“So how was it?” Nora asked.

“What?”

“The lasagna?”

Michael stared at Nora.

Nora kissed him. A quick gentle kiss on the lips and all was forgiven.

“That’s rough, Angel,” she said, stroking his hair again. “No wonder you’re stressed to the power of eleven.”

“It’s humiliating,” he said, resting his head again on her thigh.

“What is? Being proposed to? I was proposed to and survived it. Barely.”

Michael had red candle wax all over his shoulders, throat, chest, and stomach. The red streaks looked like a wolf had clawed the front of him from shoulder to hip. Nora was a genius. Michael knew he’d never be able to get through telling that story to her if it hadn’t been for the comfort of physical pain distracting from the heartache.

Michael smiled and shook his head. “Not being proposed to,” he said. “I mean…not knowing what to do when Griffin’s friend died.”

“I’d say you handled it pretty well.”

He looked up at her through narrowed eyes. “Nora, I called my mommy. I felt like a five-year-old kid, not an adult. Five-year-old kids don’t get married. Adults get married.”

She grinned at him. “Your ‘mommy’ is a nurse who works in the ER. She’s had grief training, addiction training, and she knows Griffin’s history with drugs. She was exactly the right person to call. Asking for help from someone who knows more than you do doesn’t make you a kid. It’s a sign of maturity.”

Michael took a deep breath, so deep the congealing wax on his chest cracked in places.

“I felt so…dumb,” Michael said. “Young and dumb.”

“I was in my early thirties when Søren’s mother died. I didn’t know what to say to him, what to do to make it better. I did the only thing I could do which was be with him. And that is the only thing you can do because there is no making death better. You didn’t run away from Griffin or try to force him to cheer up, and you didn’t tell him everything was fine when it wasn’t. You called a professional to talk him through it. You went to the funeral with him. You stayed by his side. You didn’t rush him into acting like his old self while he was grieving. I hate to tell you, Angel, but you handled it better than a lot of people my age handle this sort of stuff. So if you’re using that as your excuse to not get married, it’s not a very good one.”

“I’m not looking for excuses to not get married,” he said.

“Good,” she said. “Because you don’t need one. You get married because you want to get married. You don’t get married if you don’t want to get married. Why am I not married? I don’t want to be married. Marriage would chafe, like too-tight lace panties, the kind that are like sandpaper on your asshole. But that’s me. Marriage might be a better fit for you.”

“It never occurred to me he’d want to get married,” Michael said. “It’s so… vanilla.”

Nora cackled at that, head back and smile broad.

“Now you’re laughing at me,” he said.

“Some of the filthiest, kinkiest people I know are married,” she said.

“Are they straight?” Michael asked.

“Most of them are.”

“I’m not,” Michael said. “We’re not.”

“True, but same-sex marriage is legal in New York now.”

“Great,” he said. “They finally let us into their little clubhouse. Maybe I don’t want to be in their clubhouse.”

“That’s fair,” Nora said. “I can’t argue with that. Despite the old joke, I wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that wouldn’t have me as a member.”

“You get married,” Michael said, “and people don’t believe you’re bi anymore. If you and Father S got married, they’d see you as a straight couple.”

“Horrifying.”

“If Griff and I got married, they’d see us as a gay couple, and we’re not.”

“Then they’d be wrong,” she said. “People are wrong all the time. It’s kind of what people are known for. All you can do is correct them the first time they get it wrong and kick them out of your house the second time.”

“I’m too young to get married,” Michael said.

“Me, too, Angel,” Nora said. “Me, too.”

“You shouldn’t get married just because you’re scared one of you is going to die.”

“Is that why Griffin asked you to marry him?” she asked.

Michael sat up straight.

“You know, I didn’t ask,” he said. “He just brought it up and told me not to answer until Sunday when he got back from checking in with the L.A. club.”

“Just a thought—maybe ask him why he wants to marry you,” she said. “Throwing that out there. It might not be for the reason you think it is. I know for a fact Griffin already put you in his will, so it’s not like you have to get married to inherit from him if a bus does hit him. Although, being New York, it’s more likely going to be a taxi that gets him.”

“I don’t want his money,” Michael said.

“Fuck, I do.”

Michael groaned.

“Go on,” Nora said. “What else?”

“He thinks I’m perfect,” Michael said, “and I’m not. And if we get married after I graduate, we’ll be together all the time. Every day. Every night. He’s going to get sick of me. I don’t want that to happen. I don’t want to disappoint him. And I know I will. When I do, I don’t want him feeling like he’s stuck with me just because of the red tape and paperwork.”

Nora kissed his cheek.

“You aren’t perfect and he knows that,” Nora said. “And you will disappoint him at some point in the future whether you marry him or not. Søren’s disappointed me in the past. I’ve disappointed him. It happens to everyone. That being said… you’ll amaze Griffin some days. And you’ll delight him on others. And some night you’ll make him furious to the point he’s got to walk away before he says something he regrets and maybe he doesn’t walk away in time and he does say it, or you say it, and the next day you’ll make up and you’ll have sex so good you’ll think, ‘Ah…we should fight more often.’ You’ll have a ton of inside jokes no one gets but you two. I can make Søren laugh just by saying the word ‘diphthong’ and I will go to my grave before I tell you or anyone else the story behind it. You’ll never lack for someone to go for dinner with. You’ll always have someone to call in an emergency. There’s a lot to be said for getting married. Then again, there’s a lot to be said for climbing Mount Everest, but you don’t see me doing that either.”

She tugged his hair playfully, hard enough to make him gasp.

Michael laughed and stretched out across Nora’s lap. She leaned over and rested her face against his still warm and welt-covered back.

“Tell me the truth,” she whispered. “Tell me why you’re afraid of saying yes to something you and I both know you want.”

There it was. Leave it to Nora to say the thing he didn’t have the guts to say. Yes, he did want to marry Griffin. And for no other reason than…he wanted to marry Griffin.

“It’s…” He shook his head. “Stupid. Awful. Awful and stupid.”

“I won’t judge you. That’s not what happens in this room. Just say it.”

“If Griff and I get married, that’s it,” Michael said. “I’ll be dead to my father.”

“I thought you hated your father,” Nora said.

“I do,” Michael said. “But he’s still my father.”

He fell silent and Nora didn’t push him to say more. She just stroked his hair and waited.

“He asked Erin about me the other day,” Michael said. “Just ‘How’s your brother?’ She told him I was fine. He said, ‘Good.’ That was the whole conversation apparently. And you know what? When she told me he asked about me…”

“You were happy?”

“I was,” he said. “Stupid fucking happy that my fucking awful father asked my sister how I was. And I hate that. I hate that I still give a shit about his opinion of me. I hate…I hate it. All of it. But it’s there. I marry Griffin and that’ll probably be the last time Dad ever acknowledges I exist.”

Nora was quiet a long time.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she said finally.

“You always know what to tell me.”

“Not this time. This time it’s not for me to tell you what to do or think.”

“Could you maybe try please?”

Nora laughed her big sexy laugh and it made Michael feel better to hear it. Things couldn’t be too bad if Nora was still laughing.

“Okay, I’ll try. Well…you know, my mom never understood me, was always angry at me for the kind of person I turned into, but…the minute I got the phone call that she was dying, I was out of the house in five minutes on my way to see her.”

“Why can’t we cut the cord?” Michael asked.

“Because the cord is made out of the same stuff our hearts are made of,” she said. “That’s why it’s red.”

“That explains it.”

“Earth is just an island in space,” Nora said, “and we’re all stranded on it. There came a time I had to ask myself who did I want to be stranded on this island with? Someone who wanted to change me or someone who wouldn’t change a hair on my head…” Nora held out her hands, palms up, and lifted them up and down like they were two sides of a scale. Very quickly one side won that battle. “I’m not telling you that you should marry Griffin. What I will tell you is that I know you, and I know your heart. If your dad called and said he was sorry, that he wanted to start over with you, you’d give him a chance, right?”

“In a heartbeat.”

“So the ball’s in his court then. It’s up to him to make that move. You marrying or not marrying Griffin has nothing to do with it. Your father is in the wrong. Only he can make it right. Not you. You’re already in the right. So you might as well do what you want to do.”

Michael turned his head and pressed a kiss on her thigh. She couldn’t give him the answers he needed, but he worshipped her for giving him the question he needed to ask himself. If he had to choose between Griffin and his father, well, that question answered itself.

After all, Griffin would never ask him to make that choice.

But his father would.

“What are you thinking about right now?” Nora asked, gently stroking his cheek with her knuckles.

“I miss Griff,” Michael said. “I wish he was here.”

“Why don’t you call him? It’s eleven here so it’s…what? Only nine in L.A.?”

“Do you mind?” he asked.

“I’ll leave you alone in here to call him. He’ll get a kick out of you calling him from my dungeon.”

“He definitely will,” Michael said. “He’ll want pics.”

“Better send them then.”

Nora took his phone out of her bustier, where she’d stored it for safe-keeping.

“I’ll be back in ten minutes to clean you up,” she said. “If Griffin can’t tell you in ten minutes or less why he wants to marry you, then neither of you needs to get married.”