Unearthly falsettos ushered Michael into the club like a choir of K-Tel angels.

Thursday was '70s night at Babylon, the one night a week Madonna and the Chemical Brothers were hustled off the dance floor by Donna Summer and the Bee Gees. Fading voices of a more innocent age, when Carter was president, Disco was king, and the worst bug lurking in a back room was a cockroach or two. A few years back it was '60s night, and Michael had it on good authority that in the mid-'80s—when he was such a pipsqueak even Brian couldn't talk him past the stone-faced bouncers—it was '50s night.

He'd heard rumors lately that Dan, the club manager, was thinking of changing it to a New Wave theme. By the time the new millennium hit they were going to be out of decades. Their only option would be to circle back to the one they just left, Gen X's insatiable appetite for nostalgia forcing it to swallow itself.

Like that guy in the Stephen King story who ate his own feet, Michael thought, feeling sick.

Not from King's story—when you cut your teeth on Neil Gaiman and Frank Miller, a little autocannibalism isn't going to faze you. He'd been shaky all day, an expected reaction when you were stuck in a freezing warehouse counting cartons of maxi-pads from eight in the morning on. He should still be at it, but Rick, the nightshift supervisor, had taken pity on him.

Go home and get some shut-eye, Novotny, he said, hitching up his Banlon pants over his beer belly. You look like you could use it. But what Michael could really use is a drink.

He made his way through the crowd, thinned by the rainstorm outside to Sunday night sparseness, and signaled to the bartender while maneuvering around a pair of six-foot stunners tricked out like Frida and Agnetha. By the time he got past the dancing queens, Luis—who along with perfect abs boasted the other bartender virtue of perfect drink recall—had a Bacardi and Diet Coke waiting on a coaster.

Michael opened his wallet and experienced one of those sinking panicked moments when all he saw were a couple of singles. He thought he'd given the guy at the front a twenty, the last bill in his wallet after paying off the cab driver. But either he'd gotten shortchanged, or he was so out of it he hadn't realized it was a ten.

Wading in the cold and wet back to the MAC across the street seemed like a journey of a thousand miles. He peered at his credit cards, trying to remember which one wasn't maxed to the limit.

Before he could figure it out, a crisp five-dollar bill was slapped on the plexiglass in front of him. Michael tensed, not in the frame of mind to get cruised by some random stranger. He relaxed when he turned and saw his friend Ted's familiar face.

"Thanks," he said. "I'll pay you back tomorrow."

"Don't worry about it," Ted said. "You're the first cute guy I've bought a drink for all night."

Michael looked down at his wrinkled jeans and t-shirt, pulled from the bottom of his locker at work. He was sure he still reeked of the cheap lemon soap in the locker room shower.

"Yeah, I feel cute right now."

Ted followed his gaze, smiling. "You're adorable. As always." He leaned against the bar, one hand in the pocket of his impeccably pressed khakis. "Where have you been, anyway? It's almost midnight."

"Quarterly inventory. We should've been done hours ago, but somebody made off with twelve cases of Beanie Babies. The assistant general manager went ballistic. She collects them—has a bunch lined up on her desk and calls 'em by name and shit."

"Breeders," Ted said, shuddering. "They call us twisted."

"Mmmm," Michael agreed, plucking the lime garnish off the rim of his glass and biting into it. He tipped the drink against his lips, grimacing at the strange metallic taste. Dan passing generic booze off as name-brand again, but he was too thirsty to complain. When he stopped, wiping his mouth and stifling a burp, he realized he'd drained the glass in one shot.

Ted gave him an odd look and seemed about to comment, but Michael cut him off. "How is it tonight?" he said, eyes scanning the half-filled dance floor.

"Pointless," Ted replied. "It's twinkie central out there, and I'm last week's prune danish."

"Come on, Teddy, that's not true," Michael said, but his heart wasn’t in it. He'd only known Ted a few months, but had already realized his new friend was a black hole into which all reassurance vanished. "It's just a bad night," he finished lamely.

Ted nodded. "Lots of people gone from the storm or that flu that's going around. The only ones left are the desperate die-hards and the ones too young to know better."

Michael wondered wearily which category he fell into. He held the cold glass against his forehead, hoping it would ease the pounding behind his eyes.

"Are you okay?" Ted said. "You look pale."

"Fine," Michael replied, rolling the glass back and forth. "Long week."

"You've had a lot of those lately."

"Oooh. Who's had a lot of what lately?" a low-pitched voice drawled from their left. It was Emmett, fabulous in pink pleather pants and a matching net shirt. His face was almost the same color as his outfit—the flushed look of someone who just spent an equally fabulous interlude in the back room.

"Don't get excited. I was telling Michael he's been putting in too many hours at Big Q."

"Honey, any hours are too many at the Q. I’ve been tellin’ him for years to ditch that discount gulag. The lighting scheme alone is enough to make you despair your own existence.” Bending his tall, lanky form like an inquisitive giraffe, he peered into Michael’s face. “You do look a mite peaked." He dug around in the front pocket of his skin-tight pants. "But never fear—Dr. Emmett's here.” He held out a glass vial.

“No thanks. Not tonight.” The thought of snorting anything up his aching sinuses set his teeth on edge.

“It’ll cure what ails you.”

"No, really, that's okay."

"You suuure?" Emmett said, waggling the vial in front of his nose. Michael caught a sicky-sweet whiff of amyl and gagged.

He knocked Emmett's hand away. "I said I don't fucking want it."

Michael saw his friends' shocked expressions and took a deep breath.

"I'm sorry, Em. It's been—"

"—a long week," Ted finished. "Yeah. We know."

There was an awkward silence, filled by the Trammps screeching at them to burn, baby, burn. His body appeared to be listening: he'd been inside less than ten minutes, and his t-shirt was already soaked. Dan compensating for the cold deluge outside by turning the heat up to volcanic levels. Michael ran a hand across his sweaty neck and tried to focus on his reason for braving this disco inferno in the first place.

“Where's Brian? We were supposed to meet up."

“Last time I saw him, he was headed to the back room with some Keanu Reeves clone in tow,” Ted said after a brief pause. "But that was awhile ago."

“Didn't see him when I was there," Emmett added.

Motherfuck it. Michael slumped against the bar, chewing rum-tinged ice cubes in frustration. Babylon wasn’t that big. If Brian wasn’t at the bar or on the dance floor or in the back room, he wasn’t here.

“But I wasn't exactly lookin' for him, if you know what I mean," Emmett said. "He was trying to page you earlier, but the storm's made cell reception go all funky."

Great. Now even Mother Nature was conspiring against him. Michael pinched the bridge of his nose, the pounding in his head beating in time with the heavy bass from the speakers overhead.

"Guess that means he won't get to tell you his big news," Ted said.

Michael looked up. "What news?"

"Teddy," Emmett sighed. "Didn't your mamma ever teach you not to tell everything you know?"

"What news?" Michael persisted.

“Brian had the last of his on-campus interviews today," Ted answered. "Impressed the hell out of the rep from Young & Rubicam in New York. She made him an offer right there."

"She made him an offer. . ." Michael repeated. Maybe it was the heat or the headache, but for a minute he didn't take the words in. He may as well have been standing there chanting gitchy-gitchy ya-ya da-da.

Then, with a painful rush, his head cleared. He set the glass down on the bar and rubbed his damp palms together. “He took it?"

"He's taking the weekend to consider," Ted replied. "Playing hard to get. For once."

"He's hasn't made any firm decisions,” Emmett said, giving Ted a look. “He told us he has a couple of real nice offers from Pittsburgh companies, too."

Michael sank down on the bar stool behind him. The headache seemed to be spreading—suddenly everything hurt. But the worst of the pain was centered in his chest, a hot, heavy rock sitting on his heart.

"Good for him," he managed after a minute. "Brian's always wanted to live in New York." But his head was going fuzzy again, and the words seemed slow and distorted, like they do in very bad dreams.

"Oh, sweetie, don't get upset," Emmett said. "He ain't gone yet."

"New York isn't that far. He can always come back to visit," Ted put in. He gave Michael's leg a reassuring squeeze. "And hey, if he doesn't, you still have us."

Michael stared at Ted's hand like an alien life form had attached itself to his thigh. But he was too exhausted to pry it off. He sat there letting the music swirl around him, trying not to think about it. Trying not to think about anything.

Ted leaned forward, intruding his face into Michael's line of vision. "Michael," he said softly. "If you need to talk or—or anything, you know I am—"

But Michael didn't hear what Ted was. And he didn't care. For his heart had given a familiar pulse, so sharp and sweet it was painful. He stood, shaking off Ted's hand, and looked out at the dance floor.

Brian Kinney, ladies and gentlemen. A vision all in black, his flawless skin glowing incandescent in the blue radiance of the club. Standing in the very center of the floor, loose-limbed and ruffled from his time in the back room. His long neck was bent swan-like, whispering a few parting words to an exotic-looking man. The trick stared up at him with dazed infatuation, which changed to dazed disappointment as Brian walked away without a backwards glance.

Brian was advancing across the floor towards the archway that led to the exit. A dozen inviting looks came his way, and he fielded them cleanly but never broke stride. Then, very suddenly, he stopped. Slowly, he turned around, his bright hard gaze sweeping the room like a searchlight.

Michael felt it the instant it found him. Felt the pull of it, a gentle but relentless hand grasping the very center of him. He gave a low gasp as their gazes locked. Brian's searching look relaxed into a slow smile.

"That is so spooky, how y'all do that," Emmett muttered.

But Michael was already moving away from the bar, into the smoke and lights. Like one of those trick shots in the movies, where you stay still but jerk forward at dizzying speed.

Two days since he’d talked to him. Twelve days since he’d seen him. It seemed like so much longer.

But now Brian was here, right up close. Smiling down with that smile he kept just for Michael, the one completely free of irony. Seeing Michael as no one else did, with a gaze that seemed to reach down into the bottom of his soul.

"Christ. You look like shit."

Michael blinked, then burst out laughing. Breathless giggles that were halfway to hysterical sobs. He leaned his aching head against Brian's chest. "So much for the dramatic voice-over."

Hands grasped Michael's shoulders in Brian's version of a tentative hold. "Mikey? What the hell?"

Michael straightened, wiping his streaming eyes. "Shut up and dance with me."

That piercing stare swept over him again. Brian's eyebrows drew together a fraction of an inch.

Michael shook his head. "I don't wanna talk. I wanna dance."

Like the point in a movie where the big musical number comes on, the lights brightened, smoke blue becoming sun orange. The jazzy moans of Sister Sledge quickened into a staccato synthesizer beat, accompanied by the joyful blast of a brass section.

"Shit! I love this one," Michael exclaimed. "Come on!" He grabbed Brian by the wrist to pull him further into the crowd on the dance floor. After a second's hesitation, Brian let himself be led. But when they found a spot under the lights, it was Brian who took Michael's hand and swung them into the song.

They were made for this music: the slower, steadier tempos of disco are so much kinder to a white boy's rhythms than techno. Brian, especially, excelled at this kind of dancing. (Unlike the usual stand-up-and-shimmy, where he had an unfortunate tendency to get distracted by the tempting sights surrounding him and step off the beat.) Disco gave him a chance to do what he did best—grab a partner and take control.

With Brian leading, you didn't have to think or plan or keep tempo, just hold on tight and be swept along. Just let the world go to a blur of color and noise. Just let go.

Not the 21st, but the 23rd. September 23rd, 1985. The day he first sees him. Brian, all tousled hair and leather jacket cool, slouches into English class twenty minutes late. Tosses an office pass at Mrs. Bay and surveys the room with wide amber eyes that miss nothing. Michael's heart leaps into his throat when they pass over him, falls into his shoes when they move on. More cardiac gymnastics when they come back. The strangest look crosses the new kid's face—not hostile, not friendly, but knowing. I see what you are, it says. I see you. The first time Michael realizes how devastating Brian Kinney's attention can be.

Then Brian looks away, and Michael realizes how much more devastating it is to lose it.

That pop of connection stays with him. It stays even as he hears the rumors that swirl around the new kid like Pigpen's haze. Brian Kinney was expelled from Immaculate Heart for beating up his soccer coach—no, he pulled a knife—no, a gun. He spent last summer on the streets—at a loony bin—in Juvie. He's on five kinds of meds and that's why he never talks—no, it's smack, Steve Nguyen saw the track marks. On and on, each story worse than the one before. But however insistent the whispers, nobody gets what's so glaringly obvious: under all Brian's don’t-give-a-damn is pain and rage that makes Michael's stomach clench.

And beneath that, something worse—desperate, screaming loneliness.

It takes days to scrape up the courage to talk to him. Days of watching from a distance, days of daydreams and nightsweats. Michael finally decides screw it, better to get smacked down than go crazy. The journey across the cafeteria is ten years long, damp palms clutching his lunch tray while his heart hammers in his chest. Those cold eyes look up, look through him, not happy to see him at all. Michael wonders what the hell he's let himself in for. What follows is a sweaty blur, Michael not even sure he's making sense for the greater part of the conversation.

But by the time it's over he catches it—that same spark of recognition in Brian's face, but brighter now.

It still isn't easy, of course. Nothing about Brian ever is. He's all frozen attitude in those days—sometimes it’s like hanging out with Han Solo while he's still in the fucking carbonite. It takes weeks to thaw him for real. Weeks of one-sided conversations and casual desertions. Weeks of cool indifference spliced with hostile flirtation. Michael holds on with the dogged persistence of a prospector panning for gold in the barren wilderness. Then one day he hits the motherlode. It takes a fairly serious groping and a fifth of Jack Daniels, but Brian smiles at him—really smiles.

Debbie's histrionics, his grinding hangover, and the month-long grounding that follow are so worth it.

He loved him from the moment Brian stared him down in first period English. But it isn't until he sees his new friend smile, the way he does not and will not ever smile at anybody else, that Michael knows it. Brian must know something too, because from then on things are different. The difference between someone letting you tag behind, and someone stopping, putting his arm around you, and bringing you along.

A dull snowy afternoon, Uncle Vic visiting from New York. Bored enough to try teaching them the Hustle, Brian and Michael bored enough to try learning it. Michael getting tripped up on his own feet and clinging to Brian for balance, both of them tumbling to the floor in a tangle of arms and legs, giggling like idiots.

Michael's 17^th birthday, he and Brian strutting into Babylon with their shiny new fake ID's. Putting on bad Australian accents and convincing the chicken hawk buying them drinks that they're foreign exchange students. Spending the rest of the night on the dance floor, flushed with triumph and Long Island ice teas.

The two of them in Brian's freshman dorm room, stoned and sleepy from a lid of truly excellent Chronic. Curled up on the single bed, Brian's head in Michael's lap. Brian reaching up and touching Michael's face, fingers warm and trembling, as he tells his best friend for the first time what they've both known for years.

Tripping on 'shrooms in the balcony of the Rialto, hitchhiking to see Depeche Mode in NYC, strumming along to Disintegration on Q-Mart guitars, skinny-dipping with Lindsay Peterson and Rebecca Tucci, road-tripping to Florida in Brian's Mustang;

Finishing each others' lunches, finishing each others' sentences; conversations about nothing, touches that say everything; a hundred in-jokes, a thousand shared looks, the million moments that mean nothing by themselves, but together make up the mosaic of Brian and Michael.

Nobody gets it—not Michael's mom and not his other friends. Not the friends Brian makes after he shrugs off the bad rep like a jacket that's out of style. Ego-trip, hero-worship, manipulation, obsession, sadism, low self-esteem. Nobody understands the truth is so much simpler:

I see what you are. I see you.

The song reached its crescendo, vocals swelling, horns blaring like Gabriel's trumpet. Michael was half-dizzy from heat and migraine, but Brian had him safe. The pain fell away, the way everything fell away when Brian was there.

The line between Brian's brows smoothed out. He leaned in, voice a low purr. "Miss me?"

"Nope," Michael gasped. "Not a bit."

Earth, Wind and Fire faded and the lights changed once more, darkening to smoldering red. Brian pulled him close for the deceptively slow intro of the next number, his hands dangerously low on Michael's hips. He nuzzled against him, lips to his ear.

"Well, I missed you."

Pulling back, he tilted Michael's chin up with one finger, trapping his gaze. Michael went breathless, Brian's concentrated interest hitting him, as always, like a ball peen hammer right between the eyes. They stayed that way an endless moment, Thelma Houston's plaintive vocals pouring out of Babylon's sound system in a disco dirge:

He knew it the instant Brian's focus faltered. Nothing serious—no more than a split-second flicker of his eyes over Michael's head. Just an instinctive reaction, like a well-fed cat pricking up its ears at a squirrel running by. Nobody else would have caught it. Any other time, Michael would have laughed at it. But tonight he felt the loss like an amputation. He closed his eyes and clutched Brian tighter, breathing in his familiar scent of sex and cigarettes and expensive soap. But it didn't help.

Long arms wrapped around Michael. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," he lied into the soft fabric of Brian's shirt. Everything was wrong. In this moment of agonizing awareness, he felt how closely they were being watched. The gazes were acid on his skin, burning with curiosity and vague hostility. Sometimes it seemed like the world was full of eyes, and all of them were looking at Brian. And he looked right back.

The song sped up, Houston's plea becoming a frantic demand:

Baby, my heart is full of love and desire for you
So come on now and do what you've gotta do
You started this fire down in my soul
Now can't you see it's burning, out of control

Michael stayed stock-still as the tempo increased, clinging to Brian like he was the only fixed point on a swiftly tilting planet. Other memories were returning, the ones they never talked about over take-out and old yearbooks. The kisses that went a second too long, the hands that went an inch too high, all their sorta-kinda-almost moments. Needy, sudden advances and subtle, guilty retreats, jealousy and mindgames and frustration. Brian going out the door with stranger after stranger, Michael going home alone. The faces of all those men blurring together until they became a single nameless fear in human form: that one day Brian would walk out the door and not come back.

Michael felt Brian's regard pulling at him like impatient hands. He looked up into that cruelly beautiful face, unable to resist. For this was the wonder and the horror of Brian Kinney. Once he saw you, really saw you, you were finished. Caught inside his gaze like a fly in amber, you couldn't look away. Even when he hurt you, even when he left you, even if it killed you, you could never, ever look away.

Houston drew the final word out, a piercing shriek of loss that built and built in Michael's ears, increasing the pressure on the swollen balloon of his brain. Until he felt something shatter inside, the fragile scrim of denial he’d erected. Pain flooded through him in a hot sick wave. The world tilted and darkened, Brian fading in the grey haze that swirled in front of Michael's vision. His thoughts melted together in the heat, one phrase echoing like the stutter of a scratched LP:

"Mikey!"

Hands caught him by the waist, but Michael tore away and stumbled into the mist. Not sure where he was going, just knowing he needed to get out, get away, before he suffocated in the dark. He ran into sweaty solid objects that cursed at him, and he pushed past them frantically. Running across the floor to the archway he made out by the lights strung around it, sparkling like the hope of escape. But then something huge and solid rushed up to him, blocking his exit. He smashed into it with a thud, realizing at the same instant it was the floor. He lay there stunned, greyness bursting before his eyes like somber fireworks.

The hands were back, turning him over and lifting him up. His head was pillowed against something soft but rough-textured.

Denim, he thought hazily. Lap.

He heard a voice calling him. At first he couldn't make out the words but slowly they grew clearer, like someone was turning the volume dial up.

—oddamn it, can you hear me?"

The greyness ebbed away. For a moment everything seemed achingly sharp, like seeing in more than three dimensions. He stared up, mesmerized, at the sight of Brian, his dark head ringed by a brilliant blue-white halo. The glow burst from his skin like captured starlight, fading everything around him.

"The light comes from you," Michael whispered. "I knew it."

Now Brian looked really worried. "Talk to me, Michael. Tell me what the fuck you're on."

With a bending of his vision, like that helpful someone just twisted the focus knob, the world returned to a blurry version of the normal spectrum. Brian was Brian again, stunning as ever but no more than that.

Ted and Emmett came racing over.

"Ohmigod, is he all right?" Emmett asked.

Brian's head jerked up. "What the fuck did he take? I swear to God, Em, if you've been scoring favors from that piece of shit Mario again—"

"He didn't take anything," Ted snapped. "Can't you tell he's sick?"

Brian blinked and looked down at Michael. "Sick?"

"He's probably got that bad flu that's going around. I knew as soon as he came in he wasn't feeling well. Any idiot could see it."

A soft, assessing hand on Michael's cheek. Then Emmett, sounding anxious. "Lord, he's burning up."

His shoulders were seized in a firm grip. "I'll take him home," Ted said briskly. "I was headed out anyway."

“No.” A steely arm clamped around Michael's waist. "I'll do it."

"It's okay," Ted said with another tug. "Michael's on my way. I don't mind giving him a hand."

Brian didn't budge an inch. "I bet you don't."

"What the hell does that mean?"

“You really want me to explain? He’s not that out of it." Cool fingers smoothed the damp hair from Michael's forehead. "He's coming with me."

"Oh, so now you get territorial. That's rich coming from someone who ditches Michael for every skank with six-pack abs. Would you be so fucking attentive if he'd passed out before you got your dick sucked?"

"Spoken like someone who never does. And guess what? Tonight's not your big chance."

"What did you say?"

"You heard me. I didn't stutter."

"Would you two quit it?" Emmett broke in. "Michael's gonna expire here among the cigarette butts while y'all lock horns."

A long tense pause, the syncopated bass of the Commodores machine gunning in their ears.

"Take your hands off him, Theodore." Brian's voice was so lifelessly calm, Michael knew he was seething. His clear brown eyes had darkened to jet, staring at Ted with the dilated focus of a leopard about to spring.

Michael sat up with a jerk, disengaging himself from Ted. The world swam dizzily for a second, then righted itself. "I'm fine," he said, firmly as he could. "Not dying." Then, as his head gave another painful throb: "Not yet."

It was enough to break Brian's dangerous concentration. He looked away from Ted and towards Michael. Emmett finished diffusing the situation by taking abnormal advantage of the four inches and forty pounds he had on Ted and pulling him away. Michael's last glimpse of them was Em leading his friend back to the bar. His arm was around him in a death grip, his mouth against Ted's ear, whispering urgently.

Before he or Brian could move, a tall blond man came bounding up. One of the club’s bouncers, so new Michael didn’t know his name. "Everything okay here?" he said, nodding at Michael but addressing Brian.

"Fine," Brian said. "A touch of boogie fever."

"It's going around," the bouncer said, flashing a blinding white smile that had to be caps. "I can call your friend a cab, if you want."

"Thanks. I've got my car."

"Need help getting him home?" the bouncer pressed. "I'm off in a few minutes."

Brian paused for a critical couple of seconds, his gaze roving over the man's Atlas-like build. With an insight brighter than bouncer boy's fake teeth, Michael knew this was the same guy he'd been checking out on the dance floor not five minutes ago.

Michael struggled to his feet, scowling into the bouncer's chiseled features. "Call me a cab.” His knees buckled and he reached out for a nearby support column, but Brian caught him by the shoulders.

"Yeah, that's a good idea."

"I can take care of myself," Michael hissed.

"Uh-huh," Brian said, clamping down and steering him towards the door. He spared the bouncer one last glance over his shoulder. "Not tonight."

"Oh. Well, I'm here tomorrow if—" But Brian was already moving them away.

"Don't worry about me," Michael said as they headed to the coat check. "I'm fine."

"You said that after Brad Pearsall cracked two of your ribs junior year," Brian said. "Keep walking."

Michael began to protest, but just then another wave of dizziness hit him. Brian's hands tightened. "Hang on." With the same swift efficiency that he handled most things, he dug the claim ticket out of Michael's front pocket, found his own, tossed both at the clerk, gathered their jackets, wrapped Michael's around him, threw his own over one arm, and herded them outside.

The blast of cold wet air revived Michael like a slap in the face. Brian lowered him onto one of the semi-dry steps leading up to the club's entrance. "Stay here. I'll get the car."

"I can walk."

"It's four blocks, Michael." Brian shrugged into his jacket and pulled a folding umbrella out of the front pocket.

"I can walk." He stood, pacing back and forth on the wet concrete. "See? Been doing it for years."

Brian sighed. "Why are you being a jerk about this?"

After a moment Brian sighed again. "Whatever. You're explaining to Debbie when you wind up in an oxygen tent."

The rain had turned to sleet in the rapidly plummeting late-night temperatures. Brian's umbrella proved useless, heavy gusts of wind driving the ice-cold needles of water almost horizontally. Michael didn't pass out, but a couple of times it was a near thing, the slick sidewalk wavering snake-like in front of him. The third time he slipped Brian, swearing under his breath, folded the umbrella and put a bracing arm around his shoulders. Michael was too exhausted to do anything but lean into him.

By the time they made it to the parking garage, they were both soaked to the bone. Brian dropped him on a bench by the entrance and pointed a dripping finger. "You. Stay,” he commanded. He headed for the garage elevator, jamming the button three times in rapid succession. As if responding to his impatience the doors opened immediately, and he disappeared inside. Michael leaned against the concrete pillion next to the bench, shivering.

He must have fallen into a light doze, because it seemed like Brian was back instantly, picking him up and half-walking, half-carrying him through the open passenger door of his silver Mustang hatchback. He slammed the door and walked around to other side, getting behind the wheel.

Michael straightened, shaking himself further awake. "Can you drive?"

"Been doing it for years," Brian said, not looking at him.

"‘Cause this is usually the point in the program where I ask for your keys."

"Watching your best friend pull a River Phoenix has a wonderful sobering effect." Brian flicked the lights and wipers on with his left hand and shifted into first gear with his right, the movements tense, jerky.

"It wasn't a River Phoenix," Michael said as Brian braked the car, slotting a ticket into the automated gate. Even if it was, it’s not like I don’t owe you one.

Brian didn't reply until they reached the traffic light past the garage. "I didn't know."

"I have the flu," Michael said, insulted. "Jesus, Ted knew I was sick. Why didn't you?"

"Why didn't you?" Brian shot back. He shifted into second gear sharp enough to make the engine grind. "You shouldn't even have been out on a night like this. What the fuck were you thinking?"

I was thinking how much I wanted to see you, you clueless prick. But Michael just rested his head against the seat, too tired and miserable to keep arguing.

Brian had turned the heater up full blast, but rivulets of water continued to run down Michael's neck like tiny cold fingers. The chills were coming regularly as contractions, and he clenched his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering.

"There's a blanket in the back seat," Brian said, his tone a little softer.

It took a good two minutes of poking around before Michael came across the smoke-colored corner of a blanket. Brian was normally more organized than this, but it looked like Michael had caught him in the middle of his mid-term shuffle. Most of the stuff covering the back was shopping bags, a testament to how frantic Brian's schedule had been lately. He shopped when he was stressed out. He also shopped when he was happy, sad, bored, and, well, breathing, but this kind of spree indicated Brian had been nervous enough to indulge in the only kind of therapy he believed in: retail.

Michael smiled a little at the chink in Batman’s armor, one nobody but his faithful sidekick would spot. Then he recalled the other reason Brian might have been shopping, and stopped.

Interviews, he thought. Have to look sharp to show those New York types you're not just another green kid from the Pitts, right?

He snatched the blanket from under two fat Saks Fifth Avenue bags, toppling them over. He caught Brian's questioning glance but ignored it, wrapping himself burrito-like in the soft flannel. Silence stretched out, the only sounds in the car the whoosh of the windshield wipers and Glenn Frey's reedy whine.

Michael cut the music off with a vicious click. Brian shot him a look that was part surprise, part irritation. Thou Shalt Not Touch Thy Best Friend's Radio had been the number one commandment since he bought his first clunker at seventeen. Without deigning to comment, he flicked the radio back on.

Michael went for the button again but Brian blocked his hand. "Are you trying to piss me off?"

"Yeah, it's all about you," Michael seethed. "I have a headache. That electric guitar is going through my skull like a goddamn drill but I guess I'll just suffer like a mute ‘cause you can't go five minutes without a soundtrack. God forbid once, just once, you think about what somebody else needs—"

"Christ, would you calm down?" Brian didn't turn the radio off, but he did turn the volume down several notches. "If something's bugging you, fucking say so. I get enough of the martyr act from my mother."

The reality of the New York offer hovered in the back of Michael’s mind like a dark presence. But he couldn’t turn and face it, not yet. He pulled the blanket closer, stifling another shiver.

The strident squawk of the Eagles became the mournful drone of Fleetwood Mac, barely audible over the rain.

"It's always a fucking shock," Brian said quietly.

"What?"

"You're never sick. Not since your asthma cleared up in ninth grade. Which is pretty goddamn amazing—with your mom, you should be a total hypochondriac. But you're not. You're always okay." Brian's voice dropped, like he was making a damaging admission. "That's what I tell myself. Whatever happens to me, you'll be okay. So it's a shock when you're . . . not." In his eyes Michael caught something he hadn't seen in forever, a strained look of guilt and anger. And he knew Brian was no longer talking about random viruses.

Weird, for him to refer twice in one night to something neither of them had mentioned in years. The first time Michael had seen this look was after Brad Pearsall's attack. Propped up on the sofa at his mom's, Brian stalking in like the Wrath of God in sweaty gym clothes. The two of them didn’t say much—Debbie was in high mother-hen mode, doing enough screeching for three people. But even hazy on painkillers, Michael took one look at Brian and got the message clear as if he was screaming it: THIS IS NOT OVER.

The second time neither of them mentioned, ever. If Michael had his way, they never would.

"I never understood why he did it,” Michael said, more to himself than to Brian. “He barely knew my name, then one day, wham! It didn't make sense."

"It made perfect sense. If you were paying attention."

"Huh?" Michael said, startled out of his thoughts.

"Brad was watching you for weeks. Coming out of the shower every day after gym, all shiny and wet in your Batman towel. You were driving him nuts."

"What? No."

"Yes. He wanted to fuck your tight little ass till you screamed. But he couldn't. So he made you scream another way."

"But—but—" Michael stuttered. "He was dating Jenn Wachalski, the lead majorette."

"And I was dating Alyson Livingston, the head cheerleader. What's your fucking point?"

The thought of anybody driven nuts over his scrawny seventeen-year-old self, much less North Allegheny High's All-American Adonis, was so bizarre it was a joke. But Brian's expression was dead serious.

Michael shook his head in amazement. "I never saw it."

"No," Brian said. "You never do."

He ignored Brian's jab, focusing instead on his revelation. Junior year of high school. Brian had hit his final growth spurt the summer before, attaining his enviable adult height of 6'3. He hadn't quite filled out—Debbie used to joke that if he turned sideways going over a sewer grate they'd lose him forever. But he was still a heart-stopping sight, smooth golden skin stretched taut over a long, strong frame, all streamlined grace and swiftness of motion.

Michael flashed on a memory, so intense it still tugged at him. Brian standing under one of the shower heads in the boys' locker room, light streaming on him from the rectangular frosted windows set near the ceiling. His eyes closed, his hands slathered with white softsoap from the dispensers, spreading the iridescent liquid across his chest, over the tight tan circles of his nipples. Bright bubbles and sparkling water spilling down the rippling muscles of his stomach, catching in the thatch of dark hair just below—

Who the hell noticed anything when that was standing next to you? It had taken every shred of Michael's shaky teenage concentration not to walk out of the showers every day with a raging hard-on.

But Brian noticed, like he always noticed everything. Probably thought it was funny, Brad the Golden Boy lusting after his runt of a best friend. Just freaking hilarious, until the day Brad slammed Michael into the slimy tiles, giving him the business end of the right foot that had made the varsity soccer team district champions and state finalists. Brian might even have noticed enough to prevent it, if he'd been there. The worst of bad timing, that he was stuck running laps that day for mouthing off to Coach Dale again. Brad was in the principal's office and Michael was on his way home before Brian even knew what had happened.

Another image, fuzzy at the edges, something Michael saw more than once. Brian standing very still, head cocked to one side, watching Brad Pearsall. Across the cafeteria, in the halls between classes, but especially on the soccer field, his dark eyes tracking the other boy with unblinking focus. He watched and he waited, until Brad had served his suspension, until Michael's bruises faded and he could walk without wincing. Until the day before district finals. A practice scrimmage, a slide tackle gone wrong, a sound (according to gossip) like an icy branch snapping, and Brad was on the ground, clutching his golden right leg and screaming in agony.

Anterior cruciate ligament tear, that was the official pronouncement. Seriously fucked up, that was the unofficial one. A career-ending injury—all the surgery and physical therapy on the planet wouldn't put that crucial bit of flesh back like it was. But nobody blamed Brian. Coach Dale insisted on serious competition even in practice, and it's not like anyone would do anything like that on purpose. But Michael's powers of observation, so slack when it came to himself, never faltered over his best friend. He saw it, that satisfied sparkle in Brian’s eyes whenever he watched Brad limping across the quad on his awkward aluminum crutches.

Michael came back to Roger Daltrey, low and defiant in his ear:

"What he did was insane," Michael whispered. He wasn't sure who he was talking about—Brad or Brian.

At first he didn't think Brian had heard him, too occupied scanning the streets near Michael's building for open parking spaces. He should have known better. Brian no sooner slid the Mustang between two parked cars than he turned to face him. The glare of an arc sodium lamp at the corner had rendered his face savage and strange, stark shadows bringing out the cruel curve of his nose, the feline arch of his eyebrows, the harsh, sensual lines of his mouth. Like one of those hybrid anti-heroes in the graphic novels—John Constantine, maybe, or Wolverine. Passionate and powerful and sometimes well-intentioned, but never quite human.

He reached out and cupped Michael's neck in the old possessive way, one thumb tracing slowly over the vulnerable hollow at the base of his throat. Pinpoints of light sparked in Brian's eyes when he felt the pulse there race at the contact.

"You want to touch someone badly enough, sooner or later you find a way."

Michael gave a shiver that had nothing to do with sickness.

Brian took his hand away and shut off the ignition. "Come on. Let's get you inside."

A dash through the wet to the building entrance, a less energetic slog (on Michael's part) up one flight of stairs, and they were at the battered door of #2-B. Thirty seconds of fumbling with the sticky deadbolt and another thirty of argument— "I'm sick, not retarded, Brian. I can open my own damn door"—then the lock clicked and they were in.

Michael scrabbled for the foyer light, and with a gasp began peeling off his waterlogged outer layer. Though equally soggy, Brian made no move to do the same.

"I love what you've done with the place."

Michael looked up from stowing his jacket on one of the hooks by the door, surprised at the distaste in Brian's voice. In the three months since moving in, he hadn't been home enough to worry about his place much. But he always thought he'd done pretty well for his first foray into the Pittsburgh housing market.

The twelve hundred square feet he called home were mostly taken up by a big square living room, featuring ten-foot ceilings and built-in bookshelves. On its left side, double doors with glass insets opened into a nice-sized bedroom. On its right a small hallway led to the fabulously kitschy pink-tiled bath and a space that could work as a home office or a second bedroom. A sixties vintage dayglo orange kitchen with equally antique appliances was tucked away in an alcove just off the front door. There were wood floors throughout, and in the daytime lots of natural light came flooding in through the triple window that faced the street. Not exactly a townhouse at the Pennsylvanian, but nothing to hang your head over, either.

But looking at it now through Brian's critical eyes, Michael realized just how sad his surroundings were. The spacious living room was occupied only by a thrift store sofa and his 13" TV/VCR combo machine, balanced on a rickety wooden table left behind by the previous tenant. Empty soda cans, crumpled papers, and plates crusted with the petrified remains of meals littered the floor. The walls were blank except for a six-foot cardboard Captain Astro, rescued by Michael from the dumpster of Buzzy's Comics. Harsh street light glowering through curtainless windows made the Captain's heroic smile look a little desperate, as if months of observing the squalor below had begun to wear even on his fabled nerves of steel. The kitchen was a greasy disaster, its counters piled high with pizza boxes and take-out cartons, its sink brimming with Big Gulp cups and dishes snagged from the Q-Mart discount bins. The doors to the bedroom gaped open, revealing the faded corners of an old mattress and box-springs, hemmed in by a mountain range of laundry.

"Should I be checking your arms for track marks?"

"Oh shut up. I've been busy."

"Any busier and the EPA is going to declare this place a biohazard."

"It's not that bad."

A cockroach longer than a thumb scurried across the floor in front of them. Its antennae waved merrily, as if in greeting.

Brian returned the salutation with a stomp of his Doc Martens. "Jesus Christ, Michael."

He felt his already burning face grow hotter. "Go then. You think my home is so scary, just go. I bet you can still catch up with what's-his-name at Babylon."

Brian didn’t dignify that with a response. "Why is it so fucking cold in here?"

"Because the living room radiator's busted, okay? And yeah, I've tried to get the super in to fix it but he's never around when I'm home and he's blowing off my phone messages. I'm not even sure there is a super—just an answering machine with some guy named Rocky on it." Weary of disapproval, he started walking towards the bedroom. "I'm gonna change."

"Hurry up."

"Why? No place I gotta be," Michael muttered, tugging at the water-stiffened button fly of his 501's.

"Oh yes, there is. I'm taking you to your mother's."

He stopped short in the doorway of his room, whirling. "Huh-uh. No way."

"Mikey—"

"I'd sooner stay here and freeze to death in my own filth."

"Look, I'd take you to the dorm but it's across town and the animals are lining up two-by-two out there. We can be at Debbie's in five minutes. You know she won't give you shit when she sees you're sick."

"Not tonight, maybe. But tomorrow it'll be 'you're too skinny' and 'you're working too hard' and 'look what you've done to yourself, you little asshole. I knew you weren't ready to move out.' I don't wanna hear it."

Brian raised an eyebrow at him. "Why? Because it's true?"

Michael clenched his hands and stalked into the bedroom. He flipped on the overhead light as he went, to be met by a flash and a pop as the bulb burned out. Yeah, that's about par for tonight, he thought, shaking his head. He hit the switch of the oversized lava lamp sitting on the milk crates serving as his nightstand. By its eerie blue glow he began pawing through the piles of laundry on the floor.

He could feel Brian looming in the doorway behind him, but he didn't turn around.

"You're killing yourself at Queer Mart to keep this dump. It's fucking stupid."

"I can handle it,” Michael said, picking up his favorite Superman t-shirt and giving it the sniff test.

"The evidence on the bottom of my shoe suggests otherwise."

He tossed the shirt down. “You know what? The last thing I need is a reality check from you, Mr. Full Soccer Scholarship. We don't all get free rides handed to us."

Wood creaked as Brian's fingers tightened on the door frame. "Nobody handed me a goddamn thing."

Michael just kept poking through the laundry piles, now roughly identified as 'clean', 'semi-clean', 'dirty', and 'do not approach without hazmat suit'.

"Fuck you, Michael. You think I liked dealing with Gaudioso and his Vince Lombardi bullshit? Sweating on the field every day with retards whose whole mental process was limited to stats and pussy? Spending every summer mentoring fucked-up prep school brats? Newsflash: I hate soccer. I've hated it since I was fourteen years old. But I stuck with it because I knew it was my best chance of getting off the shitheap. I have earned this degree. And I've earned every single perk that goes with it."

"Just what the world needs. Another selfish yuppie asshole."

He regretted the words the second he said them. He regretted them even more when he looked up and saw the hurt on his best friend’s face.

Shit. "Brian, I'm—" But he was already headed for the front door.

"Brian! Wait—"

He caught him with his hand on the doorknob. Brian didn’t look hurt now, his features set in the mask of chilly blankness he defaulted to in painful or threatening situations. Michael thought of it as his Jack Kinney face, not because it made him look like his father—no amount of conflict could do that—but because it was the face he wore for his father. Knowing he'd been the one to bring it out this time made Michael feel sicker than he already was.

"I'm sorry," he said, clutching onto Brian to keep him from bolting. The tension Brian wouldn't show in his face was in his body, the muscles of his arm hard and coiled as steel springs. "What I said was awful. You're not an asshole. I'm the asshole. It's just . . ."

You're getting courted by Madison Avenue while I'm crawling around a warehouse looking for Beanie Babies. In three months you'll have a corner office, a West Village condo, and more nameless tricks than even you will know what to do with. If I'm lucky, I'll be off the night shift. We make even less sense now than we did five years ago. How long before you realize that? How long before you forget my name, Brian?

"Just nothing. You're right, you deserve your success." He sighed. "I want you to be happy."

Brian's guarded expression grew puzzled. Hallmark sentiments had never exactly been their lingua franca.

"Whatever it takes for you to be happy," Michael said in a low voice, looking at him steadily.

He watched as understanding filled his eyes. Saw them widen a little with the realization of what Michael knew, and what he was offering. The perfect opening, the chance to say what he had to say. Because Michael meant what he said. He'd meant it since he first saw Brian across a crowded classroom, and sensed the pain reverberating under that still exterior like a silent scream. His guiding instinct for nearly a decade, to help Brian, to be what he needed when he needed it. Michael couldn't deny him now.

So say it, Brian. Say you're leaving me. And respect me enough not to come out with any crap about how we'll always be best friends. Break my heart if you have to, but make it a clean break.

Michael could feel himself growing faint. The blood was roaring in his ears, the dimness of the apartment growing even dimmer, cold sweat running down his neck into the damp cotton of his t-shirt. He dug his nails into his palms, desperate to stay upright. If nothing else, Brian wouldn't remember him as a pussy.

Brian put a firm hand on Michael's shoulder. It was unclear whether the gesture was supposed to be comforting, apologetic, or just an attempt to keep him from falling down. Hours seemed to pass before he spoke. His face had resumed its cool emptiness, and for once Michael couldn't guess what he was feeling. Then, finally, he opened his mouth. Michael's entire body went numb with dread, waiting for the axe to fall.

"Get out of those wet things before you catch pneumonia."

Michael stood rooted to the spot, staring at him blankly.

Brian took his shoulders and turned him around with a little push. "Go on, march."

Michael was undressing in the middle of the bedroom before his brain recovered from the shock.

All right, what the hell just happened? He'd totally put himself on the line, and Brian had ignored his generous offer like it was a two-inch dick.

Michael tossed his wet clothes in the corner, grabbed a t-shirt and a pair of boxers off the clean pile, and put them on. He sat down on the bed, concentrating.

Okay, you're Brian. You've just had the biggest success of your goddamn life. Even you couldn't stay cool under those circumstances. You'd have to tell somebody. But it's not exactly like you can call Jack and Joanie up for a pat on the back, is it? Your best friend is stuck in a warehouse somewhere, and you know he's not gonna take this shit well, anyway. Ted and Emmett are the first semi-interested listeners you come across. You ask them not to say anything, not till you're sure of your plans. Only that little twat Theodore—and you know it was him—had to open his big fat mouth. Now Mikey's heard everything, and you don't know what the fuck to tell him because you don't know yourself what the fuck it is you want.

Interesting theory. Except for one thing: Brian always knew what he wanted. And Manhattan was at the top of the list. He'd been talking about it forever; to him, it was Shangri-La, Oz, and Disneyland rolled into one. No way he wouldn't jump at the chance to go there, leaving Pittsburgh and its bad memories behind.

No, the much likelier explanation was Brian didn't want to have this discussion when Michael was all sick and pitiful. He'd see it as adding insult to injury, like kicking a puppy you were planning to leave at the pound.

Sighing, Michael stretched over and turned up the gauge on the radiator under the window. He tucked the fitted sheet around the corners of the bed and lay down, staring at the cracks in the ceiling. He was worn out and wide awake at the same time, with that grainy alertness which sometimes accompanies fever.

Brian came in, sans jacket and shoes. That, and the resigned air, signaled he was staying despite his better judgment. In one hand he held a Big Gulp cup full of water, in the other a couple of small plastic bottles. One was the Anacin which along with some packets of Alka-Seltzer made up the total contents of Michael's medicine cabinet. The other was an unfamiliar prescription cylinder.

He grabbed a towel, sniffed it, spread it on the bed and sat down. Motioning Michael to sit up, he handed him the water. While Michael arranged himself, Brian shook pills from each bottle into his palm. Four round aspirin and two smaller oblong ones it took a second to identify.

When Michael did, he looked at Brian skeptically. "Xanax?"

"You need something to make you sleep. It's these or the half-bottle of Kahlua I found under the sink." Then, when he didn't respond: "Give me a break, Mikey. The drugstores are closed and this is what I've got." An edge of fatigue had come into his voice, and Michael remembered it had been a long week for Brian, too.

He swallowed the pills, washing them down with a gulp of flat-tasting tap water. Brian took the cup from his hand and raised it to his own mouth, but Michael grabbed his wrist. "Wait, you don't want my germs."

"I had my flu shot months ago,” Brian said, shaking him off. “Gaudioso practically frogmarches his first string to the infirmary." He took a sip, grimaced, and set the cup on the nightstand. "Why didn't you go when the free clinic was giving them out?"

Michael shrugged. "I've been busy."

Brian shook out three more Xanax for himself, chewing them like baby aspirin to speed up the effect. Michael read the printed label on the bottle and frowned.

"Since when do you have a prescription for this stuff?"

"Since Anita told me she'd swap these for X whenever. She's got a guy in Toronto with a standing order."

"Glad that NAFTA thing's working for you." Michael gave Brian a considering look. "Where’d you get the scrip?"

"Are you kidding? The infirmary hands these out like lollipops."

To everybody, or just you? Michael thought. He wondered if the doctors at the infirmary had seen Brian's juvenile medical records. If so, they probably would've given him a Ketamine drip, if he asked for it.

Brian stood, undoing the top buttons of his shirt. "What do you have that will fit me and hasn't developed the ability to walk on its own?"

Michael ignored that. "The sweats on top are yours," he said, nodding at the clean laundry pile.

"I've been looking for these," Brian said, holding up the grey CMU track pants.

"I wore them home when I stayed over Christmas week. I kept meaning to tell you about them, but—"

"You've been busy," Brian cut in. He glanced around the dingy room. "It's okay. I haven't been around much to remind you." A shadow crossed his calm features, like a cloud moving over a still lake.

"You're earning an MBA in three semesters. Between class and soccer, I’m amazed you ever set foot off campus," Michael said quickly. He told himself it was because he felt bad about his earlier outburst. "I don't know how you deal with all that. I'd be in a bell tower with a sniper rifle."

"It's crossed my mind." Brian snapped the caps on both bottles and set them on the crate. He turned back, giving Michael a strange little smile. "That's what I told the nice lady at the infirmary, anyway."

With a twinge, Michael realized Brian knew exactly what he'd been thinking about that prescription.

"Would you shut the doors? We're letting the heat out," he said, after a beat of silence.

Still smirking, Brian got up and drew the doors closed. With one bare foot, he pushed some stray laundry in front of the gap at the bottom to block stray drafts.

Michael rolled to the other side of the bed, reaching for the stereo sitting on cinderblock shelves braced against the back wall. He hit a button and the CD changer slid out. After a minute of lingering over the discs on the shelves, he filled the tray and pressed shuffle. Michael could take or leave the bedtime soundtrack, but even on three Xanax Brian wouldn't sleep without it.

Roxy Music warbled out of the stereo speakers as Michael returned to the right side of the bed. He pulled the covers up, shivering. The radiator was groaning like the audience at a Pauly Shore movie, but the room remained chilly. He silently cursed himself for not liberating an electric blanket from the stacks he'd seen at the warehouse. Or a pillow, he thought, trying to fluff his sad flat one. Though Louise might think the Beanie Bandit was escalating to other poly-filled inventory. Smiling ruefully, he glanced up.

It was one of the sadder facts of Michael's existence that, even after all these years, there were still times his best friend could make him feel like that scrawny kid reciting multiplication tables in the boys’ shower.

Times like now.

Brian was standing naked at the foot of the bed. Indifferent to the chill, he folded his wet clothes, carefully draping each piece on the comic-filled crates by the doors. He was breathtaking in the glow of neon blue, cool light caressing his skin lovingly, violet shadows tracing every muscle in his long, lean form.

Maybe it was the flu or the emotional rollercoaster he'd been on tonight eroding Michael's usual defenses. He could feel his throat closing up, that half-pleasurable choked sensation he got when all the right buttons were being pushed. He wasn't cold anymore, the blood in his veins going south in a hot rush.

Twelve times twelve is 132—no wait, 142—Jesus, Novotny, get a grip. Michael tore his gaze away, reminding himself of the rules.

When you're into men, and all your friends are also men, you develop a certain selective blindness. You stop seeing them as men, at least in the let's-stumble-gleefully-into-the-back-room-together kind of way. Otherwise, you end up with a personal life straight out of Aaron Spelling. (Or the personal life a gay man would have on a Spelling show, if ol' Aaron ever acknowledged gay men possess working genitalia.)

This is most important when it’s your best friend, and it is most important when your best friend is really hot. And we're talking really hot—the kind of insane hotness that makes total strangers stop and stare at him in the street. You have to look past the walking wet dream and focus on what's underneath. As with Matt on Melrose Place, though your best friend may possess a penis, its existence is purely theoretical.

Problem is, Michael thought with a guilty glance, nobody who isn't legally blind ever mistook Brian for a Ken Doll.

It wasn't just the inches nature had graced him with, though he did smash that Irish curse myth to smithereens. It wasn't even the perfect face and body. Any Friday night at Babylon you could find a dozen guys just as perfect, and as blessed below the belt. But put those guys next to Brian, and suddenly they had all the mojo of a cardboard Captain Astro. Call it charisma, pheromones, that certain I don't know what: something set Brian apart, a quality you couldn’t quantify or copy, though lots of people tried.

Brian didn't just have sex, Brian was sex. Ignoring that part of him meant ignoring him, which kind of put the kibosh on the best friends thing. It was an impossible situation, that nine years of flirtation, frustration, and intermittent groping hadn't resolved. Brian seduced the way other people breathed, and he couldn't—or wouldn't—turn the function off just for Michael.

Take right now, for instance. Though all his attention seemed focused on shaking the creases out of his Calvin Kleins, he knew he was being watched. You could see it in the tilt of his head, arrogant and sort of sly at the same time. Brian liked being watched—plenty of eyewitnesses to testify to that. But what he really liked was being watched by Michael, a fact Michael hoped wasn't as evident to Pittsburgh at large.

This was not a two-way mirror. Brian did not like watching Michael. Wait, let's be clear: Brian did not like watching Michael with anyone else. Never mind that period a few years back, when he did it whether anyone liked it or not.

Man, it’s like your fucking master is over there, one back-room trick complained after Brian’s unblinking stare intimidated him out of his hard-on. You two need to take this shit to the Meathook. Michael couldn't explain that the surveillance had nothing to do with getting anyone off.

But that had been a long time and a lot of hard-ons ago. Nowadays, Brian dealt with his best friend's sex life by mostly pretending he didn't have one. Since mostly this was true, everything sort of worked out.

Michael's eyes again strayed to Brian, stripped and spectacular not six feet away.

Sort of.

He sagged back against the cold wall, temples and other parts throbbing while he tried to look anywhere but straight ahead. Bryan Ferry's vocals slithered around his aching brain, arrogant and sly.

I´ll find some, way of connection
Hiding my intention
Then I´ll move up close to you

I´ll use you, and I´ll confuse you
And then I´ll lose you
Still you won’t suspect me

Michael sat forward, snatched the CMU sweats from the pile, and chucked them at Brian's head.

With the lightning reflexes that had paid for his MBA, Brian grabbed them out of the air one-handed. Before he could react further Michael hit the light, turning away and burrowing under the covers.

Brian made no comment. But Michael could feel his gaze run over him like cold rain.

The Roxy Music song was ending in a flurry of synthesizers by the time Brian climbed into bed. Michael kept facing the window, trying to get his breathing back to normal. Instead of assuming the usual sleepover position, sprawled over two-thirds of the mattress and clutching Michael teddy-bear style, Brian stayed silently on his own half. A move that could have been an apology, or a demand for one.

The silence stretched out as Michael's stereo began playing the intro to the next song, human heartbeats that quickened into a confusion of cash register bells, ticking clocks, insane laughter, and women's screams. The chaos opening Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon matched Michael's mood: his own heart was still beating too fast, the blood fizzing in his veins like something carbonated. There was nobody he could more comfortably share a silence with than Brian. But not this kind of silence.

Brian felt the tension, too. Over the music Michael heard the catch in his breathing from his deviated septum, legacy of a long-ago broken nose. The slight wheeze was Brian’s only tell when he was uneasy.

Chaos faded into a dreamy tapestry of electric piano and steel guitars, but the atmosphere stayed awkward. Michael was almost glad when Brian made the annoyed noise which signaled further criticism was coming.

"I'm sensing a theme to tonight's entertainment."

"Thursday is '70s night."

"Fuck the eight track flashback. Where's that copy of In Utero I gave you for your birthday?"

Michael's hand tightened on the edge of the mattress. "Propping up the wobbly table in the living room. Where it's staying."

"You call yourself a Gen Xer. After all that Radiohead shit you've made me listen to—"

"For. Get. It."

Last Christmas weekend Brian, stoned scary on supergrass, had subjected Michael to a Nirvana marathon. He explained—between lapses into what sounded like backwards Martian—that blasting the Seattle rockers was the only thing keeping them safe from the demons lurking outside his dorm. Michael, feeling the wild energy crackling off his best friend like ozone, did not argue. Instead he stayed. And endured. For thirty-one hours. It probably said something about them both that Nirvana remained one of Brian's favorite bands, while Michael hadn't been able to stand the sound of Kurt Cobain's voice since.

"Maybe it's just as well. No point staying too attached—Cobain's not long for this world."

"Don't say that. The thing in Rome was an accident."

"A bottle of Dom on top of fifty painkillers? Some accident," Brian scoffed. "You were with me in those fifth-row seats last fall. You saw him do 'All Apologies.' That was the face of a man who wants to die."

"I guess I can see how marriage to Courtney Love might spark that reaction."

"Pathetic. The guy spends ten years clawing to the top. He gets there and all he wants to do is jump."

"Maybe the view wasn't what he expected."

"So? His kind of money, you change it to what you want. You don't cry in the corner like a little bitch."

"Maybe he doesn't know what he wants. That's our Gen X thing, isn't it? Despair in the face of a soulless corporate culture that reduces us to marketing stats?"

"Depressed slacker is your Gen X thing. I'm the asshole with the marketing degree. Remember?"

"Never mind," Michael sighed.

Brian tossed restively on the lumpy mattress. "These are the sheets I gave you when you moved in.”

Michael gave an affirmative grunt.

The bed moved again, more violently. "Four-hundred count Egyptian cotton deserves better than this."

"All right, I get it. You hate my depressed slacker's apartment. Can we drop it?"

"I don't hate your apartment. I hate what you're doing to your apartment. I hate what your apartment is doing to you. You and this rental property are in a dysfunctional relationship.”

“I have a knack for those."

"It's too big and it's too fucking expensive," Brian said, undistracted. "Especially for a building with an imaginary maintenance man."

Michael made an exasperated sound. He should have known Brian wasn't going to give up on the living conditions commentary. It was standard operating procedure when something really pissed him off—hang back and size up the situation, then attack when his opponent's guard was down. But ignoring him wasn't the answer. If anything was guaranteed to piss Brian off more, that was it.

"It's near everything. Anyway, it was the best I could do on short notice."

"What short notice? Your ass wasn't in the street. You were paying Debbie, what? Four hundred dollars a month? The only thing cheaper is a cardboard box on Liberty Avenue."

"Not when you factor in the cost of my soul."

"Don't be a drama queen."

"I'm not being a drama queen. You know I used to have a recurring dream when I lived there? Ever since I can remember, a couple of times a month. I'm stuck in the house and can't get out, while a huge red hen chases me around pecking off body parts. My eyes, my hands, my dick."

"How David Lynch,” Brian said unsympathetically. “But you lived with that giant chicken for twenty-three years." Long fingers snaked around Michael's hip. "Everything seems to be intact."

"Hey! Cut it out!"

Brian dropped his hand but not the point. "Before Christmas you mentioned maybe looking for your own place at the end of this year. Maybe. A few days later you were throwing your worldly belongings into Hefty bags. I . . . wasn't really with it that week, then school started and things got nuts. We never discussed it."

When Michael didn't say anything, Brian rephrased his statement in the form of a question.

"What the fuck happened, Michael?"

He stops at the bottom of the stairs to his room. "Can we talk about this later?" he says tiredly.

"No, we fucking well can't. You run out on Christmas dinner, disappear for two days, and drag in looking like death warmed over. You'd better have a pretty fucking good explanation, young man."

"I didn't disappear. I called you."

"Once. For twenty seconds. From the middle of a goddamn rave."

"They don't play Nirvana at raves." Or in my presence ever again. "The music was for Brian. See, he—"

"I should've guessed. Brian." Debbie says the name like it's contagious. "What did he do this time?"

"He didn't do anything. Something was done to him." Michael has decided to just give her the story—as much as he can stand to give, anyway. He's too wiped to think up a decent lie.

"Brian went to Christmas dinner at his folks', and that went like it usually does. He headed back to his dorm to smoke some weed—don't start, I've seen you and Uncle Vic and your Led Zeppelin LP's—anyway, the weed was laced. With PCP, we're thinking now. When Brian started feeling weird, he called me."

Debbie has paled beneath her Maybelline. "Why the fuck didn't you take him to the emergency room?"

"They'd have stuck him in the psycho ward, Ma. Restraints, needles, God knows what."

"GOOD. Do you know what can happen when someone’s flying on that shit? The sick, crazy things he can do?"

"Brian isn’t . . . I mean, he didn’t—I wasn’t—” Michael stops, swallows hard. “He would never hurt me.”

Debbie makes a disgusted sound.

"He didn't know the stuff Mario sold him was spiked. What happened wasn't his fault!"

"Nothing ever is, is it?"

Michael starts upstairs. "I am not doing this right now."

"Yes, you fucking ARE." Debbie grabs his arm so hard he'll have marks the next day from her Lee Press-Ons. "For years, I've watched you take his scraps, take his shit. I’ve kept my mouth shut because I know what he means to you. But now you tell me he's put your fucking life at risk. I can't shut up this time." She pulls him closer, so close he can see grey hairs poking out beneath the bright frizz of her wig.

"Brian is bad for you."

Michael pulls away. "He's my best friend."

"Sure, that's what he says. It's how he operates. Always feeding you those extra bits of his attention, keeping you pining away while he goes out and does whatever the fuck he wants. Let me tell you something: That is not friendship. That's ownership."

"Brian loves me." His voice shakes as he says this. He blames the exhaustion.

Her face softens a little. "Sweetheart, Brian doesn't love anybody. Not like you love him. And no matter how much shit you take, that's not gonna change."

Michael turns away, clutching the banister until his knuckles turn white.

"I'm sorry. I know how much that hurts. If I had it to do over, I'd have put you in Catholic school so you two never got started. I don't care how many jobs I had to—"

He whirls back. "You are not serious." Then, seeing from her expression she is: "Do you know what high school would have been like for me alone? What it would have been like for Brian?"

"You'd have been all right. I'd have damn well made sure of that."

"And Brian?” he demands. “You know how it was for him at home. Maybe you don't know everything, but—Christ, if he hadn't been able to come here sometimes, get away from that shit, what he might have—" Michael breaks off, shaking his head.

"That would have been sad," Debbie says without emotion. "But he's not my son, Michael."

He looks at her a long second. "Jesus. You really hate him, don't you?" he whispers.

"Wait a minute, I never said that."

"Can't believe I didn't see it before," he says slowly. "And it’s not because he owns me. It’s because me being with him means you don't."

"What the fuck are you talking about? I don't want to—"

"All those dinners and hugs, the fuss you used to make over him, that was just your way of keeping the competition close, wasn't it? God, no wonder he never really warmed up to you. I thought he didn't trust parent types in general, but he knew. You can't stand him, like you can't stand anything that loosens your death grip on me. Sports, sleepaway camp, Uncle Vic the summer he invited me to New York." He laughs bitterly. "Thank God Dad's dead, right? No competition there."

Her face goes remote, like it does whenever John Novotny is mentioned. "Now you're being stupid."

"No. I'm finally being smart." He starts walking towards the front door.

"Where the fuck do you think you're going?"

"Brian's. He'll let me crash there till I can figure things out."

"You are not going back and let that lunatic strangle you in your sleep." Arms flapping, she runs to block his exit. For one surreal moment, Michael swears he sees feathers.

He closes his eyes, counts five, and opens them. "Brian is fine now. But I don't care if he's Charles Manson. I won't stay here. Not one more night." He pushes past her, trying to get to the door.

"All these years I've sacrificed to put a roof over your head and clothes on your back, and you're gonna leave me like this? Over Brian?"

"No, over me." He reaches for the doorknob.

She grabs his wrist. "You're just a kid. You're not ready. You don't know what it's like on your—"

"I'll handle it."

"Sweetheart—" she says, squeezing.

"NO!" he yells, pushing away. 'I won't let you peck pieces off me anymore." Then, when she looks at him like she's wondering what he's been smoking: "I'm a grown man. This is my life, Mother."

Even as it's happening, he wonders how the hell they got here so fast. Then he realizes, with the edgy clarity you get after too many hours of grunge, several gallons of coffee, and zero sleep, that this choice has been coming forever. Maybe since his mother walked in on two ninth graders drunk on whiskey and hormones. Sad thing is, for all the yelling and guilt over time, she never stood a chance.

“Brian is your life. But you are not his. If you think different, you are in for one rude fucking awakening.”

Michael's hand tightens on the door's splintered edge. "I'll get my stuff later."

"You take only what you bought and paid for. Walk out of here, and you stand on your own two feet. I'm not carting towels and ziti to some bachelor shithole like the fucking Welcome Wagon."

"I'm a little hazy on that week," Brian said when Michael still didn't answer. "But I recall you babbling something about your mom putting The Incredible Hulk #181 in with her library donations."

"The first ever appearance of Wolverine. Very fine plus condition, only minor stress marks and slight discoloration on the staples," Michael said wistfully.

"Shame. You loved that comic like my mother loves Jesus."

Michael sighed.

"You sold it to pay the deposits on this place. Didn't you?"

Another slight intake of breath was all the confirmation Brian needed. "I repeat, what the fuck happened?"

"Does it matter? I'm here now," Michael said. "Wolverine is gone, either way."

"Fine. Whatever. Work things out with your mom. She doesn't deserve the silent treatment."

"You shouldn't defend her." Michael couldn't keep a slight emphasis off the first word of that sentence.

Brian must have heard it, because it took him a minute to answer. "She has your best interests at heart."

"Do I need to elaborate on the deeper meanings of the chicken dream?"

"So Debbie is Queen of the S'mothers. She means well. She'd never hurt you on purpose." Brian paused again, and when he spoke his voice was quiet. "That's more than you can say for a lot of parents."

There was no argument Michael could make to that. Which no doubt had been the point of Brian saying it.

The silence spun out once more. Michael could feel the first effects of the meds in his bloodstream, that numb floatiness which is nothing like natural sleep. The fugue went along with the Pink Floyd on the stereo, David Gilmour crooning on about insanity and loneliness and killing yourself with blind obsession. Or maybe he was talking about rabbits and surfing, Michael wasn't sure. But it was a relief when the track shifted to Bowie's "Moss Garden," a dreamy instrumental. When you put psychedelic art rock on top of tranquilizers, you could hear all kinds of things you’d rather not.

That was the problem with drugs like Xanax: they didn't just loosen up your body, they loosened up your brain. Michael's most vivid hallucinations and violent nightmares had been when he was on tranks, a fact he unfortunately forgot earlier, since it had been forever since he'd taken any. He didn't just hear things, he saw things, too. Flashes of the past, pictures exhumed from the dusty deep storage of his subconscious.

Michael's dry, tired eyes drifted to the window. He watched the rain run down the glass, water drops seeming to move along with the Oriental plinkings on the stereo. They threw weird twisty shapes on the blank wall opposite, pale shadows writhing like fierce creatures in terrible pain.

Brian is soaked through and shivering as he climbs awkwardly through Michael's bedroom window. So awkward he catches and tears the hem of his sweater on an exposed nail. This stutter in his catlike coordination is Michael's first clue something is really wrong. His second, the welts he sees on Brian's back before he can pull his sweater down.

St. Patrick's Day, 1986. Just before midnight on a rainy Monday—Michael could recall the date and circumstances exactly. You don't forget the first time you see the results of a really serious beating.

He doesn’t forget the cold nausea that roils in his gut. Or his frantic need to call someone—his mom, the cops, anyone—who might help him put a stop to this. He definitely doesn't forget when Brian grabs his wrist and says hoarsely that if he does, it's over between them. He looks into those dark eyes, glazed as they are from heavy downers, and knows Brian means it. So Michael takes his hand off the doorknob. Because he also knows, though he can’t say how he knows, that the help Brian needs isn't available through Social Services.

But later, as they lay tangled together in the dark, he works up the courage to ask the question that's been torturing him for months.

It takes him so long to reply, at first Michael thinks he's not going to.

“If I ever start in on him, I won't stop." The words are slow, slurred with pain and Quaaludes. "He's not gonna fuck my future like he fucked his own. It's what he's after, y'know. Suicide by psycho."

"You are not psycho."

Brian doesn't reply to that, just holds Michael tighter.

They never talked about it again. Not on the days—rarer after ninth grade but still occurring—that Brian showed up at school glazed and silent. Definitely not on the days things were so bad he didn’t show up at all. They never talked about what had happened to him the summer before they met. Michael worked out most of that story by cutting rumor with common sense. The rest of the blanks were filled in from several remarks made in front of him by Joan Kinney, who in her own sanctimonious way could inflict injuries as painful as her husband's. Those weren't a topic for discussion, either.

They never talked about any of it, not to each other or—despite the court-ordered therapy Brian suffered through freshman year—to anyone else. Which wasn't always easy, because even once Brian reinvented himself as Big Man on Campus, other people still talked. If Michael had a nickel for every time he'd been asked "What is his problem?" he wouldn't be in his current mess.

Yeah, Brian was a real question mark to the masses. But Michael never had any trouble seeing what lay under those menacing defenses. Which was why after their first exchange in the cafeteria, he was never scared of him. Scared for him, often. Nervous as hell from his mood swings and mind games, sometimes. But that was as far as it went. Brian might stare through other people like they weren't even the same species, but he never, ever turned that look on Michael.

It's a real rush, when you are the one he sees that way. The rush a big cat trainer must feel when his favorite tiger comes up and nuzzles his neck. You deal with the occasional nip, because you know anyone else would have gotten his head chewed off by now. Soothing that savage instinct is such an ego trip it makes you conceited, it makes you careless. You forget your sexy beast isn't the only predator around.

Brian’s fingers shake as they trace over the cuts and bruises on Michael's arm. One of the cuts has opened, a single drop of red welling up like a tear. "Is this the only place you're still bleeding?" he says softly. Of course he knows the answer, knew it before he asked the question. But there's some inflection left in his voice, which means he hasn't let himself believe it yet. This is the time to speak, to sell him on a comforting lie. But Michael can't push words past the icy lump in his throat. By the time he finds a way, it's too late.

October 26, 1988. Another rainy day, another disaster: Michael was beginning to see a pattern. The date stuck in his head because, well, you never forget your first time. Or your first partner.

"Brian, please, he didn't mean to, he was drinking—"

"Yeah. We all know how crazy the Irish get when they drink." His mouth twists in a mirthless grin, but that’s not what terrifies Michael. It’s the look in his eyes that does that.

"I was drinking too, I flirted with him, I asked him to—"

Brian grabs his arm again. "You asked for this?"

His voice is mechanically empty now, his face just as blank. But beneath that camouflaging calm things are lurking in the dark. Guilt and grief and a cold, relentless rage Michael has glimpsed only once before.

He tries to answer, speaking fast and desperate, straining for something that will get through to Brian. But suddenly it all stops making sense, the words breaking apart, sliced to bits on the broken mess inside his head. He feels everything go to pieces, the numbness of the last twelve hours shattering in a bright sick burst and he must have totally lost it because Brian is drawing him close whispering soothing nonsense but it doesn't matter because he hears the real message clear as if Brian was screaming it

THIS IS NOT OVER.

No, you never forget your first time. Or your first partner. Even when you really wish you could.

Kevin Dougherty. Michael hadn't said the name in years, even to himself. Long and lithe, with dark hair falling model-messy into his big dark eyes, and a mocking smile playing around his full red lips. Through some Celtic coincidence of genes practically Brian's mirror image, plus ten years. In the best Star Trek tradition, the doppelgangers had hated each other on sight. And Michael knew this, even as he stumbled out of BoyToy with Kevin's arm around him in a hold that was both terribly familiar and terribly wrong.

He should have known better. Brian warned him weeks before at Babylon. Hand on Michael's neck, voice casual but face serious: "That motherfucker plays rough, and you’re still in the sandbox. Do not engage, Mikey." Michael raising an eyebrow and saying it wasn't a problem, since Kevin totally wasn't his type. Brian looking at him hard a second, then relaxing. "Right. My mistake." The two of them smiling, seeing the joke that wasn't one—Kevin was as appealing to Michael as a Q-Mart designer knock-off was to Brian.

Until one blurry night, Michael's 18th birthday. Six kinds of bad luck intersecting: too much tequila on top of too much testosterone, the wrong thing said the wrong way, someone doing the big ditch once too often, someone else swooping in at a shaky psychological moment.

What Kevin did was wrong. What Michael did was stupid. That's what he told himself hours later, during the long cold walk home. He was wrong and I was stupid he was wrong and i was stupid hewaswrongandiwasstupid Saying it over and over to block out the pictures in his head, till the words lost all meaning and his brain went as numb as his feet.

He had no intention of telling Brian. He wasn't that out of it. But his reactions must have been more off than he realized, because Brian sized the situation up about sixty seconds after laying eyes on him. Michael's shaken state was his only excuse for not seeing what would happen next. He knew some response was coming. He knew when it came it would be dramatic. But he didn't count on it coming so fucking fast. The best clue, maybe, to how shaken Brian was.

"—chained to the bed with fucking duct tape on his mouth. Been there a day or two, beaten half to death and with this thing shoved up . . . you know Kyle Murray—real hottie, looks like Jason Patric with a better hairline—he's an ER nurse at Mercy, and he said it was the biggest metal one he'd seen, and he used to bartend at the Mineshaft back in college so I guess he’d . . . huh-uh, not permanent, but unless you wanna invest in a set of rubber sheets I wouldn't invite ol’ Kev for a sleepover any time . . . not a clue, he got roofied up good, but whoever it was must've had a mad hate on to leave him like that. If his roomie hadn't come back early from Fantasy Fest—"

Early November, 1988. Michael couldn't pinpoint the date any better: that period's details still fuzzed in and out. He did remember there was no rain, which might or might not fit the pattern. Calling what went down a disaster was a matter of judgment, something else of Michael's that wasn't too sharp just then.

"What's a good way of saying someone's totally batshit?"

Brian looks up from his AP Anatomy homework. "Come again?"

"This essay Mrs. O'Steen has us doing on one of the characters in Jane Eyre. I got Bertha Rochester, and I've already used up 'crazy,' 'mad, and 'insane.'"

"'Schizo.’”

"'Formal academic prose,' remember?'"

"'Deluded.'"

"She torched the house of a guy who kept her chained in an attic for twenty years. Seems pretty in-touch to me."

Brian thinks a second, tapping his highlighter on the Formica diner table. "'Bipolar.'"

"Hmm. Don't think the Victorians recognized the DSM-III."

"I don't know," Brian says impatiently. "Do I have 'Roget' stamped on my fucking forehead?"

"You're the one who talked me into this Honors English crap. I'm guessing you already did it?"

"Yup, St. John Rivers. Lots of synonyms for 'closet case.'" Brian shuts the thick textbook in front of him, rubbing his temples. "That's it, I'm taking a break. I can't tell glutes from gonads anymore."

"Gotta be the first time that's happened."

Brian rolls his eyes, reaching for the groaning snack tray Debbie dropped off before her shift ended. He goes for his usual choice, a big, shiny red apple.

Michael struggles a second longer, then throws down his pencil. "Forget this. I'll finish it later."

"We’re going to Babylon later."

"Nah. Think I'm gonna bail on the thumpa-thumpa tonight."

Brian pauses with his hand in the zippered pocket of his bookbag. "Again?"

"Sorry. Stuff to do." Michael nods at the scribbled-over notebook in front of him.

Brian sighs as he takes a folding knife out of the bag. He opens it and begins skinning the apple, fingers moving with practiced precision. The peel comes off in one curling strip, a skill he's been perfecting since his father gave him the knife on his last birthday. The Spyderco is a thing of evil beauty, its blade curved like a scimitar and sharp enough to slice a sheet of paper dropped on its edge. Michael can't even begin to work out the freaky motivations that must have gone into the giving and the accepting of such a gift.

Silence falls over them as he watches Brian carefully follow the fruit's rough globe shape. There's been a lot of that lately, filling the spaces between their usual banter like noxious gas fumes. All the things they haven't said since Jeff Cramer, the biggest gossip on Liberty Avenue, entertained them with his latest juicy story here at this very table.

Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name
But what’s confusing you
Is the nature of my game

Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners, saints
As heads is tails just call me Lucifer
Cause I’m in need of some restraint

So if you meet me have some courtesy
Have some sympathy and some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I’ll lay your soul to waste

"It's not gonna work," Michael says, tired of dead air. "You always lose patience around the equator."

"I'll bet you," Brian says, not glancing up. "I get it off in one piece, you go to Babylon tonight."

"And if you don't?"

"I'll do your Jane Eyre essay."

It takes Michael a minute to get it. "Clever," he says flatly. “No wonder Steve Nguyen’s so worried over the Valedictorian spot."

Tell me baby!
What’s my name?

Tell me honey!
Care to guess my name?

Tell me baby!
What’s my name?

I’ll tell you one time,
You’re to blame . . .

Brian releases Michael and sits back in the booth. Though the sun hasn’t changed, the light in his gaze has gone out like a total eclipse of vision.

Kevin Dougherty. A lot skinnier and paler than the last time Michael saw him, his look of bad health underlined by the yellowing bruises on his face. But his body signals anger as much as sickness: hands clenched, spine stiff, mouth tightened to a hard line. It’s a surreal moment, he and Brian staring at each other like Captain Kirk's light and dark sides, ready to rip each other to shreds.

Except both are dark, Michael can't help thinking.

"You hear me? I know you did it, you fucking freak."

"Relax, Kevin. Have Dolores bring you something. The lemon bars are yummy today." Brian's mouth stretches in a smile that gets nowhere near his eyes.

"Keep right on smirking, Kinney. It'll look nice for the mugshots after they've cuffed and shackled you."

Brian picks up the apple again. From the easy boredom of his body language, they might have been discussing Jane Eyre. "Why would they do that?"

"It was you at the Meathook last Tuesday."

"I was home watching TV on Tuesday. That Roseanne is a trip, isn't she?"

"You think you're so fucking cute, with the Rohypnol and the latex gloves. I don't need your face or your fingerprints. That little toy you left behind is plenty of proof. Real unusual item, they tell me. I ask around at the sex shops off Liberty, I bet I'll find out which one sold it. I show the clerks your picture, I bet one of them will remember selling it to you."

Brian’s knife pauses briefly.

"Didn't think of that, did you?" Kevin sneers. "My mom goes to St. Tim's with your mom. She's told me some really interesting stories about you. But there won't be any cushy teen trauma center this time around. Not when the charge is kidnapping and aggravated fucking assault. We'll see how cute you are after a couple of years at Fairview. You know they still do shock treatments there?"

"I've heard those make you shit yourself uncontrollably. Wow, how humiliating that must be."

Spots of dangerous color appear on Kevin's high cheekbones. He turns to Michael.

"Hold your buddy's hand while you can, Mikey. Soon his straightjacket's gonna make that tough."

“Don't you fucking call him that." Every trace of humor has vanished from Brian's face.

"What, Mikey? Wait, that's your pet name for him, isn't it? Sweet. But he's sweet, isn't he?" Kevin moves closer to Michael's side of the booth, eyes on him like he's remembering what he tasted like. Michael barely suppresses a shudder.

"Get away from him." The emotion is bleeding from Brian’s voice like he’s been stabbed somewhere vital. "Now."

"Oooh, territorial. But that's what this freakshow was about, wasn't it? You can't stand anybody touching your pet." A nasty grin spreads over Kevin's face. "Not even you. Tell me Bri, one top to another, how do you keep your hands off him? He's so . . . touchable." He reaches out, brushing the curve of Michael's neck.

"No," Michael replies. "He's not going anywhere."

Something in the way he says this makes Kevin break focus on Brian and look at him. Michael meets his gaze calmly. He has never felt so calm. A cold, clear-eyed anger is washing over him, seeming to flow up from the fingers gripping Brian's wrist. Brian, whose eyes are still blank with shock, who is still incapable of forming sentences. Michael is having no such problem with articulation. This amazing chill is freezing all the fear and confusion that's been burning inside him for days.

"You start talking about Brian, I start talking about you. I'll tell the cops all about October 26^th. The shots you bought me at BoyToy. The lines you did off the dashboard of your BMW. The other lines you did off your granite kitchen countertops. I'll tell them how scary you got after that, how rough. So rough even smashed senseless on Cuervo, I begged you to stop. I'll tell them how you didn't stop."

"That is NOT how it—"

"No? Two of us there in the wee hours that Wednesday, Kev. I was the one getting stitches at the free clinic Thursday. Somehow, I think the cops will believe me. They'll believe me when I tell them you were stalking me for weeks before the 26^th. And since the 26^th, you've developed a scary fixation on my best friend. My seventeen-year-old best friend."

Kevin stares at Michael like he’s never seen him before. "Y-you're as crazy as he is.”

Michael smiles. "Ever hear what happens to pretty boys in prison, Kev? It's not like the porno flicks. Next time you get laid, you'll be wearing pigtails and calling some Aryan Brotherhood member 'Daddy.'"

He sees the sudden, terrified glitter in Kevin's eyes. And everything gets even more clear. The beautiful cold clarity you experience when you put your hands on a combination lock, feel a click, and know just where to press to bust it wide open.

"You know they pimp their bitches out? Have 'em on their knees in a closet somewhere, hour after hour. Can't talk, can't move, can't fucking breathe. You know that feeling? That helpless, suffocated feeling?" He looks at him a second, and nods. "Oh yeah, you do. And way before last Tuesday. That's why you have to be on top. That's why you like it so rough. Just how Daddy used to do it, right?"

"Shut up! You j-just shut your mouth!" Kevin sounds about twelve years old. He's trembling head to toe, face gone the yellowish-grey of someone ready to faint or vomit or both.

Michael’s voice remains calm. He has never felt so calm. "Rape is a first-degree felony. Figure in the time they’ll tack on for 'deviate sexual intercourse.' That's what the nice officer who visited our health class called it. You're looking at ten years, minimum. Ten years in that closet sucking cock. How cute do you think you’ll be?”

—and you're back in that room, staring down at that bed, an iron monster draped in dark, expensive linen. On it is a long, lean figure, naked and gagged, bound hand and foot to the frame. Its blank helpless body flashes in the blade of your knife as you pass the weapon back and forth between your gloved hands. A desire that's the dark twin of what you feel in all those bedrooms and backrooms courses through you like cold electricity. But you know if you give into it there won't be any turning back, not this time. So you stay very still, poised on the crumbling edge of the abyss, loving the dizzy feeling of almost jumping—

HE STOOD LIKE THAT FOR AN HOUR A FUCKING HOUR

Michael bolts for the back of the diner. His protective coldness is going going gone, melted by a scalding flood of sick horror. He bursts through the door of the bathroom, reaching the stall just in time. He retches again and again, insides twisting like they're being ripped out, wrung out, and shoved back in strange shapes. It goes on and on, until all he's bringing up is pale brown water.

"You are not crazy."

Brian gives a choked laugh and starts to turn away. Michael catches his hand, not considering the consequences. But the touch is just a touch, Brian's fingers warm and a little damp.

“The ugliness you've been through, it doesn't matter. What you've done, what's been done to you . . . none of it matters. I see what you are, even if you can’t."

"What do you see?" Brian says this like he really, really needs to know.

And Brian is pulling him close, arms wrapping around Michael. He clutches him like he's trying to absorb him into his own skin. Kisses the top of Michael’s head, whispering into his hair.

"You just answered your own question."

Michael rolled over on the mattress, resting his head on Brian's chest. Let the tingling warmth of his best friend flow over him, a feeling like nothing and no one else he’d known. But the sounds of Brian's breathing and heartbeat were not enough to drown out Pink Floyd's mournful meditations.

The lunatic is in my head
The lunatic is in my head
You raise the blade, you make the change
You rearrange me 'til I'm sane

You lock the door
And throw away the key
There's someone in my head
But it's not me

Just lyrics, he thought. They’re like dreams. They don’t have to mean anything real.

"I love you," he said. Because that’s what was real. No matter what he had done, or what had been done to him. That was the truth that mattered.

Long arms twined around his waist, pulling him closer. "I know."

He was quiet so long, Michael thought he’d gone to sleep. He was about to drift off himself when he heard Brian's last words, soft and sad as the whisper of his own conscience.

"Everything would be so much simpler if you didn't."

“Fucking dinosaur rock.”

“Thursday is ‘70s night at Babylon.”

“This isn’t Thursday.” Brian’s eyebrows draw together as he surveys the dance floor. “And this isn’t Babylon.”

Even from the distance of the bar, the crowd looks wrong. The crush of beautiful faces and bodies is too beautiful, too uniform: features molded into empty perfection, muscles sculpted with plastic precision. The same face and form repeated dozens of times, an army of mannequin men doing one mechanical dance. As Michael watches, they turn from their robotic grindings and fixate on Brian. The savage hunger of those gazes is a burning contradiction to their blank doll faces.

Brian gazes coolly back.

“Stop encouraging them.”

“It doesn’t matter. They’re not going anywhere.”

“They’re not real. Not like you are.”

“Not like you are,” Brian says with a smirk.

Michael ducks his head, embarrassed.

Marc Bolan’s mellow drone fills the awkward pause which follows.

“That’s a really great look for you,” Michael says finally, by way of distraction.

Brian is shining like a fallen star under the neon constellation of disco lights. His flawless skin glows blue-white; the darkness of his hair and eyes, the muscles of his throat and torso, all shade to indigo in contrast. The effect is so dazzling it almost hurts to look at him, brightness bursting from his body like its source lies beneath flesh and bone. As if a pilot light, blue and blazing, glows where his heart should be.

“You’ve seen it before.” Brian turns, giving one of his hard bright glances. “Dig yourself, Mikey.”

Michael holds up a hand. The flesh gleams like he just took a bath in iridescent body paint. But the color goes more than skin deep, a pale silver radiance like pearls or moonlight.

“Or a mirror,” Brian suggests, his voice soft. “A really fragile, expensive one.”

Michael wiggles his fingers, frowning. “I don’t think it’s me.”

Brian raises an eyebrow at him. “What are you?”

Michael wipes his hand on his leg. “I don’t wanna talk. I wanna dance.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me,” Brian sighs.

Over their heads, the soothing sounds of T. Rex fade to the exotic twang of an electric guitar.

“Shit,” Michael mutters.

The lyrics come in seconds later, David Bowie’s vocals straining seductively over a samba beat:

Michael shifts nervously. “Come on. Dance with me.”

“You hate this song.”

“I don’t hate it. I—I just don’t get it, that’s all.”

Brian gives him the stare of superior impatience he used to get in Honors English when Michael failed to grasp the deeper meanings of whatever awful old book Ms. O’Steen was torturing them with that week.

Oh no, not me
I never lost control
You’re face to face
With the man who sold the world

“You want something badly enough, sooner or later you try to take it. No matter what the price.” Brian’s brilliance darkens like someone flicked his dimmer switch. “You get that, right? After our hands-on demo last Christmas.”

“I don’t care about Christmas. How many ways can I tell you?”

Brian gives a choked laugh and tries to turn away, but Michael grabs his wrist. The energies between them spark and dance, blue and silver swirling together like heavy metals. Like cobalt and mercury, beautiful but deadly if you don’t know what you’re doing.

“That’s not the solution. That’s the fucking problem,” Brian says, pulling back. He faces the floor again, features as cold and blank as the dancers’.

“What you did . . . what you wanted to do . . . it doesn’t matter,” Michael says quietly. “You didn’t mean—”

Brian’s whips around. “I always meant it. For nine fucking years.”

It takes Michael a moment to answer. “I didn’t see it.”

“No.” Brian’s voice is so calm Michael knows he’s seething. “You never do.”

Then his shoulders slump, the anger leaving as soon as it came.

“It’s just as well. You never would have stayed.”

“Hey—I’m not the one who keeps walking out the door.”

Brian flinches a little but says nothing.

Michael leans wearily against a nearby support column. “Just dance with me. Please?”

“I’m tired of dancing.” Brian is already moving away, his attention fixed on the dark archway looming on the other side of the dance floor.

Brian only gets more distant. His bright form is tracked by a thousand eyes, glowering like wolves on the edge of a bonfire.

But Michael can’t seem to move or speak. Paralyzed by everything he can’t do, speechless with everything it’s too late to say.

Brian has reached the depression leading to the floor. He stops, giving Michael one last, long look. For all the brilliance around him, his face is very pale.

“Nine years, Mikey. Sooner or later, the song has got to end.” He steps over the edge.

“Stop!” Michael cries, finding his voice at last.

But Brian has already plunged into the crowd. Bodies close around him like a living shroud.

Michael begins screaming

“BRIAN, PLEASE!”

Screaming, the words he couldn’t whisper before

“DON’T LEAVE ME!”

But Brian is gone.

Panicking, Michael darts forward, trying to push his way into the crowd. But it’s like trying to force through a blank metal wall.

As if some invisible signal has been given, the men turn as one and begin to close in. Their faces are smooth and horrible as they stare at him with empty doll eyes. Michael tries to back away but there’s nowhere to go: behind him, in front of him, on top of him, is a pale crush of hostile bodies. And suddenly it’s all he can see, hard flesh that reeks of a hundred expensive colognes and the false tang of plastic and underneath that, a hot metallic stench he knows is the smell of their rage. Slick stiffness pushes against him, into him, in his mouth and eyes. Hands like steel hooks tear at him in a hundred places. He can’t speak, can’t move, can’t breathe.

Dark flowers begin to bloom before his vision as his tortured lungs gasp for air. He tries to scream and struggle, hysteria completely taking over, but it’s no good

Michael feels a cold steely grip close round his wrist. With a tendon-tearing tug it frees him from beneath the bodies. Before he has time to take a breath or clear his vision the grip is pulling him forward, across the floor and through the archway that’s the only exit, moving at a speed that almost jerks him off his feet.

The mannequin men scream as one, a piercing robotic shriek like Ultraman going down in flames. They give chase but his rescuer is superhumanly fast. Before a minute passes the sound of pursuing feet fades.

They are running through a series of dark corridors, way branching onto way like the tangle of some mythic maze. Michael is too dazed to have any idea where they are or where they’re going, but it seems to be in the general direction of down. As they go he sees flashes of things out of the corner of his eye, faces and voices emerging from alcoves hidden in the dark. Some seem familiar, bright scenes that catch at the back of his mind like eager hands. But they go by too quickly for him to make connections. His rescuer keeps them moving faster and faster, till the blood thunders in Michael’s ears and the air turns to fire in his lungs.

At the point he’s about to collapse from sheer exhaustion, the pace slows, then stops altogether. He falls to the ground, heart hammering, colored sparkles dancing before his eyes.

After an indeterminate amount of time has passed, his heartbeat slows and he sits up on his elbows.

He is lying in the middle of a dim, chilly space. The overpowering odor of mildew suggests somewhere that hasn’t seen sunshine or fresh air in years, if ever. He can hear the drip of distant water, and the floor beneath him is cold and slimy. It’s hard to make out more details: only two of the dozen or so recessed lamps in the ceiling are working, their glass faces bruised by what looks like the dust of decades. The walls just visible in the sickly light are of crumbling brick that might have once been grey but has darkened in the gloom to a dingy black. There’s no way of telling for sure, but the place gives the impression of being far underground—the deepest of deep sub-basements, excavated for who knows what sinister purpose.

Michael wipes a hand across his sweaty forehead and looks around for exits, but though there must be at least one he can’t see it. Fighting off creeping claustrophobia, he takes a shaky breath and tries to think.

“Cardio—forty-five minutes, three times a week. Consider it.”

The voice sounds amused, but also somehow wrong: like a radio station that won’t tune right, or words that have been passed through a vocoder. It’s vaguely masculine in pitch and timber, but that’s as recognizable as it gets. Michael blinks and looks up, squinting into the dimness for its source.

His eyes make out a—a figure is the best way to describe it. Not overly large, but as with the voice, there is something vaguely masculine about it, in the stance and in the outline of the shoulders. But it’s more like a very detailed shadow of a person than an actual person. Hints of features seem to swim just below the surface darkness, like a fabulous monster waiting to emerge any minute.

“Wha—who are you?”

“I’m nobody!” the figure says cheerfully. “Who are you?”

“Huh?”

“Don’t tell me you forgot Honors English already,” the figure sighs. It makes a movement that resembles a shrug. “Oh well, it’ll come back to you.”

“You know me?” Michael says as he struggles to his feet.

“Not as well as I should. Guess you could say that’s my tragic flaw. Remember those? Tragic flaws?

“Like Constantine’s temper, or Superman’s lying,” the figure explains when Michael just looks at him. “Tom Welling’s Superman, anyway.”

“Who?”

“Oops. You can’t exactly Google him, can you?” The figure laughs, a low brittle sound like fingernails scraping over rusted metal. The hair on the back of Michael’s neck stands up.

“Uh, no. I sure wouldn’t want to do that,” he says, edging a step back.

“Oh, cool it. If I wanted to hurt you, I’d have left you up there to get groped to death by the Cylons.”

“Cylons aren’t humanoid,” Michael mutters automatically.

This sets off another burst of corroded chuckles. “Not yet.”

“Suuure. Okay. Well, thanks for the, uh, saving my life and all, but it’s getting late and—”

“It’s later than you think, Michael.”

“Right, exactly,” he agrees, moving faster. “Good luck with the goggles and everything, but I’ve really gotta—” he whirls around to make a blind run for it.

The figure catches his arm and jerks him back sharply. Michael winces, though not from the pull. Without panic and suffocation as distractions he finds the creature’s touch awful, a cold crawly ants feeling that breaks him out in full-body goosebumps. He tries to twist away, but its grip is iron.

“Yeah, it’s not exactly a happy ending massage for me, either. But I don’t feel like running another hundred-yard dash just now.” Michael can feel the figure’s gaze on him, from eyes lost somewhere in the darkness of its face. “If I let go, will you chill the fuck out and listen?”

When he doesn’t untense, it sighs. “Relax, Donnie Darko. Mars isn’t Heaven, and this ain’t the Matrix.”

Michael only got about a third of that, but something in the matter-of-factness of the figure’s tone is convincing. That, and if it doesn’t stop touching him right this second Michael will have to start chewing his own arm off to get away. He gives a jerky nod.

The figure lets go and Michael takes a step back, rubbing his bicep. “What do you want?”

“Not important. This is about what you want.”

“I want to get the hell out of here.”

“That’s it?” The figure’s dim voice has brightened with impatience.

Michael blinks at it.

“BRIAN, PLEASE!” The words are trembly, girlish. “DON’T LEAVE ME!”

Michael scowls. “I don’t care if you saved my life. You’re an asshole.”

“Never mind what I am. Was that the heat of the moment talking? Do you really want him back?”

“Of course I do.”

“So sincere,” the figure muses. “You’d almost think you meant it.”

“Do you know where Brian is?” Michael says, refusing to rise to the bait.

“I can help you find him. But I warn you, it’s a long trip.” The figure turns, surveying the emptiness around them. “We didn’t get here overnight.”

It makes a small gesture with its right hand, and one of the lights brightens a few degrees. From the gloom of the darkest corner a door emerges, no more inviting than the rest of the place: painted dull grey, with pock marks at the bottom and a heavy steel bolt for a handle. Like one of those dim doors you see at industrial parks, the ones that are always, always locked, mutely guarding whatever stale secrets lie behind them.

“Where’s that go?”

“You know where.”

Like the words were a signal, ghostly letters light up on the painted metal:

“I—I don’t wanna go in there.”

“No one does,” the figure replies. “But it’s the only way.” It starts moving towards the door.

“Wait—wait. What should I call you?”

The figure pauses. Michael still can’t make out an expression, but he sees impatience in the set of its shoulders. “My name doesn’t make any—”

“Screw that. No way I’m walking into Mordor with the Shadowman and not even know what to yell when I get strangled.”

“‘I will never harm the one under whose bed I live,’” it quotes with a smile in its voice.

Michael stands there with his arms crossed over his chest.

“Fine,” it sighs. “Call me Charlie.”

“Is that your name?”

“It’s a name.” He starts moving away again.

With a sigh of his own, Michael follows.

They both come to a stop just outside the door.

“Go on. Open it.”

Michael hesitates. “It won’t be locked?”

“Not to you.”

He reaches for the bolt and finds it opens at a touch, the door moving noiselessly on heavy hinges. Michael glances at the dents at the bottom again. They look like someone—something, maybe—was desperately trying to get in. Then he takes a closer look at the direction of the dimpling.

No, he thinks, a small worm of fear uncoiling in his gut. Someone—something—was trying to get out.

Charlie pushes past him and steps through, his shadowy form moving as quickly and noiselessly as the door. After another second of hesitating on the threshold, Michael does the same.

He makes a mostly successful effort not to scream when the door slams shut behind him.

Deep Storage looks exactly like Deep Storage should: A long, stale-smelling corridor with more of those dingy brick walls and dim lights, floored with scuffed checkerboard tiles that seem to stretch on and on. Closed doors much like the one they just entered line it on each side. A small card in a metal frame is centered at eye-level on every door, but the light and a few feet of distance make deciphering impossible.

After passing the first few doors without slowing, Charlie stops abruptly in front of one. Michael draws as close to his guide as he can while avoiding actual contact and reads the yellowing piece of cardboard:

“Open it,” Charlie commands again.

Again Michael hesitates. “Brian’s in there?”

“You could say that.”

“Just tell me if he is or not,” Michael sighs. “I’m sick of the word games.”

“And I’m sick of the Paranoid Android act. You’re not a red shirt, man. Nothing’s gonna jump out and eat you. Now pretty please, with sugar on top, open the fucking door.”

Michael puts his hand to the knob, and as before the door practically jumps open.

The harsh whiteness of fluorescents floods the corridor. He takes a step back and puts a hand up to shield his vision, trying to discern blurry figures he can see moving within the light.

Before he can make out much of anything the smell hits him: sickly sweet industrial pine soap overlaying the unmistakable hospital stench of urine and misery.

Then come the voices. A boy’s first, still cracking with the change of adolescence. But there’s nothing boyish about what he’s yelling.

“HE WANTS TO EAT MY COCK! REALLY FUCKING EAT IT! DON’T YOU FUCKING PEOPLE GET IT?”

Michael’s vision finally adjusts enough for him to make out real details. Behind the door lies, as the stench forewarned, a hospital room. Its cinderblock walls are painted dull green, its drop ceiling set with glaring track lights. Empty of furniture except for a heavy bed bolted to one wall, and in the corner nearby a small cabinet with a medical waste bin underneath. The two large figures are burly men in white scrubs, the small figure a painfully thin teenage boy being pressed against one of the walls by the larger of the other two. The boy’s face is deathly pale and haggard, his brown eyes circled by shadows like bruises. Still, there is something striking about those fine-drawn features. Something familiar—

Michael makes a choked sound and hurls himself into the room.

It’s like hurling himself against an invisible but powerful forcefield. Michael is repelled with a shock that would have sent him crashing to the opposite wall of the corridor if Charlie did not reach out lightning fast and catch him. Michael tries to shake off that awful crawly touch and go again, but his guide holds on.

“Let go! Goddamn it, LET ME GO!”

“You can’t help him,” Charlie says, restraining Michael as easily as a child with a struggling kitten.

“Why the hell not?” Michael gasps with another futile lunge.

“Because it’s already happened to him.”

Michael stills. He turns his head slowly, looking at the card on the door again.

“June 30, 1985,” Charlie reads. “Three months before you first saw Brian. Six months before he really saw you.”

He releases him, motioning towards the open doorway.

“Just watch.”

Unpausing like a video, but more vivid than any VHS ever dreamed, the action begins where they left off.

“I don’t give a fuck what Sister Shrink says. Cool him out right fucking NOW.”

He finishes the right and starts on the left. “Scottie my boy, you wanna last at this gig long as I have, remember the prime directive: Never, ever let your guard down with a patient. I don’t care if they’re kids—the shit they do, they may as well be fucking mutants.”

Scott discards the hypo and approaches the bed. “What do you think is wrong with him?”

“Dunno what the good sister’s gonna say when she decides to grace us with her presence. Schizo, prob’ly: he’s old enough. Or one of those yo-yo bipolars. First night here, he pitched a fit when the nurse tried to take his Walkman away. Said the music kept his thoughts from eating him.”

“Poor kid,” Scott says softly.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Gets awfully quiet in Isolation,” Scott says as he adjusts the sound to a comforting murmur.

“Yeah. That’s why they call it, y’know, Isolation.”

“Could be the middle of the night when he comes out of it—he’ll be all by himself. You said he liked the music . . .” Scottie trails off, flushing as Paulie stares at him with frank disgust.

“Next thing you’ll be tucking him in with tea and Goodnight Moon. We have to toughen you up, kid.”

“Oh, enough with the bleeding heart bullshit! What is it with you and this one, anyway?”

“Your wife knew, Scottie. She fucking knew.”

“Okay, that’s—” Paulie puts a hand on Scott’s shoulder, but he shakes it off. The smaller orderly has gone so white his freckles stand out like sores. He stares at Brian with horrified fascination.

“Make them stop make them stop please just make them stop . . .”

Michael stands frozen, gripping the edge of the door frame until the metal bites into his palm. But in that moment he welcomes the pain.

“I—I didn’t know,” he finally chokes out.

“You collected those stories like MAGIC cards. You knew it was something like this.”

“I knew he left home that summer. I knew the cops found him in Philly and his parents stuck him in that Catholic crisis center for awhile. But nothing like . . . ” he trails off, shaking his head.

“And you knew about Ed Nelson.”

Michael can’t help grimacing at the name.

“Yeah, you got that one straight from the source. Brian made it sound so sexy, didn’t he? Screwing his soccer coach when he was in the eighth grade. Like something from a dirty book: Lolita in cleats.”

“I never thought it was sexy. He was fourteen.”

“He was fourteen when it ended.”

It takes Michael a minute to digest this. “Why did he lie?”

“Because twelve doesn’t work. See, Brian’s marketing instincts were keen, even back then. You can’t sell twelve, you can’t make it sexy. You can’t make it anything but what it was.”

Michael puts a hand to the cold, oily ball his stomach has become. “A felony,” he whispers.

“But not a shock. You’ve seen the yearbook pictures: Nelson was hot, if the WASPy type does it for you. Smart, too, gotta give him that. Saw all that need coming off Brian like cheap cologne and just went for it. Never pushed him, never made it seem like just a fuck. Romanced him.” Charlie pronounces the word like it’s obscene. “He made him think it was real. Till Brian got a little too old. Then it was just . . . over.”

“That’s why he beat the shit out of him,” Michael says slowly. “It’s why he ran away.”

“Not even Brian could handle that harsh a dose of reality. Not with everything else he was handling.”

Charlie turns to look at the boy on the bed again. Even in the midst of all that undifferentiated darkness, Michael thinks he sees him frown. “A month on the streets doesn’t sound like long. But when you’re living it, it’s forever. How Brian survived, the things he did, it’s all down here. I could show you.” Charlie ducks his dark head. “But I don’t want to.”

“Why are you showing me any of it? Jesus, did you think I wanted to see this?” Michael turns away from the door. “This isn’t what I want. This isn’t my Brian.”

“Don’t you fucking get it? Your Brian wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for this one. You two would never have met if he hadn’t met Ed Nelson first.” He leans closer and Michael flinches, but Charlie doesn’t touch him.

“If you want Brian back, you have to open your eyes. You have to see this, and everything that came after it. All those choices that left you alone on the dance floor at Babylon. All the moments you hid away and pretended never happened. You have to know who you’re looking for and why, or you’ll never find him. Or if you do, it won’t make any fucking difference.

“It’s the same old scene: Go all the way or go home alone. And I know which way you’re used to going, but this time it’s different. This time it’s for keeps.”

Michael looks down at the fluorescent light flooding over the dingy tiles, but he doesn’t see it. What he sees is Brian’s face right before he disappeared into the crowd at Babylon. Brian, beautiful and brilliant and as grown-up as he’ll ever be. But on his face is the same pale despair as the boy’s in the hospital bed.

“Show me.”

Charlie points with a dark hand, motioning Michael to look back into the room. Reluctantly, he takes it all in again, the tears and the restraints, the cold light and even colder silence.

“I’m showing you this because it’s the moment he broke. The moment he decided feeling nothing was better than feeling so much pain.”

Charlie’s voice is dim and quiet in Michael’s ear. “He came so close. So very close to getting lost forever in that cold dark place inside. The one where nothing hurts and nothing is real. Not even himself.”

For a moment they are both silent, taking in the scene like witnesses of a lethal crash who can’t look away from the blood on the road.

Charlie rouses himself with another of those rusty giggles. “Brian would’ve got away with it too, if it wasn’t for that meddling kid.” He pokes Michael in the stomach with a hard finger.

“Hey! Cut it out!”

As if blown by an invisible wind, the door slams shut in Michael’s face. He jumps back.

“Come on. Still got a long way to go.” Charlie is already heading down the hallway.

Rubbing his stomach reproachfully, Michael leaves the first door.

Charlie has stopped at one a few yards down.

“Three months of following Brian around. Three months of nothing but sarcasm and sexual harassment for your trouble. Three long months, to find the real person buried under all that ice.”

Michael draws closer and reads the card: December 20, 1985

“He was a little realer than you were expecting, huh?”

Michael doesn’t answer as he turns the knob and throws the door wide.

Drop of a hat she's as willing as
Playful as a pussy cat
Momentarily out of action
Temporarily out of breath
To absolutely drive you wild, wild
She's out to get you

She's a Killer Queen
Gunpowder, gelatine
Dynamite with a laser beam
Guaranteed to blow your mind
Anytime

Recommended at the price
Insatiable an appetite
Wanna try?
You wanna trrr—

“ABBA, Donna Summer . . . Peter fucking Frampton? God-Damn, Mikey.”

“Vic give you anything produced after the Paleozoic Era?”

Brian gives a slight shudder and keeps looking. “No New Order, no Depeche Mode, no Cure. Thought you said your uncle was cool.” He brushes the hair out of his eyes. “Duran Duran. Yes, I’d go for fucking Rio right about now.”

“Me.” Brian tries to snatch it, but Thriller is held away from him.

“Quinruple—Quadtuple—Multi-platinum sales. Eight Grammys!” Michael waves the album like an enthusiastic semaphorist. “He’s a genius.”

“Michael Jackson cares about the children, ‘cause he never had a childhood and—“

“Uh-huh.” Moving so fast Michael doesn’t have time to twitch, Brian grabs the album and sends it after the first. “If Mike cares about the children so much, where are the little girls?”

“Hot Rocks.” He says the words like a man greeting an old and trusted friend. “You’ve been holding out on me, Mikey.”

He squints at him doubtfully. “Oh, they don’t count as dinosaur rock?”

“Like diamonds and genital herpes, the Stones are forever.” Brian slips an LP out of the double sleeve, and soon the apocalyptic bassline of “Gimme Shelter” is pounding from the record player’s tinny speakers.

“Y’know, you think everybody’s a perv. You prob’ly think I’m a perv.”

“SHUT UP! What were you doing snooping?” Michael cries, jerking upright. “ I can’t believe you—” He cuts off with a wheeze, holding a hand to his narrow chest.

“Christ, don’t get asthmatic about it. So you like the look of Han’s light saber. So what?”

“First, Han uses a blaster, not a light saber,” Michael shoots back breathlessly. “Second, fuck you.”

Brian tosses Hot Rocks aside with a little flourish. Carelessly shoving a few more albums and a box of Mallomars out of his way, he creeps closer to Michael. His long, slender form moving with panther-like grace, he doesn’t stop till they’re almost nose-to-nose.

“Easy there, tiger,” Brian says, rescuing Hotel California from under Michael’s right Converse All-Star.

“Maybe I’m adopted.”

“I’ll remind you of that next time you and Deb are drooling over the shirtless scene in Raiders.”

I saw her today at the reception
A glass of wine in her hand
I knew she would meet her connection
At her feet was a footloose man

Now you can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime, you’ll find
You get what you need . . .

“No. Sometimes people just want to—want to help.”

“Let me give you the benefit of my expertise,” Brian says, turning a page. “Somebody puts his arm around you, he’s just looking for a place to stick the knife.”

“GOD, Brian. Why are you so—” Michael stops, biting his lip.

“Come on,” Brian says, focusing in. “Why have you spent the last three months not being scared?”

Michael is silent again, fingers tracing pensive patterns on the gaudy quilt. Then he sighs and looks up. “You know Star Trek, right?”

“I swear to fucking God, if this is another one of your geek rants—”

“It’s not. Just listen, okay?” Michael pauses again. When he continues it’s quickly, like he’s trying to get the words out before he changes his mind.

“You live your whole life, and you never fit. You’re a step behind, or maybe a step ahead, but anyway you can’t get in sync with everybody else. Like that one episode where Kirk got all speeded up, and nobody could see him. Nobody sees you, except maybe your mom, and even she doesn’t understand, not really. You walk around, wondering if it’s always gonna be like this—all flat and grey and just—just wrong.”

“But then one day you see somebody. And he sees you. And suddenly everything—your whole life—snaps into focus. All that flat grey nothing—it’s something now.”

“When I look at you, I see more. More colors, more light. Just—just more.”

You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, well you might find
You get what you need
Oh baby yes . . .

Slowly, oh so slowly, Brian’s hand comes up to cover Michael’s. At the same time, his cold look melts into a smile. A smile that’s different from his usual smirk, different because it’s warm and radiant and real. It transforms him completely, softening his too-sharp adolescent angles into devastating balance. When Brian smiles, really smiles, you see the shadow of the man who’s still several years away. The one who will turn heads in places where Greek God looks are common as a cover charge.

get what you want—get what you need—get what you want—get what you need

Charlie gives another of those rusty chuckles. “Debbie always did have awesome timing.”

“Shut up,” Michael snaps.

“Why? It’s the truth. Lucky for you, huh?”

Michael doesn’t answer.

“Lucky for Brian, too. With Deb watching you two like a hawk after that, he had time to work it out.”

Charlie nods at the two teenagers, caught not quite in the act on Michael’s narrow boy’s bed. “There was something better than feeling nothing. A lot better.” He pauses. “As long as he didn’t fuck it up.”

Michael turns away. “Are we done here?”

The door slams shut. “We are.”

By the time Michael turns around, Charlie is already vanishing around a bend in the hallway. He sprints to catch up and finds him leaning nonchalantly against the bricks between two doors, dark figure like the shadow of something ominous lurking nearby.

Michael looks at the right-hand door, the one closest to Charlie. A cold hand twists his vitals as he reads

October 26, 1988

He takes an automatic step back. “No fucking way.”

“Relax,” Charlie says. “We’re not going in there. It’s not important.”

“Not important?”

“Nope. Just like these.” Charlie points to a succession of doors nearby, to the right and just behind them.

October 26, 1988 (II)

October 27, 1988

November 1, 1988

November 10, 1988

“Yeah, those weeks were a real trainwreck of trauma. But Kevin’s apartment in the wee hours of the 26th wasn’t where you guys jumped the track.” Charlie turns back to the original pair of doors. He nods at the left-hand one.

October 25, 1988

“What happened before midnight—that was the real collision.”

Michael stares hard at the date. “I don’t remember.”

“It was easier that way, wasn’t it?” Charlie replies, not unsympathetically. “But that’s why we’re here.”

Like Monty Hall showing off the mystery prize, he makes an exaggerated wave towards the door.

Like a contestant expecting the live goats instead of the brand new car, Michael opens it.

The men’s room at BoyToy is as over the top as the rest of the club. Red Lucite and pink neon, mirrors on the ceiling and Warhol on the walls. A pouting Marilyn graces the entrance door to the right. Frosted stalls dotted with lipstick kisses stretch luridly across the back center. Mini disco balls form a constellation above the sinks at the left. But for all the flash and glitter, the place smells like every other bar bathroom in the world—stale liquor, standing water, and the ripe stench of too many bodies.

Flamingo-pink fliers are stuck across the neon-framed mirrors over the sinks. Sparkles from the disco balls spotlight their contents. A greyscale image of David Bowie, spiked and seventies fabulous, a message below in flowing script:

TUESDAYS
GLAMARAMA
Dress to excess
& drink free till 11!

Except for a couple of huddled shadows in the far stalls, the room is empty when the door slams open.

Michael Novotny. Tall now as he’ll ever be—not very—his slight form dressed to excess in silver pants so tight they look painted on. That’s not the only thing that looks painted: the blush on his face isn’t from the heat, and his big dark eyes seem twice as big ringed with coal-black liner and mold-green shadow. Gloss the color of asphyxiation brings out the curves of his lips. His shoulder-length hair hangs in tendrils that have wilted only slightly in the steamy air. Amazing, the difference mousse and make-up makes, Michael’s boyishness distorted into goth androgyny. He is striking and alien against the overwrought colors of the men’s room, like a Beardsley figure who’s strayed into a Lichtenstein.

One doesn’t have to look far to find the inspiration for the costume. Stretched across his thin shoulders is a black t-shirt, so cracked and faded it has to be vintage—a screenprint of Iggy Pop, heroin chic and serpentine, clinging to a microphone like he can’t decide whether to sing into it or swallow it.

Amazing, the difference body language makes. Iggy looks like a beautiful predator. Michael looks like prey.

He walks to the sinks. Sets his drink, a tall glass with too many garnishes, on the edge. Leans against the counter, staring into the mirror. His normally expressive features are strangely empty beneath their layers of color. As empty and strange as the voice blaring from the speaker overhead.

When routine bites hard
And ambitions are low
And resentment rides high
But emotions won’t grow
And we’re changing our ways
Taking different roads
Then love, love will tear us apart again

Michael’s blankness becomes tenseness. His shoulders hunch and his mouth pulls down in a grimace, like the speaker just screeched feedback only he could hear.

A second later, the door opens.

“Christ. It looks like Liberace exploded in here.”

Brian Kinney, ladies and gentlemen. Not quite filled in through the shoulders, but as tall now as he’ll ever be—very. His long legs are clad in black leather pants that fit him like a second skin, bunched only at the bottom where they meet the top of his steel-toed boots. His brown hair is gelled into artful spikes that just touch the torn collar of his t-shirt, which is white and tight and held together by safety pins and attitude. The outfit is much closer to punk than glam, his sole nod to tonight’s theme the figure on his shirt—the same one that’s on the fliers, this time in full color. Bowie painted up like a space geisha, below him in block letters the name that’s also a warning: Aladdin Sane.

Moving with the slinky grace that turns heads even at this tender age, Brian walks to the sinks. Puts his hands on his best friend’s shoulders, pulls him flush against his body. His hands slide down Michael’s arms, down, down, all the way to his wrists. Michael’s eyes close briefly at the caress, then open again.

They stand there a moment, gazes meeting in the mirror.

Why is the bedroom so cold
Turned away on your side?
Is my timing that flawed
Our respect run so dry?
Yet there’s still this appeal
That we’ve kept through our lives
Love, love will tear us apart again

Brian breaks pose first, bending down and speaking low in Michael’s ear. “Never look in the mirror when you’ve been drinking Tequila. You’ll see what you’ll look like when you’re seventy.”

Michael’s eyes drop to his hands, which have tightened on the counter until the knuckles are white.

“You don’t look seventy,” Brian reassures him, taking the move for self-consciousness. “Actually, you look hot.” He tweaks the silver hoop in Michael’s right ear. “Rent boy works for you.”

Michael doesn’t look up. “Thanks.”

Brian’s brows draw together a millimeter. But he tries again. “I’m glad I let you talk me into this. Thought the Glamarama shit would be lame as fuck, but . . .” His glances up at the speaker. “TJ the DJ’s not doing half-bad.”

“Joy Division is goth, not glam. TJ the DJ doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.” Michael shrugs Brian off and slaps the hot water faucet on.

“What the fuck’s eating you?”

“What’s eating YOU? Wait, that’s a stupid question. The whole goddamn club knows what’s eating you. Or should I say who?” Michael pumps soap on his hands and scrubs like he’s decontaminating.

Understanding hardens Brian’s features. “Don’t be a drama queen.”

“I’ll be a drama queen if I damn well please. It’s my goddamn birthday. Or did you forget that?” Michael stalks to the other side of the sinks. “Oh wait, that’s another stupid question.”

“Yeah, it is. I’m right here looking at you.”

“Are you? ‘Cause I got the idea your attention was somewhere else.” He snatches a towel out of the dispenser. “How could you bring him? On my birthday?”

“Uh, the same fucking way you brought Jeff and Alex?”

“I didn’t spend three hours in the back room with Jeff and Alex.”

“If it will chill you the fuck out, go for it.”

“Fuck you.” Michael hurls the paper towel at the trash can and stomps towards the door.

Brian darts forward and catches him. “Christ, Mikey, cool it.”

“No, you cool it, Brian,” he says, twisting away. “Do you have any idea the shit I went through to get out of the house on a school night? If I knew it was gonna be like this, I wouldn’t have bothered.”

“Fine, fuck, whatever. We’ll hang out now.”

“I can’t hang out now. I have to be home in twenty minutes. Maybe he doesn’t have a curfew, but I do.”

“His name is Kit,” Brian says flatly.

“I know his fucking name. You only say it fifty times a day.” Michael crosses his arms over his chest. “Jesus, Brian. Every other night of the year to hook up with your boyfriend, you have to do it tonight?”

Brian’s jaw tightens. “Kit is not my boyfriend.”

“No? How many other guys you had in the last couple of weeks? Fuck it, the last month? Why aren’t you ever home anymore? Why can’t I get you on the phone? You know I’ve got Alyson Livingston crying on my shoulder every day in homeroom?” Michael laughs bitterly. “She thinks you’re seeing another girl.”

Brian dismisses Alyson and her fears with an impatient wave. “Kit is not my boyfriend. I don’t do boyfriends.”

“Yeah, I heard you the first five thousand times. And if I had a nickel for every lovesick trick I’ve clued into that fact, I’d be in Cancun for my birthday. But Kit Floyd is no trick. He’s—he’s trouble.”

Brian rolls his eyes.

“I don’t care how many Ivy League schools are kissing his ass. And neither do you.” Michael pauses, like he’s nerving himself up for something.

“I’ve seen the yearbook pictures. I know what you’re doing.”

“How much Tequila have you had tonight?”

“I’m not drunk! And I’m not blind. Do you really think I can’t see it?” He looks up at Brian, seems to look through him with his big shadowed eyes. “It makes my skin crawl. It’s fucking sick.”

Brian goes still. It takes him a minute to answer, and when he does his voice is calm. Too calm.

“You know who’s sick? You. Shoving your pathetic fucking hang-ups on me.”

“My hang-ups?”

“Poor little Mikey, all by himself,” he says in a nasty sing-song. “Left behind because his best friend got a better deal. Someone who’s smarter and blonder and gives better fucking head. Who gives head, period.” He smiles mirthlessly. “A one-night stand who won’t go away—isn’t that your worst fucking nightmare?”

“You have no idea what my worst nightmare is. But you’re right—it’s about you.”

“Oh, cut the fucking guilt-trip. I haven’t been to confession since Confirmation. I won’t do fucking penance now.”

“Do what you want,” Michael says in a choked voice. “Just like always. Get your class ring back from Alyson and give it to him. Take him to the goddamn prom. When Jack goes on another binge, crawl in your not-boyfriend’s window. He can stay up scared shitless after you’ve chased bennies with Absolut.” He runs a hand through his tangled hair, swaying. And it’s suddenly clear that Michael is drunk. Drunker, maybe, than either of them realize.

At that moment the music starts up again. Brash and bouncy but again, not glam.

You spurn my natural emotions
You make me feel like dirt
And I'm hurt
And if I start a commotion
I run the risk of losing you
And that's worse

Ever fallen in love with someone
Ever fallen in love
In love with someone
Ever fallen in love
In love with someone
You shouldn't have fallen in love with

Michael snatches up his neglected drink and hurls it at the mirror. Glass meets glass with a brittle crash, ice, fruit, and bright shards flying everywhere. A few pieces of shrapnel hit him, but he doesn’t flinch.

The stall door nearest the sinks flies open. “WHAT the—?” A tall, lanky figure emerges. Wipes his nose, tellingly, and regards the mess with overbright eyes. “Hey man, I know it’s punk night and all, but fuck—”

“The Buzzcocks are pop, not punk,” Michael says wearily.

The man turns to Michael. He’s strikingly handsome, in a strung-out cover boy way. Long and lean, with flawless olive skin stretched over high cheekbones, and tousled dark hair falling model-messy into his big brown eyes. The resemblance to Brian is remarkable, enough that in dim light or at a distance the two could easily be mistaken for each other. In the bright glow of the bathroom it’s clear he’s a good decade older, and his snakeskin pants and raw silk shirt probably cost about ten times what Brian’s ensemble did. A familiar eye could catch other variations: he’s an inch or two shorter, nose blunter and chin sharper. But the real difference is more than height or bone structure: body language maybe, basic vibe. For all his glossy grooming, next to Brian he would still look like the knock-off.

Hectic brown eyes consider Michael for a moment. Then full red lips stretch into a smile.

“Michael, right?”

Michael nods.

“I’m Kevin. I’ve seen you around.”

Michael says nothing.

“You know a lot about music, huh?”

Michael shrugs.

Kevin moves a little closer. “You okay?”

“So, Mikey. Do anything special for your big day?”

Slowly, Michael shakes his head.

Kevin leans down, focusing in with those busy eyes. All shallow color and surface shine, like fake topazes.

“I can change that.”

Michael’s gaze strays to the broken mirror. The thick glass has cracked in a spider web pattern. His face reflects back, broken into a hundred Picasso fragments. His eyes flick to the image of the man beside him, smiling and almost disturbingly handsome. But still, nothing more than a distorted version of the real thing.

Ever fallen in love with someone
Ever fallen in love
In love with someone
Ever fallen in love
In love with someone
You shouldn't have fallen in love with

Michael smiles back. But his eyes don’t change.

“Let’s go.”

Charlie begins clapping slowly. “Nice work.”

“What?”

“Oh, come on. You knew what you were doing.”

For a moment Michael can’t even speak. “Are you—are you saying I asked for it?”

“No. Not for that,” Charlie says in a gentler voice. “But if a good time was all you were looking for, there were a hundred guys at the club who would’ve given it to you. You chose Kevin.”

“And?”

“And, anybody would’ve put Brian in the red zone. Anybody. You picked the one guaranteed to make him thermonuclear. Almost his mirror image, but older and richer and slicker. His worst fucking nightmare.”

“Why? Why would I do that?”

“You were asking for something, all right. But not from Kevin.”

Michael stares at him, his forehead wrinkling.

“Okay,” Charlie sighs. “Try it this way. Four players in this scene. We know how things went for you and Brian. And Kevin—hell, everybody on Liberty Avenue heard that story. Just leaves one more.”

Michael shifts uncomfortably.

“Kit Floyd,” Charlie says, as if Michael wasn’t already thinking the name. “How did it go for him?”

Michael stares down at the scuffed tiles. When he speaks, his voice is quiet.

“Brian cut him dead.”

The door slowly shuts on the bathroom. There is something almost accusing in the soft click of the latch.

“Like I said: Nice work.”

Charlie strides down the hall with a satisfied strut, like he’s just scored some kind of major point.

“Time is fleeting, man. Come on,” he says, standing in front of one more door.

Michael plods over and reads the card. April 7, 1989.

Nothing about the date stands out for him. At this point he doesn’t dare to hope that’s a good sign.

“How many more of these are there?” he says tiredly.

“A few. But you’ll like this one. Nudity and adult situations: TV-MA all the way.”

Michael doesn’t even bother asking what that is as he puts his hand to the bolt.

The hotel room is big and airy, its brush-patterned walls the color of a conch shell. Blond wood furniture with wicker accents adds to the summery feel. There is a king-size bed in the center of the room, glass-topped dolphin nightstands on either side. A dresser and mirror sit directly across from it, next to the entrance door. A table with two cushy chairs is cattycorner on the left, by another door to what must be the bathroom. The scent of the ocean wafts on a warm breeze through the big open window to the right of the bed. It’s peaceful, tropical, glowing with cream-and-peach accents and late-afternoon sunlight.

Brian is alone in the room. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he clashes with the décor in a black tank top and shorts. His skin is bronzed from a day at the water, but he does not look like Life’s a Beach. He’s smoking and staring out the open window. The hand holding the cigarette is stiff, his other hand curled into a fist in his lap. His lanky form vibrates with a wire-edged tension we haven’t seen in awhile. When he stubs out the butt in the nightstand ashtray, he looks like he wants to be crushing something much larger.

He jumps up and starts fiddling with the boombox sitting on the peach-striped window seat. He spins past commercials and a lot of country and salsa before picking up a promising call sign. “WBGG-FM, Big 105.9 Miami/Ft. Lauderdale. We Rock Miami Beach!”

The DJ’s rich whiskey voice kicks in, talking over the slow-building intro to the next song. “Now for all you Stones fans, something from the Bad Boys of Rock before they totally sold out. Going back to 1969, off Let it Bleed—still my favorite Stones LP, even if they are using “Gimme Shelter” in a Budweiser ad . . .”

The patter cuts off just in time for the chorus.

I saw her today at the reception
A glass of wine in her hand
I knew she would meet her connection
At her feet was a footloose man

Now you can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, you might find
You get what you—

Brian shuts the radio off with a sharp click.

He walks to the open closet door at the right of the dresser, which has a couple of empty suitcases piled in front of it. Zips one inside the other and stows them neatly on the floor of the closet. Takes a wadded up t-shirt hanging off the end of the dresser, folds it, stashes it in the top drawer. Finds a pair of sneakers—too small for him—tossed into the corner. Puts them in the closet, lining them up precisely with the suitcases on the floor. Shuts the door.

His eyes dart around the room, looking for more disorder. Finding none, he sits on the bed again. He reaches into his pocket and takes out a silver lighter, then stretches toward the nightstand for his pack of Marlboros.

Before he can light up there is a knock at the door. Brian’s edgy posture gets a little sharper. He pockets the lighter, then sits looking at the door like he’s trying to X-ray it with his eyes. A second knock rouses him. He stands, turning his head to glance at himself in the mirror, a move so automatic it’s unconscious. He crosses the room in three swift strides and puts his hand on the knob. Another tense pause and he throws it open.

“Wait a second. Rewind.”

“This isn’t a fucking VCR.”

“Then just fucking stop.” Michael steps away from the door. “There’s something I don’t get. I remember the hotel, but I don’t remember this. And the hospital—I was never there. And Kevin in the men’s room—Brian sure as hell wasn’t there for that. So how can we both be here? Whose rooms are these, anyway?”

Charlie is silent, like he’s reluctant to give an answer or pondering how to frame the answer he will give.

“You and Brian—you share a lot of space,” he says finally. When Michael’s puzzled look doesn’t change, he sighs. “Tonight wasn’t the first time you two have hung out after hours. You’ve been wandering around each others’ back rooms for years.”

Michael looks down the gloomy corridor doubtfully. “We’ve been here before?”

“You’ve never been this deep before. But there are a lot of rooms upstairs. A lot of rooms.” He chuckles. “The first night Brian met up with the Debbie chicken—that was one for the blooper reel.”

Michael processes this. “Why don’t we remember?”

“You remember what you can live with—not much.”

“But shouldn’t we know—”

“No. Your thoughts would eat you alive.” Charlie leans against the moldy bricks, crossing his arms over his chest. “But knowing and feeling aren’t the same thing. Thank God.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.” Charlie turns back to the door.

“But—”

“Hold all questions till the end of the tour,” he says in a mock-official voice. Then, in a more (for him) normal tone: “Seriously man, you wanna watch this.”

Brian looks out the open door. His face is empty except for his eyes, which are sharp as laser pointers.

“Brian? We talked on the phone.” A man’s voice, pleasant and with no trace of accent. “I’m Skylar—”

“I’ve been doing this awhile.”

“Congratulations.”

Skylar doesn’t dignify that. “After awhile, you learn a few things about people. Who pays for it, who doesn’t. Guys like you don’t pay for it. You don’t have to. Not unless . . .”

“Yes?”

“Unless you want something weird. Rafael should’ve told you—I don’t do weird.”

“Guess we’ll leave the inflatable rubber suit in the luggage, then.”

Skylar looks at him. Brian rolls his eyes. “Nothing weird. Nothing you haven’t done a thousand times.”

When Skylar still doesn’t move, Brian holds the money out like a challenge. “Is this going to happen, or do I have to tell Rafael his referrals are for shit?”

Skylar takes the roll. Shuffles the bills, notes the amount with a practiced eye. Then he tucks them in his jacket pocket and seems to relax, leaning against the dresser.

“So. What do you—”

The bathroom door opens with an exuberant thunk! A slight male figure comes bouncing out. His face is obscured by the shell-pink towel he’s rubbing vigorously over his head, but it’s not hard to tell who it is. If the body language didn’t give it away, the boxer shorts would—bright red with grinning Mighty Mouses.

“This place has heated towel racks—how cool is that? Hey, think we have time before dinner to run down to A&M comics? It’s kinda far and yeah, I’ve heard the place is a freaking mess but when Alejandro was down here last year visiting his Grandma he found a VG+ Green Lantern #50 for like thirty bucks and—”

He stops suddenly, pulling the towel off. Michael’s short-cropped hair sticks up in Alfalfa spikes, his round cheeks rosy as a Campbells Soup kid’s with sunburn. His excited grin fades to an O of bewilderment.

Skylar stands bolt upright. “I want to see some I.D.s right fucking now. Or I am out of here.”

Michael stares at him with that gobsmacked look on his face. Brian sighs.

“You’re kidding.”

“Did you talk to Rafael or not? I don’t do weird and I don’t do minors.” He pauses, sniffing. “Or smokers.”

Brian snorts. “Five hundred hustlers in Miami, I get Dudley fucking Do-Right.” But he picks up his own leather wallet and a nylon one that was lying next to it.

“Real ones,” Skylar adds. “I’ll know a fake.”

“Yeah. I’m sure you’re an expert at faking.” Brian sorts through the wallets and pulls out a couple of cards. He hands them to Skylar, who inspects them closely.

“See? Eighteen. Everybody’s eighteen.”

Skylar quirks an eyebrow as he hands them back. “Happy Birthday.”

Brian just shoots him a look as he tucks the cards in place.

Skylar shrugs out of his jacket. “Okay. A threesome’s fine—but it’s extra.”

Brian shakes his head. “That’s not—”

“Brian, can I talk to you?” Michael asks in a low voice. His eyes dart to Skylar, then away. “Alone?”

Skylar nods agreeably enough. “I need to use the head, anyway.”

Michael doesn’t speak again until the bathroom door closes. Then, in a furious whisper: “A hustler, Brian? A thousand guys a hundred yards down the street and you’re fucking paying for it?”

“I’m not—”

“I guess regular cruising isn’t doing it for you anymore. I told you something like this would happen if you didn’t slow down. What the hell am I supposed to do while you’re having your Midnight Cowboy moment? Stand in the lobby and read the brochures for Gatorland?”

“No. You are—”

“‘Spring Break in Florida, Mikey. We’re both finally legal, let’s take advantage of it. Get away from all those Pittsburgh assholes. Just the two of us, the dynamic duo on the road again.’ I should have known—”

He cuts off, because it’s hard to talk when someone’s grabbed you by the shoulders and mashed his mouth against yours. The kiss is hard, aggressive—more like a slap in the face than a gesture of affection.

After a few seconds Brian lets go and steps back. Michael stares up at him, breathing hard.

“Shut up and listen.”

Michael does, though he doesn’t look thrilled about it.

“He isn’t for me.”

“Then who—” Michael stops, eyes widening. “Oh, that is it. You really have lost it.” He bolts like he’s going to run out the door in his underwear.

Brian catches him and jerks him back. “Would you stop with the high fucking drama? Christ. You’re like a drag queen behind that shit.”

“Fine. I will very calmly and undramatically tell you this is not going to happen.”

“Why?”

Michael looks like Brian asked him why he didn’t want to swan dive out the window. “Because, he’s a hustler? You’re the one who loaned me the freaking Basketball Diaries. He could be drugged out or diseased or—”

“You think I’d invite some random piece of junkie shit up here? For you?” Brian seems really offended.

Michael goes silent. He looks at Brian like he’s scanning the thought bubble above his head.

“How long have you been planning this?” he says quietly.

“Awhile. It took some time to work out the details.” There is a perverse pride in Brian’s voice. “Rafael, the bartender at Adonis, comes from here. He turned me on to Skylar. Said he’s the one all the white boys from the ‘burbs would have—if they could afford him.”

“How are you affording him?”

Brian pauses. “Let’s just say Steve Nguyen really wants to be Valedictorian.”

Michael wilts onto the edge of the bed. “Jesus, Brian. You gave up—” He shakes his head like he’s shaking off a blow. “Why would you do this? Why would you want me to do this?”

“It’s been almost six months. You have to get back out there.”

“I am out there.”

“A couple of boiler-room blowjobs from Marcia Kendrick don’t count as ‘out there’.”

Michael looks down, face redder than ever. Brian crouches in front of him, putting his hands on his shoulders.

“We’re a thousand miles from Pittsburgh. Nobody knows us here. This guy’s good—he’s discreet.” He bends his head, trying to catch Michael’s gaze. “Don’t tell me you don’t think he’s hot.”

Michael looks at the bathroom door. Smiles, but there’s no humor in it. “He’s fucking Superman.”

“That Man of Steel in there will do anything you want.” Brian pauses. “Well, anything you would want.”

“You’ll sell anybody on anything, won’t you? You should major in fucking Advertising next year.”

“Does that mean you’re sold?”

Michael says nothing, still looking at the bathroom door.

“It’s time, Mikey. You have to get past it.”

“You think he’s the way.”

“You have a better idea?”

Michael opens his mouth. Then he shuts it, biting his lip like he’s trying to keep words from coming out.

Brian stills. “Do you?” He leans closer, finding Michael’s eyes. His own are suddenly intent, bright as two new pennies. “Is there—is there some other way you want to go?”

They hold each other’s gaze. Though normally there is no physical resemblance between them, in this moment there is a strange likeness in their faces. Mostly it has to do with expression. A tense, engaged look, like someone reading a difficult but fascinating book.

Then Michael turns his face away. He looks tired and a little sad. But he doesn’t look back.

Brian sits back on his heels. His shoulders slump, but he doesn’t seem surprised.

“So, boys. Are we doing this or what?”

Skylar pauses in the doorway of the bathroom, posing like a Ralph Lauren model. Late-day sun makes his hair shine like a crow’s wing, picks up the gold glints in his sea-blue eyes. Hot, if you like that type. One so opposite to Brian’s lean, smoldering good looks that the contrast must have been a deliberate choice.

Brian stands. “He’s doing this.” He settles himself on the window seat. “I’m here for immoral support.”

Michael’s head jerks back to his best friend. “Y-you want to watch?”

Brian raises an eyebrow at him. “You want me to go?”

Further exchange of glances. Skylar looks between them like he’s trying to follow a foreign movie without subtitles.

Brian steps back. Finds the window seat absently, all of his unflinching focus on Skylar and Michael. His face is expressionless, even for him. The one reaction comes a few minutes later, when the other two move from beside the bed to on top of it. His eyes narrow a little, pupils contracting to pinpoints, like someone exposed to a painful and blinding light. But he never looks away.

“He never did,” Charlie says softly. “Not for the next two years. Whenever you were with somebody—which wasn’t often, but it happened—he was right there.”

“Everybody thought we had some freaky fetish thing going on.”

“Everybody was right.”

“No. It wasn’t about sex.”

“What was it about?”

“I guess—I guess he was worried.”

“That makes sense the first time. After that, not so much.”

Michael looks down, biting his lip.

“He hated it, you know. Every second of it.”

“I know,” Michael whispers.

“But he wouldn’t stop. Why?”

Michael is silent.

“It wasn’t sex, and it wasn’t surveillance,” Charlie presses. “What was it?”

Michael has to try a couple of times to get the word out. “Penance.”

“Those Catholics weren’t fucking around with that ‘give us your children till they’re five’ stuff, huh?”

Michael’s head jerks up. “You think this is funny?”

“Brian scourging himself for two years because he took his eyes off you for two seconds? No. That’s not funny at all.” Charlie sounds plenty serious now. “Neither is the fact you let him.”

“I didn’t—”

“You did. But the whip cut both ways, didn’t it?” He nods towards the hotel room. “Even now, when you’re with somebody—hell, even when you’re not—who else is there? When you’re sweaty and shaking and just about to lose it, in those last few seconds before everything goes gooey, who do you see?”

Michael doesn’t realize he’s staring at Brian until the door slams shut.

“Or is that a stupid question?”

Michael sinks down onto the tiles. Puts fingers to temples, where he can feel the first twinges of a sick headache. He is tired, so very tired. He leans against the wall, shivering.

“Come on. One more to go.”

Michael closes his eyes and watches the pulse beat behind his lids.

“Don’t be a pussy, Michael.”

“I’ve got the flu,” he mutters.

Charlie snorts. “Yeah, the junkie flu.”

Michael opens his eyes and glares. “I. Am. Sick.”

“You’re. Never. Sick. Not since ninth grade.” Charlie begins to pace. “You could take a bath in Nyquil, it won’t fix what’s wrong. Just a distraction—a placebo. Like Brian’s new Xanax scrip.”

He crouches next to Michael, who shrinks into the wall. “Remember when he flushed the meds? Lithium, Ativan, Wellbutrin, a whole pharmacy right down the toilet. Swapped ‘em out with baby aspirin and Smarties, so his mom wouldn’t catch on. That was your idea. You helped him lose the chemical leash ‘cause you knew he didn’t need it.”

He draws a finger down Michael’s chest. It’s like being stabbed by a burning icicle. Michael flinches back with a cry. But Charlie keeps him pinned to the wall.

“You knew what he really needed, didn’t you?”

Another sharp poke and he releases him, leaping up and striding away.

“Your fix is this way, cowboy,” he calls over his shoulder, before disappearing around a blind corner.

Michael sits slumped a minute. Under the pain in his chest, a raw eagerness he tries to ignore.

But soon he rises and follows.

Charlie stands at the end of the hallway. He seems to be keeping a wary distance from the very last door.

The sick ache behind Michael’s eyes is growing worse as he draws close enough to read

December 26, 1993

The sickness curdles to horror.

“NO.”

“Look, man—”

Michael is already backing away. He turns to run, and screams as he nearly slams into Charlie, who is suddenly, impossibly right behind him.

“Michael—”

“Move.”

“It’s the only way.”

“Fuck your way, and fuck y—” Michael cuts off, wheezing.

Reflexes sharpened by panic, he darts around Charlie and down the hall.

Running, running, fast as his lungs will let him. Fleeing across scuffed tiles that are now endless. His steps seem to slow, taking on the awful gummy quality of moving in a nightmare. Edge of desperation in his gut, drawing out like a dull blade as he turns a hundred corners, passes a thousand doors that look alike.

Until it’s like pulling air through cotton batting, and he can’t run anymore. He stops, one hand on the wall and one on his chest, shuddering with deep heaves that are almost sobs. He scans the hallway frantically for the dented door to the outside, but who can see anything in this light? It could be any of these, or none.

He can hear Charlie. Slow relentless footsteps, tracking him, taking him back.

Michael jerks forward and yanks open the nearest door.

The dark carnival of West Philly at night is wasted on Brian. Slumped inside the entrance of a service alley, he’s deaf to sirens and ghetto blasters, mute in the face of gas fumes and garbage. Blue neon from a nearby sign reflects on his face as he dozes, arms circled protectively around a dirty backpack. Only some of his insensibility can be traced to the headphones over his ears. Violet smudges under his eyes speak of deep exhaustion. So deep that when a shadow falls on him he doesn’t react. Not until a hand touches his shoulder.

He stirs, mumbling. “Eddie? Where’ve you—” He stops, rubbing his eyes and coming fully awake. Spots the looming figure and starts back with a look of fear.

He recovers scowling. “Fuck off.” His skinny form radiates the same message as he pulls off the headphones, Neil Tennant’s dead tenor echoing against the concrete.

Too many shadows, whispering voices
Faces on posters, too many choices
If, when, why, what?
How much have you got?
Have you got it—do you get it—if so—how often?
Which do you choose—a hard or soft option?
(How much do you need?)

His observer doesn’t retreat. What appears to be a middle-aged stiff in a suit, sharp features seamed with too much living. Everything about him reeks of prosperity, from the knot in his power tie to the mirror-shine on his wingtips. Not tall, but he carries with him the authority of serious money. He looks down at Brian with a strange expression, intensity untainted by anger—or sympathy.

“Unconscious in the middle of University City. That’s a good way to have your throat cut.”

“So? What’s it to you?”

“This is my building. One of my people will be scrubbing your blood off the asphalt come morning.”

Brian shoves the Walkman in his backpack and jumps to his feet. He starts to walk away.

“Wait.” The man’s voice isn’t loud, but the command in it is hard to ignore.

Brian pauses at the mouth of the alley, turning. Scruffy and sullen, he should not be a tempting figure. But he is. All stray-kitten charm, big eyes and sharp claws. The more enticing because of the desperation under the attitude.

“What’s your name?”

“Jack.” Only a split-second delay tells the lie.

Thin lips quirk as it’s caught. “Well, Jack. Where are you going?”

Shrug.

“It’s past midnight. Do Mom and Dad know where their darling boy is?”

Another shrug. But it’s more like a flinch.

The reaction is noted with a flicker of cool grey eyes. “How old are you?”

Brian bites his lip, a gesture that could be seductive or uncertain, depending on how the viewer chooses to interpret. He’s shaking a little—hunger or fatigue or something else.

“How old do you want me to be?”

Assessment becomes amusement. “Quite the salesman, aren’t you?”

Brian is silent. Pale in the smoky street light, eyes like cigarette burns in a sheet of white paper.

“So, Jack-the-lad. What’s your going price?”

A pause. “One hundred.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“But you’ll pay it. Won’t you?” Brian never takes his gaze from the man’s face.

Tip of red tongue against white teeth. A flash of feral under all that clinical interest. “You’ll earn it.”

Brian shrugs, his expression blanker than the wall behind him.

“My car is over there.” The man nods at a black Mercedes parked in a space marked ‘Reserved.’

Brian follows him without hesitation. That comes a moment later, when he reaches the car. He stops, finding his face in the smoked glass of the passenger window. The empty look in his eyes falters. Suddenly he seems his age. Fourteen. Barely fourteen, with no idea where he’s going.

“Jack?”

The name snaps him back to business. One breath and the boy is gone. Brian opens the door.

Cold grip on Michael’s shoulders, jerking him away.

“What the hell? You won’t go where you need to, but you’ll scar yourself with this shit?”

Michael twists loose. “It’s not true.” His heart is pounding triple-time. He tries to take a deep breath, but it’s like someone’s tied a tourniquet around his lungs. “It—it’s not. I d-don’t care what—”

“Jesus, calm down before you rupture something.” Charlie reaches out a hand.

“QUIT FUCKING TOUCHING ME!”

Michael breaks into a fit of violent coughs. He clings to the wall, trying to take shallow breaths.

For a minute, only the sound of his struggle. Charlie stands stiff and silent, waiting.

Finally, Michael’s respiration improves beyond suffocation. He slides down the wall, cradling his head in his hands. It feels like a hundred tiny feet are doing the Safety Dance inside his skull.

“I’m not the Boogeyman,” Charlie says in a wounded voice.

Michael snorts, rubbing his bruised chest.

“I’m not trying to hurt you. You—you just piss me off. You’re acting stupid, and I know you’re not. This—” Charlie flaps a hand. “Is stupid. Running away like I’m a Cenobite dragging you into his chamber of horrors.”

“This whole goddamn place is a chamber of horrors. That room—I don’t know if it was some kind of sick joke, or what . . . ” Michael trails off, pressing palms to eyes like that will block the images out.

“You know it’s no joke.”

Michael drops his hands. “Brian never told me anything like—”

“He didn’t have to. Jesus, that’s the whole fucking point.”

Charlie makes a restless move, as if he’d like to give Michael one more poke. But all he does is throw up his arms.

“What he couldn’t tell his shrinks or his tricks or, God help me, his parents, he couldn’t tell you. But you got it all anyway. Maybe you didn’t know where every last bit of pain was coming from, but you felt it. Because you felt it, he could deal with it.”

The irritation in Charlie’s voice softens. “He doesn’t know what he is. What’s at the center of him—can’t process. Too many years spent blanking everything out, just to keep a grip. He needs you to reflect it all back to him, all that stuff he can’t stand looking at straight on.

“You’re his mirror, Michael. Without you he’ll lose himself.”

“Then why is he leaving me?” He tries for angry but just manages pathetic.

Charlie leans against the latest door. “Only one answer to that.”

“NO.” Michael digs fingers into the tiles like he fears dragging. “I won’t go back. You can’t make me.”

“I’m not trying to make you do anything. You can leave anytime you want.”

“Fine.” He gets to his feet. “Lemme out.”

“I’m not the one keeping you.”

Michael rolls his eyes. “So I click my heels together three times and—”

“Something like that. But you won’t.”

“Uh-huh. The exact phrasing is ‘there’s no place like home,’ right?” Michael starts to walk away.

“You leave now, and you leave alone.”

Michael stops. Slowly, he turns back around.

“He’s so close,” Charlie says, very quiet. “Standing right on the crumbling edge. You know how he is once he makes up his mind. You’ll be sleeping right next to him, but he’ll already be gone.”

Michael squints at Charlie. Hovering against the door, obscure as a shadow’s shadow. Impossible to read.

“Say that’s true. Say Christmas is the answer. Why do I have to see it again?” He can’t keep the plea from his voice.

“Because Brian isn’t the only one who won’t process. You didn’t see. You’ve spent three months trying not to.”

Michael looks down at the tiles like he’ll find a better option there.

“Fuck this,” Charlie spits. “You think I wanna be here? I’ve seen this shit already. More than once.”

Michael raises his head. “Why are you here?”

It takes Charlie a moment to reply. When he does, his voice is dimmer than usual.

“I’m not here. Not really.” His narrow shoulders slump.

Michael feels a flash of pity for him. But it’s a strange reaction, mixed, inexplicably, with dread.

Charlie rouses himself with a little shake.

“It’s your choice. Just like always.”

He makes a gesture, and the May 25, 1985 door shimmers. Michael’s brow creases as he re-reads the card.

December 26, 1993

“I don’t understand.”

“Place, distance—they don’t matter down here. It’s all just a metaphor, anyway.”

“Huh?”

“Wow. We really didn’t pay attention in Honors English, did we?” Charlie sighs. “Trust me, this is the right one.”

Michael reaches out a tentative hand. Lays it on the door’s surface. He can feel it even through the thick metal: heavy bass, throbbing under his fingers like the beat of warning drums.

He curls fingers into his palm. Hesitates, staring at the dull steel.

One shaky breath, and a memory. An icicle right through the heart. Brian in English class, that very first moment. Fourteen years old with ancient eyes. But under that ageless calm he’s screaming—he can’t stop.

“He never has,” Charlie whispers.

Michael rips the door open like a man ripping the bandage off a wound.

Screaming darkness. Torments of a lost soul set to electric guitar.

With the lights out this is dangerous
Here we are now entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now entertain us

As eyes adjust to the gloom, details of the room materialize. The shoebox shape and painted cinderblock walls of all institutional housing, dormitory or cellblock. Single bed on the right-hand wall, dresser and desk on the left. At the far end one big window facing the quad below, underneath that a small stand with a television and an expensive-looking bookshelf stereo, the source of the sound. Except for a stack of CD’s spilling out the front of the stand, and a profusion of paper cups cluttering the desk next to that, the space is pin-neat and bare. Like all institutional shelter, it gives the impression of staying rather than living.

The only thing to distinguish it from dozens of identical rooms in the same building is the smell. The clean musk of sports soap and the musty whiff of marijuana aren’t unusual. The odor underneath is: a hot metallic scent with the crackle of ozone. It ruffles the hairs at the back of the neck, wakens certain wary instincts in the reptile brain. The aromatic equivalent of a DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE sticker.

The menacing atmosphere isn’t improved by the weather. Angry gusts of wind hurl thick flakes against the window panes. The cold orange light from the quad lamps is eclipsed by sporadic stabs of lightning, attended too quickly by crashes of thunder.

Brian stands at the window, staring out into chaos. He’s tousled and stubbled, half-wearing CMU sweatpants, but there is nothing casual in his pose. Standing very straight, right hand gripping the sill, left hand digging into his thigh. Periodically the knuckles on that hand turn white, and his jaw clenches like he’s been hit by piercing pain. His face is a cold mask except for the hectic glitter in his eyes. They seem to steal sparks from the electricity outside.

It’s suddenly clear where the scent of danger is coming from.

Slant of white fluorescence as the door opens. A narrow-shouldered silhouette stops on the threshold.

“Thundersnow on Christmas Night. Creepy.” The voice is rushed, nervous. Too much caffeine and too little sleep.

Brian mumbles under his breath. Not quite words—splinters of syllables.

The figure comes further into the room, shutting the door. Michael’s pale worried face emerges in the smoldering light. He’s holding two cups, one steaming. He sets that on the desk. Rummages in the top dresser drawer, takes out a plastic baggie holding a kaleidoscope of pills.

“I got you water. Sorry it’s from the fountain—the machines are out and everything’s closed.”

Brian doesn’t respond. Michael finds two v-shaped blue pills in the baggie. Holds them out with the cup of water.
“Here.”

Brian turns from the window. His eyes flick to Michael’s palm. One twitch of his head.

“Just to take the edge—”

“Valium.” Brian’s usually smooth voice sounds like someone took a razor to it. “Lithium. Ativan. Wellbutrin. Haldol. Motherfucking Thorazine.”

“Brian—”

“Xanax. Halcion. Librium. Bullshit.” He knocks the cup away. Turns back to the window.

Michael retreats dripping. He picks up the cup on the desk, takes an anxious sip. Reaches forward to turn down the screeching on the stereo. Before his fingers brush the knob Brian has whirled around, catching his wrist.

“NO.”

This seems to upset Michael much more than the water business. He starts back. Rakes his hair with hands that shake from half-a-dozen cups of vending machine coffee.

“Thirteen fucking hours. This is driving me crazy.” He kicks the jewel case for In Utero across the room.

Brian laughs, jagged as broken glass. “Welcome to my world, Mikey.”

Eyes bruised from exhaustion narrow. Michael goes for the stereo again.

Light strobes with a crack of thunder. One flash Brian is standing. The next he’s pushing Michael into the window.

“Don’t you get it?” His fractured gaze cuts over Michael’s shoulder.

“There is NOTHING out there.”

Brian’s fingers tighten and he spins Michael around, making him face the panes.

“Look.”

“I don’t—” Michael tries to twist away but hands come up, caging his head.

“LOOK.”

When he won’t respond Brian’s tone grows desperate. “Please look—really look.”

Michael’s lips thin. But he stops resisting.

There is no physical resemblance between Brian and Michael. None. But as they look out the window they could be twins. Identical expressions—focused, tense, but certain. Men reading a native tongue they haven’t used in awhile.

Finally, Michael turns around. “Nothing.”

“No. You haven’t—”

“Nothing. We’re safe, Brian. Safe.” He looks up at him. “Wouldn’t I know?”

“No. I—I don’t know. Christ, I can’t—” Brian’s voice begins to break. He tries to say more, but all that comes out are torn-up pieces of words. He sinks onto the edge of the bed, clutching his head like it’s about to split in two.

Michael kneels in front of him. “Talk to me. Tell me what’s hurting you. Please.”

A long minute. Brian struggles visibly before he can speak.

“The voices. They never stop.”

He looks up at the window. Drops of fearsweat catch the light, giving his face a sick sheen.

“It’s coming. Thought I was safe here but—” he jerks his head. “That’s why the others won’t be quiet.”

“Others? What—”

“Nights are worst. That’s when it walks. It finds you. Claws you open and bleeds all the light out.” He shudders. “It’s going to be so dark when it’s over.”

“Who? I don’t—”

“When it comes, you think you can choose. You can say no. But it’s too late.” His ruined voice is soft with despair.

Michael gives a consoling nod, though it’s clear he has no idea what Brian is talking about. He starts to reach out to him, but Brian jumps to his feet. Begins pacing back and forth between the dresser and the window, always back to the window. After a minute he pauses in his circuit, staring out the frost-rimmed glass at the darkened buildings.

“I know all their secrets. That’s why they hate me. So afraid I’ll tell. I just want them to st-stop.” His voice gives out on the last word. He collapses into the corner under the window, covering his face. He’s trembling all over.

Michael crawls to him. Puts his hands on his best friend’s shoulders. Flinches a little, like someone given a nasty carpet shock. But he holds on when Brian tries to pull away.

“I don’t understand.” His voice is quiet but there’s a note of hysteria in it. “I don’t know why but—” Michael swallows hard. “Make me understand.”

Silence. Even the howls from the speakers have stilled, the CD changer shuffling to the next track.

Michael’s face crumples like he’s the one in pain. “Tell me how to help you.”

Still no response. The next song begins, a throbbing exotic riff that sounds nothing like Nirvana’s normal frantic style. The vocals kick in, Cobain’s anguished rasp a strange fit with Bowie’s cool lyrics.

We passed upon the stair
We spoke in was and when
Although I wasn’t there
He said I was his friend
Which came as a surprise
I spoke into his eyes
‘I thought you died alone, a long long time ago.’

Michael leans so close his lips are in Brian’s hair. “Anything. I just want to h—”

He pulls back, brow wrinkling.

Slowly, Brian raises his head.

Oh no, not me
We never lost control
Face to face
With the man who sold the world

A shriek of lightning splits the sky.

Eyes meet in a blaze of shocking blue.

Michael is on his feet, backing away.

Brian rises. “You could help. You could help a lot.”

Michael doesn’t answer as he keeps retreating. He bangs his elbow hard against the edge of the desk but doesn’t notice the pain. All his attention on Brian’s face, scanning frantically.

“Come here, Mikey.” Words calm as glass. None of the strain of earlier.

Michael bolts for the door.

But Brian is always faster. He’s blocking the exit before Michael’s at the foot of the bed.

Michael holds out a hand. But he doesn’t touch him. He seems to be making a point not to touch him.

“Brian,” he says, very carefully. “Please.”

“Please what?” Brian says in his new calm voice.

“Please move.”

Brian seems to consider this. Then he shrugs and takes a step to the right.

Quick as thought Michael goes for the knob.

Brian seizes his arm—he doesn’t even seem to be trying. Slams Michael into the fake wood with a hollow thunk!

His eyes glitter with predatory glee. A cat playing with its favorite squeaky toy.

“You can’t run away from me. I’ll find you.” One finger traces over Michael’s face. “You shine like moonlight.”

His hand travels down, down. Exploring.

“D-don’t—” Michael gasps.

“You used to like it. You used to fucking beg for it. Every day in the showers, watching. All those times—“ the barest crack in that glassy voice “—with the others. Touching them. Seeing me.”

He nods as Michael recoils. “I saw you.”

Brian leans close.

“I always see you.”

So close.

“Even when you wish I’d look away.”

Michael tries to pull back but Brian thrusts forward, pressing him into the door.

“Brian—“ The word a strangled whisper. Michael stares up at him.

“No,” Brian says as if he’s replying to something. “No more stand-ins. No more seeing me in your dreams.”

The look on his face is almost pleading. But the hunger in those dark eyes is nothing human.

“I need you.”

Michael’s gaze wavers. The slightest weakening.

Brian is on him. Caging his face, kissing him like he’s devouring him. Michael gives one last struggle, a spastic uncertain movement like he’s not sure whether he’s fighting Brian or pulling him closer. Brian’s lips move down, ravishing the white skin of Michael’s throat. Worrying at the fragile swell just over the pulse.

Then—a sudden yielding. Michael melts against Brian with a sound that’s really a sob.

“Nine fucking years.” Shaky words whispered into the curve of Michael’s neck. Then, with a growl, Brian yanks the bottom of Michael’s t-shirt out of his jeans, pulling it over his head. One hand slides down bare skin, fingers curving into flesh like he’s going to plunge right through to the pulsing depths. Michael eyes are flat, blank as a junkie who just mainlined a pure dose.

Brian, not stopping. Michael’s muscles more aware than he is, the taut skin of his belly straining at the invasion. Brian’s hand finding the row of steel buttons closing Michael’s jeans, pulling them open with small dull pops. Sounds that seem to reverberate over the blaring music. Slow but relentless, he reaches for him.

Lightning crashes. Silver-blue streaks, beautiful and deadly.

Michael jerks forward like a man awakened from a nightmare. Shoves Brian off him with strength beyond his size. Backs towards the window, getting as much distance as he can. He’s ghost pale and gasping.

“NO. You can’t—I will NOT—t-this isn’t—” He stops. Wraps arms around himself like it’s all that’s holding him together. “We aren’t doing this.” He looks up at Brian, eyes accusing. “You aren’t doing it.”

It takes Brian a moment to come back enough to talk.

“Why?” Real confusion in the word.

Michael just looks at Brian with those wounded eyes. But under the reproach is something else, lurking in the depths like an old cancer. The cold bitter spark of resentment.

“That’s not fair. They don’t count. They’re not even real.” Cracks in Brian’s calm, showing the anarchy beneath.

Michael turns away. Shutting his eyes, shutting down.

What seems like an endless silence. Stars could ignite and extinguish in the time Brian stares, stone-faced, at Michael’s stiffened back. But it’s really only the length of a chorus.

Oh no, not me
I never lost control
You’re face to face
With the man who sold the world

Brian’s voice is quiet, so very quiet. It would be less terrifying if he screamed.

“I’ll show you what’s real.”

Michael spins around. His mouth opens, like he’s wants to say something to make it better, to take it back.

Too late.

Flash of preternatural speed. Brian is gripping Michael’s neck. He throws him face-first on the bed. Jumps on him and traps him between his knees. Presses him to the mattress with one hand. Michael struggles but Brian holds on without effort.

“N-NO . . .” Michael manages to gasp. “Not this way. Please—“

Brian tears through the thick denim of Michael’s jeans like it’s paper. Tears them off.

Michael screams like a rabbit in a trap. But Brian doesn’t hear. Deaf to everything but the chaos in his head.

“BR—” The name cut off by a choke.

Brian’s fingers pull at the waistband of Michael’s boxers.

A sound like the end of the world. One blinding explosion of brightness, silver so bright it’s white. Deafening burst of feedback and the stereo goes silent.

Brian recoils like he’s been shocked.

Michael, coming up in a blur of motion. Brian goes for him again but for once Michael is faster. He grabs Brian’s wrists, holding him off. The two of them caught there half-embraced, like dancers who don’t know the next step.

“Brian, STOP.”

He makes one more forward attempt. Michael goes a shade paler, barely keeping his grip. He stares up at Brian with huge exhausted eyes. Seems to stare right through him.

“If you love me, you—will—stop.”

Brian stills.

Michael draws close. Features ashen with fatigue, but in the not-light the whites of his eyes shimmer like pearls.

Slowly, never letting his gaze falter for a second, he lets go of Brian’s wrists. Catches Brian’s head in his hands. Runs trembling fingers over his face.

“Come back to me,” he whispers.

All that frozen blankness, breaking into a million fragments. The emptiness in Brian’s eyes fills with a pain that is terrible to see. When he speaks he sounds like a child. A frightened child who woke up in the dark.

“My God—Mikey . . .”

He’s falling. Michael is almost dragged off the bed by the momentum. He clings to the edge while Brian collapses.

He grasps Michael around the waist. Buries his head in his best friend’s lap. His shoulders begin to heave. Awful choking sobs, like something is tearing him apart from the inside.

Michael makes soothing sounds, a string of soft words meant to comfort more than make sense. He doesn't know he's crying too, tears running unchecked down his face. Onto hands that pet Brian like he’s a wounded animal.

“Shhh, I know. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. You don't have to—I’m fine. I’m okay.”

Brian continues to break.

Michael looks up at the ceiling.

The December 26 door shimmers.

“You—you said we were done with those.”

“We are.” Charlie nods towards the door. Not another card emerging: Letters over the frame, glowing and ghostly.

EXIT

“I’m not leaving without him. You said if I went back—”

“I remember what I said,” Charlie replies with a touch of irritation. “Everything you’re looking for is right there.”

Michael considers the door. Reaches out. Draws back.

“Don’t worry, it’s safe. Well—safe as it can ever be.”

Michael brushes hesitant fingers against the metal.

“Then why am I so scared?” he whispers.

“Because you know,” Charlie whispers back.

Michael looks at him as if he could find a clue in that lurking nothing of a face.

“What you have to do—what you will do. Deep down, you’ve always known.”

Strangest feeling of déjà vu as Michael turns the bolt. Experiencing a moment he’s lived before, and will again.

Light washes over them. Blazing blueness in every shade—azure-cobalt-ultramarine-sapphire-cerulean-indigo. Like looking through a stained-glass window on a brilliant morning.

Michael squints into the spectrum.

He feels him before he sees him. A feeling like nothing and no one else.

Brian Kinney, ladies and gentlemen. Brian, as we’ve seen him a thousand times before, standing in the center of everything. Aglow on the dance floor at Babylon, surrounded by a crowd gone dim by contrast. Lasers and disco lights turning in neon constellations overhead, but the only real light comes from him. Brilliance that goes so much deeper than skin, surging from within. A light that could blind you, if you only knew how to see it.

He hasn’t seen Michael yet. Half-turned from him, looking at another exit across the dance floor. A huge black arch, looming like a coming storm. Facing it the way he faces everything—unflinching, with his eyes wide open.

“I don’t understand. How did he get back here?”

“He never left. You were the one who ran away.”

“They were attacking me,” Michael says, gesturing at the mass of bodies.

“They’re not real,” Charlie says. “They’re not what you’re afraid of.”

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“Brian does. He knows, Michael.”

Charlie nods at Michael’s pained start. “Why do you think he never pushed it? Not until he was out of his fucking mind with it? Brian Kinney, who always gets what he wants. Except with you. He knows how frightened you are.”

“I’m not— ”

Michael stops. Too much has happened tonight. He doesn’t have the strength to lie anymore. Not even to himself.

“I’ve tried,” he says. “I’ve tried so hard.”

“But it’s not easy, is it? Everybody wants him—they can’t help it. But they don’t really see him. Not like you do. You know what he is, you know what he’s capable of. It scares the hell out of you.”

Charlie looks over his shoulder. Down the corridor that seems to stretch to infinity.

“Choices, Michael. Nine years’ worth. Every time you’ve made the same one: Shutting down, running away. So afraid if you let him in, there’d be no stopping him. He’d take everything you had and it still wouldn’t be enough. That’s your worst nightmare, isn’t it? That’s what held you back all this time. You thought if you never had him, you could never lose him.”

Charlie points at the bright figure on the dance floor. Caught in the moment of turning away. “You were wrong.”

“NO, that can’t happen,” Michael says desperately. “Tell me how to make it not happen.”

“Do I have to do it in Powerpoint? Give him what he needs.”

“I have. I always have.”

“What he wants, then. You know it’s the same thing.”

“How the hell does that solve anything? I’ll be just like the others. All the ones he doesn’t even remember—”

Cold hands hard on his chest, thrusting him forward with a brutal shove. Michael stumbles, just managing to catch the doorframe on either side. He flinches away from the light, tries to retreat, but Charlie is there blocking the way. He’s not much bigger than Michael—no bigger, really. But he hovers like the Figure of Doom.

“Look at yourself.”

“I don’t—”

“LOOK,” Charlie says with a menacing step forward.

Michael shrinks back as far as he can without crossing the threshold. Glances down.

He glows phosphorescent in the azure haze streaming through the door. Light blooming beneath his flesh, silver as pearls are silver, as the moon is silver. Silver so bright it’s white, the shine of the most expensive mirror ever made.

“Do you look like the others?”

“It’s just reflected light,” Michael says, turning his face.

Charlie grabs his chin, jerking it back. Sparks fly as Michael twists free. Charlie lets him go but doesn’t step away.

“That was there, all of it, before Brian ever saw you. It’s why he saw you. When he couldn’t see anything else.”

He waves a dark hand over Michael’s heart. Not touching him, but Michael feels the cold pull of his power.

“You’ve played sidekick so long you’ve convinced the world it’s all you are. But I know your secret identity.” He pauses, and when he goes on his voice is softer. “What’s inside you—Brian couldn’t take it away if he wanted to.”

Michael slumps against the steel doorframe. Truth dawning like the worst day in the world. All that time, wasted. So much time . . .

“You can save him, Michael. You’re the only one.”

Starving himself until he was sick with it, for no reason, none at all . . .

“Go to him, before it’s too late.”

Michael leans his aching forehead against the cold metal. Sick with the knowledge, so sick . . .

“Michael, GO.”

His head jerks up. He stares at Charlie with burning eyes. “What the fuck is it to you?”

Charlie says nothing.

“Well?” Michael crosses his arms over his chest. “Why are you here? What’s your secret identity?”

Charlie seems to dim further. Blending into the walls around him, hiding himself in their darkness.

“NO way.” Michael steps forward. Not ready to touch him, but not about to lose him, either. “Drop the mask.”

Charlie stops mid-dim. “Why should I do that?” Something strange in his tone. Almost like . . . encouragement.

“None of this is making sense. Not you, not this whole night. You’re so gung-ho on getting me with Brian, why put off the big reunion? You said it’s no big deal, right? Everything I’ve tortured myself over for a goddamn decade—poof!” Michael waves, sending up more sparks. “I’m Lord fucking Raiden: plenty of juice where that came from.”

“I’m not lying.”

“No, I don’t think you are. But that’s not all the truth, is it? If it was, we never would’ve had to leave Babylon. You could’ve told me everything I needed to hear in about two minutes.”

Michael looks past Charlie, into the depths of Deep Storage.

“That little trip down memory lane, every single scene with the same theme. (I did pay attention in Honors English sometimes.) Brian hurt, needing something desperately and not getting it. Needing me. Why hammer the point over and over? If the solution is so easy, why make me feel like such shit about it?”

Michael knows the answer even as he asks.

“Giving him what he wants—that’s not the only choice I’m making, is it?”

Charlie tilts his head at him, like a scientist whose lab rat has finally done something interesting.

“And—and I have to know I’m making it.”

“See? I knew you were smart.” Charlie leans against the wall by the exit door. “But how smart?” He crosses his arms over his chest. The pose is casual, familiar.

Too familiar.

“Show me your face,” Michael says. He hears the shake in his voice and doesn’t give a damn.

Charlie straightens, shifting back and forth on the balls of his feet. He runs a hand through the dark mass of his hair.

Michael feels his own legs twitch in response. He has to dig fingers into his thighs to stop the same restless gesture.

“Uh-oh, here we go. Arthur’s finally figured out where his towel is.”

“SHOW ME!”

He realizes his hands are going for his hair again and he yanks them back.

“Show me,” he rasps. “Or I’m gone right this second. Swear to God.”

Light, swirling around Charlie in a fluorescent tornado. So stunning that for a moment it turns the black moldy bricks to something like brightness.

What emerges from the storm, the worst kind of shock. And no shock at all.

A small black-haired man, fine-boned and narrow-shouldered, with boyish features that make it hard to tell his true age. He’s casually dressed in Converse All-Stars, faded jeans and a light brown canvas jacket. Under that, a t-shirt for a superhero Michael has never heard of, some kind of masked man, tall and lean and intense. Below this striking figure—sketched by an artist of some talent and boldness—a name that could be a warning: RAGE.

The man in the t-shirt is almost Michael’s mirror image. Complete to the energy that hovers around him in a fitful silver cloud, sparking and humming at frequencies Michael feels with a sense beyond the usual five.

Like looking at his own reflection, except for the eyes. They are the same shape and spacing, with those same girly lashes Michael has frowned over a thousand times. But the color is wrong—so wrong. A flat, unending blackness. Looking into them is like looking through doors into dark rooms, hiding things that will never see light.

Michael Charles Novotny, in another time and place. Reaching from beyond whatever filled his eyes with shadows.

“I understand,” Michael says slowly. “You’re the price.”

He presses a hand to his heart, as if he could quiet its frantic racing.

“If I go to him now. If I save him. One day, I’ll be you.”

The older Michael nods. Still and serious in his moment of truth.

“Why?” So much he can’t express in that word. A thousand questions that are really one: how a single choice can come to this. Work down through the years and create what’s in front of him.

“We’ve spent hours getting to who,” the older Michael answers. “We could spend days on why. Weeks. I know all the rooms—even the ones that haven’t been unlocked yet. I could show them to you. But in the end, it would come to this.” He turns, bottomless eyes staring at Brian. “It’s what has to be.”

“You’ve seen it, haven’t you? How it will be if I don’t save him. His—ending.” Michael barely gets the word out.

Silence.

“How—how bad?”

Eyes closing, as if they can’t bear the brightness anymore. “There are no words for it.”

Michael can’t look away. Seeing Brian, like he saw him the very first time. Fourteen years old and speechless with the shock of him. Seeing color where there had been nothing but shades of grey. Brian, the beginning of everything. His end like the end of the world—a sight so terrible it can’t be faced, only glimpsed in the darkest corner of vision.

Michael, trembling with the truth that has never been spoken. Never been known, only felt.

Brian is what matters. Take the rest of the world and burn it to ash: Brian must be saved.

“He can be. But the cost is high. It’s—everything.”

Michael never takes his eyes from Brian as he answers.

“I will pay.”

The words are quiet, but they hang in the air like the echo of a great bell. It seems to clang through him, centering in his heart. Not pain—the end of pain. Breathing after a suffocating weight is finally gone.

The older Michael’s bottomless eyes grow full. His halo dims to pewter, then suddenly flashes out, platinum-bright.

Michael squints through it, studying those familiar features. Looking for lines, signs of age. How old. How long.

And he knows.

“Nine years,” he whispers. “Such a long time.”

“And no time at all.” Through the light, there’s a sorrow in his face that’s like a promise.

Michael has to look away from it. A moment to feel for himself, the brightness around him blurring to puddles. “Did you—I mean, will I—d-does it—”

“It will be different from anything you suppose.” A hand reaches out to cup Michael’s face. “And luckier.”

The touch doesn’t hurt this time. Gentle energy flows over his skin like water. But it’s cold, so cold, a chill that freezes Michael to the marrow of his bones.

He can hardly speak around the iceberg in his throat. “Is—was he worth it?”

The older Michael—the not-so-much-older Michael—smiles. So brightly it almost reaches the darkness in his gaze.

Cold hands, drawing Michael in. Cold brilliance, flooding his vision. He closes his eyes.

Breath like an icy wind against his cheek. “When it comes, you will remember.” A cold kiss, one on each eyelid. “Until then, the truth can sleep.”

Brush of cold lips against his. Energy echoing like a rain of silver bells, filling him as it drains. Taking unbearable knowledge and leaving sureness in its place. A feeling that’s so much better than knowing.

“Time to go. He’s been waiting.” It isn’t clear who’s speaking. It doesn’t matter.

Michael steps over the threshold.

Going fast now, through the space that is and isn’t Babylon. Its mirrored walls stretching to an impossible distance, reaching towards a ceiling remote as the night sky, strung with lights twinkling like distant stars. A hundred times larger than reality, louder-bolder-shinier-sexier-stranger. More crowded, more compelling—not Babylon, the idea of Babylon, in all its orgasmic glory. As imagined by two bright-eyed teenagers who couldn’t get past the bouncers.

Going to Brian. The one true thing in a world of illusions.

He’s almost reached him, is nearly close enough to put his hand on his shoulder, when one of the dim things peels off from the crowd. It blocks his path.

“Move,” Michael says.

The thing stands there, staring at him with blank and blazing eyes.

They crunch like Christmas bulbs breaking when Michael puts them out.

Inhuman screaming, the screeching metallic whine of unoiled bearings, echo off the mirrored walls as Michael digs in and pulls down. He expects to meet resistance outside the eye sockets, but the creature’s flesh peels away in soft gummy strips. Behind that, there is nothing. A hollow shell like the inside of a doll.

It continues screaming until the moment Michael rips off its lips. Then, smoking silence as he tears through its neck and chest with no more effort than if he were tearing open a plastic trash bag. The smell of it is plastic too—hot and acrid, tinged with the alcohol sting of cheap cologne.

When he’s split the torso completely in two, it collapses to the ground in a deflated heap. Michael kicks it away.

He stares around at the others. A raspy murmur rises from them, mechanical and repetitive, like somebody yanked all their pull-strings simultaneously.

“Anybody else wanna be a hero?”

He feels their anger like acid on his skin. But no challengers come forward.

“Get the fuck out of here.”

There is no dramatic exit. No panicked crowds shoving through the doors, no thunderclap and flash of lightning. The room is loud and full and then it’s silent and empty, figures lost in the haze like they were never there at all.

Brian has turned from the archway. He surveys the void and frowns.

“Way to harsh everybody’s buzz, M—”

He cuts off, because it’s hard to talk when someone is kissing you breathless. The kiss is rough, almost angry. Crush of mouth on mouth, Michael’s hands hard on Brian’s chest.

Lights flash blinding-bright. Precious elements that shift and sparkle: sapphire and silver, cobalt and mercury.

The two of them pull back after a minute, gasping.

Brian catches his breath. “What—”

“Shut up,” Michael says. “Whatever you were gonna say, just—don’t. No sarcasm, no innuendoes, no goddamn metacommentary. For once in our incredibly dysfunctional lives, we’re talking straight.”

He pauses, runs a hand through his hair. “I know about New York.”

Sparks glitter angrily in Brian’s aura. “Theodore,” he mutters. “Little twat. Like it will get him anywhere.”

Michael waves this away. “You can’t go. I won’t let you.”

Brian raises an eyebrow. “You’re more delusional than Ted.”

“Fuck Ted. I know what you’re doing. Did you really think I wouldn’t see?”

Brian’s expression doesn’t change. His mouth mocking, his eyes desperate.

“What happened—we have to get past it.”

Brian’s smirk falters.

“Don’t punish yourself. Don’t punish me. Stay.”

Brian seems to be having difficulty finding a reply.

“You—want that? Even after I—” he stops. Shakes his head, starts to turn again towards the darkness of the arch.

Michael catches his hand. Gently turns him back, saying what he must surely already know.

“You are all I have ever wanted.”

Brian blinks once. His lips open but nothing comes out.

And Michael understands. Realization ripping through him like he ripped through the mannequin man.

He didn’t know. Suspected, sure. Hoped, maybe. But never certain. Brian, who sees so clearly into every soul. Except one. The one who could keep him out, the only one he really needed.

Michael has to gasp past the ragged hole in his chest. “Jesus, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Brian looks away.

Michael tightens his grip. Ducks his head down, tries to find his best friend’s eyes.

“Brian, please,” he whispers. “Don’t leave me.”

Brian raises his head. For one second a glint in his gaze, the brightness mirrored in the energy surrounding him.

Just as quickly, it goes out.

“No. It won’t work.”

“But—”

“You want the straight truth? Here it is. You’re the one, Mikey.”

Brian’s energies go murky as ocean water after the sun has set.

“But—you’ll never be the only one.”

Something Michael never thought he’d see in Brian Kinney’s face: Regret, deep and real.

“I can’t help it. You can’t live with it.” His eyes don’t leave Michael’s. “Can you?”

Now it’s Michael’s turn to look away. He glances down, sees his fingers entangled with Brian’s. Cold and trembling now, with a fear that chills him to the core. That it’s already too late. Everything he did

and it still wasn’t enough.

He pulls his hand back. Brian doesn’t try to hold on.

Michael still can’t look at him. Instead, he looks at the lights twinkling down on them.

Inspiration, bright as the tiles of a discoball.

“Up there, maybe it’s that way,” he says slowly. “But here . . . ” His gaze sweeps the echoing space around them. “How many nights? Here, just the two of us?”

“Every night.” Brian shrugs. “Anyway, that’s how it feels.”

“We’re safe here. As safe as we’ll ever be.”

“What are you saying, Michael?” His voice is carefully neutral.

Michael takes Brian’s face in his hands. Takes a breath.

Saying it is so much easier than he thought it would be.

“Yes,” he says. “I’m saying yes.”

Brian’s expression has become more blank than his voice. “Do you know what you’re getting into?”

“Do you?”

Michael leans close. Touches his forehead to Brian’s. Feels energy stir between them like a great sleepy beast.

“Do what you have to with the others. They’re just bodies. Distractions. But you don’t go deeper than skin. Inside, where it counts, I’m the only one. You can’t have anybody else. Not here, not like this. Not ever.”

“I don’t want anybody else like this.” The words are a raw whisper. “Never have. I never will.”

Brian’s hand grips Michael’s t-shirt. Michael feels power curl through him like those fingers are gripping his heart.

He flinches and pulls back, way back. Sheer ingrained instinct—he can’t help it.

Brian goes stone still. His expression is a question, but what Michael hears is an answer.

It’s okay. You can say no. Even now, you can say it. I never really believed you’d say yes.

[what did you]

Michael stops, shivering like he’s been hit by a sudden draft. Wraps arms around himself, scans the room again.

“This is not right. Something isn’t . . . ” he stops, trying to find where the wrongness is coming from.

Brian stares at him silently.

Silence.

“No music,” Michael realizes. “We can’t dance if there’s no music.”

Brian gives an exasperated laugh that’s really a sigh. “Oh, is that what we’re doing?”

It’s how we’re starting. How we’ve always started.

But we never seem to finish, do we?

“Come on,” Michael says, after a beat. “Dance with me.”

Brian doesn’t move.

“Please?” Michael takes a step closer. Close enough that Brian could reach out and hold him

“Excuse me?” Brian says, brows drawing together.

“Sorry,” Michael murmurs. He closes the remaining distance, resting his head on Brian’s chest. Hearing the most reassuring sounds in the world, the rush of his best friend’s breathing, the throb of his heartbeat. Above those and below, a crackle of power that’s like nothing and no one else on this earth. Usually he only feels it; tonight he sees it, swirling and twirling around his own, their energies dancing already, music be damned.

“Dance with me,” he says again, very softly. “I won’t run away. Not this time.”

The move tentative for him, Brian’s arms find their way around Michael’s waist.

As if it was the cue they were waiting for, [it was] the sound system blares to life. A wall of sound, mournful synthesizers and more hopeful strings, David Bowie’s mournful, hopeful voice overlaying all.

“More dinosaur rock?”

“I love this song.”

A pause. “Me too.”

Slowly, like a couple of kids who are just learning the steps, they begin to move.

And you—you can be mean
And I—I’ll drink all the time
'Cause we're lovers
And that is a fact
Yes we're lovers
And that is that

Moving faster, around and around. Wrongness falling away, everything falling away, existence narrowing to just the two of them. How many nights like this? How many nights when place and distance didn’t matter? Sleeping alone, sleeping with strangers, but not enough space or bodies in the world to keep them apart.

“Every night.” Brian, low and fierce in Michael’s ear. “Every night, I’ve looked for you. I’ll always find you.”

The whole space seems to be spinning now, lights blurring in bright circles far overhead. But the true light, the one that defines everything, contained in the space of an embrace. Michael dizzy, clinging to Brian, the sole fixed point and the source of all chaos. Brian’s power thundering on his skin. It seems cold at first: like Brian himself, chilling until you realize all that energy is really heat, so intense your stunned nerves signal its opposite. Michael’s energies tremble like walls of glass, trying to withstand the storm.

A searing hand on his neck. Brian speaking, in that voice so calm Michael knows that he’s barely keeping control.

“Let go. You have

to let go.”

Brian pulling back, looking at him with eyes that glow like banked embers. The same eyes he’s seen for so many years, across smoky dance floors, in dark strange bedrooms and hazy back rooms. Hungry cat’s eyes in a human face. Alight with a terrible patience that’s like despair.

Something loosening, deep inside. Like a long-clenched fist finally opening, painful at first, then blossoming into release. Burying his head in the shelter of his best friend’s neck, Michael lets go, lets it all go. Feels barriers nine years in the making come down, all the way down.

He takes in Brian’s cry of relief, but not with any human sense.

I—I can remember, standing by the wall
And the gods shout above our heads
And we kissed as though nothing could fall
And the shame, was on the other side
Oh we can beat them, forever and ever
Then we can be heroes, just for one day

They’re falling, falling, as reality flickers around them. Walls now mirrored and distant, now cinderblock and right up close. Cartoon paper of a boy’s bedroom, dull white paint of a man’s first apartment. Scratched cabin paneling, stucco hotel walls, cool night air of a deserted beach, steamed-up windows of a parked car. The ground under them hard as flashing floor tiles, sprung as a dorm mattress. Soft as well-worn Captain Astro sheets, smooth as 400-count cotton, rough as splintered wood. Slick as a hotel bedspread, shifting as sand, stiff as a Mustang’s back seat.

All those red lights going green, every ‘no’ becoming ‘yes,’ each terrified retreat turned a brave last stand. Every first time that ever could have been, happening in the same brilliant moment. The music is deafening— becoming all the songs, every tune they ever broke their hearts to. The soundtrack of a thousand fantasies, finally coming true.

Brian hovering over him now, leaning him back on the fast-changing ground. His flesh blue-white marble outlined in cobalt, shadows under his smoldering eyes smudges of ultraviolet. Dionysus, figured in shades of blue, throwing off heat and light like an unearthly thing. The most beautiful thing Michael has ever seen. And the most dangerous.

He feels the rush of Brian’s energy building, flashing and roaring like an ocean made of lightning. Air reeking with something primal and overpowering, musk and ozone, sex and electricity. Dazzling blue everywhere, crashing over him in a tidal wave and that must be why he suddenly can’t breathe, lungs straining as his heart pulses in his throat.

“Mikey?” The words seem to come from very far away. “Do you want to

Last chance, Michael. Another voice, cool and calm, his own but not his own. The very last choice.

Michael’s hands come up. Pale as a mirror but shining, silver light shimmering under fathoms of blue.

He finds his breath.

“I want to. I really really want to.”

He pulls Brian down and kisses him.

How many kisses before this one? Every day, approaching a decade of days. Thousands of them, swift in motion and simple in meaning: hello, goodbye, thanks, I’m sorry, shut up. The complicated ones—ones that really meant something—a lot rarer, two, three a year, maybe.

Kissing Brian Kinney, and meaning it, is a devastating experience. Doesn’t matter who starts it, he’s the one who finishes it, eyes and mouth sucking you in, taking you, finding places within you didn’t think anybody could reach.

It’s when you will know him for what he really is.

But Michael isn’t scared.

Everything getting jumbled up then, wavering around like the walls, bodies flickering in and out like figures caught in strobe. Hot and vivid as a fever dream, a wet fever dream, all mouths and hands and sweat, voices splintered into silent fragments oh yes oh god and please yes right there, nothing both of them haven’t done before but nothing like this before, not together, not here, not this far, till they’re right on the edge and Michael understands this is it, Brian hard and pulsing against him and it’s getting so real and that’s enough to pull him back, all the way back to speech.

“Can we—we’re not ready—we don’t have anything—”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“We can’t do it raw.”

“It’s okay. The sex is just a metaphor.”

“I sure hope this is a dream,” Michael mutters.

“Yes, Michael. You’re dreaming.” Lips on his throat, contact tingling like an electric shock. “Close your eyes.”

He does, his light-stunned brain welcoming the dark.

Then Brian thrusts inside, all the way inside.

And everything goes supernova.

This is the first time, the real one, what Michael has wanted and feared for all these years. Brian surging through him, the heat and pressure unbearable. Pain, so much pain, all mixed up with pleasure, an awful raw ecstasy like nothing he’s known. What he was so scared of, having this once and needing it forever, ruined for everything else.

Brian, not stopping. Plunging into him, down down down to where he’s never been before, never this deep before, not on a thousand desperate nights. It’s too far, too much, nothing human was meant to take this. Michael can feel himself splitting apart, bleeding from every cell, not blood but light, silver-white, pouring out like mercury.

Brian taking him, all of him, swallowing the light with that terrible hunger which has never been satisfied. Michael screaming from the sensation, the only thing worse than feeling this not to feel it. Devoured by ravenous eyes, the ones he’s always felt at this moment. Touching strangers, seeing him, the face of his dreams and his nightmares.

“This is no dream,” he gasps. “This is real.”

One last, answering thrust and he’s going going gone, an explosion behind his eyes that’s like a million silver stars, falling into a blue as deep and endless as night.

Falling, falling, through that blue-black nothing.

And suddenly it’s like running down a thousand hallways with a million doors, and all of them are flying open so he can see inside. He can see everything, looking through the dark to a light like the end of the world. He sees all the way to the very end—sees the future, written in blood on walls of ice, and it’s too far, too much, nothing human was meant to see this

Screaming, not with pain or pleasure but with knowing, it’s tearing him to pieces he’ll never put back not ever—

A voice, calling out to him in the chaos

A hand, pulling him away from the edge

Falling, for what feels like forever. Time and space rushing past, a thousand doorways with a million doors. But all of them closing. Finally, mercifully, closing.

Falling into earth, with a smash that seems to echo through every cell. Reality shrieking in, like all of those cells are shattering and reforming in new shapes.

And then, silence.

But then, music.

Organ and drums. Vocals triumphant but tinny through cheap bookshelf speakers.

All that is now
All that is gone
All that’s to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon . . .

White walls lit by cool greyness, the false light just before dawn. Cool sliding softness of expensive sheets.

A melancholy English voice, barely audible at the end of the track. Words spoken from the edge of nothing.

‘There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark.’

A touch on his face. He flinches a little from sheer instinct but it’s just a touch, soft as the air around them.

Yes. You will.

Michael shivers.

Arms entwining, pulling him closer. Heat and breath and heartbeat. Gentle sated energy against his cheek.

Exhausted by the journey, he lets true sleep take him. Grey dissolving to black.

The last thing he hears, the sound of rain, pouring down like the sky is weeping.

BANG!

Michael awoke with a start.

He fumbled for the stereo, cutting off Jimmy Page’s galloping guitar mid-stride. Rubbed his eyes and squinted from the harsh light of—a glance at the wall clock—noon.

BANG!

He got to his feet. Sat right back down again, woozy. Ran fingers through his damp hair and blinked at the familiar mess of his room. It looked even worse in daylight.

BANG!

He struggled up again with a sigh. Picked his way through piles of clothing, shuddering at the cold bare floor under his feet. But his t-shirt was soaked through with sweat. Yuck.

BANG!

He tore open the bedroom door.

“What the hell—”

Michael froze on the threshold.

“What the hell,” he whispered.

Midday sun streamed in through sparkling windows, the light laying in streaks along equally gleaming wood floors. Spotless pink tiles winked from the wedge of bathroom visible through the hallway. In the kitchen, formica and linoleum glowed in mellow autumn tones. Above, Captain Astro beamed down heroically on the transformation.

The place was spotless. Every dirty dish washed, every grubby towel picked up, every crumpled paper and crusty take-out carton disposed of. Reek of rising damp had been replaced by the nostril-flaring scent of pine. Except for a few sticks of furniture scattered around, the apartment was as empty and pristine as the day he’d moved in.

BANG!

Michael blinked again, his fuzzy brain slowly processing the biggest exception to his apartment’s just-out-of-the-shrinkwrap state. Scattered underneath the window was an asteroid belt of copper and steel bits.

On his knees in front of the belt, a hammer in one calloused hand, crouched a man of about Michael’s age. Hard to tell height and build from that position, but he looked lean and well-muscled, smooth bronzed biceps flexing as he worked away at an exposed pipe near the baseboard. He was dressed for the dirty job, in a stained t-shirt with the sleeves torn off and equally battered jeans. Steel-toed black boots complemented the look.

As he turned Michael saw he was more goth than grease monkey, though. His spiky wheat-blond hair was streaked with rainbow shades. His left eyebrow was pierced by a thin silver barbell, his right earlobe by a thick silver disc. Lumps under his shirt suggested nipple rings. Thick strands of tattooed barb wire curled around his neck. On his left bicep was a recreation of red leering lips, in wavy script beneath, a phrase: Creature of the Night. More striking was the motto snaking up his right arm in bold black letters an inch high: DON’T DREAM IT BE IT.

He pushed a lock of purple hair out of his face and grinned up at Michael with eyes the same color as his jeans.

“Hey, did I wake you?” His voice was low and raspy, like he was just getting over a cold.

“Yeah, you—” Michael stopped. “Who are you?”

“Rocky Corcoran, Building Super,” the young man said, extending a grease-marked paw. “You gotta be Michael.”

“Um,” he said, taking the hand. “Not to be rude or anything, but—what the hell are you doing?”

“Your radiator’s on the fritz, right?” Rocky said, waving at the contraption with his hammer.

“Yeah. But—I called like, weeks ago.”

“First chance I’ve had to swing by. I’ve been a little—tied up.”

Michael looked down and saw pink raw lines circling the maintenance man’s wrist. More alert now, he noticed that same rawness under the spikes of Rocky’s throat tattoo. His lips were swollen, like they’d been chewed on in pain or pure excitement. The thin skin of his inner arm was scored with splotchy blisters: remains of candlewax, except for one raised red burn that looked like—holy fuck, was that a brand mark?

Michael let go of his hand.

“You know how it is,” Rocky said.

Michael frowned. “I do?”

Rocky tilted his head, bleached blue gaze giving him a long look that had Michael wishing for a robe.

“Oh yeah,” he said in his soft strangled voice. “You do.”

Before Michael could figure out a response to that, Rocky had turned his attention back to floor, picking up some unidentifiable widget from the collection there.

“Anyway, I got your messages and I was gonna come Monday. But your man Brian called this morning.”

He put down the widget and raised both eyebrows. “Kinda . . . intense, isn’t he?”

Michael rubbed at his chest absently. There was a deep aching soreness there, like he’d somehow pulled a muscle: his heart, maybe.

“Yeah. He is.”

“Lucky you,” Rocky said. “Hey, does he look as good as he—”

The front door opened.

Brian Kinney always looks good. This is a matter of public record. But even after all these years, came moments his sheer physical impact hit Michael like a lightning bolt.

Moments like now.

Brian, stopped in the doorway, wearing last night’s wrinkled clothes and clutching a big Bruegger’s Deli bag. Light playing over the fine bones of his face, his eyes gone golden in the sun. Dressed all in black, but by far the brightest thing in the room. Standing there with that eerie stillness of which he is capable, quiet and striking as a statue. Or a stalking tiger. Michael struck stupid, the ache in his chest throbbing with each pound of his heart.

A long slow beat of silence, the only audible sound the rush of blood in his ears.

“I got bagels,” Brian said finally, in the tone of a man who must say something.

Michael would never be sure how he managed to move just then. One second he was standing by the window. The next he was right there with Brian like something had beamed him across the room.

Up close, he could see the tension in Brian’s face. His body stayed still but his eyes were busy, busy, darting over Michael with that bright hard stare which misses nothing. This close, Michael could hear the faint catch in Brian’s breathing. A low labored wheeze that coming from anybody else would have sounded nervous.

Brian reached out. His fingers didn’t quite brush the front of Michael’s t-shirt.

Michael leaned closer but Brian had already pulled back.

“I feel better,” Michael said.

It was almost true. He felt sore and shaky and a little, well—drained would be the best word for it. But that nasty grey nausea was gone, burned away in the night like his fever.

Brian’s eyebrows drew together. His free hand twitched restlessly.

“I’m okay,” Michael said, more insistent.

Slowly, Brian reached out again, cupping Michael’s face. One thumb traced over his throat like he was checking for a pulse. The touch was light as a feather, but it tingled through Michael like a low-grade electric shock. He gasped softly but didn’t move away. Instead he caught Brian’s wrist, holding him.

“Well, you look like shit.” But Brian was smiling as he said it. A real smile, the first one Michael had seen in what seemed like forever. It was like watching the sun come out after a long and terrible winter.

BANG!

Brian glanced over Michael’s head. His eyes narrowed a millimeter.

Michael turned.

Rocky was looking at Brian like a hungry man who’d just seen exactly what he wanted on the menu.

“Brian. You gotta be Brian,” he said fervently. “I’m Rocky? We talked earlier?”

Brian said nothing, his face as uncommunicative.

“Here by noon, just as ordered.” Rocky put a slight emphasis on the last word.

Brian glanced at the metal bits on the floor. “Good.” Then he looked at Rocky, really looked, taking him in from steel studs to steel-toed boots. His gaze flicked over the tats and burns like he was ticking off a list. Then it came up, making and holding eye contact.

“Very Good.”

Rocky colored under his tan.

“Would have been even better two fucking weeks ago.”

“I know. That was wrong,” Rocky agreed. “Very wrong.” He stood, looping his thumbs into his jeans, exposing a tempting stretch of tanned belly. He ran his tongue over swollen pink lips. “What can I do to make it right?”

“You can fix my fucking radiator,” Michael said.

Rocky stared at him.

Michael stared back.

Rocky tilted his head at Brian. “Like ‘em versatile, huh?”

Brian’s hand, warm and steady on the back of Michael’s neck. “You have no idea.”

“No,” Rocky smirked. “But I’d like to.”

Michael made an incoherent noise, a dozen versatile and detailed responses fighting for expression. But before he could clear the traffic jam Brian was already steering him towards the bedroom.

“Come on, tiger. Lay down before you fall down.”

He spared Rocky a parting glance over his shoulder. “Back to work. Keep the noise down.”

“Sure,” Rocky sighed. “If that’s what you really—”

The slam of the bedroom door cut him off.

“Brat Bottom,” Brian said, like a bug collector identifying a beetle.

“Gee, ya think?”

Michael whipped off his damp t-shirt, grabbing a fresh one and a pair of sweatpants from the clean pile. He sat down on the bed and pulled them on.

Brian set the bagel bag on the nightstand. “Move over.”

Michael scooched to the far side. Brian smoothed out the rumpled sheets and sat down on the edge. He took a large lidded Styrofoam cup out of the bag. Michael caught the scent of fresh coffee and stared longingly at the cup, but Brian set it down, reached in the bag again, and found a tall glass bottle of orange juice. He held it out.

“I really do feel better,” Michael said, with another glance at the coffee.

“Great,” Brian said, not moving.

Michael took the juice with a sigh.

Silence, as Michael watched Brian work. Move the neon lamp and a nine-inch vintage Doctor Who action figure to the edge of the nightstand. Take napkins from bag, spread them out. Take a raisin bagel (Michael’s favorite) and a poppyseed (his), place on napkins. Find a pat of butter (Michael) and a mini-tub of non-fat plain cream cheese (guess). One more dig for a plastic knife. Movements calm and swift and ordered, the way he handled everything.

Order.

“Did you clean up?”

Brian nodded, unlidding his coffee and taking a sip.

“The place looks amazing. Thank you.”

Brian waved the coffee lid dismissively. “Junkie squalor is so two years ago.”

Michael let that one pass. “What time did you get up? It must’ve taken hours.”

“Sunrise,” Brian said around another sip. “Couldn’t sleep. I felt—wired.”

He looked over at Michael. “You know that feeling?”

Michael nodded at the cup. “Maybe you should cut down on the caffeine.”

“Maybe,” Brian said, eyes steady.

“Are there any more napkins?” Michael said, after a beat.

The bedside phone rang as Brian was handing them to him.

Michael wiped off the sweaty neck of the bottle and lay back on the bed. He held the cool glass to his forehead and sighed tiredly. “Answer that, would you? Tell ‘em I’m asleep or dead. I don’t care which.”

Brian picked up the cordless handset. “What?”

Then he smiled. Not a real smile—the one Michael privately thought of as his Joker grin.

“Theodore. Always a pleasure.” Pause. “I’ll have to take a message. He just—”

Brian held the phone away from his mouth. “Christ, Mikey, put some clothes on!”

Michael looked down in confusion at his modestly clad self, but Brian was talking to Ted again.

“He always does that. Hops in the shower and forgets his towel or something, then goes running around like he’s at the fucking Everhard Baths. I mean, would you want to see Michael all naked and wet first thing in the morning?”

Michael plunked the juice on the bookcase. “Give me the phone.”

“No, Michael, I will not scrub your back. I’m not your little geisha girl—”

He made a grab for the handset but Brian stood up out of reach.

“Fine. I’ll be there in a second.” He gave a theatrical sigh. “Sorry, Teddy. My boy’s all over me this morning.”

“Brian—”

“Sure, I’ll let him know. But I warn you, we could be awhile. He’s awfully dirty—”

Michael pulled the plug out of the wall.

Brian put the handset down, smirking.

“You’re an asshole.” Michael fell back on the pillows with a disapproving thump.

Brian kicked off his boots and stretched out next to Michael. He reached one arm over, reordering the nightstand into a more pleasing formation: the neon lamp, Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, and the phone in a triangle, the Bruegger’s bag in the middle. He pushed the two bagels off to one side on their napkins, away from the main group.

“Ted’s a good guy.”

“Good ol’ Ted,” Brian remarked to Tom Baker. “Always trying to look after my best interests.”

He raised both the Doctor’s arms in a wide triumphant V, placing the round white coffee cup in front of him like it was the central control panel to the TARDIS. “Too bad for him. He won’t be getting his chance.”

“What?”

Brian settled the Doctor’s brown plastic hat more firmly on his head and twitched his scarf over his shoulder in a jaunty fashion. He placed the sonic screwdriver more securely in his hand. Then he turned back, saying casually:

“I took I/M’s offer this morning.”

“What?” Michael said, sitting up.

“Inverness/Muir,” Brian clarified. “The agency at Fifth and Liberty.”

Michael stared at him.

“I have a job,” Brian said, like he was addressing a slow learner.

Flu or exhaustion must have still been gumming up Michael’s synapses. It took him another minute to process.

“You—you’re not going to New York?”

“Who said anything about New York?”

“Ted told me you had an offer from Young & Rubicam.”

“Ted.” Brian rolled his eyes. “Ted told you about Richard Gere and the gerbil.”

“So wait. You didn’t have an offer?”

Brian shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“But—you love New York.”

“Fuck New York. Work seventy-hour weeks and live in some roach trap in the East Village? I don’t think so.”

Brian sat up against the headboard, folding his arms over his stomach in a smug way. “With what I/M is offering, I can afford a loft the size of a city block.”

Michael shook his head, not in disagreement but in total bewilderment.

“The old appliance warehouse on Trent Street is getting renovated. Should be an amazing space when it’s finished.”

Michael reached over Brian and grabbed the coffee cup off the nightstand.

“Of course, that will be Christmas at the earliest.”

Michael took a big swallow of Colombian roast.

“This place is bigger than you’d think, once you clean all the shit out of it.”

“Twelve hundred square feet,” Michael muttered.

He felt Brian’s eyes on him. He looked up.

Michael stopped with the cup halfway to his mouth. “You want to stay here?”

“Well, I could crash at Jack and Joanie’s. But if I wanted to surround myself with deranged alcoholics the homeless shelter on Highland’s an easier commute.”

“Oh. Well—well sure,” Michael said, recovering. “Mi casa su casa, you know that.” He looked at Brian closely. But are you sure? You’ve got all these options—”

“I had feeling about this one.”

He fixed Michael with a steady gaze. “You know that feeling?”

“Yeah,” Michael said, after a second. “I think so.”

The caffeine rush was finally kicking in. The room seemed twice as bright as it did a minute ago. Michael wrapped his arms around his knees, imagining the possibilities. “Come June, no more double shifts. Cool.”

“Come now. I’m moving out of Stalag 13 tomorrow.”

“With what?”

“With my signing bonus, smartass.”

“Okay, Mr. Moneybags. So long as I never have to look at Rick’s Banlon-clad ass for sixteen hours straight ag—”

Michael slapped his forehead. “SHIT. I was supposed to be at work forty-five minutes ago.” He made a frantic reach for the phone but found himself blocked.

“Cool it. I called. Told them you were at death’s door and you wouldn’t be in until Monday at the earliest.”

“Louise must’ve loved that.”

“Louise doesn’t give a shit. Too busy yelling at her assistant about some chick named Patti.”

“Patti’s a stuffed platypus.” Then, seeing Brian’s face: “She’s missing. Louise is taking it personally.”

“Mother of God.” Brian grabbed the coffee back from Michael and finished it in two long swallows.

“If you must make discount retail your calling, you should put in for the Q’s management training program,” he said as he tossed the cup in the bedside trash can. “With that kind of competition you’ll be CEO in five years.”

“Hey, while you’re organizing my life today, I’ve got all this laundry—”

“Forget it. I don’t even like washing my underwear.”

“Bet Rocky’d be thrilled to take care of that for you.”

“Who?”

“Rocky. The guy eye-fellating you, like, five minutes ago.”

“Oh.” Brian’s voice was flat. “Not my type.”

He reached out, brushing Michael’s tangled hair back from his face. “I like ‘em more versatile.”

Michael’s answering smile was cut short by a yawn.

Brian stretched lazily. “A disco nap’s not a bad idea. The Leather Ball’s at Babylon tonight.”

Michael grimaced. “Last year Hans cornered me in the men’s room and begged me to be in his scheisser video.”

“Hans is full of shit.”

“Ha-ha. Pass.”

Brian looked up at the water-stained ceiling, his expression considering. “Maybe I’ll take the night off, too.”

Maybe he would. Probably he wouldn’t. Sooner or later Brian would walk out that door, leaving him behind. Michael knew this as sure as he knew his own middle name.

The sun had suddenly dipped behind a cloud, leaving the room in momentary greyness. Michael shivered like the air temperature just dropped fifty degrees.

“Come here.”

Michael let Brian pull him in, long arms softly imprisoning him as the sun came back out. He sighed, relaxing into the comforting weight at his back. A tingling warmth that wasn’t quite like anything or anyone else.

He was okay. Their day wasn’t even half over. They had a lot of hours left before it got dark.

A sudden hush fell over the room. The only sound, the slow relentless ticking of the clock.

He stretched forward, reaching over to the stereo.

“Leave it.”

“Seriously?” Michael asked, turning.

Brian nodded.

“But—it’s so quiet.”

Brian gave him a bright, boyish grin. In the brilliance of noon he looked like a boy. Not a day over fourteen.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s finally quiet.”

He pulled Michael close again.

They stayed that way for a long time, together in the light and silence.

****END****

1. The Bee Gees “Night Fever” Saturday Night Fever (1977)

2. The Trammps “Disco Inferno” Disco Inferno (1976)

3. Sister Sledge “He’s The Greatest Dancer” We Are Family (1979)

4. Earth, Wind & Fire “September” Best of Earth, Wind & Fire Vol. I (1978)

5. Thelma Houston “Don’t Leave Me This Way” Any Way You Like It (1976)

6. The Commodores “Machine Gun” Machine Gun (1973)

7. Paul Simon “Slip Slidin’ Away” Greatest Hits, Etc. (1977)

8. The Eagles “Heartache Tonight” The Long Run (1979)

9. Fleetwood Mac “Dreams” Rumours (1977)

10. The Who “Baba O’Riley” Who’s Next (1971)

1. Roxy Music “Ladytron” Roxy Music (1972)

2. Pink Floyd “Speak to Me/Breathe” Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

3. David Bowie “Moss Garden” “Heroes” (1977)

4. The Rolling Stones “Sympathy for the Devil” Beggars Banquet (1968)

5. Pink Floyd “Brain Damage” Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

1. T. Rex “Cosmic Dancer” Electric Warrior (1971)

2. David Bowie “The Man Who Sold the World” The Man Who Sold the World (1970)

3. Madonna “Like a Virgin” Like A Virgin (1984)

4. Queen “Killer Queen” Sheer Heart Attack (1974)

5. The Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter” Hot Rocks 1964-71* (1971)

6. The Rolling Stones “Midnight Rambler” Hot Rocks 1964-71* (1971)

7. The Rolling Stones “You Can’t Always Get . . . ” Hot Rocks 1964-71* (1971)

8. Joy Division “Love Will Tear Us Apart” Substance (1988)

9. The Buzzcocks “Ever Fallen in Love” Love Bites (1978)

10. Pet Shop Boys “West End Girls” West End Girls (single) (1984)

11. Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Nevermind** (1991)

12. Nirvana “The Man Who Sold the World” Unplugged in New York*** (1994)

13. David Bowie “Heroes” “Heroes” (1977)

14. Pink Floyd “Eclipse” Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

Led Zeppelin “The Song Remains the Same” Houses of the Holy (1973)

*These tracks originally appeared on the album Let it Bleed (1969).

** I’m aware the accepted reading of the chorus is “With the lights out it’s less dangerous.” But after approximately eight-seven listenings in the course of writing that scene, I feel my interpretation is as defensible.

***A slight anachronism: Unplugged wasn’t released until November 1994, almost a year after the events of the flashback in which “The Man Who Sold the World” appears. But the Unplugged episode the album was taken from was taped in November 1993, so the track was in existence that Christmas. I reasoned that Brian, always so resourceful when it comes to getting what he wants, could have scored a bootleg copy.