Chapter 28

Daniel yankedthe crooked nail out of his office wall, his thumb smarting from the errant hammer blow. The clock showed 8:50, which left him only ten minutes to get these new 24" x 36" canvases up before his Zoom date with Joel. The trio of Missouri River photos were some of his best work, so he was going to show them off, like a peacock spreading his tail feathers to a potential mate.

His phone blasted The Go! Team's "Pow"—Hailey's favorite song and therefore his ringtone for her. He yanked the device out of his shirt pocket. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing, Dad. Why?"

"You're allergic to phone calls, so I figured it was an emergency." He set the hammer on his desk. "Not a guilt trip, just observing. I totally support your choice in communication?—"

"Okay, class starts in three minutes, and I didn't have time to text an explanation of the link I'm sending you." Her words streamed out even faster than usual.

"Link to what?"

"So, I did a project on social media and the pandemic for my communications class. I found this Twitter account called Faces of Covid. They post pictures and short bios of people who died of it—some recently, some last year. The idea is that statistics are dehumanizing, but seeing faces makes it real. It shows how everyone who died left behind people who loved them." Hailey paused long enough to give a quick, punchy sigh. "It's so sad, but I can't stop looking at it, even though my project is done. I'm weird, I guess."

"You're not weird. Not that there's anything wrong with being weird. You're perfect the way you are."

Hailey's groan was an audible eyeroll. "Anyway, I was scrolling through posts from the last few days and saw someone I think might be your boyfriend's mom, based on her age and location. Random, huh?"

"Dr. Mendel? Wait, did I tell you Joel's last name?"

"Mom told me. We thought it was funny that a biologist had the last name Mendel. Like the monk who invented genetics?"

"Right."

"So that's what I'm texting you." A bloop sounded in the background. "Gotta go, Daddy-O. Love you! Bye!" She hung up.

His phone played Hailey's assigned text tone. He tapped the link. The tweet was dated yesterday:

LEAH MENDEL, 79, of Baltimore, Maryland, died of COVID in June 2020. Beloved mother of two, grandmother of two more, and hero of many, Leah was a prominent pulmonologist who saved thousands of lives and lungs. An avid gardener, she never wavered in her quest for the perfect mulch.

The photo was a smiling closeup. Though her hair was white and her face lined, she looked exactly like the woman who had comforted him the day Dad died. If he closed his eyes, he could still feel her arms squeezing his ribs, could feel how far he'd had to bend over to be enveloped in her embrace.

He scrolled through the account's tweets of the last few weeks. Hailey was right: There was something magnetic about all these vibrant faces, all these truncated lives, joined by one spiky little son of a bitch.

His phone vibrated, then his screen flashed a reminder that it was time to Zoom with Joel. With a final frown toward his unfinished office wall, he signed onto the meeting.

Joel appeared onscreen, sitting in front of what looked like a wooden headboard.

"In bed already?" Daniel asked.

"Long day." Joel wiped a thumb under each of his eyes.

"What's going on?" Was it the Faces of Covid post? Maybe he should tell Joel he saw it. But would that be intrusive?

"Something good. Gimme a sec to share my screen." Joel reached out toward his computer. "Tonight I showed up for Biology 117 and saw this."

A screenshot appeared, of a different Zoom call filled with a dozen windows. Each featured the face of a young person holding up a sign. Most said something along the lines of, Thank you, Professor Mendel or You're the best! A girl with bright pink hair brandished a sign reading, I never understood science before you. A boy with cornrows held up a colorful caricature of Joel as a glowing firefly above the words, Thanks for brightening our days!

Joel ended the screen-sharing and reappeared in the present. "Are they amazing or what?"

"Sounds like you're the amazing one." He unplugged his laptop. "Think I'll join you in bed."

"Ooh, I get to see the place where you sleep and sometimes jerk off to thoughts of me."

"More than sometimes." Daniel carried the laptop into his room and sat on his bed, where Luna was curled up at the foot. "But seriously, your students seem great."

"They've gone through so much. Imagine being that age, having all that energy, but you can't even hug your friends, much less hook up with some hottie you just met. Then adults tell you that breaking these rules might kill your grandma."

"Hailey was so stoked to go away to college in Seattle, but she's spent her entire freshman year at home." He turned to lean sideways against the headboard so he could face the bedside lamp. "Not to be an annoying optimist, but if young people can get through this pandemic, they might be better equipped to handle the next nightmare, like climate change or an alien invasion."

"At the rate this planet is going, an alien invasion might feel like a rescue."

"Shh!" Daniel pointed at the ceiling and whispered, "They'll hear you."

Joel gave a muted laugh as he picked up a large bowl-shaped mug from his nightstand. "It's starting to feel like a race between the vaccine and all these new variants. One of my colleagues has family in India, where there's, like, apocalyptic levels of virus right now. She's scared for her parents."

"Does it bring up bad memories?"

"Big time." Joel took a long sip, squinting against the steam rising from the mug. "It's like there's this international family of mourners, this miserable fraternity that keeps growing. Gives me flashbacks to the AIDS epidemic, waiting for the next person I love to turn up positive. Sometimes when I don't get enough sleep, or if I read too much news, that's when hope starts to feel like a sucker's game." He rubbed his eyes. "You're probably dreading seeing me now, because I'm not the man you knew. I'm not Sunny McSunnerson anymore."

"You were never Sunny McSunnerson. You always had dark moments, even when we met before. I liked those moments as much as I liked the goofy ones." Daniel paused for emphasis, so Joel would get it through his thick skull already. "The man I want to see is you, you cranky old ding-dong."

Joel's impish smile sidled onto his face. "You're a cranky old ding-dong."

"Then it's a good thing we found each other, huh?"

"It is incontrovertibly a good thing." Joel glanced down and to the side. "Hey, as long as we're in bed?—"

"I am not having Zoom sex."

"Look at Mr. Old-Fashioned here. What about a Zoom snuggle?"

"I could go for that." Daniel replaced the other pillow with his laptop.

"Cozy times, woo woot!"

As Daniel slid beneath the covers, arranging his feet so as not to disturb Luna, Joel tugged up a green blanket and tucked it under his chin.

"Is that the side of the bed you usually sleep on?" Joel asked. "Just so's I know for when you're here."

"I'm not picky." He scanned what he could see of Joel's bedroom in the background, greedy for details to populate his daydreams until he could be there himself. "Is that a king-size?"

"Yep. It was my gift to myself two birthdays ago, after my—" Joel pressed his lips together. "My ex took his bed with him when he moved out."

For a moment, Daniel could only blink at him. Joel had never mentioned living with someone. "What happened?"

"You mean, why did we break up? Uh…" Joel blew out a breath through his lips. "We wanted different things?"

Now Daniel understood Joel's frustration with his own hoarding of painful tales. Maybe if he opened up, then Joel would too. Regardless, it seemed safer to do it over Zoom than face to face. They could get all the angst out of the way now so their reunion could be pure joy.

"You asked me on Valentine's Day about how my marriages ended." Daniel swallowed, pulse pounding in his throat. "I wasn't ready then, but…I'll try now."

Joel's eyebrows pitched at an angle, pointing together in sympathy. "About Vanessa or Corey?"

Daniel shut his eyes in a long blink at the sound of the second name, but couldn't shroud the windows of memory and the things they showed: The He doesn't suspect a thing dick-pic text sent to Daniel's number by mistake. The shattered shot glass. The view from his knees as he'd begged Corey not to go. Luna finding him alone on the kitchen floor, then sniffing his hair for clues about her newly shrunken world.

"You don't have to tell the story," Joel whispered, "if you don't want to."

But he owed Joel a story, so he'd start with Vanessa. "When the magazine folded in 2011, I took it really hard. Ten years of my life had gone into it. It wasn't just a job, it was who I was. I was also a husband and a father and a son, but those weren't enough. Is that awful?"

"Of course not. Work gives our lives a lot of meaning, if we're lucky."

"And I was very lucky. So then…" There were no words for the next several months, only the image of an unmoving charcoal cloud. "I changed. We fought. I moved out. Vanessa didn't kick me out, she was too kind for that, but I knew that this-this darkness of mine was hurting her, too, was making Hail—" The name tripped up his tongue. "That I was scaring Hailey. She wasn't scared of me, more like scared for me. I couldn't see much past the end of my nose, as Mom would say, but I could see I was frightening my kid. I didn't want her to be the one to-to find me if things went…" He broke off. "Anyhow, when I was at my lowest, Corey walked into my life."

"And things got better?" Joel asked softly.

"Things got magical."

"That's great."

"Except the part about magic not being real." He rubbed his lips. "No, that's not fair to him. It was real, and there was real happiness. Hurting me didn't make him a villain, and it didn't make seven years together count for nothing."

The silence stretched out. Finally Joel said, "Hailey was another reason I didn't want to pull you away from Wyoming. I could tell how much that little girl meant to you." He shook his head. "I still can't get over the fact you have an eighteen-year-old daughter."

"Time didn't stop when we were apart."

"No, it only stopped when we were together." Joel widened his eyes , as if surprised by what he'd just blurted. "You know what I mean."

"I do." The skull-popping pressure inside him eased a bit at this revelation of Joel's feelings. "When Corey and I started, you know…"

"Fucking?"

"Dating. Okay, fucking. When I fell in love with him"—so hard, so fast—"it was the first time I was glad things didn't work out between you and me. I thought, ‘If Joel and I were together, I wouldn't have this.'"

"And by ‘this,' you mean…"

"An all-consuming, blowtorch-to-the-soul infatuation."

"Sounds, uhhh, fun, I guess?"

"It was the opposite of fun," Daniel said. "It was ecstasy."

Joel gave a low whistle. "Gonna be tough to follow that."

"You're not following that. I've been with other people since. Besides…" He let his voice trail off. It was too soon to declare that no one—not even Corey—had made him feel at home in his own skin the way Joel had. The way Joel still did.

"Were these serious love affairs," Joel asked, "or friends with benefits?"

"Somewhere in between. The last one fizzled out when we decided not to move in together at the start of the pandemic." That conversation felt like years ago. "Our cats wouldn't have gotten along, anyhow. Luna only likes dogs and people, in that order."

"I respect that, being a dogs-over-people person myself."

"So that's when I learned how to be alone. How to be enough for myself even when no one was sitting on the other side of the dinner table." Daniel chuckled. "Though I did start this weird habit of talking to myself out loud."

"I do that all the time. Sometimes I pretend I'm talking to the dogs, but why? Who am I pretending for?" Joel laughed with him, then drew in a deep breath. "I turned down three marriage proposals from the same man."

Daniel gaped at him. "The one who lived with you there in that house?"

"Michael, yeah. The third time he asked and I said no, he finally left me. Not right away. But soon after."

Jesus. Talk about persistence. "Why didn't you want to marry this guy?"

"Because I wouldn't marry anyone who wasn't…" Joel rubbed his jaw, beard scraping his palm "…who wasn't permanent. After my parents got divorced, I vowed my marriage would be forever. But I never saw forever in anyone's eyes. That probably says more about me than about them."

So Joel had been full of it when he'd said he wasn't a romantic guy. Funny how Daniel had never made that promise to himself after his own parents' divorce. His therapist would probably have ten or twenty insights about that issue.

All that mattered right now was Right Now.

"For the record, Joel, I'm not looking for another one-night stand, or even a one-week stand. We can't know ahead of time what it's going to be like between us in person, but I'd like to go into our reunion with the intention that it has serious potential, that it means more than a twelve-hundred-mile booty call." He held up a hand. "That's not to put pressure or expectations on you or on us, it's just where I stand."

This time there was nothing impish or smirky about Joel's smile. "I'm standing right there with you."

"Whew." Daniel rubbed the back of his neck, where a knot of tension had formed, and not just because his pillow was bunched up in an awkward way.

"Lemme show you something." Joel rolled away from the camera and stretched to reach toward his nightstand. His red T-shirt rode up to reveal an inch of skin on his lower back, an inch of skin that drew Daniel's fingers to the screen like they'd been tugged by a rope.

He pulled his hand back as Joel turned around.

"It's one of the last things I look at before I go to sleep every night." Joel held up the cicada rock-band painting.

Thatcicada rock-band painting.

Daniel's throat clamped down on all his words, along with the breath to set them free.

"I kept it on my desk at school," Joel said. "When we were sent home last year, it was the first thing I grabbed to bring with me." He turned the painting to study it. "Still my favorite gift ever. How did you know, out of all the art at that convention, this would be the thing I'd love most?"

"I got lucky."

"Not as lucky as me." Joel set the painting back in place, then flumped onto his pillow again. "Augh, I can't wait to see you. Why is time such a slow-ass motherfucker?"

"I thought it was supposed to speed up as we get older."

"Seriously. I demand a refund." Joel tugged the covers up to his shoulders, then finally went still. His blinks slowed, his eyelids carrying the weight of the day.

"At least we can see each other," Daniel said. "In the olden days we would've had nothing but expensive long-distance phone calls."

"And letters. We could've been pen pals. That would've been cool."

"Yeah." There it was again, that hollow ache of all their lost years. "But this is better than letters. To be able to look at you lying there like that makes me so…"

"Horny?"

"Happy."

Joel smiled. "Me too. You sure you don't want to have Zoom sex?"

Daniel laughed, the tension leaving his body in a rush. "I'm sure." A tempting offer, but they'd waited this long, and their first orgasms together would be all the sweeter if they were in the same room.

"Suit yourself," Joel said. "Just know that I'll be rubbing one out the moment we sign off."

"If we could make eye contact, I might change my mind."

"Soon we'll be making contact with a lot more than our eyes." Joel's smile faded. "But I gotta warn you about one thing."

"What's that?"

Joel looked serious—seriously serious, not fake-serious. "I haven't hugged anyone in fifteen months. So I might not remember how."

"How to hug?"

"How to let go."

Daniel reached out to the screen to touch Joel's virtual face. "Then don't."