairs before the first floor. He buried his head on my shoulder and took a deep, shaky breath. The house was completely silent even though there were six people in the dining room, waiting for us. Julia, John, Jasmine, Joy, Jamie and George were all there, sitting in silence, just like we had practiced over and over again.

I could feel the nervous excitement in the air. It was difficult for me to even try to contain it. Although seeing Jordan so uncomfortable and shaky brought that excitement down quite a lot. I hugged him tightly and spoke soothing words in his ear. Walking down the stairs had stopped being scary to him weeks ago, but I wasn't surprised it was more difficult on this particular day.

We had been practicing sitting at the dining table alone, then with Julia, then with Julia and John and so on, until Jordan had become comfortable with them all. It was only two days ago when we'd been sitting at the table again with everyone else, and it had gone really well, but now Jordan was going to try to eat too. That was why he was so nervous again.