Page 79 of Bounced!

On Sunday, the hockey guys rolled in after their game, the whole absurd pack of them.

Now it was Monday, and Finn had made us all get dressed and go to a real restaurant with cloth napkins and a wine list that had an upturned nose.

“A double date” was the phrase Chase had used, delighted, when he made the reservation.

A double date, like we were seventeen.

Dante sat next to me in a light-colored shirt, some soft, pale thing that fit him like it had been poured on and dried across his muscles. It hugged the chest and the arms in a way that should’ve been illegal in a family restaurant. Against his skin, it did something to me, the pale of the fabric against the rich dark of him. It was a contrast I still couldn’t get used to, and couldn’t stop looking at. He’d worn it knowing exactly what he was doing. I was half sure the only reason we made it to the restaurant on time was that if I’d had one more minute alone with him in that shirt, I’d have peeled it right off him, and we’d have skipped dinner entirely.

I made myself look at the menu.

Across the table, Finn had his arm along the back of Chase’s chair. He’d been doing that for years and would do it for years more. I looked at the four of us and felt something settle in my chest that I hadn’t felt in a while.

“So,” Chase said, the second the waiter left with our order, a mischievous glint in his eyes. “I’ve been waiting all weekend for this. I want the whole thing from the beginning. How long?”

“How long what?” I said.

“How long were the two of you doing the—” Chase waved a hand between Dante and me. “—the pining thing, the mutual agonized, everybody-could-see-it pining. Finn’s given me pieces, but I want the full account from a primary source.”

“There’s no account—” I started.

“Two years,” Finn said.

“Finn.”

“What? He asked for the full account. I’m the historian.” Finn took a slow sip of his wine and savored it, a man who’d waited months for this exact moment. He wasn’t about to rush it. “Two years, Chase, give or take. I clocked it the first winter. Mark hired a bouncer built like a vending machine who read Dostoyevsky on his breaks. Inside of a month, Mark started doing this thing where he’d find reasons to walk to the door, checking the door, as though the door might magically escape its hinges and float away.”

I crossed my arms and huffed. “I was managing the room—”

“You were managing your feelings, badly at that, in front of a professional observer.” Finn didn’t even look at me. “And your man here was no better. Two grown adults, both of them sharp as tacks about everything except the most obvious thing.” Finn shook his head, but his smile was all warmth. “They orbited each other for two years like a couple of magnets somebody’d glued in backward. All that pull, and both of them swearing they couldn’t feel it.”

Dante, beside me, made a low sound into his wine. I glanced over. He was smiling.

The traitor was smiling.

“You agree with all this?” I asked.

“He’s not wrong.” Dante shrugged.

“You’re supposed to be on my side.”

“I read Russian literature. I’m on the side of history.” Dante set his glass down. And there it was, the dry thing he did, the one that still got me every time. “You did check the door a lot, Mark.”

“I checked the door a normal amount—”

“You knew my tea order, and you’d never once had a conversation with me longer than four minutes.” He said it mildly, wickedly, enjoying himself. “For two years, I catalogued it. I thought you were just observant. Turns out you were pining.”

“Okay, first of all—”

Chase was delighted, both elbows on the table now. “He knew your tea?”

“I drink a very specific kind. It’s not common,” Dante confirmed. “He’d been running surveillance on me since before either of us admitted anything. I found out the morning after we finally, well, got together. He made my tea perfect on the first try. He even guessed the right amount of honey.”

“Finn,” Chase said, scandalized with joy. “You didn’t tell me about the tea.”

“I didn’t know about the tea. This is new information.” Finn actually raised his glass. “To the tea.”

“We’re not toasting the tea,” I grumbled.