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Around lunch, he runs out of orange juice, which is presently the only thing giving him a will to live. Before he can consider whether it’s a good idea to go outside in his current state, he already has his shoes on.
They have more soup for dinner. Andy is coming to realize that Nick believes that soup is basically a prescription drug designed to cure all illnesses and also, probably, bad moods. He doesn’t protest.
That’s the thing about walls. They don’t tend to appear for no good reason; they’re either closing something off or holding something up, and you can’t just wish them away.
He doesn’t know how anything between them could be anything but good.
“Oh yeah. Sure, it’s right over by the— No, I fucking don’t have any Plato in my apartment, for fuck’s sake, Andrew.”
And if Andy hadn’t already known he loves Nick—if Andy had managed to tuck that truth away where he keeps everything else he doesn’t want to deal with—he would have known it then, watching Nick laugh with the butcher on a sunny May morning.
All right. He needs to buy flowers. Just some. A normal, non-alarming quantity of flowers. Not all the flowers in the world. He can do that.
Families might usually be bonded by blood, but maybe sometimes they’re bonded by shared secrets, by a delicate mixture of caution and faith, by the conviction that hiding together is better in every way than hiding alone.
He’s just filled with dumb ideas this morning, but they’re the only ideas he has, so he’s keeping them.
“This is all my fault,” he says, wrapping his arms around Nick’s neck. “I thought you understood. But I forgot that you’re a goddamn idiot.” He kisses the corner of Nick’s stupid mouth. “I love you. I love you and I’m in love with you. I don’t know how to make this clearer. I’m not biding my time here. I’m here.”
“Are you going to be this brainless after every time you fuck me?” Andy asks, a little breathless. “I just need to know so I can plan in advance.”
And more than that, it means something to Andy—something he can hardly put into words—that his father is speaking up when he could have remained silent.
“Talk to him!” his father calls, and Andy hardly even notices that this is the first advice his father’s ever given him.
was—it wasn’t okay, it might not even be forgivable, but Nick could hope that maybe the person Michael had been in 1945 wasn’t around anymore.
He has no idea how they’re going to manage to make it work, but they have to find a way because Nick has never, in his whole life of wanting things that were just out of reach, wanted anything so bad.
Nick isn’t sure there’s any kind of blow to the pride worse than when your least favorite person is right about something.
Maybe the trick is to put fear in its place so it doesn’t take over.
What he can do is— God, he keeps thinking of that woman. He can feed the goddamn ducks and he can kiss his boyfriend. He can believe that the future they have is worth more than his fear, and he can do what it takes to make that future as safe and happy as possible.
“Don’t like to think about you waking up alone,” Nick mutters. Andy stares at him. “If you don’t already know that, I’m really making a mess of things,” Nick says. “Look, if I have to choose between work and you, between a story and you, between anything and you, I’m picking you.”
“I love you,” Andy repeats, “and I want to be with you, and that’s all there is to it. The rest is details. The rest is . . . administrative.”
Nick knows that when Andy thinks too hard about the Chronicle, he still feels a little sick to his stomach, and Nick’s own demons make sure to say hi a dozen times a day. But they have one another, an unmapped future, and the bone-deep certainty that they can figure it out together.
