Page 98 of Homecoming for Beginners

I don’t think Jesus was involved. Mom might have been.

That explained nothing. But fine. Let Ollie keep his secrets.Where are you? Going to be home for dinner?

Sorry, boss. Top secret mission. Eat without me. But I’ll be home in time to tuck Theo into bed.

Pause.

And you too.

Frowning, Ty put his phone back in his pocket. Well, if Ollie was busy and Jake and Ollie’s dad had spent their afternoon doing repairs to Ty’s house, he probably owed them dinner, at the very least. He walked back around the house to make the invitation.

OLLIE DIDN’Twant to spend the days leading up to Ty’s de facto trial essentially AWOL. He and Ty both knew Ty had done nothing wrong, unless you counted assuming other people had basic human decency, but that didn’t mean Ollie couldn’t see the specter of the town hall meeting weighing on him.

Ollie couldn’t fix that.

What Olliecoulddo was take care of the other things in Ty’s life.

Getting the window fixed proved easier than he thought. Ollie couldn’task, and his father couldn’t offer. Ollie had to hold the grudge until his dad made things right. The family politics made the whole thing trickier than it had to be. Ollie had to arrange for his father to find out about the broken window from someone else and hope he decided that fixing it might be a good first step in building goodwill with Ollie and, by extension, his wife.

Fortunately for Ollie, Peggy knew everyone in town and was far more Machiavellian than Ollie could ever hope to be. All he actually had to do was be home at the right time to give his father access to the office so the initial piece of glass could be set into place.

Sure, it almost made him late for his after-school meeting with Peggy and Jason, but it was worth it.

By the time Ollie got home, dusk had fallen. Theo and Ty were in the living room, watching the Tigers beat the snot out of the Cubs.

“Uh-oh, baseball? Shouldn’t you be reading your book?” Ollie teased.

“Dad, I’m over halfway done. I’ve been reading during the commercials.”

“What?” Ollie walked over, ruffled his hair, and grinned when Theo made a face at him. “No homework?”

“Dad,” Theo protested.

Ty turned his face upward to look at him. “You’re in a good mood.”

“Mmm.” He was, actually. Ollie hadn’t felt this bone-deep contentment—sexual encounters with Ty not included—in…. He didn’t want to think about how long. It would only depress him. He leaned over and pressed a smacking kiss on Ty’s mouth, upside-down. “Unemployment agrees with me.”

“Gross,” Theo said from the armchair, but he didn’t actually sound upset.

“Uh-huh,” Ty said, obviously skeptical. He made room for Ollie on the couch and then promptly shoved his feet into his lap, but he didn’t ask any other questions. Ollie’s nonanswers from earlier had had the desired effect.

“How was practice?”

“Nobody died.”

Any other day it might’ve sounded light. On a day when Ollie knew Ty had been obsessing over Mrs. What’s-her-face, that was black humor at its finest. Ollie rubbed his hand over one of Ty’s ankles, then the arch of his foot. “Always good news.”

“Danny and Peter won’t look each other in the eye, so that’s a good sign of team togetherness.”

“Paolo says they used to be best friends,” Theo piped up. “But now they don’t talk to each other.”

“Did Paolo have any insight?” Ty asked. “Because Henry forbade me from getting into it, and I am dying to know the tea.”

“He forbade you?”

“He said I might learn something we’d have to tell their parents.”

“He said I was too young to understand.” Theo rolled his eyes. “People always say that, but what they really mean is they don’t want to explain it.”

---