23. Gus
Gus
I wake before the furnace with June asleep on my chest, and for a while I do nothing but be a man who gets to have this.
The room is that blue-gray that comes before the sky commits.
Her hair is everywhere, including my mouth.
One of her hands is curled against my ribs like it fell asleep mid-sentence.
The lamp is still on, small and golden, outlasted by everything it was lit to see.
Downstairs the house ticks. Two kids, two adults, one truth, zero secrets.
The best headcount this house has ever run.
She stirs when my hand finds the long muscle of her back. Doesn’t wake. Moves closer, which her body does now on its own, which I will never get over.
“Mm.” Not a word. An objection to being awake.
“Go back to sleep,” I whisper.
“You first.” Eyes still closed. Her hand flattens on my ribs and starts moving, slow, aimless, and then less aimless. “In a minute.”
What happens next barely counts as deciding.
It’s half asleep and wholly unhurried, the two of us turning toward each other under warm covers in the almost-dark.
Mouths finding whatever’s nearest — a shoulder, a jaw, the corner of a smile.
Her hand wanders down my stomach, patient as someone with nowhere to be for the rest of her life.
She finds me already wanting her and hums, pleased with herself, right on schedule.
I return the favor slowly, learning her again in the dark by touch alone.
My fingers ease over her until her breath goes uneven against my throat and her hips answer on their own.
“Morning,” she whispers, to my collarbone, late, out of order.
“Not yet it isn’t.” I slide my fingers through her heat, slow, nowhere to be, and she makes a small sound she’d deny owning and opens for me.
We stay like that a while — my hand learning her awake, her fingers wrapped loose around me, moving when they remember to.
Nothing about it has a destination yet. That’s the luxury.
A whole gray morning, a locked door, nowhere either of us has to be.
“C’mere,” she mumbles, one syllable, tugging.
I pull her leg over my hip. She sighs into my neck when I slide into her, already soft and open from sleep and the night, and neither of us moves much at all.
Small tides. A slow rock, more pressure than motion, deep and warm.
When I shift deeper she breathes yes into my jaw — barely a word, mostly warmth — and tips her hips to keep me there.
Her breath at my ear. My hand spread wide on the small of her back, hers in my hair, everything half-dreamed.
No performance anywhere in it. Just two people keeping each other warm from the inside.
Minutes go by like that. Whole soft minutes, the blue light coming up around us, her mouth moving against my jaw in something that isn’t words and doesn’t need to be.
“Stay past the furnace,” I whisper into her hair. The old rule, retired last night with the rest of them. “Stay for breakfast. Stay.”
“Staying,” she murmurs, and tightens around me, lazy and deliberate, and I stop being able to whisper.
The build is long and shallow and sweet, and when it finally crests it takes us almost by surprise.
Her first — a slow shiver running the whole length of her, one soft broken sound into my throat.
Me right behind, wrapped around all of her, her name said into her hair like a word you say in your sleep.
We finish the way we started, gradually, almost quietly, and it’s the gentlest thing I’ve been part of since my children were small enough to fall asleep on me.
The furnace clicks on. She doesn’t move.
I hold her while the vents breathe warmth into the room, both of us drifting, and I think — clearly, distinctly, the whole sentence — five perfect minutes.
Whatever else this year does, it gave me these five perfect minutes.
The phone rings at 6:01.
Mitch’s name on the screen, and I’m instantly, coldly awake, because in thirty years Mitch has never once called me at six in the morning. Mitch schedules. I’m sitting up with the phone to my ear before June’s eyes are open.
“Gus.” His voice is the one he used the year everything went wrong for the franchise. Flat, fast, awake for hours. “You need to get awake right now. Are you awake?”
“I’m awake.”
“A tabloid’s running a story this morning. They called the Foundation’s press line at five for comment, which was a courtesy, which means they’re certain.” Paper moving on his end. A keyboard. “Gus. It’s about June.”
The room goes very still. June sits up, sheet to her chest, reading my face the way she reads my hands.
“Say it,” I tell him.
“They have screenshots. A subscription site — Velvet. An account called Juno, archived last summer, the whole page. And they have her name next to it. The headline they read me is HALL OF FAMER’S SECRET: THE NANNY NEXT DOOR.” He exhales. “There’s a photo of her at the winter concert. With Margot.”
Yesterday this secret was ours — told across a kitchen table, hers to give. In three hours it belongs to everyone.
“How,” I say. It comes out steady. Somewhere in me the public voice has taken over, the one that talks to referees and reporters, while the rest of me stands in a hallway screaming. “That page was deleted in August. It existed for eleven hours.”
“Their letter says the screenshots were ‘lawfully obtained from publicly available material.’ Archived last summer — that’s the phrase they read me.
So somebody had the page saved before it ever came down.
” A beat, and his voice goes carefully neutral, a man handling evidence with tongs.
“Gus, if it existed for eleven hours, then somebody spent those eleven hours saving it. What I know is it’s up in about three hours.
Then it’s everywhere — the board, the sponsors, every parent at that school, every guy in every group chat in this league.
” A pause, and then Mitch does the thing that makes him Mitch.
His voice comes down out of crisis and lands somewhere human.
“Before we do one single piece of strategy — is she okay? Is it true, and is she okay?”
“It’s true. She told me herself, before any of this. Weeks—” Days. It was yesterday. It was one day. “I know all of it, Mitch. There’s nothing in that story I don’t know.”
“Okay.” He absorbs that the way he absorbs everything, no judgment landing anywhere.
“Then here’s my whole speech. You have three hours, and you have two problems that need two different answers.
The first problem is how to protect June.
The second is how to protect Margot and Teddy. Get dressed. I’m coming over.”
He hangs up. The room is gray and gold. The lamp is still on.
I tell her all of it, plainly, the way she told me her whole story yesterday: the tabloid, the screenshots of the archived page, her name attached to them, the headline, the three hours. And last, because I have to, the photo from the winter concert.
June doesn’t move while I talk. She sits very straight in my bed with the sheet clutched to her, and her face — I watch it happen, and I’d give anything not to.
The softness of five minutes ago closes up, piece by piece.
What’s left sitting in my bed is the person from the interview.
Composed. Contained. Employable. Her hands are perfectly still on the sheet, and by now I know what her still hands mean.
“June.”
“Margot has school Monday,” she says, level, like she’s reading a report. “You said the photo is from the concert. Margot was next to me all night. That means Margot’s in the photograph.”
“June. Look at me.”
She looks at me. My first thought, instant: get in front of this, protect her — lawyers, statements, every professional Mitch can put on a phone, nobody touches her.
My second thought, one beat behind, cold in the stomach: my daughter’s face in a tabloid photo, my son’s school hallway on Monday.
Nora’s foundation, with its pediatric ward and its gala donors.
Both thoughts are true. Both are mine. They do not agree with each other, and they’re both awake now.
There’s no version of the next hour where I don’t have to be two men at once — hers, and theirs.
“We’ll handle it,” I say. “I need you to hear that. We. Together. Whatever happens now happens to both of us — that’s the whole point of last night.”
“I heard you,” she says.
She’s already out of bed, already reaching for her clothes, already somewhere I can’t follow. Downstairs, a car pulls into my driveway at 6:19 in the morning, and the day starts whether I let it or not.