Chapter 15 Prague #4
And suddenly Josh found himself saying Grace’s line. “But you love me, right?”
And then Grace—who cuddled or swatted or broke into Josh’s room or flat at fuck-all in the morning for a conversation—was hugging him.
And Grace didn’t hug.
“You made promises,” Grace said. “You and me, going out as old men, bungee jumping off an airplane. Don’t break my heart.”
“I won’t,” Josh said, his eyes burning.
“Going to go eat schnitzel,” Grace muttered. “Fried meat—it’s delicious.” And then he drifted away like angry smoke.
Liam leaned forward, the last in the room, and kissed Josh’s forehead. “This won’t hurt much,” he murmured. “But I think it’s a long time coming.”
And then the room had cleared out, and it was just Josh and Danny.
Danny wasn’t particularly tall—a thing that Josh had always loved about him because Josh wasn’t particularly tall.
Sure, Liam could pass for tall at five ten or so, but after being surrounded by Carl and Chuck—both in the six four/six five range—for the past year and a half or so and being visually dominated by Felix all his life, Josh appreciated Danny’s slender five seven.
Danny was Josh’s. Josh had never needed to share Danny with a job or a spotlight. When Josh was a child, Danny had been more like a nanny than Josh’s actual nannies. And right when Josh had grown out of needing a caretaker twenty-four seven, Danny had still been the fun parent.
Until Danny hadn’t been there anymore.
Josh sucked in a breath to kill that thought, like he’d killed it for the last eleven years, and Danny blew out a breath and sank down next to him on the bed.
“Josh,” he said softly, “you know how much I love you, right?”
Josh swallowed and nodded. “Of course I do.” That terrible rift so Danny could clean up, get sober. Those postcards and letters and gifts. The surreptitious visits, the trips to Chicago where everything hurt so Danny could be there for Josh, who was the one person who didn’t hurt.
Josh knew.
“Then you need to trust me,” Danny said, leaning against him. Josh leaned back, his eyes burning. Fucking anemia.
Sure.
“I do,” Josh reassured. He’d poured out his heart in his letters, telling Danny things he hadn’t trusted with Felix or his mother.
Of the three parents, Danny had been the first to know Josh was gay.
He’d been the first to know Grace had been using drugs, the first to get Josh’s panicked, anguished letter when Grace almost let that dangerous preoccupation kill him.
Danny had known about Josh’s high school boyfriend, his doomed affair with Sean the closeted policeman, and his stupid, helpless attraction to Nick, who’d been married.
Danny had even suspected the thing—the tremendous, amazing, heart-changing thing—with Liam, probably long before Liam had.
Certainly long before Josh allowed it to happen.
“Good,” Danny said, looping his arm around Josh’s shoulders. “So if you trust me, you need to tell me the truth, okay?”
“I always do,” Josh said, and now the tears started to slip from between his squeezed-shut eyelids, and he wished for Liam, who would tell him not to cry.
“Good,” Danny said again. “So, my boy, my son, the child of my heart, the precious human who kept me sane, who made me want to clean the fuck up and get sober and keep being a parent and who dragged me back to a life I love beyond measure, you need to tell me, on a scale of one to one hundred, how viciously angry at me are you?”
Josh gasped, feeling as though he’d been struck. “I’m not—”
Danny shook his head and kissed Josh’s temple.
“Sure you are. I left. I know what it’s like to have damage, son.
My father was killed when I was four years old during a shooting at a convenience store, and my real mother died of cancer when I was nine.
I was furious with them for a lot of years, and they were not nearly as culpable as I was for leaving you. ”
“You had to….” Josh whispered, shocked by Danny’s revelations, things Josh had not known.
“I did,” Danny agreed. “I had to leave. But you are not obligated to forgive me for it.”
And that stung. “Of course I do.”
“Oh bullshit,” Danny said sadly. “Goddammit, Josh, this drive you have to be the king shit of grifters, to be the mastermind, to make this crew yours and damn your own health for doing it—”
“Kadjic is threatening our family—”
“Then let me die fighting him!” Danny shouted, surprising Josh enough to pull out from under his arm.
In his entire life he’d never heard Danny yell.
“Danny,” he whispered, more surprised than frightened.
But Danny was wiping his own tears with hands that shook.
Josh thought that for once Danny looked like a man in his early forties, instead of ageless like Peter Pan.
Josh could see the gray hairs that threaded through the rich brown and the fine lines around his eyes and the corners of his mouth.
Not a lot. But enough. Josh’s Uncle Danny hadn’t lived an easy life, no matter how light he made of the things that had hurt him.
A lifetime of telling people you’d been a helpless falling-down drunk for a number of years didn’t lessen by one iota the strain of living through those years in real time, although they could make the present easier in the telling.
“Your drive,” Danny said bitterly. “Your amazing, prodigious drive. Josh, I get it. I left, and you felt like whatever parenting I’d given you, you had to take it over yourself.
And all I’d had to give you back then had been the game.
You could pick a pocket at four. You could run a con at seven.
You once brought us the diamond collar of a spoiled schnauzer when you were eight years old.
You’d even assessed the karats. And we were so proud of you, son—but we would have been as proud of you if you’d been playing chess.
Dancing.” He emitted a broken laugh. “God, are we proud of the way you dance. Acting. How very smart you are. And… and I think the thing I’m proudest of is how you’ve gathered these people together—these separate, different people—and you haven’t merely secured their loyalty and love to you, but your loyalty and love to each other. ”
“But Danny,” Josh whispered, “you did that.”
Danny laughed bitterly. “No, son. I arrived to help your father, remember? And you took me to pizza. And pizza led me to Stirling, Molly, Chuck, and Hunter. And that led us to a dozen people in that hallway who will cry tears of joy right now, because you are okay.”
“Both of us,” Josh said, feeling like he had to be clear. “That was both of us.” Danny had brought Carl, Tienne, and Liam. Chuck had brought Lucius as a lover and Michael as a friend. Felix had brought Tor, who brought Marco.
Danny gave a faint smile. “You’re trying to do math with a family the size of a hurricane, son. Don’t bother. What matters is we are all swept away together. And they all love you. And for that I am proud. But you can’t let my pride get in the way of what you feel.”
Josh let out a sigh and tried to fight it, but now that Danny had said the words, it was all so very clear.
His eyes hadn’t stopped leaking, but now his voice broke, and he shook from his hands to his heart.
“How could you?” he mewled, falling apart at all the seams, destroyed from the inside out by the thing that had driven him, from his earliest memories to his adulthood.
The thing he couldn’t admit, because he knew it wasn’t fair.
But fairness didn’t matter now.
“I loved you so much,” he rasped. “All I wanted was to be you. And you left me!” That last came out as a howl, one buried in his chest since he was ten years old, and he wanted to rage about the room and throw things.
He wanted to—oh God, he wanted to hit this man who had only done his best by Josh, and Josh had never suffered.
But he had. The hurt… the hurt….
“You left me!”
All he had the strength for was to sob, and like he had for Josh’s entire life, whether by his bedside or three thousand miles away, Danny held him. Took his pain and anger and turned it into love so Josh could sob and rage and sob some more.
HE WOKE up on a soft bed in a small, quaint bedroom with Moroccan tapestries on the walls and floor and satin drapes in blue and gold across the windows, with white silk flowing underneath.
There were shelves and shelves of books surrounding the room, making it smaller but, Josh thought sadly, also making it like the Tardis. A magic place that was bigger inside than it was out.
Danny’s apartment. It must have been.
Liam was seated in an armchair by the side of the bed, doing something serious on his phone.
He’d done that periodically as they’d traveled.
He’d told Josh he was faking his job, but Josh knew he was also supposedly deep undercover and feeding Interpol tips on the Kadjic operations that the family had sabotaged so far.
The sabotage—blamed on rival operations—had given Liam some cachet, because he’d been the first to report on not only the end of the operation, but also the roots—where Kadjic had gotten his guns, for instance, or which distributors would now be missing cocaine.
So he was not, in fact, “faking” his job; he was using Salinger intel to do his job, and giving the money from his promotions and such to his family to pay for his mother’s big house, his sister’s university experience, and to subsidize his other sister’s business.
A good man, Josh thought achingly. Not necessarily an honest one—at least by the standards of his employer—but such a good man. A man who wanted to do good things in the world.
And who thought he and Josh were cut from the same cloth.
“I don’t even remember getting here,” Josh muttered.
“Really?” Liam said, after making one last tap on his phone and setting it down on the end table. “There was practically a fist fight for who got to carry you out of the hospital.”
Josh was too tired to smile. “Who won?”