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Liam almost left the hospital. Almost got out. Escaped from that strange, terrible dream called reality, called the end of the world, called survival, called Beacon Hills.
The story almost ended there. Mason and Corey on his right but no one on his left. The imbalance is what gave him pause. Something missing. The hospital room with the door cracked open to reveal Theo, the lone figure standing beside a bed, staring into his phone like it was an oracle, is what made Liam backtrack entirely, waving the two of them on.
Liam slips into the room and shuts the door with a soft click. It’s too bright in here. Everything so clean and contained, a snow globe of starched sheets and antiseptic. Theo’s sneakers look dirty against the white linoleum. He’s postured like caution tape. Liam can feel his seismic ache from across the room.
Theo pockets his phone. When he turns around he does not look happy to see Liam. He does not look happy, period. The harsh overhead lights wash him out. Turn him glowy, ethereal. Everything is starker. The bluegreen veins of his arms. The hints of shadow beneath his eyes. The clotted red staining his shoulder.
“I was looking for you,” Liam says. Half-truth. He wasn’t looking for Theo knowing it was Theo. He was looking for Theo the way the Anuk-ite was looking for its other half. Not knowing what it needed but knowing it was out there somewhere.
“And you found me. Congrats.”
Liam takes a seat on the edge of the bed. Theo falls into place beside him.
“Everyone is going back to Scott’s.”
Because it’s easier than going home. Liam’s parents know something is going on but don’t know what to call it. He’s been lying to them a lot. He’s been lying to them a long time. Tonight he’s “sleeping over at Mason’s.”
The rebuilding has to start somewhere. But rebuilding suggests that the destruction has ended. That the war is over.
Here’s the war, that heavy set of Theo’s shoulders. Clenched fists. The sheen to his eyes that he blinks back into nothing. The heavy, swollen stillness of the air before a storm. Survival is supposed to go down easier than this. A mouthful of honey.
Theo inhales. Exhales a weak, “Okay.”
“Are you?”
“Why, do you need a ride or something?”
“No, I meant...are you. Okay.”
Theo curls his fingers into the stiff bedsheets, squeezes and releases.
“I’ll live.”
Theo doesn’t ask, but Liam answers his silence anyway. “Me too.”
“Will you?” Theo retorts, laugh ragged. Laugh terrible. Laugh so raw it’s barely a laugh at all.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“You lied.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“‘I’m not dying for you, either,’” Theo quotes lowly, looking up from the bedspread at once. He fixes Liam with a hungry, searching look.
So they’re back in the elevator. They’re back in the moment before survival turned from hope into reality. Back in that brief eternity of dead-end relief: I might die but at least I won’t do it alone.
“I wasn’t listening to your heartbeat,” Liam argues. “So why were you listening to mine?”
Even now, he sees the way Theo is polygraphing him. Leaning in. His eyes pinball between Liam’s chest and face. A miasma of frustration hangs between them.
Theo discards the question entirely.
“You can’t do that, Liam. That kind of sacrifice. Not for me.”
Theo has exit signs in his eyes. Liam knows that he will not see him for a long time. Probably even before the night rolls over in surrender, sunrise streaking the sky into cotton candy. Some grief is anticipatory.
“You don’t get to say that. You can’t tell me what I can or can’t do.”
Liam lied. He is a liar. He ceded to the myopia of the elevator, so what. They’re both semi-transparent to each other, anyway. Theo brought up dying first and Liam only followed his lead. Liam doesn’t know what part of the lie is making Theo break open like this. The dying or it being for him.
He would have died for Theo because he thought he was going to die. Period. The end. The story had already been written. What harm would there be in changing the dedication.
He thought he could’ve died for Theo and the only thing that upset him about it all was that he told his parents he would be back in the morning.
“You’d do the same for me,” he adds quietly. He’s a little undone beneath Theo’s scrutiny, pinned down. Defenseless. Human.
“No. I wouldn’t.”
“You’re lying.”
“Fuck off.”
A stilted but near-reverential hush falls between them. Their bodies press against each other the only way they know how. Hostile and graceless. Ungentle. Theo won’t talk about it—the pain he took. The pain he’s in. But something good has to come from all of this hurt. Even if it’s not a happy ending. Even if it’s just the sun shining at the end of the world. Even if it’s just a warm patch of light.
“Thanks for being here anyway," he says.
“I didn’t do it for you,” Theo replies, commitmentless. His heartbeat revs up something high and hysterical. Liam holds onto that stutter. They live in subtext, the meaning beneath the meaning.
Liam is reaching for a better ending when his hand finds Theo’s. Knuckle and sinew. Theo shudders, some soft, weak noise escaping him like the last gasps of a deflated balloon. They live between parentheses. All this secret, tender impossibility between them. The things their bodies do but won’t ever say out loud.
In the midst of existential fear it’s easy to lose sight of lesser needs. Soft hands. The gentle warmth of another body. Violence grows so old and Liam doesn’t know the last time he had a reason to feel giddy.
He doesn’t know how to do this. Not exactly. Never touched Theo gently before, always out of violence or desperation. Never touched a boy knowing he wants the boy to touch him back. But a door opened up in the elevator and someone’s gotta close it.
Theo turns his head to the side, away from Liam. Toward the bed, the floor, anywhere else. He won’t look at their hands but intertwines his fingers with Liam’s anyway. Mutual recognition in the space where their palms meet. Liam knows something is going on between them, has been for a while, but he doesn’t know what to call that either.
Because a door opened up in Theo’s truck, too. And in the zoo. The locker room.
“Liam,” Theo sighs, all burdensome and. Fucking doomed.
“Just shut up for a second, alright?”
A door is open here and somebody’s gotta walk through it.
His hands chart a path up Theo’s wrists, forearms, shoulders—their heartbeats twin staccatos the whole time. Gooseflesh everywhere his fingers touch. Theo doesn’t flinch when Liam’s thumb presses into the wound in his shoulder on accident. He is used to getting hurt on purpose.
When Liam mumbles an apology it’s into his mouth. Warm palms splayed on either side of Theo’s jaw tilt his face upward and Theo moves with him so easily. Gives. Liquid heat. A mouthful of honey.
They fall back against the bed. This is still them, Liam thinks. Their bodies follow the same script they always do. Still desperate. Still ungentle. Scrambling for purchase against the other’s skin. Liam hooks two fingers inside Theo’s belt loop, his free hand tangling into his hair. Theo’s hands slide beneath his shirt, mapping the smooth expanse of his back. Learning the shapes of each other’s mouths.
“You don’t mean this,” Theo murmurs into his neck. His nose is nuzzling Liam's jawline and Liam wishes he could keep him there, tucked under his chin for safekeeping.
“Sure,” he pants. “Just like I didn’t mean it in the elevator.”
He either said it wrong or shouldn't have said anything at all, should've just kept speaking broken promises against Theo's lips, because something has shifted. Theo’s hands slot into place against his waist, ribcage, and then shoulders—hard stop. He pushes Liam away, sits up. Mouth pink, raw and glossy and slanting into something like a frown.
“I don’t know what you want, Liam, but I can’t be it for you.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
All he wants is for this not to end.
The pad of Theo’s thumb brushes against the corner of his mouth like an apology.
Liam swallows hard. Swallows grit and glass shards. He says, “You’re not going back to Scott’s, are you.”
“No.”
Just one syllable that splits him in half. Liam’s listening for the stutter in Theo’s pulse but only hears a door slamming shut. A denouement.
So many words can sound like goodbye if you listen close enough.
“I need a ride,” he tries.
Theo’s eyes flit toward Liam’s chest. He looks impossibly tired. He leans in, presses one last kiss against the edge of Liam's mouth.
“Please don’t ask me.”