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“Peter…”
“Yeah?”
“Could you… Would you mind just…holding me some more?”
Without a word, I led him over to the sofa where we’d both sat when we chatted with Bobby. We turned to look at his empty chair.
“Not here.” Daniel led me back to the guest bedroom. A place I’d rarely been in. It was spartan with only a bed, a bedside table with a box of Kleenex and a lamp, and a desk under the window. There were some paintings on the walls—forest glens with deer in them—but otherwise it appeared unused.
“The closet’s full,” Daniel said when I mentioned the emptiness. “Don’t open it. It’ll all fall out on you. Take a guess how I know that.”
I laughed and he did, too, but it was faint.
I removed my camera from around my neck and put it on the bedside table. “C’mon,” I said, pulling him down to the mattress with me. “Let me hold you.”
This time I was the big spoon, and though Daniel was larger than me, he felt right in my arms. We didn’t talk for a long time. The breeze from the open window blew over us, calming and soft. We breathed together, and at some point, I thought he’d drifted off.
But then he murmured, “I keep thinking about the next steps.” Daniel turned over in my arms so he could see me. His hair was golden in the glowy light of the room, and his eyes were the sad, tired brown of fallen leaves in autumn. “If I can just get through these next few months, maybe it will be over.” A pessimistic smile twisted his mouth. “But is that possible? Can iteverbe over?”
“I hope so.”
He sighed. “Me too.”
“What are the next steps?”
“To sell our house. But that means I have to do a ton of other stuff first. It’s not a single event. More like a series of steps that make up that big step.”
“Where will you live?”
“I’m not sure yet. I might rent a place. I might take some of the proceeds from the sale—because some of them will be mine according to my father’s will—and buy a place of my own. I don’t know.”
I hesitated before asking, “Where will your mom live once she’s out of rehab?”
He tensed. “She can either buy a house with a lower financial profile here locally, or she can do the right thing and move to Florida to be close to the kids.” His voice was tight. “Maybe buy a place near my grandparents there.”
“The kids won’t be living with her again?”
“I hope not. The legal aspects of it all are…” Daniel let out a long sigh and shook his head. “Even if she gets sober, in my mind there’s no world where the right thing is to put them back in her hands. She’s relapsed too many times. I can’t—” he sighed and flopped onto his back, placing a hand over his eyes. “I won’t adopt them or take custody.Iwon’t be their father. My grandparents are the only option.” He looked at me. “Does that make me an asshole?”
I shook my head. There was nothing to say, and there was no way Daniel waseveran asshole.
Daniel rolled toward me to cup my face. Gazing into his eyes, I felt dizzy with anticipation. Was it wrong to kiss here in Bobby’s guest room now that he was dead? Was it disrespectful?
Daniel rubbed our noses together.
“Should we do this?” I asked. “In our dead friend’s house?”
Daniel kissed the tip of my nose. “I kind of think he’d want us to, don’t you?”
Tears pricked my eyes. “Yeah.”
Daniel’s mouth was hot and somehow full of sorrow. His kiss was sad and desperate, and I let it swallow me up. We kissed for a long time. So long that my lips ached, and I felt the beginnings of beard burn stinging my chin.
When Daniel shoved my shirt up and started kissing my chest, I didn’t push him away or worry about Bobby anymore. Especially when he tugged off my jeans and underwear and then went for his own fly. Tugging off my shirt and casting it aside, I leaned back in the golden light from the open window. The breeze teased my nipples.
Daniel’s body was gorgeous. He wasn’t overly muscled, but he was strong, and he looked like summertime in the flesh. I wanted to get him over me, feel his weight on top of me like at his house, but when he moved down between my legs, I changed my mind.
“Is this okay?” he whispered.
