Work Text:
They’ve run their errands, they’ve had some malasadas in the park, and they’ve just crossed the road to get to the parking lot when someone says, “Danny Williams?”
It’s not loud, but it stops Danny, and half a step later Steve too. Danny turns around and has to blink twice, but yeah. Yeah, that’s who he thinks it is, standing still in the middle of the crowded sidewalk. “David?”
It’s bizarre to see him in this context of sun and palm trees and Danny’s current life. He belongs to the past, framed by deep dish pizza and skyscrapers.
But he’s here, and undeniably so. He’s wearing a tame version of an aloha shirt instead of a V-neck sweater, his hair is shorter and he’s smiling awkwardly. “Yeah. You look good, Danny.”
“So do you,” Danny replies, because it would be rude not to. He supposes it’s also true, no thanks to the shirt.
He’s grasping for how the hell to follow that up when David makes some gestures over his own shoulder. “Hey, listen, I actually can’t talk right now. I’m supposed to be meeting my, uh-” His hesitation is barely perceptible, but definitely there. “Fiancé,” he finishes, lamely. His eyes slide to something just behind Danny for a moment.
“Ah,” Danny says, and he briefly wonders why news like that is still awkward when it hasn’t been any of his business for years and he hasn’t thought about David in almost as long, but it is. He pastes on a very fake grin. “Wow, hey, congrats.”
“Yeah, thanks.” David hunches his shoulders and jams his hands in his pockets. The stance is achingly familiar, like something Danny had forgotten he knew. Forgotten he used to be annoyed by for no good reason, too. “Hey, we’ll catch up on Facebook or something, right?”
Danny can think of few things that seem even less likely. He bobs his head. “Yeah, sure.”
“Good, good.” David flashes him a vaguely haunted smile, looks off behind Danny once more and then turns around and walks off, hands still in his pockets. Who walks with their hands all the way in their pants pockets?
Danny watches him go, wondering if his annoyance is genuinely directed at that, or at how painful this unexpected encounter was. Not even emotionally, because too many years have passed for any of what happened then to still be remembered with sharp edges now, but socially? Oof. Like a sea urchin armed with knitting needles.
After the crowd drifts in such a way that David disappears from view, Danny turns. He almost bumps into the thing that in hindsight it is very obvious David kept looking at.
That thing is Steve. Steve isn’t budging and radiates inappropriate curiosity in the way he always does when it turns out that Danny did in fact live a life before they met. “Who was that guy?”
It makes sense that he would need to ask, because there are certain things Danny has purposely never told him. Having held back in the past puts Danny in an awkward situation now, though. He could try and talk around it, or he could just outright lie and be done with the whole thing, but the traces of annoyance linger and he doesn’t feel like putting on either of those acts. They live in a supposedly modern age. He shouldn’t really have to tiptoe around stuff that’s totally normal, should he?
So he doesn’t.
“An ex,” he says, and almost immediately starts to regret his big mouth. Not having to hide doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be easier anyway. Safer, more comfortable, more certain of a positive outcome.
Steve stares at him for a bit, like his brain doesn’t know how to add up “Danny’s ex” and “definitely a very male man I just saw” and get something that equals reality, and then he lets out a bark of a laugh. “You know, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think you meant-”
Danny weaves past Steve around the word ‘better’, because that’s the point where it’s all hopeless anyway. Behind him, he hears Steve call his name, but he keeps going. If he just gets to the Camaro, he can leave Steve’s disappointing ass stranded, insofar as that’s possible in a city with more cabs than permanent residents.
“Danny!” Steve says again, but from very close now, and Danny is right in front of the damn car – why didn’t they park further away, huh? what’s wrong with a little healthy exercise? – so he has nowhere left to go. He realizes he doesn’t even have the keys, because of course Steve drove them here.
He drops his stupid reusable shopping bag that he just now realizes he’s been carrying and that was a very thoughtful gift from Steve for the last Beach Cleanup Danny did with Grace and Charlie, and he whirls around, ready for a confrontation. “What?” he barks.
Steve is being predictably weird. He’s hovering right inside Danny’s personal bubble, even now that Danny is facing him. He seems unsettled, almost nervous, which is exactly what Danny was afraid would happen if Steve ever found out that Danny might not always be strictly into women. Too many guys feel threatened in their own oh-so-secure heterosexual masculinity if someone else within a ten mile radius lets on that they don’t subscribe a hundred percent to those same ideals. It’s fucked up, but Danny knows that about the world, so he’s learned to work around it.
Sometimes that means just not going there, ever, at all.
And then Steve stands up straight and visibly seems to rally his mental forces and says, out of nowhere, “Danny, do you want to have dinner with me?”
Danny’s initial response is confusion. He doesn’t point out that they were already going to have dinner together. Dinner and dinner are two entirely different things, only one of which he had ever considered to be on the table between them – or on the couch, or wherever they were going to dig into their takeout in a few hours.
The penny must have been pinging down a ravine, that’s how long it takes, but eventually it does drop. Danny’s blood pressure goes along with it.
He looks for words and comes up with some really stupid, insensitive ones. “What, so I get to be your gay experiment now?”
From then on, things just keep getting stranger, but only in ways that simultaneously make a strange amount of total sense. Steve doesn’t get mad or back off. Instead, he produces an incredulous noise. “You really think after all these years I still need to experiment to know that I want you?”
Danny, somehow, finds himself in this situation, having just seen a guy he dated in a former life and now caught between his own car and his own Steve, who’s talking about want like it’s a familiar thing. Like he knows it inside and out, but mostly out, from a distance, until just now when “out” took on an entirely new meaning.
None of this seems quite real.
“I don’t know,” Danny says very honestly, because even if he thought he had all the answers when he woke up this morning, apparently he doesn’t. “Do you need that?”
Danny still, perhaps naively, expects Steve to hesitate or get irritated or say yes or maybe, or even to just kiss him outright in an impulsive effort to prove a point. Instead, Steve stands there in front of him, just a little too close – the same way he always does, very solid and real and with no distance at all. And Steve says, “No.” And then he grins. “But I think we’d be good at it.”
“At experimenting,” Danny says, because he feels like he needs some clarification here.
He doesn’t get any. Steve just keeps on grinning, like he expects Danny to be right there with him.
“We’d-” Danny tries, and gets stuck there for a moment as he actually imagines it. “We’d be very passionate.” He has to swallow. “Argue over everything.”
The space between them shrinks. It’s not that either of them moves in – it’s that the same number of inches can feel very different when it’s noticeably charged with sexual tension.
“I don’t think we’d argue that much,” Steve says, which is good, because it starts an argument, but also ridiculous, because it’s a deeply nonsensical one where Steve’s contrarian take has no merit by simple virtue of existing. Steve is not in this to win it with words, so he must have something else in mind.
Danny thinks about that something else.
He thinks about kissing Steve. Not as a fleeting thing, and not as a daydreamed impossibility, but instead he takes it seriously, and really considers it, the reality of it, the weight of the act. Steve is tall, but that just means Danny would have to drag him down a bit – pull at his face, his neck, his hair. Bite his lip and lick his teeth and make him want to stay down there, and reel him in further so he can kiss Danny against the car, arms braced on the roof on either side. Steve would be handsy and Danny would pretend to slap his hands away while feeling him up in return and it would be easy. It would be so simple, and all it would take is a single spark to set this whole thing aflame.
And Steve’s right. They would be good at it.
Danny turns the lighter around and around in his mind and then puts it back in his pocket. “Yeah,” he says. Steve opens his mouth to argue back, but Danny interrupts. “Yeah, I’ll have dinner with you.”
Steve’s mouth, not yet bitten red, is still open when Danny snatches up his bag, slips out from between Steve and the car, and walks around it to the passenger door. He waits there for all of two seconds. That all he can take, far too itchy from all the future potential in the air that he keeps having to breathe through to be able to muster any more patience than that. “Well?”
Steve needs the full eternity of another endless second, but then he moves. The car makes a noise and the headlights flash as it unlocks, but Danny almost misses that bit, because Steve did hit the button on his key, yes, but he also- He also smiled.
It’s not aimed at Danny. Steve is moving, getting shit done, getting in the car like a regular human being – a good joke, that – but his expression as he does it freezes Danny in his tracks again, because that smile is tiny and genuine and not tailored for consumption. It’s just there because it happened, which it did because other things happened, and perhaps because yet more things are almost certainly about to happen.
Danny thinks that maybe he should look David up on Facebook after all. Just to say hi. Just to reminisce about Jersey a bit, and to figure out where David’s staying and have the hotel send up a few malasadas to his room as thanks for whatever the fuck he was doing in Hawaii on a Tuesday afternoon that made it possible for them to run into each other.
Maybe.
Maybe, but certainly not right that second. Right that second, Danny’s heart pumps fast enough to instantly melt his shock frozen limbs again, so he can get into the car in his seat next to Steve, where he belongs, where he’s been a hundred thousand times and where he’ll be a hundred thousand more.
He wonders if they’ll get around to dinner at all.