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[Damien Lockwood]
The room felt heavier than it had moments earlier. Damien sat with it.
"He adored her," Frank said. "I know he did. And she loved him, as much as she was capable of, that’s real. But she left, and after that something shifted in him. He stopped letting people get close. Not because he didn’t want connection, but because he learned that when people leave, they take something with them that doesn’t grow back easily."
Damien looked down at his hands. He thought about Oliver during those early weeks...the sharp deflection, the careful distance he kept, the sarcasm and insults he used like armor.
He finally understood Oliver’s fear, and how long it had taken to trust Damien even though it was obvious Oliver liked him.
Damien’s heart panged at the image of a little Oliver, waiting for a mother who had abandoned him.
It started to make a different kind of sense now.
A brief silence filled the room after that revelation. Damien’s voice came out quiet and almost pained. "I didn’t know. He only told me that his mother died. Nothing more."
"He only told you the general story." Frank set the candy wrapper on the tray and met Damien’s gaze with the clarity of someone convinced the full truth matters more than a comfortable version. "When Oliver turned eighteen, she reached out after seven plus years of no contact. She wanted to reconnect with him...another chance."
Damien sat very still.
"He refused for months to see her." Frank’s smile was weary, edged with grief. "I couldn’t blame him. He’d spent nine years questioning why she chose another person over staying, and now she was back, asking for something.
He exhaled slowly. "Eventually, he agreed to meet her."
The afternoon light shifted slightly across the floor.
"There was a car accident on the way back from the town where she’d been staying," Frank’s voice remained even and quiet. "She...she didn’t make it."
Damien held his breath for a moment.
"And we discovered afterward that she was pregnant with a baby girl."
The words settled in the room with the weight of things that irrevocably change how you see everything.
"He blamed himself," Frank said. "For months. He convinced himself that if he’d just agreed sooner...if he hadn’t agreed to see her, or if he’d just forgiven her faster, she would’ve reached him before it happened."
He studied his hands. "I tried to tell him that wasn’t true. It didn’t really help. Grief doesn’t respond well to logic."
Damien absorbed everything Frank had just shared. He thought about the Oliver he had been getting to know for months, the one who worked himself into exhaustion without seeking help, who deflected sincere gestures, who had learned to carry burdens quietly and alone because putting them down felt more dangerous than the weight itself.
He thinks, Frank had said earlier, that people close to him either hurt him or get hurt because of him.
"He’s been carrying that for three years," Damien stated, not as a question, but as a realization.
"Longer, if you consider everything that came before. He looked directly at Damien. "He’s stubborn as hell."
"I’ve noticed."
"He’ll push people away before they can leave him. He’ll make himself challenging to love just enough that leaving feels justified if it happens...even if he’s lonely deep down,"
Frank’s eyes were clear and focused even as they were filled with sadness. "He won’t mean to do it. He might not even realize he’s doing it even by being a genius at that Psychology he’s studying."
"I understand," Damien affirmed.
"So don’t make me regret trusting you with this." Frank said. "I’m asking you to keep being patient with him. Keep looking out for him like you have been, I can tell he really loves you."
The room was quiet save for the monitor and the clock. Damien held Frank’s gaze without looking away, knowing the man deserved to see the answer, not just hear it.
"I love him." The words came simply, without embellishment, without the usual managed approach he applied to important things.
"That’s been true for a couple of years now. I’m not going anywhere." He paused. "Whatever happens...whatever complications his family throws into it, whatever the outside world says...I’ll be right there beside him."
Frank regarded him for a long moment. Then something in his expression softenened, not entirely, not in a way that suggested he had fully released a concern, but in a way that indicated he had examined the situation from all angles and found at least one trustworthy.
"I believe you," he said.
Those words were simple but carried weight precisely because of their simplicity.
Footsteps echoed faintly in the hallway, drawing closer. They both noticed the sound at the same time...Damien leaning back slightly in his chair, Frank reaching for the newspaper on the bedside table with the smooth efficiency of someone who has spent decades dodging getting caught at what he’s been doing.
The door opened.
Oliver stepped in, balancing two coffees with the focused determination of someone who has navigated a café line and isn’t about to lose his hard-earned rewards.
A newspaper was tucked under one arm. He looked between the two of them with narrowed eyes, the suspicion of someone who has been managed before and hasn’t forgiven anyone for it.
"...Why do you both look so innocent?"
Damien smiled. "You were gone longer than five minutes."
"There was a line. One long ass line." Oliver set the coffees down and handed the newspaper to his father with the resignation of someone participating in a well-rehearsed ritual. "You talked about me."
Frank accepted his coffee with quiet satisfaction with a smile. "We might have mentioned you briefly.
"Lying with your faces," Oliver repeated, pointing at them both, before apparently running out of steam and dropping into his chair, pulling his coffee closer with the sigh of someone who has accepted a scenario that’s gone out of control.
Damien observed him. Oliver rearranged the orange candy bag on his father’s tray with the instinctual care of someone tidying up a familiar space, adjusted the flowers slightly to catch the light better, and asked his father something about the crossword, his tone a blend of fondness and playful complaint.
He had no idea what had just been shared in this room.
He had no clue that his father had just given Damien something priceless...the full picture of a wound Oliver had been carrying quietly and alone for far too long.
Frank caught Damien’s eye over the top of his coffee cup, sharing a small nod. Brief, private, complete.
Damien turned back to Oliver, the way he was laughing now at something Frank said, the sound bright and unguarded, a rare openness that wasn’t always there, the unique ease he had in this room with his father that Damien had never seen him express quite so freely anywhere else.
He thought about a nine-year-old boy waiting by a front window every evening.
He thought about an eighteen-year-old finally agreeing to something, and the heavy cost of being too late.
He thought about how carefully Oliver had built up every wall, and how quietly he had been taking them down, one cup of coffee, one shared blanket, and one honest conversation at a time, without anyone making a big deal out of it.
Something settled in Damien’s chest...not new exactly, but clearer. More certain. The kind of certainty that doesn’t need proclamations because it simply exists, solid and supportive, already doing its work.
He was here to stay.
Even Oliver couldn’t find a way to push him away.