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Liam thinks that there is a part of his father that will always live in his bones.
In his cracked bones, in his whole ones, in each of the two hundred and six bones he learned from school exist beneath the veneer of healing skin and scarless bag of blood and memories.
When his grandmother first told him, you look the spitting image of your mother, but you have your father’s eyes, he was eight years old and he couldn’t figure out why it didn’t feel like a compliment. Henry Dunbar’s eyes were the pride of the clan. Even in over-stylized sepia photos from his senior year, those eyes were always blue, blue, like they could make anyone swoon at the sight of them, or like they contained a multitude of skies behind those irises that could make the crankiest old devil crack a smile.
Henry Dunbar had humor. Henry Dunbar had wit.
He made everything into a joke, even the way he’d smashed Liam’s lopsided plaster-of-Paris model of King Tut’s head against the doorway in a fit of rage when Liam was nine years old. Think of it like the raiders of the lost ark got in, he told Liam the next morning over breakfast with an uneasy wink but an easier laugh and a nudge to the ribs. Jenna swept up the shards of the school project into the corner behind them. Oh, don’t look like such a sourpants. You didn’t wait for me to help you with that. Now you know what we can do? Huh? We can go down to the hardware store again and get more plaster-of-Paris and do this again, together. The right way. I’ll mold it to your face and we’ll see how kingly we can make you! King Alli!
Liam had cracked a smile at that. It was just King Tut, after all, not a pair of ribs or the end of the world.
Liam doesn’t think it’s the end of the world, either, when Henry yanks his arm back so viciously that the shoulder pops out of its socket and Liam is left breathless and tear-stung from the surprise. Or when Liam catches him at a bad time in the garage, and Henry whirls with his long yellow measuring level in his hand and whacks Liam right across the arm, snapping his wrist.
Henry yells that he should have knocked instead of barging in like an idle brat. Stumbles over all frantic and his hands trembling around the boy’s shoulders, the next second, shushing him because it’s okay, everything’s all right, he never meant to hurt Liam.
Liam doesn’t want to go to the hospital. Neither does Henry, but Jenna does, and their disagreement escalates rapidly into an endless scream as Jenna tries to haul their son to the car and Henry grips his other arm just as firmly to hold them back.
Henry’s other hand darts for the yellow level with an intent that Liam has never seen in his hands or body before, and Jenna no doubt sees it, too, because suddenly her mouth snaps shut and she stumbles back into the kitchen through the doorway and yanks Liam in with her and slams the door shut and locks it.
They don’t end up going to the hospital. Jenna calls her colleague, Dr. Geyer, and he arrives an hour later through the side door and he has Liam hop up onto the bar stool at the counter and lay his wrist on the cold granite so he can take a look at it.
He tells Liam he’s a very brave kid, a millisecond before he pops something back into place, and he beams even wider when Liam just bites his lip as if he didn’t feel a thing.
At some point Liam gets a cast on his wrist--somehow--but those kinds of things are hazy in Liam’s memory from his nine-year-old body.
Kind memories, after all, aren’t the kinds that stick around for long when the rise of the tide of remembrances of Henry is irresistible.
The only kind memory Liam retains of that incident, he thinks, is how Henry joked about the cast two days later. Said it made Liam look like a boxer in training. Called Liam Southpaw for weeks after that, and the story shifted and changed as Henry explained to neighbors just what had happened, until soon it was Liam who’d thrown a punch at a fence, Liam who’d been working out some anger, and yelled for his dad when the bones in his wrist or hand or other had shattered.
Liam couldn’t decide then if he wanted to thank his father or strangle him for the cover story.
To be honest, he still doesn’t know, to this day.
----
Liam is eleven when he comes to his mother, trembling all over even though he’s never trusted anyone more in his life, and presses the shears into her open palm of surprise and begs her to cut off all his hair right at the nape. To do it quickly. To not think about it.
She knows what this is about, of course. She’s always known.
She does it quickly, though she doesn’t do it thoughtlessly, Liam thinks. She’s been thinking about this for a long time. Longer, perhaps, than he himself has.
“You wore suspenders to picture day in third grade, honey. Course I knew,” she whispers playfully in his ear half an hour later, as they both face the crooked mirror over the bathroom sink. She smiles at him, and he smiles back--smiles at both of them, because that’s Jenna and that’s him, he thinks, finally, nice to meet you, reflection, hi, it’s nice to be me.
They manage to keep it a secret in their own household, somehow. Henry doesn’t see the truth where he thinks it doesn’t exist. Where its acknowledgment is too inconvenient for his perception and ego. He scowls at the haircut but jokes that Liam could look like the girl from Bridge to Terabithia. Maybe grow up into a pretty supermodel someday, because those kinds of weird haircuts are all the rage nowadays.
It’s a secret that is fun to keep between him and his mother, at first. But then Liam is thirteen and he’s stuck at gender therapy with less than forty minutes to get to his recital at school, because his mom got held up at work at the hospital and Mason’s parents are out of town and nobody else can come pick him up. Liam does the brave thing--the stupid thing--and he uses Dr. Geraldine’s office phone to call home and ask his father to pick him up and take him to the school.
His fatal mistake was waiting inside the building, where Dr. Geraldine could catch sight of Henry and wave at him from the hallway, and then quickly approach and tell him how proud she is of his son for coming so far in therapy, and how she hopes that with a supportive home environment, Liam will continue to flourish into the fine young man he’s becoming.
Henry is deadly quiet on the drive from the clinic to the school. He sits in the row third from the front at the recital and watches. Jenna joins him some minutes later, running late from the hospital, and she doesn’t sense anything amiss. Just nudges him when it’s Liam’s turn to climb onstage for his performance with the violin.
Liam jangles the notes in the last five bars of his piece because he knows, he knows the swirling look in his father’s eyes promises something more than harmless jests when they get home.
----
He shoves Liam hard enough that the back of his skull connects with the porcelain edge of the toilet bowl.
There’s shouting and shoving, the crack of open palm against cheekbone, then the split of her lip under his fist and the thud of her body going down on the hardwood.
Liam remembers flying to his feet and trying to tackle Henry from behind. Latching onto his ankle, getting a mouthful of kicks to his teeth in the process.
“Get out!” Jenna screams, even as she’s flat on her back and Henry is heaving with clenching fists over her. “Get out. Get out. Get the fuck out!”
He walks out the door. Leaves bruised cheekbone and split lip and teeth done in and the memories of dislocated shoulders and shattered wrists and shards of plaster-of-Paris behind him, and a pair of hearts cracked down the middle.
----
Turns out that Liam being a boy isn’t the best-kept secret in the Dunbar household.
Something about being strong for so long, being strong for one last time for her son when it mattered, makes the lock on Jenna’s lips fall away and everything comes spilling out over the course of several days.
Cleaning up the broken glass in the bathroom together and telling Liam about the time he shoved her into a hallway mirror when he found out she was pregnant with Li. How Henry joked about the incident a few days later, and the story warped and changed as it always did under the grip of his unyielding bones, and it became a story of how excited Henry had been to be a father that he couldn’t help jumping his wife and slamming her against the hallway wall.
Murmuring over a lopsided breakfast of burnt pancakes--because Jenna’s shaky and unfocused, for good reason, and turned the dial on the stove to 8 instead of 3--how Henry would squeeze her wrists too hard, too hard, and then apologize in the same breath because he knows he’s garbage and he doesn’t deserve her, but please forgive him, because you’re it for me, baby, you’re it.
Liam runs his tongue over the sour taste of these hidden memories bursting forth. He stores them behind his teeth.
Lets them lodge into the spaces between his bones, feels them crack and fester, and soon in the Henry-shaped hole in their house he begins to feel himself grow and expand into the man he never imagined himself to be but always knew he would become.
----
When the diagnosis for intermittent explosive disorder comes back, Liam isn’t even surprised.
----
Liam thinks, sometimes, that asking for that first haircut was a mistake. That it was the beginning of the fateful spiral that led to this very point.
Even though he knew that he and Jenna were always the A-team, honey, you and me till the end of time, and even though he knows she means it when she says it’s you, I’ll always choose you, Liam, the part of his body that bends under the story-warping power of Henry Dunbar looks back and sees that the haircut must have been the start of it all.
That everything before then was manageable. Excusable.
A jest that made him uncomfortable, but wasn’t the end of the world.
----
Until today, August 10th, sitting in a booth across from Mason and Corey in their favorite Chinese takeout, as Liam and Corey sketch out lacrosse plays on the back of the disposable menus and a movement catches Liam’s attention from the corner of his eye.
Four years isn’t that long of a time, all things considered, but for Liam Dunbar, who’s hurtled off a roof, been bitten by Scott McCall, become the beta of a pack, fought Ghost Riders and Monroe’s hunters and plunged a sword into the ground to resurrect the first chimera, who’s seen the flicker of Berserkers and Dread Doctors behind his eyelids in more dreams than he can count, four years can also feel like an eternity.
This is why he doesn’t recognize the man at first. Feels the pull to stare at him over the tuft at the top of Corey’s head, but can’t explain it for a full minute.
Until the man sitting at the counter sets down his Pepsi and sucks the ice cube into his mouth and swirls it around between his cheeks, just like Liam still does to this day, and Liam’s breath hitches in his chest as he sees Henry.
“...I still think it’s too similar to our championship play from last semester,” Corey is saying.
“I have never understood a word less coming out of your mouth and been turned on more,” Mason groans half in fondness and half in exasperation.
Corey rolls his eyes. “Liam, Mason’s being horny in the middle of Wah Mei.”
“It’s not Liam’s business to control my horniness. Right, Li?” Mason taps the surface of the table by Liam’s hand. “Liam?”
Liam jerks so hard that it would be comical under any other circumstance. He finds that his best friend is lifting a single brow at him, while Corey’s eyes are widened inquisitively.
“What’s up, man? Everything okay?” Mason says.
“Please don’t growl at me. I think your play could work just fine,” Corey says meekly.
Liam swallows, confused. Until Mason’s hand squeezes his on the tabletop, and he glances down and realizes that the shift has been rippling just under the surface of his skin: his claws threatening to spring out of his nailbeds. Liam tamps down the wolf immediately and feels the golden shimmer of his eyes recede.
Mason doesn’t say anything, but instead, like the quick-thinking and protective best friend that he is, casts about the restaurant to follow Liam’s line of sight.
When Mason stiffens, Liam knows he didn’t just hallucinate Henry Dunbar seated at the counter with his back partially to them.
Mason turns back around, grim vengeance written into every pore of his face. “Liam, is that--?”
Liam draws a shaky breath. “Yeah.”
“What the hell is he doing here?”
“What the hell is who doing here?” Corey whispers, matching their furtive tones. “What’s going on?”
“Liam’s bio dad,” Mason hisses to his boyfriend. “Bad news. Very, very bad news.”
Liam blinks. White spots are dancing across his vision, he thinks, but then he blinks again and they’re gone. Henry goes on swirling his drink in his glass at the counter.
Mason squeezes Liam’s hand again. Just a pinch, grounding. “Do you want me to talk to him?” he says in a low voice. “Tell him to fuck out of here?”
Liam’s shaking his head before Mason’s finished speaking. “No. No. It’s fine. It’s--honestly? I don’t think he’d even recognize me.”
Corey furrows his brow at that cryptic statement of Liam’s, but then at a meaningful look from Mason, his face clears, apparently remembering Liam’s story from long ago, scant with details, about how his bio dad had walked out after Liam came out as trans.
“Then I think we need to get out of here,” Mason says decisively, already making to stand up.
“No,” Liam stresses. “Our dessert isn’t even here yet.”
“I’ll take it to-go, you guys just get in the car.”
“No,” Liam says again. “Sit down, Mase. Please. Let’s not--don’t let me ruin this for us.”
“Liam, you’re not ruining anything,” Mason says, gaping at him in disbelief. “Your asshole of a sperm donor is.”
“I’ll get the dessert and take care of the check, babe,” Corey says. He leaves with a soft kiss on Mason’s temple and heads to the counter, allowing no further argument.
And so that’s how Liam finds himself being dragged by Mason and Corey into their car, where they take turns splitting the almond cookies and cracking open the fortune cookies and Mason spends half the time sending furtive and solicitous glances Liam’s way, and Liam spends just as much time pulling on a mask of nonchalance to put his friends’ anxieties to rest.
He actually laughs out loud at the fortune he gets--Sift through the past to get a better idea of the present--and trades it with Mason’s, which is a much more entertaining Advice is like kissing; it costs nothing and is a pleasant thing to do.
----
Eventually they have to part ways, because Mason needs to head over to Corey’s for family dinner, so Liam has them drop him off at his favorite records store in the quiet, yawning downtown and promises to call his stepdad to pick him up when he’s ready to go home.
Liam doesn’t enter the store for several minutes. Eventually he does, but he barely skims the new releases on the table closest to the window. He gives a single half-hearted circuit around the space and then breezes out of the bell-jangling door again into the hot puff of summer air, and sits himself down hard on the curb.
He pulls up his latest text thread with Theo.
L: U off work today?
T: You stalking me or something?
L: U gave me ur damn schedule u unpeeled carrot
T: Then why even ask
L: U are insufferable
L: Wanna hang?
T: Thought you were with bestie and the boyf
L: Not anymore i’m not
T: Wya?
Liam sends him his location and waits. It doesn’t take very long for Theo’s truck to rumble toward him in the distance, kicking up dust in its trail like the proverbial cowboy steed, and it instantly makes the corners of Liam’s mouth pull up in an involuntary smile.
Theo rolls down the window to stick his head out before he’s even fully braked in front of Liam. “Your friends ditched you?”
“Mase and Corey had family dinner, and Mase had to go as the boyfriend,” Liam says. He rounds the front of the truck and slides into the passenger seat.
Theo rolls his eyes. “So yeah. They ditched you.”
Liam waves him off. “They did not ditch me. You, on the other hand, have ditched me before. On multiple occasions.”
“You were irritating me.”
“That’s no excuse to push me out of the passenger seat while the truck was still moving.”
“It’s not my fault you have the reflexes of a sea anemone.”
“Whatever, Theo,” Liam says around a roll of his eyes, already feeling spades better despite himself. “Point is, they needed the space from me. I was probably boring them with lacrosse plays, anyway.”
Theo frowns at his last statement and it looks like there’s a question lingering on his tongue there, but he clamps down on it behind his teeth and goes for the customary jab instead. “You’re the most uptight jock I’ve ever met,” he remarks, as he peels away from the curb and speeds down the center of downtown back toward the main road.
Liam scoffs. “Excuse me, have you met Stiles? Or Scott?”
“Scott is a mother hen and Stiles is his own brand of nuts,” says Theo. “You? You’re uptight.”
Liam’s mouth pinches. A moment later, he feels his brown scrunch up in a line.
Theo’s looking at him, fixing him with a stare, one hand on the wheel and his gaze most definitely not on the road ahead of them. “See? Look at you. Wound up like a teeny tiny pocket watch.”
Liam scowls through the windshield. He knows Theo is goading him--knows that this is how they connect with each other, somehow, through barbs and harmless insults pushed to the limits--but he can’t help it. A second later, he flips down the visor to check his own reflection in the mirror.
Theo snickers from the driver’s side. Liam doesn’t have to look to deliver a punch to his bicep with perfect aim.
“Watch it, Rocky, or I might just have to take you up on that challenge,” says Theo.
Liam scowls harder.
“Aw, c’mon, Dunbar. You love Rocky Balboa.”
“You’re only saying that so you can call yourself Creed.”
“Whoa, now I didn’t call you old and has-been. You called yourself that.”
“I am so regretting ever having you over for movie nights. Ever.”
“But you can’t help it,” says Theo, all smiley and smug, just the way Liam likes it, the way it makes him feel like he’s dying a little bit inside from his stupid humongous crush on this gigantic asshole. “Cliché boxing movies are your bread and butter. And somehow you always have to drag me into that shit when you need a personal punching bag.”
“You’re not my personal punching bag. You’re my personal popcorn holder. There’s a difference.”
“It’s fine, Liam,” Theo drawls, “I can multitask.”
“It’s like you’re asking to be punched.”
“Whatever helps you sleep at night, Southpaw.”
Liam stiffens before he’s even registered why his back goes rigid at hearing the nickname. Something ugly and hot clenches in his chest, and it must be doing something to his heartbeat or his scent that he’s not present enough to be aware of, because just a few seconds later Theo is shooting him a nonplussed look.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Liam says quickly. “You’re just being a jackass.”
“Nothing new there,” Theo points out. They roll to a stop at a light and Theo takes advantage of the pause to turn to the side and point his chin in Liam’s direction. “Your heart’s being annoying. What’s going on?”
“You’re being annoying,” Liam mumbles at his lap with a pathetic lack of heat.
“Liam,” Theo says warningly. “We’ve been through this before. You bottle up shit and then it explodes, and then I’m left to scrape you off the walls and figure out what the hell just happened.”
Liam scoffs, a brow raised. “Excuse me? Pot, kettle, anyone? You’re the one who bottles up shit?”
“I don’t explode.”
“No, you just go on a very calm and well-planned homicidal rampage.”
Theo swallows and opens his mouth, but very pointedly doesn’t have anything to say, or perhaps chooses to have nothing to say, and the sudden silence between them makes shame bloom behind Liam’s sternum and forces him to look back down at his hands twisting in his lap.
“Sorry,” Liam mutters. “Exploding. Point taken.”
A flicker of a smile returns briefly to Theo’s face. He gases up again. “Like a little mince meat pie in the microwave,” he confirms with a nod.
“G-d, do you ever shut up?”
And there it is, back on Theo’s face again, that wickedly smug look that drives Liam to absolute insanity. He wants to either punch Theo right in the fucking nose or lunge across the console to kiss the living daylights out of him until he turns that infernal smug look into something dazed and stupid.
They bicker like that for the next several minutes as Theo somehow manages to hit every single red light between downtown and wherever it is they’re heading, and then Liam rails on him about that, too, just because it’s them and just because he can. He’s almost forgotten the whole incident with Southpaw and almost managed to shove all vestigial thoughts of his biological father from his mind when it happens.
They’re rounding a bend at a frankly alarming speed that only manages to feel smooth and steady under Theo’s hands on the wheel, when Theo stiffens and jerks his head back toward Liam. His eyes are sharp, glittering, intense. He rakes his gaze up and down Liam’s body in assessment, and it makes Liam squirm, want to open his mouth and demand that Theo snap out of it because it reminds him of the little bits of old Theo, before-hell Theo that still bleed into the tension in his shoulders and between his eyes sometimes.
Theo doesn’t say anything for a moment. He takes a subtle sniff. “You’re bleeding.”
“What? No, I’m not.”
“You’re bleeding, stop bullshitting me. Where are you hurt? What happened?”
“Nothing happened! We were hanging out at Wah Mei and then we--”
Liam chances a glance down at himself where Theo’s gaze is trained, just in time to catch sight of the murky red patch slowly spreading throughout the crotch of his jeans. And then he smells it.
Oh.
Oh.
Liam ends up biting his own tongue with the force of his realization.
“What?” Theo demands. “What? What the hell were you doing before I picked you up, Liam?”
“Nothing,” Liam says stubbornly, though this time the heavy resignation in his voice isn’t fooling anyone.
“I swear to G-d, if you were actually out on another heroic little death mission without telling me about it--”
“Will you quit overreacting?” Liam snaps.
“At least let me see it.”
Liam stares bug-eyed at him. Is Theo serious? “Are you being serious right now?”
“Then we’re going to the clinic.”
“It’s a Sunday. Deaton’s closed. And this is not Deaton’s problem.”
“I have his number. I’ll call him and I’ll make it his problem.”
“Fucking hell,” says Liam.
“No, don’t you ‘fucking hell’ me. You need to see someone. A doctor. Your dad. He’s working today, right? I’m taking the next left and taking you there.”
“No, you’re not taking me to the hospital. Theo. Theo. Will you stop your little tirade and listen to me for a second? You’re getting out of hand.”
Theo’s grip on the steering wheel grows white-knuckled. “I don’t know, Liam, I’d say your stupid fucking martyr complex is getting pretty out of hand.”
“I don’t need to see Dad about this. I don’t.”
“Oh? Oh?” Theo’s voice pitches up, and they say Liam’s the dramatic one. “I’m sorry, is bleeding buckets out of your pants not justification to see your dad, an actual doctor?”
“I don’t need to go to Beacon Memorial when I can get tampons and Kroger is literally right there.”
“Since when were tampons an adequate substitute for proper medical attention?”
“Do you not know what tampons are for?”
“I know what g-ddamn tampons are for!” Theo snarls. “They’re for--for--”
Liam waits, first one eyebrow raised and then the other, and then it happens: the record-scratch moment.
“Uh,” Theo says, swerving a little at the stoplight. “Uh.”
“It’s my period,” Liam says slowly, as if he needs to spell it out for Theo. Because apparently the big bad Chimera of Death is an idiot who does need spelling out. “Y’know? That thing where I get blood sometimes? Doesn’t happen often, actually. I shouldn’t have gotten it today. Or any other day, really. Thought I was done with this--”
He stops to take in Theo’s pale, slack-jawed look at him. The red light turns green, casting an unnatural glow on Theo’s cheek through the tinted windshield, but Theo doesn’t make a move to drive forward through the intersection.
“Hold up,” Liam says. “Did you not know I was trans?”
Theo splutters. Well, that’s a first.
Liam’s mind feels like a marble ping-ponging between glass paddles. Warping, reforming, stumbling back to look at Theo and reconsider everything about their dynamic from the past year in a new light.
“Honestly,” Liam presses. “You really didn’t know?”
“No,” Theo grits out, finally lurching the truck forward at the insistent beep of the car behind them, and he’s looking far more uncomfortable and unmasked now than anything Liam has seen on him before.
“But--but all the times you called me short? Made fun of me? Runt?”
“I never called you ‘runt’.”
“Uh, yeah, you did. Teeny tiny pocket watch, too.”
This time Theo turns to look at him, his irises shimmering between gray and gold, and he fixes him with an expression of unadulterated disbelief. “You thought I called you short because I’m a transphobe?”
“Maybe?” Liam says defensively.
“Jesus Christ,” says Theo. “I called you short because I’m an asshole.”
Oh, fucking hell, indeed.
Liam breathes out sharply through his nose. “Okay, that’s it, we’re going to Kroger. Take a right. Take a right here, dammit, Theo.”
“I’m turning, I’m turning!”
Five minutes of grumbling and atrocious parking later, Theo and Liam have disembarked from the truck and stalked into the grocery store, Liam single-minded in his beeline for the hygiene products aisle as Theo trails behind him. To his credit, Theo doesn’t stop or pause, just drifts behind Liam like a vaguely stunned and formerly evil shadow as Liam peruses the shelves for the kind he used to get when he was still new in his transition and his periods were spotty.
“These all look the same to me, just different colors,” Theo admits in a grumble after several minutes have passed in Liam’s absorbed silence.
“Hush. You’ve got no room to talk, Mr. I Own Four Black Hoodies Because the Pocket on Each One Is Shaped Different.”
Theo looks at him, completely unimpressed. Liam rolls him a flat look back. Theo gives an exaggerated yawn and leans against the aisle with his hands stuffed in his pockets, mutters, “Wake me up when you’re done, Your Highness.”
In answer, Liam grabs the nearest pack of tampons off the shelf and lobs it at Theo’s head. The way Theo doesn’t even attempt to duck out of the way, just lets the package bounce off his forehead and watches it roll to the floor disinterestedly, is frankly a bit insulting.
“Violence in the diaper aisle,” Theo remarks mildly. “You truly have no limits.”
“I’ll hamstring you as soon as we get out,” Liam threatens him, which really only just proves Theo’s point.
“You’re not getting any more blood in my truck.”
“Fine, we’re picking up a tarp, too, while we’re at it, so I can make the cleanup a little easier for you.”
Theo bares his teeth in a devilish smile, confusing Liam for a long moment, until he realizes that Theo’s gaze flickered for a second over his shoulder. Liam glances around to lock eyes with a middle-aged woman, wide-eyed and flushed with her hand halfway to a package of sanitary napkins on the shelf next to them, her expression giving away the fact that she must have heard almost all of their conversation.
“It’s his time of the month,” Theo tells her.
She flushes even further, pitching her package into her cart, and rapidly wheels away from them.
Liam turns back around with a longsuffering groan and bangs his forehead repeatedly against the edge of the shelf in front of him. “You’re going to be a little shit about this from now on, aren’t you.”
“Always and forever,” Theo promises. “C’mon, get this one.” He grabs one from a higher shelf and tosses it into their basket. When Liam opens his eyes again and blinks down, he finds that Theo’s picked the most expensive brand. He decides not to complain about it.
They’re on the way to the self-checkout machines, Theo having snagged a pack of D batteries from the stands by the registers, when Liam suddenly perks up. “Hold on, just a couple more things. I’ll be right back.”
“Liam--”
But Liam takes off at a near sprint across the tiled floor, his overgrown hair flopping stupidly behind him as he dashes toward the produce section, which--honestly, Theo doesn’t even know why he still tries.
Liam’s back in less than five minutes, which is a feat in and of itself considering how his arms are laden with food that Theo didn’t realize was on their imaginary grocery list.
“Chocolate?” Theo asks him disbelievingly, as they scan not one, not two, but three bars of varying kinds. “Okay, the Tootsie Rolls I can understand, but--” He squints down at the plastic tub Liam shoves into his hand. “--Guacamole? And...bing cherries?”
“I have my cravings, okay?” Liam says defensively. “I wasn’t sure what I was gonna be feeling over the next couple of days, so I got a little bit of everything.”
Theo eyes the family size package of candy in the bagging area with a snort. “A little bit. Sure.”
“Stop being a jerk, or I might change my mind about sharing.”
Theo raises his hands in surrender, his hair doing that infuriatingly attractive thing where it tugs free of its gel and flops into his eyes. Liam wants to--wants to brush it back or yank it, he doesn’t know.
“Okay, go take care of your business, I’ve got this,” Theo says gruffly a minute later, shoving the tampon package into Liam’s arms and jerking his head toward the public bathroom.
“You are not paying for all my period snacks.”
“You’re right. You are,” says Theo, dipping shamelessly into the back pocket of Liam’s jeans to fish for his wallet. “Now go.”
Liam rolls his eyes very maturely at him but obliges.
----
Once they’ve packed the stuff into the back of the truck, Theo stops Liam with a hand on his elbow and digs around in the backpack he still keeps under the back seat for emergencies. He comes up with a relatively fresh pair of jeans and offers it to Liam. “Your pants are all bloody and I’m not explaining to every other person we run into that you didn’t just come out of a massacre.”
“Thanks,” Liam says, in lieu of a retort, because he’s weirdly and genuinely touched by the gesture. He waits for Theo to head around the front of the truck and slide into the driver’s seat, then climbs onto the back seat so he can wriggle out of his soiled jeans and pull on Theo’s with a little bit of privacy. Then he clambers unceremoniously over the back of Theo’s seat to join him in the front cabin.
Theo clears his throat as his eyes dip down to Liam’s waistline, where his t-shirt is still hiked up and exposing the soft trail of hair down the center of Liam’s torso. Liam yanks the hem down and pinches his mouth, trying not to think too hard on what exact images are going through Theo’s head right now. He also pointedly tries not to think too much, either, about the fact that the smell of Theo from his borrowed pants are a welcome change from his old outfit. Very welcome indeed.
----
They manage to drive out to the preserve without incident. Theo parks under a spreading tree some ways away from the edge of Lookout Point, offering them both some shade while at the same time they can glimpse the entirety of Beacon Hills when they hop down from the truck. Theo grabs the grocery bag from the back and brings it to the front, where Liam is already leaning back against the front of the vehicle with his hands in his pockets and his eyes fixed on their little town below. Under the August sun, it all abruptly feels like a mirage, like they’ve ascended above the clouds somehow and the little cars moving down the grid of main streets that they know so well are but a refracted version of their own remembrances.
Theo sets the grocery bag softly on the hood and picks through it for the dark chocolate bar. He’s had some chocolate candy here and there, free things mostly at banks when he was a little kid, but he knows Liam seems to have picked the good kind. He takes the liberty of tearing open the package and ripping the foil inside with his teeth, then offering the bar to Liam.
Liam looks at him as if to say I’m not having my period cravings right this instant, what do you take me for, but Theo just pushes up one eyebrow and then the other like are you actually shitting me right now, Dunbar, and Liam heaves a very put-upon sigh, breaks off a square to hand it to Theo, then takes the bar for himself.
Theo pops the square into his mouth and lets the chocolate melt on his tongue. He’s not particularly a fan of chocolate--he could honestly probably go the rest of his life without needing to eat it--but there’s a hidden feeling buried in there, a memory, maybe, or the phantom of one, the way the heat streaming down on them through the flimsy shadows of the leaves mimics the heat inside his mouth dissolving the sweetness there mingled with salt and the lingering tingle of a chemical taste.
“You can ask questions, you know,” Liam pipes up. He keeps his head forward to look ahead, just like Theo.
Theo clears his throat. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve been quiet since the drive over here. You’re allowed to ask stuff. Since, y’know--it turns out this is actually new to you.”
Theo considers that. He doesn’t know where to begin with his questions. Or how, rather, to even figure out what his questions are in the first place. He’s been intimately acquainted with changes, violent transitions, at the receiving end of the scalpel and metal cuffs and the rip-tug-plunge of his skin and bones opening up below prying eyes, but he’s never exactly encountered a How to Talk to Your New Friend-and-Something-More-Than-Friend about Being Trans manual lying around.
He decides to start with something that doesn’t sound too stupid to his own ears. Something small, that mirrors his own question to himself some days: when did you know you wanted to change? That you craved this power the Doctors promised they could give you, beyond a shadow of a doubt?
“Did you always know?”
“Maybe?” Liam’s huff at himself sounds like he’s not very satisfied with how unsure his answer came out. “I think there was a time I could’ve almost been happy with living as a girl, except--I always started out with a very warped perception of what a girl is ‘supposed’ to be. Thanks to my dad, I guess. So maybe that was a good thing, maybe not. In either case, I figured it out pretty fast. I remember there was a time when I was seven years old and my mom took me to the YMCA for public swimming lessons. The class was full of boys, and mom bought me these swimming shorts and a tank because I wanted them, she just--didn’t question stuff like that when I wanted it, I guess. So I started my swimming lessons in just my shorts and took off my tank because--I dunno. I saw everyone else in the class doing it. And it just felt really, really natural.”
Theo hums. He accepts the bar of chocolate from Liam wordlessly and breaks off another piece before handing the package back to the other boy. He doesn’t place the candy in his mouth just yet, though, lets the square slowly go slick and dented between the heat of his fingers, like the thoughts that are congealing in his brain as he tries to pick his way forward in this conversation.
“I was seven, too, when I figured out what was wrong with me,” Theo says after a beat.
Liam glances at him, hums inquisitively.
“The heart condition,” Theo clarifies. “Before then, I’d always thought that maybe...I don’t know. Everybody went to the doctor’s office as often as I did. I thought Tara did all the time too when she was younger. Then my mom said something--” Theo breaks off. The hurt is old and pointless now, like the edges of wallpaper peeling in an abandoned apartment, and there’s no use revisiting it. “Anyway, my mom said something to the effect that it cost a lot more to raise me than my sister, so--that’s when I figured it out.”
“Did you want a new heart then?”
A bold question from Liam, but not unexpected, because it’s him. Theo looks at him. Liam’s eyes are on him, wide and solemn and a little dark like creek water overshadowed by autumn.
Theo wants to deflect. He should deflect--it’s in his nature. Instead he shakes his head. “I don’t think I wanted anything at that point. I wasn’t capable of thinking like that. I just wished--”
Liam waits in the space of his pause, breaths even, far more even than Theo’s.
“--I just wished I didn’t need to have a heart, you know? Maybe...maybe that I didn’t need to exist, so it wouldn’t be so hard on anybody.”
Liam’s own heart stumbles over a single beat at that revelation. It is, at once, so unlike the boy he knows who came back to Beacon Hills, yet achingly Theo.
The survivor who would sink his claws into anything to stay alive, warring with the nineteen-year-old kid who’d far outlived his tired soul’s stay on this earth.
Theo says, “Can I ask another question?”
“Of course,” Liam says, and he ponders on how gentle Theo sounds, how gentle Theo is, at least about this topic, but about Liam now, ever since the unintentional coming out an hour ago in his truck. Liam can’t decide yet if he likes it or finds it disorienting.
“What was your name? Y’know, before?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
A shadow passes over Theo’s face. Liam catches the tail end of it as he leans back on his elbows on the hot metal of the hood, and he reads it, understands it right away as the bitter disappointment at a perceived refusal of trust. He feels the instant pull to fix it and smooth that frown from Theo’s face.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you to tell you that,” Liam clarifies. “I don’t tell anyone that. It’s called a deadname, and sometimes some trans people tell their loved ones what it was before, because they want to. Others don’t want to. I’m part of that group that doesn’t want to.”
Theo looks mollified. “Can I know why?”
Liam nods, not breaking eye contact with him. “Passing is really important to me. To some trans people, it’s not. It’s more about experiencing gender without, like, pressures and roles. I’m not that kind of guy. Being trans is--” He breaks off, breathes, starts up again. “It’s not that it’s not important to me. It’s just...it’s something that I’ve been for so long, that I don’t even think of there being a me before. D’you know what I mean? And like, thinking of the name I had before...it’s just not me and I don’t think I can ever be comfortable with hearing it in reference to who I was as a kid.”
Liam gnaws at his bottom lip, waiting, searching Theo’s face for a reaction, worrying that what seemed like a grand explanation came out completely incoherent to this person who’s come to mean so much to him so quickly and knows an infinite amount of things about the feel of different bodies and identities but apparently knows close to nothing about being trans.
“Does that make sense?” Liam asks softly, tentatively.
Theo raises the half-melted square of chocolate to his own mouth and presses it inside. He rubs his sweetened tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
Theo has something like that, he thinks. Not quite the same, but not an entirely different beast, either: Teddy. Teddy Raeken. A name that was never uttered again after his sister died. After his sister was killed.
“Mason knows my old name,” Liam says thoughtfully with a tug of his teeth at his lip, looking forward again. “But only because--y’know. We’ve been best friends since kindergarten.”
Theo nods. He looks inside the grocery bag between them, then, for want of something to do, because he’s not sure if his next question will be answered or not, and if he’ll feel disjointed after another of Liam’s gentle rejections.
“Want some?” says Liam.
“What?”
“The cherries. They’re good with the chocolate, actually.”
Theo stares at him. “I’ve...never had cherries.”
Liam’s eyes widen. “Wait--seriously--okay, that is a crime that needs to be rectified, like, right now. C’mon.” Liam rummages in the plastic package of cherries and selects a handful of the darkest ones, cups them in the round of his palm and picks one up by the stem between his thumb and forefinger. “Watch,” he says, and places the round of the fruit between his teeth and tugs the stem off. He rolls the cherry around in the front of his mouth, biting down, chewing a little bit, and then he seems to be searching for something. He finds it, peels back his lips to bare his teeth, then spits out something small and brown and hard into his other hand.
“That’s the stone,” Liam explains. The skin of his palm is rapidly staining with a juicy red from the little seed, not unlike a bleeding heart at all, Theo thinks half-hysterically.
Liam drops the stone into the grass between them.
“Now you try,” Liam encourages him. He grabs one of Theo’s hands, the one that has its fingertips still sticky with melted chocolate, and he plops another choice cherry into the center of it.
Theo keeps his eyes trained on Liam’s face as he copies the other boy’s demonstration from earlier. Liam isn’t looking at him, not exactly, but rather studying the flex of Theo’s hand as he brings the cherry to his mouth and repeats the bite and the roll and the chew to search for the stone and spit it out.
He shows Liam the stone in his palm, for some inane reason, apparently, and then drops it onto the ground beside the first one.
“Well?” Liam demands. “How’s it taste?”
“Dark and sweet,” Theo says immediately. “A little sour. I like it.”
There’s a joke here somewhere about Theo basically describing his secret self, Liam thinks, but he doesn’t take his brain up on the idiotic idea of voicing that thought. Instead, he says through a gusty breath, “You can ask your question.”
“I…”
“Theo.” Liam levels him with a look. “I know you want to ask me something else.”
Theo does. “You mentioned having a warped perception of what girls are supposed to be. Why is that? Was it your mom?”
Liam’s already shaking his head. “Not her. My dad. My bio dad, I mean.”
Theo looks down and busies himself with taking another cherry from Liam’s hand. Liam never talks about his dad. Not the one before David, anyway.
Liam doesn’t go on. He just breathes, the sound a little pressed and a tad faster than usual.
Theo doesn’t think much of it, at first, until an entire minute passes and the silence no longer feels contemplative so much as loaded. He looks back up at Liam.
Liam is oblivious to Theo. Oblivious to much of the world, really, because the feeling is back, the twist and clench of something in his gut that jolted through him the moment he laid eyes on Henry again back at the Chinese takeout. He wonders, half-crazed, maybe, if he’d been imagining things, if his brain just short-circuited at the sight of dark blond hair like his and a sharp nose that he could never forget. The rational part of him is long buried by the part that’s older and more familiar, the one that always looked at Henry’s crinkling eyes and laughing mouth and clung to the lies and jokes that fell off his tongue like it was nothing. The part that snapped at Liam that he was imagining things. Exaggerating them. Pulling them out of shape to suit his own narrative.
That part forgets that Mason had seen Henry at the restaurant, too, had recognized him and known what kind of effect it was having on Liam.
What could Henry be doing back in town, anyway? It doesn’t make sense. Liam knows he already doubted his eyes the second they left the restaurant, because he never bothered to pull out his phone and text his mom to ask what was going on.
Or maybe he didn’t want to text her because she didn’t know, either. And it was better that she didn’t know. This was--this was some strange and unearthly way that the universe was allowing Liam to pay back the favor, how she defended him that night and took the fist to her face to deflect Henry’s attention from Liam’s small frame knocked back against the bathroom floor. It’s a paltry thing Liam can do for her now, but it’s not often he gets to protect her so directly and so fiercely.
If she doesn’t know that Henry is back in town, then he’ll keep it that way. He’ll see to his father himself if he has to, stand up to him, land a punch or two if it comes to it, and spit at his feet to let him know to never come back.
Except that Liam knows himself and the cowardly boy he becomes in front of his father. With anyone else he’ll take up his lacrosse stick without hesitation and bash in the windows and leap for the jugular, but with Henry--
With Henry, he’s a small and pale and fragile thing again, barefoot in the middle of the garage with his shattered wrist clutched to his chest, chin wobbling as Henry’s trembling arm sets down the yellow measuring level and the man’s breaths heave through his lungs. Because it’s all Liam’s fault, his fault, his fault, his fault--
“Liam. Liam. Look at me. Liam.”
Liam blinks. Is he awake or is he remembering?
He’s aware, in a dim and slow-swimming sort of way, that Theo’s fingers are curled against his jaw, in the space that meets the corner of his nape. And Theo’s talking, saying his name. Theo’s lips move with the shape of two syllables, over and over.
“Liam. Liam? Are you with me?”
He blinks again. And then again. He realizes that he needs to breathe, needs to be--conscious about it.
“Yeah,” he whispers.
“Where did you go?”
Liam licks his lips. “I don’t know.” His nerve endings are tingling again with the heat of the summer afternoon around them. “What happened?”
“You spaced. I’ve been calling your name a thousand times.”
That sounds like it has a double meaning that Liam doesn’t have the energy to parse. Maybe he’s just overinterpreting things.
“Oh,” says Liam. He sags back against the hood, and Theo follows him, leaning across the blue metal at the same angle to maintain eye contact.
“I’m sorry I asked about your dad,” Theo says quietly.
“You didn’t. Not really.” Liam’s more lucid now. He remembers that this is a thing that happens sometimes, not too often anymore, at least not in the past two years or so since he’s gotten better at coming home and not seeing an ugly and unhealed Henry-shaped hole where David sits now at the dinner table.
Theo’s still touching him. His thumb is on Liam’s jawline, tracing it, back and forth in a way that lets Liam know he could press harder into his skin if he wanted, and he wants, Liam wants, he’s pretty sure Theo wants, but this is new and Liam just came out of somewhere in the depths of his own head and they don’t want to push their luck.
Liam realizes then that his left hand is still clutching two cherries. He slides one into his mouth and bites down for the tangy sweetness that will ground him completely. He picks the stone out from between his teeth, and Theo takes it from his fingers immediately and flings it out behind him in a wide arc toward the other side of Lookout Point.
“I want to tell you about him,” Liam decides.
“You don’t have to,” says Theo.
“I want to.”
Theo looks at him in silence like okay, so tell me.
“He hit us a lot,” Liam says simply. No preamble, no fanfare. “He made excuses about it. It felt like an accident, most of the time. Which was--not okay, it wasn’t. But it could’ve been forgiven if not for his lies.” Liam lets out a huff through his nose. “He was always telling stories about how I got my injuries.”
Theo stiffens visibly beside him.
“He lied so much,” Liam says, voice cracking where he never intended it to. “He said I punched a fence. Tripped over a bat. Ran into an electric pole. Went biking too fast and fell in a hedge. Fell down the stairs to the basement. It was--”
Liam doesn’t go on. Can’t go on.
“For the longest time ever I thought I was crazy,” Liam says. He looks up at Theo, looks into him, begging him, willing him to understand.
Theo does. There was a time he grew up wondering if he’d ever really had a childhood before the Doctors, or if he’d hallucinated it all, if he’d simply been born from a petri dish or something into the feral creature they tied down to the table or shoved into the cages when they were done with him. It wasn’t a hard conclusion to make when he realized how they could implant and steal away memories like the drop of a syringe. It was the easiest conclusion to come to, really, and it was comforting in a twisted sort of way for Theo back then, especially when he felt his heart cracking and aching down the middle and he’d do anything to go back to before he pushed Tara into that creek.
That was one memory the Doctors never seemed to get rid of.
“You’re not crazy,” Theo says, half a minute entirely too late to Liam’s statement.
“Maybe I am,” Liam insists. “I thought I saw him today. Back at Wah Mei.”
That makes Theo lift his head suddenly, on high alert. “Was that--?”
“Right before you picked me up? Yeah. Don’t worry, Mase and Corey got me out of there.”
“No, yeah, I meant--when you started bleeding.”
“Oh.” Liam’s brow furrows. “Well, yeah.”
Theo’s eyes aren’t dead anymore, not a still pool of winter water, but a swirl of gray like an August downpour about to break through.
“I’m fine,” Liam says softly. “I promise, Theo. I’m fine.”
Theo’s voice is rough in protest. “He triggered a stress reaction in you strong enough to get you on your period, and then make you black out, so excuse me if I don’t believe you right now.”
“Theo.” Liam rolls a bit on the hood to face Theo fully and latch onto his forearm. Theo’s hand is still curled at the junction of his jaw and neck. It’s nice. Grounding. “I can take care of myself.”
And then Theo shocks him when he speaks through his teeth, “And I can take care of you, too.”
Liam doesn’t know why that single phrase does things to him. He doesn’t realize the extent of the impact on his body, until he feels lukewarm juice trickling between his fingers, and he glances down at his left hand where the last cherry lies forgotten, slowly being crushed to death in his fist. He opens it quickly and pops the half-destroyed cherry into his mouth to chew it.
Inexplicably, Theo holds out a hand under Liam’s chin. On instinct, Liam opens up and spits the stone out into the center of Theo’s palm. Theo doesn’t move again for a while, and Liam just gazes at him, wholly incapable of looking anywhere else because everything else is irrelevant in this moment, and Liam slowly grinds the cherry to a pulp between his teeth and tastes the dribble of cool red in the crevices between his canines.
There’s something there, he thinks. There’s something like another question and it’s there in the wavering sea-gray of Theo’s eyes.
It’s not the kind of question that can be articulated or answered in words.
So he holds his breath, and he watches, and he waits.
He doesn’t have to wait very long, because Theo is a creature of instinct, no matter how much he may protest otherwise. Theo’s eyelashes flutter as his gaze dips down to the uneven stain of burgundy on Liam’s lips. Liam feels his mouth part as the breath leaves him. It doesn’t go unnoticed by Theo. He hones in on the sight of Liam’s mouth, on the smell and shape of it, and then before either of them know it, he’s closing the distance and parting his own lips and pressing them, dry and warm, to the cool and half-sweet taste of Liam.
Liam should be embarrassed by the high-pitched moan that escapes him instantly. But he’s not, because the sound that should have startled Theo only spurs him on. He presses further, deeper into Liam, like there’s still an ineluctable distance that will always need to be crossed between them. He kisses Liam like a man taking a running jump from the precipice to the other side. With heat and tentativeness mixed with growing desperation, like a diver on his last minute of oxygen breaking the surface for air.
And Liam—Liam presses forward and kisses him back, kisses him back with all he has, with need and understanding, like the two ends of a broken bone fusing together.
Theo licks at the seam of Liam’s lips as if chasing the last taste of the cherry mess there. Liam reads the unspoken question there, too, and he opens up readily for Theo. Lets Theo dip his tongue inside and taste some more—lets him have his way with him, yank his head closer, take him, take care of him—and he licks back inside Theo’s mouth just to hear Theo come undone with a shiver and a groan not unlike his own.
They break away some time later for air, and Liam mourns the loss of contact, feels like breathing now on his own is wholly subpar to the feeling of them breathing together and passing air between their lungs.
But Theo has no plans of stopping. He coaxes Liam to an upright position and shifts his hands down, pressing against the outsides of the back pockets on Liam’s jeans—Theo’s jeans, really—and that, of all things, presses a snicker out of Liam.
“Shut up,” Theo says, all gravelly and his voice delicious in a thousand ways. “I’m making sure this is the pair without rivets. You are not scratching up the hood of my truck.”
Liam stares at him, uncomprehending, but then it all suddenly make sense when Theo hoists him bodily into the air and shoves him on his bum onto the hood. Liam yelps and scrabbles for purchase against the sun-warmed metal under his palms. He needn’t worry long for a handhold, though, because Theo’s on him again in an instant, shoving himself between Liam’s legs and taking Liam’s face by the sides with both hands and slotting their mouths back together, aligning every inch of his torso against Liam’s, chest to chest through flimsy cotton and pulsing skin, till their hearts are mere inches away from each other and jackhammering in tandem.
The kiss turns from chaste to wet and open-mouthed in little time. Liam groans, finds that he doesn’t need to hold on to anything but Theo for balance, so he does that, threading his fingers through Theo’s hair and tugging hard. Theo growls and the sensation rumbles between their chests. Ignites a spark in the pit of Liam’s belly. He presses himself impossibly closer, and Theo’s wolf must like that, because he growls again into Liam’s mouth and grinds against Liam’s crotch all slow and dirty.
When they reluctantly pull back for more air, Liam’s gasping, and Theo looks as dazed and kissed-stupid as Liam hoped he would. “Theo,” Liam manages to rasp out. “If we keep going, I am gonna scratch up that paint job.”
“Don’t care,” Theo snarls, gentle and feral at the same time, and he goes back in, this time to latch onto the space next to the hollow of Liam’s throat. Liam tips his head back with a whimper—has no choice but to follow what his body wants—and he loses himself to a senseless chant of Theo, Theo, Theo, as Theo’s grip tightens on his hips and Liam’s fingers tangle tighter into his hair and they breathe and pulse together until their bodies feel like one.
Some time later, much, much later, so much later that Liam doesn’t quite know anymore if this might have been a fever dream, Theo breaks away from biting and licking at his neck to release a shuddering breath.
“Yeah,” Liam whispers, boneless, because he gets it.
“Yeah?” says Theo, strained but sated.
“Yeah.”
Theo tips his forehead against Liam’s shoulder where his bare skin has been exposed from the collar of his t-shirt being yanked to the side. Their scents are thoroughly mingled, near indiscernible from one another.
“Have I made my point?” Theo asks hoarsely.
Liam blinks. His brain is slow to catch up. “What point?”
“My point,” Theo grumbles into his collarbone, “that I can be here for you.” That you don’t have to be alone, the rest goes unspoken.
“Oh.” Liam swallows spasmically. “Yeah.” Honestly, it’s kind of hard to think with Theo’s nose and the ghost of his lips right there on his clavicle.
He has no words, not long ones, anyway, or coherent ones, to respond to Theo’s promise. This might possibly be the first promise Theo ever made. A real one, at any rate, not a bald-faced lie like I’m not dying for you when they both knew, somehow, always, deep down in their very bones, that once Theo came back from hell he was never capable of leaving. Of leaving Liam behind.
Liam doesn’t know what to do with that. He’s made promises with his best friends, with his mother. It’s you and me till the end of time, Li. He’s believed those promises without a doubt. It’s promises from the people who hurt him, who grew up with the next lie waiting idly behind their teeth, those promises that smart the most because Liam wants to believe them so badly.
But he looks at Theo now, truly looks at him, and he wonders to himself whether any part of Theo now retained the Theo from before. If the lies drilled into him by the Doctors and raw pain and survival still have a home on Theo’s tongue.
And he realizes, in the same breath, that he was foolish to ever think that after the Ghost Riders, after the Anuk-ite, after—after all the times in the hospital and afterward, when Theo could have left, could have shoved him back to the cold of the metaphorical bathroom tiles and left when Liam screamed at him that that’s what he knew he wanted to do, anyway—that this Theo was ever the same Theo as the one who wanted to gut him.
Liam looks at them now and thinks, there is a part of his father that will always reside in his bones, and a part of hell that will always be nestled in the secret cavity of Theo’s chest, but it’s them, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
He drops a kiss on top of Theo’s head, fluffy and bleached gold-brown by the setting sun, and he smiles at the contented sound that leaves Theo and stretches into Liam’s lungs, too.
It could never be a bad thing, when they’re two broken bones growing together at last.