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‘Door?’
‘Renato,’ he spelled slowly. ‘Doctor.’
Rex lit up. ‘To see me?’
‘He wants to teach you to make pasta.’ Frey used the sign for spaghetti since that was the only one he knew, plus the only one that Rex really liked so far. But he figured his son would at least try the thing they made together.
Rex all but threw himself off the desk, and Frey had to catch him before he crashed to the ground and broke his other collarbone.
‘Careful,’ he signed, but Rex just turned away and went tearing into the kitchen. Frey heard a quiet “oomph” and then a laugh. When he came around the corner, he found Rex tugging a chair into the kitchen so he could stand on it.
Renato looked over his shoulder at Frey and winked before he lifted his hands. ‘Ready to get messy?’
Rex let out a loud peal of laughter and bounced on his feet. ‘Messy!’ he repeated.
Frey’s heart was full as he cocked his hip against the fridge and watched. He jumped in a few times when Renato was lost with Rex’s home signs, and Frey had to stop Rex from trying to sample the raw pasta dough because he was pretty sure uncooked flour would destroy the boy’s stomach, and the last thing he wanted was to be up all night with a sick child.
But it was nice. It was more than nice. It was a glimpse into a future Frey once thought he might have with Jace. Only…it wasn’t. Not really. He closed his eyes and tried to picture the scene with his ex, but he couldn’t. Jace wouldn’t have gotten his hands dirty. He would have pitched a fit and pouted about getting flour everywhere, and about Rex being loud, and dinner not being Instagram-worthy.
He would have wrinkled his nose at Rex’s misshapen noodles, and he wouldn’t have told his son that his work was better than his nonna’s back in Milan.
But Renato was a natural. He smiled like he was content—like he was happy to be there. He exchanged quick, heated looks with Frey when he could get away with it, but he spent most of his time making Rex laugh and making sure he understood every step.
‘Now you can make it for your dad,’ Renato told him as he gave the pasta a quick stir in the water.
Rex’s eyes went wide. ‘Maybe. Spell,’ Rex demanded, pointing at himself and Renato.
It took Frey a second to realize what he was asking for. ‘C H E F,’ he showed him. He grabbed his phone and opened the app Oz had given him to look up the sign for it. ‘Cook-person.’
Rex and Renato both repeated him, and then Rex let out a peal of laughter before hopping off the chair and disappearing around the corner.
Renato looked a little stunned. “Is he okay?”
“He’s going to write it down in his sign book,” Frey told him. “You should feel special. He only keeps the ones he thinks he’ll use again.”
Renato’s cheeks went a little pink as he took the sauce off the heat, then added a little bit of pasta water to it before giving it a stir. “This was fun.”
“You’re pretty good at this kids thing. You should have gone into peds,” Frey said, shifting a little closer.
Renato let out a quiet ha and shook his head. “I thought about it. Kids are a lot less hard on the ego than the patients I see. But I couldn’t do it.”
Frey’s brows dipped. “Why?”
“I don’t like seeing little ones in pain,” Renato admitted as he turned his back to Frey and began to plate the pasta. “When I was a resident, there was a little girl.” He stopped for a moment, and Frey’s heart kicked up because he knew these stories. He had these stories. “She was five, almost six. It was a bad accident. C-4 incomplete paralysis, double compound fracture. Her mother wanted to know why we bothered putting pins in her legs if she was never going to use them again. She wanted to know why her daughter was in so much pain if she was paralyzed. She didn’t understand why her baby was hurting, and all I could tell her was the science behind it all.” He let out a ragged breath, then turned to face Frey, who stepped into his arms. He understood this pain, and he pressed his lips to the side of Renato’s jaw. “She was so angry at me that I couldn’t make it go away.”
“The girl or the mom?”
Renato let out a soft laugh. “The mother. The little girl asked me if it would always hurt, and I told her no. Only sometimes. She asked me to put a cast on her little stuffed bear.”
“And you did?” Frey asked.
Renato smiled down at him, cupping his chin. “Two casts. Just like her.”
Frey surged up and kissed him. And he kept kissing him until he heard a soft noise behind them, and then reality crashed in. Fuck. He hadn’t wanted Rex to see that. Not because he cared that his son witnessed kissing, but because Rex would get his hopes up, and he didn’t want Renato to crush him.
Asking him for dinner was taking it right up to the line.
Doing this was crossing it.
