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It has been a gruelling few weeks. There was a battle, followed by a long trek across a mountain range, punctuated by sleepless nights, constantly looking over their shoulders, lying awake in case of an ambush. They are usually in good spirits, travelling together, but by the time Yusuf, Andromache, Quynh, and Nicolò come across the first village in weeks, most of their communication is non-verbal. It's a peaceful little place, disturbed only by what appears to be the preparation for some kind of harvest festival.
Yusuf isn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. He wants to laugh, because he is weary of the road and the people here are kind and welcoming, offering them food and shelter and invite them to partake in their festivities. He almost cries, because he is weary of the road and the people here are kind and welcoming, yet all he wants to do is to sleep for an indeterminate amount of hours.
A young woman carrying a child on her hip, another trailing her skirt, greets them when they make their way towards the centre of the village. She introduces herself as Alyena and tells them that ahead of the festivals, they do not have any more accommodation for travellers (Yusuf nearly weeps again), but she is happy to let them sleep in the little wooden building behind her house, where she stores the harvest and grass for her livestock to eat.
‘How biblical,’ Quynh mutters under her breath, and gets nudged in the shoulder by Nicolò for it.
‘I don’t think anyone’s going to deliver the second coming of Christ tonight,’ he says.
‘They must be celebrating something.’
They snicker at each other and Yusuf would join in, he would, but his mind and body are not up for it. If he were a cat, he’d be curling himself around Nicolò’s ankles right now. If he were a little child like the one Alyena is carrying, he’d be tugging on Quynh’s hand until she picked him up.
Andromache has the best grasp of the local tongue and so she chats idly with Alyena as the woman shows them to her stall.
‘They’re not celebrating Christmas,’ Andromache picks up the conversation when they are by themselves once more, then repeats the name of the festival Alyena told her. It’s not something Yusuf has ever heard before but Quynh makes an appreciative noise. Behind her back, Yusuf catches Nicolò’s eyes and finds his own confusion mirrored back at him. What a blessing, that he and Nicolò became immortal at the same time. Not just because Nicolò has sworn to love him, and proven to love him, over and over again. The last hundred or so years, would have been lonely, travelling with the two oldest women in the world. At least with Nicolò, he has a companion to his ignorance.
‘What is it?’ Yusuf asks.
‘It’s hard to explain,’ Quynh says. ‘In other cultures you might have a fertility rite, but they are celebrating the children their village has been blessed with instead. How the children are securing a prosperous future for their people.’
Andromache smiles indulgently, then scoffs a little. ‘It means that there’s a hog on a stick in the town square and the children get to run from backyard to backyard, playing games and eating sweetmeat.’
‘That sounds like a lovely tradition.’ Nicolò sits down on the stack of hay he and Yusuf will share during their stay, an idea so brilliant, Yusuf immediately follows suit. Why had he still been standing? Sitting down feels heavenly.
‘Does it have any spiritual significance?’
Andromache and Quynh share a look, the kind that Yusuf privately titled their ‘what will we do about Nicolò’-look a long time ago.
‘It’s just a bit of fun, Nicolò,’ Andromache says. ‘Alyena invited us along for the feast in the evening.’
‘That is very kind of her.’ Nicolò turns to Yusuf. ‘Would you like to go, my love?’
It’s the last thing Yusuf remembers hearing before he passes out in the hay.
When Yusuf wakes again it is early evening and he is parched. It’s been a warm day, and the heat lingers like stagnant air in the little stall. He needs a moment to orientate himself, remember where he is and where they keep the water skin.
Yusuf is alone in the stall, surrounded by only the hay and the things they travel with, bedrolls and weapons and garments. Once he has located the waterskin, he drinks deeply, nearly drains it, then takes a moment to just lie there as the day, the travel, his energy comes back to him. It won’t quite manifest the way he is used to, but after a moment, he still gets up to find the others.
There is a thrumming of festive spirit throughout the village, children laughing and screaming everywhere, and the hubbub carries Yusuf gently towards a square where, much like Andromache predicted, there is a hog on a stick – or some other animal, it’s impossible to tell. Yusuf spots Andromache and Quynh at one of the many games set up for the children, instructing a young girl on how to hold a bow steady so her arrows don’t pan away from her grip as she fixates on her target.
He would have expected Nicolò to be with them, seeing as his skills with a bow nearly rival Quynh’s by now, but he is not. Yusuf rounds the square and finally spots Nicolò crouching in the awning of a side street leading away from the square, surrounded by a throng of children. For a moment, it looks like Nicolò is telling them a story, and Yusuf can picture it, that earnest way of his—but then Nicolò stands to his full height again, one of the children hanging onto his back like a little bear.
Yusuf is too far away to hear, but he sees Nicolò’s lips move as he makes what is undoubtedly a whooshing sound, spinning on the spot, arms outstretched. The children shriek in delight, the one on his back the loudest.
‘I’m next, I’m next,’ Yusuf hears them argue as he approaches, but he hardly pays them any attention. The look of fondness as Nicolò sets the child down again – it takes a little prying – is captivating. Yusuf tries to remember if he has ever seen Nicolò look like this before, the almost absent-minded glow in his eyes as one child toddles away and another grasps for his hands, eager to be lifted.
Before Yusuf can reach the little scene a woman from the square joins them, a parent of one of the children by the looks of it. She and Nicolò chat idly, possibly hampered by language difficulties. Yusuf only hears the last part of their conversation.
‘Got any of your own?’
Nicolò smiles and shakes his head. ‘None so far.’
The woman pats the head of the child beside her, smoothing the hair of their face.
‘See that you do, any woman could count herself blessed to have a father like you for her children.’
‘I wouldn’t know about that.’
Nicolò’s smile turns wry for a moment, but then he beams at the little girl grasping for his arm again and strikes about a playful conversation that ends with the girl dangling from his arms, shrieking with joy as he tickles her belly.
He almost doesn’t spot Yusuf until he is standing right in front of him, having joined the children clamouring for his attention.
‘Yusuf! Hello.’ Nicolò leans over to press a kiss to Yusuf’s cheek, soft lips against his beard. ‘Would you like to join the fun?’
Yusuf glances down at the children still eagerly waiting for their turn on Nicolò’s back. ‘Are you offering me a ride as well?’
‘Noooo!’ some of the children are fast to chime in, ‘I’m first!’
Nicolò flashes a smile at him, exasperated as it is. ‘I thought you might want to help me with these rascals.’
The girl on his arm bears her teeth at Yusuf, although it is probably supposed to be a smile. Another tugs on Yusuf’s sleeve and he grins down at her, catches her hand and spins her around with a slow twist of his arm before she can climb on.
‘Wheee! Again, again!’ The little girl demands, and Yusuf spins her once more before keeping his hand down for a stop.
‘Maybe another time, habibi. But you have fun,’ he says, and returns the kiss to Nicolò’s cheek, then points at the children. ‘And you. And you. And you.’
‘Thank you,’ Nicolò says as the children around him giggle, already trying to climb him again. ‘And Yusuf’—here Nicolò switches to a language Yusuf hopes the children don’t understand—‘maybe later.’
He winks, and Yusuf groans when he catches what Nicolò is referring to.
He wanders back towards the centre of the square, where two women and men have started to hand out meat from the roast to anyone who asks. Before his nap Yusuf was starving, but standing in front of the food now, he finds it hard to rustle up an appetite. Still, it’s been weeks of scraps and salvaged nuts and berries. At the very least rationally, he knows he should eat.
He sits with a group of people having their dinner who all introduce themselves to him and ask him questions about his travels, but he forgets their names shortly after and finds it hard to follow their conversation, only grins at the speaker when it seems appropriate.
For the first time in years, maybe decades, Yusuf finds himself thinking of his wife. They were so young when they married. He thought that when he first became immortal, when it was still painful to think of her and the life he’d left behind, and he marvels at it now, almost 200 years later. Married at twenty-six, it’s both familiar and incomprehensible.
Her name was Emine, or at least Yusuf thinks it was. The only thing he can recall with certainty is the form of her eyes, their round shape and colour of burnt nut.
She was the daughter of a connection of his father, the match an advantageous one for both their families.
‘Your son will be a prince among men,’ Yusuf’s father had often said. Had Yusuf not gone to fight in al-Quds before both his and her father had died, he and Ermine would have inherited both their trading fleets and connections.
There are many things of his mortal life, as Yusuf has come to think of it, that he struggles to remember with any clarity. Yet that sentence remains burned into his mind, how his fathers words had sounded – and how they made Yusuf feel.
He had never been told outright that he was expected to have children with Emine. His parents didn’t need to, Emine’s parents didn’t need to, his friends didn’t need to. It was not an outlandish assumption, that within a year of being married, a man and a woman were to expect a child. Far from it. Thinking back on it now, Yusuf must have assumed so himself in the time leading up to his wedding, but never had he considered the reality of the fact until his father spoke to him of a son he didn’t have yet.
That sentence made it seem so real.
A little person who’d be half of Yusuf’s everything out there in the world, and it would be Yusuf’s responsibility to provide them with the skills and resources to become a prince, to protect them and to teach them and to love them until their dying day.
It was a maddening thought. So much bigger than anything else Yusuf could imagine.
From the moment he’d married Emine, he’d held his breath. Any day could be the day she might tell him. Any day could be the day his life would change forever, the days he would have to stop his travels abroad, his studies, the nights he stayed up late looking at the stars and dreaming of something, anything that wasn’t—wasn’t quite having a wife and a son and running a trading empire.
The day to exhale never came.
Emine carried it stoically, their inability to produce an heir. The food she cooked for them did not change in taste, but she ate less every day. The stories she traded with her best friend didn’t change in vibrancy or salaciousness, but she invited her to their house less often. When at night she would only ask to be held, Yusuf wondered if she had given up.
Privately, Yusuf had been glad. Publicly, he had never admitted as much.
He loved Emine, truly. The feeling does not compare to what he feels for Nicolò, but then, he’s not sure anything ever would. Still, he didn’t want to see her unhappy, and the wistful glances she would cast at other young parents in the street, the children playing in the streets outside their house – they were not those of a happy person.
On the other side of the square, Yusuf sees Nicolò lift one last child down from his shoulders, pat it on the head and bid it good-bye. So this is what brought the thoughts back. Because the first thing Yusuf did when he saw Nicolò with the children was scan for the wistful moue in his eyes, that one type of longing that doesn’t abate with the years. Once there, it touches everything. With Emine, he couldn’t move past it in the end, too insurmountable the hurt of every day interaction, the loss that never was.
With Nicolò—
‘Hey.’
Quynh has appeared in front of him, waving a hand in front of his face. Yusuf blinks up at her, down at his plate that he had hardly touched. The people he’s been sitting with for dinner were gone. Without Yusuf noticing, the evening dipped from amber golds to inkier shades. In the centre of the square, a group of people has picked up instruments and strung up a tune, the first people already moving to dance in front of the fire. The children have been sent to bed.
Quynh laughs at him. ‘Where did I just call you away from?’
‘I was just thinking of—’ Yusuf wants to tell Quynh, but finds that he can’t. Had his wife’s name really been Emine? Was that not—no, his mother’s name, surely he would remember—
‘See, this is why we don’t sleep in the afternoon.’ Quynh ruffles his hair and offers him a hand to get up. ‘Lucky for you, I have just the thing to get you out of your stupor.’
She doesn’t wait for Yusuf’s reply or reaction, just pulls him towards the dancing people and begins moving her body in a rhythm with his.
Yusuf is close to begging off, his mind too far gone to focus on the joy that is moving freely in a group of people, music tugging through his veins. After a moment, when the musicians launch into a drumming section and his mind goes once again perfectly blank, he is glad he hasn’t.
These are the moments in which Quynh is his favourite companion, when she takes him by the hand and laughs with abandon as he twirls her through the air. They are all graceful on the battlefield, but Quynh knows how to move with elegance beyond efficiency.
Nicolò and Andromache don’t join them often when they dance with other people. They prefer the quiet nights of the four of them around a campfire, but tonight Andromache is swaying back and forth where the musicians are standing and after some time, Yusuf finds Nicolò’s waiting arms, is pulled into a kiss with two hands that almost cover Yusuf’s whole face. It’s not much of a dance at this point, more laughter shared in the same breath, but it expands the energy Yusuf needed. Something inside him snaps back into place.
He knows Nicolò, more than he ever knew anyone. He would tell him if he—
‘I’m glad we stopped here,’ Nicolò whispers into Yusuf’s ear. ‘Did you have fun today?’
‘Not as much as you, maybe.’
And there it is again, the image of Nicolò with the village’s children, unbidden. Yusuf’s steps falter in their sway and if not for Nicolò he might have stumbled.
‘Oh, my love. You must be exhausted.’
Nicolò rights him with a steady hand on his back and pushes the hair out of Yusuf’s face. ‘Do you want to retire for the night?’
Yusuf shakes his head but his feet betray him, already walking towards a stoop to sit down on.
‘In a moment, perhaps,’ he tells Nicolò in the hope it will take the worry line from between his eyes. ‘I don’t see you dance often enough. You should ask Quynh to show you another twirl. I’ll be here when you’re ready.’
Yusuf knows his face holds up when Nicolò peers at his face. Two hundred years with the same person is enough to know when something is wrong with the other in less than a heartbeat.
Nicolò kisses his forehead, an unspoken promise, then winds his way back through the dancers to find Quynh. Yusuf picks up a cup of water from a nearby table, takes a drink and splashes some water in his face.
Maybe he shouldn’t have stopped dancing. How will he get rid of the pulse thrumming starkly all through his veins? No, he must contemplate his feelings a little longer. Only he shouldn’t, because contemplation will only make the feeling worse. Yusuf didn’t reach his old age without learning a thing or two about himself.
Although apparently not everything.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’ Andromache drops to sit on the stoop next to him. He had not been aware of her presence until she is already touching Yusuf. ‘Everything alright?’
‘Yeah, yes. Just tired.’
Andromache nods. That is something she can understand. She wordlessly agrees to Yusuf’s companiable silence, or maybe she just waits exceptionally patiently until Yusuf asks what he so clearly wants to.
‘Did you ever have any children?’
‘Mhm? Yes.’
Andromache stretches her long legs out in front of her, feet just coming up to rest on Yusuf’s ankles.
‘I try to remember all of them, but you know how it is. We can try as we might, but time takes them all in the end.’
Yusuf has a hard time swallowing his drink. It hurts, to think of what never was. He can’t imagine what it would be like to lose like this. He can hardly fathom losing his family as it is, even though he knows one day he must.
‘I didn’t know we could still do that.’
‘What?’ Andromache frowns at him until she catches his meaning and gestures at her stomach. ‘Wait, this? No, that’s all dried up years ago, don’t worry. I always figured it came with the healing, for me and Quynh. Though I never saw Lykon sire any children, and he wasn’t exactly celibate.’
Andromache shrugs and grins into her cup as she drains it.
‘Probably safe to say immortality comes with infertility.’
Infertility. The thought sits squarely in Yusuf’s head, although he can’t say that it comes as a blow. Hard to be surprised by something you have grown used to.
No, his stomach clenches only when he thinks of Nicolò, and the children using his shoulders as clambering board. What if one of them had sandy hair, or the inexplicable colour of Nicolò’s eyes? Is that weight in his stomach what he is supposed to feel at the thought?
Andromache is not looking at him, although Yusuf can’t say how deliberately. When he follows her gaze, he sees Quynh and Nicolò dancing at the edge of the crowd, Quynh on her tiptoes to make Nicolò spin under her arms, both of them laughing uncontrollably. This, he reckons, is how it will always be. The four of them, happy and from time to time carefree, for an eternity. His heart is full but not whole. Something is draining him of his feelings, something both so big and so small that he can’t explain it to Andromache. He can’t explain it to himself, and so he stays quiet.
It is late in the evening when Nicolò and Yusuf are lying entwined in the outbuilding of their hosts’ house. There are two bed-shaped lumps of hay and fabric for the four of them, but Andromache and Quynh did not retire when they did.
They are still out, probably using the clear night sky to have sex in the nearby woods. Not that he and Nicolò have not done their fair share of fucking in the woods, too. Yusuf remembers it fondly, those heady days when they were newly in love, and felt like they might be the only people to love like this, the first people to ever love like this. Who knows. Maybe for Andromache and Quynh, that thought rings true.
Yusuf doesn’t feel competitive about this. After over a hundred years of walking the earth with Nicolò, it’s hard to comprehend what it is he should be insecure about. And yet when he closes his eyes to go to sleep, all he sees is Nicolò laughing as he is surrounded by children. A joy that Yusuf cannot give him, in more ways than one. And so he doesn’t close his eyes.
Yusuf thought these feelings in the past, now that he is with a man. Not that life is ever simple for those who blindly assume.
‘You’re thinking very loudly tonight.’
Yusuf buries his face between Nicolò’s shoulder blades.
‘I’m sorry.’ His voice sounds muffled, and Nicolò huffs out an amused breath.
‘What is keeping you awake?’
‘Maybe just the nap I had.’
‘Hmm.’
Nicolò hums, tracing Yusuf’s knuckles with his fingers. If Yusuf tightened his grip, he might stop him from turning around, end the night in a tussle, escalate it with a kiss, a leg between Nicolò’s legs. But Nicolò’s memory is long.
He won’t evade the conversation forever. And so he lets Nicolò turn, swipe the hair out of his forehead. Even looks into his beautiful, starborn eyes. If he looks defiant, Nicolò doesn’t say anything.
Yusuf swallows. ‘Did you have fun today?’
‘I did. I already told you.’
Yusuf picks up Nicolò’s hand from where it lies between them and starts playing with his fingers. The skin on his knuckles is getting a little rough, the pads of his fingers always quick to form callouses. From experience, Yusuf knows this is as bad as they will get. If something happens to Nicolò’s hand now, the skin will grow back soft like a baby’s.
‘I think it is great that the people here celebrate their children and future generations,’ Nicolò continues, watching Yusuf trace his hand. ‘It’s a tradition I wish we had growing up. I also enjoyed the roast they invited us to, and the dance. But if something has upset you today then I would rather try to make it better than fall asleep.’
Yusuf nestles closer into Nicolò’s chest. His arms come up around him, and Yusuf sinks into the feeling of cocooning warmth. Relishes being held.
‘It’s silly,’ he mumbles into Nicolò’s collarbone.
Nicolò does not say “your concerns so often are,” even though that would be the truth. Yusuf loves him a little bit more for it. Nicolò hums, and presses a kiss to Yusuf’s hairline.
Yusuf exhales.
‘I don’t want to have children,’ he says.
The sentence hangs between them, suspended in the air but held only by a single hair of a horse’s tail ready to snap. Damocles, Yusuf thinks, would know all about this.
‘I don’t hate them,’ he adds when he can’t bear the silence any longer, ‘and I know many people who delight in them, but I—I don’t seem to be able to do it. There was a time when I enjoyed playing with my young cousins, but that feels so long ago now that I can scarcely remember how to do it.
‘I know it’s at the heart of what we do—care for people, and I do, I care so much. If I need to die a hundred times to save ten children from a burning building, I would do it in heartbeat. But I can’t—I don’t—I don’t want to be a father, Nicolò. Not in that sense of the word.’
It feels freeing, saying as much. It always does. Yusuf is old enough, and has been with Nicolò long enough, that he is not afraid of what Nicolò will say now. What stings is the possibility that he has hurt Nicolò, that there was a door in Nicolò’s life he considered open and Yusuf has now slammed it shut.
Nicolò doesn’t say anything at first, just touches Yusuf. Grounding strokes down his spine, breath in Yusuf’s hair.
‘Thank you for telling me.’
‘If you do want to at some point—I don’t know if we can, Andromache said it might not work, but if you want to, at some point, I’m sure we can work something out, we can—’
‘Yusuf.’
Nicolò’s voice is steady, calm. He’s every ounce the calculating fighter Yusuf met, every cell of his being is the man Yusuf came to love so dearly.
‘I like children. I enjoy playing with them. I enjoy spending time with them, because most of the time I like to listen to the way they see the world.’ He kisses Yusuf’s forehead again. ‘I never considered becoming a father. First, I thought it would be hard to, working for the church. Then, I thought it would be impossible, because I found myself only sleeping with men. And finally, I died. And I met you. And the thought to ask for more has never crossed my mind.’
Yusuf has been trying not to cry, but now the tears spill over. ‘But what if—If you—’
‘Shh, Yusuf,’ Nicolò gentles him, pulls Yusuf into his chest and rolls onto his back, blanketing himself with Yusuf. ‘Please don’t tell me you’ve been thinking you could somehow not be enough for me.’
‘No, that’s not—It’s a different kind of not enough,’ Yusuf says.
Nicolò kisses him again, longer, hint of desperation nipping at his teeth, not allowing for an argument. They know that they can both be right and still unhappy about this situation.
‘But you are, my love. You are.’
Yusuf opens his eyes to look at Nicolò and bask in the care he sees in his eyes. They can also choose to be right and happy, he supposes.
‘And if that changes, you will let me know?’
Nicolò kisses him once more. ‘I will. Will you?’
Yusuf doesn’t think he will have to, but he nods regardless, beard rustling against Nicolò’s chest hair, already half asleep. I has been an exceptionally long day.
‘Always.’
around 700 years later
‘Hey, boss.’
Joe wraps Andy up in a hug as she stumbles into their apartment, kicking of her shoes and throwing away her backpack before launching herself into his arms. She travels light, always has done, but Joe still offers to take everything from her and carry it to the living room.
‘How was Cleveland?’ Nicky asks from the kitchen. He started cooking as soon as he heard Andromache was coming, and by now there is a delicious, earthy smell of food everywhere in their flat.
‘You know what? Really good.’
They are in San Francisco, again. They will probably travel south again soon. It is that time of year. Apart from Andy, none of them particularly enjoy the cold.
Andy pulls open some of their cupboards. Joe would ask what she’s looking for but the answer is obvious, Andy is after a snack. Even Nicky has learnt not to tell her she will spoil her appetite, having learnt around five hundred years ago that that’s probably not true anyway.
‘I ran into Zeus.’ Andy hops onto one of the kitchen counters once she’s found a granola bar, unwraps it, dives into it. ‘Where is Booker?’
Joe stands in the doorway, leaning against the frame with one shoulder. ‘Sleeping in the other room. How is he?’
Nicky darts a quick glance at him from the stove. They both remember Zeus, of course. The little orphan Andy had come back to the safehouse with after Passchendaele. How Nicky had insisted that it was no space for children, that it wouldn’t be possible to fit him into their lives, until Andy had told him that she would take a break in that case.
She’d packed up a bag and left the very same evening.
‘We can… do that?’
Joe still remembers the way Booker had asked that question after witnessing the scene. Sort of shell-shocked, sort of marvelling.
‘Yes,’ Joe had said.
‘But you never do.’
‘Yes,’ Nicky had added. The way he’d looked at Joe after was similar to the way he looked at him now – a bit like there was a cupboard in the attic that only the two of them had the key for.
‘He’s well,’ Andy says now, digging into her granola bar. ‘Runs a restaurant there now. And the flavours, mhm! I got three different pasta dishes in one evening, and they all tasted better than I remember them. No offence, Nicky.’
Nicky grins at her. ‘Pasta Alfredo?’
‘How’d you guess?’
Even though Andy left with Zeus that evening, neither of them was out of their life. Andy took a break from their missions and their work, but a break is only ever that—it’s never a stop. And so there were the nights when Andy would show up at their door, Zeus in tow and tell them to look after him for the evening. So Nicky would make him whatever the closest to hot chocolate they could afford that evening was and Joe would sit by his bedside, reading to him by candlelight until he could fall asleep.
‘Who do you think taught him how to make that dish, hm?’
Nicky raises his eyebrows and holds a spoon out for Andy to try.
‘I still think his is better,’ she says, and they tussle for a little while Joe watches from the door, smiling at his family.
‘How old is he now?’ he asks once they’ve quietened down.
‘He must be in his sixties,’ Andy says, pensive. ‘He’s—he looks old, now.’
When Zeus was still a child, it was always Joe and Nicky who would point out how tall he’d grown when they hadn’t seen him for a while. But that’s the thing about immortality. At some point you forget a little what it’s like to grow up. And to grow old.
Nicky clears his throat. ‘Will you see him again?’
Andy stares out of the window for a while, then she shrugs.
‘I don’t know. I only ran into him by chance this time.’
There have been more children like Zeus over the years, fostered by Andy, and then sometimes left with Joe and Nicky, or Booker. The first couple of times, Joe felt like he had no idea what to do with any of them, but as the centuries wore on, he got better. He knew what he was good at – bedtime stories, braiding hair – and what he needs to stray away from – answering questions, or taking children too seriously. His favourite bit is still when Andy comes to take the child away again. Or maybe his favourite bit is what it does to Nicky’s face when they’re waving them good-bye, the kisses he gets after that are a little reward in themselves, deep and indulgent.
Nicky turns off the stove.
‘Habibi, can you get Booker? Dinner is ready.’
Joe nods and heads for the bedroom to get Booker up and seated at the table, clapping his shoulder as he grumbles and complains until the first spoon is in his mouth. Andromache tells them more about her trip during their separation, and across the table, Nicky grins at him, breath-taking as always.
And then, Joe thinks of the neighbourhood cat that comes by to get fed and his belly scratched, and how he’s already asked Nicky twice if they can take him when they leave.
This is his family. They don’t have children, and they don’t try to change that. For the most part. If the years and years of his life have taught Joe anything, it’s this – that he doesn’t need to be a father to love unconditionally. Everyone he cares about found their way into his heart all on their own.