Avery said around a mouthful of burger, “A few weeks? It’s up to you guys, really. I mean, I’d vote for tomorrow if I could.”
Wilder sent him a look that was so full of fond amusement I was almost jealous, except that was dumb. I had my own fondly amused guy to give me those looks nowadays, and he was currently in the kitchen checking on the apple pie and probably bitching about how crappy the oven was.
So it was just Danny and Miller and Wilder and Avery and me outside for the moment. Gracie was at a sleepover at a friend’s place—her first, and hadn’t Wilder stressed about that until Avery had talked him down?—and Cash was working an evening shift at Sunny Fields. It was nothing like old times but that didn’t grate the way it used to. I liked Miller and Avery,and I didn’t think of them as interlopers anymore. They weren’t taking Danny and Wilder away—except for the part where Avery literally was, but it was only as far as next door—they were making our weird little family bigger. I’d started life with one brother, and now I had a bunch of them, and it was okay.
And I’d given them a new brother too. Against all my own expectations, I hadn’t fucked things up with Lee. Yet. But also, hopefully not ever. And the guys loved him. They joked that it was mostly for his baking skills, but he fit in well. He played video games with Danny and Wilder and swapped cookie recipes with Avery, and I’d even caught him talking to Miller about some podcast they both listened to. And Gracie loved him because he’d made her a unicorn birthday cake, so now he was something like a god in her eyes. He hung out at the house a bunch, and the sky hadn’t fallen. I hadn’t ripped it down either.
Wilder still looked worried. “I know it’ll leave things tight around here.”
Danny smiled. “Nah, we’ll manage, bro. We always do, right?”
He was right about that. He’d taken Cash and me in back when we’d had nothing, and somehow we’d never gone hungry. So what if some months had been rougher than others? We managed, because Danny had decided we were family and everyone looked out for each other. That was how things worked in this house. It had taken me a while to learn that, and even longer to trust it, but I finally believed it.
“Uh,” I said. “Maybe I could take Wilder’s old room?”
Bobby and Lee were always talking about hiring more staff and expanding Gobble de Goose’s hours. If it was open all day like they wanted, I could pick up longer shifts and more pay.
The four of them stared at me like I’d grown a second head.
“You want your own room?” Wilder asked.
I shrugged. “Maybe I’m sick of me and Lee getting cockblocked by Cash.”
Avery almost choked on his burger.
I only said it because Lee was inside and Cash was at work. Otherwise I might have found a different way to phrase it, but why beat around the bush for these guys? They were all getting laid on the regular and knew how good it felt.
“That’s fair,” Danny said.
“More than fair,” Miller agreed.
Wilder nodded. “Hell yeah.”
See? They got it.
“I’m gonna go wrap up a burger for Cash,” Avery said and headed inside. A few moments later, I heard him and Lee talking. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but Avery laughed at something.
“Does getting your own room mean you guys are getting serious?” Danny asked.
“No,” I said. “It means I like to fuck, that’s all. And I’d like to do it without having to check Cash’s roster first.”
Everyone’s expressions called me a liar.
I guessed I’d changed in the last few months too, and at least some of that was down to Lee. Some of it was down to me taking a breath and deciding to trust what Lee and I had too. That was the hardest part. But I was trying to take a leaf out of Cash’s book and let myself believe the best of people. Like, I was never going to be the sort of guy who thought people were great, because people in general were assholes. Butspecificpeople? People like Danny and Wilder and Miller and Avery? People like Lee and Lindsay and Sam? People like Tyler and Bobby and Danny’s grandma?Mypeople? Yeah, I believed the best of them, because they’d proved it over and over.
Wilder proved it again when he said, “You wanna keep Gracie’s bed? We don’t need it.”
The bed in Gracie’s room had been Wilder’s first, before he’d given it to her and moved onto the foldout couch. It was way too big for a five-year-old but would be just right for a twenty-something who regularly had his boyfriend stay over.
“Really? How much do you want for it?”
He shrugged. “Nothing. It’s yours.”
“Awesome,” I said, grinning.
We spent more nights here than we did at Lee’s place—I still didn’t like leaving Cash on his own, and Lee got that—but my twin bed was a tight fit for the two of us. We made it work, but Wilder’s bed would be a game changer.
I was finishing my burger when Lee came outside and sat next to me on the bench seat. He was wearing shorts, and the sight of his bare thighs, which had turned out to be my new favorite thing about summer, was giving me ideas for later.
