Grinning, Dan held the door open as Charlie came through, juggling his duffel, lacrosse stick, helmet, and an ice cream cone. Dan's grin faded as he saw Lisa had already arrived and was glaring at Casey. Stopping for ice cream had made them a little bit late.

Lisa shot a swift, disapproving glance in their direction and turned back to Casey. "You're his father, Casey. Do you see me delegating my parenting duties?"

Casey blinked. "You mean, like having a nanny?" He clenched his jaw, then took a deep breath. "No, it's fine that Charlie has a nanny. It's good, because we're both busy people, and we want to make sure he's taken care of." He slowed his speech with an obvious effort. "I had an interview this evening-- it was a timing issue. It came up at the last minute and there was no other time it could be done. Yes, I could have called one of the other parents to drop Charlie off here, but I didn't know when I'd be home."

"And so you thought Dan should--"

"Rather than leave him by himself until I was through working?! Damn right I did!"

Dan nudged Charlie's shoulder. "Come on, Charlie, let's go get your stuff," he said quietly.

Lisa turned around. Her eyes fixed on Dan's face, she said, "Go get your things from your room, Charlie. And clean the ice cream off your face."

Charlie glanced uncertainly at his father's face, at Dan, and back to his mother, before hurrying to his room.

Dan glared back at Lisa, determined not to give an inch. "Lisa, I know we don't get along, but I am perfectly qualified to pick up a kid from lacrosse practice and bring him home."

Ignoring Dan, Lisa turned back to Casey. "Charlie's nanny is a trained professional, with references and years of experience caring for children. When I can't be with him myself," she continued, "I make sure he's in capable, safe hands." She looked back at Dan. "Do you really think, with your family history, that you're the kind of person I want influencing my son?"

The color drained from Dan's face. He opened his mouth. Before he could say anything, Casey snapped, "Lisa! That is not--"

"It's bad enough that he's an influence whenever Charlie comes into your office, Casey. If you're going to bring him into the place that, several days out of every week, you want Charlie to call home ..."

Lisa glanced at her watch without finishing the sentence. "Charlie!" she called. "How long will it take you to get your things together?"

"He's already all packed, Lisa," Casey said.

Barely has a chance to get unpacked. "Several days a week," my ass. Dan's thought went unspoken.

Lisa shook her head, then went to knock on Charlie's door. Her voice light now, she asked, "You ready to go, sweetheart?"

Charlie emerged from his room, his face solemn. "Okay, let's go," Lisa said. She smiled at him. "We'll get the ice cream off at home, hm?"

"Okay," Charlie said quietly.

With a hand on his shoulder, Lisa steered Charlie to the door. "Bye, Dad," he said as he passed.

Casey knelt down to hug him. "So long, champ. See you Wednesday."

"Yeah." Charlie glanced back at Dan on his way out; Dan put on a smile for him and raised his hand, but didn't wave.

The apartment was silent for a moment after they'd gone.

"Whoa," Dan said a little ironically.

"Sorry about that," Casey mumbled.

"Tell me, Case, is there a right side of the bed for Lisa to get up on in the morning?"

Casey closed his eyes. "Just ... leave it be."

Dan shook his head. "No, I have to wonder ... why on earth did you marry someone who's so deliberately malicious?"

Casey scratched his chest, then walked past Dan into the kitchen. "She wasn't always like that."

"Well, that just begs the question, what the fuck changed her that she thinks that kind of thing is okay? Huh? What great wrong did you visit upon her that she's allowed to treat you like shit? What'd you do, run one of her relatives through a wood-chopper or something?"

Casey slammed a cabinet door shut. "Dan. Leave it."

Dan raised his hands. "I'm leaving it. For now."

---

Dan stretched underneath the bedspread, watching as Casey took out his contacts and turned off the lamp. He moved in close as Casey settled under the covers. "So what was Lisa like back when you got married?" he asked quietly.

Casey sighed. "I'm tired, Dan."

"Me too," Dan replied. "But--"

"If I offered you a thousand dollars, would you drop it?" Casey asked dully. "I need to sleep."

"Me too," Dan repeated. "But I won't be able to until you talk to me." He propped his head up on his hand and looked at Casey.

Casey tilted his head against the pillow to get a better look at Dan's face in the darkness. "I could fix you some warm milk."

"Case."

Casey sighed again. "What about a backrub, then?"

Dan paused. "Devious."

Casey smiled and kissed him slowly. "But so good ..." he said, kissing him again.

"Mmmmph." Dan pulled away. "I won't forget this," he said as he turned to his other side.

"I know you won't," Casey said as he began to knead at Dan's shoulder through his thin T-shirt. "I have magic fingers. No one forgets my backrubs. I have a bit of a reputation, you know."

Dan didn't respond to Casey's attempt to change the subject. "So," he murmured after a moment, "does this mean I'll be seeing less of Charlie now?"

Casey stopped his ministrations on Dan's shoulder for a moment, then continued. "Dan." His voice was reproving.

Dan shifted against him. "Well, I just thought maybe--"

"Dan, Charlie adores you. You're the grown-up he knows he can be a kid around. And when you talk with him, you make him feel like an equal. I think you're one of the best influences he could have."

Dan's muscles relaxed slightly under his hand. "... Okay."

"And besides, Lisa said what she did because she knew it would scare you. She'd never actually -- do anything."

Dan let out a long breath. "How can you know that, Case?"

Casey continued to rub, letting his thumb dig into the muscle at the base of Dan's neck. "Because she wants what's best for Charlie too. I do know her, Dan. And, yeah, I guess she can't stand me, and she even has her reasons. But she loves Charlie, and she knows how Charlie feels about you."

Neither spoke for a moment. "What changed, Casey?" Dan asked softly. "She couldn't have been like this when you married her."

Casey moved closer to Dan, resting his forehead against the back of Dan's head, his hand still gripping Dan's shoulder. He inhaled slowly, feeling Dan's hair tickle his nose. "No. She wasn't."

Dan reached over his shoulder to twist his fingers into Casey's. "You ever going to tell me what happened?" He let the silence stretch on, then eventually rolled back over to face Casey and stroked his arm gently.

Casey cleared his throat softly and shrugged one shoulder. "I didn't really date a lot in high school. Nobody did, you know -- we went around in bunches, and paired off some, but nothing really serious. Lutheran community, you know. So getting to college was really -- freeing. Met lots of new people. We all started out as a big group, you know, like in high school, but once you paired off once, you were sort of done. Or, I guess, a lot of people were.

"Which was a little weird for me, because I didn't know what I wanted yet. I didn't want ..." Casey sighed. "I didn't want to be paired off right away. So I let myself fall in with a couple of people, and lost my virginity ... and I like to think he didn't know it was my first time, but, anyway ..." he shrugged. "I got to know Dana, because she was at least as fanatical about sports as I was, and her best friend was Lisa.

"And Lisa and I ... we got really serious, very quickly, but that's I mean, she was smart and funny--really sharp wit- -and beautiful, of course. And she knew how to have fun. It was college. And we were like all college kids -- on- again, off-again, but there was ... never really anyone else for either of us. And that, combined with the fact that she and Dana were so close, I never really would have thought of actually acting on that ... attraction I'd always felt for Dana. Until, then ..."

Dan gently brushed his thumb over Casey's eyebrow and let him continue. "I just ... well, I did feel like I was awfully young to be that serious about someone. But any of the times we broke up, it wasn't for real. It just got to be a pattern, something to do after we got tired of going to the usual hangouts on Saturday nights and sneaking sex around our roommates. And then when we got tired of being broken-up, we'd go back to dating and ..." Casey cleared his throat. "... fucking. And I thought I could have more than that with someone. At the time, I thought it might be Dana. We already did spend a lot of time together, and ... well, there were sparks.

"But then just when I'd decided I was going to do it, for real this time --at least she said it first. We Have To Talk." He gave a shallow, mirthless laugh. "God, it sounds so stupid and trite, but it really was ominous. So I never got a chance ... I was sure she knew that I'd been interested in Dana. And Dana's never been exactly subtle ..." Dan chuckled faintly in agreement. "So I thought maybe that's what she was bringing up. She wanted to break up with me to preserve her friendship with Dana. Or she wanted to cause an ugly scene over it, which kind of would have been justified ... I don't know. But ..."

Dan still did not speak. Casey finally swallowed and continued. "This was right before graduation, so we had to plan fast. She--" he took a deep breath. "We hadn't thought there was any reason to use ... it was still the mid- 80s; no one in our circle knew anything about AIDS. She said she was on the Pill ... And I'm sure she was, but there's that 2%, or whatever ... And she would have only had to have forgotten it one day ...

"So anyway, that was that. Wasn't what either of us had planned, but I mean, it wasn't that I didn't love her. We were very happy together, except when we weren't. Huh. Obviously. But really, she was smart and witty and charming and, well ... funnily, all those things you don't want her to be now when you get into an argument with her."

Dan's brow was furrowed. "And this was the year you graduated from college?" he asked softly.

Casey nodded. "... Yeah. And it was still tense sometimes. Because Lisa had known that I'd been ready to break up with her. That standing in front of her in her dorm room, before she told me, I'd been ready to end it with her. And to start seeing Dana. At least, that's when Lisa and Dana stopped being best friends. We had some ... discussions, about being trapped, and about responsibility ... But, still. We were young. It was scary, but it was pretty exciting too. In our best moments, we were sure we could make it work.

"So we couldn't tell our families, obviously, why we were really in such a hurry. But we graduated, and the wedding was two months later, and it wasn't much more than a month after that --" His voice finally broke, just briefly, and he sniffled, once. "Just in time for my birthday," he said, with a bitter smile in his voice.

Dan's arms tightened around him. "... Casey?"

Casey sniffled again. "So, yeah, we got married, when I didn't really want to ... when I'm sure neither of us really wanted to ... because we wanted to do the right thing for this ... child we'd created ... but then all of a sudden that was gone and we were still there. Together.

"But we convinced ourselves this was better ... we were kids ourselves, we didn't have jobs, or a place to live where we could have a family, really ... "

Dan made a small sound and brushed his fingers through his hair. "Oh, Casey ... "

"So what could we do? We got jobs, and became adults, and life went on. And not a lot was different, except the stakes were higher. We fought some, like we had in college, but we couldn't just wait until we were ready to get together again ... And ... underneath it ... Lisa knew that I hadn't really chosen to be with her. And that always colored every fight we had. And that always colored every fight we had. What did it mean when I chose to work late -- where Dana was working? What did it mean when I chose to work late or go out with you? Or, later, when I ..." Casey took a deep breath. "What did it mean when I turned down the offer for Late Night?" Dan tightened his hand around Casey's.

Casey continued. "Then one time she said she didn't know why I'd married her. She said it was obvious I didn't care about her, and she implied very neatly that she was surprised I had done the Right Thing, instead of just handing her the money for an abortion. And I told her I did care. And that ..." There was a catch in Casey's voice, and he continued in a whisper, "I was heartbroken when we lost the baby." He paused while Dan waited for him, rubbing the small of his back. "We both thought that we wouldn't be so unhappy if things had ... if the baby had been all right. So not long after that, we decided to try again."

"Charlie?" Dan whispered.

Casey's voice softened as it always did when he talked about his son. "Charlie. And -- well, the rest you know. We both just loved him so much ..." He paused. "But he couldn't make us love each other."

"I had no idea, Case."

Casey pulled back a little, rolling onto his back. "I know. Nobody does. It's -- obviously we don't talk about it." He smiled a little wryly. "Usually it doesn't come up."

Dan slowly rubbed Casey's belly through his shirt until Casey stilled his hand. "Danny."

"Hmm?"

"Can we go to sleep now?"

Dan raised Casey's hand and kissed it. "Yeah." He lay down next to Casey and curled himself around his body. He didn't go to sleep for a long time.

---

Comments always welcome!