In light of this new revelation, Pax cooled off hounding Cliff for a romp.

He pestered Cliff in other ways, though. He dragged him and the trio to the Saturday farmers’ market. Convinced them to picnic at Tunnel Beach. Practiced theatre with Bianca so loudly that Cliff had no choice but to stop studying and join in.

On Sunday night, after eating the finger-licking fish ’n’ chips Cliff had picked up for them, they played piano duets.

They sat next to each other on the small, thin-cushioned stool in his study. Luca and Henry stood behind them, taking turns dancing with Bianca.

They both wore T-shirts, and their arms brushed and bumped as they reached for each other’s end of the piano keys.

Pax sang. Cliff controlled the pedals, the press of their thighs solid and comfortable—even if it made his dick tickle.

A tickle that didn’t quite vanish and that he painfully ignored when he later followed Cliff into his bedroom.

Cliff stripped to his underwear and shoved on a nightshirt, and Pax trailed his fingers over Cliff’s shelves. He shifted the wooden ornaments of native birds until he saw the spines of the CDs for himself.

Just as Bianca had told him. Teenagers. Trust. Discipline. Acceptance.

“I thought you’d given up trying to sleep with me,” Cliff said, folding his glasses and sliding under the bedsheets.

“Disappointed?” Pax teased.

Cliff didn’t deign to answer. He stuffed a pillow between his back and the headboard and waited.

Pax hesitated. He knew why he was here, but he was more nervous about it than he thought he’d be. He glanced at the CDs and swallowed. “It’s Monday tomorrow.”

“Up early for our run, then. You’d better scurry off to bed.” Cliff sounded extra tight, but Pax sensed an echo of pain.

Pax peeled the button of his jeans and unzipped them. “Just so we’re clear. There’ll be no run tomorrow. And I’m sleeping with you tonight.”

“I told you, Apollo—”

“This is not a seduction.” He shoved his pants down and kicked out of them until he stood in boxers and a T-shirt.

“You must see where I’m having trouble believing that.”

Pax turned his back to Cliff and pulled out a couple of videos. “I’m not after sex. Not tonight.”

He pushed a tape into the video player, rewound it to the beginning, and pressed Play. He felt Cliff’s watchful gaze simmer against his back.

The television screen brightened to life, and after a steadying breath, Pax scrambled into bed at Cliff’s side.

“Why are you here?” Cliff asked.

“Like last time, to keep you up all night.”

“Another Luca-Bianca pancake brunch?”

“No.” Pax paused. “Well, in all fairness that’ll probably happen, too.”

They watched the opening of The Princess Bride. Just after Buttercup’s line “I want to see my face shining in it by morning,” Cliff grabbed the remote from his nightstand and pressed Pause.

The sudden quiet made Pax stir. “I relate to her, you know. I also love to see my face shining in things.”

There was no humor in Cliff’s voice. Just a softly uttered question. “Why are you here?”

Pax steered his attention toward the photo on the other nightstand.

Pax felt Cliff’s shrewd gaze slide over his face, hot and thick.

Cliff stiffened, and then sucked in a breath of comprehension. “You’re here so I don’t think about them?”

“So you don’t think about them,” Pax repeated. Cliff began to nod. Pax stilled his chin between thumb and forefinger. His skin was rough with a shadow of a beard. He caught Cliff’s gaze and held it. “So you talk about them instead.”

“Talk?” Every sexual advance Pax had thrown at Cliff had boomeranged back to him with almost no reaction, but the soft suggestion they do nothing more than talk broke Cliff’s voice.

Pax skated his fingers over Cliff’s jaw before dropping them. His stomach twisted at the intimate shaking of their breaths.

They both stared at The Princess Bride paused on the screen. Pax rolled his shoulders, scrubbed a palm over his mouth. “Plan’s surprisingly the same as last time. I understand that you’re tired enough to tell me things you wouldn’t with a clear head.”

“There’s no way of getting you out of here?”

“Pass me a pillow, I want to be comfortable.”

Cliff’s movement winked out the soft lamplight, drowning them in shadows and subdued colors from the TV. Fingers pressed against his shoulder blade, pushing him away from the headboard. A soft pillow settled behind him.

Pax burrowed back into it, elbows knocking Cliff’s, legs close enough to feel the air stir with the slightest movement.

“Well,” Cliff said, hesitantly, “if I open my heart to you, you’d better do a good job tiring me out.”

Pax’s lips vibrated with a bubbled laugh. “Jesus, Cliff. I’m trying my best not to jump on you here.”

“Tell me about your family,” Cliff said.

Pax tugged the blankets up to his waist. “Turnabout’s fair play. What do you want to know?”

“Whatever you can tell me.”

“It’s a boring story.”

“All the better for tiring me.”

Cliff’s dark eyes were intent on him. His pulse skipped. “Then I guess I’d better tell you everything.”

The numbers on Cliff’s alarm clock were glowing pretty damn hard. Pax had no idea how it was almost one in the morning.

For over an hour, he had talked about his family and answered all Cliff’s detailed questions, including the color of his soccer uniform. He’d borne Cliff’s amused laugh when Pax had confessed he’d only played for the boys in uniform. Chasing after them was the only running he ever did.

“Coach said I made the worst goalkeeper Ravensbourne High had ever had. I told him it was strange, because all I ever dreamed of were balls. He was the first adult I came out to. But I guess the guys on the team had a fair idea. The center, certainly. But then, we were fucking each other. So.”

“Now that I think about it,” Cliff said, “we must have played against each other. Maori Hill High.”

“Maori Hill? You didn’t play us. You worked us so hard, we didn’t know what hit us.”

“Interesting how history has a way of repeating itself.”

“You planning to work me hard, Cliff?” Pax waggled his eyebrows and darted a daring glance down to Cliff’s—

Cliff gently smacked the back of his head. “I already am.”

Cliff asked more questions and Pax gave more answers.

They sat closer. Legs pressed at the thigh and the foot. Pax kept pushing his toes over the top of Cliff’s foot. It was a game to see if he couldn’t rile Cliff up enough to push back.

He didn’t.

They spoke more. Pax tickled the sole of Cliff’s foot with his toenails.

Who was he kidding? It wasn’t a game. It was a distraction. Pax had never told anyone so much about his life. All the insignificant details that meant the world to him.

He didn’t think anyone cared for the snooze-fest that was his childhood, but Cliff thought Pax growing up an only child of a single mother was fascinating and his mum was amazing to have raised such a son.

“Oh, there are things she’s not so thrilled about. Like my National Bank tattoo.”

“Thought you said it wasn’t the National Bank logo.”

Pax sighed and dropped his head back against the pillow. “The first and last time I ever got drunk. Let no more be said about it.”

Cliff’s foot twitched.

“The best thing about my mum, though,” Pax said, “is how she grounded my childhood with music.”

He saw Cliff studying him out the corner of his eye.

Pax continued, “She loved the classics. By God, you should have seen her ashen face when I said I wanted to rock.”

“Take a bit of getting used to?”

“She didn’t bat an eye when I told her I banged boys. But when I told her the electric guitar was the love of my life . . .” Pax shook his head fondly.

“She tried to change your mind?”

“She took a few days, then sat me down and looked me square in the eye. She said she would support me in whatever I chose to play, but she urged me to learn the fundamentals of music before I decided to fuck with it.”

“Discovering all there is to know about . . . music before fucking around with it? Sounds like sage advice.”

“Don’t say that to her face. If you think I gloat, you’ve seen nothing.”

A laugh. “Does that mean I have a chance to tell her that?”

Pax focused on their feet bumping the sheets. “She’s in Australia for Christmas this year, but when she comes back . . . I mean, you can tattle all about my scheming ways. If you want?”

Cliff weaseled his toes under Pax’s heel, and rested there.

Hours later, they were lying side by side.

They had continued watching the movie. Neither had paid attention, but they had stared at the screen nevertheless.

When it ended, they took turns using the bathroom. Cliff switched off the TV and rewound the tape.

Blankets rested over Pax’s chest and legs. His little toe kissed Cliff’s. The air tasted thick, despite the balcony door being open a few inches.

The curtains shifted. The shelves looked daunting in the dark.

His heart banged too loudly. “Cliff?”

“Hmm?”

“Are you tired yet?”

“No.”

Pax searched for Cliff’s hand under the sheets and slipped their fingers together. “You want to tell me about your parents anyway?”

Cliff’s breath hitched. “Yes.”

Pax turned his head and Cliff did too. Their gazes met in the safety of the shadows.

“How did they meet?”

“The angel.”

“The angel?”

“She brought them together.”

Cliff whispered his stories. His love for his parents. Their love for him and Bianca.

“There were fights and frustrations, but under it . . . you have no idea how deep the love ran. How deep I let it in.”

“But you’re supposed to let it run deep, aren’t you?” Pax said.

“I suppose so, when you’re a kid. When you don’t know better.”

Cliff’s tongue clucked, and Pax squeezed their knotted hands.

“My parents were my world, Apollo, and I never thought they wouldn’t be there. They were there for everything. Starting school, coming out, teaching me to dance for their twentieth anniversary. They were supposed to be there for bigger things.”

“Like when you graduate from university with a double masters?” Pax said.

“And when I find a job.”

“And when you bring home a guy who’s magnetized to your shrewd mind?”

A trace of a smile. “Shrew mind, you mean.”

Pax blinked rapidly in lieu of shaking his head.

Darkness eclipsed the lightness in Cliff’s tone as he sighed and remembered the day it happened.

“They were there. And then they weren’t. Those first weeks without them were all trumpets and cymbals.”

Pax rolled onto his side and draped an arm over Cliff’s thumping chest.

They stayed like that, Cliff recounting tender memories until his words turned to a rasp.

After a lengthy quiet, Pax whispered against Cliff’s upper arm, “Your brashness with Bianca . . . You aren’t worried about her having sex with boys. You aren’t playing the shrew because you need her concentrating on school.”

Cliff stared up at the ceiling, not saying anything. He didn’t have to.

“You want to protect her from loving again. From having her heart broken.”

Cliff rubbed a palm over his forehead. “I am also worried about the other parts.”

“To a lesser degree.”

“To a lesser degree.”

Later, much later, when Cliff was asleep, Pax slipped out of bed and wrote lyrics in the moonlight on the balcony, wrapped up in a soft sweater. He wrote lines, scribbled them out, and wrote new ones.

When he was done, he settled the pen and paper next to the photo and slipped back into bed. He reached over Cliff and disengaged his alarm clock, then curled under the sheets.

Cliff’s mouth was gently parted, face serene in sleep. A touch of silver from the balcony haloed his profile. Made Pax think of an angel. Cliff’s angel.

Their angel.

“I’m sorry the future love of your life won’t meet your parents,” Pax whispered. “At least he’ll know your sister. Your friends.”

Cliff stirred, and Pax froze.

“Will he like them?” came Cliff’s hoarse voice.

So he had heard. Of course he had.

“On a scale of one to ten, how likely is it you will remember this tomorrow?”

An arm shot out, and Cliff crushed Pax against him. “Answer the question.”

“Maybe later,” Pax said into a warm armpit. “If you’re a good boy.”

Cliff chuckled and fell back asleep.