It took forever to get through the houses. Joey had a goofy grin on his face the whole time. On anyone else, it would have be obvious he’d just had a killer orgasm, but since Joey pretty much always looked like he had just gotten laid, no one notices.

Liam managed to avoid any long conversations, getting away with dispensing hugs and general holiday greetings. The pitying looks got more intense when they made it back to the O’Reilly house. It was evident from the looks on some people’s faces that they had heard the news.

To Liam’s surprise, most of the comments were brief and along the lines of how much the situation sucks. No one blamed him—to his face anyway.

What surprised him even more was the way he leaped to Michelle’s defense when Mrs. Kelly, the meanest gossip on the block, starting whispering to him conspiratorially about how Michelle had probably been sleeping with half the neighborhood.

“How do we know the baby is even Nico’s?” she stage-whispered with a self-satisfied smirk. “That girl doesn’t deserve you.”

It hit Liam that the old lady was right. Michelle hadn’t deserved him. But not in the way that Mrs. Kelly meant. She’d deserved better.

Liam bent down to loom over the smug woman. “You keep your mouth out of my business, you old hag. Michelle is a good woman, and she didn’t deserve the way I treated her. So, shut the fuck up about her being a slut.”

The last word rang out in the suddenly quiet room. Liam met Michelle’s eyes across the room. She stood in the middle of a gaggle of women that included Joey’s very pregnant older sister, Sophia.

The guests’ heads swiveled like they were at Wimbledon, and the only ones making any noise were the kids too young to pick up on the vibe of the room.

“I hate Tom Brady,” Bridget O’Reilly, Liam’s grandmother, said loudly into the silence. She had no problem being heard on a good day; when she raised her voice, everyone noticed. “He’s an overrated, overpaid ass.”

“Shut your trap, old woman,” Joey’s grandfather, Lorenzo Luciano, yelled back, shooing her opinion away with a swish of his hand. “Women don’t know crap about football. Why don’t you go into the kitchen and get me a cup of coffee?”

Liam could have kissed them.

The predicted arguments broke out in pockets of the room, allowing Liam and Michelle to break from their conversations and make their escape. Liam’s grandmother winked at him as he passed, and he gave her a quick kiss on her gray head.

He headed to the master bedroom where he knew Michelle would be.

Of all rooms in the house, his parents’ bedroom had changed the least over the years. The furniture had been his grandparents’. It was all indestructible solid wood. A quilt some long-dead aunt had given them for a wedding present still covered the bed. The obligatory portraits of John F. Kennedy and the Pope hung over the headboard. Liam had always thought that would be quite the boner-killer.

His mother kept reading glasses and a pile of romance books from the library on the nightstand by her side of the bed. The lamp was a porcelain shepherdess complete with a staff and a lamb at her feet.

His father favored word puzzles, and a stack of them teetered precariously on his nightstand. A pencil stuck out of the top book, marking the current puzzle. His uncle had teased his father once, telling Robert that if he were really good, he’d be using a pen.

Robert had looked over the edge of his reading glasses and said, “I’ve been wrong before, and I’ll be wrong again. No shame in a man fixing his mistakes.”

But the focus of the room was the dozens of framed photographs filling the walls and covering every flat surface. Candid snapshots from times long past shared space with more formal pictures of weddings and First Communions.

Great-grandparents in black and white stared down at him. Polaroids of his parents when they were young and newly in love were stuck in the frame of the mirror. And everywhere he looked were photos of him and his siblings and their friends.

A history of a lifetime of love. Of family.

“Hey,” he said, closing the door behind him.

“Hey,” Michelle replied, eyes darting between him and the floor.

She’d been crying, that much was obvious in her puffy eyelids and red eyes, but even that couldn’t distract from the sweetness of her face. Michelle had been a pretty girl who had grown into a beautiful woman. She and Liam had circled around each other since high school, both of them leaving their neighborhood for different reasons and returning when they could.

A few years ago, they’d run into each other at a mutual friend's house. Liam had just been starting to deal with the hip issues that would eventually end his career, she’d recently gotten out of a bad relationship, and they’d ended up together. There had never been mad passion between them, but it had been nice. Easy.

Which, come to think of it, wasn’t high praise for a relationship.

She wore black pants of some gauzy material that floated around her legs and a red sequined sweater that fit her more loosely than her normal shirts. If Liam looked closely, he could see the signs of pregnancy, a gentle swell of her belly that even the sweater couldn’t hide.

Well, now they’d both fucked Luciano men. He had no moral high ground here anymore, if he’d ever had it. There was nothing nice and easy about Joey. But the sex had been smoking hot.

“So, do you hate me?” Michelle asked after the silence stretched too long.

Liam sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “No. Of course not. But it was a bit of a fucking surprise, Shelly. I thought we were doing okay.”

She frowned and tilted her head, wrinkles forming between her eyes. “Is okay the best we should hope for?”

Oh. The final dregs of anger drained from Liam and with it what little filters he possessed. “Is it better than okay with Nico? Or was this,” he waved his hand in the general direction of her stomach, “just a one-time thing accident?”

She wrapped her arms around her stomach and straightened up, looking him in the eye. “Well, it wasn’t planned or anything.” She dropped her eyes to the ground. “But, no, it wasn’t just a one-time thing.”

Liam sat down heavily on his parents’ bed. “I feel like a fucking idiot. I suppose you two were laughing at me the whole time. Jesus, Michelle, why didn’t you say anything before fucking Christmas Eve?”

She walked over to him and hovered near the end of the bed. He made an impatient gesture, and she sat down next to him. “I was scared. Scared to hurt you. Scared you’d hate me. Scared everyone in your family and Nico’s family would think I was a slut. But it wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like?” Liam found himself curious. It wasn’t like Michelle to be so reckless. He’d always thought of her as calm, predictable. He’d completely taken her for granted.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. It was like…like being hit by a fuckin’ train, you know? I’ve known him all my life and just one day… A normal day. We were watching some old Sox game at his place, and he was telling me all the ways he screwed up, and just generally ranting like he does, you know?”

Liam knew. Nico talked a mile a minute normally, but get him started on baseball and you might as well just sit back for the ride. What he didn’t know was that Michelle had been hanging out at Nico’s apartment.

“And I got up to get a drink, and there was this whole fucking case of Dr. Pepper.” She shook her head incredulously, smiling to herself like she could see it all again perfectly.

“Nico doesn’t even like Dr. Pepper,” Liam said.

Michelle threw her hands up. “That’s what I said! And you know what he said?”

Liam shook his head.

“’Yeah, but you do.’ And that’s when I knew he loved me,” she said with a small shrug.

“And you love him?”

She blinked away sudden tears. “Yeah. I do. We were gonna tell you. I swear.”

“Coulda, woulda, shoulda,” he said, something his father said when his kids were making excuses for things they were honestly, truly, really going to do but hadn’t gotten around to. “What does he have that I don’t?”

“I don’t know, Lee.” She searched for the words to make him understand, and Liam found himself desperately hoping she found them.

“It’s not something he has; it’s how he makes me feel. He makes me feel crazy, wild.” She pushed her hand against her heart. “Like the future could be something bigger than I ever imagined. Do you know what I mean?”

He didn’t know what she meant. Not really. He’d seen nothing but his future narrowing over the last year. Everything he’d worked for, and everything he’d thought he was, had been taken from him. He was a sliver of the man he had been. And now even Michelle, this one remaining piece of the life he’d had, was gone.

But then he thought about Joey, so vulnerable and trusting. It stirred something wild and protective inside Liam. How hot could that fire burn, if they were different people in a different situation? “Maybe,” he said slowly.

“Do you hate me?” she asked quietly.

“I could never hate you. I love you.”

“You don’t. Not really.” She took his hand.

“That’s not true. I loved you more than I’ve ever loved anyone else.”

“I know. That’s what makes it even sadder. You deserve more than this. I deserve more than this bland, safe. Nico makes me crazy, but he loves me like crazy, too. There’s this passion between us.”

Liam jumped up. He’d heard enough. The pictures from the walls mocked him with promises of a love and family that he would never have. He was old and washed up.

He knew he should say something encouraging, wish her and Nico a healthy baby, but he was nowhere near being able to do that yet. Maybe he never would be.

She didn’t try to stop him as he left without a word.

* * *

Back in the living room, Joey sat on a wing chair tossing out presents to the gaggle of Luciano and O’Reilly cousins clustered at his feet.

It had struck Liam as so weird the first time someone had referred to this group of kids as ‘the cousins.’ The realization that he and his siblings had moved up a limb on the family tree, becoming the aunts and uncles, had been the first time he’d gotten a sense of this line of family stretching back into the past and forward into the future.

Joey met his eyes across the room, concern visible in his expression. When Liam gave him a thumbs up, his smile lit up the room. Liam couldn’t help smiling back.

“Hold on,” Joey said, bending over to dig through his sack of presents. He came back up with a small present. “This one’s for Uncle Liam,” he said tossing it in a gentle arc across the room.

Liam laughed at the wrapping Santa with a hockey stick and skates wrapping paper. “Should I open it now?” he asked.

“Of course!”

Of course, Joey would say that. Instant gratification was practically his middle name. Just to be difficult, Liam took his time peeling the tape up and keeping the paper intact. He was laughing before it was fully unwrapped.

He held the gift up for the room to see. It was a Funko Pop likeness of Joey in his Rangers uniform. The vinyl figure was about four inches high with solid black staring eyes and head way too big for its body, yet somehow it managed to convey the Joey-ness of Joey.

“I love it,” he said. “I’ll treasure it forever.”

“Put it on your dashboard so you think of me every time you drive,” Joey suggested.

“I’ll get right on it,” Liam said, trying to hold back a grin. When Joey met his eyes, fuck-me smirk firmly in place, Liam laughed at shook his head. He’d be thinking of Joey, alright, probably more than he should be.

* * *

Eventually, Liam managed to catch up to his mother as the crowd thinned out. There was a lot of cheek kissing as friends and family left clutching foil-wrapped leftovers and dragging exhausted, wired children behind them.

“Are we going to midnight mass?” Liam asked his mom.

“Nah,” his brother Jimmy said. “They canceled it. Too many people showing up drunk.”

“Really?” Liam said with a laugh.

“Hand to God,” Jimmy answered.

“I miss you, man,” Liam said, dropping an arm around his little brother’s shoulder.

Jimmy had headed overseas to play hockey. He loved the bigger ice rinks, the travel, and the whole experience of working and living outside the United States. He had a gorgeous Brazilian girlfriend he’d met in Portugal, and they already had one kid Liam had never met yet. Gabriella had taken the baby to Brazil with her for the holidays. Jimmy was flying out tomorrow to join them.

“I miss you, too. You should come over in the offseason. Hang out with me and Gabriella. You can meet your new nephew.”

“I will, I promise.”

The party wound down rapidly after that point until all that was left was Liam and his siblings and their significant others, and Joey and his siblings and their significant others. Liam loved it. He couldn’t remember the last time they had all been together. Maybe for Sophia’s wedding.

Even he and Michelle had reached a détente. Nico had come back from the corner bar sloshed and begging Liam for forgiveness and understanding. Liam had accepted his sloppy hugs and hugged him back, promising they would talk when Nico was sober.

“Come on,” Gina said, prying Nico off of Liam. “Let’s get you and the rest of the kids to bed.” Gina and her family lived in the Luciano’s house. Her husband, Carter, had put their two-year-old to bed hours ago and never returned. He’d probably fallen asleep as well. Poor Carter had never really adjusted to the chaos of the holidays, even after ten years as part of the family

“It’s way past bedtime, and Santa can’t come until you’re asleep,” Gina said, shepherding her two older kids out of the kitchen.

Angie took advantage of the moment to round up her troop as well. “Okay, terrors. Kiss your Nana and Grandpa goodnight. It’s time for bed.”

Nathan opened his mouth to argue. Angie stabbed a finger in his direction. “Kids who say they don’t believe in Santa don’t get presents,” she warned him before he could let out the breath he had just taken. He let it out with an exaggerated puff.

Liam stood in the doorway, leaning heavily against the doorjamb, a glass of wine in his hand, as he watched his mom and his brother Patrick load the dishwasher for the hundredth time that day.

He should be helping, but he couldn’t seem to make the effort. The day had caught up to him, and he was almost dizzy with exhaustion. What time was it back in Seattle? When was the last time he had slept in a bed?

Though Liam was reluctant to leave his and Joey’s siblings, he’d kill to get out of his suit and put on some sweats. Too bad moving seemed like too much effort.

The only ones left in the house were the people who were sleeping there, and a few of the Luciano siblings including Joey. They nibbled on leftovers as they wrapped up extra food and carried it downstairs to the overflow refrigerators.

Liam swiveled out of the way to let Joey pass him. As he brushed against Joey, Liam couldn’t help remembering those tiny briefs for the hundredth time. Joey was going to kill him simply by existing.

“Why don’t you go to bed?” His mother asked. “It’s been a long, trying day for you.”

“I don’t know where I’m sleeping,” Liam admitted. Obviously he couldn’t stay with Michelle now. They’d agreed they needed to have a serious talk, but neither one was ready to do that tonight.

Both houses were full with out of town friends and family. Maybe there was a stable he could sleep in.

“You can share with me,” Joey offered coming up behind Liam. He put a friendly hand on Liam’s shoulder. “I don’t mind. I’m used to sharing a room,” he added while his fingers did more than friendly things to the back of Liam’s neck.

Liam wasn’t sure if that was a great idea or a terrible idea. He wasn’t going to be able to take his hands off Joey. He was still raw from talking with Michelle and despite a prodigious effort, he hadn’t been able to drink it all away. Curse his Irish heritage and capacity for alcohol.

Joey reached over his shoulder and took his vinyl likeness from Liam’s hand. Liam hadn’t realized he’d been twirling it back and forth as he thought.

“Stay with me, Liam,” Joey said in a squeaky voice while making doll-Joey dance on Liam’s shoulders. “We can tell ghost stories and braid each other’s hair.”

Liam couldn’t help laughing even as he swatted Joey away. “You’re such a brat.” He laughed even harder at Joey’s unrepentant grin.

“I’m sure there’s a couch I can crash on,” Liam said more for appearances than any real desire to sleep on a couch even if it were a better idea. Selfishly, he wanted a little more time alone with Joey. Being around him felt good. He felt safe around the kid, like he could let his guard down, and that’s what why it was such a bad idea to be around him.

Liam couldn’t let himself get attached to Joey. He reminded himself, it had just been sex. Didn’t mean anything. The kid probably had someone waiting back home. Probably had a line of someones.

“Nonsense,” his mom said. “Stay with Joey. You boys have a lot to catch up on.”

“Yeah,” Joey said. “We have lost time to make up for.”

Liam was going to kill him. Or kiss him. The typical reaction to Joey.