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If there’s one thing Steve has always struggled with, it’s relationships. Smooth Dog was a fun nickname, but flirting is easy, and nine times out of ten it doesn’t mean anything anyway. When it comes to that tenth time, that’s where he gets stuck.
It took a lot of pushing from Joe until he finally realized he had actual feelings for Catherine. He only dated Lynn because Ellie introduced them and because Lynn seemed to indicate that she wanted to date him, and it was fun, but it never got very serious. He wasn’t distraught or even very hurt when she told him she wanted to end things, which was the biggest shock of all, because he really thought she was the kind of woman he could have fallen in love with.
Maybe it means that at the time he was still in love with Catherine, secretly. So secretly even he wasn’t aware of it, granted, but as evidenced by his past, that wouldn’t be the first time.
Nor the last, it seems, now. When Danny hangs up the phone, he looks at it for a moment and sighs, but it’s not the furious expelling of breath or even the frustrated huff that it would have been just a year ago. It’s something that drives Steve crazy, because he has no idea when Danny started looking kind of wistful after his talks with Rachel. The fact that he does so now doesn’t sit well with Steve for reasons he can’t pin down.
They’re in the Camaro, which is where Steve has caught most of the Danny-Rachel conversations he’s overheard over the years, because it’s a small and rapidly moving space that doesn’t leave much room for concealment. He’s not too worried about offering Danny any privacy, either. He at least knows for sure that he doesn’t feel guilty about that – it’s his duty as a best friend to pry into Danny’s personal life when Danny starts sighing cryptically.
“Everything okay?” he asks, very unsubtly throwing out a fishing line.
Danny bites. “Yeah, I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know,” Steve admits.
Maybe that’s what’s been bothering him. He does a quick systems check on his own body and finds tightness in his chest, like skin stretched to its limits, a slightly elevated heartrate that thumps more like panic than excitement and a nagging worry in the back of his skull. He tries to figure out what it’s attached to or what it wants or even who it’s about, exactly – Danny? himself? Danny’s kids? – but he’s spectacularly unsuccessful, because he finds himself distracted by thoughts of Rachel and what she could have said to make Danny sigh like that. So not mad. It sounded almost content, maybe.
Danny has started fiddling with the radio, like he either thinks this conversation is already over or he wants it to be, both of which are suspicious in their own way.
Steve stares hard at the road and asks the first question that springs to mind. “So you and Rachel have been getting close again?”
“Hmm,” Danny says, which is infuriatingly non-committal. The inharmonious three second snippets of different songs and radio talk shows as Danny flips through channels do nothing to calm Steve down. “In a way.”
That’s all he says about it. In a way.
Steve wonders if that’s an oblique yes, and then decides that it must be, and then wonders about Rachel’s side in all of this again, and what she must be thinking.
The raging green monster that’s been curled up in Steve’s chest rears its head. He’s met it before, but he never realized it had gotten this big, and its size pushes his heartrate up another few beats per minute, because that’s not just annoyance over his best friend maybe having less time to hang out, drink beer and shoot the breeze. That’s something serious. He has actual, strong feelings at stake here, even if he’s been too oblivious to realize it until now.
And see, that’s the thing - even Steve, who’s about as good at reading his own emotions as a blind man is at reading the paper, can figure this one out. He’s jealous that Danny is mending bridges with Rachel, and there’s only one sane explanation left for why he would have that reaction to something objectively good.
Clearly, he’s in love with Rachel.
*
He’s fairly sure he drops Danny off at home. When he arrives at his own house, he’s in his truck, so he must have switched cars at some point. He hardly remembers any of it, because he’s stuck in panic mode.
Oh god.
Oh god.
*
He sticks his head in the fridge for a while to cool off. When their therapist suggested counting to ten in stressful situations, she probably wasn’t talking about a literal cooling off, but he figures it can’t hurt. He also drinks a whole glass of water in two swallows, and then another, because he’s sweating more than usual, and then a third, and then he stops because he can feel the water sloshing around uncomfortably in his empty stomach.
He goes back to the fridge and gets himself a beer instead. He pops the cap and then fumbles it, so he watches the small circle fall to the floor and bounce and roll a handful of inches and land upside down at his feet, and he thinks that’s just great. It’s wonderful. It’s the universe showing him a metaphor for his life, or something. He doesn’t know exactly how that would fit, but he feels a deep sense of kinship with this beer cap that was once useful and has now turned into a hazard for everything around it through just one tiny mistake, so he leaves it where it is and steps over it to get to the lanai for fresh air. There’s no hope of clearing his head, but he can try.
Outside on the grass, he encounters two chairs overlooking the ocean. He takes a seat in the one on the right, trying to be defiant and show that he doesn’t care, but then he jumps up like it’s burned him and moves to the chair on the left instead, which is his.
The righthand chair belongs to Danny. He can’t just take things that belong to Danny. What kind of monster is he?
It’s a simple thought, but it opens up the floodgates. So far, his panic was a vague, brewing, overwhelming but mostly undefined thing, which he’s been trying to push down instead of pull up to examine it in any kind of detail. Then that one name crossed his mind, the one that was inevitable because it’s everywhere around him – Danny, Danny’s chair, Danny would have been better at the beer cap metaphor, Danny could have been here if Steve had invited him over, he hopes Danny is okay – and there is no more stopping the horrible details of his situation from crashing down on him.
Danny. Danny, who is his best friend, who will shortly be his ex-best friend the minute he hears that Steve has this much of a strong, visceral emotional reaction to his ex-wife.
Danny, who is standing right next to him.
Steve startles so badly he drops the beer. It lands with a dull thud on its side and the contents slosh out, creating a wet, foamy spot on the sandy grass, but Steve’s too busy staring at Danny in horror to bother trying to stop it. “Fuck,” he says, belatedly.
Danny’s expression is an odd mix between amusement and worry. “You wanna pick that up?”
The bottle has gone still, enough of the contents having spilled out that the dredges are at an even level. Steve considers it. “Nah,” he decides. “Too late.” He gives the bottle a good kick and watches it skitter and roll across the lawn until it disappears in the bushes that mark the division between the grass and his private strip of beach.
Danny watches the bottle leave their line of sight, too, but with rising eyebrows. “You know the kids and I still do Beach Cleanup every year, right?”
Steve tries to feel guilty about littering in his own backyard, but his guilt-o-meter is already pretty much maxed out, so he just feels a dull ache at the back of his heart for disappointing Grace. “Sorry.”
“Oh-kay,” Danny says, in a way that weirdly sounds like “well, this is worse than I thought”. He steps around Steve and sits down in the other chair. The right chair. The one that belongs to him. “You alright?”
“No, I’m freaking out,” is what Steve probably should say. Instead, he says, “What are you doing here?”
“I just told you, I’m asking if you’re alright. You were being weird earlier and I couldn’t shake it, so I came to make sure you weren’t drowning yourself.”
“Drowning?”
“Yeah.” Danny makes a swooping gesture at the world around them, which is fairly apt. “In the ocean, in beer, in misery, whatever. So, I ask again: you okay?”
Steve gazes out at what little he can see of the ocean past the bushes. He wonders why he ever moved the chairs from the beach to the grass. He’s made a lot of stupid decisions recently. “I’m, you know─” That’s about as far as he gets before the words get stuck in his throat. He’s still wrestling with the “fine”, when Danny speaks up again.
“Just FYI, I’m taking that as a firm no.”
Steve allows his shoulders to sag. He doesn’t hang his head only because that would force him to be reminded of the spilled beer, which he’s trying to forget. There’s more important stuff to be embarrassed about. “Yeah,” he admits, on a sigh.
Danny scoots forward in his seat, bumping his knuckles into Steve’s arm in support. “So what’s up? Talk to me, buddy.”
“I’m,” he says, again, and again that’s about as far as he gets. He takes a few quick, shallow breaths, like he’s preparing for a freedive. It feels like he’s probably about to go under for real and he’s not sure yet in what condition he’ll be when he resurfaces, if ever. “I’m in love.”
Danny is quiet next to him. When Steve chances a look over, Danny is giving him a smile but sitting very still, too, and there’s something pinched about his expression. “Huh. I didn’t even know you were dating.”
“I’m not.” Danny seems a little dubious about that, so Steve repeats, because this is very important, “Danny, I’m not. I would never.”
Danny laughs. “You’d never? What is this, tragically forbidden love? The modern Romeo and Juliet?”
It’s Steve’s turn to keep suspiciously quiet.
For a long moment, Danny just studies him, the only sound that of the ocean nibbling at the land in the distance. Then the set of Danny’s mouth softens and he gives a shake of his head. “Oh, buddy. Only you.”
“Yep,” Steve manages, forced past the mess of feelings he doesn’t want that clog up his throat.
“So what’s the deal? Is she, what, doing some important job on the other side of the planet?”
“Not this time.”
“Right. So not Catherine.”
Steve is almost surprised Danny got his meaning in one, but of course he would. It’s probably exactly who he was referencing in the first place.
“So then where’s the drama? Is she married?” Danny starts snapping his fingers in rapid succession. “Oh, I know ─ she’s foreign royalty and her dad has vowed to hire a hit squad if you touch anything more interesting than her wrist.”
Steve feels more trapped and claustrophobic than that time they were buried under a building, but that still gets a laugh out of him, even if it’s brief. “What soaps have you been watching?”
“None,” Danny says. “I’m just making predictions based on the usual level of ridiculous that’s your life.”
“Well, you’re wrong.” And he’ll continue to be wrong, because the only right answer is probably the one he would never in a million years guess. Steve can’t sit by and let him keep thinking up increasingly unlikely stories, not in the face of the betrayal he’s already committed. “You’re not going to like the answer.”
Danny pulls an exaggeratedly troubled face. “It’s not one of my sisters, is it?”
“It’s Rachel.”
The words are shockingly easy to say. One moment they’re still unspoken, only acknowledged within the confines of his own mind, and the next he’s set them free in the world, to wreak havoc in ways he won’t be able to control. In a secret, guilty way, it’s a relief.
He doesn’t dare look at Danny, though.
Then Danny starts laughing. “What the hell are you even talking about? Is this a really fucking weird practical joke?”
Dread. This feeling Steve has now, it’s dread of the deepest, most gut-churning kind, because this is very serious and Danny isn’t appreciating the gravity of the situation. “No. Danny, I’m─”
Danny cuts him off before he can finish the sentence. “You are not in love with Rachel.” Steve looks up unintentionally. Danny doesn’t appear angry at all, but he does sound awfully sure of himself.
Steve has never been described as someone who gives up easily, even when everything is shit ─ especially not then ─ but Danny always has to push him to his limits. He expected Danny to start yelling, and now that he hasn’t, everything is weird and somehow even more awful. Yelling, Steve knows how to handle. Denial is a different beast, one that jumped up out of nowhere and is mocking him. “I am,” he insists.
“No, you’re not,” Danny repeats. “I’m telling you, you can’t be. Don’t get me wrong, Rachel can be a lovely woman with a myriad of charms-”
The monster roars its triumphant, frightful return. Monsters, beasts ─ the full cast of at least two horror movies resides in his body.
“-but you’ve barely even spent a minute alone with her, ever. You hardly know her. How the fuck could you be in love with her?”
“I don’t know.” If it comes out as something close to a whine, that’s not his fault. Usually if you do something terrible, you don’t have to work so hard to convince the other person you’re even capable of the deed, let alone that they should be mad about it. “You think this is easy for me?”
Danny’s whole upper body sways left and then right, like he’s doing a dance while sitting down. “Oh, no, I know you’re torturing yourself over this. I get that. That doesn’t mean it’s for a good reason.”
“I think it’s a pretty good reason.”
“You would.” With no warning, Danny veers up out of his chair, which is the first real sign that he’s agitated too, but he doesn’t walk off. He just starts pacing in a straight line, four steps left, turn, four steps right, back again.
Steve watches him for a bit, feeling unfairly reassured by the restless movement. “You okay?”
“Peachy,” Danny quips. He comes to an abrupt stop during a turn on the leftmost end of his path, holding his hands like he’s doing a double karate chop. “Okay. Okay, how about a little thought experiment, huh? Let’s say I gave you my blessing.” He waves at Steve loftily, like there’s any other ‘you’ he could be referring to. “I say, sure, Steve, my very good friend, go ahead and romance my ex-wife, because I’m just that great of a buddy and I want you both to be happy.”
Steve’s not feeling very happy.
“What would you do then?”
That feels, sounds and smells like a trick question. “What do you want me to do?” Steve hedges.
Danny’s hand waves at nothing in particular. “Irrelevant. You have a carte blanche. Immunity and means, if you will. Make use of it.”
Carte blanche is what his mind feels like. Blank.
“What’s your move? What’s your end goal? What do you want, huh?” Danny shakes his head at Steve’s lack of response. “What? You want to take her out to dinner? You wanna fuck her?”
And God, that sounds horrible and wrong. He really wishes he had another beer right about now, or maybe something stronger.
For lack of any alcohol, he submits to Danny’s experiment. He lets his mind run free and serve him an image of what it would be like to kiss Rachel. It would be easy – he’d lean in, slowly, and press his lips against hers, and there’d be that sweet pressure as she kisses him back, which she probably wouldn’t, but it’s a fantasy, so it’s okay to think that she would. It’s a nice thought.
But that’s all it is. It doesn’t set his heart racing and the feeling of wrongness persists. It’s miles away from the way he remembers kissing Catherine, or even Lynn. The good parts of it are very abstract, like they would be if he imagined kissing some nameless woman he’s never met, and they’re rooted purely in the fact that kissing in general is pretty damn nice. The wrongness, on the other hand, has everything to do with the reality of who Rachel is.
“You don’t want any of that,” Danny says, squinting at him suspiciously. “I can see it in your face.”
“Feels wrong,” Steve admits. There’s a bad taste in his throat from just the thought. Danny opens his mouth, probably to gloat, but for once, Steve doesn’t let him talk. “But that doesn’t mean anything.”
Danny’s eyebrows make a valiant attempt to merge with his hairline. “Oh, it doesn’t?”
“You’re standing right there, buddy.” They’d already established Steve is pretty torn up about this. He doesn’t think he should be forced to reiterate that.
Danny nods, and then does something weird, his eyes skittering away when Steve expected an eye roll, at best. “Listen, there’s something else I want to try, but you have to promise me one thing first, okay?”
“Of course.” At this point, Steve’s ready to say yes to pretty much anything. It’s the least he could do. “What kind of thing?”
“The kids shouldn’t see me with a black eye, so if you’re going to punch me, don’t aim for the face. Alright?”
Steve’s mind breaks a little. It’s reached a point where all the impossible things being posited today just don’t compute anymore. “I’m sorry,” he says, so busy frowning that his situational awareness is shot to hell badly enough that he doesn’t even think about why Danny is suddenly coming closer. “Punch you?”
Danny doesn’t explain anything beyond that. Steve is still puzzling over how that would even work, how he could ever punch Danny without alien parasites having taken over his body or something equally science-fiction-y forcing him into it, when Danny leans down, puts a hand on the back of Steve’s chair to brace himself, and presses their lips together. Danny is very close – Steve can feel him and smell him and taste him.
CPR, is Steve’s first, nonsensical thought, his brain going a mile a minute but in totally the wrong direction. Then he thinks, oh, and then, ah! Okay! He doesn’t think much at all for a little while after that.
Danny straightens up and backs off after what seems like only seconds. He brings up a hand to his own face, and Steve thinks he’s going to touch his own lips, like they might still be tingling from the pure shock of it, just like Steve’s. Instead, Danny rubs a hand along his jaw, a nervous gesture, and asks, “So?”
Because of the sheer force of his stubbornness, it may not always seem like it, but Steve is a quick learner. He does a thought experiment. He thinks about kissing Danny again, and just the idea of it sends heat skittering from his face and the back of his neck down his spine. It bounces back up when it reaches his toes and finds a last stop in his chest, nestling comfortably in a corner of his heart that he never knew was this empty.
The monster locked in his ribcage purrs, like a big, happy cat. He feels like he’s been hit by lightning and won the lottery in the same instant.
He almost falls out of his damn chair. “It’s you.”
“Well yeah,” Danny says. “Who else am I gonna be?”
“Yeah,” Steve agrees, because Danny is always going to be Danny, and that’s what’s so wonderful about it. He laughs, unable to help it. “I’m in love with you.”
Danny’s eyes, which have been everywhere and nowhere by now, land squarely on him. Steve could swear he can feel the hopeful weight of it, and he may have only known about this thing between them for all of thirty seconds, but he can relate. “Yeah? You sure?”
“Danno, you’re the only person I know where I’m always sure.” Steve gets up. It’s not a conscious decision. He has a thought about how there’s too much space separating him from Danny, and in the same instant, his body is already doing something to fix the problem.
Danny’s hands reach out for him, grabbing hold, pulling their foreheads together. “God, you almost gave me a heart attack,” Danny says. “That would have been a fucked up love triangle, you know that? Rachel probably still likes me, you want her, and meanwhile I’m pining after your oblivious ass.”
Steve has no idea what’s come over him. He’s never done drugs, but even the really good uppers can’t possibly come close to this. “My ass, huh?”
“Babe, after today, you can’t think I’m after you for your mind.”
Steve laughs again. “Fair enough.”
And it’s not like this fixes everything. At some point, he’s going to come down from this ninth cloud that swept him up, and then he’ll start wondering how this will work practically, and what it means for their jobs and their friendship as it used to be and what their ohana is going to think. He might have to consider when the hell this started and examine how the fuck he missed it and consider what the devil it means for his sexuality, which is not something he’s ever spent a lot of time thinking about. Maybe that’s part of his problem in the first place.
But that’s later. For now, he kisses Danny, and lets Danny kiss him, and revels in how unmistakably right it feels.
And when Danny pushes, he steps back, but draws Danny with him. Carelessness borne out of soft, warm distraction leads him to only narrowly avoid sitting down next to the chair he’s aiming for instead of in it, and when his ass, the one Danny was pining for, finally does land firmly in the seat, he has a moment of confusion because there’s another chair to his left. Then Danny is on top of him. The wood creaks dangerously in protest, and that’s his answer right there: it’s Danny’s chair that he ended up in.
The irony isn’t lost on him, but neither is how his heart pounds with the knowledge that he doesn’t have to take things that belong to Danny, because he has loftier goals now. He’s taking Danny, all glorious five foot not very much of him, and he’s not letting go. There’s no guilt attached to that.