"Have you no concept at all of what an umbrella is?" Emery asked the moment Josh opened the door.
Josh dripped all over the doormat, taking off his boots and socks before walking in; his bare feet still left puddles in their wake. "I wasn't expecting it to rain," he replied, bottom lip trapped between his teeth.
Despite being wet and miserable from the downpour, something inside him was warm at the sight of Emery marching into the bathroom and turning the hot water on, so it would actually be hot once Josh got in. These were the moments he was going to miss the most, when Emery left.
"You look like a drowned rat." Emery's words, on the other hand, could use some warming.
"Thank you, you're looking very sexy yourself," Josh quipped, getting rid of his jacket.
And then he froze.
Emery had paused too, face caught between stoicism and something else Josh couldn't quite name. Damn it. They had a habit of bantering, but this one had been crossing the line into dangerous territory. He couldn't tell whether Emery was stunned or annoyed but, whatever it was, Josh shouldn't have opened his mouth in the first place.
Emery swallowed, the first hint of movement since Josh's unfortunate remark. "I'll leave you to your shower. There'll be hot soup waiting when you're done."
He left without expecting a reply, which was just as well.
#
Sitting on the couch, warm and most definitely dry, Josh ate his soup with relish. "Thanks for this. I think even my bone marrow was freezing."
"Again," Emery replied, tone dryer than Josh's hair, "I feel it falls upon me to inform you that there are umbrellas you can make use of."
Josh's earlier comment seemed to have had no lasting effect, which was a bigger relief than Josh was ready to admit to. "I told you, I didn't think it would rain."
"And once you saw that it was, in fact, raining, you decided you'd run around with your arms open, head pointing towards the sky, in a celebratory tribal rain dance until you were sufficiently soaked through, rather than taking shelter?"
Josh choked on his soup with the laugh Emery startled out of him. "I didn't!" His eyes watered from coughing he couldn't get under control. "You're a health hazard, did you know?"
"Yes, both I and the rain," Emery replied without missing a beat, haughty and disapproving, and entirely too amused at Josh's expense. "Dare I ask what was worth catching pneumonia for?"
His smile remained, but Josh didn't feel like laughing anymore. He set down his plate to fiddle with the small wooden house in his bracelet. "I was at the cemetery. It didn't feel like I should leave to get an umbrella. It didn't look like it would rain when I went, or I'd have taken one with me."
Emery's face lost its mock stern look. "I... Forgive me. I didn't mean to pry."
"That's okay." Josh offered a smile. "I don't mind telling you, if you're curious. Don't get many chances to talk about it, really. But I don't want to dump my issues on you either."
Emery turned to face him head on, brown eyes tender. "I'd be interested in hearing whatever you're willing to tell me."
Somehow, Josh didn't doubt him. "Today is the anniversary of Ms. Winters' death. Twenty-five years. I usually go by the cemetery on the day, unless I'm working."
"Ms. Winters?" Emery picked up on the name.
"Yes. The neighbor who took me in after my parents kicked me out. She adopted me when I was eighteen — my parents wouldn't allow her to before that, for some obscure reason. I didn't know why she was so adamant about it, at the time, but I didn't question it. I'd grown to love her by then — she felt like the grandmother I'd never had." He smiled at the bittersweet memory.
"It turns out she had lung cancer. Pretty advanced. She'd known for a few years, but it hadn't been progressing that quickly, probably because of her age. And she'd decided she didn't want to spend the time she had left in and out of treatments that were never going to cure her in the end."
Emery moved fractionally closer, shoulder touching Josh's; Josh hadn't realized how much he needed the contact until that moment.
"She didn't tell me until she'd adopted me. Because she wanted me to be taken care of, once she died. That's how I discovered this line of work. After everything she'd done for me all I could think of was that I wanted to do whatever I could to make that time worth it. I asked her for stories of her past, took the time to find out what she liked, to read to her often... I like to think I became the keeper of her memories."
Emery's right hand found his, fingers interlacing, and Josh held on tight.
"She had no one else, and neither did I." With his other hand, Josh wiped a stray tear that was threatening to fall. "Never mind that my parents lived right down the street. They acted as if they didn't know me and I did the same. She passed away a year later. She'd wanted me to go to college but I delayed it — I didn't want to find out she'd died while I was away. I wish you could have met her."
Josh's last sentence probably revealed a lot more than he'd have preferred, but he wasn't filtering his words. It felt... nice, for lack of a better word. To share his past with Emery. Mark was the only person Josh had told — even Brian hadn't known.
"I thought about studying to be a nurse, but I didn't want my relationship with people to be about the medicine of it, you know what I mean? I wanted to be a..." He trailed off, lacking the words to explain it.
Emery offered him a smile in faraway eyes and finished his sentence with a different memory. "You wanted to be a sort of lady-in-waiting for the dying."
"Yes," Josh replied with a grateful huff of laughter. "That. I still can't believe you called me that on the day we met."
"In my defense, I didn't mean to," Emery retorted. "It just slipped out."
"Right, right. Perfectly understandable. It's the sort of thing that just slips out when you least expect it to."
"Precisely."
Maybe Josh ought to have gotten up when Emery slid his left arm behind his back, but... He didn't want to. He laid his head on Emery's shoulder and closed his eyes, allowing himself to bask in the moment. And if he pictured, in the privacy of his mind, how Emery's lips would feel when pressed to his, well. It wasn't as if Emery would ever know.
#
Playing Scrabble with Emma was fun, if one's definition of 'fun' consisted of being flattened by a steamroller without ever losing consciousness. She came up with the most impossible words yet, every time they challenged her, the words turned out to exist. Even she wasn't enjoying trouncing them — stealing candy from babies had more appeal, she said.
By the third game, she'd determined they'd be a team, Emery and him, playing against her with 'twice the tiles and half a brain between them'. They still lost consistently, but at least they had a fighting chance now.
They plotted strategies in secret; they stooped to studying online dictionaries over coffee, while she was in physical therapy. When they finished close to half her score they high-fived, Emery looking more than a little surprised at himself for doing such a thing.
The one time they won saw Josh dancing around the room, to the amusement of his audience of two. Somehow a high five seemed insufficient; before he realized what he was doing he'd drawn Emery into a celebratory hug.
It wasn't until later that night that Josh thought it was rather suspicious, how smug Emma had looked for someone who'd just lost.
#
"You have new pieces on it," Emery commented, gaze drawn to his charm bracelet. "There were fewer of them before."
"I make a charm for every client." Josh's fingers found the little wooden tile with the E. "This one's Emma."
Emery's hand was warm when it moved to touch the charm. He leaned closer, adjusting his glasses and squinting. "What's this below the E?"
Josh smiled. "An infinity sign. Whatever she did with her tiles, they were always worth more than all of ours combined, weren't they? Seemed fitting."
His eyes leaped to Josh's, something unmistakably tender in their depths. "Fitting," he echoed, and then said nothing at all. Josh swallowed. He hadn't realized they were this close. Emery's fingers still held the tile, unwittingly trapping Josh by his bracelet.
He was going to need that punch in the face Mark had promised sooner, rather than later.