Sunday Dinner

A Straight on Paper Bonus Chapter
by Chase Power

Six weeks after the gate. Cole’s parents’ house. Brisket, a brother with no filter, a mother who hugs too long — and what happens when a man who spent his whole life being someone’s secret gets introduced to a room.

Cole

Adrian changed his shirt four times.

I know because I watched him do it. I was sitting on the end of his bed with Lily’s overnight bag by my feet and my keys in my hand, and he kept disappearing into the closet and reappearing in something marginally different, and each time he would stand in front of the mirror and adjust the collar with the focused precision of a man defusing something.

“That one’s good,” I said, for the third time.

“This one’s too casual.”

“It’s a button-down, Adrian. It has buttons. That’s the whole thing about it.”

“It’s chambray. Chambray reads casual.” He turned sideways in the mirror. “Your mother is going to have an opinion about my chambray.”

“My mother is going to hand you a plate before you get your shoes off and ask you six times if you’re warm enough. She will not have an opinion about your fabric.”

He looked at me in the mirror. Gray-green eyes behind the glasses, the composed librarian face fully deployed — and underneath it, visible only because I had spent months learning to read him, absolute terror.

I stood up. Crossed the room. Put my hands on his shoulders from behind and met his eyes in the glass.

“Hey.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve changed your shirt four times.”

“That’s within the normal range.”

“For who?”

He exhaled. His shoulders dropped an inch under my hands — the specific surrender of a man who had been holding a posture and had just been given permission to stop.

“I’ve never done this,” he said.

“Met parents?”

“Met a boyfriend’s parents.” He said the word carefully, like he was still testing whether it would hold weight. Six weeks and he still did that. So did I. “David’s mother didn’t know I existed, Cole. Two years. She came to visit and he sent me to my apartment for the weekend. And James — James’s wife found a text and that was the end of that. I have never once in my life been the person someone brought home.”

I turned him around by the shoulders.

Up close, without the mirror between us, the fear was even more obvious. It sat in the tightness at the corners of his mouth, in the way his hands hung at his sides instead of finding something to do.

“You’re the person I’m bringing home,” I said. “That’s what today is. That’s the whole point of today.”

“I know.”

“Say it back.”

His mouth twitched. “That’s a very Adrian move. You’re using my own techniques on me.”

“Yeah, well. I learn.” I put my hand on the side of his neck the way he did to me, thumb along his jaw, and watched his pupils go wide. “Say it back.”

“I’m the person you’re bringing home.”

“Damn right.” I kissed him. Slow, unhurried, my hand still on his throat where I could feel his pulse kick against my palm. When I pulled back his glasses were crooked and his composure had a hairline crack in it and I felt the familiar low pull in my gut that I had stopped apologizing for weeks ago. “Wear the chambray. It makes your shoulders look unreasonable and I want Marco to suffer.”

He laughed. The real one. The tension broke in his face like a fever going down.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay. Lily — BUG. We’re leaving in five!”

From the living room, muffled, aggrieved: “I’M FINDING CAPTAIN CHOMP’S BOW TIE.”

Adrian looked at me. “His what?”

“Don’t ask. She’s been planning this for a week. Apparently the triceratops is also being formally introduced to the family.”

Adrian’s face did a thing then — soft and stunned and slightly wrecked, the expression of a man being handed something he had not known he was allowed to want. He looked away quickly, the way he did when he was managing something, and picked up his keys.

I let him have the moment. But I filed it. I filed everything about him now.

My parents’ house smelled like brisket and my mother’s specific brand of anxiety, which manifested as too much food and every surface cleaned twice.

She opened the door before we made it up the steps.

“There they are!” She had Lily off the ground in one motion, which at sixty-two was frankly impressive, and Lily shrieked and clutched Captain Chomp — who was, I noted, wearing a bow tie fashioned from a hair ribbon and approximately nine feet of tape.

Then Mom set her down and turned to Adrian.

I watched it happen. I watched my mother look at the man standing on her porch in a chambray shirt with a bottle of wine and a bakery box and an expression of carefully managed terror, and I watched her decide, in about a second and a half, exactly what she was going to do about it.

She hugged him.

Not a polite hug. Not the arms-length pat that people give strangers. She wrapped both arms around Adrian Vale and held on, and I saw his body go rigid with surprise and then, slowly, by degrees, let go — his shoulders coming down, his hands coming up to return it, his face turning into my mother’s shoulder for a half-second longer than a greeting required.

“I’m so glad you came,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for weeks. Cole talks about you constantly and tells me nothing useful.”

“That tracks,” Adrian said, and his voice was not entirely steady.

“Come in. Are you warm enough? It’s colder than it looks.”

“It’s seventy-one degrees, Mom.”

“I’m asking Adrian, not you.”

Adrian caught my eye over her head as she steered him inside. His eyes were bright. He mouthed something at me that I was pretty sure was oh my God, and I grinned so hard my face hurt.

Dinner was chaos.

Dad shook Adrian’s hand, asked him about the Mets, and got a twenty-minute answer that was so well-researched and so obviously the product of frantic Wednesday-night studying that I had to leave the room. Adrian held his own on the bullpen situation. My father, who has never once in my memory said an unnecessary word, said “Huh. He knows ball,” which from Frank Mercer is a knighthood.

Marco arrived twenty minutes late with a six-pack and no filter.

“So you’re the librarian.” He dropped into the chair across from Adrian and looked at him with open, cheerful appraisal. “Okay. I have one question and I need you to be honest.”

“Marco,” I said.

“It’s a legitimate question.”

“It’s never a legitimate question.”

Adrian folded his hands on the table. “Ask.”

“What’s your workout routine?”

Adrian blinked. “I — walk to work. And eat vegetables.”

Silence.

“That’s it?” Marco said.

“That’s it.”

“That’s offensive.”

“I’ve been told.”

“No, seriously. I do four days a week. Four. And you’re over here doing walking and looking like—” He gestured vaguely at all of Adrian. “—that. Cole, are you hearing this?”

“I’m hearing it.”

“This is an injustice.”

Lily, from the far end of the table, without looking up from her mashed potatoes: “Adrian also does the rabbit voice.”

Marco turned. “The what?”

“In the bear book. He does a rabbit voice and it’s suspicious-sounding and Daddy can’t do it right.”

“I can do it fine.”

“You do it like a normal rabbit, Daddy. It’s supposed to be a rabbit who’s up to something.”

Marco put his beer down. “Okay, hold on. Do the voice.”

“I’m not doing the voice at the dinner table.”

“Do the voice, librarian.”

Adrian looked at me. I shrugged — you’re on your own — and he sighed, set down his fork, and delivered four lines of a children’s book in the voice of a rabbit who was, unmistakably, running some kind of scam.

My mother laughed so hard she had to put her head down on the table.

Marco pointed at him. “He’s in. He’s family. I’ve decided.”

And Adrian — who had changed his shirt four times, who had never once been brought home, who had spent two years being introduced as somebody’s friend — sat at my parents’ dinner table with a napkin in his lap and my daughter defending his rabbit voice and my brother declaring him family, and I watched his composure come apart in real time.

He covered it well. Took a drink of water. Cleared his throat. Said something dry about method acting.

But his hand was shaking around the glass, and under the table I found his knee and pressed my palm against it and left it there for the rest of the meal.

Mom hugged him again at the door. Longer this time.

“You come back,” she said. “Every Sunday if you want. There’s always too much food.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Mercer.”

“Diane. Good Lord.” She pulled back and held him by the shoulders and looked at him the way she used to look at me before hockey games, like she was checking a structure for weak points and finding none. “He’s happier. My son. He’s been carrying everything alone for four years and now he laughs on the phone. That’s you.”

Adrian didn’t say anything. I don’t think he could.

Dad shook his hand. “Come by if you want to see the shop. Cole tells me you appreciate a dovetail.”

“I do.”

“Huh.” Dad nodded once. “Good.”

In the car, Lily fell asleep before we hit the highway — sugar-crashed, Captain Chomp’s bow tie hanging off by one strip of tape, her cheek smashed against the car seat.

Adrian was silent for eleven miles.

I let him be. I had learned that about him: when something big landed, he needed to sort it before he could speak. His hands were in his lap. He was looking out the passenger window at the dark, and every so often he would take a breath that was not quite steady.

Somewhere around exit 14 he said, quietly, “Your mother called me family.”

“Yeah.”

“Your brother made me do a rabbit voice.”

“He’s an idiot. I apologize on behalf of the bloodline.”

“Cole.” His voice cracked on my name.

I reached over. Found his hand. Laced our fingers together on the console and held on, driving one-handed down a dark highway with my daughter asleep in the back and the man I loved falling apart quietly in the passenger seat.

“I know,” I said.

“You don’t.”

“I do. You’ve been the secret. And tonight you were the guest of honor and my mother hugged you twice and my kid defended your rabbit voice in front of the whole table. And you don’t have a file for that yet.”

He made a sound. Not quite a laugh.

“You’re doing the thing,” he said. “The noticing thing. That’s my thing.”

“Told you. I learn.”

We got Lily into bed at my place — shoes off, dress off, pajamas on, the whole operation executed without waking her, which after four years I could do in my sleep. Adrian tucked Captain Chomp under her arm. Fixed the bow tie. Stood in the doorway a second longer than necessary, looking at her.

Then we walked through the gate.

I barely got his back door closed before I had him against it.

“Cole—”

“Don’t talk yet.” My mouth was on his throat, his jaw, the spot under his ear that made his breath stutter every single time. I got a hand in his hair and tipped his head back and worked my way down the column of his neck while he made a sound like something breaking loose.

Six weeks of this and I still was not used to it. The permission. The daylight. The fact that I could want him out loud now, in my mother’s kitchen and my brother’s line of sight and my own goddamn driveway, and that wanting him out loud had turned the volume up on everything.

I undid the chambray one button at a time. Slowly, deliberately, watching his chest rise faster with each one.

“You changed this shirt four times,” I said against his collarbone.

“I’m aware.”

“You were scared.”

“I was—” His breath caught as I got the shirt open and dragged my palms up his bare chest. “—adequately prepared.”

“You were scared they wouldn’t want you.” I pushed the shirt off his shoulders and let it drop. “And then my mother hugged you twice and called you family and my brother adopted you over brisket, and you’ve been vibrating out of your skin ever since.”

His eyes were dark. His hands came up to my waist and gripped.

“Cole.”

“Do you know what that did to me?” I got my hands under his thighs and lifted — he made a startled sound, legs coming around my waist, and I carried him three steps and put him down on the kitchen table with the fruit bowl scattering and neither of us caring. “Watching you get loved by my family? Watching them see what I see and want you here?”

I stepped between his knees. Took his face in both hands.

“You’ve spent your whole life being the thing people hid,” I said. “And tonight my mother stood on her porch and told you to come back every Sunday. I need you to understand what that means. You’re not a secret. You’re not a thing. You’re ours. You’re mine and Lily’s and now theirs and there is no version of my life anymore where you are hidden in it.”

Adrian’s composure detonated.

He came off the table into me, hands fisting in my shirt, and kissed me with everything — open-mouthed, desperate, the kiss of a man who had been holding himself together through a four-hour family dinner and could not do it for one more second. I took it. Gave it back. Got my hands in his hair and kissed him until neither of us could breathe.

“Bed,” he gasped. “Now. Cole, I swear to God—”

I didn’t take him to the bed.

I got his belt open right there, standing between his knees at the kitchen table, and had his cock in my hand before he finished the sentence. He arched and swore — an actual, uncharacteristic fuck, dragged out of him — and his head dropped back and his hands slammed flat on the table behind him.

“Look at you,” I said.

I stroked him slow. Learned him again the way I did every time, watching his face for what worked, twisting on the upstroke because that made his stomach muscles jump, thumbing the head because that made him say my name like a prayer.

“You did so well tonight,” I told him.

He froze. Then shuddered, hard, from his shoulders down.

I felt it happen — the praise landing somewhere deep in him, the same place it landed in me, the place that had been waiting a very long time to be told it had done a good job.

“You were nervous and you came anyway,” I said, working him steady, my mouth against his ear. “You researched the Mets for my father. You did a rabbit voice for my brother. You let my mother hug you when I know how much that cost you. You did all of it, for me, and you were perfect.”

“Cole—”

“Say it.”

“I can’t—”

“Say it, Adrian.” I tightened my grip. “Tell me you were good.”

He broke.

“I was good.” His voice was shredded. “I was—God—Cole, please, I was good—”

“You were perfect.”

He came in my hand with a sound I felt in my sternum, his whole body folding into me, his forehead against my shoulder, his hands clutching at my back like the table was not enough to hold him. I worked him through it, murmuring into his hair — that’s it, I’ve got you, so good, so good — until the shaking slowed and he sagged forward and breathed against my neck.

“You’re going to kill me,” he said.

“Not done.”

He lifted his head. “What?”

I picked him up again.

I got him into the bedroom and onto the mattress and stripped what was left of his clothes off with a single-mindedness that would have embarrassed me a few months ago and now just felt like honesty.

He watched me undress with his chest still heaving and his eyes half-lidded and something soft and wrecked in his face.

“Come here,” he said.

“In a minute.”

I put my mouth on him instead. Started at his ankle — which made him laugh, startled — and worked up. Calf. The inside of his knee. His thigh, where the skin was soft and pale and made him twitch when I scraped my stubble across it. His hip. The dark trail below his navel. I took my time. I mapped him, thoroughly, the way he had mapped me a hundred times, because I had learned this from him too: that attention was the whole thing. That being looked at closely was the rarest gift anyone could give you.

By the time I got my mouth back on his cock he was hard again and swearing softly into the pillow.

“Cole. Cole, I can’t—it’s too much—”

“You can.”

I opened him up slow with slick fingers while I worked him with my mouth, and he came apart in stages — first the words, then the composure, then the last careful piece of himself that he kept behind glass even now, even with me. He pushed down onto my hand. He said my name in a register I had never heard from him outside this room.

“I need you inside me,” he said. “Cole. Now.”

I slicked myself and lined up and pushed in slow, watching his face the whole way — the flutter of his eyes, the parting of his mouth, the exact moment the stretch turned from pressure into pleasure and his whole body opened underneath me.

“God.” My voice was gone. “Adrian. You feel—”

“Move. Please. Move.”

I moved.

Deep and slow at first, then harder as he demanded it, his legs locking around my waist and his heels digging into my back. The bed took it. The headboard knocked the wall — the same wall I had pressed my hand against for weeks when he was on the other side of it and I could not reach him — and the sound of it, the physical evidence that the wall did not separate us anymore, made something feral rise up in my chest.

“Mine,” I said. It came out rough, half a growl, not a word I had planned. “You’re mine. Say it.”

“Yours.” He was gasping, his hands clutching at my shoulders, his nails leaving marks I would find tomorrow and be stupidly happy about. “Yours, Cole, I’m yours, I’ve been yours since the spaghetti—”

I laughed — wrecked, breathless, half a sob — and kissed him through it, and drove into him harder, and the rhythm we found was brutal and perfect and entirely ours.

I got a hand between us and stroked him in time. He was already close again, oversensitive and shaking, his cock leaking against my knuckles.

“Come on,” I told him. “One more. You can do it. You’re so good, you’re so fucking good, let me feel it—”

He came with my name in his mouth and his whole body clenching around me, and I followed three strokes later, buried deep, my face in his neck, everything in me pouring out at once — the want and the fear and the four hours of watching my family fall in love with him and the six weeks of getting to have this in the light.

We collapsed. Tangled. Breathing.

His hand found my hair and stayed there.

Later — much later, the sheets ruined, the lamp still on because neither of us could be bothered — he lay with his head on my chest and his fingers tracing the tattoo on my ribs.

“Cole.”

“Mm.”

“Your mother said every Sunday.”

“She did.”

“Did she mean it?”

I looked down at him. At this man who catalogued everything, who noticed every detail, who had spent his entire adult life being told in a hundred small ways that he was too much — and who still, after six weeks and a family dinner and a woman hugging him twice on a porch, needed to check.

“She meant it,” I said. “She’ll call you Wednesday to confirm. She’ll ask if you eat pork. She’ll make something else if you don’t.”

His breath hitched.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay?”

“Okay.” He pressed his face against my sternum. “I’d like to go every Sunday.”

I held him. The monitor glowed green on the nightstand — Lily’s breathing, steady, twelve feet and one open gate away. Through the window, if you looked, you could see the cedar of it catching the porch light.

Neither of us looked.

“Adrian.”

“Hm.”

“For the record.” I kissed the top of his head. “The chambray was fine.”

He laughed into my chest — wet and helpless and completely undone — and I felt it travel through both of us, and I thought: this is the noise. This is the sound of a life. And I almost didn’t knock on that door.

“Go to sleep,” I said.

“Bossy.”

“You like it.”

“I do,” he said. “God help me, I really do.”

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