Chapter Ten

They leave for the city around midday on Saturday. In part, Daniel’s hoping to miss out on the weekend traffic by leaving as late as they can; in part, he’s unwilling to bend to the part of his id that wanted desperately to see Tony as soon as possible because it feels like he’s getting too attached too soon.

Tony slides into the passenger seat outside a squat, two-story house in Kingston. He smells like he just showered, and he’s wrapped up in a red-and-black scarf and a quilted jacket. From the porch, a woman with his dimples waves goodbye.

“Have fun, boys,” she calls.

Daniel’s jaw twitches.

“Don’t start,” Tony warns him.

“Wasn’t gonna,” Daniel lies.

“I feel like I’m a kid going on my first sleepover,” Tony tells him as they take the freeway exit south.

Daniel shrugs. “I guess it’s not that different.”

“No, I mean… This is my first time doing something like this. Going away for the weekend. With, um…”

Catching his meaning, Daniel picks up the sentence before Tony can come up with a label, or worse, ask Daniel what label he’d prefer. “I sure hope my boring talk won’t be a disappointing first, then.”

“Are you kidding? Hot professor being all smart and professional? No way.”

A flush creeps up into Daniel’s cheeks, and he turns the car’s heating down a bit. “Hot professor?”

“I said what I said.”

This time, Daniel couldn’t keep the shit-eating grin off his face if he tried.

“So,” Tony says pleasantly. “What the fuck are we listening to?”

It’s one of Daniel’s carefully curated mood playlists, which he can’t answer without sounding like an idiot or an asshole. “Um, I think this is the Bleachers.” He chances a look over at Tony’s blank face and restrains himself from adding a whole swell of words about who the Bleachers are and why he likes them.

“Can I take a look?” Tony indicates Daniel’s phone, settled in the holder on the dashboard.

“Yeah. Just let me know if I’m about to miss my turnoff.”

“Sure.”

It’s not that Daniel is ashamed of his taste in music; he knows who he is. He’s a nerdy liberal arts professor who likes nerdy indie music. Actually, the Bleachers are pretty cool in terms of Daniel’s taste in music. It’s not a secret or anything what kind of music he listens to. Something about Tony scrolling through his Spotify makes him incredibly nervous all the same.

There’s a little frown line in the middle of Tony’s forehead when he looks over briefly.

After what feels like an eternity and is probably less than three minutes, Tony announces, “I have never heard of a single one of these bands.”

It’s not a judgment, so Daniel will take it. “You can pick the music on the way back,” he offers.

“I’ll take you up on that. This isn’t, like, bad though. I’d need something faster for driving is all.”

Daniel doesn’t mention that in comparison to some of the other stuff he listens to, this playlist is pretty up-tempo.

He has to turn the music down when they reach the city anyway. It’s always weird, how loud noises somehow make it harder to see when, by rights, the two things should be entirely different mental processes. Driving in the city is the worst. By the time they get to the hotel, his grip on the steering wheel is white-knuckled, and his jaw is clenched tight.

“You okay there?” Tony asks lightly, almost amused.

“I hate driving in the city.”

“Who doesn’t?”

Daniel squints over at him in the dark garage. “You’re a car guy, though, aren’t you?”

Tony snorts.

Daniel flushes, and he looks away. “Sorry…”

“No, no, I get it. You just keep saying that as if it means anything besides that I know how they work. I can drive us out tomorrow if you want?”

“You’d do that?”

Tony shrugs. “Sure. It’s not fun in the city or anything, but it doesn’t get me all…”

He doesn’t finish, and Daniel’s thankful they don’t have to have a conversation about anxiety or that it’s Daniel’s natural state of being.

“Should have taken your car,” Daniel jokes.

“Oh, I wouldn’t dare.” Tony flashes him a grin as he unbuckles his seatbelt and gets out of the car. “Last time I drove more than fifty miles, I had to take a two-hour maintenance break.”

“Seriously, why are you still driving that car?”

“You know that saying about cobblers always wearing the worst shoes? Anyway, it’s been more than ten years, and you don’t just quit on that kind of relationship.

Daniel mulls that one over while they check in and freshen up. Is Tony’s relationship to his car somehow indicative of how he feels about dating? Relentless loyalty? That would be nice. Or is this a class thing, and Tony’s not in a place to easily buy himself a new car?

In the hotel room, they barely have enough time to use the bathroom and for Daniel to change out of his warm coat and into a blazer suitable for the talk. Under his own coat, it turns out Tony’s wearing a dark-blue button-up with lighter pinstripes. It stretches across the expanse of his pecs in a way Daniel would describe as “unfair.”

“I’m sorry about this.” He adjusts his tie with a wince.

“Are you kidding?” Tony bounces on the balls of his feet. “I can’t wait to see you in your element, Professor.” He wiggles his eyebrows ridiculously, and Daniel can’t help but laugh.

The hotel is only two subway stops from NYU, which is why Daniel chose it. The event Paul invited him to speak at is barely a conference—the Northeastern Digital Humanities Conference is, between the lines, an excuse to get wasted with their grad school buddies. Otherwise, Mari would have stopped getting invited when she accepted an adjunct position at UC Santa Cruz. It’s also why Daniel feels comfortable showing up for his own talk and the dinner afterward and none of the other events. There was a panel yesterday evening, and it might have been interesting, but he feels awkward enough about dragging Tony to one day of this.

Anyway, he’s so drained by everything that’s happened recently. Surely that makes it defensible to miss out on one panel in a subject he knows backward and forward.

Paul doesn’t give a shit either way, so long as Daniel makes it to drinks tonight. He greets Daniel with an exuberant hug, at least three espressos deep into the afternoon. “Danny! Perfect timing.”

Danny, Tony mouths over Paul’s shoulder.

Daniel tries to make his displeasure known without words.

“And who is this you’ve brought?” Paul looks Tony over with far more interest than Daniel is comfortable with.

“Tony.” Tony holds out his hand to be shaken. “I’m Daniel’s…uh…”

“My friend,” Daniel adds quickly, letting his arm brush against Tony’s and hoping he doesn’t take the title personally.

Paul’s eyebrows do a little dance anyway. “Nice to meet you.”

Tony’s elbow knocks against Daniel’s, and Daniel decides to assume it’s okay.

His talk is scheduled for forty-five minutes, fifteen of those a discussion section. For the first part, he outlines the Hudson Valley soundscape project and plays a few examples, among them the recording of Tony’s garage. He’s careful not to look at Tony as he plays it; he might do something unforgivable like wink.

In the second half of his talk, Daniel fleshes out future potentials for digital mapping in social and literary studies. He presents his half-formed notion of an interactive map of real and fictional violent crime and what that could do both to demonstrate the sensationalizing of violent crime and the way media tends to act as though it’s a question of individual mental illness rather than structural violence.

The question session nearly goes over. At least five different procedural cop shows get mentioned. Three different people suggest collating crime statistics with reports of police violence or gross police incompetence.

It turns out Daniel struck a nerve with this one. He’s definitely going to have to write that grant.

In the obligatory mingle before dinner, a whole bunch of people flock to Daniel to talk about it. And they’re not even only people he got drunk with in grad school, although Mari and Paul hang around plenty.

“It’s like you’re a rockstar,” Tony murmurs, too low for anyone else to hear. He has a champagne flute, the stem pinched delicately between his thumb and forefinger, and something about the filigree glassware in his broad, strong hands is relentlessly appealing.

“You’re going to inflate my ego,” Daniel warns quietly, lips almost brushing Tony’s ear.

He can see the goosebumps that break out on Tony’s neck. Flattering.

“All right, lovebirds,” Paul says loudly, forcing them apart. “Time for dinner; flirt later!”

Daniel asks Tony as they head toward dinner, “Do you mind that he’s… Um. So obvious about us?”

“I mean, I think it’s pretty clear I’m here as your date.”

“Yeah, but you’re not…”

“Out?” Tony nods. “True, but what are the chances of anyone here telling my parents about me?”

“Fair.”

“So,” Mari asks, taking a seat across from Tony in the dimly lit restaurant Paul chose for the evening. It’s covered by NYU, so Daniel’s willing to bet it will be stupidly expensive. “What did you think of Daniel’s talk?”

“It was super interesting.” Tony unfolds his napkin. “I never used to think about how my work sounds, but when you listen to it, it’s actually kind of nice.”

“Oh, that was your place of work we heard?” Mari leans forward.

“Yeah. That was me working, actually.”

Looking between the two of them, Mari asks, “How did you two meet anyway?”

“My car needed fixing.” Daniel wills her silently to drop the line of questioning.

“Do you not find your work nice in general?” Paul asks, sliding into place next to Mari and taking a long sip of his wine. How he got a glass of wine already before they’ve even ordered is anyone’s guess.

Tony shrugs, loosening his tie. “I like it. It’s just— You know. Loud and dirty.”

“Loud and dirty,” Paul repeats slowly, savoring the syllables.

Daniel throws a napkin at him.

Tony turns to Daniel. “They don’t meet a lot of nonacademics, do they?”

“Sadly, no, we waste away here in our ivory tower, never going amongst the masses,” Paul intones. He’s at NYU with an anthropology professorship, and given everything Daniel’s learned about participant observation since he started working with Colette, the irony is rich, although it’s lost on everyone else at the table.

“Ignore him,” Daniel says. “Please.”

Mari laughs. “Please do. We’re only teasing. Daniel never brings anyone to these things.”

“That’s not true. I brought Jeff.”

Paul waves a lazy hand. “Jeff got his own invite. He was on the panels about copyright and other boring legal stuff sometimes, remember?”

“Shit, he’s not here, is he?” The thought is mildly horrifying. While Daniel wouldn’t mind showing off that he’s moved on, Jeff would almost certainly be an ass about Tony’s job.

Paul shakes his head. “No, he’s at a much more prestigious conference somewhere in Wisconsin.”

Mari snorts. “If it were prestigious, it wouldn’t be in Wisconsin. Anyway, where’s Dolores?”

Paul sighs melodramatically. “She’s doing fieldwork in Costa Rica. We’re on a break.”

While Mari drills Paul for further details on Dolores’s research, Tony leans in close to Daniel.

“Jeff is…”

“My ex. Also, an academic. And a lawyer, I guess, but mostly he teaches political science and human rights classes. We broke up a year ago.”

Tony nods.

“Is this too weird?”

Tony’s eyes crinkle a little, as though he’s about to smile, but he’s not quite happy enough. “It’s not. These are your friends, right?”

“Yeah.”

They chat easily about work and life over dinner. Mari is slowly working her way up the ranks at Santa Cruz by virtue of being the most organized person Daniel knows while also being too nice to say no to responsibility. She’s the Stacy of California. Paul got funding for a truly batshit project that involves attending an ayahuasca retreat, and he’s due to start a special diet for it after Christmas, apparently. Who knew you had to fast before taking drugs for maximum effect? Around them, the buzz of the dinner continues through the appetizers and the main course.

Tony eats slowly and steadily, only commenting occasionally. Under the table, though, his fingers brush Daniel’s often enough that Daniel feels reassured this isn’t going awfully.

Some of the older guests leave around dessert. It’s already almost nine, and a few people are in the city with their families or looking to get home tonight. The younger group remains, drawing closer around the remaining tables. Daniel knows most of them, not as well as Mari and Paul, but well enough in passing that he can make conversation about recent publications and current news.

He’s only drawn out of a drawn-out discussion about how ridiculous it is that the right to have an abortion is once again in question in the US when Tony’s fingers clench around his and then suddenly let go.

Daniel remembers, suddenly, what Tony admitted only the other day. That he drove his sister to get an abortion, and she decided against it.

“Wanna get some air?” he asks in an undertone.

“Yeah.” As they get up to go outside, Tony undoes his top button as though it’s strangling him.

“Sorry,” Daniel says when they get outside.

Tony laughs. It doesn’t sound as joyful as Daniel remembers. “For what?”

“Um…” Daniel runs a hand through his hair. “That all my friends are academics and start talking about politics like it doesn’t affect people’s lives. That I didn’t remember about…your sister.”

“It’s not like I don’t have the same conversations with my friends. Or like I’ve never been to the city before.”

That surprises Daniel for a moment, which is shitty of him. Of course Tony has friends. Of course they talk about these things.

“Y’know, I do have an associate’s degree,” Tony adds, which has nothing to do with anything except that Daniel didn’t know.

“Okay.” He wonders if he should add anything, but Tony keeps going before he can.

“And I kinda feel like a token uneducated person in the room just because I’ve had a conversation with a Republican in the last two months.”

Daniel winces. “I’m sorry,” he repeats.

“I don’t mean… Ugh, I’m sorry. Look, I have a bunch of hang-ups about stuff, I guess, and I don’t want you to think…anyway. It was getting a little much in there. And, yeah. Made me think of Gigi.”

Daniel lets himself reach out, grasp Tony’s arm with his hand, and stroke slowly along the tendons. “We can go back to the hotel room. Call it a night.”

Tony breathes out slowly and leans into Daniel’s space. He kisses Daniel, a soft whisper of a thing. “I already promised Paul we’d go out with him.”

“Paul can live with the disappointment. I have disappointed him many times.” It would be disappointing to Daniel too. Going out with Paul once in a blue moon when he makes it down to the city is the only holdover from his partying days. Standing under a streetlight, dwarfed by the giant buildings in Manhattan and shivering in the cold, Daniel finds he’d rather disappoint himself and one of his oldest friends than Tony.

“Nah.” Tony smile weakly. “I wanna see you cut loose a bit. I just need to stop feeling self-conscious.”

Tony shouldn’t have to feel responsible for managing his response to being the only tradesman in a room full of stuffy academics. Daniel wants to reassure him about that, but he doesn’t know how to untangle that line of thought without it sounding either condescending or way too invested in Tony’s emotional wellbeing.

“Here’s a suggestion,” he offers instead. “Alcohol.”

They make a valiant attempt, downing their wine and topping it up as soon as they get back inside, but in the end, it’s only two drinks before Paul has either scared off or enticed the remaining group into following him to one of his haunts.

Paul has a way of finding places that seem incongruous to his aesthetic. He embodies a waifish, scarf-wearing hipster look that was stylish for a moment when they were still students and has become eccentric now they’re professors. The club he takes them to is a barely converted warehouse with R&B thumping from the speakers. The bouncer barely checks their IDs, and the beer costs four dollars. Daniel’s pretty sure it’s Dolores’s influence as he vaguely remembers Paul being aloof and artistic in a very white way when they met—before she sat down next to them in their first-ever graduate seminar and spent half of it muttering about intersectionality under her breath. He’s never known much about their relationship, not least because neither Paul nor Dolores are the kind of people who like to label their own genders, sexualities, or relationships, but he loves what they bring out in each other. He does wish Dolores were in the country. He misses her.

“Cheapest beer in the state,” Tony yells in Daniel’s ear as he slides his wallet into his pocket. He got a glow-in-the-dark bracelet from a group of girls who are way too drunk to be so happy on their way to the bar. He looks lighter around the edges since they talked, even though they didn’t clear anything up at all. He looks happy to be here.

The beer is served in red solo cups, sloshing with every movement, so they drink quickly. Daniel can’t quite help the way his nose wrinkles. It’s really bad. Bud Light levels of bad.

Grimacing, Tony nods and chugs the rest of his.

Mari cheers. Being a reasonable person, she got a bottle of water.

“C’mon, Danny.” Tony grins. “Finish yours so we can hit the dance floor.”

It’s probably that Daniel doesn’t drink this much that often, so he’s already tipsy, or that Mari and Paul are rooting for him, or that he’s feeling young and stupid in general, but he manages to down the beer in four big swallows.

“Sweet!” Paul crows. “To the floor with us!”

He leads the way, neon bracelets glowing on either wrist. He’s still wearing his checkered scarf, and he dances like he used to, all knees and elbows. Weirdly, it seems to work for this crowd because after barely two songs, he’s already made friends with three different groups on the dance floor.

Mari bops along to the music, sipping at her water. She throws her hands up when the lyrics tell her to, and she spins and laughs and, to Daniel, looks almost exactly like she did at twenty-three. She’s got one of the other academics they brought by the hand, with a third bopping his head along awkwardly next to them.

It’s as nostalgic as it is strange how much Daniel feels catapulted ten years into the past. He’s spent so much time telling himself he’s happy with his quiet life that he almost forgot he wasn’t always like this. He does like things restful for the most part, but there’s a place for this kind of throwback, for music that was popular when he was a teenager, drowning out his usual cacophony of overthinking.

Daniel doesn’t feel guilty at all when Tony’s hand migrates from his arm to his hip, when he pulls Daniel in close and Daniel turns away from the group to dance with only him. He loops his arms around Tony’s neck, lets himself press close.

He wasn’t sure what this would be like, with Tony. It’s not as if Kingston is a hotbed for the clubbing scene (although it is, according to one of the weirder staff emails Daniel’s gotten, part of the heroin trail between New York and Montreal). Adding to which, Daniel’s never done this with…well, anyone but his friends, really. It wasn’t Jeff’s scene, and before Jeff, Daniel came to places like this to find someone for a one-night stand or to hang out with Paul, Dolores, and Mari all night while their eardrums got destroyed.

He likes how familiar and warm Tony’s hands are at his hips, even though he’s way too hot already. He likes how Tony throws his head back and laughs when Daniel can’t quite help but mouth the words to an Usher song from 2001. He likes how good it feels to move with someone else like this. Neither of them are great dancers, but Daniel can keep a beat, and Tony knows how to use his hips, and Daniel’s heart is racing and he’s grinning and he feels unbelievably alive.

When he reaches up to cradle Tony’s head in his hand, Daniel’s struck by the feel of the close-shaved part of his hair prickling against his palm, soft and sharp at the same time. A swell of something unspeakably tender overwhelms him, and he drags Tony in for a kiss.

Daniel tastes the cheap beer on Tony’s tongue, and he doesn’t give a shit. He wants to kiss Tony all the time. He loves the way Tony’s mustache scrapes across his upper lip. He loves how Tony draws him in, wraps him up, holds him close. He barely notices it happening, but one, maybe two songs pass before they’ve lost the group, before he’s got Tony up against the wall and they’re not even dancing anymore, just making out to the sound of 50 Cent asking a girl to take him to the candy shop.

“Wanna get out of here?” he asks, right in Tony’s ear.

Tony shudders, and Daniel feels every little tremor.

“You trying to seduce me, Professor?” Tony’s smiling enough that his dimples are showing again. It warms the pit of Daniel’s stomach, and his earlier unease is gone.

“I thought you were a sure thing.”

They’re both laughing as they stumble out of the club, shoulders and hands brushing the whole subway ride to the hotel. Daniel’s tipsy in that warm contented sweet spot where he’s feeling it but not too much, and with the way Tony’s looking at him, all unguarded wide-open eyes, he’s probably feeling pretty similar.

For all he’s been to a lot of conferences, Daniel’s never done the out-of-town hookup cliché, making out in the elevator and stumbling to his hotel room with his fingers tangled with someone else’s. Maybe it will wear off, this thrill at every mundane experience he shares with Tony.

He hopes it doesn’t.

They tangle up against the door of the hotel room once they’re inside, trading sloppy kisses and pushing and pulling at each other’s clothes.

“Sweetheart,” Tony mumbles into Daniel’s lips as Daniel pushes his shirt off his shoulders.

“Fuck you’re hot.” Daniel traces his fingers across Tony’s pecs.

A flush spreads across the skin Daniel’s mapping, as though Tony’s embarrassed or something, and Daniel grabs Tony by the belt buckle and pulls him back toward the bed. When he’s got Tony where he wants him, settled above him, Daniel says, “You must know, right? You must know how good you look.”

The flush reaches Tony’s cheeks. “I, uh, um…”

Daniel grabs him by the nape of the neck, pulls him in, and kisses him with all he’s got. “Can’t believe I got lucky enough someone who looks like you likes me,” he gets out between kisses so frantic they’ve gone sloppy. “Can’t believe someone so kind likes me.”

With a desperate noise, Tony buries his face in Daniel’s shoulder, collapsing to his side beside Daniel, tugging at his belt.

They kick off their pants gracelessly, and Tony squirms closer until he’s got a thigh hooked over Daniel’s hip. Until they’re pressed up against each other everywhere that matters, so close a sheet of paper couldn’t fit between them.

“Baby,” Daniel gasps when Tony ruts against him.

For the second time that night, he gets the pleasure of feeling Tony’s full-body shudder against him.

With an expression bordering on desperate, Tony looks at him, cheeks red, eyes wide. “You gotta stop talking, sweetheart.” His voice borders on desperate. “You’re going to ruin me.”

I want to ruin you, Daniel thinks selfishly. He wants Tony all to himself, for as long as he can get him. Instead of saying that, though, he kisses Tony again, grinding his hips until they’re aligned. He snakes a hand down and makes enough space so he can jerk them off together, held tight between them.

Maybe it’s the alcohol, maybe it’s the frenzy of emotion this night kicked loose in them, but it’s not long at all before Tony’s groaning in Daniel’s mouth and shooting off in his fist, wet and warm and beautiful. He whimpers in the aftermath, oversensitive, with his hips still jerking helplessly into Daniel’s grip. Daniel feels powerful, almost ridiculously turned on that he reduced Tony to this, and that thought and the added lubrication of Tony’s come sends him hurtling over the edge into an orgasm so powerful it makes him dizzy. He presses up tightly against Tony’s skin, riding the waves of it out, balls clenching and unclenching so hard it almost hurts.

He flops onto his back, finally done, breathing unsteadily.

When he gets his eyes open, Tony’s staring at him.

For a long moment, they just look at each other. Finally, Daniel manages, “That was…different.”

“Uh-huh. Um.”

They look at each other for a long moment, and then, unsteadily, they both begin to laugh.

“I think I’m gonna shower.” Tony looks down at himself. Most of their mess landed on his stomach, matting the sparse hair on his lower belly.

“Yeah.” Daniel snickers. “Yeah. I’ll be there in a sec. Once my legs work.”

“Yeah,” Tony agrees, still laughing a little as he makes for the bathroom.

Daniel gives himself a moment to bask, stretching out in the sheets before he forces himself upright. There’s a moment of headrush that tells him he should probably drink some water, and then he hears the shower turn on.

His pants are a crumpled mess at the foot of the bed, and he picks them up to get out his phone to check the time.

Quarter to two.

He’s officially not entirely an old person yet if he’s up this late.

He’s also officially still drunk and really tired, and it’s making his head swim.

Shit, there are three missed calls from Colette blinking on his lock screen.

Guiltily, he remembers how they left things and hits the button to call her back before remembering the time.

She picks up on the third ring.

“Daniel?” she asks down the line incredulously.

“Sorry,” he hisses, trying to keep his voice down. “My phone was on silent. I’m…”

“Are you drunk?”

“Maybe a little. Tipsy.”

“Who are you even.”

“I’m at a conference.”

“Ah. I take it this is a bad time to talk about Mario.”

Daniel lets himself slump down onto the bed. “I brought Tony.”

“All right.”

“I brought Tony, and I like him way too much, Colette.”

She sighs heavily down the line. “It’s not a bad thing to start a relationship.”

“Mario got his sister pregnant,” Daniel tells her as quickly and quietly as he can. Even as he says it, he feels the weight of the secret lifting off of him, tension releasing in waves. He’s spent all weekend forcing himself not to think about it, not to search for gaps to talk about it, because he wants Tony to himself, because he wants this to work. It’s a short-lived relief. Within seconds, the weight of the secret makes way for the guilt of not having told anyone. “And we haven’t talked about it. Not really. And I really like him, and I’m scared that…”

“Daniel?” Tony calls from the bathroom.

“I gotta go. Colette, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.” He disconnects the call and follows Tony to the bathroom.