Chapter Thirteen
T ony doesn’t park in the lot. He drives to the Lawrence house again and leaves his car at the curb. If anything happens, Emilio will see the car eventually and come looking. Or if Emilio’s involved, the police—more likely, Colette—will know where to start looking.
Fuck. Who is he kidding? Emilio isn’t involved. Tony should have trusted his gut, which has been protesting Emilio’s innocence since the memorial service. It’s been evident since they met that Emilio had nothing to do with this. Over the last few hours, Tony flirted with the simple solution, imagining he might have done it. It was easy in the way the resolution of an episode of Bones often is. Emilio has a motive and a complicated relationship with his wife. Emilio wouldn’t need to be pitied if he did it. It would make sense.
It would be wrong. Tony might not easily understand Emilio’s relationship with his wife, but he loved her, and he loves his daughter. His grief is making him harder and harsher than he was before. Tony understands more intimately than he wants to. He has from day one even if Colette can’t quite see it.
No, the solution is much more obvious and a lot harder to take. Since the very beginning, Tony thought there was something off about Lily. The first couple days of the semester, she put up a good front that she was doing better, and she was ready to be back in school. But after Amelia Lawrence’s death, Lily’s downward spiral was so obvious Tony noticed it from two degrees of separation. He let Daniel’s firm, almost desperate desire to help her blind him to the danger of Lily’s instability, and now, they’re paying the price. Now, Emilio and his daughter have paid the price.
The only thing stopping Tony from calling 911 is that Daniel’s message said, “No police,” and Tony has no idea why.
He uses his phone flashlight to return most of the way to the Continuum. Germantown needs to invest in some streetlamps. Some infrastructure. Something. When Tony can see the empty theater in the distance, he shuts his light off. No need to alert anyone to his presence.
Empty beer cans and fast-food wrappers litter the parking lot and pile up high beside the overflowing trash can. The place has probably become a favorite hangout for local teens since it shut down. Tony and his friends used to do that as well, find empty spaces no one was using and claim them for their own. He likes to think he was a little more conscientious about cleaning up his trash, but he knows for sure no one in the vicinity appreciated the elongated Eminem phase he and Blake G went through when they were about fourteen, so he really has no legs to stand on.
The main entrance is padlocked. If he had the proper tools on him, Tony could easily crowbar it open, but he doubts it’s a good idea. At the very least, whoever took Daniel—and at the moment, Lily is looking likely—got rid of his phone and made him come here, which tells Tony a threat was involved.
Tony wanders around the outside. On Criminal Minds , they would call it “casing the perimeter.” On Bones , the FBI characters would be angry at the scientists for going to a possible crime scene without backup.
Tony’s neither a scientist nor an FBI agent. He’s just a run-of-the-mill idiot.
The building barely has any windows, which is probably convenient for a movie theater but annoying for people trying to see inside. The back door has no lock. Tony tries the handle, but it doesn’t budge as if there’s something blocking the way.
He pushes a little harder, and an awful, grinding scrape screeches as though something shifted minutely, but the door stays shut.
Almost immediately, he hears footsteps inside.
“Hello?” a thin, high voice calls.
Low, aggravated whispers follow, and then what sounds like furniture shifts behind the door, loud and sudden.
Tony races around the corner of the building and makes for a section of greenery on slightly higher ground between that side of the old building and the fence encasing the whole property. He drops to his knees and scrambles into the underbrush growing wild there, which scratches at his face, hands, and neck.
The light of a cell phone flashlight sweeps around the asphalt by the back door. Thank fuck, Tony was paranoid enough to park somewhere else. He can’t make out the owner of the phone, not in the dark with the light from it blinding him to everything else. He can take an educated guess though. Especially when the person, obviously agitated and frustrated, sparks up a cigarette as they continue their search.
Sean.
He and Colette talked about how out of his depth he was, that Lily was dragging him down. But for some reason, Tony didn’t expect to find him here. He looks incongruous, like a teenager in a suit he borrowed from his dad, the wrong shape to fit.
Colette said it days ago, didn’t she? Amelia Lawrence and Daniel aren’t the only ones who have been pulled under by the tide of Lily sinking into her struggles. Sean has also been affected, and Tony has done him the same disservice he does himself: pretending that because he acts unaffected, he’s doing fine. They should have pushed more on the phone with him, should have asked him if he was really okay, if he was sure he hadn’t heard from Lily. He must have been scared.
Sean sweeps the whole of the parking lot, checks behind the building, and for one agonizing minute, the light of his phone shines across the bushes hiding Tony. He covers his face with his arms. The whole thing is over fast enough that he doesn’t even rediscover Catholicism through panicked prayer, which is a pleasant surprise.
After Sean’s done, both with the search and the cigarette, he returns to the building. Tony can’t see or hear a single thing happening inside. But it’s only a matter of minutes before Sean exits again, this time wearing an unseasonably warm duffel coat and a baseball cap that, unfortunately, does nothing to disguise his distinctive facial hair. Sean chains a second lock into place over the back door.
Then, he gets in his car and drives away.
“Fuck,” Tony mutters to himself as he scrambles out of the bushes and heads for the door. He should have said something. Gotten Sean’s attention. Sean is the reasonable one here, the one who doesn’t want to be in this mess. If Tony talked to him… But who knows how deeply Lily has her hooks in him. What if Sean thinks he needs to keep helping her or she’ll hurt him? It’s too risky. Tony’s first priority is Daniel.
He should have brought a toolbox. He should have brought fucking anything. No way he’s getting through that lock with his bare hands. It’s a bike lock (of course it is; these are Lobell students), and with the right tools it would be easy to crack, but Tony doesn’t have anything helpful on hand.
“Daniel?” he hisses. He doesn’t dare raise his voice too much. Who knows if Lily is still in there, or how dangerous she is. At least Sean was free to leave. But their third friend might also be part of this. Tony is unarmed, and he’s no closer to getting Daniel out.
A scrambling noise comes from the other side of the door. “Tony?”
It’s been a day and a half since he last heard Daniel’s voice. Not much time in the grand scheme of things, but the sound of it makes Tony’s entire body feel so light with relief he thinks he might float away. His joints turn to water. He sinks to his knees by the door.
“Daniel,” he repeats dumbly. “Are you all right? I mean, are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” Daniel says hurriedly. “I mean, they have me in some terrible Party City handcuffs, and I’m losing circulation, but otherwise.”
“They have a quick release? I can’t get the door open right now, but give me an hour or so to get some tools. Then I can—”
“No, listen.” Daniel’s voice through the door is urgent. “You can’t break me out yet.”
The information doesn’t register in Tony’s brain at first.
“What?”
“Look, this has gotten…complicated.”
Tony lets his head thunk against the door. The adrenaline of finding Daniel, the relief he’s alive and reasonably unharmed, fades quickly. “Tell me why I’m not calling Detective Taylor out here right now.”
“It’s Lily.”
Great. Just as Tony suspected. “She did it? Amelia Lawrence?”
An ominously long pause follows.
“She showed up at my office yesterday looking as if she hadn’t slept in years. She was talking about the knife, Tony. I think she…I think she probably must have.”
“Of course she did! She taped the murder weapon to your door!”
“She was freaking out though. Totally off the wall. I couldn’t understand half of what she was saying. Next thing I know, she’s pulling out a hunting rifle she could barely hold up on her own and pointing it at me and telling me I had to go with her.”
“Jesus.” Tony waits for Daniel to continue, but when no further information is forthcoming, he has to ask. “Seriously, though, why no police?”
He can hear the huff of Daniel’s sigh through the door. “I think she’s high.”
This still doesn’t sound like a reason to Tony, but he bites his tongue.
“And the boyfriend is helping her,” Daniel continues. “He took my phone, threw it out the window somewhere on the road. Brought us here. He had the pills they both took before.”
“She has a Xanax prescription. Shouldn’t that help—”
“Not those kind of pills.”
Ice creeps down Tony’s spine. Lily has been getting more and more unstable ever since the start of the school year. Tony saw, and he barely knows her. What did Gianna say? Lily was “flaky.” Not responding to messages. Moody.
“You think that’s why she did it?” Tony asks.
“Maybe. I mean, she’s barely responsive half the time and totally over the top the rest of it. And, well…”
“Hey.” Tony leans in so he’s as close to the door as he can be when Daniel trails off, seeming unwilling to say the rest. “You can tell me. It’s me , Daniel. I came out here alone because of a text you sent to Paul’s landline .”
“I had no idea if that would work,” Daniel admits. “But, uh… Look, I don’t know enough about all this, but one or both of them is… After they took the pills, she got all…hyperactive. They, well, they…went into the bathroom. Together. And…I don’t want to say it.”
Tony swallows. “You think he’s taking advantage?” Of the two students, Tony has a pretty good idea who is trying to keep it together and who caused this mess. The drugs are a bad look, but they’re students . Of course they’re doing drugs.
“I have no idea who is taking advantage of whom.” Daniel’s voice is clipped and angry. “But I do know she has been taken advantage of before, and she’s my student and my responsibility, and I can’t call the cops on her. You remember what happened to Andrew.”
That’s who Daniel’s angry at, then. Himself.
“It wasn’t your fault.” Tony tries to be as gentle about it as he can, but he already knows Daniel doesn’t want to hear it.
“I should have done better by him. And I should have done better by her, last year. I should have known.”
Frustration boils over. “Lily kidnapped you at gunpoint . She’s been threatening you for weeks. She’s dangerous. Daniel, you could have died.”
“She needs help.”
Tony wants to shake Daniel by the shoulders. Just because Lily needs help doesn’t mean it has to be from Daniel. Just because Daniel is carrying all this guilt for things out of his control doesn’t mean he should put himself in danger. It doesn’t mean he should put Tony through this.
Tony wishes he’d met Mario so he could have done more than shake him for starting all of this. If he’d known what consequences his actions would have, not only for Gianna but for Lily, for Daniel, for Colette, would he have acted differently? They’ll never know. “So how did you get the text message out?”
“Right.” Daniel clears his throat. “Lily left her phone out when they went to the bathroom. I used the quick release on the cuffs and texted the only number I know. Gotta hope she’s a real Gen Z kid and doesn’t check old-school SMS logs. I’m going to have to tell Paul he was right to make me memorize the damn thing.”
“Jesus,” Tony says again. So much for not rediscovering Catholicism.
“And I always knew this place was creepy as fuck,” Daniel continues. “I told Colette every time she and Mario wanted to come here that it’s always cold, the chairs are covered in scratched-up stickers and gross old gum, and it’s not a fun place to watch a movie. They never showed good movies anyway. It was always weird arthouse shit—”
“Sweetheart, I love you so much, but this is not the time.”
There’s nothing but the hum of cicadas and distant cars passing on the 9G for a moment.
“I love you, too, Tony,” Daniel says.
Abruptly, Tony starts crying. The tears have been lying in wait for him all day, and hearing Daniel say those words to him reminds him he told himself twenty separate times he might never get the chance.
“And I’m so sorry, but I can’t leave her,” Daniel adds. “Not now. It’s dangerous. They’re both high, and she’s been swinging that damn rifle around like a toy. She shot a hole in the wall and then laughed . She’s… I’ll never forgive myself if I leave her here for the police to take care of and she doesn’t even get a chance, or if she hurts herself, or…”
“I’ll never forgive myself if you die when I could have saved you.” Tony’s voice breaks as he says it.
“Tony…”
“It’s not going to change what Mario did if you get hurt over it. It’s not going to bring Andrew back to life.”
“I know.”
Tony takes a deep, unsteady breath. “Look, I…I need you to be safe.”
“Well, he left, and she’s totally out of it right now.”
“So, we’ll get you both out. We’ll get you both out, and we’ll figure out how to help her, and then we’ll call the police.”
“That’s the problem though. I don’t think she’ll come with us. Not while she’s like this.”
“Have you asked her?”
Daniel shifts against the door. He must be leaning his head on it. “I tried earlier. She kept saying it was all her fault, and that I didn’t understand. I’m scared she’ll hurt herself. And what if she goes into withdrawal or something?”
Tony thinks for a minute. “I have some ideas. Can you sit tight here for, like, an hour?”
“Can’t do much else,” Daniel says wryly.
“You think Sean’ll be back?”
“He said he was going to his dorm. Honestly, I hope he doesn’t come back. They seem to bring out the worst in each other.”
As much as it pains Tony to say it, Sean is probably completely out of his depth here. “It’s probably better for him if he isn’t involved anymore. As an accessory or whatever. He’ll be in enough trouble.”
“I didn’t even think about that.” Something hits the metal of the door dully. Probably Daniel’s head, more self-flagellation. “You’re right. If you make it back early enough, we’ll probably be able to leave before he returns. That might…protect him.”
Early enough. Tony’s not getting any fucking sleep tonight. “I don’t want to leave you here.”
“Is this where I say something brave and cinematic like ‘the sooner you leave me, the sooner you get back’?”
Maybe it’s the situation, maybe it’s the lack of sleep, maybe it’s the idea of Daniel as a movie damsel in distress, but Tony laughs. “I guess.”
“I don’t want you to go either.”
“I’ll get you out as soon as I can.”
“I love you.”
Tony’s heart does something truly stupid in his chest. “I love you too. I want to see your face the next time you say that.”
“You will.”
It’s a wrench to leave, to hurry to his car. Tony looks over his shoulder at least twenty times. Every set of headlights down the road, every sign of life disrupting the tiny slot of time he has to get Daniel out of there sends his pulse racing.
The trip to Rhinebeck is some of the worst driving Tony’s done since he got his license. He’s lucky it’s so late, and the road is largely empty. By the time he gets home, he’s walked through the facts in his head so often they’ve stopped feeling real.
He should call the police. He can’t call the police. He has to call the police. It’s the only rational thing he could possibly do, and Daniel is totally blinded by—whatever. Tony can’t call the police without getting all of them into more trouble. With any luck, Detective Taylor found some incriminating fingerprints on the knife, and she’ll arrest Lily without Tony having to lift a finger. Then, they’ll only have to explain why they didn’t call. Again.
The thought drags a high-pitched laugh out of Tony. Christ, he’s losing it. Maybe it’s because it’s past midnight, and he’s running on about four and a half hours of sleep since Daniel first went missing.
The lights are still on in the apartment when he gets in. Lisa and Blake are under the covers on the foldout couch. Lisa’s got her hair in a scrunched-up bun on the top of her head and her knees drawn up tight. They’re both still sitting up, neither of them trying to sleep.
“Having a slumber party?” Tony asks as he sets his keys down by the door.
“Tony!” Lisa struggles fully upright through the blanket. “Where have you been? We were getting worried.”
Tony lets himself fall into the chair beside the couch. “It’s a long story. And I’m going to need your help.”
“Literally what we’re here for.”
“Okay.” Tony leans forward. “I found Daniel.”
It takes longer to summarize the whole story than Tony wants when he can barely stop himself from turning right back around to Germantown to make sure Daniel’s still all right, from Lily’s increasing instability to Daniel’s crazy text message plan to the difficulty they now find themselves in.
“Daniel doesn’t want to call the cops?” Lisa frowns. “It sounds like Lily definitely did it though. And like she’s…unstable to begin with.”
“Yeah.” Tony clenches his jaw. It takes real effort not to get mad that he’s sitting here defending this incredibly stupid choice. “I think he wants her in a better place to advocate for herself at the very least. Last year…last year, Andrew was institutionalized, Colette was arrested, and Daniel couldn’t do anything to help either of them. I think he wants to help as much as he can before it’s too late. Especially after…”
“After?” Blake prompts.
“After Mario.”
Neither of them says anything, but their bated silence might as well be a question. Beyond his existence and his name, Tony hasn’t told them much about Mario. It’s sweet they still aren’t pushing him to.
“Lily…she was in love with him. She said he never…got physical with her, but we don’t know how much he encouraged her feelings. It seems likely he did, at least in some way.”
Blake picks at a loose thread on the blanket. “What a shitstain.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“Okay.” Lisa considers. “So, you have an extremely vulnerable girl—young woman—whatever, on some drug. She’s armed, violent, and presumably not in her right mind, and your mild-mannered professor boyfriend is… Okay, he’s not trapped, but he feels responsible for keeping her safe, and the goal is to get the girl and the professor out unscathed.”
“When you put it that way that, it could be a video game.”
“I am in the process of writing a proposal for Bethesda as we speak,” Lisa assures him. “I’m also wondering what we can possibly do to help. I’m happy to call in sick to work and come to Germantown with you, but I’m also no good in a fight.”
“No fighting,” Tony says instantly. “We do not want any fighting to happen this time.”
“This time,” Blake repeats faintly.
Tony glares him into silence. “There are two problems. First, we need to get them out. I can do it with a decent crowbar and some bolt cutters. Daniel says Lily doesn’t want to leave and get help, though, so we need to convince her.”
“One problem is solved with bolt cutters,” Blake says. “Something else for your video game proposal, Lisa.”
“No, that wasn’t one of the problems.”
Blake groans.
“We don’t know what she’s on. We don’t know if she’ll go into detox, or come down badly, or whatever else once we get her out. That’s where you come in.”
Blinking and turning to Tony in bafflement, Blake repeats, “Me?”
“Are you or are you not an in-house social worker in a mental health ward?”
“Oh, right.” Blake laughs nervously. “I nearly forgot.”
“Encouraging.”
“So, Blake takes care of her and gets her back to herself once she’s here,” Lisa says. “But how do we get her here?”
Tony shrugs uncomfortably. This is the one part he hoped they’d sort out for him. “I was hoping you two would be able to convince her?”
Lisa looks over at Blake doubtfully. “We can try.”
Blake’s lips thin to a narrow line. “Tony.”
“What?”
“You know who you need for this.”
“I do?” It’s news to Tony that he knows anything at all.
Blake rolls his eyes. In the last half hour, Tony has told him he intends to rescue both a kidnapping victim and his kidnapper by himself without informing the police, and it’s only now Blake starts to look annoyed. “Yeah, man. You do. Lisa and I can come along, sure. We might have enough experience with troubled kids to help out, but Lily doesn’t know us, and she won’t trust us. You know who she does trust. You know who definitely shares her awful taste in men.”
Tony swallows hard. “You mean Gianna.”
“Yeah, I mean Gianna,” Blake says as if it should be obvious.
Shifting on his seat, Tony avoids meeting Blake’s eyes. “I mean. I guess. But she won’t be awake or here in time. And I don’t wanna—”
“ Dude ,” Blake interjects impatiently. “Get over yourself and whatever dumb fight you and Gianna are having. If anyone knows what Lily’s feeling—like returning to college with everyone knowing about their stupid fling with an asshat professor—it’s gonna be Gianna. If anyone can get through to her, it’s gonna be Gianna.”
“It’s still the middle of the night.” Tony knows it’s a weak protest, but he can’t quite deal with the piercing way Blake is staring straight through him.
Lisa rests a gentle hand on his knee. “She’s going to pick up the phone. She’ll always pick up the phone for you.”
Tony lets his eyes fall shut. “Okay. All right. I’ll try.”
Gianna picks up on the third ring. Her voice is sleep-soaked and groggy, but she picks up. “Tony? What is it?”
“I found him,” Tony says. He moved to the kitchen to make this call. It gives him the illusion of privacy, although he knows Blake and Lisa can hear everything he’s saying anyway. “I need your help.”
“I can be there in half an hour.”
“Lia—”
“Ma will take her. She was gonna tomorrow morning anyway.”
Tony wants to ask if she’s sure. Why would she drive out here with no more information than Tony needing her help, especially after everything he’s said to her in the last few days? He wants to apologize, to tell her he loves her, to explain everything going around and around in circles in his head.
All he ends up saying is “Thank you.”
All Gianna says in response is “Of course.”
It takes her twenty-five minutes. She must have been speeding.
Her hair isn’t straightened, and she’s not wearing makeup. Tony hasn’t seen her like this since two weeks after Lia was born when they were all still getting used to life with a baby.
She’s wearing an old flannel shirt of Tony’s.
Tony can’t stop himself from hugging her for much too long, so filled with gratitude he can hardly speak for the first few minutes.
“Hey,” she says, gentle in a way he rarely gets to hear anymore. “Tony, what’s going on?”
He tells her in bits and pieces between getting coffee brewed much too strong in the hope it will keep them going for long enough to get through the night. He pours it into a thermos and dumps towels, tools, and whatever else he can think of into the trunk of his car while Blake and Lisa fill in the blanks, things he’d told them a half hour ago and already forgotten.
“Are you sure ?” Gianna asks more than once. “I knew something was wrong, but…”
Tony can’t offer her more than a helpless shrug. “I guess the pressure was too much for her?”
Gianna’s lips tighten, but she doesn’t say anything. She slides into the passenger seat, and they take off.
It’s only him and Gianna in the car, headed to Germantown. Blake rightly pointed out that if Lily does need medical attention, Daniel’s apartment is severely low on supplies. He and Lisa will pick up all the materials Blake’s lifted from work over the last couple of months.
According to Blake, it’s fully within his rights as an employee to take along the odd bandage or syringe every time he gets thrown up on, someone yells slurs at him, or he gets “accidentally” scheduled for back-to-back shifts. Beyond the possibility of it getting him fired, Tony can’t find anything wrong with his argument. Ever pragmatic, Lisa is thrilled she won’t have to steal materials from her job since the missing poster has become a moot point.
“All that work on the poster,” Gianna sighs as they pull out of the tiny lot under Daniel’s apartment in Rhinebeck.
“Imagine if we actually had to go around hanging them up though.”
“Yeah, would have been a pain.”
They’re silent for a stretch of dark road.
“Why didn’t you tell me you thought she had something to do with it?” Gianna asks Tony. “She’s my friend. I was trying to, like, support her. If I had known…”
He freezes, foot slipping on the accelerator.
“You would have, what? Called the cops?”
“I mean, maybe?”
Even Gianna knows it would be the sensible option. And she’s closest to Lily of all of them. The things Tony is willing to do for Daniel…
“Seriously though. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We…weren’t really talking,” Tony mutters.
Gianna crosses her arms under her chest. “Yeah. Why was that?”
Tony can’t quite meet her eye. “Because I was being a dick?”
“I’m not sure you were.” Gianna twists toward him, tangling her seatbelt the way Ma always told her not to. “Talk to me.”
“I…” Tony tries to remember when he got so angry at her and why he couldn’t let it go. “When it happened, with Professor Lawrence, I kept asking if you were all right.”
“Yeah,” Gianna says slowly. “I didn’t want to talk about it. Brought up a lot of things for me I haven’t had time to work through, with Lia and everything.”
“I get that.” To his own surprise, he does. It makes sense, and it’s understandable. “It…brought up a lot of things for me too. Things I didn’t tell you about when they happened.”
“Like what?” It’s the first time in days he hasn’t read irritation or boredom in her voice when she talks to him, only open curiosity. She probably wasn’t annoyed or bored, looking back on it. She just wanted him to stop asking when she wasn’t ready to answer, the same as him.
“Stacy Allan nearly killed me too.” Tony’s thankful he’s staring straight ahead at the road and can’t see her expression, or he wouldn’t be able to keep going. “And Daniel. And Colette nearly went to prison for Mario’s murder. It was…intense when it all happened. I know you knew about Daniel getting shot, but she was about to shoot me first when Daniel found us. I never told you about…about me because you were already going through so much. I didn’t want to put that on you or Ma and Pa. But when this happened…”
“It started reminding you of all the things you were trying not to think about,” Gianna finishes.
“Yeah.”
“Guess I should have asked if you were okay.”
“You couldn’t know I had any reason not to be. I never told you.” Admitting out loud that he hasn’t been okay and part of it is his fault for not leaning on her, on his family when he needed them, is a weight off his chest.
Gianna picks at a fingernail. “You know you’re the best big brother I could have asked for, right?”
Tony blinks, surprised. “I don’t think I’ll be winning any awards after the last few weeks.”
She shakes her head. “Forget about that. All the rest. Our whole lives. Lia. You always did your best for me, took care of me.”
“That’s my job.”
Looking up at him, Gianna forces him to meet her gaze head-on for an instant before he turns to the road again. Even without her makeup, she’s fierce, undeniable. “I love you so much for that. But I want to take care of you, too, sometimes. I’m not a kid anymore. You gotta give me a chance to be there for you.”
He lets out a long, shaky breath. “You’re right.”
“Wow.” A faint smile loosens her expression. “I’m gonna need that in writing.”
“Ha, ha.”
They’re quiet for long enough that Tony starts to consider logistics again—whether they’ll be on time or if they can get Lily into the car by force if necessary.
“Is there anything else?”
The question draws him up short.
“C’mon, Tony Baloney.” Gianna grins at him, a shadow of the know-it-all twelve-year-old who used to follow him around the whole house when he was seventeen and thought he was so much cooler than her. “License to be fully honest.”
“I wanted to talk to you about Daniel,” he admits.
She doesn’t say anything in response. Strangely, it makes him want to say more.
“It’s not on you.” He forces his shoulders to drop, his jaw to unclench. “Not at all. I never knew how to start the conversation. I never…I didn’t know how to talk about it with you or with Ma and Pa. And before him, I kinda…gave up hoping I would feel like this about anyone.”
“ Tony .” She reaches out. For a moment, he panics, wants to duck away, but he’s driving and has nowhere to go. Her hand is soft on the top of his head, stroking across his hair where it’s coming out of its ponytail. It makes it easier for him to keep going.
“I never…I never got what all the fuss was about. I mean, I knew I preferred men. But I never wanted to be with someone the way I want to be with Daniel. Thought there was something wrong with me.” He laughs humorlessly. “I was gonna move out, before Lia. Try dating; see if that would fix me. Then…”
“Then, Lia.”
“Yeah.”
Gianna rests a hand on his on the steering wheel, not long enough to affect his steering, just so he knows she’s there. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“I know. I—”
“Even if you hadn’t met Daniel, even if you never met anyone you cared about romantically. We’d still love you. You know that, right?”
He nods. He can’t seem to speak.
“Idiot,” Gianna adds to make them both smile.
“I also felt kinda shitty about…about being with a Lobell professor after…”
That makes Gianna laugh. “Don’t be dumb, Tony. Daniel’s nothing like Mario.”
He doesn’t tell her how comforting it is to hear that.
“Plus, you weren’t ever his student.” She pauses a moment. “Hey, he was your customer. Did you—wait, did you hit on him at the shop ?”
Involuntarily, Tony remembers the first time Daniel came to the shop, how he felt an attraction so sudden and abrupt it felt as if he put on glasses for the first time after living in a blurry world. How he hadn’t been able to stop himself from flirting, how they kissed up against a customer’s car. He doesn’t need to say anything; his face gives him away.
“Oh my God .” Gianna cackles. “You didn’t! In front of all of Pa’s tools!”
“Shut up.” Tony’s glad it’s dark, and she can’t see how red he’s going. God knows what she’ll read in his face if he starts thinking about the second time Daniel came to the shop when they did have sex on the premises.
“So, do I need to bleach the entire shop?” Gianna asks lightly.
Tony did bleach parts of the shop afterward, suddenly paranoid Pa or Kyle would find suspicious stains on the floor. It was one of his more ridiculous moments. It’s a goddamn auto shop. There are so many motor oil stains that cleaning up was probably more suspicious than doing nothing.
“Please stop talking.”
Mercifully, they reach Germantown, and Tony pulls into the Continuum’s parking lot. He throws the car into park a little too suddenly, so the brakes squeak in protest for a long minute after he turns off the ignition. He locks the car and raps on the hood in apology before heading for the door. Oil time is coming up again whenever things calm down.
After she gets out of the car, he holds his arms open for Gianna.
She walks straight into his hold. He buries his face in the top of her head. She smells like shampoo and baby powder. Her arms snake around him to squeeze him tight.
He takes a deep, steadying breath. “All right. Are we ready to do this?”