Page 97 of Bounced!

He gave me what I needed, the way he’d learned I needed it.

I wrapped myself around him and held on like he was the one solid thing in a tilting world, because he was.

For a while, there was no December. There was only the two of us moving together in the dark, breathing each other’s air, saying with our bodies the things too big and too plain for words.

You.

Still you.

Always you.

Whatever we lose tomorrow, we don’t lose this.

Not ever.

I came apart with my face in his neck and his heartbeat going against my mouth. He followed me, and we held on through it all, while the cool air moved over our skin and the dark held us both.

It wasn’t fireworks.

It was better than that.

It was the truest thing either of us had managed to say in a month of not finding words.

After our hearts settled, we lay in the wreck of the sheets. I ran my hand slowly up and down the long muscles of his back, and I didn’t say anything for a while. Then I said the thing that had been sitting in my chest all night. “You know what’s strange?” My voice came out low and gravely. “In the middle of all this—the bar, the money, the whole disaster—you and I have been the easy part, the one easy thing in this whole convoluted mess.” I pressed my mouth to the top of his head. “Falling for you was the easiest thing I’ve ever done.”

He lifted his head and looked at me. “Easy?”

“Yeah.”

“You call two years of dancing around each other easy?” He propped himself up on an elbow, and there was the wicked grin, even now, even here. “Two years, Mark. You memorized my tea order and every book I ever carried in, and you never said one word. I built a whole system out of not wanting you. Do you remember how long it took us to get through a single conversation that lasted longer than four minutes? That was not easy. That was the least easy thing I’ve ever survived.”

“No, I know.” I was smiling now, tired and sad and happy all at once. “The getting here was murder. That part took two years and nearly killed us both.” I kissed him again, then pulled him back down against me. “But that’s not what I meant. I said falling was easy . . . and being here . . . this part . . . us. This has been the easiest thing in my whole life, and I’ve been lying here trying to figure out why, because nothing about you should be easy. You’re the most complicated man I’ve ever known.”

“Thank you, I think.”

“You’re welcome.” I chuckled and kissed his temple. “But it’s true. You’re the one thing I’ve never had to work at. Everything else I ever kept, I kept with both hands, white-knuckled, sure it was going to slip if I loosened my grip for a second, the business, the bar, all of it. And then there’s you. I don’t have to grip at all. You’re just there, easy as breathing. I don’t understand it, but . . . I guess . . . I stopped needing to. For once in my life, I don’t need to know how it works. I’m just happy it does.”

Dante went quiet. I felt something work through him. When he spoke, his voice had dropped into the register he only used in the dark. “That’s the thing,” he said. “About the—I don’t know, whatever you want to call it, the wall I built and the two years I spent not letting myself have this. Everybody thinks the hard part is the other person, learning them and earning them. It’s not. The hard part is all on your own side of the door. It’s the years you spend talking yourself out of the thing you want, every single day, convincing yourself you don’t want it. That’s the labor. That’s what nearly killed me, and I did every bit of it to myself, alone, for no good reason.” I rested my palm on his chest, stroked his hair, loving the feel of him more by the moment. “And then one night, you wouldn’t let me leave,” he said. “ I finally walked through the door I’d been standing guard at my whole life. You know what was on the other side?”

“What?”

“Nothing. There was no monster, no catastrophe, just this, a man who makes my tea right and builds my dog a house and lets me hold him when it’s bad. The thing I spent years barricading the door against turned out to be the easiest thing in the world.” He shook his head against my chest. “So you don’t get to say falling for me was easy, because you never had my door. But this? Being here? Yeah. This part’s easy. It’s the easiest thing I’ve ever done, and I did two years of the hardest work of my life to get to it. I’d do it all again ten times over for this exact ordinary quiet right here.”

I lay there and let that settle. It took the breath out of me a little, because he’d said the true thing before I could find the words.

“The door’s the whole thing, isn’t it?” I said finally. “Everybody’s just standing on their own side of their own door, working up the nerve to open it.”

“That’s the whole thing.”

“And the other side’s just easy.”

“If you’re lucky. If it’s the right person on the other side.” He found my hand in the dark and laced his fingers through mine. “I got lucky. I did the hardest work of my life, and at the end of it, I got you, the right guy at the right time. Most people don’t. Most people guard the door so long they die behind it.” He pressed a kiss to my knuckles. “I almost did. You’re the reason I didn’t.”

Something moved in me too big to say back. So I turned and gathered him in, all of him, and held on as tight as I could.

“Whatever happens tomorrow,” I said into his head. “Whatever they take, we keep this. This isn’t for sale. They can have the building. They can’t have us.”

“No,” he said. “They can’t.”