“She’s sad,” Cully said hoarsely. “She… she will never move out of that town. And when I went away to college and she stayed, I realized how much being friends with someone could hurt. It’s been hard, you know? Getting used to the idea that these friends won’t? Even if they started out as your friends first—”
“By about five minutes, Cully! Why does that five minutes matter so much?”
“Because I don’t think they would have been my friends without you!” Cully burst out, and then he caught his breath, because he’d never voiced that, not even to himself.
Dante was staring at him like he’d turned to lavender and sprouted bees.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No?” At Dante’s skeptical eyebrow, he went on. “I mean, look at you, Dante. Everybody likes you. You’re everybody’s best buddy. I’m a frustrating, high-maintenance little diva who drives people batshit—”
“But we all have our glitches!” Dante insisted. “Jordan can be hella intense—have you noticed that about him? He says, ‘Let’s go look at bugs!’ and we all do that, because not doing what Jordan says is scary, right? Alex can seem awfully dry until you get to know him and realize he’s got a wicked sense of humor. Barty tries to fade into the background, and you’ve got to watch to make sure he doesn’t succeed. Josh, well, he’s sort of a meatloaf, and Kate’s perfect.”
“She really is,” Cully agreed.
“But I think this arrangement is so exciting for her because she’s surrounded by men and she can be the queen bee her mother always wanted her to be but she never was in high school. Not that this is a flaw,” Dante conceded, “because she’s a wonderful den mother, but, you know, none of us are perfect. So you’re high-maintenance. Aren’t we all?”
“They’re just….” Cully swallowed. “I don’t feel worthy,” he said finally. “And I don’t know how to be a good enough friend to make sure they don’t leave me behind or ditch me like Denise. I don’t ever want to be in a place with them where they don’t want to talk to me anymore because I’m….” He trailed off, the enormity of what he was about to say hitting him.
“Stuck,” Dante said it for him. “Like we’ve been since we’ve met. Like we’ve really been for the last month. Are they ditching us, Cully? Are they really?”
Cully’s eyes burned as he remembered the exhaustion showing clearly in everybody’s faces as they’d all linked hands in the living room. “They’re killing themselves,” he said hoarsely. “Anybody can see it. They really are trying to get us back.”
Dante nodded somberly. “It’s like trusting me,” he said. “You’ve got to learn to trust all of us, or… well, baby, it’s your worst nightmare. But you’re going to be the one to make it happen.”
“Or I’ll get left behind.” Cully closed his eyes against the thought, but he remembered how Denise’d had a scholarship and a college that wanted her, but she’d stayed back in their hometown because the wide world seemed so frightening. Cully had taken that leap, though, and they’d left each other in the past.
If he didn’t figure out how to trust his friends, trust Dante to be his lover, he’d know how that felt.
“We’ll both get left behind,” Dante said. “I’m not going anywhere without you.”
Cully squeezed his eyes shut again. “I don’t deserve you,” he said after a moment, and now it was his turn to say the painful things with tears in his voice. “I don’t deserve you, and I don’t deserve our friends, and I don’t know what to do to keep you.”
“Trust us,” Dante said. Idly, he toyed with the pentacle at Cully’s throat before he started to stroke Cully’s chest in earnest. Cully welcomed it because the touching made him feel real. “Trust that they’re not going to leave us behind. Trust that I don’t want to go anywhere without you. You don’t have to ‘deserve’ us—you just need to accept that you’re loved.”
Cully swallowed, hard. “That’s the hardest thing of all,” he admitted. He looked unhappily at Dante. “How do you do it?”
Dante gave a bitter bark of laughter. “Oh, baby. Do you think I’m good at it? I’ve got no choice. My family… I mean, they still write me, but they’re not my family anymore. And I liked having a family. I liked having a brother, even if Carlo is a class-A fuckup. I miss my parents, and I even miss my nana, and I gotta tell you, she’s a mean, passive-aggressive, deeply unhappy old woman, but boy, she could bring the rest of us together like nothing else.”
Cully laughed, fascinated. Dante didn’t talk about his family a lot, and until this moment, he hadn’t figured out why.
He captured Dante’s hand, splayed against his bare chest, and whispered, “You were trying to figure out how to live without them.”
Dante shrugged. “I was. That first year, you and me—I think maybe that’s one of the reasons I didn’t make my move. I missed my family so bad, and you were part of my new family. I didn’t want to fuck with that.”
Cully let out a bitter laugh. “And I didn’t want to trust it.”
The silence that fell between them was a speaking kind of quiet. Cully searched Dante’s face, not sure what he was looking for. It wasn’t until Dante spoke that he realized what he needed.
“It’s not too late, is it?” Dante asked. “We… I mean, I don’t want to think of the last seven years as wasted. I’ve loved it. I’ve loved being your roommate. I’ve loved living in this little, I dunno, postdorm commune, I guess. I’ve loved being a part of this group, this coven. I don’t want to… regret, I guess is the word. I don’t want to regret any of it. But I don’t want this to be it. Jordan and the group get us out of this house, and I guess we’ve got a place to live waiting for us, waiting to see if we want to live there, together, or not. I want more than roommates now. I want what I’ve always wanted. I want to be your guy.”
Cully’s eyes burned at the quaintness of that. Be your guy. Dante’s old-school manners—he’d been forced to church in his best suit. He’d told Cully that a million times.
“Cully?” Dante’s voice fractured, and Cully realized the silence had stretched again.
“Yeah?”
“If we make love here, it’s not going to end here, is it?”
“I don’t know,” Cully said, his heart aching, that reluctance to trust haunting him still. “But what I do know is that if we don’t make love, we’ll never move forward. We’ll be stuck here forever and… and even if you and I become lovers and we flame out and we split up, at least we’ll have had that moment, that try, that knowledge that we gave it a shot and couldn’t. I mean, all the substitutes in the world haven’t moved us forward, not in seven years. Maybe it’s time we try the real thing, right?” He gave a crooked grin, trying to lighten the moment, but he wasn’t prepared for the desolation on Dante’s face.
“Oh, love,” he said, taking Dante’s hand and kissing the knuckles. “You and me, we can’t just not be. We can’t make love and then end. I just… it’s like that crack in the fucking hallway to neverland. It’s against all the rules of nature. There has got to be a Dante-and-Cully. In any reality or any timeline there is, there’s got to be an us.”