Archive of Our Own

Before officially landing Late Night, Casey had to test-run a live show for an audience of NBC execs, few of whom seemed aware of the existence of Sports Night as a show or of Casey McCall as a human being. He’d needed help rounding up guests: Isaac pulled some strings and got Larry Johnson and Dan called in a favor from Janeane Garofalo, the most famous person he knew, who he didn’t really know at all but had met at the Luna Lounge so many times by then that it managed to count for something.

Casey called him first thing the morning after. Things were still off between them in a way that was starting to feel permanent.

“How’d it go?” Dan asked.

The line from Casey’s home office always made him sound tinny and far away. “I don’t know.”

“I’m sure you were great.”

“It’s harder to tell on my own. It’s like I have no barometer for quality without you.”

It was an unfair thing to say on an already unfair call to make. Dan scratched at three-day-old stubble and blew past it. “What, you want me to be the guy who sits at the end of your couch and laughs at all your jokes?”

Casey said nothing for a moment.

“The closer I get to this thing, the more I…“

The line hissed. Dan didn’t ask him what he meant, didn’t want to hear it. He stared up at an old stain that looked like someone had spilled a cup of coffee on his ceiling.

“Case, you’re getting your face powdered in 30 Rock. It’s no gulag.”

“That doesn’t make this easy.”

Dan scraped his fingers across his eyes. “What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t want you to say anything. I just wanted to talk to you.”

His voice was low. Dan wondered how this conversation would sound to Lisa if she picked up the kitchen phone. How it would sound to Charlie if he walked past Casey’s office door and heard his dad sounding serious and strange.

“I thought part of the decision to leave was that we wouldn’t talk so much. Get some space. You know.”

“We do have space. We’re not spending seventy hours a week together anymore.”

“You call every day. Twice, sometimes.”

“They’re not long calls.”

Dan wiped his hand down his face and said, “Casey.”

There was a pause.

“If I don’t call, you won’t call,” Casey said.

“I don’t think this is good for either of us right now.”

“This.”

“Talking.”

Static cracked the line. “You don’t want to talk to me.”

“l want to talk to you all the goddamn time.”

“So do I.”

“You don’t get to say that.”

“But you just -“

“This is different for me than it is for you!” Dan shut his eyes, lowering his voice. “You know that. Come on, man.”

Casey’s voice was quiet. “You said we were okay.”

“I wanted us to be.” Dan jammed his knuckles into his eye. “I want things to work out for you with the show. With Lisa. But this feels like shit. I can’t keep doing it. Don’t make me do it.”

“You mean it. No more - you really mean it.”

“I mean it.”

Another pause, longer, slower moving. Dan dreaded the call ending, the call dragging on. In an hour he’d have to be at work, where he’d spend all day writing in an office that, despite its clutter, felt totally fucking deserted.

“Listen,” he said. “The show’s gonna work out. It’s gonna be great.”

“Danny.”

“You’ll be great.” He had the same numb unsteadiness in his hands normally saved for bad arguments with his father. “Bye, Case. Good luck. Bye.”

“Danny.”

With the receiver so close to the hook Casey sounded far-off, spectral - then Dan hung up, and there was silence.

He got into work half an hour late. Natalie greeted him at his desk brandishing a razor and shaving foam. In the sanctuary of Isaac’s private bathroom she nicked his jaw with the blade and told him, gently, that it was about time he stopped acting like someone had died.

Casey didn’t call again. Three weeks later Dan stopped dead in the morning crush of people coming out at 72nd and Broadway: Casey’s supersized face was grinning down at him from the side of a building. A billboard advertisement for Late Night with Casey McCall.

-

In ‘89, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar finished off his career as the NBA’s number one all-time scorer by losing to the Pistons, 97 to 105. Dan and Casey watched the game on the Star Tribune’s battered couch while passing a box of Mallomars back and forth and idly swapping player stats. Dan’s first day as an intern - he’d hung around after everyone else had gone home because the dive he was renting for the summer had no TV in it.

The game ended. They watched Abdul-Jabbar walk off court with his arms above his head. You couldn’t hear the commentators over the crowd cheering.

“Thirty-eight thousand, three hundred and eighty-seven points,” Dan said.

Casey whistled, crossing his arms behind his head. “Almost forty years for someone to break Chamberlain’s record. You think anyone will break his?”

“I might take a crack at it.”

Casey turned and looked at him properly for the first time.

He played along: “How tall are you?”

“Five eleven,” Dan said. “Six one, if any girls around here ask.”

“You ever play competitive basketball?”

“There’s another way to play it?”

The apples of Casey’s cheeks popped out when he smiled.

Dan extended a hand across the couch. “Dan.”

“Intern Dan,” Casey said, like he’d heard of him conceptually. He shook Dan’s hand. “Casey.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“You too.” Casey's head lolled back to face the TV. He asked, absent-sounding, “Want to get a drink, Dan?”

Dan looked at him sidelong.

“Sure,” he said. “Okay.”

Casey took him to a bar a few blocks from the office, a place where they had to raise their voices over the sound of music and voices and glasses knocking to have a conversation. Dan liked the noise. A year of living in a dorm with five other guys had gotten him used to it, to the point that over spring break, when he’d been one of the few to decide to bum around campus, he’d invested in a heavy-duty cassette player and a collection of tapes to keep him company.

In the new apartment the only thing he could fill silence with was the landline phone he’d used late last night to let his mom know he’d arrived in California safely - that call, like every interaction with his parents the last eight months, made him feel like more of an imposition than a son.

Casey examined his fake ID under the dim lights.

“Twenty-two.” He nodded, eyebrows raised, and handed it back over. “And how old are you, really?”

“Twenty.” Dan made a vague gesture. “Ish.”

“So not twenty.”

Under the table Casey’s knee bumped the inside of his thigh. Dan felt a flare of heat at the base of his spine, then Casey moved away again. He took a drink before speaking.

“Twenty, minus, like, six months.”

Casey’s mouth twitched. “You know, I think there’s a more concise way to say that.”

He told Dan about the paper, the people there, the stories he’d written, the best place in town to order crab rangoon. Dan downed beer too quickly and kept trying to make him laugh.

When Casey mentioned he was putting together a tape for on-camera work, Dan said, “I could see that.”

Casey sat up a little straighter. “Yeah?”

He looked like he’d been designed in a lab that genetically engineered anchormen, like he’d been poured into a mold or something. There was a brightness to his face that made it hard for Dan to want to look away from him.

Dan shrugged. “Easy.”

“You know Dana?”

“Assistant editor Dana.”

“She says you have to be nuts to want to be on TV. Granted, she is nuts, just not that kind of nuts.”

Dan desperately wanted to be on TV.

“I fear I am that kind of nuts,” he said.

Casey held his beer out. Dan clicked his own against it.

After a long drink Casey fixed him with a look, head cocked, his mouth a considering line. Dan tried to play it cool.

“I could see that,” Casey told him after a moment.

Dan raised his eyebrows. “Yeah?”

“You’ve got something.”

“I’ve got something,” Dan repeated in wonderment.

Casey smiled. “Something, you know. Charisma. Charm. You’re very likable.”

They were another thirty minutes into talking before Casey mentioned that he’d gotten engaged the week before to his college girlfriend, Lisa. By then it was too late. Dan felt how he felt about him.

-

He watched Casey’s first Late Night episode sitting hunched over on their office couch and gnawing at his thumbnail, still dressed in his show clothes.

Dana peeked her head through the door. “How’s our boy doing?”

His eyes were stuck to the TV. “Hasn’t started yet.”

Another ad came on. Dan had a flash of Casey nervously watching the Yankees try to mount a comeback in Game 4 of last year’s World Series - grim-faced and pale, gripping onto Dan’s forearm so tightly with both hands that he’d apologized for leaving pink marks on the skin after. Who knew what Casey was doing right now.

“You look nervous,” Dana told him. “You look more nervous than you did before the first episode of this show.”

“We weren’t replacing Letterman on this show,” Dan replied automatically.

Brass music played. The logo that had been popping up all over the city came up on screen, Casey’s name in a swooping font.

Dan jolted up straight. “It’s starting.”

Dana came and perched on the arm of the couch next to him.

On the TV Casey walked out from behind a curtain and into well-conducted applause. Under the spotlight, in a tailored navy suit, with his new haircut and same old smile, he looked ridiculously handsome.

He raised his hands modestly. Dan knew that he and Dana were the only two people watching who could have caught the split-second look of anxiety on his perfectly made-up face.

Dana tilted her head. “It’s kinda weird, seeing him on TV without you.”

Dan blurted out, “I can’t watch this,” and fumbled for the power button on the remote before Casey could open his mouth.

-

In Dallas, after their first show together at Lone Star with Dana at the wheel, the three of them had gone out for drinks and stayed out later than they should have. Around midnight they stumbled their way from the bar by the station towards the karaoke place Dana liked performing tone-deaf renditions of power ballads at. Casey stopped at a payphone on the way.

“I’m gonna call Lisa,” he said, fishing for change in his pockets, his forehead squeaking against the glass door of the booth. “Let her know I’m staying at your place.”

“You’re staying at my place?” Dana said faintly.

Casey gestured his head. “His place.”

“I feel I should have been the first person to know about this arrangement.” Dan held out a quarter. Casey took it. “What if I meet Miss Texas 1993 at karaoke? What if she saw me on TV tonight? What if she’s so enraptured by my performance of Babies by Pulp that she demands to come back to my place?”

“Tell her tough luck. You’re going home with me.” Casey opened the booth door. “I don’t want to wake Charlie at some ungodly hour.”

He went into the phone booth and put Dan’s change in the machine, the door clattering shut after him.

Dan turned to Dana. The wind had swept her bangs into disarray and a few cocktails had smudged her mascara a little, and in the neon blue light from the laundrette next to them she looked sort of luminously beautiful to him. He could never understand looking at her why he couldn’t just force an attraction that might solve their shared problem.

“How do we think Lisa will take this information?” he asked.

She hummed and tapped at her chin.

“Let me see,” she said, drawing it out. “I’m Lisa, it’s midnight, I’ve been alone all day with my hurricane of a three year old, I’m enjoying the relative peace of my kid finally being asleep and wondering when my husband will be home to enjoy it with me, then he calls up and says, ‘hey babe, I’m staying out with my friends all night long, so I’ll see you tomorrow.’” She pursed her lips, eyes narrowing. “I’m probably not going to take that well.”

Dan kicked at a littered can. “It was our first show.”

“And she really hates him when he’s drunk,” Dana added, quietly.

He looked at Casey, separated from them by the glass panes of the booth. All he could see of him was his coat, the back of his lowered head.

“She hates him when he’s sober lately, too,” he said.

Dana looked at him, then over her shoulder at Casey. They could hear the low murmur of his voice - it was the soft way he spoke to Lisa when he was trying to stave off an argument. She took Dan’s arm and steered him away from the booth, the two of them walking slowly along the empty street.

“He was flirting with me at the bar,” she said.

“I saw.”

“It means nothing. I know that. You and I flirt. Hell, enough beer and you two flirt with each other. But when he does it with me, when he does it and he’s got that ring on, I think, ‘I should really put my foot down on this.’ And I never do.”

Dan remembered his first summer interning at the Star Tribune, the first time he’d hung out with Dana and Casey together after work hours. They’d gone for drinks at the dive bar that from then on, for all three summers Dan spent working there, they ended up at constantly. He’d been struck by how brazen Casey was about flirting with Dana. The two of them had put on a whole show about it: Casey pushing, Dana faking putting up a fight.

She’d noticed Dan noticing it. When Casey had left to order another round of shots she’d leaned over the table and said, “He’s getting married and he’s feeling restless. That’s why he pulls this kind of thing.”

“I think the time to act on any pre-marital restlessness is probably before you pop the question,” Dan had said.

Dana had pinched his cheek like he was a kid. The line of her mouth was flat and guilty.

“That’s because you’re a good egg, Dan,” she’d told him - as if he’d spoken out of some boy-scout sense of propriety and not the jealousy he’d felt seeing Casey flirt with someone who wasn’t his fiancé.

Four years later and they were still having variations of the same conversation, stuck in a loop they couldn’t seem to get out of. Probably due to a lack of trying on everyone’s part.

Dan slipped an arm around her shoulders and rested his chin on her head. He was only just tall enough to manage it with her in heels.

“Maybe we should have a go at it,” he said. “Get married. Be miserable together. All the cool kids are doing it.”

Dana snorted. “You could at least get down on one knee.”

Dan did, in the middle of the sidewalk, down on the concrete. He held his hands out towards her like he was displaying a ring box.

“So?” he said, grandly.

She threw her head back laughing.

“Ask me again in, oh -” She reached down and closed his hands over, shutting his imaginary box. “Let’s say five years.”

He got up and brushed off the knees of his pants. “You got it.”

They huddled close, looking up at the green light from the Bank of America Plaza together. Dan had always found it sort of fascinatingly ugly.

Dana leaned her head back on his shoulder and said, “Dan, do you think I’m an idiot?”

“No, I do not.”

“Good. I don’t think you are, either.”

Dan didn’t have time to say anything to that. Next thing Casey was cutting in between them, slinging his arms around their shoulders, pink-faced and smiling. He swooped down to kiss Dana then he turned and kissed Dan too, a hard, brief kiss on the lips, his breath smelling of tequila.

Dan stared at him, reeling. Casey was dramatically lit under the streetlight and strange looking for it - his deep set eyes in shadow, the line of his jaw and slope of his nose impossibly clean. He looked more like a romanticized sculpture of himself. It lasted a second; when he tilted his head up a fraction, he just looked like himself again.

“My friend,” he said, mouth an inch from Dan’s, “I think we might just be the right kind of nuts for TV.”

Dan could see Dana’s red lipstick smeared across his mouth. Past Casey’s profile he could see her dazed, dazzled face.

Later, at the karaoke place, a few terrible songs down, he caught his reflection in the filmy men’s room mirror. Dana’s lipstick was smudged on his upper lip, passed from her to Casey to himself. He was struck by a sudden sobriety, an understanding that they were, all three of them, fucking idiots.

-

Casey’s show got off to a rocky start.

Dan never managed to sit through an episode, but he did have a dedicated subscription to Variety for the sole purpose of charting Casey’s Nielsen numbers week-to-week, as well as a compulsion to buy any newspaper or magazine that looked like it might so much as mention his name. The first month, during the endless tidal wave of unforgiving comparisons to Letterman being published everywhere, Dan restrained himself from picking up the phone - then the hit piece in the Post came out that said, in essence, that Casey was too young, too green, too smug, too sports, too irritating to be a late night show host worth watching.

Thinking about him reading it made Dan feel like throwing up. He caved in and called the first number on his speed dial.

“Hello?” Lisa answered.

Dan squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Hi, Lisa.”

“He really doesn’t want to talk to anyone, Danny.”

“Can you tell him it’s me?”

“I thought you two had a falling out.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“You think he told me anything?” she asked, scoffing.

Dan sincerely doubted the call would have lasted this long if Casey had.

“We didn’t fall out,” he said tentatively.

“He sulks like you did.”

Dan could not physically bear the irony of Lisa laying a guilt trip on him for this, of all things. He could hear Charlie’s voice in the background, the sound of Saturday in the McCall household.

He shut his eyes. “I should -”

“Was it about Dana?”

“What?”

“Both of you spent the last eight years revolving around her,” Lisa said. “Are you seeing her? Is that why you stopped talking?”

He rubbed his eyes. “I’m not seeing Dana. It’s not about Dana.”

“But you and Casey aren’t talking.”

“No.”

“And you’re not going to shed any light on why that is for me.”

At some point over the past decade Casey and Lisa had taken to roping him into their arguments, like by playing bystander to enough of their marital bullshit he’d reluctantly become some sort of participant in it. Why don’t we ask Danny what he thinks? Danny, do you think that’s fair?

“No, Lise,” he said. “I’m not gonna do that.”

She sighed. Dan thought she might hang up, but she stayed on, the line buzzing between them.

“Is he okay?” he asked.

“You know what he’s like. He keeps quoting it. He’ll just be sitting there then out of nowhere he’ll say, ‘an hour of aimless dawdle masquerading as a TV program’, like he’s reading it off the page.”

Dan could imagine Casey’s flat delivery. His fingers had tangled in the phone wire. He clenched them until it hurt.

“Can you tell him it’s me?” he said. “Please?”

Lisa paused.

“Give me a minute,” she said.

The line went fuzzy, then silent. Dan held the receiver to his ear and looked blankly out his living room window. He hadn’t heard Casey’s voice in almost two months. He let his head bump the glass as he waited.

The line fuzzed.

“Danny?” Lisa said.

Dan thumped his head against the glass again. “He said no.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry for - sorry. Bye, Lisa.”

He pressed his thumb on the hook to hang up. He stood there with the phone cupped to his ear and his forehead up against the window until the dial tone rang out.

-

Back in Dallas, Dan dated one of the show’s researchers without anyone else finding out about it - Adrien, who, despite only reading grim non-fiction books about dead presidents, had a good sense of humor; who cooked elaborate meals for Dan whenever he stayed the night; who was sometimes a smartass in the specific way Dan found attractive and other times just an asshole. It wasn’t serious between them until it was.

“Want to go for a drink?” he asked Casey after their Friday show.

“You’ve gone out every night this week.” Casey gave him a look. “And from what I’ve heard around here you haven’t been a particularly fun drinking buddy on any of them.”

“I’d like to keep the hot streak going.”

“You could just tell me what’s wrong, you know.”

“You could just say no,” Dan said, not looking at Casey, pretending to reorganize the papers on his desk. “I don’t need you to put on your dad voice with me.”

Casey crossed the short distance of their cramped shared office to sit on Dan’s desk, knee to the arm of his chair. Closer than Dan wanted him to come.

“Normally,” Casey said, “when you get like this, it’s...”

“It’s what?”

“It’s around October.” He glanced at Dan. “And I know what it’s about.”

He looked guilty. He always did whenever he talked around Sam.

“I’m not that bad right now,” Dan said quietly. “I’m not close to that bad.”

“You’re not great.” Casey nudged the back of the chair and it swayed Dan slowly, gently towards him. “I can let you get away with a couple of days of brooding, but I’m getting kind of worried now, Danny.”

Dan felt that age-old urge to get up and leave, to go sit in a bathroom stall or in his car until he had himself under control again. He’d never given into that feeling with Casey.

“I’m fine.” He was, objectively. He knew he was. He just couldn’t make himself sound convincing about it. “Really.”

Casey frowned. “You know whatever it is, you can tell me.”

Dan looked at him and tried to picture it, telling Casey. His reaction would ease the twisted up feeling in his chest or it would screw him up even worse. Either sounded good to him, then.

He dragged both hands through his hair and said, “I had a bad break-up.”

“I didn’t even know you were seeing anybody,” Casey said, blinking.

“I was. For about four months.”

A crease appeared between Casey’s eyebrows. “How the hell could you see somebody for four months without me knowing about it?”

“I really did not want you to know about it.”

“Why wouldn’t you -”

“Casey,” Dan murmured, glancing up.

He made himself look Casey in the eye. Casey’s expression cleared with slow understanding, his frown sliding away, face turned blank and set. Well, Dan thought, now you’ve fucking done it.

Casey exhaled heavily through his nose. He nodded a few times. Then he said, “Who was he?”

“Adrien.” There was no recognition on Casey’s face. “The research guy.”

“Oh.”

He stayed leaning on Dan’s desk, hands loosely folded in front of him, face glazed over, and said nothing. He was close enough that any move Dan made would knock the arm of his chair into him. Dan was boxed in. He turned restless.

“I know it was stupid. It jeopardizes the show. It jeopardizes you. I don’t normally, I haven’t been with - not since Dartmouth. And I’m not going to do it again.” He looked up at Casey’s unmoved face. “Case, I’m really -”

“How did that happen?”

“What?”

Casey’s eyes flitted to his. “You and Adrien.”

“We were both hanging around late one night and it - it just happened.”

“Four months just happened. I don’t remember you dating anyone for that long before.”

Dan only ever had once. A six month stretch with a TA at Dartmouth called Andy who’d sort of resembled Casey with his floppy Bill Pullman hair and lanky build. Dan had referred to him, compulsively, as my buddy Andrew in all his letters and calls to Casey that semester.

Andy was supposed to be it, the last mistake he’d ever knowingly make, then Dan had been in the office one night, lingering the way he did whenever the thought of going home felt like too much for no discernible reason. He’d bumped into Adrien on the way out and asked if he wanted to get a drink, and Adrien had given him a measured look through his too-long bangs, then he’d said “Sure, I know a place,” and taken Dan back to his apartment. It happened before Dan had time to prepare for what it meant.

He looked down. “I liked him.”

“You liked him,” Casey repeated. “You - did you...”

“I was starting to, I guess.” Dan shrugged. “I’ll get over it.”

It was out there. The reality that he could love another man was reshaping the way Casey saw him in his head, their friendship, their work, everything.

He’d been biting down an apology for hiding this part of himself ever since they’d become writing partners. It rose up in him then like bile.

He pressed his hands to his eyes, balled up into fists. “Casey.”

Casey stood up.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Come on. Let’s get a drink.”

They went to Dan’s place, where they split half a bottle of whiskey between them and talked very little. Casey put music on because he knew Dan couldn’t deal with silence - a Tom Petty cassette an ex-girlfriend had given him in college that was starting to sound warped and deep.

Dan lay on the couch with an empty glass balancing on his chest. They’d done something similar on the anniversary of Sam’s death last year, on the night of Lisa and Casey’s first spectacularly bad fight after Charlie was born a few years back. Just sat around with each other and said nothing, like existing in the same room took precedence over being good company.

Casey sat cross-legged on the living room floor, haphazardly arranging Dan’s collection of VHS tapes on the rug into some Casey-specific order. He was frowning down at Dan’s treasured VHS copy of Big Time.

“I could name your top three films out of those in exact order,” Dan told him. It was the first time he’d spoken in a while.

Casey said, slurring a little, “The depths of my mind are vast and unknowable.”

“The Godfather.”

“Yeah, well, that’s an easy one. That barely counts. And since you don’t have the second one -”

“Network.”

Casey blinked down at the tapes in front of him, brows drawing together. He turned to Dan. “Then what?”

Dan pressed his mouth to the side and squinted.

“Naked Gun,” he said.

Casey looked at him hazily. Then he started gathering up the tapes strewn all over the floor and wordlessly putting them back on Dan’s bookshelf.

“Your favorite movie is The Sting,” Casey said, holding Dan’s copy of it above his head.

“My favorite movie is The Sting,” Dan agreed, raising his empty glass.

Casey slid the tape back into place on the shelf. “Your dad took you and your brothers to see it when you were kids. On rerelease. But your sister was still too small.”

Dan sat up.

Casey’s hand was still on the film’s spine. “Do you think Paul Newman is handsome?”

It was the closest they’d come to discussing the fact Dan liked men since they’d left the office.

“I don’t think Paul Newman is handsome,” he said. “He just factually is.”

Casey made a vague sound. He pulled something off of the shelf and then came over to the couch to sit by Dan’s outstretched legs.

He held up a dull looking book Adrien had left behind. “Danny, what the hell is this?”

“It’s a gigantic book about Abraham Lincoln.”

Casey looked bewildered by its existence. “You’re reading a book about Abraham Lincoln?”

“No.”

He opened it near the middle and started to read, leaning back. Dan had a distinct mental image of them from a distance at that moment, two of them sprawled out on the same couch, Casey with his shoes off and shirt collar open and Dan’s feet tucked into the small of his back.

He drew his legs in, away from the heat of Casey’s body.

“This book says Lincoln was already dying before he got shot.”

Dan put his glass down on the coffee table and decided that if Casey tried to pour him another drink he would give a firm no, unless he forgot he’d decided this. “I wouldn’t trust it. Adrien read a lot of historically dubious crap.”

“I don’t know. Maybe there’s something to this. Maybe Lincoln should have died of this Marfan Syndrome thing. Sometimes, you know, sometimes it’s meant to be one thing, then -“ Casey ran both hands through his hair to clasp behind his neck, his elbows hanging out. On his lap the book closed itself over with a thud. “Then - well, then - then -”

“Then?”

“Then some guy shows up and blows the roof of your head open,” Casey finished.

Dan raised his eyebrows. He cocked his fingers like a gun and took aim, thumb popped squarely under his left eye, then he shot an imaginary bullet straight at Casey’s head. He made a sound effect from the corner of his mouth: pew.

He dropped his hand back into his lap. “Like that?”

Casey stared at him.

“If you’d…” he said.

“If I’d what?”

Casey blinked hard.

“I don’t know.” He used the arm of the couch to push himself up to his feet. “I should get going.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I just drank a little too much.”

He picked up his coat from the back of the couch and looked down at Dan as he slid it on, hair mussed, an odd look in his eyes.

“I always thought he was an asshole,” he said.

“Lincoln?”

“Adrien, the research guy.”

A month ago at this time on a Friday night Dan would have been falling asleep curled around Adrien’s back, and in the morning he’d have woken up to the smell of someone cooking his breakfast, someone brewing his coffee. A week ago, he was telling Adrien that they were at a dead end.

He looked down. “He was less of an asshole than I was.”

“What happened with you two?”

“Nothing happened. Nothing could happen. I’m on TV talking through NFL draft picks every night next week, I can’t -” Dan rubbed his eyes. “I had to make a decision. You know?”

“I know,” Casey said.

For some godforsaken reason Dan wanted to say, no, you don’t, you have no fucking clue. All his adult life he’d kept trying and failing to be the kind of man Casey just was, effortlessly - sometimes he had to remember that Casey didn’t know that about him.

Casey put a firm hand on his shoulder, jostling him. His face was serious.

“You’ll be okay,” he said.

Dan looked away. Casey had spent his Friday night sitting in miserable silence with him. He’d probably put himself in deep shit with Lisa doing it. “Yeah?”

“Yes. I decree it.”

Dan cracked a smile. Casey smiled back, the apples of his cheeks popping out. Dan loved him, platonically and romantically, singularly. He imagined saying as much to Casey with the same calm awareness he felt it with. I love you. It’s no big deal.

“You decree it.”

“I decree it.” Casey squeezed. “It’s been decreed.”

“Then I guess I’ll be okay,” Dan said.

-

Steve Sarris became Casey’s official replacement after a long stretch of rotating co-anchors. Steve was a solid writer, a die-hard Braves fan, an affable guy on-air and off. Dan liked Steve. It wasn’t Steve’s fault that the office was an entirely different place now than it had been back in January.

The day of their thirtieth show together, Dan floated the idea he’d been discussing ad nauseam with his new therapist over lunch with Isaac.

He frowned at his untouched deli sub. “What would you say if I told you I wanted out?”

Isaac swiped relish from his mouth with a napkin and eyed him tiredly. “Can’t I just enjoy my sandwich, Danny?”

“I have a confession. I brought you to this deli and bought you that sandwich with an ulterior motive in mind.”

“To ask me what I’d say if you told me you wanted out.”

“Yes.”

“I'd say you’d better have a good reason.” When Dan said nothing Isaac gestured for him to go on. “Which would be...”

Dan cleared his throat. “I'm unhappy. And I think it would make me less unhappy.”

Isaac’s face softened. He put his sandwich down.

“Unfortunately,” he said, wiping his hands, “that is a good reason.”

Dan wrapped his sandwich back in its plastic. He had no appetite. In fact, he felt sort of sick. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, son.”

Hearing this instantly made Dan want to retract his half-baked resignation.

He clasped his hands on the table, businesslike. “If I leave, will you still hang out with me every day?”

Isaac reached over to put his own warm hand over Dan’s. He smiled at him.

“No,” he said.

Isaac was the easy one to broach this conversation with. With Dana, it was a nightmare - the weeks of panicked rejigging since Casey’s departure were finally over, the show had finally found steady footing again, and now Dan had to pull the rug out from under her.

After every show these days, she’d drag Dan to Anthony’s to talk through every fuck-up and fumble over negronis. It had been the same in ‘95 after they’d started on the show. Every night those first six months, Casey would diligently go straight home to Lisa after every show in an attempt to mollify her about the move to New York, and Dan and Dana would grab a drink or four together and talk about how to make the show run better, smoother, both of them buzzing from the adrenaline and anxiety hangover of live TV. Critiquing their work back then had been gratifying in a painful way. Now, it was just painful.

“The back and forth isn't quite there yet,” Dana told him that night, lips pursed. “You know, Steve’s a big Knicks guy. Maybe you should go to a game together.”

“I’m pretty happy with only seeing Steve six days out of my week.”

“I just think you two would benefit from spending a little more -”

“Dana,” Dan interrupted, digging his thumb into the corner of his eye, “Steve and I are never gonna be like Casey and I were together.”

“Of course not. But you could be better together than you are right now. That’s all I’m saying.”

He knocked his empty glass on the table, mouth pressed. “Yeah.”

“Do you want another one?”

“I’m okay.”

“I’m getting another one and I owe you a round.” She blinked down at the glasses assembled on the table. “Oh. I owe you two rounds. I’ll go -”

She pushed her chair out. Dan reached out to grab her by the wrist.

Her eyes darted from his hand to him.

“I miss him pretty badly,” Dan said.

Dana blinked and resettled into her chair. “I know you do.”

“It’s different, doing the show without him.”

“I know it is.”

“Dana,” he said.

“What?”

Dan looked at her guiltily.

She yanked her hand out of his grip. “Is this - is this what I think it is?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Danny, are you serious? We’re finally back in the swing of things and you want -” She shook her head. “Just because Casey isn’t -“

“It’s not the Casey thing,” Dan said quickly.

Dana screwed her face up at him.

“It’s not just the Casey thing,” Dan corrected. “I don’t think this is good for me. I don’t think it ever was.”

“Sports Night?”

“Being on TV.”

“Dan, you love being on TV.”

“I love making people like me, and being on TV means I can try to make just short of three million people do that for an hour every night.”

“That’s not why you do it.”

Dan screwed his face up at her.

“This,” she said, wagging an accusatory finger, “this is your therapist talking.”

She wasn’t wrong. His relationship with his own burgeoning fame came up in every therapy session, which was more than he’d expected it to and more than he found he was comfortable with.

During the very first session Abby had inferred that his desire to be on TV was a result of being denied parental love, which was something Dan had already figured out on his own but could not stand to think was immediately obvious upon meeting him. The third session Abby had asked him, how do you feel about being closeted for the rest of your professional life? and it had pressed on his chest like a physical, crushing weight to be asked so directly about something he’d only let himself consider nebulously.

The final straw was much more banal. Dan had told Abby how pathetic he felt for getting pissed off at a fan who called him ‘Dave’ repeatedly before asking for his autograph. He’d tried to make a joke out of it, but the way she looked at him made it clear that she knew it had honestly stung.

“That’s what fame is.” She was blasé about everything he told her in a way he found either alternately reassuring or frustrating beyond belief. She shrugged. “You’re well-liked but you’re not known.”

It had stuck in Dan’s head since he left her office almost a month ago. It made him sound about exactly as lonely as he knew he was.

“I’m sorry,” he told Dana. “I am. To everyone, but especially you.”

Dana leaned back, arms crossed. “What is it, exactly, that you want to do instead?”

Dan looked off to the side. “Write. Go to sleep at normal hours. See New York.”

“You’re seeing New York right now.” She flapped a hand at the bar around them. “Look around. This is it.”

“I meant like an exhibition at the Met or something.”

“I will take you to the Met tomorrow.”

“I’d like to date men,” Dan said.

Dana’s shoulders slumped. “Oh.”

“I figure it’s better for everyone that I leave before I do that.” He flexed his fingers. His hands felt clammy. “I mean, I’ve gotten death threats from disturbed individuals for making lighthearted jibes about golf before. I cannot imagine a reality where our core audience reacts well to the idea of me romancing other guys in my spare time.”

“No. Me neither.” Dana looked miserable. “But I don’t want you to go.”

“It’s not a decision I’ve come to easily.”

“It’s not even about the show.” He gave her a humoring look. “Okay, it’s not just about the show. You’ve always - you keep me at an even keel. It won't be like with Casey, will it? We’ll still be -“

“Yeah.” Dan reached across the table and swiped the beginning of tears from under her eyes with the sleeve of his sweater. “We will.”

She grabbed his napkin and crushed it against her eyes.

“It’s been five years,” she said thickly. “Ask me again.”

He smiled. He opened his hands out to her like he was proposing.

“Dana, will you marry me?”

“No.” It was instant. Dan laughed. Dana smiled a little. “But you have to ask again in another five years. Okay?”

“Okay.”

She wiped her nose with the napkin before putting it down. “I know how you felt about him.”

“I know.”

“You get over it. Being in love with Casey McCall.”

He could feel the full weight of just how different the way he loved Casey was from the way she’d loved him, then. Over the last decade he’d spent more time with Casey than Casey had spent with his wife - he knew sides of Casey that Lisa and Dana didn’t know existed, that he was now alone in knowing. Being apart from him was like being cut off from part of himself.

He let Dana buy him the two drinks she owed. The whole night a third chair sat at their table at an odd angle, halfway pulled out, her purse and coat hanging over it.

-

In January, a few weeks before NBC reached out to Casey with the Late Night offer, they spent two nights in Louisiana shooting for the Super Bowl pregame show. They got in so late the first night all they did was check into the hotel and go to their rooms.

Casey called Dan’s room at 1AM sounding uncharacteristically high-pitched.

“I have blinded the stuffed toy Charlie packed me,” he said. “Danny. I have blinded my child’s best friend.”

Two minutes later Dan was wandering the hotel hallways in pajama pants, his worn Dartmouth sweatshirt and a wrinkled overcoat with the belt hanging out of it lopsidedly, smiling at any passersby who felt the need to shoot him odd looks. He found Casey’s door and knocked.

The door swung open. Casey’s pale face was there to greet him. His hair was sticking up at angles Dan would have openly laughed at under other circumstances.

He stifled a yawn. “Where’s the patient?”

“On the coffee table.” Casey stepped back to let him in. “Down an eye.”

Casey’s room was, Dan couldn’t help noticing, every so slightly nicer than his. In classic Casey fashion he’d bothered to unpack a day’s worth of clothes and toiletries and put every item in its proper place, unlike Dan, who suffered jet lag worse, and preferred to leave his suitcase wide open on hotel room floors with all its innards conveniently on display.

On the coffee table, a purple stuffed turtle was lying helplessly on its back. At its feet there was a black button with a tiny wisp of thread extending from it.

Dan covered his mouth with a hand.

“Casey.” He turned with a grave look on his face. “I know this turtle.”

“Beanie,” Casey said miserably.

“Beanie,” Danny repeated, with feeling. He picked Beanie up and turned her in his hands. “I can’t believe Charlie still has this thing.”

“He’s had her since he was born. She was a gift from Lisa’s now very deceased grandma.” Casey scraped his eyes with his fingertips. “And her eye came off in my goddamn hand.”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“I can’t stop fucking things up lately. This is the exact kind of thing Lisa will just -”

“Case, it will take me one minute to sew a button back onto this toy’s face.” Dan held Beanie up and gave her a squeeze. “It doesn’t need to be a painful process unless you decide to make it into one.”

Casey dropped his hands back to his sides. He looked tired in a way Dan had never seen him before.

“Things are bad right now,” he said.

“I know.” Dan pressed his lips together. “How bad?”

“I hate leaving Charlie for work, but leaving her is -'' Casey looked out the window, New Orleans at night. “It’s a relief. It’s more of a relief every time.” His voice lowered. “That’s a fucked-up way to feel about your wife, isn’t it?”

In all the conversations they’d had about his marriage over the years he’d never said anything quite so definitive. Dan wasn’t sure how to respond to it, whether to offer his honest opinion or whether to recite the same old reassurances he’d been feeding Casey their entire friendship, the ones that had started wearing thin about five years ago. For the most part he tried to be neutrally supportive where Lisa was concerned - there was always the worry that his feelings towards her were colored by something too biased to trust, something selfish - but Casey was giving him a flat look that demanded no bullshit.

“Maybe,” Dan admitted. “Yeah.”

Casey exhaled a deep breath. “Yeah.”

Dan touched his arm. “I’ll call reception and ask for something to sew this with. It’ll look fine. Charlie won’t even be able to tell.”

In the space of time it took him to call the front desk, accept a tiny travel sewing kid from the uniformed girl who appeared at the door five minutes later, and carefully sew Beanie’s left eye back onto her face, Casey didn’t move. He just sat with his back upright against the bed frame and his legs out straight in front of him, staring at some soap on the TV without watching it, looking like a maneuvered cadaver.

Dan got up off the couch and went over to him. He placed Beanie down on his lap.

“My young friend,” he said, “I have performed a miracle for you. I have returned this turtle’s sense of sight.”

Casey’s mouth twitched. He lifted her and thumbed over Dan’s handiwork. In a flat voice he said, “How can I repay you, Doctor Dan?”

“The only payment I require is the stitched-on smiles on my patients’ adorable little faces.”

Casey looked up at him. “I’m sorry for the hysterics.”

“You don’t need to apologize, man.”

“I called you at one in the morning over a stuffed toy.”

“I’d rather you call than not-call. You know?”

“I know.”

They looked at each other for a moment. With Charlie’s little turtle held to his chest Casey seemed oddly fragile.

“I don’t want you to be unhappy, Case,” Dan told him.

Something in Casey’s expression eased. He did something he’d never done before. He reached out and curled his hand around the one hanging at Dan’s side.

He squeezed Dan’s fingers and Dan squeezed back on instinct, chest tight.

He let go when Casey didn't. “Get some sleep, man.”

Casey rubbed his eyes. “Yeah. Thanks.”

-

Dan got lunch with Natalie two months into his new job, which was how long it took to coordinate plans with each other now they were working on separate tumultuous TV shows. Before he’d even so much as cracked open a menu she asked him if SNL had any producer roles up for grabs.

“Natalie, I love you,” Dan said, scanning the wine list, “and because I love you, I will do everything in my power to make sure you never work on this show so long as you live.”

She gave him a sympathetic look. “It’s really that bad?”

Dan’s work days consisted of chain-smoking out his tiny office window in 30 Rock, exchanging shitty ideas with people until it turned dark outside, and writing shitty jokes until it started turning light again. On a good night he got about five hours of sleep.

“It’s more work than Sports Night for half the satisfaction. Less, probably.”

“How long is your contract?”

“Six months.” Four left before he had to figure something else out.

Natalie took the menu out of his hands so she could pretend to study it when she asked, lightly, “Do you ever see Casey?”

“We work on different floors of a pretty big building.”

Natalie slapped the menu down on the table. When Dan made to reach for it again she used it to swat the back of his hand.

“Okay, ow.”

She frowned. “What the hell happened with you two?”

“I don’t want to get into it.”

“Why not? Because if you do you’ll realize whatever reason you have for not talking to him is petty and stupid?”

“Because I have good reasons for not talking to him.” Dan rubbed his eyes. “And that makes me very fucking sad, Natalie.”

She sat back in her seat, lips pressed.

“Fine. Okay.” She slid the menu across the table towards him. “I’ll drop it.”

They ordered a bottle of white wine with their lunch. Natalie fed him a messy forkful of linguine across the table and Dan thought about how they must have looked to the people around them, like some sweet young couple on a date and not two ex-colleagues approaching such a sexless dynamic it bordered honorary siblinghood.

Years ago, the night he’d moved to New York, he and Casey had eaten from the souvlaki cart outside his new apartment for dinner after hours of moving everything Dan owned upstairs. Dan had taken a bite from his wrap, hummed, and offered it out towards Casey.

Casey had raised his skewer of pepper and meat. “I’m good.”

“Trust me, you’re not good ‘til you’ve had some of this thing.”

He’d meant for Casey to take it from him but Casey just grabbed his wrist and took a bite out of it like that. Tzatziki had spilled out of the pita onto the backs of Dan’s fingers.

Casey had chewed consideringly, tapping the back of Dan’s hand with his thumb. Through a mouthful of grilled chicken, he’d told Dan appreciatively, “Okay. Now I’m very fucking good.”

They’d been sitting on the steps of his building with strangers passing back and forth, nobody so much as looking their way, but still, Dan felt watched by some unseen person, someone who might have mistaken them for something they weren’t. It hadn’t been an anxious thought. He’d wanted someone to see them that way.

“Are you listening to me?” Natalie asked.

“Raptly,” Dan said, “yes.”

She pointed at him threateningly with her fork. “What’s the guy’s name?”

Dan blinked. “What guy?”

“What guy? The guy I’ve been talking about for the last ten minutes, Dan, the very cute new associate producer.”

“Right, that guy.”

“So? What’s his name?”

Dan stared at her, mind blank.

“Jeremy,” Natalie said.

“Jeremy. Jeremy. I was just about to say Jeremy.”

“I’m telling you I think I’m going to marry this man,” Natalie muttered, stabbing an unfortunate mushroom, “and you’re not even listening.”

“You’re dating him?”

“No.”

“Ah.”

“What about you?” She looked at him over her glass. “Are you seeing anyone?”

Dan didn’t stop chewing to say, “Nope.”

“You know, I have a lot of friends who happen to be single, handsome, and gay. I’m just putting that out there.”

“You can put it away again.”

She looked at him exasperatedly. “Dan, come on.”

“I’ve tried a couple of times.” He’d gone to some bars, half-assed enough charm to get numbers from guys he had no intention of seeing again. Each time he’d headed home before midnight feeling lonely and newly depressed. He shrugged. “I'm not ready.”

Natalie observed him for a moment. She put her glass back down on the table.

“If it makes you feel any better, Casey’s miserable, too,” she said.

Dan frowned. “Why would that make me feel better?”

“I don’t know. It's like you guys had a bad break up or something.”

He turned. Out the window the city kept moving at its same old clip. “This is you dropping it?”

“You won’t tell me what happened, sue me for hazarding a guess.”

He lifted his glass. White wine; Casey preferred bottles of malbec that painted his tongue black. Dan’s mind still provided constant Casey-related addendums to everything regardless of the fact he hadn’t seen or spoken to him in months.

“You talk to him a lot?” he asked.

“I try to.”

“Dana can barely get him on the phone.”

“I’m persistent about it. I think the last few months have been hard on him. You know. Everything that’s going on.”

Dan moved pasta around his plate for the sake of it. “The show’s doing a lot better.”

“I’m not talking about the show.” Natalie gave him a look. “I’m talking about the divorce.”

-

The second day in Louisiana was chaos. Dan and Casey spent it endlessly calling back and forth with Dana and Isaac, filming interviews, Superdome coverage, learning crew guys’ names, and sweating profusely in the New Orleans heat.

It was after eleven by the time they finished for the day. They drank at the hotel bar until the alcohol and lingering adrenaline worked any exhaustion out of them.

“Lisa said I'd do this,” Casey said. He licked the corner of his lip. “That I’d be up all night with you even though we’ve got a flight to catch tomorrow morning.”

Dan was too drunk to get into another conversation about Casey and Lisa’s marriage. Casey must have been too drunk to stop himself.

“I knew she thought I was a bad influence.”

“She said -“ Casey cleared his throat and looked away. “She said you make me excitable.”

Dan burst out laughing. “Excitable. Wow.”

“I know. Like I’m six years old and you’re a bag of Skittles or something.” Casey turned his wedding band around his finger. “But she’s not -”

“Danny?”

Someone touched Dan’s shoulder. He turned.

“Andy,” he said. “Jesus.”

Andy grinned at him. He’d filled out since his days of being a stringy TA at Dartmouth to the point that he almost looked like someone else, someone who’d had time to settle into himself. He had a well-trimmed beard and a Packers jersey on.

Dan got up and pulled him into a hug. “Jesus,” he said again. “You look great.”

“You look great. You’ve barely changed at all.” Andy pulled back to pat his cheek. “You’ve still got that baby face.”

“It’s good for TV.”

“I catch your show sometimes. I say to people, ‘I taught that guy the importance of moisturizer.’”

“And I’m sure they’re all really impressed,” Dan said.

Casey finished his drink and thunked the glass down on the bar. Dan turned to him.

“Andy, this is Casey,” he said. “Casey, this is Andy.”

Andy held a hand out. “Dan Rydell alongside Casey McCall.”

Casey shook it. “That’s right.” He gestured to the jersey. “Good luck tomorrow.”

Dan ordered them a round of drinks. By the time Andy said goodbye and went upstairs to his room a little while later, Casey had finished the drink Dan got him and another on top of that. When he got out of his chair he teetered a little.

Dan guided him back to his room with a hand on the small of his back. Casey turned increasingly morose like he sometimes did after one too many.

At the room door he fished Casey’s card key out of his inside jacket pocket for him.

“I wanted another drink,” Casey mumbled, forehead to Dan’s shoulder.

Dan patted his head with one hand and turned the handle with the other. “I think that’s a bad idea right now, buddy.”

“Why’s that, buddy?”

“Alcohol is a depressant.” He eased Casey through the doorway. “It makes you depressed about things you don’t need to be depressed about.”

“What if it’s something you’re entitled to be depressed about?”

Dan closed the door behind them and gave Casey a nudge in the direction of the bathroom. “Go brush your teeth, Casey.”

Casey turned to face him and blinked.

“What,” Dan said, “you want me to do it for you?”

Casey swayed. “Yes.”

“Maybe you should sit down.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re about to fall on your ass just standing there.”

Casey walked over to the bed and dropped onto it. He yanked his jacket off and threw it unceremoniously at the floor, then he flopped back onto the mattress.

“I am depressed,” he said. “Danny, do you have any idea why I'm depressed?”

Dan felt drunker now that he was no longer dutifully steering Casey through the hotel. He held the door frame for balance. “Because the Pats don’t have a shot in hell of winning this thing?”

“That wasn’t me asking for a joke answer. I was really asking.”

“You’re really asking if I know the reason why you got drunk and depressed tonight?”

Casey pushed up onto his elbows and looked at him. The humidity had broken through some of the product in his hair, strands of it hanging loose over his left eye, and there were dark patches under his shirt arms. “I’m really asking.”

“Yeah, Casey. I know why.”

“Why?” Casey asked.

“Because of Lisa,” Dan said.

Casey flopped back onto the bed again and put his hands over his face, groaning.

“Danny,” he said.

Dan smacked his own cheeks a few times like it might expel some Southern Comfort from his system. He went to the minibar and grabbed two bottles of water. He put one down on the bed, where it rolled down to hit Casey’s hip, and uncapped the other to finish it in a few pulls.

Casey was looking up at him through his fingers.

“Danny,” he said again, muffled.

Dan clapped him on the thigh. “Drink the water, Case. You’ll feel better.”

He picked Casey’s jacket up off the floor and went to the closet, where Casey’s shirts and pants and pajamas were hanging with a uniform neatness that Dan found both endearing and insane.

Casey clambered off the bed and came over while Dan was sliding the jacket's shoulders onto a hanger. He stood behind him while he hung it, weirdly looming, and didn’t say anything.

Dan glanced over his shoulder. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay.” Dan closed the closet door and asked, hand on the handle, “What are you doing?”

“What are you doing?”

“Was it not clear?” Casey was almost standing too close for him to turn. “Are you in need of medical attention?”

“You’re hanging my jacket for me.”

“Yes. Obviously.” Dan waited; Casey didn’t move. Dan said, “Casey.”

“Danny,” Casey said. “How’d you know him?”

“Who?”

“Downstairs at the bar. The haircut.”

“His name is Andrew, and you and him have the same haircut.”

“Yeah?”

“What the hell is this about, Casey?”

“He was one of the guys at Dartmouth. Right? One of your guys.”

Dan turned. He leaned back against the door, startled by the closeness of Casey’s face, the intensity of his expression.

Casey’s eyes lowered to his lips. Dan realized, heart jumping, what was about to happen.

“Case,” he murmured.

Casey leaned in as Dan tilted his face away, the tip of Casey’s nose grazing his cheek. He had to swallow before he could speak.

“You’ve got jet fuel on your breath,” he said.

Casey hung his head. “Danny.”

Dan slid out of his way.

“You need to drink some water.” He wasn’t sure if the shakiness of his legs and hands was real or imagined. “You need to brush your teeth and go to bed.”

“Danny.”

“This is really stupid and you’re really drunk.”

“This is stupid,” Casey repeated.

Dan couldn’t look him in the eye. “Yes.”

Casey stared at him.

“Why him and not me?” he asked.

“What?”

“Why not me?” Casey waved a hand between them. “We have this thing. Me and you. The thing, our thing. We’ve always had it.” His eyebrows arched towards each other. “Do you really not know what I’m talking about?”

“I know that you have a wife and a kid and I know that you’re not -”

“Not what?”

Dan flexed his fingers. “Attracted to men.”

“Jesus.” Casey dragged his hands through his hair. “All the women you pick up, all your week-long girlfriends, do they make you not attracted to men? No? Getting married to a woman, you think that’ll do the trick?”

There was a crushing feeling in Dan’s chest looking at him then, like a secondhand pain.

Casey’s tone became sort of pleading. “You really never felt anything for me.”

“Casey, man, I don’t -”

Casey went on, frantically picking up speed. “Not once, not in all the years we’ve known each other, all the years we’ve worked together, all the time we’ve spent together, all the talking on the phone we did while you were in school, all the letters - all the you looking after me and me looking after you - and you’re telling me you never, not once -”

Dan hauled him in by the shirt collar and kissed him.

He made to pull away right after, panicked, but Casey caught him by the backs of his arms and drew him closer. Their chests pressed together - Dan was confronted by the firmness of Casey’s body against his, the heat of him through their clothes, the smell of his sweat. Instead of pulling away he slid his tongue into Casey’s mouth.

Casey moaned. Dan felt the low vibration of it all the way in the base of his spine and shuddered. He felt delirious, eight-years-of-wanting delirious, with two or three heavy pours of whiskey to top it off.

He pushed his fingers through the sweat-damp hair at the nape of Casey’s neck. Casey’s hands moved down his back to his waist, his fingers spread and kneading, feeling for his body through his clothes.

“Danny,” Casey murmured, lips to the corner of his mouth.

Dan wanted to give him anything he wanted. He walked Casey back towards the bed. Casey lowered onto it obligingly and Dan lowered onto him, knees on either side of his thighs and hands on his chest.

Casey cupped the sides of Dan’s face and looked up at him, mouth parted, eyes dark. He was hard against Dan’s hip. Dan shut his eyes, dropping his forehead to Casey’s. I make you hard, he thought, pleasure curling in his gut, and he kissed Casey again, deeper, dirtier.

Casey shifted his shoulders and murmured, “Wait.” When Dan pulled back he chased after him for another quick kiss, reaching behind himself. “There’s something - let me -”

He pulled Charlie’s stuffed toy out from under his back.

Dan stared at Beanie’s oblivious little smile. Then he climbed unsteadily off of Casey.

They lay next to each other on the mattress, breathing hard. Next to him Casey pushed up to sitting.

He swallowed. Dan heard it in the quiet.

“We didn’t eat much today,” Casey said, “did we?”

“We did not,” Dan said.

Casey slowly rose to standing and went into the bathroom. Dan heard him retching a moment later and stumbled to his feet.

He peeked through the half-open door just in time to catch Casey throwing up into the toilet.

“Oh, Casey,” he said.

He knelt on the tiles and put a tentative hand between Casey’s shoulder blades, the fabric there damp. Casey’s hand flew back to grab him just above the knee. He threw up again, his muscles seizing up with it. Dan rubbed his back in circles until he was done.

Casey spat one last time.

“I fucked everything up.” His voice sounded rough, scratched. “I’m sorry.”

Dan touched his forehead to the bone at the back of his neck.

He helped Casey up to his feet. It was hard to look at him, at his colorless, shiny face, something kid-like to his expression like he needed to be told what to do.

Dan combed some sweaty hair back from his forehead. “I’m a little scared you might choke and die in your sleep.”

“There’s nothing left to come up,” Casey said, tilting his head back into Dan’s palm.

Dan let his hand linger, fingers petting the back of his hair. He knew he shouldn’t have. He just couldn’t help himself.

It sounded like Casey was asking a question when he said, voice low, “Danny.”

“Drink some water.” Dan pulled away. “Get some rest. Okay?”

“Okay.” Casey’s head swayed forward. “Yeah. Okay.”

The next morning at the JFK arrivals gate, Lisa was waiting with Charlie on her hip wearing the tiny Yankees cap Dan had gotten him for his last birthday. Dan spoke to them briefly. He had no idea what the hell he said. All he was conscious of was how painful every split-second of eye contact with Casey felt, like it was too much to look at each other anymore knowing what they knew.

-

He went back to work after lunch with Natalie. He rode a few floors up in the elevator before it stopped, its doors sliding open, Casey on the other side of them with his hands in his pockets.

“Casey,” Dan said.

Casey’s eyebrows twitched. “Danny. Hi.”

He looked exactly like he did on posters for his show: in a fitted dark suit, hair coiffed, shoes gleaming, sweet-faced.

The elevator doors started sliding closed again. Dan reflexively stopped them with a hand. They stared at each other.

Casey gestured. “I can get the next one.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Dan said.

Casey nodded, mouth pressed. He rocked a little on his heels before coming into the elevator.

“What floor are you going to?” Dan asked.

“Forty-seven.”

It wasn’t where the Late Night offices were. Dan pressed the button.

The doors shut, the elevator rising uneasily. They stood next to each other with enough space for a third person between them. For the first time in his life he had no fucking idea what to say to Casey.

“What’s on forty-seven?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Casey said. “Sometimes I just wander random floors of the building before the show.“

Dan blinked. “Why?”

“To get away from the floor where nobody leaves me alone.” Casey turned. “Is that blood?”

He was looking at the red-orange stain on Dan’s chest, his bottom lip tucked into his mouth.

“Pasta sauce.” Dan covered it with a hand. “I had a late lunch with Natalie.”

“She tell you about Jeremy?”

“She did indeed.” Dan cleared his throat. “And she told me about you and Lisa.”

Sure enough, the silver band around Casey’s finger was gone. “Yeah. I didn’t - I didn’t know if you’d heard.”

Eight years of knowing each other better than anyone else and Casey looked so jarringly awkward then, fingers splaying out by his thighs, teeth in the side of his lip.

Dan looked away from him. “Are you okay?”

“Sixteen hour work days really take your mind off these things.” His voice was low, more controlled than Dan was used to hearing it. “And I get Charlie on weekends. He likes being in the studio a lot, which is concerning.”

“How’s he taking it?”

“A lot better than I thought he would.”

“Little champ,” Dan said.

Casey flashed a small smile, the first one Dan had gotten out of him in almost six months. The apples of his cheeks popped out in a way that would never not make Dan feel crazy about him.

The elevator dinged, the doors spreading open. They’d reached Dan’s floor already.

He lingered. He wanted, urgently, to say something he couldn’t put the words together for. Everything he’d wanted to tell Casey the last six months clustered in his throat.

He made his way out, his head bent. “Take care, Casey.”

The elevator made a juddering sound after he left.

“Danny.”

He turned. Casey was holding the doors open.

“The worst thing is knowing I could have done it before.” His eyes were sort of wild. “That I should have done it before.”

Dan was pinned to the spot, the ugly patterned carpet of the thirtieth floor.

Casey let his hand fall. The doors started mechanically creeping towards each other again.

“Case,” Dan said through the gap, quietly, and the elevator closed shut.

-

A week after Louisiana, Casey showed up at Dan’s door with snow in his hair, some dusting the shoulders of his coat, his nose and ears bright red from the cold. Freezing temperatures outside, unending snow, and he didn’t have a scarf. He hadn’t even buttoned his coat.

“I need to talk to you,” he said, big-eyed.

They were about to have the conversation they’d been carefully avoiding since coming home. Eventually, one of them was bound to break. Dan knew that - he just thought it would end up being him.

He let Casey in and shut the door. Casey stood fixed in the hallway for a moment with his back to him, his hands balled up at his sides. His eyes were pale when he turned around.

“NBC wants me for Late Night,” he said.

Dan’s body reacted to hearing this in the same way it would have reacted to plummeting from a great height.

“Congratulations,” he heard himself say.

“I haven’t said yes.”

“You’re going to say yes. Case, this is it.”

“You said that about Sports Night.”

“Sports Night was it. This is it.”

“This is it,” Casey repeated, quietly.

“What did Lisa say?”

“I haven’t told her yet.”

“Casey.”

“I know exactly what she’ll say.”

“She’ll say there’s no reason to pass on an opportunity like this,” Dan said. “And she’ll be right.”

Casey swallowed. “This thing with us -”

“There’s no thing with us, man.”

Casey lowered his head.

“If the world reshaped itself, or something,” he murmured.

The world is reshaping, Dan thought. It’s putting you in a building 80 blocks from the one with our office in it.

He thought about saying the unsayable thing, the stupid, unsayable, non-retractable thing. If they weren’t sharing an anchor desk anymore what degree would they get to see each other? Ten hours together six days out of the week hadn’t even been enough.

“That wouldn’t happen on its own.” There was an out-of-body sense to it, like Dan was hearing himself say the words, not speaking them. “It would - we would have to make that happen.”

Casey looked at him, stricken. He stooped over and twisted at his wedding ring.

“Danny,” he started.

His voice was so soft it was almost inaudible. Dan understood too late that for Casey this conversation was about lamenting something, not about trying to change it.

“Sorry.” He swallowed. He felt vaguely sick. “Jesus. Forget it.”

Casey looked pained. “It's not that I don’t -“

“Don’t.” Dan put his hands over his eyes. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Danny, if I asked you to give up your career for me -”

“I’d quit,” he said.

He breathed in and out. He dropped his hands to find Casey staring at him, stunned. Scared, even. That look on anyone else’s face and Dan would have fled.

“I know you’ve got too much to give up, Case,” he said, chin to his chest.

Casey’s breathing turned harsh. Dan could see the agitated rise and fall of his chest, the look he got before he started crying - it was the way he looked the night Dan turned twenty-one and celebrated by drinking his body weight in beer, the night he’d told Casey about Sam and Casey’s face had collapsed in on itself.

“I -“ Casey swallowed. “I just want things between you and I to be - I want us to be okay.”

Dan pictured him behind Letterman’s desk exactly how he was then, miserable and unfilmable, made this small.

He put his hand on Casey’s shoulder.

“Then we’re okay,” he said.

-

Dan sat at his desk and didn’t write a word.

At six-thirty he took the elevator to the thirty-second floor. He walked around the Late Night offices feeling like an alien, watching harried looking assistants and interns and crew members dart from room to room. There was a post-show energy running through the place Dan recognised, that he felt entirely detached from. He passed posters with Casey’s face on them, a bullpen with his show’s title printed on the walls. An office door with his name on it.

He hung by it. A red-haired woman with a pencil behind her ear and another in her hand noticed him there, stopped in her tracks, and asked, “Who are you?”

Dan blinked. “I’m Casey’s old partner.”

“From the sports show?”

“From the sports show, yeah.”

She pointed her pencil at him. “Danny.”

“You watched it?”

“God, no.” She gestured her head at the door. “He’s not in there.”

“Oh.” Dan stuck his hands into his pockets. “Do you - do you know where he is?”

She looked at him with her lips pressed.

“Come on,” she said, and started walking.

Dan followed after her. As they navigated the floor, four separate people tried to stop her to ask where Casey was, and she told each of them she had no idea without so much as looking their way. When it was just the two of them, her heels clicking on the floor and his Nikes squeaking across it, she looked over her shoulder and said, “He talks about you.”

Dan was oddly flustered by it. Maybe she knew. Maybe Casey had told this stranger he’d known all of six months the thing he’d spent eight years meticulously keeping from Dan.

He cleared his throat. “You’re his...”

“I’m Katie. His PA.”

Casey had an entire floor of 30 Rock devoted to him, filled with people who looked for him every second he wasn’t around - of course he had a personal assistant. It was a different beast from Sports Night. It needed a different Casey. Dan wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing there anymore.

“What’s that like?” he asked, just to say something.

“He talks a lot.”

“He does.”

“During football season I had no idea what the hell he was ever saying.”

Dan had watched most of the year’s NFL season from a barstool in Anthony’s, Dana next to him in the seat that had historically been reserved for Casey. An entire season of football without being able to talk about it with an overexcited, overeducated Casey. He’d ended up missing more games this year than he had in the past decade.

She stopped and unclipped a ring of keys from her belt outside a pair of double doors. Stage doors, Dan realized.

As she unlocked them she said, “It’d be good for him to have someone around who knows what he’s talking about.”

She pushed the bar on the door and it opened with a mechanical click. She held it for him.

Dan nodded at her. “Thanks.”

He came out at the side of the set, greeted by two hundred empty audience seats. There was a labyrinthian light grid stretching out overhead, the last few lights that had been left on still pointing at the set, where the huge blue curtains that drew open every night to reveal Casey were drawn closed.

Casey was sitting on his desk looking out at the stands. The scale of everything around him made him seem small in a way Dan found oddly painful. He cut such a lonely figure.

“Casey,” he called.

Casey turned. When he saw Dan his face turned soft and slack, and in Dan’s chest something reared up that he couldn’t remember how to keep down.

His voice echoed in the space. “Danny.”

They looked at each other from across some unreal divide, Dan offstage, Casey with a matte painting of the New York cityscape behind him.

“Did you see the show?” Casey asked.

“I missed it.” Dan came onto the set, hands in his pockets. His palms were already damp. “Was it a good one?”

“I can never tell.” Casey didn’t take his eyes off of him. “I know how narcissistic this sounds, but I always - I can't help wondering if you’re watching.”

It made Dan's stomach twist. “I saw a little of your first episode.”

“What'd you think?”

Dan looked over at the empty stage where the band was supposed to go. “What I think might hurt your feelings.”

“As long as you don’t write a column about it in the Post.”

Dan's mouth twitched. Quietly, he said, “I think I've had my fill of TV you.”

Casey nodded, casting his eyes down. “Yeah. I get that.”

“I wondered if you were watching. After you left.”

“I was.”

“I mentioned you in my last show.”

“Your mentor and former partner Casey McCall, who taught you everything you know about good sports writing and more than you ever wanted to know about the Indianapolis Colts,” Casey said. It was word-for-word what Dan had said on-air. “It sounded weirdly final, you saying my name like that." He had his hands folded loosely in front of him, fumbling slightly with each other. "Like I’d died or something.”

Dan had felt the same on the night of Casey’s last show. Casey had delivered a two and a half minute goodbye to the audience, during which the camera never once picked up on the shininess of his eyes; Dan had watched from the other side of the anchor desk, already aching for the era of their lives that was only just drawing to a close that night, one he knew there was no going back to. At the very end Casey had turned to him, smiling his uniquely televisable smile, and said, I leave you all in the stellar hands of my partner and friend Dan Rydell. The sheen on Dan’s eyes had been unmissable on playback.

Dan swallowed. He looked around them. “What's it like on this show?”

“It’s…” Casey looked around, too. “Every show we did together felt like we’d accomplished something. You know?”

“I know.”

“Even in Dallas it felt like that. Like we’d won every time we got to put something on air. Here, the camera goes off, and I get tired thinking about having to do it all again.”

“Ten minutes on this floor was a lot,” Dan said.

“I don’t think I have this in me. Maybe I did once, but now - I don’t know.” Casey exhaled, deflating. “It’s like I know better or something.”

Dan couldn’t picture himself in front of these cameras the way he had as a Letterman-obsessed teenager. He couldn't place himself back into this other world now he was out of it.

“Yeah,” he said. He leaned on the desk next to Casey. “I get that.”

Casey turned to him, not quite meeting his eyes.

“I’m sorry, about -” He shook his head. “I can’t believe I told you like that. God. Eight years and I told you like that.” He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, then his hand clapped back down to his thigh. He looked at Dan. “I was such a fucking mess. I’m sorry.”

He had been. Dan had hated him for it on-and-off in whatever capacity he was even capable of hating Casey.

“You didn’t know how to get through what you were going through,” he said, softly.

It sounded like an apology when Casey told him, “I’m still going through it.”

Dan blew out a breath. “I’m not sure what the fuck I’m going through anymore.”

“I think -” Casey stopped. His throat worked. “I think maybe we’d be better at getting through what we’re going through if we were doing it together.”

All his on-air eloquence was gone. Dan smiled at him helplessly. “It’s that penchant for brevity that won you your ASPE award.”

“I miss you.” A muscle in Casey’s jaw jumped. “I miss you all the fucking time.”

“Yeah.” Dan looked down. “It’s been - it’s not been great.”

“I felt more divorced after we stopped talking than I did after Lisa and I split.”

“That's because I love you more than she did,” Dan said.

The last studio lights shut off above them as he spoke. He sounded quieter in the dark somehow.

In front of him Casey was a square-faced shadow. He reached out and cupped Dan’s cheek lightly, stroking Dan’s temple with his thumb. Dan turned his face into his palm.

“I’ll do it.” Casey’s soft voice reverberated in the empty studio. “I’ll reshape everything. The whole world. Hell, I’d do it just to get to talk to you again.”

Overhead the light grid made a clanging sound like something else was turning off, a sound Dan was used to. Studio bones creaking in the night. Only the fire exit signs were still on - Dan’s vision settled enough that the very edges of Casey’s features became visible, glowing dim green. He knew Casey too well to see anything anonymous in his silhouette. Knew his face so thoroughly he could understand the seriousness of his expression without having to see it.

He leaned in and found Casey’s mouth, Casey’s soft bottom lip. He imagined how it looked from one of the empty audience seats - the two of them together, one shape in the dark.