Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Dennis is ten years old when he realizes he can simply not eat.

He’s one of many, too many, in a house that always feels a size too small. The walls crowd in around the table when they eat. Everything’s a contest: for their parents’ attention, for a seat that isn’t splintered, for the last slice of pizza. Dennis, the youngest of the siblings, is left in the dust more times than he can count.

The realization happens by accident.

That evening, Dennis is late. He’s been helping the neighbor fix a sagging fence, staying out until the air turns cool and the nails glint in the dusk. By the time he slips back inside, the family’s nearly finished eating. His mother sets a plate in front of him - a few limp pieces of broccoli, a thumb of chicken, and the heel of bread slicked with butter.

“Sorry, sweetie,” she says, stacking plates with one hand, brushing hair from her face with the other. To Dennis she’s still beautiful, though her skin is worn by years of sun and strain. She married young and had babies younger. She isn’t forty yet, but life has already made her look it. “We couldn’t wait. You know how your father is.”

“That’s okay,” Dennis says.

She smiles, ruffles his hair, and turns back to the sink. Water runs. His brothers are in the next room, shouting over each other. His father’s voice cuts through with a sharp knock it off that echoes down the hallway. Dennis can imagine his father sitting in that old gingham armchair, its patched arm split again at the seam with a beer in his hand shouting at his siblings.

Dennis looks down at the plate.

He’s hungry. But also, he isn’t strangely. Maybe because he was sitting at the table by himself, not elbowing someone to get to the bread. It’s like all his urgency is gone.

The thought comes to him quietly;

What if I just don’t?

He picks up his fork. Puts it down. The broccoli looks dull and wet, a cold green stare that gazes up at him. His stomach aches. His arms are sore. He’s tired, bone tired from a day of patching fences. He really should eat.

He doesn’t.

He sits there until the water stops running, until his father starts shouting about someone breaking a lamp and throwing a ball in the house. Then Dennis stands and scrapes the food into the trash. At once the guilt hits him like a slap. They’re not supposed to waste food on their shoestring budget. His hand hovers over the garbage, ready to dig it out, but then his mother appears in the doorway.

“Oh, you’re done! Will you take the trash out, dear?”

He nods, the words caught somewhere behind his teeth. He ties the bag shut and carries it outside. The plastic is warm against his fingers.

That night in the top bunk, surrounded by the steady breathing of his brothers, his stomach growls. At first it’s unbearable. There’s a sharp and hollow pain that is gnawing from the inside out. He almost gets up to go to the kitchen. But then something changes. The ache softens. The hunger turns strange, almost light.

He feels untethered.

Weightless.

And for the first time all day, it feels good.

Really good.

It’s not about weight; he comes to realize.

It’s about control.

It’s the most cliché, overused reason on earth. But it’s true.

 He doesn’t spend hours in front of the mirror, pinching at the soft parts of himself or cataloguing imperfections. The mirror means nothing. What matters is the ledger.

He writes down everything - every crumb, every sip, every accidental bite when he’s not paying attention. He learns the language of food like scripture: grams, calories, ratios, conversions. He knows what happens once it crosses his tongue; starch into glucose, glucose into glycogen, glycogen burned down to carbon dioxide and water. He knows that fat stores what sugar cannot, that protein feeds the body’s slow repair. He gets a library card and spends hours in the reference section. He learns about metabolism, insulin spikes, and  basal rates. He learns how to outsmart them all.

He likes the math of it. The logic of it. The perfect order where input meets output and nothing slips through. He likes that his body can be charted and reduced to figures in a notebook.

His mom sees him jotting down the chemical formulas in his notebook one day, the one he carries everywhere. She never finished high school- she’d gotten pregnant at 16 and dropped out her junior year.

“What are you doing?” she asks him, a basket of laundry that needed to be folded balanced on her hip.

“Chemical equations,” he tells her.  “This is how the body turns glucose into glycogen.”

“Wow,” and for the first time in a long time, she sounds impressed in him. “You know bunny, I think you could be a doctor. That’s a lot of science right there.”

The hallow, gnawing hunger in his stomach squirms and transforms at her praise. He feels proud.

Dennis cannot control the noise of his brothers, or his father’s temper, or the way the house always feels one argument away from breaking. But he can control this.

He can choose when to eat.

and when to stop.

It builds slowly, like a hum beneath the skin.

Dennis doesn’t plan it. It just happens. Sort of like the same way some kids start collecting baseball cards or stones with streaks of quartz. His collection is numbers. Columns of them. Calories, grams, minutes spent walking to school. A record of a body being managed and tamed and balanced.

By twelve, he knows how to make hunger invisible. He eats at the table with everyone. Just small bites at a time and chewed carefully and he’s praised for being “such a good eater.” He packs lunches for school but gives half away. At dinner, he cuts his food into smaller and smaller pieces, moving them around until the plate looks convincingly touched.

No one notices. Or maybe they do, but the noise of the house covers it. There’s always someone crying or shouting or slamming a door. There’s always something more urgent than Dennis being quiet.

He likes it that way.

Hunger becomes a kind of friend. Dennis is a little odd, he knows. He’s not the most popular guy at Broken Bow Middle School. He has a few friends, but none of them are quite like hunger. It’s reliable. It’s something he can carry with him when everything else feels out of his reach. The ache in his stomach is clean and simple. It asks nothing of him except endurance. It gives him something no one else can: proof that he can choose what happens to his own body.

Sometimes, late at night, he lies awake and counts his ribs under the blanket, not out of vanity, but curiosity. It’s like checking the work of an experiment. And when he counts them all over and over it’s a small, private success.

Then in the morning, when his mother sets out breakfast - eggs hissing in the pan, toast gone golden - he smiles, says he’s not hungry yet, and means it.

The feeling is still there, light and steady. And it feels like power.

By the time Dennis turns fifteen, control isn’t a habit anymore. It’s a rhythm. A compulsion, almost.

He’s taller now, all elbows and legs, a boy stretched too thin by time. His brothers have grown louder and the house smaller. His father drinks more, his mother works longer. Bills are piling up with big red stamps on them.

Dennis has learned how to disappear in plain sight.

At school, he’s unremarkable. Quiet. Polite. Teachers call him “dependable,” which really means forgettable. He keeps his head down and his grades perfect.

The cafeteria is a kind of theater with everyone watching each other and pretending not to. He learns tricks: how to break a sandwich apart and toss half away without anyone noticing, how to sip water until the hunger ebbs and flows like a tide.

He takes up running. First for the torture that is called gym class and then later for himself. There’s something pure about the slap of sneakers on asphalt and the ache spreading like fire through his legs.

Dennis is even talked into joining the cross-country team. His guidance counselor says it’ll look good on college applications. He even gets third place in the state competition. But he doesn’t run to win. He runs to empty out. Each mile is a subtraction he can add to his ledger.

He tells himself it’s science, and that it works because he understands it better than anyone else. He charts his progress: heart rate, weight, intake, hours slept. His notebooks fill up with data and equations. He’s looking for the math to balance.

But balance never comes.

He starts skipping meals entirely. Not because he means to, but because the thought of eating feels heavy. Hunger becomes the background music of his life.

His mother comments sometimes. She says he’s “thinning out,” and offers him seconds. He smiles and shakes his head. His father doesn’t notice. Or maybe he does and doesn’t care.

By then, Dennis has already learned the secret truth:

If you can master the body, you can silence the rest.

By the time Dennis starts medical school, hunger has become less a feeling than a philosophy.

He studies metabolism now in lecture halls instead of the back of the public library. Glucose pathways, lipid oxidation, endocrine feedback loops. It’s honestly kind of incredible. The language he once whispered to himself in notebooks has become the currency of his world. He can recite it all without looking: how ATP fuels muscle contractions, how leptin and ghrelin battle over appetite, how the body is never still, always burning, breaking, and building.

The knowledge thrills him.

 The science validates what he already knows. That the body is a system and can be obedient if you learn the rules. It’s all ratios and exchanges of energy. Hunger, he learns, isn’t just emptiness. It’s chemistry. It’s electricity and impulse. It’s something you can master.

Medical school suits him. It rewards endurance. He learns to live on caffeine and the satisfaction of not needing what everyone else seems to crave. Around him, classmates joke about surviving on vending-machine snacks and Red Bull. He laughs with them, but he’s proud that he doesn’t need even that.

He doesn’t eat because he can choose not to.

The body is supposed to demand. To insist. To scream.

His doesn’t. Not anymore.

He feels powerful in the way surgeons must feel, holding a beating heart and knowing it will obey their hands.

Sometimes after a long day in the cadaver lab he’ll stand under the shower until the water runs cold, mapping each bone and tendon beneath his skin. In awe of the human body.

He keeps a small notebook still, though now it looks more professional with neat handwriting, and labeled columns.

Dennis calls it data, but it’s something holier.

Sometimes, when Dennis walks the halls of PTMC late at night, he thinks about the time he was homeless.

He doesn’t call it that - not even to himself. He calls it “the in-between,” as if it were just another rotation. But he remembers the exact feel of it: the thin blanket, the damp concrete under his back, the wind that cut through his jacket like glass.

It was during his last year of med school, the semester after his father died and he couldn’t bear to call his mother. His loans had been delayed. His part-time job had fallen through. He told no one. He couldn’t. What would he have said? That he could memorize the Krebs cycle but not keep a roof over his head?

So, he lived in his car for three months. A faded blue sedan that had 200,000 miles on it with one door that didn’t open from the outside and a heater that coughed more than it warmed. He parked near the river where the streetlights didn’t reach, where no one would notice him curled in the back seat with his coat pulled to his chin.

He studied by flashlight, his anatomy flashcards balanced on his knees. He rationed everything. Every apple, every granola bar, every cup of gas-station coffee was a calculation. Intake and output. Energy and conservation.

It should have felt humiliating. But mostly it felt familiar.

Sometimes he’d wake before dawn, the windows fogged, his breath hanging in the cold air. The city would be silent, just a low hum of traffic somewhere distant. He’d sit there, feeling the ache in his stomach and the tightness in his chest, and think: This is control. This is freedom.

He doesn’t tell anyone at PTMC. He doesn’t tell anyone about the abandoned wing he’d found after his car finally broke down and he was desperate. Only Trinity knows, and just barely

 When his coworkers  talk about resilience, he nods. When they joke about being “starving med students,” he smiles.

But every time he walks past a patient tray, the smell of food makes something deep in him tighten. Not in hunger, exactly, but in memory.

He knows what it’s like to live on the edge of the body’s patience. To live small and to need nothing.

And part of him still believes that’s what makes him good at being a doctor.

The patient’s name is Thomas. Sixty-eight. Late-stage pancreatic cancer.

Dennis meets him on a Thursday morning  the third week in at PTMC during his internal medicine rotation.  The sky outside the ward is a dull gray, the kind that makes everything inside feel more fluorescent. Thomas is thin in a way that’s different from Dennis’s kind of thin. Not controlled, but consumed. His body has turned against him, feeding on itself cell by cell.

He’s propped up in bed, a plastic tray untouched beside him. The oatmeal has gone cold, congealed at the edges.

“You the new doc?” Thomas asks, voice rough as sandpaper.

“Student doctor,” Dennis says, forcing a smile. “Just checking in on you.”

Thomas grins faintly. “You don’t look old enough to know what you’re doing.”

“Most days I’m not sure I do.”

They both laugh, but the sound feels thin in the hospital room. Dennis checks vitals, asks questions, and writes notes.  When Thomas turns away to cough, Dennis sees the tremor in his hands.

“Can’t keep food down,” Thomas mutters. “Body don’t want it anymore.”

Dennis looks at the untouched tray. “We can try something lighter.”

Thomas shakes his head. “It’s not about the food. It’s about knowing it won’t matter.”

Dennis nods, pen stilling in his hand. There’s something in the man’s tone he can’t quite place. It’s almost a kind of peace Dennis doesn’t know how to name.

When he leaves the room, the smell of cold oatmeal lingers on his gloves. He scrubs his hands twice, harder than necessary, watching the pink bloom under his skin.

That night, he can’t stop thinking about Thomas’s words as he settles into the old hospital bed.

It’s not about the food.

It echoes in him like an answer to a question he didn’t know he’d asked.

He dreams of the hunger that makes him feel powerful. And then of Thomas, a body hollowed and not by choice.

The next morning, Thomas is worse. His wife sits by the bed, spooning broth toward his lips. He can’t swallow. It dribbles down his chin, and she wipes it away gently, her hand shaking.

Later, in the stairwell, he leans against the cold tile and realizes he hasn’t eaten in almost two days. His hands are trembling. He tells himself it’s the lack of sleep or stress. But it’s more than that. He can feel it.

For the first time, hunger doesn’t feel clean.

It feels cruel.

Dennis is pretty sure he can go on forever like this.

Running on caffeine and adrenaline is something they all do. Even Dr. King, with her meditation apps and lectures on the importance of a full eight hours of sleep.

The world blurs at the edges, but he tells himself it’s fine - he’s fine. He’s efficient. People keep patting him on the back and telling him he’s doing a good job. He can do this forever.

Until he wakes up on the floor of the ER.

There’s a sharp smell of antiseptic and copper in the air. His cheek sticks to the tile. The fluorescent lights burn through his eyelids.

“Dennis.”

Robby’s voice cuts through the ringing in his ears. It’s low and threaded with something like panic. When Dennis blinks, Robby is crouched beside him, hoodie half-off, his face pale.

“You passed out,” Robby says quietly. “When was the last time you ate?”

Dennis opens his mouth. Nothing comes out. His pulse pounds in his temples quickly. He can feel his heartbeat in his throat. It’s too loud.

Fuck.

So much for balance.

Chapter Text

Robby’s hand is on his shoulder, steady and careful, like he’s afraid Dennis might shatter if he grips too tight.

Someone’s brought a wheelchair over, and a nurse is crouched near his feet, saying something Dennis can’t quite process. The words slide past him like water- hypoglycemic, vitals stable, blood pressure low.
He knows the vocabulary. Hell, he’s learned it forwards and backward and upside down. But it still doesn’t feel real.

He lets Robby help him up into the wheelchair, his muscles trembling, vision tunneling in and out. The nurse, who Dennis doesn’t know, presses a juice box into his hand. It’s apple, the kind they give pediatric patients. He stares at it for too long. The straw trembles between his fingers.

“You need to drink that,” Robby says, quiet but firm.

Dennis hesitates. He knows the physiology of what’s happening. His body is trying to save itself. This is a simple fix, right? Glucose, absorption, equilibrium. But his throat locks anyway. His stomach twists. The juice smells too sweet, too sharp. They’re out of rooms, so Dennis ends up tucked in a small alcove in the hallway. The nurse takes his pulse and exchanges a look with his attending.

“Dennis,” Robby says again, softer now. “Come on.”

Dennis tries to pierce the straw through the foil, but he’s shaking too hard. Robby takes it from him and sticks it through before handing it back.

Dennis forces the straw between his lips and takes a sip. It coats his tongue, thick and cloying. His body reacts before his mind does. It jolts, like a spark through a dead wire. The rush of sugar makes him dizzy. He grips the armrest of the wheelchair, breathing hard through his nose until the nausea ebbs.

Someone asks if he wants to lie down, he’s not sure who. He shakes his head. He can’t stand the idea of everyone seeing him like this. It’s bad enough his mentor has.

Robby doesn’t push. He just stands there, one hand on the back of the wheelchair, the other rubbing his jaw, eyes darting to Dennis every few seconds.

When the nurse leaves, Robby crouches again, lowering his voice.

“You scared the shit out of me.”

Dennis swallows. “Sorry.”

“That’s not-” Robby stops, exhales through his nose. “You don’t have to apologize. Just… tell me what’s going on. Are you too busy? Do you have too much on your mind to eat?”

“I’m fine,” Dennis says automatically, even though his hands are still shaking.

Robby just looks at him. There’s no accusation in in. Maybe… something like recognition.

“When’s the last time you had a real meal?”

Dennis almost laughs. The word real catches him off guard. What counts as real? The protein bars? The coffee? The endless rounds of self-discipline that feel like control but taste like nothing?

“I don’t know,” he admits. His voice sounds far away.

Robby sighs, straightens up, and rubs his face. “All right. Then you’re off for the rest of the day.”

“Robby-,”

“No arguments.” He grabs Dennis’s wheelchair before Dennis can stop him. “You’re not going back on shift like this. You’re not driving. You’re going to sit in the breakroom and eat something that didn’t come out of a vending machine. What’s Trinity feeding you these days, or are you both too busy to find the time to eat?

Dennis opens his mouth to argue, but the fight drains out of him before it forms. He’s too tired. Too cold. The juice box is empty in his hand, crumpled and sticky. He stares at it as if it might explain something.

Robby doesn’t know.

Robby doesn’t know that this was on purpose. He just thinks it’s Dennis being overworked and overwhelmed. That was fine. Maybe he could spin it this way. That this was a one off due to stress.

“Okay,” he says finally. It’s barely a whisper.

Robby nods once, the tension in his shoulders easing just a little.

It’s not even the end of either of their shifts, but Robby has a lot of pull because they’ve both gotten the okay to leave for a bit. They don’t leave the building, instead they go to the break room- the one that smells of old socks and coffee. The one everyone is supposed to eat their lunches in, but no one ever does because they’re too busy.

For a moment, the only sound is the faint tick of the LEDS above.

“You know,” Robby says finally, “passing out in the ER is a real overachiever move.”

Dennis huffs a weak laugh. “Always aiming for excellence.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I wasn’t trying to be.”

Robby looks at him for a long moment, then starts to rummage around the cabinets and Dennis feels worse.  He’s spent years studying what keeps a body alive. It hadn’t occurred to him that it could be this fragile.

That his could be.

Robby doesn’t fill the silence, instead banging around the tiny kitchenette. Every now and then he glances over, like he’s checking that Dennis hasn’t disappeared.

When Robby returns to the rickety table, he’s holding a bowl of something steaming. Oatmeal, maybe. He sets it in front of Dennis with a plastic spoon.

“It’s instant,” Robby says, awkward. “Didn’t find much else.”

Dennis stares at it. The smell makes his stomach twist again. Not from hunger.

“Try,” Robby says. Not a command, exactly. A request.

Dennis picks up the spoon. His hand shakes. He takes a small bite, mostly to make the moment end. The texture is gluey and the taste is too sweet, but the warmth spreads through him like an ache that almost feels good.

Robby sits across from him, elbows on his knees, watching.

After a while, Dennis mutters, “You don’t have to babysit me.”

“I’m not babysitting,” Robby says. “I’m making sure my friend doesn’t collapse again. Big difference.”

Dennis looks down at the bowl. The word friend catches somewhere behind his ribs. He takes another bite.

After a long silence, Robby says quietly, “You ever gonna tell me what’s really going on?”

Dennis doesn’t look up. “There’s nothing-, ”

“Dennis.” The way Robby says his name stops him cold. It’s the same tone he’s used on trauma patients when they start to spiral. “You scared me today. And not just because you fainted. Because you didn’t even look surprised.”

Dennis swallows hard. The spoon clinks against the bowl.

“I’m just tired,” he says finally.

“Bullshit.”

He flinches. Robby exhales, softening. “Look, I don’t need the whole story. I just need you to stop pretending you’re fine when you’re falling apart in front of everyone.”

Dennis wants to say he’s not falling apart. That he’s holding everything together by the thin edge of will, and that should count for something. But the words don’t come.

Instead, he says, “I know how to take care of myself.”

“Do you?” Robby asks, not unkindly. “Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you’ve been trying to outsmart your own body.”

Dennis looks up then, and the concern in Robby’s face is unbearable. He wants to disappear into the floor, into the walls, into anything that isn’t being seen.

He manages, “You don’t understand.”

“Then help me.”

The request lands like a weight.

Dennis opens his mouth, but the truth feels sharp-edged and too dangerous to touch. He can’t give it shape.

So instead, he says the smallest part of it.

“I used to go without. A lot. It got… easy.”

Robby doesn’t look away. “And hard to stop.”

Dennis nods, barely.

Robby leans back, scrubs a hand over his face, and exhales. “Okay,” he says, voice low. “Then we start there.”

Dennis frowns. “What does that mean?”

“It means you don’t have to fix everything right now. You just have to eat breakfast. Then maybe sleep. Then rest and we’ll figure it out.”

Dennis wants to tell him there is no “we.”

“It’s just, ever since Trinity found me-,” he tries to explain.

“Found you?”

Dennis freezes, oatmeal clogging in his throat.

Double shit.

“Nothing. Never mind. I mean, um, when she found me as a roommate. I mean.”

Robby stares into him so intensely Dennis was to squirm. Maybe he does a little. Sue him.

“I was… kind of…,” Dennis sets the spoon down with a gentle tap of plastic. “I was in between places when I moved in with Trinity.”

Robby stills, as frozen as the meds they keep in their freezer.

“In between?”

“Yes. But-,” alarm grows as Robby stands up suddenly from the plastic chair, it squeaking under him.

“No, it’s fine! I’m living with her now. I have my own room, even.”

“You were homeless? While you were working here?”

Dennis feels like a little kid again, feeling the hunger gnawing in his stomach as he hears his father and mom shouting at each other. Hearing plates break. Hearing her crying after.

“I-,” he tries to squeak out but can’t find the words. “Well, I-,”

Robby whirls around on his heels and he must see the look on Denis’s face because he completely stops in his anger.

For a long moment, neither of them says anything. The hum of the vending machine fills the room.

Robby’s face softens. He drags a hand down his face and mutters, “Jesus, Dennis.” It’s not an accusation anymore. It’s worry so sharp it could cut. Robby sits back down.

Dennis stares at the tabletop, the surface mottled with old coffee rings and scratches. His pulse is loud in his ears. “It was a long time ago,” he says finally, his voice thin even thought it was a lie.

“What aren’t you telling me?” Robby asks so sharply it makes Dennis flinch. He keeps his eyes on those coffee stains.

“It wasn’t a long time ago, was it.” His voice is flat now.

Denis shakes his head.

“How long?” Robby asks, voice icy as the first snow of the year.

“Robby-,”

“How long?”

“Two semesters in my car. Just – a few weeks on the streets. Less than a month. During my internal rotation here, I found a place. And our first day in the ER, I moved in with Trintiy. Not that long. Nine months at most.”

“You spent a Pittsburgh winter in your car?”

Dennis winces at the sound of it said out loud. A Pittsburgh winter. He wants to explain, to make it sound less awful than it was. To tell Robby about the layers of clothes, the old sleeping bag from Goodwill, the way he used to park by the river where the wind was calmer.

But his throat locks up.

Robby’s chair scrapes back as he stands again. He paces a few steps toward the counter, and then back again, running both hands through his hair. “Jesus Christ, Dennis. That’s not-  you could’ve died.”

“I didn’t,” Dennis says, quiet. “I was careful.”

“Careful?” Robby snaps, spinning around. “You were living in your car in subzero temperatures! Studying by flashlight? Freezing? Probably skipping meals-,”

Dennis flinches.

Robby stops mid-sentence when he sees the flicker cross Dennis’s face.

The silence that follows is suffocating.

Finally, Robby exhales hard and sinks back into the chair across from him a third time. He scrubs his hands over his face, voice shaking just slightly when he speaks again. “You’re supposed to call someone. You don’t just- ” He breaks off, shaking his head. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

Dennis stares at his hands, fingers white-knuckled around the edge of the table. “Who was I supposed to tell?” His voice is small. “My family and I don't really speak. I wasn’t about to tell the program director I couldn’t pay rent. I couldn’t lose this, Robby. I couldn’t afford to.”

Robby’s jaw tightens. “You think asking for help means losing something. But you were already losing.”

Dennis swallows, throat burning. “It wasn’t like that. I just had to keep moving. I didn’t have another choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” Robby says softly.

“Not for me,” Dennis snaps back, louder than he means to. The echo startles them both. He presses his lips together, forces his voice lower.

“Not then. Not anymore.”

That’s the ugly truth, the one that festers deep inside him: Dennis doesn’t think he has a choice anymore when it comes to food. And that thought terrifies him.

He’s tried to stop obsessing with eating and hunger. The first time was when Trinity convinced him to go out for drinks after work. He told himself he could do it. He even calculated it out: a light beer, ninety calories, easily burned off on the walk home. But when Trinity had already drained her first glass, he was still staring at his, barely a quarter gone. Because he couldn’t bring himself to finish it. Because he just couldn’t.

He tried again a few weeks later, at a staff potluck in the residents’ lounge. Everyone had brought something. There were foil trays of pasta and casseroles. Trinity had made deviled eggs and kept nudging the plate toward him, smiling like it was nothing.

He’d told himself he’d take one. Just one. To look normal. To stop worrying her.

He even picked it up. It was cool and smooth in his fingers, the smell of paprika and mustard sharp in his nose. But when he looked down at it, his mind started its familiar litany: the fat, the salt, the calories, the way it would sit heavy in his stomach. His chest went tight, his throat closed.

By the time he set the egg back down, pretending he’d changed his mind, his hands were shaking. He laughed it off, said something about saving room for coffee, and no one noticed.

He knew he needed to get control be it spiraled. But these days, he didn’t have a choice. More than Robby knew.

It was like he’d never had one in the first place.