Valentines

Valentines - Chapter Two

Chapter Two

“Dad?” I yelled as I dumped my bag down beside the front door. Thank God college was over for the day because the ever impending Valentine’s Day talk and prank planning had fried my brain. I was ready to chill and forget love and stupid Chace.

“Kitchen,” he called back.

I forced my legs to walk the few steps to the kitchen.

Dad was leant over the counter, concentrating hard on some recipe.  “Hey, how was school?”

“College,” I corrected. “It sucked, as usual. What’s for dinner?”

“Paella,” he replied, going back to his cookbook.

I frowned. Dad was the head chef at a local posh restaurant. Why was he looking up how to make paella? “You forget how to make it?”

He smirked. “No, smart arse, I’m just looking at how much vanilla you’re supposed to put in a crème brulee. Pop thinks I put in too much, but I know I put in more than the recipe states. I’m going to make it by this and see what he thinks then,” he explained, tapping the page for emphasis.

“You two are so immature.”

He looked up and smiled. “When you have a husband, you’ll be the same.” Dad and Pop had been married, well civil partnered, since it was made legal in England 2005, but they had been together for twenty-one years. Dad was my biological father, but I loved them both the same.

“Not gonna happen. I hate men so I’m never getting married.”

“Uh-oh. What’s he done now?”

“Nothing,” I exclaimed. “Sweet FA!” That was the problem. It seemed like he wanted more but more never bloody happened. Sighing, I plopped down on the stool under the island. “I hate him.”

“You hate who?” Pop said as he walked into the room and kissed the top of my head.

“Chace.”

He laughed, his eyes doing that annoying sparkling thing when he was amused and/or about to tease. “No, you don’t. You love him.”

“Yes, I do, and no, I do not. What are you doing here anyway?”

“Oh, sorry. I’ll leave,” he teased, gripping his heart. I rolled my eyes. “Just went in for the morning. Now I’m off all week.”

“If you would have told me you were planning on taking holiday I would have too,” Dad countered, shaking his head in exasperation.

“I told you three weeks ago, Greg.”

“I think I would have remembered that, Will.”

Resting my elbows on the counter, I smiled. Their little arguments always cheered me up. They were definitely an old married couple. “This came for you from Leanne,” Dad said, slipping me an envelope and going straight back to bickering with Pop about how he really didn’t know.

I ripped the envelope open. My surrogate mum, Leanne, was a friend of theirs in school and after having two sets of twins two years apart she decided she didn’t want kids, but she did want to help my dads who were desperate to be parents. Back then the chances of two men adopting a child wasn’t all that great.

“Oh my God, will you two stop!” I shouted once I’d finished reading about how Leanne and her family were doing. Their bickering was funny as hell, but neither one of them wanted to give up first.