Chapter Text
“Can you take Billy for a few days” wasn’t the sort of phrase that would regularly have gotten Sonny’s heartbeat leapfrogging up into his throat. Billy was mostly an easy-to-please child, thank the lord, and Sonny appreciated those rare times he got to monopolize him. Timing wasn’t even bad at work— things were surprisingly quiet right now, and worst case scenario, someone at the station would be happy to give him some crayons and paper for an hour.
Sonny swallowed back a dry lump, like trying to eat a spoonful of powdered herbs.
“Sure,” he agreed, desperately glad Caroline could not see his face through the phone line.
Even gladder that she could not see the real problem, the reason for his Sahara-mouth: Rico, flopped shirtless on his back on Sonny’s couch, watching him with one inquisitive eyebrow. Rico’s toothbrush in his tiny bathroom. A fridge full of food Sonny wouldn’t be touching with a twelve-foot pole if he wasn’t screwing a vegetarian. A laundry line with two different styles of men’s underwear hanging from it. A rumpled bed he hadn’t bothered to make in about a week and half, with a glass and a book on the side Sonny didn’t sleep on.
Caroline sighed with relief on the other end as Sonny’s lungs grew progressively tighter.
“Thank you, seriously. My great aunt just passed away—”
“Oh, jeez, Milly?”
“Yeah,” Caroline breathed, disappointment in her voice, “She was ninety-four, but still.”
“I’m really sorry,” Sonny apologized, with genuine sentiment that mixed into a black, slimy morass with his mounting fear. He’d really liked Aunt Milly, and he knew Caroline had, too, and it was always sad to lose a loved one. Of course, she wasn’t really his loved one anymore, and there was a strange flavor of displacement to the grief that made it all the more uncomfortable. Here he was, a half-naked man on his couch, feeling weird about his ex-wife’s dead great aunt. Almost dreamlike, the swirl of cognitive dissonance.
“Anyway,” Caroline continued, “I need to go down to Jacksonville and don’t want to make him stay with me. It’s going to be a few days of, y’know, cleaning out her house, making arrangements. I’d have him stay with a friend but Freddy’s family is visiting the grandparents and Cameron’s family is in Disneyland— which I really don’t understand, we have one of those right here—”
“Caroline.”
“—I’m rambling.”
“You’re a little stressed out, maybe?”
She half-laughed, almost more of a sigh. “Could be.”
“It’s no problem,” he lied. “You don’t need to foist him off on one of his buddies, he has a perfectly good father.”
“I know that, Sonny, but I also know you, and I know the way sometimes your job makes that a little hard.”
The queen of tact, as always— what a gentle way to say you’re actually not a ‘perfectly good father,’ but I’ll let it go.
Rico’s expression continued to grow more curious, bordering on concerned. Sonny waved him off very slightly, and then felt Caroline’s I know you comment a second time, like a baseball to the kidneys.
God he hoped she didn’t.
They wrapped up the details and said their pleasantries; she’d offered to drop him off, but really it made more sense for Sonny to meet them in Jacksonville and then drive back down to Miami with Billy. He hung up and looked around the Vitus .
“Everything okay?”
Sonny breathed out slowly, through his nose, trying not to loose the contents of his roiling stomach onto the floor.
“Caroline needs me to take Billy for a couple of days,” he explained, each word feeling like a live mine, “So I gotta go get him, and uh.” He stopped dead. He could not voice and bring him back here .
It was too much, all of it.
Back here, where he and Rico had been practically living like newlyweds all summer. Bringing his son here, where Rico had been hiding from the loss of his own. Making space for Billy— looking him in the eye— talking with him about— what? What in his life could he even talk to his kid about right now? The drugs and the murder and the needless, senseless death around him every day? His stupid drug-dealer car and drug-dealer boat and drug-dealer clothes? The fact that he’d gone fag about nine months ago and hadn’t quite been able to figure out where he’d left his manhood since then?
“Sonny?” Rico’s mouth said no more, but his eyebrows said You don’t look so hot, partner.
“I gotta kick you out for a while, pal,” he blurted, trying to make the tone of this sudden ultimatum as light and jocular as possible.
Rico snorted. “No shit,” he grinned, sitting all the way up. “I didn’t figure you were gearing up for a ‘daddy’s roommate’ talk.”
Sonny’s bowels iced over. He knew Rico was joking, but, jesus christ, that was not the kind of joke he wanted to hear, ever, for any reason, especially not from him. He stood useless, inert by the phone, the rest of him freezing over as well, despite the oppressive July heat.
Rico’s grin sloughed off.
“When do you need to go pick him up? Tonight?”
Sonny shook his head. “I’m meeting Caroline tomorrow afternoon.”
Rico stood up, hands in his pockets. “Well, we’re good then. I can get all my crap outta here by then, easy. Hell, you leave tomorrow morning, everything’s out before you get back.”
His tongue still felt brittle, cold, but Sonny managed to choke out a weak, “Thanks, man.”
Rico touched his arm and Sonny felt the air leave his lungs, shaky and involuntary.
“About time I brought some of this stuff home, anyway,” Rico smiled, exposing the teeth on one side, sugar-sweet and saccharin-false. Sonny couldn’t respond except to nod.