“You shouldn’t keep saying things like that,” he whispered, his chest tight.
Greg’s hands stilled in his hair, his thumb tracing Dale’s ear. “Why not?”
“Because I might....” Dale gulped, looking down. “If you keep it up, I might actually, well...”
I might actually fall in love.
He didn’t speak, and Greg continued to massage his scalp. But Greg wore a smile, never asking for the rest of his sentence.
And maybe, just maybe... he’d heard what Dale had been too afraid to say.
15
Greg
In the following days, Greg watched as the unease in Dale’s shoulders fell away.
The first morning, Dale tried to wake early to make them breakfast. Greg beat him to the kitchen, grabbing the coffee grinder when Dale turned to put the coffee beans away. Dale tried to wrestle the grinder back. Greg hung on with brute strength, and Dale pouted.
The next morning, Dale set his alarm for half an hour earlier. Greg didn’t realize Dale had disappeared from the bed until he woke up. He pulled on his rumpled boxers and wandered to the kitchen, where he found Dale puttering between the fridge and the stove, a sheepish smile on his face.
“Go back to bed,” Greg rasped. “It’s too fucking early.”
“I’m making you breakfast,” Dale told him.
“Make me dinner.”
Greg stepped over to the stove, shut it off, and wrapped his arms around Dale. Dale protested the entire way back to bed, but Greg didn’t miss the way he wriggled his hips, rubbing their bare skin together.
After that morning, Dale stopped climbing out of bed early.
Sometimes, Greg would crack his eyes open when the alarm rang, to find Dale’s face in his chest, his eyes closed, his nose pressed against Greg’s skin. Other times, Greg would wake with a gasp, his body taut and needing, Dale’s hand between his legs. He’d growl and pin Dale down against the mattress, teaching him a lesson for waking him early.
Except Dale didn’t learn anything from it, but to wake him more frequently instead.
Sometimes, Greg would wake first, and Dale would be asleep, his mouth hanging open, the worry lines absent from his face. He looked younger this way; Greg realized Dale probably didn’t know this. Didn’t realize that maybe twenty years wasn’t that big a difference in the grand scheme of things.
When their schedules roughly matched, Dale drove them both to the college—his white Volkswagen blended in with the rest of traffic, and they arrived far too early for students to glimpse Greg stepping out of his car.
They each went about their days. Greg watched the students around Dale; some of them glanced curiously at the professor, but with Greg on the other side of the lab, tending to his own experiments, their stares lingered on him, then drifted away. No one questioned the increasingly-prominent aspen scent that Dale wore, except Penny.
At noon, Greg would bring lunch to Dale’s office. In the evenings, Greg would return, and they’d drive home for dinner. Dale would cook, while Greg would set up his laptop in the living room, going through his homework.
At night, after dinner, Dale would read the latest science journals on the couch. Greg would sit at the coffee table, typing out reports. Dale’s feet would skim across his shoulders, and every so often, Dale would lean in, pressing a kiss to Greg’s nape.
And even though Greg hadn’t foreseen it, they settled into an easy routine, one they both looked forward to.
A week passed.
In the second week, Dale attended Greg’s basketball game. He sat in the front-row seats, and during the half-time break, Greg jogged by him, just to see Dale light up, his cheeks rosy.
In the third week, Dale taught Greg to fold the paper cranes. He had had a new delivery of paper squares waiting for him at the mailbox, and when Greg asked, Dale pulled out two squares of polka-dotted paper, showing Greg the creases to make.
Greg had folded them decently, or as decently as he could, with the corners slipping when he tried to match them. His first crane took half an hour, and tore when he tried to unfurl its wings. The second turned out better. Dale said, “It’ll get easier as you practice.”
“How many have you made?” Greg asked when Dale folded his fourth crane that night.
“I’ve lost count,” Dale said, the tips of his thumbs whitening as he made a crease, “but I’ve made five hundred this year. A Japanese myth says that if you fold a thousand in a year, your wish will come true.”
“What do you wish for?”
“If I tell you, then it won’t happen, will it?” But Dale glanced at his belly, and Greg pulled another sheet, determined to help.
The next day, Greg presented him with ten cranes, and Dale’s mouth fell open.
Two days later, while Greg did his homework, Dale set a plain white envelope next to him.
Greg glanced at it. He solved the equations on Dale’s second assignment. Dale’s toes skimmed over his shoulder, and Greg had to make himself focus, get through the rest of the homework before he picked the envelope open. Then his heart skipped.
“The NY Rockets game?” Greg blurted, staring at the glossy tickets in his hands. He’d been thinking about attending the match this weekend, but had decided not to, so he could save up for the baby.
“I dropped by your Facebook page,” Dale said, smiling wryly. “You said Phil O’Riley is your favorite star. I did a bit of sleuthing.”
Greg couldn’t help his grin. “Two tickets? Are you watching it with me?”
“Do you want me to?”
“Yes!”
Dale’s eyes sparkled. “I thought you’d, you know, watch it with a friend. From your basketball team or something. You have lots of friends on Facebook.”
“But you’re my omega,” Greg said, climbing onto the couch next to Dale, tackling him in a hug. Dale yelped. “You’re coming with me.”
“I thought it might give you something to look forward to,” Dale said, pressed against Greg’s chest, his hands stroking down Greg’s sides. “Granted, it’s not very far into the future.”
Greg
