Fic: Like Sugar to My Heart (RPF, Nick/Danneel/Sophia, NC-17)
Whatever, it's still February 2 somewhere. This is my polybigbang fic.
Title: Like Sugar to My Heart
Fandom: CW/Disney RPF
Pairing: Sophia Bush/Danneel Harris, Nick Jonas/Sophia Bush/Danneel Harris, past Sophia Bush/Chad Michael Murray
Rating: NC-17 just barely
Word count: 14,000
Warnings: homophobia, religious bigotry, implied past domestic violence
Summary: Nick loves his internship at an organization lobbying in support of traditional marriage. He's in Washington DC, working for a cause he believes in, and every afternoon he gets cupcakes for the office from the two pretty girls who park their food truck around the corner. What could be better? But the more time he spends with Danneel and Sophia, the more he starts to question his strict views on relationships and sexuality, and the more he starts to wonder if he's really on the right path at all.
Notes: I am eternally grateful to balefully for listening to me hash out this idea in the first place, to mediaville and novaberry for looking it over and encouraging me, and to wutendeskind for her graphics and mix and all-around awesomeness. <33 I want to write ALL THE PORNY FOLLOW-UP to this story OMG. Title from Mandy Moore.
wutendeskind's fabulous art and mix is here.
“You never get anything for yourself, do you, Nick?” Danneel asks, leaning out of the window a little to hand Nick his cardboard box of cupcakes, the v-neck of her shirt giving him a clear view of the tanned slopes of her breasts.
Nick shakes his head. “I’m diabetic.”
Danneel smiles, quick and warm. “Guess it’s time to start a sugar-free line then, huh?”
Nick looks at the box, the Sweets for the Sweet logo stamped on its lid, the little truck trailing a cupcake-shaped cloud of exhaust. He wonders, not for the first time, if she’s flirting with him. “I’d buy one if you did.”
“Good,” says Danneel. “See you next week, Nick.” She winks at him, and he shuffles sideways to let the next customer get to the window.
They’ve been on a first-name basis for the past three days, although he’s been getting cupcakes from the truck practically since he started his internship back in July. Danneel and her partner Sophia park their truck just a few blocks from the Capitol Hill headquarters of the Coalition in Defense of Marriage during the afternoons, and Nick, being the youngest of the interns, ended up in charge of office cupcake runs. He doesn’t mind it; Danneel and Sophia are friendly (not to mention pretty) and it’s nice to get out of the office for a little while, even in the thick of the summer humidity.
It starts to rain hard just as he reaches the office door, and the back of his shirt is nearly soaked through by the time he gets his swipe card out, although he manages to shield the cupcakes. Mr. Price, the president of CDM, is in a black mood over the imminent repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and even a double caramel coconut cupcake doesn’t keep him from snapping at Nick about the “neat and tidy appearance” line of the dress code. David, Nick’s rival for the title of most efficient intern, smirks up from his desk.
“How were the cupcake ladies today?” David asks, as Nick sits down across from him.
“Fine,” replies Nick, shivering now in the blast of the A/C. He’s glad it’s Friday, that two days of empty weekend stretch out of front of him. If it’s nice, he thinks he’ll go down to the Mall again and force himself through more of the National Gallery. He has no natural appreciation of art, but he thinks he should. And the sculpture garden is lushly green on sunny days, even if he doesn’t understand the giant typewriter eraser. He looks out the window at the steaming streets, the rain pounding greyly against the row houses across the way, and thinks, not for the first time, how strange it is to finally be in this city, only blocks from the Capitol.
*
Mrs. Wheeler is out when he gets back to the house after work, coated in sweat from the walk from the metro. The brief rain hadn’t broken the humidity, and Nick showers and changes into a t-shirt and jeans. Mrs. Wheeler is an old friend of his aunt’s, a retired youth mission leader, and he’s a little embarrassed by her generosity, letting a stranger live in the guest room of her little brick house in Arlington rent-free. There’s a note on the refrigerator saying she’s gone to visit a sick friend across town and leaving instructions for heating the casserole in the fridge.
Nick resents her mothering a little, even as he’s grateful for it. He’s almost twenty-one, and he knows how to use the oven on his own. If he were home, he would call a friend and see about catching a movie or something on a Friday night, but even after six weeks, he barely knows anyone in Washington. The other interns are all a few years older than he is, and they treat him like a precocious child whenever they can, and although the church he attends has a strong youth group for the high-schoolers, there are no other young adults. He wonders idly how old Danneel and Sophia are, how they spend their Friday nights.
*
On Monday at two, Nick stands through the line at the Sweets for the Sweet truck with his usual list. Sophia grins at him. “I’ve got something special for you today,” she says, putting his order into a box and then adding another, smaller container on top. “Danneel said you were diabetic.”
Nick stutters in surprise. “Yeah.” He gestures at the little box. “How much do I owe you for that one?”
Sophia shakes her head. “It’s a prototype, so no charge. You just have to come back and tell us how you liked it.”
“Thank you.” On his way back to the office, he notices that the box says “For Nick” on its lid, a heart drawn next to his name. He feels flustered, and he tears off the box lid and stuffs it into his pocket, as though it’s somehow incriminating. The cupcake is so delicious that he swipes up the crumbs from the wrapper with his finger when he’s finished.
David looks at him skeptically. “I’m not qualified to do any first aid if you go into a diabetic coma.”
“It’s sugar-free,” Nick tells him. “They just started selling them.”
“Must be your lucky day.”
Nick shuffles some crumbs off his desk. “Guess so.” He has no idea why he’s blushing.
*
“It’s my birthday on Friday,” he tells Sophia. He’s not even sure how it came up, except that there was no line and she seemed to feel like talking.
“Oh my gosh! That’s exciting. How old are you going to be?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Ooh.” Sophia looks him up and down, considering, and Nick wonders if she thought he was older or younger. “So what are your plans for the big day? Coworkers taking you on a pub-crawl? Party with the girlfriend?”
Nick is taken aback to realize she’s the first person to ask that, and disappointed in himself for the answer he has to give. “I don’t really have any plans. Yet.”
“Impossible. On your 21st birthday, you have to. You have to.” She leans out over the counter, hanging halfway out the window to talk to him. “You could come to our place, me and Danneel’s, even bring some friends if you want.”
Nick can’t admit that he doesn’t have any friends in this part of the country. “Where do you live?”
“Chantilly. It’s a ways out, but it’s nice. I’m serious that you should come. I can bake a cake - I’m pretty good at that, if you hadn’t heard - and we could hang out someplace besides on this street corner.”
“I’ll let you know,” Nick says, uncertain. “Thanks.”
He wishes he had someone to talk to about what you do when a woman you hardly know invites you to her house and offers to make you a cake. He knows he wants to go, but at the same time, he has no idea if that’s an appropriate thing to want. On the train ride home, he thinks about calling Joe, but there’s no service when he gets his phone out, and by the time he gets home, he’s decided he’ll do it regardless. It’s an adventure, and at the age of nearly 21, he deserves to have an adventure.
*
It’s possible he should take it as a warning sign when he finds himself lying to Mrs. Wheeler about his plans. But Nick knows he can’t explain how traveling thirty miles to spend the evening with women whose last names he doesn’t even know is the best way to celebrate his birthday. He says he’ll be with people from the office, knowing she trusts all of them on principle, since the CDM is a Christian organization. The truth is that none of them even seem to remember his birthday until Jenny from accounting walks by while he’s on the phone with his mom outside, and he watches her detour to the drug store for a card. He doesn’t mind that no one notices otherwise.
And after work he meets Danneel and the truck up the street, the window locked up tight for the day, all the storage bins in the back strapped closed. She grins from behind her sunglasses. “Bet you’ve never ridden in one of these things before.”
Nick shakes his head.
“You may hope you never have to again,” she says ominously, and as she lurches into the flow of traffic towards the bridge, he thinks she may be right. The truck clatters and rattles anytime they hit the slightest bump, and he can feel the weight of it on the turns, even though he’s not the one driving. The highway is packed, and the stop-and-go makes him nervous, but Danneel seems unconcerned. “Have you ever come out this way?” she asks, passing the exit to the beltway, after which the traffic eases just a little.
Nick shakes his head. “I don’t really get out much. I mean, to other towns, farther out of the city.”
“One suburb is a lot like the others. I’m thinking you don’t have a car.”
“My, um, landlady lets me borrow hers sometimes. But it’s not mine.” Landlady sounds more grown-up than “my aunt’s friend who I live with,” and he wants to sound grown-up. He’s 21 today, after all.
“DC’s a pretty good place to live if you don’t have a car.”
“I live in Arlington,” Nick says, not wanting to misrepresent himself.
Danneel shrugs. “There, too.”
She turns up the radio after that so he doesn’t have to make any more attempts at small talk.
*
The air conditioning in the front seat is spotty at best, and Nick’s back is tacky with sweat by the time they pull into the driveway of a little yellow house on a quiet cul-de-sac. He doesn’t really look like someone going to his own birthday party, at least, not any of the other birthday parties he’s had: pizza and movies with his friends from school or church, family dinners at nice restaurants.
Even on the front porch, the smell of cooking spills out of the house, the warmth of baking mixing with the warm evening outside. Danneel pushes through the front door, calling out, “We’re here,” toward the back of the house.
Sophia appears at the end of the hall, flushed, her hair piled messily on top of her head, and Nick’s eyes fix on the falling strap of her tank top, the bare curve of her shoulder. “I forgot about dinner,” she says sheepishly. “But I thought you might want something before the cake.”
Danneel grins. “There’s plenty of booze.”
“Besides that.” Sophia comes over to kiss him on the cheek. “Happy birthday, Nick.”
“Thanks. You didn’t have to go to all this trouble for me.”
“Sure, we did. It’s your birthday. Come on in and sit down.”
Danneel follows him into the kitchen, looking skeptical, but everything else looks a lot more ready than Sophia does. There’s a salad on the table in between a pair of tall candles, and a bottle of wine waiting. It’s very grown-up looking.
“I’m going to…” Sophia gestures vaguely at herself.
“Put on your party clothes,” Danneel tells her. “I’ll keep Nick amused. Is the cake okay?”
Sophia nods. “It’s perfect.”
Nick sort of exhausted his small talk on the way down, but he says some polite things about the house until Danneel jumps in and starts telling him about it. “It was Sophia’s parents’ until they retired to Florida two years ago. But they owned it outright, so we’re barely even paying rent. And I’ve turned one of the bedrooms into an office. If it hadn’t been for Sophia’s parents, we’d still be living in a one-bedroom apartment in Manassas, getting in each other’s hair all the time and working crap retail jobs. There wouldn’t have been any Sweets for the Sweet.”
“And then we wouldn’t have met you,” Sophia says, reappearing in the doorway. Her hair is gathered in a sleek ponytail, and her blue dress is short and cut low in the front, so he can’t help the way his eyes linger.
Danneel pours the wine and holds up her glass for a toast. “To new friends,” she says, and Nick clinks his glass against hers and then Sophia’s. The wine is cool and tart, and Nick holds the glass against his lips, sipping at it to get used to the taste.
“How’s legal alcohol consumption feel?” Danneel asks.
Nick smiles self-consciously. He doesn’t tell them he’s never tried the illegal kind. “It’s nice.”
“So where’s your family that they can’t hang out with you for your birthday?” Sophia asks, portioning out salad into bowls.
“Dallas,” Nick replies. “Mostly. My brother Joe’s in culinary school in New York, but everyone else is back in Texas. It’s a long way. And I couldn’t afford to fly home.”
He finds himself feeling light and happy in their company over dinner, these two women he barely even knows. They finish each other’s sentences in stories about Sweets for the Sweet, and it’s easy to get caught up in it. Finally, in a lull in the conversation, Sophia says, “So I think it’s time for cake.”
They make him shut his eyes, but he can hear the spark of a match, and his heart gives a little jump. It’s like being a kid again, even if his family isn’t around to sing him through it, and Danneel and Sophia couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.
“Open your eyes,” Danneel says, close to his ear, and he’s momentarily blinded by the candles before he gets himself together to blow.
The cake is three layers, all tipped at angles, and there are vines of green icing twisting down between them, sprays of ferns around the base, and a number of toy dinosaurs marching up the whole thing. “I didn’t know what you liked,” Sophia says, almost apologetically, “but I figured everybody likes dinosaurs.”
Nick laughs. It’s the kind of cake you’d make for a little kid, but it doesn’t make him feel too young like he does in the office all the time. It makes him feel like he’s in on a joke, because Danneel and Sophia are certainly old enough to decide for themselves if dinosaurs are a cool cake theme. “It’s awesome.”
“The bottom layer’s yellow cake and strawberry buttercream, the middle one is chocolate peanut butter, and the top is hazelnut praline. So, anything you like.”
He doesn’t even know where to start. He thinks about Sophia making three different kinds of cake batter to construct this thing for him, and he’s almost breathless with her generosity. “I want to try them all,” he says.
Danneel grins. “A boy after my own heart.”
Nick can’t help but grin back.
*
He lies again because now that he’s started he can’t really stop, but he tries to pretend Danneel and Sophia don’t hear him telling Mrs. Wheeler that he’s spending the night at David’s in the city because the metro is running slow and he doesn’t want to get caught somewhere far from home when the trains stop for the night. She tells him he’s being prudent. “Thank you, ma’am,” says Nick.
Danneel and Sophia don’t ask him about it. They just make up a bed for him on the living room couch, even though none of them are sleepy. Nick checks his levels in the bathroom because he doesn’t want them worrying about the poor diabetic kid, but he’s okay, even with the cake and the wine. He studies himself in the mirror, allowing himself a moment of silly introspection as he tries to figure out if he looks more grown up. He’s never had a birthday like this before, away from his family, with people he hasn’t known his whole life. He’s not even sure why Danneel and Sophia are doing this for him, but he must be doing something right in his new life in Washington to have friends like this.
*
In the morning, Nick wanders into the kitchen in his undershirt and his boxers, following the scent of scrambled eggs. He starts to say “good morning”, but even as bleary as he is, he knows Danneel and Sophia are kissing, nuzzling into each other in a way he can’t deny. Nick feels stupid and vulnerable and disgusted. He’s spent weeks buying cupcakes from them, making friends with them, thinking they were normal, and now…
He thanks them for dinner, and breakfast, and the cake, and the ride Sophia gives him to the Vienna metro station. He doesn’t say they’re doing something sick and wrong and against the God-given ways of men and women. But his stomach churns sickly the whole way back to Mrs. Wheeler’s, and a part of him wishes he just hadn’t seen.
*
On Monday at two, David asks if Nick’s going to go out for cupcakes. Nick should tell him that Danneel and Sophia are an affront to everything they work for and buying cupcakes from them is supporting the gay agenda of normalization. But he doesn’t. They were kind to him, and taking their business away seems cruel. “I don’t feel like it today,” he says. David is glad to get the office cupcake order in his stead, while Nick updates donor information in the database.
In fact, David is happy to do it again and again for the next two weeks. Finally, on the last Thursday in September, he sets a single cupcake box on Nick’s desk. “She wanted you to have this,” he says.
“Which one?” Nick asks.
“The red-haired one.” David hasn’t even bothered to learn their names. Which Nick hadn’t for the first month either, but somehow it seems like an unforgivable oversight when it’s David.
Nick doesn’t open the box until he gets home; David is too curious, and Nick doesn’t have any desire to answer questions. He’s not sure why he hasn’t said anything yet; there was a moment when he could have, when it was still soon enough that he could have decided he didn’t care about their business and outed them to the whole office. There probably wouldn’t even have been a scene. Quietly and without a fuss, they would have gone back to Dunkin Donuts for the afternoon sugar fix, and Sophia and Danneel would have had other customers to fill up the space. But he can’t say anything now. He doesn’t have any excuse for waiting, and it might make people wonder. It already makes him wonder.
There’s a note written inside the lid of the box. “It’s sugar-free. We miss you. Come out and see us again sometime. Love, Sophia & Danneel”. He stares at it for a while, feeling unaccountably guilty. He thanked them for the things they did for him, and he doesn’t owe them an explanation. He’s not obliged to associate with them any more than that. But somehow this perfectly valid logic doesn’t ease the guilty feeling.
*
One day Danneel is waiting outside the front door of the office, leaning on the railing at the bottom of the steps when he comes out. Nick thinks about walking right past her as though she’s not there, but that wouldn’t do either of them any good. He stands next to her with his hands in his jacket pockets instead.
“So, this is where you work,” she says, an ironic little smile pursing her lips as she looks up at the banner on the side of the building that says, “Marriage=One Man + One Woman. Do the Math.”
“Yeah,” replies Nick. He wants to get farther away, out of earshot of any of his coworkers. Danneel seems to sense it. She takes a few steps away down the block and waits for him to follow her.
“I wouldn’t have known just talking to you,” she says.
“Known what?”
“That you were a bigot.”
Nick bristles. “Just because I have different political beliefs than you do doesn’t mean you get to call me that.”
Danneel’s voice is low and calm. “What was political about coming to the house my girlfriend and I share and spending your birthday with us? Where was the politics in that?”
“I wouldn’t have if I had known.” It comes out biting somehow, as though they’d tricked him. But of course they hadn’t. “I didn’t know from just talking to you either.”
“That’s why it’s not politics. If you don’t want to be friends, say so. But I think there might be things we could learn from each other.”
Nick sighs. He shouldn’t. He should just cut ties while he can because it won’t be easier if he waits. But not even the people he spends eight hours a day in the office with had been more welcoming to him than Danneel and Sophia. “What do you want me to say?”
“Say you’re sorry for being an asshole and avoiding us for a month after Sophia made you the best birthday cake in the world. And say you’ll come out to see us again sometime. Like a real friend would.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have ignored you.”
“Thanks. Are you off Monday?”
“Columbus Day is a federal holiday. So, yeah. Why?”
“We’re doing the cake for a wedding up here Sunday, so we could get you on our way back out and you could spend the night and come back with us Monday.”
“What kind of wedding?”
“One man plus one woman. Your kind. Although our kind are perfectly legal in the District of Columbia.”
I know,” he replies. After being at the CDM for three months, he thinks he knows more about marriage law than he could ever need to. That doesn’t change anything about how he feels about the issue. “Civil law doesn’t have to dictate right and wrong.”
“Depends how you define your terms,” Danneel points out. “I don’t want to argue with you. But we’d certainly like to have you come. We don’t even have to talk about ‘politics.’” She finger-quotes it, and Nick takes the jab for what it is.
He considers. It would mean lying to Mrs. Wheeler again, an even bigger lie now that he knows the kind of people he’s associating with. “Sure. Can you pick me up, um, not at my house?”
Danneel nods. “Absolutely.” She flicks him a grim little smile. “Trust me, I know how that is.”
*
It’s so not different, it strikes Nick again, as he walks up the old house’s driveway. There’s nothing that would scream that this house, unlike its neighbors, is home to a particular kind of insidious political protest. Just a house, made in the same shape as many of the other houses, painted cheerfully yellow. Nick doesn’t pause before crossing the porch behind Danneel, but he thinks about how he came to be in this situation again, knowingly this time. He should be psyching himself up to be strong and preach to them about good and evil, but he’s not. He’s thinking how it smells sugary and warm in the house, even though Danneel and Sophia have been gone most of the day.
Sophia stifles a yawn against the back of her hand. “Do you drink coffee?” she asks Nick.
He nods, standing in the hall while Sophia trots off to put the put on water for coffee. He can’t exclaim about how lovely the house is and how nice their housekeeping is; he’s already been over that ground and there’s nothing left to say in his head, just buzzing uncertainty. “Thanks for coming,” says Danneel.
“Thanks for having me.”
“Come on. Sit down in the living room and stop hovering. We’ll have some coffee, then we can talk about whatever’s on your mind.”
“I’m not sure what to say,” Nick admits.
“Then we can talk about that.”
He sits down in the plush armchair in the living room, and Danneel takes over the couch, kicking off her shoes with a clunk and putting her feet up. Nick hunches forward, can’t seem to get comfortable.
“Coffee!” calls Sophia, carrying in a tray with a large French press and three cups. She sighs when she sees the miserable expression on Nick’s face. “Jesus Christ, this isn’t an inquisition. Cheer up.”
“How did you find out where I worked?” he asks.
“It was on your friend’s bag. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together.”
“It wasn’t hard to figure out why you hadn’t come back either.”
“I can’t change what I believe just because you believe something different,” Nick says, almost apologetically, watching as Sophia pushes the plunger on the French press.
“You’re looking at it as though you have some stake in our civil rights, even though they don’t impact you at all,” Danneel says strongly. “Your whole organization works on that premise. So let’s start with how this isn’t a belief issue.”
Nick takes a deep breath, steeling himself for the argument ahead. “Every murder committed doesn’t impact my life, but that doesn’t exactly make murder right.”
“Who are the victims of same-sex marriage? Beyond that, who are the victims of queer people continuing to exist in the world? No one dies for it.”
“But it tells people they are allowed to make wrong choices if they want, with no consequences.”
Sophia is staring at the coffee. “Define wrong, Nick.”
“You know what I mean. You must… there must be morals in your life. Things you know are right and wrong.”
“Nothing about my morals tells me these things are wrong.”
Nick can’t respond to that. They’re expecting him to pull out chapter and verse of the Bible. He can practically see it in their faces. And because of that he can’t. He can’t be the cliché they expect him to be. “What makes your morals better than mine?”
“I don’t think people should be punished for who they love,” Danneel says. “I feel good about that.”
“But what about people who say they love little kids, or dogs, or anything else? Are you proud of that?”
“It’s different. You know exactly how it’s different.”
“I don’t. You say it’s important not to judge people for who they love, but people do horrible things sometimes. I’m just being consistent.” Danneel sighs, and he thinks maybe he’s gaining ground because she’s not just glaring at him.
“A kid can’t consent. A dog can’t consent. But you’re acting as if somehow each individual adult in a relationship is either an abuser or a victim, even though they would be all good if they’d just picked another adult of the opposite sex. There’s nothing consistent about that.”
It takes him a minute to work through that one. “I’m just saying they’re making an immoral choice. And even if both of them are adults making an immoral choice, well, adults do that sometimes.”
“I think you need to consider the real basis of your morals,” says Sophia heavily. “I don’t think you mean to hurt anyone. But you do.”
“I think everyone is capable of doing the right thing.”
“Have you ever tried looking at what people might be doing already that’s the right thing? You didn’t have to know anything about us personally to buy cupcakes from us. You didn’t assume we were doing anything wrong.”
Nick likes the hypotheticals better. No matter what, it’s hard to think that people who are generous and kind with him are in the wrong. He’s used to showier, meaner forms of vice, like the man from his church growing up who had been asked to leave after he was unfaithful to his wife. No one could doubt that his homosexuality hurt his whole family. “But some people are. Some people lie and cheat and do horrible things in order to fulfill their… desires.”
“That’s not just gay people,” Danneel points out. “That’s everyone.”
“You don’t have to make any decisions right now,” Sophia says kindly. “But think about it. Things like this aren’t simple. The last guy I dated was a pretty terrible person.”
“You dated a guy? So you’re not…”
“I’m not a lesbian, but that’s my point. It’s all more flexible than you’re allowing for in your head.”
Nick remembers Danneel saying they didn’t have to talk about politics, and it’s getting clearer that there are things that don’t qualify that Nick needs to think about.
Danneel puts on a movie, an old Rock Hudson comedy, and Nick’s pretty sure it’s because Hudson was gay and she’s trying to make a point, but he enjoys it anyway. They stay up late talking about school, how Danneel wants to get a business degree so she can run Sweets for the Sweet better, the pastry classes Sophia took that she plans to use more if they can just get more catering jobs. Nick talks about his school, a tiny private college he attended on a scholarship because it fit his family’s values.
“The kind of place where they avoid mentioning evolution, right?” Danneel asks.
“I don’t know,” Nick hedges. “I never took a biology class, so it didn’t come up.”
“What about before college?”
“They taught it as a theory. Everything’s a theory. I didn’t think much about it.”
“Such a different world you live in,” Danneel says. The ironic little smile on her face says she’s making fun of him, but she softens as the night goes on.
Nick can’t help watching the two of them together, the way Danneel lays her feet across Sophia’s lap as though it’s the most natural thing in the world, the way Sophia curls a hand around her ankle in response. They don’t seem self-conscious about it, and Nick starts to feel ashamed of the unease that whirls in his stomach when he looks at them. They don’t look like people who have anything to hide.
He’s not surprised by the way they touch each other in the morning this time, the way Sophia kisses Danneel on the cheek while she cooks French toast. There are men who fantasize about this sort of thing, two beautiful women together, but Nick’s never been one of them. Still, he can’t help the way his eyes catch on their curves, tank tops and sleep bottoms rumpled and clinging. It will be hard to go back to work after this, to look his coworkers in the face and know that he won’t give up on Sophia and Danneel.
*
He hates the way he thinks about them sometimes, the way that lust creeps up on him without him even noticing. He understands temptation, he understands the sin he is committing just by thinking about them, but that doesn’t stop him imagining them together, picturing what it must be like. They’re not especially modest, but Nick can handle that. Plenty of girls wore short shorts and tank tops in the Texas summer, and Nick isn’t completely sheltered. But he hardly had reason to think about those girls naked, touching each other in the way Danneel and Sophia probably do every night. He can’t blame them for it, when he strokes his dick in the quiet of Mrs. Wheeler’s guest bedroom. It’s his fault for giving into it, letting his body lead him to immoral thoughts. The slide is so easy, but when he comes into the lonely cup of his own hand, both their names tangled in his mouth, he feels ashamed after. Not just because homosexuality is a sin, but because they’re his friends, and they deserve his respect.
*
The next time he goes out to Chantilly, Sophia declares that she’s going to teach him to make soufflé. She’d asked him before if he knew how to cook, and he’d admitted that he could boil spaghetti and make toast, but that was about it. After all, Joe was the one who’d always cared about that sort of thing.
“You are seriously so deer in the headlights right now,” Sophia tells him, setting out a pair of mixing bowls on the counter. “It’s really not that scary.”
“I’m not scared,” Nick argues. “I just don’t want to accidentally burn down your house.”
“We’ve got a fire extinguisher in the closet under the stairs. You’ll be fine. Now get me the milk, eggs, and butter from the fridge and we’ll get started.”
At least she’s not asking for anything complicated. He’s seen the extra refrigerator and freezer they have out in the garage, where they keep all the stuff they use for Sweets for the Sweet, pastes and syrups and flash-frozen fruit, all kinds of stuff he’s never even heard of.
“So first we’re going to heat up some milk in a pan,” Sophia tells him, clicking on the stove. “Do you know what the secret is to heating milk?”
He’s surprised to realize he does. “Heat it slowly and stir it so it doesn’t scorch.”
Sophia looks surprised too, and that’s gratifying. “Exactly. You’re totally lying about not being able to cook, aren’t you?”
“My brother and I had a bad experience making hot cocoa once. The smell was definitely memorable.”
“Your brother in culinary school?” She hands him a spoon. “Stir that.”
Nick does. “I think he’s moved beyond that kind of thing by now.”
“I hope so. What’s he like?”
“Joe? I don’t know. He’s funny. He was always the class clown, making everybody laugh, but he never really knew what he wanted to do. And my parents really got on his case after he finished high school. It was hard.” He hasn’t told them anything real about his family, anything besides endearing kid stuff. But it’s easier having it be just him and Sophia, Danneel upstairs working on the books for the truck. “He moved out right after he graduated, and he didn’t… he barely talked to my parents for about six months. He started working in the kitchen at this tapas place, and he got really into making food, into these weird new flavor combinations, so every time I went over to his place, he’d be like, ‘Try this, try this.’ But it was all really good, really creative, and he was just happy, in this way he hadn’t been in a while.”
“So he decided to go to culinary school? That milk’s about to boil. Pour that in here now.”
“Well, he had to wait a couple of years, while he saved up money, found loans and grants and stuff. My parents wouldn’t pay for it, or they said they wouldn’t. I think they figured he probably wouldn’t really do it. But then when he did, they really came through.” It starts to feel like airing too much dirty laundry, and he trails off. “I didn’t agree with it, leaving Joe hanging just because they didn’t like what he was doing.”
“Families are hard. Get Danneel to tell you about hers sometime. You’re not responsible for the things your parents do. Especially not when you’re, what, fifteen?”
“Something like that. I just. I’m just glad he’s happy now.” Whatever their parents thought, Nick’s always looked up to Joe a little, listened to his advice even when it was stupid. They shared a bedroom until their oldest brother, Kevin, went to college, and Nick missed his constant presence even now, although he’d been out of the house for four years, and Joe had been gone for even longer than that.
He realizes Sophia’s looking at him, stirring idly at a pan full of milk, butter, and flour with a little smile on her face. “He sounds like a pretty cool guy. I hope maybe we can meet him sometime.”
Nick nods. “I bet you’d like him.”
“He’ll be pretty damn impressed if you tell him you’ve learned how to separate eggs by the next time you see him.”
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
Sophia cracks an egg against the edge of the countertop, and sifts the yolk and the white into two separate bowls on the counter. She does it so fast he can hardly even follow. When he tells her that, she takes his hands to guide him through it, the careful flip flop from hand to hand, and that may be even more distracting, Sophia’s body pressed to his. And they still have four more eggs to do.
She adds cheese, grated apples, walnuts, and the egg yolks to the flour and milk on the stove and then says, “Now for the fun part. You ever feel like beating something?”
“I don’t know how to answer that, I don’t think.”
“Well, here’s a hand mixer. Keep beating it until it gets stiff. If you’re into that.” She makes a face at him, and Nick can’t keep himself from blushing.
He’s shocked when the soufflé doesn’t collapse in the oven, doesn’t burn, and doesn’t turn out gross. “I’m not surprised at all,” Sophia says. “You’ve got cooking in your blood, right?”
He snorts. “Yeah. I’m sure that’s what does it.”
Danneel grins. “We’ll make something of you yet. Good job, Nick.”
Nick takes another bite of soufflé. “Thanks.”
*
They're playing Never Have I Ever. Danneel and Sophia look at him like he's an alien when Nick says this game was never a part of his college experience, along with beer pong and flip cup. "We'll teach you," Danneel says cheerfully. "Your innocence will keep you sober on this one."
"Is that a good thing?" Nick asks. "This doesn't sound like a game I want to remember in the morning.”
"You'll be fine," Sophia says. "We won't even pick on you. Not this time."
"You can even go first," Danneel offers, handing him a bottle of Corona.
"What do I do?" Nick says. "What kind of thing do I say?"
"Whatever you want. Pets, international travel, sex is always most popular."
He's not even drunk, so he has no excuse. "I've never had sex."
They look at him like he's an alien again. "Never?" Sophia says. "Are you sure?"
"I think I'd know!" He’s more amused than embarrassed. Spending time out here, he’s starting to get pretty used to their shock and awe.
Danneel raises her beer and takes a swig. “You really are just as good a kid as you make yourself out to be, aren’t you?”
“Probably. What does that even mean?”
“No drinking, no drugs, no sex, home by curfew every night without so much as a speeding ticket.”
Nick shrugs. “I guess so.”
Sophia leans forward in her chair. “I’m sorry. I’m still trying to wrap my head around this never had sex thing.”
Nick feels suddenly more self-conscious. “I didn’t grow up with people who were having sex all the time. Some people were, but a lot of us weren’t. I went to Christian schools and stuff. It wasn’t like there were, you know, orgies on the weekends.”
Danneel seems to find it hilarious that he even knows the word “orgy” and she can’t seem to stop laughing. Sophia says, “But you’re so pretty.”
Nick scrubs a hand through his hair. “That’s not the word I’d use.”
“Then you’re choosing your words poorly. I don’t care if you were cloistered, you chose not to have sex. It didn’t just happen by accident.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” He thinks about Selena, his only real girlfriend in college, the way they’d ended up teasing each other half by accident as they were making out in her dorm room, the door cracked open to abide by campus policy. He wanted more, but he’d never let himself so much as ask for it. He had a lot of self-control, and so did she, but he didn’t want to test it. “Why does that matter?”
“Because if you were talking to somebody besides us, somebody in your office or your favorite brother or whoever, you’d be proud you’d held out that way. You wouldn’t just shrug it off like a lack of peer pressure. You can be honest if you like being a virgin. We’ve seen the ring.”
Nick touches the place where his purity ring would sit on his knuckle. He wears it to work because it’s the kind of place they understand, but he’s never worn it around Danneel and Sophia, except apparently by accident. “I don’t know if I like it. It’s how things have always been.” There has been more uncertainty in Nick’s life since he met Danneel and Sophia than at almost any other time; they keep telling him to question his assumptions, and he’s starting to try. “I feel good about my self-control. But that’s something anyone could feel, not just…” It’s embarrassingly hard to say “virgins”.
“If you don’t want to have sex yet, that’s fine. No one should make you. And you don’t have to take your ring off like a married guy at a singles’ night.”
He can’t quite explain how it feels different, how he thinks differently about himself in the context of this friendship, but he does. He’s not sure he wants his chastity ring when he’s with Danneel and Sophia; he’s not sure it means anything he wants for his life. “I’m not married,” he says. “It’s not a lie if I have my ring off. It’s just something I’m trying out.”
“Well, we’ll like you no matter what,” Sophia tells him. “So, about this game we were supposedly playing… I have a lot more beer here.”
“And a lot less innocence to go with it,” Danneel says.
“Never have I ever had sex in a truck bed,” Sophia replies, and Danneel tosses her head defiantly as she takes a drink.
“You know, if you’re going to throw out sex shit like that, you know it’s only going to work on me. I’m pretty sure Nick’s never even gotten to first base in a truck bed.”
“I’ve never had a truck,” Nick says.
“That’s how you play the game,” Danneel tells him, and she takes another drink.
By the time they’ve been around three times, Nick’s cheeks feel like they might burst into flames, and Danneel and Sophia seem more interested in teasing each other about their sexual experiences than getting Nick drunk. And Nick’s starting to wish he was drunk. They’re so casual about it, “I’ve never let someone finger me in the bleachers during a football game,” “Well, I’ve never let someone finger me during cheerleading practice.”
“You know, I could just leave you guys alone,” Nick says, when Sophia is laughing so hard he can’t even tell what she’s saying, except it’s got the words “pool table” in it.
“Hey, no,” Danneel tells him. “We’ll stop. You need to experience this game as a young person in America.”
“I’m still not convinced about that.”
“We’ll just have to try a new subject. Never have I ever been to Mexico.”
Nick takes a drink. Mexico wasn’t nearly as far when you were living in Texas, even if Dallas was still a pretty long way from the border.
“See? Not totally inexperienced,” Sophia says. She doesn’t drink either. “I’ve never been to college full-time.”
“I’ve never been to a bar,” Nick says.
“You’re not doing a good job of celebrating your legality,” Sophia points out at the same time Danneel says, “We could change that.”
“I’m okay,” Nick says, holding up his beer. “But thanks.”
“I’ve never had a dog,” Danneel says wistfully. Nick drinks.
“I’m allergic,” Sophia explains. “All little furry animals make me sneeze. So I’ve never had a cat either.”
“So dogs not cats, huh, Nick?” Danneel asks. “Afraid of a little pussy?”
Sophia whacks her with a couch cushion. “That was terrible.”
“I’m not afraid of anything,” Nick says boldly, grinning at both of them. He doesn’t mean anything by it, but it’s fun to play along just a little bit instead of them always thinking they were offending his delicate sensibilities. Inexperienced he might be, but even kids at little Christian colleges knew how to make pussy jokes.
He laughs so hard that night over one beer that he’s hoarse in the morning, and David pushes a cough drop at him in the all staff prayer meeting that afternoon, a tradition they practice one Sunday a month. “There’s something going around,” David says sympathetically, even though his “maybe you should stay home tomorrow” is obviously a ploy to catch up with Nick’s productivity level. No matter how much the consequences of Nick’s job are starting to weigh on him, he’s still good at it. He doesn’t know how to be anything less.
David tries to ask him where he’s been, why he hasn’t ever come out with them after work, as though socializing with Nick is suddenly acceptable and the short answer isn’t that Nick has never come because he was never asked. “I’ve been hanging out with some other friends,” Nick tells him. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Friends from church?” David persists. They’re leaving the office, stepping out into the cooling afternoon, and Nick shrugs into his jacket as though he hasn’t even heard the question.
He doesn’t lie. “I’ll see you around, David,” Nick says, turning towards the metro, knowing that the five other interns will be coming up behind him in a minute. He walks quickly with his chin up, and thinks about taking out his phone to have something to do with his hands. He doesn’t really call Danneel or Sophia unless they call him first, but he knows Joe never has his phone on him, and the other numbers in his phone are college friends he barely speaks to and his parents. He can hear the pack of other interns drawing up close as he waits to cross the street. He sends a quick “how’s it going?” text off to Sophia before the light changes.
“Still recovering,” she replies almost immediately. He’s afraid that will be the end of the conversation, but then the phone buzzes again. “whatcha up to?”
“office prayer meeting just ended. going home.”
“did you pray for us?”
Nick is shamefully aware that he sat through pleas for God to change the hearts of non-believers who want to destroy the sanctity of marriage. He clasped his hands and kept his head down and mouthed “amen” when he couldn’t bear to really say it because he didn’t want those things to be so. He just wanted people to understand. “no. i think you’re fine on your own.”
Her reply is just “<3” and Nick stashes his phone as the pack of interns reaches the metro escalators. He’s still smiling. He can’t help it.
*
There’s something inevitable about when it finally happens. There’s always been some tension among the three of them, and Nick doesn’t even think that was all in his head. He got to know Sophia and Danneel in the first place because they were pretty, and he can admit to his own shallowness there. Because they’re friends now, and he’s told them plenty of things about himself he’s never bothered to tell anyone but Joe before.
So when Danneel kisses him one night after dinner, and Sophia follows her to it before he can even take a breath, he doesn’t actually fall over in shock. “We have a proposal for you,” Danneel says, still too close and warm at his side, her hand closing gently on his knee.
“I can’t,” Nick blurts out, not even waiting to hear it, because whatever they’re going to say, he’s pretty sure it will go against something he believes in, maybe just about everything he believes in. And he knows he’ll still be hard pressed to say no.
“You could sleep with us,” Danneel says anyway, and Nick shuts his eyes. He can’t help the places his mind goes with that. He’s started to be one of those men who fantasizes about two women together, and he can’t help it, being around Danneel and Sophia all the time. “But you don’t have to. We just like you. We think there are things the three of us can learn together.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just what it’s meant this whole time,” Sophia tells him. “Except maybe with more kissing.”
“But people don’t do that. They don’t just…”
“There are a lot of different kinds of relationships, Nick. You know you haven’t seen all of them. You knew that as soon as you got out here.”
“But that’s different. That’s not…” Every once in a while, something about polygamy comes through the CDM, even though the political charge to that issue is lower. And every time, there is a woman or a child or more than one of each talking about abuse, talking about how polygamy made her powerless in her own life. As horrifying as the anecdotes of their ex-gay speakers were about the dangers of the homosexual lifestyle, the polygamy stories were always worse. He didn’t want to be involved in anything like that.
“What are you thinking?” Danneel asks, taking her hand off his knee and leaning around to look him in the face.
“Have you done this before?” he asks, even though that’s not what he’s been thinking at all. “Do you, like, find guys on the street and invite them in to…”
Danneel’s eyebrows go straight up. “Seriously? That’s what you’re going with? Of all the things you could say, all of a sudden you’re worried that we’re too slutty for you. That’s a dick move.” There’s a quirk to her mouth that says she’s not really mad, but it still feels awful because he doesn’t think that. He’s never thought something like that before in the three months he’s been hanging out with them.
He takes a breath and reins himself back in. “I’m sorry.” But now his mind is spinning off before he can stop it, imagining the two of them with a stranger, luring him in like every invitation to sin Nick’s ever heard about in a Sunday sermon. He knows they’re not like that, that Danneel and Sophia are his friends, not cardboard cutouts of vice. He looks back and forth between the two of them again. “I still don’t think I understand.”
“It doesn’t have to look like anything else,” Sophia says. “Whatever you’ve got bouncing around in your head right now, it doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t have to feel dirty. It’s just us, getting to know each other in a new way.”
“Why?”
“Because we like you. Because we both like you and we’d both be happy to be with you. In whatever way we can.”
“We’re already friends,” he says meekly.
“We’re hoping we can stay friends,” Danneel tells him. “I know I haven’t always been understanding with you with your shit about gay people. But you’re a good guy, and you’re worth knowing better, if that’s something you want.”
“But no sex.” It’s a slippery slope, and he’s already on it going down fast. He shouldn’t even try to bargain, but he knows that even if he gives in to his feelings in this way, it won’t be as bad, or as hard to get out of, if he doesn’t sleep with them.
“No sex if you don’t want sex. That’s a rule in our house all the time. Consent is the number one thing either of us wants.”
Nick hesitates, tries to think about something besides sex with Danneel and Sophia, the softness of their bodies pressed up close against him. He can’t concentrate. “I need to think about it. I’m not sure I can do that. But I’d… I’d like to.”
“Good enough for me,” says Danneel.
“Ditto,” says Sophia.
*
Joe comes to get him the weekend before Christmas. The office is going to be closed all week anyway, since so many people have a long way to go to be with their families for the holidays, and Nick’s gotten to a point where he thinks it’ll be good to get away from Washington and get his head together. He’s been spending so many nights with Danneel and Sophia that even Mrs. Wheeler’s credulity is wearing thin, and there’s so much he can’t say to his coworkers anymore when they ask how his weekends have been. He’s ready to get as close as possible to the way things were before he left for Washington, and he’s agreed with Danneel and Sophia that they probably won’t even hear from him until after new year’s.
“Is your family home really that much of a communications black hole?” Sophia had asked him, when he pointed this out.
“I’m just not sure I can talk to you when they’re around,” Nick had answered honestly.
Sophia had seemed to understand that, although she had still glanced at Danneel as she nodded. “Don’t let them make you feel guilty,” Danneel had told him. “No matter what you do or don’t decide to say, don’t let them make you feel guilty. It’s never worth it.”
Danneel still won’t talk about her family to him, not in anything but the most general terms, so all he knows is it’s bad and she hates having any reason to go out there. She’s avoided family Christmases for at least three years, and when she talks to her family at all, it seems to be just short, cryptic phone calls. They’re both going to Sophia’s parents’ new place down in Florida this year, and Sophia seems pleased as anything that she doesn’t have to send Danneel off to her mysterious family. Nick hopes that one of these days, Danneel will trust him enough to tell him the truth about them, whatever it may be. Thinking that their views on sexuality must be even worse than what he’d grown up with is a little bit nauseating; there are so many things Nick won’t be able to say at home, and he can’t imagine dealing with even stricter boundaries.
Seeing Joe though, after three months of nothing at all, is just as good as he wants it to be, and when Joe rings the doorbell at Mrs. Wheeler’s, Nick has to resist the urge to hug him too tightly forever. Joe’s hair is growing out from the almost military cut he had in the summer, and he’s wearing the puffy coat Mom bought him as proof against New York winters. His face lights up when he sees Nick, and it’s pretty much everything Nick could ever think to ask for.
Joe has a lot of friends at culinary school, and the stories he spins about them last him and Nick all the way out 66 to 81 south through Virginia: the time someone thought Joe was hitting on his girlfriend and they had to leave the bar before there was a fight -- only to have the guy's friend tell them he didn't even have a girlfriend, he was just too drunk to remember; the time they were butchering pigs and Joe's friend Isaac chopped off half of his finger; the time they went sledding on enormous cookie sheets and the metal froze to their fingers as they were carrying them back. It was all stuff that would have been horrifying if it had happened to Nick, but Joe made it funny and lighthearted (and apparently Isaac got his finger reattached). Nick leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes, letting the sound of his brother's voice wash over him.
"You're gonna sleep through the best part of my story," Joe protests, nudging him over the gearshift.
"Am not," replies Nick.
"Whatever. If my life is too boring for the likes of you, why don't you tell me something about yours?"
Nick shrugs and straightens up. "It's not that exciting."
"You can't just be working all the time, dude. Come on, you've been practically silent about your entire life for months. What happened to the other interns? Weren’t you gonna hang out with the other interns, not just stay home and go to bed early like you’re forty?”
“The other interns are kind of assholes.”
Joe’s head snaps around, an almost comical expression of surprise on his face. “Nicholas Jerry Jonas! If I had any soap, I’d wash your mouth out right now.”
“Yeah, I can smell that you don’t have any soap.” Nick grins.
“Shut up. I’m seriously, I don’t know, appalled. I am appalled that you would use that word.”
It’s less funny this time, and Nick gives a little sigh. “You use it all the time. Asshole, asshole, asshole, that’s practically all you say.”
“I like douchebag too.” Joe nudges him with his elbow. “So what happened to you? You seem different. I didn’t notice at first, but you’re… I can’t imagine you swearing six months ago. H mm, oh my gosh, maybe you’re not as tense either.” He can see Joe thinking it through, squinting behind his glasses, and Nick’s heart is beating too fast. If Joe just guesses, it won’t be like Nick told him. Then Joe bursts out, “You got laid, didn’t you, baby brother?” He grins like he’s hilarious, like he expects Nick to balk and punch him or something.
“No,” says Nick, but he draws it out a little, so maybe Joe will figure out to keep asking.
Joe’s grin dissolves, and he turns serious again, focusing on Nick for real this time. “But there’s a girl?”
“Sort of.”
“We don’t have to do this like twenty questions. You could just tell me.”
Nick hesitates. “There are two girls.”
For a second he thinks Joe’s going to drive them straight off the side of the road, and Nick’s prepared to grab for the wheel if he has to. “Two girls? What happened to your passionately forthright and not cheatery soul?”
“It’s not cheating. It’s just… there are two of them.” He knows the word is “polyamory” - Danneel and Sophia throw it around casually enough - but he would feel ridiculous saying it to Joe, when he’s still not sure the concept makes any sense at all.
“At the same time?”
“It’s not sex. It’s not like… porn or anything.” He can’t tell Joe how glad he is that Joe’s immediate reaction wasn’t disgust and disapproval the way their parents’ would be, might still be.
“But there are two of them. At the same time. How did that even happen? You work all the time. At a place that probably doesn’t have girls willing to date you in twos, unless things have changed a ton since the last time I went to church.”
“They sell cupcakes. By the office.”
“You don’t even eat cupcakes.”
“I picked them up for other people. And then we got to talking and they made sugar free ones just for me. It was nice.”
Joe takes a deep breath, and the glee disappears from his voice. “So you’re dating both of them? And you feel okay about that?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing at all. I thought they were gay, Joe. They were a couple first, and I… I wanted to be disgusted by it. I wanted to think what they were doing was wrong. But I couldn’t. And I started questioning everything. It was like, all the fundamentals stopped seeming so fundamental because nothing I knew prepared me for people like Danneel and Sophia.” Joe’s staring straight ahead, frowning, and Nick’s so afraid he’s ashamed of Nick’s doubts. “What?”
“Nothing,” Joe replies. “You just didn’t tell me.”
“You didn’t ask.”
“So it didn’t bother you that they were gay? Or that you thought they were?”
“Of course it bothered me! I work at a place that’s supposed to prevent the legalization of gay marriage at all cost. And now I feel like maybe I’m making a huge mistake. Either way, maybe I’m making a huge mistake. But Danneel and Sophia are good people. They love each other and they want to do the right thing.” Warmth wells in his chest just thinking about them.
“And you’re okay now, that they’re a couple? Think carefully. Your answer is important.” Joe’s voice is sort of high and weird.
“Yeah, I am. I have to be.”
Joe nods to himself, shoulders tense. “Then I need to tell you something. Like, I really need to and I really need it to be okay with you, okay?”
Nick nods, although he’s almost paralyzed with waiting for what Joe’s going to say, stiff-backed with dawning suspicion.
“I’m gay,” Joe says. The car is totally silent, and Nick feels caught in it, like even if he knew what to say, he couldn’t. It’s all the hardest parts of what he felt the first time he saw Danneel and Sophia kissing, not the righteous indignation that came easily, but all the other stuff, the vertiginous sense that his world was shifting and he could move with it or be crushed.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” he asks, to confirm what he already knows.
“I didn’t ask if you were dating two girls, you didn’t ask if I was gay. Sometimes it’s hard to know what the right questions are. And I needed you to not just hand me some flyers for cures and never talk to me again.”
Nick nods. He deserved all of that. “Did you just…” He searches for the right word. “How long have you known for?”
“A long time,” Joe says, and it sounds so lonely. He imagines Joe keeping that secret from him, afraid of what Nick might say. He thinks how Danneel must have felt the same way with her family, how there may be hundreds or thousands of other people in families like theirs feeling just that way. It’s nauseating.
He squeezes Joe’s shoulder because he can’t hug him while he’s driving. “I love you.”
Joe smiles at him. “Love you too.” He forces a laugh. “So I guess we’ve both got stuff to keep quiet about over Christmas dinner.”
“Definitely,” agrees Nick. He swallows down lingering shock and discomfort. “So do you have a boyfriend? Or two?”
“I’m not a player like you are, Nicholas. It’s only one.” Joe’s smile changes, goes soft and lopsided, and Nick knows he’s in for more stories, different kinds of stories. He can’t help but be grateful that something good has come out of his confession. He wants to know everything he can about Joe’s life suddenly, and hearing about Joe’s boyfriend is so much less gory than most of the stories Joe’s told him so far. It’s as though Joe’s rewriting the last year of his life before Nick’s eyes, filling in gaps Nick had never bothered to wonder about before.
“You’re much better at lying about this stuff than I am,” Nick says, almost awed by it, even though the past misdirection makes him feel sick.
Joe’s smile is bitter. “Guess we’ll both be getting some practice at that over the holidays, huh?”
Nick nods, resigned, his chest thick with a mess of unresolved feelings.
*
Mrs. Wheeler calls the day after Christmas. Nick doesn’t even talk to her; he’s at the movies with Joe and has his phone off, so he doesn’t get Mom’s panicked voicemail for an extra 90 minutes. “Mrs. Wheeler has to leave for Kenya the day after tomorrow. The head of the school she used to run passed away unexpectedly, and there’s no one else who can take over. We have to find you another place to live as soon as possible. Please call me back.”
He nearly hyperventilates in the middle of the mall. Then Joe says, “Didn’t you say your girlfriends have an extra bedroom?”
part two
Title: Like Sugar to My Heart
Fandom: CW/Disney RPF
Pairing: Sophia Bush/Danneel Harris, Nick Jonas/Sophia Bush/Danneel Harris, past Sophia Bush/Chad Michael Murray
Rating: NC-17 just barely
Word count: 14,000
Warnings: homophobia, religious bigotry, implied past domestic violence
Summary: Nick loves his internship at an organization lobbying in support of traditional marriage. He's in Washington DC, working for a cause he believes in, and every afternoon he gets cupcakes for the office from the two pretty girls who park their food truck around the corner. What could be better? But the more time he spends with Danneel and Sophia, the more he starts to question his strict views on relationships and sexuality, and the more he starts to wonder if he's really on the right path at all.
Notes: I am eternally grateful to balefully for listening to me hash out this idea in the first place, to mediaville and novaberry for looking it over and encouraging me, and to wutendeskind for her graphics and mix and all-around awesomeness. <33 I want to write ALL THE PORNY FOLLOW-UP to this story OMG. Title from Mandy Moore.
wutendeskind's fabulous art and mix is here.
“You never get anything for yourself, do you, Nick?” Danneel asks, leaning out of the window a little to hand Nick his cardboard box of cupcakes, the v-neck of her shirt giving him a clear view of the tanned slopes of her breasts.
Nick shakes his head. “I’m diabetic.”
Danneel smiles, quick and warm. “Guess it’s time to start a sugar-free line then, huh?”
Nick looks at the box, the Sweets for the Sweet logo stamped on its lid, the little truck trailing a cupcake-shaped cloud of exhaust. He wonders, not for the first time, if she’s flirting with him. “I’d buy one if you did.”
“Good,” says Danneel. “See you next week, Nick.” She winks at him, and he shuffles sideways to let the next customer get to the window.
They’ve been on a first-name basis for the past three days, although he’s been getting cupcakes from the truck practically since he started his internship back in July. Danneel and her partner Sophia park their truck just a few blocks from the Capitol Hill headquarters of the Coalition in Defense of Marriage during the afternoons, and Nick, being the youngest of the interns, ended up in charge of office cupcake runs. He doesn’t mind it; Danneel and Sophia are friendly (not to mention pretty) and it’s nice to get out of the office for a little while, even in the thick of the summer humidity.
It starts to rain hard just as he reaches the office door, and the back of his shirt is nearly soaked through by the time he gets his swipe card out, although he manages to shield the cupcakes. Mr. Price, the president of CDM, is in a black mood over the imminent repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and even a double caramel coconut cupcake doesn’t keep him from snapping at Nick about the “neat and tidy appearance” line of the dress code. David, Nick’s rival for the title of most efficient intern, smirks up from his desk.
“How were the cupcake ladies today?” David asks, as Nick sits down across from him.
“Fine,” replies Nick, shivering now in the blast of the A/C. He’s glad it’s Friday, that two days of empty weekend stretch out of front of him. If it’s nice, he thinks he’ll go down to the Mall again and force himself through more of the National Gallery. He has no natural appreciation of art, but he thinks he should. And the sculpture garden is lushly green on sunny days, even if he doesn’t understand the giant typewriter eraser. He looks out the window at the steaming streets, the rain pounding greyly against the row houses across the way, and thinks, not for the first time, how strange it is to finally be in this city, only blocks from the Capitol.
*
Mrs. Wheeler is out when he gets back to the house after work, coated in sweat from the walk from the metro. The brief rain hadn’t broken the humidity, and Nick showers and changes into a t-shirt and jeans. Mrs. Wheeler is an old friend of his aunt’s, a retired youth mission leader, and he’s a little embarrassed by her generosity, letting a stranger live in the guest room of her little brick house in Arlington rent-free. There’s a note on the refrigerator saying she’s gone to visit a sick friend across town and leaving instructions for heating the casserole in the fridge.
Nick resents her mothering a little, even as he’s grateful for it. He’s almost twenty-one, and he knows how to use the oven on his own. If he were home, he would call a friend and see about catching a movie or something on a Friday night, but even after six weeks, he barely knows anyone in Washington. The other interns are all a few years older than he is, and they treat him like a precocious child whenever they can, and although the church he attends has a strong youth group for the high-schoolers, there are no other young adults. He wonders idly how old Danneel and Sophia are, how they spend their Friday nights.
*
On Monday at two, Nick stands through the line at the Sweets for the Sweet truck with his usual list. Sophia grins at him. “I’ve got something special for you today,” she says, putting his order into a box and then adding another, smaller container on top. “Danneel said you were diabetic.”
Nick stutters in surprise. “Yeah.” He gestures at the little box. “How much do I owe you for that one?”
Sophia shakes her head. “It’s a prototype, so no charge. You just have to come back and tell us how you liked it.”
“Thank you.” On his way back to the office, he notices that the box says “For Nick” on its lid, a heart drawn next to his name. He feels flustered, and he tears off the box lid and stuffs it into his pocket, as though it’s somehow incriminating. The cupcake is so delicious that he swipes up the crumbs from the wrapper with his finger when he’s finished.
David looks at him skeptically. “I’m not qualified to do any first aid if you go into a diabetic coma.”
“It’s sugar-free,” Nick tells him. “They just started selling them.”
“Must be your lucky day.”
Nick shuffles some crumbs off his desk. “Guess so.” He has no idea why he’s blushing.
*
“It’s my birthday on Friday,” he tells Sophia. He’s not even sure how it came up, except that there was no line and she seemed to feel like talking.
“Oh my gosh! That’s exciting. How old are you going to be?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Ooh.” Sophia looks him up and down, considering, and Nick wonders if she thought he was older or younger. “So what are your plans for the big day? Coworkers taking you on a pub-crawl? Party with the girlfriend?”
Nick is taken aback to realize she’s the first person to ask that, and disappointed in himself for the answer he has to give. “I don’t really have any plans. Yet.”
“Impossible. On your 21st birthday, you have to. You have to.” She leans out over the counter, hanging halfway out the window to talk to him. “You could come to our place, me and Danneel’s, even bring some friends if you want.”
Nick can’t admit that he doesn’t have any friends in this part of the country. “Where do you live?”
“Chantilly. It’s a ways out, but it’s nice. I’m serious that you should come. I can bake a cake - I’m pretty good at that, if you hadn’t heard - and we could hang out someplace besides on this street corner.”
“I’ll let you know,” Nick says, uncertain. “Thanks.”
He wishes he had someone to talk to about what you do when a woman you hardly know invites you to her house and offers to make you a cake. He knows he wants to go, but at the same time, he has no idea if that’s an appropriate thing to want. On the train ride home, he thinks about calling Joe, but there’s no service when he gets his phone out, and by the time he gets home, he’s decided he’ll do it regardless. It’s an adventure, and at the age of nearly 21, he deserves to have an adventure.
*
It’s possible he should take it as a warning sign when he finds himself lying to Mrs. Wheeler about his plans. But Nick knows he can’t explain how traveling thirty miles to spend the evening with women whose last names he doesn’t even know is the best way to celebrate his birthday. He says he’ll be with people from the office, knowing she trusts all of them on principle, since the CDM is a Christian organization. The truth is that none of them even seem to remember his birthday until Jenny from accounting walks by while he’s on the phone with his mom outside, and he watches her detour to the drug store for a card. He doesn’t mind that no one notices otherwise.
And after work he meets Danneel and the truck up the street, the window locked up tight for the day, all the storage bins in the back strapped closed. She grins from behind her sunglasses. “Bet you’ve never ridden in one of these things before.”
Nick shakes his head.
“You may hope you never have to again,” she says ominously, and as she lurches into the flow of traffic towards the bridge, he thinks she may be right. The truck clatters and rattles anytime they hit the slightest bump, and he can feel the weight of it on the turns, even though he’s not the one driving. The highway is packed, and the stop-and-go makes him nervous, but Danneel seems unconcerned. “Have you ever come out this way?” she asks, passing the exit to the beltway, after which the traffic eases just a little.
Nick shakes his head. “I don’t really get out much. I mean, to other towns, farther out of the city.”
“One suburb is a lot like the others. I’m thinking you don’t have a car.”
“My, um, landlady lets me borrow hers sometimes. But it’s not mine.” Landlady sounds more grown-up than “my aunt’s friend who I live with,” and he wants to sound grown-up. He’s 21 today, after all.
“DC’s a pretty good place to live if you don’t have a car.”
“I live in Arlington,” Nick says, not wanting to misrepresent himself.
Danneel shrugs. “There, too.”
She turns up the radio after that so he doesn’t have to make any more attempts at small talk.
*
The air conditioning in the front seat is spotty at best, and Nick’s back is tacky with sweat by the time they pull into the driveway of a little yellow house on a quiet cul-de-sac. He doesn’t really look like someone going to his own birthday party, at least, not any of the other birthday parties he’s had: pizza and movies with his friends from school or church, family dinners at nice restaurants.
Even on the front porch, the smell of cooking spills out of the house, the warmth of baking mixing with the warm evening outside. Danneel pushes through the front door, calling out, “We’re here,” toward the back of the house.
Sophia appears at the end of the hall, flushed, her hair piled messily on top of her head, and Nick’s eyes fix on the falling strap of her tank top, the bare curve of her shoulder. “I forgot about dinner,” she says sheepishly. “But I thought you might want something before the cake.”
Danneel grins. “There’s plenty of booze.”
“Besides that.” Sophia comes over to kiss him on the cheek. “Happy birthday, Nick.”
“Thanks. You didn’t have to go to all this trouble for me.”
“Sure, we did. It’s your birthday. Come on in and sit down.”
Danneel follows him into the kitchen, looking skeptical, but everything else looks a lot more ready than Sophia does. There’s a salad on the table in between a pair of tall candles, and a bottle of wine waiting. It’s very grown-up looking.
“I’m going to…” Sophia gestures vaguely at herself.
“Put on your party clothes,” Danneel tells her. “I’ll keep Nick amused. Is the cake okay?”
Sophia nods. “It’s perfect.”
Nick sort of exhausted his small talk on the way down, but he says some polite things about the house until Danneel jumps in and starts telling him about it. “It was Sophia’s parents’ until they retired to Florida two years ago. But they owned it outright, so we’re barely even paying rent. And I’ve turned one of the bedrooms into an office. If it hadn’t been for Sophia’s parents, we’d still be living in a one-bedroom apartment in Manassas, getting in each other’s hair all the time and working crap retail jobs. There wouldn’t have been any Sweets for the Sweet.”
“And then we wouldn’t have met you,” Sophia says, reappearing in the doorway. Her hair is gathered in a sleek ponytail, and her blue dress is short and cut low in the front, so he can’t help the way his eyes linger.
Danneel pours the wine and holds up her glass for a toast. “To new friends,” she says, and Nick clinks his glass against hers and then Sophia’s. The wine is cool and tart, and Nick holds the glass against his lips, sipping at it to get used to the taste.
“How’s legal alcohol consumption feel?” Danneel asks.
Nick smiles self-consciously. He doesn’t tell them he’s never tried the illegal kind. “It’s nice.”
“So where’s your family that they can’t hang out with you for your birthday?” Sophia asks, portioning out salad into bowls.
“Dallas,” Nick replies. “Mostly. My brother Joe’s in culinary school in New York, but everyone else is back in Texas. It’s a long way. And I couldn’t afford to fly home.”
He finds himself feeling light and happy in their company over dinner, these two women he barely even knows. They finish each other’s sentences in stories about Sweets for the Sweet, and it’s easy to get caught up in it. Finally, in a lull in the conversation, Sophia says, “So I think it’s time for cake.”
They make him shut his eyes, but he can hear the spark of a match, and his heart gives a little jump. It’s like being a kid again, even if his family isn’t around to sing him through it, and Danneel and Sophia couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.
“Open your eyes,” Danneel says, close to his ear, and he’s momentarily blinded by the candles before he gets himself together to blow.
The cake is three layers, all tipped at angles, and there are vines of green icing twisting down between them, sprays of ferns around the base, and a number of toy dinosaurs marching up the whole thing. “I didn’t know what you liked,” Sophia says, almost apologetically, “but I figured everybody likes dinosaurs.”
Nick laughs. It’s the kind of cake you’d make for a little kid, but it doesn’t make him feel too young like he does in the office all the time. It makes him feel like he’s in on a joke, because Danneel and Sophia are certainly old enough to decide for themselves if dinosaurs are a cool cake theme. “It’s awesome.”
“The bottom layer’s yellow cake and strawberry buttercream, the middle one is chocolate peanut butter, and the top is hazelnut praline. So, anything you like.”
He doesn’t even know where to start. He thinks about Sophia making three different kinds of cake batter to construct this thing for him, and he’s almost breathless with her generosity. “I want to try them all,” he says.
Danneel grins. “A boy after my own heart.”
Nick can’t help but grin back.
*
He lies again because now that he’s started he can’t really stop, but he tries to pretend Danneel and Sophia don’t hear him telling Mrs. Wheeler that he’s spending the night at David’s in the city because the metro is running slow and he doesn’t want to get caught somewhere far from home when the trains stop for the night. She tells him he’s being prudent. “Thank you, ma’am,” says Nick.
Danneel and Sophia don’t ask him about it. They just make up a bed for him on the living room couch, even though none of them are sleepy. Nick checks his levels in the bathroom because he doesn’t want them worrying about the poor diabetic kid, but he’s okay, even with the cake and the wine. He studies himself in the mirror, allowing himself a moment of silly introspection as he tries to figure out if he looks more grown up. He’s never had a birthday like this before, away from his family, with people he hasn’t known his whole life. He’s not even sure why Danneel and Sophia are doing this for him, but he must be doing something right in his new life in Washington to have friends like this.
*
In the morning, Nick wanders into the kitchen in his undershirt and his boxers, following the scent of scrambled eggs. He starts to say “good morning”, but even as bleary as he is, he knows Danneel and Sophia are kissing, nuzzling into each other in a way he can’t deny. Nick feels stupid and vulnerable and disgusted. He’s spent weeks buying cupcakes from them, making friends with them, thinking they were normal, and now…
He thanks them for dinner, and breakfast, and the cake, and the ride Sophia gives him to the Vienna metro station. He doesn’t say they’re doing something sick and wrong and against the God-given ways of men and women. But his stomach churns sickly the whole way back to Mrs. Wheeler’s, and a part of him wishes he just hadn’t seen.
*
On Monday at two, David asks if Nick’s going to go out for cupcakes. Nick should tell him that Danneel and Sophia are an affront to everything they work for and buying cupcakes from them is supporting the gay agenda of normalization. But he doesn’t. They were kind to him, and taking their business away seems cruel. “I don’t feel like it today,” he says. David is glad to get the office cupcake order in his stead, while Nick updates donor information in the database.
In fact, David is happy to do it again and again for the next two weeks. Finally, on the last Thursday in September, he sets a single cupcake box on Nick’s desk. “She wanted you to have this,” he says.
“Which one?” Nick asks.
“The red-haired one.” David hasn’t even bothered to learn their names. Which Nick hadn’t for the first month either, but somehow it seems like an unforgivable oversight when it’s David.
Nick doesn’t open the box until he gets home; David is too curious, and Nick doesn’t have any desire to answer questions. He’s not sure why he hasn’t said anything yet; there was a moment when he could have, when it was still soon enough that he could have decided he didn’t care about their business and outed them to the whole office. There probably wouldn’t even have been a scene. Quietly and without a fuss, they would have gone back to Dunkin Donuts for the afternoon sugar fix, and Sophia and Danneel would have had other customers to fill up the space. But he can’t say anything now. He doesn’t have any excuse for waiting, and it might make people wonder. It already makes him wonder.
There’s a note written inside the lid of the box. “It’s sugar-free. We miss you. Come out and see us again sometime. Love, Sophia & Danneel”. He stares at it for a while, feeling unaccountably guilty. He thanked them for the things they did for him, and he doesn’t owe them an explanation. He’s not obliged to associate with them any more than that. But somehow this perfectly valid logic doesn’t ease the guilty feeling.
*
One day Danneel is waiting outside the front door of the office, leaning on the railing at the bottom of the steps when he comes out. Nick thinks about walking right past her as though she’s not there, but that wouldn’t do either of them any good. He stands next to her with his hands in his jacket pockets instead.
“So, this is where you work,” she says, an ironic little smile pursing her lips as she looks up at the banner on the side of the building that says, “Marriage=One Man + One Woman. Do the Math.”
“Yeah,” replies Nick. He wants to get farther away, out of earshot of any of his coworkers. Danneel seems to sense it. She takes a few steps away down the block and waits for him to follow her.
“I wouldn’t have known just talking to you,” she says.
“Known what?”
“That you were a bigot.”
Nick bristles. “Just because I have different political beliefs than you do doesn’t mean you get to call me that.”
Danneel’s voice is low and calm. “What was political about coming to the house my girlfriend and I share and spending your birthday with us? Where was the politics in that?”
“I wouldn’t have if I had known.” It comes out biting somehow, as though they’d tricked him. But of course they hadn’t. “I didn’t know from just talking to you either.”
“That’s why it’s not politics. If you don’t want to be friends, say so. But I think there might be things we could learn from each other.”
Nick sighs. He shouldn’t. He should just cut ties while he can because it won’t be easier if he waits. But not even the people he spends eight hours a day in the office with had been more welcoming to him than Danneel and Sophia. “What do you want me to say?”
“Say you’re sorry for being an asshole and avoiding us for a month after Sophia made you the best birthday cake in the world. And say you’ll come out to see us again sometime. Like a real friend would.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have ignored you.”
“Thanks. Are you off Monday?”
“Columbus Day is a federal holiday. So, yeah. Why?”
“We’re doing the cake for a wedding up here Sunday, so we could get you on our way back out and you could spend the night and come back with us Monday.”
“What kind of wedding?”
“One man plus one woman. Your kind. Although our kind are perfectly legal in the District of Columbia.”
I know,” he replies. After being at the CDM for three months, he thinks he knows more about marriage law than he could ever need to. That doesn’t change anything about how he feels about the issue. “Civil law doesn’t have to dictate right and wrong.”
“Depends how you define your terms,” Danneel points out. “I don’t want to argue with you. But we’d certainly like to have you come. We don’t even have to talk about ‘politics.’” She finger-quotes it, and Nick takes the jab for what it is.
He considers. It would mean lying to Mrs. Wheeler again, an even bigger lie now that he knows the kind of people he’s associating with. “Sure. Can you pick me up, um, not at my house?”
Danneel nods. “Absolutely.” She flicks him a grim little smile. “Trust me, I know how that is.”
*
It’s so not different, it strikes Nick again, as he walks up the old house’s driveway. There’s nothing that would scream that this house, unlike its neighbors, is home to a particular kind of insidious political protest. Just a house, made in the same shape as many of the other houses, painted cheerfully yellow. Nick doesn’t pause before crossing the porch behind Danneel, but he thinks about how he came to be in this situation again, knowingly this time. He should be psyching himself up to be strong and preach to them about good and evil, but he’s not. He’s thinking how it smells sugary and warm in the house, even though Danneel and Sophia have been gone most of the day.
Sophia stifles a yawn against the back of her hand. “Do you drink coffee?” she asks Nick.
He nods, standing in the hall while Sophia trots off to put the put on water for coffee. He can’t exclaim about how lovely the house is and how nice their housekeeping is; he’s already been over that ground and there’s nothing left to say in his head, just buzzing uncertainty. “Thanks for coming,” says Danneel.
“Thanks for having me.”
“Come on. Sit down in the living room and stop hovering. We’ll have some coffee, then we can talk about whatever’s on your mind.”
“I’m not sure what to say,” Nick admits.
“Then we can talk about that.”
He sits down in the plush armchair in the living room, and Danneel takes over the couch, kicking off her shoes with a clunk and putting her feet up. Nick hunches forward, can’t seem to get comfortable.
“Coffee!” calls Sophia, carrying in a tray with a large French press and three cups. She sighs when she sees the miserable expression on Nick’s face. “Jesus Christ, this isn’t an inquisition. Cheer up.”
“How did you find out where I worked?” he asks.
“It was on your friend’s bag. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together.”
“It wasn’t hard to figure out why you hadn’t come back either.”
“I can’t change what I believe just because you believe something different,” Nick says, almost apologetically, watching as Sophia pushes the plunger on the French press.
“You’re looking at it as though you have some stake in our civil rights, even though they don’t impact you at all,” Danneel says strongly. “Your whole organization works on that premise. So let’s start with how this isn’t a belief issue.”
Nick takes a deep breath, steeling himself for the argument ahead. “Every murder committed doesn’t impact my life, but that doesn’t exactly make murder right.”
“Who are the victims of same-sex marriage? Beyond that, who are the victims of queer people continuing to exist in the world? No one dies for it.”
“But it tells people they are allowed to make wrong choices if they want, with no consequences.”
Sophia is staring at the coffee. “Define wrong, Nick.”
“You know what I mean. You must… there must be morals in your life. Things you know are right and wrong.”
“Nothing about my morals tells me these things are wrong.”
Nick can’t respond to that. They’re expecting him to pull out chapter and verse of the Bible. He can practically see it in their faces. And because of that he can’t. He can’t be the cliché they expect him to be. “What makes your morals better than mine?”
“I don’t think people should be punished for who they love,” Danneel says. “I feel good about that.”
“But what about people who say they love little kids, or dogs, or anything else? Are you proud of that?”
“It’s different. You know exactly how it’s different.”
“I don’t. You say it’s important not to judge people for who they love, but people do horrible things sometimes. I’m just being consistent.” Danneel sighs, and he thinks maybe he’s gaining ground because she’s not just glaring at him.
“A kid can’t consent. A dog can’t consent. But you’re acting as if somehow each individual adult in a relationship is either an abuser or a victim, even though they would be all good if they’d just picked another adult of the opposite sex. There’s nothing consistent about that.”
It takes him a minute to work through that one. “I’m just saying they’re making an immoral choice. And even if both of them are adults making an immoral choice, well, adults do that sometimes.”
“I think you need to consider the real basis of your morals,” says Sophia heavily. “I don’t think you mean to hurt anyone. But you do.”
“I think everyone is capable of doing the right thing.”
“Have you ever tried looking at what people might be doing already that’s the right thing? You didn’t have to know anything about us personally to buy cupcakes from us. You didn’t assume we were doing anything wrong.”
Nick likes the hypotheticals better. No matter what, it’s hard to think that people who are generous and kind with him are in the wrong. He’s used to showier, meaner forms of vice, like the man from his church growing up who had been asked to leave after he was unfaithful to his wife. No one could doubt that his homosexuality hurt his whole family. “But some people are. Some people lie and cheat and do horrible things in order to fulfill their… desires.”
“That’s not just gay people,” Danneel points out. “That’s everyone.”
“You don’t have to make any decisions right now,” Sophia says kindly. “But think about it. Things like this aren’t simple. The last guy I dated was a pretty terrible person.”
“You dated a guy? So you’re not…”
“I’m not a lesbian, but that’s my point. It’s all more flexible than you’re allowing for in your head.”
Nick remembers Danneel saying they didn’t have to talk about politics, and it’s getting clearer that there are things that don’t qualify that Nick needs to think about.
Danneel puts on a movie, an old Rock Hudson comedy, and Nick’s pretty sure it’s because Hudson was gay and she’s trying to make a point, but he enjoys it anyway. They stay up late talking about school, how Danneel wants to get a business degree so she can run Sweets for the Sweet better, the pastry classes Sophia took that she plans to use more if they can just get more catering jobs. Nick talks about his school, a tiny private college he attended on a scholarship because it fit his family’s values.
“The kind of place where they avoid mentioning evolution, right?” Danneel asks.
“I don’t know,” Nick hedges. “I never took a biology class, so it didn’t come up.”
“What about before college?”
“They taught it as a theory. Everything’s a theory. I didn’t think much about it.”
“Such a different world you live in,” Danneel says. The ironic little smile on her face says she’s making fun of him, but she softens as the night goes on.
Nick can’t help watching the two of them together, the way Danneel lays her feet across Sophia’s lap as though it’s the most natural thing in the world, the way Sophia curls a hand around her ankle in response. They don’t seem self-conscious about it, and Nick starts to feel ashamed of the unease that whirls in his stomach when he looks at them. They don’t look like people who have anything to hide.
He’s not surprised by the way they touch each other in the morning this time, the way Sophia kisses Danneel on the cheek while she cooks French toast. There are men who fantasize about this sort of thing, two beautiful women together, but Nick’s never been one of them. Still, he can’t help the way his eyes catch on their curves, tank tops and sleep bottoms rumpled and clinging. It will be hard to go back to work after this, to look his coworkers in the face and know that he won’t give up on Sophia and Danneel.
*
He hates the way he thinks about them sometimes, the way that lust creeps up on him without him even noticing. He understands temptation, he understands the sin he is committing just by thinking about them, but that doesn’t stop him imagining them together, picturing what it must be like. They’re not especially modest, but Nick can handle that. Plenty of girls wore short shorts and tank tops in the Texas summer, and Nick isn’t completely sheltered. But he hardly had reason to think about those girls naked, touching each other in the way Danneel and Sophia probably do every night. He can’t blame them for it, when he strokes his dick in the quiet of Mrs. Wheeler’s guest bedroom. It’s his fault for giving into it, letting his body lead him to immoral thoughts. The slide is so easy, but when he comes into the lonely cup of his own hand, both their names tangled in his mouth, he feels ashamed after. Not just because homosexuality is a sin, but because they’re his friends, and they deserve his respect.
*
The next time he goes out to Chantilly, Sophia declares that she’s going to teach him to make soufflé. She’d asked him before if he knew how to cook, and he’d admitted that he could boil spaghetti and make toast, but that was about it. After all, Joe was the one who’d always cared about that sort of thing.
“You are seriously so deer in the headlights right now,” Sophia tells him, setting out a pair of mixing bowls on the counter. “It’s really not that scary.”
“I’m not scared,” Nick argues. “I just don’t want to accidentally burn down your house.”
“We’ve got a fire extinguisher in the closet under the stairs. You’ll be fine. Now get me the milk, eggs, and butter from the fridge and we’ll get started.”
At least she’s not asking for anything complicated. He’s seen the extra refrigerator and freezer they have out in the garage, where they keep all the stuff they use for Sweets for the Sweet, pastes and syrups and flash-frozen fruit, all kinds of stuff he’s never even heard of.
“So first we’re going to heat up some milk in a pan,” Sophia tells him, clicking on the stove. “Do you know what the secret is to heating milk?”
He’s surprised to realize he does. “Heat it slowly and stir it so it doesn’t scorch.”
Sophia looks surprised too, and that’s gratifying. “Exactly. You’re totally lying about not being able to cook, aren’t you?”
“My brother and I had a bad experience making hot cocoa once. The smell was definitely memorable.”
“Your brother in culinary school?” She hands him a spoon. “Stir that.”
Nick does. “I think he’s moved beyond that kind of thing by now.”
“I hope so. What’s he like?”
“Joe? I don’t know. He’s funny. He was always the class clown, making everybody laugh, but he never really knew what he wanted to do. And my parents really got on his case after he finished high school. It was hard.” He hasn’t told them anything real about his family, anything besides endearing kid stuff. But it’s easier having it be just him and Sophia, Danneel upstairs working on the books for the truck. “He moved out right after he graduated, and he didn’t… he barely talked to my parents for about six months. He started working in the kitchen at this tapas place, and he got really into making food, into these weird new flavor combinations, so every time I went over to his place, he’d be like, ‘Try this, try this.’ But it was all really good, really creative, and he was just happy, in this way he hadn’t been in a while.”
“So he decided to go to culinary school? That milk’s about to boil. Pour that in here now.”
“Well, he had to wait a couple of years, while he saved up money, found loans and grants and stuff. My parents wouldn’t pay for it, or they said they wouldn’t. I think they figured he probably wouldn’t really do it. But then when he did, they really came through.” It starts to feel like airing too much dirty laundry, and he trails off. “I didn’t agree with it, leaving Joe hanging just because they didn’t like what he was doing.”
“Families are hard. Get Danneel to tell you about hers sometime. You’re not responsible for the things your parents do. Especially not when you’re, what, fifteen?”
“Something like that. I just. I’m just glad he’s happy now.” Whatever their parents thought, Nick’s always looked up to Joe a little, listened to his advice even when it was stupid. They shared a bedroom until their oldest brother, Kevin, went to college, and Nick missed his constant presence even now, although he’d been out of the house for four years, and Joe had been gone for even longer than that.
He realizes Sophia’s looking at him, stirring idly at a pan full of milk, butter, and flour with a little smile on her face. “He sounds like a pretty cool guy. I hope maybe we can meet him sometime.”
Nick nods. “I bet you’d like him.”
“He’ll be pretty damn impressed if you tell him you’ve learned how to separate eggs by the next time you see him.”
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
Sophia cracks an egg against the edge of the countertop, and sifts the yolk and the white into two separate bowls on the counter. She does it so fast he can hardly even follow. When he tells her that, she takes his hands to guide him through it, the careful flip flop from hand to hand, and that may be even more distracting, Sophia’s body pressed to his. And they still have four more eggs to do.
She adds cheese, grated apples, walnuts, and the egg yolks to the flour and milk on the stove and then says, “Now for the fun part. You ever feel like beating something?”
“I don’t know how to answer that, I don’t think.”
“Well, here’s a hand mixer. Keep beating it until it gets stiff. If you’re into that.” She makes a face at him, and Nick can’t keep himself from blushing.
He’s shocked when the soufflé doesn’t collapse in the oven, doesn’t burn, and doesn’t turn out gross. “I’m not surprised at all,” Sophia says. “You’ve got cooking in your blood, right?”
He snorts. “Yeah. I’m sure that’s what does it.”
Danneel grins. “We’ll make something of you yet. Good job, Nick.”
Nick takes another bite of soufflé. “Thanks.”
*
They're playing Never Have I Ever. Danneel and Sophia look at him like he's an alien when Nick says this game was never a part of his college experience, along with beer pong and flip cup. "We'll teach you," Danneel says cheerfully. "Your innocence will keep you sober on this one."
"Is that a good thing?" Nick asks. "This doesn't sound like a game I want to remember in the morning.”
"You'll be fine," Sophia says. "We won't even pick on you. Not this time."
"You can even go first," Danneel offers, handing him a bottle of Corona.
"What do I do?" Nick says. "What kind of thing do I say?"
"Whatever you want. Pets, international travel, sex is always most popular."
He's not even drunk, so he has no excuse. "I've never had sex."
They look at him like he's an alien again. "Never?" Sophia says. "Are you sure?"
"I think I'd know!" He’s more amused than embarrassed. Spending time out here, he’s starting to get pretty used to their shock and awe.
Danneel raises her beer and takes a swig. “You really are just as good a kid as you make yourself out to be, aren’t you?”
“Probably. What does that even mean?”
“No drinking, no drugs, no sex, home by curfew every night without so much as a speeding ticket.”
Nick shrugs. “I guess so.”
Sophia leans forward in her chair. “I’m sorry. I’m still trying to wrap my head around this never had sex thing.”
Nick feels suddenly more self-conscious. “I didn’t grow up with people who were having sex all the time. Some people were, but a lot of us weren’t. I went to Christian schools and stuff. It wasn’t like there were, you know, orgies on the weekends.”
Danneel seems to find it hilarious that he even knows the word “orgy” and she can’t seem to stop laughing. Sophia says, “But you’re so pretty.”
Nick scrubs a hand through his hair. “That’s not the word I’d use.”
“Then you’re choosing your words poorly. I don’t care if you were cloistered, you chose not to have sex. It didn’t just happen by accident.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” He thinks about Selena, his only real girlfriend in college, the way they’d ended up teasing each other half by accident as they were making out in her dorm room, the door cracked open to abide by campus policy. He wanted more, but he’d never let himself so much as ask for it. He had a lot of self-control, and so did she, but he didn’t want to test it. “Why does that matter?”
“Because if you were talking to somebody besides us, somebody in your office or your favorite brother or whoever, you’d be proud you’d held out that way. You wouldn’t just shrug it off like a lack of peer pressure. You can be honest if you like being a virgin. We’ve seen the ring.”
Nick touches the place where his purity ring would sit on his knuckle. He wears it to work because it’s the kind of place they understand, but he’s never worn it around Danneel and Sophia, except apparently by accident. “I don’t know if I like it. It’s how things have always been.” There has been more uncertainty in Nick’s life since he met Danneel and Sophia than at almost any other time; they keep telling him to question his assumptions, and he’s starting to try. “I feel good about my self-control. But that’s something anyone could feel, not just…” It’s embarrassingly hard to say “virgins”.
“If you don’t want to have sex yet, that’s fine. No one should make you. And you don’t have to take your ring off like a married guy at a singles’ night.”
He can’t quite explain how it feels different, how he thinks differently about himself in the context of this friendship, but he does. He’s not sure he wants his chastity ring when he’s with Danneel and Sophia; he’s not sure it means anything he wants for his life. “I’m not married,” he says. “It’s not a lie if I have my ring off. It’s just something I’m trying out.”
“Well, we’ll like you no matter what,” Sophia tells him. “So, about this game we were supposedly playing… I have a lot more beer here.”
“And a lot less innocence to go with it,” Danneel says.
“Never have I ever had sex in a truck bed,” Sophia replies, and Danneel tosses her head defiantly as she takes a drink.
“You know, if you’re going to throw out sex shit like that, you know it’s only going to work on me. I’m pretty sure Nick’s never even gotten to first base in a truck bed.”
“I’ve never had a truck,” Nick says.
“That’s how you play the game,” Danneel tells him, and she takes another drink.
By the time they’ve been around three times, Nick’s cheeks feel like they might burst into flames, and Danneel and Sophia seem more interested in teasing each other about their sexual experiences than getting Nick drunk. And Nick’s starting to wish he was drunk. They’re so casual about it, “I’ve never let someone finger me in the bleachers during a football game,” “Well, I’ve never let someone finger me during cheerleading practice.”
“You know, I could just leave you guys alone,” Nick says, when Sophia is laughing so hard he can’t even tell what she’s saying, except it’s got the words “pool table” in it.
“Hey, no,” Danneel tells him. “We’ll stop. You need to experience this game as a young person in America.”
“I’m still not convinced about that.”
“We’ll just have to try a new subject. Never have I ever been to Mexico.”
Nick takes a drink. Mexico wasn’t nearly as far when you were living in Texas, even if Dallas was still a pretty long way from the border.
“See? Not totally inexperienced,” Sophia says. She doesn’t drink either. “I’ve never been to college full-time.”
“I’ve never been to a bar,” Nick says.
“You’re not doing a good job of celebrating your legality,” Sophia points out at the same time Danneel says, “We could change that.”
“I’m okay,” Nick says, holding up his beer. “But thanks.”
“I’ve never had a dog,” Danneel says wistfully. Nick drinks.
“I’m allergic,” Sophia explains. “All little furry animals make me sneeze. So I’ve never had a cat either.”
“So dogs not cats, huh, Nick?” Danneel asks. “Afraid of a little pussy?”
Sophia whacks her with a couch cushion. “That was terrible.”
“I’m not afraid of anything,” Nick says boldly, grinning at both of them. He doesn’t mean anything by it, but it’s fun to play along just a little bit instead of them always thinking they were offending his delicate sensibilities. Inexperienced he might be, but even kids at little Christian colleges knew how to make pussy jokes.
He laughs so hard that night over one beer that he’s hoarse in the morning, and David pushes a cough drop at him in the all staff prayer meeting that afternoon, a tradition they practice one Sunday a month. “There’s something going around,” David says sympathetically, even though his “maybe you should stay home tomorrow” is obviously a ploy to catch up with Nick’s productivity level. No matter how much the consequences of Nick’s job are starting to weigh on him, he’s still good at it. He doesn’t know how to be anything less.
David tries to ask him where he’s been, why he hasn’t ever come out with them after work, as though socializing with Nick is suddenly acceptable and the short answer isn’t that Nick has never come because he was never asked. “I’ve been hanging out with some other friends,” Nick tells him. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Friends from church?” David persists. They’re leaving the office, stepping out into the cooling afternoon, and Nick shrugs into his jacket as though he hasn’t even heard the question.
He doesn’t lie. “I’ll see you around, David,” Nick says, turning towards the metro, knowing that the five other interns will be coming up behind him in a minute. He walks quickly with his chin up, and thinks about taking out his phone to have something to do with his hands. He doesn’t really call Danneel or Sophia unless they call him first, but he knows Joe never has his phone on him, and the other numbers in his phone are college friends he barely speaks to and his parents. He can hear the pack of other interns drawing up close as he waits to cross the street. He sends a quick “how’s it going?” text off to Sophia before the light changes.
“Still recovering,” she replies almost immediately. He’s afraid that will be the end of the conversation, but then the phone buzzes again. “whatcha up to?”
“office prayer meeting just ended. going home.”
“did you pray for us?”
Nick is shamefully aware that he sat through pleas for God to change the hearts of non-believers who want to destroy the sanctity of marriage. He clasped his hands and kept his head down and mouthed “amen” when he couldn’t bear to really say it because he didn’t want those things to be so. He just wanted people to understand. “no. i think you’re fine on your own.”
Her reply is just “<3” and Nick stashes his phone as the pack of interns reaches the metro escalators. He’s still smiling. He can’t help it.
*
There’s something inevitable about when it finally happens. There’s always been some tension among the three of them, and Nick doesn’t even think that was all in his head. He got to know Sophia and Danneel in the first place because they were pretty, and he can admit to his own shallowness there. Because they’re friends now, and he’s told them plenty of things about himself he’s never bothered to tell anyone but Joe before.
So when Danneel kisses him one night after dinner, and Sophia follows her to it before he can even take a breath, he doesn’t actually fall over in shock. “We have a proposal for you,” Danneel says, still too close and warm at his side, her hand closing gently on his knee.
“I can’t,” Nick blurts out, not even waiting to hear it, because whatever they’re going to say, he’s pretty sure it will go against something he believes in, maybe just about everything he believes in. And he knows he’ll still be hard pressed to say no.
“You could sleep with us,” Danneel says anyway, and Nick shuts his eyes. He can’t help the places his mind goes with that. He’s started to be one of those men who fantasizes about two women together, and he can’t help it, being around Danneel and Sophia all the time. “But you don’t have to. We just like you. We think there are things the three of us can learn together.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just what it’s meant this whole time,” Sophia tells him. “Except maybe with more kissing.”
“But people don’t do that. They don’t just…”
“There are a lot of different kinds of relationships, Nick. You know you haven’t seen all of them. You knew that as soon as you got out here.”
“But that’s different. That’s not…” Every once in a while, something about polygamy comes through the CDM, even though the political charge to that issue is lower. And every time, there is a woman or a child or more than one of each talking about abuse, talking about how polygamy made her powerless in her own life. As horrifying as the anecdotes of their ex-gay speakers were about the dangers of the homosexual lifestyle, the polygamy stories were always worse. He didn’t want to be involved in anything like that.
“What are you thinking?” Danneel asks, taking her hand off his knee and leaning around to look him in the face.
“Have you done this before?” he asks, even though that’s not what he’s been thinking at all. “Do you, like, find guys on the street and invite them in to…”
Danneel’s eyebrows go straight up. “Seriously? That’s what you’re going with? Of all the things you could say, all of a sudden you’re worried that we’re too slutty for you. That’s a dick move.” There’s a quirk to her mouth that says she’s not really mad, but it still feels awful because he doesn’t think that. He’s never thought something like that before in the three months he’s been hanging out with them.
He takes a breath and reins himself back in. “I’m sorry.” But now his mind is spinning off before he can stop it, imagining the two of them with a stranger, luring him in like every invitation to sin Nick’s ever heard about in a Sunday sermon. He knows they’re not like that, that Danneel and Sophia are his friends, not cardboard cutouts of vice. He looks back and forth between the two of them again. “I still don’t think I understand.”
“It doesn’t have to look like anything else,” Sophia says. “Whatever you’ve got bouncing around in your head right now, it doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t have to feel dirty. It’s just us, getting to know each other in a new way.”
“Why?”
“Because we like you. Because we both like you and we’d both be happy to be with you. In whatever way we can.”
“We’re already friends,” he says meekly.
“We’re hoping we can stay friends,” Danneel tells him. “I know I haven’t always been understanding with you with your shit about gay people. But you’re a good guy, and you’re worth knowing better, if that’s something you want.”
“But no sex.” It’s a slippery slope, and he’s already on it going down fast. He shouldn’t even try to bargain, but he knows that even if he gives in to his feelings in this way, it won’t be as bad, or as hard to get out of, if he doesn’t sleep with them.
“No sex if you don’t want sex. That’s a rule in our house all the time. Consent is the number one thing either of us wants.”
Nick hesitates, tries to think about something besides sex with Danneel and Sophia, the softness of their bodies pressed up close against him. He can’t concentrate. “I need to think about it. I’m not sure I can do that. But I’d… I’d like to.”
“Good enough for me,” says Danneel.
“Ditto,” says Sophia.
*
Joe comes to get him the weekend before Christmas. The office is going to be closed all week anyway, since so many people have a long way to go to be with their families for the holidays, and Nick’s gotten to a point where he thinks it’ll be good to get away from Washington and get his head together. He’s been spending so many nights with Danneel and Sophia that even Mrs. Wheeler’s credulity is wearing thin, and there’s so much he can’t say to his coworkers anymore when they ask how his weekends have been. He’s ready to get as close as possible to the way things were before he left for Washington, and he’s agreed with Danneel and Sophia that they probably won’t even hear from him until after new year’s.
“Is your family home really that much of a communications black hole?” Sophia had asked him, when he pointed this out.
“I’m just not sure I can talk to you when they’re around,” Nick had answered honestly.
Sophia had seemed to understand that, although she had still glanced at Danneel as she nodded. “Don’t let them make you feel guilty,” Danneel had told him. “No matter what you do or don’t decide to say, don’t let them make you feel guilty. It’s never worth it.”
Danneel still won’t talk about her family to him, not in anything but the most general terms, so all he knows is it’s bad and she hates having any reason to go out there. She’s avoided family Christmases for at least three years, and when she talks to her family at all, it seems to be just short, cryptic phone calls. They’re both going to Sophia’s parents’ new place down in Florida this year, and Sophia seems pleased as anything that she doesn’t have to send Danneel off to her mysterious family. Nick hopes that one of these days, Danneel will trust him enough to tell him the truth about them, whatever it may be. Thinking that their views on sexuality must be even worse than what he’d grown up with is a little bit nauseating; there are so many things Nick won’t be able to say at home, and he can’t imagine dealing with even stricter boundaries.
Seeing Joe though, after three months of nothing at all, is just as good as he wants it to be, and when Joe rings the doorbell at Mrs. Wheeler’s, Nick has to resist the urge to hug him too tightly forever. Joe’s hair is growing out from the almost military cut he had in the summer, and he’s wearing the puffy coat Mom bought him as proof against New York winters. His face lights up when he sees Nick, and it’s pretty much everything Nick could ever think to ask for.
Joe has a lot of friends at culinary school, and the stories he spins about them last him and Nick all the way out 66 to 81 south through Virginia: the time someone thought Joe was hitting on his girlfriend and they had to leave the bar before there was a fight -- only to have the guy's friend tell them he didn't even have a girlfriend, he was just too drunk to remember; the time they were butchering pigs and Joe's friend Isaac chopped off half of his finger; the time they went sledding on enormous cookie sheets and the metal froze to their fingers as they were carrying them back. It was all stuff that would have been horrifying if it had happened to Nick, but Joe made it funny and lighthearted (and apparently Isaac got his finger reattached). Nick leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes, letting the sound of his brother's voice wash over him.
"You're gonna sleep through the best part of my story," Joe protests, nudging him over the gearshift.
"Am not," replies Nick.
"Whatever. If my life is too boring for the likes of you, why don't you tell me something about yours?"
Nick shrugs and straightens up. "It's not that exciting."
"You can't just be working all the time, dude. Come on, you've been practically silent about your entire life for months. What happened to the other interns? Weren’t you gonna hang out with the other interns, not just stay home and go to bed early like you’re forty?”
“The other interns are kind of assholes.”
Joe’s head snaps around, an almost comical expression of surprise on his face. “Nicholas Jerry Jonas! If I had any soap, I’d wash your mouth out right now.”
“Yeah, I can smell that you don’t have any soap.” Nick grins.
“Shut up. I’m seriously, I don’t know, appalled. I am appalled that you would use that word.”
It’s less funny this time, and Nick gives a little sigh. “You use it all the time. Asshole, asshole, asshole, that’s practically all you say.”
“I like douchebag too.” Joe nudges him with his elbow. “So what happened to you? You seem different. I didn’t notice at first, but you’re… I can’t imagine you swearing six months ago. H mm, oh my gosh, maybe you’re not as tense either.” He can see Joe thinking it through, squinting behind his glasses, and Nick’s heart is beating too fast. If Joe just guesses, it won’t be like Nick told him. Then Joe bursts out, “You got laid, didn’t you, baby brother?” He grins like he’s hilarious, like he expects Nick to balk and punch him or something.
“No,” says Nick, but he draws it out a little, so maybe Joe will figure out to keep asking.
Joe’s grin dissolves, and he turns serious again, focusing on Nick for real this time. “But there’s a girl?”
“Sort of.”
“We don’t have to do this like twenty questions. You could just tell me.”
Nick hesitates. “There are two girls.”
For a second he thinks Joe’s going to drive them straight off the side of the road, and Nick’s prepared to grab for the wheel if he has to. “Two girls? What happened to your passionately forthright and not cheatery soul?”
“It’s not cheating. It’s just… there are two of them.” He knows the word is “polyamory” - Danneel and Sophia throw it around casually enough - but he would feel ridiculous saying it to Joe, when he’s still not sure the concept makes any sense at all.
“At the same time?”
“It’s not sex. It’s not like… porn or anything.” He can’t tell Joe how glad he is that Joe’s immediate reaction wasn’t disgust and disapproval the way their parents’ would be, might still be.
“But there are two of them. At the same time. How did that even happen? You work all the time. At a place that probably doesn’t have girls willing to date you in twos, unless things have changed a ton since the last time I went to church.”
“They sell cupcakes. By the office.”
“You don’t even eat cupcakes.”
“I picked them up for other people. And then we got to talking and they made sugar free ones just for me. It was nice.”
Joe takes a deep breath, and the glee disappears from his voice. “So you’re dating both of them? And you feel okay about that?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing at all. I thought they were gay, Joe. They were a couple first, and I… I wanted to be disgusted by it. I wanted to think what they were doing was wrong. But I couldn’t. And I started questioning everything. It was like, all the fundamentals stopped seeming so fundamental because nothing I knew prepared me for people like Danneel and Sophia.” Joe’s staring straight ahead, frowning, and Nick’s so afraid he’s ashamed of Nick’s doubts. “What?”
“Nothing,” Joe replies. “You just didn’t tell me.”
“You didn’t ask.”
“So it didn’t bother you that they were gay? Or that you thought they were?”
“Of course it bothered me! I work at a place that’s supposed to prevent the legalization of gay marriage at all cost. And now I feel like maybe I’m making a huge mistake. Either way, maybe I’m making a huge mistake. But Danneel and Sophia are good people. They love each other and they want to do the right thing.” Warmth wells in his chest just thinking about them.
“And you’re okay now, that they’re a couple? Think carefully. Your answer is important.” Joe’s voice is sort of high and weird.
“Yeah, I am. I have to be.”
Joe nods to himself, shoulders tense. “Then I need to tell you something. Like, I really need to and I really need it to be okay with you, okay?”
Nick nods, although he’s almost paralyzed with waiting for what Joe’s going to say, stiff-backed with dawning suspicion.
“I’m gay,” Joe says. The car is totally silent, and Nick feels caught in it, like even if he knew what to say, he couldn’t. It’s all the hardest parts of what he felt the first time he saw Danneel and Sophia kissing, not the righteous indignation that came easily, but all the other stuff, the vertiginous sense that his world was shifting and he could move with it or be crushed.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” he asks, to confirm what he already knows.
“I didn’t ask if you were dating two girls, you didn’t ask if I was gay. Sometimes it’s hard to know what the right questions are. And I needed you to not just hand me some flyers for cures and never talk to me again.”
Nick nods. He deserved all of that. “Did you just…” He searches for the right word. “How long have you known for?”
“A long time,” Joe says, and it sounds so lonely. He imagines Joe keeping that secret from him, afraid of what Nick might say. He thinks how Danneel must have felt the same way with her family, how there may be hundreds or thousands of other people in families like theirs feeling just that way. It’s nauseating.
He squeezes Joe’s shoulder because he can’t hug him while he’s driving. “I love you.”
Joe smiles at him. “Love you too.” He forces a laugh. “So I guess we’ve both got stuff to keep quiet about over Christmas dinner.”
“Definitely,” agrees Nick. He swallows down lingering shock and discomfort. “So do you have a boyfriend? Or two?”
“I’m not a player like you are, Nicholas. It’s only one.” Joe’s smile changes, goes soft and lopsided, and Nick knows he’s in for more stories, different kinds of stories. He can’t help but be grateful that something good has come out of his confession. He wants to know everything he can about Joe’s life suddenly, and hearing about Joe’s boyfriend is so much less gory than most of the stories Joe’s told him so far. It’s as though Joe’s rewriting the last year of his life before Nick’s eyes, filling in gaps Nick had never bothered to wonder about before.
“You’re much better at lying about this stuff than I am,” Nick says, almost awed by it, even though the past misdirection makes him feel sick.
Joe’s smile is bitter. “Guess we’ll both be getting some practice at that over the holidays, huh?”
Nick nods, resigned, his chest thick with a mess of unresolved feelings.
*
Mrs. Wheeler calls the day after Christmas. Nick doesn’t even talk to her; he’s at the movies with Joe and has his phone off, so he doesn’t get Mom’s panicked voicemail for an extra 90 minutes. “Mrs. Wheeler has to leave for Kenya the day after tomorrow. The head of the school she used to run passed away unexpectedly, and there’s no one else who can take over. We have to find you another place to live as soon as possible. Please call me back.”
He nearly hyperventilates in the middle of the mall. Then Joe says, “Didn’t you say your girlfriends have an extra bedroom?”
part two