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The laundromat hums like a lid over a pot, holding the night at a low boil. Fluorescents flatten everything. A single bug keeps headbutting the light until it forgets what it’s chasing.
Lark sits on an orange chair that flexes around his aching body. He is bare from the waist up, skin a constellation of stormy colours: a violet orbited by yellow, a crescent of red, the rough scrape where asphalt met skin. His and Grant’s t-shirts are already past the glass, turning like obedient planets in a chipped chrome universe. Blood fades to pink, then to something almost forgettable. He watches the swirl and imagines the machine trying to make peace, shirts twisting together like they can’t tell if they’re dancing or fighting - like him and Grant, a little of both.
Grant comes back in with a plastic bag and a bottle of something sugared. Hoodie zipped to his throat, sleeves tugged long over his knuckles. The zipper teeth flash when he moves. The hood casts his face in shadow until the door hisses shut and the light decides what colour he should be.
“I got… stuff,” he says, like an apology and a truce. The bag crinkles as he sets it down between them. Inside: a roll of gauze, plasters with cartoons because that’s all the bodega had, antiseptic wipes, a sports drink, a pack of sour candies with a cartoon lemon that looks like it’s screaming.
Lark lifts the lemon sweets out of the bag first. “You didn’t have to.”
“I know,” Grant says. His mouth does a crooked thing- maybe a smile, maybe an admission. “You like these.”
“When I’m…” Lark starts, then lets the sentence sit. They both know the words that would have gone there. Bright and too fast and unbearable. He’s not that, not now. He feels hollowed instead. Quiet like a room after the party where the cups are still sticky.
Grant’s eyes flick down, quick, to Lark’s chest, then away with the clean precision of a blade sheathed. Lark feels the look rather than sees it; a thin heat moves under his ribs, the bruise-blossoms answering like flowers in the wrong season. In the parking lot, it had been easier. No words, just gravity and impact and the animal clarity that comes when a body accepts one kind of pain to drown out the others.
Grant nudges the bag closer. “You’re bleeding,” he says, casually.
Lark glances at the slow bead threading his sternum where a knuckle- whose, unclear- had found a ridge. The blood has the good manners to stop when he wipes at it. He tears open a wipe, inhales the sterile bite of it, and makes no sound as he pulls it across the wound. Pain is a map; tonight, at least, he can read it.
“You okay?” Grant asks. Not a throwaway line. More like: Do you still recognize yourself inside there?
“Mmm,” Lark says, non committally. “You?”
Grant’s shoulders rise and fall. “Not the worst,” he says, which is the saddest scale, but honest. The hood stays up. His strong hands- bruised at the second knuckle, a scrape running crooked along the heel of one palm- fidget with the edge of the chair. Lark can still feel the pattern of those knuckles against his jaw in a way that is not about violence at all, which is its own problem.
He thinks of twenty minutes ago, his car nosing the curb under the overpass, the shadow pooled there like bad sleep. Grant on the railing, not perched so much as folded, as if the structure had been built around him and not the other way. Lark had felt it like static across the skin: something in the staccato responses to his texts, the way Grant had written out, the lack of punctuation like a dropped heartbeat. Lark can find his people in the dark the way other animals find water.
“Come on,” he’d said then, palms up, as if the air between them were a skittish dog. “Don’t do something stupid alone.”
“I wasn’t,” Grant had lied, softly.
“We’ll go somewhere no one cares,” Lark had offered, because asking for tenderness would have sounded like begging and because this, at least, he knew how to choreograph. “We’ll burn it off.”
Grant had looked at him like a mirror tilted at the wrong angle. Then he had climbed down. They had not spoken its name.
Now, Grant unzips his hoodie two inches, breath hitching as the fabric catches on skin. The edge of a bruise finds the light: a dark, thumb-printed halo licking above his collarbone. Another near his ribs when the zipper snags and he shifts to fix it. Lark’s mouth goes dry, then floods, some old reflex misfiring between ache and want and shame. He looks back at the washing machine like it can answer any of this.
“You should sit down,” Lark says, because the words I was scared for you get stuck on his teeth.
“I am sitting,” Grant says, and then he is, sinking into the chair with the caution of someone negotiating rent with his own bones. He picks up the sports drink, opens it, doesn’t drink. Lark counts the beat. On the third, Grant takes a small sip and remembers to swallow.
They inventory the damage without ceremony. It’s a ritual by now, ugly and precise: what will bloom and what will stiffen, what will hurt tomorrow like a confession. Lark cleans the split at the corner of Grant’s mouth, close enough to smell laundry soap ghosting off the industrial drum and the ghost of something sweet on Grant’s breath- donut, maybe, or breath mints, something bodega bright. Grant holds very still. The antiseptic wipe trembles only after Lark tosses it, and only when he’s sure Grant isn’t watching.
“You found me fast,” Grant says, not quite looking at him. The statement is what it is.
“I drive fast.” Lark says. He shrugs with one shoulder; the movement pulls at the edge of a bruise and he makes the face anyway. “You were loud in the way you were quiet. I don’t know.”
“Hmm,” Grant says, but there’s a thread of something grateful in it, like a hidden seam you can run your finger along. “I wasn’t-” He stops, stares at the coin slot as if it’s about to speak. “I needed to feel the edge under my feet- to know it was there. That I could step back. That’s all.”
Lark nods and doesn’t press. The machine takes the beat for him, thudding into a new rhythm. He opens the sour candy. The smell sparks the old, foolish part of him that associates sour with survival- how, on certain nights, that hit can drag him back into his body like a thrown rope. He doesn’t need it now, not exactly, but the tongue-tingle feels like a story where the ending isn’t written yet. He offers Grant one.
Grant shakes his head, then takes it anyway, and the first sharp bite softens the line of his shoulders by a millimeter. A tiny, usable miracle. Lark files it away with a thousand other small things: the way Grant’s breath catches on the second laugh, how he hates the taste of metal in his mouth, how he says I’m fine in the tone that means everything but.
“So,” Lark says. “Ground rules going forward.”
Grant makes an amused noise that fails to be a laugh. “We need ground rules?”
“Yeah,” Lark says, rolling the candy wrapper between his fingers. “Rule one: if it ever gets that bad again-like tonight- you call me. Or text. Whatever. I don’t care what time it is.”
Grant’s eyes flick toward him, unreadable in the harsh light. For a second, he looks like he might argue, but the words never come.
“Look at us,” Lark adds, gesturing loosely at the evidence. The motion makes a little star of pain flare beneath his right rib. He catalogues it: bright, simple, honest. “We’re obviously experts at making good decisions.”
For a few minutes they listen to the machine argue with its own bearings. Outside, a siren rises and fades, the world’s oldest lullaby. The laundromat door breathes once when a draft teases it, then settles. Grant tips his head back and closes his eyes. Lark watches the thin skin there pulse. He thinks: you are here. He thinks: that has to count for something.
“Do you- ” Grant starts, then stops, embarrassment blotting his cheeks high and sudden. He unzips the hoodie another inch like he needs to let the question out. “Do you ever… in the middle of it, just- ” His hands open and close, helpless. “Want to be-” The shape of the word hangs between them: ruined, remade, erased... kissed.
“Yeah,” Lark says, before he can protect himself with humor. The admission lands like a coin in a jar you promised not to fill.
Grant exhales, a thin, relieved sound. “Same.”
They look at each other then, properly. The air between them tightens, a wire drawn quietly. Lark feels it in his mouth, the calcium ache of his teeth. He thinks of kissing Grant, of biting him, of how often those two have been the same action in his body. He thinks of Grant’s hoodie zipper, the little steps down into a throat he doesn’t have a right to touch.
He swallows the sour instead, lets it burn the back of his tongue. He says, “We shouldn't keep doing it like this.”
“I know,” Grant says, and the words aren’t formal, aren’t a vow. They sound like a fact they’ve both been avoiding, a sign on a door they keep pretending not to see. “But sometimes I feels like I'm drowning.”
Lark leans forward, elbows on knees, his head tipping into his hands. For a second he imagines pressing his forehead to Grant’s shoulder and staying there until the machine ends the cycle. He imagines the tilt and catch of bone against bone, the way it would hurt and also not. He imagines wanting something without destroying it.
Lark drags a hand through his hair and lets it fall, the gesture useless. “I don’t know how to help without wrecking it,” he says finally. “Without wrecking you.”
He breathes out, shaky. “But I’d rather you hate me for trying than-” He can’t finish the sentence, so he doesn’t.
Grant’s eyes lift, steady and unbearably kind. “I don’t hate you.”
The words land like clean fabric, warm from the dryer.
“I just don’t know how to feel without waiting for it to hurt,” Grant adds, voice thin but real. “I want to learn.”
Something loosens in Lark’s chest. He nods, a twitch more than a motion.
“In the meantime,” he says, “we do laundry.”
A promise, for now. That they stay long enough to clean what they can, even if the stains never really come out.
For the first time tonight, it feels like enough- small, uneven, but alive. The sound of the dryer fills in the rest, low and steady, like a heartbeat that’s decided to keep going.
Lark’s hand finds the roll of gauze. He lifts it. “Let me see your knuckles.”
Grant hesitates- then gives them over. The skin is split at the same place on each hand; symmetry like a curse. Lark wraps them with the care he reserves for anything he isn’t sure he deserves. His fingers are steady now. The white covers the mess piece by piece until the hands look almost ceremonial. When he’s done, he doesn’t drop them immediately. He feels the thrum there, the low drumbeat proof of life. He lets go before it starts to say too much.
The washer ticks into rinse hold, water pausing, garments suspended in their own gravity. The sudden quiet is ridiculous. Lark hears their breaths, the hum, the small swallow Grant makes after the sour’s gone. He hears his own pulse choose not to sprint.
“Can I…” Grant says, then abandons whatever sentence that was going to be in favor of the safer battlefield. “Can I get a quarter?”
“Of course,” Lark says, and trades two for a smile that reaches Grant’s eyes. He drags their shirts dripping into a dryer. Grant stands and the hoodie lifts; Lark gets the briefest flash of the bruises mapped over his ribs, the stubbornly beautiful geography of him. It hits in the exact wrong place. He slams the dryer door a touch too hard. The noise covers the sound he makes.
Grant pretends to adjust the temperature setting to give them both the dignity to breathe.
The dryer starts. The sound is lower, steadier, like a heart that’s decided to try. They end up shoulder to shoulder without planning to, hands dangling between their knees, the sour-candy packet empty and folded small.
“There’s this- it’s not a group." Grant says suddenly, as if offering a rope across a pit. “It’s just… people. Sitting. I can text you the details. There's snacks. You don’t have to talk.”
“I’m very good at not talking,” Lark says.
“You don't have to talk,” Grant repeats, ignoring Larks attempt at dismissing the thought. “Or you could eat the snacks.”
“What if they’re bad snacks?”
“They are,” Grant says. “But they’re there.”
Lark nods, the motion minute. It feels like loosening a screw one quarter turn. “Text me anyway.”
“I will,” Grant says, and he will. Lark can feel the truth of it in his bones the way he feels rain. It doesn’t promise safety. It promises a direction.
They don’t touch. They don’t name it. The dryer is warm against Lark’s knees. He looks at their reflections in the fogged window: two boys in the bright hum, not better, not worse, present. The sight hurts more than the rest of it.
When the cycle dings, they don’t move for a breath. Two. Then they stand and open the door together. Heat rolls out, damp light. The shirts are softer now, colour leached toward something gentler. Lark holds Grant’s out to him without looking, and Grant takes it. Their fingers press for a second- contact, current, an unlit match- and then let go.
They don’t put their shirts back on. Not yet. They carry them between them like flags from some battle that didn’t pick a winner.
At the door, Lark pauses. He keeps his eyes on the cracked tile, on the dull reflection of the lights in the glass. His voice is roughened from exhaustion, almost lost under the hum of the machines.
“Please,” he says. A beat, then softer: “Next time…”
He doesn’t finish it - doesn’t need to. The rest hangs between them in the warm, detergent-thick air. Next time call me. I will answer. I will always answer. I will find you. I can’t lose you.
Grant’s hand twitches like he might reach out, but he doesn’t. He just nods once, slow and sure, and answers, “Okay.”
They step out into the cool, ignorable dark, not quite together and not apart, the drum of the dryer still in their bones. Behind them, the laundromat light buzzes once more - a tired, stubborn pulse - and then the door closes.