“You’re quiet.”

Elliott looked over at Aiden behind the steering wheel. “Am I?”

Elliott loved driving. He missed it now that he was close to everywhere he wanted to be in LA. Whenever he was home, he badgered his dad into letting him drive his police cruiser.

He wasn’t as good at being a passenger. He got bored too easily, and when he was bored, his default was restless and loud, as Aiden knew.

Aiden’s eyes never wavered from the road ahead. “Are you nervous?”

“Now, what makes you say that?”

Elliott had been sitting on his hands for the last half hour to keep them from tapping out maddening rhythms on the dashboard of Aiden’s fancy car. He couldn’t feel them anymore, but he still didn’t take them out. The discomfort distracted him from counting the minutes until they arrived at Aiden’s parents’ house.

They used to live right in the city. Aiden had been born and raised there, with plenty of trips to the trails on the weekends. He’d told Elliott all about the cabin they had, and how they’d wake up before the sun to make the trip. The new house wasn’t as far as that, but it was still far enough that the buildings got less close together, and the terrain started to look a lot more like a desert instead of a tropical oasis hundreds of miles wide.

“You shouldn’t be nervous,” Aiden told him, as if it were that simple. “They’ll like you. If they even notice you, that is. There’s probably going to be so many people there that you’ll get lost in the shuffle.”

“We can only hope.”

Aiden flashed him a bright, quick smile. “We’ll be there in about five minutes.”

The urge to wiggle his fingers disappeared and paralysis set in, stiffening Elliott’s neck as he watched scenery go by.

The houses were so nice in this area. Huge, like Aiden’s parents’ home must be if it was going to accommodate as many people as Aiden had told him to expect. Elliott wasn’t sure if he was dreading being mistaken for the help or hoping for it.

Next to him, Aiden took a deep breath. “Are you—”

“Please don’t ask again if I’m sure,” Elliott said, before Aiden could get it out. “I am. I want to go. It’s just difficult for me to feel like I belong here, especially when we’re still figuring out what we are.”

Aiden took his eyes off the highway long enough to send Elliott one of his tiny smiles. Elliott returned it right away, and the fluttering in his stomach switched gears.

After Elliott had gone home on Sunday, he’d immediately wanted to go back, but they both had their own lives, and Elliott had needed some time away. He hadn’t had any contact with Aiden for a few days, even by text. But when he’d shown up for their regular Wednesday appointment, and Aiden had hugged him hello, he’d been hit by conflicting emotions.

Happiness. Disappointment.

Both had been present and accounted for when he’d realized that it wasn’t just the long weekend and his illness that had awoken something in them both. This epiphany made things significantly more difficult for him.

Their standard night in had felt more like a date than ever, but the best kind of date. The kind where they’d already broken down the barriers and seen some of each other’s vulnerabilities. They had been relaxed around each other even while they were still high on the undefined newness of the relationship Elliott wasn’t ready to name.

Aiden threw on his turn signal, taking them down yet another road lined with large houses. “At least Innes isn’t coming.”

Elliott shrugged, the motion pulling at his trapped hands. “I wouldn’t have minded if he was. Have to face him sometime.”

Even after he’d started getting paid by Aiden, it had seemed pretty likely that he could go his entire life without having to see Innes again, but getting involved in Aiden's personal life would inevitably lead to a run-in with his past. That was just another bullet point on the Shouldn’t He side of his Should He or Shouldn’t He list.

Ticktock, ticktock, the calendar in his head chanted. He now had one week less to go until payday. One week less to decide what he would do.

“So, how isolated do these houses get?” Elliott asked, shutting up his own brain.

“Not very. Why?”

“Oh, no reason.”

Aiden shifted his fists on the steering wheel and shot him a glance, his eyebrows pulled together. “A likely story. Why do you— Elliott.”

“Yes?” Elliott asked innocently.

“There is no way that I am letting you give me road head.”

Elliott gasped and finally freed one of his hands to clasp it to his chest like a dowager countess. “I would never! You have no idea how many hours I spent listening to my dad—a cop, you remember—lecturing about distracted driving. I wouldn’t even give you a road hickey.”

“Good.” Aiden nodded, and they drove for a couple of minutes in silence, while Elliott massaged the feeling back into his fingers. “Wait. If you didn’t want to do that, why did you ask about—”

“I never said anything about side-of-the-road head.”

Aiden’s laughter flew out the open window as they sped closer toward the Kent homestead.

“Innes has a daughter?” Elliott shout-whispered, his hand around Aiden’s arm in a death grip.

They were blessedly alone after half an hour of introductions. There were so many people that Elliott was seeing stars—he certainly wasn’t seeing any names attached to faces. He’d stopped trying to remember any of them after the fifteenth person had stopped them on their way to the kitchen to find Aiden’s parents.

He remembered one name only: Mimi.

Mimi, the one person Aiden hadn’t explained his relationship with. At least, not until they were walking away and Elliott had asked. Aiden had glanced at him quizzically, identified her, then let himself be dragged to an unoccupied room.

“I thought you knew,” Aiden said, his eyes pinging from Elliott’s white-knuckled hand to his face.

“No, I did not fucking know!” Elliott hissed. “It isn’t like Innes and I did a lot of talking about our personal lives. And she’s . . . she’s my age?”

“A bit younger. She just turned eighteen.”

Elliott let out a pained wheeze that might have resembled a laugh. “So he had a teenaged daughter the entire time he was fucking me. Including when I was nineteen, still a teenager.”

Aiden grimaced. “Yeah. I think that’s probably why he didn’t tell you about her. He must have figured you’d feel awkward about it.”

Elliott planted his hands on his hips and widened his eyes theatrically. “Really? Now why would that be? What possible reason would I have to feel awkward about being born within a couple years of the girl whose dad I was fucking? Oh, god.” He let his head fall into his hands and moaned. “This is a nightmare. Please tell me she never knew about me. Tell me she never heard my name or saw me in some picture Innes got tagged in on Facebook.”

“I don’t think so,” Aiden murmured, at a volume much more appropriate for such a sordid conversation. “I can’t be sure, but Mimi never brought up his arm candy, and she’s not the type to stay quiet about that kind of dirt. In any case, she’s only just started coming to things like this. Birthdays and Thanksgiving and what not.”

“Should I even ask?”

Aiden glanced back at the closed door to the living room behind them, as if staring through it to the girl who stuck out, a skyscraper in a landscape of homey bungalows.

“She and Innes don’t talk much, but she wanted to know this side of the family. Mostly to spite her mother, probably. I’ve only met the woman a couple of times, but she’s a piece of work, and she hates all the Kents on principle.”

“Jesus. This seems like soap-opera levels of family drama.”

“We’ve got a couple of skeletons, sure. Innes was only just eighteen when Mimi was born, and he refused to marry her mother because they would have killed each other in a year. He pays child support, but other than that, he stays out of Mimi’s life, partly because her mother thinks we’re all scheming, snobby pieces of trash, and partly because—” His lip quirked humorlessly. “—can you imagine Innes as a father?”

Elliott whistled. “Yikes. Not really.”

“Well, there you go.”

Like a party balloon deflating, Elliott released a stream of anxious breath. It’d been less than an hour, and he was already exhausted by the meet-the-family outing. He’d expected to learn more about Aiden through his family, but he hadn’t expected, or wanted, to learn more about Innes.

A daughter.

The revelation didn’t change anything. Innes was as much of a closed book as ever, and Elliott still had no desire to open it for a better look. It did, however, make him uncomfortably aware that there might be more chapters than he’d anticipated.

He hated this metaphor. He wanted out.

“Answer me one thing,” he said. “Did Innes actually name his daughter Mimi?”

Aiden laughed. “No. I think she named herself that. But he didn’t have a hand in her given name, either. Her mother called her Miriam, and Mimi hated it as much as Innes did.”

That sounded more like the Innes Elliott knew, but it didn’t settle his nerves in the least.

“All right,” he said. “For the sake of my sanity, I’m going to pretend that the last ten minutes didn’t happen, so that I can function normally until later, when I’ll actually vomit from how creeped out I feel.”

“Noted.”

“For now, what do we do? I’m sorry, I have no idea where we are or where we’re going. I still feel like I’m about the size of a bug in this house, and that’s probably translated to the size of my brain.”

The house wasn’t just big. It was casually, effortlessly luxurious in a way that made Elliott want to crawl up the chimney where he belonged, with his broom and his grimy cap.

Ticktock. Ticktock.

Aiden didn’t seem to notice or mind his existential crisis. “You’ll get used to it,” he told Elliott as he pulled them away from their quiet corner toward the chattering of more people in a room nearby. “I suppose we could go help out in the kitchen, if they need it.”

“Don’t bother, you’ll only get in the way,” a commanding voice said.

“Hi, Mom.”

Aiden went over and hugged the woman who’d come through the door behind them, which presumably led to the kitchen. Elliott was relieved to have identified where the food was. If he stayed where he was, he wouldn’t starve to death if the rapture happened and he was left in this maze of a house.

“And you must be Elliott,” Aiden’s mom said, extending her hand.

Elliott shook it firmly. “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Kent.”

The Kent genes seemed to have overpowered hers for the most part, because she and Aiden didn’t look much alike, physically. Her coloring was lighter, her eyebrows nowhere near as majestic as Jill’s. Despite that, there was something about her kind but inescapably scrutinizing stare that reminded Elliott of Aiden’s intense gaze.

“It’s Kent-Graham, actually.”

“Oh, sorry—”

She waved her hand. “It’s fine. I took my husband’s last name at my parents’ request, but I only committed halfway. My name is very unlike my marriage in that way.”

Elliott laughed a little hesitantly. She had the same deadpan delivery as her son, and while he’d gotten used to Aiden’s jokes, he couldn’t be sure he’d understand hers.

“But please, you must call me Catherine.”

Elliott deliberately relaxed his posture, reaching deep to find the calmest, most confident version of himself. “Catherine, then. Are you sure we couldn’t help in the kitchen?”

Crossing his fingers behind his back, Elliott chanted, Please say no, please say no. He wasn’t a bad cook, but he hadn’t had a lot of practice, living in a dorm. If the kitchen was as well-appointed as the rest of the house, he’d be worried over breaking a butter knife worth hundreds.

Catherine held up her hands. “Oh, no. They’re at the stage when too many people in there would only make things more difficult. Come outside with me, instead. It’s a lovely day.”

She led them through the busy kitchen to the backyard, where people were milling about, eyeing the door they’d come out of, as if staring would make the food arrive faster.

Catherine smoothly introduced them to more people than Elliott could possibly have remembered, and he could suddenly see in her the brilliant lawyer Aiden had told him about, the other Kent in Kent, Kent & Morris.

Even when she got distracted by the younger members of the clan, wiping messy chins and exclaiming over newly loose teeth, it was surprisingly easy to imagine her as a prosecution-crushing genius. It was in the way she moved people to her will without them even knowing they were in motion, not in a mean-spirited manner, just an inexorable one. She was quickly embroiled in an impenetrable crowd, so Aiden steered them away, and Elliott followed him gratefully.

In the back of his mind, he was constantly aware of Mimi. Aloof and reserved, she stuck out of the group. A part of the festivities, but also not. She didn’t appear to know everyone as well as they all knew each other, and she didn’t attempt to keep up with the lightning pace of the conversations around her, staying conspicuously silent instead.

Despite her separation, she looked a lot like the rest of the Kents, with her lips pressed in a hard line. She looked like Innes, especially around the eyes, which freaked him out a little bit, but he got used to it pretty quickly, especially since he was so busy meeting all the other people in Aiden’s family who also looked like Innes, and Aiden’s dad.

Jill must have done a good job downplaying the significance of Elliott’s presence, because he never got the grilling he’d prepared for. Everyone was too busy talking about the minutiae they’d missed in each other’s lives to pay much attention to the stranger in their midst. It was a cheerful sort of disregard. It didn’t feel the same as being ignored by Very Important Pricks at parties, because it wasn’t a deliberate snub.

Elliott was leaning on the picnic table waiting for Aiden to come back from the bathroom when Catherine cornered him.

“You haven’t been together long, have you?” Her powerful, glinting stare pinned him in place.

“No,” he said. With any other person, he might have delayed and asked how long constituted as long, but Catherine would have seen through him.

She smiled like a proud mother cat. “I knew it. You have that look about you both, like you’re afraid that the next thing you say will be the deal breaker. I wouldn’t worry, though.”

“No?” Elliott asked.

Behind her left shoulder, Aiden was making his way toward them, panic on his face.

“He’s in deep with you. I can see it. I know my boy. He might be almost thirty now, and as much of a closed book as ever, but I can still tell. You aren’t leaving him behind in that, are you?”

Across the patio, Aiden was waylaid by an elderly relative. He threw Elliott an apologetic look, then went right back to listening to his great-aunt or grandmother. He listened intently, with his customary tense almost-frown, but Elliott could tell that he was happy here, surrounded by people who knew him and his stern face and knew how to see beyond it, to the true empathy inside.

“No,” he answered Catherine. If he wasn’t falling already, then he was clinging on to the edge with a pinky finger.

They ended up planting themselves in a corner of the backyard and not moving except for more food—burgers and salads and sickly sweet birthday cake, like a proper spring barbecue—while a revolving stream of cousins and aunts and uncles occupied the seats beside them.

“I like your family,” Elliott said, during one of the rare times that they were alone.

“They like you too,” Aiden said, smiling back.

One of the best parts of the day was seeing various children toddle up to Aiden and press their sticky hands into his elbow, chatting up a storm while Aiden listened and made appropriate noises, even though their babble was unintelligible.

“They’re like cats,” Elliott told him, laughing at Aiden’s perplexed expression when a two-year-old stumbled drunkenly away after presenting Aiden with a treasured stuffed bear. “They’ve fixated on the person who cares the least about them.”

“I don’t mind kids,” Aiden said, shrugging. “But I don’t know what to do with them.”

Elliott fixed him with a level stare. “Really? You don’t mind them?”

“Most of them.” Aiden rolled his eyes to the clear sky above them. “Honestly, I feel bad. I like Jim a lot. He’s one of my favorite cousins because we have a lot in common. I just hate his kid so much. He’s such a horrible child. But they seem to like him, so that’s all that matters, I guess.”

“I’ve heard it’s easier to like your own kids than other people’s,” Elliott pointed out. “God knows, my parents were the only ones who liked me when I was a kid.”

“Yeah?”

“I was awful. Too much energy, not enough impulse control. I never tried to annoy anyone, but there are only so many knock-knock jokes you can memorize and spout rapid-fire in a permanent outdoor voice before people—mostly teachers—start to lose their minds.”

“I bet your dad’s proud of you. And your mom would be too, if she were here.”

Elliott’s smile faded.

“I’m sorry,” Aiden said. “Was it insensitive of me to talk about her?”

“No, of course not. It’s no big deal, really. I’m used to reminders that she’s gone.”

“Is that something you get used to?”

Elliott blinked. “I— Why wouldn’t it be?”

Aiden grasped Elliott’s hand, which was dangling between the arms of their patio chairs. “She was your mom. I wouldn’t expect that you’d get over her not being there.”

Aiden’s palm was warm against Elliott’s. Elliott looked down at it, trying to come up with one of the normal placating brush-offs he gave to other people who expressed more concern than a simple I’m sorry for your loss. It’d been ten years since she died, so he had a lot of them, but none seemed appropriate for what Aiden had said.

“No,” he said, finally. “You don’t. Every once in a while, I think I’ve reached the point where I’ll stop missing her. And it’s true that I don’t miss her in the same way I did when she’d only been gone a month or a year. I just wish she was here, for all this important stuff in my life. She’ll never know I got into UCLA. She won’t see me graduate. She’ll never be able to brag about her son, the professor of ancient history. It burns that she’s missing all of it.”

“She’d be proud.”

Elliott’s hand tightened around Aiden’s before he could get it under control. He let Aiden’s fingers slip from his grasp. “Sure. Well, enough about my tragic backstory. What’s the synopsis of your teen drama? Were you the athletic type? The likeable nerd? Did you sneak off to Mexico for your eighteenth birthday? I want to know all the season finale scandals.”

“None of the above.” Aiden rubbed a stubbled cheek and his unfocused eyes turned in the direction of the picnic table surrounded by his family. “I was a boring child.”

“Nooo, don’t tell me that,” Elliott whined. “I already know you’re a huge dork in your old age. Don’t ruin young Aiden for me as well!”

Aiden shrugged. “Hey, you asked.”

“Yeah, I did.” Elliott sighed. “I brought this disappointment on myself. No locker room fist fights over someone’s honor? No academic decathlons skipped so that you could audition for the school musical?”

“Nope. Sorry. If anyone had academic decathlons to skip, it was Jill.” Aiden shifted a bit, seeming suddenly ill at ease in the chair he’d occupied for almost an hour. “She was the really smart one, in that overachieving, rule-following way her teachers loved. I was only on the basketball team and student government because they were great on college applications.”

Elliott hummed. “Interesting. I would have thought you’d be one of those kids who were effortlessly amazing at everything.” The kind of kid he used to hate for no reason other than petty jealousy.

“Nope. I’m the middle child, and middle of the road in every way. Smart, but not as smart as Jill. Hardworking, but not as driven as Shannon. A good lawyer, but not as good as—”

Aiden’s head dropped. They both watched as he laid his hand down on the arm of the chair and relaxed his fingers individually, until none of his knuckles were white with tension.

“Innes,” Elliott finished.

Aiden nodded, a sharp dip of his clenched jaw. “Always compared with him, but somehow always found wanting.”

Elliott winced. That had to be tough, when Aiden was clearly so well aware of the unfortunate similarities between them. Elliott never brought them up anymore, not even as a joke, because Aiden always went tense and still, like he was now.

“Are you so sure about that?” Elliott hazarded.

Aiden laughed at the same time as someone else on the porch across the lawn, though they couldn’t have sounded more different. “Oh, yeah. ‘You’ll be just like your uncle,’ I’ve been told, like it’s supposed to be a compliment. It happens all the time. So similar to him, but never as good.”

“Yeah, maybe not.” Aiden’s eyebrows flew up at Elliott’s easy capitulation, and Elliott took his hand. “Maybe you aren’t as great at winning cases. Not yet, anyway. But I can tell you what you’re better at right now. You’re better at caring about the people you’re representing. Getting people to trust you unconditionally. Letting your family know they’re loved. You’re better at lots of stuff.”

Aiden smiled and his grip pulsed around Elliott’s hand. “Thanks.” The tension in his shoulders loosened, but the worry and frustration in his eyes didn’t completely disappear.

“Well,” Elliott said, his big mouth flapping without his express consent. “If you get too tired of being compared to him, you could always get out of the lawyering game.”

Aiden’s eyebrows popped up and he smirked. “This again?”

“Sorry.” Elliott probably didn’t look it, though. “I was just thinking, you do have stuff that makes you happy.”

“Like what?”

“Your donations. Your football games. Charity work, you know? You could spend time on that.”

“Maybe.”

“Hell, you could do anything you wanted.” The paper plate balanced on the arm of his chair nearly took a dive as he gestured expansively. “You could take up interpretive dance.”

“Yeah, that’s never going to happen,” Aiden growled.

“You more of a ballet guy?”

“You’ve seen me dance. You know I don’t have that kind of coordination.”

“Yeah, me neither.” Elliott winced. “There’s a reason I didn’t turn to stripping as a career option.

Aiden laughed, loud enough that a couple of people looked over.

“But I’m serious, Aiden,” Elliott said. “You should think about it, at least.”

“I’ve already told you, my mother—”

“I’ve met your mother. That woman adores you, and I can tell you now, having known her for a couple hours, she’d still love you to bits if you did something that made you happy.”

“I know.” Aiden’s voice was soft and fond, and his shy smile made him look young, like Catherine Kent-Graham’s son rather than just one of the many Mr. Kent, esquires.

“Then why are you still working a job you hate?”

He waited, but Aiden didn’t deny it. When they’d talked about it before, the word hate had never passed Aiden’s lips. It still hadn’t, but the longer Aiden stayed silent, the harder it would be for him to turn around and say it wasn’t true.

The conversation floated away, and they moved on. They watched the kids run around for a while, and then Elliott remembered that they were still holding hands, and he stroked his thumb along the tops of Aiden’s fingers until Aiden broke the silence.

“I gave myself a mushroom cut once because all the cool kids on TV were doing it.”

Elliott sat straight up in his chair. “No way.”

Aiden rubbed the back of his head. “Yes way. Only my mother knows about it, though. I needed her to buzz all my hair off when it failed completely.”

“No way! Pics?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Crap.”

“Hey, lovebirds!”

They both looked. Jill was making her way across the lawn, a plate full of food in her hands.

“Are you just getting here?” Aiden accused. “After all the grief you gave me about showing up?”

“I’m a busy woman, Aiden,” she said, waving her hand in his face so forcefully that a deviled egg almost toppled off of her plate. “I’m putting in an appearance. Jim and Sheila should be grateful for that. Don’t waste time being pissy with me, though. I’ve come to do my sisterly duty and cut you loose before they start unwrapping the presents. If you leave now while everyone’s still sleepy and dumb from too much cake, no one will even bat an eye.”

Aiden sighed, looked at Elliott as if for his opinion—Elliott shrugged—then stood up, stretching his arms high over his head.

“So, you want to make a run for it?” Elliott asked, standing up himself, shaking out joints gone stiff from sitting in the hard chairs for so long. He scanned the backyard, which was steadily growing more gilded with the setting sun. He’d almost forgotten how many people were surrounding them.

“Yeah, let’s do it.” Aiden kissed Jill on the cheek, ignoring her indignant squawk as something finally did tumble off her plate into the grass. “Thanks, Jill.”

They said goodbye to everyone they passed, receiving hugs from some and distracted waves from others—and were on the road and heading back to the city in no time.

Elliott didn’t fill the car with chatter on the way back, but it wasn’t because of nerves this time. The party had gone as well as it could have, considering that he’d been intensely aware of how different he was from everyone he’d met. Experiencing what a large family felt like had been strange for him—the only child of two only children—but also exhilarating.

It was almost dark when the houses going by started to look like the ones Elliott had grown up with.

“Thank you,” Aiden said quietly as the streetlamps illuminated them both in stark bars.

“No problem. I was glad to come.”

He shook his head. “Not just that. Thanks for not freaking out and running away from this craziness. And for talking to me. I’m happy to listen.”

Elliott leaned over and pressed his lips to the underside of Aiden’s jaw, keeping them there for four streetlamps’ passing. When Aiden’s arm wrapped around his shoulders, he moved in as close as his seat belt would allow, resting his head on Aiden’s arm as they drove away from one home and toward another.