Page 97 of Sean's Sunshine

“Whatcha thinking?” he asked softly.

“That I don’t got no guarantees,” Billy rasped. “About Berto. He could steal all your stuff. Murder us in our sleep and run away with our dogs. It could all go horribly wrong.”

“Very true. But I have faith that your mom will help keep him in line, and so will the dogs. And so will Jackson’s guys. I mean, there’s no guarantees with kids, you know. My own mom goes off on my brother’s girlfriend all the time because she doesn’t like the way she’s raising the kids, but I’ve met them. They’re fine. I don’t see a lot of screwups in their future. I could be wrong. It’s a crapshoot.”

Billy chuckled and gave up on the dishes, taking Sean’s hands where they were clasped around his stomach. Billy’s hands, warm and soapy, were comforting somehow.

“What if I hate my new job and I have to go back to waiting tables?”

“Happens all the time,” Sean soothed. “You’ll find something you like more.”

“What if I get to my upper-division classes and I suck at them, and I realize I hate engineering and should have been a chef instead?”

Sean finally laughed outright, tilting his head back so he could really put his stomach into it.

Billy caught his breath and turned around in his arms, his eyes searching out Sean’s face.

“What?” Sean murmured, caught by the intensity of those not-so-cynical, very vulnerable brown eyes.

“Your laugh,” Billy said, as full of wonder as a little kid. “I used to wish I could hear it when your lungs worked, because I thought it would be really amazing.”

Sean’s smile felt shot with sunshine, like glorious light was filling his soul. “Is it?”

“It’s even better than I thought it would be,” Billy said, sounding choked.

“See?” Sean whispered. “Have some faith, Guillermo. Have some hope. That turned out all right for you, right?”

“Yeah,” he said, lowering his mouth to Sean’s. Their mouths meshed, the kiss a benediction, and then a prelude, and then becoming all it needed to be in itself. He pulled away and engulfed Sean in a hug, strong and gentle, everything Sean had ever wanted when he’d dreamed about being in a man’s arms. “Maybe we should have some faith.”

“We’re going to get dogs,” Sean promised.

“We’re going to be in love forever and ever,” Billy promised back. “I’m going to graduate, and you and me are going to get married in a park, like Rivers and Cramer are threatening to do, and our mothers can come be a lot together, and we’ll invite the flophouse and your people and?”

Sean kissed him again. “Wait until I ask you,” he murmured. “Don’t worry. It’ll happen.”

“It’ll happen,” Guillermo Morales replied, going back to that tight, greedy hug. “We can do things like that.”

“Together, we absolutely can.”

Sean could stand holding his sunshine to his heart forever, but they’d get bored just standing around saying I love you. Their lives were busy, and when they held hands and got to work, they could accomplish so much.

Like all of their friends, they had so much to do.

Nothing Happened

A Fishlet

ELLERY STAREDat his two PIs—technically one too many for such a small firm—and flailed for something to say.

“You… you were just going to… you were supposed to pick up a file,” he said, well aware that he’d said such things before.

“We did,” Jackson told him, nodding excitedly like a puppy who’d fetched. “Right, Henry?”

“Sure.” Henry gave his partner the side-eye—through the one eye not swollen shut. “We got the file. See? On Jade’s desk.”

Jade, who was rifling through the file, gave them both the stink-eye. “Right file,” she confirmed. Then, “Whose blood is this?”

“Blood?” Jackson said, his most innocent voice at odds with the ice pack held against his broken nose. “There’s blood on your file? How’d that happen?”