The house that had been in such ruins had been rebuilt, beauty and strength had been restored, and a family was set to be installed. It didn’t feel like chaos so much as growing pains.
There was hope in that. He liked being a part of it.
“Hello,” he called.
“Back here!”
Tobias wound through the family room and down the hall to the cramped kitchen and dining room, where Sullivan was sitting at the scarred table, laptop open in front of him. He lifted his head when Tobias walked in, eyes going, as always, to the collar first.
“I’m wondering,” Sullivan said thoughtfully, “how you feel about romance in big moments.”
Tobias’s stomach rumbled and he turned toward the fridge. “Am I reiterating or is there a new development? Because if it’s the first, the magic words are Valentine’s Day. That should be enough reason to never do anything romantic for a big moment again.”
That was an understatement. Tobias gave Sullivan a lot of points for trying, but the grease fire-catfish incident had ended in a two-hour wait at a nearby restaurant while they got increasingly snippy with each other because they were hangry. When they’d finally gotten some food in their bellies, they’d decided that pizza and a movie was a valid romantic strategy. They’d employed it countless times since then, and they never had to make a reservation.
Win-win.
“Valentine’s Day is not a big moment.” Sullivan sounded mystified by Tobias’s example. “Valentine’s Day is an illusion of grandiosity. I mean real moments.”
“What moments?” Tobias shuffled some things in the fridge. He’d been planning to try out this new white wine sauce he’d seen in a magazine—
“The sort that come in boxes.”
“Huh?” Tobias opened the crisper and pulled out mushrooms, only to turn and bump into Sullivan, who took the mushrooms out of his hands and put them back in the fridge. “What are you doing?”
“Pizza. It’s already ordered. And I picked a movie. The one with the talking tree-thing you keep saying I should see. It’s all set up.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, this is an outrage,” Sullivan said conversationally, mouth quirked with humor. “I’ve been very well-behaved. Not even a misdemeanor. Can’t a young, innocent soul do something nice for his boyfriend?”
“Show me a young, innocent soul and I’ll ask him.” Tobias eyed Sullivan suspiciously. “Did you break something?”
“No.”
“Oh! Did your loan come through?”
“Not yet, but the finance guy says it will, so I’ve started to think about some of the other important details in the meantime.”
“Like?”
“Like I think I’m gonna call it Sullivan’s Super-Legit Detective Agency.’”
Tobias snorted even as Sullivan grabbed him by his bare shoulders and turned him back toward the dining room. He stopped Tobias just inside the room, and dropped a kiss on the curve where his throat became his shoulder. “But this isn’t about work. I wanted to talk to you about a thought I had.”
Tobias’s stomach abruptly filled with butterflies. It didn’t get better when Sullivan nudged his jaw, directing his attention to a brown box on the table. It was a bit bigger than a men’s watch box, and yeah, Tobias’s whole body was vibrating with the whole nervous tension thing.
“A few weeks ago, you said something about hating leaving in the mornings, remember?” Sullivan asked, sounding a little like he was struggling with some nervous tension too. “You said it was about your collar.”
The memory snapped into place. The comment had been the outcome of a truly horrendous series of events the day before. It’d been his first class session after being out with the flu and he’d been exhausted. He’d showed up for class to find that while he finished his half of a group project from his sickbed, his perfectly healthy partner hadn’t.
Tobias was studying Human Services now, concentrating in nonprofit studies, planning to eventually use his skills to help smaller nonprofits that didn’t have a lot of money figure out how to make their noble intentions self-sustaining. There was a lot of grant writing in his future. And he loved it, loved the classes and his work-study and his internship, but he’d spent the rest of that day not only catching up but helping his ass of a partner so they could get a passing grade.
Coughing, frustrated, and woozy, he’d come out of the library that night to find a voicemail from Sullivan that started with “Don’t panic, because I’m fine,” and ended with, “So the car is completely fucked but I’m really fine.”
He’d held on long enough to rush home, where he found Sullivan bruised but cracking jokes about teenage drivers, and promptly lost his shit. There’d been kisses and cuddling and ice cream and The Great British Baking Show—Tobias was convinced that nothing bad could happen in the world while someone, somewhere, was watching that show—and sweet, easy sex that was mindful of Sullivan’s incredibly minor injuries, and by the time he woke up in the morning, he’d been much more together.
Until it was time to leave the house and he needed to take his collar off.
His fingers had trembled and his stomach had been sick, and he’d almost been in tears at the idea of it, and Sullivan had had to unbuckle it for him. As soon as Sullivan had set it back on its shelf, all the fragilities from the day before had seemed to reawaken and he’d found himself turning to bury his face in Sullivan’s shoulder.
“I’m okay,” Sullivan had whispered over and over. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Anyone was bound to be shaky when the person they loved most in the whole world had a near-miss like that, but Tobias knew it was counterproductive to his sanity to dwell, so he’d forced himself to put aside the close call. After a while, he forgot about it entirely.
Except for the ten seconds every morning when he removed his collar and hid it in a box.
“I remember,” Tobias said now, and every muscle in his body went taut.
“I’ve been thinking,” Sullivan said. As he spoke,
