Archive of Our Own

“You’ll need your own toothbrush, but you can use my stuff for everything else. I have extra toothpaste, towels, things like that.”

“Sick.” Avery stuffed the last of his tub of Aquaphor into the suitcase, then stepped back to admire his work. His bedroom was mostly stowed; he just needed to remember to pack his toothbrush in the morning. He’d already texted the gym owner about tomorrow’s shift, and the restaurant, staffed largely by seasonal hires and the chef’s teenage daughter, only really expected him to show up if he called in beforehand. 

A part of him, a teensy part, whispered that it might be overkill to pack two overnight bags and a suitcase for a three-day weekend trip. It was easy to smother in the face of just how little he owned and just how much he used what little he owned, though. 

“Okay. I have to get my laundry out of the dryer, but… talk to you later? Talk to you tomorrow,” Derek corrected himself. It sounded like he was sitting in bed, or had wrapped himself in cellophane; he crinkled as he moved. 

“Talk to you tomorrow. In person.” A firework of giddiness burst in Avery’s chest. He had to sit down, criss-cross applesauce, right there in the middle of his packing frenzy, and press his knuckles to his cheeks. “Oh my god. I’m really— I’m so excited. How am I gonna sleep? I just got, like, crazy adrenaline.”

“Well, you could start by leaving the call,” Derek pointed out, not matter-of-fact at all. He didn’t own a mic, so his tone was always a tossup, but Avery could tell that Derek was smiling. He could always tell, when Derek was smiling. There was just this way his voice would lilt, like it had been put in a pan and swirled with butter. Avery could almost imagine him sitting at his kitchen table, or on his couch, balancing his phone on his leg, cradling his cheek in one hand, listening with his eyes half-closed to the sound of Avery’s voice on the other end. 

“You could bring me with you to get your laundry,” said Avery. “Pocket Avery. Pocket mayo.”

“Pocket mayo,” repeated Derek, carefully. 

“Hm. Poor word choice, maybe. Pocket mayo is dangerous. Like, what if it explodes?”

“How in the world does mayo explode? Is this a commentary on mayo, or on your pockets?”

“Well,” Avery said, trying to sound diplomatic and mostly failing, “I was thinking about mayo packets. You know, like at a deli. You have delis, right?”

“Ithaca isn’t that out of touch with the modern world,” Derek said drily.

“I believe you. It’s just, whenever you talk about it, you make it sound medieval. You guys don’t even have trains.”

“We don’t need trains. You can bike from one end of the Commons to the other in fifteen minutes.”

“You’re really selling me on this trip, dude.”

Derek’s voice suddenly quietened. He sounded as placid as he ever did when he asked, “Are you still sure about visiting?” which meant, of course, that he was deadly serious and whatever he was feeling was something he wasn’t comfortable naming. 

These were things Avery knew about Derek, now. Just as he knew the cadence of Derek’s voice when he smiled he also knew that Derek listened without speaking so that he could ask long thoughtful questions afterwards and that Derek’s thoughts drew concentric circles around an idea as he puzzled it over and over and that Derek loved to learn about anything and everything: Minecraft creepypastas, running shoes, facetious Twitter drama, Javascript, how to drain a toilet, what kinds of jarred pasta sauce Avery found personally offensive. 

Avery also knew that Derek was two weeks out of the hospital and sometimes subsided into a smooth blank silence that was difficult to close Avery’s fingers around, as if it had a quicksilver surface. They had only been talking for a month, but New Year’s Eve alone had felt like ten thousand years, so really it was ten thousand years and a month that they’d known each other, and it didn’t always feel like Avery had the right to feel the ways he did, but he did, so he just had to make peace with it.

And by make peace with it, he meant he decided three days ago that he was going to go see Derek in person.

“Yes,” said Avery, lifting his phone out of the mayhem of clothes on his bedroom floor. It was suddenly imperative that Derek understood that Avery had never been more sure of anything in his life. “I’m a thousand percent positive. I mean,” he remembered that he’d sprung the plans on Derek on very short notice, and he was definitely putting Derek out at least a little bit, “if you’re okay with me staying at your place? Like, I’m sure I can find a hotel or an Airbnb or something.”

“Don’t. You can stay with me.”

Derek’s voice took on a steel edge. It was eerily similar, actually, to the tone Avery had been using not a second before, and Derek must have realized it, too, because he went quiet in an understated, bemused way. Then he chuckled.

“I really need to get my laundry now,” he said.

“Well, fine. If you have to,” Avery replied, aiming wildly for coyness. It didn’t come out coy at all. 

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” said Derek, very softly.

“Yeah,” said Avery, “yeah. See you tomorrow.”

Upstate New York turned out to be just as liminal as everyone on Reddit said it was. It was only a couple hundred miles from Avery’s place to Derek’s, but the last leg was miles and miles of barren hills furred by toothpick trees, with only the occasional tiny municipality for company. Forty minutes of thawing postwinter gray as far as the eye could see. It was about as opposite from New York City as you could get, except for the weather. 

The drive would have been objectively nicer if Avery were talking to Derek to pass the time, but it felt stupid to call when he was literally driving up to see him to talk in person in real life with their real life bodies that they had, so Avery resisted the urge. Besides, there wasn’t much to say — just passing observations of the shape of the land and the colors of the trees, and the occasional glance he got directly into somebody’s living room when he sped by the squat ramshackle houses that dotted the endless road. 

Driving into town subsequently had the emotional impact of driving off a cliff — it really did feel like someone had airlifted a well-off suburb and transplanted it into the middle of the foresty rural nowheres. Avery kept missing green lights because he was gawking around at the balconies, and the boba shops, and every sidewalk packed with college students toting beat-up Jansport backpacks or designer fashion with absolutely zero in-between. Culture shock wasn’t the word.

Google Maps herded Avery down a road that peeled away from what seemed to be the edge of the campus. There wasn’t really a good place to park, so Avery rolled to a stop next to a parked car, turned on his hazards, and prayed he wouldn’t get fined as he pulled up Derek’s Discord profile one-handed.

“Hey it’s your Uber driver here… Am outside,” said Avery the moment Derek picked up.

Derek paused. The pause stretched into five seconds, then ten.

Avery sighed. “You don’t know that meme, do you.”

“I was looking it up. It says it’s ten years old.”

“I drove three hours straight to be here in person,” Avery said loudly, “and you are arguing with me about my taste in memes.”

“Be right out.”

Derek disconnected from the call, so Avery left his phone in the cupholder and emerged from his car into the frigid air of Ithaca, New York. It was a nice day, actually; the ominous gray pall over the sky that had followed Avery most of the way out of Pennsylvania had thinned into pale white folds in tremulous blue, and though the trees that lined the sidewalks were bare and spindly, they were no longer bearded with icicles as they were in the picture Derek had sent him a few mornings ago. Everything smelled fresh, watery. 

The crunch of approaching footsteps broke Avery from his reverie. He turned entirely on reflex, and forgot in the process to be nervous.

The guy standing on the other side of Avery’s car, hands loose at his sides, was wearing a hoodie and jeans under a puffy knee-length winter coat. The hoodie read CORNELL DAD in college font and was so faded from washing it was nearly pink. He wore wire-rimmed glasses. His hair was dark brown and a little long, hovering uncertainly around his neck. His face was all angles: terse and sharp and structured, a regiment of features.

But he looked at Avery and then his whole face softened, his whole body, and his hands fluttered briefly against his sides. He opened his mouth, and as he did his gaze dropped a few inches onto the hood of the car. His eyes were indistinct at the edges, dark and gentle.

“Hi, Avery,” said Derek softly.

Avery rounded the car in three strides and threw his arms around Derek. He didn’t think about doing it, or intend to do it, it just happened, it roared out of his body and he was just the messenger. Derek’s shoulders felt impossibly thin against him, insubstantial as tissue paper, but he smelled like spicy food and Old Spice deodorant and he was real. He was so real that Avery could hold him, a realization that had wings. This was the kind of euphoria they talked about in the Bible, probably.

Derek shivered, so briefly and finely Avery thought he imagined it, and then his hands rose to cup Avery’s elbows, slid upward, and fit themselves over the juts of Avery’s shoulder blades. Avery could hear the smile in his voice as he said, “You found me.”

“Yes,” Avery agreed, just this side of overwhelmed, “yes I did, but it was way easier this time. Thank you, Google, for the Maps.”

“Google Maps could not have saved you if I didn’t send you my address.”

“Okay, well, I would have found you anyway,” retorted Avery nonsensically, and was not at all prepared for the way Derek’s hands flinched on his back, in a way that drew him infinitesimally closer, pushing his nose momentarily against the side of Derek’s neck. The motion was simultaneously too intimate and a vast understatement. 

When Derek finally stepped back his face was just slightly pinker than before. “Statistically speaking, you probably could have found me eventually,” he said. 

That was a ringing endorsement if Avery ever heard one. He beamed, not quite able to contain it. Derek’s eyes lowered, and he smiled again at the hood of the car.

“You can drop your things off in my place before we head out. Do you need a hand?”

It took, absurdly, two trips back and forth to ferry all of Avery’s stuff into Derek’s apartment, and he did end up needing a hand. His overnight bags were unwieldy with shoes and toiletries, and when Derek tugged Avery’s suitcase experimentally, one of the wheels popped off and rolled morosely into a storm drain before either of them could grab it. Since Derek’s apartment didn’t have an elevator, the suitcase was a team effort.

Derek’s apartment wasn’t particularly small or big. It had a brown pullout couch and a fridge with lists taped all over it and a checkered blue rug under the coffee table in the living room. Avery dropped his bag at the foot of the couch and began to rummage for a pair of walking shoes, throwing surreptitious glances around. It looked like any apartment, a little on the bare side, but fastidiously clean, like Derek had been tidying up until the very last moment. There were no plates in the sink or stray cups on random surfaces, only a glass half full of water on the kitchen counter.

The door to the bedroom was closed. Avery felt his lip catch between his teeth. He put his head down and began pawing through his shoes in earnest, pointedly not thinking about anything.

“I thought we could walk around campus,” Derek was saying, perched very still at the edge of the table. This was something Derek did with his body, Avery was realizing, not just in Minecraft, not just in conversation — the thing where he stopped where he stood and navigated, slowly, patiently, through the workings of his mind. “And then we could get dinner, or bring home takeout. I’ll cook tomorrow, but we’ll have to eat out tonight. I forgot to get groceries.”

“That sounds good. I mean, I’ve only ever heard of Cornell. I have no idea what it’s like.”

“That’s probably for the best. There isn’t much to do here. But I did put together an itinerary.”

Avery blinked. “Whoa. Okay, hit me. What’s on the agenda?”

A rudimentary campus tour, a detour for toiletries if necessary, and then takeout. Tomorrow, pending their wake-up time, breakfast or brunch followed by a hike out in the gorges or around the lake or maybe both, and groceries, and dinner. On the last day, breakfast and the Commons, so Avery could weigh himself down with as many souvenirs as his heart desired before he headed back home.

Something was fluttering like a scrap of lace in the cup of Avery’s chest. Derek wasn’t quite looking at him; his gaze was pinned to the ceiling at an angle, a far cry from the level intensity of being stared down by a Minecraft skin in full golden armor, but there was something about his voice — a low, dry scrape, very even and uninflected — that was so perfectly like his way of typing, and so perfectly Derek, that when Derek glanced at him and his lips twitched it took Avery several seconds to realize it was because he was grinning like an idiot.

He hunched to jam his feet into his shoes. “Yeah, that sounds like a great time,” he said brightly, fumbling over the laces. “Whatever works. I’ll go anywhere with you!”

That last bit, unpolished, unhemmed, rolled out of his mouth like a bowling ball too heavy for his hands. Derek went still again, but not like he did earlier, to think out loud; his mouth was an unsteady line now, slightly open, and his eyes were bright behind his glasses.

Then the corner of his mouth ticked. And he said, “Well, we can start with Rand Hall.”

That first day they spent strolling around the vast dignified expanse of Cornell University. Avery had almost no frame of reference for universities in general, but Cornell felt like the Platonic ideal of one, what Avery pictured instinctively when people talked about college: lots of dark climbing ivy, stone brick and turrets and towers, lawns cut into four diamonds that Derek kept calling “quads.” It had an astonishing number of libraries for an astonishing number of different disciplines, with very specific call numbers and arrangements of books, precariously perched shelves with nothing but wrought iron rolling ladders to reach them and that one weird floating library that had grated walkways over open air and made Avery really nervous. When they passed by one of the churches, which Derek assured him was very gothic with its pointed roof and elaborate stained glass windows, organ music floated out, two chords and then a pause and then an aggrieved dissonant clang that let Avery know a student was practicing. The walkways would be empty, and then suddenly heaving with people as the bell towers tolled on the quarter-hours, and then they’d be empty again. 

Through it all, Derek kept up intermittent but insightful commentary. Avery already knew that Derek was smart — he had the sort of mind to solve a cipher stack in seventeen minutes with a pen and paper, and to extrapolate the mechanics of a Game of Life and then proceed to trick another player using the rules he himself had just discovered — but it was another thing entirely to be talking to him for a long time, just exploring places that were completely new to Avery, and the measured, thoughtful way Derek would explain the history of the building, or describe the architecture, or even just say that this was the main frat party location, was— a lot. 

It was also hard not to notice that Derek kept a markedly sedate pace that didn’t quite match the way he walked. He kept shuffling awkwardly when his heel touched down, as if he was used to taking bigger strides than he was. He had his hood flipped up, squashing his dark hair into his forehead, but even that couldn’t quite hide how washed-out he was. He looked like someone had turned the saturation dial down on him. 

Derek didn’t notice Avery noticing, or if he did, then he didn’t say so. He took Avery to a building whose name Avery immediately and guiltily forgot, one with an oxidized statue out front and whose facade looked kind of like a scaled-down White House, and led him through the sun-drowned main area where students were sitting with their heads down over their laptops, and up the stairs, through a cramped and winding hallway that smelled powerfully of Lysol, and paused before a closed door with a tiny window to say, “And that’s my carrel.”

“That’s your what now?”

Derek’s hands had been slung in his pockets; one emerged now with a key on the end of a lanyard, and he fitted it into the lock. The door creaked open.

“My office,” said Derek.

Avery felt his mouth drop open. “Your— hang on, you said you were a student!”

“I am. The department has enough space for the grad students to get their own rooms.”

“Whoa.” Derek stepped back to let Avery peer in. It was only a little bigger than Avery’s bathroom back home. Most of the square footage was claimed by Derek’s massive two-tier desk, which took up two walls, and a calendar, which took up the other one. There was a computer and two spiral notebooks on the desk, and a digital clock that was frozen at 1:22 PM, and the calendar was open to November of last year.

“It’s nice,” said Avery.

“That’s a generous assessment,” said Derek. 

Avery glanced over his shoulder. Derek’s hands had returned to his pockets, and he was facing the other way, down the hall, but Avery could still see the line of his mouth, a very slight curve, on the corner of his face. 

“I’m on academic leave this semester,” he told the hallway. “I’ll come back in the fall to continue working on my thesis. But I still have keycard access to all of the buildings. And the office.” He blinked, then in a different tone of voice said, “I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow.”

“Sorry?” The change in subject was abrupt and jarring. Usually Avery could at least feel along the thread of Derek’s logic. “Um — okay?”

“I just remembered. I couldn’t reschedule it in time. I’m sorry. You don’t have to come with me.”

“Dude, hold on, back up.” Avery scooted backward out of Derek’s office. Derek was still looking resolutely down the hall. He had this expression on his face, impossible to describe, yet the affected flatness somehow incongruous, that made Avery want to make a grab for his hand.

Avery did not do that, because boundaries. Instead, he asked, “When’s the appointment?”

“3:15,” Derek said. Hesitantly, “Avery, it—”

“We can see the gorges, and then go to your appointment, and then get groceries. I’ll drive us,” Avery said firmly, then backpedaled, “I mean, if it’s not, like… if that’s okay. For me to be there. I won’t go in with you or anything if you don’t want, I just—”

“That’s okay.”

Avery stopped. Derek’s eyes were on his, wide behind his glasses, and for the first time Avery noticed that they weren’t really black — they were brown, rich, almost amber where the light reflected off his irises. In the sun they might be gold. 

“It,” Derek began. He did something complicated with his hands that Avery couldn’t quite parse, because he was so focused on staring into Derek’s eyes. 

Derek’s expression eased out of its stark, strict flatness. He looked soft again, and it occurred to Avery that this was how Derek smiled without smiling: with his eyes, with the warm not-quite-there edges of his voice as he said, “It would be nice if you were there.”

Dinner, they decided, would be Chinese takeout. “The best one in the area,” Derek assured him over the folded paper menu he handed Avery.

Avery squinted down at the menu. Derek had annotated it meticulously with two different kinds of pens. Some of the items were crossed out, not because Derek didn’t like them, but because they were no longer on the menu. One or two were underlined in red. “Too spicy for me,” Derek said of those. Enchanted, Avery asked, “How high is your spice tolerance?” and Derek explained that his spiciness metric was the number of times he had to get up to refill his glass of milk over the course of his meal. 

They settled on two of Derek’s favorites which Avery had never heard of, and pork dumplings, in case Avery didn’t like either. Derek fished two glasses out of his cupboard and handed them to Avery, then began to pull the narrow wooden table away from the wall next to the kitchen counter while Avery pored over beverage options.

“I have juice,” Derek said breathlessly, “and milk, but I don’t know if it’s expired.”

“It is,” said Avery.

“Ah. I’ll pour it out.”

“We can get more tomorrow,” said Avery, thinking of the grocery trip, and what kind of seasonings Derek liked, and whether Derek was one of those fearless maniacs who drank cow’s milk straight. He didn’t notice that Derek’s movements had ceased, that Derek was looking at his back, one hand planted on the tabletop, his fingers curled around a spoon.

By the time the food arrived Derek had settled on water and Avery, because he was not proud, on apple juice. “It’s my favorite,” he said, not defensively but not not defensively either, and Derek just gave him a blank look and said, “I know,” which, yeah, okay, maybe Avery should have seen that coming.

The hand-pulled noodles, hot and peppery and giving off clouds of spicy steam, were hilariously good. The beef thing Derek had heartily endorsed, and that Avery had agreed with just on principle because the menu described it as “tingly,” was even better, and the dumplings were so soft they pooled in Avery’s spoon. Everything was deeply savory and warmed him from the inside out. He hadn’t registered how cold it was until he was sitting at the table with Derek, bowls and chopsticks and napkins and tiny dishes of rice all crammed together, and their chairs pushed so far in that every time Avery shifted back to drink his apple juice his knees knocked into Derek’s under the table. He stopped apologizing after the fifth time it happened. Derek didn’t say a word.

Somehow, despite having talked for four straight hours while wandering over the hills and rocky valleys of Cornell campus, they didn’t run out of things to talk about. Avery had worried, distantly, in the back of his mind, whether the trip would fix something that wasn’t broken; if the long-distance Discord calls had provided a necessary buffer, if they weren’t good at taking up the same space. 

Sitting with Derek, teary-eyed over a peppercorn he’d accidentally chomped, it was impossible to remember being worried. Derek was laughing with his eyes and padding over to the fridge to retrieve the juice jug, and talking about how capsaicin convinced your tongue it was actually on fire, and Avery felt kind of drunk, not just because of his burning tongue. There was something about the wholeness of the moment. He was here, in Derek’s kitchen, with Derek, and Derek was pouring him more apple juice, and Avery’s taste buds were on fire, his cheeks.

Derek elbowed out a tiny square of space between his chopsticks and the demolished plate of noodles and set down the notepad that had been taped to the fridge. “I’m going to write down a grocery list,” he informed Avery, flipping to a fresh page.

“Tha’ soun’s goo’,” said Avery thickly, lapping at the apple juice so that it hit as much surface area on his tongue as possible.

Derek tapped the tip of his pen to the paper for a moment, then began to write. He scrawled quickly and absentmindedly, and Avery noticed that he would skip letters, then have to go back and scrunch them back in, as if his mind were going faster than his hands could follow.

By the time Avery could think anything other than ow hot ow ow hot again Derek had gotten to the bottom of the page. He tapped it again, then slid the notepad to Avery. “Peer review,” he said, when Avery glanced questioningly at him.

milk, read the notepad, but without a dot over the i, so it looked like mılk. apple ȷuıce / rıce / eggplant / bok choy / eggs ½ dozen / peanut butter. 

“Do you want bread?” asked Derek, watching Avery closely. Avery realized he had been mouthing along to each item, skimming his fingers over it. The dotless letters were doing something funny to his heart.

“I mean, are you gonna eat it? Like, I don’t want to put you out of your way and eat one— one—” Avery lifted his pointer finger in demonstration, “—slice of bread, and then you’re left with just, like, a whole loaf that you have to kill on your own.”

“It’s bread,” said Derek.

“So that is just not an answer at all,” said Avery.

“I would eat it eventually.”

“But if you don’t usually eat bread, I mean—”

“Avery,” Derek interrupted, sounding not at all annoyed or exasperated. Avery lifted his eyes from the slanted dotless letters on the notepad and found that Derek was looking at him with this brimming, unbridled fondness, a look Avery had caught glimpses of all day and finally had a name for, how it brushed down the harshest edges of Derek’s features. 

“It’s bread,” Derek said again, like that explained everything. “We’ll get the kind you like, and I’ll finish it eventually. Bread keeps well in the freezer.”

A hundred half-formed ideas flew through Avery’s brain in a crush of feathers. They were mostly along the lines of Does sourdough have a longer expiration date and What if I got, like, Wonder Bread? Would he judge me for getting Wonder Bread?? but one thing that emerged from the flock with the clarity of a bugle call was, if he doesn’t like it I could finish it, and somehow that struck him as— as a dangerous thought. Not dangerous the way they had both encountered truly dangerous thoughts, informational radium, stuff that was actively detrimental to your health to know and think about, but just… a nonstarter. Or the teetering risk of asking for too much without realizing you’re asking for too much.

Derek was still gazing expectantly at him. Avery, with a degree of steadiness he should have been awarded an Oscar for, said, “Banger, I’ll put whole grain on the list.”

The raised platform with its gilt beveled edges. The dais lifted in supplication. A perfect confection of a final resting place, so long as he was fast enough, so long as he struck like a viper. There was no need to outwit. Only to outpace.

“Avery.”

It was odd; the words hung heavily, typographed midair, as if they had their own gravity. Wishful thinking? He wasn’t sure. His wrists felt slippery in their sockets. His fists a mockery.

“Avery.”

He strafed at the approach. He could be utterly untouchable when he wanted to be, and they were in his home turf: platform over void, eyes in the sky. Spectator sport was where he excelled, the only place where he excelled. He could do this. He would ensure that worthiness lived another day.

“Avery.”

And then he failed, again; he was tricked, again; and he was betrayed, again, pitching headfirst into the gullet of safety, and all that was left of the proof of his inadequacy was the siren-red screen and the horrible pulse in his temple that screamed YOU DIED, YOU DIED, YOU DIED—

“Avery.”

Avery shot upright at a ninety-degree angle, so fast and so hard he almost slingshotted himself over the edge into the dark. He made a string of vowel noises and scrabbled until his fingers found purchase on something— hard— fabric. The arm of a couch.

Realization struck him like lightning: he was on Derek’s couch, where he’d curled up with two blankets and a pillow after they’d washed their plates, knocking elbows at the sink, and after five breakneck rounds of Overcooked on Derek’s Switch. Sometime in the night he had kicked off both blankets, because he’d been asleep. He’d been dreaming. 

His spit stuck when he tried to swallow.

“Avery.”

The apartment was pitch black, but the blinds had been fiddled around so the slats were horizontal and let in thin white strips of light from the lamp poles outside. Several of these stripes stole over the body next to Avery’s, standing beside the couch, and limned him in silver. When Avery chanced a peek through his fingers, it was the whites of Derek’s eyes that glinted at him in the gloom.

“You were having a nightmare,” said Derek, without needing Avery to explain.

Was it a nightmare? It wasn’t a good dream, necessarily. Avery remembered feeling smoothed over, blank and chilled as a pool of water, glossed and gelid and utterly tranquil, and the horror of the words in the book on the lectern hadn’t so much as touched him. It was just like, he was realizing, it was just like how he had felt staring at his screen, all of his senses dulled into useless nubs, as he ferried one Minecraft flower after another into the flat scrubby stretch of grass outside the church.

“Avery,” Derek said again, and Avery realized with another start that his tongue was moving, and he’d actually been commentating on what he saw with a frantic, shrill edge to his voice he didn’t recognize at all. He had never heard himself sound that way before, at least not recently.

“Don’t apologize,” Derek said. Avery clamped his mouth shut, and squeezed out a meaningless syllable from between his lips. His chest was thrumming from the inside out, his ribs were probably vibrating from the force of it. He pressed both of his palms flat to his chest and could feel the twin wings of his collarbone shudder.

A new weight appeared on Avery’s arm. His fingertips were numb, so it took him a few seconds of concentration before he understood what was going on. Derek’s head, on his shoulder, not leaning, but just held against, his temple to the bone in Avery’s shoulder, so close Avery could feel the heat of Derek’s breath through his sweatshirt, and Derek was talking, slowly and patiently, about… about ancient Greek philosophy. Something about atoms, about how a guy once said that everything had to be made out of an infinite number of unchanging things, that the universe existed because of those unchanging things, because without order everything would be destroyed. Something about how the universe was real. 

“You’re here, Avery,” Derek was saying. “You’re here.”

In the morning Derek poured Avery three glasses of apple juice and took down the toaster from where it was collecting dust on top of the fridge.

“Okay, now I really feel weird about putting bread on the shopping list,” said Avery, watching Derek drag a finger through the thick gray layer that frosted its surface. Derek made a face that was second cousin to a grimace and placed the toaster very gingerly in the sink.

“I’ll deal with it later,” he said in response to Avery’s skeptical look. “It’s fine. There’s a bagel shop down the street. We can take sandwiches to the lake.”

It was a whole new kind of a lot to have Derek in the passenger’s seat of Avery’s car, a spot usually reserved for his gym bag or his delivery order. Derek was about as obtrusive, sitting serenely with his gaze fixed to the horizon and his arms tucked loosely around his beat-up canvas bag, but every once in a while he piped up to point out a feature of the landscape, which rushed past them in sheets of gray and white, and bare brown branches grasping at the coarse bluish sky. Whenever he spoke, Avery thought about how he’d woken up that morning tucked carefully under his blankets, and Derek had been asleep on the floor next to the couch with his head lolled on his own arm, breathing slow and soft, his curled hands inches from Avery’s nose. 

The parking lot they rolled into was mostly scrubby yellow grass, but the ground just across the street had bunched up its shoulders, and then, behind the trees, stood straight up at full height. As Derek scrounged his things together, Avery stopped to crane his neck and gape. 

It was true what they said: Ithaca was gorges. Topographic maps just couldn’t do justice to the way the massive shelves peeled away from each other like they’d been pared with a hot knife, and the abrupt drop down into a flat lapping wend of river, water that rippled over white patches of stone and gurgled down to the next story and spread itself thin again. Derek paused over one of the muddy banks, gazed over the offset riverbed, then said, “Water level’s lower than usual,” and continued leading them deeper into the valley.

They eventually made their way to a stone bench that was perched precariously at the edge of the riverbank. It was a little frosty, and Avery was wearing jeans, but he didn’t say a word. He’d brought literally every pair of pants he owned. He could change after they got groceries.

Derek had made them coffee in a thermos before they left. He owned a Moka pot, a tall slender one with two chambers, and that morning Avery had watched, mesmerized, as twin runnels of thick dark liquid streamed out of the spout. Derek produced the thermos alongside two travel cups and carefully poured out equal amounts, lifting the cups to his eye line after each pour.

Avery’s sandwich was chicken salad and butter lettuce on rye; Derek got a blueberry bagel with a fried egg, and little packets of plain and strawberry cream cheese on the side. When he brought out a plastic knife, Avery said, “Dude.”

“What?” 

Avery gestured. Derek was gingerly lifting the lacy edge of the fried egg with his fingertip and slathering strawberry cream cheese onto the untoasted bagel beneath it. 

“This,” Avery said, waving his hand vaguely in Derek’s direction, “is… it’s a lot.”

“It’s just a bagel and egg.”

“I mean a lot in, like, the figurative sense. I’m overwhelmed.”

“I have a sweet tooth,” said Derek.

“I don’t know if sweet tooth really covers— y’know what, I’m not gonna yuck your yum. It looks delicious,” said Avery, bravely and not at all doubtfully. Derek gave him a long shrewd look from the sides of his eyes, then took a big bite of his culinary war crime.  

They subsided into silence, broken only by the occasional rustle of wax paper and the water in the river, which was burbling in a very quiet self-conscious sort of way. Avery kept sneaking glances at Derek, framed by tree trunks and frozen dirt, chewing peaceably, and feeling something tucked carefully inside of him lift the top of his head away.

There was something frank and cracked-open about sitting together in the brisk winter chill surrounded by only rocks and trees for company, warming their hands around mugs of coffee and the sandwiches in their laps. It was a totally different ease than heckling each other over video games, or nagging from the couch as Derek fussed at something in the kitchen: routines that could be performed over Discord call. You couldn’t hike into the gorges and watch a robin wing cautiously over the flat white stones that carpeted the riverbed through a Discord call. 

Derek’s hands were curled loosely on his knees, around his sandwich. Avery thought about that, and then stopped thinking about it.

“It’s my first time coming back,” Derek said suddenly, “since what happened.”

A bird called overhead. “Since January?”

“Yeah. Oh— no, before that, actually. Finals.” The muddy tips of Derek’s shoes eddied over the tangled roots and rock. He crossed one ankle over the other, leaned back, and braced his hands behind him on the bench to tip his face toward the sky. “There’s a time during the fall when it’s too cold for the locals, and not scenic enough for hikers. That’s usually when I come. When it’s quiet. When there’s nobody here but me.”

It was quiet now; the bird had stopped crying, and the only sound was the wind, chill and scraping, moving sinuously through the branches. The sky white and cloudless overhead, the water still. They could have been the only two people in the world.

“It’s nice to be back here with you,” Derek said, and lifted the atrocity of a bagel to his mouth like he hadn’t just shifted the entire world two inches to the right under Avery’s feet.

This was, Avery was understanding, one of Derek’s things. His capacity for delivering devastating statements like he was bringing a plate to a table. Avery had liked hearing him talk over the phone, his rare laughs, his thoughtful hums and silences, but this moment, this bench, was so totally different from the phone calls, they might have well existed on a different planet. All that Avery could manage to get out was, “It’s really nice. To be here with you. I mean, I’m also happy.” He hadn’t even known that’s what Derek really meant until he said it out loud, and then Derek was chuckling softly, shaking his head, and Avery knew it was true.

Derek was looking at him. His eyes were soft behind his glasses, his choppy hair. “That’s very you,” he said, “giving it a name.”

“It is?” Avery supposed he was more in touch with his emotions than the average twenty-something gamer, but maybe that was stereotyping. He just figured that it was a quirk of Being Avery, the awkward fumble for words that got projected directly from his brain out of his mouth. 

Derek’s gaze dropped to his half-eaten bagel. Turning it over in his hands so the less-toasted side faced the sky, he said, “I have never known and never will know anyone like you.”

Avery opened his mouth, and then closed it again. “Uh yeah same dude” didn’t seem quite right. He was thinking of abject uselessness in the face of eldritch madness, of how he fell for every last trick in the book, of how he hadn’t even been able to move — and how in spite of all of that, the twenty-four-hour nightmare and tasting blood on the backs of his teeth when the color came back into his vision, he had been happy. 

It was an inexplicable and impossible feeling and it felt taboo to even reflect passingly upon it. Avery didn’t have the words for any of this — he wasn’t Derek, firing on cylinders he hadn’t even come equipped with. Avery was just Avery, and his hobby was Minecraft PvP, and he was held together with spit and glue and the light that had blazed to life inside of him on that terrible endless night when Derek’s little Minecraft character looked at him, and trusted him.

“Sorry,” Derek said. His expression didn’t change, but the octave of his voice had dropped off a cliff. “Maybe that was a lot.”

“No, it wasn’t a lot at all,” Avery hurried to say. “Just— I didn’t know how to make it sound right.” He cleared his throat. “Same. You know. For the record.”

Derek said, totally nonsensically, “I’m confounding the data.”

“What?”

The bewilderment in Avery’s voice finally made Derek look up from flipping his nominal sandwich over and over like the first student in class to finish the test. He took in Avery’s face. His eyebrows did something complicated, and he said, gentler, “You don’t have to say it back.”

“No, I really, really do.”

“I wasn’t looking for reciprocation.”

“Well, you have it,” said Avery stubbornly, now not only out of honesty but on sheer principle. His third-best skill, after Minecraft PvP and being in touch with his emotions, was picking hills to die on. “You’re the best person I know. You’re smart and you’re thoughtful and you’re—” he fumbled, almost dropped the sentence, and felt his inability to do words good as keenly as a death in the family, but Derek was sitting there and not quite looking Avery in the eyes and Avery had picked his hill, dang it. “You threw your life away to— to save someone. Who does that? You, that’s who.”

He’d reached out to poke Derek in the arm before he could think better of it. Derek startled so hard Avery jolted too, and he had a moment to feel a pinch of regret before Derek did something extraordinary. 

Avery had kept coming back to the terseness of Derek’s face; how if Avery didn’t know him like he did he might have thought, walking past him on the street, that he was a cold and sort of distant person. His brusque way of speaking, how there seemed to be a keyboard shortcut for each expression in his regular rotation. Even a handful of words in and you’d know that he was a huge nerd, but you wouldn’t know it through a passing glance.

There was none of that absent opacity in Derek’s face now. His face flowered like a rosebud in summer, the petals peeling away from its heart. The bow of his top lip swept into a curve. Someone, pretty rudely, doused the placid lake of Avery’s stomach with gasoline and set it on fire.

And then the whole blown-open expression dropped off of Derek like water. His hand darted to his bare left wrist. 

“What?” Avery demanded, struck cold. “What is it?”

Derek said, very calmly, “What time is it?”

Avery blinked, and took in the position of the sun, and then promptly scrambled for his phone. His sandwich slipped off his legs, and there was a split second of complete chaos as he dove for his sandwich and Derek made a bid for his phone and they got hopelessly Tom-and-Jerried.

Derek surfaced first, Avery’s phone clutched in his fist. “2:47,” he said, audibly dismayed.

“Oh crap,” said Avery. He launched to his feet and started throwing everything into Derek’s bag, stuffing the leftover triangle of his sandwich into his mouth. 

“It’s a thirty-minute drive,” said Derek. The evenness of his voice was totally at odds with his stretched-wide eyes.

Avery hiked up the cuffs of his jeans, double-knotted his shoelaces, and said, “I’ll make it twenty-nine.”

They skidded into the parking lot at precisely 3:13, and Derek tore out of the car at a speed Avery did not even remotely consider Derek to be capable of until that exact moment. By the time he power-walked into the waiting room, Derek had already sat down in one of the chairs past the reception desk, a clipboard in his lap and worrying a pen between his teeth.

“It’ll only be thirty minutes or so,” he said hoarsely. Avery unscrewed the cap of the plastic water bottle Derek had left in the cupholder and tipped it toward Derek. “Thank you.”

“Sure thing. Hey, do you have the shopping list on you?”

Derek produced the note from his pocket, slightly crumpled. Avery smoothed the corners of the paper down with his thumbs. Derek had added whole graın bread and raısın bran to the list between today and yesterday. Avery stroked a finger over the word bread and tried, and failed, to be normal about the dotless letters.

“Derek Hutchins?” A freckled nurse with microbangs was poking her head out of the door. Derek looked up, one hand coming with it to clasp the clipboard to his chest. He looked — Avery felt all the hairs stand up on the backs of his arms — he looked odd and waxy just then, in the normal light of the waiting room, the plain and soothing green of the walls. His general air of restiveness had toughened into a crystallized shell. It made him utterly alien to Avery specifically.

When Derek stood up to take a step toward the examination room, Avery, on a wild whim, stole out a hand and snatched at Derek’s sleeve.

Derek glanced back at him. “Avery?”

“I— I’ll be here,” Avery said lamely, resisting the urge to draw his hand away. There was literally no one else in the waiting room aside from an older woman who was captivated by something on her paleolithic iPhone 4, but he felt weirdly self-conscious, which was wild considering he’d never been a shy person and wasn’t planning to start now.

Derek’s expression did… something. His fingers curled around the edge of his soft frayed sleeve. The very tip of his pinky brushed against Avery’s knuckles where they’d snagged the fabric. 

“I’ll be right back,” said Derek. He vanished, quietly, after the nurse with the microbangs. 

Avery sat back down in the hard plastic chair. Actually, he more sort of fell backward into it. His knees had turned to jelly. The older woman glanced up, nodded genially at him, and returned to her phone with a little smile on her lipsticky mouth. 

Derek emerged in the promised thirty minutes, rolling down the sleeves of his shirt. He looked the same as he had going in, and his voice was perfectly even as he said, “Are you ready to leave?” probably unaware that Avery had spent the entire thirty minutes staring at the opposite wall with his hands clutching the arms of his chair, feeling enormous as a beached whale, feeling the floor sucking his ankles down like quicksand.

Derek looked up from his wrists when Avery didn’t answer right away. “Avery?” he repeated, furrowed this time.

“Huh? Oh, yeah, let’s go. Where are we headed?”

At the Aldi’s, they bickered good-naturedly about who would push the cart. It came down to rock-paper-scissors, best of five. Avery won, so Derek, mildly chagrined, led him down the aisles with his hand slotted into his jeans pocket, not even once referencing the shopping list he’d jotted down so carefully the day before. He only had eyes for the shelves of dewy produce, the crates of dairy cartons still duct-taped into their pallets, and Avery.

They got everything on the list in what would have been world record pace had Derek not stopped every couple of feet to point out a snack or a strange-looking fruit, turn to gauge Avery’s reaction, and then either keep moving without comment or dump several into the cart. Between Avery’s eye for chips in novelty flavors and Derek’s sweet tooth they did some serious damage in the nonperishables section. The cashier had the good grace to pretend to be busy with the receipt printer when Avery practically pounced on Derek to stop him from opening his wallet.

“I’m your guest,” he argued, fumbling his credit card out of his phone case.

“Yes. Guests shouldn’t pay,” Derek said.

“Says who? Take me to your manager. Also, I’m employed. I’m double employed!”

“And I’m not?”

Avery floundered for a response. “You’re a grad student! You’re starving! Your milk was expired!”

Consternation appeared like far-off stormclouds on the fringes of Derek’s face. “I’m— That was a coincidence. I just don’t drink that much milk.”

“Dude, I could’ve yelled into your fridge and gotten reverb.”

At that point the cashier cleared his throat. Derek and Avery turned to behold the line that had coalesced behind them, stretching nearly all the way to the freezer doors at the back of the store. 

Avery stepped aside and let Derek tap his card.

Back at home, they spread everything on the countertop, the dining table, and also the floor, because they ran out of space on the countertop and the dining table. Avery sat down in the middle of the mess of plastic bags, sorting through what went into the fridge and what went into the cupboard, and was promptly beaned with a sense of deja vu.

“Is the rice over there?” asked Derek indistinctly. Most of his upper body was inside the fridge and he was rummaging through it, elbowing out room; it sounded like he was mining in an ice cave. “I was going to use some for dinner. And the eggplant… Stir fry. I froze some pork belly last week.”

“Here you go.”

“Thank you.” Derek propped the rice bag on the small pile of ingredients he’d stacked methodically beside the stovetop. He hesitated over them, hands held aloft, and then he said, unusually careful, “Would you… like to help?”

Avery hopped up onto his feet and said, “I thought you’d never ask.”

They turned out to be good at cooking together. It was a novel realization. Avery’d never thought of himself as a good cook, necessarily, or even really a cook at all. He slapped ingredients together at the end of the day in the vague hope that he was getting enough protein. He fed himself alright. He liked eating his own stuff, but he wasn’t ever excited to feed someone else.

Derek, on the other hand, cobbled a recipe together with a mechanical air that totally belied the quality of the meal. He had two frying pans and a pot going at the same time, one of which he ceded to Avery, and together they chopped vegetables and seasoned liberally, and Derek would pause every so often to taste, hum, and offer the spoon to Avery. He answered every single one of Avery’s questions about why he added a glug of this or a dash of that with equal, patient attention. “The ginger cuts the fattiness. Vinegar gives it brightness, same reason. And garlic just makes it taste good.”

“It also drives off vampires.”

“That too,” agreed Derek, very warmly, and Avery turned to the pot of rice and let the heave of steam open all the pores on his face.

Avery dragged the dining table out this time. He remembered which drawers were for cutlery and which one was for napkins, and he dutifully fluffed the rice with a fresh spoon while Derek clattered out small flat plates and two bowls that fit snugly in the palms of his hands. One was white, but the other was pink and had a tomato vine painted on it, and it was this one that Derek handed to Avery. 

Without thinking about it Avery moved their chairs so that they were arranged in right angles, the big frying pan with the pork and eggplant stir fry in the spot Avery had been sitting in yesterday and he and Derek sitting facing it, with their right and left knees pressed together under the table. The entire dinner, Avery held Derek in his periphery, chewing and listening and asking his long, thoughtful questions, as Avery yapped about Minecraft creepypastas and the most recent meta of Five Nights at Freddy’s.

He startled awake in the middle of the night with no idea why. It didn’t take him as long to put a name to his surroundings — couch, nighttime, Derek’s house — though he had the benefit of not waking up in the tangled throes of a nightmare. The apartment stood still around him, the stark black peeled back thinly in places by the weak light of the lampposts outside. 

Avery had vague notions of college housing, frats and sororities and stuff, and parties that toiled into the early morning, and kids stumbling home with their heels in their hands. He couldn’t tell if it was a symptom of Cornell or if he was just bloated on stereotypes from coming-of-age comedies, but Derek’s neighborhood had struck Avery as eerily quiet, even during the day, especially for a place so close to a college. There wasn’t so much as a stray strobe of party light spilling into the main street when they’d taken a walk after dinner. 

Which was why when the sound broke the silence again Avery threw off his blankets and rocked to his feet.

It hadn’t come from outside. It wasn’t the fuzzy, everpresent hum of the fridge, nor the bone-dry clicks and clacks of the heating. It wasn’t the periodic self-conscious judder of the ice machine in Derek’s freezer, either. Avery swept past all of these on sock feet, carried nervelessly to the one door in the apartment he hadn’t yet opened.

He stood for a moment, hand on the doorknob, swallowing and then swallowing again. He didn’t know if he had the right to turn it, to enter the only space in the apartment they had never shared. He didn’t know if he was brave enough.

The sound came again. That brief quiet hiccup of a sound. A sound that was only easy to snuff if you knew you were making it, and you were ashamed.

Avery pushed the door open. 

The bedroom was smaller than he had expected, and not completely dark. There was a nightlight shaped like a moon plugged into the wall socket, and the keyboard had not been turned off; it was still rippling peaceably between the colors of the rainbow. The desk was— a desk. It had a computer on it. The monitor was turned to face the wall.

Avery tore his eyes from the desk to the corner of the room, to the wall with the window, to the bed. 

It was a narrow bed with a twin mattress and a thick, heavy quilt, pressed between the junction of two walls. It was raised slightly, and stacks of books, their spines facing out, were visible underneath the wooden frame. The sheets were rolled tightly around a central lump, like a taquito. 

Avery swallowed hard. He closed the door behind him, turning the doorknob fraction by fraction until he heard the quiet click of the latch. The room grew fractionally darker.

This was the bedroom where Derek first made eye contact with the King in Yellow. This was the bedroom where Derek almost died. 

“Derek,” Avery whispered.

The taquito on the bed did not stir.

“Derek,” he tried again, a little louder. There was no response.

Avery stood, back pressed against the door, the doorknob still clutched between both hands, his shoulders hiked up to his ears. Maybe he misheard. Maybe this was way too much. Maybe he was reading so wildly hard into the palimpsest of tiny things that had led him to this moment, the thousand-count fabric of their conversations, that he’d really dared to enter private property without so much as asking—

Derek made the noise again.

It was a quiet, hitched, bitten-off breath. It had no pitch. It was a gunpowder sound. It would go unheard from five feet away if you weren’t acutely attuned to the particular auditory paraphernalia of people having nightmares.

Avery darted to the side of the bed and flattened a hand against the blanket taquito. “Derek,” he said, low and urgent. “Wake up. You’re having— it’s— it’s just a bad dream, Derek, wake up. It’s Avery.”

At bad dream the sheets shuddered once, and at it’s Avery the whole rickety frame squealed as Derek seized once, hard, like the recoil of a gunshot. It was sudden and it was soundless, as if the entire world had been sucked dry of color, and Avery’s hands flew to the headboard and one of the rungs supporting the thin mattress as Derek nearly heaved the bed over its side.

“Whoa!” he cried, or tried to cry. The words jammed in his throat, feverishly swollen. Derek’s eyes shone over the hem of his sheets, but they reflected the light like an animal’s in the dark, glassy and uncomprehending, and the ragged, jagged edges of the terror Avery saw in them slashed him to the soul.

During the countdown to New Year’s Day Avery had been hunched at his computer with his heart in his mouth, hands trembling on the keyboard, because there were no words for what had been done and what had been lost. Midnight came and went and Avery had thought Did he at least see the fireworks and the thought was so terrible that he stumbled into the bathroom and turned the shower on and stood under the freezing water fully clothed and made a long, mournful, animal sound until the neighbors banged on their shared wall.

He and Derek didn’t talk about What Happened much. Not really about What Came After, either. It was impossible to put into words the endless stretch of days when it had been just Avery and the inbox he shot email after email after wrenching, navel-gazing email into, and Avery had wanted to be mindful of where Derek might be. It was mostly Derek’s ordeal, after all; Avery was kind of just there, with front-row tickets to the world’s worst New Year’s show, scrabbling vainly to save someone who was trying to save him from himself. It got mixed up in his head, sometimes. Who had actually saved who.

Derek was breathing softly, rapidly, with the shivery pace of a rabbit’s heart. When Avery put his hand on Derek’s shoulder, it was rigid. One long tremor was working its way through the sinews of him, one endless and silent cacophony. It hurt Avery like a sword or a sigh or a death in the family to look at him, and to understand, in a single look, just how scared he had been.

He didn’t speak. He just rose up onto his knees and untucked the corner of the quilt from under Derek’s side. He lifted the edge of the covers. Derek, his eyes still big and glassy, shimmied helpfully backward as Avery slipped in beside him.

The bed was probably too small for both of them. Avery’s knees were slotted between Derek’s knees. Their hands made a hushed congregation between them, a tiny island of known quantities. Despite the pitch blackness, Avery swore he could make out the pale half moons of the beds of Derek’s overlong nails.

“I’m right here,” he whispered, feeling the faint flutter of Derek’s breath warm his cheeks, the tip of his nose. “I’m right here, I’m not going anywhere. Anyone trying to take you away has to get through me first.”

Derek blinked — those oddly luminous eyes. And then they slid shut, and one by one, the tense ridges of his body sloped toward Avery’s.

“Oh,” said Derek.

“Whuzzat?” mumbled Avery.

Derek paused. When he spoke again, his voice was tinged with a light, bright sweetness. Like tea. Like air. “I said, oh,” he repeated, kindly.

“Hrngh,” said Avery, and then remembered, and would have sprung straight upright had he not been straitjacketed into the sheets.

They were— cuddling. In Derek’s bed. The sun shone in brilliant white sheets against the pillow. Their legs were still somewhat tangled, which was the only reason Avery hadn’t gone overboard. He’d fallen asleep facing the ceiling, but somehow during the night they’d maneuvered themselves into a pair of parentheses, and Avery was staring at the cup of Derek’s throat, at his chin. Derek had one hand cradled beneath his own head, and the other placed, very carefully and very deliberately, on the highest point of Avery’s shoulder.

Avery’s brain helpfully whited out. “Um!” he said.

Derek’s fingers smoothed over the knob of bone in Avery’s shoulder. Squinting a little, he said, “Thank you for keeping me company.”

Avery snagged on the squinting first, rather than unpacking literally everything about the whole situation and also Derek’s vast understatement describing it. “Do you want your glasses?”

“It’s okay. You’re close enough that I can see you. Kind of.”

“Kind of? Dude, how bad is your eyesight? I’m, like, less than a foot away from your face,” Avery said incredulously, then clamped his runaway mouth shut. 

Something like surprise flitted briefly through Derek’s eyes. Avery’s 20/20 vision it chose to clock out without so much as a memo as Derek peered closely into Avery’s face, blinked, and stroked a wayward braid out of Avery’s eyes with an absent hand. 

“Thank you,” he repeated, now gravely, as he did when he was making a point, or invoking an irrefutable truth, “for keeping me company.”

Warmth was pouring in a golden fountain down the steps of Avery’s spine. He nailed his gaze to Derek’s neck and said, “Anytime.”

It was a slow morning. They both felt the dregs of the weekend dwindling around them, and it made them drag their feet. Derek produced the loaf of bread and the freshly cleaned toaster, and they had toast and eggs with butter and the half-jar of fancy fig butter Avery had unearthed from the fridge last night. Avery chewed each bite as slowly as he could, showering crumbs into his plate, his eyes fixed on Derek, who was chewing equally slowly, without relish. They didn’t talk much; the only sound was of toast crunching and the birds chittering beyond the living room window.

“When do you need to leave?” asked Derek as they stacked the dishes in the sink. “Don’t,” he added when Avery made a move toward the sponge, “I’ll get them later.”

Avery withdrew reluctantly. Washing the dishes would have given him yet another excuse to linger in this sun-drenched apartment, in this monument to Derek’s survival. “Um, probably by four. Five?”

“Let’s make it four. I don’t want you to get back when it’s too dark.”

There was a lump developing in Avery’s throat. “Yeah,” he croaked, “sure. Four it is.”

That gave them several hours to kill, with only a goodbye to look forward to at the end of it. Avery honestly, genuinely preferred bare-knuckle brawling a netherite block with only his heartbeat in his ears for company than the torture of watching the clock tick down while trying to distract himself from the upcoming departure with last-minute sightseeing. 

Derek had made an itinerary, though, and no shot was Avery going to blow off Derek’s thoughtfulness. “You said Ithaca Commons today, right?” Avery asked brightly, wiping his hands off on the kitchen towel. “I can leave my stuff here and then we can pick it up before I leave?”

Derek was gazing down at the countertop. His fingers doodled aimlessly over its surface. He said, “That works,” and didn’t comment when Avery tromped straight over to the front door, because he couldn’t bear to start packing his things.

The Commons were an avenue of narrow three-story buildings like four strip malls shoved together at the base of the hill that led up to the university. The sky was a bright, faultless blue, and it highlighted the cheery, touristy street with its printed glass windows and family cafes and what Derek called, with a limp attempt at irony, “Cornell swag.” Avery let himself be led through the maze of shops, let himself be surprised and giggle at the novelty Ithaca merch. He tried on a couple dozen hats with inside jokes printed on the front, and placed one that said “Ithaca is ANGST” on Derek’s head, which Derek observed with great solemnity before asking the cashier how much it was.

Lunch was another bagel shop of the same name as yesterday, just on a different street. Normally Avery loved picking out the minute differences between chain spots, but today, something in him felt gray and curled-up and too fragile to touch. He ate his panini numbly, and opposite him Derek dispatched today’s monstrosity — honey walnut cream cheese on a granola bagel, what the heck was a granola bagel — and they didn’t speak. They chewed even slower. Avery’s car keys felt like ten tons.

The sun had begun to bead on the tops of the roofs when they got out. Derek studied the sky, stuffed his hands into his pockets. He said, “We should start heading out.”

“Maybe,” Avery said. He didn’t quite succeed at sieving the reluctance out of his voice, because Derek turned to him with a furrow of concern between his brows. Somehow that was worse than the silent ordeal the whole day had turned out to be, so Avery forced himself to stand upright and chirp, “Yeah, you’re right! Let’s go,” and to walk away first, to practice.

At home— at Derek’s house, Avery putzed morosely around the apartment, chasing down all the miscellanea he’d seemingly infested the place with. Even with Derek’s quiet help, he still had to check every room several times, and he kept finding new things each time, even though there were literally only three rooms in the apartment, and one of them Avery had only set foot in once. There were hair ties strewn on every surface, and a pot of lotion on the bathroom sink; a portable charger; the Ziploc of loose change he’d stuffed into the front pocket of his overnight bag that was mysteriously discovered lounging under the coffee table. With every new and utterly mundane item Avery could feel his stomach inching out of its usual spot in his middle and climbing up towards his mouth. 

An indeterminate amount of time saw him standing on the welcome mat, two overnight bags and his three-wheeled suitcase piled at his socked feet. Derek had left Avery standing at the door twice to check all the rooms one last time, and the second time he returned from his bedroom with Avery’s bonnet clutched in one fist, looking, absurdly, stricken. 

“It’s good that you found that,” Avery said inanely. His sneakers were lined up behind his feet, all he had to do was step backward into them. “Since, uh, you know. Couldn’t sleep tonight without it. Or, I mean, I could, but it would be, uh. Bad. For my hair. What I mean is,” he rallied doggedly, “thank you. For… everything.”

He reached out before he could think better of it, on nameless impulse. The thing he’d been restraining with a child leash all weekend reared up at that precise moment, and he placed his palm on the ridges of Derek’s knuckles.

Derek had been looking down. Not the usual gentle downward drift that his gaze took, that meandering surrender to gravity. He was caved inward, his head and most of his upper body facing the floor. He looked up sharply when Avery’s skin touched his skin; the rest of him went deadly still. Even when Avery took his hand apologetically back, he continued to stare. He looked, Avery thought suddenly, the way cats did sometimes, when they were expecting you to do something, like pet them or blink slowly back.

Avery thought about that. He took a mental step back and thought about all of it, actually. He beheld Derek in his entirety, in this house, in Derek’s rumpled Cornell swag, his mismatched woollen socks. He beheld Derek with his uneven fringe and uncertainly colored eyes behind his square, severe lenses, and his slide-ruled shoulders, the fine long fingers. They’d been so cold to touch, those fingers. Even when they were bundled up indoors with the heat cranked to unbearable stuffiness.  

Avery thought about the slow loping way Derek walked. He thought about the miles and miles of gorges and water that Derek haunted alone. He thought about the empty carrel, the office with its calendar still splayed open to November. He thought about the groceries, the games, the hard plastic chairs in the waiting room at the hospital. He thought of Derek doing all of that by himself.

And then he thought about making a good meal together. The best Chinese takeout in Ithaca, New York, and honestly probably the whole United States. He thought about spending every waking hour he had bickering with Derek about who would push the shopping cart. He thought about letters and mindless notes scrawled around the house, the forest of those dotless lowercase letters. He thought about directionless drives and spending hours in the woods and the sweet high call of birdsong he really did think sounded different than where he came from. He thought, helplessly, about the light that had shone out of Derek’s face when Avery told him how happy he was.

Avery thought about Derek’s hands. And he did not stop thinking about them. 

“Do you think,” he ventured haltingly, “if. I mean. You have the foldout couch and— maybe, if it’s not too much trouble—”

“Ask.”

Avery looked up from the frantic knot of his thumbs and almost took a step back, just out of sheer psychic pressure. 

Derek was looking at him like he was holding the entire world with his eyes, as if one wayward glance might topple the whole business over, or spill it out. Derek was looking at him as he might have through a screen, a fateful night long ago, when he first glimpsed Avery through the teleidoscope of his fracturing reality. Derek was looking at him like everything in the entire world that had he had ever waited for, and ever conceived of, was finally coming true.

Derek said again, with the exact same intensity, “Ask.”

Avery squeezed his eyes shut. He reached inside himself, his imaginary fingers riffling awkwardly through his ribs, and he picked up the bright glowing thing he’d been rolling together speck by speck with every breath breathed between them, and he let it blow wide open. 

“I brought all my things with me, literally everything I own is in my car,” he said, finding Derek’s gaze, and the world he saw within them nearly brought him to his knees. Derek, who had sought him and saved him and slept with his hands covering his face. Avery would do everything in his power, everything he’d ever known, for a chance to keep that world.

Avery swallowed hard and reached out. He threaded his fingers gently through Derek’s. He said, bravely, “I’ll stay.”

“Yes,” said Derek, and he squeezed Avery’s hand. “You will.”