The door opened and Gus barreled out.
“Oh my god, Daddy. She sat around my neck like a scarf!”
Gus’ eyes were bright as stars, so Adam swallowed down his nausea and smiled right back.
“That’s so cool!” he said weakly.
“So. Cool.” Gus shivered with delight. “You know how everyone said Wes was a vampire and a witch and stuff?”
“You know better than to believe everything people say, don’t you?” Adam admonished.
“I know.” Gus waved him away. “I was gonna say, I think he’s more like a superhero. He has all these sidekicks, and he knows how to do everything.”
Gus pulled the door shut and skipped toward the garage. Adam trailed along in her wake. He was embarrassed to admit it, but he was just the tiniest bit jealous of his daughter’s worship of Wes.
Wes came out carrying a ladder, a hammer, and some nails.
“Penny nails,” Adam said absently.
When they’d lugged the ladder across the street and stood in front of their house, Adam said, “Okay, Gus, your call. Where are they going?”
“Can I go on the ladder?” she asked excitedly, eyes wide.
“Er, no, baby. Sorry, it’s too dangerous.” She pouted but shrugged. “Because I might have a heart attack,” he muttered.
“Let me guess,” Wes said. “You don’t like heights?”
Adam rounded on him, instantly defensive.
“Why would you say that?”
His whole life people had looked at his small stature and his sexual orientation and his sensitivity and assumed he was weak and scared.
And yeah, okay, he was afraid of some things. But it was natural to be afraid. There was nothing wrong with it. Tarantulas and snakes could be poisonous. It was self-preservation to fear them. He wasn’t upset that he was afraid of things; he was upset that people thought being afraid meant being weak.
And Adam Mills was definitely not weak.
Wes looked taken aback. “You just seemed really worried about Gus going up, so I thought... I don’t know. Sorry.”
Adam internally cringed at himself for being so defensive.
“Oh. Right. Um, no problem. That’s just because she’s, you know, a very small child.”
Wes nodded.
“I don’t really know much about children.”
“Surely you at least were one?” Adam said, trying to lighten the mood he’d cast in darkness.
Wes just blinked. “Not this kind.”
“What kind?”
He shrugged, and walked onto the porch, then around the side of the house.
“Here’s your outlet,” he said.
Gus pointed to the front of the house. “Let’s put them there, like an outline of light.”
Adam nodded and gathered the lights under his arm. Then he began to ascend the ladder.
The truth? Was that Adam was afraid of heights. But he would be goddamned if he was going to admit that in front of Wes now.
“Are you okay, Daddy?”
Gus sounded concerned and Adam realized he’d stopped four rungs up the ladder.
“Uh-huh, fine.” His voice broke but he made himself keep climbing.
From the top of the ladder, Adam surveyed the neighborhood below him.
This, it turned out, was a huge mistake.
“Oh god, oh god, ohgod, ohgodohgod. It’s tall. This is tall. High. Up here. This is dangerous! How many people die each year in routine Christmas decorating accidents?!”
“Careful, Daddy,” Gus said.
Wes said, “Three hundred ladder-related fatalities annually in the US. Hmm, I would’ve thought it’d be higher.”
Adam squeezed his eyes shut and forced himself to unclench the claw of his fist from around the lights enough to find the end of the strand.
“Here’s ten years of Christmas-related injuries.” Wes scrolled on his phone. “Wow, 134,281 people were sent to the ER with holiday decoration–related injuries from 2008 to 2017. God, who knew.”
Adam’s whole body was rigid, and he heard himself make a tiny whimpering sound that he hoped didn’t reach the ground.
“They’re not straight, Daddy,” Gus called helpfully from the ground.
Adam, who was at the moment trying to figure out how on earth it was humanly possible to lift a string of lights, unpocket a nail, hammer in said nail, string the lights on the nail, and move the ladder to another position without falling to his death, just said, “Thank you, baby.”
After a great deal of ladder moving (because no, thank you, Wes, Adam did not want to simply climb onto the roof), thumb hammering, and light adjusting, Adam got all ten strands of lights hung.
He climbed down the ladder slowly, feeling extremely pleased with himself. Triumphant, even!
He let out a pleased sigh, slung his arm around Gus’ shoulders, and looked up at what he’d just accomplished.
And looked.
And tilted his head and looked some more.
“Huh,” he said.
“Hmm,” Wes echoed.
The ten strands of lights barely outlined the front triangle of the roof, and even though they twinkled merrily in the darkness, the lights looked sparse against the clear sky full of stars.
“That,” Gus declared, “is not the most lights in the world.”
Which, frankly, was what they were all thinking.
“We’ll get more, sweetie,” Adam said, wanting to cling to the sense of triumph he’d felt only seconds before. “This is just a start.”