Chapter 38

After two years,Joel's favorite restaurant looked both familiar and foreign. Now that the setting sun was behind the nearby trees—trees that held a slight buzz from the few cicadas that were still awake—the faerie lights strung along the brick patio's railing shed a soft, romantic glow over the space.

Most of the outdoor tables were full, and the other diners' eyes had the same slightly manic free-at-last look as Joel felt in his own. For some reason, dining together among others who were also dining together felt more intimate than all the meals he and Daniel had shared over Zoom. Tonight, they were part of humanity's slow, halting rebirth.

Joel picked up his menu (not a takeout menu!) and examined the selection of cocktails (made by a real bartender!). As long as he lived, he'd never take eating out for granted again.

Their server appeared, her twisted auburn ponytail bouncing above the collar of her green polo shirt. "Hi, I'm Ariel. Can I get—ooh!" She looked at the gifton the table beside Joel. "Is someone having a birthday?"

"Actually—"

"Or anniversary?" She pointed to the gift on Daniel's other side.

"Both our birthdays," Daniel said, "and our anniversary."

"Well, triple congrats, then." Her eyes smiled above her mask, which featured Bugs Bunny munching a carrot. "Let me guess: fifteen years? Twenty? Am I close?"

Joel held back a cringe. Why did people keep assuming they were a long-term couple? Because they were "old"?

"Seventeen," Daniel said. "Give or take seventeen."

"Oh. Ha." Ariel looked understandably confused by Daniel's answer. Then she took their drink order and headed back toward the restaurant entrance.

Joel waited until the door closed behind her. "What the hell? Strangers have never asked me how long I've been with any other guy."

Daniel shrugged. "I'm told I have an approachable face. Comes in handy when photographing people I've just met." He took his reading glasses from his shirt pocket and picked up his menu. "Besides, after being cooped up aloneso long, people want to talk to each other."

"It's not just this year, though. Remember in 2004, that Belgian juggler in Fell's Point?"

"I thought he was French. You spoke French to him, right?"

"He had a Belgian flag on his case, and with a name like Arnaud I guessed he was French-speaking. Anyway, remember how he wanted to know how we met? For a song he was allegedly going to write?"

Daniel stared at him, his glasses frozen halfway to his face. "What do you mean, ‘allegedly'?"

That expression…bewildered, almost hurt.

Joel spoke carefully. "I never got an email, so I assumed Arnaud never wrote the song."

"He sent it to me in January 2012, a few months after the magazine went under. I remember because the email address I gave him was the one at the magazine. I was just about to delete that account when Arnaud contacted me."

"2012…" Joel put a hand to his temple. "I stopped teaching at the community college when I got tenure at the university. That was in 2010, and my email was only forwarded for a year.So his message to me must have—" Hang on. "It took him eight years to write that song? Was it worth the wait?"

"It was an emotional hand grenade." Daniel fidgeted with his glasses, folding and unfolding the arms. "It kinda messed me up, especially since you didn't respond."

Oh no—if the song arrived right after the magazine collapsed, Daniel would've already been at a fragile point. Fuck fuck fuck…

"I never would've blown you off like that on purpose." Joel touched his arm. "Why didn't you reach out instead of assuming I didn't care?"

"You left me," Daniel said. "It was up to you to reach out."

Fair. Still, something wasn't adding up. "Didn't you reply to his email? You would've gotten a bounce-back message from my dead account."

"I wrote back to thank him, to tell him how much it meant to me, but I didn't reply-all." Daniel stared through his menu. "I didn't know what to say to you, or what to say to him in front of you."

The pang in Joel's chest was no duller than the one he'd felt walking out their hotel room door. "I'm so sorry."

"Joel…" Daniel said softly, his gaze still lowered. "I wouldn't have contacted you on New Year's Day if I hadn't forgiven you."

So as of 2012, he'd remained unforgiven. "Do you still have the link to the song?"

Daniel shook his head. "There wasn't a link. It was just lyrics, no music. But yeah, it's on my laptop."

"Can I read it?"

Daniel nodded, then finally looked at him. "It's really good. Arnaud nailed us, even though he knew us for, what, a minute and a half? Somehow he nailed us."

Joel picked up the wrapped box at his side. Nothing could erase what he'd done in the past, but maybe this present could help build their future. Assuming Daniel didn't hate it.

"Here, your birthday was first. I had it commissioned," Joel added, as if that fact wouldn't be obvious.

Daniel lifted the lid and peeled back the thin foam wrap to uncover the framed painting. "Whoa. Wait, is that—holy cow, it's me! Me as a centaur." He pulled it out of the box and showed it to Joel, his mouth agape.

"Is it weird?"

"Very weird! And I love it. I love it so much." Daniel studied it intently, tracing the body of his centaur self through the glass, over his silver mane, slate-gray coat, and of course his bare, ripped chest. "It's super flattering. I wish my abs looked that good." His finger stopped beneath the horse's hindquarters. "Speaking of flattering…"

"I sent the artist the link to your shop. She used your profile pic as a model and looked at your work to get to know you better. That's why you're pictured on the prairie."

"So what's with the humongous dick?" Daniel's deep cowboy voice boomed across the patio. "There's no nude selfies in my Etsy shop."

Joel scratched his ear to cover the sound of the other diners' sudden silence. "It's not that big compared to?—"

"Other guys you've known?"

"—a horse's body. It's proportional."

Grinning broadly, Daniel tapped the wooden spyglass his centaur held. "What am I looking at?"

"That's up to your imagination. The artist said you had to hold something or your arms would look awkward. I suggested a camera, but she said that was too modern. The more traditional options, of course, were a bow or a spear."

"Who needs a spear when you've got a cock like that?" Daniel asked, just in time for Ariel to arrive with their drinks.

"Oh!" She let out a peal of laughter. "What did I just walk into?"

Daniel showed her the painting. "Look what he gave me. Isn't it beautiful?"

Her eyes widened. "Wow. Did you paint that yourself?" she asked Joel as she set their drinks in front of them.

"No, I can only draw bugs. I had it commissioned."

"Who's the artist?" she asked. "My best friend is obsessed with mythology. She would completely die if I had her made into a nymph."

Daniel plucked the artist's business card from the painting's box. "Here you go."

"Thanks!" Ariel wrote down the information, then gave the card back and took their dinner order. "You better have given him a good gift, too!" she told Daniel as she swept away.

He went back to staring at the painting. "Joel, this is stunning."

"That's because…" The words wanted to turn back, but he said them anyway. "You're stunning. Somehow more than ever."

Daniel's eyes turned tender and warm. "You called me ‘horseboy' the day we met."

"And you said it made you sound like a centaur."

"A callback gift from someone who claims to hates nostalgia." Daniel handed over a box wrapped in ladybug paper. "That makes me feel better about this."

Joel tore off the wrap, lifted the lid, and peeled back the tissue paper.

A vintage white T-shirt proclaimed Maryland is for Crabs.

"There's more," Daniel said.

"What the—" He lifted the shirt. Virginia is for Lovers stared up at him. Holy shit. "Where did you find these?"

"On the internet. They don't sell them in Omaha."

"Can I tell you something pathetic?" Joel pressed the Virginia shirt to his chest. "For days I slept with the T-shirt you wore, because it smelled like you."

Daniel cocked his head. "When you say, ‘slept with'…"

"No, I didn't fuck your T-shirt. I meant I literally slept with it, on my pillow."

Daniel put a hand over his. "I believe you, Joel," he said with mock seriousness.

"Haha." He checked the sizes. "A medium and a large. So we can wear them together?"

"That's the idea."

Joel gasped. "We could wear them at the beach."

Daniel's eyes lit up. "We're going to the beach tomorrow?"

"Monday. We'll come back Friday to avoid Memorial Day crowds." He wagged his fingers like a magician. "Surprise!"

Daniel frowned, his forehead creasing into four perfectly parallel lines. "I need to work during the week, remember? Not as much as usual, but I have clients to check on, and the new marketing manager needs?—"

"You can work from the bungalow. I made sure it has good WiFi and a desk with a view. We'll fit our playtime around your schedule."

"But don't you have research to do here, now that the cicadas are out?"

Yeah, that. Time to come clean.

"They're not my specialty anymore." He kept going so Daniel couldn't interrupt. "Right now I'm researching how innovations in roadside maintenance—basically, planting wildflowers and not applying pesticides—can provide habitat corridors for migrating insects. Climate change is making it harder for a lot of species to survive, and as insects go, so goes the entire ecosystem."

"Sounds like important work, but?—"

"It is. Humanity wouldn't last long without bugs to do our dirty work. Imagine a world without dung beetles. It would be literally full of shit."

Daniel grimaced. "But you loved cicadas. Why did you stop studying them?"

"Because—" Even if he could conjure a plausible white lie, he owed Daniel the truth. "I stopped studying cicadas for the same reason I started studying them. Because they reminded me of you."

Daniel sawhis entire life from above, with every day laid out like dots on a number line. Saturday, May 29, 2004, wasn't the chronological center, but it was clearly the most massive date, and that mass had created its own gravity, so that every date before and after revolved around it like planets around a star.

After dropping this bomb, Joel slumped back in his chair. "I think that's my last revelation."

What could he say to that? Daniel took a sip of his citrus-y gin cocktail, set down his glass, then lifted it again for a longer sip.

"What are you thinking?" Joel asked.

He swallowed slowly, the bitter tartness lingering on his tongue. "I'm thinking I finally understand where you were coming from on Valentine's Day."

Joel's shoulders hunched, like he was a kid sent to the principal's office. "That can't be good."

Daniel collected his words, putting them in the right order before he spoke. "Our effect on each other the last seventeen years has been bigger and more destructive than I realized."

"True," Joel said in a small voice. "But that's in the past. We've agreed to try to focus on the present." He held up the box of T-shirts. "Even though we did get each other gifts based on thirty-four-year-old jokes," he added with a shaky laugh.

He couldn't let Joel derail his train of thought. "I knew how large you loomed in my life, but I had no idea…" He shoved a hand into his hair and rubbed his head. Maybe that would press this new fact into his brain. "I get the thing with the mileage sign, having Colorado in your face three times a week. But cicadas were your career. They were your life's passion, and you left them behind because of me."

"Because of me. Because of what I did to you."

"I wasn't blameless in 2004. I showed up with no warning. I crawled up out of your distant past like some kind of zombie?—"

"Or cicada."

"—and instead of telling me to fuck off, you made time for me. And in return I flipped your life upside down. I don't know how to live with?—"

Daniel cut himself off as Joel sat up straight and looked past him.

"Here we go." The waitress placed their appetizers in front of them. "And a couple of plates for sharing." Her voice was subdued now, mirroring the mood at the table. "Enjoy."

"Thanks." Joel gave her a warm smile. As she walked away, he turned back to Daniel. "First of all, in no universe would I have told you to fuck off in 2004. You were an old friend I was totally stoked to see. Second of all, if I'd been truly happy with Sam, then your reappearance wouldn't have wrecked our relationship. Third of all," Joel said, taking his hand, "cicadas may have been my life's passion, but a life can have more than one passion."

The scent of quesadilla made Daniel's stomach growl, but he couldn't take his eyes off Joel's.

"I don't mean just careers," Joel continued. "The fact that we've been drawn together again and again doesn't negate what we felt for other people."

He was right. Daniel had truly loved both of his spouses, as well as his girlfriends before Vanessa. But none of them had made him feel the way he felt with Joel, both warm and hot, both cozy and electrified..

He had to shift the gravity of their lives. This had to be the moment all their yesterdays and tomorrows revolved around.

Daniel picked up one of the four wedges of his quesadilla and examined it. "Does being vegan make you live longer?"

"Uh…" Joel cleared his throat. "Maybe? A plant-based diet lowers cholesterol, so it's good for your heart. And more fiber is linked to a reduction in colon cancer. But because veganism is a relatively recent phenomenon, there haven't been any long-term longitudinal studies confirming an increase in lifespan." He picked up his soup spoon. "Why do you ask?"

"My new goal is to give us as much future as we have past. That means living to be eighty-five." Daniel pointed his quesadilla wedge at the trees behind Joel. "Then we can hear these cicadas' grandkids." He took a bite of the crispy filled tortilla. The flavor was actually good—not just tolerable, but delicious. "How do they make fake cheese taste so real?"

Joel was still staring at him, his empty soup spoon hovering above his bowl. "Probably cashews. Daniel, what are you saying? That we should plan more reunions in seventeen years and thirty-four years?"

Daniel swallowed quickly so he could say this as clearly as possible. "I don't want any more reunions. Getting back together has been amazing, but to do that, we have to be apart in the first place."

Joel took in a breath that sounded half wince. "You just got here yesterday, and already you're talking about, what, moving in with me?"

"Not necessarily." How did his voice sound so calm? Wasn't this the part where he begged and cajoled, said whatever it took, sacrificed his own needs on the altar of harmony? Apparently not. "I don't know what form it'll take. It could be a long-distance relationship, or 'til death do us part, or something in between. All I know is that we're not getting rid of each other this time."

Joel slowly lowered his spoon into the soup, scooping up what looked like a pair of chickpeas along with the broth. "These last two days have been great, but it won't always be like this."

"No kidding. There'll be days that suck. But if we're going to screw up—which we will, because we're human—then it should be while we're still connected, so we can fix the hurt instead of letting it fester." Daniel set down his appetizer and clasped his hands together, elbows on the table. "The thought of us walking away after we've torpedoed each other's lives again…I can't take it. So could we just not?"

"Yes."

Whoa. Daniel gaped at him. "That's it?"

"Yes."

"No argument, no twisty-turny dialogue between you and yourself weighing the pros and cons? Just…yes?"

"Yes." Joel slipped the spoonful of soup into his mouth, then swallowed. "Let's stay together, like the song says. We'll figure out exactly what that looks like over the coming days and weeks, but I speak for both me and myself when I say yes. Unequivocally for once. Yes."

"Okay, then." If only he could draw a curtain around their table so they could share the sort of kiss the moment called for. He made do with taking Joel's hand and bringing it to his lips. "Let's stay together."