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“Hey,” Steve says to Danny as he walks up to stand beside him looking out at the ocean.
“Hey.” Danny studies the side of Steve’s face. “You okay?”
“I’m so tired of this Danny.”
“I know.”
“I’m so fucking tired of people coming in and out of my life whenever the fuck they feel like it and lying to me again and again and again.”
“I know babe.”
“She knows. She knows how i feel about it. She was there for the whole thing with my Mom. She knows how I feel about lying, Danny.”
Danny touches his arm. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m done, Danny. I can’t anymore.”
“Come on. Beer. My treat.”
“I should just go home, Danny.”
“I’ll bring the beer to you or we go out for it, doesn’t matter to me.”
“I’m not going to be good company right now.”
“Well that’s not necessarily that much of a change.”
Steve laughs. “Fair enough.”
“That said, no way I’m leaving you,” Danny says, bumping his shoulder against Steve’s.
“No, you don’t, Danny,” Steve says, sliding his eyes over to finally look at Danny. “You don’t leave me.”
“Or lie,” Danny says quietly. “So. Sidestreet with everyone, or just us at yours. Your choice, but those are your choices.”
Steve smiles slightly. “Thanks Danny.”
They go back to Steve’s and drink beer and Danny teaches Steve how to play what his family calls Kay’s Crazy Game, but is in actuality called Cadillac , and even though it involves only losing $0.50 at a time Steve still demands rematch after rematch and double or nothings until he owes Danny $15 and Danny’s cheeks hurt from laughing.
“If it's called Cadillac why do you call it Kay’s Crazy Game,” Steve asks, pouting at Danny and propping his chin in his hands as Danny brandishes quarter after quarter at him, counting them up painstakingly slow.
“Because my Aunt Kay was obsessed with this game, but she always, always lost,” Danny says, still chuckling as he separates the quarters into two even piles. “I’m not actually going to take your money, Steve.”
“Hey, fair’s fair, keep the damn money,” Steve says, waving a hand, still scowling. His eyes shine with mirth though so Danny just grins at him and reaches down, scoops up all of the quarters, and stuffs them into Steve’s breast pocket. “It’s a complicated, confusing game, Danny!”
“Bitch, I been playing this game since I’m five,” Danny says, snorting as Steve frowns as he drops half the quarters down his shirt. “Grace has been playing this game since she’s five. It’s not confusing!”
Steve rolls his eyes and then tosses a handful of quarters backwards behind his head like he spilled the salt. They clatter and roll and spin and clank and Danny about spews his beer. Steve grins at him. “Your family is terrible,” Steve says, waving a finger. “Terrible, terrible influence. Encouraging gambling in such young impressionable minds.”
“It was a necessary life skill,” Danny exclaims, hand flying wild. “Where I come from, you don’t know how to play cards and know how to play ‘em well you get taken!”
“Taken?”
Danny nods. “Yes! Taken. Divested of all of your money. Taken for a ride. Stolen from. I’m from the mean streets of Jersey, you don’t know me!”
Steve cracks up. “The mean streets of Jersey.”
“It’s true!”
“Okay, Danny,” Steve says, making a face and making the okay symbol with his hands as he winks at Danny. “Sure. I gotcha.”
“It is!” Danny pulls out his phone and stretches it out to Steve. “You call my Ma, no, call my Pop! You ask him what’s the first thing you do when you reach manhood in my family!”
“Atlantic City,” Steve guesses.
Danny nods. “Atlantic City, bitch. It’s not corruption, it’s solid parenting.”
Steve just grins at him. “Okay Danny. Am I arguing?”
Danny waves the cards at Steve. “Okay, okay, Mr. Corruption of Impressionable Minds, I won’t take it easy on you this time, play me in five card stud and see who cleans whose clock, huh?” He starts shuffling, so fast and perfect that Steve is transfixed by the whirring of the cards. “You know how to bet or you need me to teach you while beating the crap out of you, huh?”
“I’m too tired to hear your lectures on when to hold and when to fold and when to bet and when to stay, Danny,” Steve says, stretching and leaning back in his chair at the dining room table, his feet tangling with Danny’s. “Also too drunk.”
“Aw, come on, I finally get you to play poker with me and you’re pussying out?”
Steve grins at him. “Sorry.”
“Chicken shit,” Danny grouses, but picks up the cards and puts them in their pack. “Later I’m teaching you.”
“Okay, later I’ll let you,” Steve says, nodding.
Danny look at him, squinting. “You just agreed to it. I’m holding you to that.”
Steve leans forward and slides his hands down the table, folding himself over the table like you do in school when you take a nap during a lecture. He’s long and lanky and it doesn’t make sense that this is comfortable, but he looks like he is as he folds his arms one over the other and tilts his head to the side to look at Danny as he lays it in his arms. “Hey Danny?”
“Yeah babe,” Danny says distractedly as he stacks the quarters up into piles of four.
“When I went to jail, you didn’t leave me.”
Danny’s fingers faltered and he knocked over a pile of four. “What’s that?”
“When I went to jail, Danny. After Wo Fat killed Jameson,” Steve says, voice quiet and serious. Way too serious for being six beers deep and midnight. “You stayed.”
Danny looks at him. “Yeah.
“For me.”
Danny starts stacking quarters again. “Yeah, Steve.”
“When Rachel was trying to move to Vegas, part of the reason you fought so hard, part of the reason you didn’t just pack up and move with them, part of that was me.”
Danny chewed on his lip, concentrating way more on the quarters than was necessary. “Yeah. You. You and Kono and Chin, and… Ohana. Family, man. I’d already left one family and somehow miraculously found a new one, I wasn’t gonna do it again.”
“Okay but Danny,” Steve says, still so quiet and serious, and it makes Danny’s chest ache. “Part of it was just me. Specifically me. Wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, man,” Danny finally says, looking over at him. “Yeah, a big part of it was specifically you.”
“And those are just the times you stayed, Danny,” Steve says, lifting his head and reaching over to grab Danny’s sleeve. Not even his arm, his sleeve. Playing with the button on the cuffs. “That’s not even the times you came for me.”
“I thought we were avoiding talking and thinking about Catherine,” Danny says, watching Steve’s fingernails pluck at his button.
“Not talking about Cath, Danny, talking about you,” Steve says, sliding his fingers from the button to the skin of Danny’s wrist, over the pulse point. “About how you always stay for me. You always come for me.” His fingers dig into Danny’s wrist, holding it there on top of the table. “You are always, always there for me, man.”
Danny watches Steve’s thumb rub over the bump of his wrist and flicks his eyes up to meet Steve’s. “And I always will be.”
“I felt like I could trust Cath to never lie to me, Danny,” Steve says. “We always, I thought, had a very open and honest relationship. I never lied to her, Danny. We were always open. Even when the truth was shitty. Even when it was ugly, and made the other person feel bad, we told the truth. And I thought, I thought she’d never lie to me.”
Danny sighs, gut clenching for the lost look on Steve’s face. “Babe maybe she thought she was protecting you. Maybe she just didn’t want you to worry.”
“Like my Mom,” Steve asks. “Like Joe?” Steve shakes his head. “Danny, how do I feel about being lied to for my own good?”
“You fucking hate it,” Danny says immediately.
“And you know that about me, right,” Steve asks. “You didn’t even have to think. Because I’ve made my feelings on that matter very, very clear over the years. To you. To her. To everyone. So if that’s what she was doing, it’s still--”
“A betrayal, yeah,” Danny says, distracted by the way Steve’s fingers trace over the palm of his hand. It makes his hand itch, makes him want to close it up into a ball and take it off of the table, but he doesn’t. Instead he just watches Steve do it. “Yeah, I get that.”
“Why, Danny,” Steve says finally.
“I can’t answer that, Steve,” Danny says, shaking his head. “I don’t know why she lied.”
“No,” Steve says, shaking his head. “Why do you stay? Why do you stay when everyone else leaves?”
Danny sighs, scrubbing at his face with his free hand. “Steve, I don’t think that’s one of those things I can explain. I can’t answer for why people leave, I don’t understand how they could. It’s not something I can wrap my brain around.” He closes his hand over Steve’s fingers, holding them in place. “All I know is I will always do whatever I can to be there for you, always.”
“But why, I’m asking,” Steve says.
“Because you’d do it for me. Because that’s how I was raised, because that’s what you do when you love someone. Because that’s just who I am.” He leans forward and meets Steve’s eyes. “It’s who you are too.”
“The Taliban had me, Danny. They were going to kill me. They were going to…” Steve closed his eyes and shook his head. “I was gonna be one of those videos they played on Al Jazeera to use as propoganda, Danny, they video taped… And she had to get the kids to safety, but even after…”
Danny squeezes Steve’s hand. “Steve.”
“Even after they were back home, she just left it to you. Radio silence. And that’s what you do on an op. That’s how it goes. You do the mission. You stay the course.” Steve clears his throat and blinks a few times. “Except I would never have been able to do that with her. I would never have been able to do that with you.”
Danny shook his head. “Babe I can’t answer these why’s. I just can’t.”
“Do you ever think something is what you think it is, but it winds up it’s maybe not,” Steve says quietly, looking down at their hands. “What I’m saying is, maybe I thought what me and Cath had was love, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was camaraderie. Maybe it was serving together. Maybe it wasn’t…” He lets out a breath. “Or maybe it was, I don’t know. But part of me just thinks that I didn’t have a choice in the matter. That’s just… her ship passed my ship and we happened, and that’s that. And that’s fine, but. I didn’t choose her, Danny.” He looks up then. “Maybe that’s the difference. Maybe there’s love, and then there’s love .”
Danny frowns, confused. “What… I don’t understand.”
“I left her there,” Steve says. “Because you asked me to. She was alone in Afghanistan looking for her friends kid and I left her there. And yeah, I’d been ordered to leave, and I’d been threatened, but really, I left because you asked me to.”
“Steve, it wasn’t safe--”
“Do you understand that, Danny,” Steve asks, leaning closer. “Do you have any concept… I left her there. I was okay with leaving her there to carry on her own mission. Not okay, but… Okay enough to do it. For you. Do you think if the situation was reversed, if you were there and she is who asked me to leave you there, do you think I would ever leave you?”
Danny frowns. “Are you blaming me?”
“No, Danny, I’m saying, I would never have left you there. No order, no threat, no amount of talking me through it from Catherine would have kept me from coming for you.” Steve says, shutting his eyes. “I’m saying have you ever been looking so hard for your keys that you don’t even notice they’re in your hand the whole fucking time?”
Danny frowns. “What?”
“I chose you, Danny,” Steve says. “Our ships didn’t just pass in the night, you weren’t just comfortable, hell you fought me every step of the way, you were the fucking opposite of comfortable. But I chose you.
Danny looks down at their hands and sighs, watching Steve’s thumb caress his skin. “Steve, I’m not really sure what--”
“I choose you,” Steve says, and Danny looks up into his eyes and sees that Steve is that much closer to him. “I’ve been choosing you from the start,” Steve says, closer, and closer, so slow Danny can’t even track when or how he’s getting closer. “I’ll keep choosing you.”
Danny gets lost in Steve’s eyes, time slows. It maybe even stops. “Choosing me for what, Steve?”
“To be my partner,” Steve says, close enough to taste his breath. “To build my family on. To be the reason I stayed. I chose you over Navy, over duty, over country, Danny.” Steve’s eyes shift to Danny’s lips and Danny’s lips feel like they’re on fire and his heart butterflies around in his chest with uncertainty and confusion and anticipation. “I chose you over Catherine without even knowing it.”
Danny breathes out and closes his eyes. “If we do this, Steve. If we go here, everything changes.”
“Nothing will change.”
Danny shakes his head. “Everything will change.”
“No don’t you get it, Danny,” Steve says, close enough that Danny can feel his breath move against his skin. “Nothing will change. I’ll keep choosing you, you’ll keep choosing me. We were already doing this, Danny. We were already here.”
“Steve,” Danny starts, but then Steve’s lips meet his and Danny realizes there was never a fucking choice to be made to begin with and lifts a hand to rest on the side of Steve’s cheek, and says, “Okay.”
Because sometimes choosing is conscious, but sometimes it’s something you just give into because your heart already chose without ever consulting your brain.