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“Behold, God works all these things, Twice, in fact, three times with a man,
To bring back his soul from the Pit, That he may be enlightened with the light of life.
Give ear, Job, listen to me; Hold your peace, and I will speak.
If you have anything to say, answer me; Speak, for I desire to justify you.
If not, listen to me; Hold your peace, and I will teach you wisdom.”
— Job 33:29-33
“Hey, brother. Getting some air?”
Jack says it lightly, as though it is nothing, as though his words don’t carry the weight of a hand extended across a narrowing distance. But Robby must hear what is underneath it, because he turns back to look at Jack, as the door thuds shut behind him, and gives a small, almost imperceptible nod from where he’s standing on the wrong side of the railing, meeting Jack’s eyes across the distance that feels suddenly, to Jack, vast and uncrossable.
The night has received both of them without question. It is the fourth of July, and the night feels impossibly alive rather than empty, the sky low and luminous with reds and blues and whites, the city breathing, celebrating, beneath them in a scatter of lights and passing cars blaring music and voices that rise and dissolve before they reach the height of where the two of them stand. The wind moves gently, insistently, tugging at their scrubs, their hair.
Robby is leaning against the wrong side of the railing as though he belongs to it, as though he has already decided something and is only waiting for the rest of them to catch up.
Jack watches him, rooted to his spot by the fire escape door. He thinks, absurdly, of all the times he has watched Robby—across rooms, across hospital corridors, across beds—and how none of those looks have ever quite prepared him for this one, for the particular quiet in Robby’s shoulders, the way he seems both present and already receding.
Jack feels something tighten in his chest then; not with the sharpness of panic, but with a slow, dreadful recognition, as though some truth, long deferred and carefully avoided, has at last risen to meet him and refuses to be set aside—and it is not only the sight of Robby on the far side of the railing that summons it, nor even the quiet, terrible composure with which he holds himself there, balanced in a way that suggests not recklessness but a kind of familiarity, as though he has come to understand the measure of that edge and found, in its narrowness, a strange and private allure; it is, rather, the knowledge that this place, this height, this vantage point from which the city seems both diminished and infinite, had once been offered by Jack himself, had been made known to Robby, made accessible, not through accident but through invitation, lightly given and, at the time, entirely unconsidered.
He remembers it now with a sickening clarity: that day not so different from this one, four, five years ago, after a shift no worse but no better than this most recent one, and an argument with Janey that had Robby moping around the place, the relationship slowly unravelling to its end. They’d been friends then, best friends, even, but Jack didn’t know Robby, then, wasn’t greedy for him the way he is now. At the time, he just coveted any small moment he got with him, as his heart started to slowly relearn the beats to falling in love; a dance he hadn't performed the steps to in many, many years. In the years that have passed since, he’s come to know Robby inside and out, like the back of his own hand. He knows Robby angry, and sad, and scared, and knows him joyful, elated and content. He knows how Robby moans when he’s getting fucked and the way he likes missionary, likes to look Jack in the eyes because he’s a romantic at heart, really. Jack knows how to stroke the nape of his neck when he’s curled around Robby, lulling the other man to sleep, how it relaxes him, how it's something his grandmother used to do for him and the comfort, though different now with different hands, remains. He knows that he’s a habit Robby just can’t quit, no matter how much he likes to run through the single women of Pittsburgh, and Jack knows that the first time Robby will refuse to sleep in his bed after a night together, a subtle attempt at pulling away, he need only set his watch and seven weeks later, Robby will knock on his door once more.
Jack hadn’t known any of that then, but he loved Robby just the same, wanted Robby just the same.
At this moment, it’s like he’s looking at an overlay of film. He can see where he is now, on the 4th of July 2026, dusk just beginning to settle at the skyline, fireworks erupting overhead, illuminating Robby in hues of blue and red. But over that he swears, he can see that bright Autumn day all those years ago, when the sky was still blue, and the leaves were just beginning to turn to that brilliant, vibrant auburn and red that ushers in the Fall. He can hear the easy confidence with which he had said, Come on, I want to show you something, to Robby, as though what lay beyond the door were no more than a view, a novelty, something to be shared and then forgotten.
He remembers the weight of the fire escape door in his hand, the now familiar resistance of it as it opened, the small, unremarkable triumph of stepping out first into the open air and turning back with the expectation—so ordinary, so harmless—of being followed; and Robby had followed, of course he had, had paused only briefly at the threshold in that way of his, as though taking stock of a place not by what it offered but by what it concealed, his gaze moving not outward, not to the scatter of the cityscape and the restless movement of the streets below, but to the edges, always the edges, to the places where the surface ended and something else—something less certain—began.
You can see everything from up here, Jack had said then, with a careless gesture toward the city, as though height itself were the point, as though distance could be rendered benign by the promise of perspective, and Robby had smiled—he had smiled, and Jack remembers it because it was one of the very first iterations of a smile that has come to be given only for Jack —and stepped forward, and if there had been, even then, some hesitation in the way Robby moved, some attentiveness that suggested a different understanding of what such a place might mean, Jack had not allowed it to trouble the moment, had not imagined that what was being given might one day return to him in this altered and terrible form before him.
And now, in the future and the present, Robby stands on the other side of that same railing, as though the intervening years have done nothing but clarify the terms of that first invitation, as though what had once been merely a threshold has resolved itself into a boundary, stark and undeniable, dividing what can be held from what may yet be lost; and the distance between them, though no more than the reach of an arm, assumes in Jack’s mind a vastness that feels almost insurmountable, not because it cannot be crossed in any physical sense—it would take so little, a step, a shift, the smallest act of movement—but because it resists the imposition of will, as though it demands something other than action, something more difficult and less assured.
Robby does not speak as Jack finds it in himself to move, to walk the five, ten steps to him, and then comes to lean against the railing, the right side of the railing the metal cool on his arms; Robby only looks, and in that look there is no overt appeal, no dramatics, no urgency that might permit Jack to act or speak, but rather a stillness so complete it unsettles Jack, for it suggests not indecision but a kind of resolution that has already taken place beyond Jack’s reach, a decision made in some interior space to which Jack has not been admitted, and which he now, standing where he is, cannot force open; and yet there is something else there, too—something quieter, more elusive—a question, perhaps, though not one that could be answered directly, and Jack, meeting his gaze across this new and impossible divide, feels with a sudden and disorienting clarity that it is he who is being asked, not to act, not to command, but to understand.
He doesn’t join Robby on the other side like he usually would; he can’t, because if he did, he would be acknowledging too plainly the fact of it. The fact of this, their physical separation, the line that has been drawn not only in space but in all that has come before, in every moment in which Jack has chosen not to see, not to press, not to insist upon the truths that now press in upon him with such unbearable force; and beneath this, threading through his thoughts again and again with a persistence that cannot be quieted, is the guilt that he had brought Robby here, had transformed what should have been inaccessible into something familiar, something that could be returned to, alone, in a moment such as this.
Robby shifts, just slightly, and Jack feels it as though the movement has occurred within himself, a corresponding tightening, a breath held without conscious intent, and he is struck, then, by the terrible fragility of it, the sense that this moment—this exact configuration of distance and stillness—exists only under certain conditions, and that to disturb it carelessly would be to risk losing something that cannot be recovered once gone; he thinks, dimly, of the peril inherent in certain crossings, of the way a single misstep—a misstep that took his leg from him—can undo what might otherwise have been preserved, and the thought does not arrive as thought but as instinct, as a kind of bodily understanding that holds him where he is.
“I was supposed to leave tonight.”
Jack swallows, nodding. Dumbly, he looks at Robby’s shoes, his New Balances’, as if by staring at them, it will compel them to stay exactly where they are, immobile. “Pretty dark to be setting off on the open road.”
Robby sighs. “But then, Al-Hashimi wanted to observe handover, Dana’s on the warpath, I’m worried about Santos, I gave Whitaker my house and I couldn’t find him to give him the keys and then Duke’s tests came back…” He shakes his head, and Jack can see the way his hands fret inside his cargo pockets. “Man, I’ve been dreaming about getting out of here for so long, and now I can do it, and I can find ten good reasons to go, and a tiny million ones not to, and I can’t tell which is which anymore.”
Jack blinks, trying to school his face not to announce too plainly his shock. The jury is still out on him regards Al-Hashimi; of course the loyal part of him wants to hate her for Robby’s sake, but hell if isn’t intrigued to see what she’s made of, bizarre reliance on AI aside.
As Jack listens to Robby’s litany, he finds, as he follows the thread of it, that the particulars begin to blur at the edges, not because they are unimportant (because he knows that each name, each obligation, each half-finished task carries its own weight, its own claim upon Robby), but because of the way they are offered, all at once, without hierarchy, as though everything has become equally urgent, equally impossible to resolve.
More and more names as Robby speaks of Mohan, Javadi, their respective mommy issues (Jack’s got to put a pin in that one, but trusts himself to return to it), McKay going rogue, Ogilvie being a general menace, Langdon apologising left, right and centre, but seemingly refusing to accept responsibility for the crime he commited—each name lands, and with it a glimpse of something unfinished, something unattended, something that might, in another moment, on any other day, have been manageable, but which now accumulates into a kind of unbearable density; and beneath it all, threaded through the catalogue of responsibilities, there is something else, something quieter and far more difficult to answer. An admission, halting but unmistakable, that Robby’s desire to leave—once so clear, so singular—has fractured into something indistinct, something that no longer offers the clean relief it once promised.
Ten good reasons to go, and a tiny million ones not to. Jack feels that, more than he understands it, because it had been like that for him too—not one clear reason, never that, but a handful that sounded right when spoken aloud, and a thousand smaller hesitations he learned, over time, to ignore; and so he kept signing up and shipping out, again and again, not out of certainty but because stopping felt harder than continuing, because leaving would have required a kind of reckoning he was not yet willing to face.
In the end, the decision was made for him.
It had been the loss of his leg, the clean, irreversible fact of it, the body making final what the mind never could—and he thinks, now, with something like quiet dread, that Robby is standing in that space Jack never truly occupied, that moment before, where staying is still a choice, and not yet something taken out of his hands.
He watches the way Robby’s hands dither inside his pockets, the restless, unconscious motion of them, as though they might find, in their action, some anchor, some way of steadying the confusion that has taken hold; Jack sees, too, the way his shoulders have drawn inward, just slightly, as though the weight of his own indecision has begun to press upon him in a way that is no longer sustainable.
But Jack’s mind catches on one detail—I gave Whitaker my house—and he feels, for a moment, a sharp, disorienting jolt of something like disbelief, like irritation, like the beginnings of a question that cannot, in this moment, be asked without an expletive and a raised voiced; what the hell was that about, what does that mean, how far had this gone already, how much had been set in motion without his knowing—
—but even as the thought forms, it dissolves again, rendered insignificant by the larger, more pressing truth that asserts itself in its place, quiet but immovable:
Robby is already halfway gone.
Not in body—not yet, at least—but in the arrangement of things, in decisions that have been made and set aside and made again, in the slow, incremental process of detaching that precedes any final act; Jack sees it now, the wood for the trees, the way Robby has been preparing for this, perhaps without even realising it as such, the way he has been loosening his hold on one thing after another until what remains is no longer enough to keep him.
And beneath that recognition, something in Jack resists—instinctively, almost violently—the notion that this could be allowed to continue, that he might stand here, listening, understanding, and do nothing.
Because this—this confusion, this inability of Robby’s to tell one reason from another—is not certainty, and definitely not resolve.
It is, instead, the thinnest and most precarious of thresholds, and Jack knows that if Robby crosses it alone, if he is left to sort through it without interruption, without something—someone—to counterbalance the quiet pull toward departure, then whatever answer he arrives at may not be one he can return from.
Jack doesn’t think. Or, he does, but the thought does not take the form of language, doesn’t arrange itself into anything so orderly as reasoning; it is, instead, a convergence of instinct and understanding, of fear and something more resolute, something that has been building, but which now refuses to remain contained.
And so the words come—not as a question, not even as a considered response, but as the only possible interruption to the trajectory he can feel, with terrible certainty, unfolding before him.
“Please don’t go.”
The words are out before he has had the chance to temper or disguise them, and he feels, even as they leave him, that they have been drawn up from somewhere deeper than speech, from that place where thought has already given way to something more urgent, more unknown even to Jack—where want, having long pretended to be manageable, reveals itself at last as need.
Robby turns his head, staring at Jack.
His eyes are wide, but not entirely startled, as though he had anticipated, if not the words themselves, then the inevitability of something like them, and in the expression he brings to bear upon Jack there is a softness that might, in another moment, have been mistaken for gentleness, were it not so closely shadowed by something else—resignation, perhaps, or a particular form of disbelief.
“Jack…” Robby says it as though it is both a thank you and a fuck you, as though his name in itself might serve to slow what Jack, unfettered, has already begun.
But Jack has begun, and finds that he can’t, won’t, retreat into the safer territories of implication or deflection; there is, in him, a kind of gathering resolve, not loud or forceful, but steady in its insistence. He’s begun, and God strike him down if he doesn’t continue to the last.
So he says, “Please stay.”
Robby lets out a short breath that is something like a laugh, though there isn’t much amusement in it; it is the sound of someone who has grown accustomed to the unreliable architecture of kindness, of someone who has learned to distrust those moments in which it is offered too plainly as though it might conceal, beneath its surface, some inevitable retraction.
“You’re just telling me what I want to hear.” It’s not said cruelly, but it is said with conviction, with the weary certainty of someone who has rehearsed this understanding often enough that it has begun to feel like fact. God bless those poor therapists, Jack thinks. Talk about an uphill fucking battle.
“Fuck no, I’m not,” Jack answers, and there is, now, a flare of something sharper in him, something unguarded and immediate. Robby’s casual dismissal has struck not at his pride but at something more essential. “I’m asking you for what I want.”
Jack shifts forward as he says it—his forearm fitting perfectly into the divot where Robby’s ribcage makes way for his waist, a deliberate closing of the distance between them—and as Jack draws nearer, the details of Robby’s presence come into sharper focus: the subtle rise and fall of his chest, the slight tension at his throat as he swallows, the way his gaze flickers to Jack’s own, just briefly, before returning.
“I want three months of you,” Jack continues, and though the words are plain, there is nothing careless in them, nothing imprecise; they are, instead, said with a kind of exactness that renders them more, rather than less, intimate. “In my bed. You can hop on the bike to go to the brunch place you like and pick us up breakfast bagels, and then in the evening you can set out and maybe even go to the Thai place you like. You can traverse the great distance between my bed and the living room TV. You can— fuck, I don’t know, volunteer at the dog rescue, or learn to make sourdough, or start training for a triathlon. I don’t give a shit, Robby, do whatever you want, just do it and then come back to me.”
For a moment, the world seems to contract around that statement, to hold it in a kind of suspended quiet, as though awaiting its consequence.
Robby’s mouth parts, then closes again, and in that small, involuntary movement there is something unguarded; he looks, in that instant, younger, or perhaps only less resolved, as though the ground beneath him—so carefully tested, so deliberately chosen—has shifted by some imperceptible degree.
“Robby, don’t go,” Jack says again, and now his voice has softened, almost a plea and almost a prayer.
Jack steps into him, then, into Robby’s space, reaching out and gripping the side of his waist, squeezing gently to try to convey the depth of his promise, of his feelings, as he looks up into Robby’s eyes. He feels, in the closeness of it, the undeniable fact of Robby’s body, the warmth of him, the life of him, so immediate and so precariously held.
Robby, doesn't say a word, but shifts himself just so, only a slight degree of movement, but turning nonetheless, coming to face Jack more fully now. Jack’s mouth finds the place where Robby’s neck meets his collarbone, and he doesn’t press, not at first; he lets the contact remain light, almost insubstantial, a brush rather than a claim, as though even here, even now, he is asking rather than taking.
“Stay,” he murmurs, the word scarcely formed before it dissolves against skin, carried more by breath than by sound.
He traces his lips upward, slowly, the path deliberate, until he reaches the space just behind Robby’s ear, where his pulse beats quick and undeniable, where his body, regardless of Robby’s denials, reveals his truths.
Robby inhales, sharply, the sound small but unmistakable, and Jack feels it as though it has passed through him, as though the boundary between them has, in that moment, thinned to something nearly permeable. Only then does he draw back, not far, but enough to see Robby, all of him, to meet his eyes and hold them, to ensure that what he says next can’t be mistaken, can’t be softened or misheard.
“Please don’t go,” Jack says, and there is, now, no distance between the plea and the man who makes it, no barrier of tone or phrasing to render it less than it is. “I need you.”
The words fall into the space between them with a quiet, irrevocable weight, and Jack feels that something has shifted beyond recall, that a line has been crossed not in space but in truth, and that whatever answer comes—whatever shape it takes—will be given in the full knowledge of what has now been laid bare. Maybe this would have been scary to him, before, before he lost a leg, and then a wife. But losing Robby? The thought of it makes Jack sick, and that makes him brave.
“You—” Jack begins, and then stops, stealing himself. He clears his throat, the sound rough, unsteady in a way that would have startled anyone who knew him elsewhere, in other rooms, in other lives where his voice did not falter. “You matter, to me. You mean a lot to me.”
It is pathetically insufficient; he knows it even as he says it. The words feel thin against the breadth of what presses behind them. And yet, they are all he has.
He looks at Robby then, properly. As much as he can feel Robby’s pulse thrum like a hummingbird beneath the hand that Jack has moved up to cup his neck, thumb resting against his carotid, he can feel in his own body the quickening in his heart, the way his throat closes over the weight of his words, his stomach alive with butterflies and bile, his chest fit to burst from the love and fear of it all. He feels, literally, both a kind of foreboding despair and a fragile, stubborn hope.
“Mikey,” he says, softer now, the name slipping out with an involuntary intimacy, belonging to a version of himself he does not often allow to surface. “I couldn’t live with myself, if something happened to you, I—”
Jack breaks off, not because the thought has concluded, but because it cannot be completed without becoming something else entirely—something too revealing, too final.
Robby exhales, and the sound of it is uneven, frayed at the edges.
“You’re not my keeper,” Robby says, and there is a steadiness to it that might, at first pass, resemble certainty, but Jack can see the fracture running through it, the way the words do not hold as firmly as they should. Robby’s eyes are bright—too bright, and fuck, those are tears. And then Jack blinks and realises— Oh fuck, when did he start crying? When did they become a pair of weepy old men? Jack has the sudden disorienting thought that he does not remember when this became possible, this quiet unraveling between them, this softening.
“I could be,” Jack says, more quickly than he intends, as though the refusal must be met immediately, before it has time to settle into fact. “If you’d let me.” He presses a kiss against Robby’s fastening pulse, almost willing it to slow, to calm. “I want to be.”
Robby shakes his head, just once, a small, almost helpless movement. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
Jack lets out a soft breath—not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh.
“I think I do,” he says. “Or enough of it.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No,” Jack agrees. “It’s not.”
For a moment, neither of them speaks.
The space between them feels charged now, not with tension exactly, but with something denser. The city moves on below them, indifferent, unchanged, and yet it feels impossibly distant from this—this narrow strip of roof where everything seems, suddenly, to matter too much.
Robby looks away first, as though the act of being seen so directly has become too much to sustain. His hand comes up, briefly, to his face—not quite wiping at his eyes, not quite concealing them either, but hovering there, as though unsure what to do with itself.
“You can’t—” he begins, and then stops, the rest of the sentence dissolving before it can take shape. “Jacky, I’m so fucked up. Look at my life. Look what a mess I make.”
Jack waits.
He has learned this, at least—that there are moments, for Robby, which cannot be hurried, which will close entirely if pressed too firmly. So he waits, though every instinct in him urges otherwise, and every passing second of his own silence breaks his own heart.
“You can’t make yourself responsible for me,” Robby says finally, and now there is something steadier in it, something closer to the truth he is trying to hold onto. “That’s not—fair. I lo—” Robby stops himself, screwing his eyes shut, his hands steepling on either side of the bridge of his nose as he takes one deep breath, and another. “You mean too much to me, for me to do that to you.”
Jack considers that, tilting his head slightly, as though examining the idea from an angle that might reveal its weakness.
“I’m not talking about responsibility,” he says, after a moment. “Not like that.”
Robby lets out a quiet, disbelieving breath. “Well, that’s exactly what it sounds like.”
“It’s not,” Jack insists, though his voice has softened again, the edge of argument giving way to something more careful. “It’s—”
He pauses, searching for the words.
“It’s choosing,” he says at last. “It’s me, choosing you. And—” He hesitates, just briefly, before continuing. “And letting you choose me back, if you wanted to.”
Robby’s gaze flickers, returning to Jack despite, Jack can see, his best efforts not to.
“That’s not the same as being kept,” he says.
Jack studies him, something almost gentle in the way he does it.
“No,” he says. “But it could be.”
A pause. Long enough that it might have become something else, had Jack not spoken again.
“You could keep me too, you know,” he adds, quieter now, but no less certain. “I’d let you.”
It lands differently, that.
Jack can see it—the way it unsettles something in Robby, the way it interrupts the careful structure he has been building, the logic that places him always as the one who leaves, the one who is left behind, but never the one who is trusted with anything that might be broken.
“You don’t—” Robby starts, and then falters.
Jack doesn’t look away.
“I do,” he says, simply.
Robby searches his face, as though looking for the point at which this might be revealed as exaggeration, or sentiment, or anything less than what it appears to be.
He doesn’t find it. He won’t ever find it, if he ever feels the need to look again, though if Jack gets this right, which God knows he’s going to try hard to do, he’ll make it so that Robby never has to second guess anything Jack says to him, again.
“You don’t know what that means,” Robby says, quieter now, and there is something in it that feels less like a refusal and more like a warning.
Jack nods, acknowledging the truth of it without retreating from what follows.
“I’ll let you show me. And I’ll keep choosing you, even after that.”
The words settle between them, heavier than anything that has come before, not because they demand anything immediate, but because they leave something open—something that cannot easily be closed again.
Robby exhales, slow and uneven, his gaze dropping briefly to the space between them before lifting again.
For a moment, it seems as though he might speak.
He doesn’t.
Instead, he leans forward, closing the distance that remains, and though he does not say yes, not in so many words, there is something in the way he holds himself—still, and close, and unwilling now to retreat—that feels, to Jack, like an answer.
For a heartbeat, Robby only looks at him, and then something in him gives.
Their mouths meet not gently but inevitably, as though the distance between them had always been a temporary fiction. Jack’s hand comes up to the back of Robby’s neck, not to force, or to claim, but to anchor, to make certain that this—this—is real and happening and not another near-miss they will later pretend was nothing. There is urgency in it, yes, but also a strange steadiness, as though in choosing this, they have both stepped into something that will hold. There is, beneath all that, what there always is, when they’re reunited after being apart; Oh, you. I’ve missed you.
Robby leans into Jack, and Jack melts into Robby, and there is no resistance in it, only a yielding that is not submission so much as trust, reluctant and hard-won.
When they part, it is not because they want to, but only because breath insists.
What a life, Jack thinks—what improbable, undeserved luck, that love should find him and Robby both again at this age, in this shape, at this hour, and ask so plainly to be kept. It has felt, the past few years when they’ve done this back and forth of seven week long dances, that what is between them is a thing too delicate to be trusted, as though it might vanish if named too directly; and yet here it is, again, stubborn and insistent, refusing to be mistaken for anything less.
What a thing, then, to be given the asking of it at all—please stay—not as placation, nor half-measure, but as someone who has weighed the cost of wanting and found himself willing to pay it. And that Robby can answer him, not out of obligation or fear or the thin tether of habit, but because he chooses to do so.
And more than that—because it astonishes him, still, to turn it over and find it true from the other side as well—that Robby might carry within himself that same quiet, unspoken plea: ask me to stay; give me a reason not to leave. That Robby might stand there, held between leaving and being kept, and find that he wants—desperately, almost painfully—to be persuaded, and persuaded by Jack. And that Jack gets to answer that plea just as surely.
It’s a rare thing, Jack thinks, to be met so exactly at the point of your own longing. To want, and to be wanted in the same breath; to hesitate, and be answered not necessarily with retreat but with a quiet insistence.
If Jack loved Robby less, perhaps he could speak of it more easily—reduce it to something orderly. If Robby mattered less to him, he could probably make a joke of it, or flatten it into something manageable. But as it is, the feeling resists neatness, and doesn’t stay still, instead it keeps catching at him, a thorn in his side. It spills over the edges of language, settles instead in the quiet spaces between them: in the way Jack does not look away, in the way Robby lingers when he might have gone.
What a life, to stand on the brink of departure and find, waiting there, not an ending but an answer.
They don’t say anything else; In the best possible way, there is nothing left to say.
Instead, they walk down the stairs together, Robby’s hand gripping Jack’s, as though he might fall or trip without it. And in this way they start to return to themselves, to how they always ever were, always ever will be, Jack leading, and Robby following.
And as they descend the many, many stairs back into the pitt, time seems to loosen its grip, to lengthen and soften at the edges. Jack feels it unfolding ahead of them, not in sharp increments but in a slow, continuous thread: they will go home; they will peel off the night and the sweat and the weight of everything that came before; they will stand under the hot rush of the shower, not speaking much, because they will not need to; he will order from the Chinese place Robby likes; they will eat like men starved and he will even splurge for the ridiculous IPA Robby likes, and when the other man sees this his smile will be so coy, so bashful, he will actually blush, and Jack will tease him about this, and Robby will threaten to steal his leg if he keeps it up, and they will both laugh, earnestly.
When they go further into the night, the sky pitch black outside the windows, Jack will slowly lead Robby by the hand once more, but this time to his bed, where he will take him apart, first with his hands, then with his mouth, with his fingers and then finally with his dick. Jack will give it to Robby exactly how he likes it, all slow and romantic, and he’ll stare into Robby’s eyes, the dark chocolate pools of them, and mid-thrust his will grab Robby by the face and hold him, still, and Jack above him will just say it plainly, and tell him: “I love you. You’re not allowed to leave. Not anywhere that I can’t follow. Do you copy, Mike?” And Robby will nod, slow, and then faster, and then he will grip Jack’s shoulders and he will say “Jack, I love you”, and it will be ridiculous, of course, so corny even his sixteen year old self would blanch, but that is how they will be; together, their voices like a choir as they say it over and over and over again “I love you, I love you, you fucker, don’t ever leave, I won’t leave if you don’t, I’ll follow you anywhere”. Afterwards, back to the shower they will go, and Robby, improbably kind, will return the favour and blow Jack just the way he likes it, and once they’re both cleaned up, they will fall into bed and remain there as though the rest of the world has briefly ceased to exist.
Later—much later, when the immediacy has settled into something quieter, something more sustainable—they will talk. Jack will make Robby talk, not just because he can but because he will offer himself up to Robby, will be truthful in all the damage and destruction he’s done both to himself, and others, and will not pull away at what Robby has done in a similar headspace, but instead will embrace it, will reassure him that it’s okay, he’s okay. And from this, this slow loosening of rules Robby has been unwittingly following, Robby will not skitter when they talk. And talk they will. About therapy. About the things that have gone unnamed for too long. About maybe diagnoses, maybe medicine. Jack will not push, not exactly, but he will not let Robby slip away either.
And then—then—Jack will learn him again, slowly, attentively, as though Robby is something both familiar and entirely new. Not to take, not to dismantle, but to understand, to map the places where he is most himself and the places where he has learned to hide.
He will keep Robby safe.
Not in the way of promises that pretend the world cannot intrude, but in the smaller, more difficult way: by staying, by asking, by refusing to turn away.
By wanting him, plainly, and saying so, and meaning it.