Page 53 of Bounced!

Neither of us spoke.

I’d watched Mark command a full bar on a Saturday, defuse a drunk twice his width, and carry a whole family on his back and never set it down. Yet there he was, undone by a couch and a conversation. I loved him for it, which was a word I hadn’t said to myself in that plain a form until it was already sitting there in my chest with its shoes on.

Mark turned his mug in his hands.

“Okay, I’ll go,” he said. “I’m bad at this, full disclosure. Last time I did this, Obama was president, and I was a different weight.” He rubbed his neck. “But I want to do it. That’s the headline. Whatever this is, I want to keep doing it. I didn’t want it to be a bar thing or a we-got-carried-away thing. I wanted to say it somewhere with the lights on.”

“The lights are on.”

“They are. So.” He looked at me, and the nerves under the gruff were the most honest thing I’d ever seen him wear. “I want this. I want you. I don’t totally know how to have either, but I want both. That’s the whole speech. I practiced a longer one in the truck. That’s the part that survived.”

I sat with the warm weight of that moment.

Being wanted out loud was a strange thing. I’d wanted from a distance so long I’d forgotten the other side of it even existed, that a person could sit three feet away and say all that to your face with the lights on. It seeped into somewhere deep. I had to take a breath before I could answer him.

“I want it, too,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“I drove across town at eleven at night to hold your coat while you flirted with strangers, Mark. I’ve wanted it for two years. I’m the last man in this conversation who needs convincing.”

That got a grin, relief cracking it wide. “Right. Yeah. The wingman thing was, in hindsight, not my finest hour.”

“It was a low point in a rich history of low points.”

“Hey.”

“You asked a man who was deeply ‘in like’ with you to help you meet other men. At a leather bar. You made him watch.”

“When you say it like that—”

“Is there another way to say it?”

“No,” he admitted. “There really isn’t.”

We went quiet again, but the good kind now, the truck kind. The cushion of sense still sat between us, and neither of us had closed the distance. I understood we were both being careful, both circling.

Mark got there first. Mark always walked straight at a thing.

“So what is this?” he said. “Are we, like—are we—” He stopped and grimaced. “I don’t even know the right word. Is there a word? What’s the word for two grown men who—”

“Don’t say, ‘boyfriends.’”

“I wasn’t going to say, ‘boyfriends.’”

“You were about to say, ‘boyfriends.’”

“I was considering, ‘boyfriends,’” he said, “and I rejected it because I’m forty-eight years old, and if I call you my boyfriend, I’ll sound like I’m asking you to the sock hop. It doesn’t fit in my mouth.”

“The sock hop?” I snorted, unable to hold it back. Then I smoothed my face and said, “So don’t use it.”

“But then what are you?” The jokes thinned. Under them was a man who needed to know where the ground was. “I label the shelves in my own garage, Dante. I can’t have the biggest thing in my life just floating around undefined with no—”

“The biggest thing in your life?”

He went a little red.

“Yeah, that came out. I’m not taking it back. Don’t make me take it back.” He turned his mug again. “I spent months deciding I was too old and too much and too done, then you kissed me at a bar, and I haven’t felt ‘too anything’ since, except maybe too happy, which is a new problem I don’t have a label for.”