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Elio nudged his side, sharing a your-kids-are-hilarious-and-adorable smile with him.
God, Elio was just so good at this. A fucking natural.
James wondered for about the billionth time what it would be like if he’d been able to raise kids with someone more like him.
Or actually him.
But no, that was ridiculous. Wasn’t it?
Elio had asked him yesterday if they could see each other after this week, and he’d said he’d think about it. Well, actually he’d said I wish we could, but he wasn’t sure what that would look like and if he could.
This summer had been overwhelming. He was just finding his footing as a single parent with joint custody.
But honestly, he just couldn’t imagine seeing Elio in little drips and drops, getting himself all worked up and then crashing down at the end. Saying goodbye tomorrow was going to be hard enough, and they weren’t even in a relationship.
He didn’t want to be Elio’s entertainment, mixed in with kink parties upstate and a club where he apparently had a membership.
“What’s your favorite place, Mike-a-roni?”
Mikey’s eyes lit up, either because he was talking about ice cream, or because he liked the thousand and one nicknames that Elio and his siblings now had for him. Somehow, they’d gone on this weird tangent where Mikey wanted a new name if Dana had one, but he still liked Michael, so they were calling him all sorts of crazy things like Mikey-Bikey and Mike-a-doodle-doo that made him giggle every time.
“Twisted,” Mikey announced. “They have these big circle cold things, and you can watch them pour the milk stuff on it, and then it freezes, and they scrape it up into a spiral.” More like a cylinder, but Mikey loved spirals, and you could see the spiral pattern on top.
“Oooh!” Elio enthused. “I love Twisted. It’s right by my apartment.”
Wait, what? “Is Twisted a chain?” James asked. The one he knew about was a couple blocks from the hospital where he worked.
“I dunno. I was talking about the one on Thirty-fourth and Market.”
“But you live in Prrr…?” He squinted. He couldn’t remember the name of the town.
Elio laughed. “Ah, no. You thought I lived with my parents?”
James spluttered. “I mean, not in their house. But some of your siblings live nearby, right?”
“Yeah. We’re all over the East Coast, and some of them stuck around back home. But James, we live in the same city.” Elio was staring into his eyes now, his words heavy with meaning.
Oh God. Too much, too fast. James’s mind was going off like fireworks, exploding in a thousand directions and then fizzling out into puffs of smoke. They could… But then… And if…
“Uh, I must have missed that,” he finally managed.
“Maybe you were distracted,” Calvin put in, teasingly.
Yes. Probably. Elio left him dazzled, drunk on sex and pleasure. But he felt like he would have at least remembered that.
Elio gave him an inscrutable look, but then left him alone with his thoughts. And a hand that somehow made its way into his back pocket while they were sitting at the picnic table.
The evening went by like all the others had, full of laughter and impromptu singing. James washed up the dishes, splashing along with Mikey in the soapy bins.
Ava showed Dan–, er, Juniper how to build up the fire for marshmallows. Calvin put the food away. Elio took out a guitar—because of course he had a guitar—and they all called out songs for him to play.
The air was full of wood smoke and laughter and music, a circle of faces glowing by the fire’s light.
It was like a fantasy. Not the sexy type that James had always pushed to the back of his mind, but the one that had driven him to the woods in the first place.
Happiness. Trees. Dirty-faced children with beaming smiles. Food where you could taste how it was made. Mikey asking for the train song for the third time and shouting out the lyrics. Family.
It felt like every dream James had of family and it seemed as ephemeral as the flames, flickering as they disappeared into the twilight.
