Second Chance (Hudson Valley Murder Mysteries #2)

Chapter Two

M ike’s isn’t too crowded when Tony finally gets there. It figures, given school is in session again and the tourists have all gone home. Weeknights in Kingston are not hopping.

“Sorry I’m late,” he says as he slides into the booth beside Blake. He wishes they were sitting outside while the weather’s nice as it’ll get rainy and cold soon enough. Blake has weirdly strong opinions about eating outdoors, though, and Tony doesn’t want to get into it today. “Nice piercing. That new?”

“Yeah.” Blake grins, flicking the eyebrow ring back and forth. “My boss had a conniption about it. Worth it.”

Tony wrinkles his nose. “Why?”

Blake shrugs. “Professional workplace attire or something. It’s 2019 though. People should be able to wear whatever they want to work.”

“Hear, hear!” Lisa says from the other side of the table. She lifts her beer glass and takes a big sip. “One of my kids got sent home for wearing spaghetti straps the other day.”

“Ah, the great American education system.” Blake raises his glass in a mock-serious toast.

Tony’s never been entirely clear on what separates spaghetti straps from other straps, but they don’t sound like something worth sending someone home for, let alone a middle schooler who wouldn’t know better if they were a problem. Tony had a phase in seventh grade where he only wore T-shirts for bands he had never listened to. No one sent him home about it, though they probably should have. He doesn’t know how Lisa does it, even if he were earning twice his current salary, he doubts he could handle taking thirty prepubescent nightmares and teaching them to become real people.

“There you are.” Daniel comes up from the bar. He settles into the seat next to Lisa and slides a beer and a burger across the table to Tony.

Tony closes his eyes in thankfulness. “You are my savior. Thank you.”

He’s about halfway through demolishing the burger when he manages to look up and realizes all three of his friends are watching him. He swallows a big bite. “What?”

“Rough day?” Lisa asks.

Tony shrugs. It was pretty par for the course, all things considered. Gianna’s maternity leave segued seamlessly into her return to college, and while they technically could afford to hire someone else at the garage, it would put them in a tight spot if any unexpected costs come their way this year. They crunched the numbers in January when Gianna’s due date was looming, and it was much cheaper for Tony, Pa, and Kyle to take on an extra shift here and there than it would be to have a new receptionist. After all, Ma comes in two days a week, and Gianna still does Friday afternoons and Saturdays. She has Lia with her, squalling away, but that might be good for business given how customers coo over her. Covering for Gianna’s absence means more shifts with all three of them, him, Pa, and Kyle, clambering all over one another to get the jobs finished and the customers seen to. Adjusting to the new normal has been difficult, but Tony will get there.

At least, Tony thinks guiltily, he isn’t sleeping in the same house as a screaming infant most nights. Pa is.

“Didn’t pack enough for lunch.” He’s self-aware enough to know he’s not telling the whole truth but not willing to get into any more detail all the same.

“I knew we should have gotten some bananas yesterday,” Daniel says.

Tony shrugs. “We didn’t know I was staying over when we went shopping.”

He usually decides to stay over casually, depending on how late it gets and how comfortable it is on Daniel’s couch, in Daniel’s bed, or on one occasion, with Daniel wrapping his arms and legs around Tony because he didn’t want him to go.

Tony just happens to be in Rhinebeck late frequently, and Daniel has a very comfy couch.

Again, Tony becomes uncomfortably aware of Lisa and Blake’s eyes on him.

He takes a long sip of his beer to ignore it and then nearly spits it out. “Jesus. What is this?”

“Oh no.” Blake gives Daniel an accusatory look. “Did you get the new one on tap?”

“Yeah. I thought—this is Blake’s new beer, right? I mean, other Blake?”

Blake rolls his eyes. “Call him Blake G. That’s what our English teacher did.”

Lisa’s eyes slide over to Tony, willing him to get in on the joke. “Fair’s fair. Then you have to call this one Blake W.”

Tony takes another sip to hide the laugh and nearly chokes on the weird, yeasty cinnamon taste.

Not for the first time, Blake huffs, irritated. “I was the original Blake. It’s not fair. And Blake W sounds so dumb.”

He’s not annoyed. During the month that Blake G wore the same kind of flannel shirts and ripped jeans as him in sophomore year of high school and told everyone to call him Blake G, Blake W was briefly irritated, but only while Blake G pretended to do it on a dare. As soon as Blake G told him that the whole thing wasn’t a bit, that he was much happier as Blake G than he ever had been before he transitioned, Blake W was entirely on board and spent the rest of high school complaining loudly about how he should be known as the original Blake. This led to a lot of discussion about how Blake wasn’t Blake W’s real name anyway, but he’d gotten tired of people misspelling Baalkrishan and sweet-talked the school secretary into changing it on his forms though it wasn’t technically legal. The ensuing discussion usually derailed the conversation so thoroughly no one thought to complain about anything else to do with Blake G.

By now, the whole thing is mostly nostalgic.

Daniel looks between them, mildly confused but willing to go with it, just like he goes with Tony deciding to stay over all the time. He even started buying Tony’s favorite brand of prepackaged ham, though he thinks it’s bad for the environment. Daniel joined Thursday night drinks at Mike’s at some point in April when Tony wanted both to get mildly drunk and stay over at his place and, therefore, needed a designated driver. Tony’s friends apparently like him enough that it’s become a standing invitation.

Tony tries not to read too much into the way their lives have become so seamlessly tangled. He fails most of the time.

He still hasn’t told his friends in so many words what Daniel is to him. He doesn’t need to; he’s aware he’s not subtle about it. But still.

The ease with which Daniel took to it and his friends’ acceptance in return makes something big and tender swell up in Tony, and he has to take another drink to will it down.

“For fuck’s sake.” He sets the beer glass down and pushes it away.

“Oh, right.” Blake thankfully awakens himself from high school reminiscing to explain what is wrong with the drinks tonight. “Blake G made a cinnamon bun flavored beer, and Mike’s put it on tap this week to crowd test it for him.”

Tony wrinkles his nose. “Oh, that’s what that is. Huh.”

“Yeah,” Blake agrees. “I think he and Charlie scheduled their vacation for this week on purpose so he wouldn’t have to take questions about it.”

Daniel’s eyebrows crawl up. “Can I try a sip?”

Tony gestures for him to go ahead.

Daniel takes a sip and then another. “I like it.”

“You would,” Tony mutters. Daniel is not exactly a beer connoisseur.

“What was that?”

“Oh, nothing.” Tony smiles guilelessly. “You wanna drink it?”

“Are you driving, then?”

Tony shrugs. “It’s one beer, but yeah, I can if you’d rather.” Now he’s eaten something, he’s less annoyed. He’d rather stay sober and sleep at Daniel’s than spend time at home. It will keep his irritation levels lower.

“Sounds good.” Daniel takes another long drink. “Hey, Lisa, how’s…uh…” He trails off, obviously trying to remember the name of the guy Lisa brought to New Year’s and a few other things in the last few months. He tries to catch Tony’s eye for help, but Tony can only shrug.

“There’s your answer,” Lisa says darkly. “He’s deeply boring, and we broke up two weeks ago.”

Blake and Daniel debate whether this merits cheers or commiserations while Tony finishes his dinner. He leans back against the booth with a satisfied sigh when he’s done.

Blake and Lisa compare notes on the perils of app-based dating, which Tony never got around to trying in as much depth as they have, and Daniel makes listening sounds Tony associates with how he gets when he’s doing research.

Tony looks out the window at the sun longingly. This would be perfect weather for a picnic. Or a hike, or a long walk, or—

“Okay, but is there such a thing as a welcome dick pic?” Lisa asks skeptically.

Tony’s attention is drawn forcibly indoors.

“I mean,” Blake hedges.

Tony leans forward, resting his chin on his hands.

“Okay, you shut up.” Blake points at him. “You’ve never even downloaded Grindr, you luddite.”

“No, no, I’m interested to see how this plays out. Tell me more about this modern technology you speak of.”

“Oh, shut up.” Blake puts his head in his hands. “Sometimes dating apps are for NC-17 dating, okay?”

“Sure.” Tony keeps his tone as light and pleasant as he can without cracking up. “I can see that. What are your favorite angles for taking dick pics, Blake? Do you go for the upright soldier? The banana comparison? Hey, are you circumcised? You could do the pig in a blanket—”

“Shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

Tony gives it a moment longer, and then he lets himself look over at Daniel and laugh.

“I don’t know why I talk to you people.” Blake sits back in his chair, arms folded in wounded dignity. He doesn’t mean it. Tony’s known him for over a decade, and he can count on one hand the number of times Blake has been honestly upset about being teased.

“Anyway,” Tony says. “We should go hiking.”

“Hiking?” Daniel sounds alarmed. He should. For someone who’s lived in the northeast for upward of five years, he has an alarming lack of decent shoes.

“Yeah, hiking. We haven’t been at all this year, and it’s best in autumn. It’s gonna be gorgeous.”

“I’m in,” Lisa says. “I haven’t been in ages.”

“Next week? Saturday?”

“Lemme check.” Blake peers down at his phone calendar. “I guess. But nothing crazy.”

“I was thinking a little light rock climbing?” Tony suggests.

Lisa swats at his arm. “Stop teasing. Can you drive us?”

With a grimace, Tony thinks of his rickety Toyota.

“I can drive,” Daniel offers. “If, uh, if you want me—”

“Always,” Tony says with a grin. “You want to go hiking?”

A flush rises on Daniel’s cheeks, which might be the cinnamon bun lager he downed pretty quickly but also might be the words. “The jury’s still out. But I could give it a try.”

Tony’s not entirely sure, but he thinks there’s a for you at the end of that sentence going unspoken, and he likes it.

They order another round—Sprite for Tony, since he’s driving now, although only Daniel has another cinnamon beer—and debate different trails to take. Tony will have to dig out his hiking boots from whatever storage closet his mom put them in. Maybe his running shoes could work if he doesn’t get home in the meantime. He left those at Daniel’s. They split an order of fries as they talk. Lisa hogs the ketchup. For the first time since this morning, Tony starts to relax a little.

Then the door opens and an all-too-familiar voice floats in.

“…just one, though, this place is way too expensive.”

Lisa looks incredulously toward the source of the voice, coming from outside at one of the patio tables, and says, “This place has the only four-dollar beer in the state.”

“College students.” Blake follows her gaze, craning to see the culprit.

Daniel’s posture straightens so fast his shoulder knocks into Tony’s. “Please no.”

Regretting most of his day, Tony looks outside as well. “Yup. Definitely college students.” Dumbass college students, he adds in the privacy of his own mind because they’re definitely drinking, and they’re definitely here by car—the car Pa and Kyle spent half the afternoon fixing up.

“Hey, isn’t that your sister?” Blake leans halfway out of his seat to see.

Tony’s head whips around. He cranes a little to the left.

“Yup. That’s…that sure is my sister.” And his niece in her stroller, Gianna carefully rocking her as she laughs at something Sean says.

He seemed so innocuous in the shop, a lost, scared student barely out of his teens. Here, drinking beer with Tony’s little sister, he kind of looks like a dick.

“Oh, shoot.” Daniel sinks lower in his seat.

“Hm?” Tony doesn’t look away from the scene outside.

“Those are my students,” Daniel hisses. “And I’m…not sober.”

“I’m so glad that can’t happen to me,” Lisa crows in delight.

Daniel glares. “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. I’m told eighth graders drink cough syrup to get buzzed these days.”

“Oh, yeah, I have a few who definitely would. But not in public, where I’m drinking.”

“Fuck.” Daniel sinks even lower.

“Are they okay?” Blake asks.

“Huh?”

“Are they…nice?”

Daniel blinks. He straightens a little. “Oh, yeah. I mean, Lily’s great. She’s had a rough time of it. I saw her this morning actually, and she’s turned a corner. Sounds like she’s finally got a decent support network at school with her friends and her boyfriend. And I mean, academically, she’s…good. Really good. This year is her second chance at junior year, and I’m sure she’ll be brilliant. Frank, in the jean jacket, is all right too. He’s a lit major. Struggled with his math requirement and wound up taking a summer class, but a lot of kids in the humanities have trouble with math. I don’t know the third one.”

“Sean,” Tony says.

“Oh, did Gianna introduce you?”

“No,” he grates out. “Sean was in an accident today, and his car got towed to the shop.”

“Was it his fault?”

“Unclear.”

The deer wasn’t anyone’s fault, but Tony still doesn’t get how the flat tire happened. Watching Sean grandstand now, wide smile on his face and his arms flailing about in all directions after being a chickenshit about calling his mom earlier, Tony wonders if the deer was even real. Judging by how anxiously Lily’s eyeing Sean, he’s not the only one.

“Oh.” Blake gives him a knowing look. “And now you’re concerned he’ll be a bad influence on her.”

“That’s not…” Tony starts. “I mean, she’s… I’m not…”

“If it helps, I think he’s with Lily.” Daniel squints through the window to where Sean has now slipped an arm onto the back of Lily’s chair. “Must be the boyfriend she told me about.”

It does help, which Tony hates himself for. Gianna’s a grown-up, and she can make her own choices. “So, Lily’s doing better?”

Daniel nods. “A little case of start-of-term jitters, but otherwise, I haven’t seen her so even-keeled all summer. She seems ready for a new start.”

Tony looks outside. Gianna’s laughing again. She didn’t do much of that for a while there last year. He should be glad to see it. He is when he’s not being an idiot. “Yeah, I’m glad for Gigi too. Still a weird support group, but…”

Daniel nods.

“How’s Gianna dealing with it all, anyway?” Blake asks. “I mean…”

Tony shrugs and then sighs. “About as well as she could be. She doesn’t complain about anything but the lack of sleep, and she’s great with Lia. She loves that kid so much. I think…I think she misses him.”

Daniel looks away.

Tony’s certain he misses Mario as well. Daniel doesn’t talk about it much, not with Tony, but Mario was his friend before he was Gianna’s…not-boyfriend. And Mario’s dead now, murdered by Stacy, who Daniel was also friends with. It can’t be easy. Tony’s selfishly glad Daniel doesn’t seem to need or want sympathy about it. What would he say? “Sorry for your loss; wish he had lived for me to throttle him personally”?

They sit in awkward silence as everyone debates what to say.

Tony wishes it were the first time in the last eight months that there was awkward silence surrounding this topic and not the billionth. Outside, Lily shifts in her seat, slightly out of range of Sean’s hand, which was resting on her shoulder. For a moment, she looks over toward the waterfront, and her expression goes dark and clouded. Her hands clench to fists.

Then, Gianna says something, and Lily looks back to her group with a smile.

Tony forces himself to stop watching them.

One fry remains in the communal basket, the fry of decency no one wants to be greedy enough to eat. Tony takes it.

Outside, Gianna gets up. She shrugs on her jacket. It’s too warm for a jacket, but she runs cold, and it drives Tony nuts because she always nudges the thermostat up a degree or two too warm. He checks his watch. It’s almost eight. Way past Lia’s bedtime. She’ll be fussy as all hell.

The other college students drain their drinks as she gets up to go. They leave an assortment of loose change and dollar bills on the table to cover it. Students.

As they leave, Tony spots Sean handing his car keys to Lily. They did only have one beer, but a drink after an accident does not a safe driver make, and it looks like Lily was drinking a diet soda. The sight makes Tony feel a little better. Maybe Sean isn’t so bad, especially if, as Daniel says, he’s had such a good influence on Lily. Tony was overreacting before. There probably was a deer, and maybe there was some glass or rough gravel on the shoulder when Sean hit the guardrail.

They head out not long after. It’s still a weeknight, after all, and they all have jobs to get to in the morning. Tony drives Daniel’s car, leaving his own parked near Mike’s. He’s a little ashamed of how relieved he is to be driving a car where the steering wheel doesn’t jam when he parallel parks.

“You good to drive me over tomorrow morning?” he asks Daniel, who folded himself into the passenger seat and appears ready to fall asleep.

“Yeah.” Daniel yawns. “No classes till noon tomorrow, and if I get to be late for faculty council because I have to drive you places, I will reconsider giving road head.”

Tony chokes on a laugh. “I mean, I won’t. It’s a safety hazard but noted.”

Daniel chuckles, a warm, comforting sound, and Tony breathes it in. He likes how familiar it is to hear Daniel laugh, to make him laugh.

He looks over for a second at a red light, and Daniel is watching him. No. Studying him, examining the lines of his face and the cut of his jaw.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Daniel says. “Just…wondering.”

Tony forces his shoulders to stay relaxed, though instinct would have them up around his ears. He’s been weird today, and he knows it. The heavy cloud of his annoyance after work still follows him, and he can’t quite make it go away. Daniel can ask him anything, of course, but Tony doesn’t want to explain why he’s in such a funk; he doesn’t know if he can.

“How do you know so much about dick pics?”

Tony breathes an internal sigh of relief. “Blake doesn’t know everything about me.”

“Oh?”

“I did download Grindr once.”

Daniel doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to. Tony can feel his eyes, questioning, curious.

“It was last summer when I thought I was going to move out. I had a place lined up in downtown Kingston, and I thought…I thought it would be my chance to finally do something about…” Tony gestures toward himself.

“Hmm.” Daniel hums in agreement. “Did you meet up with anyone?”

“This feels like a trap.” Tony doesn’t think it is. Daniel’s not a person who gets jealous. But Tony would rather have the lighthearted, banter-y relationship talk than try to explain his own sexual history. He’s never had the right words for it.

“I know you were with other people before we met, Tony. It’s not a big deal. I guess I want to know more about you.”

“Oh.” Tony hadn’t thought about that. He knows a bit about Daniel’s dating past, in large part because he met his ex not too long after Tony and Daniel started seeing each other. Jeff is a nice guy, and Tony likes him despite being very glad he moved to Ohio. “I met one guy. It was…fine, I guess.”

“A ringing endorsement.”

Tony shrugs. “It was pretty clear we were meeting to hook up, so we did. I didn’t think much about it before or after.”

For a moment, Daniel doesn’t answer. Then, he says, “If I hadn’t come back to the garage after we met…”

“I was thinking about you.” Tony’s glad he has to look at the road. It feels strange to admit even though Daniel knows how Tony feels about him. He must. “I was thinking about you all the time.”

He chances a glance over.

Daniel looks smug. “Sorry to pry,” he says. He doesn’t seem all that sorry to Tony, but Daniel is nothing if not polite. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. I just… You had a whole life before I came along, and I’m sure seeing other people was part of it.”

Tony shifts uncomfortably. “Not really. I mean, sometimes, I guess, but nothing serious.” Nothing more than a quick fuck every now and again is what he means, but he doesn’t want to say that in so many words.

“You weren’t…dating?” Daniel asks, picking up on the subtext like he always does.

Tony shakes his head. “I…never felt that way about anyone.” They’re on the bridge now. He loves driving the bridge when it’s dark, the water sparkling beneath them with the reflection of the lights on the bridge and absolutely no one around for miles. “You know, I used to think I was bi.” He didn’t enter this conversation intending on telling Daniel this. He’s never told anyone. But Daniel’s willing to listen, and the night is quiet and mellow with the first hints of autumn creeping up on the Hudson Valley. Some combination of all these things has put Tony in a sharing mood.

Daniel makes an amused sound. “I think a lot of us went through a phase of hoping we could still pass as straight.”

“No, I mean…” Tony tries to find the words. “I didn’t want to date anyone when I was a teenager. And I thought, well, I don’t want to date girls, and I don’t want to date guys, so I guess I like both equally.”

“Oh. Oh, I see. What changed?”

“I started being attracted to people even if I wasn’t too into the whole…dating thing.” He doesn’t quite mean attraction in the way he’s seen it in movies or read about it in books, but he can’t figure out how to make the words work to explain how he felt as a teenager. He was so confused all of the time. When he imagined the future, it was him in a nebulous marriage, modeled after what he knew from his parents. But when he tried to apply that to anyone his own age, he didn’t want it. Sex, sure, he was interested in sex on a conceptual level, but not with anyone in particular and definitely not with anyone he tried dating.

“You know,” Tony continues, “I dated Blake G for, like, two weeks in high school. Before he was Blake. We were friends and spent a bunch of time together, and I thought maybe that was what a crush was. But I didn’t want…anything. Kissing, or sex, or even holding hands.” The experience messed them both up more than Tony wants to let on right now. He spent the entire time feeling wrong for not wanting to kiss a pretty girl, and Blake G felt wrong for not being a girl. To this day, hanging out with Blake G alone is weird for Tony. Daniel doesn’t need to know all that, at least not now. “And then a while later, I could at least picture hooking up with Blake W, so I figured I wasn’t into girls.”

“Really? Blake? W, I mean?”

Tony grins over at Daniel. “Highly strung, overthinks everything, ringing any bells here?”

“Shut up. I am not like Blake W.”

“No.” Tony never once wanted to sleep cuddled up with Blake or spend time together on the couch, touching for the comfort of it, nothing else. He didn’t especially want to do anything sexual with Blake either. It was more that he wanted to have sex in general, and Blake was attractive. “No, you’re definitely not. Eventually, I figured out I was attracted to men in general, but I still couldn’t see myself dating anyone.”

“Makes sense,” Daniel says. “But you decided not to follow up on…the attraction and see if romantic feelings happened afterward?”

“It wasn’t an active decision. I…never developed those feelings for anyone.” Shifting in his seat as much as he can while driving, Tony adds, “I was a bit of a late bloomer in terms of…sex and all that.”

Twenty wasn’t necessarily late in the grand scheme of things, but at the time, it felt late to Tony. Only afterward, when he drove home after an unmemorable blowjob from a classmate in the classmate’s shitty apartment toward the end of community college, did he realize he hadn’t done it because he especially wanted to. It was something he thought he should want to do. It scratched a physical itch, but Tony didn’t feel any particular way about it.

“Sounds kinda lonely.”

Tony’s foot slips on the accelerator.

He gets the car under control again, the back of his neck burning. “Yeah. I didn’t…I didn’t know that until you came along though.”

It’s an understatement. The dormant part of his brain or his heart or his dick, or all of the above, came online when he met Daniel and couldn’t stop thinking about him. He wants to say as much. Before, he pursued some casual flings and had one-night stands now and again and never thought about it afterward, never needed more until Daniel walked into the shop, and Tony tripped over his tongue and his feet until Daniel kissed him. He doesn’t know how to find the words without it sounding like too much.

Tony thinks the conversation might be over as he follows the winding roads toward Rhinebeck, safe in the dark from having to be seen so thoroughly in all ways at once.

“You did know a little,” Daniel says just when Tony thinks he might let it go. “Or you wouldn’t have downloaded Grindr.”

“I guess. But I didn’t get it. You know, I love Gianna, but I didn’t understand then.”

“Understand?”

“Why she couldn’t leave well enough alone and not keep seeing Mario,” Tony explains. “It was so clear to me whatever she had with him wasn’t worth it. Every time she saw him, especially once she was pregnant, she was miserable, but she kept going back. I didn’t understand why she would until…”

“Until I fucked up and made you miserable. And you still came back.”

So, Daniel does know how special he is to Tony, even if neither of them can quite say it.

“Come on. It wasn’t that bad,” Tony says. It’s not true, strictly speaking, but Daniel feels guilty enough about Mario, and Tony forgave him for everything he did last fall the minute he asked.

“I thought you helped Gianna kill a man.”

“Okay, it was kind of bad,” Tony revises. “But you more than made up for it.”

“Or I’m lucky you’re a very forgiving person.”

Tony can hear Daniel’s smile in his voice.

“Thanks for telling me about this,” Daniel says.

“Yeah.” Entirely without him intending it to, Tony’s voice sounds like it was raked over hot coals. “I want you to know this stuff about me.”

“One more question. You and Blake W. Did that ever happen?”

Tony groans as he pulls the car into the lot by Daniel’s apartment building. “We kissed one time and then decided once was enough. You cannot ever tell anyone. We made a pact.”

The sound of Daniel’s laughter follows him out of the car and to the door.

“Hey, how are you, anyway?” Tony asks as they troop up the stairs. “I feel bad. We talked about me for ages. How’s your first week as official dean of the department going?”

The college unofficially promoted Daniel last semester because someone had to pick up the slack left by Stacy’s absence. She might have been a murderess, but she was also a very effective administrator. Now the dust has settled, Lobell changed Daniel’s job title to encompass all his new duties. The actual process involved some more stuff about tenure and letters of recommendation, but Tony didn’t follow past the point that it is, in essence, a promotion.

Daniel shrugs. “It’s the same as being the unofficial dean of the department last semester. A lot of red tape.”

“Red tape?”

Daniel unlocks the door and kicks off his shoes. “I mean, look at Lily. She couldn’t do her finals last winter, but she was in classes all semester. Now, half her professors won’t take a late final, and the other half will, so what do we do with her credits? And she was too late to withdraw from classes, so do the classes where she can’t submit a final count as failed classes or incomplete? What will that do to her GPA?”

“Christ, I haven’t thought about a GPA in years.” Tony unties his shoes and follows Daniel into the living room. “So figuring out administrative headaches is your job now, huh?”

“Yeah.” Daniel lets himself fall onto the couch. “Apparently, the registrar’s office doesn’t know what to do with Lily either.”

This is at least the fifth time Daniel has mentioned the registrar since they started seeing each other. Tony vaguely remembers the word from his time at community college in Poughkeepsie. But he only went past the office with the word emblazoned on the door once in the two years he spent commuting for classes, and it’s way too late to ask Daniel what it means.

“Lily was talking about heading to her psych professor’s office and outright begging for her grades to be accepted. I had to convince her that wouldn’t go over well.” Daniel sinks into the couch until he’s practically lying down. “I think she took it okay, but it must be frustrating, especially after she put in the hours with summer school and all.”

“I forget how stressful it is being a student,” Tony says. “All the insecurity about what will come next, depending on your professors for your future. I never had that.”

“Must have been comforting, having built-in job security.”

“I mean, so long as the shop keeps running,” Tony points out.

“But you have skills and a trade, and experience.” Daniel rolls onto his side to look at Tony. “Most college students don’t, you know. They’re looking to get a foundation for their futures from us, and we can’t even give them any guarantees.”

Tony thinks guiltily of Gianna and Lia. Gianna has most of her degree, but she’s getting a BA in psychology, which is apparently worth nothing without at least an MSW, and she has a baby to support. She needs all the help she can get, and there he is, complaining about having to go to work a little more while she studies. Tony can’t imagine having her ambition.

He studies Daniel, his tousled sandy hair, and how tired he looks. It’s odd. Something about the bags under his eyes and the way he’s lying there, propped up on one elbow, his whole body curled toward Tony, makes him appear both younger and older at the same time.

Maybe Tony feels vulnerable, soft-boiled, and he’s looking to find the same feeling in Daniel.

Maybe Tony can imagine them lying like this after a long day years and years from now.

“I’m so old.” Daniel turns onto his back and stares up at the ceiling. “Two beers on a weeknight, and I’m totally done for. And did I tell you my mom called today? Apparently, my dad is getting a hip replacement next week. I know I’m an adult and everything, but I was not ready to feel this ancient.”

Tony chuckles and draws him close. “Wanna get ready for bed and watch some Criminal Minds ?”

Daniel presses a wet kiss to his cheek. “You read my mind.” He heads off to the bathroom to brush his teeth.

Tony watches him go, then pulls out his phone and checks it.

Sorry if this is out of line , Blake texted at some point in the last hour. But if there’s anything any of us can do to help you and your sister, I hope you know we’re there for you.

Tony swallows around the sudden lump in his throat.

He sends Blake a string of heart emojis. He can’t imagine how he could possibly turn what he’s feeling into words.

Then, Tony opens his text thread with Gianna. She last wrote him three days ago, a GIF of a dog in a funny hat.

How’s your first week back at school going? he texts her. U need a babysitter to get homework done or sth? lmk