He was closer to Hadyn than Ty was, for good reason. He knew some of what had happened - he and Ty had already been the best of friends at nine - and he could understand why his friend was closer to Elisha, to his uncles Victor and Jordan, than he was to Hadyn. For Carlos, though, Hadyn had long filled in all the holes Felipe and Bethany Sánchez had left empty. He'd been a quiet boy in the center of a raucous and energetic Latin-Anglo family, and often overlooked. Hadyn had been the one who listened to him, and unlike Felipe, Carlos thought now, there hadn't been conditions or expectations wrapped around Hadyn and Elisha's love for him. Logically, that should have meant that it would have affected him less when his biological father washed his hands of him, but it had put cracks in his psyche that even the Kagans couldn't entirely fix.

Maybe that was why, even with Hadyn's words and even knowing they were true, he wasn't sure that he could ever convince Gael to love him. Even if Gael opened himself up to love again, Carlos thought, what reason did he have to love Carlos - a man whose main appeal seemed to be the fact that he could fuck him the way Patrick had no doubt taught Gael to like? His own family hadn't wanted him, not really. His sisters and brothers, sure, but he'd been easy for his parents to let go of.

Some of his thoughts no doubt showed on his face, and even if they didn't - Hadyn was a perceptive man. And Hadyn understood Carlos, it seemed, far better than either of them would have liked. "I think I might be falling in love with him," he confessed after a moment. It was more than caring, more than simply liking. "And it scares me. Because if he knows, he'll reject it." Reject Carlos, more specifically, and that was...well, he just wasn't sure he could take another rejection from someone he loved like that. Of course, it wasn't just the all too likely rejection that scared him, Carlos thought.

There was also the always present suspicion that he wasn't a man who could be loved at all.