Page 62 of Bounced!

I didn’t say anything. I kept my hand on his scalp. I let him have space to breathe.

“He’s still in Atlanta. We don’t talk. It’s not a fight. There was never a fight. It’s just a thing that cooled all the way down and neither of us ever tried to warm it back up. My mother keeps a chair for him at every table in her mind, but I keep that door shut. We’re both right, probably. That’s the worst kind of family thing, the kind where everybody’s a little right and still a lot wrong.”

I lay there and held him, understanding a great deal more about him than I had an hour before—his stillness, his rationing, his wall with no door. He hadn’t built it out of nothing. Somebody had poured the footing.

After a moment, he shifted, lifted his head off my chest, and looked at me in the dark. I watched him decide to ask the thing I could feel him circling. “You want to know what he’d think of you, don’t you?”

I hadn’t asked it, but he was right. It was sitting in me, loud enough for him to hear, the way he heard everything. “Yeah,” I admitted. “I guess I do. Your mom, your dad, all of it. What do you think they’d think of me?”

Dante stared at me a long moment, then he reached out and laid his hand flat on my forearm. He looked at it there, his hand on my arm, and I looked, too. Neither of us said anything because we were both seeing the same thing.

He was dark against me, that deep, rich black-brown that had knocked the wind out of me when he took his shirt off, laid over my graying, sun-freckled, aggressively pale slab of a forearm. The contrast of it in the low light was—I don’t have a better word—it was beautiful. His skin and mine. The difference of us, right there, his fingers splayed over my arm.

“My mother would take one look at you and decide you don’t eat enough, which is insane. She’d start cooking immediately. She’d have your whole life story out of you inside an hour and your mother’s maiden name inside two. She’d love you loud and proud, the way she does everything.” His thumb moved across my skin. “And then she’d take me aside and say, ‘He’s a white man, Dante. You know that, right?’ It wouldn’t be a problem, mind you, just a fact she wanted to be sure I’d considered, because she looks at everything. I’d tell her I’d considered it, and she’d nod and say, ‘Go make you a plate.’”

“And your dad?”

“My father would have two problems with you.” He said it plainly. “That you’re a man, and that you’re a white man.” He let that sit for a second before going on. “I spent a long time letting his two problems be my two problems, longer than I want to admit.” His hand pressed a little into my arm. “I never let myself want a white man, Mark, not once. It wasn’t because I thought it was wrong. I don’t. It was, I guess, because I could hear him in the back of my head, and it was easier to close that door, too, than to hear his voice every time I wanted somebody. I closed a lot of doors to keep from hearing him.”

I put my hand over his, the dark and the pale and my big pale paw over the top of both. “And this door? Our door?”

“This one I opened anyway.” He looked up at me. “It’s the first time in my life I heard his voice and opened the door anyway. That’s what you are, if you want to know. You’re the first door I opened with him still talking.”

I didn’t have words for that. He’d taken the ones I had. So I did the only thing I could think to do, which was lift his hand off my arm and kiss the back of it, his knuckles dark against my mouth. I held his hand there for a long second so he’d know I understood the size of what he’d just handed me.

“I love the way it looks,” I said, when I could. “Is that—can I say that? Your hand on my arm. You next to me. I’ve been lying here half the night just looking at us, the difference of it. It’s the best-looking thing I’ve ever seen in this bed, and I built this bed.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “You built this bed?”

“I built this whole house, smart-ass. That’s not the point—”

“It’s a little bit the point—”

“The point is, you’re beautiful, and we look good together, and I don’t care what your dad’s voice says. I’ll out-stubborn a voice. That’s my whole skill set.”

He laughed, low and real, and leaned up and kissed me. For a while, the heavy thing lifted and it was just the two of us being warm and stupid in the dark, but I could feel there was still one more thing, one more door, further back than the others. I felt him get near it and hesitate.

“You said two boys,” I said, careful as I’d ever been about anything. “Your mom raised two boys.”

Dante flinched.

I waited.

It was a long, painful moment before he spoke.

“I have a brother. He’s older. Well, he was.” He took a breath. “He was always the one who couldn’t get right. A lot of alcohol. Drugs, some. The wrong people mostly.” The next breath was longer. “We lost track of him a few years back. Nobody knows if he’s—” And he stopped. I felt him stop, felt him hit the edge of it, the place where the words ran out. “Nobody knows. That’s all. That’s the whole of it.”

“Okay,” I said, gently closing the door for him so he didn’t have to. “Okay, that’s plenty. You don’t say another word about that tonight or ever, unless you want to.”

I felt him exhale, felt the gratitude in it, the relief of a man let off a hook he’d expected to hang on. I understood I’d just been trusted with the location of the deepest thing in him, not the thing itself, just where it was buried, and that was more than enough.

We lay there a bit longer, and then something else popped into my head, a thing I’d been carrying since he started talking about his father. I didn’t have a smooth way to get to it, so I went at it the way I attacked everything, straight on and a little clumsy.

“Can I ask one more thing?” I asked. “And it’s going to come out wrong. I can feel it lining up to come out wrong, so just . . . bear with me.”

“Okay.”

“You told me what your mom would think, and your dad—the white man thing—and I’ve been lying here and I keep—” I stopped, gulped, and started over. “I never asked you about you. I asked what they’d think. I didn’t ask if you’re okay with it, you know, me being me.” I gestured uselessly at my own pale arm in the dark. “All this, a white guy. You grew up with his voice and her worries and the whole community’s pain, and I don’t know what you carried out of it. I guess I’d rather know now than find out in a year that some part of you flinches every time we walk into a room.” I made myself finish it. “Are you okay with me, Dante? Really? Because I’d understand if it’s . . . if it’s complicated. I don’t want to be a thing you have to talk yourself into.”