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Chapter 21 - Mission to Rescue Sunshine.

“Hey, Pops . . . So, um . . . I guess you’re probably wondering what’s going on and why I’m in California right now . . .” Quinne started off lamely.

“Nope. I think your sister has adequately explained that part of this caper,” Brian replied with a smirk for his crafty daughter. “You’re there trying to sabotage her father’s wedding to some troll, right? That part I get.”

“Great. Then, since you seem to know what’s going on, how about you return the favor and explain exactly how it is that I even HAVE a sister I didn’t know about until three months ago,” Quinne immediately hit back, just as snarkily as any Kinney ever.

“I’ve got no clue on that part, Spark.”

“You’re seriously expecting us to buy that, Pops?” Quinne questioned harshly. “Come on. You’re the guy who’s always saying that there’s no such thing as a coincidence, right? So how it is that you and your HUSBAND - yeah, we know about that too - hire a surrogate so you can start a family and then, after you two break up, you both miraculously end up with a baby each without ever knowing about the other child? That’s a pretty big stretch, don’t you think?”

Brian chuckled again, apparently amused by his pushy daughter and her unerring logic. “I promise you, Spark, I had NO idea there was another one of you out there - which, by the way, is a really scary thought - and if I HAD known, I wouldn’t have kept you two apart. I swear. Cross my heart.” He facetiously made the juvenile gesture with his index finger x’ing over his chest to emphasize his words.

“Then how do you explain what happened?” Qianna interrupted. “We figured that you and my dad probably didn’t realize you were having twins when you separated, since it was so early in the pregnancy, but you had to have figured it out when we were born, right?”

“Except that I wasn’t there when you were born.” Brian huffed a big sigh and grimaced at whatever memories were assaulting him. “I hate using the phrase, ‘it’s complicated’, but that’s the only way to describe what happened, I guess.”

“Yeah, well, complicated or not, I think we have the right to know how this shitstorm came about,” Quinne asserted, then added, “and how you think this thing can be fixed. Because I can tell you one thing, Pops, Qianna and I aren’t going to be happy if there isn’t some way the two of us can be together.”

“Now that we’ve found each other, we won’t go back,” her sister echoed the sentiment.

“Judging by the lengths you two have already gone to in order to prove that, I think I believe you,” Brian smiled affectionately at the girl sitting in front of him. Then he stood up straight and announced, “Honeycutt, I’m going to need more fucking caffeine if I’m expected to unburden my soul here.”

“Me too, I think,” Em agreed as he bustled off to the kitchen for more coffee and breakfast fixin’s for all.

By the time he returned about ten minutes later - laden with a tray full of coffee for the adults, hot chocolate for the kids, and more scones for all - the facetime call had been transferred via screen mirroring to the big flat screen television on the wall of Drew’s study and the principles on the Pittsburgh end had taken up more comfortable seating where they could all see. On Quinne’s end, she’d also scrounged up some breakfast for herself and made a more comfortable nest of the pillows and quilts on Qianna’s bed. As soon as everyone was resupplied with refreshments, though, Quinne renewed her inquiry.

“Okay, enough stalling, Pops. Start explaining,” Quinne ordered.

“How the fuck did I end up with the pushy one?” Brian complained, with a smile sent Qianna’s way.

“You were just lucky, I guess,” Quinne beamed at them all from the huge screen overhead. “Don’t discount my QiQi, though. She may seem like the less assertive one, but she’s wicked sneaky and quietly conniving. You don’t want to get on her bad side either.”

“I can see that,” Brian conceded and then scrubbed at his face with both hands before finally launching into full disclosure mode. “So, Justin and I . . . Shit . . . I knew we screwed up but I didn’t think it would affect anyone else . . . I’m sorry about that, girls. Really. And you know I don’t apologize easily but, fuck it, you’re owed at least that much . . . Anyway, I really didn’t know there were two of you. And I don’t know for sure whether Justin was aware of the situation, but I seriously doubt he knew either. He would never have let you two grow up apart. But that’s not really an excuse is it? If we hadn’t fucked up so bad in the first place it wouldn’t have been an issue.”

“You can say that again,” Emmett mumbled, shooting Brian a withering look, which the big stud chose to ignore.

“Yeah, well, they say hindsight is 20/20, right?” Brian carried on. “I have no idea what we thought we were doing, to be honest. We’d only just worked out our shit enough to finally do the marriage thing and then we had Gus and JR for the holidays and I somehow got the idea that we could do the family thing too. That was back when you were off in the Great White North during the Munchers’ Toronto Retreat, Sonny Boy, and I have to admit that I was missing you more than I had thought I would. So, when Sunshine jumped on the chance to try for a family, I naively thought it would somehow all work out.” Another big sigh caused Brian to pause while he struggled to frame his confession. “It didn’t go well from the very beginning, though. We even disagreed on who to use as our surrogate - I wanted to go through a reputable agency but Justin insisted that we use his artschool friend who needed the money. I gave in, of course, but only because he talked me into it by claiming that, since Lizette looked sorta like him - she was blond and short and artistic - that we’d end up with a genetically similar baby. Which didn’t make any sense, really, when he later insisted that we mix our sperm so we could be ‘surprised’ by who the father was. Silly, sentimental, little twat . . .”

Brian drifted off at that point, lost in whatever visions he was seeing in his mind’s eye, a tender yet sad smile coming over his face.

“Well, that would explain the two different fathers, right?” Gus interjected? “What was that thing you two tried to explain to me? Hetero Dads Extra Fertile something or other?”

“Heteropaternal Superfecundation,” both girls corrected him, speaking at exactly the same time and in voices so similar it was like hearing in stereo, which caused everyone in the room to smile.

“We’ll send you a link to the video, Gus,” Qianna offered. “It’s animated so you’ll like it and, by the end, you’ll actually be able to say the term.”

“Whatever,” Gus waved off the helpful offer. “But that’s what it is, right? Two different fathers from the same pregnancy? That’s how you can be twins and have two fathers - they mixed their sperm and the surrogate was super fertile and . . . voila, I get two sisters for the price of one.”

“Leave it to Sunshine to overperform even in the reproduction arena. He always was a showoff, so of course his kids would be the same,” Brian huffed a quiet laugh before continuing. “Anyway, we did the thing and Lizette got our mixed loads squirted up her hoohaw.” There was a round of groans and an ‘ick’ from Gus at that particular description of the procedure, but Brian ignored them all. “And the next thing we knew, we had a positive pregnancy test. I mistakenly thought the hard part was over, but . . . we didn’t even make it to the end of the first trimester before the bitch backed out on us.”

“Lizette was the one who backed out?” Quinne seized on that point. “It wasn’t that you and Justin broke up? We thought that, maybe, it was you two splitting up that caused all the problems and then you just decided to take one baby each.”

“Hardly. It was that bitch pulling out of the contract that CAUSED us to argue in the first place. She’s what broke us up,” Brian insisted.

“Well, that, plus the fact that you’re a total ass and you abandoned him afterwards when Baby was at one of the lowest points of his life,” Emmett added, glaring Brian’s way.

“I never fucking abandoned him,” Brian shot back, now sounding more angry than sad. “We had a fight. We were both upset about the surrogate thing falling through and we both said shit we probably shouldn’t have. I decided to leave before things got even more out of control. I needed to cool off. And when I came back . . . HE was the one who’d left ME.”

“That's not how I heard it from Baby,” Emmett contended, just as angry as Brian by that point. “Justin came to me, in tears, more upset than I’d ever seen him - worse even than after the bashing, mind you - and told me that you blamed him for the surrogate backing out and had ordered him to leave. He was so hurt, he cried all night long. And the worst part of it all was that he blamed himself just as much as you had. He agreed it was all his fault, moaning about how he forced you to pick Lizette, and now that everything had gone to shit it was no wonder you hated him. It was all Daphne and I could do to calm him down and get him to finally get some sleep. But he was gone again by the time we woke up the next morning. We didn’t hear from him again for almost two weeks and then all I got was a voicemail saying he needed to ‘make some serious changes in his life’. And that was that. The next thing I knew, Daphne told me he’d found that job in Cali and wasn’t planning on coming back.”

“And you didn’t call or tell ME any of this?” Brian snarled at Emmett. “Fuck you, Honeycutt! I never meant for him to leave - that was just something stupid I yelled when we were arguing and . . . I was gutted by the thought of losing the baby, okay? After we got the news, I spent the afternoon getting snot-puking drunk, and Justin got angry at me for how I was handling it. Then I said some shit about how, if he didn’t like it, he knew where the door was . . . But I didn’t MEAN it, okay? . . . Then I stormed out. And when I came home the next morning, he was just gone. I had no idea what happened to him or where he’d run off to. I figured he was still pissed at me - which, let’s face it, wasn’t exactly unwarranted - but I assumed he’d eventually come home. Wasn’t that the whole point of the marriage thing? Commitment means you have to stay with each other, right? But, no, he just left. Again. Without a fucking word. So, yeah, I . . . I lost it.” Brian fell silent, looking so sad and hurt that they were all stunned by his unprecedented show of emotion, until he finally gathered his self-control and continued in a much more subdued tone. “A couple weeks later, when I finally climbed out of the bottle of scotch I’d fallen into, I had no idea where he’d gone or how to find him. I just assumed it was over and he’d had enough . . .”

“Oh, Pops,” Qianna slid closer to the big man and encircled him in her arms in a gesture of comfort. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault, Kiddo,” Brian absolved her with a return hug. “Anyway . . . Life goes on, right? I survived and everything went back to how it was before. Until, that is, almost a year later when I get this call from Lizette saying she’d changed her mind again and asking if I still wanted the baby or should she just put it up for adoption. What am I going to say, ‘No’? Of course I wasn’t going to let her give Sunshine’s baby to some stranger, so I anteed up another wad of cash for her and she handed Quinne over. But I wasn’t around for the birth and she never mentioned a second baby - why would I even suspect that, right? - so I had no idea about you, Qianna.” Brian squeezed the girl’s shoulders with his one arm in a semi-apology. “I surmise that Lizette probably did the same thing to Justin - demanding more money from him as well, the bitch - and that’s how you ended up with him. And before you ask, I DID try to contact Justin to tell him about the baby - I had to hire a fucking private investigator to track him down in California - but he didn’t return any of my calls so I just figured that he didn’t care anymore. If the little twat had called me back, we would have known what Lizette was up to and . . .”

“. . . And Qianna and I wouldn’t have had to grow up alone, separated by 3,000 miles,” Quinne summed things up for everyone. “Shit, Pops, you two stubborn idiots completely fucked up everything. You realize that, right?”

“So it seems,” Brian replied, looking up at the screen where his daughter was glowering down at him. Then, heaving one last, huge, sigh, Brian stood up and smiled around at his audience with determination. “But we’re going to fix all of that right now!”

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By 7:30 pm that evening, Brian, Gus and Qianna were at the airport waiting to board a flight from Pittsburgh to San Jose. Unfortunately, that was the first available flight, and they’d have to deal with a three hour layover in Denver, so they wouldn’t actually arrive in California till just before dawn the following day. However, it was the best that could be arranged at the last minute.

Strangely enough, the revelations of the morning had left them quiet and introspective so there hadn’t been much discussion afterwards beyond what was needed to make their travel arrangements. Which isn’t to say that they weren’t, all three, busy mulling things over in their minds. There was a lot of private speculation about what might have been, or should have been, not to mention trepidation about what was going to happen. But underlying all, at least for Qianna, was a frisson of excitement about getting to see her father again, even if coming clean to him was probably going to land her in a heap of trouble.

“You okay, Kiddo?” Brian asked as he took a seat next Qianna in the Liberty Air VIP Departures Lounge.

“Yeah. Just . . . worried about seeing dad, I guess,” she admitted. “He’s going to be soooooo pissed off at me.”

“He’ll get over it,” Brian assured her. “Sunshine would forgive almost anything for those he loves.”

“How can you say that when it seems like he just walked out on you and your marriage like he did?”

“Yeah, well . . . It’s not like I ever made it easy for him to stay with me,” Brian confessed wistfully. “Your dad and I had, at best, a rocky relationship from the start. I . . . I don’t know how much Quinne or Gus told you about me, but I didn’t have very good role models in the relationship department when I was a kid so I was always a bad bet. Justin tried his hardest, the stubborn little shit, but I guess it wasn’t enough. I don’t blame him for finally giving up. I’m just glad that I got Quinne out of it. And now, hopefully, you too.”

Qianna leaned over to shoulder butt him reassuringly, although she wasn’t done with the conversation. “But how is this going to work? I mean, my dad’s still engaged to the fucking Yeti from Hell and we still live a nine hour plane ride away from each other. I can’t stand the idea of being that far away from all of you.”

Gus kicked her foot gently from where he was sitting across the aisle to let her know the feeling was mutual. Qianna offered him up a genuine smile with a little added nose scrunch to take the seriousness out of the gesture. It worked, causing Gus to chuckle and smile back.

“Shit. When you do that, you really DO look like Sunshine,” Brian commented.

“I meant to ask - why do you call my dad ‘Sunshine’?”

“It’s something Deb came up with.” Brian shrugged and then smiled with a nostalgic glint to his eye. “It suited him so well, it just sorta stuck. When he smiles at you, it’s like . . . shit . . . that smile just seems to light up the whole fucking world, you know?” The usually laconic man shook his head and laughed quietly to himself. “Don’t tell him I said this, but it was that fucking smile that roped me in from the very beginning. He smiled at me from across the street and I was toast. It was like a moth being drawn to a flame - I couldn’t look away. And, fuck, he was so damned beautiful. Right from the start, I couldn’t get enough of just looking at him. Touching him. All that perfect, unmarred, pale skin . . .” Brian stopped, cleared his throat, and fidgeted in his seat, which caused Qianna to blush as she realized exactly where those thoughts were going. Luckily he changed to a much less uncomfortable topic and added, “that’s why I call Quinne ‘Spark’, you know? She was all I had left of my Sunshine and she brought back at least a little spark of that brilliance to my life.”

“Sheesh, Pops, I had no idea you were such a big old softie,” Gus teased, probably in an effort to alleviate the somber mood his father’s words had created.

“I’ve told you before about using the word ‘soft’ around me, Sonny Boy,” Brian warned with a mock-serious glare that caused them all to laugh.

When the laughter had died down again, though, Qianna’s anxiety returned. “I doubt I’ll be seeing his sunshine smile for awhile though. By the time he gets done lecturing me for going off on a wild tangent all the way across the country without telling him, I’ll be grounded for life. Although, maybe that’s a good thing; maybe he’ll be so angry he won’t let me be part of the stupid wedding to the Yeti. Of course, I’ll still have to put up with the creep after the wedding, though, so . . .”

“I promise I won’t leave you to the tender mercies of The Yeti,” Brian chuckled at the poor little worrywort.

“You laugh, but he really is THAT horrible,” Qianna promised. “He tried to scald Quinne in the shower yesterday and he’s always saying mean stuff to me when my dad isn’t around. I can’t stand him. I mean, dad’s had some loser boyfriends before, but Hairy Alex is the WORST!”

“I don’t know . . . there was that one old guy a few years back - some producer or something, I think - the one that looked like he was about seventy. I thought he was pretty much the bottom of the barrell,” Brian ventured.

“How do you know about Matthew?” Qianna asked, remembering the older man whom her father had dated for about a year back when she was in the fifth grade.

“I’ve periodically kept tabs on your dad,” Brian admitted, trying to make it seem like a casual thing even though Qianna knew it would have taken serious effort for him to have found that information since her father wasn’t one to let his personal life be widely known. “I saw a picture of the two of them together at some movie premiere or something a while back. From what I could tell, it sounded serious, but I’m glad it didn’t work out. Sunshine would be wasted on a dried out old geezer like that.” Qianna gave him an appraising look causing him to shrug unapologetically. “Personally, my favorite was the bodybuilder guy he was seeing last year. But, then again, I’ve always had a bit of thing for gym bunnies myself.”

“Dean?” Qianna had to laugh at that assessment. “Dean WAS actually pretty sweet but he was as dumb as a sack of hammers. I seriously wondered some days how he managed to dress himself. I don’t think my dad was interested in him for his brains though.”

“No doubt,” Brian winked at her and chuckled. “Not that a brainless jock could keep Justin happy for long. I knew he’d get bored with that one pretty fast.”

“So . . . if you’ve been keeping track of all my dad’s boyfriends all this time, that must mean Gus was right; you’re not over him, are you?”

Brian didn’t immediately answer and Qianna thought she might even have detected a bit of a blush as he seemed to think about his answer.

“No, I don’t suppose I’ll ever be over him,” Brian finally admitted with a sad smile. “What Justin and I had was . . . It wasn’t something that comes along more than once in a lifetime. At least not for me. Like I said, I’m not exactly the relationship type, so I figure Sunshine was it for me. I had my shot and I blew it. Game over.”

“But . . .” Qianna was frustrated by Brian’s strangely defeatist attitude - it didn’t fit with the self-confident man she’d come to know. “If you still loved my dad enough to watch him from afar all these years, why didn’t you do something about it? Why didn’t you come get him. Try to explain and win him back? Do something!”

Brian simply shrugged again - a habit of his that Qianna was becoming annoyed with - and answered. “Everytime I thought about it, he was hooked up with someone else. He seemed happy enough and I didn’t want to storm in and ruin whatever he had going. All I ever wanted was for him to be happy, so what good would me showing up on his doorstep and chasing away the boyfriend du jour do? I figured I’d just wait and see and, if I ever saw an opening, then I’d . . . I don’t know . . . swoop in and save the day?”

“You, Pops, are a romantic old fool,” Gus pointed out the obvious for all of them, to another round of laughter. “And all these years you’ve been giving ME shit whenever I’d fall in love with someone? If I’d known, I wouldn’t have let you give me such a hard time.”

“For your information, Dad HASN’T been happy all this time,” Qianna interrupted their joking. “I mean, didn’t the fact that he’s been going through boyfriends faster than most people go through socks tell you anything? He’s never been happy with any of them. Not for long. But at least none of the others were devious enough to try and trick Dad into marriage - a mistake that won’t be easy to correct when he finally wakes up and realizes just what a scheming, manipulative, conman, Alex really is. Then it WILL be too late. For Dad and for you,” she asserted conclusively.   

Right then their flight was announced. Brian stood up and started to gather together his belongings. Qianna thought it odd that he was smiling the way he was when she felt so upset by the specter of what they were heading into.

“Well, then I guess I’ll just have to go break up a wedding and win back my man,” the big stud declared, with a goofy smile directed towards his two co-conspirators. “Who’s with me?”

“Me!” both kids shouted enthusiastically, jostling past Brian to get to the gate as quickly as they could.

And so the three accomplices set off, together, on their Mission to Rescue Sunshine.

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