Page 59 of Ashes to Ash’s

He chewed his bottom lip, taking a moment to respond, but I saw my words hitting him, not like blows, but like they confused him.

“If I don’t fit in with what you want, you’ll send me back.”

Jesus fuck. I grabbed his shoulder as I stepped up beside him. There had to be a way to say this right, but I didn’t have any parenting skills, did I? I really wanted to give him stability and security, so he could decide for himself who he wanted to be.

“Ren, I don’t know how else to say this, so just try to hear what I’m saying, even if it’s not the most eloquent response. We don’t care what you like or don’t like. What we care about is that you’re safe and happy. We’re not going to throw you away if you’re not a carbon copy of one of us, again, that’s probably a good thing, because we’re both fucked up. I wish someone had been there for me like this, so I’m trying to make sure you have what I didn’t. Support. Friendship. Family, even.”

Ren squeezed his eyes closed, and took a deep ragged breath.

“I was never enough,” he whispered, biting his lip again as it trembled. The poor fucker had done enough jumping through fucking hoops to suit others. There was no way in hell I was letting him feel he had to do that for the rest of his damn life.

I dragged him into a hug, which I expected him to resist, but he didn’t. If he had, I wouldn’t have forced the issue, but he needed it, and I think I did too.

He tried to cry quietly, but I could feel every shudder, and hitched breath, every sob. The fact that he tried to hide it made me want to find his parents and break them. How could they have left him feeling like he wasn’t enough unless he was what they wanted?

“It’s okay, Ren. You’re one of us now, and we look out for our own.”

“Thank you,” he practically sobbed, burying his face against my chest, while I silently cursed my dead uncle, this kid’s parents, and every other fucker who’d ever been involved in their sickness.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Ash

Inever expected to be a fucking parent, and certainly not at eighteen, when I’d barely had any time with my chosen life partner, but here it is. Ren needed someone to care that he even existed, and that was something I knew how to do, because I was raised by the right kind of parents. Loving. Committed. Supportive. Open-minded. Enabling. They were the parents everyone should fucking have.

We sat Ren down, and told him pretty much what Cal had recounted to me after the kid went for a shower after their run. The key points were, he had a home, a family, and didn’t have to be anything he didn’t want to be. We would learn this parenting thing on the fly, but it seemed pretty simple to me. Let him be him.

“For reals?”

I grinned. “I had a great example of parenting, and maybe having three parents made it easier for them to get it right, I don’t know, but you won’t get anything from us but support and, I guess, love. I mean, it’d be weird to say we love you yet, right? We like you. Like goes a long way. I’m betting it’s better than what you had before anyway. So you have a room, you have food, you have anything you fucking need. You wanna do things, you do them. You wanna go places, we’ll get you there. When you decide what you want to be, career-wise, we’ll back you. Is there anything else, Cal?”

He groaned, jerking a thumb at me like he was about to say, ‘this guy, right?’

“He’s covered it, but Ren, you can’t just run wild, that’s not what he’s saying. All people have to learn, and grow, so at some point, we need to talk schools and stuff, but not right now.”

“Yeah, my family do great in schools,” I said with a dramatic eye-roll to really emphasise how much I didn’t mean it. Blaze was in constant trouble, Em was expelled, I was expelled, Cole, aka Pyro, had been expelled. Only Nix was still able to be in school, but was apparently now vehemently refusing without his twin there. Would Ren really fare any better?

“School sucks,” Ren grumbled, but maybe that’s because he just didn’t want to go. I could understand that. School could be constraining, forcing people into moulds that we didn’t fit into.

“Homeschooling is an option too. I know a teacher.”

Cal frowned at me. “Not one of us. Nobody needs that burden blocking their education.”

“Firstly, how rude, but secondly, I meant Ethan.”

Cal grimaced, darting a side glance at Ren before he spoke.

“What the… Maybe he’s not the best influence for Ren though.”

“He’s the guy who liked the blood, right?” At least he remembered him, but whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, I had no idea. Fucked up or not though, Ethan was a teacher, and he wouldn’t constrain Ren’s growth either.

“Yeah. It was his first time killing, and he kinda got caught up in it. He definitely didn’t react the way you did after the bitch you killed, Cal, but does that make him wrong?”

Cal’s face drained of colour, and his gaze turned to a glare, before he stood up and walked away from us, heading out of the room and probably upstairs. Shit. I didn’t mean to upset him or whatever. I was just making conversation. My god, so many fucking rules and boundaries in life.

“He killed someone?”

I leaned my elbows on my legs and debated what to say, but hell, the kid deserved honesty, right? We had to start as we declared we’d go on, after all.