Page 64 of Bounced!

Just when I thought it was done, that I’d spoken my piece, Dante asked the question I’d been afraid of for longer than I cared to admit.

“Do you miss him?”

And because it was Dante, because he’d trusted me with a brother he couldn’t finish naming, I gave him the true answer instead of the safe one.

“I did for a long time, but now . . . shit . . . I don’t . . . let me think a second.” My fingers found his scalp and began to massage again. My mind was racing almost as fast as my heart. “I don’t think I’ve missed him in a while. What I missed was not being left. I missed being somebody’s somebody. I missed the idea that a man could look at all of—” I gestured at myself, the size and the gray and the too-much of me. “—all this and decide to stay. I think that’s what I was grieving. I don’t think it was Wes or him leaving. Somewhere in the last couple of months, the whole thing quietly stopped being about a note on a counter and started being about a man reading Russian literature at the end of my bar. I was just too dumb to notice that grief had changed addresses.” I tipped his chin up. “I’m not haunting or haunted by anything anymore. The man I want is lying on my chest with his hand on my arm. I don’t run from the things I decide to keep. I told you that on the couch, and I meant it.”

His eyes had gone bright in the dark.

“Wes taught me one other thing. I’ll give him that. He taught me that a person can leave with no reason. So now I get to be the man who stays with no reason—or with every reason. You’re my reason, Dante. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll tell you that every morning until you quit bracing for me to change my mind, however long that takes.”

Dante pressed his face into my chest, hard, and breathed me in the way he had earlier. I held the back of his head and let him have it, the big, guarded, beautiful man taking his own turn at being reassured for once in his life.

“Okay,” he said finally, muffled, gruff, and wrecked.

“Okay,” I said.

We lay there a while.

The sweat had dried.

The fan still turned.

The whole of us was in the world now, both our families and both our ghosts. Instead of heavy, it felt like we’d set something down we’d each been carrying alone. Now, it was all spread out on the floor where we could both see it, and it turned out lighter with two.

Dante finally stirred, propped up on one elbow, and looked at me, something wry and warm coming into his face.

“So,” he said.

“So.”

“I think we blew right past the casual dating thing.”

I laughed. “Yeah. I’d say the casual portion of the evening shot right up my ass.”

Dante shook his head. “You’re disgusting.”

“And you’re sexy.”

He squeezed my arm and smiled. “We said we weren’t going to pick a word.”

“We did say that.”

“On the couch, only a few hours ago. We were very mature about it.” His mouth twitched. “You couldn’t say, ‘boyfriend,’ without hearing a sock hop.”

“I stand by that. It’s a teenager’s word. It doesn’t fit a man with a mortgage and a bad back and a house he built with his own hands.” I squeezed his body into me with an arm. “And don’t make fun of sock hops. They were cool back in the day.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” Dante chuckled.

He stared a long moment, and then the last of his wall crumbled, every brick of it. What was left was just the man, open and unhindered. “Boyfriends?”

It wasn’t a stupid word anymore.

Somewhere between the couch and my bed, between his family and mine, between the note on the island and his hand on my arm, it had gotten heavy enough to hold. It fit in my mouth just fine now, and felt right.

“Boyfriends.”

Dante craned to kiss me, then let his head fall back onto my chest and drifted off. I rubbed his scalp a while longer before sleep claimed me, too.