Flip the Coin [BL]-Chapter 373. A slightly paranoid Exit

In the end, we both apologized to the kid while glaring at each other.

Danny burst out laughing and turned it into a cough in the most obvious way, so I thought I’d leave him for the demon queen to devour and snatch Henry to take him to bed.

"Henry, let’s go." I nudged him, finding that he was already half asleep and needed a few seconds before he moved and stood up.

Constantly hiding under the hood, he looked comfy and cute.

I stood up myself, and when I was in the midst of leaving with Henry, I turned around in expectation to see my grandma attacking Danny, but I only saw the latter looking at me in a daze.

"You are so scrawny; go and bring more firewood. A man shouldn’t look like this." My grandma finally targeted Danny, so that was my cue to run.

Yet I was held back again, not by receiving strange looks this time but by the hand of a child.

He had stood up from his seat, with broccoli still left on his plate.

"What’s up, buddy?" I asked him, but he just held onto me, while Henry also hung on me as if he were challenging the poor kid.

I bent down a little, together with Henry half lying on my back, and whispered to the kid,

"If you are scared to sleep alone, that grandma there will surely read you a story."

My grandma was still belittling the poor Danny while nobody came to his rescue, not even the staff sergeant.

"You know she is not as bad as she looks, right? Did you dream of her?" 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

The kid nodded and smiled at me, apparently agreeing.

I looked at the kid with similar eyes but a much smaller and more petite stature than I ever had—even if I am not the tallest guy—and went through a few possibilities in my head.

First, we could be somehow related, but with my mother dead and my father still heartbroken over it—wait, the child is around eleven to twelve years old in this world’s time now, with me being twenty.

So we are about eight to nine years apart, and my mother died a bit more than a decade ago; it couldn’t be my mother’s child. The kid had been born a few months to a year after my mother’s death.

Or did my father have an affair?

Secondly, maybe I wasn’t the real child of my parents to begin with but was all along related to that child’s family?

"Grandma." I called her, and she finally stopped to devour the innocent and turned in her chair to look at me.

"Could this child be related to me?" I asked the easier question first and felt Henry squeezing me tightly from behind, apparently not liking this topic.

My grandma grimaced.

"We did a test after bringing him here. He has absolutely no relation to us."

"...Are we related?" I pointed at her and then at me as a surge of paranoia broke forward and wreaked havoc in my mind.

It wasn’t the place to ask such questions, but I didn’t give a shit as my childhood flashed before my eyes, especially the part where I had ’cursed’ my mother and was easily abandoned by the rest of my ’relatives’.

Wouldn’t it be much easier to cut off an adopted or stolen child than your own?

"Kenny?" Henry whispered in worry.

Seeing my grandmother’s face darken, I took it as a confirmation, suddenly finding that everything made sense—the fucking alienation and all the shit.

My mother said it to me inside the car back then when the magpie song ran, and I corrected her on the song text, ’No, baby, in reality, there is only yourself.’

She meant me with that, didn’t she? It was a hint, wasn’t it?

I was alone because my family had no relations to me.

She knew it, and now I know it.

I KNOW.

So many little situations could be turned and twisted to match this theory and only this theory, letting ME KNOW, LETTING ME FEEL what the actual truth was.

"KENNITH HOWARD!!! YOU WANT ME DEAD, IS THAT IT???" My grandma roared, and the child hid behind Henry.

Every one of the onlookers looked at the table before them, wishing they weren’t here, and trying to give us as much privacy as possible.

"LOOK AT THIS!" She pointed to her right ear with the big sapphire earring in it, precisely at the top of the ear.

Then she showed me her other ear, and seeing them compared, I noticed that her outer ear fold on the right side looked as if it was a bit pressed in.

My hand went to my ear folds, and I could feel it; in one ear, the outer ear fold had grown closer to the skin than on the other ear.

"Ah... okay." I said dazedly as relief washed over me while I still held onto my ears.

"Kid, ask Mrs. Howard or Ethan for a story," Henry murmured, grabbing my shoulders from behind to lead me out of the kitchen.

This is good... I don’t know why, but I preferred to be ignored by my own family than to discover some second-rate family drama.

Henry brought me into our room, where he took the hood down again and stepped in front of me.

"Are you alright?"

"Mhm."

"You could have asked me; I would have told you." He smiled and fiddled with the pressed-in outer ear fold.

"You noticed it on my grandma as well?" I asked him.

"Not only that, but you and your grandma’s eyebrow area look exactly the same: especially well-behaved." Henry stroked over my eyebrows.

"What the hell?"

Then he slid his fingers over my cheek to my jawbone.

"Here, this part as well, though more petite on her and stronger on you. That you two are related is crystal clear."

"Ah..." I grimaced, but inside I was glad to hear him saying it so confidently.

Henry sat me down on the mattress before he looked around.

"Where is the sandcastle?" He asked, so I conjured it up for him again.

Meanwhile, he had used the sandcastle twice to distract me, and that was only between a few hours.

"And the car?" I took a seat beside me, and I conjured up the two cars still in their package.

Henry ripped his open instantly and looked just as excited as Steven had been back then.

I smiled and also opened my package and put the remote control together.

"First." I announced, looking at how Henry fiddled with the battery package.

"Hey! This isn’t your first time putting this together!" He whined, and I chuckled.

When I turned on the remote control and moved the car, both of them moved instead of only mine.

"Ah. We could have thought of that," I nodded at the late realization.

Henry needed half a minute more and finally held his remote control closer to the cars than me, and now they headed at his command.

Well, let him have a bit of fun with this; it seemed he had not really ever played with a remote-controlled car before, and if he had, it was surely a long time ago.

I put the sandcastle away again and conjured up a new one on the top of our closet so that Henry could drive the car around without crashing into it.

I wouldn’t care anyway, but he appeared to mind, driving the cars as far away from the sandcastle as possible.

I flopped on the mattress and lay down, and Henry soon came to the top of the bed as well to lean against the wall while still running the cars around.

The sound didn’t seem as loud as it did many years ago when Steve and I had played with the car.

Maybe because it wasn’t so late at night and this house was still bustling with people instead of everyone else being asleep.

Maybe because we didn’t do it while breaking the rules.

Maybe it was just because we had grown up.

"Better?" Henry asked me, and I came closer to lean my head against his chest, with him making way for me by lifting his arm and placing it around me.

I watched the car make its rounds.

"Yeah, sorry for the breakdown when you were already tired." The package had a little pole with a yellow banner hanging on it, and while I didn’t put mine on my car, Henry did put it on his, so they were easy to distinguish.

"No, I am much more relaxed now that I know you and the kid aren’t related."

"Mhm..." I hummed absentmindedly.

"...Why?"

"Because I have to reluctantly share you with your grandmother, and I don’t want additional family members clinging to you." He said while burrowing his face in my hair, like some creep, as he drove the car with the banner against the closet.

"Pfft. Who could ever cling to me more than you?"

"Nobody." He sighed in satisfaction before raising his head and continued to move the cars around.

The moment felt so cozy, especially after giving myself such a big scare, that I fell asleep under the two remote-controlled cars driving around and making not-so-loud noises.