“Shit,” Danny said succinctly. “Oh, that makes so much sense. I’ll ask Gray if he can hunt that down for us. Excuse me a moment, yes?”
Felix watched him go, eyebrows knit as though he was perplexed. “You know,” he said musingly, “Torrance Grayson was my friend first. I don’t even know how he does that.”
There was a pause then, and Chuck was the one who drawled, “He’s Uncle Danny.”
The laughter was strained, and it took Hunter a moment to realize why. They’d all been waiting for Grace to say it.
He took a deep breath and looked reflexively to the stairway, but no Grace. Then Felix started talking again, and his attention was drawn back to the matter at hand. But inside he still ached a little; his stomach still burned with an emptiness that had nothing to do with the fifteen zillion oatmeal cookies he’d eaten to make one dancer/thief smile.
Hallelujah
GRACE LOOKED at the street sign and frowned. Where the fuck was he?
“Woodward?” He shuddered. “What suburb am I in?”
Josh’s parents lived outside of Glencoe, which was the mansion suburb outside of Chicago. He didn’t know if there was a Woodward Avenue in Highland Park. Great.
His legs ached, because apparently he’d run himself to exhaustion. He was lost, and, thank you motherfucking Chicago, it was starting to rain.
He looked around and saw row upon row of decent, happy family houses. Not mansions, like in Glencoe, but, well, they all had lawns, and all the lawns were well cared for. Great. He couldn’t even steal from these people.
He was wearing yoga pants with a pocket in the thigh for his cell phone, and his thigh started to buzz.
Unconsciously, he answered it, wondering how long he’d been wandering around on this warm and rainy night in the suburbs of Chicago.
“You are worrying the shit out of me, dumbass,” Josh’s voice said, loud and clear. “Where the fuck are you?”
“I have no idea,” Grace said, as lost as he’d ever been. “I…. Woodward and Aesop?”
“Evanston,” Josh said, apparently without thinking. “Seriously? Grace, you are fuck-all miles away. You’ve been gone for two hours—have you been running all this time?”
Grace tried to think about it, but his brain veered away from his sudden exit from the Salingers’ basement.
“I guess,” he said. “Wow, I’m pretty fast. Think I could run marathons?”
“Only if you have the patience to run with a herd of people in the same direction,” Josh said, his voice sounding weak. “Where exactly are you?”
“The sidewalk,” Grace said. Glumly he looked around and didn’t see shelter anywhere—only people’s front porches. The houses here were decent-sized but not outrageous—someone would notice if he went to sit under someone’s porch to evade the rain. With a sigh, he sat down next to a stop sign and leaned against the pole, ignoring the fact that his ass was now as soaking wet as his hair.
“On the corner of Woodward and Aesop,” Josh clarified.
“Yeah, whatever.”
“Well, stay there. Someone’s coming to get you.”
“I don’t know why,” Grace muttered. “I mean, why would you bother?”
“Because we love you, Dylan.”
For the first time since he’d bolted out of the mansion, he felt the full weight of hurt crash onto him. “Gabriel didn’t. He left me to die.”
“Yeah, but Gabriel was a fucking psychopath. You have actual friends now who wouldn’t leave you like that.”
Grace swallowed, feeling the weight of this thing in his chest. “I haven’t told Hunter yet,” he whispered. “He told me about his dead boyfriend, and I didn’t tell him about almost killing myself because Gabriel Hu was a fucking psychopath. Why didn’t I do that?”
“Because you’re afraid,” Josh said, his voice tender. “Because you’re embarrassed. It doesn’t matter. Tell him. Get it over with. He’ll understand.”
“Understand what?” Grace asked bitterly. “Understand that I’m so fucked-up you can’t leave me unsupervised? Understand that I had all the fucking money and a big fucking house but the best I could do with that was… what? What am I? Some sort of mascot?”
“Mascot?” Josh’s voice rose. “Have you even been to the same places I have? You’re our heart, you fucking moron! Without you, Danny would have gotten shut in an air vent two months ago. He could have died!”
“That was the other way around,” Grace muttered. “He saved me.”
“Yeah, but you were the one we sent in first because you’re that good. And it’s not only the skill or the cleverness. Don’t you get it? It’s… it’s that you love us so very purely, you will do anything for us. Do you think that goes unnoticed? Do you think we don’t see what a good person you are? That you use your skills to protect us and, well, to wreak vengeance on our enemies, which is sort of psycho but very much appreciated. You’re a good person, Grace—you’ve made me happy for years. I wouldn’t know what to do if you didn’t have my back. But I’m not your lover. You need to give yourself a chance to have one of those, to see if you can be the guy who can do all that.”
Grace grunted, suddenly chilled. “What if I fail?” he asked, feeling stupid and wet and sad. “What if I can’t? What if I’m destined to sort of be a human cocksleeve for the rest of my life? If that’s my job?”
Josh made a hurt sound over the phone, and Grace wondered who was driving while he made his way through the rain. “You are not a human cocksleeve,” he snapped. “And even if that was who you were, just sort of everybody’s one-night man, you’d still be my best friend. But I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think you will fail. I think you’ve grown up, Grace. I think you’re ready. I think if you talk to Hunter, be honest with him, let him care for you, you’ll be surprised. People surprise you all the time. Sometimes they’re super shitty, like Sergei Kadjic or that Jenkins guy, and sometimes they’re like Hunter, who was just walking by when he saw a mugger and decided to take the bad guy out. And sometimes they’re like you, who….” Josh took a breath that sounded like a sob. “Who steals the watch that my Uncle Danny gave me about once a year so you can pretend you had an Uncle Danny too. You do have an Uncle Danny, Grace. You have all of us. My mom will give you her damned emerald earrings if you take a deep breath and remember you’re loved.”
“Not her emerald earrings,” Grace said, something weird and hiccuppy going on with his voice. “They’re the gold-and-pearl drops she wore when we graduated from high school.”
“You changed it up,” Josh accused, but he didn’t sound mad.
“The emerald ones were so pretty, but she stopped wearing them. I thought if I stole different earrings, she’d wear them again.”
Josh’s laugh came out a little hysterical. “Of course.”
Grace saw a car—the first one in the ten minutes since he’d answered Josh’s call—and stood up, staring into the night to see if it was Josh. “Is that you?”