Bad Guys
Then—like Danny had taught him when he’d been a child—he’d counted the people breathing in the room.
Danny had spent some of his own childhood in less-than-optimal foster homes and much of his adolescence hustling sugar daddies on the Jersey Shore.
Knowing who was breathing in the room you’d been asleep in was an important skill.
Liam, check. His own breath, check.
Breeze from a window that shouldn’t have been able to be opened?
Check.
And there it was.
“Grace,” he mumbled, eyes still closed, “if you are watching me sleep, that’s creepy as fuck.”
“Maybe I’m a voyeur,” Grace said, absolutely unrepentant. “Maybe I was hoping to see hot sex and now I’m disappointed.”
“You were surfing porn at fourteen,” Josh said. “It was gross and disturbing then, and I don’t even want to think about what you’re watching now.”
“Like I have time to watch porn,” Grace muttered. “I have danced two shows since we started planning this gig. I am busy, and now I am worrying about your weenie ass again.”
Josh yawned, sat up, and held his fingers to his lips, casting a glance at Liam, who was lying on his back, one hand on his middle, the other out against the white cotton sheets.
He looked vulnerable there, and Josh was reluctant to leave his side, but Grace wouldn’t let them sleep if Josh didn’t give him some reassurance.
Josh was still wearing his briefs, which Liam had helped him into earlier, and as he walked into the front room/kitchen part of the apartment, he grabbed a black hoodie from on top of the dresser near the door and one-handedly slipped it over his head, then wiggled his good hand out, leaving the other sleeve and shoulder flapping over his immobilized shoulder.
“That’s stylish,” Grace poked, and Josh eyeballed his friend’s black microfiber turtleneck and yoga pants.
“The undertaker called,” Josh told him. “He wants that outfit back.”
“You’re just jealous because I make it sexy,” Grace returned, and Josh smiled, partly because Grace was right and partly because they could go back and forth like this for hours, much to the despair of everybody who knew them.
“Want anything?” Josh asked. “Before you answer, I want orange juice.”
“I brought doughnuts,” Grace said, “because I love you.”
And while somebody not in their family might have interpreted that as banter, Josh knew that from his friend, it was the purest and sweetest of truths.
“Thank you,” he said sincerely. “If you ate all the cream-filled, our friendship is over.”
“I ate all the jelly-filled,” Grace said with a lascivious laugh. “’Cause—”
“Don’t finish that sentence.” Josh went to the fridge and one-handedly pulled out the OJ and the milk, wondering who’d stocked up.
Maybe Liam had, since he’d obviously arrived earlier that day, but maybe Phyllis, the housekeeper at the mansion, had known he was coming and had ordered a delivery.
It was funny how many tiny strings could be pulled to make his life easier.
He tried not to ever take them for granted.
Together they sat on stools at the counter and tucked into the small box of pastries that Grace had brought from the shop around the corner.
Hunter kept a penthouse apartment in a building about four blocks away, an older Gothic building with gargoyles and hardwood floors and stone cornices.
Josh rather loved it. Hunter, of course, had converted the apartment into a giant open area, with a gym mat and exercise equipment in front of a dominating window, a bed on one end, a kitchen on the other, and a couch with a view out the window if there was not a sweaty man lifting weights to block the view.
The doughnut shop—mom and pop owned—sat between the two buildings, and Josh and Grace had done the doughnut ritual more than once when Josh had stayed in the city, particularly after the more violent rounds of chemo.
“So…,” Grace said leadingly, his voice laced with innuendo.
He dipped his raspberry-filled, powder-sugar-coated piece of heaven into his glass of milk and then took a bite so big raspberry squirted out the end into the milk.
He did this on purpose, Josh knew, because they’d both done this as kids.
Josh’s stomach hadn’t done dairy since he’d gotten sick, but he still watched Grace happily because it meant somebody knew what doughnuts were for.
Josh didn’t ask “So what?” because he and Grace had always confided in each other about sex, from Grace’s first wet dream (fraught with wonder) to Grace’s first blowjob (fraught with worry from Josh’s end because Grace had been high and getting higher every day) to Grace’s first buttsex (Grace’s term, of course) to, finally, Grace’s first times with Hunter, confessed quietly as though Grace had been afraid that being with somebody he cared about would get snatched away from him by the king of the trickster gods himself.
And for his part, Josh had talked about Greg, his sweet make-out buddy in high school, and Sean, the closeted policeman, and their few awkward, resentful encounters, but never about Nick, not even the one abortive kiss that Josh had regretted immediately and Nick had both feared and yearned to pursue.
And not one overnight—not even when Josh and Grace had shared an apartment in the city before Danny returned for good.
Josh would wake up, give whatever Grace had brought home the night before breakfast, cab fare if needed, and on more than one occasion, a good frisking to make sure nothing like, say, cash or credit cards walked out the front door.
Then he’d woken Grace up, made sure he’d taken his prophylactics that morning, and endured the horrific blow-by-blows of intimate physical details he really didn’t want to know.
“So,” Grace said now, “did his penis have a split at the end like a cloven hoof?”
“No, that was your date,” Josh said with a shudder. He sighed. “I miss milk—no, don’t give me yours. I’m sure Phyllis has oat milk at home.”
Grace patted his shoulder in true commiseration. “Maybe it’ll come back, the little bacteria thingies that let you drink the original moo-juice.” He took a milk-sopped bite of his doughnut and squeezed out some more raspberry jelly to make the milk pinker.
“So…,” Grace prompted again, and Josh knew he sort of owed Grace the salient points.
“He made me come—spectacularly, I might add, and I fell promptly asleep.”
Grace sputtered doughnut into his hand and then grabbed a cloth napkin from the corner of the counter to clean up. “That? That’s all you got after six months of stopping midsentence, staring out the window, and picturing his manly abs or whatever?”
“I didn’t even get to see him naked,” Josh muttered glumly. Then he cheered. “But the kisses were amazing.”
“See, that’s important,” Grace said wisely, as though, on an emotional level, Hunter hadn’t been his one and only lover. “The kissing… it’s more than the buttsex, right?”
“Sure,” Josh said evasively, but Grace wasn’t fooled.
“Which you will have someday,” he added loyally.
Josh smiled at his friend, loving him fiercely, and figured he owed Grace one of Liam’s closest secrets for his faith in Josh’s love life.
“Want to hear an amazing fact?” he asked.
And why not? Josh knew all about Hunter’s dead lover, Paulie, and how Grace had agonized at first that he’d never be able to live up to a perfect dead guy.
It was a good thing Hunter had the patience of a, well, hunter, because he’d managed to patiently explain many times that he cared about Grace, alive, more than he ever cared about perfect dead guy, dead.
“Yes,” Grace said, pausing at the end of his doughnut. He often did that, Josh noted, because he’d probably been born understanding that life was fleeting, and happiness was too, and the end of the doughnut needed to be appreciated.
“The reason he got into Interpol so young was because the first agent he contacted—about Danny, because Liam’s smart and had figured out that Lightfingers was behind some local art thefts—”
“Before they were friends,” Grace clarified, but again Josh knew this wasn’t because Grace had needed it cleared, but because sometimes Grace kept track of things better if he repeated stuff.
“Yes, it was during the becoming-friends phase,” Josh told him.
He’d spent the last year assembling timelines in his head revolving around Danny, and some of them were heartbreaking and some of them were exciting and some of them were…
just Danny. In a way Josh had come to appreciate his father more, seeing him this way.
Danny had missed his family—missed Josh—so much, but when he wasn’t in Chicago celebrating milestones, giving drive-by hugs, or sometimes checking him and Grace out of school in the suburbs and taking them for pizza in the city, he was out and about, living a life, curating an underground art dealership or reading voraciously, he also…
was Danny. Causing chaos because he could.
“So, the first agent he contacted what?” Grace said, obviously hanging on Josh’s every word.
Julia and Felix were Grace’s parents in all the ways that counted—they’d been there through much of Grace’s childhood and all the adolescence, the worrisome parts and the awesome parts—but Danny had been Grace’s idol.
Grace’s parents hadn’t bothered to come to his bedside when he’d almost died and they’d been in the same city.
Danny had come to Josh’s important stuff from half a world away, and had even, Josh knew, snuck into Grace’s hospital room that one awful time to reassure Josh that he’d be okay.
“The first agent Liam contacted about thinking the person responsible for the weird art relocations in Liam’s neighborhood slept with him, promoted him, and then went back to his wife.”