“It’s weird,” he said, able to think clearly for the first time in forever. “When we all met in the living room, they told us that we were meeting with them, talking, eating. We’d done the shopping online, paid bills. I look at my invoices on my computer, and it looks like I’ve been writing up a storm, but….” He shook his head and buried his face in the hollow of Cully’s shoulder. “I don’t remember doing that shit. Maybe seeing them once or twice, but I only remember Kate, telling me about the necklaces. Probably because it was the only time somebody said something real, you know?”
Cully nodded. “It’s like that part—that part was what kept our bodies running. It’s what we were doing on the outside, but on the inside—”
“It was all about you,” Dante said.
“Us.” Cully pulled back and cupped his cheek. “It was like this entire month, we were lost on the inside because we didn’t have an us.”
“Yeah,” Dante whispered. “Baby, there needs to be an us.”
Cully nodded and then grimaced. “Can, uhm, we be an us in the shower? I’m not sure what the rest of us have been doing for hygiene, but this part of us has been having sex and sweating, and….” He sucked on his teeth. “And eating something with chicken and broccoli in it. I could swear it.”
Dante frowned and did the same thing. “That must have been the part of us that was helping everybody move our shit, because I don’t remember that at all.” He looked mournfully behind him, fully aware that his secret—the manuscript box under the bed—was out. He trusted his friends not to look inside, it was true, but the fact was, the printed pages he’d put off sharing with everybody were missing, and he had no way to share that part of himself with Cully other than his word.
He looked at Cully in his arms, naked, slender shoulders pale above the darker skin of Dante’s arms, and thought about how strong Cully was, how insistent that he be himself, ruffled pirate shirts and breeches, guyliner, fluffy bangs, and all.
If anyone would understand, it would be Cully, right?
“Let’s shower,” he said gruffly, “and scare up some more food. I’m guessing we’ve got one night and two days left here, and we’ve got some more talking to do.”
“Is there anything wrong?” Cully asked, his brow scrunching in a way that was so cute—and so unnecessarily worried—that Dante almost started kissing him there and then.
But not yet.
“I… well, I have a secret. A stupid secret. But, you know, something I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time, because I wanted to share it with you, but I was sort of embarrassed.” He gave a thin smile, but Cully narrowed his eyes.
“If you tell me you’ve fathered an illegitimate child, I’m jumping into the void,” he said seriously. “There’s only room for one child in this relationship, and I’m the one who wears the puffy pants.”
Dante snorted. “Oh, like you wouldn’t be a good dad if it came to that. But that’s not what this is. Let’s shower, and I’ll tell you about it, and you can laugh at me, and it’ll all be good. Right?” He hated the defensiveness in his voice. Talk about trust; didn’t he trust Cully to be encouraging in this matter?
But then, given his parents didn’t think freelance journalism was a serious job either, maybe sharing his secret project really was scary. By the time he was out of college, he’d already made his name on lifestyle pieces, as well as thoughtful editorials and interviews with local up-and-coming talent. It paid the bills, but not extravagantly, and he didn’t have to drive to an office, which he’d watched his father do—and hate—for most of his life. But at least to his parents, journalism was “real.”
Cully wasn’t like that, though. Dante knew for a fact Cully wasn’t like that. Dante, for all his talk about trusting people, needed to trust that Cully—or for that matter, any of his friends—wouldn’t make fun of him for trying to be creative. They were witches, right? They made sparkly lights and spells and things. They weren’t even supposed to exist!
But Cully’s good opinion—oh, that meant so much to Dante.
He needed to trust he wouldn’t lose it by telling him about the things in his heart and the hopes he had for the pages in the box under the bed.
“Dante, you’re fading,” Cully said worriedly, and Dante pulled himself into the here and now.
“You know, I’m going to be really happy when we get to some place where a guy can have a reverie and not get thin around the edges.”
“Right?” Cully griped, and it was a relief to know they were on the same page. “Here, let’s shower together….” He paused, and the smile he gave Dante was nothing short of dazzling. “Let’s shower, make love, and talk some more. Because that’s our job now, isn’t it? Isn’t that our job? Our house is disappearing in pieces around us, and every time I think about going outside, I get amnesia for days, probably, and apparently all the fates want us to do is fuck like bunnies and have ourselves a conversation. You know what? I am down with that. I have a feeling I will always be down with that. So let’s go. Let’s have a shower and sex. Let’s have shower sex—”
Dante made a pained sound. “It’s sort of gross,” he said.
Cully nodded with enthusiasm and then pointed first to his temple and then to Dante’s. “Same. Page. It’s amazing. Let’s have a shower and then have sex and then you can tell me your big scary secret and then, then, we can maybe eat. I’m not hungry right now, but….” His voice dropped, puzzled. “It’s weird. I know that we, as the coven, break bread together all the time. And I guess whatever our bodies and our spirits are doing in this house is sustaining us—the others said we seemed to be eating. But I miss eating with other people. I know it’s dumb, but I want to have a meal with you. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. I swear to Christ, Dante, it can just be toast. Remember when we were all at the ocean and all we had was sourdough baguettes and salami? And we were starving, and it tasted so good, but it was the… the togetherness. It’s very primal, don’t you think?”
Dante couldn’t help it. He was grinning. Not because Cully didn’t have a point—he so did—but because hearing him ramble, holding him while he rambled, felt real. It felt special. It felt like a privilege to be in the same room with him and talk about something as simple as food.
“I think,” he said softly. “I think I want to take you out someplace where we have to sit down and we have a waiter who reads us a wine list—”
“And we know the good ones to pick because of Josh, right?” Cully asked, his version of this fantasy obviously already imbued with flourishes.
“Yeah! And we’d go someplace, like, ethically sourced and shit, because Alex knows all those places.” Alex wouldn’t be snotty about it either. He was very green, but he understood it was a process.
“But Kate would have to okay it for atmosphere,” Cully added the obvious. “And we have Bartholomew make us a dessert for afterward, because it doesn’t matter what we order on the menu, it never tastes as good as what Barty can make.”