Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

All kids mimic.

When Jonah was four, he started poking his tongue into the side of his mouth like TK. Only, unlike his brother, Jonah did it when he was in deep thought. A year later, Jonah wanted glasses for reading because Carlos wore them. When they finally relented and gave him a glassless frame, Jonah grew out of as quickly as he did the idea of liking them. 

It was around this time that Jonah started calling everything ‘babe’ for a while. His stuffed whale toy? Babe. Marjan, Joe and their daughter Nada? All babe. It was only for a day or two until he understood that that word was something for them, like ‘mijo’ and ‘kiddo’ was only meant for him, but it's one of the stories they never tire of bringing back up until Jonah grumbles at them to stop. They try not to embarrass him on purpose, they simply don't tire of being fond of those memories.

When Jonah was eight, he constantly asked to pick Carlos up from work so he could sit in his chair and swivel in it, wearing the Ranger hat while questioning Carlos about ‘their case’. They drew the line at a plastic gun. Carlos wouldn’t have minded — he’d grown up with more than one — but his New York husband set his foot down and Carlos had no real reason to argue given what he saw on his job. Around the same time, he insisted on wearing orange when they visited Enzo, so he wouldn’t feel as alone.

When Jonah was ten, Rangers were out because TK returned to his old job as a paramedic at the 126, leading his own team. That’s when Jonah swore he’d be a doctor so he could greet his brother in the hospital halls. These days, after seeing either of them in the hospital for one reason or the other, Jonah gave up on either of their professions.

Freshly fifteen, Jonah thinks about joining track like Carlos did back in his high school days and wears the same clothes as all his friends. And he wants to be a sculpture artist… ’or whatever.’

Artist fits him well, focuses the endless energy of him as he builds little figures out of popsticks, out of mud, out of clay. In Carlos’ head Jonah is just like that, something constantly reforming. 

A little too quickly if you asked him, evidenced by this night.

When Carlos approaches the field, seeing the red and blue lights of the parked police car reflecting on the wheat field and empty roadside, he wonders if kids can even mimic things they don’t know their brother did. If this is all some cosmic joke.

He takes a deep breath and puts on the Ranger hat beside him on the seat, just to feel a bit of safety and authority settle over his bones. The gravel crunches under his boots as he exits his truck, louder as a discussion comes to a halt when he approaches.

Officer Stevenson barely acknowledges him, but stems his hands onto his spindly hips as he glares down at a boy handcuffed to a stop sign. The red octagon metal is dangling on by one screw, dangerously close to the teenage head below. The boys’ brown wavy hair is just long enough to hide half a face with his head bowed, the patches on his jeans look splotchy on his knees. Carlos knows the rip on the shoulder of the lilac hoodie is one that this kid’s brother is gonna mutter about as he attempts to fix it before leaving the messier work to Carlos.

“Reyes!” Stevenson greets him with a boisterous voice that echoes through the night. “Barely recognized you with the hat and the belts on. Thought I saw a ghost for a second.” When Carlos doesn’t react, he goes on, head tilted to the ground. “This boy tells me he’s yours? No way to ID him, but he showed me pictures of you, him, and your husband on his phone. Said to call you.”

“Yeah,” Carlos replies, while Jonah steals his first look through strands of long fringe up at him. “That’s my kid.”

It’s what they settled on. ‘Son’ feels reserved, but people would hear ‘kid’ and know what they are regardless. In the beginning of raising Jonah, it had felt like either side could rip their relationship like velcro, but, very quickly, his heart knew his fears couldn’t hold a candle to how he saw Jonah.

This is his kid, Jojo, mijo. His family in any shape a word could take.

“Can you tell me why the handcuffs are necessary?”

Stevenson clicks his tongue, his white mustache trembling with it. “Your family or not, he and his friends committed several misdemeanors tonight, including evading arrest.”

Several misdemeanors. Carlos’ heart drops but it’s easier not to show it when he’s still in uniform, and can fold his hands over his belts. 

“Evading arrest? Seems like he’s in handcuffs and detained to me.”

Stevenson throws him a glare, and it would bring Carlos more satisfaction if Jonah didn’t also stifle a laugh at Carlos’ lip. 

“Yeah, well, everyone ran except for him. Obviously.” Stevenson kicks dirt, lets it sail through the bright car light illuminating the little spot in the night. “It’s not like he gave me a whole bunch of options besides detaining him. You got a lively son.”

More than half his life ago now, some colleague called Carlos over.  ‘You know the Strand kid right? Firefighter from big shot New York? We picked him up at The Trap after he wrestled some dudes.’

Back then, he’d argued his way into processing TK, even as his heart warred with love and anger at seeing his bleeding lip and the bruised eyes glaring at him across the desk. It’s not unlike what he feels tonight.

“I’d appreciate it if you uncuffed him,” Carlos tells Stevenson. “He’s a minor and he poses no harm to himself or others. And he isn’t going to run for it, right?”

Jonah slowly looks up and nods.

Not exactly in his usual chatty or argumentative mood it seems, but then Carlos remembers how quiet he himself could get whenever he got in trouble with his own father. Not for doing anything illegal — he’d always been too anxious for that and the bitter pill of being only on the outskirts of friends meant no one roping him into anything worth punishment — but he’d end up in trouble anyway. He was never screamed at, never beaten, never mistreated. His father’s disapproval was all in his sharp questions that already contained disapproval. In the set of his shoulders and jaw, and the few words that would pound into Carlos’ soft spots like nails.

‘I thought you’d be smarter than that, mijo’. ‘Compórtate.’ ‘When I was your age, all I knew was helping out your abuelo after school, not playing video games and lazing around.’ ‘Show a little more respect.’

Or maybe not disapproval. Carlos finds that hindsight, grief, and his own growth into fatherhood have a way of pulling some of the pain from these memories. Still, Carlos purposefully loosens his shoulders and tries to already plan how to be both attentive and caring like his father, but wields it with a softer touch like his mother.

All kids mimic.

Stevenson hands him the key and Carlos undoes the too tight handcuffs sitting tight on the freckled thin wrists of his kid. They leave the skin pink. At fifteen, Jonah barely fills in TK’s sweaters. Who in their right mind would think he needed this kind of treatment?

Carlos draws Jonah up by the elbow and helps him pat the dirt off his pants. They just bought them in a vintage store last week that made Carlos feel ancient leafing through 90s clothes, but he did love seeing TK in clothes he would have worn as a teenager.

Old habits die screaming, so as Carlos throws the handcuffs back to Stevenson, he asks, “What are the charges?” 

He only notices that he could have asked Jonah when he hears him mumble, “I’m here too.”

Stevenson glances at Jonah first, Carlos second, an eyebrow raised in disapproval. “Jaywalking, trespassing, trying to steal this street sign, and evading arrest.”

Crickets are joined by the sound of clinking, a noise as familiar as putting a hand on Jonah’s shoulder to try and calm his wringing his hands. 

“Trespassing where?” Carlos inquires.

Stevenson rolls his eyes and gestures behind them at the stalks of wheat swaying in the night breeze. “Here.”

“The field?”

“This field has a fence,” Stevenson adds like he’s trying to pierce through someone daft. “It’s private property even if it’s farm land. You should know that, Ranger , or did you forget basic law now that you’re in two belts?”

Ignoring the last part, Carlos says, “And I assume that you saw him climb said fence?”

Stevenson pushes his jaw back and forth, the hand on his belt righting it before he twists around the intersection no car has passed by since Carlos arrived. “Where else would they have come from?”

“We walked all the way down Jameson Street,” Jonah says, tone on the edge of pissed but mindful enough of who he is talking to. “That’s where we were found too.”

What he’s saying is that they weren’t caught in the act. Carlos is unsure if he believes him though with how his fidgeting stopped right as he started talking. It’s not always a giveaway for a lie, but it is noticeable when Jonah becomes still. And if Carlos’ mental map isn’t wrong, then the Wright’s house the boys were supposed to have a sleepover at is right behind the field.

None of his suspicion changes how he needs to take Jonah’s side and moreover, keep him free of any charges. “Without evidence, we can all agree that the boys didn’t trespass.”

“We—” Jonah starts but Carlos once again squeezes his shoulder until his voice trails off.

Jonah is a kid. Not just his kid, a kid. His limbs are gangly because he continues to shoot taller and taller, he never ties his shoes well enough to not trip on them at least once a week, he still watches some cartoons for young kids though he quickly switches off the TV when TK or Carlos walk by. His voice has just stopped the squeaky bursts through the new deep tone they all have to get used to, and he keeps on checking the mirror with a hand over his top lip as if that would make anything grow there.

“Jojo asked me if I could show him how to shave today,” Carlos had told TK two weeks prior as soon as the bedroom door closed behind them.

“Shave what? His bare skin?”

Carlos snorted and clapped a hand over TK’s mouth as he pressed him down into the bed. “Shh, don’t let him hear. He thinks that bit of fuzz is gonna be a full beard any day now.”

TK licked his palm until Carlos let go, grinning because it always worked. “Why didn’t he ask me to show him? I shave too!”

“We both know I’m more meticulous,” Carlos said, expecting a pillow and the usual reply: ‘No, you’re a control freak, that’s what you are.’ His expectations were met - his face too.

There’s not a single darker hair on Jonah’s upper lip, but there is a flush to his cheeks now, a furrow to his bushy brows. He keeps on glancing up at Carlos before he looks back down at his hands pink from wringing and the sharper pieces of his rings digging in.

“I assume you’re not going to arrest him if you called me?” Carlos finally asks Stevenson, making his voice hard over the uncertainty living in his belly tonight.

His old colleague strokes his stubbly chin. He looks older these days, skin stretching tighter over bones. “You owe me one, Reyes.” Turning his attention to Jonah, he puts his thumbs in his belt, draws himself up taller. “And you, young man? I don’t want to see you or your friends vandalizing this town of ours, you hear me? We have enough criminals destroying what was left of it. Your dad can’t always bail you out.”

There used to be this reflex, this bracing each time someone called him Jonah’s dad. This deep fear that Jonah’s face would scrunch up in disgust before he corrected them. Carlos? God no, he’s not my dad! 

It’s never happened. In fact, Jonah calls him a few variations of ‘papa’ sometimes. It’s ‘where is pa at?’ and ‘Pop, can you help me hang up my shelf?’ and a memorable time he called him ‘Car-pop’. It used to make his heart glow each time, but something about how he’s gotten used to it is all the more special.

Maybe this time, bracing him would have been better though, because Stevenson turns one more time to say, “Don’t let him off too easy, Reyes. You know, your old man would have never got you out with just a warning. With him, you’d be in the back of my cop car, stewing there longer than most kids, just to teach you a lesson.”

The worst thing about this is that Carlos believes it first — before his heart disputes it. There’s no proof for it, no trouble big enough that Carlos got into to draw from. He knows Luisa shoplifted for a year or so, but was never caught nor given more than a sharp look by their mother over a new pair of shoes she didn’t have money for and lied about. Ana was pulled over once for driving over the speed limit and cried so much for the rest of the night that they all took turns comforting her. But his sisters were always treated differently. For worse or for better. They still say he had it easy, because as a boy he had a longer curfew even if he rarely used it, but he knows that one tear or smile from them and their father’s anger melted.

Old wounds tell him to believe Stevenson’s words. Fatherhood tells him another thing. 

Before Jonah, Carlos thought he might not ever make a good father. He blamed Gabriel for it and himself for blaming Gabriel, a cycle that would have continued if someone hadn’t robbed him of more years with his father. The months after, in the few moments where revenge hadn’t been the loudest sirens in his body, Carlos had spent trying to make sense of what his relationship with his father had really been like. If he had made the distance and the strictness bigger than it had been, if his fear of being cast out of his family before coming out had been all selfmade, if he’d been the reason he didn’t know Gabriel enjoyed puzzles and green tea. If the ocean between them was filled by Carlos himself, a bucket at a time.

Jonah’s adoption had been as sudden as his father’s death. Or so it feels in retrospect.

Once the decision to take Jonah home was made, there was no more room for doubt. No time to spin out the scenarios of what father Carlos would be. One like Gabriel? The exact opposite? 

He thought taking care of a toddler would rob him of the last chance of reconciling the image he had of Gabriel.  Instead, fatherhood gave him a new perspective, shifting until Gabriel’s strictness became worry, his misplaced jokes an attempt to connect with him, his distance something his father must have suffered from just as much. Even if they had been different, even with Gabriel dead, Carlos felt fatherhood gave him a different lens to consider his father through.

It doesn’t erase how much of his childhood was spent in a place between feeling small in his father’s shadow, while also fearing he would lose the proximity of it. It does however make these pain points hurt less and allow him to seek out things he wants to adopt in his own role of fatherhood with more fondness and clarity.

No. Gabriel wouldn’t have let him stew extra long to teach him a lesson. He also wouldn’t have taken the time to comb through all of his kid’s emotions because it wasn’t a skillset he had, even if Carlos would have needed it. Carlos can decide that now. He can decide to give his father grace, because he won’t ever be able to be contradicted in it.

Time and fatherhood make him accept the co-existence of anger and compassion equally, give room for his father's kind words too:

‘Call me if you need help with the shelves.’ ‘De nada.’ ‘My son has great instincts.’

Jonah squirms under the hand Carlos keeps on his shoulder, dragging him from his mind. “He’s— he’s a real asshole.” Anger rises and then falls as he understands Jonah means Stevenson, not Gabriel. “Don’t listen to him.”

“Don’t insult law enforcement,” Carlos chides, because he has to. He also has to ruffle his kid’s hair to thank him for the bit of solidarity that comes so naturally to Gwyn’s sons. Ideally, Jonah would never know that Gabriel can be as much a funny story, a fond memory, as he can be a dagger to Carlos’ heart, but TK and him learned early on that Jonah is more perceptive than that, would sense and be affected by the emotions of others too much. 

He’s the same kind of sensitive that Carlos is deep down, eagle eyed through vulnerability. All kids mimic. 

“Come on now, let’s get you in the car.”

Jonah nods slowly, before whipping his head to the side and stumbling a step toward the tall wheat grass beside them. “Wait. Stai and Finn are still somewhere out there.”

“I know, I didn’t plan to leave without them.”

His kid is rubbing the pink around his wrists that Carlos wants to wring Stevenson’s neck for, and yet Carlos will have to take care of something else first. Will spend the night combing through fields for the idiotic friends that must have instigated this. He has half a mind to get Stevenson back to take over the job. Conscience winning out, he maneuvers Jonah to Carlos’ seat on the driver’s side, hands him a water bottle and a Cliff bar he always keeps in the glove compartment, and then uses Jonah’s phone to call his stupid friends.

Matthaeus Staimos — aka Stai — picks up first. Thankfully, it doesn’t take much convincing to get them to come out from behind the field they hid in.

Jonah’s leg shakes its usual rhythm into the floor beside the car when Carlos rejoins him. “Did you have to tell them like that?”

“Like what?” 

“Like a Ranger.”

Carlos' heart sinks, all of his organs tumbling around in one derailed night. “What I sounded like is a concerned parent, who wants to make sure you all get home safely.”

He can’t be sure, but something that Jonah mumbles sounds close enough to ‘it’s embarrassing’ that he feels bowled over. It takes several breaths to calm into the knowledge that Jonah would not have said that. His low impulse control hasn’t slashed outwards like this in years. But then, maybe this night brings new truths Carlos has to digest.

Either way, Carlos pretends he didn’t hear anything. He’ll have to conserve the energy for Jonah’s friends.

The same friends that have a much easier time warming up to TK than to his Ranger husband, who sometimes joins dinner late and in his uniform still - even when it was Carlos who meal prepped so they could eat together. Even when Carlos tries so hard to be warm and engaging when he asks them about all the things Jonah told him they liked. He still has all these dinosaur facts and Formula 1 drivers memorized. He has this stupid list in his phone about each and every friend Jonah ever made, because there are too many and he remembers hating it when his mom could never keep track of the few people Carlos mentioned. 

TK always squeezes his hand under the table when he notices him trying too hard to connect with Jonah’s friends. Like he used to when Carlos first met TK’s then, now- their friends. They all assure him no one can tell that he’s nervous. ‘Dude, when we met I thought you were way too cool for us,’ Mateo said. He isn’t sure if he believes them. Especially not his entirely too biased husband.

Five eternal minutes later, Finn emerges from around the corner of the linked-in field a few yards down from their car. He rubs his bare arms, looking small all folded in when he’s the biggest of the three. Stai is in what looks like the exact same clothes as Jonah behind him, and waves at Carlos like he’s hoping pretending to be all friendly will help him with the situation. Finn plays the saxophone, Stai doesn’t like anything Carlos ever memorized about him anymore. They used to be less similar before high school made their edges blend.

“Hi, Mr. RSM,” Stai says, a drawl to his words as he continues. His hands try to find his pockets to appear cool, but he misses several times. “No wait it was R…MCS? Sounds like a band.” Laughter bubbles out of him. Finn follows, stumbling over his large feet before catching himself on his friend.

Carlos’ head whips to Jonah, who is looking back at him wide-eyed, both of them trying to scan the other for a reaction. Carlos to see if he missed his own kid being inebriated too, Jonah to see if Carlos realizes his friends are drunk. It’s hard to tell in the dark, but if Jonah drank too, he clearly didn’t do it enough to alert Stevenson or him to it at first glance. The thought that he even had one beer still makes Carlos' stomach feel like a shaken beer can.

“Are any of you hurt?” Carlos asks the boys. “Or feeling sick?”

They shake their heads.

“Are we like…are we arrested?” Finn asks. He’s clearly the most inebriated between the two. Between the three?

Stai slaps his arm and hisses way too loudly, “Dude, don’t give him ideas.”

“He’s chill. We’re good,” Jonah says, walking over without his usual spring in his step. TK noticed him losing it around his friends lately. Enthusiasm must be uncool. The word ‘uncool’ is now uncool. What does Carlos know? “Come on.” 

As the boys press into the backseat, Carlos takes the moment of solitude to press thumb and pointer finger into his eye sockets and take a deep breath. Getting out more water from his trunk for the boys, he contemplates calling TK, just to hear his voice and get an opinion on how to handle all this. Or his mom. He glances up into the sky, finding only clouds. 

It’s best if he talks to Jonah alone first anyway, he tells himself.

The drive back starts out dead quiet, before the first giggle breaks loose in the backseat, turning into a domino effect as the first slaps with the plastic bottles and hushed insults rain. Jonah doesn’t curse. He had a brief phase as a toddler where he thought it was hilarious to make TK and him angry by being naughty. Since then, ‘shit’ is the only one that might slip out, every other curse word in some way or another problematic and Jonah isn’t tired of explaining how or why. Usually. Tonight, he doesn’t join in with his friends, but he doesn’t correct them either. 

When it gets to a certain level of rowdy, and the car stinks of ethanol and teenage sweat, Carlos finally says, “Just so you’re prepared, when I drop you off, I will have a chat with your parents about what happened tonight.”

It’s effective. The car has never been quieter. 

Stai is the first to ask, leaning forward so that Carlos can see each bracket of his braces in the rearview mirror and smell the distinct wheat of beer on his breath. “About the street sign?”

Carlos nods. “About the drinking too.”

“Bronah, you snitched on us?” Finn asks, slapping Jonah’s chest with the back of his hand. 

“I didn’t!” Jonah defends, his voice high-pitched. He doesn’t hit back. “I swear, man.”

There is a lot of violence in these boys, and it’s not unfamiliar to him, the kind of touch men allow themselves. But he’d hoped things would change. He’s seen these three be different, seen them hug and even sit tightly on the bed like Carlos never could have with his friends or even his cousins. If slapping and rough housing is a new layer to their friendship, he’s unsure how to feel about it.

“We didn’t even drink much!” Stai protests, poking his head in between the front seats again. “Can you please leave that part out, Mr. Morgan? My dad’s already gonna freak because we snuck out tonight.”

“His last name isn’t Morgan,” Jonah murmurs.

“Right, Jo, sorry. Always forget all the names, but man you know your family thing is all like, complicated.”

Carlos glances between the dark road and the rearview mirror, at the sliver he can see of Jonah sluming like a wet sack into the car door. It’s not the first time someone condensed their situation like this. Jonah’s kindergarten teacher did, Carlos’ new friends did. They all don’t seem to realize that something this wrong of a statement can needle in and puncture lungs. It’s not complicated. TK may have always had an easier time to call people chosen family than Carlos, who’d grown up with a large and tight-knit family and been taught to honor and rely on them, but Jonah made it all so easy to understand. 

Family is choosing love, choosing to return. He can only hope Jonah never stops believing this.

“Ey it’s not that hard. I know all your last names,” Finn breaks the tension, completely oblivious to it.

Taking the chance to circumvent the topic, Carlos asks, “Where did you even get the alcohol?” Another hush falls over the backseat. “Well?”

“Me. I brought it.”

Carlos pulls a sharp breath between his teeth, trying not to lose focus on the inky night as his brain processes who it just confessed.

“Did you?” Carlos asks Jonah, grateful that he has training in keeping his voice level. 

“Yep.”

He doesn’t want to believe that his kid, his Jojo — who once lectured a mother of his friend on the risks of painkillers when she gave his friend an ibuprofen — supposedly got his hands on alcohol to give out. He doesn’t want to believe it. 

But then he also didn’t think his night would end up here. 

The one reason his burning stomach doesn’t immediately align with one wrong followed by another, is that Jonah has a tendency of playing a hero. There must be a reason why both Finn and Stai seem tipsy, and yet were able to run from Stevenson, while Jonah at least appears to be sober, but was caught. There are so many ways Carlos and him are similar, but this martyrdom is all TK.

“What was it and where did you get it from, Jonah?”

Jonah fidgets in his seat, then shrugs. “Dunno. Like beers and stuff.”

“Someone must have sold it to you.”

“I found it. In…at the school one day. In one of the gym lockers with the green doors. I thought it would be irresponsible to leave it there.”

And TK says Carlos is the worst liar in their little family. 

“Right.”

Carlos could push but there is no point outside of embarrassing Jonah, and though a part of his training nags at him to get to the truth, another remembers feeling two inches tall every time his father interrogated him.

It’s enough to make the rest of the drive a quiet one. 

The first house they reach is the one the boys escaped from, a two story modern that Carlos knows well because bringing Finn home from school some nights means getting the chance of being handed a tupperware of the best gumbo in town if he is that lucky.

As he leads a steadier Finn up the front porch, the boy turns to him to say, “Uhm, Mr— Mr. Reyes Strand Morgan De La Cruz, sir—”

“It’s Carlos.” He can’t help a fleeting smile. “Though I’m impressed that you actually do know all our names.”

Finn blinks a few times and nods. The boys couldn’t look less similar, but Carlos still grows softer with how much the gesture reminds him of his kid. “Carlos, sir, Jonah wasn’t the one who brought the drinks. I did. I swiped them from my sister’s bachelorette party.”

Carlos has the urge to reach out and clap Finn’s back. He decides against it, lets his hand hover awkwardly before he brings it back to the safety of the belt. “Thanks for telling me, Finn.”

“Jonah is so…” Finn shrugs, looking five years younger through it. Carlos remembers him at that age too, gap-toothed and still having the most infectious smile. “He’s not really into stuff we’re into lately, you know?”

The dropping heart is familiar. Becoming a parent meant learning all new fears, for himself, but also in equal amounts for his kid. The one he grapples with to this day is Jonah being lonely. He’d been through so much, Carlos couldn’t bear him going to kindergarten, to school, and finding himself eating lunch by himself. Like Carlos had some years. Not all years. Not in all schools. Not all his life, but enough to drag those memories up when he hadn’t been fitting in like he’d ached to.

But Jonah is cool! Jonah was the first of his friends to climb the tallest trees, can make a mean looking monster out of mashed potatoes, and learns these tricks on his bike that turn Carlos’ stomach when he sees him practice. He is so clever too, listens to a political podcast as much as he’s into anime and video games. He’s cool! 

“Did he—” Carlos exhales and drops the question. That’s something he will ask Jonah himself when they’re alone. “Nevermind.” Inclining his head to the front door, he says, “Let’s talk to your parents. I’m not saying anything about the street sign, because technically, you didn’t steal it. What I can’t keep quiet about is where I found you in the middle of the night and that you’re not sober. But believe me, they’d know either way.”

Finn looks like a kicked puppy but nods. “Sorry, Carlos.”

It reminds Carlos that maybe Jonah’s friends aren’t the worst. “I just want you all to be safe, okay? Now come on.”

He tells the Wrights what he will tell Mr. Staimos a few minutes later, toes the line between fulfilling a parental duty and being truthful, while also trying to butter the parents up as soon as the kids are ushered into the house. Finn’s parents apologize profusely to Carlos, Mr. Staimos sighs and doesn’t say much to either his son or Carlos.

It only puts more weight on how Carlos will handle it himself. Parenthood is to have opinions on other parents, he figured out early on. And to then fail with the approach you think is better.

Still on the porch, Carlos pulls out his phone. The lockscreen is the image of a Ranger star. It sits in a case on their fireplace mantle, the corner of a frame with Gwyn’s photo next to it.

His background as he opens his phone greets him with the image of his family. They’re in a park, celebrating Jonah’s eighth birthday, TK and him in complementary button downs, arms wrapped around their giggling boy. Andrea behind them, chin on Carlos’ curls, hand on TK’s shoulder. It’s been his phone background ever since they took it. That’s almost half of Jonah’s life now. The realization feels like a punch to his gut sometimes, but takes out his entire spine with it today.

Just last week, Jonah had rolled his eyes and asked if it wasn’t high time to change the photo. But how could he? It’s what gives him comfort when TK is up early for work and Jonah is at school, when he works one of those cases that try to wrench his faith in humanity and needs the reminder that the world has them in it too. And that he should call his mom more often.

There’s a text from TK — who he warned he’d be a little late — with an attached photo of bare knees balancing a bowl of popcorn. ‘You’re missing out on more time with me, but okayyy’

All day, Carlos had been looking forward to an empty house with his husband, to forget how tiring work had been and press him down into the couch. A horror movie would play in the background, because why not and none of it would be watched because they’d be busy having the kind of sex that didn't need to be muffled or hurried. The kind of sex only kid-free houses allowed.

If he’s bummed about the turn of events, TK will be even moreso. It’s only fair to give a warning. Especially knowing how TK likes to greet him when they have the house to themselves.

Carlos strokes a thumb over the photo he was sent. Then he texts back, ‘Get dressed if you’re not. Bringing Jonah home with me. Don’t worry, he’s fine. Will explain later.’ And because it doesn’t feel enough, he adds: ‘I love you ❤️💙’

He doesn’t wait for a reply. His feet feel cemented to the floor as he makes his slow way to the car, gathering every single word he means to convey from the gravel. Jonah remained in the backseat, but he’d rolled the window down to listen in. Ever the worrier.

Carlos opens the car door and leans down to look at his kid. “Join me in the front?” 

Jonah locks his phone he pretends to have scrolled through instead of having his eyes glued to the Staimos house, and puts it in his lap with a sigh. His eyes stay trained on the baggy jeans bulging around his thighs. “Did they get into trouble?”  

“I tried to soften the blow.”

Jonah is back at creating a concert with the rings on his hands. “...Thanks.”

Carlos looks at his family, his kid over the hood of the truck, and for a moment Carlos wants nothing more than to push the vehicle away with his bare hands so he can be closer to his kid. So he can hug him. The long kind, where Jonah will feel too large, because wasn’t it just a week ago when Carlos could carry him in his arms?

“Will you sit up front with me?” Carlos repeats.

Jonah considers him, clink-click-clink of rings, before he opens the passenger's side door and gets in. Alone, it allows Carlos another quiet question to the stars and ancestors. If you saw me now, would you be proud?

Carlos slides into the driver's side. Starting the motor back up, the low purr becomes the only sound that fills the first few minutes. as they make their way out of the residential area where every house looks distinctly architectural.

There is weight in Jonah’s silence, because it’s one of the few things he is terrible at. The shake of his leg is more familiar, as is the little twinkle of his jewelry. He’s loud, always, one way or another. Carlos thought it would melt away with age, but Jonah loved cars with sirens and playing drums, and even at his newest hobby and the softest clay, he will sing or mutter under his breath. It’s a source of comfort now, the house feels too quiet when he’s gone.

Carlos' head goes through a million ways to start this conversation, all of them ending in dead ends and crashes. Moths fly in and out of the beams of streetlights, the night a still life they feel statuary in despite moving within it.

“I— uhm, I’m sorry for tonight,” Jonah says first.

Air whooshes out of Carlos’ lungs.

“I shouldn’t have agreed to sneak out with them,” Jonah continues, syllables tumbling with volume. “We only wanted to look at the shooting stars and stuff. Somewhere truly dark like we did that one time in Big Bend with Charlie. There’s this app for it that shows you where it’ll be clearest and— I know the sign thing was stupid. Stai thought it would be sick wall art for his room, and then Finn said none of us would even dare. And I, uhm, I didn’t like him saying I wouldn’t do it, like I was too scared or something. I wasn’t scared. I don’t even remember agreeing, but then I was up on Stai’s shoulders and— Oh, and we walked by the way. Like Stai has a license now, but no one drove drunk. We walked!”

There’s a point where Carlos wants to stop the ramble, make sure Jonah doesn’t derail into panic, but tonight he’s too relieved to finally recognize his kid again. Stoically not crying, instead becoming a verbal waterfall.

Jonah twists more to him, his spindly legs hitting the console between them. “Will this go on your record with the Rangers?”

Carlos glances away from the road ahead long enough to put a hand on Jonah’s elbow and squeeze gently. “It won’t. Don’t worry.”

“It was such a stupid thing to do!”

“It was—”

“What if their parents hate me now?” Jonah’s leg starts to shake more, the up and down of a spring board. “What if I’m no longer allowed over? Finn has this giant pool and movie room and Mr. Staimos makes the best vegan chili I’ve ever had…besides yours.”

Unexpectedly, Carlos finds the corner of his mouth go up as he recognizes the spirals all the family members can tumble into for different reasons. And for the poor attempt of a safe through a compliment.

“Mijo, I hear you okay? I know you’re sorry. And nobody hates you.”

Jonah clicks his tongue. “You can’t know that.”

Seeing the real chance for something that sits beneath the surface of Jonah’s skin to break him apart anew, Carlos takes on his calmest voice. The one that sometimes has the power to transfer his assuredness to the brothers. “I can.”

“How?”

“Because I don’t hate Finn or Stai either,” Carlos explains. “And if their parents have a problem with you, they can take it up with us.”

Thankfully, Jonah groans. “Please don’t actually talk to their parents about me.”

Carlos grins and shrugs. It’s the first time the atmosphere has lightened. The smell of the fir air freshener has taken over the scent of teenage exhaust and it nearly allows him to take this as his sign to keep it at that, to take the heavy stuff on four wheels towards shared responsibility.

But then Jonah asks, “Are you mad at me?”

That’s it, that’s the question Carlos was supposed to know the answer for before he got into the car. Instead, his mind goes to the ‘Wheel of Emotions’ that Mrs. Lee, the children’s therapist, had given them. 

When  Jonah was young, he was a whirlwind with a heart, laughter following him everywhere. Sometimes he became a true storm though. They’d recognized the pattern quickly. They had read up on early childhood trauma after the abandonment They should have been able to prevent it. They never truly could be.

Some things, like his anxiety over Carlos leaving for work, faded fairly quickly and his sleeplessness and bed wetting fluctuated until it ceased too. Jonah’s outbursts were worst at the whims of life. Any time Jonah was thrown for a loop, like when TK had an unplanned trip to visit Owen in New York after a minor accident, or when they told him to try and no longer sleep in their bed, the early years when neither visiting nor keeping him from Enzo bore any better results, Jonah’s emotions would blow out in all directions.

Jonah’s cries were a siren, piercing, his cries flooded Carlos’ entire chest so much he couldn’t breathe, like both of them were drowning together. Jonah refused to eat, sometimes a full day passed where he would push any food away or spit it out with a lot of tears and even more defiance. They had to hold his tiny arms steady because he had a phase of pulling at his hair when he got completely into a tantrum.

Only when he calmed, asleep in their arms or their bed, did they allow themselves their own breakdowns.

There are markers of failure in Carlos’ life, each a memory so vivid he can remember every single sensation about it. TK’s tears on Jonah’s hair and pillow, the tracks clinging to Jonah’s cheeks pink from exhaustion and fever, all in bed with him and his helplessness.

The chart Mrs. Lee gave them when Jonah was six was supposed to teach their kid to really listen in on what was off and pull the feelings apart until there was more than just one big lump. At first it was only a five colored wheel with emotions next to animals that he could point to.

H - Happy - Hippo. A - Afraid - Ant. S - Sad - Snail…

“Do you feel like an ant right now?”

“No, a snail!”

“What does the snail need? A hug? A kiss? To listen to a story?”

Honestly, Carlos found it helpful, too, especially when their adult version had a lot more nuanced vocabulary to categorize how he was feeling. Maybe ‘overwhelmed’ didn’t have a cool animal associated with it, but it helped to be aware of the nuances emotions could have when he used to push any discomfort into oblivion.

“I can’t say I’m not mad,” Carlos admits softly. He decides to slow the car to make sure he can say what he has to before they reach their house. “As much as I dislike Stevenson, he was right to stop you guys. You shouldn’t be out in the middle of the night, and you absolutely shouldn’t have crossed private property or had alcohol.” 

Jonah mumbles, “Disappointed would have done it.”

The word instantly triggers Carlos to say, “I’m not disappointed. There’s never gonna be a time I’ll be disappointed in you, okay?”

A sigh is the only answer he gets. It’s hard to know whether it’s in relief or annoyance at this point. Jonah’s teenage sighs need a dictionary of their own.

A centering breath to calm his voice, before Carlos adds, “But at least don’t lie to me about tonight. I know you didn’t get here using the sidewalks, which by the way, also would have been reckless.”

“How?”

“You could have been run over if a driver didn’t see you in those dark clothes.”

“How is my sweater dark?” Jonah raises his arms to present the lilac cotton evidence, completely skirting anything else. It’s not always on purpose, Carlos knows Jonah can get hung up on details, but it still irks him now. Which in turn irks him even more to be irked by his family.

“That’s hardly the point.”

“I guess,” Jonah grumbles, pushing back into his seat, his knees hitting the console. “By the way, I wasn’t gonna lie to you. You know I hate lying, but I had to or I would have implicated us with the officer. I was being smart.”

“No, you would have been smart if you had stayed at Finn’s like you were supposed to,” Carlos says, skirting the big Catch 22 of how to deal with law enforcement. 

All he gets as an answer is loudly folded arms and the metronome of Jonah’s leg.

He has half a mind to simply table any of this discussion until they’re home and he doesn’t have to muddle through it alone, but then he remembers a case from a year ago. Two teenage girls got shot because they trespassed. Remembers another, with a crumbled body and a bike in the bushes after an accident. The things he saw before are all scenarios he’s now envisioned Jonah in in the manifold of his nightmares. 

“Are you aware that this was actually dangerous?” 

Jonah’s loud exhale is the last drop to topple Carlos’ calmness. 

“You could have been hurt or killed! You know the law, you know that some people don’t hesitate to ask questions first when you trespass. That is why I’m upset. I’m upset because you’re a teenager out in the middle of the night where anything could happen, and then get into more trouble by stealing things. Well not just things, a stop sign , which could have ended up in someone else getting severely hurt.”

Jonah reacts with a pointed silence for once. The next day, Carlos will tell his mother that he was never like this, never this moody when he’d been a teenager, and Andrea will laugh and assure him he is sorely mistaken.

“I know it wasn’t like super smart or anything, but we were safe,” Jonah defends after half a stretch of a mile. “We stayed on well-lit main roads for the most part and we only crossed this corn field that Finn uses all the time. The owner lives miles away. It wasn’t dangerous at all or I would have felt it in—”

Carlos cuts him off before Jonah can say it: “You can’t always trust your gut.”

“That’s not what you taught me!” Jonah snaps back.

There’s a million ways Carlos is tugged tonight, but this one pops his lungs until he gasps for air. 1 - 2, in, 3-4-5-6-7, out. F is for frustration. And foxes or something.

“What’s a gut?” Carlos had asked his father when he was first taught to follow it. Not all memories are preserved like this one, too many distorted reflections in soap bubbles. But this one is crystalline, his father in a great mood, laughing and making his belly heave with it. Carlos had shook with it too, sitting on his father’s knee. 

“This here,” his father said and poked Carlos’ stomach, making him giggle even more. “You know how when you’re hungry, you know you want lunch?”

Carlos nodded eagerly. “Yes.”

“It’s kind of like that. It’s not your head that knows. There are times where there is nothing happening in your brain. But here—” his father rubbed his own impressive barrel of a belly, “—here, you know, mijo.”

Carlos is nine and he has bunched fists on knees scraped bloody because he didn’t trust his gut about how dangerous the jump over the stream looked. He’s thirteen and the girl he asked out on Valentine’s Day said yes and his heart is all funny about it despite her feeling okay to his stomach at first. He’s sixteen and he feels like nothing has ever been worse than following his gut when he clicked on that damn website and found his eyes stray to the naked men in it.

He’s twenty-eight and Gabriel pulls him in by the sweat-soaked neck in an interrogation room to tell him it’s no use following his gut; he has to have the right intuition.

Now it leaves Carlos with nowhere to go. In the end, his gut had served him more often than not. Even Gabriel had praised it in the end, loving the thing Carlos’ intuition had known was right for him the moment he first laid eyes on it in the middle of a stormy night. But his gut had also made him pull a gun on an innocent man after his father’s death, and has led him astray in more than one case that he drags with him every day. 

His gut told him once he wouldn’t be a good father; that he didn’t even want to be one. This night certainly tests him in new ways, but his brain doesn’t even allow the thought of what life would be like if he had listened to his fears and never even attempted to raise Jonah. 

“There will be times you should trust your gut,” Carlos tells Jonah after memories and present converge on suburban Austin roads. The light at the intersection ahead flashes red and he is grateful to stop and be able to look at Jonah and see him gaze back. “Trust it when you wonder about what afterschool club you should join or when you should step in when you see someone being bullied. It’s no good to try and be analytical about everything. But generally a good rule of thumb is this: if you wouldn’t advise your best friends to do it, don’t.” He thinks and adds, “And if it’s against the law, for sure don’t.”

Jonah crosses his arms in front of his chest, TK’s sweater swallowing him even more. “Not all laws are ethical or right, so breaking laws can’t always be wrong.”

Damn pedantic. This one he must have from his podcasts.

“You’re not wrong.” Carlos drums fingers on the steering wheel. The light goes green, giving him another moment to think. “How about this, you can trust your gut if it means standing up for your rights and helping people in need.”

“Okay, so I can break rules if I steal bread for an unhoused person?”

Carlos gives Jonah a sharp look. It doesn’t have the desired effect, but instead Jonah’s face settles even more into a challenge.

“Or…or…” His kid’s legs speed up as does his words, “Or I guess it’s fine when you’re the CEO of green energy companies and invest in a useless product. And when that fails you blame it on your good heart because you only moved money around to save employees.”

Carlos is just quick enough to reign himself into a collected parent, but hates when all he can offer at first is: “Jonah.”

Teenagehood is like dentistry, Ana had warned him, like every conversation is pulling teeth from someone who didn’t want to open his mouth. She clearly didn’t account for Jonah’s tongue, or the trauma a small body would not have the strength to carry.

“Sorry,” Jonah apologizes in the small voice his entire fire extinguishes into sometimes. “Didn’t mean to— I shouldn’t have brought him— I get it. No trusting my gut. Sorry, Pa.”

Carlos holds tightly onto the wheel, only straight road ahead for a long stretch but it feels so oppositional to how his mind tries to find the right exit to a problem he has never steered Jonah right on.

Softly, Carlos says, “It’s okay.” One streetlight, two. “Where did you hear all that? Do you want to talk about it?”

Jonah doesn’t have to ask what Carlos means, doesn’t do the swerve Carlos sometimes takes on hard topics, or become drained like TK does sometimes. Alone in the car with him, no friends to impress, Jonah whispers, “Not right now if that’s okay.”

“Of course,” Carlos lies.

Shortly after, the car fills with the renewed cacophony of clinking metal. One finger is noticeably empty.

Carlos knows that Enzo’s ring sits like a golden wreath in a little dish on his dresser they used to use for tapas. Jonah only wears it now when they go to visit him in prison and immediately pulls it off on the way out the visitors door. 

What had started out with untameable excitement followed by heartbreaking sobs had turned into the void of bitterness the past year. It’s something they had hoped therapy and regular contact would prevent, though Carlos can’t really feel too warm for someone who spoke more highly about TK’s past than he had spoken to TK, and who had nearly implicated one son and at the very least risked losing the other through his crimes. Truthfully, Carlos doesn’t like Enzo. No one can redeem himself when they harmed what he loves most. He isn’t as gracious and good-hearted as TK or Jonah.

He knows TK will always put Jonah first and if Jonah made any statement on not wanting to see Enzo, he would accept it. Jonah denied it though, insisted on having been sick the last few times they had planned a visit and that he would write a letter instead. Carlos hadn’t been as easily convinced because, for him, the stakes weren’t as high as they were for TK. Owen, Jonah and Enzo were the last true family TK had on his side, and with his past, Carlos knew that all TK wished for was for family, for peace. For once, let his family not break apart. For once, let him keep the family he had left.

It gives Carlos pause now to wonder whether this night was Jonah’s cry for something, a way to get attention, a way to connect to Enzo. It’s not uncommon, the overlap of teenagers Carlos arrested as a beat cop whose last names would bring a search result for an imprisoned parent was significant. It just never occurred to him to worry about it with his own kid. Until tonight.

It’s a work in progress.

The fabric of the seat scritches as Jonah turns toward him. Carlos glances over from the stretch of rocky road the city never fixed in this area where the houses are smaller. 

“I guess it doesn’t really make sense to me. How do you know what to do?” Jonah asks quietly. “When to go against rules and when to follow your gut?” 

Like he asked Carlos to show him how to bake pizza, like he asked him why Carlos’ side of the family sometimes spoke a language he couldn’t speak and if he could learn it. Like he asked Carlos why it was so wrong that he asked a little girl in the grocery store why she was in a wheelchair.

The weight of these questions made Carlos feel like what he would reply or do would shape Jonah permanently. It’s not completely true, but not false either. His words matter, have weight. He knows because his parents’ words have dented and mended him.

“It’s impossible to always make the right decisions,” Carlos says. “But it helps to get older, gain more experience, and judge from there.”

Jonah huffs. “Great. It’s the same old ‘you’ll understand one day’ then.”

Carlos can’t help but smile, the memory of his anger at being told the same never fading. “I’m afraid so. We all hated hearing it, but it’s no less true.”

Jonah hums. His legs have started to calm again, tamed as he loses himself in deeper thought.

The next intersection is more familiar again. They’re a few minutes out now, these streets know the weight of Carlos’ steps on his biweekly runs and the paw prints of the hairless cat Jonah walks with a leash sometimes and scares the neighborhood kids with.

“I won’t go climbing fences anymore,” Jonah promises as they pass his old elementary school. “Or steal street signs. That was stupid. I would have felt awful if something happened because of it.”

“Good. I’m taking you at your word.” They go over a pothole. Two streets over from their house now. “One more thing.” To his credit, Jonah swallows the sigh as soon as he releases it so Carlos pushes on. “About you getting drunk—”

“Drunk? Wait, I didn’t even have a single sip of that beer! I swear!” Jonah twists to him, hands flying up. “Oh my god, I can’t believe you think I would do that.”

“You did a few things I didn’t think you would tonight,” Carlos reminds him.

“And I apologized for it,” Jonah cries. “If that’s not enough, how can I make it up? I can mow the lawn for a month or I can see if Mr. Staimos needs help with the hens again. I can do this summer internship thing with the Rangers—”

It’s tempting to take Jonah up on offers he knows are genuine, but Carlos stays on duty and track. “Both your friends had alcohol. Alcohol you maintain you supplied, so how can I be sure?”

“Test me then. You have one of those breathalyzer things as a Ranger too right? Test me!”

Jonah worries his lip, loud with nothing but his body language again. The way he holds his shoulders and legs still now is foreboding for something working its way out of his brain, intercepted at some parts.

The tiny bit of anger ebbs as soon as it comes up. He knows Jonah is telling the truth with how panicked he is. “Okay. No need for a test. I didn’t mean to needle you like this, I was just worried.”

“I wouldn’t drink!” Jonah repeats.

“I believe you.”

“And even if I did, I’m not gonna end up like him .”

Chapter Text

It’s a miracle and years of training that Carlos can keep his hands steady on the wheel. Practice and instinct as he parks the car with practiced precision in a driveway of an empty house he knows is up for sale. 

‘I’m not gonna end up like him.’ - There was no heat to Jonah’s words, a promise more than venom. Carlos feels poisoned by them anyway.

“Don’t ever let him hear you say that,” Carlos says calmly, keeping a lid on his temper because he has to. “It would shatter him.”

Jonah is fifteen, he doesn’t grasp the weight words can have. On the color wheel of emotions, Carlos firmly lands in the swamp between sadness and irritation. He turns his head to the left, watches the front porch light switch off in a house on the other side. 

His hand rubs the mouth that will have to find the right thing to say once again. 

So what is it this time? Like brother, like kid?

Jonah goes completely still, eyes wide and dark like the night. “I’m sorry.”

“TK is the best person I know,” Carlos grips the wheel tightly, secures his gaze on it too. “You both are.”

“TK?” Jonah asks a moment later, with each letter having a question mark embedded. “Why would…I didn’t mean TK.”

Oh. 

Like father, like son then.

The poison is all Carlos’ own. It’s his own mind that filled with the image of his husband, his soulmate and Carlos will grapple with this being his first association and the weight of his own bias for long after this night. Will be robbed of sleep and appetite for a few days until he has kissed TK enough times for a remedy and sealed a silent apology into each touch. 

“I didn’t mean TK, I swear. Oh god, it sounded like that, didn’t it? But I would never, it’s not like--” The car fills with the scratch of too large jeans rubbing as Jonah’s legs go into overdrive. “Well, I didn’t drink because of his recovery and stuff too, but like, it’s a good thing, right? I promise that came out so different from how I meant it. I would never say that about TK. How could you think I would say that about him?”

Lately, the shoulder Carlos strained a year ago on a front door has been acting up again. It chooses this moment to twinge as he gathers up his strength to look at Jonah. It never gets easier seeing his kid upset, it only feels worse when his own guilt must be locked down.

“Enzo made a mistake.”

Jonah wrings his hands, white around rings and knuckles. One finger is empty. “You said we don’t have to talk about it!”

They could pause this conversation here. Sometimes Carlos shamefully does stop at these spaces of ‘almost’. He shouldn’t, tiredness or stress or the fear of damaging their relationship are never sufficient excuses to halfass parental duties. 

But the truth is, sometimes it’s easier. Sometimes Carlos wants so badly to be the good cop, the nice parent, the confidant who lets things go, loosens their rules, and gives up in a fight. He has to be the other role in too much of his life.

Growing up, discipline had sat on Carlos’ shoulder like metal armor, and though he thrives in rules and control these days, the idea of forcing Jonah in the same mold of strictness churns his stomach. What’s another hour on an app, what’s dessert before dinner, what’s a sharp tone in the face of becoming someone Jonah no longer turned to? 

Maybe it would be fine, maybe Carlos could be the opposite of his parents like most kids swore they would be. Maybe… 

But the reality is that lenience ends up forcing TK into strictness and it’s just as unbearable to witness. Carlos is too aware of TK’s own fears of losing ease and Jonah’s love by taking on parenthood instead of brotherhood. 

“The best thing you can do for Jonah is to give him stability,” was one of the first things Jonah’s therapist told them. There was no compromise on this.

It took years to understand that it meant more than regular sleep times and bathroom routines and hugs. Fun older brother, good cop. That’s not what parents are allowed to be. At least not primarily. Either one of them has to be strict and live with the potential grudge of a toddler, child, pre-teen, teen. It’s a scale tipping back and forth, sometimes disproportionally. Carlos can handle it.

The only reason it hasn’t completely worn them down is because Jonah made it easier the older he got. He’s so good, keeps to their rules (mostly, he has never lost his penchant for loopholes and finding one of them to approve some leeway), he helps in the house and garden, he’s a decent student. He calls the elder members of the family to chat with them, he walks the neighbor’s dog, he takes care of their cat because he promised he could take the responsibility for. 

Tonight is a night of changes though, the first time Jonah has given him cause for worry. A night of changes for Jonah and for himself.

“I fear not talking about Enzo more led us here,” Carlos says. 

Jonah shakes his head, long hair hitting the cheeks where a few pimples have joined the tiny freckles that this summer recharged. It’s his time to stare out into the static of the strange driveway they parked in. “I didn’t do any of this because of Enzo, or like I also didn’t not drink because of Enzo. Ugh, you know what I mean,” he says. It sounds like something he has repeated to himself before tonight. A mantra. “I’m nothing like him.”

It’s familiar only because Carlos’ head has revisited the same mantra too. Only his mind was instantly flooded with shame over it, a push back of everything he should and did admire about Gabriel even when their relationship was strained. He would be lucky to have his good characteristics, the tenaciousness, the humor, the eternal love for his life partner, the role of a provider for his family. 

Before Jonah, Carlos thought his biggest fear was becoming his father’s flaws, cursed with a generational pattern of a wedge between son and father. With Jonah, Carlos learned his biggest fear should have been not being considered a father at all.

Carlos undoes his seatbelt now, not wanting anything more between him and Jonah as he twists in his seat toward him. “Did something happen between you two?” he asks carefully. 

Jonah shrugs.

“We always hoped we wouldn’t pressure you into seeing him and would respect your wishes, but if we did anything to make you scared to tell us—”

There is panic in Jonah’s eyes, hearing the pain in Carlos’ voice and reacting to it. “No. No you didn’t! You guys are great.”

Carlos nods, because Jonah needs assurance. It isn’t the first time they asked. It’s the first time Carlos pushes through and from the way Jonah curls up on himself, dangly limbs in a knot, he sees they both have to be brave about it; Jonah for weathering sadness and Carlos for holding him in it.

Carlos cups Jonah’s knee, taking the rhythm with it instead of forcing it still. “Do you want to know what grandpa Owen said to TK when your father got arrested?” Jonah blinks at him, the nod almost imperceptible. “He said that TK shouldn’t have to decide between being angry at Enzo or loving him. That there is room for both the gratitude and love he gave TK when he helped raise him, but also for his flaws. That both of these things can be true.”

It’s not verbatim, but of all the things he is angry at Enzo for, this Carlos can’t begrudge him. TK’s compassion was fostered by a father who showed up when Owen couldn’t.

But he must have messed up retelling it, because Jonah scowls deeply. He clenches his jaw around his truth though until Carlos prods again. “You can tell me what’s on your mind, Jojo.”

“I—” Jonah’s lips wobble and he throws his body so roughly into the seat his head bounces off it. As he blinks up at the car roof, it doesn’t stop the next tear from sliding down. He instantly wipes the heel of his palm— then brings the fist down onto his thigh. Hard. Flesh and bone collide in a dull sound, but it rattles Carlos’ core.

“Don’t,” Carlos orders, slipping into his Ranger voice, because that’s easier when Jonah’s bursts of anger unleash against himself. His hand instinctively covers Jonah’s. “Are you okay?”

Ignoring him, Jonah pulls his hand away. It stays a fist. “I’m so happy TK got all this quality time with dad, I truly am. But that’s not what I got! All my memories are of him in prison uniforms, all he talks about is mom and those two years he had with me and Sophia. That’s all we have. Some years I don’t remember, and a woman I remember more than time with him outside those stupid meeting rooms!” Jonah throws his head back hard enough to make the seat vibrate. “I’m sick of it! I’m sick of all the promises of what we will do when he gets released or his illusions of being able to appeal. I don’t want to live with him, ever. I don’t need him in my life. I never did.”

There was a point where Carlos would have been more prepared for it, early on when exactly this was a more likely outcome. It only hurts more that it comes now, because he can’t know if it hadn’t always been there after all, if Jonah had grown into resentment and Carlos hadn’t recognized it despite knowing it so intimately.

Jonah wipes his nose with the back of his fist. His gaze goes out the passenger side and he stiffens again, the fist on his knee tightening. It’s right before his breathing picks up. 

“Jojo, it’s okay to be upset about this,” Carlos says, trying to diffuse the pressure that can build up in his kid, his own panic right behind it. “Do you need me to sing ‘Let it go’?”

There are phrases that work like a charm, even on teenage sons who had a huge Disney phase growing up. Jonah grimaces before finally cracking a smile that turns into a grimace, turns another tear. It’s a full spectrum of emotions. 

“Sorry,” Jonah squeaks.

“It’s okay to cry.”

“No, no, I shouldn’t have yelled at you,” Jonah blubbers, pressing the tissue Carlos always has at the ready in his belt to where his nose is leaking. “You did nothing wrong. You were —” Jonah looks at him. “You are my dad more than he will ever be.”

Every time Carlos worried Jonah would correct people, any time the wound would reopen when people told TK that they could see the resemblance, every nightmare of waking up to an empty loft then house, was waiting for this remedy. And yet it fails to bring relief.

Carlos lays his palm over his kid’s fist. He needs it now. “There is nothing in the world that I’m prouder of than being one of your fathers.”

Jonah sniffs, a motor in water. “Last week you said the same thing about being married to TK,”  he corrects, managing a wobbly smile. 

“He’s all you, babe,” TK isn’t tired of saying, “a charming avoider.”

“Okay, both are true. Let’s not make that a competition,” Carlos says, giving them the breath of ease until he dives back into discomfort. Even the thought of sharing brings back the lump that has never eased fully. His father’s ring is on the hand touching Jonah, connecting generations. 

“I never went through what you did,” Carlos starts. “I was very lucky growing up with my parents and my sisters. It was strict, but I never really felt like it was all that hard to fall into line.” Carlos floods with love as he sees Jonah closing his mouth before he can interrupt. “And yet there were times I wished I had a different dad.”

No couples counseling, no family therapy, not even the safety of the one heart he hates to burden but can’t help to, has heard him utter this sentence. Even now, he looks up through the windshield and finds only a green garbage can instead of lightning striking down in punishment for the sin of even having thought this.

Lo siento, papa.

“Why?” Jonah asks quietly. His fist releases to grasp Carlos’ hand. “I thought you loved him?”

“I did,” Carlos assures. “I do.” He can barely look at Jonah. He shouldn’t put all this on his kid, he should have kept that thought locked in where it belonged. Jonah’s idea of Gabriel is an abuelo they honor each year as a family, someone Carlos must love so deeply to mourn him into debilitation some days. How can he tarnish it.

“Then why did you want a different dad?” Jonah prompts.

Carlos wishes to rewind time, rewind the last words so nobody heard what his brain fought over for so many years. But a father sets an example, a father has responsibilities.

Carlos takes a deep breath until wetness gathers in his eyelashes. “Growing up, my father was all about discipline and authority. I guess it made sense. He was a Ranger, well respected in the community, in his family. But he was also a Tejano who rose in ranks despite working in a predominantly white field. What his family did reflected on him. Especially what his son did. So I was taught to be respectful, to follow his rule and become a strong man he could be proud of. That at the very least, he wouldn’t feel ashamed for.” 

Carlos remembers the heavy gait of his dad, of Major Reyes, coming home, the rattle of belts, the star worn sometimes late into the day because his father didn’t always change shirts, and how grand he seemed even when Carlos grew taller. He doesn’t recall him coming in to do voices with Kique, not even by the thousandth time of rewatching the tape that proves it.

“I never felt like I fit that mold though,” Carlos explains, each word heavier. “I wasn’t interested in a lot of the things he liked, that men are supposed to. I pretended for the longest time, and avoided him when I couldn’t. Especially when I realized that I felt shame whenever my parents would bring up girlfriends or a nuera.” Carlos clears his throat again, the lump jumping at the memory of marriage expectations and how he briefly met them. “I thought being gay would be the biggest shame I could bring on my family, especially on my dad. They never made any mean remarks about queer people, not like some of my tíos did. They never contradicted them either. But I knew… I thought I knew that coming out would change everything. And for a while, it did.”

“Abuelita too? But she loves you guys! She comes to pride every year with us,” Jonah bursts out. “That’s so wrong. Sexuality isn’t something you can change and you shouldn’t have to either.”

The indignation Jonah has wielded with might since a small age is something that will never fail to make Carlos smile. He grew up in a world that was both more open to different gender and sexualities, and had more pushback, but in a family and community that fostered diversity. It’s no wonder he finds it unfathomable that Andrea could have ever had to learn about it in adulthood.

“It’s not, but not everyone grew up understanding that.” Carlos brushes a thumb over Jonah’s many bumpy rings. “Despite that, my parent never let me feel like they loved me less. They just also didn’t know how to talk about it. It was easier to tell me they loved me, but then to never bring it up again or ask me about my love life.”

“That sucks!”

“My dad and I had our differences even before that, but it only made it worse. I thought that it was all my fault. That I couldn't uphold the Reyes name the way I was supposed to. I was soft, I was gay, I was nothing like the hopes my father had set for me.”

It’s the opposite of what Carlos wants the world to see him as. Strong, dependable, unbendable. He fought so long to allow himself to be soft too, to go against the stereotype for men instead of seeing it as a weakness. He is all of it at once, a strong man who is as soft as he feared his parents thought him of, and who is allowed to be.

The tissue Jonah hands Carlos is damp. Carlos has a pocket full of new ones, but there is no squeamishness left after raising a toddler, so Carlos finds a somewhat dry corner and wipes his own nose.

“I get why you didn’t like your dad back then,” Jonah says, squeezing Carlos’ hand extra tight. “I get it.”

And Jonah truly thinks he does, thinks Carlos told him this to mirror his own festering resentment for Enzo. That is where they relate most, like kid, like dad. In some ways it’s true, but it’s not where Carlos wishes resemblance will rest.

“He was a big reason for why I became a cop too,” Carlos continues. “Not that I understood that back then. Your abuelita told me that I didn’t have to have the same career to get closer to him, but I insisted she was wrong. I was so sure I was becoming a cop to make my community safer. I was so adamant about it, that I believed it myself. It was pure coincidence that we were in similar fields, I told myself.” 

He stifles the nervous bubble of the idiosyncrasies of his late teenhood. 

“And my community was a big part of it, but it’s true too that I became a cop because I knew my dad would disapprove. Once that seal was broken, once I had stepped so far out of line, he had to return to the father he had been before I came out. Because after it, we barely talked about anything but weather or the Astros, but then the day an acceptance letter to the academy arrived at our house, was the first time he raised his voice at me again. He was even angrier than when I spent all my savings on a sports car right after my first pay check.”

“Wait, the 2016 blue Camaro from the old photos you showed me?” Jonah interrupts. “You bought that? When you were that young?”

Carlos fondly rolls his eyes at how Jonah has space for both being into the preservation of the environment and cool looking cars, can be deeply compassionate and so easily distracted. “Yes, that one. He hated me driving around Austin in that flashy car.”

Or spending all his savings on it. Carlos never quite knew which was truer.

Jonah purses his lips and for the first time, looks away from him again. Something rattles in his leg and brain again and he releases it. “Thanks for telling me, pa, but I know what you’re doing.”

It almost amuses him. “Oh?”

“I didn’t do this to copy Enzo. Or to make him mad. It’s not like he would even know about tonight unless you tell him.” Jonah tugs his hand back now, hiding it in the paws of his sweater as if to hide anything between these two stories tying them together. “And anyway, he doesn’t matter to me. I might be on this planet because of him and mom, but they’re not my parents.”

No lightning struck with Gabriel's wrath, not even a drop of rain signals Gwyn listening in and weeping. Their legacies live in the two hearts in this car though, heavier through it, but pounding relentlessly because of them.

Carlos decides to tell the end of his story instead of trying to change Jonah’s mind on why tonight happened the way it did. It’s unlikely Jonah can tug it apart now, could point at the Wheel of Emotions and go: r is for rhino, is for revenge. Carlos hadn’t been able to either when he was younger.

“It took me well into my adulthood to learn that most of what I thought was true about my father, wasn’t,” Carlos continues. The silver ring with the turquoise has never quite settled, never feels unobtrusive, or as part of him as his wedding ring does. It doesn’t have to. He likes noticing its weight. “Living with him, I felt too small, too much like hiding big parts of me was necessary. Out of the closet and their house, I felt it was better to keep my distance. It wasn’t until I met TK — until time passed for my parents to understand they had to learn too, that they had a hand in making us distant — that I could see them better. My dad was strict. Maybe too strict, but it was never about his name or reputation.” 

Jonah glances back at him through his lashes, brown eyes tugging at what is lodged in Carlos. 

“He didn’t want me to get hurt. I had to be a good kid, because there are different sets of expectations on Tejano men. He didn’t want me to be in danger because of my skin color. He didn’t want me to be bullied or discriminated or hurt if I lived my truth,” Carlos manages through a tight throat. “I had to be good, not for him, but so he wouldn’t feel weak seeing me get hurt.”

 “Did he tell you that?” Compassion is written into every pore on Jonah's face.

“No.” Carlos licks the salt from his lips, the same taste on his tongue as he had the last time he hugged his father. “He told me he was proud of me though. The rest he never had the chance to tell me, unfortunately. I don’t know if he could have either way.” He gives Jonah all his attention, has since the day their fates tied. 

“Then how do you know?”

“I learned most of it because of my own kid and how much I’m scared for you every day.”

Jonah blinks and blinks.

“I’m sorry,” he says with a cracked voice, before releasing a sound not unlike the squeak of a rubber duck that he used to drive Carlos crazy with for a whole year when he was five. “I didn’t mean to worry you, or argue, or get you into trouble. I don’t want to be a burden.”

“You’re not a burden, not to me or anyone,” Carlos hurries, hand brushing back Jonah’s bangs like he had when he was three, eight, thirteen. “I loved learning all of this through you. It’s okay to be emotional about the people you love.”

None of this is a new revelation, but it is new that Carlos managed to put it into one order, into a sense and a space that isn’t fragmented between therapist and husband, and Ana and Luisa, and his mother and Owen. It’s not the entire story, but Jonah holds the biggest fragment.

It feels like these things tend to, something ripping at Carlos’ chest that he emptied out. He lets it show, keeps both a hand on composure needed from a parent, and the vulnerability a parent should model.

“Mama, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not ready to be a father.”

“No one is. Be you. Just be you, Carlitos.”

They look at each other. Father and kid, no blood relation but their brown eyes well up with tears at the exact same time.

“I’m scared too,” Jonah whispers to his lap. “And angry. Like… all the time.”

“I’m so sorry, mijo.”

“And I hate my dad! I hate him!”

Carlos’ heart aches, but he manages a slow nod above the pain. “That’s okay.”

Jonah frowns at him, still doubting that he is allowed to say any of this, and yet unable to stop the snowball of anger. “This girl in my class, told everyone their aunt lost their job because of Enzo, that he was a criminal. And that my friends should be careful because I might steal their money too. Like crime was in my genes or something.”

“What? Who was it? Who said that?” It makes sense to ask, makes sense to flip through the idea of finding the cause of Jonah’s distress. Carlos doesn’t think on the how yet.

Jonah purses his lips around the answer. “Whatever.” His hands curl over his knee until his body vibrates fully. “It made me look into him too for the first time. There were a lot of articles.”

“I wish you would have told us that. We always tried to give you as much information as we could, but you were so young.”

Jonah shakes his head. “I didn't want—” He breaks off, visibly refocuses on anger. “The people in his company trusted him and he spent the money they earned him. This article talked about all these off-shore companies — and I don’t know — other illegal shit. Shit that didn’t help anyone but himself. He says he tried to help the environment, protect employees, but the money benefitted him. He’s a selfish asshole!”

These are all Carlos’ thoughts stirred up for TK’s sake, for what he thought would be in Jonah’s best interest. He always outwardly defended Enzo regardless of these feelings. Now he has to do nothing but rub Jonah’s knee and listen, because his kid isn’t done.

“And who sends a three year old to a boarding school in Europe?” Jonah seethes, chopping the air. “Who doesn’t immediately try to find a home for him with his family? He tells me he loves me, but he never, he —”

“Your father loves you!” Andrea would say, conviction as sure as her faith, with a hint of anger of Carlos even implying that Gabriel didn’t.

‘I guess.’ Carlos never knew he was allowed the addition of: He loved me, but not always in the way I needed.

At the first sob, he pulls Jonah in, allowing himself to need it just as much. Jonah is stopped by a seatbelt, the console another barrier, but it might be the best hug they have shared in years.

“I love you,” Carlos says. He wonders if there will ever be an abundance of these words and hugs, but he needs the comfort of trying to build a tie between them that will be as present as fear. “Please never doubt that.”

Wetness seeps through the shoulder of his stress-soaked shirt, but neither of them minds. 

“Even after tonight?” Jonah asks, so quiet and mumbled into the fabric Carlos nearly misses it. He’s glad he doesn’t. 

“Of course. Always.” He pulls back and ducks his head until Jonah looks at him, a trick that always works with either brother. He wipes a tear off still-slightly-chubby cheeks. “Hey, you're a good person, you have such a big heart. You also made a mistake. We all do.” Before Jonah has a chance to spiral, Carlos squeezes his shoulders. “I appreciate you apologizing for it — maybe even facing consequences TK and I will decide on — but you don’t have to worry about forgiveness. You have it.”

Jonah wipes at his eyes, an orange plastic ring catching the next tear he doesn’t hold back. “So, is this where you tell me to do the same? Be the bigger person and forgive Enzo? That it will be like it was for abuelo and you? Because I don’t—I don’t know if I can.”

“I didn’t tell you this so you would feel guilty,” Carlos explains past the guilt of his shared past burdening others. “Whatever you feel about Enzo right now has its place. I just wanted to give you some perspective on how feelings can change. Whether you stay angry at him or forgive him, that’s something you have to decide for yourself,” Carlos says, but as soon as he hears himself, adds, “But your brother and I, or Mrs. Lee, are always happy to talk to you about it.”

Jonah nibbles at his bottom lip, chewing on what must be a million thoughts.

Even after the adoption was through, TK’s worries about him not having his own space in the loft had never quite ceased. Only for them to move and realize that Jonah didn’t like being in his big bedroom full of toys. He didn’t like a bigger bed. Or a closed door. Not until recently.

But there are different ways to be alone, and Carlos knows that intimately. “You don’t have to be alone with your emotions.”

Brown eyes look up at him through now-damp bangs. “I know.”

Carlos only starts the car back up when the only sign of Jonah’s distress is the familiar concert of rings and rattling chains on jeans. They don’t talk about Enzo during the last mile home. They don’t talk about Gabriel either. It’s a blissful stretch that feels like the rising vapor of a sun drying out the remnants of a storm. Especially when Carlos puts on the family playlist and skips two songs until one of TK’s comes on because that man refuses to have ‘sad car music’.

Not too much later, they turn into the driveway with the porch light welcoming them, a skeletal shadow considering them from behind the pale curtains of the kitchen window. The garage door folds open slowly and they park next to the electric van TK will drive until they give it to  Jonah when he turns sixteen. He doesn’t know that yet.

They both stay seated for a while, staring out at the metal shelves with neatly stacked boxes that house some of Jonah’s old toys, some of Carlos’ old toys, his mother insisted she didn’t have space for anymore, and lots of TK’s trinkets accumulated over the years. There’s also a bunch of Enzo’s, and Gwyn’s, and Gabriel’s things that they couldn’t bear throwing away or putting up.

Any second, he thinks Jonah will break the silence again, but he doesn’t. Instead, his breath is harsh like an old train’s exhaust, the bobbing knee like a morse code of anxiety. Seeing the fist in Jonah’s lap, Carlos cups it again.

Carlos takes a breath. “Do you want me to tell TK or do you want to do it?”

“Can I do it alone? Just him and me?”

It’s a drop of acid in a wound, but it aches a little less today like Jonah’s earlier words build a protective layer over it.

“Sure,” Carlos says as confidently as he can.

Jonah undoes the seatbelt but hesitates with one hand on the door handle. He stays in the car. “Can I leave out the alcohol?” he asks. “He’ll freak out, and worry, and get quiet. Universe-away kind of quiet.” His voice becomes strained, “Please?”

There were a lot of hard things he had to say tonight, the hardest he thought was behind them. But the duty never ends. “No, we can’t,” Carlos replies softly. “Sorry. I won’t keep secrets from him.”

“What about video games, or me kissing Helen? You promised to keep those a secret.”

The reminder loosens some of the tightness in Carlos’ chest. See, those are the things Jonah keeps secret, so innocent Carlos had felt even giddier to be the keeper of them. 

“And I did,” Carlos assures him, hand to his chest. “You can always come to me with secrets like that and trust that I won’t tell. Just like I trust you not to tell TK about me letting you stay up to watch your show every Wednesday or about hiding his lizard print shirts in the basement.”

It gets the tiniest of smiles out of Jonah. “Yeah, you know I will cap that. It’s for his own good not to wear those out.” His eyes sparkle in the warm, overhead light of the car. “See, that’s a moment where we should trust our guts and help people help themselves.”

An agreement exchanged in grins, before Carlos has to put back his responsible dad hat on again. “But you know tonight isn’t one of those times I can keep a secret. This is serious.”

Jonah’s smile falls. “I didn’t even have a single sip. Please, I don’t think we should worry him over this.”

He knows he’s right. There have been plenty of times over the years where Carlos found TK awake, standing in Jonah’s doorway biting his thumbnail ever shorter because one worry or another kept him up. In no universe will TK be okay with Jonah already being around alcohol, though he isn’t sure TK wouldn’t be proud that Jonah didn’t have any.

Carlos rubs Jonah’s shoulder, palm over the tear in the sweater; and makes a decision. 

“Your brother thinks the world of you. If you say you didn’t drink, he’ll believe you. And if he gets upset about this, then it's not your role to take care of him, but mine.”

Jonah pokes his tongue into the corner of his mouth. “I don’t want you two to fight.”

Fondness seeps through his ribs as his kid reminds him time and time again that things change, but his good heart doesn’t. 

“We won’t fight. But if we did,” Carlos reaches out to ruffle Jonah’s hair, “you’d have to leave that to us, too, mijo.”

Carlos knows he’s done right when Jonah’s tightly wound body relaxes. He looks younger again, a toddler in an oddly large body.

Jonah’s answer is the plop of a forehead onto his shoulder, brief but familiar. “Thanks. For everything.”

Tight-throated, Carlos manages another, “Of course.” Jonah doesn’t like kisses on his head by either TK or him, so Carlos once again ruffles the back of his hair instead. Gabriel would always give two pats to Carlos’ back. “I’ll always be there when you need me.”

Jonah’s lips curl up, and he looks just like when he was four years old, finding any loophole in their rules, finding a way to play with their words. “So next time I get arrested—”

Carlos huffs and shakes his head. The same answer his brother would have given. 

“Don’t push it.”

They find TK pacing by the steps that face the front door, one arm curled deeply over his chest, the other around his phone. He stops as soon as they enter. Something else moves though, flinging right at them at the speed of light. Jonah instantly crouches down to catch the racing shadow before it can go ahead to bite into his shoe laces. He picks the bat-like creature up, cradling the bag of skin and bones like it's a baby and presses a kiss to the wrinkled head that Carlos still struggles to see as a cat’s.

They took in the devon rex cat from a shelter two years ago, because of course Carlos was cursed with not just one but two brothers liking hairless beasts. Now they have a lizard in a terrarium that takes up half the living room and a cat that looks like a wrinkled ballsack and feels all bones whenever Carlos dares to pet it. Choc-Chip Pancake, aka Chippy, aka Pancake, aka Short Stack (as Carlos tends to call her) has as many names as this family has on the post box — and is the farthest from sweet-looking you could get. She’s not a sphinx, not hairless, but is covered in gray fuzz that gets near black around her face, but does nothing to make her appear any less bat-like. Short Stack purrs sweetly in Jonah’s arms and licks TK’s hair when he gets sad. And maybe, like Lou and his replacements, Carlos doesn’t completely hate the furless pet as much as he initially thought.

“They just walked in, Dad,” TK says into his phone, before looking up to scan his boys from head to toe like they returned from battle. His shoulders drop when he doesn’t find wounds. “Yep. All in one piece…Okay…I will. Of course he will. You know how teenagers are. Yes. Okay. Okay, Dad. Love you too, bye.”

Carlos is first to approach him, hand on TK’s hip to calm him, lips pressing to his cheeks so he can receive the same level of comfort. “Hey.”

TK’s eyes still won’t rest, going back and forth between them even as he returns the ghost of a kiss. Meanwhile, Jonah sways in place, all attention on Short Stack. Before he can take the no-fur bundle further than a few steps, TK stops him.

“Wait, where are you going? What is even going on? Why aren’t you at Finn’s? Did you ask Carlos to come pick you up? Are you not feeling well?”

Jonah doesn’t meet TK’s eyes by giving the meowing cat another kiss to her head wrinkles. “I was just gonna make sure Chippy’s water bowl is filled up.”

TK looks to Carlos like he can make sense of how that answered any of his questions. There is no way that Carlos’ face can encompass any answers either.

“I will leave you two to talk,” Carlos decides to say.

“Babe?”

Carlos pulls an apologetic face and pats TK’s hip before he turns to the stairs. It’s a little cowardly, but then Carlos promised Jonah the chance to confess it all.

It’s in the shower where everything catches up with Carlos. There is no relaxing under the warm pelt he dials hotter and hotter, no comfort in the fuzzy bath robe. He finds himself in a similar limbo TK must have been in before as he halts in the middle of their bedroom. He sits on the edge of the bed at first.

When that makes his anxiety grow more restless, he gets up, brushes the dent from their bed, then sinks to his knees next to it. Folding his hands on the edge of it, he rests his head against them like he was taught to as a little boy. Before bed, his family would pray. The words weren’t his own for a long time, but a repetition of what he’d heard his mother wish for. Health and happiness for our family, peace on Earth. He remembers the jolt of excitement the first night he was naughty and asked God for a Tamagotchi. The guilt of when he had to fend off the true wishes of his heart, before he would stop altogether.

No prayer comes tonight. The words stay all up in his head, a big jumble of everything he must have done wrong. The confession he should have left up to a priest or the folds of his own hands instead of condensing it for his kid, making sense of it as he talked. They are joined by the deep sense of guilt when he thinks TK had Owen to call tonight, while he doesn’t even have the strength to talk to the ghost of his father to apologize.

TK won’t find him like this, or see the dents from the rug on his knees because they have faded by the time he comes up to their bedroom. By then, Carlos has moved on to the dresser, not knowing what he was doing here until he had one loose sock in his hand and folded it into the fitting one and continued.

Everything used to be so neatly sorted, their loft curated to avoid clutter. Jonah is long past a million toys spilling into every room, they have so much more space since moving into a two story house on the outskirts of Austin. And yet, everything seems fuller. From the sock drawer to their kitchen cabinets and the bookshelves. Everything is fuller since Jonah came into their life. Carlos never wants to go back to a closet he could barely fill by himself, never wants to go back to the mint conditions of their loft.

TK pads over to him, bare feet on wooden floors, and curls into Carlos’ side. Carlos lifts his arm before he even thinks about doing so, finds some of the nerves relieved from tension as soon as TK’s head finds its place on his collarbone.

“Hi,” Carlos whispers, pressing a kiss to TK’s hairline.

TK runs his palm down Carlos’ spine and up to soothe and self-soothe. “Hey, baby.”

His voice is as tired as Carlos’ bones.

“Is Jonah in bed?” 

TK nods against the fabric of Carlos’ bathrobe before he takes a step back to pull off his own shirt with a sure grip. He’s leaner these days, on a new routine with the softball team again, with a bruised h

ip to prove it. Carlos ghosts a hand over it as TK kicks off his pants too.

They sink into the safety of a thick blanket and a large mattress, when Carlos finally dares to ask: “How did it go?” 

TK heaves a breath. The green of his eyes appears darker and Carlos knows it’s not from the soft light of the bedside table lamp. His leg slips between Carlos’, the ever-cold toes wiggling into the warmth that Carlos gives without complaint today. Carlos slides closer on the mattress, hand cupping TK’s throat because he likes to feel the life in it that he hopes to shield. And he loves how it never fails to take the edge off of TK’s shoulders.

“Ugh, I thought we’d be safe from ‘when did he even get this old’ shit,” TK says, “But…when did he get this old?”

“Right?”

“I fear every day is a midlife crisis when you’re a parent.”

It makes Carlos smile and thumb the little gray bits on TK’s jaw, a patchwork of different tones. It’s more noticeable on his own these days, the white temples on black hair something he had to accept begrudgingly.

“Saving our kid from something going on his permanent record was certainly not on my bingo card.”

Carlos startles when TK’s snorted breath meets his shoulder. “I know I should be more upset, but we truly do have a nerdy kid,” TK laughs. “Star gazing with the pals. Wine coolers he didn’t even drink. Arrested for not even managing to steal a stop sign!”

A million ways this could have gone wrong, a million things Carlos has seen end with flashing marine-maroon lights for another reason, so it’s only when TK laughs that he sees beyond the parental duty and worry. There might be humor in it if he considers it, but he isn’t amused.

“Wait, you actually think this is funny?” Carlos asks.

TK sobers up somewhat, but mirth continues to dance in the corners of his eyes as he rubs Carlos’ chest. “Babe, I did worse things before I was thirteen.”

“Yes, and that wasn’t something you are proud of or would wish for your brother.”

A familiar curtain washes over TK, ease replaced with old aches he had to hide for so long. It instantly scares Carlos to see.

 “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

The moment passes, and instead of a snapped reply, TK scooches closer until his lips meet Carlos’ collarbone. “No, you’re right.”

“No, I shouldn’t have said it like it was something you need to be ashamed of. I was just thrown because I thought that’s why you would take this more seriously,” Carlos says, searching for the husband he expected to have to talk down instead of the one who laughed. “He trespassed in Texas. You know how that could have ended. People could have gotten into accidents if they managed to take the stop sign. His friends got drunk.”

It’s like he is talking to Jonah all over again, feeling like he has to convince someone to join him in his rational outrage.

Thankfully, TK does mirror him in severity. His head lands in the dip between their pillows until Carlos leans back so they can both share his as his arms fold all around TK’s shoulders. “I don’t want to take this too lightly. Maybe I am though.” TK stops, gathers wisdom from the hollow of Carlos’ throat  as he thinks. “I don’t know how I would have felt if he had come home drunk. I really don’t. I think I would have been alarmed, because alcohol is the first thing I tried too. I puked up Smirnoff Ice the night after my bar mitzvah.” Carlos hooks his thumb under the silver necklace at TK’s nape until he relaxes more. 

“But…but it’s Jonah,” TK emphasizes, eyes meeting Carlos’. “I was always open about my past as much as I could be, he knows I’m a sponsor. We explained his predisposition for addiction too and told him he could come to us with any questions or if he ever wanted to try. So the fact that he didn’t even try a sip makes so much sense to me. It’s just so like him.”

It’s something Carlos didn’t hear from Jonah. It makes sense that they each get fragments of the night the other doesn’t and puzzle them together the way parenthood has schooled them in by now.

“And the other things he did?” Carlos pries. “That’s the Jonah you recognize?”

TK sighs. Like brother, like brother. “No, no, you’re right. Sorry. I guess I had a bunch of time to imagine the worst when you told me you were coming, so at least some of it felt like a relief.” His leg trembles a bit between Carlos’ so he clamps it down into rest. 

TK splays a hand over his eyes. “Ha, it’s funny how I thought I’d have to be prepared to not lose it if he ever came home under the influence, only to take that and everything else too lightly now when it came close.”

As the initial confusion ebbs, as the permanent sense of duty for keeping TK’s heart safe isn’t needed, it allows Carlos to see it more clearly. TK’s teenage years had been a tapestry of excess, of abandonment and wrong friends and the kind of stories other people would envy him for at the time. Maybe even to this day, if TK’s life hadn’t slipped. A Manhattan glitter party story only stays funny if TK doesn’t tell the part where he saw a friend nearly topple over the balcony. Being invited to an A-list celebrity’s apartment after a fake ID got him into a gay club was only funny if TK didn’t add that he was sixteen at the time and the actor’s age and pills he’d left with matched the number forty.

If there are pieces of TK’s past left to unveil, Carlos has no idea of them, but equally no longer fears and yearns to know them. There is plenty TK has bared. If all memories failed, these are the ones Carlos has felt imbedded with and indebted to preserve in his mind. Not because they define TK, but because the honor to hear them and be able to hug TK and try to kiss a past version of him better is one he doesn’t take lightly.

That’s how TK must have heard Jonah's night as a success story. His brother snuck out with friends, sure, but he did it in a relatively safe and ritzy suburban neighborhood and ultimately didn’t give into peer pressure. Not to the one TK’s mind will always worry about most. What Carlos’ anxiety heard from start to finish were the almosts.

It’s a familiar division between them, one of them spiraling, the other holding ship. Carlos hates both for different reasons. Leaving the safety of TK’s neck, Carlos grasps the hand with TK’s wedding ring with his own. Something they will always be equal in. 

“What exactly did he share with you?”

A lot of what they heard is the same, but that doesn’t surprise Carlos. Jonah was right about one thing: he isn’t prone to lying, and even when he does, it’s too easy to see through. 

“I’m pretty sure I completely blanked on what to say half the time and messed him up with the other half, ” TK concludes.

As much as it weighs him down, it helps to snuggle in close and hear it all back from TK, because through any diversion they have as takeaway, they find themselves sliding into the same spike they get hooked on.

Carlos strokes a thumb over the edge of TK’s jaw. “Can’t have been worse than what I said.”

TK rolls his eyes.

“What?”

“Are you kidding?” TK murmurs. “We both know that you’re the only one in this family that has a chance of finding the right words when one of us spirals.”

There are plenty of examples Carlos could use to contradict that, all the little and big fights erupting from poorly chosen words over the years.

The bottom dropped open when he realized no amount of research and no words or hugs would help TK as well as a sponsor could. The flood came in when he realized no amount of research and no words or hugs would help Jonah navigate loss and trauma as well as a professional therapist could, and how even that wouldn't be a healing potion.

“I told him about my dad,” Carlos confesses, even as the lump returns. It’s a tiny bit smaller this time.

“You did?” TK asks softly, hand coming up to grip Carlos’ wrist, his own lifeline thrumming between bones. “What exactly?”

“That…that I held a grudge for the longest time he was alive. That I came around to it. That raising him helped with that.” Carlos pushes his jaw back and forth. He is so tired of his emotions today. “Pretty sure I trauma-dumped on our kid.”

“Nonsense.” TK’s eyes glisten, wet as the lips he presses to Carlos’ knuckles. “As much as we cry about him still being our baby, he has grown up. I’m sure he appreciated you opening up like this.”

There is nothing Carlos can reply. He musters up a smile though, thankful to know that TK’s support is unfailing whether he deserves it or not.

“Speaking of fathers though,” TK says, “we both think tonight had something to do with how he feels about Enzo, right?”

It was a matter of time when they got to this point, but Carlos finds himself still unable to have put all of his thoughts into order.

“It’s at least likely a big factor.” 

TK has taken to playing with the cross around Carlos’ neck, now spins it around his finger. When his mouth opens and closes without an answer, Carlos braves asking, “What do you think? How should we go about this?”

TK inhales deeply and flips onto his back. Carlos’ hand instantly follows up to cover his heart, hating the inches of distance it created.

“I guess…” TK swallows. “I mean if he’s this angry at Enzo, we have to accept it. We said from the beginning we would take his lead on this. And, well, I can’t blame him, can I? The day Enzo got arrested or when he nearly shipped Jonah off without considering us, I hated him a little too.”

Carlos swallows ‘don't forget he tried to implicate you too’ as well as the tack stuck in him over the time he nearly lost TK to poor communication over this. Nearly missed out on the family they are now.

“He told me someone at school bullied him for it too,” Carlos says. “That he did his research.”

“I know.”

“We should probably go over it again with him, tell him what we know of what happened and how newspapers portray one version of events.”

TK twists his body back to drape against him, a watery sheen over his eyes. Hands fold together, their wedding rings touching, the warmth of their skin making it seem like the gold could fuse after all. “I appreciate you so much.”

Carlos’ heart jumps. “Why?”

“Because you’d have every right to be angry at me for putting Jonah through this. I know you’re not exactly a fan of Enzo—” TK shuts Carlos’ protests up with a brief kiss. “I’m too tired to argue when we both know I’m right.”

Carlos would very much like to argue, but this is a can of worms they had to get back to eventually. It had already been brought up a few months ago.

“This is the second time Jonah pretended to be sick for the visit,” TK had murmured when Jonah had left the breakfast table they had set early for the long drive out to Seagoville. “At what point do we need to tell him that he can’t keep avoiding it?”

Carlos had gripped his coffee mug, hoping that silence would be better than his truth. Of course, TK had turned his head to him, eyebrows set deep in a frown. 

“You think we should let him.”

It wasn’t a question. As little as Carlos had shared about his thoughts on Enzo, not wanting to upset the bit of fondness TK had for what little he had left of family, his husband knew him too well. 

“I think we always were prepared for Jonah to make this decision,” Carlos answered diplomatically. “You know how upset he got when he was little.”

“Yeah and we stopped going for two years and that also wasn’t good for him. That’s why we got professional help, and went back when he expressed the wish to see Enzo again.” TK’s shoulders dropped, Carlos’ heart with it. “I’m not saying he has to go. I would never pressure him. I simply want him to tell us if there’s a reason for it.”

“I know.”

“They’re family. I’m afraid someday, Jonah will regret giving up on that. Enzo really loves him. And it’s not like he has a lot of joy in prison besides our visits—”

La familia es lo primero. Blood is thicker than water. But: “Enzo is an adult man who faces the consequences of his own actions.”

“So does Jonah!”

They stopped the discussion right there, both at a brink that would have forced change they couldn’t decide on by themselves, and secretly relieved for it.

“Regardless of how I feel about Enzo—” Carlos drawls, fishing for the best way to say what he has to in slowness. “—we both agreed that it would be good for Jonah to keep in contact with his biological father for as long as he wanted to. We had family therapy just for that. We made sure no one at the prison made him uncomfortable, and we took up all these rituals so he would feel better about it. We did what we could. Both of us.”

He can watch as TK’s heart breaks, a projector in his eyes. “But we also went because I have all these great memories of Enzo. I wanted Jonah to have his family, to learn where his roots are. I wanted him to know more about mom.” TK squeezes his eyes shut against his own grief, while Carlos squeezes him tighter. “But I didn’t do a good enough job to keep Jonah’s heart safe. I should have accepted him not wanting to visit Enzo the first time he pretended to have a stomach ache.”

“We couldn’t be sure he was lying. He gets a nervous stomach from anything.”

“Well…yeah. No one will forget the Birthday Cake Armageddon of 2027,” TK says, managing a small smile that flickers off as quickly as the twisting stomach had after a few bites of a bacteria-ridden firetruck cake. “But this wasn’t…you don’t have to be on my side in this case. I know I have my own issues, but I shouldn’t have allowed them to put off something that hurt Jonah.”

Something they had to get used to with Jonah, besides the new chaos, the new routine, the new quiet sex and hushed words, was having another person to put first. And to accept that meaning they themselves and the other would come second.

“You could say the same about me and how late we realized how much Día de los Muertos weighed him down. Or for how long I tried to get him to ride a bike before I understood he only did it because he thought he had to.” Carlos’ head nearly crashes into TK’s as they both lean in simultaneously. It brings his lips closer to TK’s cheek too though, so he doesn’t mind. “Again, you aren’t the only parent here, we don’t make these decisions alone. So come on, blame me too.”

“No,” TK murmurs into Carlos’ chest, some life back in his voice. 

“Say it. Say you blame me.”

“No. No, you’re perfect.” TK looks up through his eyelashes. “Frankly? It’s a bit annoying.”

Carlos rolls his eyes and steals a kiss. “Liar. I will use that against you next time you tell me I’m not strict enough about bed times.” 

“No, okay you definitely aren’t!” TK says, playfully fired up. “You made me read all these books on being gentle parents and health for the developing mind. It’s all muddled up here,” TK points to his own head. “Only to become the one who folds in instantly when Jojo bats his eyes."

Carlos smiles, pulling TK’s hand up to kiss his knuckles. “Fair. So we agree, neither of us is perfect.”

When TK buries down in a mood, it takes a bit to draw him out. Today, no banter, no soft touch manages it. Carlos has tomorrow to try again.

“I just wish I would do a bit better, you know?” TK insists, releasing his lips from sharp teeth. “I thought if we were prepared, if we read up and sought out help, if we had this village of family and friends to help raise him I would…I don’t know. Be a good brother at least. Not exactly a perfect replacement dad but…” TK nuzzles his cheek in between Carlos’ pecs. “Maybe I was relieved at first, because if he had come home the way I did when I was his age, I probably would have still felt as out of my depth as my parents did with me.”

Their bed is an equalizer: one shared mattress and blanket, one fitted sheet. So is parenthood.

All Carlos can do is hold TK tightly as he listens. TK clutches his pendant. Carlos knows the weight of it must be as heavy as the cross around his neck, as uplifting as it is too.

“I constantly wonder how—” TK clears his throat. “How mom would’ve raised him, you know? How Enzo might have. My parents loved me when I made their life a living nightmare but they also…could be so distant. Sometimes, I felt like I had no family at all. And I never want Jonah to feel like that.”

Almost twenty years and Carlos has heard all these memories in different ways, different emotions and lenses, but ultimately they all accumulate to one narrative TK has of himself as the flaw in a system. Even when he admits some shared responsibility, TK’s compassion usually tips the scale toward his own faults, so it’s surprising to hear the edge of bitterness toward his parents, and no surprise he leaves it at that. 

Carlos undeniably houses envy for a dad as affectionate as Owen or someone as fierce as Gwyn had been. Parents who were in their kid’s corner, no matter what, when Carlos had been so convinced his own parents couldn’t even handle him holding a boy’s hand. Carlos also houses resentment over every way Owen, Gwyn and Enzo hurt TK into the deep furrows only parents leave behind. 

He knows TK feels similarly towards Carlos’ parents, envies the community and stability of the Reyes family, but doesn’t like the unspoken policy of shoving things under the carpet.

The dichotomy goes unsaid most days, is uncomfortable and reassuring all at once to be known and cherished enough to be angry at the other’s family and wish for it all the same.

“First--” Carlos starts, stroking TK’s cheek and tilting his chin up, “--you were never hard to love. Not ever. But I’m sorry you felt lonely sometimes.”

TK clicks his tongue, voice nasally with tears. His finger feebly pokes Carlos’ chest. “Yeah sorry. I know, I know, no negative self-talk. But I can't really say I wasn’t a handful.”

“If you have compassion for your parents now, you should have the same for yourself.”

“Ugh. Was it a mistake to get us all into therapy?” TK jokes, his nose wrinkling in laughter that Carlos finds as adorable as the permanent wrinkles settled into the corner of his husband’s eyes.

Carlos can rest his case, knowing that TK has gotten so much gentler with himself and his past. He still kisses the remaining clutches of old demons away by pressing his lips to the tip of TK’s nose.

“And second,” Carlos concludes, “it’s probably inevitable to become at least somewhat like our parents, but I doubt Jonah feels anything but smothered by us.”

TK fondly rolls his eyes. “By you, maybe.”

“The thing is,” Carlos continues, having braved vulnerability for his kid and now his husband instead of swerving off. “When I reflected on my dad today, one of the first things I thought about was how I also have some of his good qualities.”

TK regards him, eyes roaming over what feels like Carlos’ genes. TK is the only one who seems to look into Carlos’ past and believes to see the future too.

“Of course you do,” TK says softly, taking the wind and sailing with it because either of them finds it easier to navigate towards compassion for the other. He cups Carlos’ cheek. “There is so much of your father’s pride and dry pragmatism in you. Jonah really needs levelheaded advice like that. There is a reason that he often comes to you when he needs calmness. It’s what I was drawn to from the beginning as well.” TK gives him a brief kiss. “And I see so much of your mother in the way you are with Jonah, how you can easily banter with him, but also how warm and affectionate you are.”

Niño de mamá. There were times it was said to shame Carlos, or at least said with laughter that filtered down into it. TK never said it with anything but admiration. I promise to take care of your heart as if it was my very own - TK does more than that. He traverses Carlos’ heart, inside and out, leaving little footprints Carlos feels known through.

Carlos brings their joined hands in between their chests and presses close enough to trap them there. “And you don’t believe the same things about yourself?” Carlos asks gently. “I can see how Gwyn could be distant, but I also see her tenacity in you. You love Jonah like she would have. So fiercely, he will never have to worry about you not being on his side. If you don’t believe me, just think about how much the PTA fears you.” 

It forces a laugh out of TK that fills Carlos’ stomach with butterflies only his husband can recharge. Carlos brings his forehead against TK’s, needing to be ever closer. “You’ve set such a great example for Jonah for how important it is to be considerate and compassionate to everyone, how to be an everyday hero. Why else would he take on all the blame for getting the alcohol and being the only one caught? All very much an Owen and TK Strand classic.” 

TK chuckles wetly. Nudging Carlos' chest with their fused hands, he says, “See? You have a way with words.”

“Got that from my sisters, maybe?”

TK shakes his head, the little bumps of their eyebrows rubbing in. “I believe that is a Carlos Tomás Reyes special.”

“We’re pulling out middle names now, Kennedy?”

“Ew, stop.” 

TK presses his smiling lips onto Carlos’. There are a lot of things that feel like coming home to him, but this is the thing Carlos’ bones truly and fully feel welcomed by.

“We will have a bit more clarity on this when all of us have had some sleep,” Carlos decides when TK yawns right into his mouth. It’s a common occurrence, and Carlos finds it equally adorable and off-putting. 

“Hmhm.” TK looks at him through slanted eyes. “We’ll be the strictest gentle parents ever. We’re gonna figure the thing with Enzo out…and stuff.”

“And stuff,” Carlos repeats with a smile, ever fond of how, despite all their years together, a sleepy TK never fails to be adorable. “Did you think of what Jonah’s punishment will be?”

TK peels his eyes back open. Yawns again. “Your turn to be inventive with not punishments, but teaching moments. Remember, we said you had to be the bad cop this time?”

Carlos pulls a face, mostly for theatrics. “I miss the times when his ‘teaching moments’ could be no chocolate chips on his pancakes.”

“Those were the days.”

“Lawn mowing duty?”

“Nah,” TK says, “he weirdly likes doing that.”

“For liking it, he’s not exactly proactive about it,” Carlos muses and TK nods sagely. “We could ask the Wrights if they need the boys to scrub the pool? After all, they snuck out of their house.”

Stormclouds gather over TK’s face again. “Don’t worry, Finn’s parents are the first call I plan to make tomorrow, because how the fuck did they not notice?” He thinks, then goes, “But no to the pool thing. I don’t like our kid near those chemicals. Or slippery surfaces.”

The idea of Jonah in the hospital again is an instant freeze. Once was enough. “True.”

“Maybe…” TK starts.

“Maybe…”

“I mean, he already faced pretty big consequences if we consider him being arrested and getting told off by both of us,” TK slurs. “Oh, you’ll have to tell me the officer’s name, by the way, and if everything he did was legal. I did not like how Jonah’s wrists looked.”

Carlos exhales and nods. “Way ahead of you.”

Sometimes, the easy way out is allowed after they all walked the hard roads. 

Before they fall asleep, TK insists on being the big spoon ‘for doing a lot of the hard work today’ and Carlos has no reason to fight this. Usually, the warmth in his back, the breath on his nape, the way TK’s hand folds over him, are sure ways to drag him under. Tonight, comfort leeches out but doesn’t manage to hold a candle against the smoke ahead.

There is pain and resentment growing in his kid and he has no way of fixing it. Someone will have to inform Enzo, and Carlos knows he will have to fight TK over it because he will want to be a martyr, but Carlos will never stop wanting to wrap TK’s heart up first. Jonah is out of the picture. Until they find a way to talk about it as a family and help Jonah untangle his feelings about Enzo, they won’t force contact. Carlos doesn’t know what he’d do if Enzo called or sent them a letter. Would he tell Jonah? Would that hurt him more? He couldn’t hide it either, but his instinct would be to keep it safe but locked away until Jonah was ready. That’s not a good idea either—

Carlos’ thoughts come to a halt at the edge of TK’s lips. They press to the clasp of his necklace, before TK’s nose follows the dip of his spine up to his hair.

“I can hear you thinking, husband,” TK mumbles.

Carlos’ twists his neck, only managing to see the moon painted on the ceiling. He should tell TK to go back to sleep, knowing that TK at least dozed off because otherwise he would have twitched and twisted and turned the past hour or so. But the idea of staying with these thoughts the entire night is too lonely to bear.

“Do you want a snack?”

It’s how they find themselves in fuzzy bath robes that Owen had given them last year, sneaking down the stairs that Carlos pats his past self on the back for stabilizing. It’s halfway down them, past the wall of endless photos of everyone they consider family, that a noise makes Carlos stop. TK curses when he stumbles into him.

Half his life in law enforcement has given Carlos a sixth sense of awareness — but he relaxes when the sounds translate into familiarity. Short Stack greets them at the bottom of the stairs, only her green eyes visible in the dark until her mouth opens to sharp teeth and the near inaudible meow that is part of her creature-dom. TK scratches behind her papery ears before she leads them to the kitchen to where the next noise crashes into the nightly silence. To where her loyalty lies.

Jonah is illuminated by the refrigerator light, half his hair falling out of a bun on top of his head, wearing a faded Phoebe Bridgers shirt and long cartoon boxer shorts. When TK flips on the kitchen light, Jonah flinches and turns to them, quickly bringing the bottle of orange juice from his mouth. Wiping his mouth with the back of his wrist, he says, “Uhm…I’ll pick up a new bottle tomorrow.”

The digital clock on the oven reads 2:39 and TK looks at him with a fondness that he knows must match his own.

“I’ll make sandwiches,” Carlos decides. 

He doesn’t speak as the quiet of the night and tranquility slowly fall away. Jonah kicks his legs back and forth on the kitchen stool because he knows not to push it by jumping on the counter tonight. TK hands Carlos cold cuts and cheese from the fridge while he tells them about Owen’s newest adventures in New York. No one pulls out a phone tonight, Jonah doesn’t take his sandwich up to eat it in his room. 

3 AM has seen this family in this kitchen many times in as many constellations, but something about the heft of the night forces them even closer together in it. Jonah is fifteen now, and if Carlos squints, maybe he can see the hint of stubble on his upper lip after all. He is fifteen and doesn’t run up to hug them like he used to, doesn’t tell them goodnight most nights, needs a lot less supervision and more all at once.

He is fifteen, and when Carlos and TK have settled on the couch, Jonah rushes back to the kitchen to add something to his sandwich. When he returns, he doesn’t take the edge of their lounger, but stops before them before taking what looks like courage to plop between them. They have to scooch to allow him in their midst, this gangly almost-grown-up that digs his elbow into Carlos’ ribs before he settles and then bounces his leg against TK’s for the remainder of the night.

TK puts on a documentary about chipmunks that no one takes issue with. From time to time, Jonah glances up at them, wetting his lips, opening his mouth. His hands will ball up around the words he can’t form. Carlos will shift then, TK will point something out on the screen, until Jonah settles. They’ve all apologized enough for one night. Another one would only hurt all of them.

The latest distraction technique emerges when TK steals Jonah’s half-eaten sandwich and takes a big bite. They both watch as his self-sufficient grin turns into a look of horror.

“What the hell did you put on your sandwich? Is that—”

“Raspberry jam.”

TK’s features never settle into acceptance as he chews but he gives Carlos a look of disbelief over Jonah’s head. 

“Raspberry jam with ham, gouda, honey mustard and pickles?” Carlos asks carefully. “Who taught you that culinary nightmare?”

Jonah shrugs, then takes a bite from where TK had left a big dent. “Dunno. Tried it one day and liked it. The extra little seeds in there make it fun to eat.”

Well, this is your kid, TK’s gaze says, and Carlos knows his own must echo the sentiment. This is your kid. And mine.

And all his own.