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“You’re cute,” Doyle stated. “In a stick-up-the-ass, sees the world in black-and-white with a severely disadvantaged sense of humor sort of way.”
“It was very cute,” Larkin continued. “The way you used your height to impose yourself and compared my eyes to the moon.” “They’re gray,” Doyle protested. “And bright. Like the—forget it.” “I’m surprised you’re single.” Doyle met his look. “It’s a shame you aren’t.”
“People don’t want to know,” he whispered, not looking up. “Know what?” “What makes them uncomfortable,” Larkin specified. “Sometimes they don’t know what to say, don’t want to make a bad situation worse. Other times, they only pretend to not know because the empathy required is too big a burden. They pull back. They become distant. They ask how you are the same way they ask if it looks like rain or if you watched that Mets game on TV. People don’t really want to know.”
“People don’t want to know.” He was quiet, so absolute in his agreeance. Doyle cast Larkin a sideways glance. “But I do.”
“I’m a world-class hugger, if you—” Doyle didn’t have a chance to finish before Larkin turned into him and grabbed the other detective in a back-breaking embrace. Doyle let out a whoosh of air, choked out, “—want one,” and then wrapped his arms around Larkin.
Doyle wasn’t okay. Larkin understood that now, because he used those same coping tricks. But Doyle had also seen the light. He wasn’t afraid of the extremes, of feeling happiness, of being alive. He’d been standing in that deep dark hole and thought to look up. And that was the kind of man Larkin wanted in his life—in whatever capacity Doyle was willing to share himself.
“I struggled for a long time with the concept of love languages,” he said into the quiet. “You know these?” “Affirmation, quality time, service, gifts, touch.”
“The city was already cracking down on the strip clubs in Times Square when I was a kid.” He cast Larkin a teasing, sideways look. “Daddy has a few years on you.”
