So I guessed we were having salad for dinner.
I bobbed my head to the beat of the music and carefully sliced through the meat, wondering why he didn’t just buy the meat as steaks ready to throw on the grill.
“I feared you’d grown up with Conway Twitty or something like that,” I said. Instead, he’d grown up listening to Queen—which was playing on the stereo right now—Bowie, Pink Floyd, and Deep Purple.
August laughed and gathered the chopped onions into a bowl. “You have some interestin’ thoughts on Southerners.”
“The curse of never having traveled much.” I added the steaks to a plate. “My world is made up of stereotypes. Hell, I grew up around stereotypes.”
He tilted his head, curious. “A grandmother and a father raising two homosexual brothers doesn’t sound like the most stereotypical upbringin’.”
I chuckled. “Maybe not that part.” I picked up the cutting board and carried it over to the sink. “Still. Brooklyn isn’t just my home—it’s my world. Or it was for a very long time. As a kid, I rarely left our hood. We had everything there. From the kids shooting the shit on the stoop to grumpy men playing chess on the sidewalk and talkin’ about the old country.” Which they’d never left in the first place. But since we’d lived in a Latin neighborhood, the Italians clung harder to old traditions, and suddenly everyone with roots in Italy missed the old country as if they’d been born and raised there before being welcomed to America on Ellis Island. “My family and everyone I grew up around were a few decades behind the rest of the world. The Brooklyn I knew when I was a kid changed a fuckload by the time Nicky was the same age.”
August nodded. “I think that goes for many places. My sister Tilda lived in New York a while before she moved to Chicago, and the first time we went up to visit her, our mother thought Brooklyn was a mafia stronghold like it was during the Murder, Inc. era.”
I grinned a little. “When was this?”
He squinted in thought. “I’d say…’77? ’78, maybe?”
A far cry from the thirties, but we’d still had some shit going down back then. I remembered when Castellano was gunned down in ’85. Mostly, I remembered Nonna swearing up a storm about it.
“I suppose I grew up in the remnants of it,” I replied. “It was drilled into my head that I wasn’t allowed to visit certain clubs and restaurants. Pop could suggest a joint for Friday night dinner, and Nonna would go, ‘No, no, can’t go there, the—whatever pazzi—runs that place.’ But other than that, it was minor shit. Similar to what we see in all bigger cities today.”
August’s eyes flashed with amusement. “I do like it when you use slang.”
I wiped my hands on a towel and furrowed my brow. Had I used slang?
“Pazzi,” he said.
Oh. “It’s what Nonna calls everyone who’s either batshit crazy or lives on the wrong side of the law—”
“Daddy!” Camden yelled from upstairs. “Are you busy?”
Today was not the day he learned not to yell either.
I smirked at August’s sigh, and then he hollered back, saying if Camden had something on his mind, he had to come down here.
The boy stomped quickly down the stairs and ran toward us with nervous excitement written all over him.
“I have gifts for you!” He hurriedly left two little packets on the kitchen island before he spun around and made another run for it. “See you at dinner—I’m too shy to see your reactions!”
“Baby!” August called. “Aren’t you supposed to clean your room?”
“That’s the thanks I get,” Camden huffed, already out of sight. “Just call me when dinner is ready!”
Hurricane Camden was something else.
Why wouldn’t he wanna see our reactions? Had the evil genius pulled a prank on us?
I leaned over the island and snatched up the two packets, and I couldn’t help but grin. He’d wrapped the gifts in Christmas paper. One said Daddy; the other had my name.
“Here.” I handed him his.
Under the Christmas wrapping was a regular envelope dotted with not entirely dried glitter glue. When I opened it, a familiar-looking bracelet fell out on the countertop, as did a piece of paper. I unfolded it and read the note.
You’re one too.
And I think you’re so amazing and hot and kind and funny.
You made me change my plan.
Love, Camden
I couldn’t really muster a smile for the adoration I felt sweeping through me. It was the same heaviness I’d felt earlier. For each second I spent with August and Camden, it became increasingly difficult to explain away this vacation as a “bit of casual fun.” Nothing was casual anymore, and the attachment I’d formed for them was anything but fleeting or shallow.
“That sweet boy,” I heard August murmur.
He stood slightly behind me and inspected his own gift. It was another beaded bracelet.
I picked mine up off the counter and read the… My forehead creased. “He must’ve given me yours by mistake, ciccio.”
“Hmm?” He glanced up from his bracelet, confused. “What do you mean?”
“It says Daddy on this one.” I showed it to him.
He frowned and peered closer, resting his chin on my shoulder. Then he let out a breath and tilted his head to rest his forehead against my neck.
“That’s not a mistake.”
But it— Before I could finish my thought, he held up his bracelet, and in the same multicolored beads, it said Daddy.
You’re one too.
I swallowed hard.
He couldn’t mean…
August inched away again and leaned back against the other counter, his hands gripping the edge of the surface, and he hung his head.
Fuck. This was too much. For me, for him—I wasn’t sure. No, I was. It was too much for August. While my heart slammed into my rib cage, my feelings growing and cementing quicker than I was ready for, I felt a sense of
