Chapter 5 #2
The night had gone clear the way July nights sometimes did, the marine layer holding off out over the water so you could actually make out a few hard stars over the rooftops, and above the back door the sign's spill reached even here — a wash of gold on the brick, on the dumpster, on the man who came out through the sticking door thirty seconds behind him.
Because of course he did. Because Nick could not let a bus tub live in an alley unsupervised.
The alley smelled like it always did — the crime Dante had accused it of on day one, dumpster and old fryer oil and salt off the harbor — but tonight the gold reached all the way to the back and made even the dumpster look like it had been forgiven something.
Dante set the tub on the step and breathed and couldn't come down.
Every kitchen he'd ever run had ended a night on exactly this buzz, wrung out and lit up, and every one of those nights he'd showered it off alone in some rental and woken up one step nearer the door.
This was the first one in years he didn't want to wash off.
He wanted to stand in it. He wanted — God help him — to still be standing in it tomorrow.
That was the tell. That was always the tell, the wanting to stay. It meant it was already too late. It meant the leaving was already going to cost him. It meant he'd broken his one rule somewhere back around a plate of galaktoboureko and hadn't even felt it go.
"You laughed," Dante said.
"I did not."
"You did. Whole room saw it. Manny's going to talk about it for a year.
" Dante set the tub down on the step. His heart was doing something reckless and he let it, just for a second, just out here where nobody was keeping books.
"I've been trying to make you do that for three weeks.
I was starting to think it wasn't in the building anymore. "
Nick leaned against the brick under the gold light, tie loose, sleeves rolled, wrung out and lit up and looking at Dante the way he'd looked at the two inches on Sunday — like a number he'd stopped fighting. "It worked," he said quietly. "The room was full. You were right. It worked."
"It worked."
"Say it again. That I was right. I want to bank it — I don't get it in writing often."
"You were right." Dante huffed a laugh. "There. Framed. Hang it over the compressor."
"Careful. Keep being this useful and I'm going to end up not able to afford to keep you and not able to afford to lose you at the same time.
It's a real problem. Very inconvenient." Nick said it dry, said it like a joke, but his eyes weren't joking, and the gold caught the exhausted, undefended thing in his face he only ever let out when the day was over and the drawer was counted and there was nobody left to be granite for.
And this was the part where Dante was supposed to say great, so, business, and pick up the tub, and go inside and cool it, and remember the signed lease in the Arts District and the keys Rey had picked up on Thursday and the whole careful architecture of one foot out the door that had kept Dante intact through three years and four cities.
This was the part where the smart, light, leaving version of him took over and got them both safely to morning.
Instead he looked at Nick Roussos lit gold against his dead father's brick, laughed-out and undefended, and Dante thought, with the clarity of a man stepping off a roof: I am so tired of leaving before it can cost me anything.
He crossed the alley. He didn't do it smooth; his hands weren't steady and he didn't try to make them.
He got one on the warm brick beside Nick's head and the other, careful, unbelievably careful, at the side of Nick's jaw where the stubble was, and he gave the man every second in the world to say don't — a whole slow second, then another, the sign humming above them, the harbor somewhere past the roofs.
Nick didn't say don't.
Nick made a low rough sound like a man setting something heavy down after carrying it too long, and turned his face into Dante's hand, and closed the last of the distance himself.
The kiss was not careful. That was the thing that undid Dante — that for all Nick's granite, all his squaring of plates and holding of lines, the second he decided to stop resisting a thing he stopped all the way, hands coming up to fist in the front of Dante's coat and pull him in, kissing him like the till had finally come out right, like ten months of held breath, like a man who had just watched a light he'd given up on come back on over his head.
Dante lost the plot entirely. Lost the alley, the tub, the lease, the vests, every careful mile he'd put between himself and wanting anything.
There was just the salt and the gold and the rough catch of Nick's jaw and the small wrecked sound Nick made against his mouth, and Dante's own heart going off like a struck match in the dark.
When they broke apart they didn't go far. Nick's forehead came down against his, both of them breathing like they'd run the rush again.
"That was —" Nick started, in the voice he used when a sentence had gotten away from him.
"Don't," Dante said, and felt himself grinning, helpless, terrified, gone. "Don't file it. Don't square it to the edge of anything. Just — let it be one thing that isn't a problem yet."
"Yet," Nick repeated, and Dante felt the word land in his own chest like a stone dropped down a well he'd been pretending was full.
Nick's thumb moved once along his jaw, slow, like he was checking the work was real — this man who couldn't say thank you, saying it again the only way he had, in touch instead of words — and up on the pole the whole gold bird hummed its two-winged hum over both their heads, glad, finally, all the way glad to see them.
Because that was the trouble, wasn't it.
Standing in a gold alley with the taste of the best night of his year in his mouth and a man's hands still in his coat, Dante finally, fatally happy — and nineteen days of end of the month ticking in his pocket, and a whole life built on the certainty that the happier he got, the harder the leaving came for him.
He kissed Nick again anyway. Some fires you just let burn and sort out the damage later.