Chapter Text
“What do you wanna call yourself?”
“Umm…”
“Greg the Great Jr.?”
“Nooo, every Greg uses that, I don’t wanna be a copycat.” He took a bite through the soft snap of Magic Chocolate Shell and opened a creek through which vanilla cream drained and dribbled over his thumb.
“Well, my deepest apologies, Captain. I didn’t mean to be a copycat,” his father faked affront and produced a couple napkins from his jacket pocket. Gregory Sr. bent at his knees in a half squat to wipe at the soiled knuckles before handing the napkins off for Greg to finish the job. “The Fantastic Mr. Hirsch?”
Greg scrunched up his nose. “I don’t wanna use my name.”
“No?” He resumed standing and held his hand over his heart in a mock show of hurt. “My own son denying the family name twice .”
“What about… Magnificus?”
“Ooh-hoo, I like it, it’s strong.”
He clicked open the doors of the Lincoln and got into his seat, then moved a large box with the words “YOU CAN DO MAGIC!” emblazoned in hot pink to the back. Greg sat and kicked the scraps of wrapping paper on the floor with his toes as he took a bite of his waffle cone.
“Magnificus, and I can make an elephant disappear! Kaboom! That’s the smoke,” Greg informed with a hand flourish.
“A whole elephant? Is this for your first trick?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s start a little smaller,” his father smiled as he took the last bite of his ice cream and rolled the paper between his hands into a firm ball. “Like a rabbit?”
“Or a man!”
“Or a man, okay. That’s… smaller than an elephant, I’ll give you that.”
Gregory Sr. turned on the car and rolled down the window to toss out the paper ball into the street. He took a quick look at his son to check for a locked seat belt before sliding the car into traffic. On the radio Greg could faintly hear the transgressive whispers of Meredith Brooks and delighted in the repetitions of ‘bitch’ as if his dad’s ignorance of it were permission. In the car with his mother the radio would be strictly instrumental or turned off entirely in fear that she could become distracted and cause a pile-up, but here he was, listening to swear words with a dripping ice cream in his hands and his shoes bouncing against the leather seat.
“Well, Captain I gotta know, who’d you disappear? Grampa? Mommy?”
“I’d disappear Michael,” Greg responded with a shrug and a final crunch.
“Don’t like him? You just met him!”
“I’m sure he’s nice.”
Gregory Sr. laughed at his eight year old’s even-handedness. “But you want to disappear him.”
“Well, he must be bad.”
“Why’s that?”
Greg crumpled the wrapper in his hands like he had seen the man do, but found himself too weak to force it into as tight a shape. He pushed down the button for the window, stopping when the ball was taken from him and tossed out his dad’s side into traffic. Greg pulled up on the button until the window closed and sat back in thought.
“Because… you won’t let me tell Mom about meeting him, so… he’s probably a bad guy, right?”
“I can see your reasoning there, that makes sense… You know, kiddo, I can’t tell you whether he’s a good guy or a bad guy. I don’t really know him that well, but if you don’t like him I’ll tell you what—you never have to see him again.”
“Really?”
When Greg had been introduced to Michael, a short, dense man who could fit easily in a box and fill all its corners with his shape, he had been told the man was a very good friend. That explained the hug his father was pulling away from as Greg approached him earlier that afternoon. He’d waited an hour at school before walking towards home only to be caught with the recognizable form mere blocks from where he left. Michael noticed him first, shook Gregory’s shoulder, and whispered as his father turned around with a brilliant smile. That smile could sell God on Judas’ innocence and to Greg, even as his father grabbed his hand with the one not doing up the buttons on his shirt, this platonic excuse made enough sense.
“Yep! Y’know what? I didn’t think he was too great either. Nice enough guy, though.”
The contents were simple, if not pared down due to displacement: three stacking cups of brushed steel, three matted fuzzy red balls, a short length of rope without a vase, a stack of water-warped cards shuffled with several facing the wrong way, and five tarnished silver rings. The contents of the box didn’t need to be more complicated than this, if they were there would be a chance of emotional reaction, but things being what they were he was comfortable with the fact that Tom had seen the moment of its unveiling.
“All there?”
“Mmhm, yeah… all there,” Greg responded, taking out the cards to count them. “Well, looks like this deck’s missing a few.”
“Do you remember how to use all of this?”
“Yeah, totally, or… I mean, the rings are kinda too rusted to use right, you can see where the join is. But yeah, you can play Monte with the balls or the cards, like—you can do a lot of tricks with just cards.”
“Show me,” Tom grinned and sat in the Sunday morning light with a second cup of coffee. Greg had only returned just before midnight the previous night after a month in LA learning the ropes. He assumed he’d be slipping into a warm bed next to his sleeping partner only to return to a fully lit loft, Mondale at his thighs doing his best not to jump, and Tom in his pajamas, hands in his pockets, smile as wide and warm as the hug that soon followed before Greg could even set his bags down. Now that he was back, Tom kept glowing at him like a moon hung especially to reflect Greg’s light.
“Oh, no, I’m so out of practice,” Greg scoffed, standing up to refill his own mug. “There’s like whole ways to hold your hands and a lot of math, actually—well, if you want to do special tricks. There’s beginner's tricks you don’t need to work that hard on.”
“Wait, wait, wait—how into this did you get?”
“Uh pretty into it. Yeah, I was like… yeah, really into it for like six years, I guess?”
“No!”
Greg returned with his coffee and shrugged before taking a sip, then sat into the low-backed stool.
“Don’t make fun of me.”
“I’m not—“ defended Tom immediately.
“Because this isn’t like your Star Wars thing.”
“Greg.”
“This is the one thing you don’t make fun of me for.”
“I wasn’t going to—I’m curious about it,” Tom beamed, cocking his head slightly.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Like, how long does it take you to…”
“Get good?” Greg completed.
“Yeah.”
“Years, kinda? Like—so I saw this one magician who I think he said for 8 years practiced his grips—how you hold the cards—“ Greg smiled at Tom nodding along and demonstrated with the deck on the table. “So like this is a Biddle grip for controlling the top card, and this is a dealer’s grip which is also a mechanic’s grip—there’s that and then this… is a straddle grip.“
Greg brought his pinky beneath the deck in his left hand, then uncurled his fingers and thumb to let his little finger anchor the cards as they wiggled in his flattened, wavering palm. “See, ‘cause it’s a little straddle.”
“Greg, I absolutely have to kiss you right now.” Tom had already begun moving towards him across the counter, pulled his stool to angle out and used his other hand to take the cards and set them down.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Tom closed around Greg’s lips.
Greg melted into the kiss, the warm weight above him pulled in by long arms. He breathed deep the amber, sandalwood, and rosewood that atomized on his golden skin, the scent he’d missed more than he could ever say.
“I missed you,” Tom breathed into him, combed his fingers through ebony hair, caressed his chin and cradled the back of his neck.
“Oh?”
“Yeah, dumbass, of course,” Tom snickered as he kissed along Greg’s jaw. “Is that okay?”
“Yeah! Yeah, I… I missed you too, Tom.”
“Greg, you don’t have to say it just because I said it.”
Greg laced his fingers through Tom’s hair, longer and softer than he last remembered it being. “I mean it, I do. I did, I’m so happy I’m home.”
Tom kissed Greg’s cheek and brow bone before he scanned Greg’s eyes and re-intensified their contact.
“So happy,” Tom echoed along his lips, furrowing his brows with each passionate re-connection. “So happy.”
Linden trees turn yellow in Autumn but it was early days yet, being only a day into September, and the weather had been unseasonably warm. In comparison to the dry desert heat, Greg languished in the humidity and refused to leave the apartment except to take Mondale on a quick walk.
The couple hadn’t graduated to PDA before Greg’s trip but something about it seemed magnetic to Greg’s mind. He wrapped his hand around Tom’s as it held the leash only for Tom to let go of the leather loop with a confused side-eye.
At the end of the fourth block, Tom circled back with silence and a single finger, disappearing into the corner deli for 45 seconds. When he exited he threw Greg a black plastic bag, which he caught with one hand, the other wrapped around Mondale’s leash.
“Snickers, good call, and—okay!” Greg pulled a pack of playing cards from the bag with a wide grin.
“Not to replace—“
“No! I know. Thanks, Tom.”
He had the instinct to kiss Tom’s cheek, to reach for him again, but could see from the pocketed hands and tight shoulders that it wouldn’t be allowed. Tom saw this desire too and reached around to pat Greg on the shoulder.
“Of course, I want to see some tricks, Houdini!”
The man on screen displayed an End Grip with his left hand. Without recognizing the thought, Greg noted the man’s wedding ring and subconsciously decided he needed a different YouTube mentor to learn this from. He tested the deck in his own palm, clumsier and larger than he felt his hand ought to be, then googled if there were slightly larger cards he should practice with.
When his hand had just begun to cramp, he set the cards down before risking fatigue and picked up one of the red balls. The fibers of the fuzz had slightly fused together in spots that tangled up and left undersides bare in strands of downy thinness. His fingers picked up the memory quickly as he practiced tucking it between and behind his knuckles, eventually getting it passable enough to be able to run through five rounds of reveals without it showing through the hide of his flesh.
Satisfied with this reborn skill, he left his room and descended the stairs calling Tom’s name. The open layout gave his answer quickly, a ‘quick jaunt to the store with Mondale to pick up strawberries’ was explained on the pad on the counter. He grabbed sparkling water from the fridge and returned upstairs to continue practicing his hides.
The first trick Gregory Seth Hirsch ever pulled on his son was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. Greg had skinned his knee on the splintered wooden dock that Ewan had warned him not to play on, and his father was there at the rescue with a hug but also a mysterious coin that seemed to appear from behind Greg’s ear. He handed it to his son like a talisman. Twenty-five cents was more fantastical than the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny, than Moses’s water trick. Twenty-five cents was the cost of entry to an entirely new universe, one where he could possibly wield that same manifestation power.
Three years later Gregory Sr agreed to entertain his son’s seventh birthday party, a gaggle of second graders who wouldn’t stop screaming while Greg and a couple girls eagerly stood in front of a small red-draped table carrying the banner “Gregory the Great”. His father said it was a game, got the children to bet plastic barrettes and pocket change to guess between three face down cards to find the red ace. Over and over again he shuffled, slid, and stopped the cards, allowing each kid to have their chance while his petty riches piled high and the silent crowd grew louder than the playful screams. Eventually there was a hush across the entire back yard, the only sound a turtledove high in a cypress.
It was Greg’s turn next, but first came Lydia. She was blonde, so she was pretty, and Greg knew half his class had a crush on her, just like him. Secretly he’d hoped she’d guess correctly, end his father’s reign of terror over the better part of the last hour, conquer him like some flaxen warrior princess. He watched as his father’s hands passed the three cards around the table, then lifted them to show each face. Several children nodded. He threw down each card and as he did, Greg noticed a small divot in the side of the ace. He kept his eyes trained on the bend as it was shuffled along the fabric of the table before Gregory lifted his hands and backed away.
Lydia smiled in preemptive triumph and pointed proudly to the marred card. The man held out his hand and she dropped a tiny pearl stud earring into his palm, which he added to the pile. He slid the face of the card against the fabric of the table a couple times before showing it to the audience.
Black Queen.
The crowd erupted in shouts of “Not fair!” and “No way!” and “He cheated!” as well as unintelligible cries of shock and dismay. Greg felt a deep fear in his gut that he’d never felt before as he approached the front of his father’s table. His bones trembling beneath his skin, frigid shivers of uncertainty as he considered the possibility that his father was not a human man. The three cards were picked up and shuffled once more in the air, faces visible only to the crowd but not the operator as he threw them down one by one and began the dance. Greg focused on any aberration he could see on the red ace but it was all too quick and he felt he’d lost by the time the large hands pulled away from the table. He guessed, pointed, and dropped a marble into his father’s palm. Gregory smiled.
Red Ace.
The screams intensified from before, a wave of gasps and awe with a couple cries of foul play for the birthday boy. Gregory pushed all the game’s spoils into a baseball cap and handed it to the victor, from whom the crowd was dispersing with a mix of disappointment and residual shock. Greg watched them as the party turned from being a celebration to a lesson.
“Did I really guess the right one?”
“You won, kiddo, that’s all that matters,” he replied, arm wrapped around the back of his lawn chair as he sipped a bottled beer.
“Yeah, but did you make me win?”
“Listen, Captain, just between you and me… Nobody else was ever going to win. Sure, okay, the game’s a scam. It’s a fun little party trick to get folks to settle down. But you had fun, right?”
His father turned his head back to gaze off at something Greg couldn’t see. Nothing was interesting over there by the fence where the parents drank and smoked their acrid cigarettes. His attention was too fleeting for Greg’s liking.
“How did Lydia lose? I saw the card go down with the bend, it was the ace.”
“...Well, now Greg, that would be a con.”
“What’s the difference?”
“A scam is just a crooked game you can’t win, a con is where I make you believe you’re cheating me.”
“So… you never bent the red card?”
“Go play with your friends before they gotta go home. I’ll be inside.”
By the end of the party Greg had returned everyone’s bets, all but a simple pearl earring with a back that looked almost like a crown.
Strawberries, yes, but also whipped cream, chocolate, and Greg’s favorite sparkling rosé like Tom owed him something. Oysters, figs, artichokes, he really had to wonder.
“Are you trying to seduce me, Tom?”
He hoped he’d get the reference.
“Do I need to try?”
“Hmm…” Greg leaned over the counter and watched Tom unload the groceries into the fridge. “You can’t cook an oyster, right?”
“I’m going to overlook that, Greg. Said you had something to show me?”
Greg righted himself and dug in his pocket for the three fuzzy red balls, eyes darting for the metal cups he had left somewhere.
“Those are metal?” Tom asked.
“Yeah. Y—obviously,” Greg replied, holding the cups up in front of him, stacked in a tower.
Tom sucked his teeth. “No, not on the marble.”
“Oh, well where can I…?”
“Coasters?”
“You can’t… You can’t do it with coasters.”
“What are you trying to do?”
“It’s basically Monte, the cups and the balls—“
“Like a street urchin?”
“Well yeah, maybe… I guess?” Greg placated, crestfallen.
“I didn’t think that was the kind of magic you were talking about,” Tom muttered as he pulled out two wine glasses from the cabinet.
“No… it’s cool, it’s… dumb anyway, I’ll put them away.”
“Greg, stop, I don’t think you’re supposed to be performing that on hundred thousand dollar slabs of stone, that’s all I’m saying. We can find a table for you to practice on before you start an amateur crime ring down at Fulton. Really, are we not paying you enough?”
Greg rolled his eyes and set the cups down on the counter with a pronounced thump, his fingers toying with one of the red balls in his pocket. He pulled it out and tucked it behind his middle finger using his index and ring knuckles before lifting his hand. His palm faced flat to Tom as he waited for acknowledgement.
“Hi?”
“How many balls are in my hand?” Greg asked in his best impression of a carnival barker.
“Is that like code? How many—“ Tom squinted in confusion and took a sip of wine.
“Guess.”
“None, there are no balls in your hand.”
The line of Greg’s mouth curved upwards as he flicked his hand like he’d practiced to hold the pouf between his two first digits.
“Well, well! Pretty cute Gregory!”
Greg bowed with a couple circles of his wrist, surreptitiously snuck his hand back in his pocket, then returned it to the air, palm flat to Tom.
“Again? One,” Tom guessed, leaning over the counter with his head cocked in interest.
Greg grinned and rapidly hinged his knuckles closed and open once more, three red puffballs appeared between his open fingers. The man across the counter tightened his chin to push out his lower lip as he nodded.
“Impressive! Show me how you do it, are they behind—“
“Tom, come on. Magician’s code.”
“Oh, there’s a code? Forgive me, I don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night to find a Greg-shaped pile of rose petals that blows away at a single touch. A rabbit’s head under the sheets.”
After much debate, the oysters were almost pulled from the menu until Greg saw a recipe for flame grilling. It took very little convincing, the afternoon downgraded from sauna to simply summer, a chance to be taken advantage of before they’d miss it. It only took a couple trips to bring their party upstairs to the terrace. Mondale dutifully followed them up and down the stairs each time in an effort to assist and rested at Greg’s feet as Tom readied the grill.
“Can he have an oyster?” Greg asked. He lit a joint using the long barbecue lighter and reclined, using a couple toes to pet the side of the dog below him.
“Don’t know, actually. Better not,” Tom remarked as he tossed the artichokes in vinaigrette. “That reminds me, could you make a note to buy treats?”
“Making me take notes for you again?”
Tom’s arm stuttered as he seemed to suddenly be arrested by some hidden thought like an apparition. He looked at Greg for a moment, then clamped the tongs around the first artichoke to set it face down.
“Hey so I’ve actually been meaning to ask you something, you want me to do it now or after dinner?”
“That’s… kinda cryptic,” Greg began hesitantly. “Is it… did something happen?”
“No, no, nothing’s happened yet.”
“Yet?”
“At all. Nothing’s happening, nothing needs to happen, it’s nothing bad,” Tom consoled, but wouldn’t meet Greg’s eyes. “Or I don’t know, might be.”
“Tom…?”
“So, uh… you remember that article a while back, the one—“
“Yeah, of course.” The one that nearly threatened his free room in a penthouse, the one that could have cost him his job, the one that threatened to expose him to not just friends and family but the whole world before he even knew what he was being outed for. That article?
“Well…” Tom finished loading the grill with artichokes and took the joint from Greg, inhaled deep. “How do you feel about it… now?”
“Is she—is she posting it? Did she post it? Why would she—“
“No, Greg, it’s not the article, I’m asking how you… What if we need to be open about… this?”
Greg eyed the joint in Tom’s hand and took note of the tan line around his third finger. Taking a sip of his wine, he rearranged his feet to sit upright. “You mean about us?”
Tom nodded and handed the joint back.
“… Why?”
“HR reasons, mostly.”
He had to laugh at that, even if somewhere in his gut there was an icepick rushing through his most salient meat. It was understandable, was true that a covert affair was looking less and less possible the more comfortable they got around each other. It was already hard enough to keep their eyes away from the room across the floor, their arms from the tailored shoulder, hands away from hands. Often, Greg wondered if everyone already knew. Lindsay might, he guessed, if only because of how she would tell him what Enrique ordered for Tom’s lunch and ask if he wanted to be added on or order separately.
“Can I have a little more information?”
“Greg, we’ve been… I’ve been regularly pounding you into a lobotomized haze for months and even though—“ Tom held in a giggle at Greg’s pronounced eye-roll, “a—and even though I’m not your boss, strictly speaking, I am technically your superior.”
“Ahh… My superior.”
“Oh yeah, buddy.”
“Well what about…”
“What about… Shiv?”
“Yeah.”
“What about her?”
“I mean… I know we’re not supposed to talk about it, or… whatever—“
“This is just about work, it’s a safety measure.” His voice was calmer than his face, eyes electric with some buried frenetic energy. “And yeah, it would mean the guys on the floor would know we… Yeah.”
“Wow, yeah…”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t really… I don’t know that I like the sound of that, honestly?”
“Okay,” Tom responded with his eyebrows raised in kind placation. “Okay, it was just a thought.”
“Cause like… Even if you’re bi to people like them, you’re gay… you know?” Greg worked out, his eyes unfocused on his hands as the joint stopped smoking.
“Yeah… No, that would be bad,” Tom agreed and opened the hood of the grill in a billow of smoke. He turned the vegetables and closed the lid once more, eyes shiny from irritation.
“Because… I’m straight, mostly.”
Was that a laugh? Did Tom just laugh at him for that?
“Okay, Greg.”
“I am.”
“Hey, buddy, I believe you, yeah? We all have a right to our own fantasies, and if that’s yours, so be it.”
“Ok, so just because we have sex I’m gay? What does that say about you?” Why was this making him so heated? He could feel his heart racing, sweat dewing on his skin that the humidity wasn’t responsible for.
“That I’m a big fucking queer for you, but I still could rail a woman into a coma if I want to and we’d both have a hell of a time,” he explained efficiently.
“Yeah, and so could I,” retaliated Greg. It felt like proper anger but he couldn’t excuse himself enough to feel it, to understand it and label it, pinned down to a white board. “You’ve never even let me fuck you, dude, you have no idea.”
“I don’t know that I will ever need to, Greg.” He took the last sip from his glass and set it down on the prep table.
“Uhh… And what’s that supposed to mean?”
Tom raised his eyes to the coral sky, considered. “Well, you’re a little bit of a cock slut.”
It wasn’t fair. That was too quick. It shouldn’t turn him on like that.
“N-no?”
“Yeah, Greg, you’re a whore. Even when you’re talking about how straight you are, you’re talking about fucking me to prove it.” He said it so casually, just like he used to, like he’s been practicing while Greg’s been away. Good.
“If—When I fuck you, I’m not even gonna touch your cock once,” Greg taunted as muscled arms came to rest on both arms of his chair, Tom hovering over him in a sloth-fast approach.
Tom nodded, eyebrows lifted in appreciation of this retort. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, I’m not even gonna look at it.”
Tom chuckled under his breath, his chest vibrating with joy. “Pity, he’ll miss you.”
“Don’t—don’t do that,” Greg groaned.
“What?”
“Call your dick a ‘he’”
“Sorry. She’ll miss you,” Tom jeered as he closed their lips and had to let go of his laugh to kiss properly.
“I missed you, missed you, missed you.”
It didn’t matter who said it, it was true. He loved it the most when it was like this, their closeness as Tom would set his hands on either hip while Greg rolled himself around the substantial arousal within him. Tom raised his hand to Greg’s cheek and pulled him into a kiss as he repeated the words he might have originated. They were his words now, Greg could use them later if he asked politely.
“I wanted this so bad, Tom, every day,” Greg whispered, forehead connected to forehead. He began an upward slide along Tom’s cock that started at his base and ended in his shoulders, serpentine as he writhed downwards slowly, tortuously. “I don’t want it to ever stop.”
Tom wrapped his arms around Greg, flipped him gently onto his back, and promptly muffled his whine in a kiss. He re-entered the man below him, their lips shushing moans as Greg’s feet swung around Tom’s back to interlock at the ankles and pull him closer.
“Say it again,” Tom commanded, a plea as he drove in deeply, warmly, fondly. He buried his head in Greg’s neck and kept his pace level as he repeated his request in a whisper. “Tell me, please.”
“Don’t ever stop. Don’t stop.”
“Greg.”
“I love this so much. I fucking love you fucking me Tom. I fucking love it. I f-fucking love it,” he babbled out, eyes shut tight and holding on so dearly to the wide, strong shoulders above him.
“I fucking missed you, baby.”
“I missed this so much,” Greg said, and tightened his thighs.
“I love this, Tom, I love this,” Greg said through gasps as Tom’s hips adjusted to fuck him even deeper, more perfectly than perfect.
“I love you,” he said. “I love you, I love you.”
God, it felt so good. Just as good to hear as to say, he imagined. It kept pouring out of him, into him, the words like melted wax all over, dripping down and solidifying as a stalagmite cage.
“Greg…? What?”
Those were his words, Greg realized as he blinked in shock, eyes finally meeting Tom’s.
“What?” repeated Tom.
“Get off,” mumbled Greg, his face hot.
“What?”
“Get the fuck off!”
Tom retreated to the far corner by the window, out of breath, eyes wide with concern. “Honey did I—did I hurt you?”
Greg pulled his legs up to cover himself and searched the rug to the side of the bed for the answer to this simple question.
“Greg?”
“No, Tom. You didn’t hurt me.”
“What… What the fuck?”
Wasn’t it obvious? Could he have imagined it, a fantasy of what he’d never say slipping through the cracks due to sex-brain?
“First you’re telling me that… Did you—“
“No! No, I uh… No, I didn’t,” stumbled Greg.
“Oh?” Tom covered himself with his hands, distance kept from the bed, not moving at all, well tamed on a choke chain. But not tamed enough not to say, “Because it sounded like you said… that you love me.”
“I said I love ‘it’.”
“Yes, you did, you did… but you… you also said—“
“ Tom .”
“My ear was right next to your mouth, Greg—“
“Look, can we just—take a shower—“
“Because… what I heard—“ Tom continued. “If that’s… you know, if that’s the case...”
“And maybe do some hand stuff or whatever—“
“… Greg… If you… If you love me—“
“No! No, I—I don’t.”
Is this what a car crash felt like? A gunshot? A hammer through a window? The majority of tragedies have lead-ups: a diagnosis, an ache, a weird freckle. Everything was fine before, it was a clear blue day today. A perfect day.
“O-oh?”
“Uh… I’m gonna go shower.”
He couldn’t tear his eyes from the rug, couldn’t look at Tom, could hear from his breath that shook on every inhale that the man was worrying it could be his last. From the corner he saw a silhouette pull aside the drapes to the open glass door to the terrace before crossing to leave the room.
“Yeah me too. Go ahead. Use the one outside.”
He sat still on the bed in the dark while the sound of the faucet turned on, then opted to have a bath downstairs instead. It would be easier this way, to not have to cross paths when he’d come inside. Maybe even sleep on the couch like an adulterous husband despite having a room and a bed of his own. The couch was what he deserved.
The first trick Gregory Seth Hirsch ever pulled on his wife, to Greg’s knowledge, happened seven years into their marriage when Greg was freshly five. It really only became apparent in hindsight, at the time just a blurry thing, like a conversation with a distant cousin under the table at a wedding, eyes unfocused on wood grain in the dimmed light of the tablecloth while big feet kick around you. When he thinks back on it, and he really would prefer not to, he wonders if he really saw what he did. Regardless of the specifics that Wednesday morning he knows he saw his father standing closer to their gardener than he’d ever seen him stand with his mother.
Greg hadn’t meant to catch him, hadn’t meant to catch the cold he caught days before while at kindergarten—how could he have controlled that? How could he have controlled his mother choosing to leave for work regardless of his 101 degree fever with the instructions that he call the number she left on the fridge should he black out and die. She had a very important showing that day she couldn’t miss, honey, come on. Don’t be sad.
He was sick. He was thirsty. He needed water. None of this was his fault, so when he turned the corner with small sniffles he hadn’t expected to hear a strange man’s laughter, much less his father’s voice. And it doesn’t matter what they were doing, he said, it doesn’t matter because the truth is Mr. Lowry is actually a really bad man and they’re gonna have to let him go.
What matters though was that Gregory was mad. He was so mad at him, he raised his voice, shouted Greg’s name, and seemed like he wanted to scare him away. He could have, almost did, but Greg knew that he was his father and so when the man ran towards him he stood still and waited for what came next. It was only words, really, the firm hands around his arms not tight enough to hurt let alone bruise; a father’s grip.
Greg could only cry, and cry, and weep until the gardener had long gone and he needed to be wrapped in a blanket and held on the couch. It was a strange comfort to have as he considered the story carefully and tried to make sense of his feelings. It wasn’t his fault, his father said, and Greg agreed.
“Can we call Mom?” Greg asked quietly, his head tucked under his father's armpit. He watched the man’s chest rise and fall in a deep breath, taking up most of his vision.
“Mom’s… You know, she’s going through a lot right now, champ. I think what’s best for her and us is if we talk about it, just you and me, and then it’s our secret from there, you get it?”
“Our secret?”
“Yeah, just between us. Like… like you know when you’re with your buddy Ryan and he tells you a secret about his mom and you come home bragging about it to us? It’s like that but you don’t—don’t, don’t, absolutely never, ever, ever tell your mom anything about why we fired him.”
“But I didn’t fire him, Dad, you did.”
“Hey now! You’re an important member of Team Hirsch! We fired him together, Captain Greg, commander of the USS Lincoln Continental. But Mommy doesn’t like letting go of the help, she gets really hurt feelings about it. We don’t want to make her sad.”
Greg saw his mom fire two women yesterday for streaks on the glass cabinets. Adults were complicated.
“Do you love Mom?”
“I do, in my own way, I do. As much as I can. And she loves me too. And we love you. Nothing’s gonna change about that, not ever.”
“Is this lying?” he asked plainly and picked at a thread of frayed wool.
“… Yeah.”
They sat in silence for a spell and his dad flicked on the TV. A commercial for a toy; the red power ranger did a backflip. Greg smiled.
“Think he’s cool?”
“Yeah.”
“Seems like a pretty cool guy,” his father remarked, cracked his neck and looked down at the bundle next to him.
“He’s cool, he fights and kicks and he gets to be the head when they fight.”
“Wow, when they fight he gets to be the head?”
“Yeah.”
“Lucky guy.”
“Yeah, but I like the blue ranger better,” Greg informed.
“Yeah? How about… we go get him… and a happy meal, and you promise me something?”
“Umm… maybe.”
“Promise me… that this is our secret, a double dog secret. A quadruple double vampire secret.”
Greg pulled back from his father’s side and took in a full round of breath, considering his options.
“Big kids’ chocolate milkshake too,” he bargained.