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Breanna’s burning the digital midnight oil when Harry shows up looking like a kicked dog.
“Rough date?” She suggests, mostly as a joke. She’s not working on anything for the team, just a personal side project. She’s been babysitting Maureen’s gopher frog conservation group for what has to be more than a year now. She’s got plenty of volunteers since Breanna helped her modernize, but it can’t hurt to have her eyes on it. Besides, the frogs are cute.
Harry sighs deeply, which means the answer is yes. Breanna expects him to meander over to the bar to brood by himself for a while. That’s usually what he does whenever he feels depressed, which Breanna doesn’t think is a very good coping mechanism but Parker wistfully refers to as “just like the old days.” Instead, he sits down next to her on the couch. A lifetime of nosy foster siblings makes Breanna angle her computer away from him even though she doesn’t actually have anything to hide.
“Can I talk to you about something?” He asks, studying the floor.
She eyes him. Knowing him, this could be about anything from her college prospects to how to ask Eliot to stop offering to teach him how to flip a guy twice his weight over his shoulder to whether or not she can help him turn AirDrop off on his phone. “...Sure.”
He taps his foot, drumming his fingers on his knee. “Don’t laugh.”
“I can’t promise that,” Breanna says immediately, because laughing at Harry is one of her favorite recreational activities and it would make her very sad if she couldn’t participate in it. She expects him to know that, but instead he just sighs again and slumps forward until his face is in his hands. She frowns and pokes his shoulder. “The date couldn’t have been that bad, could it?”
“The date was fine,” Harry says. He lifts his head, lacing his fingers. Once when Breanna asked about spotting nervous tics in a mark Eliot told her that sometimes he sees Harry go to twist a wedding ring that isn’t there anymore. “At least, I think it was fine. I don’t know. Maybe I’m still not ready for this.”
“You’re totally ready for this. You’ve been divorced for ages, dude, you can totally get back on the horse. And if you need advice on appealing to women, you’ve come to the right place,” Breanna says, rubbing her hands together. While in general she tries to avoid talking or thinking about Harry’s love life due to the fact that what old people do with each other is gross, she is definitely an expert in picking up women. Other than all the times she’s fumbled. Including in front of Harry. But that’s not important right now.
“I don’t need help on appealing to women,” Harry says miserably.
Oooh. Breanna nods wisely. “You have come to the wrong place. Go talk to Sophie. No, wait, she'll be too into it. Go talk to Eliot.”
Harry actually shudders at the thought. “The date was fine,” he reiterates after a moment, rubbing his chin. “It was good, actually. We went out for dinner. We talked about our kids. It seemed like kind of a big step to talk about that right off the bat but it came up naturally. It was… nice.”
Breanna waits for him to elaborate. After about a minute of silence from him she shrugs. “I don’t see the problem.”
He goes back to bouncing his leg. “The problem is that there wasn’t a problem. The problem is I had a nice date with a very handsome single father and he would like to see me again.”
He sounds absolutely devastated. Breanna frowns. “If you don’t want to see him again, you can just tell him you think you’d be better off as friends.”
“I do want to see him again,” Harry says. “That’s part of the issue. I don’t want…” He makes a complicated motion. “I remember what happened with you and Emily. You really liked her, and I thought the two of you could figure it out even though you weren’t in the same line of work, and you couldn’t.”
He doesn’t mean for it to sound judgmental, and to his credit it really doesn’t. But Emily is still a sore spot that makes Breanna’s chest clench. Harry had been on her side when she insisted that it wasn’t going to be too complicated for them to be together, even though by then they’d seen how it worked out with Eliot’s attempt at a relationship with an outsider. But when the rejections started rolling in, it hadn’t been fair to keep her tied to them, and Breanna had to let the best thing she’d ever had after her family—the team included, of course, that's what they in the business call extended family—go.
“You’re not as in it as I am, though,” she says. “You could have a normal life. Maybe not with this guy, but with someone.”
He looks at her the way he does when she talks about having to split time between college classes and running scams. “You can have a normal life, too.”
“But I don’t want one,” Breanna says. She’s… less sure about that, these days, but it’s not worth getting into right now. Because she likes what she does. She loves it. And she’s damn good at it, too. But sometimes stuff comes up. She’ll think about Emily and why she had to break it off with her, or she’ll remember how Hardison always told her she would be the best of the best at whatever she put her mind to even if that was inside the law, or she’ll start wondering if what they’re doing even matters when it’s just a drop in the bucket.
(Other times, she thinks about the smile on Emma’s face. The people that she’s helped. Not just the team, but her. She wouldn’t give that up for anything in the world.)
“That’s—” Harry’s face contorts the way it does when he’s preparing for Eliot to hit him in the face during a con. It’s the same expression he made when Parker accidentally got lemon juice in his eye while trying to help Eliot garnish a Dutch baby. “I don’t want one either. I don’t want to go back. Even if I find a new firm, try to make amends like I did before, I don’t want to give this up.” He gestures to their headquarters at large. “I love this.”
“You can still try to have both,” Breanna suggests. “It sounds like you like this guy. What if it works out? You never know. In a few years I could be giving a speech about this at your wedding as your maid of honor.”
Harry sighs once more. He sounds like an old dog when he does that. Nana never had dogs, just cats picked up from the shelter and occasionally lured in from outside, but plenty of their neighbors did, including the girl next door who had been Breanna’s babysitter and her first real crush. “Because I wanted to talk to you about something else.”
“Shoot,” she says, recognizing that she’s not going to be able to get any work done on graphics for frog flyers for at least another hour. It’s not enough to put her laptop away, but it’s enough to put her phone in her pocket so there’s only one screen in front of her.
“How do I know if I’m gay enough?” Harry asks earnestly.
Breanna chokes on nothing. “What?”
“How do I know if I’m gay enough?” He repeats, voice raised slightly like the problem was that she didn’t hear him and not that the question didn’t make sense.
Breanna stares at him. “Are you a man? Are you into men?” Normally she would do everything in her power to avoid bringing up the idea of Harry being sexually active, but desperate times call for desperate measures. “Romantically, sexually, whatever? Also, is there literally anyone else you can ask about this?”
Harry’s voice raises in pitch by about three notches as his ears turn bright red. “Well. Yes. Yeah. I am. Uh. Romantically. Sexually. Whatever.”
“Then there you go. Kinda the textbook definition, dude,” Breanna points out.
“Right.” He nods slowly. “I just—I don’t know. What if I’m not? I tried to keep my private life private for a reason. When it was just me, I didn’t have to justify it to anyone. But now I can’t tell if it’s an obligation.”
Breanna tries to piece together what he means. The problem with lawyers is that they’re really good at sounding incredibly vague. The private life thing, that’s dating, but he’s been telling her and Sophie about the women he’s tried dating (of which there admittedly haven’t been very many). “Obligation” doesn’t sound like it’s an obligation to the con. He’d been excited about it despite feigning annoyance over her micromanaging because if Harry was going to represent the community then the community should not have his usual fashion sense. But…
“Did I only go on a date with this guy to prove that I could now that Becky—uh, I mean, now that the team knows?” He makes a conscious effort to stop jiggling his knee and fails.
Bingo. And that kind of makes Breanna feel really bad, since it’s definitely her fault Becky walked in. “Sorry we didn’t pick up on her applying for a job there,” she says. “I know normally I run interference to keep everybody out of each other’s way, but I was trying to keep tabs on Eliot and Parker.”
“It’s okay,” Harry says immediately. “I didn’t expect you to. I just didn’t—I—well, I guess she already knew, so…” He trails off.
“You know,” Breanna says quietly after pretending to look at Maureen’s home-grown iNaturalist project for gopher frog sightings for all of three minutes, “I never got to come out to Nana.”
“No?” Harry looks at her.
She nods. “I didn’t… I mean, I got to choose when I told Alec. Most of my siblings had it figured out by then, but I got to tell him ‘cause he wasn’t living with us so he didn’t know. But Nana, she knew because she saw me holding hands with a girl in middle school. It was just holding hands, it could’ve meant anything, but—she knew. I would’ve told her eventually. But for a long time I wanted a do-over. If she’d just come to pick me up ten minutes later, we would’ve been late for my dentist appointment and I would’ve gotten to tell her.”
“I’m sorry,” Harry says. He sounds like he means it. That’s something Breanna has noticed, something she’d always kind of picked up on but became a hell of a lot more obvious when she was looking at schools with him and Becky. He doesn’t like lying to his family, but he really hates apologizing insincerely.
“It’s okay.” She means that, too. It is. “It was easier that way, honestly. And she’s the only person I’ve ever told I was ace who I wasn’t dating. Out loud, I mean.”
“You told me,” Harry reminds her.
Breanna taps the back of her laptop. “‘Cause you asked about the sticker. That’s pretty much the only way I do it anymore. Working smarter, not harder. Nana was different.”
“Oh.” He hums. “I don’t think I was ever going to tell Becky, unless I met someone I was really interested in committing to who happened to be a man. I didn’t know I had told her about the—well—you know.” Unfortunately Breanna does know, because she was listening very closely when it seemed like their con was about to get blown. “But a lot of what she said made sense. About why I’m like this.”
This is getting into territory Breanna doesn’t feel remotely qualified for. Okay, it wasn’t something she was qualified for earlier, but at least she and Harry vent to each other about bullshit all the time.
“I think the way you are is pretty cool,” she says, trying to take the edge of sincerity off by nudging him with her foot. It doesn’t work. “Ugh. Stop making me be authentic, I don’t like it.”
“Nope,” he says gleefully. “Sorry. You have to feel your emotions like the rest of us.”
Breanna fake groans, looking back at her computer. “Sounds painful and embarrassing.”
“Only sometimes.” He puts out his fist. “Thanks for the pep talk.”
She bumps their knuckles. “Be honest. Did it even do anything?”
“More than you know,” Harry says. He stands up. “I think I'll text Josh—I think I'll text him first. Ask him if he wants to see me again." He claps his hands. "By the way, Becky’s inviting you over to my place for dinner tomorrow night. You in?”
“I’ll clear my schedule,” she says, mentally shuffling around her vaguely defined plans to watch horror movies until her eyes fall out of her skull. Although she might actually be able to get Becky on board with that. Honestly, she likes Becky a lot. They share a favorite activity, after all—there are only so many people on the planet that can experience the raw wholesome joy of bothering Becky’s dad.
As he turns to leave, though, something occurs to her. It’s not a big thing, but…
She pulls her backpack up next to her. “Oh, wait, hang on.”
Harry obligingly stops as she roots around in the front pocket. Wow, she’s got a ton of stuff in here, and what she’s looking for is so little that for a moment she’s not sure she’s actually going to be able to find it amid the sea of fidget toys, stale protein bars, and extra SD cards. Finally, her fingers close around something metal with a plastic front that clatters a little in her grip. Aha.
“Here.” She tosses him the rainbow pin-back button she snagged at NOLA Pride over the summer. She got a lot with a bunch of different flags, but this should be her last one. Parker got most of the others and has been hiding them around the building. She says it’s like a scavenger hunt but more painful because all the pins are left unclasped and ripe for poking the unsuspecting person that picks them up. “Enjoy, dude.”
He’s still standing there grinning when she goes back to looking at pictures of frogs.