Billy looked up from where he'd been reading from his phone. "Where'd you go this morning?"
"Nowhere. Went for a walk," Machiavelli lied. He hung up his coat on one of the pegs in the front hallway, unwrapped his scarf and carefully placed it beside the coat. Taking off his shoes, he turned to find Billy watching him. "Really, I didn't go anywhere," he said desperately. He sat beside Billy on the couch.
The Kid sniffed suspiciously. "You smell good, Mac," he said in a low voice. "What did you do?"
"I bathed, Billy. Remember bathing? You might try it some time."
Billy ignored that jibe. "Something's different and I'm going to figure it out." He crossed his legs under him and looked at the Italian immortal, even going so far as to lift one of the other man's arms, as if to check to see if it was still bendy. "Mac," he said, his fingers still wrapped around the Italian's skinny arm, "where's your arm hair?" Now he just sounded confused.
"I really did go for a walk this morning," Machiavelli said plaintively. "And while I was on my way back, I happened to pass a little shop, which had a special going on until the end of October, so we could bring you if you wanted to and…"
"Is this what I'm like when I babble?" Billy interrupted. He flopped backward and dangled one leg off the edge, but put the other in Machiavelli's lap.
Machiavelli paused and thought about that. It's always very weird when we switch places, he thought idly. "Probably. Do you find this annoying?"
"No," Billy said decisively and Machiavelli groaned. "Continue your story," he commanded. "Where'd you go?"
"Well, all your comments on my," he gestured to his abdomen and couldn't bring himself to say the words Billy had used, "got to me, I guess. So I went in and got a full body wax this morning. I am now completely hairless again and I refuse to feel bad about it; I like being groomed!" He said the last bit more forcefully than he'd intended, but felt confident that Billy was used to his idiosyncrasies enough to not care.
Then again, Billy was staring at him, rubbing his chin, and Machiavelli began to feel slightly nervous. "Did I talk about your penis last night?"
"What? No!" Machiavelli pushed the other man's leg off of him. Some conversations you couldn't have with another man's body parts that close to your own. "You kept talking about the hair between my naval and my pelvis…"
"You have a happy trail?" Billy asked, rubbing his chin. Machiavelli grimaced at his word choice again. "I didn't notice before now."
"Billy, why don't you ever remember anything you say when you're drunk?" Niccolò sighed.
Now Billy looked confused. "Why? What did I say to you last time?"
Machiavelli backpedaled. "Nothing. You just seem to suffer a little amnesia after you drink more than one glass of wine. And last time…" Billy waited, but he refused to continue. A somewhat awkward silence followed.
The Kid shrugged. "I've never noticed that before, but I don't drink very much, so I guess I wouldn't know how I act," he said, echoing what he said last night. He brightened. "So you're completely hairless now? Like there's no hair anywhere? You could commit a crime."
"I'm mostly hairless," Machiavelli said, crossing one leg over the other. "And I have no intention of committing a crime at the moment. Maybe later this month. I usually wait for a reason." He begrudgingly accepted Billy's leg again, even when the American immortal put the other one on his lap too. "What are you reading?"
Billy fished his phone out of the space in the couch between the cushions. He'd completely forgotten about it, apparently. "String of messages from Black Hawk from last night. I'd left my phone down here while we were painting; missed them." He scrolled up and down the list, looking at the messages. "He says it's important, but never actually says what's up. I tried calling him while you were apparently," he coughed, "manscaping, but he didn't pick up. I'll try again in a little bit."
"So do you have a hangover?" Machiavelli absentmindedly rubbed Billy's feet. Billy shook his head. "It's still early. Want to go out to get some breakfast?" Billy nodded. "Okay, well get dressed out."
"I am dressed," Billy said, looking up.
"Billy, I'm not letting you go out in that hideous, blue fleece nightgown," Machiavelli said.
The Kid looked at him with his wide, beautiful blue eyes. "Mac, you don't like my Snuggie?" Machiavelli squinted at him, so Billy sighed and got up. He tugged away the fleece cover, revealing his normal street clothes.
"What the blast is a Snuggie?"
"Oh, Mac, sometimes I wish you'd join us in the 21st century," Billy told him as they walked back out into the sunshine. He picked blue lint off his shirt and nudged Machiavelli. "So tell me more about this full body wax. Do you pay by the strip? Like does a hairier man pay more than a man with my, shall we say, perfect amount of body hair?" He jogged beside the Italian immortal. He continued nudging Machiavelli until the tactician grinned at last.
"It's a flat rate. Even a man with your alleged perfect amount of hair would have to pay the same as me."
"Aw, that seems like kind of a rip off when I'm already gorgeous. Here, we're going in here," Billy said, stopping in front of a diner. The Kid dashed up to the door and held it open for Machiavelli.
Machiavelli followed the American immortal into the diner, and immediately came to a halt. The diner, already admittedly tiny, was full of people. "Billy? There's a lot of people in here."
"Yeah, I forgot how popular this place is. I usually went at night, it's a lot better then." He looked at Machiavelli, pulled him against the wall so that they were standing in line with everyone else, and half shouted in his ear, "would you like to go somewhere else?"
"No. You promised me crepes." Billy grinned and nodded. Machiavelli looked around the restaurant. Immediately to the right of the door, below and across from the wide windows, were four booths. They were all occupied. On the walls behind these booths were framed news articles, pictures of famous people who'd visited this diner, records, and one rather obnoxious red neon display of a coffee mug with a cartoon face. "Next table!" an overweight waiter yelled and two very frazzled looking, young parents edged their way past the long line, the man carrying a little girl. The rest of the line shuffled to the left.
Machiavelli leaned out past the Kid to look at the rest of the diner. It was partitioned off, the kitchen presumably hidden behind the wall jutting out in the middle of the space. An impossibly long bar ran down the length of the building with stools regularly interspersed on this side of the counter.
"She's pretty," he heard Billy say in his ear and for a fleeting moment, he felt a pang of jealousy, before following Billy's line of sight to the little girl that had passed them. He felt a little foolish, but the American immortal had not picked up on it. He was enraptured with the toddler who'd caught his attention.
"She's beautiful," Niccolò agreed, feeling a little ashamed of himself. He saw the baby girl looking around the room, a chunk of muffin clutched in her pudgy hand, and he gave a little wave. He got an enthusiastic response- she bounced up and down and gurgled and he beamed at her. "My little girls were beautiful," he told the outlaw as the line shifted again.
He watched the toddler's face fall as her newfound friends disappeared from her line of sight. He hoped she wouldn't cry, but he needn't have worried. Her father made a silly face at her and she forgot entirely about the faces in the crowd.
"Anybody a party of two?" another server called from behind the counter. Billy looked down the line of people, and, seeing no one, grabbed Machiavelli by the shoulder and pulled him to the open spots. He handed him a menu. Their waiter ambled over. "Something to drink?"
"Coffee, black, please," Machiavelli ordered.
"Coffee, not black." Billy waited for their server to move away. He closed his menu, aware already of what he wanted. "If you could have a kid, Mac, would you want it to be a boy or a girl?"
Machiavelli blinked. "What?"
"If you could have a baby, would you want a boy or a girl baby?" Billy repeated. They stopped the conversation again when their waiter came to take their orders.
"Why are we talking about babies?" Niccolò asked softly
"Well, if we talked about what's going on in our lives, we'd run out of things to say before long, so we have to use hypotheticals to keep it interesting."
Machiavelli sipped his coffee. "I don't know," he said honestly. "I don't think I'd have a preference as long as the baby was healthy."
"That's a good answer," Billy said thoughtfully. He pointed out a placemat drawing which had been framed and was half covered by napkin drawings. It was an actually very well drawn picture of a roughhewn man with a shotgun slung over his shoulder. "My friend Henry drew that picture. I wasn't with him at the time, that was back in the 1990s right after the second Young Guns came out- I still think I should get royalties on that- but he told me he left a picture here. We used to eat here in the sixties, a couple of my friends came up and visited for a couple of years. I didn't like the second one as much as the first…"
"How do you know for certain your friend drew that particular picture, if you weren't here when he drew it."
"Well, he signed it," Billy said in surprise. He pointed to the corner where Machiavelli could just make out the initials H.N.B. "Henry Newton Brown. Besides, it's the cover of Young Guns II. Henry hated that movie cause they didn't even give him his own character, they combined him with my other friend Jim French- not an immortal- to make this really lousy character."
"Young Guns is a movie about your friend?"
Billy looked over at him. He accepted his plate as it was thrust at him. "Nah, Young Guns was a movie about me."
"Never heard of it."
"That's fair. There's a lot of movies about me."
Machiavelli heard the bell over the door ring as it was opened. The couple from before was leaving and as they left, the toddler saw him, leaning back. She waved at him, then the door was shut. "I'd want a girl."
"What's up?" Billy lowered his coffee cup.
"I said I'd want a girl. If I had a baby. But I won't." He began cutting up his crepes. "That's not possible. I can't even find someone who'd want to have a baby with me. There's no dating website for immortals," he said very quietly.
The Kid huffed a small laugh. "Do you like your crepes?" he asked.
"They're very good. I'm glad we didn't go somewhere else."
"We didn't end up waiting very long, when you really think about it. There are some advantages to being a group of two people." Billy wiped up his egg yolk with his piece of toast, pushing the egg onto the toast with his fork. Machiavelli resisted the urge to shake his head, watching the American immortal. It would have been considered bad table manners in Italy, to use the bread in that way. But, he supposed, rules were different here.
They continued to banter back and forth until they were done. Billy paid their bill and they left, feeling that they couldn't linger long. "Immortals can't have children, Billy," Machiavelli commented as they continued down the road. "It would be terrible to knowingly choose to outlive your children."
"Yeah, but it's nice to think about… Anyways, I really blame all of this on you."
"Me? What'd I do?"
Billy jammed his hands in his pockets. "I'd resigned myself to the fact that I was never going to have children. Then that thing with you happened," he said, looking slantwise at Machiavelli. "And I realized that you were everything I wanted. Now I see babies everywhere."
"I'm sorry you can't have children, Billy. You made a great dad."
