Word Count: 1023

Christopher Gallo knew that he was lucky.

There really wasn’t anything for him to say to deny that. He had a good family, relatively good looks, a good education, and a lot of money, and though he knew the old adage “money can’t buy happiness” was true in some cases, he acknowledged that his family’s success in the wealth department had indeed allowed him to grow up in a manner that he and many others would consider appropriately happy. For almost twenty years now he’d lived a pretty good life (hell, a great life), and even if he tended to whine about things that weren’t all that bad in the grand scheme of things, he’d never really had any true complaints.

Except that sometimes, especially recently, he felt a bit… trapped.

Oh, of course he knew what people would say in response to that. “Suck it up. Get over it. What do you really have to complain about?” “Trapped” seemed like such a typical thing for a rich kid to say. “I’m trapped by my fame and success” or “People only want me for my money” or “It’s not as easy as you think.”

Chris figured some of that could be true for other people in his situation, but it wasn’t true for him. It helped that he wasn’t famous (though maybe he would be one day if he kept playing ball); his parents might mingle around famous people on occasion (it couldn’t really be avoided at certain dinners and events), but Chris and his brothers had always been kept out of all of that. It also helped that he never really advertised exactly how much money he had to his name. People assumed he was decently well-off because of his dad’s high rank, but they never seemed to realize that his dad's salary was a mere pittance compared to his family’s net worth, that the money came from other areas, too, and Chris was more than happy to let them continue to make their assumptions.

He liked being just another guy—a well-dressed guy with a big apartment and a nice car, sure, but not someone people would look at and view as an entirely different sort of person by virtue of his family’s riches.

Again, he knew he was lucky, but he didn’t think it was always necessary to flaunt just how lucky he really was. And despite the ease with which he’d made it through life so far, he still felt trapped—certainly not because of the money, but because of the people who had made up his life so far.

The two biggest culprits were probably the two people he spent most of his time around these days: his mother and his boyfriend.

He loved his mother. He loved that she was sweet and adoring but could take care of herself and keep the family together even with his father away for extended periods of time. She was a mother and a father and she did it well, not just with her own kids but with all the other people in her life that she adored just as much. He might not always talk about his private life with her, and sometimes she brought those sorts of things up at times that he didn’t think were necessarily appropriate, but he loved being able to turn to her when he needed her and knowing she’d always be there.

His boyfriend was startlingly similar—definitely not as flighty as his mother sometimes seemed, but just as caring in many of the same ways. He’d gotten more from Paris than he would have thought to ask for in a significant other, surely more than he’d gotten from Skye, but then he and Skye had been teenagers while he and Paris were… well, still teenagers, too, but Chris liked to think that his relationship with Paris was more mature than his relationship with Skye had ever been, because he and Paris shared a lot more between them than Chris had ever shared with anyone before.

But sometimes he felt as if that was all his life had become. It had gone from baseball, money, and Mommy to baseball, money, and sometimes Mommy but mostly Paris.

It wasn’t horrible, just… sometimes he wondered if things might be a little too serious. He couldn’t hear things like “I love you”—even if Paris didn’t remember saying it—and not wonder if all of this might be a little too much too soon.

He was only nineteen years old. Sure, he’d be twenty in a few months, but what was the difference? It was just another year. Maybe he’d grown physically, but other than that he hadn’t changed at all. He was still just a kid. He’d traveled around the world passing his childhood as a Navy brat, but he’d never really seen the world, because back then he’d been too young to understand. Now he was older. Now he was a knight. Now he had other responsibilities besides school and walking his dog and being a good son and brother.

Yet he still didn’t think he understood, not completely, because when it came down to it he’d always had someone there to hold his hand through everything.

He’d never really been independent.

Chris sat on the couch in his living-room—sideways, so he could look into the kitchen area and watch Paris throw something together for dinner like Chris’s mother would have done if he was at home.

He should have thought about how lucky he was. He should have thought about how considerate his boyfriend was to make him dinner and do his laundry and look after his dog, or how devoted Paris was to their relationship. He should have thought about how much he liked having Paris there, living with him and sharing his life. He should have thought about how good it felt to have Paris be a part of it.

Instead, he thought about how he’d never really known anything else, and he wondered…

Maybe he wasn’t as ready for this as he’d thought he was.

Maybe he wasn’t ready for love.