Danny had thought he was beyond shame, but the heat that swept his neck and cheeks certainly had that flavor, didn’t it?
“Ten years,” Danny said, his throat dry. He wondered if he could get Carina to bring him some water. Some pizza. A time machine. “Ten. I couldn’t… I couldn’t….” He looked away. “I just couldn’t.”
“I know,” Josh said softly. “But you didn’t leave my life either, and eventually that penetrated my thick skull, you know?”
Danny’s mouth twisted, and he tasted bitterness. “You… you’re the best thing he and I ever did together.”
“You can have more time to do better,” Josh said soberly. “But first we need to get him out of the mess he’s in. I’ve got some ideas, but I haven’t been doing this for twenty years like you have.”
“Almost thirty,” Danny corrected grimly. “I started when I was twelve, you know.”
Josh’s eyes lit up. “No, really? How?”
“I told a bully that he’d be cursed with bugs in his pockets if he kept stealing our lunch money. Then I got the kid who liked bugs to bring me a box of them, and me and my friends took turns sneaking them into the pockets of his coat whenever he wasn’t looking.” They’d tripped him in hallways, dropped them in his hair when he was concentrating on classwork—whatever it took. “For a week that kid couldn’t sit down to eat without a worm falling out of his sleeve or a cockroach crawling out of his pocket. He finally broke in math class one day, confessed everything, and started throwing money on the ground to pay us back.”
Danny gave a smile that Fox had always called “predatory” but Danny had always felt was more “self-satisfied.”
“Poor kid. I understand he grew up with anxiety issues. Unfortunate.”
Josh snorted softly. “Yeah, that’s a real fuckin’ tragedy, Uncle Danny. But however you started, you were an expert at it by the time you met Fox, and you’ve made a living on the grift for your entire adult life. And now we can use it to help the only dad I’ve ever known. Are you game?”
Danny nodded. “But first you have to tell me what happened—what really happened—okay?”
Danny knew what really happened. Anybody with half a brain who knew Felix could figure out that what happened in the press was all spin. A woman who’d worked for Felix had accused him of discriminating against her because she was female, of using her work and calling it his own—and she’d done it in tears, on television. The outrageous lies and blatant spin that resulted in his spectacularly painful flameout in the press had been played over and over again on the news. But while Josh covered the basics, he let his mind wander, just a bit. An indulgence, really.
An image.
Two boys grifting through Europe, absolutely sure the world would never tear them apart.
Two boys madly in love.
Past
FELIX, TALL, lithe, blond as a god, running down the cobblestone streets in Rome, one step ahead of the mark he’d just pickpocketed, his red scarf streaming behind him like a banner.
Danny had been pocketing his breakfast as he’d watched the boy tear-assing down the road, and he’d been so delighted watching an amateur thief in his brazen glory that he’d forgotten himself and actually paid for the pastry he’d grabbed before he realized he could have simply walked away.
Oh no. The boy was fast—no doubt about that—and nimble. He dodged a family with cameras, and a clowder of cats, and didn’t crash into a single tourist. This close to the Coliseum, there were plenty, but they were on a side street, and Danny was pretty sure if the kid kept running like that, he was going to hit a cross street against the green light and die messily in traffic.
Even running full tilt, Danny had seen the pale, aristocratic features, the hectic flush across his cheeks, the flyaway blond hair. As he’d sprinted past Danny’s café, the scarf had fluttered from around his neck to the ground, a slash of crimson against the tan bricks.
It would be a shame if that kid died on the streets of Rome.
Before he even knew what he was doing, he’d walked out of the café and was surveying the Vespas, bicycles, and Fiats parked on the street. He chose a Vespa without pausing in his step and used a small metal bar to unlock the ignition while he kickstarted the thing. It was easier for him to steal a vehicle than to actually own one, and he took off down the street before the owner could spot him from the café.
It wasn’t like Danny wasn’t going to abandon the mini-motorcycle a couple of blocks away, right?
He stepped on the pedal hard, listening to the engine buzzing like a laboring mosquito. It didn’t bother him; they always sounded like that, and no matter how slow the Vespa felt like it was going, the truth was, he was going faster than the boy who had dropped his scarf in the street and, even more importantly, faster than the big angry tourist shouting obscenities as he chased the boy who had dropped his scarf in the street.
In fact, Danny was going fast enough that he felt compelled to use the little motorcycle’s quick start and stop capabilities to pick up the scarf.
He easily passed the tourist, who ignored him because the mosquito cycles were all over Rome. When he drew abreast of the boy, he slowed down a bit and called to him.
“I see you have lost your scarf!”
The boy shot him a look that was part annoyance and part amusement. “How inconvenient,” he shouted, still running. “How nice of you to return it.”
“But if I return it,” Danny hollered, “you will only get yourself killed!”
“Then,” the boy said, pulling in a breath, “you may keep it.”
“If you come with me, you might not die,” Danny said, turning his head enough to flash his dimples. At twenty, that was all he needed to do to a lot of boys. This one was no exception.
“Then I shall have to come with you!” the boy told him. Behind them they heard a shout as the tourist picked up speed. Danny stopped the motorcycle just long enough for the boy to hop on behind him, taking the scarf so Danny might better drive the little mosquito cycle along the crowded streets.
Danny gassed the thing as he headed for a tight left turn, and behind him he heard his passenger cry, “Let go!” The tourist had nearly caught up and had grabbed the scarf. Danny grinned as his passenger ripped the scarf—a fine cashmere; Danny had felt it—right out of the man’s hands.
Even the gods probably heard them laughing as Danny gunned the Vespa and powered the thing toward a far corner of the city, where the cafés weren’t quite so crowded and he might get to know the boy with the red scarf a little better.
“UNCLE DANNY?”
Danny pulled himself back to the here and now, to the sterile, gray, soundproof room with the boy he loved like a son sitting across from him.
“Sorry,” he said with a faint smile. “Lost in the past. But don’t worry, I heard what you were saying.”
“Prove it,” Josh said skeptically.
“Felix was grooming this Marnie Courtland woman to take over his news programs,” Danny said, although that was common knowledge. When Josh’s grandfather had passed away, he’d left his cable affiliates to Felix to run—Felix had been doing it anyway. Hell, it’s why Felix and Julia had kept up the pretense of the marriage. Not for Josh, obviously. He was fine. But Felix had worked hard to make a life for Julia, and the old man had been set in his ways. He wouldn’t leave the station to Julia, so Felix had earned it by virtue of hard work, charm, and that certain lack of scruples that had made him and Danny so compatible in the first place. Once the old man had gone, about two years after Felix and Danny’s final, horrible breakup, Felix had taken the little group of cable network stations—a news station, a movie station, a cable action show station—and built an empire.