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Were the request for the presence of all three siblings announced at once, or if Connor were included, Tom would default to the notion of a family matter and not care much whether Shiv told him the details later. The suited lady who was sent out to retrieve them, however, approaches Shiv with noticeably more care and possibly more confusion—with an air of I know as little as you do. It could still be a family thing, technically. Something in regards to the mother that Connor doesn't share with the rest. Perhaps even something that should concern Connor but Logan simply forgot about him. Tom feels these notions to be easy and plausible until he's watching the way that Shiv's shoulders stay squared as she walks. Then it feels that he's come across a dark hole in the wall that he just doesn't have the means to investigate, and which he chooses to leap away from lest he fall into the trap of staring hard and fruitlessly.
Seconds later, he's hooking a hand into an arm that then nearly drops a plate full of cake—its third slice.
"Hey buddy, I got some news. Walk with me?"
"Oh, sure, yeah yeah," Greg says to him, then turns back to Connor and Willa, "sorry guys!"—and then, back to him, a few strides down the path and leaning a little close, "thank you, oh my god, I couldn't tell if he was about to start teaching me or quizzing me. And I dunno which would be worse..."
Tom snorts. Having heard something about how the Brusilov Offensive wasn't topped in lethality until the next World War, and unsure whether Connor actually said the words Operation Barbarossa or if his own memory supplied it, he did feel that he was pulling off a swift rescue of sorts. It brightens him to hear Greg confirm it and pushes him comfortably into the news that he's waited to share in person:
"Quizzing for sure, hah. But listen, uh... so—did you happen to hear me talking to Shiv a minute ago? I was surprised that you didn't say anything, but you must've just been too focused on your little apartment problem—"
"Oh, yeah, no, I did like, hear bits and... pieced them together, I think, like—yeah. Congratulations, man."
Tom waits patiently in the ensuing silence for Greg's eyes to become calculating or at least questioning, but they don't. He just nods and smiles all the while a sadness shines from underneath. It lasts long enough to make Tom laugh and slap him on the back—this time indeed jostling a bit of cake to the ground—and by design snap Greg's face into a new shape.
"Uh, yeah, congratulations yourself, man," he says, and revels in the continued confusion. "...Are you stupid or something? Obviously you're coming up with me."
"Oh—shit. Okay. Shit. Wow—"
"Did you really think I was just gonna let you fade into obscurity at Parks? Be some random desk jockey forever?"
"Well, I didn't necessarily—"
"C'mon, you're family. And I'm not the type to go through assistants like underwear, okay, if something fits I keep it. You should know that. So don't you fucking worry about your station, Greg. Not even in this little twist of events with Kendall. Alright?"
Another push of hand against back, though far less forceful, and another few patient moments. Eventually Greg nods again and says the word that Tom was waiting for: "Alright. Yeah. I'm... thank you."
It becomes safe to relax his gaze and his neck and shoulders alike. He and Greg have gone halfway around to the first blockade at what felt like a slow pace, but then he supposes they've just got such long legs. He looks past the disappointed crowds as if they're not there at all and instead at the grey skies and similarly desaturated trees. A single pair of birds in the far distance makes two dark spots moving across the clouds. Tom was appreciating mostly this very same view with Shiv minutes ago, though not so consciously, he realizes. He breathes it in deep and it makes him want to explain himself even further.
"You know that you'd've been my third choice for best man, right," he says in a way intended to sound the least like a confession but instead a teaching moment. He puts as much duh as he can into his eyebrows as Greg glances over. An actual confession that he doesn't mind at all comes next, after a sigh. "...Second, really, if it wasn't only fair to let Roman do it after he planned my bachelor party."
"Oh, right," Greg breathes, looking like he's thinking just as vividly of how ill-fitting the man was to have done any part of the job. Tom doesn't think he'd have to explain his move to make himself out to be someone as eager to be a brother as a husband, then, even if that was the sort of thing he could explain out loud.
What ought to be just as needless to explain, he does anyway: "The first in an ideal world would've been Matt and Jonas—as the single entity that is The Fly Guys, of course. Would feel fucked up for anyone to pick a favorite between your two oldest friends. But... y'know, I barely see 'em anymore, so."
The logical conclusion, which is also of course the same point he began from, is left unsaid for Greg to digest in whatever way he likes. Tom does glance over as their walk comes full circle and starts on a second lap, though, just to make sure he is doing so. He catches a smile on the man's face that he's glad to see, much in the same way that he feels fuller from an uninterrupted gaze out at the view beyond Brightstar Buffalo.
And much in the same way that he felt it the last time he watched Greg's hair stir in the cold wind, too, Tom falls into the rhythm of replacing it before too comfortable a silence can prevail.
"Speaking of a future that I'm excited about, by the fuckin' way... I oughtta tell ya. You know how it's, like, such a thing for married guys to call their wife their 'ball and chain'? Well—not me! And I don't just mean that I'm a good guy, I'm talking by definition." He watches Greg's eyebrows knit together and feels something grow inside him. "You ever been in an 'open relationship?'"
"Have I...?"
"Matter of fact, do you know what that is?"
"Um, I don't... I mean yeah, yes, I know what it is, I've seen 'em. But no, I... no. I haven't partaken myself. I mean I really... yeah, hah, no. But. You're saying that's what you and Shiv are doing? Or are you just—"
"Yes, Greg, god. It's a thing that people do. In real life and not just Sex and the City. Don't be so vanilla."
"It's just that I wouldn't have thought you would go for that, really..."
"Why not? Huh? I'm cool, I'm hot, I'm modern... It's a consensual arrangement! It's basically the same rules of the bachelor party, but... forever! Right? That's all it is."
"Uh—"
"Once you get to a certain tax bracket, Greg," he starts to teach, so that his heartbeat will level out, "you are no longer beholden to certain rules. You know? Nothing really matters. Rules period are for those far below you. The way I see it... I'm the king and she's the queen, right, so... why not fuck the odd peasant once in a while? If anything it could even further affirm our commitment to the marriage, y'know, since it proves a little number is... meaningless. It's about having a default that we keep coming back to."
As he says those thoughts in that order aloud for the first time, they sound almost logical. He thinks he might even sound enlightened, like someone up on a stage, motivating thousands of losers for a hundred bucks a pop. All is calm for a moment or so.
Greg's voice, theoretically calm itself at least in volume, cuts through. "So on the wedding eve, then... um. I mean, nevermind. That's... cool, I guess. If you're cool with that."
"Yeah, Greg, everything I've been saying is about how I'm cool with it."
"Uh-huh. Yeah, no, I get it, I was just... So you're gonna start doing that too?"
There's a dip in Greg's voice that gives the impression it's following a drop further down, in his stomach. Tom's own gut follows.
"Yeah—well no, no..." He doesn't know why he started to lie nor why he couldn't commit. He tries to avert his gaze to the sky, which looks now to just be a blank, blurry space. "It's not that I—there's no question that I'm allowed the same freedom, if that's what you're asking."
"But—"
"But I don't have any plans, no. Not... yet, I guess, but I... no, I'm not really, or haven't been, um. Particularly interested in any other women."
The dash of honesty grounds him and unblurs his surroundings. Something very unpleasant rages on in his abdomen, though. Tabitha flashes in and out of his mind with no weight, just an image, the first in a backwards list that amounts to three female faces. Exiting the realm of sex, the number doubles, so long as he includes an elementary school girlfriend. He wants to count the photo of Jackie Onassis on his dad's office wall and, in a jolt of purpose, make it seven.
What he sees next on Greg's face is more than just his own discomfort mirrored ruthlessly back. There's a bitten lip but also a spark of real understanding.
"I get that," he mutters. With one breath he betrays that he might even get too much. He seems to have an idea. "...What about—?"
The sight of Shiv far past the coasters, finally returning from the meeting rooms, draws Tom's eyes away from the distinct press of Greg's lips. With a squeeze to the man's arm he strides away, both deeply relieved and in a sharp mourning for the moment he lost.
*
His clarity and panic after returning to the initial news, which happens on transit back to Manhattan, a thought so abruptly triggered he's not sure that it doesn't become real noise—wait a second, it'll be so fucked up to be gay and working for ATN—is the first time that he's identified himself as such, at least in as many conscious particles, in a long time. Even while making out with that waiter and exchanging blowjobs, let alone the preamble or aftermath, the word never crossed his mind. But he was of course quite high, then. As most of his nights of that nature have ever been. Not even learning the guy's name, as bad as he felt for some seconds between leaving his car and jogging up to meet Tom in such beautiful coincidence on the icy road, likely helped.
In the past, more often than not, Greg would have followed up that thought with something more purposeful about how except I'm not, not really, I'm just... just what, he has nothing on tap to fill in the blank now. But it's less a matter of coming up empty and more likely, he thinks, a matter of newfound self-respect, that he thinks the word again. Decides that maybe it doesn't matter if he can't imagine putting it on like a perfectly fitting shirt—maybe it's just like being tall or technically-half-Jewish or having a mole. Maybe it's just something that's true.
In the moment, frankly, thinking of all the terrible things that he associates with ATN and all the right-wing beliefs that make his stomach turn... it actually does fit in that way. It's an exciting sort of secret rather than something that makes him think of a grave or a black eye.
Of the latter, he's been reminded if only vaguely by Tom, here and there. A little bit when they met. A handful of rapid but dull flashes in the office—often smothered by behavior so bizarre that it just left the neat category of bullying. Strangely, it was missing from the force in Tom's hands that sent him to the ground on the morning of his wedding. By that time, Greg supposes, he felt it a cruel comparison. He could neglect to call it anything and still know what his feelings were, returned or otherwise... and he also knew that Tom was not nor would he ever be the boy who expressed his regret by bruising the same mouth that had just been on his or around his cock.
Greg has been relying on new confident rumblings to tell himself this since the wedding, and does it now more consciously, with words: Tom will never let him do those things in the first place. Not even if deep down he'd want to.
That affirmation feels good enough for the time being, perhaps just alongside the lingering certainty about what he is unmarred by a need to deny it. It's not at all a perfect end to the pattern he's fallen into in past months. The next he actually sees of Tom, in his first day at ATN, Greg feels as if he's speedran what should have taken place over at least a week. He's down and up and down and something else. He's dreading a bad mark on his soul in the morning and morbidly proud of his work by evening—all because, he has to think by the next early morning when he's completely alone, his boss has a tendency to get close to his face and speak in a very particular register.
On his second day, everything seems to pay off, or rather a line of the good dominoes proceeds to fall. Something Greg has done—he's not sure which—has motivated Kendall to kindness. His living situation is fixed and allows him to relax, to feel like he can truly begin to move on.
Just not all at once. First he has to actually have his bed to himself. Then, between emptying himself into a sock and drifting to sleep in his new bed for the first time, he thinks not at all of the rager he just had but about the wedding. He plays Tom's speech over in his head. He squirms and relives Tom's grip on him on the dancefloor, the way he spun him and laughed and explained what Kendall had done and then left as abruptly as he came. In the world where he actually got to play the best man, Greg imagines his affection concentrated and his selfishness multiplied by ten. Here a sigh, there a bout of retching in the bathroom in secret.
He falls unconscious sometime in the middle of thinking about the soup he was in at the bachelor party—the mental image that the cocaine clung to, or maybe the other way around, and made him feel some monstrous new hybrid emotion. It occurs to him directly upon waking that in five months, including what the waiter swallowed, every single one of his loads have been helped along by thoughts of Tom.
Imagine what Tom would think if he knew that, he tries to tell himself—like a punishment.
When the most wishful corner of him then suggests the beautiful kind of secret, Greg tries further, more definitive, even more punitive: No. He's never coming out.
He wants to not understand Tom, either, but he does. His new accumulated savings only exaggerate the warning feeling in his gut, when he imagines a particular sort of fulfillment, rather than buffer it. He makes note of the culture he's in, now. Throughout the first workweek he sees the difference in rigidity than before. It straightens him as long as he's clocked in.
It's just not so bad for him, is the thing. It's about the kind of nerves he gets while in line for a rollercoaster with a big drop. He keeps getting home, and lighting up and smoothing out, and getting clearer and clearer on what he needs to do. Whom he needs to do. He comes to the simple, intelligent conclusion that he's been stuck on Tom because he's lonely, and he's lonely because he's afraid, and so he pulls up those self-help youtube gurus that he's consulted before and tries once and for all to build the courage.
Utterly unrelated to the affirmations and the sleep hypnosis music, he soon endures a second Kendall Party at his apartment and notices his cousin the host grabbing another man's ass. Not particularly out in the open but not in some obviously private nook, either. He tears his gaze away and escapes the room in the moment but feels a rule rewritten, a gear switched, chops mustered, and resolves to make good use of the weekend.
Affirmations that he has inner strength and need not rely on weed to cope with stress have been in the works for several months now. Greg's efforts have kept him sober on Waystar property past Thanksgiving but mostly stagnated there, and he'd decided that he was satisfied with that, because what's so bad about taking the edge off after work? But when he starts googling gay bars and narrowing them down and factoring in how high he might have to get to be comfortable in any given venue, he stops himself for some introspection. He doesn't want to have to smoke a bowl to be able to do this. That'll just keep him lonely, won't it? He'll barely be present. It won't fix anything in the long run.
Alcohol will be enough, he tells himself, mentally tossing the bong away. But he does have a puff or two before he goes out. Just to wean himself because he's heard cold turkey can be dangerous. It helps him fret less about what to wear, too.
He worries regardless, from the bathroom mirror to his half-reflection in the subway windows to the metal pole that he's waiting at for ten minutes, before even being allowed in, whether he's attractive. Factually some people have said that they think so, though none of those people were of the audience he's about to meet. The moment Greg gets his hand stamped he's on alert for any sets of eyes that might be on him and for how long they stay. The same pulse of feeling makes him too dizzy to really notice. On all sides at once there are hairy, sweaty chests and muscular arms and asses so round that they're more unreal than particularly erotic. A thought of terror—of oh god, I don't really belong here—competes repeatedly with dashes of undeniable, pent-up lust.
It's just that he needs to get himself a drink—from a bartender who comments on his height and calls him love and makes his cheeks go hot—and find a corner to sit in, he realizes. There he can relax and catch his breath and just observe. For several moments Greg neglects even the last, feeling obligated to do nothing but sip on his beer. He closes his eyes and feels safe, and he opens them to a room that feels new—one that he can properly survey. That is, he can look for a man that he'd like.
The thought alone is still scary but also exciting, perhaps in the fact alone of being able to admit it. And in knowing how much of a different, smoother game it'll be than the handful of times that he's been invited out to regular bars and felt prompted to do the same with women. He remembers explaining once to a guy in college that it seemed like the sort of thing people only did on TV, that picking out a girl was so arbitrary he just didn't know what metrics he should be using. The confession wasn't an innocent one; part of him knew that his disinterest wasn't normal, that he may as well have been coming out. Though it was a relief back then to be met with complete confusion—that the guy who heard it understood even less than he did. And he didn't know, back then, just how intuitive it could be.
Men of all sorts glisten from the crowd, too. It's overwhelming at first, the sheer number of options, until he remembers that they're not all options. They have to want him back. This relieves him more than it worries him now that he's actually here. Hardly half a beer in, it's begun to feel safe to simply look.
Then the first man to keep his gaze and draw warmth from him is also at least fifteen years his senior, instantly evoking a familiar image and making Greg snap his eyes down to his lap. He lives for several seconds in a pit of both regret for ruining it and shame for the pattern—for those whom he's been staring at the most, the rest just without thinking.
Okay, so maybe I just have daddy issues, he thinks, and chugs the rest of his Shiner.
He doesn't want to, though. Whatever the answer is, he doesn't want it. He goes back to the bar and gets a cocktail with a high sugar content and this time goes to another room, hoping vaguely to shift the demographics of the crowd, to make it easier to spot guys his own age. At the same time his instincts keep his gaze to the spaces between bodies, or to the walls or the floor. He skirts the edges and is careful not to touch anyone, struck against his will with very old notions of what one can catch. He thinks somehow not at all of how much he wanted to be touched and how that's the reason he's here in the first place.
The first spot he settles in has leather seats that he's eager to claim just for the physical comfort, but nothing else of note. He has little to look at but the people who take up the other couches, none of whom are singles, and then divert his attention to his phone so that he doesn't look like a creep. In spite of the drink he's very conscious that this defeats the purpose of coming here. He just needs the minutes of scrolling in the same way as a replacement for the joint he can't hit.
"Hey. Do you play?"
In the area with the dart boards and pool tables, a guy his own age or younger, dressed in similar taste, even only a few inches shorter, comes directly to him. Greg was eyeing him since he came in from the bathroom, first with a searching appreciation, then with a growing amazement that he felt neither intimidated nor disinterested. This must be what it means for someone to be in your league. Still, he never expected no matter how close the guy got that he would actually be approached.
"Huh?—oh," he registers it on a delay, prompted by the echoed cracking of two billiard balls on the nearest table. He's grinning but compelled to be honest: "No, not really, uh, not well at least. I can't control the stick for the life of me. You know."
He doesn't face the guy all the way now that he's close, and he just barely notices the pout of a lip and an understanding nod. All of a sudden the space next to him is empty; the guy has moved on.
It occurs to him a second later: that guy was flirting. And he just ruined it.
Greg's neck snaps around in a panic to spot him, wherever he went. He hasn't gotten far in such a short time, just a few strides in the direction of the bar, but part of Greg wants to sink into the floor right here in the belief that it's too late. He mentally chants an affirmation and sways briefly on the balls of his feet before pushing off to chase after, flinging a few cold drops of his drink up and past his collar and inside his shirt. He shivers but quickly disregards it, instead desperate to not be awkward about getting that guy's attention:
"Hey, shit, actually—" He turns around, startled, and Greg's mouth runs faster—"I just, I hope that didn't seem rude or, or like I was rejecting any, um, advances you may have been making? Because I am just like, genuinely not good at pool. But that's all I was saying, and if that was just like an initial approach we can move past it and I would definitely like to talk to you if you do? Or, um... we could play darts instead?"
He's expecting for a seemingly infinite pause that now he's really ruined it, that this guy will keep walking wordlessly. But then, he smirks. And in a vaguely familiar fashion, he reaches out for Greg's shoulder and leans close.
"How about I let you buy me a drink?"
It sounds funny to him at first, though quickly twists around into something fantastic. "Sure," Greg says, puffed up, feeling at once years older and wiser. Broader too, like his bones have moved to accommodate the sensation. "Um... what are you having?"
In the middle of it, when Ricky uses the bathroom, Greg wonders if the guy sussed it out about him to begin with somehow—that he'd be giddy about flexing his wallet, so to speak. And if so, when the change became visible on him. The idea of dropping twenty-five on a single drink would have made him physically ill with dread not that long ago. That he can now think almost nothing of it, even recalling the sorts of drinks and meals that he's enjoyed on Tom's dime, feels like he may as well be passing by in a carriage and throwing out handfuls of gold coins for the crowds. It makes any guilt about the source of his income lift away and dissipate into distant space.
Ricky is much better at this than he is. Not really shy at all until it's convenient to be, at which he can make a joke that seems only charming. Intelligence backs up his confidence too, as much as Greg can tell he reigns it back. He imagines that this scene is full of the types who get intimidated by a smart guy. He gets it. Similarly Greg avoids naming the company he works for and says only that it's a big one, and it's a bunch of corporate bullshit but pays great. In order to continue being honest he reimagines the career-question as being about his past and goes on about older jobs and how bad they were, and how nothing compares to the stability he's got now.
"I'm jealous," says Ricky. "I'm just an artist."
"At least that means you have no boss," Greg tells him.
"You got a shitty one, huh?"
There's a hand on his forearm, warm and tingling, and a third drink in him, and these push him past the waffling he might do if sober and instead directly into the facts: "He's actually a good guy, I just wish he wasn't my boss."
Ricky makes a funny face. A suddenly very real face, as if something shocking has made him break character. He tilts his head and raises one eyebrow and quirks his lips. "What's that mean?"
"Hm?" Greg forgot that most boss-employee relationships ended when the workday did. He's not sure that he wants to get into the family thing. He tells a story that feels real enough, though: "Oh, just... I've known him longer than I've worked for him. He's basically my best friend. He just has a thing where he like... I guess being in charge of people brings out the worst in him? Or really—the people in charge of him are the real shitty people, and... he takes it out on me."
He tries then to shrug impersonally and transition into a long sip of his drink, which he hopes will muddle the web of cause and effect that he's pieced together of his cousins and their company. When it doesn't happen quickly enough, he wants to forget it entirely. He worries that Ricky could figure out what Tom looks like by staring into his eyes for long enough. So he directs his gaze to the bar where his arm leans and a hand rests on it, and finally reaches out to do the same with the space above the other man's knee, bringing their faces closer too.
Even then all he's said stays ringing, and the fact of it being said in a gay bar makes him feel certain that Ricky is going to keep prodding for details—that if the story of him and Tom isn't already in that shape, it's going to be made into it. He's going to start thinking of all the ways it could be and he doesn't want to think about things that he can't have and shouldn't even want to have, so he pushes far past a bubble of personal space too fast to think about it and says, "Can we talk about something other than work? Or maybe not talk at all?"
He's answered with exactly what he wants, and with so little hesitation he can't believe it. Ricky is kissing him, eagerly and expertly. Heat explodes in isolated spots all over Greg's body even before there's a tongue past his lips. His cock is one of them but nearly goes unnoticed because of all the rest which feel just as good, and which he barely knew could happen before now.
Fingers start snapping to his left when he starts getting really hot—a few times before it's especially loud and he opens his eyes, and it's the bartender, who says "Hey ladies, that's what the couches are for."
Halfway to that narrow hall of leather, Ricky says why not just go straight to his place.
Greg freezes for a split second but agrees, encouraged by a pulse of his cock more than he's discouraged by fear. Fear of what, even? Sex? He's had sex. He wants sex. It can't be all that different without a weed high. Does he think Ricky is going to insist they take it all the way? What would be so bad about that? Ricky is hot. Kissing him has been so hot. He definitely wants to touch him more...
"Hey, uh," he finds himself starting anyway, breaking the silence some way past the building, "are you cool with keeping it to like, grinding and blowjobs? Just, at least for now?"
Ricky looks breathless as he nods. It sends a hot wave of confidence through Greg's core, and he proceeds to slide his hand down Ricky's back to his ass and squeeze, which makes the guy laugh. Greg grins and laughs back. He realizes he doesn't even really know where they're going, yet it feels like he's leading.
"I really hope you live close," he admits, possibly in too much of a whine, but he can't help it.
A nod so slow, now, it feels like Ricky is trying to hide his confirmation. "I do. Just down 47th, like a ten minute walk."
He lets Greg tide himself over with a sloppy kiss and a press of their chests together just then, as well as multiple more times down the way. Each time that he does he feels successful, like he's gotten away with something. He's neglected to attract angry shouts of derogatory names or worse and he feels better and better, less like his usual stammering self and more like the kind of person who could be happy, as in really happy... and so when Ricky does more than go along with it, and pulls him out of the sidewalk and into a space between buildings, pushing him against the wall and grinding his hips forward, Greg isn't afraid at all.
His moment of bliss is so pervasive as to remove the meaning from Ricky's grip on his throat until it's far past too tight—at which point, at the very moment of his strangled beginning of a protest, his skull is knocked hard into the brick behind him. He's still thinking in the moment with his dwindling brain cells that this is an accident, he's misunderstood something, he tripped on a bottle—
Then his windpipe is more or less released, and so is a switchblade from its handle right by his ear. It scrapes his jaw on the way, making him gasp. The white spots in his eyes fade to Ricky's face, which is alight and yet lacking.
"What the fuck—"
"Alright, corporate-boy. Just don't fucking move." His eyes stay on Greg's now only to send the message that he's being watched, as Ricky's free hand goes rummaging through Greg's pockets. He goes for the jeans first even though he ought to know from moments ago that their only contents are in the middle, in the process making Greg's cock pulse in spite of everything.
When he switches to his jacket and shoves a hand into the pocket with his phone, Greg reflexively moves to protect it. There's cold metal pressing hard against his cheek, then, and a rough fist in his gut—counterproductive, really, to keeping Greg's arms flat against the wall, but he manages it anyway.
"What'd I fucking say?" Ricky, if that's even his real name, spits. Greg's phone disappears into his own zipped-up pocket right then. His stomach turns from how much of his life that little box holds more than the punch, or even, yet, from the pain of being fooled.
That part comes when it's all done. This guy gets everything but his keys and the pack of gum he'd brought to make sure his breath would smell good. Doesn't have the courtesy, or perhaps not the time, to at least leave him his ID. Even if he slides it into a mailbox later, it'll go to some shitty apartment in Queens because Greg hasn't been able to update his address yet.
Greg watches Ricky's eyes as he backs away, switchblade pointed out all the while, finding them like some rabid dog's. He feels like he's waiting for some kind of apology, some I didn't wanna hurt you at least, up until the point that the guy turns on his heel and books it. By design, then, he's too dizzy to run after and watch where he goes. His throat is too sore to yell for help either.
The first thing he says aloud, after clutching the stinging part of his face and sinking to the dirty ground: "Oh my god, what a fucking asshole..."
As if it would have been better, had the mugging been out of the blue, by a more complete stranger?
Well, it might have. Maybe then Greg's hammering heart would be sending him out there to find a solution, to at least get someone to call the police. His adrenaline would be useful instead of half still in his pants, though now quickly leaving as tears stream down his face, taking all his hopes with them. It feels like his fault for not picking up on it. For mentioning that he had a well-paying job. For making out with the first guy who spoke to him. For even going to the bar in the first place.
His head stills pounds and his limbs stay shaking, but throwing up a couple times puts an end to his time in the alley. If nothing else, he can't stand to stay around the stench. But there is something else too. Greg has remembered the street that he's on, and the fact that Manhattan is on a grid.
Further, it's not his apartment that he's thinking of even though he's got the means to get in, but someplace much closer. An actual ten-minute walk. His metro pass was taken anyway. It's all I've really got left, he's thinking, and that's it.
The doorman is the first to hear the explanation of what happened so that he'll be allowed to page them at this hour, in this disheveled state.
"Tom is my friend and boss," he says first, and "his wife Shiv is my cousin."
*
"Jesus Christ, Greg, why didn't you go to the police? Or an ER?"
Tom nevertheless does a full orbit around him as soon as he steps out of the elevator and, upon spotting the blood caked by his ear, mouths fuck and takes his arm to pull him to the closest bathroom. He doesn't bother to keep his voice down because Shiv recently started wearing the densest earplugs the market has to offer. She could sleep through the rapture.
"They took my phone," Greg says in a low groan. "And... you were closer. Is it okay that I'm here? I'm—I just, I had nowhere else to go, and you said once that I could come to you about anything, so I... I know it's fucking late, man, but—"
"Shut up."
He's getting into the same lines that he said on the phone from downstairs, and he knows it, so he snaps his mouth shut even before Tom parks him on the toilet seat. The vanity lights make him squint, feeling like he took a trip downtown after all, but Tom quickly turns a dial on the wall and dims them. His eyes soften first, then the rest of him.
"You're here, alright?" Tom grunts, faced away, opening the cabinet under the sink and palming around for the first-aid kit. It's larger than he can tell in the dark under there so he struggles just slightly to hoist it up to the counter. He pulls a stool out for himself, too. Hearing I got mugged on the phone startled him awake with a mental picture of something worse, frankly, so a piece of him is relieved. "Like I'm gonna send you back down..."
Tom playing doctor wasn't necessarily what he expected when he was walking here. He wasn't sure he needed it before he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, either, except maybe an ibuprofen and some mouthwash. Of course he makes no protest whatsoever while the man dabs his face with a wet rag, not to insist that he can do it himself or for anything else. He just tightens his lips and closes his eyes. Just for a second until Tom clears his throat.
"So what the fuck happened, huh?"
"Uh..."
The story he tells is mostly the truth, just with omissions. The suddenness of the attack is his only fabrication, and a seamless one at that. Yet Greg is nauseated all the while as if it's a big, terrible lie, much like the one he was told tonight. He just... can't possibly give those details. He can't. Not even when Tom finishes taping the gauze to his face and his bottom lip leaves the visible grip of his teeth as he scoots back.
"There's something you're not telling me," he says. Fear flashes in Greg's eyes plain as day, then. That surprises Tom enough to forget his worry from moments ago and smirk, roving his gaze deliberately down to the pattern on Greg's collar. "...You look a bit too gussied up for a casual drink at the bar, Greg. Were you on a date?"
"Well..." There's no real relief at the opportunity to lie again, though with no choice he takes it with only the amount of hesitation that Tom seems to expect. Greg watches him wring out the rag and grin wildly, all his teeth, almost a snarl. "Kind of, I guess—"
"And you're trying to hide it from me because why, huh? You think I'm gonna make fun of you and how unlikely it seems you'd—?"
"It just didn't go well, man, okay?" Greg snaps to get it over with. To keep his voice from shaking for long. He looks at the floor—at their feet on the tile, Tom's bare, on either side of his. He's tearing up, trying so hard to resist opening the floodgates, dreading what more might Tom have to razz or at least ask about it, if she stood him up, if she was a catfish, if he himself was a catfish... and then Tom's hand is in his hair.
"Oh, fuck, Greg." He was angled so far down that Tom could see the back of his head, and even in the dim light he noticed a difference in darkness between some spots and others. Feeling it now, it's obvious. "You've got blood back here too... nothing still wet I don't think, thank god. But shit. You couldn't tell?"
His hands make a strong grip around either of Greg's arms before he has a chance to respond, turning him ninety degrees so that he can get a better look. He turns the dimmer a notch to get more light, too.
"Do I have a concussion?" he asks with a new panic, rather than answer Tom's question.
"...I don't know. Your scalp split open, but just a little, but... goddammit, Greg, you oughtta see a doctor in the morning."
He lets out a whine like a dog, which fills Tom with a sense of responsibility. If he wasn't full already. He feels terrible for it and that's maybe why he moves so swiftly to dab that rag through Greg's hair now, to simultaneously be so careful not to pull at where his skin split open... but something in himself settled like a stone at Greg's final news about his date. With first just an image of that shirt and some girl across a table from him, tugging on it—something out of a movie from fifteen years ago—he almost did want to shove cab fare into his hands and send him out. Now Tom invents a new image of a girl who turned out to be shallow or crazy or who never showed up in the first place and, in order to feel what he should feel, must couple it with thoughts of the guy who could have ruined Greg's life. He would have, were he himself not just a block away.
He thinks, only once the water going down the sink runs clear, that he maybe should have just left Greg to shower by himself. But it's too late.
"Okay... are you absolutely certain you're not bleeding anywhere else?" It's half a joke; with humor just in his face, clear effort behind it, Tom pats Greg quite genuinely all around. Nothing comes up wet, nor itchy, which might indicate it's dried.
"Not unless it's possible there's something internal?" Greg mutters, and tugs his shirt out of his pants to look at his stomach for the first time. "...He socked me pretty good. I guess a bruise wouldn't form this fast anyway, would it?"
Tom's palm is suddenly, thoughtlessly warm against his abdomen. "Here?" he asks, referring to the space above his navel—where his own fingers just were. Greg can only nod.
Truly, he has no idea. He wracks his brain late for medical knowledge, for something like a witch doctor trick, a fingertip-sized spot that he could push to get the answer, and gets nothing, rendering his touch something worse than the fist that knocked the wind from him. With a sigh Tom pulls away, and pulls Greg's shirt down too, and chews on his lower lip. He meets his gaze trying very hard to have the heart of the doctor that he might have become—that his parents would have loved just as well for him to become—instead of what he is.
"Okay, listen, I'm gonna give you, um... I've got a spare phone with just wifi, in case you need it, until the morning. First thing in the morning we're filing reports and getting you examined."
"Isn't it bad for me to go to sleep? In case I have a concussion?"
He feels bad at once that that is the first thing out of his mouth as opposed to any gratitude, but as soon as the notion is in his head, so is death, and suddenly everything that happened tonight feels like it was leading straight to that. He'll be a ghost in Tom's house one way or another. But—
"No, that's a myth," Tom says easily. "...But take the guest room that's closest in case you need to holler. C'mon. I'll show you."
And then go pass out in my own bed because I'm fucking exhausted, he doesn't say, but which Greg can tell is the case even without remembering the hour. Standing up just then and stepping back out into the warm-lit hall gives him his first clear look of Tom tonight. Sitting knee-to-knee in his bathroom was like being inches from a Monet. Here, though, through his own fatigue he's privy to Tom's sleepy hair from behind. To the cotton shirt and pajama pants he wears to bed, simple but awfully soft-looking. To the way he rubs at his eyes and the slivers they remain afterward, not squinting but lethargic. The difference is no wrinkles.
Greg thinks that he expected or possibly hoped that he'd simply be lent Tom's driver to get to a hospital and then back to his apartment, rather than given all this. If it did extend to hope, though, it was small then and it's gone now. Tom gives him that spare phone like the mere rise and fall of his chest under that cotton shirt, a tired smile pulling on his cheeks in the blue light from the screen, too tired to turn mean even if he wanted it to, and Greg knows very vividly that he would like nothing more than for the other man to put his hands on his face again, and for the logical thing—what happens in movies—to follow. A tragic, square-one part of him almost believes that it will.
"Thank you, really," he tells him as softly as he can, wary of being the thing that stops it.
Tom's hand does go to the back of his neck at the threshold—a quick, firm massage, as if to do his part to prevent a concussion. He lets it slide halfway down his back, where his tired mind is absent as he rubs a circle, and extends the moment of parting just slightly further:
"You're real lucky, y'know. Greg Hirsch, Crown Prince of New York... Lotsa people get mugged, barely any get the priority that we will. That fuckin' bastard's gonna be the one with a ruined life."
"...Promise?"
They both know that he can't, but, judging by his final smile of the night before he retreats, he'd really like to.