Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago

by nomadsland

Summary:

A meditation on time and space and the ending of a marriage. Ed and Stede meet at a bar while Stede's traveling for work. This story is about the ripples from that night.

Notes:

Thank you so so so so so much to Lis Ghostalservice and Jill Followedmystar for betaing this. This story is really dear to me and you have both treated it with such care and it's so much better for your help and ideas.

This is about halfway done at this point and will be posted haphazardly as is my wont.

Chapter 1

Stede Bonnet steps out of the cab and into a pile of slush. It’s January in Chicago, and he’s not dressed for the weather, though he thinks that maybe it’s just impossible to dress for this sort of weather, that humans weren’t meant to inhabit this part of the world. He’s never been so cold in his life, and he once went on an Antarctic cruise. The wind is relentless, and everything is grey and soggy and crusted with salt and grime, and now his shoe is wet, and he thinks for a moment about hopping back into the cab and retreating to the dull, predictable discomfort of his hotel room, but no. No. He’s come this far.

It’s already dark outside, despite the earliness of the hour, so it surprises him, when he steps into the bar, how empty it is. But it’s only a little after five on a Wednesday, and from the Yelp reviews, it seems this place caters more to a late-night crowd. There are a few couples in booths, and one young person sipping determinedly at something violently blue through a bendy straw at the far end of the bar. Stede looks around, takes in the posters on the walls and the disco ball in the corner and the neon lights above the mirrors and everywhere, a rainbow. He squares his shoulders and makes for the bar. He takes a seat in the far corner, the wall bracketing him in at one side, making him feel secure. Making him feel brave. There’s no drinks menu, but there’s a long line of taps and about eight shelves of liquor, and when the bartender finally deigns to look up from his Sudoku, he orders a negroni.

“Ugh,” the bartender says, but gets the right glass out, which is a point in his favor.

Stede takes another look around. It looks like a nightclub with the lights on, which is what it is. It doesn’t really look like Chicago’s oldest leather bar, which is also what it is, apparently.

(Stede isn’t here by accident. Stede is here because at the end of a very long day of very long meetings he had been trying to make nice with some of his truly odious counterparts in the Chicago offices and had asked for recommendations to get a drink and a bite to eat, and Nigel Badminton had looked down his nose at him and said,

“I think you’d really enjoy Scupper. Don’t you think, Chauncey?” And they’d laughed, and Stede had jotted the name down in his notebook, and then he’d Googled it and discovered that it was a gay bar, because that’s the joke, isn’t it? It’s always been the joke, and men like the Badmintons never tire of what passes for their own wit, and somewhere between sliding his phone back into his pocket and getting into the cab outside the office building, Stede had decided, no, fuck them very much, Stede Bonnet was going to go to a gay leather bar and have a drink.)

He has a drink. It’s actually lovely, and Stede waves at the bartender to tell him as much, and he gets a confused sort of grimace that turns into a bashful smile right at the end, and that scrap of human interaction is enough to make Stede thaw a little. He sips his drink and gets out his book and reads for a while, and then he realizes his drink is gone so he orders another.

“Surprise me,” he says. “Something, I don’t know. Fruity but not too sweet?”

The bartender rolls his eyes, but busies himself with bottles and jars and a muddler, and then he’s sliding something pink and frothy across the bar to Stede, who takes a sip and feels his eyebrows try to form an alliance with his hairline and his salivary glands contract and expand like the universe at its inception.

“Ooh,” he breathes, and the bartender rolls his eyes but also props himself up on his elbows and bats his eyelashes at him.

“It’s my specialty,” he tells him dryly. “I call it the Lululemon.”

“Oh,” Stede says. “Er, why?”

“Because my name is Lucius and it’s got lemon in it.”

“Fair enough,” Stede says, and, “Do you have a food menu?”

“Oh, babe,” Lucius says pityingly and turns his back on him, but when he comes back around five minutes later, he slides Stede takeaway menus for three nearby places that deliver and a battered Trivial Pursuit box.

“You looked like the type,” he tells him.

“Thank you!”

“It’s not a compliment.”

“I rather think it is –”

Stede laughs as the bartender – Lucius – groans and flips him the bird, and feels the thaw spread a little. He likes this guy, likes his humor. He likes the music that’s playing in the background, likes the couple in the booth across the way who had been thumb wrestling across the table and – oh, now the smaller one is leading the bigger one out on a leash. Huh.

Stede sips his drink, reads his book, ignores the Trivial Pursuit box until his phone buzzes in his pocket and he steps to the door of the bar to accept his Thai food from the deliveryperson, but when he’s replete with crab rangoons and lard na and he’s down to the dregs of his Lululemon, he finally cracks the box open and pulls out a stack of cards.

Lucius swings by a while later to bring him “ooh, how about something Chicago-y, please” which turns out to be a shot of Malört and an Old Style. The Old Style is grim, but the Malört is incredible.

“This tastes exactly like pencil shavings smell!” Stede exclaims, taking another small sip and enjoying the burn up in his sinuses.

“Oh my God,” Lucius mutters. “Maybe you do fit in here after all.”

“Hmm?”

Lucius turns away and Stede only catches the shape of the word “masochist” on his lips before it’s lost under the blare of music, suddenly turned up.

He looks at his watch. Surely it’s not eight already? Oh well, his flight isn’t until early afternoon tomorrow. He can stay for one more drink.

The trivia cards are a nice diversion, at least at first, but they’re awfully dated, and a couple times he has to take out his pen and amend the clues to be somewhat less offensive in their language. He’s just pulled a particularly egregious one and accepted another glass of Malört from Lucius that he hadn’t ordered when he realizes someone has sat on the barstool next to him and then – oh.

Louis’s school had done a Polar Bear Plunge last year as a fundraiser for some charitable cause or another – save the puffins, maybe, or build houses for orphans in Guatemala, maybe, or buy Prada bags for the poor children who were at the school on scholarship, probably, because that’s the sort of school it is, but anyway. Stede agreed to participate during one of his bimonthly attempts at Making A Parental Effort, For Fuck’s Sake, Stede. The shock of cold caused some sort of brain glitch that sent his whole body singing. It is precisely what looking at this guy feels like.

He’s long and lean, and he’s half-perched on the stool, his bottom up on it but his elbows on the bar. He’s wearing a skimpy black top with an oxblood harness over top, and he’s got a skirt and boots and ripped-up leggings and good Lord, eyes for days and hair that smells like summertime. He’s watching Stede with those eyes, a little amused, one eyebrow raised. It’s how Stede imagines the cow feels in the UFO’s tractor beam. Odd.

“When Lucius told me there was a pretty blond guy drinking Malört by choice, I knew I had to come see for myself,” the guy says, and his voice is a smoky sort of purr that makes the hair on the back of Stede’s neck stand up. Odd.

“Oh!” Stede manages, and looks at the drink he hadn’t ordered. “Is this –? Thank you!”

“I’m Ed.”

“Stede,” Stede says, and holds his hand out to shake. The guy looks at it for a moment and then takes it. His palm is warm and dry, and his eyes are warm, and Stede’s mouth is dry. He swallows, and sips his drink, and swallows again. Somehow the Malört doesn’t help. Possibly because it’s the driest beverage Stede has ever encountered. Possibly because Stede’s tongue feels too large for his mouth.

Ed is looking at him in a way that makes him feel nervous. Not necessarily like he’s in danger, which he doesn’t think he is, but like he’s a superhero whose powers of invisibility have just stopped working. Again, not like he’s in danger, but like he’s been creeping about unseen his entire life and someone has just looked up when he’s walked into a room. There’s a weight to his gaze, and Stede feels pinned by it, but also buoyed. It’s lovely. It’s terrifying. It’s new.

“Hit me,” Ed says, and when Stede raises an eyebrow, Ed taps the pile of trivia cards. Stede draws one.

“What’s the distance from the Earth to the Sun?”

“Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes,” Ed responds easily.

“Distance,” Stede repeats, and Ed shoots him a shit-eating grin.

“Hey, if Han Solo can make the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs, I can answer this question in units of time.”

Stede doesn’t drop the card, but it’s a near thing.

“Yes,” he breathes. “God, that always infuriated me. It’s a –”

“It’s a unit of distance, yeah, fucking – exactly,” Ed says, and he’s smiling, but he’s also looking at Stede rather like a mouse might look at an owl. “Another?”

“Are you a sportsman?”

“Is this the trivia question or…?”

Stede shrugs. “Could be. But no, I meant –”

Ed’s shaking his head. “No, not really.”

“Good. Me neither. We’ll be on an even footing. When was the Indy 500 first held?”

“Fuck, I don’t – the year 500.”

“AD or BC?”

“BC,” Ed says, and chuckles. “Can you imagine? Like a footrace, little Flintstones cars with their feet poking out –”

“It’s a little-known fact that Indy,” Stede says very solemnly, suddenly aware that he’s tipsy, and isn’t that something? “Is short for Indus River Valley, and it was first held in 5000 BCE. You were so close.”

“Dammit,” Ed sighs, after he stops laughing. “I knew it sounded wrong. What was it actually?”

Stede flips the card over. “Oh, wow! 1911.”

“Fuck off, did they even have cars back then?”

“Yes,” Stede says, “but I only know that because the musical Ragtime is set in 1906 and Henry Ford is a character.”

“Gay,” Ed says, and from his lips it sounds like an endearment, and something about it makes Stede feel like he’s a beetle whose rock has just been flipped over. He definitely blushes, which is something he’ll examine in therapy, maybe or, you know. Never. He flips the card back over.

“What popular fruit was named for Enoch Bartlett in the early 20th century?”

“The raspberry,” Ed says immediately, totally deadpan, and Stede doubles over, wheezing in laughter. It takes them a long time to come down from it, Ed wiping tears from the top bit of his close-cropped beard, Stede gulping ice water to soothe the ache in his throat. He can’t remember the last time he laughed like this, and he looks at Ed in a sort of helpless bewilderment. He wonders if it shows on his face. He suspects that it does, because Ed’s looking back at him with a quizzical sort of knowing.

“I like your cufflinks,” Ed says, and reaches out with one forefinger to brush the one nearer to him. Stede looks down. Ed’s finger is very brown against his crisp white shirt, and his touch is feather-light against the little silver double carrick bend knot Stede had picked up at an antique store in Maine last summer.

“Thanks,” Stede manages. “I like your – um, this,” and he reaches out with one finger to touch the shoulder strap of Ed’s harness because he can’t resist. It feels exactly as he’d hoped it would under his finger, lovely and warm and buttery soft, with a firmness underneath that’s a little thrilling. They sit there like that for maybe three seconds, Ed’s finger at Stede’s wrist, Stede’s finger on Ed’s shoulder, like The Creation of Adam if God had overshot, and Stede finds he’s forgotten how to breathe.

“Thanks,” Ed says after the longest moment that has ever existed, long enough that Stede has entirely forgotten what he’d said to precipitate being thanked. He blinks. Ed blinks back.

“So, are you a rope guy?” Ed asks, and there’s a roughness in his voice that Stede can’t parse. “Or are these just –”

“I’m not,” Stede admits ruefully, twisting one of the cufflinks so it sits a little straighter. “Always wanted to be. I bought a book at the same time, on knot tying, but there never seems to be the time or opportunity, you know?”

“Would you like to learn?” Ed asks, and the roughness is still there, it’s amplified, even, and oh, Ed’s hand is on his knee, is sliding up to his thigh, and Stede looks between Ed’s hand and Ed’s face. His eyes are dark. Stede watches him lick his lips, his tongue pink and wet. He looks back down at Ed’s hand on his thigh. He looks at the knot on his cufflinks and suddenly realizes what Ed had been asking, realizes how Ed must have interpreted his answer. He thinks about rope, about knots, about Ed’s hands, about Ed’s wet, pink tongue. His face still hurts from laughter. He feels all the blood in his body start to sing. Oh.

“Yes, I think I would,” Stede breathes, and abruptly signals Lucius for the bill.

“Oh my God, this is happening,” Lucius mutters, and slaps the receipt on the bar in front of Stede. Stede thinks about pulling out his credit card, but then he thinks about all the time that would entail, and pulls out his billfold instead. He can’t do math, just looks at the total and rounds in the upward direction, slaps some bills on the bar, hopes Lucius buys himself something nice with the – he does the math, then, because Ed has removed his hand from his thigh and he’s regained some higher-order cognitive functions – two hundred fifty percent tip. Oh well.

Ed has removed his hand from Stede’s thigh to take his jacket from the back of his stool and hold it out for him, and Stede slides into it like Cinderella into her slipper, like a Hollywood starlet on the silver screen sliding into her mink stole. He feels beautiful. He feels powerful. He feels insane, Ed’s hand surely hot enough to brand him through three layers of fabric at his lower back. He lets himself be steered, not to the door, but instead to the back hall, where the toilets are, and he is nearly ready to volunteer his hotel room when Ed guides him past the toilets and through an unmarked door that leads to another hall, with a locked door at the other end. Ed pulls out a key fob from God-knows-where and then they’re through that door and Ed is leading him up three flights of stairs and into his apartment.

Stede looks around. It’s lovely. It’s sparse but tasteful, potted plants on the windowsills, abstract art on the walls, a cozy-looking blanket on the couch. Ed hasn’t moved from the doormat and Stede stands there next to him, feeling small, feeling uncertain.

“Shoes off, please,” Ed says quietly, and Stede stands on one foot, then the other, untying his completely weather-inappropriate Oxfords and lining them up neatly next to the row of trainers and boots by the door. But Ed still hasn’t moved from the doormat, and Stede looks at him questioningly.

“Here,” Ed says quietly. “Will you?” And he puts his hand on Stede’s shoulder and applies pressure. Stede looks down – Ed has raised the toe of one booted foot in invitation. Oh. Oh.

Stede collapses like one of those wooden bead toys with the button underneath that you press to release the tension in the mechanism to make the figure dance. Or, in Stede’s case, to simply fall to his knees in front of Ed. He takes Ed’s foot between his hands, rests it on his thigh, feels the tread of his boots bite into his flesh through his trousers. His hands are shaking. He starts in on the laces anyway. His hands shake harder when Ed threads his fingers into Stede’s hair and tugs, just once. It’s a promise and a threat, and Stede has never felt like this before. Stede wonders if anyone has ever felt like this before or if he has just invented Feeling Like This. His hands shake, and he unlaces Ed’s boots and draws them off, first the left, then the right. He lines them up next to his, and returns to where he was. Kneels at Ed’s feet. Looks up at him.

“Good,” Ed purrs, and the hand is back in his hair, and it’s tugging up, and Stede just – goes. It’s like the button figurine in reverse. It’s like a golem being born from the clay. Stede stands in front of Ed and looks up into his eyes. He’s suddenly aware that he’s most of the way hard. This is –

“Hi,” Ed says softly, and takes a step closer. Stede stays where he is. He doesn’t think he could move if he wanted to, thinks that if the fire alarm went off right now he’d just stay there on the doormat and let the firemen collect his bones from out of the ashes the next day. He can’t look away from Ed’s face, from his mouth, from that pink, wet tongue that darts out again –

Ed’s hand comes up to cradle Stede’s cheek. Stede gasps at the rasp of his calluses against his five-o’clock shadow.

“Look at you,” Ed whispers. “You’re so fucking pretty.”

“I’m not –” Stede protests immediately. “I’m not – not like you. Ed, you’re so-–”

Ed’s hand is still on his face but it’s gone from caress to clench. Stede feels his cheeks and lips go into what has to be a desperately unattractive fish face. Stede feels Ed’s fingernails dig in just below his cheekbone.

“You’re fucking pretty if I say you’re pretty,” Ed positively growls. “Do you understand? Is this okay?”

“Yes,” Stede says. “Yes.”

“Say it.”

“It’s okay, yes, it’s more than – please, Ed.”

Stede doesn’t know what he’s agreeing to, not really, but he knows that whatever it is, he is agreeing to it.

Stede has not, historically, needed. Stede has, historically, seen himself as more of a cerebral person. Stede has not, historically, leaked precome into his work trousers. All of these precedents are currently wriggling on their backs, exposing their bellies with urgent, needy whines. It’s possible Stede lets a similar sound out of his mouth. Ed’s nostrils flare, and he steps closer. He’s pressed up against Stede’s front now, and it’s impossible that he doesn’t feel Stede’s erection against his hip.

“Say it,” he whispers, his lips nearly brushing Stede’s. It’s not a kiss, but somehow it feels more intimate than one.

“Say–?” and there are the fingernails again, just a hint against his skin.

“It’s okay,” Stede babbles. “It’s – yes, Ed, it’s okay, it’s great, it’s lovely, I want –”

“Good,” Ed says. “And now say the other thing.”

The other –

Stede blushes down to the roots of his hair. He wants to step back, wants to make himself smaller, but that would mean stepping away from the warm solidity of Ed’s body. That would mean disappointment in Ed’s eyes. That would mean a whole host of unacceptable things.

“I’m pretty?” he whispers, just the faintest breath, and Ed caresses his cheek.

“You’re pretty,” he confirms. “Again.”

“I’m – pretty.”

“You’re so fucking pretty. Once more, please.”

“I’m pretty,” Stede gasps, and Ed finally, finally kisses him.

It’s unlike any kiss Stede has ever had. Not that it’s a particularly useful benchmark, but – Ed’s lips are demanding and his tongue is in his mouth and his fingers are in his hair and Stede doesn’t know what to do with his hands. That part, at least, is familiar. Stede wants to climb inside Ed and zip up the opening behind him. Stede wants Ed to unhinge his jaw and swallow him whole. Stede wants – Stede wants – Stede wants.

Every new sensation needs to be cataloged, wrapped in tissue paper and archived so Stede can investigate it later, at his leisure. The sturdiness of Ed’s thigh between his legs, his steady, insistent hands at Stede’s belt, the hot slide of Ed’s palms at his lower back, the scrape of his fingernails along Stede’s spine –

Stede’s making noises he’s never made before. Stede’s doing things he’s never done before. Stede’s doing things he’s never even let himself dream of doing before, is biting kisses along Ed’s jaw and stroking his hair and rutting against his thigh and palming Ed’s cock through his skirt. Stede has never – Stede doesn’t –

And then Ed’s hand is in Stede’s hair again and he’s tugging, and the tug turns into a yank, right there at the end, and Stede pulls back with the bastard offspring of a gasp and a yelp and a moan.

 

“Bed,” Ed says, and it’s all Stede can do to nod emphatically.

Ed leads him to the bedroom, and then everything goes a little blurry, because Ed pushes Stede down to his knees again and then does something terribly clever with a relatively short length of rope and then Stede’s hands are bound behind his back and he’s still on his knees and Ed’s unzipping his skirt and stepping out of his tights and his cock is right there, hanging heavy and hard between his legs, and Stede looks between it and Ed’s face, and for the first time in living memory, the static in Stede’s mind is gone. It’s just quiet. Stede flexes his wrists against the rope, feels it bite into the soft skin at his pulse points, and the silence grows deeper and denser. It’s unsettling. It’s gorgeous. Stede allows himself to sink into the silence like teeth sinking into warm taffy. Exactly like, really. The same itch at his gums, the same saliva pooling in his mouth.

“Please,” Stede says. “Please, Ed, can I…?”

“All right, then,” Ed says with a smile, and cants his hips forward, and Stede opens his mouth and takes Ed in.

It’s utterly without finesse. Stede doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, for starters, and he’s off balance both physically, because of the rope, and cognitively, because of the everythingness, but Ed doesn’t seem to mind, just fucks into Stede’s mouth with short, considerate thrusts. Stede’s moaning around Ed’s cock, and he’s also drooling, and his eyes are watering, and, just once, Ed’s thumbs come up to his cheeks to wipe the tears away and Stede nearly convulses at the tender eroticism of it. His dick definitely twitches in his trousers. He is painfully hard. He opens his mouth even wider.

He floats. He lets Ed fuck into his mouth, focuses on the rope at his wrists and the heavy, salty weight on his tongue, focuses on opening his jaw and relaxing his throat. His mind is quiet, and his blood is still singing, and Ed is whispering praise that floats down into what’s left of his mind and settles like an eiderdown quilt on a cold morning.

“Stede,” Ed moans, and thrusts just once more, a little deeper, before withdrawing. Stede coughs and chokes, and Ed’s hands are there on his face, Ed’s soothing him and kissing him and untying his wrists from behind his back, and Ed’s gentling him down to the bed and massaging the lines the rope had made, is looking at them covetously.

“Tell me what you want,” Ed says, low in his chest, and they’re so close that Stede can feel it echo in his own.

It’s easier this time. Easier to obey, yes, but easier to locate the words, because they’re true.

“You,” Stede rasps. “Ed, please, I want you. Will you please –?”

“Please what?” Ed demands, and kisses Stede sweetly, and oh, that juxtaposition is thrilling, the steel in his words against the soft press of his lips and tongue.

“Fuck me, Ed, please.”

“Again.”

“Ed,” Stede gasps into his mouth. “I need it. I need it, please, Ed.”

“Need what?” Ed asks, with a chuckle Stede feels all along his body and down into his cock.

“I need you to fuck me, Ed, please, please, I need your cock inside me, Ed, I want – I need –”

“Why didn’t you just say so?” Ed teases, and Stede can’t help it, he laughs, wide and easy and open.

Stede is not used to laughing like that, but he is used to fingers in his ass.

(Stede travels for work four times a year. Once a quarter, to the Chicago office, and it’s awful, but it’s also a respite. It’s three nights alone in a hotel room and, over the years, it’s become a bit of a habit. He buys a bottle of lube at the Walgreens around the corner from his hotel, and he spends his evenings three fingers deep in his own hole, gasping into the pillow. He’d written it off as an odd little quirk, but now, with the echo of Ed’s cock in his throat, Stede’s not so certain. Maybe it was a premonition.)

Stede may be used to fingers in his ass but he’s not used to Ed’s fingers. Isn’t used to being pushed down over someone’s lap and pinned there with one arm; isn’t used to the snick of the lube cap and not knowing when fingers will first brush across his rim; isn’t used to spreading his legs wantonly because he thinks Ed might enjoy the view.

Ed enjoys the view, apparently, because his fingers dig into the meat of Stede’s ass, such as it is, and he murmurs,

“Look at you.”

Stede spreads wider, moans, and Ed slides two fingers from his un-lubed hand into his mouth just as he slides a finger from the lubed hand to Stede’s asshole and there’s something about that polarity that brings Stede perilously close to coming on the spot. He doesn’t, just barely, but he does gasp, “Oh, Ed,” around Ed’s fingers and feels them hook into his cheek like a fish on a line.

Ed’s first finger sinks in easily – it was just last night, less than 24 hours ago that Stede had last fucked himself into an embarrassing, quivery puddle – but it’s also somehow too much, so much more than Stede has ever felt before, and there’s an avalanche threatening in the distance, an ominous, low rumble of need. He gets what leverage he can under the weight of Ed’s elbow between his shoulder blades to cant his hips and fuck himself back on Ed’s finger.

“More,” he pants in time to Ed’s movements. “More, more, more, more, please, Ed, more.”

“Mmm,” Ed says, and removes his fingers from Stede’s mouth, which is a tragedy, but the pressure on his back increases and there’s the lube cap sound again and a second finger joins the first and if it weren’t for the extra weight holding him down to Ed’s lap, Stede’ pretty sure he’d ascend right up to heaven.

It’s lovely, it’s perfect, it’s wonderful, the stretch and slide and occasional bump of Ed’s fingers against his prostate, but it’s not enough, nothing will ever be enough until that weight that had been on his tongue is inside him, and Stede pushes back again, again, spreading his legs as wide as he can.

“Please,” he says, and his voice doesn’t sound like his own, it’s wrecked and open and urgent, “Edward, you need to fuck me, please.”

“You’re such a brat,” Ed breathes, and curls his fingers inside of him, rubs against his prostate until Stede nearly screams.

“Are you going spend all night making meaningless psychosexual designations or are you going to fucking fuck me?” Stede demands, and Ed laughs, but he also brings his spare hand up to Stede’s throat and grasps, exquisitely gently.

“Would you like to try that again?” he asks, a dangerous rumble, and Stede immediately goes limp.

“Ed, please will you fuck me? I need your cock, right now, I need it so badly, I want it inside me, please, I want you to come inside me.”

He’s babbling. He’s babbling, and he’s sweating, and his hair is plastered against his forehead, and he has never, not once in the history of being Stede Bonnet, felt anything even close to this. He isn’t a person anymore, he’s just a series of synapses and an eager, clenching, waiting hole, and God, the relief of shucking off his personhood and leaving it on Ed’s doormat is exquisite.

Ed is shifting him around, is moving away, and there’s the lube cap again and a slow, blunt press that he only barely resists the urge to shove back against, and then Ed is sliding into him, hot and slick, and the stretch and burn and low, steady need-ache inside him is so intense that his arms go out from under himself and he collapses face-first into the pillows.

(When Stede and Mary had first wed, he’d gotten a vague sense of his own desire. Not firsthand, no, but from afar, an iceberg glimpsed through the fog, the darkness below suggesting an enormity and a danger that Stede had very quickly learned to ignore, because his entire life had been a series of lessons in How Not To Want.)

Just for tonight, Stede allows himself to peer beneath the waves.

“Ed,” he gasps, and inhales deeply the summertime scent from Ed’s pillows. “Oh, Ed.”

Ed is moving slowly and deliberately inside him, and Stede just lets him, forces himself to relax and let himself feel.

“That’s it,” Ed whispers, and fucks a little deeper. “That’s it, honey. Let me take care of you. Let me make you feel good.”

“Yes,” Stede says. “Yes.”

Stede’s not even hard anymore but it doesn’t matter. All that matters is the feeling of fullness, of completion, of finally bridging the yawning chasm that’s lived inside his chest since he was young. He has always felt so alone.

He doesn’t feel alone anymore.

Ed’s moving faster, more pointedly, and he’s brushing up against that spot inside Stede with every thrust.

“Yes,” Stede says over and over again, a prayer, or a curse, or a vow.

“I’m close,” Ed says. “So close, you feel so good, Stede. You feel so fucking good. I need you to come for me, sweetheart. Can you do that? Can you come for me? You’ve been so good for me, so good, Stede, I need you to – fucking do it –” and Stede does, clenches down around Ed’s cock and comes with a cry.

And then Ed’s shuddering apart and oh my God, Stede can feel it inside him, and he wants to bottle himself up and keep every piece of Ed that he can within himself forever, and oh, God, that thought causes the cry to die on his lips and it just turns immediately into great, humiliating wracking sobs, and Ed just turns them onto their sides and rocks him through it, murmurs sweetly into his ear and kisses every part of his face that he can reach. When Stede’s calmer, Ed brings them each a washcloth and a glass of water, and he tucks Stede up into a blanket and makes him rehydrate. He kisses Stede’s lips, his cheeks, his hair.

“Was that –?”

“Ed,” Stede says, and cups Ed’s cheek in his palm. “Ed, yes. Yes.”

They fall asleep like that, curled into each other like quotation marks.

#

Stede wakes first with a jolt, and is disoriented for a moment until he remembers where he is. His legs ache. His ass aches. His heart aches, too, a little, but he pushes that aside, because it’s early, and he can steal a couple more hours of happiness.

He kisses Ed softly and gets a little “mmph” in return, and then the “mmph” turns into an “mmm” and the “mmm” turns into the sleepy play of hands and lips and tongues. Stede comes in Ed’s mouth and Ed comes on Stede’s stomach a couple minutes later, and then there’s a shower and coffee and a bagel, and Ed’s asking,

“When can I see you again?”

“Oh,” is all Stede can say for a moment. “Oh, I –”

“No, sorry, man, it’s cool, it’s –”

“I live in California,” Stede says. “I’m just here for work. Leaving later today, as a matter of fact. Otherwise, I would –”

“Oh,” Ed says. “Oh, all right, then. Fuck.”

“Yeah,” Stede says, and lets the sadness out of his gut and into his voice. “I’m sorry.”

“Nah, it’s fine. It is what it is, right?”

“Yes,” Stede agrees, and his phone buzzes in his pocket. He ignores it, for now. There will be time for all of that later. He still has this time. He still has – he glances at the clock on the microwave. Shit. He still has about fifteen minutes.

They chat over coffee, and it does absolutely nothing to help Stede’s growing panic, because he likes him on top of – well, on top of everything else. Ed’s smart and funny and a little shy and a little mean, and it’s, God, it’s too much. Stede has to go. He actually has to go, he’s overstayed by about twenty minutes and he’s really going to have to push it to get back to his hotel and to the airport on time.

Ed walks him to the door and kisses him, sweet and lingering.

“What’s your number?” he asks, and Stede gives it to him.

“I’ll text you.”

“Okay,” Stede says. “Okay, yes.”

“See you,” Ed says, with one last kiss and squeeze of his hand.

“Goodbye,” Stede says, and doesn’t cry until his cab is pulling around the corner.

He cries again in his hotel room as he packs his bags haphazardly, and again in the cab to the airport, and again when he’s on the plane and Ed’s text comes in.

Have a safe flight. I’ll be dreaming about you all day.

He stops crying when he lands in San Diego. He takes the shuttle to his car, and by the time he’s walking up the steps, he’s dry-eyed, if a little puffy.

“Hi,” he says, and brushes a kiss to Mary’s cheek. “I missed you.”

It’s a lie.

It’s a lie, and they both know it, but it doesn’t matter, because this, right here, the house and the wife and the two kids he needs to pick up from school in an hour, this is Stede’s life.

That night, after the kids are bathed and read to and asleep in bed, and Mary’s snoring on her side of the massive bed they still share but don’t touch in anymore, he opens his messages.

Is it weird to miss you?

Because I think I miss you, Edward.

This time, it’s not a lie.

Chapter 2: Winter

Alma read Harriet the Spy last fall for a book report and then Dad had given her a super secret notebook for Christmas that she’s definitely not using as a spy notebook, shut up, Emma D., she’d learned her lesson from freaking Harriet and knows better than to write down everyone’s business.

It’s not everyone’s business when it’s her own family though, now is it?

The thing is, Dad is being weird.

(Like, weirder than normal. Alma will be the first to admit that Dad’s baseline level of weirdness is pretty weird.)

It starts –

(if this were a movie, it would cut to Alma flipping back through the pages of her Super Secret Not Spy Notebook. It’s not, so you’re just going to have to imagine it, okay?)

It starts around the time he comes back from his work trip in January. Alma remembers that afternoon, because she’d had to tag along to Lou’s swim lesson, and that’s when she’d seen the bruises on his sides. She remembers (because she’d written it down) how they looked, little polka dots at his waist, just above the line of his swim trunks. Dad likes to swim laps while Lou has his lessons in the other lane. He’s not very fast, and sometimes he gets really lazy about it and just floats on his back if he doesn’t have to share a lane with Benji’s grandma who is scary and is always training for an Ironman. Ironlady? Ironperson. Anyway, Alma usually sits on the bench on the far side and finishes her homework or reads for fun or grows plants on one of the, like, three games Mom lets her have on her iPad because Mom is weird about screentime, but not as weird about screentime as Saoirse’s mom is, she doesn’t even have a TV in her house. Anyway. This time Alma sits on the bench on the far side and writes about Dad’s bruises in her Super Secret Not Spy Notebook and then he takes them out for ice cream which is awesome (Alma gets cherry cheesecake, Louis gets vanilla, and Dad always, always, always gets mint chocolate chip, but this time he orders salty caramel pretzel and makes a stupid noise when he takes the first lick, and it’s weird and gets a second entry in the SSNSN when they get home and Dad hops in the shower to wash the chlorine out of his hair with the special swimmer’s shampoo that smells like old pennies).

The weirdness piles up over the next couple weeks. Dad is, like, there a lot? Sitting at the breakfast table with them, asking questions about her friends like he remembers who they are, trying to help Mom in the kitchen and getting in the way a lot. But when Alma wakes up in the middle of the night, there’s often a light on under the bathroom door, and when she peeks into their bedroom, it’s just Mom asleep on her side of the bed. Alma logs the occurrences in her SSNSN, little secret tally marks in the back, and it’s easily three times a week, and those are just the nights Alma wakes up. Dad’s got dark circles under his eyes most days now.

And then there’s the phone thing. Dad goes to the Verizon store one afternoon and comes back with an unlimited family data plan and a brand-new iPhone for Alma and Mom loses her shit because she’s weird about screens and Alma can only hear snippets of their argument but she does hear,

“For God’s sake, Stede, she’s not even twelve yet!”

and

“I asked you to be a parent, not their fucking fairy godmother!”

and

“I was just trying –”

“Try harder.”

“I am trying harder –”

“Try differently, then, Stede, Jesus.”

and the door slams and Alma has to parkour off the staircase and into the kitchen to make it not totally obvious she was eavesdropping.

“It’s okay, Dad,” she whispers, later, when Mom’s on Zoom taking her art class. “I don’t really want a phone. And anyway, all the cool kids have Androids these days.” It’s a lie, and Dad knows it’s a lie, but the look on his face is worth it.

And then there’s the new clothes, because Dad has been losing weight and his old work clothes don’t fit anymore. The new clothes are nice, but they’re different. They’re kind of cool and they’re kind of casual and Dad isn’t either of those things. It’s weird and it’s different and Alma doesn’t like it.

The SSNSN is filling up with months of these observations, and one night after she creeps toward the bathroom door and hears a tiny, choked-off sob on the other side, the weight of what this is hits her and she sits on the top step for a few minutes with her notebook and then she sneaks downstairs and slips Dad’s work laptop out of his bag and logs in (his password has been AlmaLou2013! for like, three years, cringe) and Googles.

Bruises weight loss pooping all the time tired personality changes

And then she Googles

Colon cancer symptoms

And then she Googles

How long before colon cancer kills you

And then she Googles

Cancer hospital San Diego

And then she stops Googling and puts her head down on the kitchen table and cries.

#

After that, she keeps a closer eye on him. She makes sure he’s eating enough. She does her chores without being asked. She tries to keep Lou from being annoying which is, like, impossible, but she makes the effort anyway. And she levels up her eavesdropping, which is fairly easy at night before her parents go to bed. There’s a heating vent in the floor of her bedroom that looks directly down into the living room, and if she lies with her ear on top of it, she can hear everything, and if she uses a pencil, she can put the SSNSN up against the wall and basically transcribe what they say.

One night it’s worse than usual, and Alma doesn’t even need to lie down to listen once they get going. It starts with boring grown-up stuff, something about taxes and how Dad forgot to buy fabric softener when he went to the store this afternoon and then Mom goes into the kitchen and comes back and Dad gets snippy because she didn’t offer to make him a cup of tea when she made herself one and then all of a sudden she’s yelling that she’s not his goddamn mother, Stede, Jesus, if you want a cup of tea go in there and make yourself a cup of tea, why do I have to do everything around here? And Dad’s trying to use his calm voice and say that he does a lot, actually, has been handling all the transport to and from extracurriculars and doing the shopping and most of the cooking and the laundry besides, so if this is about the fabric softener, Mary, rest assured that your delicates will be static-free and then Mom is saying it’s not about the fucking fabric softener and you know it, Stede, it’s about being a fucking adult and Dad is still using his calm voice and saying Please don’t lecture me, Mary and Alma gets back into bed and puts the pillow over her head.

In the car to school the next morning, she waits until Lou is deep in his book before saying,

“Hey, Mom?”

“Hmm?”

“Why’s Dad been taking me to soccer?”

“It’s just how it’s been working out, I guess. Why do you ask?”

“I just – he works full-time and you work part-time so I thought it was weird that he started doing it.”

“There are different kinds of work,” Mom says, and her voice sounds funny.

“I just thought that maybe he looks tired,” Alma says cautiously. Does Mom even know? Would Dad tell her he’s sick, or would that be just another thing for them to fight about?

“I’m sure he’s fine,” Mom says. “I’m sure that if he were tired, he would say something.”

Alma looks out the window and doesn’t say anything. Thinks about saying, Mom, have you met Dad? He, like, INVENTED not saying things but she doesn’t.

It’s weird that grown-ups are allowed to be so, so wrong. When she’s a grown-up, she’s not gonna be wrong about anything.

Chapter 3

Notes:

Endless, boundless thanks to Lis and Jill for betaing this. <3<3<3

It’s all Stede can do not to sprint off the airplane as soon as it touches down at O’Hare. He forces himself into propriety, into something approximating sanity. He gathers up his things. He carefully pats himself down – wallet, phone, headphones, tin of Altoids – and flashes a tight smile to the woman across the aisle. She looks blankly at him, and he realizes that when you’re wearing a KN-94 and your smile doesn’t reach your eyes, you just look like a creep. He opens his satchel, makes sure he has his laptop and his folder of work documents and his water bottle. He wriggles his toes in his shoes. He digs his fingernails, manicured yesterday, into his palms. He exhales on a count of seven. He tries to remember anything about the periodic table. Gregor Mendel was involved, somehow? Or, no, he was the one with the pea plants. Hydrogen, helium… carbon is six, maybe? And then the noble gasses run down the right-hand column. The newfangled ones are all along the bottom. Molybdenum is the most fun to say. Yttrium is the most fun to spell –

Finally, the door is opened and people start to shuffle forward. Stede doesn't leap into the aisle but it’s a near thing. He retrieves his garment bag from where the stewardess had hung it for him. He telescopes the handle of his suitcase and speed-walks up the jetbridge, makes a frantic pitstop in the nearest bathroom. Pees. Washes his hands. Splashes water on his face. Pops an Altoid into his mouth. Looks at himself in the mirror just long enough for his features to turn foreign and unnerving. What is he doing here? What is he –?

Mendeleev. Dmitri Mendeleev was the periodic table, Gregor Mendel was the pea geneticist. Stede shakes his head.

He’s still not sure what he’s doing here, broadly. Specifically, he knows that he’s flying to Chicago for the quarterly meeting. But generally, the past few months…

Alma had given him a hug before he left, had squeezed him so hard he had to gasp for breath after.

“I love you, Dad,” she had said, and she’d looked up into his eyes like she’d needed him to believe it.

What is he doing here?

His phone buzzes.

I saw that you landed

See you later tonight?

He exhales a little shakily. He bites his lip. He texts back:

I can’t wait, Ed.

Yeah me neither

He shoulders his satchel, takes his suitcase, and strides out into the terminal.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that whenever he flies somewhere, his plane… docks? Berths? Disembarks? Vomits out its refuse? at the furthest possible gate from baggage claim. It’s not the worst thing, to move his body, to thread himself around slow walkers and between pillars and the kiosks hawking Garrett’s Popcorn and Navy Pier fridge magnets. It’s not the worst thing, but he also wishes he could just teleport to his hotel room and fast-forward to eight o’clock that evening when he’s meeting Ed at the bar. Their bar. Can it be their bar, if they’d only been there once together? It’s certainly Ed’s bar. (It’s not literally Ed’s bar, not anymore, since he’d sold it to his manager, but he still lives above it and spends a good amount of time there. It’s certainly Ed’s bar, but maybe it could be their bar. Maybe. In another life.)

His stomach twists in pleasant anticipation, but he also hopes his deodorant holds because, God, he’s nervous already, and he’s still got an hour of transit ahead of him before he can shower and he doesn’t want to subject humanity to his nervous sweats. He has to – he doesn’t know how he’s going to manage it all, retrieving his suitcase and taking the El to his hotel and checking in and showering and dressing and not vibrating right out of his skin, just walking down to the lobby like a peeled grape, his muscle and sinew and viscera all on display. His heart, beating right out there in the open where anyone could see.

It’s been three months. It’s been three bizarre, torturous months of living two half-lives, strung between Mary and the children and work and drudgery on the one side and Ed on the other. Ed, who is clever and quick and sweet and mean. Ed, who sends him dirty jokes at ten in the morning when he knows he’s in a kanban standup. Ed, who teases him relentlessly but never makes him feel like he’s laughing at him. Ed, who sees him. Ed, who has quickly become his best friend in the entire world. Ed, whom he routinely texts at two in the morning, hiding away in the bathroom so the light from his phone doesn’t bother Mary as she sleeps in their bed. Ed, who had rearranged the inside of his brain in twelve hours, who had made him come harder than he even knew was possible, who flirts with him by text but never, ever sexts. Ed, who makes him feel like a kid from Southern California going sledding for the first time, awake and alive and full of wonder that the world is so much bigger than he ever dreamed.

Ed, whom he will see tonight. Tonight. Stede swallows against the flood of saliva in his mouth as he remembers for the thousandth time the feeling of Ed’s cock on his tongue. He doesn’t know whether that’s in the cards, even. Yes, they banter and Stede has told Ed things he hasn’t even told his own therapist. Things he hasn’t even told his own wife. They text constantly, and yes, Ed flirts, but Stede doesn’t know whether – doesn’t know if –

But it doesn’t matter. Tonight, Ed, and then tomorrow, one of the bigger presentations of his career, but that’s nothing, that’s a footnote to this trip, to this visit. Ed, tonight.

Ed – now?

Stede catches sight of him when he’s halfway down the escalator and he doesn’t believe it at first. He literally blinks. He literally rubs his eyes. He feels like a cartoon character. He feels like he’s left his entire body back in San Diego, that he’s just some sort of vibrating sentient mist. He feels like if he’s not very careful, he’s going to burst into tears (flames?) on the spot. Ed’s standing there by the baggage claim looking up at him with the oddest expression on his face. He looks terrified.

Stede nearly knocks a little old lady over in his haste to get down the escalator. He drops his suitcase and his garment bag and his satchel and steps into Ed’s arms. It feels like missing the last step at the bottom of the staircase. He thinks his heart is going supernova.

“Ed,” he breathes. “I can’t believe you’re here – why? What?”

“Didn’t wanna wait. Couldn’t wait. Literally could not wait to see you. Is it – sorry if it’s weird –”

Stede draws back just enough to look Ed in the eye.

“I am so glad to see you,” he says firmly. “I missed you so much, Edward.”

Ed does an upper-body sort of wiggle that Stede hopes, just for a moment, means he’s swaying in for a kiss, but he just bumps Stede’s shoulder with his own and smiles with his eyes at him.

They stand there like that for a while, just looking at each other, until a woman in a Bears cap mutters, “Excuse the fuck outta me” at a volume more appropriate for Soldier Field than anyplace indoors, and they jump apart. Ed scoops half of Stede’s luggage up off the floor.

“C’mon,” he says. “I parked. I’ll drive you.”

Take me home with you, Stede thinks, but he just nods and lets Ed lead the way out of the terminal, over a skybridge to a parking lot, and into his car, which is dirty on the outside but pristine inside. It smells like cigarettes and newsprint. It smells like Ed. Stede wonders if it’s possible for one’s heart to literally physically explode inside one’s chest. He thinks about pulling his phone out and looking it up, but decides in favor of ignorance.

Stede sits in the passenger seat and watches as Ed navigates onto the 90, drinks in the sight of him, feels like he’s being pulled toward him by the gravity of his body. Stede finds himself leaning in, trying to soak up Ed’s proximity, if not his actual body heat, and he finds himself thinking,

Maybe this could be enough,

and then he thinks about the weight of Ed’s cock on his tongue and the sharp burn of the ropes against the flesh of his wrists and thinks that maybe, when it comes to Ed, there won’t ever be such a thing as enough.

“Flight okay?” Ed asks, and Stede has to reorient for a second, has to remember that, yes, he was just on an airplane, because he doesn’t live here, in Ed’s orbit.

Stede nods, smiles a little shyly.

“Could’ve been a lot worse,” he says. “We got in on time and then you were there.”

Ed blinks at him and then curses, swerves into the next lane to narrowly avoid rear-ending a Keebler truck.

“Shit, man, you can’t just say shit like that.”

“I wouldn't say shit like that if you hadn’t done shit like that, Edward.”

Ed smiles into his beard at that, and Stede has to ball his hands up on his knees to keep himself from reaching out to take Ed’s hand over the gearshift.

Stede is not wholly naïve. Stede has been alive and sentient in the world for forty-odd years (he’s not counting the time before he could read). Stede knows they had sex, and that they’ve been flirting and sharing and - and bonding, or at least talking a lot by text over the past three months, but he also knows that he’s deeply unlikeable, and he’s not sure how to overcome that rather immutable fact. He doesn’t know how to reach out and settle his hand over Ed’s. He doesn’t know how to open his heart to the possibility - the probability – of rejection. He doesn’t know how to even begin navigating the bramble bush that’s taken up residence low in his gut, a tearing, biting, relentless tangle of guilt and shame and want and hope and fear.

He doesn’t know how to do this when he doesn’t even know what this is.

He squeezes his hands more tightly, clenches them so hard that he knows that when he finally releases them, the bones will creak and groan like a ship in a gale.

He doesn’t know if he should do this when he suspects this is somewhere between cataclysm and catastrophe in terms of terrible decisions that will ruin his life.

He bites the inside of his cheek so hard he tastes blood.

(He doesn’t know, if he does this, how he could ever bear to stop.)

Ed is talking, and Stede struggles to catch up, rewinds a bit, registers,

“--could drop you off at your hotel to freshen up a bit, or we could get a bite to eat, or whatever you want.”

Stede looks at him, looks at his hand on the gearshift. Looks out the window at the suburban sprawl that’s slowly giving way to warehouses and auto body shops

“Stede?”

“Mmm?”

“What do you want?”

Stede is frozen for a moment, and then he exhales slowly and unclenches his fingers. He knows what he wants. He has spent months surveying the topology of the iceberg of his desire and he knows the shape and size of it, now. His bones creak as his fists unfurl and he lets himself, rudderless, adrift, plow directly into it. He lets his aching hand settle over Ed’s.

He doesn’t say anything, just looks at him, just slides his fingers in between Ed’s, and Ed bites his lip to hide a smile and jerks the wheel to cross five lanes of traffic just in time for the exit.

They split the baggage between them. There’s not even a little pretense about leaving it in the car so Stede can take it to his hotel later. He’s going to have to do something about that, cover his tracks in some way so a canceled reservation doesn’t raise any flags at work, isn’t he?

Stede follows Ed up the three flights of stairs, keeps his eyes trained on Ed’s feet rather than his ass in his well-worn jeans because he apparently does have some small sense of self-preservation after all. Then they’re in Ed’s apartment and Ed’s offering him tea like a normal person who uses words and kitchen appliances. Stede accepts his mug and watches Ed spoon sugar into his own. Ed has a sweet tooth. He knows so many things about Ed now, but learning it organically feels different, somehow. Sometimes when Stede is in an antique shop, he feels something akin to this. A flash of recognition, a Surely not? and then the thrill of discovery. The silversmith’s stamp at the bottom of a lovely little ewer. The shape of Ed’s lips as he counts the spoonfuls silently to himself, the tink tink tink of the spoon inside his mug, an incredibly ugly floral motif with “Too Blessed to be Depressed” in generic wedding invitation script. There’s a story there. Maybe Stede will learn it, too.

They drink their tea in the kitchen, leaning up against the counter. Stede’s been sitting for hours and hours and it feels good to be upright, to feel the cool of the kitchen tile leach through his socks and into the soles of his feet. It feels good, and Stede is worried that if they went to the living room and sat down on the sofa, he would find himself in Ed’s lap in under ninety seconds. Not that that’s not where he wants to be, but he also wants this, wants the anticipation low in his belly and Ed’s sidelong glances at him, wants the heat building between them even though they’re not yet touching. He wants the heat of the tea in the mug between his palms and the cold of his feet and the clank of the radiator in the dining room, the watery spring light coming in through the window casting leafy shadows on the wall behind Ed’s head. Stede has allowed himself to want today, so now he wants everything all at once. He’s voracious. He’s greedy. He drinks his tea and listens to the clank of the radiator and the roar of his own pulse in his ears.

Ed breaks first, as it turns out. He lets out a long sigh and dumps the last of his tea in the sink, takes Stede’s from his hands and slides it along the polished concrete counter, ignores the horrid little shriek it makes, and steps in toward Stede, pressing him back against the cabinets. Stede lets himself be pushed, and at the first press of Ed’s hips against his, he gasps, lets his head fall back with a thunk against the cupboard. Ed takes his face between his hands and Stede prepares himself to be kissed but Ed doesn’t lean in.

“I thought maybe I had fucked up last time,” he murmurs. “Because you never said anything –”

“What? No! I thought maybe you didn’t want – because you never said –”

“Fuckin’ hell, mate. Are we stupid?”

“Yes,” Stede says immediately. “Very.”

“I do feel like maybe I fucked up a little, though,” Ed continues after they stop giggling like fiends. “I dunno, it was maybe a little intense, and we didn’t, like, talk it through first?”

Stede shrugs. “It was lovely.”

“Yeah?”

“I spent the past three months thinking about it. About you.”

“Yeah?” It’s a little growlier the second time, almost breathless.

Stede nods.

“Yeah, fuck, me too. You know. But we should probably still talk –”

“Ed,” Stede says, and brings his arms up around Ed’s shoulders. “Please kiss me.”

“Yeah, no, yeah, that’s a way better idea.”

Kissing Ed for the second time is a little less like being struck by lightning and thrown into the ocean and a little more like getting into your own bed after a long time away from home. Ed just tips his head forward and their lips meet. Ed’s lips are chapped, and his beard is rough against Stede’s chin and his breath is warm and humid in Stede’s lungs. Stede’s lips part of their own volition and Ed licks into his mouth, suddenly hot and urgent, and it’s all Stede can do to hold on and remain upright. He’d never understood the phrase “weak at the knees” prior to this moment, and the discovery that it’s based in reality makes him smile into Ed’s mouth.

“What?” Ed asks, and Stede shakes his head, slides his hands up the back of Ed’s shirt, feeling each vertebra as he goes. Ed makes a gratifying sound low in his throat, and steps back, tugs Stede forward by his belt loops.

They undress each other slowly in Ed’s bedroom and Ed draws Stede down on top of him on the bed, and it’s obscene how much skin Ed has. Just mile and miles of it, and Stede hopes it's okay that he’s just sort of rubbing himself against Ed like Ed’s a particularly exquisite cashmere.

The first time, Stede had been blindsided by desire, had operated on pure instinct and Ed’s direction. But now – he grinds down purposefully and swallows Ed’s moan, does it again and again until Ed’s biting him on the shoulder and shoving him off of him.

“Ed?” Stede asks, but Ed’s rummaging in his bedside drawer and oh, that’s a much better idea.

Stede feels like he’s short-circuiting. Ed’s rummaging in the drawer, and then Ed’s fingers are stretching him open and then Ed’s rolling a condom on and pressing in and Stede is wrapping his legs around Ed’s back and tilting his hips up and God, it’s perfect. It’s everything Stede had remembered. It’s more than Stede had dreamt of, because it’s real. It’s hot and sweaty and awkward and even funny, because about forty-five seconds before he thinks he’s going to come, Stede gets a cramp in his hip and they have to stop while he writhes around on the mattress, laughing and groaning until it passes, and then Ed’s pressing back into him and Stede gets to climb back up to those dizzying heights of pleasure a whole second time before he finally comes, cramp-free and wide-eyed, and then Ed’s pulling out and pulling the condom off and sliding his cock into Stede’s mouth and it’s a little lubey and a little latexy and objectively, it should be disgusting, but Stede’s still got Sex Brain and doesn’t give a single fuck. And then Ed’s coming in his mouth and Stede swallows him down and thinks now I have a little bit of him that I get to keep and then he steadfastly doesn’t permit himself to think anything else for the next ten minutes while they lie there and catch their breath.

Later, Stede takes a shower, thrills a little at using Ed’s shampoo, thrills a lot more when he realizes he’s using Ed’s shampoo because he hasn’t bothered to unpack his toiletries. Maybe this is who he is now. Maybe he’s someone who changes plans and uses other people’s hair care products and leaves the toilet seat up. No, not that last one. There are limits. He is a guest in Ed’s home and he will be courteous. But instead of dressing in the outfit he’d carefully curated for their evening together, he unpacks his robe and joins Ed in the living room. He settles at one end of the couch and is immediately gratified when Ed rearranges himself to be lying mostly atop him, his nose in the vee of chest exposed by the robe. It’s lovely. Ed’s heavy and warm, and Stede instantly relaxes, not so much pressing the button of the little bead toy, but cutting the strings and letting the beads roll away under the radiator.

Eventually, his mind returns from wherever it had fucked off to, and he registers an odd, rhythmic noise from outside. It’s like a purr, but cursed.

“What’s that sound?” he asks, and Ed mushes his face harder into Stede’s chest with a groan.

“Ugh, fucking Ruthie.”

“Ruthie?”

“See for yourself. She’s nesting out on the neighbor’s window unit again this year.”

Stede manages to extricate himself out from under Ed and goes to the window. Just across the little alleyway between buildings, there’s a windowsill with a pigeon roosting atop the air conditioner. She’s beautiful, mostly blue with a dazzling purple and green ruff and a blot of cream at her breast, and she’s cooing as she sits on –

“Oh, no! That’s not her nest, is it?”

Ed groans from the couch in confirmation and Stede immediately opens the window. It’s still much colder here than at home, but nothing like it had been back in January.

“Ruthie,” he calls, and she ruffles her feathers. “Ruthie, darling, listen. That’s not a nest. That’s just two sticks set at an angle. I know you’re trying your best, but you need at least – Ed, how many sticks would you say you’d need for a nest?”

“I dunno, like… fifty, at least?”

“At least. Ruthie, love, you’re going to need at least forty-eight more sticks, okay? And you’re going to need to – God, how do I explain architecture to a pigeon? Shouldn’t this be something she knows innately? Do pigeons learn? Why is she so bad at it? Why’d she – Ed, why did she even put those two down? Does she have eggs in there?”

Ed’s off the couch now, is squeezing in next to Stede at the window and he’s grinning.

“Watch,” Ed says, and he raps sharply on the window. Ruthie startles and flaps off the… nest? coordinate plane? crucifix? for a moment, just long enough for Stede to glimpse two small white eggs.

“Oh no,” he whispers, but Ruthie settles back atop the eggs, apparently safely.

“We have to do something,” he tells Ed, who shakes his head, still smiling, and draws Stede in for a hug.

“I’m serious!” Stede protests. “There’s got to be something – I’ll phone up the local Audubon chapter, I’m sure they’ll have a solution.”

Ed’s response is to kiss him so sweetly Stede has to steady himself against the window. He hopes Ruthie’s not a prude.

They make it down to the bar, eventually, and Ed leads them to a booth in the corner. Stede orders them takeaway on his phone and Ed orders them drinks from the bar – Lucius is off that night but Ed’s chummy with the bartender who is working, a tall, thin man with light brown skin and a mop of curly hair.

“Do you still know everyone who works here?” Stede asks him when he returns.

“More or less. There’s a new woman who I haven’t met, but otherwise… Iz runs the place but I’m here often enough. Pop down a few times a week for a pint and a chat. I mostly skip the scene stuff these days, but the staff’re like family at this point, you know?”

Stede doesn’t ask what “scene stuff” means, but he has an inkling. He’d Googled the bar when he’d learned Ed used to own it, and some of the posters were, um, educational and had explained a thing or two about the clientele he’d noticed last time.

Ed’s brought their drinks, and he’s also brought a game of Jenga from behind the bar, and when Stede sees the conceit of it, he’s both thrilled and a little apprehensive.

“I’ve haven’t played Truth or Dare since I was twelve,” he whispers, and remembers the sick wash of shame as Kristy Clark had opted to leave the party early rather than kiss him on a dare. He hadn’t been invited to any parties after that. Probably for the best.

“We don’t have to –” Ed says, but Stede shakes his head. He’s here. He’s … is he queer? He’s partaking in queer activities, at any rate. How many blowjobs does one give another man before one considers oneself queer? Some might say just the one, but – Stede shakes his head. He’s here, he’s queer-adjacent, he’s doing this.

(Mary doesn’t like to play games with him, tells him he gets too competitive, that he always takes things too seriously. Stede thinks that if you’re going to commit to playing a game, you should commit. Stede wonders what game it is, exactly, that he’s committing to right now.)

The thing about pub Jenga Truth or Dare, he quickly learns, is that it is deeply silly. The truths and dares are written in a kaleidoscope of different handwriting, and some have been scratched out and updated over the years. He learns that Ed can tie a knot in a cherry stem with his tongue, and that individual maraschino cherries from the bar cost a dollar apiece, or at least they do when the lanky bartender, whom he learns is called Frenchie, is working. He learns that Ed is scared of both snakes and spiders, despite having tattoos of both. Ed learns that he’s afraid of heights and elevators, and suggests he get a tattoo about it.

“What would that even look like?” Stede muses, and Ed takes his hand, sketches on him with the tip of one finger.

“Up and down elevator arrows here,” he says, tracing the circle and triangle on the inside of his wrist. It sends a shiver up Stede’s arm, and he wonders if Ed notices he’s gone all goosebumpy. “And, I don’t know, a hawk or some shit? Peregrine falcon, that would be cool as hell. They dive straight down off the tops of skyscrapers. Can’t be scared of heights when you’re a peregrine.”

“I couldn’t possibly,” Stede protests. “Don’t they eat pigeons? What would Ruthie think?”

“Ruthie would understand,” Ed says very earnestly, and tips the last of his drink back. Stede is transfixed by the line of his neck, the bob of his throat, the way the light catches the silver in his hair. “Ruthie would want you to face your fears.”

I am, Stede thinks, but instead he says,

“Ruthie can’t make a quadrilateral out of sticks,” and swills the rest of his whiskey, shuddering a little. “I don’t trust her judgment.”

“Are there stakes?” Stede asks, much, much later, when he has just successfully blown the paper off a straw through the set of goalposts Ed is making with his fingers. The Jenga tower has long since toppled and they’ve just resorted to drawing blocks like playing cards. It has just occurred to him, probably because it’s late enough and there’s been enough whiskey that his thoughts are intermittent and fleeting, little dandelion seeds on the breeze.

“Huh?”

“Are we playing for anything? Bragging rights or the next round or –”

“Fun, Stede. We’re playing for fun.” Ed smiles at him in a soft, fond, puzzled sort of way and all at once Stede understands some things he hadn’t previously understood. He is queer. Ed is here. And they are doing this.

#

Stede’s alarm is an insult and a punishment the next morning, far too early for the throbbing in his head, but he drags himself through the shower and brings Ed a cup of coffee in bed, sits with him while he sips it.

“I should be finished at six,” he says quietly, not certain where things stand, but Ed just takes his hand and kisses his fingers (has anyone ever kissed Stede’s fingers before? And why not?) and says,

“Take the Brown Line to – Southport, I think? Maybe Addison? I’ll text you. Anyway, there’s a Charlie Chaplin festival at the Music Box. Thought it might be fun. We could get something to eat beforehand?”

“It’s a date,” Stede says, and Ed’s eyes go wide, and Stede realizes what he’s said, and he’s so thrilled with it that he says it again, into Ed’s mouth right before he kisses him: “It’s a date.”

Stede takes the El downtown, finds a cup of coffee and a decent scone, and navigates successfully to the office. He hates the Chicago office a little more than the San Diego one, but it’s a near thing. He smarms and schmoozes and does his stupid little presentation, which is very well received given the amount of effort he’d put into it, and everything afterward is so boring that he spends two hours doodling in the margins of his notebook and wondering if Ed could be convinced to fuck his face again tonight.

#

The night before Stede’s flight back, they stay in. Ed cooks, and Stede picks up a bottle of wine on his walk back from the El. It’s been three interminable days of meetings and site visits and posturing, stifling steakhouse lunches and constantly being jumpscared by one Badminton or the other, but every evening, he’d gotten off the Red Line at Ed’s stop and walked the few blocks to his apartment and Ed had met him at the door with a hug and it had felt like thievery, like Stede was pulling a fast one on the universe somehow. He’s pulling a fast one on himself, certainly.

Ed takes the wine, and gives Stede his arm so he doesn’t lose his balance while he unlaces his shoes, and Stede changes out of his suit and into his robe, and Ed dishes them up some pasta and they eat on the sofa, drinking the wine out of Mason jars like they’re cool. Ed is cool, Stede supposes, and when he’s here with him, he gets to pretend a lot of things. Coolness is among them, though it’s toward the bottom of the list.

After the dishes are washed and dried and put away, after Ed has showered and trimmed his beard (though not in that order; Stede had sat on the closed lid of the toilet seat and watched him, had imagined doing it for him with a straight razor, could almost feel what the snick of each hair would feel like under the steel, Ed’s carotid pulse strong and steady under his fingers, and God, he’d been half-hard just thinking about it) —

After Ed’s dry and Stede has disrobed, they stand naked in Ed’s bedroom, not touching. Ed is lovely. Ed is long and lithe and lean where Stede is sturdy, staid, stodgy. Ed’s hair is even longer when it’s damp, the weight of the water stretching the curls out a little, defining each one, and Stede wants to feel them with his hands. Wants to wrap them around his neck.

Stede isn’t certain which one of them moves first, but it doesn’t matter. The end result is the same. The end result is Ed pinning him to the mattress first with the weight of his body, and then with his words.

“Lie still,” he murmurs. “Just like that. Can you do that for me?”

Stede can’t do much for Ed, but he can do that. He can lie still and let Ed use his body for his pleasure. He can lie still and listen to himself make noises he hadn’t known were hiding in his chest. He can lie still until he’s a mad, rabid thing, shaking and crying and begging Ed for more, harder, please, deeper, Ed, Ed, Ed. He can lie still and let Ed clean them both up, can lie still and listen to Ed’s breathing even out next to him in the plush, warm darkness. He can lie still until dawn, when Ruthie starts up from across the way and the coffee pot beeps in the kitchen and Ed begins to stir. He can lie still until his bones crumble to dust, mixed with Ed’s, indistinguishable.

The next night, he lies still in his bed and lets the tears drip silently down his cheeks onto pillows that smell like Mary and thinks about how the pigeon must feel in the second before a peregrine drops like a rock out of the clear, blue sky.

Notes:

(I am SO EXCITED that you all finally met Ruthie!)

Chapter 4: Spring

There’s a lot Louis doesn’t get.

He doesn’t get why he has to go to bed at the same time every night even though it’s starting to stay light later. The sun’s not in bed yet. Why should he be?

He doesn’t get why some of the teachers at school give such confusing directions. “Behave” is just a verb. Behave like what? A lion? A superhero? An asshole like Aiden F? (It’s an important distinction, because while Aiden F is an asshole, Aiden K is pretty nice, most of the time. He shares his Oreos with Louis sometimes at lunch. Louis likes Oreos, at least the cookie parts. He gives the bits with filling back to Aiden K, and Aiden K turns them into double-decker Oreo sandwiches with too much goop. Louis takes care of the crunchy bits for him, and Aiden K takes care of the mushy bits for him. It’s nice to have a system.)

He doesn’t get why stores have to play music all the time. And it’s not ever good music, it’s always old stuff that Mimi and Poppy have on when Mom makes them go over there for dinner in their house that smells like sunscreen and the corner behind the Seven Eleven. But the store music is always loud and it doesn’t make sense. What does a hotel in California have to do with shopping for toothpaste? Is it to annoy people so they get out of the store faster to keep the lines shorter? Because if so, there’s got to be a better way. Louis has made a list, not that anyone has asked to see it. Being six is bullshit.

He doesn’t get why Alma hangs out with girls who are mean to her. He asked Mom about it one time and she just smiled and shook her head and said, “It’s a girl thing,” which seemed a little stupid because gender is a social construct and therefore not real, and if she meant it’s a sex-based thing, Louis can’t think of a single good reason why having a vulva would predispose a person to making bad decisions.

But the current thing Louis doesn’t get – the thing he’s worried about not getting – is marriage.

Grown-ups are married, mostly, but sometimes they’re not. Mx. Jimenez at school isn’t married. Dad’s assistant Pete isn’t married.

“I’m not the marrying kind,” he’d said when Louis had asked why not, but he said it in a way like it meant something else. Louis doesn’t like that. He likes Pete usually, though, because he makes Dad laugh, and Dad laughing usually makes Louis laugh, because Dad has a nice laugh. He doesn’t laugh very much.

Louis had looked “marriage” up in the dictionary, but that wasn’t very helpful.

the legally or formally recognized union of two people as partners in a personal relationship (historically and in some jurisdictions specifically a union between a man and a woman)

That made it sound like a money thing which maybe was part of it? But the people he’d asked about it tended to lead with “When two people are in love…”

And that’s the piece that Louis really doesn’t understand.

He’d asked Mr. Boodhari yesterday what it meant to be in love, and he’d said, “Well, when you’re in love with someone, it means they’re your favorite person, and you always want to be around them, and you want to treat them kindly and make them happy” and then he’d gotten a stupid kind of distracted look on his face and Louis had tried to look where he thought Mr. Boodhari was looking because that’s something you’re supposed to do to understand what other people might be thinking about, but the only thing on that end of the playground was a trash can and Mx. Jimenez trying to pick gum out of Richie Banes’s hair, and that didn’t make sense.

Anyway.

Louis has been thinking a lot about it since yesterday, and he thinks he’s figured it out. He’d assumed that Mom and Dad were married because other people’s parents seem to be married to each other. But Mom and Dad are definitely not in love, because they don’t act at all like what Mr. Boodhari had said, so maybe Mom and Dad aren’t married?

Though if they’re not married, that raises some new questions. Why do they live together when they don’t like it? For that matter, why do they all have to live together when they don’t like it? Louis could live with Mom and Alma could live with Dad. That way, Mom and Dad wouldn’t have to live together and Louis and Alma wouldn’t have to live together, and now that he thinks of it, Alma and Mom have been fighting a lot lately, so maybe they shouldn’t live together either. Louis supposed he might miss Dad a little, but not that much. He’d still see him when he took him to swim lessons and stuff.

It also raises the question of how Louis and Alma happened in the first place. He’s not an idiot, he knows that babies come from people doing the sex, but when he’d asked Mom about the sex, she’d led with “Well, when two people love each other…” so clearly that’s out, too.

Maybe Mom did the sex with someone else to have babies. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t like Dad, because he keeps pretending that he’s their father. Louis doesn’t like it when people pretend to be things they’re not, maybe Mom feels the same way.

He wonders who Mom’s in love with, since it’s not Dad. He makes a list of all the grown-ups she spends time with and then ranks them in order of how kindly she treats them and how much time she wants to spend with them.

Huh. Maybe her art teacher, Doug, is the one she did the sex with?

Does that mean Louis needs to start calling him Dad instead?

He’ll try it out the next time he sees him.

Chapter 5

Notes:

Pouring one out for my homies (Lis and Jill for betaing).

Stede slams the car trunk closed with no small amount of satisfaction. Their bags are Tetrised neatly in the hatchback with Alma’s big duffel of bedding thrown over the lot of it. It’s too much luggage for two people, but neither Stede nor Alma is familiar with moderation when it comes to packing, and Alma’s protests of, “But Dad, I might need it,” had been rather compelling.

“Are you sure you have everything?” Mary asks from the stoop, where she’s holding her coffee. It’s not yet dawn, and Mary’s face is rather haggard under the porch light. Stede has a premonition, as he looks at her, of what she’ll look like in thirty years. Stede wonders what he’ll look like in thirty years. Stede hopes, just for a moment, that he’s not still looking at Mary in thirty years. Maybe he’ll be dead by then.

“Yes, Mom,” Alma huffs, but she peeks in the back anyway, and Stede watches her lips move as she counts her bags.

“And you have the stamps?”

“Mom, ugh, it’s 2024, no one uses stamps.”

“No phones at camp,” Mary and Stede chorus for the twelfth time that week, “Unless it’s an emergency.”

“You’d better write letters,” Mary adds, ignoring Stede’s whispered jinx, “Letters out, care packages in, that’s how camp works.”

“That sounds like prison.”

“It’s wonderful,” Mary says. “You’re going to love it. I loved it. I wish I could go back –”

“I know, back in time to Camp Manitou-Lin, ugh, Dad, can we please go?”

“Soon,” Stede says, looking at his watch. “Five minutes. Go say goodbye to your brother.”

Alma takes off into the house and Stede leans against the car.

“I’ll just pop up with anything she needs,” he tells Mary in a tone he hopes comes across as more reassuring than weary.

“She doesn’t need you to rescue her, Stede, she’s going to be canoeing and making macrame bracelets, not machete-ing down trees to build her own shelters in the jungle.”

“I’m just saying if she’s forgotten something crucial –”

“Okay, fine. Yeah.”

“I’ll text you when we land.”

Mary nods.

“It’ll be good for me,” he says, and he hates himself because exactly none of it’s a lie, “To be out there for a couple weeks. Show face at the office, establish those relationships a little more – this worked out well.”

“I know, Stede.”

“I feel bad -–”

“Don’t,” she says, and for once there’s no venom to it. “Don’t. It didn’t make sense for me to fly her to Michigan and come back only for you to go to Chicago a few days later. And anyway, I think – it’ll be good. Some perspective. Some breathing room.”

“Yes,” Stede says and he doesn’t look at his phone. “Yes.”

It’s the closest either of them has ever come to acknowledging what their marriage has become, and Stede is halfway to drawing breath to say more when Alma comes barreling back out of the house. She nearly knocks Mary down with the force of her hug. Stede closes his mouth, watches as Mary smoothes her hair, kisses her on the crown of her head, which is just at lip height for her. When had that happened?

“Love you,” Mary says, and Stede recognizes it for what it is: directed at Alma. He keeps quiet, opens the car door. Mary waves as they pull out of the driveway, and she’s still waving when he takes the bend in the road and loses her from sight.

“All right, sprout. Ready for your adventure?”

“Hell yeah,” Alma crows, and Stede ignores the profanity, opens their windows, and lets the breeze blow away his shame.

Airport, airplane, airport, and a short but tedious line for a rental car. A bit of a harrowing drive to the highway as Stede navigates potholes and jaywalkers and the sensitive brakes on the unfamiliar car. They stop for lunch in St. Joseph, sit on a picnic table outside a rest-stop Wendy’s with their burgers and fries. Stede names birds for Alma – seagull, grackle, robin, yellow warbler – and Alma names them for Stede: Henry, Beatrix, Robyn, Josh. Stede wonders whether Ed would agree with her names, or whether he’d suggest different ones. Stede wonders whether Ed likes kids. For the seventieth time that week, Stede wonders how to start to have that conversation. Whether to have that conversation. When and where. If.

Alma falls asleep in the car about half an hour after they hit the road again and sleeps nearly all the way to the camp, just like when she was a baby. She never could resist the road’s lullaby. She wakes when Stede takes the exit off the freeway, and presses her nose to the window for the last twenty minutes, watching the trees get denser and the roads get gravelier. And then they’re there, and there’s a flurry of checking in and getting her settled in her cabin and making awkward small talk with some of the other parents and watching the girls circle each other like wolves trying to determine pack order and just generally hovering until she says,

“Didn’t you want to get back to Chicago tonight, Dad?” in a pointed sort of way that is pure Stede, and he doesn’t know whether to be proud or horrified, so he hugs her tight and kisses her cheek and slips her sixty dollars for ice cream at the camp commissary, because it may be wonderful, but it’s also not unlike prison in some specific ways.

The car feels quiet and lonely without her for the space of time it takes him to get back on I-94, and then he just feels free. He speeds back down around the lake and checks into his hotel. He’s got a hotel room because he’s going to be here the entire two weeks Alma is at camp and he can’t impose on Ed for that amount of time. He’s got a hotel room because he’s grimy from the plane and the road and the french fry grease and the OFF! he’d sprayed on himself before the whirlwind camp tour, and because he’s catastrophically tired and only thing in the world he wants more than to fall into Ed’s bed is to take a shower so he doesn’t smell like Dr Pepper flavored Lip Smackerz and Ovaltine when he finally does.

He feels slightly more human when he’s clean, and he packs some clothes in an overnight bag and finds his way to the Red Line. He nearly nods off on the shoulder of the person sitting next to him, an elderly woman who pats his knee when she gets off and flashes him a sympathetic grin.

And then he’s at Ed’s house and somehow finds the energy to climb the three flights of stairs and Ed’s opening the door and Stede collapses into his arms and takes his first real breath in three months.

They don’t have sex that night. Ed takes one look at Stede and leads him to the bathroom, bullies him through brushing his teeth and foregoing his skincare routine for one damn night, c’mon, mate, strips him down efficiently and bundles him into bed with a glass of water. He slides in behind him and holds him close.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” he whispers into Stede’s hair. “My bed is so much fuckin’ better with you in it.”

“‘M much better with you in me,” Stede mutters, and Ed laughs and kisses his shoulder, and then Stede’s asleep.

#

He wakes to sunlight and a distant, familiar, demented cooing, but he ignores Ruthie for the time being. He’s not sure he’s up to facing her, actually, not since Ed had reported the (inevitable) loss of both her March and May clutches. He’d had to put his phone down and take a walk when Ed had sent a photo of half an eggshell in the alley. Stede had mourned for weeks, and Ed had been kind but also clearly bemused about the depth of his grief. Stede still needs to call the Audubon Society.

He turns away from the window and looks at Ed. He’s awake, and his eyes crinkle in a smile, and he’s the most beautiful thing Stede has ever seen.

“Hi,” Ed whispers, and Stede’s smile breaks across his face like an egg, gooey and all at once.

“Hi,” and he scoots closer, cradles Ed’s head in his hands, and kisses him. They haven’t had sex in the daytime before and somehow it feels different. Somehow, when Stede sinks down onto Ed’s cock and grinds it against his prostate, it feels like going to church is supposed to feel, but that Stede has only ever previously experienced at the symphony: Awe. Wonder. Terror. Grief. Joy. Relief. Comfort.

Ed is beautiful underneath him, his hair fanned out on the pillow, his eyes squeezed shut, his fingers pressing hard into Stede’s sides. Stede half hopes he’ll bruise again. Stede half hopes he’ll die right here so he never has to feel something that isn’t this, isn’t Ed, ever again.

Ed comes apart underneath him slowly and then all at once, and the noise Stede makes when Ed pulls out is like a wartime lady reading a telegram informing her of her widowhood, and then Ed’s pushing him down into the mattress and fingering his own come back into him and biting at the juncture between neck and shoulder and Stede changes his mind immediately. He wants to live. He wants to do this every day until he’s a hundred. Maybe every other day once he’s past eighty, he imagines that at some point his hips won’t—

He makes one more embarrassing noise and comes all over himself and the bedsheets. Ed’s draped across his back like a sticky weighted blanket and his hair is in Stede’s mouth and Stede thinks that maybe this is what it feels like to be happy.

***

Ed drives them down to the Indiana Dunes the following weekend. It’s a hot, sultry Saturday and the beach is filled with picnicking families. They spread out a blanket and set up an umbrella and Stede ignores the stirring in his swim trunks as Ed rubs sunscreen onto his shoulders. It feels like being a child on holiday, but the sickening swell of excitement and hope isn’t about the waves or the gulls or the prospect of a giant ice cream later, but rather the man lying next to him in a criminally small swimsuit, his brown, tattooed legs gangling all over the place.

“It’s not the Pacific,” Ed says, gesturing at the lake, “but it’s not bad for an hour’s drive.”

“No,” Stede agrees, feeling a little unmoored. The smell is wrong, sweet instead of salt, and suddenly he needs to taste it.

“Come on,” he says, and holds his hand down to Ed. He takes it immediately, and they scramble the wrong way, away from the water, up and up and up until Stede’s feet are burning from the sand and his calves are burning from the climb. Even way up here, he can’t see the other side of this impossible sea. Ed hasn’t let go of his hand, and Stede tugs him closer, kisses him deeply, and gives him just a second to get his bearings, looking shellshocked and greedy, before he’s tugging at his hand again and they’re running, sprinting, flying down the dunes.

Ed’s laughing loud, delighted whoops as their strides grow longer, longer, so long they must look like astronauts, and Stede can’t help himself, he gives voice to the joy that’s been threatening to choke him all week and simply yells, loud and wild. The wind whips it away and they’re still flying, down, down, hand in hand. They keep running even after the sand levels out, all the way across the beach, zig-zagging between beach blankets and kids with sandcastles, and the shock of cold when they finally plunge into the water tears another, shriller yell from Stede’s lungs just before he dives under. It’s colder than the Pacific. It’s colder than that first night in January when he’d met Ed. It’s so cold that Stede opens his eyes underwater to look for an iceberg. Stede opens his mouth, too, because he had wanted to. The water is sweet and fresh. Stede is sweet and fresh. He comes to the surface with a gasp and a laugh-shriek and Ed’s there, looking down at him with his heart in his eyes, smiling and shaking his head.

“Oh my God,” Stede says, just as Ed says,

“Stede, I —”

He doesn’t finish the sentence, just lets it hang there between them, and Stede steps forward to kiss the words out of his mouth. They kiss and kiss, and then Stede breaks away and plunges back under the freezing water. He opens his mouth, down there where it’s safe, and lets himself say the words, the water heavy and chill on his tongue. It doesn’t sound like anything. It feels like something, though. He doesn’t know until he feels himself saying it that every time he’s said it to Mary, it had been – not a lie, exactly, but a half-truth. A sin of omission.

When he resurfaces and kisses Ed again, he sends a prayer up into the sky and deep down into the water.

Help me, he asks. I don’t know how to do this.

They spend the day napping and baking in the sun and running down the dunes and into the violently cold water. Ed buys him an ice cream and kisses him, sticky and sweet, right out in the open. Stede’s face hurts from smiling. Stede’s heart hurts from smiling.

That night, after they’ve eaten a huge dinner and showered and Ed has rubbed aloe into Stede’s shoulders and rubbed oil into Stede’s hole and pinned his arms above his head and fucked him slow but hard, after they’ve both come and both wiped themselves down, after they’ve kissed in the darkness to the strange, unsettling music of the rattle of next door’s air conditioner and Ruthie’s plaintive coos, after all of this, when Ed pillows his head on Stede’s chest and Stede is running his fingers contemplatively through Ed’s sweet, clean hair, Ed says, with a casually practiced air,

“Maybe our next beach day can be in San Diego,”

And Stede wonders if Ed can, where he’s lying with his ear pressed against his chest, hear Stede’ heart begin to race.

“Yes,” Stede says. “Yes, I would love that.”

It’s true, in the pocket universe adjacent to this one where Stede has a completely different life. He wills his heart to steadiness. They still have another week. He still has another week.

***

Monday

miss you already

how do i miss you already??????????????

you just left for work

I will see you in like 8.5 hours

I’m like a middle school girl

Drawing hearts in the margins of my notebook

<3 Stede Bonnet <3

Do middle school girls still have notebooks?

I hope so

Lisa Frank is probably passe though?

I have it on good authority that they do still have notebooks.

And what’s worse:

Lisa Frank is now RETRO

Fucking hell

I miss you, too, by the way. Need me to pick anything up on my way home?

Fuck i like hearing you call it home

Nah

i’m good

Gonna go to the store on my way home from PT

Thanks though

 

Tuesday

9:31

I’ll meet you downtown this afternoon around 4

Show’s not til 8

We can go to Marshall Fields and pretend to be fancy rich fucks

Have a drink at the Walnut Room

Oooh yes please!

12:36

Ed, did you know they offer boat tours about Chicago architecture?

Real ones, via the Architectural Society?

Not just touristy Look At The Shiny Tall Buildings Ones?

Yeah babe

I live here

I know about the architecture boat tour

Would you mind going with me?

Literally buying tickets as we speak

Tomorrow evening?

That would be lovely. Thank you, Ed.

Wednesday

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[IMG_7933.heic]

We make a handsome pair, don’t we?

I don’t know when the last time I smiled like that was.

babe

You look like that all the time

Thursday

5:55

God, I’m sorry, Ed, I’m only just leaving the office.

Today’s been a nightmare.

Fucking Chauncey.

I’ll be home soon as I can.

No worries

Want to go downstairs for a drink?

Please.

And maybe

6:09

Maybe…?

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Babe that’s just a picture of your cufflinks

oh

OH

So it’s like that, huh?

Only if you’re interested.

[IMG_8002.heic]

Oh my goodness, Edward, I’m on the TRAIN.

I’ll see you in fifteen minutes

And then it’s Friday, and Stede has to leave the next day to fetch Alma. He wakes up early and calls in sick to work, doesn’t even try to fake sounding under the weather. He fixes Ed a plate of toast and marmalade and bullies him out onto the back porch to eat it.

“I have plans involving you and this bed very soon,” he says snippily, “And crumbs aren’t invited. Come on.”

“Yeah, no, okay,” Ed says, and Stede has to chase after him down the hall with his robe so he’s not cited for public indecency.

They’re almost cited for public indecency anyway, as the innocent game of footsie Stede starts under the little cafe table turns into practically mutual masturbation right out there in front of God and Ruthie and everyone because Ed has never once backed down from a challenge, and something about being with him makes Stede feel like he can be bold, too, if not brave.

Stede caves first, hauls Ed back through the apartment and sits him down on the sofa, sinks down to his knees in front of him, puts Ed’s hands in his hair, and looks up at him.

“Please,” he whispers, and Ed fucks his face so tenderly that Stede can’t tell what’s actual tears and what is just the usual eye watering.

He pulls off before Ed can come and sinks down onto him, relying on last night’s sex and his spit on Ed’s cock to ease the way. He wants it to hurt. He wants Ed to carve his initials into his flesh. He wants to catch fire and become something new from the ashes. He wants, just for a little while, to stop being Stede and just be Ed’s.

They fuck, and then Ed puts his head in Stede’s lap and asks him to read to him, so they do that until Stede’s mouth is dry and his voice is hoarse. They play a silly little game sitting in the front window, making up stories about the people on the street below. Ed is much, much better at it than Stede is. His imagination is wide and unfettered. Stede wants to be like that. Stede wants to be able to see the secret beauty in the mundane.

Ed fixes them sandwiches and sends Stede downstairs with the key to the bar to grab them a couple of beers. It feels like sneaking alcohol from his parents’ cabinet when he was still in school. They get a little tipsy in the late afternoon and Stede tries hard to avoid becoming maudlin but it’s hard when he’s feeling so much. He thinks about a video Alma had shown him a couple months back of watermelons bursting in the fields, overripe and fermented. He feels sick and heavy with need. He wants, so much. He wants so much.

That night, they have slow, aimless, meandering sex. Stede has never — well, of course he hasn’t. But there’s something frighteningly intimate about fucking without the intent or even the urge, really, to orgasm that makes him feel small and raw and tender. Ed is barely moving inside him, just rocking every so often, just to keep his erection and let Stede know he’s there, and Stede cries silently into Ed’s pillow and hopes he doesn’t notice.

Of course he notices.

“Hey, babe, no. D’you want me to —?”

“No, please don’t stop,” Stede whispers. “Please don’t ever stop.”

“Oh, honey,” Ed murmurs, and puts his hand up to Stede’s throat. “I’ve got you.”

The next morning, Ed walks him to the train. They hug for so long that Stede misses two southbound trains in a row. Finally, Ed lets him go.

“I’ll see you,” Ed promises. “I’ll look at plane tickets tonight, okay? It won’t be another three months.”

Stede nods and loathes himself.

He makes the third train. He lets himself into his hotel room. He sits on the bed he hasn’t slept in once in two weeks. He gathers his luggage. He goes down to the valet and collects his rental he hasn’t driven once in two weeks. He pulls onto Lake Shore Drive.

He drives back to collect his daughter.

He drives back to…

He’s not sure to what.

 

Chapter 6: Summer

Alma admits that Mom had been right and that camp was wonderful, but it’s also, like, weirdly nice to see Dad when he comes to pick her up. She shows him her macrame projects and the three ticks in a jar that she’d picked off of herself and she marches him down to the archery range and he oohs and ahhs when she makes a bullseye. And then she has to introduce him to Monique and Corinne because they’re her literal absolute best friends in the whole world and they already have a plan for weekly FaceTimes but also an extensive letter-writing campaign.

“Did you get my postcard?” Alma asks, and Dad nods.

“Kept it above my computer at work so I’d see it every day,” he tells her earnestly, and she makes a face at him but is secretly pleased. It’s weirdly nice to see him, after all.

He looks different. He’s got a tan and is holding his body in a different way. She didn’t used to notice things like that but her acting counselor Marc had taught them about how people lead with different parts of their bodies and she’d spent a rainy afternoon writing down everyone’s body language in her SSNSN. Dad had always led with his head, but now he’s leading with his hips. It’s weird. He looks more confident, somehow. More relaxed. Less like he’s constantly apologizing for existing.

Alma looks at her watch, and looks at Dad.

“Our plane’s not til nighttime, right?”

“Right.”

“Can we skip the farewell thing and go to the Art Institute in Chicago?”

“The – why?”

“Monique told me about the Degas statue of the ballerina and I really really really really really want to see her. Please?”

Stede looks at his watch, then at her.

“All right, then,” he says, with a pleased sort of half smile. Alma cheers and runs to load her stuff in the car.

 

On the drive, she tells him all about camp. She tells him about Marc and the play they’d done, and about how Monique lives in Michigan during the summer with her dad but in Georgia during the school year with her mom and about Corinne’s acting lessons at home in Ohio and about capsizing the canoe with the two of them and how they’d laughed so hard they’d almost drowned and about staying up until dawn with them last night (this morning, technically) because they hadn’t wanted to waste a single moment together, and Dad had put his hand over hers and squeezed, just once. And she’d told him about winning the three-legged race with Monique and falling down so hard during the obstacle course with Jake and Noah that she’d thought she’d broken her wrist but it was really just bruised and her counselor Tara who wants to be a paramedic when she graduates from high school next year had been really cool and helpful and wrapped it up for her and how Li had given her her s’more that night because she felt bad for being part of the reason she’d fallen and –

And then they’re driving down Michigan Avenue and she sees the lion statues just like Monique had said, and Dad’s handing his car keys and some money to a guy which seems like a good way to get your car stolen, actually, and then they’re running up the stairs and Dad gives some money to the person behind the desk and the person gives them each a cool little metal tab to wear on their clothes just like Monique had said and then Alma’s got a map open and she’s dragging dad upstairs to the Degas room.

And there’s the ballerina, just like Monique had described her, cast in bronze but wearing this cool old tutu made of actual fabric, and she has a real cloth bow in her metal hair, and everything is weird and faded with age and it’s beautiful and sad and it makes Alma feel a bunch of feelings all at once, and she stands in front of her for a really, really long time, matching her pose. Her weight is on her back leg. Her arms are behind her back. She’s looking up into the little ballerina’s sad little face.

Alma is halfway through a mental letter to Corinne and Monique when she hears someone say,

“Stede?” and she looks up. There’s a cool–looking guy with lots of hair and tattoos striding across the room, right up to Dad, who immediately looks like he’s about to cry. Dad takes a step backward, preserving his space, and the cool-looking guy frowns and tries to move back in, and Dad looks even worse, and Alma’s only taken one semester of karate but she moves in.

“Who are you?” she asks the guy, planting herself between him and Dad.

“I – I’m Ed Teach?” he says. “Who are you?”

“Alma Bonnet. Do you work with my dad?”

The guy – Ed – suddenly looks like he’s the one who’s going to cry. He’s got a face for it. His eyes are huge and brown and sad, and Alma immediately feels bad and like she wants to hug this stranger, which is weird.

“Yeah,” he says softly. “Yeah, I – yeah. I do. I mean, I did.”

“Okay,” Alma says, and then (because he’s way cooler-looking than any of Dad’s coworkers she’s ever met. Those guys are all beige and wear stupid polo shirts and have bad hair. This guy looks like he could be famous if he wanted to be), she adds, “What do you do?”

“I’m an accountant,” Ed says, just as Dad says,

“Graphic design,” and Alma looks between them, frowning. Dad’s face is very pale and he’s looking at Ed like he’s trying to send him telepathic messages. Ed’s looking at his own shoes, which are big black lace-up boots with snakes on them. Alma would be nice to Louis for a year and a half to have boots like that.

“I make fun graphics,” Ed explains, “when I do my, uh, accountancy. Lots of little doodles in the margins. The people at work go crazy for them.”

“My teachers don’t like it when I doodle in the margins of my notebooks,” Alma says skeptically.

“Yeah,” Ed says very quietly. “Yeah, no – I think your, uh. Your dad mentioned something like that.”

Alma looks between them. There’s a mystery here, for sure. She wants her SSNSN and to unravel whatever weirdness this is, but she also wants to be literally anywhere else. The vibes, as Monique would say, are rancid.

“I’m gonna go look over here,” she says to Dad. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Teach.”

“Yeah. Yeah, no, you too, Alma. Um, I have to go, too.”

“Ed –” Dad says, and his voice is all high and nasal.

“Take care, Stede,” Ed says softly, and he turns on his heel and walks out of the room. He leads with his shoulders, Alma notes, and is limping a little, favoring his right leg. He’s got a sketchbook under his arm. She hadn’t noticed that before. She wants to see his margin doodles. She still wants to give him a hug.

Dad watches Ed go, and then he looks at Alma and looks at his watch.

“Stay here,” he tells her, and his voice is still all nasal but now it’s sharp, too. “Stay here, for five minutes. Don’t leave this room – I’ll be right back.”

“Okay.”

She follows him, of course, the minute he turns his back. She watches from the gallery as he runs down the stairs. She doesn’t know if she’s ever seen Dad run before. She watches as he grabs Ed’s arm. Ed doesn’t shake him off, but he also doesn’t turn to look at him. Dad is saying something that Alma can’t hear, and something he says makes Ed laugh, but in a way that means he doesn’t think it’s funny at all, but he also finally turns to look at Dad. Ed’s got his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched up around his ears and it’s clear he’s trying to make himself look small. His face looks like someone who’s just seen a puppy get hit by a car, or maybe it looks like he’s the actual puppy. Dad’s still wearing that tight, pinched, miserable expression. They talk for a minute, but then they stop talking and just look at each other for a full minute. And then Ed leans forward and — oh.

He brushes a kiss against Dad’s cheek, whispers something into his ear. Alma feels like she’s going to throw up, but also like she’s just won at dodgeball.

And then Ed’s fleeing down the stairs and Dad is pressing the palms of his hands into his eyes. His shoulders shake once, twice, thrice, and he presses harder with his hands. He dabs each eye once with his shirtsleeve. He exhales. He squares his shoulders. He pastes on a horrible sort of smile that Alma recognizes immediately. That’s what had felt different about Dad. For a couple hours that afternoon, his smile had been real, but the one he’s wearing now? This one is familiar. When he turns to come back up the stairs, he’s leading with his head. Alma slips back into the Degas room, assumes her pose in front of the little dancer. She waits for Dad to come and find her.

That night, when she’s lying in bed at home (her own bed! It feels so nice to be back in her own bed!) she tries to remember if Dad and Mom hugged hello and she doesn’t think they did.

In the morning, she writes everything up in her notebook.

She doesn’t doodle in the margins even once.

***

She’s vigilant for as long as she can be, but things go back to totally normal almost immediately. Dad takes Louis to swim and her to karate and piano. She’d been angling for acting classes, too, and Dad had said, “I think that’s a wonderful idea,” but Mom had said, “She’s overscheduled as it is, Stede, and we said we weren’t going to be those parents,” and Dad had said, later, when Mom was upstairs, “Maybe when piano is over in the winter, sprout,” and Alma had nodded and let him kiss her on her head.

He and Mom aren’t yelling at each other through the floor vent anymore, but they’re also not talking very much at all. Alma had listened for sixteen nights in a row and heard literally nothing worth writing down before she gave up the habit entirely. She knows they have some sort of regular boring grown-up meeting on Tuesday afternoons because it’s on the whiteboard calendar in the kitchen and because Mom reminds Dad about it every Tuesday morning before he goes to work.

She says, “Don’t forget the, uh, meeting at one,”

And Dad says,

“It’s on my calendar, Mary,”

And Mom says,

“Yes, but you missed it –”

“I missed the first session because it wasn’t on my calendar yet and I was pulled into an emergency site visit and had my phone on silent. I haven’t made a habit of it.”

“Evelyn was not impressed.”

And Dad usually laughs a laugh that isn’t really a laugh (a laugh like Ed had laughed that day on the stairs) and says something like,

“What a surprise,”

And Mom makes a face like Louis when he insists on sucking on the lemon in his water at the restaurant they always have to go to when they visit Poppy and Mimi.

Anyway. Things have gotten back to totally normal.

But every once in a while, when she can’t sleep, Alma thinks about those four hours when Dad had held himself differently. She thinks about the way his smile had changed, like Mr. Gonzalez’s shop on the corner when he’s closing up for the night, the big metal garage door clattering down over the display window. She thinks about Ed’s big, sad, brown eyes and wonders what the hell all that had been about. And she thinks about something Monique had said one night as the three of them were squeezed into Corinne’s bunk, sharing an illicit bag of Doritos and bottle of Coke:

“Sometimes the only thing worse than your parents getting divorced is your parents not getting divorced.”

Alma closes her notebook and shoves it under the loose floorboard in her closet. Maybe she’ll leave it there for a while. It’s not like it’s helping her figure anything out.

Chapter 7

Notes:

Thank you for all the yelling last chapter, I suspect there will be a little more yelling this chapter, but I promise there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Soon. Just... maybe not now?

Thank you as ever to Lis and Jill for their beta help/skills. Actual excerpt from a message to Jill on this chapter:

"you're like fucking Ratatouille pulling my hair to add just a little sprig of thyme or some shit"

This particular bouillabaisse needed some extra love and attention, and I'm very grateful.

Stede almost doesn’t go to Chicago in October. It’s been — well. It’s been a tough few months. Between a big project at work and promises of an even bigger one coming down the pike, marriage counseling with Evelyn (and Mary. Of course with Mary, that’s the whole problem point, isn’t it?) and a difficult patch where Louis had been waking up with night terrors four nights a week (harrowing for everyone but Lou who never remembers them the next morning), it had been a lot. A Lot. Too much. Not to mention, of course, the text messages from Ed. (But let’s circle back to that later.)

Stede drafts an email to his boss about illness, quarantine, a sick kid. Unfortunately, it won’t be possible… He doesn’t specify which kid; it feels too much like inviting a malediction down upon whichever one he would have named. He’s nearly ready to send it, but then he gets the calendar reminder that the appointment with Evelyn will be starting soon, so he runs to the bathroom. Evelyn makes him nervous in a way not even the Badmintons can manage, so he’s found starting sessions with an empty bladder is generally for the best.

He’s washing his hands when he catches his own eye in the mirror and immediately looks away. He can’t stand to look at himself. Hell, he’s been avoiding being alone with himself since – well. Since everything. He has thrown himself into his work, both at the office and at home, and when he’s in the car commuting in one direction or the other, it’s with a podcast or the radio on. In the afternoons, he lets the childrens’ chatter fill the car. When there is noise, he doesn’t have to feel.

(When he met Ed, he came to life, violently and all at once, like Frankenstein’s monster, maybe, or Dorothy stepping out of her house and into glorious Technicolor. But then he came home and his heart had dimmed into something manageable. In the spring, he poked his head out again from where he’d been hibernating. Everything felt more vibrant, more real. He felt more. He felt real. And then: home. Wilting. Disappearing. Summer, and wild, soaring, joy. Sprinting down the hot sand. Waking up next to Ed, sweat-sticky and still slick from the night before. And when he’d gone home, he’d expected the same as before: an ebb, a deadening. But the problem is now this: he can’t stop feeling anymore. Apparently once a bulb puts out shoots, you can’t just force them back inside. They just keep trying to poke out through any crack he gives them. He looks at himself in the mirror again, and he sees it in his eyes. There’s someone in there, now. There hadn’t been before.)

He dries his hands, and as he’s doing it, he can’t remember whether he used soap. He washes them again, and this time he avoids looking in the mirror. He dries his hands again. He straightens his shirt collar by feel alone. He takes the long way round to the water cooler and drinks a paper cone of tepid water.

He settles back into his desk chair with a sigh, scribbles on a Post-It note for three minutes, looks at what he has written and rips it to shreds. He is making an effort, damn it. With Mary. Of course, with Mary.

And he is. He has been. He has Listened. He has Been Attentive. He has shown up to (almost) every therapy session on time. He has Participated. He has Asked Insightful Questions. He has Been an Active Parent. He has Learned to Foresee Problems. He has Toned It Down a Little (only it feels like a lot). He has only cried a handful of times late at night with the bathroom door closed. He has only texted Ed a handful — (Let’s circle back to that later.) He has made himself small even as he has watched Mary grow into herself, and he can’t help but feel that this re-sizing or re-scaling or re-adjusting or whatever isn’t going to fix the fundamental fact of them being puzzle pieces from completely different boxes.

He clicks the Zoom link and makes agonizing small-talk with Evelyn who is already waiting. Mary pops on less than a minute later, looking pink and bright-eyed. Stede eyes himself briefly in the thumbnail. Even with the filter, he looks haggard and worn. Maybe Mary’s got a portrait of herself locked away in the attic somewhere. She’s been painting enough, she could have done. Maybe she’ll make him one if he asks, and they could be young and handsome together forever. Ugh.

The session starts, a little housekeeping, a little checking in. It feels like a work meeting. Minutes, approving the minutes, gaveling the meeting to order. Robert’s Rules. First on the agenda we have… ah, yes, a team-building activity: “What does love mean to you?” Stede wonders if the Robert who made the rules was as much of a bore as he seems, or whether he had a whole separate private life. Maybe his rules of order were for the boardroom, but he let loose in the bedroom –

Mary’s talking, something about idiosyncrasies, something about breathing air, something about laughing. His hand is moving again, and when he looks down, he’s drawn Ed’s living room window, a little nest just visible through it. What Mary has just described is not something that has ever existed between them, and that realization is like holding onto the key at the end of a kite in a storm.

“Stede?”

“Mmm?”

“Love?” Evelyn prompts.

Stede looks out the window he’s drawn.

“I think love,” he begins slowly, and then he stops for a long, long time. He looks from his drawing to the small pile of shredded paper, where an E is still visible in his own ostentatious handwriting even though he’d tried to ruin it. He looks out the real window of his office. It faces east. He thinks about how hard he has tried to be a different person these last three months. He thinks about the plunge into the cold lake, about how it felt brave and daring. He thinks about Louis at three, trying a new food for the first time. “What a brave lad,” Stede would crow, but is that really bravery? Stede had thought that what he was doing with Ed was brave, because he was allowing himself to want, but indulging in hedonism isn’t courage, it’s just greed. And then he’d thought, well, better to be brave and try to fix things with Mary, but making himself disappear in service of their marriage isn’t bravery, it’s cowardice. He thinks he knows what the actual brave thing would be, and knows he’s still too much of a coward for that.

He does the next best thing, though: he lets himself think, finally, about Ed’s texts.

July 16, 8:43 AM

I’m really fuckign pissed at you

July 16, 9:04 AM

But like

I’m not even sure why?

I know we never said it was exclusive

Or even

Like

A thing

July 16, 9:07 AM

But

July 16, 9:21 AM

It sure as hell felt like a thing

and I know I’m not alone in that

So fuck you

For letting me feel like it might have been a thing

July 16, 11:56 PM

No fuck that

It was a thing

It absolutely was a Thing

July 17, 12:00 AM

I’m sorry, Ed.

I never wanted to hurt you.

July 19, 1:18 AM

My marriage is not a happy one.

Not that that makes it better.

I’m not trying to make excuses, truly.

July 21, 5:40 AM

It was a Thing.

Still is, to me.

July 21, 10:44 PM

Fuck you, Stede Bonnet

July 21, 10:45 PM

I deserve that.

July 22, 7:16 AM

You deserve a lot more than that

Or less

??

Whatever, you deserve whatever the shitty version is

Fuck

August 7, 12:49 AM

Do you jack off at night next ot her thinking o f me

do you fuck her

Does she fuck you

Does she hold you down and fuck you sweet and slow like i did

August 7, 6:02 AM

Jesus Christ

Sorry

please don’t answer any of that.

August 7, 8:10 AM

Yes, but in the bathroom. Not directly next to her. That would feel not only rude, but intrusive.

No

No

No

August 7, 9:01 AM

Respectively.

August 7, 11:22 PM

Jesus fucking

I said please and everyhign

Can’t you read

August 8, 5:15 AM

I can read, but Ed:

No one can fuck me sweet and slow like you did.

August 8, 8:48 AM

Shut the fuck up

September 2, 11:36 PM

I want you to go into the bathroom

I want you to finger yourself open for me

I want you to fuck yourself with whatever secret little toy you have stashed away

I want you to think about my cock in your ass

September 2, 11:38 PM

I want you to think about my fingers around your throat

I want you to bring yourself right to the edge

And then I want you to clean everything up and hide it away

September 2, 11:42 PM

If you come, we’re done

September 3, 12:03 AM

[IMG 3717.heic]

[IMG 3718.heic]

[IMG 3721.heic]

September 3, 12:07 AM

Good

September 13, 4:20 PM

I saw this and thought of you

[IMG 3802.heic]

September 13, 5:09 PM

Oh my god

That’s incredible

September 13, 10:34 PM

But Stede

You gotta stop acting like you’re my boyfriend

September 14, 5:18 AM

Sorry.

Can I still be your friend?

September 14, 5:21 AM

(And where is that line?)

September 14, 9:59 AM

I don’t want to be your friend

September 24, 1:11 AM

Actutally

Fuck that

I am your friend

Even if i don’t want to be

but I’m afraid i don’t know how

Or where the fuck that line is

Or what that line even looks like tbh

Or how not to break my fucking heart about it every time you text me

September 24, 1:30 AM

I’m so sorry.

September 24, 1:31 AM

Yeah.

Me too.

There’s been nothing since then. He’s been trying – he’s been trying! He’s been Making an Effort. He’s been disappearing little by little. He’s been trying to give Ed space. He’s been —

What the fuck has he been doing, actually?

“Stede?” Evelyn prompts again, and Mary’s wearing the pinched look that means she’s annoyed.

“Sorry,” he says, and he slips the Post-It with his little sketch into his pocket.

“I don’t think I know what love is, Evelyn,” he says quietly. “But I do know what it isn’t. And I think it’s time we stop pretending. Don’t you, Mary?”

When he dares to look back up at the screen, Evelyn is writing furiously. Mary is so still that Stede thinks maybe her Internet has glitched, but then she blinks and he realizes no, she’s just sitting there frozen with her hand over her mouth.

“Mary?” Evelyn asks, and Mary shakes her head.

“I think we’re done,” she whispers, and signs off.

“For the day, or —?” Evelyn asks, and Stede slams his laptop shut because couples counseling has been bad enough, he’s certainly not going to sit through singles counseling with Evelyn.

He considers going home, but if he does that now, he’ll just have to leave in the middle of the row they’re going to inevitably get into to go fetch the children home from school. Instead he finishes the plan he’s been drafting and sends it off, packs his briefcase methodically, and goes to get the kids, right on schedule.

Alma is ebullient because she’d had computer class today and she’d gotten emails from Corinne and Monique, and Monique is coming to LA with her family at Christmas and that’s basically next door, Dad, can we please drive up there to see her, please? Louis is somewhat more subdued, but he seems happy enough fiddling with the Bakugan he’d traded for on the playground that afternoon.

It’s a rare weekday afternoon where neither kid has something to be driven to, and he almost wishes they had something on, but there isn’t even an errand to run because he’d been to the grocery and the pharmacy just yesterday in the 25 minutes between dropping Alma off at her piano lesson and picking Louis up after OT. So they drive home.

Mary’s not there. Stede looks at the meal plan on the whiteboard and is halfway through dutifully chopping vegetables for salade nicoise when he remembers he doesn’t even like tuna. When he tips the contents of the cutting board into a Tupperware and calls for Chinese delivery, it feels like clawing just a little bit of himself back from the void. He referees homework, mediates three squabbles over child pedantry, and puts Alma and Louis to bed unbathed and egg-roll greasy. He’s sitting at the kitchen table fighting the constant, low-grade urge to text Ed when he hears Mary’s key in the door. He puts his phone down, folds his hands, waits.

It takes her a minute, but she eventually makes her way to the kitchen. She leans against the doorframe and when he finally looks up at her, he’s surprised to see that she doesn’t appear upset. He can’t tell what she is, exactly. There’s a high flush on her cheekbones, and her hair is loose around her shoulders, and she smells faintly of turpentine and wine, and it’s the freest and most open he’s seen her since when they were first dating. And isn’t that something?

“Hi,” Stede says, because what else is there to say? “Did you have a nice evening?”

“I did.”

“Lovely.”

There’s a long silence, while Mary putters around the kitchen, wiping crumbs from the counters, drying the dishes in the dish rack that are probably already dry. It feels like any other night, and Stede wonders for about two seconds if he hasn’t made a terrible mistake. It’s not the worst, coexisting like this. It’s comfortable. Familiar.

“I found this,” Mary says when the kitchen is pristine, and slides a piece of paper across the table to him, “in your pants pocket, months ago.”

Stede picks it up.

“Ah.”

It’s the itemized receipt from the architecture tour. Two adult tickets. Ed had bought them, but the receipt had ended up in Stede’s pocket, somehow. He thought he’d been so careful.

“Ah?”

Stede sighs, meets Mary’s eyes. Doesn’t nod per se, just lets his face do what it does when he thinks about Ed.

“Were you going to say anything, Stede, or were you just going to let me think we were failing at this on our own merits?”

“I’m not — it’s not because of this, necessarily.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Not entirely.”

“How?” Mary demands, and there’s that fierce, wild, free look again. Stede loves her for it, if not in the way he’s meant to.

Stede spreads his fingers, looks at the spaces between them on the table. He thinks about Ed’s fingers interlaced with his as they ran down the dunes. He thinks about Ed’s fingers in his hair as he’d fucked his face that last night.

“It was a catalyst,” he says softly. “I wasn’t brave enough to do it on my own, but…” He taps the receipt with one finger.

“But you saw what it could be like?” Mary says, and her voice is surprisingly gentle.

“Yes.”

“Yeah,” she says, and Stede sees the flush on her cheeks and her tousled hair in a new light.

“What’s her name?” Mary asks, and Stede can’t help it. He reaches out for her hand, just to have something between his fingers. Somehow, improbably, she permits it.

“Ed,” he says. “His name is Ed.”

“Oh,” Mary says, and squeezes his hand. “Oh.”

“Yes.”

“Is it weird that that makes it better, somehow?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

That night, Mary sleeps in the guest bedroom.

In the morning, she joins him for coffee on the back porch for the first time in… ever, possibly? They sit in the pale half-dawn in silence for a while, and when Stede comes back out with the carafe to refill their mugs, she thanks him. It’s all very stilted and formal, like back when they were first dating. May I take your coat? and Won’t you come in? Playacting at being adults, their parents’ words in their mouths. God, they’d been so young.

“When do you leave for Chicago?” she asks, just as a plane roars westward overhead, and Stede has to ask her to repeat herself.

“Oh, I’d thought maybe I’d skip it this quarter.”

She shakes her head.

“No?”

“You should go.”

“Okay,” Stede says, and then, “Er… why?”

She just looks at him levelly over the rim of her mug, and Stede ducks his head.

“Yes, okay, some space to process all this might be –”

“Who said anything about process?” Mary says. “I’m going to ask my parents to pick the kids up from school and go get shit-faced.”

“Who with?”

“None of your goddamn business.”

Stede nods, because fair’s fair.

“Right,” he says. “In that case, I suppose I’d better pack.”

“When do you leave?”

Stede opens his phone calendar, checks the reservation.

“My flight’s a little before ten.”

“Today?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Yeah, Stede, I think you’d better pack, you’ve only got thirty hours. Might need to change your mind about what cufflinks to bring eighteen times between now and then.”

They smile at each other, and Stede leaves her on the porch, looking out at the sunrise.

He’s not going to text Ed.

***

He’s not going to text Ed. Mary needs space, and Ed probably needs space too. God knows Stede would like space from himself, for all that’s impossible. He turns his phone off and puts it in his bag. He takes the kids to school, stops off for donuts on the way. He goes to work. He sits in meetings. He offers his opinions when he’s asked. In the little chunks of time between meetings, he tries to get some actual work done. He sits at his drafting table and looks out the window. He sharpens all his pencils. He gets no actual work done. He picks the kids up. He takes Louis to swim lessons. Stede manages to swim twelve hundred yards in half an hour, and his watch won’t stop buzzing to congratulate him about it after. He goes home, makes the salade nicoise, picks the tuna out of his serving. Mary puts the kids to bed, and he spends an hour trying to read the same two pages of the latest Kate Atkinson. Eventually, he goes to bed.

He only remembers to retrieve his phone to charge it late that night, when he’s woken to swap out argyle socks for striped ones. He turns it back on. He’s not going to text Ed.

He’s not.

He’s not going to text Ed as he wrestles Louis into his school uniform the next morning, as he kisses Alma goodbye. He’s not going to text Ed from the Uber to the airport. He’s not going to text Ed from the TSA line or bathroom or frequent flyers lounge or the queue to board the plane. He’s not going to text Ed.

Other places from which he’s not going to text Ed: O’Hare, a taxi, the bland, cold hotel room with a spectacular view of the alley and the fire escapes on the next building over. A shower, an awful work dinner that tests his resolve, but he stays strong. He’s walking back to the hotel when his phone rings. Mary.

“Hiya,” he says, and makes an about-face, heads toward the lake, instead. She never calls when she can text, and Stede feels like maybe he needs the extra courage.

“Hey.”

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah. Just wanted to start talking through the divorce.”

Stede stops walking, just for a second. The city swims around him. He’d — of course this is the next logical step, but hearing her say it out loud is different, somehow.

“Yes,” he says. “All right.”

He sits on a big cement block and watches the waves crash against the shore and has an hourlong measured, civil conversation about the inevitable mutual destruction of their life together. It’s horrible and it’s lovely and it’s so, so heartbreaking that only now, at the end of everything, can they finally speak to each other frankly.

Stede says, “I think that maybe I never learned how to be myself with you because I came into our relationship wearing the armor I grew up with, and now I don’t know how to take it off”

and Mary says, “You’re so committed to the belief that you don’t deserve to be happy. Do you know what that felt like to be married to, Stede?”

and Stede says, “I’ve always been my own worst critic but I feel like at some point you decided to make it a competition”

and Mary says, “I had sex with someone who wanted to have sex with me for the first time this week. Turns out that’s pretty great”

and much later, feeling like a wrestler tapping out to end the match, Stede says

“I just wish I knew how to allow myself be happy,” and Mary says,

“I do, too, Stede. For what it’s worth, I do, too. For you.”

When Stede hangs up, his face is damp with tears and he is absolutely fucking freezing. He puts his phone in his pocket and walks to the Loop. He gets on a northbound Red Line train. And now it’s not so much that he’s not going to text Ed as it is that his body is operating on instinct. He is drained. His mind is just an echo of the heavy, clouded sky, but his body is moving with purpose, heading north like a homing pigeon.

Stede’s not going to text Ed right up until the moment he hops onto a barstool at Scupper and Lucius fixes him with a death glare and marches over brandishing a damp bar towel like a bully in the locker room after the showers.

“You have got some world-class, rock-hard, absolutely titanic balls coming in here,” he hisses, but he’s also turning on his heel and starting to assemble the ingredients for a Corpse Reviver No. 1 and Stede desperately hopes it’s for him. He doesn’t have the wherewithal to decide what he wants.

It turns out it’s for both of them. Lucius pours his own half into an insulated Yeti coffee mug and the other into a cocktail glass and toasts him a little mockingly. Stede returns the gesture, less mockingly, and takes a large sip. It’s good. He considers telling Lucius that it’s good, but he suspects Lucius doesn’t want to hear anything from him at the moment, judging by the glower he’s wearing and the way he’s tapping one fingernail on the bar like an irate schoolmarm. He waits him out.

“What exactly do you think you’re doing?” Lucius asks finally, after chugging what’s got to be half of his drink.

Stede shrugs.

“I’m not thinking, I think,” he says, and realizes as he says it how pathetic it sounds. “I mean, I’m operating on instinct, at this point. Vibes, as the kids would say.”

“Your kids?” Lucius asks, so pointedly that Stede can feel it on his skin.

“Among others.”

“Ugh.”

Stede shrugs again, because he knows Lucius isn’t wrong. He has earned this disgust.

But he is here, and Ed is upstairs, and Stede has just dropped the match on the dry, brittle leaves of his marriage, and he’s not a homing pigeon, he’s a sailor in the fog with a broken sextant and his dead reckoning has brought him this far, but it’s not quite close enough.

Stede pulls his phone from his pocket. He tries:

Hello, Edward

I wanted to say

I’m sorry, and I’m trying to change

I feel like a sea creature that’s been stranded on the beach at high tide and you’re the tide, Edward, or maybe the moon itself

How can I

What can I do

Ed, I’m downstairs

I miss you

I

I like

Fuck

“Are you going to cry?” Lucius asks in a tone of voice that makes it clear that Stede unbuttoning his trousers and shitting into the ice bin behind the bar would be preferable, and oddly, it’s this that snaps his mind back from wherever it had wandered off to. It’s a physical sensation, the kerchunk of the lens at the optometrist’s office and suddenly the letters swim into view. He blinks his eyes and squares his shoulders and knocks his drink back.

“I’m getting divorced,” he announces, and promptly bursts into loud, wracking sobs. Lucius throws his towel at him and stalks off to the other end of the bar.

Stede buries his face in the towel, and when the smell of bleach and gin becomes overwhelming, he takes a brisk walk of shame out of the side door and into the alley. He leans against the wall and cries, wishing he were cool enough to smoke. Somehow the plausible deniability of a cigarette in his fingers would make this less humiliating. Maybe Lucius – but no, he’s bothered Lucius enough already.

He takes several shuddering breaths and wipes his eyes on his sleeve. He’s going to go back to the hotel. This was a mistake. This was — he’s going to go. He’ll just duck back in and pay, and probably tip Lucius 250% again, and then he’ll walk to the train. It was selfish, coming here. He’s just going to go back in —

“Ed,” he gasps, as they collide and Ed’s hands are cupping his elbows and he’s looking at him like a firefighter looking in the shattered window at the scene of a gruesome accident, and Stede’s not wholly convinced that his head hasn’t flown clean off his body and landed in the bushes thirty feet away.

And then he’s sure of it, because Ed’s kissing him, hot and filthy, and is sliding a thigh between Stede’s legs and is backing him up against the door toward the stairs to his apartment, and then time and space fracture, and Stede only surfaces in brief gasps —

fingers digging into his hips keeping him upright as he trips up the steps

the cool wood of Ed’s door against his back

the snarl of Ed’s hand in his hair

zipper, the bite of

And then Stede’s on his knees with one hand on his own cock and the warm, perfect, heavy salt heat of Ed on his tongue and Ed’s pulling his hair, tugging him off, saying something.

“What?”

“Why’d you leave your wife?”

And Stede laughs, looks down at the strand of spit that’s connecting his lip to Ed’s cock, looks back up at Ed. Ed shakes his head, and tightens his hand in Stede’s hair, and thrusts back in, a little rougher, a little deeper. Stede chokes and moans, grips himself hard to keep from spilling over on Ed’s rug right then and there.

He’s just found his rhythm again when Ed pulls him off with one sharp yank. Stede blinks the tears away, looks up at Ed from under clumped lashes. Waits. Ed’s breathing deeply through his nose. His expression is a thunderhead. Stede can’t decide if he’s ever seen him look more beautiful.

“Why’d you leave your wife?” he asks again, his voice the low buzz of a hive that’s just been kicked, just before the hornets all pour out.

“I —” Stede catches his breath. He frowns. He thinks about it, about talking it through with Mary earlier that evening. How had that only been earlier that evening? It feels like a lifetime ago. Two, even: his tears in the alleyway the death, Ed’s lips on his the subsequent rebirth.

“We were never right,” he whispers, because his voice is a wreck from the cocksucking but also the emotion, and because it feels like something that should be spoken of in hushed tones, the corpse still warm, the pyre not yet lighted. “We never — it was something we were supposed to do, so we did it, but we did it badly. I did it particularly badly.”

Ed laughs, or rather makes the shape of a laugh with his voice but not with his face, and then he’s back in Stede’s mouth and he’s relentless, and Stede hasn’t had time to catch his breath and it’s exquisite, the way his vision starts to go all sparkly at the edges and the only thing he knows is Ed Ed Ed Ed Ed, and he’s barely even conscious of his own hand working himself furiously until his orgasm sneaks up on him and he’s spilling over his own fist and dribbling onto Ed’s living room rug like the world’s worst Zen fountain, and Ed’s easing himself out of Stede’s mouth for a third time.

“Why?” is all he says, just the faintest whisper, and Stede sits with it even longer this time.

“Ed, I —”

Stede feels like maybe the words he is looking for haven’t been invented yet. He feels like maybe all the words are already in his mouth but can’t find their way out, blind cave fishes bumping up against the backs of his teeth and his lips.

He hides his face into the crease of Ed’s thigh, breathes in the soap-smoke-salt scent of him, and can’t help himself, he has to open his mouth, first to taste and then to bite, and finally to soothe. Ed’s hips shift in a way Stede knows means he likes it, but too soon he’s drawing his hips away, putting one gentle finger under Stede’s chin, angling his face up to look him in the eye. Stede drinks him in, the soft, warm, brown eyes that somehow still look fond after all this. The crows’ feet at the corners. His silver beard, and the skin glowing bronze beneath, like a sculpture or an idol to be worshiped. The kind, firm twist of his mouth that makes him human. Stede feels his own pulse in his carotid against Ed’s finger. He knows Ed can feel it, too.

“I’m gay,” Stede says, finally. They’re not exactly the words he’d been looking for, but oh, now that they’re out, the words are raspberry bursting fresh and bright over his tongue. He has never said them before. He wants to dance, maybe, or march down the street banging a gong, or throw cash out of the windows like Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol. He smiles up at Ed.

Ed is half-smiling back, but his eyes are sad as he shakes his head, just the once. And then he’s shimmying his hips and tucking himself back into his underwear, still hard. He stands. Stede is a supplicant at his feet for a moment, and then Ed’s disappearing down the hall. He comes back with a washcloth.

“Clean that up, please,” he says softly. “And then I need you to go.”

The words are firm and kind. There’s no venom in them, but they eviscerate him anyway.

“Ed?”

But Ed just shakes his head, and Stede knows that he has erred. This was a test and he’s been found wanting, but he doesn’t understand. He’d told the truth!

He cleans his semen up off the living room rug and dresses in shameful silence, wishing the whole time that he’d done it in the opposite order. He goes to the bathroom and washes his face, wrings out the washcloth, drapes it over the side of the tub. When he returns to the living room, Ed is standing by the front door.

Stede slips back into his shoes and musters all of his courage. He meets Ed’s eyes. They’re warm and sad and distant. He’s hurt, Stede realizes. Stede has hurt him, and he wants so badly to fix this —

Ed opens his arms and Stede almost doesn’t step into them, because it would feel too final, but what’s the alternative? To not hug him? Impossible. So he flings his arms around Ed’s shoulders and holds him close and tries to memorize what this feels like. Ed brushes a kiss over Stede’s cheek.

“Come back when you figure it out,” he whispers, and he steps away.

Stede is in the street before it occurs to him to ask what Ed means.

He doesn’t text Ed.

Chapter 8: Fall

Louis doesn’t like second grade. His teacher was wrong about monotremes in September and wrong about the metal in pennies in October and wrong about the Austro-Hungarian empire in November, which means she’s probably going to be wrong about a lot of other things, only Louis has stopped paying attention a while back. His teacher has also seated him in front of Richie Banes who is mean and always smells like peanut butter even though they’re not even allowed to have peanut butter at school because there’s a kid in fourth grade who will die if she even looks at a peanut or something. But Richie Banes thinks the rules don’t apply to him so he always smells like peanut butter and likes to spit on Louis’s seat before he sits down. Louis has taken to carrying a package of Clorox wipes in his pants pocket. Mom had said no but Dad had said yes without asking why and Louis isn’t sure which one is worse.

Mom and Dad had sat them down a while ago to tell them they were getting a divorce, and Louis had asked them why they’d gotten married in the first place and they’d looked at each other and Mom had said “because we loved each other then but sometimes love isn’t forever,” and Dad had said “there are a lot of different reasons why two people get married” at the same time and Mom had made a pinched-up sort of frowny face and then went and made loud noises in the kitchen. Dad gave him the book on the Hapsburgs a couple days later to show that royal people used to marry their own siblings to consolidate power which is extremely gross and also stupid because of inbreeding. Louis is glad that Mom and Dad aren’t brother and sister.

Thanksgiving was weird, because they’d all had to go to Poppy and Mimi’s house and pretend like nothing was happening except halfway through Louis had forgotten and had asked Dad when he was planning on moving out because there’s a creek that runs behind Poppy and Mimi’s house and if Dad moved out soon maybe Mom would let him keep frogs in the little room Dad calls his auxiliary wardrobe.

There’d been a lot of excitement and Poppy had knocked over an entire bottle of wine, but Mom had given Louis an extra scoop of ice cream with his pie that night and Dad had carried him into the house from the car and tucked him into bed and kissed him on his forehead as Louis pretended to be asleep so maybe it wasn’t all bad?

Anyway. Thanksgiving had been weird, and the rest of Thanksgiving break had been weirder, because Mom had gone out on Thanksgiving night after they’d gotten home from Poppy and Mimi’s and she hadn’t come home until the next morning, so early that the sun wasn’t up yet, but Louis was awake and heard her car in the driveway, and then later that weekend Dad had gone out for the day and Louis and Alma and Mom had gone shopping for Christmas presents and Louis had seen him in the window of a restaurant wearing a new sweater that was too small for him and pretending to laugh at the jokes of some tall guy with orange hair.

And now Christmas is coming up and they’re making snowflakes in class. Louis hates crafts because sometimes his hands don’t do what he wants them to do. Louis knows he’s feeling frustrated because he had been working on that last week with Mr. Boodhari and the bubbly feeling in his chest and the hot feeling in his face and the ringing in his ears are the same as when Mr. Boodhari had helped him practice in his office. But what they hadn’t practiced last week was throwing Richie Banes in the mix.

It starts with Richie humming Baby Beluga under his breath, which Louis manages to ignore, mostly. He gets the sense that the song choice is deliberate, somehow, but he doesn’t understand why, so he keeps trying to cut out a half-heart shape in the thickly folded paper, but then Richie starts kicking the back of his seat and only stops for about ten seconds when Louis asks him to politely. And then he feels a sharp pinprick on the back of his neck like a bug bite, and he slaps at it, and Richie laughs a mean little snicker and when it happens three more times in a row, Louis puts his scissors down.

He stands up.

He pushes his chair in.

He turns on his heel.

He makes a fist with his thumb on the outside, because he’d read that that’s safer.

And he punches Richie Banes square in the nose.

There’s a lot of blood.

There’s a lot of blood.

Like, it’s actually a truly alarming amount of blood, and Louis steps back so none of it gets on his clothes, and then he runs out into the hallway because Richie is screaming and his teacher is yelling and his hand hurts even though he’d made the fist the right way and the ringing in his ears is even louder and he can’t. What if he broke Richie’s nose? What if he’d punched it clean off the front of his face, like those statues in the museum?

There’s another kid in Mr. Boodhari’s office but Louis ignores her and goes to Mr. Boodhari’s bookshelf and takes the big books off the bottom shelf and climbs in and curls his knees to his chest with his back to the door. It’s quiet in here except for Mr. Boodhari murmuring to the other kid that maybe it’s time for her to go back to class now, hey?

The door latches behind her and Louis feels rather than hears it as Mr. Boodhari sits down on the floor nearby. He’s not too close, which is a nice thing about him. He seems to know where Louis’s personal bubble is on any given day. (They’d spent a lot of time talking about personal bubbles back in kindergarten. Louis imagines each person’s to be a different color. His is purple. Alma’s is orange. Dad’s is salmon-colored. Mom’s is dark blue. Mr. Boodhari’s is orange, too, but like an autumn leaf, not like Tang, like Alma’s. Richie Banes’s is puke green, obviously.)

Thinking about Alma and Mom and Dad is nice for a minute but then he remembers what he did, and he thinks about the conversation he had had with Dad last week.

“Why do you have to move?” Louis had asked, trying really hard not to cry and only part of the way succeeding. “Don’t you want to be my dad anymore?”

And Dad gathered him into his lap and sniffed into his hair for a while and kissed him on the forehead.

“It’s — listen,” he said, finally. “There were two people who worked in the Chicago office who were not nice guys. They — they picked on people. Made them feel bad about themselves, or gave them hard, impossible jobs to do just because of who they were or what they looked like. They bullied people until they left the company. And I’m trying to be — Louis, I’m trying to be a braver man than I used to be, so I stood up to the bullies a couple weeks ago, and they got fired. Not - not literally set on fire, but —”

“I know what fired means.”

“Okay, yes. Yes, of course. So they got fired, but that means that the company needs someone experienced to take their place for a while and that’s me. I left things a bit of a mess, and I think I need to fix it.”

“But you’ll be back?” Louis asked, and Dad sighed.

“I don’t know, Lou. I love you and your sister so much, but your mom and I need some space from each other and — I will always, always be your dad, and I will always, always love you, and your mom and I are going to figure out how the three of us, you and me and Alma, I mean, how we will spend time together, okay? And we’ll FaceTime every night, just like when I have my trips, and —”

There’d been a lot more crying and hugging, and now Louis is crying again because he just stood up to a bully but he doesn’t want to have to move away. He wants to stay in the house with Mom and Alma and Dad until Dad has to move. He doesn’t want them to send him away, too.

Chapter 9

Summary:

If you saw the Tweet about the pizza and the salad, this is the chapter where I figured out what I was talking about.

Notes:

Biggest of ups to Jill and Lis for their beta work on this and to all of you for bearing with me. The pendulum is swinging in the upward direction, here, folks. <3

Stede Bonnet steps out of the car and around a pile of slush. He’s colder than he’s ever been in his life. Yesterday had been the same, and the day before that, and the day before that. Every day gets colder and Stede, not for the first time, curses the French fur traders who thought colonizing this godforsaken bit of marsh and river would be sensible. Mrs. O’Leary’s cow had had the right idea.

His apartment is warm, at least, and came furnished in a bland, corporate style that Stede keeps meaning to do something about before the kids come to visit next month. Ski Week, their school calls it, because that’s the sort of school it is. Couldn’t possibly be February Break or Presidents’ Day Inservice Week or Seasonal Affective Disorder Misery Vacation Times. Though no one in San Diego has SAD, of course. Impossible to when there are no seasons, or so his therapist had informed him. And then she’d gently suggested that maybe the reason he was having a hard time was that he was experiencing five Major Life Events all at once, and that a touch of overwhelm might be expected when one had just 1) come out and was 2) divorcing one’s wife and 3) moving across the country and 4) getting a promotion on the coattails of some nasty harassment investigations, all the while 5) dealing with one’s first heartbreak, and Stede had sat with that for a few minutes, and had finally asked,

“But what’s the alternative?”

And his therapist had just smiled knowingly at him and written for three minutes straight on her legal pad.

He’s been here for a few weeks, in this high-rise apartment in the Gold Coast that has a bland, sanitized view of the lake from the kitchen window. He takes the bus to work, and he takes the bus home, and he doesn’t hate every minute of it, but it’s a near thing.

(He’d hoped, back in the fall, that divorcing Mary would be like starting fresh. A clean break. But somehow it just felt like mopping a come stain off the tapestry that is his life, and then what do you do with the rag? The point is, or the problem is, it’s still his life that he’s living. Wherever you go, there you are. Ugh.)

Stede changes into his pajamas and collapses onto the couch, which is so new that it still smells like it’s going to give him cancer. His phone chimes but he ignores it. It’s one of two things, and he cannot bear to read another text from Mary or to look at another dick pic right now.

The past few months —

Everything Stede had told Ed back in the fall was true. Things with Mary had never been right. They’re still not right. Christmas in particular had been absolutely wretched, nothing but bickering (him and Mary, Mary and Alma, Alma and Louis, Stede and Louis, Stede and Alma and Mary…) and silence (mostly him and Mary, though Louis had made a solid effort there for a day and a half which was so unusual that Stede had almost taken him to the children’s hospital for a workup) and, eventually, a detenté that, with the distance, has settled into an uneasy if not friendship, then at least alliance, albeit the sort of alliance where one of them makes the other cry at least twice a week but they also drink wine and debrief/gossip about the kids over FaceTime on Thursday nights.

Everything Stede had told Ed all those months ago was true. He is gay! He’s been on… well, a bunch of dates. Some of them led to second dates. Most of them didn’t. Some of them had been comically bad (the guy who called him Steve the entire time despite being corrected at least a half dozen times. The one who had talked for three entire hours – one hundred and eighty minutes! – without asking Stede a single question. The guy who had paid for dinner and then, when Stede offered to buy him a nightcap at the pub down the street, ordered a $200 dram of Scotch and walked out after shooting it like Fireball) but some of them hadn’t. (Stede gained a squash partner, briefly, back in San Diego: a very sweet man named Jeffrey with whom he had negative chemistry, and with whom he’d apparently gone to elementary school? Small world. His first week in Chicago, he’d met a very odd man named Buttons who did not appear to recognize they were on a dating app. Buttons has a number of pet birds but couldn’t give him advice about pigeons when Stede had asked. Something about “feckin’ magnets, how do they work?” and pigeons’ brains? Stede hadn’t asked, and they’d never actually been on a date, but they meet up to go for a winter walk now and again and Buttons introduces him to the seagulls he knows at the lake. The next week, Stede had gone out with a drag queen whose stage name is Calypso but whose real name is John who had talked to Stede for about three minutes before informing him he was adorable but not at all his type, but who had subsequently messaged Stede several thrilling ideas for his wardrobe. John had given Stede’s number to his friend Frenchie, and they’d held hands during an entirely forgettable movie and afterward Stede had looked up into his kind, handsome face and they’d both shaken their heads and shrugged and agreed to meet up at a bar in River North to watch the next Brighton match. And so on. And so on. And so on…)

There had been other dates, too, dates that were successful enough at least to provide evidence to support the assertion that Stede is gay, and if Stede hadn’t called a single one of them back afterward? Well…

(And if Stede had printed out the selfie he and Ed had taken that day on the beach and hung it above his piano where he can look at it every morning while he drinks his coffee in the deep, relentless darkness of another miserable Chicago morning? Well.)

Stede doesn’t have any tattoos, but if a coroner were to open him for autopsy to find the words “Come back when you figure it out” etched into his long bones, it wouldn’t surprise Stede at all. He feels like Schroedinger, or maybe like the cat in the box, just waiting for someone to come open it and determine if he's real or not. He almost wishes he weren't. At least then, something would be different. It's the limbo he can't stand, not knowing what he's more afraid of: being with Ed or not being with him. Fucking meow.

His phone buzzes again, and he groans and picks it up. He’s got six new Grindr messages and the despair he feels as he thumbs through them is galvanizing. He holds his thumb down, and when his phone asks him if he’s sure, that deleting the app will also delete all of his data, he says to it out loud,

“Oh, I’m sure.”

He closes his eyes. He can’t even be good at being gay! What is wrong with him? And then he opens his eyes again, because that feels awfully reductive, doesn’t it? As if the only thing that makes you gay is slutting it up on the apps? That’s almost offensive, really. Oh, god, he’s a bigot. Is this internalized homophobia? Is it externalized homophobia? Is that why none of his dates have gone well? Because the other fellows can tell he’s a massive, loathsome, bigoted, self-hating —

(And he is! He has been hating himself even more than usual for a year now, first because he was a liar and a cheat and a fraud, and then because even as he told himself he was those things, he knew that the guilt he felt was in the wrong direction. His ring had been on Mary’s finger, and Mary’s name had been on his mortgage, but leaving Ed to fly back home felt like the actual betrayal, and he hated himself for that. Now he hates himself because he doesn’t know how not to, and because he’s a coward. There’s a gulf between the knowing and the doing, and he doesn’t know how to bridge it, or even if he should.)

He opens his eyes and his eyes, because they are open and connected to his worthless brain, fall on the photo of him and Ed. Stede is smiling so widely it looks almost painful. Ed’s smile lights up his whole face, those lovely eyes crinkling at the corners. Stede thinks about that afternoon, about the taste of strawberry on Ed’s lips as they’d kissed at the ice-cream stand, about the cold plunge under the water, about the words he’s still not quite brave enough to say out loud.

Come back when you figure it out.

He closes his eyes again and hates himself.

#

He walks to work the next morning, because it’s even colder today than it was yesterday, and maybe he’ll just freeze into a human-shaped iceberg at the corner of State and Huron and then he wouldn’t have to be a person anymore, just a brief local oddity before fading from public consciousness and becoming yet another obstacle against which the wind-blown trash can eddy. Something for the tired birds to roost on.

He’s so chilled that when he gets to the office, he has to hold his hands under the warm water in the bathroom to be able to hold his pencil properly. And then he just sits there at his drafting table for an hour or so. If Nigel and Chauncey were still here, they’d give him something else to hate.

They’re not.

He manages, eventually, to make a little headway on the South Loop project, and he’s just about to break for lunch when his phone starts to buzz. He doesn’t know the number, but the area code is from home. Home? From San Diego, at any rate.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Stede?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Oluwande Boodhari, Louis’s social support teacher?”

“Oh, no. What’s wrong? What’s happened?” Stede immediately asks, leaping to his feet and patting himself down. He can get to the airport in an hour if he times the train right. Wallet, keys, phone — where’s his phone? Where’s his fucking – ah, yes. Against his ear.

“Nothing – no, sorry. I usually lead with that. Louis is safe, he’s not injured. He is upset, which is why I’m calling. Hoped maybe we could chat a bit.”

“Of course. Yes, of course. Thank you – sorry. I panicked a little, didn’t I?”

“Hey, it happens,” Mr. Boodhari says, and Stede immediately understands why Louis likes him so much. Even down the telephone he radiates calm, steady competence. Stede sits back down.

“What’s going on?” he asks.

“Hang on, let me – can I put you on speaker? Or if you have an iPhone we could turn this into a FaceTime?”

“Either. Both. Well, not both, I suppose, that wouldn’t make sense.”

“Louis?” Olu asks. “Do you have a preference? Video or not?”

Stede doesn’t hear his response, but the audio quality widens and worsens, so he knows he’s been put on speaker, and he can’t blame him. He wouldn’t want to look at himself, either.

“Hi, bud.”

Louis doesn’t answer, just sniffs, and Stede wishes the floor would not so much open up and swallow him whole as just evaporate entirely and let him plummet down the seventeen stories until he went splat on the marble floor of the lobby.

They sit there in silence for a while, Louis sniffing intermittently, until Mr. Boodhari finally says,

“Louis? Would it be easier for you if I got us started and you could chime in when you felt up to it?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Yeah. Okay, so, Stede, Louis was feeling angry with you —”

“And Mom.”

“And his mom, yep.”

“That’s fair,” Stede says immediately. “I understand. It’s been a big upheaval. I would be mad at me, too.”

“I’m not mad that you left,” Louis snaps. “I’m mad that you lied.”

“Lied?” Stede asks, and finds himself back on his feet. The sullen scorn in Louis’s voice is undeniable, to the point that it feels weirdly like marriage counseling again. Stede finds himself on his feet again, pacing the little Persian rug he’d put in his new corner office to soften the harsh, minimalist aesthetic. The rug, a spider plant in the window, and a framed photo of the kids on this desk. The only signs that someone works here and it’s not an IKEA showroom. Though the spider plant, he realizes as he looks at it, might actually be plastic. He hasn’t watered it since he’s moved here and it looks just the same. But that’s the appeal of spider plants, isn’t it? They’re nearly impossible to kill. He’ll have to check —

“You and Mom promised to love each other forever. I saw it.”

“Saw? Louis, we got married long before you were born, I assure you. Not that there’s anything wrong with marrying after you have children. Or not at all. It’s a rather outdated social construct, after all —”

“There was a newspaper article about your wedding. I saw it in a scrapbook that Mom put out for the trash.”

Stede puts his head in his hands and laughs silently, because Louis is a tactless little monster and it’s as brilliant as it is terrible. He knows the article, of course, an ostentatious feature that ran in the LA Times because Mary’s mother had had a connection on the Lifestyle desk there and had pulled strings to make it happen while also bemoaning that they weren’t New York Times Weddings section elite.

“Stede?” Mr. Boodhari asks, and he collects himself.

“I — Lou, I understand why you’re upset, but it wasn’t a lie when I promised it.”

“What does that even mean?”

Stede looks out the window and tries to figure out how to distill an entire child- and young adulthood withering under the expectations of cisheteropatriarchal capitalism to this particular seven-year-old who has never once cared what other people think of him. Stede loves him for it, of course, but he also envies him a little, wonders how Louis’s life will be different, growing up with parents who don’t force him to be anyone other than who he is.

“I – okay. Imagine you’ve only ever eaten, I don’t know. Salad and bananas your entire life. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. At home, at school, at the grocery store, when you went to a restaurant, the only options were either salad or bananas. What would you say your favorite food was?”

“Pizza.”

“But you’ve never had pizza. You didn’t even know pizza existed. You only knew about salad and bananas. What would you say your favorite food was, then?”

“Salad, I guess. I hate bananas.”

“I know you do. So in this weird food world, where you’d never tasted pizza and didn’t even realize pizza existed, if you said your favorite food was salad, would you say that was a lie?”

“Yeah, because my favorite food is pizza.”

“Right, but in this example —”

“Stede,” Mr. Boodhari says, “I think it might be helpful if you made it a little less abstract.”

“Right,” Stede says. “Right, sorry. Um.”

It’s snowing, he realizes as he searches for his words. The slate-grey sky has given way to huge, fat flakes that don’t look real. The city noise, already muffled in this sterile, corporate aerie, is now completely gone. The only thing Stede can hear is the high whine of the fluorescent lights and the satisfying plop-splatter of snowflakes on the windowpane and Louis sniffling two thousand miles away.

“I meant it at the time,” Stede says quietly. “The promises I made to your mom. The promises we made to each other. And the promises we made to you and Alma, even though we hadn’t met you yet? Those ones are never going to change. But Louis, sometimes you can have the best intentions in the world but then you get new information, you know? Things can change. Situations can change, people can change, you can learn new things about yourself, or about the other person. It’s like science. Sometimes you have to change your hypothesis when you learn something new, don’t you?”

“I guess.”

“It doesn’t mean it was a bad hypothesis, it just means you didn’t have all the information yet.”

“Okay,” Louis says, and it’s thoughtful, not dismissive. Maybe he’s revising his own hypotheses. That’s all Stede can ask for.

“Okay,” Mr. Boodhari says, when it’s clear nothing more is forthcoming. “Louis, is there anything else you’d like to say to your dad? No, okay. Stede, is there anything else you’d like to say to Louis right now?”

“I love you,” Stede says immediately.

“Okay,” Louis says again. And then, eventually and only a little grudgingly, “Love you too.”

“Great,” Olu says. “Is it okay if we call again if we need to?”

“Of course! I’ll save your number – anytime. Day or night. Though probably not night, don’t know why you’d need to – Sorry. Sorry, yes. Anytime.”

“Great. Thanks. And Stede?”

“Yes?”

“Just wanted to say, I hope you enjoy your, um, pizza. You deserve it, I think. More than most.”

“I – oh.”

Oh.

Stede looks out at the snow, and he tries to blink the tears back into his eyes.

“Thank you. Thanks. I – I think I will.”

“Great. Right. We’re going to go, okay?”

“Okay. Bye, Lou. And Mr. Boodhari, thanks again.”

“Call me Olu, please. Cheers, Stede.”

The line goes dead, and Stede looks at his watch. It’s not yet noon. He walks out of his office. He thinks that maybe he won’t walk back in, at least not today.

It’s still snowing, but Stede braves the trek through the tunnel under Lake Shore Drive and walks along the bike path. Each breath is painful in his lungs, and he balls up his gloved hands in his pockets to try to keep them from going numb. It doesn’t help. Just before the next tunnel and the inevitable walk back toward the city, and a cab, and a hot bath, and possibly a long cry and a nap, he stops and sits on a massive stone down near the water. He knows he can’t sit long, can immediately feel his ass going numb, along with his fingertips and his feet and the tip of his nose and his cheeks and somehow his eyeballs, but he’s also never felt more alive.

He looks at the gulls wheeling above the water, and he sucks the frigid air deep into his lungs where it burns like drowning.

“I love him,” he whispers to the sky. “I’m going to let myself love him and see what happens.”

The gulls don’t stop their dance, and the words disappear with the steam of his breath, but inside him, a spark catches and glows.

Let me know when you figure it out.

I will. Ed, I will.

#

It’s amazing how much more free time Stede has when he’s not trying to win a landspeed record for highest number of dates that end in mutual ghosting. Instead, he does other things he’s been afraid of. He goes ice skating in Millennium Park and doesn’t break his ankles. He enrolls in an online lecture series and asks a couple questions without making a complete ass of himself. He finds a little neighborhood mead shop that does tastings on Sunday afternoons and learns that he doesn’t really like mead, but he really likes the little pastries that are provided from the bakery across the street, and he becomes a regular there, and no one makes fun of him for his coffee order. One afternoon, he goes to a craft store and dithers over the model kits for so long that he feels guilty and buys one of each. He listens to audiobooks while he works, books he’d always meant to read but never got around to because he’d been afraid he wouldn’t appreciate them in the right way. It turns out Melville is a comic genius and one night, he laughs so hard that he superglues his fingers together, has to use half a tub of coconut oil to get them unstuck. The first thing he builds is absolute shit (which he’d been afraid of), and the second thing he builds is slightly less shitty shit, and by mid-February, he’s got something he can be proud of.

It’s the night before the kids arrive when he makes his way back to Ed. His hand is raised to knock when he realizes he hasn’t thought this through. He’s insane. He should have called. Texted. E-mailed. Sent a letter. Something that isn’t showing up on his doorstep with a weird present and not a single thought to what he’s going to say.

The door opens, and Ed is —

Ed is there.

Ed is there and he’s looking at Stede like he’s scared of him.

 

(There has always been something about being in Ed’s presence that makes everything easier. His breath evens out, his mind clears. He feels more intensely, but also closer to the surface. Everything is easier when he’s with Ed. And Ed is here, and he’s looking at Stede like he’s scared of him, and suddenly, it’s the easiest thing in the world to let himself love him.)

He takes a half step back, because the force of it threatens to take him out at the knees, all that bottled up denial and repression and longing, the undertow threatening to drag him down.

The moment by the lake last month was priming the pump, but here, looking into Ed’s dear, worn, tired face — wowie. He takes another step back because Ed is looking at him like he’s scared of him, and he feels like he should probably give him some space, or, you know, have texted before showing up on his doorstep, but that ship has sailed, and speaking of ships —

“Er, hi,” Stede whispers, and holds out the bottle. “I — well. I made you this.”

Ed doesn’t move to take it, but he does look at it, and back to Stede with one eyebrow raised.

“Because it made me think of you,” Stede soldiers on. “With – well, it started with the rigging, which reminded me — well. You know. Sorry. But it did, it made me think of you! I thought maybe I was the rigging? But then I realized as I made the next one, and the next one after that, that I’m not the rigging. You’re the rigging.”

“I’m the rigging,” Ed says flatly. It’s not so much disbelief or skepticism as it is refusal to play Stede’s little game, and that hurts more than the fear in Ed’s eyes, almost.

“I’m not making sense, I’m sorry. Sorry. Um, the thing you have to understand about a square-rigged ship is that the standing rigging and the mast sort of counterbalance each other, and I’ve been making model ships in the evening instead of going on dates because it turns out — well. When you get the tension between them just right the ship just sort of sings and—”

“Stede,” Ed says softly. “Why are you here?”

“I wanted to give you this.”

“Okay.”

“And apologize. Or start apologizing, at least.”

“Okay.”

“And tell you that I’m rather hopelessly in love with you,” Stede says, and takes a half-step forward, but Ed is pinching the bridge of his nose and shaking his head.

“Mate, just because it’s Valentine’s Day,” he begins, and Stede looks at his watch so hard he gets a crick in his neck. Oh, no.

“You didn’t know.”

“Ed – I didn’t even think —”

“Seems to be a fuckin’ theme there, bro.”

Stede absorbs that one.

“I – I finished this ship last night, and my kids are arriving tomorrow, so today seemed like The Day, you know?”

“Your kids are coming tomorrow.”

“For a week, yes. They have the time off from school —”

“Okay,” Ed says, in a very calm and measured voice that Stede has never heard him use before. He immediately hates it. “Okay, I’m going to ask you to go.”

“Ed —”

“Goodnight, Stede.”

And he closes the door in Stede’s face.

But he takes the ship in a bottle with him, so Stede’s going to count that as a success.

#

He’s at the gate with his special Parent Picking Up Unaccompanied Minors boarding pass when Ed texts.

Thank you for the ship

sorry

I didn’t say that last night

which, like

To be fair

Is understandable

but also rude

so

Thank you

You are so welcome. I would say anytime, but that seems like overkill. How many model ships can you keep in one apartment before it turns into a nautical themed AirBnB without your consent?

Three

How many have you made?

Yours is my third. Though the first one looks like it’s been through the wars.

maybe you should’ve given me that one

Stede looks up at the arrivals screen, hoping a tailwind would give him an excuse to put his phone back in his pocket and bustle off to find the children, but no. Still fifteen minutes.

I can if you like, but I wanted to give you the best one.

I want the shitty one too

You can keep the one that’s just ok

Of course.

Anything.

Anything?

Anything.

Be careful what you offer, Stede.

Don’t think I will, actually.

hmm

Later, once they’re home with a deep dish pizza abomination and a deeply stupid sci-fi movie that Alma had insisted on and Louis had agreed to because Alma told him there were jetpack roller skates, Ed texts again.

found this online a while back

(yeah i googled you don’t make it into a thing it’s not a thing)

so

think you owe the readers in SoCal an update?

It’s a screenshot of their wedding feature, and Stede angles his phone away from Louis out of instinct. He looks at the grainy photo and wonders how it was even legal, getting married that young. Surely if you had to be twenty-five to rent a car, there should be a similar statute around marriage licenses? God, his hair was a disaster.

Late that night, when the kids are asleep and he’s sipping a very well-deserved beer, having successfully gotten both of them showered, pajama’d, and dental-hygiened with almost no negotiation and a minimum of stalling, he opens his laptop and pulls up the article.

It’s staggeringly sad. Not because of the end of the marriage, but because of how little of either of them actually made it into the feature. Stede Bartholemew Bonnet, son of Edward Bonnet and the late Sarah Bonnet married, on June 6, 2009, Mary Grace Allamby, daughter of Bruce and Gina Allamby of Los Angeles. The venue, the flowers, the guest list, the designer of Mary’s truly horrible dress that she’d dropped off almost immediately afterward at a consignment store and which, to Stede’s knowledge, had never sold. Nothing about their first dance, which was his favorite part of the entire night, spinning with Mary through the careful choreography they’d practiced two nights a week for six months at the ballroom dance studio in Mission Hills. Nothing about his cataclysmic nerves beforehand. Nothing about their choice of recessional, William Walton’s Crown Imperial March, which Stede had suggested because it has a bit in the middle that sounds exactly like the Imperial March from Star Wars. (John Williams is nothing if not derivative.) Nothing about their vows, which they’d made it through conspicuously dry-eyed. Nothing about their wedding night, of course. The article makes it sounds like they were just their parents’ possessions, which Stede supposes they were. And now they’re not anymore.

He opens a Word document and starts typing.

#

The piece (it’s an ad, really, paid by the word, just like an obit. But this feels like the opposite of an obituary) runs on Thursday. He sends the link to Ed, and, after some thought, to Mary.

Nice boa, Ed replies, and Stede smiles. The picture he’d chosen was one that Roach from the bakery had snapped a couple weeks ago, after one of John’s shows. It’s a little goofy, but his smile is genuine. He thinks about what Ed had said that day at the lake. You look like that all the time. Maybe he will again someday.

Really wish you had run this past me before coming out in my parents’ local paper, Stede, is Mary’s reply, but then, a few minutes later, she adds,

But I’m not mad you did it. They’ll throw a fit, but they can eat an entire dick. I’m happy for you.

By Friday, Stede is exhausted. They’ve gone to the Field Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry. They’ve gone to the aquarium and the American Girl Doll store. They’ve seen two movies in the theater and gone to the planetarium. They’ve gone ice skating and sledding (on a manufactured hill, necessary on this urban prairie) and eaten their body weights in Chicago mix popcorn (well, he and Alma have. Louis had made gagging noises and demanded a package of plain Jiffy Pop from the Jewel Osco). They’ve watched eight movies at home and gone through an entire package of marshmallows and nearly two gallons of milk in their pursuit of the perfect cup of hot cocoa. It has been an excruciating, lovely, exhausting week, and when Alma slips on a patch of ice outside his building and goes down hard, Stede has to bite his lip to keep from crying along with her.

He keeps it together through getting her an ice pack and watching her whole arm start to swell and administering Tylenol (she takes an adult dose, now. He remembers the first time he gave her infant Tylenol, carefully pulling up exactly two and a half milliliters in the syringe, squirting a little bit in her mouth, laughing with Mary as she smacked her tiny lips at the cherry flavor. Now she’s just popping a whole pill like a wine mom with her Xannies) and Googling urgent cares nearby and then Googling children’s hospitals nearby as the arm swells alarmingly larger. Stede drives them to the South Side because a little widget on the website showed that Comer’s wait time is half as long as Lurie’s. He keeps it together through a phone call with Mary, and he keeps it together in the waiting area and in the emergency bay and the trip down to radiology where he and Louis make fun of Dora the Explorer on the television while Alma’s wheeled back for imaging. He keeps it together through casting and remembers to ask the orthopedist about whether it’s safe for her to fly home tomorrow and he keeps it together through another two phone calls with Mary. Afterward, he takes them through the Portillo’s drive thru for a very late, very necessary dinner. He keeps it together until the kids are asleep, both of them in Alma’s bed because Louis had fallen asleep two minutes into their bedtime story and Alma had whispered, “Just leave him, it’s fine,” and fell asleep about thirty seconds later.

And then he’s alone on his sofa and lets out a sigh so long he worries he’ll crumble into dust before he gets around to his next inhale. He scrubs his face with his palms, feels his stubble rasp on his palms and wishes it were Ed’s stubble, or Ed’s palm.

He drags himself down the hall, eventually, and collapses into bed. He brings his phone with him.

Did you know that at Portillo’s, they’ll put an entire slice of cake into a milkshake for you?

literally everyone knows that

tourists know that

like tourists come here knowing that

tourists come here specifically because they know that

but yeah

it’s really fucking good

I’m afraid now that I know about it it’s going to become a habit.

what are you doing ordering a milkshake when it’s zero degrees out anyway?

fucking madman

My daughter broke her wrist slipping on a patch of ice this morning and we went for a post-ER treat. Doctor’s orders - lots of calcium. They fly home tomorrow so I figured one last indulgence couldn’t hurt.

shit. She ok?

She’ll be fine. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say she engineered it to get out of piano lessons this winter.

you ok?

Stede puts his phone on his chest for a moment. Isn’t that a question?

I am now.

oh fuck off

Stede doesn’t have any evidence for it. It’s impossible to know what tone a text was written in, of course. He doesn’t have a way to prove it, and he’s certainly not going to ask, but he would bet all the money in his wallet that Ed had been grinning shyly at his phone when he typed that.

*

He drives the kids to O’Hare the next day, and at the last minute slips his shitty first attempt at a ship in a bottle into a tote bag. He sees the kids to their gate, waits with them until they board. He hugs each of them separately as the stewardess waits, and then, just before they step onto the gangway, he scoops them both into one more hug, a threeway snarl of arms and bags and hair. He watches them go, and only manages not to cry when he thinks about just how much popcorn he’s going to have to vacuum up from between the couch cushions that evening. He would give both his kidneys, unanesthetized, for his children, but there’s something to be said for handing them back to Mary at the end of the week.

He remembers to text in advance this time.

Out and about. I could drop off your ship: shit version in about half an hour if you’re around?

I’m around

He finds a parking spot right outside Scupper, which shouldn’t be all that surprising. It’s not yet eleven. He knocks, and when Ed opens the door, he looks so good Stede has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from gaping at him like a child at the lion enclosure at the zoo.

“Hey,” Ed says, and it takes Stede a moment to unscramble.

“Hi. Oh, yes. Right. Hi you go. I mean, here you —” He sighs, and hands Ed the tote bag.

Ed looks into the bag. He closes it. He looks into Stede’s face. He opens it again and looks back in, like a Papist at a peep show. He closes it again.

“Babe,” he says, “I’m gonna need you to be honest with me. Did you really make the other one you gave me?”

Stede nods, because he doesn’t trust himself to speak, because the only word he knows anymore is babe in Ed’s gentle, teasing rasp.

“This is awful,” Ed says, and drops the tote bag on the floor. He holds the bottle up to the hall light to better admire the glue clumps at the bottom, and as he does, a halyard goes flopping down from where it was supposed to be pulled taut, and immediately thereafter the entire mainsail falls off. Ed blinks at it for a second and then he’s cradling it to his chest, doubled over, laughing silently.

“Stede,” he wheezes. “Oh my god, Stede, it’s so fucking bad.”

“I learned a lot doing this one,” Stede protests, which makes Ed laugh harder.

“Here,” Stede says, and tries to take it back. “Here, I’ll bring you the medium one, it’s not such rubbish –”

Ed cradles the bottle to his chest.

“No, absolutely the fuck not, oh my god.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, man. Really-really.”

Stede looks at the bottle, at the chip out of the glass where he’d bumped it on the kitchen counter, at the flapping mainsail, at the crooked masts and limp rigging and the thumbprint he hadn’t been able to buff out because he’d had glue on his fingers when he picked it up. He looks at Ed, who’s looking at him. He’s not laughing anymore, but his eyes are crinkled at the corners, and Stede can’t breathe for the hope that’s flooding his chest.

“I can bring you the third one,” he manages, finally, in something closer to a croak than he’d like. “Really tie the room together. I’ll throw in one of those wretched nautical welcome mats, too. Do you like the ones with a humpback on them that say WhaleCum? I don’t see the appeal, myself, but maybe — I don’t know. What do you want? What can I do?”

“Stede,” Ed says, and there’s nothing behind it, just those eyes, and the breath in his lungs. Stede doesn’t dare move, even though he wants to push Ed back through the front door to his apartment and down onto his bed, or maybe just into the kitchen for a cup of tea and to talk. Both. Either. Neither, but some secret third thing that thaws the frost between them and loosens the taut line of Ed’s body. They had fit together like nested parentheses once, but now they’re a grawlix, all sharp angles and hurt.

Time does something funny, then. Stede is tangentially aware of it passing, of the traffic outside, of the cough-cough-wheeze of the bus kneeling at the corner to expel or accept an elderly passenger, of the clank of the radiator in Ed’s living room, of the jangle of the mailman’s keys as he opens the mailboxes in the little foyer two stories below. Ed is there, leaning on the doorframe, and as time passes, his tension ebbs, the tautness gives way and eventually, an eon later, he’s not leaning so much as draped, and his eyes meet Stede’s.

“I really did like the boa.”

“Oh,” Stede says, very intelligently.

“But,” Ed continues, and Stede’s stomach immediately plummets into his boots, because of course there’s a but.

“But I feel like – You need to know, I suggested that to hurt you, man. Like, not to hurt you hurt you, but I was just thinking, what can I do to make him humiliate himself? Like some sort of fucked-up power play, you know? But then… you just did it? And it was, like, the opposite of humiliation, somehow. Like, look, dickfucks, this is who I am. It was – nice. It was really, really nice to see, but I feel like I should tell you: that’s not how I meant it to go.”

Stede sits with it for a while. He thinks about the photo, about that night at the bar, about John onstage as Calypso, sultry and powerful, and how afterward she’d draped the boa around his shoulders and it had felt like winning a prize. He thinks about Mary’s texts, and the subsequent phone call. How her mom had cried all day and her dad had been so mad he’d trimmed one of the box elder hedges two feet too short so the front of their house looked like Louis’s second-grade smile, jagged and uneven and charming. He thinks the words he’d first spoken to Ed, all those months ago, raspberry bright on his tongue, and how they hadn’t been what Ed had wanted to hear, but they’d been what he had needed to say, then.

He’s got something else he needs to say, now.

“I love you,” he says with a shrug. “And I hurt you.”

Ed nods.

“I’m sorry.”

It’s Ed’s turn to shrug. “Yeah. I mean, you’ve said.”

“What can I do?” Stede asks, and he means it. Maybe Ed had meant the announcement as a punishment, but it had felt like a gift. Some direction, a verb to channel his intentions through. He knows the words aren’t enough, for all Ed had asked him for them.

“I don’t know!” Ed barks, and turns his face away. “I – sorry. I don’t know. I keep thinking and thinking and all I can come up with —”

“Yes?” It’s too quick, too eager, but Stede’s well past that point now, anyway.

“It’s stupid.”

“Edward.”

“I – when I was a kid, my mum used to sing me this lullaby. The Riddle Song?”

Stede shakes his head, and Ed starts to sing in a low, creaky voice:

“I gave my love a cherry that had no stone I gave my love a chicken that had no bone I gave my love a ring that had no end I gave my love a baby with no crying.”

Stede listens. Stede aches. When Ed speaks again, it’s low and throaty and halting, like the words got tangled in melody and tripped on their way out.

“I just keep thinking, if this were a fairytale and I could send you on some impossible quest, if you came back —”

“Then you’d know.”

“Yeah. Then I’d know.”

“I’m fresh out of golden fleece, I’m afraid.”

“Yeah.”

“I could just –”

“Yeah?” Ed asks, too quickly.

“I could just keep coming back,” Stede offers quietly. “It’s not impossible, but it’s–”

“It was. It wasimpossible.”

“Yes, no, of course you’re right. But now –”

Time does the thing again. A trash can lid in the alley, another wheeze from the heating system, the faintest ker-chunk of the ice machine in the bar downstairs. Stede waits. Stede aches. Stede hopes.

“Yeah, okay.”

“Yeah?”

“Fuckin’ — yes.”

“Great,” Stede says, and it’s way too loud. Then, “What, now?”

“Absolutely the fuck not. Gonna need you to go, now, actually. Gotta figure out where I’m going to display this fuckin’ disaster –” he hefts the ship, “ – and cry in the shower for half an hour, you know? Busy schedule. Very important. You’re not invited.”

“Yep, no, definitely, understood,” Stede says, and stoops to pick up his tote bag where he’d dropped it at Ed’s feet. When he’s upright again, Ed’s much, much closer. Out of the doorway entirely, actually. So close Stede can feel the heat of his body and he has to look up to meet his eyes.

The hug is nearly violent in its intensity and so brief that Stede can barely bring his arms up around Ed’s shoulders before Ed’s moving away, back toward the safety of the doorframe.

“Great,” Stede says again, at a more appropriate volume now that all the air has been squeezed out of his body. “I’ll – I’ll call you?”

“Yeah,” Ed says. “Yeah, okay.”

Stede stands there and watches him step into the apartment, watches the door close. He stands there for a minute longer once the door is closed. Then he fishes his hat out of his pocket, shoves it on, and heads for the stairs. It’s still fucking freezing outside.

Chapter 10: Winter again

Alma is halfway through an email to Corinne and Monique when she hears the tittering from the other end of the classroom. She ignores it, laboriously typing a play-by-play of her first acting class that Mom had finally caved and let her sign up for since her wrist is out of commission for six more weeks and piano is impossible. (It hurts to use the computer keyboard, too, but it’s worth it because Corinne has to hear what Helena had had to say about emotional mirroring, but the tittering has turned to laughter, and then she hears her name.)

“What?” she snaps.

“Your dad’s in the newspaper,” Ned sing-songs, but when she stalks over, he angles his Chromebook away. She climbs over Maggie H in the next chair, fast enough to glimpse a photo of her dad and the LA Times masthead before Mr. Hornberry is scolding her and telling her to sit back down.

She sits, and she searches “Stede Bonnet LA Times.”

The photo makes her breath catch in her chest. He’s smiling like he had the day he’d picked her up from camp. He’s smiling like he is in the photo above the piano in his new apartment. She loves this photo. He looks young and cool and happy. She hates this photo, because he looks young and cool and happy, and she misses him so much she wants to punch him about it. It’s not fair that he gets to look young and cool and happy. He’s her dad. She reads.

It’s short.

Stede Bonnet, finally his own person and not the possession of his mercifully deceased parents, is proud to announce both his divorce and his homosexuality. After a decades-long unhappy marriage, he is thrilled to start learning what makes Stede happy. So far, the list includes his two children, Lake Michigan, amateur ornithology, and Chicago mix popcorn, and he’s thrilled to see what else it grows to encompass. In lieu of gifts, donations can be sent to the Chicago-area Audobon Society and The Trevor Project.

Alma reads it three times. She copies the link and pastes it into her email to Monique and Corinne and deletes everything she’d written about acting lessons.

This explains more than it doesn’t, she types. Emergency FT tonight, 6 PM PST, please.

“Didn’t know your dad was gay, Alma,” Ned says from the other side of the room. She swivels around in her chair. He’s got a nasty, mocking grin on his ratty little face.

“At least I make him happy,” she says coolly. “Says so in print and everything. Hey, Ned, is your dad still trying to turn you into a knockoff version of your older brother? He must be pretty disappointed. Colin was such a talented musician.”

She swivels back around in her chair as Ned’s face crumples. She sends her email. She re-reads the article. She saves the photo to her desktop and prints it to the computer lab printer.

Later that day, she hangs the photo in her locker. Finally his own person. It feels weird to feel proud of her own dad. It makes her feel sad and old and tired. She thinks about how he’d hugged her in the airport, how he’d squeezed way too tight and whispered, “I love you so much” into her hair, and how, when she’d turned back to wave, he’d waved so hard she thought he might take flight, too. She closes her locker. He’s thrilled to see what else it grows to encompass. Alma thinks about the photo in the living room, about the way Ed Teach had kissed Dad’s cheek in the Art Institute. She thinks she’s got an idea of one thing he could add to the list. She’ll ask Monique tonight to look him up on Instagram. How many accountants named Ed Teach could there be in Chicago, after all?

Chapter 11

Notes:

Thank you to Jill and Lis SO much for betaing and listening to me carp about this chapter for, uh. A while! <3<3<3

And on that topic, thank you to you all for your patience. Real life is leaving precious little time for creative pursuits, alas. Anyway, here we are.

Six

Stede thinks about playing it cool and waiting the prescribed forty-eight hours but then he decides he’s waited way, way too long already, and calls Ed that afternoon, on his way home from work. There’s a mound of snow piled up around a fire hydrant near the corner outside his office, and Stede pauses there to pull his phone out, fumbling with his mittens to press Ed’s name. His heart is in his throat, and his hands are shaking, mostly not from the cold, and Ed’s, “Hello?” when he picks up is the meteor that took out the dinosaurs, probably.

He calls Ed every day from the same snow pile. Every day, the pile gets a little smaller, and the days get a little longer, and there are a few more people out on the streets, and one day, a few weeks in, he sees the top of the fire hydrant and the flash of red amidst the dirty grey snow feels like hope. He calls every day and they talk, every day, and it’s lovely and it’s torture in equal parts, but just like all the other things that scare Stede, it gets easier with practice. (It’s not so much that the fear dissipates as Stede gets better at ignoring it.)

It’s nearly April before Stede gets the nerve to ask to see Ed in person again. It’s the first truly warm spring day, and Stede’s walking home with his phone pressed to his ear, because there’s something about walking with headphones that makes his lizard brain wary, doesn’t like being cut off from all aural input like that. The sidewalks are absolutely heaving with people, more people than he knew the city held (where had they all come from?), because the sun is out and the breeze is warm from the west, and yes, there’s still slush in the gutters but it’s more water than ice, and Stede has just told Ed how Pete referred to today as Skirt Day when they were at lunch, and Ed says, “Wait, I thought he was gay?” and Stede says, “Yes, of course he’s gay, but he has eyes, and it’s definitely Skirt Day, don’t you think?” and Ed says, “Fuckin’ fine, yeah, okay, even I’m wearing one,” and Stede hears himself say, “Come have a drink with me tonight” before the thought has registered itself in his mind.

“What?”

“Just one drink. With me. Tonight. There’s a place in Lincoln Park that does an Old Fashioned with a little bit of candied orange peel that’s just lovely.”

Stede has watched videos of free divers on Instagram, which is how he knows that it can be dangerous to hold your breath for too long, that your body can forget how to breathe if you deny it the privilege for longer than it wants, and he thinks that maybe he’s in very real danger of discovering what that feels like when Ed lets out a quiet little huff.

“Yeah, all right.”

“What, really?”

“Yeah, man, no takesie backsies.”

“No, no, of course — I would never — I wouldn’t — I don’t —”

“Stede, babe.”

“Yes?”

“Breathe.”

“I’d love to,” Stede says, “but you make it rather difficult sometimes, Edward.”

“Jesus fuckin’ —”

“Sorry.”

“No, no. No. Not — seven o’clock, okay? Text me the name of the place.”

“I will.”

And the line goes dead. It’s a new thing he’s learned about Ed, since they’ve been speaking on the phone. Ed never says goodbye, just hangs up when the conversation is over. It was jarring at first, but now Stede looks forward to it, because every conversation that doesn’t end in goodbye is a treasure, a gift. It feels like when Stede was a small child and his mother would leave his bedroom door ajar, just enough to let a little of the hall light spill in, a faint sliver that made him feel a little less alone in his big, cold bed.

He eats an early dinner so he’s not pouring bourbon onto an empty stomach. He changes out of his work clothes and stands in his underpants in front of his closet until he’s risking being late. That would be unacceptable, so he finally stops worrying about what Ed will like and chooses an outfit that makes him feel good. He fixes his collar in the mirror, tugs the pullover down, smooths the cashmere under his palms. He looks himself in the eye.

“One drink,” he says to himself. “You can do one drink.”

He goes to the mantel and fetches the little jar he’d picked up on a work jaunt to Holland a couple weeks before. (Holland, Michigan, not the Netherlands. Though the company has got clients in the Netherlands. He could be going there, probably, but instead he’d driven around the lake through an ice storm to sit in three meetings that could have been emails and didn’t get the contract. Oh well. At least he’d picked this up for Ed.)

Stede’s right on time, but Ed’s already at the bar. Stede just stands in the doorway for a moment and lets himself look. His beard has grown out a bit, and his hair is in a loose braid down his back, and he’s got a drink mostly untouched in front of him and is reading something on his phone, and he’s the most beautiful man Stede has ever seen in his life, and Stede doesn’t believe in God, not really, but he thanks him anyway for most this amazing day, for the simple fact of Edward Teach sitting on a barstool.

“Hiya,” Stede says, and he thanks God for the look on Ed’s face, while he’s at it, because the fear is gone. There’s caution, to be sure, but also a smile, and when Stede arranges himself on the stool next to him, he can feel the warmth of Ed’s leg near his. Ed’s wearing jeans, because the sun went down an hour ago and there’s a chill in the air, and Stede’s glad for it, is glad that Ed’s legs are safe and warm inside denim. He wonders if Ed owns flannel-lined jeans, wonders if he’d accept them if he bought them for him.

“Hey,” Ed says, and Stede doesn’t feel so much like a flower blooming in the spring sun as a fly being dissolved inside a Venus fly trap, but what a way to go!

“Hi,” says Stede after a beat or two. It can be excused; his brain is pure goo. “You got the Old Fashioned?”

Ed looks at his glass. “Yeah. It’s, uh. It’s good.”

“You don’t like it.”

“No, I mean, the candied orange peel is a nice touch, it’s just –”

“Oh!” Stede says, and digs in his bag. “Here, this might help.”

“Maraschino cherries?”

“Real ones, in the liqueur! They’re real Michigan cherries, too, not the ones that are soaked in lye or bleach or dishwashing detergent or whatever before they add the dye.”

“You bought me artisanal Maraschino cherries.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Well, I know you love them, and it was a great deal. I know they usually charge a dollar per cherry at bars, but this whole jar was only six dollars!”

“A dollar a — Stede, what are you talking about?”

“The bartender said —”

“What bartender?”

“At Scupper, that night with the Jenga game. You, er. You did the trick with the stems?”

“Oh my God, mate, you let Frenchie scam you?”

“Frenchie?”

“The bartender. Tall, lots of hair, full of shit?”

The memories of that night are warm and hazy, and all center around Ed, the press of his leg against Stede’s under the table; glimpses of his pink, wet tongue as he worked on the cherry stem; his unbridled mirth at Stede’s little victory dance when he’d managed to sing the fast bits of One Week by the Barenaked Ladies word-perfect; the way his gaze had caught and held when Stede had asked him what the stakes were. For fun, Stede. We’re playing for fun.

(Stede isn’t playing for fun anymore.)

“I think I remember him,” is all Stede says, because he does, just not from that particular night, and he’s not, he’s not getting into his whole, sad, sordid dating history with Ed, not tonight. Ideally not ever, but certainly not tonight.

Ed shakes his head, and unscrews the jar, and picks out four cherries and plops them into his drink. He sucks his fingers into his mouth after, completely un-self-aware, and almost all the words Stede thinks are in the Bible. Definitely the articles. Most of the adjectives. Sodomy.

He blinks hard to clear his head.

“They’re not usually a dollar a pop, then?”

“Nope.”

“Ah.”

Ed takes a sip, swirls it around, and tries again. His eyes close halfway, for all the world like a cat right before it starts purring, and Stede grabs a little frantically for the cocktail menu just to have something to do with his hands.

“Fuck, they should be, though,” Ed adds, and then, suddenly, it’s easy.

Stede, who had been imagining A Big Moment, and who had subsequently prepared a tortured, long-winded apology and/or explanation and/or exegesis, had steeled himself for a conversation like turning over a stone in the woods to expose all the pale, wriggling things in the soft loam that aren’t supposed to see the light of day.

But this isn’t that. This is easy.

This is him and Ed, turned toward each other on their barstools like — not quite like parenthesis, but maybe like inverted commas, and the noise of the world quietens and smooths. Stede watches Ed’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallows, and wishes he were one of the cherries buried under the ice. He takes such small sips of his own cocktail that it might as well be homeopathy, a tincture to cheat time. They talk. They laugh. Stede thanks a God he doesn’t believe in for the fact of Edward Teach on a bar stool ducking his head to laugh so hard he snorts.

They have one drink and no more. When they walk outside, there’s still a hint of warmth on the night breeze wafting across from the west, and Stede tips his head up to the sky.

“Thanks for this,” Ed says quietly, the light from the neon sign in the window making the silver of his hair glow like fiber optic filament.

“Thank you,” Stede counters, and means it so much that he wishes there were punctuation for speech. He rocks onto his toes with it anyway, and hopes that it’s enough.

Ed meets him halfway, bumps their shoulders together, and it could be a kiss in its sweet, clumsy intimacy and the thrill it sends shooting up Stede’s spine.

“Call me,” Ed says, and walks off. Stede watches him round the corner, and then his phone is in his hand and Ed’s laughing in his ear.

“You didn’t specify when,” Stede says, as he starts out for the Red Line stop. Ed must have driven, or he’s got someplace else to be, because he’s gone off in the opposite —

“Wait, fuck, wait up,” Ed says into his ear but also behind him, and Stede twists around and there he is again, smiling crookedly.

“Went the wrong fuckin’ way for the train. You heading that way?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Where do you live?”

“Ugh,” Stede says, as they fall in step together. “I have a horrid pre-furnished corporate extended stay type flat that they’re putting me up in in the Gold Coast, which somehow makes it grimmer. I’ve been trying to redecorate, but it’s – what?” He asks, because Ed’s face has gone all odd and stiff and mournful.

Ed shakes his head and they walk for a ways, with Ed putting more and more distance between them to the point where he’s practically in the road, skirting on the wrong side of telephone poles and mailboxes and parking meters. Stede cuts him off at the next telephone pole, intercepts him so they’re both teetering on the curb.

“Hey,” Stede says, and puts his palm to Ed’s chest. “Hey, come on. Please?”

Ed huffs and rolls his eyes and lets his hair fall into his face, but he also mutters into his beard something so soft that Stede doesn’t catch it.

“Hmm?”

“Said it seems pretty fuckin’ temporary,” Ed mutters slightly more loudly.

Stede tilts his head from side to side in equivocation.

“I suspect they’ll offer me the position I’m backfilling permanently,” he says slowly. “I’ve cleaned up the mess my predecessor left, and everyone seems pleased enough with my work.”

“But?”

Stede doesn’t shrug, because he doesn’t want Ed to feel like he’s being cavalier, but a shrug would convey I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m afraid all the time, and I’m afraid I want to go back to California because it’s familiar, and I’m afraid that if I don’t my kids will hate me forever, and I’m afraid that if I stay I’ll be haunted by the ghost of what might have been between us on every fucking Red Line platform for the rest of my miserable life better than words could.

But he doesn’t want Ed to feel like he’s being cavalier, so he tries the words.

“I don’t know what I’m doing. I wish I did, but I don’t, and I think maybe I never have? And I’m afraid all the time, and I’m afraid I want to go back to California because it’s familiar, and I’m afraid that if I don’t my kids will hate me forever, but I’m also afraid that if I do, my kids will hate me forever for different reasons, and —”

He swallows, grasps for something that is true but that doesn’t show his whole, entire, woefully flat ass.

“I’m not sure if I want to stay,” he says softly, looking into Ed’s eyes, “but I want to want to stay. Is that — is that okay?”

Ed puts his hands in his pockets, cocks his head, weighs the question, eventually sighs and shrugs. It doesn’t look cavalier when he does it, just resigned.

“I dunno, man.”

“Ed —”

“No, like I literally do not know. I’ll think about it, okay? I’ll text you when I figure it out.”

“Oh! Oh, of course.”

“C’mon,” Ed says, and holds out his hand. “Walk me to the train.”

Stede takes his hand. They’re both wearing gloves, so they clasp hands like children and trudge west. A train goes by and a roost of pigeons startles, wheels, and settles back. Stede wonders how many times a day they go through that choreography, wonders why they haven’t found a quieter spot. He holds Ed’s hand all the way to the turnstile, and then there are two separate staircases.

“Thanks,” Ed tells him. “This was…”

“Yes,” Stede says, because he feels like he’s experienced every human emotion twice in the past hundred minutes.

A train rumbles past above them but neither of them moves, and Stede, because he has been practicing doing things that scare him, opens his arms.

The hug is gentler but no less cataclysmic than the one in February. Ed’s hair smells like eucalyptus and cigarette smoke, and Stede feels Ed’s breath on his neck like a caress. They pull apart slowly, and Ed squeezes his shoulder, and then he’s turning and taking the stairs two at a time. Stede watches him go all the way up before ascending his staircase, and when he’s on the platform, he laughs, because Ed’s right there, just across the tracks. He waves, and Ed waves back, and then Stede does the flossing dance just to make him laugh, and it works, and then Ed does maybe the worst attempt at a moonwalk Stede has ever seen, so Stede starts to do the Charleston and a woman standing nearby begins to edge away even as Ed is doubled over in laughter. And then Stede’s train is there, and he finds a window seat and waves again, and Ed waves, too, and that night, when Stede falls asleep, that’s the image that replays: Ed, one arm raised, the echo of a smile still illuminating his face.

In the morning, Ed has texted.

So i thought about it

It’s not ideal, but it’s a start

#

The slush is gone completely and Stede doesn’t need his gloves anymore, just pauses by the hydrant after work, takes his phone out, presses Call.

One day, several large packages arrive at Stede’s apartment and he cries a little as he unpacks just a little more of his life with Mary into his new one. She’s sent a bunch of his books and a couple prints from his office, and some of Alma’s and Louis’s artwork from the fridge, and his birth certificate and life insurance paperwork and one bronzed baby slipper, and some old CDs, all of which are actually lovely to have, but she’s also unearthed his rollerblades (c. 2007) from the garage and had inexplicably spent $55 in postage to mail them halfway across the country to him. He nearly puts them in the bin, but then he remembers he’s trying to be brave, so he tips three dried-up spider carcasses out of them and takes a turn around the kitchen, and then sixteen more. He grabs his phone and takes a video (and okay, fine, the end of the video is him nearly braining himself on the corner of the kitchen island but he pulls what he considers a very balletic little spin move at the last minute and winds up in wide straddle and a fit of giggles.) He sends the video to Ed with the message,

My ex-wife sent these to me. Do you think it’s attempted murder? Want to join me for a skate/bike/jog along the lakefront this Saturday morning? 7 am?

If I’m going to be anywhere at 7 am you’re bringing me breakfast and coffee

Of course. What would you like?

Chicken biscuit and a caramel macchiato.

Consider it done.

Of course, when it comes to it, it’s not so easy. Stede has timed out his morning meticulously, so that he’s warmed up enough not to embarrass himself athletically, and so that the the food and the coffee will still be hot by the time he gets them to Ed, and so that he will look as nice as one can look wearing roller skates, wrist guards, and a helmet, because as much as he’d like to be cool, suave, and gear-free, he’s taken several more turns around his kitchen in the intervening couple of days and recognizes what his skill level is.

It’s too chilly for the outfit he’d planned, so he throws on a pair of black joggers in place of the shorts and a windbreaker over the mauve athletic t-shirt he likes to think brings out the reddish undertones in his hair. The skates and their accouterments go in a tote bag in the trunk of his car, and then there’s a whole kerfluffle at Roach’s, with Roach telling him they don’t serve a chicken biscuit for breakfast, and if he wants something like that he’s going to need to go to Harold’s or, God forbid, Chick-Fil-A, and Stede does a whole-body shudder and scans the menu. Everything seems pork-based. Does Ed eat pork? Has he ever seen Ed eat pork? He knows Ed is Jewish, or at least Jewish-ish (in his own words), but he’s not sure how far that extends? In the end, he plays it safe, but manages to dither long enough that he’s five minutes late to their rendezvous. At least the coffee is still warm.

“Sorry,” he says, slamming the car door behind him and jogging up to where Ed is waiting, leaning up against his own car in the trailside parking lot. “Sorry, sorry, they didn’t have a chicken biscuit and I didn’t know what else you might like and I couldn’t remember if you ate pork or not, so I kept it within the poultry phylogenetic tree. Egg and cheese on a savory scone, and a caramel macchiato. Is that okay?”

“Get the fuck out of here, poultry phylogenetic — oh my god. Yeah, man, this is great. Thanks.”

They eat standing, leaning up against Ed’s car, and then Stede excuses himself to go put his skates on, and when he comes back, Ed’s got his bicycle out of the back of the hatchback and he’s got a secret sort of half-smile on as he watches Stede wobble his way across the car park toward him.

“Hey, Stede?”

“Yes?”

“What’s the hardest part about rollerblading?”

Stede thinks for a moment, about nearly dying against his kitchen cabinets and about tweaking his ankle the other day as he tried to remember how to stop, but then Ed’s cadence registers and he smiles.

“I don’t know, what?”

“Telling your parents you’re gay.”

Stede very nearly disproves the joke by laughing so hard he falls off his skates and gets a — what is it that people in medical dramas are always coming in with? Subdural hematoma? Is that bad? It sounds bad — at any rate, nearly sustains a head injury against the kerb.

Ed’s laughing with him, and it’s like a hook right under the breastbone, how no one has ever laughed with him before. But Ed is, and it becomes self-sustaining, Stede laughing, and Ed laughing, and that making Stede laugh harder, and that making Ed laugh harder, and as Stede struggles to draw breath, he can’t remember when he’s ever felt happier.

They do skate, eventually. Well, Stede skates, and Ed pedals slowly next to him. The morning fog burns off, slowly at first and then all at once, and by the time they’ve passed the aquarium, it’s a brilliant, bright spring morning, the air clear and cool with the promise of a warm afternoon. The gulls are crying overhead, and the path is lousy with joggers and cyclists and the occasional skater, each one of whom Stede waves to enthusiastically, and Ed gives him a hard time for “trying to flirt with the other gays on parade, man, what the fuck?”

They make it all the way down to Promontory Point before Stede wobbles over to a bench for a breather. His sock has completely fallen down in his skate boot, and he’s afraid he’s developing a blister, and his legs are definitely going to be sore in a strange new way tomorrow, and his wrists are sweaty and probably foul-smelling inside their protective gauntlets, and Stede wants to preserve this feeling in amber so he can revisit it when he’s old, show it to his grandchildren and say, You see, my loves? This is the day your grandfather came back to life.

“Jesus, mate,” Ed hisses as Stede wiggles his foot free of his skate. His sock is bunched up in the arch of his foot, and the sore, damp spot he’d worried was a blister and a trickle of sweat is actually an open wound. His whole leg is smeared with blood.

“It’s okay!” Stede protests, despite the obvious carnage.

“Sit right here,” Ed tells him. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. There’s a Walgreens like half a mile from here.”

“I don’t — you don’t need —” he protests, but Ed’s already pedaling away. He takes his other skate off, and the cool air on his sweaty feet is a decidedly unglamorous flavor of hedonism. He watches the waves crash against the pylons for a while, and then he watches a bunch of unathletic college students try to play Ultimate Frisbee for a while, and then he spots Ed pedaling back toward him, a shopping bag dangling off his handlebar.

“Hi.”

“Here,” Ed says, and upends the bag. There’s a package of bandages, and a small tube of antibacterial ointment, and two bottles of coconut water, and a pair of American flag flip-flops that look to be in his size. “We’ll get you patched up and then take the bus back.”

“No!” Stede protests, because it’s been the loveliest day, and he always manages to ruin things, somehow, doesn’t he? If he’d only worn the hiking socks instead of the cotton athletic socks, they’d already be on the return trip, probably, giggling about something, with the wind at their backs and the city looming up ahead in the brilliant spring sky, but instead he’s shown Ed that he’s not only stupid, he’s weak —

The spiral derails abruptly, because Ed has drawn his foot into his lap, is uncapping the Wal-sporin and squeezing it out directly onto the wound, is opening a Flexible Fabric Bandage™ and chasing down the little paper tabs so he doesn’t litter, is carefully covering the little daub of ointment and adding a second bandage in the other direction, an X marks the spot of Stede’s folly.

“There you go,” Ed says softly, and squeezes Stede’s ankle, which had not been an erogenous zone until now, but their eyes meet and catch and hold, and Ed’s fingers are cool against Stede’s flushed skin.

“Thank you,” Stede manages, finally, because manners are important even when (especially when?) you’re halfway to an inconvenient erection while wearing thin athleisure trousers that leave very little to the imagination, oh, dear.

“C’mon,” Ed says, and breaks the tag off the flip flops with his teeth, which really shouldn’t manage to worsen the trousers situation but absolutely does in a weird, caveman sort of way that Stede doesn’t particularly want to investigate further at this juncture, but maybe later, in privacy, will. At length.

Stede comes on. He takes his socks off and balls them up and shoves them into his skates and puts the flip flops on and follows Ed down the path and under the bridge and into the neighborhood. Ed walks his bike, and does something clever to interlace the buckling mechanisms of Stede’s skates so they can hang them off his handlebars, and when they pass a sweet little cafe with outdoor seating, Ed cocks his head and Stede shrugs one shoulder, and they turn in unison to grab the last free table.

(So, all right, maybe the day is salvageable.)

Later, they ride the bus back north, and Ed sits right next to Stede, lets their legs press together from knee to hip. A piece of his hair has escaped its bun and Stede can’t help himself, he reaches out to tuck it behind Ed’s ear, and Ed blushes and clears his throat and looks up under his eyelashes at Stede, his lips parted, and Stede’s not sure whether it’s a picture that should be in the Louvre or in a shoebox under his bed. Ed walks Stede to his car, hugs him tight, puts his lips against Stede’s ear. It’s not a kiss, but it’s not not a kiss, because he lingers for a little while before he whispers,

“Call me.”

That evening, once Stede has finished all the busy mundanity of his new, solitary life, he turns the shower on hot in an attempt to loosen the weird ache in his legs. He stretches and soaps himself up, peels off the band-aid X that Ed had marked him with. The wound is the size of an almond, a perfect oval, and Stede carefully washes the tender, raw flesh. He will pick the scab, he knows. He is resigned to it, understands that he will have a scar not because of the initial severity, but because he cannot ever leave himself alone, but for tonight, at least, he allows himself to care for himself. He re-bandages it once he’s toweled off, and texts Ed just before he falls asleep.

I think the hardest part about rollerblading was saying goodbye to you at the end of the day, actually.

When Stede wakes in the night, Ed has replied.

12:31 am

so maybe just don’t

12:32 am

next time

1:04 am

say goodbye, i mean

maybe don’t do that

1:18 am

To clarify

Not like I don’t say goodbye

But

1:20 am

like

1:45 am

stay

#

And then it’s Monday, and Stede’s flying to San Diego for the kids’ spring break. Alma’s in a play with the local children’s theatre and can’t miss a week of rehearsals, so he’d agreed to come to them for the week. He and Mary have planned their divorce mediation sessions for two afternoons when Mary’s mum is free to watch the children. He imagines himself as a schoolboy writing that essay: What I Did Over Spring Break. I paid $1400 to rent an AirBnb down the street from my soon-to-be-ex-wife and haggled over who has to keep the wedding china. Maybe it won’t be that bad.

And really, maybe it won’t be that bad, because Mary has brought the kids to the airport to meet him, and Louis jumps into his arms like a baby spider monkey and Alma hugs him so tightly he worries his eyes might pop right out of his head like one of those gruesome fleshy-looking clown-shaped squeeze toys they used to have when Stede was a child. Even Mary hugs him, plants a dry, thin-lipped kiss on his cheek and tells him he’s looking well before heading off in a cloud of unfamiliar perfume.

The children keep up a respectable din as they make their way first to baggage claim and then the rental car counter, and between Alma and him they manage to install Louis’s booster seat in the back of the thoroughly bland Nissan.

Turning onto his old street feels like something from a dream, the sort where you can’t quite figure out, once you’ve woken, whether it actually happened or not. He parks outside of the little bungalow he’d driven past a thousand times before but never noticed and punches in the code the host had sent him, and then stands back and lets the children explore. Alma claims the loft bed in the attic, and Louis claims the little room in the back of the house that has a window that looks out over the flower garden, so Stede lugs his bags into the remaining bedroom and flops down on the bed.

Arrived in one piece.

Good. Be pretty traumatic for your kids if you didn’t, wouldn’t it?

Mum, where’s dad

What’s that disembodied arm doing holding his luggage

Oh god

Oh no

Quick, kids, cover your eyes

Edward.

Listen man

I’m trying

Or like

Trying to try

I know you are. Ed, I know that.

I was just going to ask how the disembodied arm could possibly still be attached to the luggage.

Rigor mortis

obviously

Oh, of course. Silly of me.

And then Stede’s phone is ringing in his hand, and he looks at it for several seconds before it computes. He’s been calling Ed nearly every day, but he’s not sure, actually, that Ed has ever called him.

“Hello?”

“Hey. What’s a skeleton’s favorite government agency?”

“Oh, gosh. Er, do skeletons believe in large government?”

“Babe, focus.”

“I don’t know, Ed. What is a skeleton’s favorite government agency?”

“FEMA.”

“Oh, Ed.”

“What? C’mon, it’s fuckin’ funny.”

Stede shakes his head. “No, love. It’s not even the slightest bit… humerus.”

There’s a pause, long enough for Stede to wonder whether Ed has hung up on him, but then there’s a little choked-off sort of hiccup and Stede realizes Ed is laughing so hard that it’s silent, which sets him off, until tears are running into his ears and his ribs are hurting. He can’t remember when he last laughed like this, unless it was one night back in the summer when he’d tried to remember the lyrics to Baby, One More Time and they’d gotten into a yelling argument over whether the line was “show me/how you wanna do me” or “show me/how you want it to be” and he’d laughed so hard he’d gotten gin up his nose, confirming once and for all what the world’s worst Neti pot would be.

“Stede,” Ed says, with so much tenderness that it’s a vaudeville hook yanking him off the stage and back to the scratchy duvet and the tinny whoosh of Ed breathing down the line with him.

He’d seen a documentary years ago about the Great Molasses Flood, how a tank had exploded and a twenty-five foot tsunami of molasses had gone ripping through the neighborhood, taking out buildings and a streetcar line and carrying the debris along in the slow, sticky flood. It’s how he feels now, viscous and saccharine and relentless.

“I love you,” Stede tells him, as a way of releasing a little of the pressure, and it helps, but not as much as — but he’s here, and soon the children will need him, so he presses the base of his palms into his eye sockets and says it again. “I love you, Ed.”

“Stede, I —” is all Ed says in return, and Stede smiles.

“I know. I’ll talk to you soon, all right?”

“Yeah, yeah. Yeah, of course. Have fun with the kids. Get me a – do they sell saltwater taffy on the West Coast?”

“I think so.”

“Would you bring me some back? Fuckin’ love that shit.”

“I’ll find some tomorrow and overnight it to you.”

“Nah, don’t mail it. Some fucker keeps stealing my packages. Just – if you happen to see some, grab me a box and bring it back with you, yeah?”

“I will.”

And Ed ends the call without saying goodbye.

#

Stede finds a little box of saltwater taffy at the gift shop at the zoo on Tuesday afternoon. Alma’s in rehearsal, but Louis still likes to visit the lemurs and the harpy eagle, and Stede’s happy to indulge him. Stede grabs the taffy and the small bag of polished rocks that Louis had spent the better part of ten minutes painstakingly selecting from the bin, and as they walk up the ramp to the parking lot, Louis slides his sweat-and-ice cream-sticky hand into Stede’s and squeezes three times, and Stede feels like an animal whose zoo enclosure has been left open by the keeper, like maybe the whole world is his to explore if only he would take those first few steps.

Stede does some online shopping in between mediation negotiations (Mary gets the house, which was a given, but Stede keeps most of his retirement savings, which he hadn’t been expecting), and when he flies back on Saturday morning, he has a plan.

(Sort of.)

(The thing about Stede is that he never really has a plan, just a rough sketch and some chutzpah. He’s made sure to text, so at least Ed’s home when he arrives.)

He doesn’t come straight from the airport, of course, he plays it the smidgiest bit cool, goes home, unpacks his luggage, takes a shower, manages to eat a little lunch, finds four AA batteries and tests them with the little battery tester he keeps in this kitchen junk drawer because, despite everything, he is a dad, and it’s only after he’s clean and fed and prepared (tactically if not emotionally) that he walks to the train and frets for thirty-five minutes as the El grinds its way northward.

He texts Ed when he’s a couple blocks away and shifts the tote bag to his other shoulder.

Meet me downstairs? I may have a solution to your porch pirate problem.

Can’t be a porch pirate without a porch, mate

Foyer filcher?

Entryway embezzler

Mailroom marauder!

Buzzed in brigand

Yentrance Yegg… Sorry, no, that one was a bit of a stretch

I’ll yegg your yentrance

It’ll be a bit of a stretch, even 😏

Stede nearly walks into a telephone pole and throws his phone into the bottom of the tote bag, because really.

Ed is leaning against the mailboxes when Stede arrives, one foot up against the wall, looking cool and collected, not at all like someone with the habit of walking into telephone poles or needing to fly off to California at emotionally inconvenient times to get divorced and parent his children.

But then Ed spots him through the door and his whole face lights up, and Stede has the sense that maybe no one in his entire life has ever been this glad to see him, and he nearly needs to sit down under the weight of that.

Ed lets him in, and Stede steps right into his arms. For a moment, he lets himself have this.

“I brought you something,” Stede’s brain says, because it is a filthy traitor, and Ed steps back and smiles at him with his eyes.

Ed protests the Ring camera at first, says he doesn’t believe in surveillance state bullshit, tells Stede that he’d thought better of him, but when Stede assures him that the footage will never, ever go to the police, but rather to Ed’s phone so he can see if he can intercept the perp to deliver a sternly worded lecture, he relents and sits on the bottom step while Stede fumbles with drywall anchors and screws and batteries, and when Stede asks Ed for the Wifi password to finish the setup, Ed goes decidedly pink across the bridge of his nose.

“I, uh. You know what, it’s a random string of letters and numbers, man. Let me punch it in.”

“Oh, do you have a mnemonic to remember it?” Stede asks, wiping drywall dust from his fingers on the handkerchief he’d brought for the purpose.

“Yeah, something like that,” Ed mutters, and gets to typing.

Stede makes Ed go upstairs with his phone to test it. He makes sure the unit is on, the little blue light around the button illuminated.

“Act one, scene one, take one. And we’re rolling. Ring ring?” Stede says, and waves his arms around the unit to make sure the motion capture is paying attention.

There’s silence from the other end, and Stede steps closer to try to troubleshoot.

“Ed?” he calls. “Ed, can you hear me?”

Silence.

Stede’s reaching to pluck the whole thing back off the wall when Ed’s voice comes through, loud and tinny.

“Stede, babe. I – yeah, I fuckin’ — can you come upstairs? It works.”

“It does?”

“Yeah, no, I — come up. Please.”

Stede leaves his tote bag in the foyer and takes the steps two at a time. He can’t quite figure out Ed’s tone, and he’d said please, which, while nice, is somewhat worrisome.

Ed’s door is open, but Ed’s not in the doorway, and even though he’d said stay a week ago in a text, Stede doesn’t want to push, so he pokes his head through the door and looks around.

“Edward?”

“In here,” Ed calls, so Stede slips out of his shoes. Ed’s flat has changed. One whole wall in the living room that used to be the same dove grey as all the rest is now a deep plum with brass shelving.

Ed is stood by the window, the line of his body a dark silhouette against the riotous sunshine outside. Stede knows before Ed moves that he’s going to kiss him. He reads it in the angle of his head, the line of his shoulders, the set of his body over his knees, one soft exhale audible in the silent flat.

Stede reads it in his tread across the living room rug, in Ed’s eyes roving across his face like Stede’s got that day’s headlines writ large on his brow, and maybe he does.

MAN, HOPELESSLY IN LOVE, DIES FROM FORGETTING HOW TO BREATHE.

AREA MAN, 48, SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUSTS IN ANDERSONVILLE APARTMENT.

MOVE OVER MONO: CARDIAC ARREST’S THE NEW KISSING DISEASE

Stede sees it coming from a mile away, but that doesn’t mean he’s ready for it. How could he be ready for it? Who is ever ready to receive everything they’ve ever wanted?

Ed strides across the room, and it’s inevitable, the arc of a pendulum along its course, the tide against the shore, the Earth’s celestial path.

Ed kisses him.

Ed kisses him, and Stede lets himself be kissed for a while before he remembers that it’s usually a reciprocal act, and oh, that’s so much nicer, like the time he’d taken a tandem bike ride with Alma and about halfway through she figured out how to pedal. It’s sweet and slow and achingly tender, and when Ed’s arms come up and wrap around his shoulders, draw him even closer, it’s every candle he’s ever blown out on every birthday cake, factorial wishes all coming true at once.

Ed pulls back with his lips but pushes forward with his hips and torso, so that’s all right, and he looks Stede in the eye and says,

“You sneaky motherfucker.”

“What?”

“The fucking Ring when it’s rolling – you’ve been doing the riddles.”

“Ah. You noticed?”

“Were you going to say anything?”

“No,” he says immediately. “No, that – well, that wasn’t the point of it, was it?”

“What was the point?” Ed asks, in a voice like a knife on fish scales.

Stede looks at the new purple wall, at the sad, ragged ship in a bottle on one of the shelves, at the lines at the corners of Ed’s eyes.

“You,” he says. “Us.”

“Us?”

“Is that okay?”

Ed smiles. “Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s – good. Us is good. Loved the cherries, still got a handful in the fridge.”

“Oh, good.”

“But I gotta say, the chicken thing was a little fucked up.”

“The song is fucked up! A chicken when it’s pipping, it has no bone? I had to look up what pipping meant, even, and then — well. Roach makes a good egg sandwich.”

“Yeah, mate,” is all Ed says, and angles his head just so.

There’s some more kissing, of course, and when they come up for air, because he has never once left something well enough alone, Stede feels the need to say,

“I didn’t do all of it, though. Hard to find a baby, you know? Not exactly something you can pick up at the shops.”

“Stede, love, you have kids.”

“Yes, but –”

“No, yeah, you’re right. That’d be weird.”

Ed kisses him again, and squeezes his hand, and leads him across the room, and points out the window.

“Think maybe —” he begins, and points.

“There’s my girl,” Stede immediately coos, because Ruthie’s still there, still on the goddamn air conditioner, which is a little rustier for the wear and Stede wonders why the tenant didn’t take it out over the winter. Then he looks more closely.

“Ed, oh my — did you — did she — did you?”

Because Ruthie’s still on the air conditioner. He’d looked it up, actually, months and months ago. Pigeons don’t need to build nests in the wild, because they nest in rock crags that are naturally protected. They use the landscape, so they don’t need architecture. And Ruthie had been doing the best she knew how, thrown into a new environment but without the tools or ancestral knowledge for success, and last year, there had been five different photos of five different eggs crushed on the sidewalk below, and Stede had mourned each and every one of them, and Ed had been kind but bemused about the depth of his grief. But now— what he hadn’t known, the secret Ed had kept from him is this: Ruthie’s still on the air conditioner, but her two sticks are gone. Instead, she’s nestled comfortably in a red plastic French fry basket, and when a small grey head pops out from beneath her breast, Stede bursts into tears.

And then Ed’s there, wrapping his arms around him, and Stede sobs into his chest, and he thinks maybe Ed’s crying a little too, and then they’re clinging to each other, and it’s like the hugs they’ve hugged over the past few months, except instead of moving apart and heading to the El, Ed’s crowding him against the window, cradling his (damp, red, blotchy; Stede has always been an inelegant crier) face between his palms and trying to map his dental records with his tongue.

They don’t make it to bed. Ed’s maneuvered Stede to the couch and pulled him down into his lap. Ed’s trousers are open and Stede’s shirt is unbuttoned and God, it’s over before it’s begun, really, with Stede coming in his trousers just from Ed grinding his palm up against him and biting a little at the juncture between neck and shoulder. Ed kisses him through it, grins up at him as Stede climbs off him with a groan, because his pants are a mess and his knees aren’t meant to bend like that for so long.

The knees suffer further punishment, though, because Ed’s grin is an invitation, and so is the slight spread of his legs, and Stede goes down like he’s been felled.

They can’t get Ed out of his jeans for a moment, and there’s laughter amid the panting and groaning and cursing, and then Stede gets his mouth around Ed’s cock and nearly cries again.

He’d missed this. He’d missed Ed, of course. Ed. The frenetic pace of him, the way they just can’t seem to say no to one another, the gentleness and softness he seems to hide from the rest of the world, secreting it away so only Stede sees it. He’d missed Ed, of course, but he’d also missed this, the soap-salt scent of him here, the weight and slide of him against his tongue and palate, the sting of Ed’s fingers in his hair, the way his mind just stops when he’s on his knees for him.

He looks up to see Ed watching him, pupils blown wide, lips parted, and Stede closes his eyes again because it’s so much to both see and feel him. It feels like finding a last little gift in the toe of your Christmas stocking after everything else has been unwrapped. And then he opens his eyes, because yes, it’s so much, but it’s Ed.

Ed brings his palm to Stede’s cheek and cups his face, not holding, not pushing, just cradling his cheek while Stede blows him, and he’s torn between wanting to push his face into Ed’s hand and wanting to push his face into Ed’s groin, so he does both, brings his own hand up to rest atop Ed’s as he relaxes his throat and takes him in a little deeper.

Ed lets out a broken, whispered “Stede,” and Stede watches as he falls apart beneath him, shaking and crying a little more, his hand never leaving Stede’s face. Stede pulls off, rests his head on Ed’s thigh, looks up at him and waits. Ed had said stay, but even now, with Ed’s cock softening near his cheek and Ed looking down at him through tear-clumped lashes like Stede’s his first cup of coffee in the morning, Stede can’t be certain –

“Hey,” Ed says.

“Hey.”

“I’m really glad you’re here.”

“Me too.”

“And I’m — mate, I’m so fuckin’ scared?”

Stede nods against Ed’s thigh and smiles up at him a little crookedly.

“Yes,” he agrees. “Me too. I mean, constantly, about everything, but this, specifically, yep. A big one.”

Ed closes his eyes, breathes through his nose, looks a little like Louis at the doctor just before he gets a shot. It’s silent in the flat save for Ed’s breathing (Stede has forgotten how) and a bike going by outside. Stede’s knees throb against the floorboards, and he chases the bitter taste of Ed in his mouth with a kiss to his palm, just by turning his face into it a little.

“I love you,” Ed says, and outside, Ruthie starts up her plaintive coo.

Notes:

This isn't the end, but we're close. <3

Chapter 12: Spring 2

Louis sits in Mr. Boodhari’s office and thinks.

(It’s nearly time to go back to class, but Mx. Jimenez doesn’t seem to mind if Louis is a little late coming back from Mr. Boodhari’s office, which is weird. They’re pretty strict, usually.)

He and Mr. Boodhari have been talking about double-dip feelings.

“What do you think that means?” Mr. Boodhari had asked, and Louis had thought about it for a minute and said,

“Like you’re not supposed to follow one feeling after another because it’s gross and unsanitary?”

“Oh, okay, you’re thinking about chips, yeah, I could see why you’d think that. I was thinking more about ice cream. A double dip is when you get two scoops, yeah? And they can be different flavors.”

Louis makes a face, because a lot of ice cream flavors probably aren’t good together. Mint and peanut butter. Coffee and Superman. Banana and literally everything. Chocolate and — no, that’s a bad example, chocolate is pretty good with everything. Okay, so maybe two flavors sometimes could be nice.

“Sometimes we have double dip feelings, just like double dip ice cream. Sometimes we feel two different ways about the same thing. Can you think of a time when you felt like that?”

Louis carefully flattens his Silly Putty and rolls it into a tube, pinches off the ends, and squeezes it in his fist until the air bubbles make the crack sound that he likes.

“Sometimes when I’m mad at Alma?” he says. “I mean, I know I’m supposed to love her because she’s my sister and I guess I do, but sometimes she’s mean to me and that makes me angry.”

“Yeah, man!” Mr. Boodhari says, and gives him the big smile that makes Louis feel all warm and shivery. Huh. That’s two, too.

“I want you to think about what’s been going on at home,” Mr. Boodhari says, “And see if you can name some of the things you’ve been feeling. Will you give that a try?”

Louis flattens his Silly Putty again and nods.

“Whenever you’re ready.”

Louis sits and thinks.

He thinks about waking up in the night and wanting to go ask Dad for a glass of water but Dad’s not there anymore. He thinks about walking in on Alma crying, and how mad she’d been that he’d seen. He thinks about Thanksgiving and the wine spilling on the white tablecloth, how the stain had grown and spread until nearly the whole thing was maroon. He thinks about how cold he’d been in Chicago when they went ice skating, but how he hadn’t said anything because he hadn’t wanted to go back to Dad’s weird-smelling apartment. But then he thinks about Dad a few weeks ago at the zoo, and the shiny rocks that Louis has been sleeping with under his pillow. He thinks about how Mom had looked last night over dinner, laughing with Alma about something that had happened at school. Mom didn’t used to laugh that much, but she’s doing it a lot more now. He thinks about Doug, who bought him a book on frogs, and Mom’s new friend Evelyn who had spent the night a few weekends ago and shown Louis pictures of her giant cat Ned on her phone. He thinks about Alma’s play. He hadn’t really gotten most of it, but seeing Alma on stage transformed into someone else – he’d been proud of her, and a little scared, and a little jealous, too. He wants to be able to turn into someone else for a while.

Huh. That’s, like, way more than two things.

“Mr. Boodhari?”

“Yeah?”

“Can we call my dad real quick?”