But he can’t be. Not with the company he’s in.
Sean spreads out the large red blanket he’d brought under the shade of an old oak tree near the dock on the pond. Then he takes the basket from Mike’s hand and sets it down beside him. Mike’s unsure of what to do next (does he sit next to him? does he unpack the basket? does he engage Sean in meaningless small talk?) when Sean says, “You look confused.”
“I’m not very good at this,” Mike admits for lack of something better to say.
“At what?”
“You.”
“You’re very good at me,” Sean says. “Maybe the best of all.”
Mike doesn’t quite know what to do with that. Oh, he kno
ws what he’d like to do, but he doesn’t think now is the right time for a first kiss. So instead he says, “You’re the best at me too,” and internally kicks himself for sounding so ridiculous.
It doesn’t seem to matter to Sean, if the look on his face says anything about it. It’s a mixture of awe and fondness like he’s thinking the same thing Mike is: I can’t believe I get to have this. But that can’t be what he’s thinking, because it if anyone here drew short, it’d be Sean.
Sean pats the blanket next to him and doesn’t even comment on how quickly or how close Mike sits, like all he was waiting for was permission.
“Now, I suppose I could tell you that I made all of this myself,” Sean says, “so you’d be impressed. But I didn’t. Walter did.”
Mike peeks inside the picnic basket and snorts. “Sandwiches. You think you’d impress me by telling me you made sandwiches.” He thinks Mrs. Richardson would be proud.
“I burn things,” Sean says. “You know that’s why Walter has me banned from the kitchen.” Which is true. It’s well known throughout Amorea that Sean Mellgard isn’t allowed in a kitchen. Walter always makes sure Sean has dinner before he goes home at night and, on any days off, sends one of the girls over with food. Sean claims it’s unnecessary, but Walter’s told Mike stories about cookies that looked like coal and a meatloaf that he was positive was actually poisonous. Not to mention that things tended to get lit on fire when Sean Mellgard was involved.
“I wouldn’t have been impressed,” Mike says, “because I wouldn’t have believed you, given that these actually look edible.”
Sean squints at him. “Do you have oil in your hair? It looks really fancy.”
“Mrs. Richardson says it makes my hair look shinier,” Mike admits, though it pains him greatly.
“Men with oil in their hair aren’t allowed to make fun of my cooking,” Sean says.
“Yeah,” Mike says, knowing he’s got a goofy smile on his face, but unable to do anything about it.
“Yeah,” Sean says in that tone of voice he does so well.
And it’s easy. It’s easy, because they’ve taken the long road to get to this point. Maybe there are times that Mike wishes he’d gotten his act together sooner than he did, but he’ll never regret it because of where they’ve ended up now. They’re eating, and he’s made Sean laugh three times, and he’s hoping to get to a fourth before the day is out.
Amorea moves around them, but they might as well be wrapped in a little bubble, because they’re largely left alone. It doesn’t take long before Mike is able to block everyone else out, and maybe it’s the moment he reaches out and wipes a little smudge of potato salad from Sean’s chin, or maybe it’s when Sean’s bare feet press against his shin (on accident or on purpose, he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t think it matters) but he thinks that it couldn’t be any better than this. That if this is what they’ve been building to, then he would gladly go through this again and again and again just to get to this moment.
The years have been worth it.
He knows it’s true when they are lying side by side on the blanket, heads turned toward each other, arms barely touching. The sunlight is filtering through the trees, little shadows rippling along Sean’s face. His eyes are open and he’s listening as Mike tells him about the book he’s reading (You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe) and about the radio serial he’s listening to (Abbott Mysteries, Jean and Pat Abbott solving murders in San Francisco, a place he’s never been to, a place he’s never heard of, a place he’ll never go, and he doesn’t think twice about how Sean never asks what San Francisco is).
There was a time when he didn’t think they’d get here, and it had nothing to do with Sean. He couldn’t quite say why he was so hesitant, where that sick, roiling feeling came from every time he thought about taking the next step. Past the argument of the age difference, there wasn’t much but a fog, but it was still there, and it blanketed Mike at times, covered him until he thought he was choking on it. There was always an urgent sense of I can’t and Not yet, maybe not ever. He knows it wasn’t fair to Sean. And he never asked Sean to wait like he did. He remembers the halted conversation they had where he couldn’t quite articulate his point, but Sean seemed to understand it anyway, patting his hand and saying, “I’m not going anywhere, big guy. You take all the time you need.”
And he still doesn’t understand it. Still doesn’t really get why it took this long, but that crippling fog is mostly gone now, and while it still curls around his ankles, it doesn’t cause him to stumble like it used to.
But it’s worth it. He knows it is. Because it’s Sean on his back, pointing at a cloud, saying, That one looks like a rabid giraffe, and it doesn’t, it really doesn’t, but Sean thinks it does, and that’s enough for Mike.
It’s in the way their arms brush together, warm skin against warm skin and how maybe they leave them pressed together instead of apologizing and moving apart.
It’s in the way that even though they’ve been here for hours, even though the sky is starting to streak as the sun goes down, Mike could stay here for hours more, just as long as he could stay right where he is.
He’s not sure who reaches for whom first, who is the braver out of the two of them. All he knows is that one moment, Sean is saying, “I don’t know, I guess so, I hadn’t really thought about it that way,” to a question Mike doesn’t remember asking, and the next, their fingers are intertwined and there’s a thumb brushing near his. Mike is blushing, he knows he is, that damn Irish luck, and Sean is amused, always amused by him.
He can see some stars in the deepening blue, can hear the town moving slowly and happily around them. He thinks he even hears Happy singing how that’s… amore, and Mike doesn’t even mind that it’s the thousandth time he’s heard that song. He doesn’t even mind that Happy sounds like a barrel full of cats rolling down a hill when he sings. It’s good. Everything is good.