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“He followed me to the front door crying because I wouldn’t take him with me. I was running away, and I told him he was too little to come.”
David smiles over his glass. “Then you made it to the end of the driveway, dropped your cake, and started crying too.”
“I was seven. It was good cake.”
“And while I was outside trying to convince you to come home, Joey was sitting on the kitchen floor eating what was left of it with his hands,” Susan says.
Nash laughs. “Yeah, that sounds like Joey.”
Nash is smiling when he says Joey’s name. I’ve mostly heard him talk about his brother through the worst parts. What happened to him. What Nash wishes he’d seen. Everything he still carries because he couldn’t save him. This is the first time I’ve sat here and listened to his family talk about Joey just being his little brother. A kid who ate half the cake. I like hearing about him this way.
Susan starts telling me another story about the boys, and Nash argues with her over which one of them actually broke the kitchen window. He laughs so hard his hand suddenly goes to his side. My hand covers his before I even think about it.
His laughter stops, and he takes a careful breath. “It just pulled a little. I’m okay.”
I leave my hand where it is until he settles back against me.
Susan watches us for a moment. “When he told us how much you’ve been hovering since he came home, I thought he was exaggerating.”
“He was actually understating it.”
Nash groans against my shoulder. “This is going to be a very long visit if the two of you team up.”
She gives me a wink, then goes right back to eating and asks Nash what kind of cheese is on one of the sandwiches. I sit there staring at her for a second. Well, shit. I guess Susan likes me.
We stay in the living room until David finishes his drink. He mentions there are still a couple of things in the car, and I go outside with him while Nash stays with his mother.
David hands me a bag from the back while telling me about the traffic they hit on the drive from Atlanta. I take another one and wait for whatever else he needs, but he closes the back of the car instead.
“He sounds happy when he talks about you. Susan picked up on it before I did. She usually does.”
Here we go. I’ve been waiting all damn day for this conversation. David starts toward the house, so I walk with him.
“After Joey died, there were times we couldn’t get through to Nash. We tried. Probably too hard sometimes.” He adjusts the bag in his hand. “Eventually, I had to accept that being his father didn’t mean I could fix it for him.”
He stops when we reach the porch and looks through the window. Nash is still on the couch beside his mother.
“I don’t need to know everything that goes on between the two of you. He’s thirty-one, and he’d tell me to mind my own damn business anyway.” David looks at me. “I wanted to see him here with you. That’s one reason we came.” I wait for him to say more, but David reaches for the door. “He’s happy. That’s what matters to me.”
Apparently, that’s the entire conversation. No questions about why a man fifteen years older is with his son, no warning about what will happen if I hurt him, not even the uncomfortable father-to-boyfriend talk I’ve been expecting all damn day. After everything I worked myself up over this morning, I’m almost disappointed.
David walks inside, and I follow him back to the living room. Nash looks up when we come in and holds his hand out to me without breaking his conversation with his mother. I take it and sit beside him, pulling him against me as he keeps talking.
I changed my fucking shirt three times because I was so worried about what his parents would think of me, and they walked into my house already knowing the only thing they really cared about.
Nash was right, but there is absolutely no fucking way I’m telling him that.
Duncan
Two Years Later
We kept the ceremony short because neither of us wanted someone else spending half an hour telling us what marriage is supposed to mean. We’ve spent two years building a life together. We don’t need anyone standing in front of us to explain what we’re promising each other.
Alessia catches me watching, smiles, then says something to Nash and kisses his cheek. When the doors open a few seconds later, he steps outside and starts toward me.
We could have gotten married anywhere. Alessia offered so many possibilities that I eventually stopped answering the group messages, but Nash wanted to do it here. Somewhere during our first year together, the house stopped being mine and became ours. His clothes took over half the closet, books appeared in rooms where I’d never kept anything personal, and the kitchen filled with food I’d never bought until I started eating it because he did. At some point, I stopped noticing which things had been his and which had been mine before we started putting everything together.
Our family fills the chairs across the back lawn as Nash walks through the middle of them toward me. His dark suit fits close through his shoulders and waist, and the first button of his white shirt is open because he refused to wear a tie. He pushed his hair back before the ceremony, but a few strands have already fallen forward, and I know they won’t be the last. By the time everyone leaves tonight, he’ll have run his hands through it enough that it looks nothing like it does now.
