Free Grown-up by Kim Fielding Page A

Mostly about music. Their tastes were wildly divergent. Austin favored dance music and some pop, whereas Ben preferred dinosaur rock, of all things. But Austin could forgive that. At least Ben didn’t listen to Barry Manilow.
    When they had polished off their sandwiches and the house-made chips, Ben seemed inclined to linger a bit, which suited Austin perfectly. Austin ordered a coffee and Ben got a refill on his iced tea.
    “What happened when you were eight?”
    The question slipped out so quickly and unexpectedly that it surprised Austin almost as much as it did Ben. That damn annoying voice in the back of his head had likely spit it out.
    Ben was normally pale anyway, but now his face whitened and his lips thinned. He clutched his napkin tightly in one hand.
    “You don’t have to answer that,” Austin said softly. “I didn’t mean to—”
    “My mother died. I never knew my father, and Mom and I moved a lot. She wasn’t very… stable.”
    Austin could understand that, considering what his own mother was like. Even when his parents were married, his father had been the steady one, the one who made sure food was on the table and paperwork got to school on time. Mom was fun. She let him stay up really late on a weeknight to watch an old Bogart movie or let him run around their suburban neighborhood in his Underoos with a rope in his hand, in search of cougars to keep as pets. Even though Austin was still in grade school when his parents divorced, he knew he was better off going to live with Sam.
    Although Austin nodded, he didn’t tell Ben any of that. In part because he suspected that Ben’s mother’s instability was more than just quirkiness, and in part because it was Ben’s turn to tell his story.
    Ben poked the straw around inside his glass as if he were spearfishing. “After my mother died, they sent me to live with my grandmother. I hardly knew her. I’d only seen her twice before. She seemed ancient, and she was sick, and… she couldn’t handle taking care of a kid. I went into foster care.”
    “Shit.”
    What would it be like to lose everyone and everything you knew while only in third grade? To have to live with strangers? Impulsively, Austin reached across the table to squeeze Ben’s free hand. “You’re amazeballs, man.”
    “Huh?”
    “To start off like that and still have your shit so goddamn together. Look at me. I have Sam and I can barely tie my shoes.”
    Ben looked uncomfortable. “Foster care wasn’t a horror movie. Nobody abused me or anything. But I got shifted around pretty often. And wherever I was—hell, even before foster care, even when my mother was alive—I knew that in the end, nobody was really going to take care of me but me. And who the hell wants to adopt a teenage gayboy? I always knew I’d age out when I hit my eighteenth birthday and there’d be no safety net for me to land on.”
    No safety net. That was so fucking terrifying that Austin’s gut clenched. “So that’s why you’re so organized and so, uh….”
    “Anal. Yeah. Because I had to be.” Ben stabbed at his ice a few times.
    Austin felt like stabbing something too, but he wasn’t sure what. He settled for glaring at his cooling coffee. “A lot of people fall apart under those circumstances. They can’t handle it—not that I blame them. But you just made yourself stronger. That’s really cool, Ben.”
    Ben stopped playing with his straw and stared at Austin instead, his eyes narrowed. “You really think that?”
    “Wouldn’t say it if I didn’t.”
    “And you don’t think that I’m a boring, uptight asshole?”
    At that, Austin had to give Ben’s hand another squeeze, and this time Austin allowed his palm to linger an extra moment or two. “You are none of those things.” He grinned. “Although you could stand to do your shopping somewhere other than the Gap.”
    The corner of Ben’s mouth twitched just a little as he looked down at his pale blue shirt and khakis. “Yeah. I’m