“I…” Oscar couldn’t contain his exuberance as he brought Aaron to the fore. His joy spilled from him like water from a jug tipped over, and Oscar giggled. “I met a boy.”
“Isn’t that how all the good stories start?” Grandma asked, crossing her legs. She was wearing blue jeans in a straight cut, because she’d always been so cool and no approaching eightieth birthday was about to change that. Her grey hair had pink highlights in it and was tied into a twist round the back of her head, pink earrings dangling from her lobes. “Tell me. I hope he’s cute enough to excuse your absence this entire summer.”
“It wasn’t exactly Aaron’s fault.”Aaronslid over his tongue like honey, sweet and warm, drizzling out of him like a holy word, a magic spell that righted every wrong.
“Aaron, hmm?” Grandma smiled.
“Aaron,” Oscar said again, because he would never grow tired of speaking his name.
Oscar thought aboutCall Me By Your Nameagain because it would always be one of the first queer books he’d read and one of the first queer films he’d watched, but if he were Elio, he’d never whisper his own name into the blankets, never say it seven thousand times into the phone. He’d whisperAaronover and over again. He’d call Aaron byhisname, the one Aaron had chosen for himself, and he would kiss the shape of its vowels on every cheek, nibble the arches of its consonants into Aaron’s earlobes, lick the rise and fall of its syllables up the column of his neck.
“We met before our surgeries.”
“Like in the romcoms,” Grandma said, grabbing one of the cushions she’d embroidered with Lina’s name and hugging it to her chest, excitement buzzing off her skin, two hundred forty volts of her undying support flickering in her eyes. “I hope he looks like Mr. Darcy.”
“His internet name is Cowboy,” Oscar teased.
He waited for Grandma’s lips to curve as she recalled her beloved Jack Twist, but she seemed far too excited about the prospect of his Cinderella-at-the-ball meet-cute, in which Oscar had dropped a body part and Aaron another, crossing their signals badly enough that it took practically seven weeks for them to find each other again. For Aaron to find him. But he had. Aaron had searched through all the kingdom, hounding every server for a foot that fit the shoe. And he’d found him.
Oscar pulled out his phone and found the picture he’d snapped for Lucas at the café, tilting the screen so Grandma could look. She raised her tortoise-shell cat-eye glasses to her nose, leaning in, then turned back to Oscar, giving him an expression that suggested he might have summoned a demon toher living room.
“And you didn’t think to lead with how absolutelyadorablehe is?” she asked.
“Grandma, he’s…” Oscar lowered his phone, smiling to himself as he caught another glimpse of Aaron, head tilted, freckled face aglow. “I feel like Papa’s alive when we’re together.”
Oscar’s voice shook, and he had to look away, fixing his eyes on Grandma’s TV, on the muted word-guessing show in which a contestant seemed to be having trouble filling in the last two gaps to complete the phrase “a stitch in time saves nine.”
“It’s literallymandv,” he muttered at the screen.
A warm, familiar hand slipped into his, calling back his attention, and when he finally mustered the courage to look, he found Grandma’s eyes trained on him, waiting.
“We haven’t said anything yet.” Oscar thought about Jack on the mountain, tumbling around with Ennis all summer, then marrying Anne Hathaway. “I don’t want to spook him, but I don’t want him to think that I—” Oscar groaned, leaning back into the couch. “Should I be asking whether we’re boyfriends?”
“Well, does it feel like you are?” Grandma took her hand back, reaching for something from behind the throw pillows. Oscar melted into the cushions as her crochet hook slid through the stitches, glinting blue as it caught the light of the TV. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“He’s a knitter,” Oscar said. “Maybe he crochets, too, but he knits. He made Luigi a trans hat.”
“You have to lock this boy down. I must have him over for dinner,” Grandma replied.
She inclined her head, looking at Oscar over her glasses, a knowing smile on her slim lips. Papa had always looked more like Grandpa, but this was an expression that brought him tothe room. Oscar wished he could ask Papa for advice. But Grandma was as good an alternative as any.
“Ozzy…darling…you kids complicate your lives too much for your own good.”
“What do you mean?” Oscar asked, picking at the hem of his T-shirt.
“In my time, you’d see someone you liked, you asked them out, and if you liked each other, you went out again. If things went well, then that was that. We didn’t have all these definitions you do now. Friends with benefits and fuck buddies and all of that complicated stuff.” Grandma carried on crocheting.
“We are definitelynotanything like that!” Oscar said.
The heat in his stomach split two ways, rising up to warm his cheeks and pooling in his depths. He and Aaron had kissed until it waslatelate, and then Aaron had stayed over and they’d slept right there in the living room with Luigi curled around their heads on the arm, but they hadn’t slept together.
Oscar wanted to. He wanted to touch every square inch of Aaron, to know him biblically, to transcend the bounds of human connection and merge their souls. Oscar wanted to have him, to be had by him.
But he didn’t want it likethat. Aaron wasn’t a job to come with benefits, and they were far more than buddies; they had to be.
“Just tell him you don’t want to see anybody else, Oscar,” Grandma said. “And whenever you’re ready, you can have him over for dinner.”
And Oscar wanted that, too. Before he could confirm, Lina appeared in the doorway, a big smile on her face. She glanced between them, settling at last on him.
