I held him. The equipment room and the shaking and the tears and the bed and the stillness of my hands. All of it. A single evening that had contained the worst and the best of me, and the man in my arms had seen both and had not flinched from either.
The bread starter at home would need feeding. Tomorrow. For now, the only thing that needed tending was this.
This was enough.
This was everything.
-e
LUCA
Iintroduced Wes to my family on a Sunday afternoon, and it almost ended us.
The video call was my idea. I'd been talking to my mother about Wes for weeks, in the careful, coded language of a son who hasn't officially told his parents he's seeing someone but whose mother has the emotional radar of a Cold War surveillance satellite. She knew. She'd known since the second time I mentioned "my friend on the team who bakes bread," because Rosa Moretti did not raise a fool and Rosa Moretti could hear the difference between a friend and a person her son was in love with from four hundred miles away.
"Bring him to Sunday dinner," she said. "Over the phone. We'll do it on the video."
"Ma, I don't know if he's ready for?—"
"Luciano. You bring him to the phone or I drive to Atlanta. These are your options."
So I brought him to the phone.
The Moretti Sunday dinner video call was a weekly event that operated at a volume and intensity that I had grown up inside and therefore considered normal. My mother, my father, Sofia, my uncle Enzo, my aunt Maria, and Sofia's husband David allcrowded around the kitchen table in Hoboken with plates of food and glasses of wine and the conversational style of people who believed that talking over each other was not rude but collaborative.
Wes sat next to me on my couch with his hands on his knees and his posture rigid and his face set in an expression that I recognized as his combat readiness face, which was the face he wore before fights and apparently also before meeting Italian families.
"Relax," I whispered. "They're going to love you."
"There are seven of them."
"Six. David doesn't really count. He mostly just eats."
"They're all talking at the same time."
"That's how it works. You don't wait for a turn. You just jump in."
"I have never jumped into a conversation in my life."
"Tonight's the night, baby."
He looked at me. I had not called him baby before. It had slipped out, the way endearments slip out when you're in love and distracted and your mouth is operating independently of your brain. His expression shifted from combat readiness to something softer, something startled, and I watched him file the word away in whatever internal cabinet he used to store the things I said that caught him off guard.
The call started. My mother's face filled the screen with the particular close-up intensity of a woman who had not fully mastered the concept of camera distance, and then she pulled back and the whole table was visible, food and wine and family, and the noise hit Wes like a wall.
"Luciano! And this must be Wes! Oh, he's so handsome. Antonio, look, he's handsome. WES, CAN YOU HEAR ME?"
"Ma, he's not deaf."
"The internet makes things fuzzy. WES, WELCOME TO THE FAMILY."
Wes said "thank you" in a voice that was approximately one-third of its normal volume, and my family erupted. My mother had questions about his health, his diet, his sleep schedule. My father wanted to know about hockey. Sofia was doing the thing she did where she evaluated the person I was dating with the forensic precision of a trial attorney, which in this case manifested as asking Wes about his "long-term intentions" approximately four minutes into the conversation.
"Sofia," I hissed. "Stand down."
"I'm being friendly."
"You're being a prosecutor."