“I—I don’t know,” Alex sputters. “I thought you might need to, like, have a Catholic moment about this or something?”
His dad slaps him on the bicep with the spoon, leaving a splatter of crema and cheese behind. “Have a little more faith in your old man than that, eh? A little appreciation for the patron saint of gender-neutral bathrooms in California? Little shit.”
“Okay, okay, sorry!” Alex says, laughing. “I just know it’s different when it’s your own kid.”
His dad laughs too, rubbing a hand over his goatee. “It’s really not. Not to me, anyway. I see you.”
Alex smiles again. “I know.”
“Does your ma know?”
“Yeah, I told her a couple weeks ago.”
“How’d she take it?”
“I mean, she doesn’t care that I’m bi. She kind of freaked out it was him. There was a PowerPoint.”
“That sounds about right.”
“She fired me. And, uh. She told me I need to figure out if the way I feel about him is worth the risk.”
“Well, is it?”
Alex groans. “Please, for the love of God, do not ask me. I’m on vacation. I want to get drunk and eat barbecue in peace.”
His dad laughs ruefully. “You know, in a lot of ways, your mom and me were a stupid idea. I think we both knew it wouldn’t be forever. We’re both too fucking proud. But God, that woman. Your mother is, without question, the love of my life. I’ll never love anyone else like that. It was wildfire. And I got you and June out of it, best things that ever happened to an old asshole like me. That kind of love is rare, even if it was a complete disaster.” He sucks his teeth, considering. “Sometimes you just jump and hope it’s not a cliff.”
Alex closes his eyes. “Are you done with dad monologues for the day?”
“You’re such a shit,” he says, throwing a kitchen towel at his head. “Go put the ribs on. I wanna eat today.” He calls after Alex’s back, “You two better take the bunk beds tonight! Santa Maria is watching!”
They eat later that evening, big piles of elotes, pork tamales with salsa verde, a clay pot of frijoles charros, ribs. Henry gamely piles his plate with some of each and eyeballs it as if waiting for it to reveal its secrets to him, and Alex realizes Henry has never eaten barbecue with his hands before.
Alex demonstrates and watches with poorly concealed glee as Henry gingerly picks up a rib with his fingertips and considers his approach, cheering as Henry dives in face-first and rips a hunk of meat off with his teeth. He chews proudly, a huge smear of barbecue sauce across his upper lip and the tip of his nose.
His dad keeps an old guitar in the living room, and June brings it out on the porch so the two of them can pass it back and forth. Nora, one of Alex’s chambrays thrown on over her bikini, floats barefoot in and out, keeping all their glasses filled from a pitcher of sangria brimming with white peaches and blackberries.
They sit around the fire pit and play old Johnny Cash songs, Selena, Fleetwood Mac. Alex sits and listens to the cicadas and the water and his dad’s rough ranger voice, and when his dad slumps off to bed, June’s songbird one. He feels wrapped up and warm, turning slowly under the moon.
He and Henry drift to a swing at the edge of the porch, and he curls into Henry’s side, buries his face in the collar of his shirt. Henry puts an arm around him, touches the hinge of Alex’s jaw with fingers that smell like smoke.
June plucks away at “Annie’s Song,” you fill up my senses like a night in a forest, and the breeze keeps moving to meet the highest branches of the trees, and the water keeps rising to meet the bulkheads, and Henry leans down to meet Alex’s mouth, and Alex is. Well, Alex is so in love he could die.
* * *
Alex falls out of bed the following morning with a low-grade hangover and one of Henry’s swimsuits tangled around his elbow. They did, technically, sleep in separate bunks. They just didn’t start there.
Over the kitchen sink, he chugs a glass of water and stares out the window, the sun blinding and bright on the lake, and there’s an incandescent little stone of certainty at the bottom of his chest.
It’s this place—the absolute separation from DC, the familiar old smells of cedar trees and dried chile de árbol, the sanity of it. The roots. He could go outside and dig his fingers into the springy ground and understand anything about himself.
And he does understand, really. He loves Henry, and it’s nothing new. He’s been falling in love with Henry for years, probably since he first saw him in glossy print on the pages of J14, almost definitely since Henry pinned Alex to the floor of a medical supply closet and told him to shut the hell up. That long. That much.
He smiles as he reaches for a frying pan, because he knows it’s exactly the kind of insane risk he can’t resist.
By the time Henry comes wandering into the kitchen in his pajamas, there’s an entire breakfast spread on the long green table, and Alex is at the stove, flipping his dozenth pancake.
“Is that an apron?”
Alex flourishes toward the polka-dotted thing he’s got on over his boxers with his free hand, as if showing off one of his tailored suits. “Morning, sweetheart.”
“Sorry,” Henry says. “I was looking for someone else. Handsome, petulant, short, not pleasant until after ten a.m.? Have you seen him?”
“Fuck off, five-nine is average.”
Henry crosses the room with a laugh and nudges up behind him at the stove to peck him on the cheek. “Love, you and I both know you’re rounding up.”
It’s only a step on the way to the coffeemaker, but Alex reaches back and gets a hand in Henry’s hair before he can move, pulling him into a kiss on the mouth this time. Henry huffs a little in surprise but returns it fully.
Alex forgets, momentarily, about the pancakes and everything else, not because he wants to do absolutely filthy things to Henry—maybe even with the apron still on—but because he loves him, and isn’t that wild, to know that that’s what makes the filthy things so good.
“I didn’t realize this was a jazz brunch,” says Nora’s voice suddenly, and Henry springs backward so fast he almost puts his ass in the bowl of batter. She sidles up to the forgotten coffeemaker, grinning slyly at them.
“That doesn’t seem sanitary,” June is saying with a yawn as she folds herself into a chair at the table.
“Sorry,” Henry says sheepishly.
“Don’t be,” Nora tells him.
“I’m not,” Alex says.
“I’m hungover,” June says as she reaches for the pitcher of mimosas. “Alex, you did all this?”
Alex shrugs, and June squints at him, bleary but knowing.
That afternoon, over the sounds of the boat’s engine, Henry talks to Alex’s dad about the sailboats that jut up from the horizon, getting into a complex discussion on outboard motors that Alex can’t hope to follow. He leans back against the bow and watches, and it’s so easy to imagine it: a future Henry who comes to the lake house with him every summer, who learns how to make elotes and ties neat cleat hitches and fits right into place in his weird family.
They go swimming, yell over one another about politics, pass the guitar around again. Henry takes a photo of himself with June and Nora, one under each arm and both in their bikinis. Nora is holding his chin in one hand and licking the side of his face, and June has her fingers tangled up in his hair and her head in the crook of his neck, smiling angelically at the camera. He sends it to Pez and receives anguished keysmashes and crying emojis in response, and they all almost piss themselves laughing.