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1
It's on the verge of occurring to him, tucked safely away under layers and layers of alcohol, that his hand need only slide a few inches further down the silk-smoothness of Greg's back and then he'll be fingering the threshold of something that begs him to get a handful, not to take so much as experience a handful—when that lower back seems to lift. Tom has the briefest drunken sense that he's being rejected by the mass under his hand and then realizes Greg is simply shirking off his suit jacket. He's announcing that he's sweating.
Something like relief.
Greg's lumbering walk further into the loft, despite the absence of Tom's hand, is still that of someone being ushered in.
"Oh my god, you have a dog?"
Something like watching a child take its first steps, as Greg makes leaps and bounds in the direction of Mondale’s pen. Of all the things Tom has shown him tonight, this makes him glow the brightest of all, at least for a second.
Mondale’s head was already perking up, too, and he’s standing and shaking himself out and sticking his nose out the edge of the pen before Greg even reaches it. Tom can’t remember the last time his dog got a surprise visitor, least of all in the middle of the night; he takes to Greg like he might be a distant uncle bearing gifts. He’s hopping into the novelty, he’s pushing his head into Greg’s long hands, he’s giving Dad’s New Friend a big wet kiss the first chance he gets and making the man yelp but only pull back a hair, and Greg just tightens his lips and lets Mondale continue while Tom needs to grab hold of the counter to keep from being toppled from compulsive giggles.
Tom is realizing just then, with a few rapid blinks, that Greg’s mop of hair is now level with his dog’s and is therefore just as easily pettable. It doesn’t seem possible that he should have crouched his entire remarkable length down into such a small space so fast. Tom notes with his sharpest remaining threads that he’s simply drunker than he’s been in a while. And if he’s self-aware then he’s got nothing to be afraid of. He feels the need to insist this to a self that doesn’t feel remotely afraid.
What’s his name, Greg is finally asking, just as Tom is deciding that Thanksgiving’s damage is officially undone, his conscience now cleared.
“Can I give him a tr... I mean, a T-R-E, uh... A-T?”
Tom snerks. He certainly wants to say something about spelling but can’t seem to form the words himself. He’s got tear-stains on his face from how hard he’s laughed throughout the night, which Greg hasn’t seen him even try to wipe off.
“It’s kinda late but—fuck it, why not, it’s your lucky night, Mondale... ”
And Greg giggles too much at the voice that Tom uses, and he watches the dog’s ears perk up with hope and then Tom rifle through the cupboards and the fridge, and before he knows it he’s being handed a spoonful of peanut butter and watching Tom pull out bread for himself.
“Does he like bananas?” he hears himself ask, entranced by Mondale whittling down the massive glob. Peanut butter never looked more delicious. “I used to feed my dogs the bruised parts. And the bottoms. But I guess when you’re rich you probably just throw bananas out when they bruise...?”
Tom abandons his sandwich to dig a banana out from somewhere, tells Greg to just give him a bite.
The two of them fold and hold onto their knees, and briefly each other’s knees or maybe it’s just the arm of a chair, watching the way Mondale smacks his sticky mouth. It’s not that fucking funny, Tom is telling him, tears practically pouring out. But he’s willing to admit in the next moment, fuck, my head is pounding, I need a beer.
Tom declines Greg’s offer to help clean up last night’s mess and tells him with a certain derision that he’s got people that he pays to clean. But after watching him disappear past the top of the stairs, he uses his hand to sweep the bread crusts from the counter into the pull-out trash can. Until he saw them he had little more than static for everything past the first shot of gold vodka.
Greg, for all his complaining at dinner hours prior, proved to have a bottomless stomach. He claimed it was all the liquid stretching his stomach out, that he’d heard something about that. There was another something in the middle of what he was relaying about his own past dogs—something from Tom teasing him about being picky with bananas, and betting he used to need his crusts cut off too, and Greg saying well yes, and Tom recalls a man with half the brain he has now finding it the funniest thing in the world to keep cutting his crusts off.
He watched Greg eat six slices of bread in total, with nothing but peanut butter in-between. This last one, he took a single bite of and decided he’d had enough. Tom took a bite, too, just to feel like he hadn’t wasted anything. The hum of a shower starts from upstairs and he slam-dunks it into the trash. He smirks at the thought of Greg having the option to control his water pressure for the first time in his life.
Then his eye throbs and he remembers Shiv, and any upward tilt of his mouth is gone. Something about the morning after a night like that makes it extra easy to see all those fucking inner workings that you’re usually blind to even without drinking. Tom thinks of her first, and then the vote of no confidence, and then her again.
“God, what am I doing here.”
He mutters it aloud because there’s no room in his head to think such big thoughts. Instead, compared to the rest of the empty space in this loft, it gets to be small. He thinks very briefly of Advil or electrolytes.
“I think she really hates me sometimes...”
Mondale responds to either the misery in Tom’s voice or the sound of it alone. Either way it feels better, then, to approach him, to confide in a particular soul with this rather than leave it to the whole space:
“I think I hate her sometimes too.” Mondale’s eyebrow quirks probably not at that but at him lifting a leg up over the cage bars and joining him in there. Tom’s chest still swells with yet more verve, however sad, and for a moment he’s unburdened with any fear of what it means when he presses his cheek to Mondale’s neck and ruffles either side of him and says: “Do I really wanna do this, buddy? Huh? Do I? ...Is it really worth it, you think?”
Mondale licks his face when he tries to check his phone, giving Tom the perfect excuse to put it away.
It feels like a similar sort of grace that Greg takes very long showers.
When he’s finally prepared to leave and stays back to pet Mondale goodbye anyway, Tom is trying and failing to remember the exact conversation that led to the other man going all the way upstairs to sleep.
His cheeks are so fucking sore.
*
2
He’s exhausted by it as soon as it comes out of his mouth: Wait, that’s tonight?
They say that a journey starts feeling shorter and shorter the more you experience it. Tom moves through thicker and thicker molasses each time he takes part in this conversation, however. Familiarity becomes a burden. The tree-lined streets don’t zip on by. Everything feels painfully sluggish.
Of course he understands that Shiv has obligations. Of course. He already made plans, thinking he’d see his wife off in the morning too—thinking surely husband and wife would mean more than boyfriend and girlfriend—but of course.
“I told you my flight was changed to tonight,” she says. “They want me there earlier. Meeting’s moved up.”
Did she say that? When did she say that? Tom doesn’t actually ask. Lately he’s asking fewer and fewer questions that he already knows the answer to. When he makes the decision to stay silent but for an oh, guess I forgot, the dip his heart has made seems to flatten back out.
There’s no what am I supposed to do with this then, and no just box up the leftovers .
Shiv meets up with him in the kitchen for a short kiss, a stop on the way to the door, a plausible moment for her to at least smell what’s cooking. There’s an audible breath that Tom thinks he might believe, for a second, is that sort of appreciative inhale. Then she’s out; the door latches, and he hears Mondale make a similar sound at the edge of the kitchen.
Sometimes, Tom misses the days before Mondale was trained not to beg for scraps at his feet. He was always patient about it anyway. Never barked, never pawed... just waited and gave him those eyes, maybe let out the most pitiful whine. It seems all of a sudden a great injustice that a dog knows not to so much as step foot on the kitchen tile.
Without thinking about it much at all, Tom is soon stirring with one hand and texting Greg with the other.
[ Hungry? ]
When Greg didn’t respond in ten seconds, Tom followed up: If you’re not, then you’re directly responsible for a bunch of food going to waste.
And again, after twenty, If you already made plans, you can just say so.
But he was, and he hadn’t.
[ Sorry I was in the bathroom. Fuck yeah dude, where are we going? ]
[ Nowhere, just come over. ]
A sense of walking into something larger than his own understanding—questions tingling in his joints, keeping him nearly too unsure to move, but with the high end of that uncertainty being excitement that he knows he shouldn’t indulge in, and which he mostly doesn’t because he’s done it before—is what he arrives with. And is what he pets Mondale and shouts for Tom with. Somehow he’s unconfident enough to need to hear Tom say that Shiv is out in order to know this and therefore feel relief.
They say your life flashes before your eyes when you come close to death; the past few months since Tom’s wedding, finishing off with those couple real close calls, flash before Greg’s just then. Only afterward does he fully register what’s going on before him. For no good reason he expects the same layout he saw before and needs a moment to shoo those memories away. He blinks the new kitchen and everything in it into existence.
An apron over Tom’s front, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, a wooden spoon in his hand. And then the vegetable medley roasting in a cast-iron pan beside him. The oven light’s on, too.
“ You’re cooking?”
“Don’t sound so fucking surprised that I can, Greg. Shit. I didn’t always have a personal chef.”
He diverts his focus to a pan that really doesn’t look so urgent to Greg—but his own experience runs little more complicated than scrambled eggs, so what does he know.
“Did... something happen to Brian?” he tilts his head to ask. True confusion lasts for a miniscule beat.
“What? No. Brian’s fine.”
Not silence, but sizzling and cracking and a burst of oil onto Tom’s hand that he shakes away and briefly seethes over, reasonably fills another few beats. Stovetop goes to low, Greg backs away from it anyway. Tom searches for oven mitts that he’d simply left in his blind spot and heads for the oven, and while turned away he gives Greg the explanation that, in retrospect, he kind of already knew. It just feels good to hear it. His joints mostly continue to tingle until Tom serves him the first glass of wine.
Greg tells him “it’s really good” and “I’d eat this in a restaurant” at least three times each. When Tom finally says okay, enough he hopes it’s obvious that he only wants Greg to sprinkle in some different words, not stop entirely.
“I’m serious, it is.”
“I can tell how shocked you are. You were convinced I’ve never cooked a meal for myself in my life, weren’t you—”
“No no, I just mean—”
“—well, I’d like to see you cook something.”
“Seriously?”
“Have you got anything up your sleeve? Watching Chopped doesn’t count as experience.”
“Oh, I couldn’t , dude, I’d... I’m sure I’d wind up getting the fire department called here, hah... assuming you have those, like, automatic smoke detectors, I mean.”
“Uh-huh.” Tom pretends to wipe grease off his chin when he’s more purposefully hiding a grin at the imagined scene. “We do. You’d be the first thing to ever set it off.”
“...But actually—now that I think about it,” Greg starts with a funny smile of his own, no longer self-deprecating, his mouth half-full, “I do know a few no-bake recipes that are pretty good? And easy. I haven’t actually made them in a while but I mean... it’s just a recipe, really. Like, everything basically goes in a bowl and then into a pan, or a glass dish, nothing more complicated than that. And if you didn’t already have dessert planned... I mean.”
The way Greg shrugs, and then seems to scan the kitchen from his side of the bar, unlocks an understanding. Tom’s eyes widen and he nearly chokes on his food—
“ Oh, you thought I was actually asking—”
A spontaneous bout of hiccups proceeds to save him in a way; while Tom presses pause with his finger in the air and gulps down water, he gets a second chance at thinking through Greg’s proposal. The mental image that he decided at first glance was laughable is straightened back out and it sees daylight this time. For a moment Tom thinks he’s done fixing it only for his diaphragm to betray him again. Alongside the ensuing frustration, and Greg telling him with a straight face to try holding his breath and swallowing three times, is a corner of his brain getting away with it: I’d like that, I’d really like that.
And when he succeeds and returns to the land of the living, what he’d started to say before is irrelevant. He has to start again anyway.
“Did you do my thing? Did it work?”
Greg’s eyes implore, and Tom pats himself on the chest with a purposefully ambiguous nod.
“You know, I didn’t really plan any dessert.” Because Shiv doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth—but he finds he’d rather not mention that. “Have at it. Why not!”
Two vaguely wine-drunk men fill the role of one, with Tom having to show Greg around his kitchen anyway, and frankly still familiarizing himself with this place. Anything the man could feasibly have in mind is stocked in their pantry. For that matter if he really wanted an ingredient that they were missing, Tom would be fully prepared to get someone to deliver it. He’s in no hurry. Greg insists nevertheless—he won’t make him do that.
It’s evident early on that no matter what, they won’t be eating what they make any sooner than a couple hours from now, but this fact feels irrelevant once the wet ingredients are in the bowl. Greg is straining, whipping them by hand with his tongue stuck out in concentration while Tom sucks his lips between his teeth and refrains from telling him, for as long as it takes the man to figure it out on his own,
“Amazing thing, Greg—I’ve heard that they’ve recently come out with this fancy new invention called an electric mixer—”
“Fuck off! ”
He’s laughing and letting Greg search for it, as his guess is just as good as Tom’s own. He’s half-seriously offering to help him figure out how to work it and that help is very nearly accepted, but it’s not a failure when Tom can’t worm in there because Greg still pouts. Still insists, still plants his feet on the stage.
Still accepts another glass of wine, too.
Greg himself realizes that it should be his last when a wrong turn of the spatula flings a glob onto the floor and he feels nothing except his face stretching. Whoopsie. Soon after, his elbow hits the counter hard and the ghost of the pain he should be feeling just makes him smile again.
Graham crackers then the whip then the chocolate, he’s telling himself—chanting, in his head, without really being so drunk but worrying that he will be. He’ll fuck up the order of operations and do it upside-down. He’ll make a fool of himself and Tom will never feed him ever again. Tom will take away his new office and bump his pay back down and demand Greg hand over the papers, and Greg will simply slump his shoulders and obey, thinking less of following through with not-blackmail than ever.
He’s focused with such determination on the dish—and subsequently Tom, on him—that it very nearly escapes their collective attention: Mondale has crossed the technical bounds of the kitchen. And he’s licking something off the floor.
“Oh shit— no, ” Greg is the first to say, glancing past Tom and sobering up in an instant, rushing over—“ what do you have? ”
Tom’s reflexes are just slightly more informed by wine. Even Mondale’s old bones are faster and he pulls his head off the floor at once, turning his head away from Greg’s outstretched hands, giving either of them cow eyes. Greg isn’t hesitating to get on his knees and pry Mondale’s mouth open.
“No no no—spit it out! Mondale! ” Tom is hearing. Then he’s on the floor too, catching the frustration and fear exploding Greg’s eyes open as far as they’ll go—because his dog is a stubborn little shit.
“What does he have?” Tom’s asking, frantically and perhaps uselessly adding his fingers to the mix.
“I don’t know! But it could be anything I’m cooking with, like— fuck, buddy, that better not fucking be chocolate or—shit, Tom. Should I just call an emergency vet? Do you have one? Is there a number on the wall or, like—?”
“I don’t... god—” He just barely hooks in a thumb between Mondale’s teeth which are probably too tight together by now to even still have whatever it is in-between them, only for him to still block Tom out. “I never have to fucking do this! Fuck. Okay, fuck. I’ll find one.”
And he stands up to get his phone from the counter, head swimming when he does. But Tom pushes through the pain. All the while, of course, loudly admonishing him for doing this now of all nights, after all this time, you’re usually such a good boy what THE fuck, man...
Tom has a number to call. It’s ringing.
“Wait—oh my god! Yes!” shouts Greg from below.
Tom’s neck cracks but he doesn’t see anything at first. It’s still ringing.
“I got... oh. Oh my god. Jesus.” Greg is slumping, and maybe smiling. His shoulders hit the fridge and he’s mostly on the floor.
“What? What the fuck is it?”
Far too slowly, Greg holds his hand up, flat like a platter, to display a wet ball of lint and fur. Mondale is still smacking his lips off to the side. He’s eyeing it like he wants another go. Someone at the 24-hour emergency vet has picked up the phone and is getting progressively louder. Concern or annoyance—Tom isn’t sure.
“False alarm,” Greg breathes, sheepish.
“False alarm,” Tom echoes into the phone, unable whatsoever to feel anything but relief. Though notions of wasted worry and of irresponsibility and other light ribbing to balance out some things cross his mind after a moment, which Greg must be able to see.
“Sorry...”
Tom’s instinct is to join the other two dogs on the cold tile.
*
3
Tom’s preemptive outrage about the supposed lack of a gift on his end followed Greg into his dreams, and he awoke with very vivid memories of being sent to prison because he couldn’t find the presents he knew he wrapped in a timely manner. Dream-Tom didn’t care about the labyrinth that Logan’s townhouse had become or all the difficulty Greg had had in tracking him down. He didn’t even care about the cartoonishly large holes in his pockets that they’d clearly fallen through.
Real Tom, however, is undeniably of the same mind as soon as their eyes meet on Christmas morning. He glances to the group, primarily to Roman, and then swivels around until settling his gaze on the landing, a room away. Before heading in that direction he snatches a box from under the tree. Greg finds he understands perfectly, and follows.
It feels like a miracle, and also obvious that he was silly for worrying. At least for a moment.
“That’s not—oh, two presents, Greg? You can’t do that. You’re not allowed to outmatch me.”
“I’m not —”
“It’s fine, it’s fine, you loaf of mincemeat. I’ll just say mine counts as two. Technically it does. Go ahead.”
Tom pushes the box into Greg’s arms and simultaneously takes the larger of the two gifts he has. While he sighs, Greg takes the in to tell him,
“Dude, I didn’t get you two gifts. That one’s for Mondale.”
Tom freezes with one finger hooked into the wrapping. Greg snorts at the look in his eye. For a second, the two of them just live in that humor.
“... Mondale gets a bigger present than I do? Seriously?”
“That’s just because his is a stuffed toy. You’re... a human.”
“I know I’m a human.”
Greg keeps staring at Tom’s trembling, curled lip, the way it keeps tightening and sealing something away. The other man doesn’t seem to know how to proceed. Noise from the other room fades and so does a lingering sense of danger.
“Uh...” Greg sets his box down and reaches out to trade with Tom once again. “You wanna open the one that’s actually yours first?”
When Tom clears his throat it’s a relief for both of them. Sure, he says. Then Greg can’t help it—he scarcely lets Tom reveal an indented golden title under the wrapping before he begins to explain how he went about choosing a book that Tom didn’t yet own but would still likely enjoy. It’s a habit of his with gifts. It keeps him safe from the possibility that he failed, gives him an excuse not to face the potential of disapproval in Tom’s eyes.
It also makes being interrupted with “buddy, it’s fucking great, I love this” all the better. The ensuing hug, prior to being allowed to open the box on the floor, all the more intoxicating.
“So now do you wanna open Mondale’s first and then—?”
“ No, no, you’re gonna come by and give it to Mondale in person,” Tom says, pulling away. Inches from the man’s face, like passing ships, Greg catches a split second of tears being wiped off. He blinks and what he sees next is a face void of irony. But with Tom you never really know.
“Oh. Really?”
“Yeah, really . You’re the only fucking person who got him anything. Now—come on, Jesus, your patience is sickening. Open it, Greg!”
*
4
On the flight home from her mother’s wedding, Shiv finally breaks the ice enough to say that they need to have a talk, but not here, and Tom agrees. The afternoon after their first sleep back in their own bed, she tells him that she’s going to stay in a hotel for a few nights while she thinks. Those few days pass and the conclusion she’s come to is that it’s clear they each need more thinking time. Tom is the bigger person—the one to say but we are going to talk about it? I know what I did. I’d like to explain.
Shiv doesn’t want him to, not yet. She collects her favorites from the wardrobe and says she’s fine continuing to hotel for a bit, but it’s only fair if they take turns. That would be hard on Mondale, he says. I’ll take a long turn, she agrees.
How long is this ‘having a think’ going to be, he doesn’t ask.
On her first truly absent night, Tom invites Greg out for drinks, and there’s so hilariously little to tell about the new arrangement that he tells all of it. He doesn’t call it a celebration himself but he doesn’t deny it when Greg says the word. But he also can’t stop wondering exactly what he’s got to celebrate, the longer that he does. Through the burn of an 800-dollar shot of scotch Greg shouts freedom and Tom takes the same shot and repeats it, laughing at Greg’s dance moves across some girl, feeling he’s in one of those movies that he only ever really pretended to enjoy anyway... but to be in a movie at all is just thrilling. It just is. Even if it feels off.
For the first time, nevermind how drunk and ready to crash Greg is, Tom feels too nervous to invite him to a Shivless apartment.
Ten hours later he’s waking up to a text asking him how he’s doing. He texts back, still groggy, a simple fine. not hungover. thumbs up emoji. Ten minutes after that, he’s settled into the silence of what almost feels like a new home. With minimal deliberation, just vaguely reading Greg’s me neither, he’s sending a follow-up message.
[ Actually, you know what, I’m fucking great. In fact, meet me in Central Park around noon. I’m gonna take Mondale on a walk, it’s a beautiful day and it’s been too fucking long since I did it myself. ]
There is no certainty of what purpose Greg will serve, and also no hesitation. A wave of something surreal looms over the length of trail between them when he first spots Tom; he takes off his sunglasses and wills it to crash over him and get it over with. At its peak, it occurs to him that it might be doing so to Tom, too. Mondale is blessed with immunity.
“Did you want me here to talk about plans, or something?” he asks after brief pleasantries. Partially because it seems likely enough but more because it feels like the one thing saving Greg from a realm of delusion.
He’s thinking of the ride home, last night. He’s also still petting Tom’s dog, crouched and staring up at the inscrutable silhouette the man makes under a rare sun.
“ What plans?” Greg’s neck screams out and he stands up. Suddenly he blocks out the sun himself. “Oh—Gojo? No, we’re still... more or less, awaiting instructions. No sense in talking naval maneuvers from the trenches, Greg.”
“Right, right...”
He nods, and the three of them are walking in lieu of conversation. Mondale trots with so little urgency that the leash has to be wrapped around Tom’s hand five times to not drag on the ground. Greg’s follow-up question quickly feels more useless than dangerous. He smirks to himself—at the mocking tone, the put-on offense, the meaningless admonishment, the familiar tune that all plays out vividly in his head. It’s tempting to prove himself right, but just as tempting are simpler distractions. So his mouth moves aimlessly instead.
“...Yeah. No sense at all.”
His company becomes pragmatic exclusively in the form of making it convenient for Tom to go piss. As though he might incur some judgment from Greg of all people, the guy makes his disgust for public restrooms especially clear for several minutes first.
Greg does personally avoid them too, lately, but there’s a thrill of superiority in telling Tom there’s nothing to be afraid of, man. He’s then fixed with a look that may have frightened him, once upon a time. Now, Greg just says that if he’s only going number one then he shouldn’t even have to touch anything. He decides to think that Tom is taking that as permission.
For a relatively short moment it’s just him and Mondale waiting at a bench. Really, for all Greg knows, he may have never been alone—he’s startled to glance down and see another person. A small hand running through Mondale’s fur.
“Oh!” The kid doesn’t look whatsoever embarrassed in return. He just barely meets Greg’s eyes. “Uh... that’s okay. He’s really friendly.”
“I know,” the boy sniffs.
He can’t be any older than five, now that he’s spoken. But he doesn’t offer anything more than that. God, this has never happened to him before. Greg shifts uncomfortably and starts twisting around to look for anyone who may be watching, or perhaps appearing to have lost something... and sees no one.
“Um. No offense, but where’s your parents? Or—guardians?”
“I don’t know!” the boy shouts, making Mondale pull away. Greg starts petting his head at once, but tries to give both him and the kid attention while he blubbers on about being lost, and being told it’s best to stay put if he wants to be found but he already walked too far away—
“Hey, hey, it’ll be okay,” Greg tries to tell him gently. He looks around again, still sees nothing, but says “I’m sure your mom’s not far. She’s looking for you too.”
“But, but she doesn’t know where I am...”
“But she’ll figure it out. Okay? Moms know how to find you. Like, once you have a kid you get really good at finding things.”
“She’s not very good at finding,” he insists.
“Well...” Greg sighs. His chest aches in a way he hasn’t needed to feel in a long time. “Listen, I’m waiting for my friend to come out of the bathroom, but once he does we’ll help you, okay?”
Finally, a nod, and a tiny fist wiping tears away. Greg smiles to show that he’s happy they could come to an agreement. And when the kid doesn’t yet seem inclined to smile back, he tells him,
“You can keep petting Mondale if you want?”
“Your dog’s name is Mondale?”
Mondale’s ears prick up in opposite directions, Greg smirks and blows air.
“Uh, yeah. Go ahead.”
He does, then frowns and says, “I don’t know if that’s a boy name or a girl name.”
“Oh, he’s a boy.”
Without skipping a beat: “My mom says that to make boy dogs calm down, they cut off their nuts. Are his nuts cut off?”
“Uhh... hah, yeah, but, he’s also an old dog... so he’s really chill anyway.”
“Is he a hundred?”
“No, he’s like... ten?” Greg recalls, and hopes sincerely that he has it right based on what Tom has said. “But, in dog years that’s like being sixty or seventy, so you’re kinda close!”
“Okay, good. Did you have him from all the way when he was a puppy?”
Something about that notion lights up the boy’s eyes. Greg hesitates more than anything out of a lack of certainty. Once jogging his memory for Tom’s tales is out of the way, though, he’s focused mainly on how the rapid-fire questions are distracting this kid from feeling too sad or freaking out. He doesn’t think much of answering them.
His first thought, from a distance, is that the kid bears a decent resemblance to Greg. It becomes less true the closer he gets, but what remains is undeniably a similar dark mop of hair to what Greg had not long ago. And a brand of awkwardness that seems inexplicably to match.
It’s animated. Greg is nodding and gesturing an awful lot. When Tom pauses on his slow and wary trek through the field, and tilts his head, he can see Mondale’s tail wagging. And he does so repeatedly, having come down with a sudden breathlessness that he simply can’t approach with, if only for the same reason that you wait until you’re finished chewing to talk.
The very young child’s presence, he thinks, is what pulls a song out of him when he does walk on up.
“Hey... please tell me we don’t have an accidental kidnapping sort of situation on us? Greg? Are we gonna have the park police on us any minute?”
Greg turns around with utter calm, fluttering eyes if anything.
“Hi, Tom—oh Davie, this is my friend,” he tells the kid, in a tone that Tom has never heard.
“He was telling me about his dog, Mon- dale,” Davie tells him at once. “He rescued him from a shelter, and his nuts were already cut off.”
“...Oh, he did?”
Tom sucks in his cheek and looks at Greg. Greg’s success in looking innocent comes somewhat from the way he folds his arms over the back of the bench and leans over it, but more from his excuse to change the subject:
“He, ah, lost his parents. I said we’d help him find them?”
Davie has gotten into Mondale’s favor quite fast, it seems. Hardly five minutes past the bridge he’s reunited with a mother who’s concerningly casual about seeing him again—just a there you are, you rascal —and equally casual about thanking the men who delivered him. They might as well be handing over her groceries. But she also lets her son run back to say goodbye to the dog upon request, and Tom keeps his mouth shut while Greg gives him the same permission. He tightens his lips especially to fight off a tremble when Mondale pushes his wet nose into the kid’s face and he laughs, a kind of pure delight that you never really hear outside of commercials.
Then he’s off, waving goodbye. Tom wills any tears that were threatening to leak out of him to suck back in and pivots to face the other man. He pokes him right below the sternum. Now there’s a hint of fear. But he really has to search for it, and gets inches away in order to do so.
“ You little fucking rascal...” He can’t help it, it’s on the brain. “Taking all the credit. Pretending Mondale is your dog.”
They’re already walking again, purely out of obligation so as to not block foot traffic. That’s what Greg blames on his ability to shrug and explain, “it just seemed simpler?”—and what Tom blames on his easy acceptance of it.
*
5
Even when dead drunk, Greg knows where to put his shoes when he comes in so that Mondale can’t get to them. It may just be that Tom himself is also entirely more sober than usual that he finds it more noteworthy now.
I don’t feel like going out just to strike out, he’d half-lied, earlier, as Greg tried to secure plans with him to go clubbing tonight. He watched Greg latch onto notions of him being tired of rejection and slip into a less obnoxious-early-2000s-wingman role. Tom truly doesn’t know how much Greg believes he’s trying to pick someone up and how much he’s just going with the flow of conversation—but the result it yielded was a relief nevertheless.
Movie night, then, maybe?
Beers from the fridge, instead of a thousand-percent markup that adds to Tom’s irritability even if it doesn’t put a dent in his wallet. No distractions of the sort that the crowds sometimes offer, but no claustrophobia either. No deep, panicked compulsion to get as inebriated as humanly possible. No limit to the streaming services.
Greg makes a joke about putting on Skinemax, and it’s not the first time he’s made that joke but it is the first time Tom doesn’t feel sick when he says no. No image of what it would look like, if he did, flashes through his mind. He’s only trying to find something on HBO.
The disappointment floods Greg far less, too.
A certain thrill is gone, or at least left to simmer indefinitely, now that Shiv no longer really lives here. It used to feel in a way like he was being snuck in through the window, and at any moment he might have to hide under the bed or in the closet, regardless of her utter lack of reaction in the morning that first time. It’s not ever Shiv is out anymore. It’s just come over.
Tom has told him that nothing’s official yet, that it’s a transitional period, but Greg hardly believes that. Sometimes he worries that it’s all going to be reversed and that the man will be miserable again. Not now.
Mondale was never allowed on the couch before that Greg saw, and now Tom has let him jump up to settle in the cushion between the two of them. That feels permanent.
Where there’s dips in the plot of L.A. Confidential, it becomes even moreso. Fingertips brush past and even run right over each other inside Mondale’s fur. It’s then remarkably easy not to say a thing aside from a comment on the movie, to glance down and pretend that his eyes never left the TV. They mostly really don’t. But then it’s been several minutes since Guy Pearce has been onscreen, and it’s a lot easier for his gaze to wander, to notice—
“ Tom, look at Mondale right now,” he whispers urgently.
His eyes meet Greg’s on the way down to his dog, whose head is propped up on Greg’s thigh, and whose tongue sticks out as he sleeps. He snorts and smirks and flicks his eyes up again. Greg takes a sip of his beer as if to get the point across that he’s not totally sober, even though it’s really got nothing to do with his clarity.
The crooked amusement on Tom’s face is more permanent than Greg knows; he flashes him with it, and finds his cheeks hot with a call to action that serves only to make him feel like a coward. He spends the rest of the movie waiting for them to cool down.
***
+1
Tom was sharply, consistently opposed to getting a new dog for a while. Even when the fancy struck, it was too easy to think of how he’d have to one day go through the death of a pet a third time. Twice is enough for one lifetime. You don’t think about it the second time you get a new puppy, and then all of a sudden you’re old enough that you know how the years will fly by. You know that if you’re lucky you’ll catch all the signs all over again, and you’ll be there to watch them go blind and deaf and you’ll have to decide the moment that you won’t let them fall apart any worse.
Maybe once he gets on in years himself, he’d say, or rather think, because he’d only be asking for the other person to insist those days were already here.
It does feel like far more than five months have passed. At the same time Tom is struck just as vividly as ever with guilt over not being able to look at his dying dog. He kept his hands on him, but in Mondale’s final moments before sleep could not bring himself to face anywhere but Greg. He did watch, and Tom watched him cry.
...But Nora has been talking about wanting a puppy for weeks now, and it really is that simple. Tom’s resolve crumbled under its own weight.
If it can crumble any further, hearing her squeal with delight at just about every dog in the shelter might do it. Though he has to take her by the hand and steer her away from some of the less healthy and more high-maintenance breeds.
“Sorry, sweetie, but there will be no flat faces in our house. Those dogs can barely breathe, I’ve told you that.”
“Mommy says she likes bulldogs,” she argues. “They don’t get so big!”
“Well, your mom isn’t here.” Tom clicks his teeth and sighs, and side-eyes Greg, who’s already eyeing him back with a wry smile. “...And she’s not going to be taking any care of this dog, will she?”
“No...”
“I think we want a big dog anyway, don’t we, Nora?” says Greg. “Something you can ride.”
Tom smacks him on the arm, which Greg clearly thinks is completely worth it, and opens his mouth to make sure Nora doesn’t take that idea seriously just as she rips away to look in another pen.
“Hey! How’d you get so slippery?”
“ PapadaddypleasepleaseIwantoneoftheseIwantoneofthese! ” is her response, for about the tenth time, and at the highest pitch yet.
“...Bloodhounds, huh? You really like ‘em wrinkled.”
“Ah, man, I can’t do bloodhounds. I’ll cry every day. I’m serious, like, Fox and the Hound traumatized me.”
Nora turns and fixes him with the saddest little stare.
“But it’s gonna be my dog, Dad!”
“It’s gonna be her dog, Dad.” Tom echoes with a shrug, just to see his face. It’s brief before Greg turns to plead his case.
“...Do you want me to cry every day? I’m gonna cry every day, Nora. Real tears. Maybe we need to watch the movie so you’ll get it.”
“ No need for that,” Tom groans, noticing that his daughter isn’t letting up whatsoever. “Come on, kid, keep walking. What we really want is a mutt anyway.”
“We do prefer that all co-applicants sign, if they’re here.”
“Right-o.”
“ I’m a co-applicant!”
“No, you’re five.”
“So what?”
“So you can’t apply for anything yet.”
The lady at the desk, who must see a hundred children a day, reassures Nora that she seems very grown-up for her age. With a smile and a nod she lets the two of them know that she’ll play guardian for a minute while they look over the papers. She seems trustworthy enough that Tom doesn’t bother to keep an ear out, either, and just lets the bureaucratic world of dog adoption suck him in. Greg leans over his shoulder to put his own pen to the paper when needed.
Mostly it’s one section, prior to which Tom finds that he still, after four years, warms up considerably: Next to Greg’s name, where it says ‘Relationship to Co-applicant,’ he gets to write husband .
After he slides the page over to him, he’s quite conscious of the moment that Greg spends lingering on the word himself.