Chapter 6
House Special
The stairs to the apartment ran up behind the kitchen, narrow and unlit, and Nick took them first without letting go of Dante's hand — which meant they climbed the whole flight sideways and badly, shoulders knocking the wall, Dante's mouth finding the back of Nick's neck on the third step just to feel the man's breath catch.
"You're going to break both our necks," Nick said.
"Worth it." Dante said it against his skin and felt the rough sound it pulled out of him.
At the top Nick got the door open, and Dante followed him in, and stopped one step over the threshold, because he knew immediately — the way you know a smell before you can name it — that he'd walked into a dead man's home.
It was all still here. That was the thing that caught Dante by the throat even now, even with his blood up and Nick's hand still warm in his: the worn slippers by the door that no living foot had touched in ten months, the little icon in the corner with a red lamp burnt out beside it, a coffee cup on the drainboard washed and set to dry by a man who'd never come back for it.
Nick had buried his father and then moved into his father's apartment and changed exactly nothing, and lived here, every night, inside the shape of the person he'd lost, counting a drawer downstairs and grieving upstairs and letting no one see either.
And he'd brought Dante up anyway.
"You don't have to —" Nick started, following his eyes, the walls already halfway up. "It's stupid. I know it's — I never got around to —"
"Hey." Dante turned him by the jaw, gentle, the way he'd turned him in the alley.
"I'm not going anywhere near that with a joke.
You hear me? Not that one." He watched something in Nick's face come loose.
"You brought me up here. Into this. That's not nothing.
I know exactly how much that's not nothing. "
Nick looked at him for a long second under the dead lamp, this granite man come all the way unlatched, and then he fisted his hand back in the front of Dante's coat like he had in the alley and pulled, and there wasn't any more talking for a while.
It wasn't smooth and Dante didn't want it smooth.
He wanted it exactly like this — Nick backing him into the wall by the burnt-out icon, kissing him like the drawer had finally come out right, hands rough and certain now that the deciding was done, all that held-line control turned loose in one direction.
Dante got the chef's coat off, then Nick's shirt, buttons he didn't have the patience for, and put his mouth to every burn scar and rope of muscle the man had spent his whole life pretending was just the cost of the job.
Nick made a sound like relief when Dante's hands found skin.
Like a man who hadn't been touched in longer than ten months.
Like a man who'd forgotten he was allowed to be.
Dante mapped him the way he'd map any new kitchen — learning the heat of him, where he ran hot and where he ran unexpectedly cool, what caught his breath and what finally cracked that granite control — and he catalogued every single one the way you memorize a thing you're scared you won't get to keep.
The scar on his hip. The place at the base of his throat that undid him.
The way Nick said Dante's name like it surprised him each time, like he kept expecting Dante to turn out to be a mistake and kept finding out he wasn't.
"Tell me if —" Dante started.
"Don't stop," Nick said, low and wrecked. "Whatever you do."
So he didn't. They found the bed in the dark, in the apartment his father had left him, and Dante took his time undoing the man knot by knot the way Stavros had made him do the custard — do not rush this, you rush this you get nothing — until Nick's control was gone entirely, until the dry deadpan burned all the way off and left just want, just Nick's hands in his hair and his rough voice saying Dante's name like it was the only word he had left, like it was a thing he'd needed to say for weeks and finally could.
Dante gave him everything. He'd spent three years keeping the best of himself in reserve, one foot out, saving nothing for anybody because saving something for somebody was how you got robbed — and here in the dark he spent all of it, poured it out, held nothing back, and the terror of that and the relief of that were the same feeling and he stopped being able to tell them apart.
When Nick came apart under him he took Dante with him, the two of them wrung out and shaking and laughing, actually laughing, foreheads together, in a bed under a dead man's ceiling that had somehow, tonight, become a place where two people got to be alive.
Afterward they lay tangled in the dark, the city sounds far off, Nick's heartbeat slowing under Dante's ear.
Neither of them reached for a joke. That was new.
Dante filled silences the way he filled plates, generous and fast; Nick armored them; and here they were doing neither, just breathing in a dead man's apartment with the streetlight coming through the blinds in bars across the ceiling.
"I don't do this," Nick said finally, to the dark.
Not cold. Careful, like he was handling something he was afraid to drop.
"Since he died. I don't see people. I count the drawer, I fix the sign, I go to sleep.
That's the whole list." His hand moved slow up and down Dante's spine, like he was still half-surprised he was allowed to.
"I don't know what this is. I'm supposed to have a plan for everything.
I run a business. I don't have one for you. "
"Yeah, well." Dante pressed his mouth to the burn scar he was already fond of. "I've got about nine plans and every one of them is a coward. So we're even."
Nick huffed — the closest he got to a laugh lying down — and pulled him in, and didn't ask what the plans were. Dante loved him a little for not asking, and hated himself a little for needing not to be asked.
***
Dante woke to gray light and the smell of coffee and, for one disoriented second, no idea where he was — and then Nick's arm tightened across his back, unconscious, possessive, and Dante remembered, and lay very still so as not to wake the astonishing fact of it.
Nick Roussos slept like he did everything else: seriously, and with his whole body, one heavy arm thrown over Dante like he was guarding the till.
The marine layer was back in the window, softening the morning to pearl.
Downstairs the diner was dark and empty and theirs.
And Dante lay in the wreck of the sheets in his dead mentor's apartment next to the man's impossible son and felt, rolling through him slow and total, the thing he had spent his entire adult life running the other way from.
He was home.
The word arrived plain and terrible and true, and Dante lay there and let it be true for exactly as long as he dared, memorizing it — the weight of the arm, the pearl light, the coffee Nick must have gotten up to start and then come back to bed instead of drinking, which was possibly the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for him and the man had done it asleep — before the other voice, the old one, the survival one, started up underneath.
You know how this goes. You know what happens to the places you call home.
"You're thinking," Nick said, not opening his eyes. "It's loud. Stop it."
"I'm not thinking."
"You're thinking so hard the bed's warm from it.
" Nick cracked one eye. He looked younger like this, undefended, his hair a disaster, and something in Dante's chest simply gave up all its remaining defensive positions at once.
"It's Saturday. We don't open till seven. Come back down here and think later."
But they did get up, eventually, both of them, because a diner doesn't open itself — and the getting up was its own quiet astonishment.
Nick in boxers and yesterday's undershirt making two coffees the way each of them took it, without asking, because he'd already learned.
Dante finding a toothbrush still sealed in its packet in the bathroom drawer — Stavros's spare, kept for a guest who never came — and Nick going still in the doorway when he saw it in Dante's hand, and then saying, rough, "He'd have liked that.
You using it. He hated a wasted thing," so that Dante's throat did something as he brushed his teeth in a dead man's mirror beside the man's son.
The domestic weight of it. The way a night turned into a morning, and a morning turned — if you let it, if you were the kind of person who let it — into a life.
Dante was not that kind of person. He knew that about himself the way you know your own blood type.
He was, this particular morning, having a very hard time remembering why.
Dante came back down. He thought later.
Later, as it turned out, was about ninety minutes away.
***
They opened the diner at seven the way you'd open any Saturday, except neither of them could stop doing the thing — the standing too close, the hands finding reasons — and Gloria took one look at the pair of them at the pass and set down her coffee and said, "Oh, finally," with such enormous satisfaction that Manny looked up from his booth to see what he'd missed.
"Nothing," Nick told the room, granite, ears crimson.
"Something," Gloria told the room, and refilled a coffee with the serenity of a woman whose entire twenty-two-year campaign had just paid off.