Page 77 of Bounced!

He set his fork down and ran a hand over his beard. I watched him decide, the way I’d watched him decide at the family meeting, to tell me instead of carry whatever it was.

“I keep doing math,” he said. “It’s a . . . it’s an occupational hazard. Twenty years in construction, you see a building, you can’t not think about what it’d take, what you’d have to do to it. I just keep looking at”—he gestured vaguely at the air, at the whole impossible thing—“at our problem from the wrong end. Everybody keeps asking, ‘How do we get the building? How do we get the building?’ and I keep thinking—”

“Thinking what?” I said.

“Nothing. It’s not fully baked. Forget it.” He picked his fork up, and the door slammed shut.

I let it go because he wasn’t ready to say whatever it was. I wasn’t going to make anything of it, because a builder chewing on a building was just a dog chewing on a bone. It didn’t mean the bone was food. It probably meant nothing.

“You’ll tell me when it’s baked?”

“Yeah.” He looked at me, and something in him settled, like the telling was already a relief, even undone. “Yeah, I will. You’re on the list of people I tell things to now. It’s a short list.”

“How short?”

“Finn. You.” He shrugged, gruff, like it wasn’t the entire world he’d just handed me. “That’s the list.”

My heart thrilled at his list, though it wept for how small Mark’s inner circle truly was.

Later, the dishes done and the dog asleep and snoring under his little roof, we ended up in Mark’s bed with the windows open and the night coming in warm, though it wasn’t like before. Our first time had been fireworks, all that held-back desire finally breaking its banks. The morning after had been giddy and greedy, two men who couldn’t believe their luck and couldn’t keep their hands still.

This was different.

This was quieter.

It went deeper for being quiet.

He undressed me slowly, like there was no clock anywhere in the world. I let him, while I undressed him. We lay down together in the warm dark and held each other for a long while before it became anything else. I listened to his heartbeat under my ear, my hand flat on his chest, dark on pale, the contrast of us gone silver in the moonlight. Neither of us said anything. The night wasn’t a marvel or a joke. The night was just true, just us, just the fact of two men holding each other against a thing that was coming for everything they loved.

“Hey,” he said, low, into my scalp. “Can I tell you something? The thing I couldn’t say at dinner?”

“Anything. Always.”

He was quiet a moment, his hand moving slowly down my spine.

“The number,” he said. “Gerald gave me the number, what it’d take, assuming the company would even sell to us. I haven’t told the family yet. They don’t need it in their heads until we know what we’re doing. Finn knows. And now I want you to know, because I can’t be lying here with you and not—” He breathed out. “It’s two million dollars, Dante. That’s what they paid Gerald. And that’s just our part of the building, not the other units they’d already bought. They’d probably want a lot more from us, just for the trouble, just to squeeze some profit out of the deal.”

I lay there and felt the size of it land. It wasn’t just the money I felt. The money was obscene, unreachable, a number from another planet. No, I also felt the weight of him telling me, that he’d taken the heaviest fact in his life and set it in my hands because he trusted me to help him hold it. The one heart I had left, and he was still being careful with it, even now, even scared, handing me his own in exchange.

“Okay,” I said, turning in his arms and putting my mouth to his. “Whatever happens, we carry it together.”

“Dante—”

“Not tonight. Tonight we don’t do any numbers. Tonight I’m going to take care of you, because you’ve taken care of everybody in that bar for seven years, and I don’t think one single person has ever taken care of you.” I got a hand in his beard, tilted his face up to mine. “Let me. You built my dog a house. Let me have this.”

And so he did. He let me, which for a man like Mark was its own surrender. He was a fixer lying still and letting himself be tended to.

I took my time.

I put my mouth everywhere I’d been too greedy to linger on the other nights, on his gray-furred chest, on the soft place under his jaw, on his scarred hands I moved to my mouth. I kissed knuckle by knuckle, the way he’d once kissed mine.

He came apart slow and quiet under me, this enormous man, undone by the simple, unbearable experience of being cared for. When I finally moved over him, into him, when we finally fit ourselves together in the warm dark, it wasn’t fireworks and it wasn’t greed.

It was a vow.

That’s the only word I had for it.

We were two people saying with their bodies the thing that was too big to say with a number looming over the room.