Me and Lee will be okay, Ernie typed.But you won’t if you go out without Sonny. A lot about tomorrow is cloudy, but if you and Sonny go out, I see me and Sonny in Disneyland next weekend, with Cotton.
Of all the fucking weirdness.
Ace stared at that text, reading it again.
I’m sorry?
“Why would I go to Disneyland without you, Ace?” Sonny asked, puzzled.
Ace grunted. “I don’t know,” he said. “But you certainly wouldn’t be going if I’m dead. So let’s have some faith in Ernie and do it his way.”
Disneyland, Ernie typed, and Ace could almost see his shrug.It’ll be fine.
And with that Ace went back to group chat.
Me and Sonny’ll be distractions and help with the Brady/Eric relay. Dimitri will hold the fort here.And then, taking a page from Ernie’s book, he added,It’ll be fine.
And then Burton typed,Goddammit,Ernie!
And things sort of broke up from there, with Ace and Jai lingering to set up places/times and asking Jason for a backup plan, in case the phone wasn’t in the police station. Ace wasn’t sure what Lee and Ernie would be saying to each other, but he had a feeling that if they were in the same house, there would be naked bodies at the end of it, and Ace didn’t want any part of that.
It was uncomfortable thinking of a friend that way.
By the time Ace was done, their guest had emerged from the shower looking cleaner, shaved, and somehow smaller without the layers of clothes currently meeting their maker in the heavy-duty washing machine Ace had bought with their work coveralls in mind.
Even clean, Dimitri wasn’t a looker. His features were knobby—chin, nose, ears, everything stuck out like it should be twisted to make Dimitri run. But clean, Ace could see the exhaustion in the man’s eyes, and the feet peeking out from Sonny’s old sweats were cracked and bloody.
Well, wouldn’t be the first time the rug had gotten blood on it.
But Ace could help the other thing too.
“Sonny,” he said, “get some of that thick lotion paste we use on our hands and give it to him. I’ll get him my thick socks. We’re asking him to work a full day tomorrow, and this ain’t no good. Dimitri, go ahead and sit on the futon. We can put something on your feet so they don’t fuckin’ hurt, okay?”
He stood and moved toward the room, but Sonny stopped him, a hand on his hip. “Ace?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For… you know. Hearing me.Seeingme. I… there’s nobody in the world I could care about like I care for you, you know that, right?”
Ace smiled a little, his throat unaccountably tight. “I’m glad, Sonny, ’cause I got no plans to go anywhere without you.”
Sonny grinned then, irrepressible. “’Cause I just showed you I wouldn’t let you, right?”
And Ace couldn’t bear it. Dimitri in the next room or not, he pulled Sonny close, not to kiss him but to hold him, tight and dear, his body trembling. This was a bad business. It had been bad from the moment George had told them all about the kids,abused, terrified, and forced to go back to the man who had hurt them, because he was supposed to be a man of God.
Everybody at Ace’s house that day—they’d told the truth. They’d do it all again. Not a one of them wouldn’t have stepped in, taken Ace’s place, and done the killing himself. But it was hard—damned hard—to be the one who’d killed. Ace had done it before, and he reckoned the way his life was going, he would do it again. But knowing that Sonny would love him for the murderer he was? That meant something.
Sonny returned the embrace, tight and hard, and the only thing that pulled them apart was the slight sound of Dimitri’s breathing.
He’d fallen asleep on their futon, bloody feet and all.
Ace and Sonny woke him up to tend to his hurts, and then after giving him a couple of ibuprofen and a blanket, they retired to their own bedroom. Normally, they watched some television around this time, but they both had phones—they could watch their shows on Ace’s phone, shoulder to shoulder in bed.
Ace felt like some time alone with Sonny was the thing he’d been missing from his whole day.
He locked their bedroom door that night and left the light on in the kitchen, although he kept the living room dark. He didn’t reckon on that beat-down man on his futon making any plans to kill him and Sonny, although they kept Duke in with them, just in case.
Ace tried to be generous, but not stupid, and it’d served him and Sonny pretty well so far.
