Archive of Our Own ^beta

Dennis Reynolds is forty-four years old, and it doesn’t get any better from here.

Every day that he gets up and goes to work, it all means a little less, and he walks into the bar and he hates his friends. He hates Charlie for looking the same way he has for the last twenty years, and he hates Dee for looking five years younger than she should by all rights, given the drugs and the drink and the way she lives and the fact that they’re twins. They were meant to get old and gross together, except that Dee was supposed to look worse because even though old men always look weird, like saggy wallpaper, old women do nothing for Dennis at all, so they must be even more hideous. At least old men are repulsive — Dennis looks at them and he thinks, Wow, I bet now you wish you’d offed yourself at fifty — but he looks at old women and they may as well be roadkill. Worse than roadkill, even, because there’s something beautiful about all that wet red and the colors it turns in the sun. Once when Dennis was thirteen or maybe fourteen, in the middle of all those years he mostly can’t remember, he was hanging out with Mac and Charlie by the Dumpster in the parking lot behind the school, smoking one of the too-thin joints Dennis always talked Mac into spotting him because the one rule of Frank’s that he had always been able to follow was Don’t pay for anything you can get for free, and a car had backed over a pigeon right in front of them. It had been a little too slow to take flight, a little sun-sleepy, and Dennis still thinks about the way its wings flapped even with the tire right on top of it — that meaningless thump-thump of muscle twitching a hyperextended joint — before red sprayed everywhere like a stepped-on ketchup packet.

It was a summer afternoon, so the sun had been soaking into the cracked tarmac for several hours already, and the blood had dried fast but the glossy messy crimson pulp gleaming between matted feathers had stayed wet for another hour at least, long enough that it left irregular streaks all the way across the parking lot in colors that Dennis couldn’t name when they found sticks and shuffled it over to the Dumpster like a wet feathery hockey puck for further examination. He memorized every hue anyway, not to mention the smells that twisted up his gut and prickled in his eyes; the way it felt to poke and probe at something else’s insides; the sharp angles of broken bone. Later, when they were tired of turning the dead pigeon’s insides into meat paste and Charlie had gone home for dinner — at eight o’clock sharp by Bonnie’s watch, which was always set exactly three minutes fast — it had just been Dennis and Mac, seeing how long they could stay out before someone came looking for them. The sun was lower in the sky by then, casting long broken-feathered shadows across the lot, and the air was starting to get cool, and they didn’t have much left to talk about at that point in the day so they just sat, passing a cigarette back and forth — and when it was Mac’s turn Dennis pressed his thumb against the center of his lower lip, where he had to push the hardest in order to feel the sharp edge of his teeth.

He couldn’t stop thinking about how unremarkable it had been, how the pigeon had just died in front of them like this kind of thing happened every day. Like it was nothing. He wondered if people died like that, too. He had been thinking that kind of thing a lot more lately, though he had carefully not been thinking about why. He wasn’t sure how to remember what had happened in the library with Ms. Klinsky just yet, and it seemed important that he got it right; it seemed like the kind of thing that he had to figure out now, before anyone else could figure it out for him. If somebody else told him how he was supposed to feel about it, Dennis thought, it would feel like having an enormous tire rolled right over him. It hadn’t made any noise — the pigeon, that was — which had surprised him. Stupidly, Dennis had always thought it would make a noise like bubble wrap, or maybe a water balloon bursting, but instead nothing: just the faint thump of the car settling back onto the road afterwards. He wondered if there was a person version of that flapping wing, and took the cigarette back from Mac, who was staring at him. Dennis had jerked his head forward, what are you looking at, just in case Mac was going to say something stupid, like how they could go back to his house if they wanted and make dinner in the microwave, because that would have split Dennis open right down the middle, and then he would be the one spilling his guts all over the tarmac. And Mac hadn’t said anything, but he’d kept looking, just with his eyes a little downcast instead, until Dennis handed the cigarette back. There had been crows in the sky suddenly, making the clattering noise of a deck of cards being shuffled, and Dennis had thought: I bet it would be a lot harder to see blood on those feathers.

Crows, pigeons, whatever kind of bird: Plumage can only do so much. There’s no hiding the years these days. Dennis wakes up an hour before Mac every morning so he doesn’t have to worry about getting interrupted halfway through putting on his face by Mac hammering on the bathroom door and declaring loudly that it’s time for the thirty-minute-long shit he takes ten minutes after he wakes up every day, like clockwork. It’s the sheer quantity of protein powder Mac consumes, probably, and all the time he spends on that fucking exercise bike. It’s the way his body still works pretty much the way it’s meant to, and looks the way Dennis’ used to, back when he could skip meals for a week and still make it through a day at work without needing to sit down or sip hot tea to stop his stomach from rumbling. He can’t smoke his way through lunchtime anymore, and every night Mac is there keeping a gimlet eye on his calorie intake and offering him a smoothie from his apparently endless stash of supplements, so Dennis can’t even get away with doing a double shot of NyQuil so that he’ll pass out before the hunger pangs break through the sedative.

He hates Mac almost all the time now, which is annoying because Dennis always figured that at some point he’d find a way to get rid of Mac, to make new friends who would help make it clear that he didn’t need people like Mac following him around and acting like they knew him. He always figured that at some point it would become clear that he was going to outshine Mac for the rest of their lives, and that would be that — and then Mac had to go and get happy. And hot, if you were the sort of person who noticed that kind of thing, which Dennis is but only because it’s always important to keep an eye on the competition. Women aren’t going to know Mac is gay if they just look at him. All they’re going to see is the way he actually puts work into styling his hair now and pays attention to the way his shirts fit, not because he’s had them tailored or wears padding — not because he actually has to put any real effort into it, the way Dennis always has — but because that’s just the way he’s shaped now. They aren’t going to know that half of his shirts used to belong to Dennis back in the day, when Mac had puppy fat rather than planes of muscle, when Dennis’ clothes had been small for him but not painted-on, and they aren’t going to know that he takes massive fucking finger-scoops out of Dennis’ texture paste, which Dennis knows because the necks of Mac’s shirts always smell of mandarin and grapefruit when he leaves them strewn all over their fucking apartment. Not that Dennis pays attention to that kind of thing. They were his shirts to begin with, anyway; what does it matter if he takes one back every now and then? It’s not like Mac notices anymore. He would have, once, but that was before he started doing things to make Dennis hate him, like not paying attention to that kind of thing.

None of that is the point. The point is that every morning Dennis wakes up and spends an hour making himself look like the person in the photos he still uses to meet women on Craigslist, even though they were taken ten years ago on a phone whose camera looks like one of those old Victorian affairs with the big box and the tripod and the black hood compared to the one Dennis has now. He could take better pictures, if he wanted. It would just take a lot of effort, so he doesn’t, because it’s already so much work to be himself; to wake up early, to put on his face, to practice expressions in the mirror despite his aching jaw and the mascara still drying on his lashes until he’s satisfied that he can make whatever face applies to any given situation with no hesitation, so nobody will notice that none of his emotions ever reach his eyes anymore. Dennis spends an hour every morning making himself into a person in the first place and then he goes to work and his terrible fucking friends are there, because they all work at the bar too, so he spends all day watching them get stupider and more embarrassing, thinking, You morons are way too old for this, and wishing they could get over themselves for just one fucking minute of their lives. They’re all just the same people they used to be except that now they can use the Internet on their phones. Once upon a time, back when they all started out, it was fun and cool to be who they were, but now none of them are willing to put in the work to be anything different, which means that they’re nearly 50 but trying to live like teenagers, and however you slice it, that’s just sad. They’re all just sad — except Mac, who had to actually go and grow as a person, who wears his skin like it actually belongs to him instead of just posturing, the way he did for so many years, when he didn’t seem quite aware of how he looked or the fact that his body was there for anything except to carry him from room to room. Dennis looks at Mac and he thinks, You fucking traitor, you sell-out, it was meant to be you and me haunting these no-good sacks of meat together until they ran out of juice. He looks at Mac and he’s so angry that it burns him up inside and rises like bile up the back of his throat; it makes him want to rip off all of his skin. Mac is happy now, and all he wants to do is make Dennis happy too, and whenever Mac looks at him or talks to him or breathes near him Dennis wants to scream in his face.

Today Mac is complaining about how hard it is to date when you come out in your forties, because blah blah blah, something to do with feeling like a teenager but looking like his dad, and Dennis can’t listen to another minute because he’ll go literally, actually crazy if he has to nod along about how paternally abandoned Mac feels when Frank, who has ruined literally every part of Dennis’ life, has suddenly figured out how to be there for every other man he knows. “Listen,” he says. “Your problem is that you don’t know what you like. Right? You’re like a virgin on prom night. You know it’s time to, you know—” he sticks his finger in his mouth and pops it like a cork — “but you have no idea what actually gets your rocks off. Except modified exercise equipment, obviously.” He’ll hear that bike’s gears squeaking for the rest of his life, like tinnitus of the prostate. “You just have to find someone you can trust to keep quiet and see how many laws of nature you can break before they stop returning your calls. Oh, hey, you know what? Just pretend God isn’t watching.”

“First of all, you know I can’t do that,” Mac says.

“Right, right.” Dennis polishes a glass, like he’s an extra in the background of his own goddamn life. He wants to smash it on the edge of the bar and then slam his own face into the shards. He wants to throw it right past Mac’s ear to watch him flinch and hear it break. He puts it down so quietly it doesn’t make a sound. “God’s always watching. It’s kind of weird, I thought you’d be into that. Catholics usually are. It’s the whole guilt thing, like fucking in your parents’ bed. Maybe that’s just girls, though. Guys, we don’t have that kind of thing.”

Mac waves his hands, Stop, stop. “No, I meant the whole finding someone to experiment with thing. It’s hard, you know?”

Is it? Is it fucking hard, when you look like that? When you just fucking walk around like that all the time? Dennis picks up another glass and presses the corner of its base into his palm so hard that it makes a bloodless white line. He forces himself to breathe evenly so that he doesn’t scream. “I don’t, actually,” he says, and Mac’s face falls a little — his stupid sleepy eyes, that fucking smile he’s grown into. This is Dennis’ speciality, his element: the botched trust fall, letting someone hang in the air for just long enough that they realize how much they really are counting on you, and then giving them a hand to grab at just before they hit the floor. This time, he promises himself, he won’t reach out. He’s been doing that a lot more lately, pulling the rug out from under Mac and letting him drop just to prove that he has to stop counting on Dennis for that kind of thing, just to show him that he isn’t anything special and shouldn’t start thinking that he is —that he shouldn’t expect Dennis to treat him the way he has all these years, like he’s someone Dennis actually cares about.

“Oh, yeah,” Mac starts to say, because he isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer but lately he’s gotten the hang of it a little more, remembering that they aren’t friends — in fact, that they aren’t anything except two people who have spent way too many years together, two burned-out stars orbiting the same event horizon, tearing vast ribbons of flame off each other. “Of course, I didn’t mean—”

“You know, if you wanted, I could show you a thing or two,” Dennis says. “If you were really desperate.”

It hangs in the air between them like Fuck you, like Try me, like What are you going to do about it. Dennis doesn’t even really know why he said it, except that it felt like pulling Mac close and sliding a knife between his ribs and whispering Is this what you wanted? You know it is. Tell me this is what you wanted. Anyway, Mac isn’t going to say yes. If he wanted this, he’s had plenty of chances over the years when Dennis has been too fucked up to remember his own name, let alone say no. Every weekend he gets blackout drunk and wakes up still fully dressed in his own bed, shoes lined up next to the door, glass of water on the nightstand. This isn’t going to be any different, he can tell already, because he knows Mac on a cellular level, down to the fucking ridges of his fingerprints and the taste of his sweat, and Mac is going to pussy out the way he always does, like any of this actually matters, like he actually cares.

“Really?” Mac says, and the look on his face is nothing like what Dennis expected. It’s better and worse, everything he was hoping and nothing at all. Guarded, that’s the word: Mac’s expression is guarded. Dennis didn’t know he had it in him. Mac says, “Like, are you fucking with me here, or what,” like he hopes Dennis isn’t, and the floor isn’t where Dennis thought it was anymore.

“No, Mac, I’m serious,” he says, because fuck Mac for trying to prove him wrong. If Mac wants to call his bluff, that’s fine, because Dennis isn’t a fucking coward. He’s good for it. He’ll show Mac that he was right all along. He’s done much worse for a win. Set the hook, he tells himself. Yank it through his cheek. Reel him in. “Unless you’re not up for it.”

“No no no,” Mac says, too fast. “I mean, if you’re sure.”

“As a heart attack,” Dennis says, and tosses the mop down on the bar. Charlie will pick it up, or he won’t and it’ll still be there a week from now, leaving a new irregular stain. What does it matter, one way or another? It’ll be the same shitty bar either way. He jerks his head at the door.

“Now?”

Mac’s eyes are so big, so bright, like he can’t believe this is happening. Dennis can work with that. The way Mac’s face is wide open, aching with how badly he wants to let himself want this but how afraid he is that he isn’t allowed to — it does something for Dennis, winds him up as tight as the click of a lock, the silence of a skipped breath. For a minute, he feels twenty-five again and fearless, like he could do anything and still live forever. For a minute, it’s all easy the way it used to be when Mac looked at him all the time with the ardor of a wandering apostate discovering a forgotten god, when that made Dennis feel untouchable, like his life could still turn out better than he expected.

“Yeah, baby,” he says. It’s nearly twenty years later and his life is emptier than ever; if he’s lucky, he won’t make it to fifty, because it’s all a losing game from here on out. Why not let himself be fooled for a moment? And later on, he won’t have to wonder anymore: Life will hold one less mystery, one less reason for Mac to keep following him around, one less reason for Dennis to keep tolerating it. Every time he looks at Mac, he’ll know all those subdermal details that you only learn by fucking someone, those secrets hidden in the skin and breath and blood. It’s better than butchery for getting the heart racing, because afterwards you can both get up and walk away, with the added bonus that Mac is the only one with anything to lose, because he’s been watching Dennis fuck for years — so Dennis has no secrets left to keep — but Dennis has no goddamn clue about Mac. Listen, he said to Dee once, back when they were still college students with shitty fake IDs. They were trashed and talking the way they only could to each other, at the bottom of a long night they had utterly pissed away. If you evvvverrrrrrr, fuck. She had been laughing at him, and the bartender had been looking at her. Good luck, asshole, Dennis thought, and then — after making the herculean effort necessary to corral his thoughts and send them stampeding back towards the point — he forced his eyes to focus on Dee again and said, If you ever really hate someone, you know what I’m talking about, right. Ifff if you do, then you have to fuck them, because then you’ll always have that, and they, they’ll know you do. Forever. Are you even listening? Dee! Fuckkk sometimes I don’t even know why I bother. You’re going to ruin his life.

The fuck I am, Dee said, like a liar, and the next time Dennis saw the bartender it was at the free clinic on Locust Street and he was wearing the familiar defeated expression of a man who had just had his soul yanked out through his dick and was only now beginning to realize it. Dennis had decided then that if he ever started looking like that in the mirror, it would be time to find a nice enclosed space and take one last long nap in the Range Rover. He keeps a close eye on himself for any signs of early onset but so far so good: If anything, the worst Dennis has ever looked is resigned, like an aging noble warrior living out his days in solitary exile who has made his peace with the fact that there are no more wars for him to fight and all that remains for him to do is find a good way to pass what time remains to him — except that now one of his old friends from the phalanx or whatever is knocking down his door and asking him for favors, for old times’ sake. Great: just what Dennis needs, one more reminder of what things could have been once but can’t anymore.

It’s maybe two minutes from the bar to where he parked, which is a perfectly unobjectionable walk — warm in the sun, cool in the shade, but not so much that he wants a jacket — but even a few blocks is enough of an interruption for Dennis to remember anew all the reasons that he’s supposed to hate Mac: how close he walks, for example, and how he keeps talking the whole time, an endless stream of nervous babble that annoys Dennis so much that it must be screaming from his eyes, but Mac isn’t paying any attention, apparently. He’s too busy leaning towards Dennis the way he used to, except that it used to be instinctual, and now his body telegraphs intent. Dennis doesn’t know how to control that kind of thing anymore, not when it comes to Mac. He used to be able to push back and Mac would retreat as if shoved by an invisible hand, compelled by the unspoken border between them. Now, when Dennis takes a corner a little wide and bumps into Mac’s side, Mac doesn’t pivot out of the way: He moves with Dennis instead, pressing his chest into the point of Dennis’ shoulder, putting a hand on the small of his back to guide him out of the way. It’s about the implication. Dennis yanks his entire body away from Mac, a short jerky step that nearly slams him into the wall.

“No,” he says, even though Mac has already yanked his hand back like Dennis is a hot stove. Isn’t that just another twist of the knife. “Okay, we need to have some ground rules, otherwise I can already tell you’re going to get all weird on me, and that isn’t part of the deal. No getting weird.”

“I promise,” Mac says. “I won’t get weird.”

“Are you sure?” Dennis snaps. “Because I hate to say it, man, but you’re already making me have second thoughts here. I mean, what was that shit? What was it, Mac? You think you just get to touch me now or something? You’re always touching me and I have to be honest, it’s kind of creepy. I never said anything because I was like, you know Mac, he’s just like that, he touches people because he doesn’t know anything about appropriate boundaries, whatever. But this is really pushing it. I don’t know, dude.”

“You’re right,” Mac says. “I’m sorry. You’re always right. I should have known better and I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,” Dennis says. “That’s the first rule. No touching me except when you’re allowed to.” He unlocks the car and jerks his head at the passenger side. Mac scrambles in. “Rule two,” he says, pulling onto the street. “You don’t get any say in what happens.” Mac opens his mouth and Dennis holds up one finger without looking at him or pausing. “I know, I know. You’re thinking, Dennis, how am I supposed to figure out what I like if I don’t get any say? But you don’t have to worry about that. I guarantee you’ll enjoy all of it. Just don’t think of it as being about you in any way, shape, or form and remember: This is about learning to meet other people’s standards. Specifically, mine. Got it?”

Mac nods. “Okay.”

He says it like he actually means it, like he heard and understood everything Dennis said and is still fine with all of this. “Great,” Dennis says, and spits the next one out through gritted teeth. “Rule three: No assplay. It’s cool with me that you’re on this big journey of self-discovery and radical acceptance or whatever, seriously, congratulations on figuring your shit out, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a line here. Okay?”

“Are you sure you still want to do this?” Mac says. “Because like, sure, whatever you say, man. Really, I’m fine with whatever you want here. But I’m kind of getting a vibe like maybe… maybe you aren’t so much?”

“Don’t get mixed up,” Dennis says, and pulls into the spot that’s always open in front of their apartment building. Anyone else who parks there gets their car keyed and their tires slashed. It’s a quid pro quo thing: They don’t park in Dennis’ spot, and he doesn’t get the chisel out of his nightstand and ruin their paint job. “That’s not what I’m saying. Is that a yes or is it a no? I don’t have time for this.”

“Yes!” Mac says immediately, and then catches himself. “I mean, yes. It’s a yes. I got it. Nowhere near your ass. Loud and clear.”

I didn’t say that, Dennis doesn’t say, because it isn’t worth what he’d have to say next, which is I think about your hands all the fucking time, and sometimes that includes while I’m jerking off. Sometimes when I’m standing at the bar and you walk behind me I wish you’d slap my ass like I’m a waitress in the fifties and the concept of a sexual harassment lawsuit hasn’t been invented yet. If you did it hard enough I bet I’d be able to feel it for days. There are a lot of things Dennis doesn’t bring up because he thinks he’d enjoy them too much and he just doesn’t want to know — how much he’d like being pinned down, for example. How many times he’s thought about why Mac owns a riding crop and a cat o' nine tails, and what he might be willing to do with them. What Mac would say if he found out that Dennis still has the lipstick he stole from that uncooperative model, and that sometimes when he wants to get off extra hard Dennis puts it on and uses the little hand mirror he keeps in his sock drawer to make sure it’s perfect before he shoves his hand into his pants, too turned on to wait.

Those are the things Dennis doesn’t say, because they don’t matter. It’s not like any of that stuff is going to come up. This is just a conditional favor he’s doing Mac, nothing more, and Mac has agreed to all his conditions, so what more is there to discuss?

“All right,” he says, and turns off the engine.

They can’t go to Dennis’ room, because that’s where he fucks girls and he can’t run the risk of being reminded of this when he’s mid-screw with some hot chick, because it takes all his focus to fuck women and carefully choreograph the scenarios he needs to get off with them. And they can’t go to Mac’s room, because if the Cathedral Basilica ever burns down, all they’ll need to do is raid Mac’s half of the apartment to recoup enough wall crosses and and icons and Immaculate Hearts and statuettes and prayer books and pamphlets — Jesus, the pamphlets! They’re everywhere, under the bed, on the windowsills, in the closet, which was funny the first time Dennis actually thought about it but has since driven him to the absolute brink of derangement — to refurnish the entire parish. If a small army of Catholic priests descended on Mac’s room, they would find enough liturgical supplies to indoctrinate the whole next generation of self-hating latchkey kids with too much love in their hearts and too few places to put it. They would also find the fisting dildo bike, obviously, which might make things a little awkward, but if Dennis knows anything about the Catholic church, it’s that they’re willing to overlook just about anything for the right number of new converts. What’s a little blatant contradiction between penitents, after all? Just throw a little holy water around and call it even.

Besides, Mac doesn’t even have sheets — just a mattress he bought off Craigslist that they had to leave on the roof for three days so that the sun could bleach the smell of old cigarettes out of it, and it took both of them to get it upstairs and then back down, knocking each other into every corner of the stairwell on the way. He has a boxspring of similarly dubious provenance, and enough sheets to keep him warm when the weather is good, like it is now, though in a month he’ll be sweating through them and sticking to the mattress cover, and when winter rolls around again he’ll need to buy a comforter because the walls won’t do shit as far as insulation goes. Dennis thinks about this kind of thing because he’s the one Mac will come running to when it’s two in the morning and he’s shivering too hard to sleep, and then Dennis will have to be the one who either lends him a spare duvet or kicks him out to sleep on the couch under a pile of coats, because one year sharing a bed with Mac and what felt like half the population of Philly was more than enough. Dennis doesn’t even like sharing a bed in the first place when he doesn’t have to: usually it takes him forever to doze off when someone is breathing next to him. It’s the warmth and the humidity, the reminder of how grossly biological the human body is. Besides, things are different now, even if Mac barely treats himself like a person in the first place. As far as Dennis can tell, his bed is somewhere he goes to do penance and then become unconscious, not somewhere to sleep, let alone fuck, or whatever it is that they’re doing.

That leaves the sofa. If Dennis remembers right, they found its first incarnation in the alley behind the building on trash day. For all he knows, Mac found its replacement in the same garbage pile. Either way, it’s seen so much wear that it may as well have been constructed at the same time as the room it occupies now. It doesn’t quite work right anymore: The fake leather is cracked, the cushions have craters and bulges, and the armrest on the right has to get kicked into place just right every few days or the entire construction gets dangerously wobbly. Mac must have taken care of that sometime in the last few days, because when Dennis sits down it holds steady. “Well?” he says, when Mac looks at him like a mariner lost in the desert. “What are you waiting for?”

“I thought you were going to tell me,” Mac says, but Dennis shakes his head.

“That’s not how this works,” he says. He could tell Mac to jump out the closed window and glass would shatter before he finished the sentence. There’s no fun in that. “No. You have to figure this out for yourself, Mac. I’m just here to tell you when you get it wrong.”

Mac nods. “Sure, okay.” He’s still looking at Dennis like he’s hoping that if he stares for long enough, the answer will float to the surface like white lettering to the window of a Magic 8-Ball. Mac hasn’t looked at Dennis like this in a long, long time. These days he mostly looks at Dennis like he really knows him, inside and out, and doesn’t want to change a thing. To see that confusion, the way that Mac is begging with his eyes for anything — the meanest scrap, the smallest crumb — it makes Dennis feel calm for the first time in years. He doesn’t want to be seen or understood. He wants to be in control, all the time, of himself and everyone around him, and he never wants anyone to look at him like they fucking understand him. He wants this, the closed-in anxiety starting to build between them, stretched taut like piano wire, the fact that Mac is saying please with his whole body. It’s a moment of perfect equilibrium, perfect stillness. The lightest touch, the slightest movement, will tip the balance.

Dennis leans back and spreads his legs.

Mac has always been so fucking obvious, wears his heart on his sleeve and his want all over his face. His eyes go to Dennis’ dick and stay there, even when he says, “Hey, uh,” even when he comes a compulsive step closer as if pushed from behind, even when he wipes his palms on his jeans. Normally this would be the point when Dennis would need to start getting himself hard, doing the little mental trick where he stops paying attention to the person in front of him and everything else about where and when he is and starts focusing on how badly he wants to be into this, how much he wants to be getting off on it, how hot he wants it to be. At this point it’s basically habitual, even when nobody else is in the room: How else is Dennis meant to get off in the shower without thinking about what he actually looks like now and how disgusting it would be if he could see himself? And doesn’t everyone do this, anyway, he tells himself — isn’t that how it works for everyone? They tell themselves they’re having a good time and if they want to believe it enough then it becomes true, and they’ll never remember it any other way.

But Mac is looking at him like he actually does want this, like he wants Dennis for real, in the sliced-up pinned-open way that makes Dennis want to squirm away, and it must be doing something for him, because he’s half-hard already. “Can I,” Mac says, and the fact that he’s still asking like he expects Dennis to say no just makes Dennis harder, makes everything in the world narrow down to the way his pulse is thumping in his ears and pounding through his body down to the blood-hot pressure of his dick in his jeans. “Can I blow you?”

Dennis pretends to consider it for as long a moment as he thinks he can get away with, long enough that Mac starts to visibly second-guess himself, and then at the last second he lets his composure break. “All right,” he says. “Sure. Fine. What are you waiting for?”

Mac gets on his knees with more grace than Dennis expects, folds himself into a neat shape and reaches for the button of Dennis’ jeans. There’s no way to make what happens next any less awkward, given that Dennis has to help get his jeans down to his ankles and only then does Mac remember that Dennis is still wearing his shoes, but before he can go into a ten-minute huddle with himself about whether to take them off or not, Dennis jerks his hips up at Mac’s face and says, “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Mac says, and then spends another minute staring, as if he’s never seen Dennis’ dick before, which is just not true. He’s watched all of the sex tapes Dennis made, some of them so many times that the ribbons wore out in places and Dennis had to buy one of those VHS-to-DVD converters to save them. He’s watched Dennis fuck girls through a cracked door, from the fire escape, from the next bed through slitted eyes that one time Dennis’ college roommate was out of town for the holidays and he finally talked Jen O’Gorman from his motivated behavior class into coming back to his place. They’ve watched porn together, for fuck’s sake, all kinds, and Dennis knows for a fact that Mac didn’t always keep his eyes on the screen. This shouldn’t be different — this shouldn’t be as new as it feels, for Mac to be watching his dick twitch in his briefs, for the sound of Dennis’ own breathing to gradually drown out everything else — but it is, because this time Dennis isn’t trying, isn’t even particularly focused on how he looks or sounds.

Dennis is a little worried about whether or not he’ll be able to get off, if he’s being honest. Most of the time he relies on the same trick he uses to get hard, when he disappears into a little compressed space at the front of his skull, right behind his eyes, and pushes his body towards it the way he does on a day when he’s skipped so many meals that he has a hard time making his eyes focus. It’s all about willpower and control, telling himself now now now, yeah baby, it’s gonna be so fucking hot, isn’t it, don’t you want to, yeah you do, you want to so bad, you slut you fucking pathetic whore, yeah yeah you want this you want it you want — until the effort of holding his breath and locking all his muscles in place pays off and he manages to force an orgasm like a full-body cramp. But those rules don’t seem to matter here. His body isn’t paying any attention to the mental blocks that Dennis has come up with all those little ploys to circumvent. It’s full steam ahead: There’s a wet mark starting to form where his dick is pushing at his briefs, and Mac is looking right at it, lips slightly parted. Fuck, Dennis thinks, and feels his cheeks start to heat up. It’s never like this. He can’t ever remember feeling like this before, especially not when Mac leans in and presses his open mouth to the wet patch and sucks lightly, breath hot even through the fabric, just the slightest flicker of tongue and it’s already too much. It already makes Dennis slide down so that he can angle his hips upwards for a little more — friction, wetness, who fucking knows. Anything: He’ll take whatever he can get. God, he’s never like this, never so fucking obvious, never so needy that he’s already swallowing the noises his body wants to make, high and breathy and humiliating.

On the other hand, he’s never done this before. He’s never let Mac do what he’s so clearly wanted for so many years, so maybe that has something to do with it. Maybe it’s some function of — think fast, Dennis — the power dynamic, right, the amount of sway he clearly has over Mac’s decisions, the amount of real estate he takes up in Mac’s head and clearly, specifically, his id. Dennis has fucked lots of women who wanted him, but that was mostly circumstantial or temporary, the buildup lasting for a few months at most, because why waste any more time than that working up to a sexual free-for-all that he’ll be able to string out for a few weeks at most before it gets boring? But Mac, he’s wanted Dennis for decades, maybe even since that day he watched Dennis realize that there’s nothing hotter than viscera, somebody’s insides rearranged and laid bare. Isn’t this the same thing? Isn’t this just like opening Mac from stem to stern and digging his fingers through until they come out sticky and rust-red and stinking of salt? It doesn’t make any difference that Mac is the one tugging down Dennis’ briefs and tracing his thumb down the cut of Dennis’ hip, pressing it into the taut line where the tendon stands out, just to see if Dennis will make a sound. He does — an involuntary huh that starts at the back of his throat and rolls into something deeper when Mac rubs his thumb all the way across to the base of Dennis’ dick as if he’s trying to smooth the ache away.

Dennis has known for years now that if he walked up to Mac with a knife, Mac would bare his throat, just as long as Dennis looked him in the eyes the whole time he was bleeding out. This isn’t so different, Mac on his knees with his mouth open so that Dennis can rub the head of his dick against his lower lip, little half-thrusts with the limited amount of leverage he has sprawled out like this — Mac sliding his tongue against the sensitive underneath spot that makes Dennis go ah ah ah — Mac letting Dennis push and push and push until he can feel the back of Mac’s throat clutch where he’s trying to swallow. Dennis has never felt so out of control before, so tethered to his own pulse, to the muscles in his back and hips that want to flex, that want him to fuck Mac’s mouth just because he can: not because it feels any better than the press of his tongue but because of whatever animal impulse has taken the place of his otherwise inescapable internal monologue. It’s all flesh and saltwater, ebb and flow, kinetic momentum that builds and builds until Dennis isn’t even entirely aware of what he’s doing anymore, only that he couldn’t stop even if he wanted to — not that he does. What he wants is to keep making a mess of Mac’s mouth, wet and bruised-ripe and perfect; what he wants is to keep watching the way his cock fits into it, more obscene than any porn he’s ever watched, including here on their shitty sofa in their shitty facsimile apartment. Fuck, but it’s good, better than any sex Dennis has ever had before. It’s the smell of sweat and spit and the little wet sounds that make it feel like Dennis is really here, really fucking his way into Mac’s throat one blood-hot millimeter at a time. He wants to say all the things he’s found laughable in porn dialogue, to tell Mac that he’s so good at taking it, at sucking cock like he was made for it, that his mouth is worth a million dollars, that he loves this, doesn’t he, yeah baby, yeah, good boy, just like that.

He only realizes that he’s about to come when it’s already happening, when his rhythm gets erratic and shallow. If Dennis is being honest with himself, it’s not like he’d warn Mac anyway, but there’s no time. All the air in his lungs catches fire and his body keeps moving on sheer instinct, dragging Dennis along with it, and then his muscles are locked and he’s shouting, a long wordless yell that leaves his throat raw and his ribs aching — saying nothing, seeing nothing — and he pushes once, twice more into Mac’s mouth before he collapses back onto the couch. His dick is still twitching, still pearling at the tip. The corner of Mac’s mouth is wet with more than spit, and Dennis wants to gather it up on the pad of his thumb and see whether it tastes any different like this, the way caviar is meant to taste better on a mother-of-pearl spoon. Mac leans forward — slowly, the way he might if Dennis had a hand on the back of his head — and licks up the excess. The sweat is starting to cool on Dennis’ skin, and he’s so sensitive that it almost hurts; it makes him want to curl up on himself, but his dick jerks again and he goes boneless instead. His entire body is a mess of leftover adrenaline and exhaustion, starting to bloom like blood in water. His hips keep twitching, but his legs ache like he’s run a marathon and his chest is burning with more than exertion.

Dennis feels as if he might start crying, which he hasn’t done in years. In fact, Dennis can’t remember the last time he cried. It wasn’t when he thought Dee was leaving him behind for good; it wasn’t when he found his first grey hair or his first wrinkle or his first age spot, although that was close; it wasn’t even when his mother died, though it might have been when they dug up her skeleton. It certainly wasn’t when Mac came out. All the times Dennis crushed a slice of onion to make himself tear up don’t count, either, because none of them made him feel like this, as if there’s a tide rising inside of him that could spill over at any moment, drawn by the gravity of an unknown moon.

“Are you okay, man?”

Mac is looking at him and his mouth is still red and his face is still flushed and if Dennis thinks about this too much then he doesn’t know what will happen. He might cry or he might scream or he might lean in and bite at Mac’s mouth until he stops asking questions and lets Dennis lick the taste of himself off his palate.

“Yeah,” he says, and hears himself as if from a great distance. “I’m fucking fine.”

“Great,” Mac says. “Was that—”

“Are you seriously about to ask me if that was good? Really?” Dennis can feel his heart pounding. His chest is still tight, his throat blocked with the effort of holding in whatever it is that has him by the heart. He makes himself talk anyway. “Yes, asshole. Obviously. Gold fucking star or whatever. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“Actually,” Mac says, and winces even as he says it, “technically it would only be a gold star if I’d figured out I was gay when I was like, fourteen or whatever, because that’s just for people who have never had straight sex. Artemis told me.”

“Jesus,” Dennis says. “Fine.” Was his heartbeat always this loud? Why is Mac talking about Artemis right now? “It was good. It’s not a big deal. Are you going to sit there and look at me all day or can I, like, have a minute? I need to shower.”

Mac rocks back a little, like he’s surprised, which he can’t be. What did he expect, that Dennis was going to kiss him on the forehead and offer him a handjob and a signed certificate — Congratulations On Giving What I Guess Was Your First Blowjob Now That I Think About It, It Didn’t Suck, ha ha — surely not. He’s known Dennis long enough to know that Dennis isn’t the forehead-kissing type. “Sure,” he says, too quickly after too long a pause. “I should get back to the bar anyway. I’m just going to, uh, I need to get something from my room.” He gets to his feet with none of his earlier grace. He’s hard, obviously, and he half-turns away from Dennis, but that does nothing to hide it. “You can go ahead and shower if you want. I don’t need the bathroom anyway.”

What Dennis wants is to keep staring at the line of Mac’s dick in his jeans and the way that Mac moves differently when all he can think about is how much he wants to get off. Instead he makes himself look Mac in the eye instead and, to regain the upper hand, waits until he goes even redder before relenting. “Yeah, thanks,” he says, and just before Mac closes the door of his room behind him, he adds, “Have fun getting whatever it is!”

Then he goes about the undignified business of peeling himself off the couch, getting his pants back up from around his ankles, and trying to make the room look the way it did six hours ago, when he didn’t know what Mac looked like sucking cock or what it felt like to come in his mouth. He flips the couch cushion, decides that’s too obvious, and flips it back. He doesn’t try particularly hard to listen for any sounds Mac might be making in his room, but he doesn’t make too much noise of his own either, just in case. If Dennis takes too long, he knows abstractly, then Mac will come back and catch him out here, and then he’ll want to talk about that as well. Does he want that? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything, right now. He may never know anything ever again.

Something in Mac’s room creaks, and Dennis feels as if his body has finally kicked him out for good.

He only realizes that he’s in the bathroom when the door clicks shut behind him, and then he turns the water up as hot as it’ll go and stands there, still fully dressed, until the mirror is entirely fogged over. Dennis can’t see his reflection at all by the time he finally strips down and gets in the shower. He scrubs at his scalp with his fingernails, rubs shampoo in so hard that it stings, and stands under the spray until his skin is red and angry, almost scalded. All he feels is a faint tingle, the static signal of desensitized nerve endings. Perfect. His head feels like it’s full of the same steam filling the room, dense and warm. At some point he turns off the water and gets out of the shower. At some point he wraps himself in a towel and sits on the side of the tub. Time passes. He stares at his knees, where Mac rested his hands while he was sucking Dennis off. He was so tentative, like he wasn’t sure what to do with his hands or whether he was allowed to touch Dennis anywhere else. Dennis presses his thumbs into the weird little divots next to his kneecaps but it doesn’t make any difference. He’s still floating perhaps a foot above his body, barely tethered, barely breathing. Maybe it would be better if Mac had been rougher, had done something that left a mark. Dennis never feels like this after he’s been tied up or slapped or any of the other things that women often seem to be very enthusiastic about doing to him. Pain is easy: It happens and you bear it and then it’s over. All that’s left is the memory, which always fades almost too quickly. It lasts longer when there are marks. But pleasure, that’s an entirely different story. It’s unfamiliar territory.

It would be easier, Dennis thinks vaguely, if Mac had gagged or puked or dug his fingernails into the wrong spot or, God forbid, forgotten to cover his teeth. Instead, he gave what Dennis has to reluctantly concede might have been the best blowjob of his life, despite a clear lack of both technique and experience, and now Dennis is meant to just fucking get on with his life, apparently. He has no idea whether Mac is still in his room or waiting outside for him. He has no idea how he feels, which isn’t remotely new except for the fact that just this once, he thought the answer would be pretty clear. An hour ago, if anyone had asked Dennis how he thought he’d feel after getting a blowjob between bros, a brojob, if you will, from Mac, he would have had a half-dozen guesses ready, no problem. He would have said, Why would you even ask that, and then followed it up with, I’m sure it would be totally meaningless. Or maybe: I would have to die immediately from self-loathing. Or his personal favorite, a classic that never gets old: I would feel exactly the same way I do the rest of the time, which is nothing. Why would you assume this would make me feel anything?

After all, Dennis has had years to feel every emotion he could possibly have about Mac. What could possibly be left — besides indifference? But he sits in the bathroom and he waits to start feeling again and the only thought in his head, spiraling around and around like water circling the drain, is that despite his best efforts, something has snuck up on him nevertheless. It has slept inside of his bones and wired itself along his nerves and lived in his blind spot for decades, waiting for its moment to strike, and now the effort of ignoring it — crushing it down small into the empty place that coils inside of him where his guts should be — has left Dennis unmoored from himself.

That’s okay. Dennis can work with emptiness; that’s kind of his whole deal. Feeling hollow isn’t the worst thing in the world. In fact, if anything, it makes him better: sharper, more focused, less concerned about other people, less prone to get swept away by his own feelings. Most of the time Dennis manages to bully them into line, and keep them too small and beaten down to register as more than a faint echo, but sometimes one manages to lie low like this until it’s too big to ignore, and then it grabs him by the ankles and drags him down, down, down, all the way to the bottom of the sea where all the rest of the monsters live with their too-big eyes and their too-sharp teeth. Dennis always breaks free eventually, kicks and kicks and kicks until he can swim for the surface, but every time he leaves a little bit more of himself behind. He trails blood all the way back up to the air, and someday maybe nothing will come back at all, or maybe what comes back will look nothing like him; it’ll just be scraps of flesh, held together with willpower and control and the all-consuming desire for just one more breath. In the long run, it probably doesn’t matter anyway. If Dennis spends too much time with the deep-sea horrors then he’ll start to look just like them, just like the reflection he sees in the mirror every day — eyes too big, mouth too hungry, teeth too sharp — and then he’ll drown on dry land.

The first step to staying afloat is moving. How long has he been sitting in the bathroom? The mirror is almost clear, and his skin isn’t flushed anymore: It just feels too tight, but maybe that’s just the room. The walls are too close together, suddenly, while the door feels five miles away. “Get up,” Dennis says to himself, spitting out one syllable at a time, and makes himself stand. Maybe Mac is waiting outside, maybe not. Either way, Dennis can’t stay in here forever.

When he opens the door, the apartment is empty.

“Okay,” Dennis says to himself, fingers digging into the door frame, shoulders braced for impact. His body is behind the curve. That’s okay too. That’s fine. That isn’t new either. He can just get on with his life and wait for it to catch up.

He gets dressed. He avoids looking at himself in the mirror. He digs around in the fridge for a while because he hasn’t eaten since last night and he knows that in theory he should eat something, even though he isn’t hungry. The only item that remotely interests him is the quart of orange juice in the door, so he shuts it again and stares at the counter for a minute before he remembers that this is why he keeps a stash of protein bars in the cash register at work, for days when he can’t make himself eat but doesn’t want to fall over. If he can hold out until he gets to the bar, maybe then he’ll realize that he isn’t actually that hungry, and then maybe he can hold out until after work — and then maybe he can just go to sleep instead of eating. One day at a time — isn’t that what they say? In the meantime, he drinks half a glass of water to stave off the inevitable empty-stomach heartburn, and then he goes downstairs and gets in the car.

Mac must have called one of the others to come get him, Dennis thinks, or maybe he decided to walk. That seems like the kind of thing Mac would do, walk forty minutes back to the bar because he won’t ask anyone except Dennis to drive the ten minutes to pick him up and the ten minutes back. Odds are, Dennis realizes, that he’ll pass Mac on the way back to Paddy’s and end up giving him a ride the rest of the way himself. He puts his head down gently on the steering wheel and spends a minute thinking about whether it’s worth trying to figure out what walking route Mac would choose in order to try and avoid him, but that feels like making too big a deal of things. It’s not like any of this actually matters, just because it feels like it does — and Dennis can’t figure out why in the first place, so that basically cancels out. So he offered to do Mac a favor, and Mac took him up on it: That’s nothing new, practically day-of-the-week-ending-in-y territory. He doesn’t have to keep thinking about it. He doesn’t have to try and figure out how he feels. He can just remember this as a day like any other, one more tally mark on the cell wall, nothing special. With enough effort, he won’t even be able to recall why it had ever felt like anything different. That’s good, he tells himself. That’s better. The pressure in his head is a little less crushing now, his jaw less clenched, his shoulders less knotted. He isn’t breathing air yet, but he’s out of the deeps.

He drives back to the bar. He picks Mac up along the way. They sit in awkward silence for a minute — Mac waiting for Dennis to set the tone, Dennis making him wait for it — and then he makes a joke about how Dee and Charlie have probably ruined the bar in their absence and they’re back on familiar shaky ground again. There are enough old patterns for them to follow that it doesn’t matter if Dennis doesn’t actually mean it. A good fake can be much better than the real thing, as long as you sell it. How does the rest of the day go? Who cares. Dennis spends a good portion of it drunk, the way he usually does. At some point somebody makes a stupid suggestion, like always, although they ran out of good stupid suggestions a long time ago and now they only have the boring stuff, like seeing if they can glue every piece of furniture in the bar to the ceiling before Frank gets back so that he thinks he’s having a rare type of brain aneurysm.

Normally Dennis would jump at the chance to torture Frank — he’s made pretty good headway so far but he still has about ten years’ worth of suffering to repay in kind — but his heart just hasn’t been in it lately. Frank is looking worse and worse these days. Getting to see him age is the only good thing about getting older right alongside him. Once a month or so Dennis spends some time behind the bar just watching Frank, how he moves a little more slowly these days, has a little more trouble hoisting himself onto a stool, has a stronger prescription on his glasses than he used to, and he thinks, one of these days, you motherfucker. No matter how wrinkly and disgusting he gets, he has to stick around at least long enough to watch Frank kick the bucket so that he can piss on Frank’s grave. Anyway, Charlie thinks that Frank might literally die of shock if he comes in to find every table in the bar glued to the ceiling, so maybe Dennis won’t have to wait that long after all. Personally, he thinks that Frank probably won’t even notice that anything is different. In order to do that, he’d need to be able to think about something other than himself for more than two seconds at a time, and that just isn’t in the cards for Frank Reynolds, certified asshole, but who listens to his opinion? What does he know about the man he spent thirty years thinking was his father? Mac and Charlie are on the case, after all, and what Dennis has learned from years of trying to make them smarter is that it isn’t possible. Sometimes they make him stupider, but that’s the only way it ever goes. Their particular variety of brain trust is like the black box of an airplane: totally impenetrable and designed for disaster. The ceiling furniture idea, for example, is one they’ve been discussing for an hour now with no discernible progress. Dennis gives up on trying to work, and tunes back in to see whether they’ve moved on from trying to figure out the difference between a brain aneurysm and a stroke.

“We’d need to make sure the glue was really strong,” Mac says, drumming his fingers against the bar. “Like, much stronger than regular glue. Super strong. Crazy strong. What do they call that stuff again?”

Jesus Christ, Dennis thinks. At least they’ve given up on amateur neurobiology. He watches Mac’s fingers, the way they slide against his dew-slick bottle of beer, and tries not to stare at the way Mac’s mouth hangs open as he waits for somebody to answer. “Epoxy,” he says, because sometimes he swears Mac gives him these straight lines on purpose. It’s just too easy. There’s no way that a man who once convinced all their other coworkers that evolution and creationism are equally viable theories is actually that dumb all of the time.

“Epoxy!” Mac looks delighted. Not a set-up, then. Dennis isn’t sure whether he’s disappointed or not.

Dee pushes her stool back. “No way,” she says. “I’m out right now before you guys glue me to the ceiling and I have to rip my face off so I don’t starve to death.”

“Come on,” Dennis says. “Nobody’s going to glue you to the ceiling.” He keeps his face just a little too still. It won’t fool Dee — she knows he’d never try to get rid of her like that — but it never hurts to keep everyone else guessing. “Don’t be so boring.”

“Uh huh,” she says, already halfway to the door. She doesn’t look up from her phone. “When you guys get in trouble, don’t call me.”

“We won’t,” Mac yells.

“But really, don’t!” she shouts back. “I mean it!”

Then it’s just him and Dennis and Charlie, looking at all the stools, the pool table in back, the standing tables by the bar, the light fixtures, the bottles — would they need to flip the bar too? It just seems like so much work, and then at some point they would need to chisel everything off the ceiling and put it back where it came from. They all start talking at once.

“I mean, it’s a good idea, but maybe not today,” Mac says.

“Oh yeah no not today,” Charlie says. “Maybe some other day. Today feels like it’s already over, you know? Like, it’s already three in the afternoon, and in an hour it’s going to be four, and then it’ll be five, and that’s basically midnight. And if I go to sleep after midnight, then I wake up unsettled and that’s no good, because then I’m unsettled all day, you can just ask Frank. Nobody likes it when I’m unsettled. I mean even I don’t like it when I’m unsettled. So I think we should just call it a day now and maybe some other day—”

“All right,” Dennis says. “All right! Everyone shut up! Thank you. Right. Okay. So. I think we all agree that it’s a good idea, but maybe we should save it for a slow day, you know? I mean, today’s pretty slow, but it’s this kind of willingness to just throw it all away on a whim that keeps us that way. What if,” he says, and then he thinks, Less than an hour ago I found out what it looks like when Mac sucks cock, and his train of thought drives right off the end of a trestle bridge straight into a ravine. Little stuntmen are jumping off and waving their arms and if there was any sound in the film inside Dennis’ head they would be shouting, but it’s sepia-toned and cartoonish and totally silent, so no. There’s a jaunty little piano tune, though. It’s quite unsettling.

“What if what?” Mac says, and Dennis looks at him, startled. It’s a reflex, he tells himself — it doesn’t mean anything — but he looks at Mac and he has no idea what he was about to say. Correlation doesn’t always imply causation, but sometimes it does. How is he supposed to know the difference?

“What if we slow-roll this whole thing?” he says. Time, that’s what he needs: Buy some time, Dennis tells himself. That’s what he was talking about anyway, right? “I mean, sure, we could glue everything to the ceiling, but then what? We’d spend hours getting it all ready and then Frank might not even come in today. Plus we wouldn’t have anywhere to sit. No. We have to do this the smart way. If you really want to make Frank think he’s crazy, you can’t switch everything around at once. You have to change one thing at a time so he doesn’t know whether they’re actually different or if he’s just losing it. That, my friends, is how you take a mediocre plan and turn it into art.”

“I still don’t know about this, guys,” Charlie says.

“No, Dennis is right,” Mac says. “I read about this in Teen Vogue.”

“I do not want to know what you were doing reading Teen Vogue,” Dennis says.

“No, man, it’s for the articles,” Mac says. “That’s where I get all my news.”

“Oh, that’s not good,” Charlie says. “You have to read news from a lot of sources, that’s what Dee always says. That’s why I turned all our sheets into curtains and replaced them with newspapers.” Dennis squints. Now that he’s looking, there’s a little patch of what looks like B1 smudged onto Charlie’s forehead. “That way, even when I’m not awake, I’m absorbing information.” He taps his temple. “It works, I’m telling you.”

“First of all, never tell me how to read news ever again,” Dennis says. “Second of all, I don’t know what you read in Teen Vogue, Mac, but there’s no way they know as much about gaslighting as I do.”

Mac shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says. “Those teens are way ahead of us. I mean, when I was that age, I didn’t even know how to put on a condom.”

“You still don’t know how to put on a condom,” Charlie says. “We were going to learn in that one class but then you just ate the banana instead. Then we got detention.”

“Hell yeah,” Mac says. “Didn’t they say we were the first students to ever flunk sex ed?”

“Every day I learn about new horrifying parts of your adolescences that I somehow missed at the time,” Dennis says. He didn’t flunk sex ed. He spent most of it digging the tip of a sharpened pencil into the palm of his hand to see whether he could leave a permanent mark. In retrospect, the teacher should have probably sent him to the nurse or maybe a counselor — definitely after he made it through the skin and bled all over that one pop quiz, for example — but Dennis had been a viciously mean sixteen-year-old, so it made sense that she hadn’t intervened. “Sometimes it’s like I don’t know you guys at all.”

“I don’t know about that,” Charlie says. “We’re pretty straightforward people.”

Dennis shakes his head. “Look, we’re getting away from the point here. All in favor of doing the smart thing and driving Frank slowly insane over the course of, oh, I don’t know, several months because we don’t have anything better to do, say aye.”

“Aye,” Mac and Charlie say in unison.

“All in favor of throwing away potential months of entertainment for the sake of immediate gratification that probably isn’t even going to be worth it in the end, and that will definitely result in Dee getting glued to the ceiling and having to rip her face off so that she doesn’t starve to death, there’s no point saying anything because the ayes have it,” Dennis says. “Even if that does have a certain appeal when I put it like that.”

“Fuck that,” Mac says, and Charlie nods. “I’m pumped. When do we start?”

Dennis reaches under the bar for a beer and opens it on the edge of the counter. “Well, if I’m being honest, that kind of took it out of me,” he says. “Why don’t we leave it there for today?”

Over the course of years and years of failed schemes, including the few that work just well enough to leave them hungry for more, Dennis has spent a good amount of time trying not to think about why they just keep on trying anyway, flinging themselves headfirst at the same wall over and over as if one of these days it’ll turn out differently. He just wants to keep on living his life the way he has since he was twenty without going anywhere near the possibility that it might not be sustainable or fulfilling. Self-awareness is the enemy of satisfaction, after all. But despite his best efforts, Dennis has come to a few realizations over the years: first, that they keep coming up with new schemes because at this point they don’t know how to do anything else. If they had spent the last twenty years of their lives doing anything other than running the worst bar in Philadelphia into the ground, then maybe they’d be able to start fresh, figure out how to be different people with different lives who could do anything they wanted, like all the normal boring people who drift into Paddy’s once and never again, whose faces Dennis never remembers because they all say look at how easy it is to be me. He never looks too closely, either, because if he does he always wants to scream, to lean in and bellow, Fuck you, you have no idea.

He tried being one of those people once, walked away from his family and his friends and the place that was his entire life to see if he could do it — wipe the slate clean and be a different man in a place where nobody knew anything about him except that he had the cutest kid on the block, an angel-faced little boy with just the sweetest mama and a father who hadn’t been around so much but was doing his best now to make things right. It didn’t last. Dennis woke up every morning and told himself that today was the day he would figure it out, how to be happy like this, how to stop hating Mandy for being so kind and patient, how to stop hating his son for loving him the way Dennis remembers loving Frank once, with the all-consuming certainty that his faith was in the right place and that if he just put enough time and work into figuring out how to show it, he would be rewarded. And the whole time he could still hear that goddamn chirping, the run-down battery of his hindbrain’s smoke detector, singing, You’re not meant to be here, you’re not good enough for this, you don’t belong. Mandy had been so understanding when Dennis had said, look, we both know this isn’t fair, to you, to him, to me. He had trotted out all his oldest, most practiced lies — It’s not you, it’s me; I just don’t think I can be the person the two of you deserve to have in your lives; it’s not fair for me to ask you to accept any less — and he had put on his best mask so that it all sounded like platitudes, even though every word was true — for the first time in his life, maybe.

So the first reason is that they don’t know how to do anything else, and even when they try, they fail. And the second reason, Dennis has come to believe, is that because they can’t do anything else, they have to keep trying anyway. They have to believe that the next scheme is the one that’ll tip the balance, that’ll finally pay off and give them a way out. Otherwise their lives have no purpose and they’ve wasted years making each other miserable in an unending circlejerk of emotional and physical battery. But it’s never going to fucking work, is the problem that Dennis has been trying to outrun for years, because they’ve tried everything and now all they have left is the misery. So they have to tell themselves and each other all these transparent little lies to keep themselves going: that next time it’ll be different, if only they had a little more time, a little better luck.

Maybe Dennis is the only one who knows it won’t work forever, or maybe he’s the only one who’s lost faith, although if he’s figured it out then Dee probably knows, and if he’s this close to cracking then Dee probably has already. She doesn’t seem to be as miserable as Dennis is, though, so maybe she has something else going on, or maybe she has the same plan that he does: to check out the minute life isn’t worth it anymore. God knows she has the practice. Dennis never really knows what she’s thinking, though, so he can’t be sure, and he definitely isn’t going to ask. Mac and Charlie and Frank certainly don’t seem unhappy either, though that’s less of a surprise. Frank and Charlie have their weird thing, whatever it is — they don’t ever really seem to need anyone except each other — and Mac doesn’t need any of them anymore. One day he’ll realize that, and then it’ll be over. At least Dennis has a plan for that, too.

The rest of the day passes the way it always does. Frank does wander in briefly, after all, but then he vanishes again, maybe to the basement or further down, to the sewers or the secret tunnels where he claims the rats have their own underground society; Dee doesn’t come back; Charlie and Mac disappear on some half-cocked errand and leave Dennis to serve all three customers who come in and then close on his own, which entails doing precisely nothing other than turning off the lights and locking the doors. He lingers anyway, double-checking the drawer and spending an extra ten minutes trying to decipher the notes Charlie left on the desk in the back office for their next order. MORR BEERE, one of them says. Underneath it, a Post-It reads GLOO? The ledger, as usual, reflects a totally fictitious balance. For all Dennis knows, Frank has been using the bar as a money laundering front ever since the day he bought it. There’s no real reason for him to check the totals except that he doesn’t want to go home yet, doesn’t want to look at Mac sitting on the couch and think about what, if anything, he wants from Mac, and whether Mac might want more from Dennis. It’s always exhausting to try and figure that kind of thing out, which is why Dennis never sleeps with the same woman for more than a few months at a time, because they always expect him to keep being the same person he was when they met and that’s just too fucking difficult. He has no idea what to do when it comes to Mac, who has known him for so long that he knows all of Dennis’ faces, all the masks he slips on and off so that nobody ever has to get attached to him; Mac, who notices what he talks about and what he wants and then gives it to him like it’s just that easy; Mac, who he just can’t get rid of, who follows him around like a kicked puppy, a bad penny, a good friend.

Somebody knocks on the doorframe, and when he looks up, of course it’s Mac. It always is.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” he says, before Dennis can open his mouth. “I’m actually really good at that, not talking about things. If you want. We can pretend nothing ever happened.”

“You’re still here?” Dennis says, and closes the ledger. Fuck: He didn’t expect Mac to come looking for him, or to call him on it, and now he has to figure out what to do next. It would be so easy to take him up on his offer, to say, That would probably be for the best, don’t you think, and then when one of them inevitably cracks, no matter which of them it is, he’ll be able to blame Mac. He’ll be able to say, I told you so, I knew you couldn’t do it, that’s why all of this was a bad idea, and none of it will be his fault. Once upon a time, he would have taken that option without thinking twice, confident both in his own ability to pull it off and Mac’s inability to do so. It would have been the perfect trap. It’s not like his other option is particularly good, anyway: If he says no, then Dennis will have to deal with all of it — what they did, what it means, whether it’ll happen again — right now, and he won’t have anybody to blame for it but himself. He doesn’t even know the answers to half of his own questions, let alone whatever Mac is bound to ask him. It would be stupid, impulsive, absurd. It would mean breaking all the rules he’s instituted to keep his life on the same track it’s been on for years, that kept him sane and alive after his second chance turned to dust in his hands and ashes in his mouth, that mean he doesn’t have to try again and again and again to be a different man, a better son, a good friend, getting a little bit closer every time but still failing. He can just stay like this forever, never exceptional but never hopeless, secure in his barely-above-average mediocrity. After all, there are only so many times Dennis can fuck up and still live with himself, and he doesn’t know how many shots he has left, but he knows it isn’t many. Saying no, telling Mac that he doesn’t want to pretend it never happened, feels like pushing all the rest of them into the center of the table and trusting Mac not to call his bluff.

Mac is still looking at him, waiting for Dennis to say yes. It’s so obvious — in the way his brows are raised and his arms are folded, like this is a foregone conclusion, like he knows exactly how it’s going to go.

Fuck you, Dennis thinks, in the same way that he sometimes thinks about yanking the wheel and driving straight into oncoming traffic, just to prove that he can: the screech of rubber, the blaze of headlights. You don’t know me at all.

“No,” he says, and for the first time in a long time, he feels the thrill of dancing on the edge of a knife — walking on hot coals — pressing a razor blade into the ball of his thumb to see just how far he can go. “We aren’t going to pretend nothing ever happened,” he says, and maybe it’s a mistake, but who cares? He feels more alive than he has in years, drunk on the surprise writ large upon Mac’s face. “What kind of closeted pussy shit is that? We were both there, we’re both adults. I don’t see any reason we can’t just acknowledge it and move on with our lives.”

“Right,” Mac says. “I mean, I’m not closeted.”

“I know, jackass,” Dennis says. “And I’m straight. What I meant was, this doesn’t change any of that. I told you, you need someone to experiment with who has high standards and won’t sugarcoat it when you don’t meet them. Right? And you promised you weren’t going to get weird about it. Are you getting weird about it, Mac?”

Mac shakes his head, eyes wide. “No! I’m not weird. I mean, I’m not getting weird. Everything is fine, and completely normal.”

“Great,” Dennis says. “Then I don’t think there’s really anything else to discuss here.”

“Well,” Mac says, and Dennis braces himself for more: “I thought we could drive through McDonald’s on the way home?”

It’s such a non sequitur that Dennis almost laughs in his face. He catches himself halfway through the first ha. “Why not,” he says, and clicks the desk lamp off. “I mean, I’m not going to get anything, but you’ve had a long day. I guess you can probably afford the empty calories.”

If he hears the jab, Mac doesn’t register it. He sails right on by with the perfect serenity only attainable by the truly ignorant, and frowns at the rest. “I’ll make you a shake when we get home.”

“Sure,” Dennis says. He’ll pretend to sip it for a few hours and then sneak it into the bathroom and flush it down the toilet, he tells himself. He isn’t actually hungry anymore. In fact, he’s probably tired enough to fall asleep without eating, and he didn’t even have to dip into his stash of emergency work snacks. It might be an unconventional strategy, but it works more often than not. Anyway, he shouldn’t be letting Mac make him shakes in the first place, not if they’re going to keep doing this; he might get the wrong impression about what it all means. Dennis claps him on the shoulder. “You ready to get out of here?”

Mac usually talks for the whole drive if Dennis lets him. Tonight it takes him a few false starts before he really gets into the rhythm of things, which isn’t entirely his fault. Dennis lets a few casual conversation starters fall through before he bites. He’s already made one big decision for both of them today, a unilateral burden he only had to take on because Mac couldn’t come up with his own opinion on the subject; the least Mac can do in exchange is put in a little extra effort to get their evening routine underway. To Mac’s limited credit, he does his best. First, he tries to talk about what he and Charlie were doing all afternoon, which involves newspapers and the library and running away from children. Dennis does actually want to know more about their brief foray into media literacy, and in particular how and why they ended up getting chased out of the computer lab by a pack of middle schoolers — an unsurprising number of anecdotes about Mac and Charlie’s friendship involve the two of them getting bullied by literal infants — but he doesn’t want to reward Mac’s first attempt at small talk, so he turns himself into conversational dead weight; he says yes and no and makes uninterested, sullen noises for a few minutes before Mac gets the message and switches tracks.

“Did Frank come in today?”

Dennis frowns. “For like ten minutes. Why?”

“I was just wondering,” Mac says. “Do you ever worry about him? Because I do.”

“Worry about him?” Dennis laughs. It comes out harsh and bitter, not on purpose, but Dennis wouldn’t soften it even if he could. Frank has had plenty of chances to earn Dennis’ sympathy over the years, and he’s thrown every single one of them away with apparent glee. It’s like one long Christmas morning of empty boxes, and empty seats at the dinner table on Friday nights, interchangeable domestics telling him that his father really wanted to make it this time but oh no, tough titties, son: He had an emergency at work, he called to say, but don’t worry, your father will be home in time to say good night, he promised, he told me to tell you specifically, and by the time Dennis was five he knew that Frank was never going to be home before he fell asleep. Half the time he wouldn’t even be there when Dennis and Dee woke up the next day, and it was back to the big empty dining room for the two of them, seated on either side of the empty chair at the head of the table, silently kicking each other black and blue under cover of the fresh white tablecloth until Barbara swept in and back out again. Every weekend she had a new handbag on her arm, full of the same shivering malnourished lapdog as always, and every weekend Dennis and Dee waited for the front door to close behind her so they could engage in open warfare with total impunity. By the time they were six, the help had been instructed not to interfere unless it looked like somebody was going to bleed on the carpet. When they were eight, Dee had made a lucky throw and lodged a fork so deep in Dennis’ shoulder that its handle twitched every time he sobbed or moved — and he bled all the way down his arm, hands clenched into tiny fists, fingernails buried in his palms, but he made it to the bathroom before he ruined anything other than the shirt he was wearing. That month’s nanny had found him sitting in the tub in perfect silence, all cried out, pressing a hand towel to the punctures — which were bleeding only sluggishly by then — and when Barbara came home that night, she took the nanny into the parlor and they stayed there for a long time before Barbara came back out and saw Dennis sitting on the stairs, waiting for her to notice him.

“Well, nobody needs more than one tetanus shot every ten years, thank God, so that’s that,” she said. “Aren’t you the big boy, taking it like a champ?”

“I didn’t make a mess,” Dennis said, and Barbara had ruffled his hair.

“That’s right,” she said. “That’s mommy’s handsome little man. You know what mommy needs?” Dennis shook his head, and she smiled. Her lipstick was starting to crack, and there was a little smudge of it on her front teeth. Dennis would have done anything for her. He waited for her to tell him what — “Mommy needs a fucking drink,” Barbara said, and patted him gingerly on the wrong shoulder. He did his best not to flinch. “Why don’t you go up to your room? I’ll come tuck you in tonight. You won’t be seeing that nasty woman around anymore, I promise.”

It hadn’t been the nanny’s fault, but Dennis didn’t say anything, because Barbara didn’t want him to and she was always right. And the next day he had set his jaw, ignoring the way pain hammered at his shoulder every time he raised his arm, and waited in the same upstairs bathroom until he could follow Dee to the top of the stairs for one hard-earned, well-timed shove. She hadn’t had time to do anything about it, but in the minute before he pushed her, she looked back and saw him there and the look on her face was not one of fear but one of fury. She had glared at him as if to say, how dare you, and then she had fallen, bouncing squarely off every other step and landing in the hallway like a sack of broken bottles.

Frank had been there for that, of course. Dennis hadn’t seen him in weeks but of course Frank had turned up the minute Dee needed him: He had looked at Dennis like he was less than dirt for laying a hand on her, and then he had taken him into the living room and sat him down on the piano bench and laid into him for hours, asking him what kind of a man pushed his sister down the stairs, didn’t he know how badly he could have hurt her, didn’t he know what that would have looked like for Frank, what if his boss found out that he couldn’t even keep his own children from killing each other? Did Dennis want him to lose his job? Did he want to get kicked out of the house, to get taken away from his mother and father, to go live with some backwards family that got their groceries at the discount store and pimped their children out to the highest bidder? Did he? Because that was what he was telling Frank by acting like this and not being the fucking man of the family when Frank was out there working eighty hours a week to keep that redheaded bitch in heels and handbags. His own father, tearing into eight-year-old Dennis like he was an underperforming intern, and the whole time he knew that Dee was sitting on the stairs listening and that he’d have to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder: It’s not really the kind of thing that encourages concern later in life.

“Why would I worry about Frank?” Dennis says to Mac, because it’s the truth. He can’t think of a single bad thing that might happen to Frank that wouldn’t feel like delayed gratification. Most of the sticky situations that Frank gets into are his own fault in the first place. “He’s spent so many years pickling his own insides that he’s probably immortal, anyway.”

“He’s still your dad,” Mac says. “I mean, I know he was a pretty terrible father, and I guess he isn’t actually related to you anyway, but at least he’s around, right?”

“Oh, I get it,” Dennis says. “Very subtle. Classically Freudian.” McDonald’s is coming up: He switches lanes and turns on his blinker. “Believe me, if I could switch fathers with you, I would have done it already. You’re more than welcome to the old son of a bitch.”

Mac looks at him, and then away. “You don’t mean that.”

“I absolutely do,” Dennis says. “What do you want? Fries?”

“Oh, obviously,” Mac says. “And chicken nuggets. You don’t want to be related to my dad, man. You have no idea.”

Dennis rolls down his window. “Large fries and a ten-piece McNuggets with honey mustard.”

“Fzwbl,” the speaker box says.

“Great,” Dennis says, and rolls his window back up before he can find out that it’ll cost him three dollars twenty-four cents and a piece of gum covered in pocket lint, pay at the window, your order will be ready in a moment, all hail the arches. “And I think I have some idea of what it’s like to be related to Luther. In fact, I think it’s actually a matter of legal record at this point. I mean, that’s what court stenographers are for, right?”

“Okay, well, I mean, I guess. But that’s not fair!” Mac says. “You know what I mean.”

“Do I?” Dennis says. He rolls his window back down and hands his card over. “It’s not for me,” he says to the cashier. She isn’t his type but it never hurts to clarify this kind of thing. Maybe he’ll run into her in the feminine hygiene aisle of CVS in a few days and pretend he’s on an errand for a fictional roommate, Oh yeah, I mean, it’s actually kind of a weird situation, we dated for a few months and then figured out it wasn’t going to work but we’re still friends, that’s actually why I’m here, she told me it was an emergency and I don’t know what that means but it’s no big deal, you know? Which will demonstrate that he can be friends with a woman without wanting to fuck her, and that he might be the kind of person that a woman could feel comfortable around, plus that he’s a good person whose progressive morals mean he doesn’t have vagina-based hangups. “I just drive him places.”

“Oh, my boyfriend is the same way,” she says, which is so far from what Dennis expected that it takes him a minute to register that it’s even part of the same conversation and that they haven’t just resorted to throwing random sentences at each other and seeing what sticks. “We’re in the car for two minutes and he wants to get Arby’s.” She glances over her shoulder. “But don’t tell anyone I said that.”

“I won’t,” Dennis says on autopilot, and before he can say, What does your boyfriend have to do with anything? Mac leans over the gearshift and slings his arm around Dennis’ shoulders.

“Your boyfriend knows his curly fries,” he says. His face is very close to Dennis; he’s warm and he smells like mandarin orange and the faint salty tang of dried sweat. Dennis feels like he’s having a fucking stroke. Are people just playing conversational Mad Libs? Did he miss a memo somewhere? Is Mac straight again and trying to pick up this girl right in front of him? What are they doing here? What are any of them doing, really, here on Earth? Why did their ancestors bother leaving the ocean? The cashier hands Dennis his card back with the receipt folded around it and he gives her a two-fingered wave and pulls forward before any of them can say anything else. He’s already having enough of an existential crisis for one night. The next window is operated by an employee who clearly couldn’t care less about customer service, thank fuck; she all but throws the paper bag into Dennis’ lap, mutters something that could just as easily be invective, and goes back to pretending none of the rest of them exist. Dennis envies her.

Once they’re back on the road, pointed towards home, he waits until they hit a red light, and then he says, “What the fuck was that?”

“What?” Mac says. He reaches into the bag, yelps, pulls his hand back, puts it in the bag again, yelps a second time, and retrieves a single presumably scorching fry for his troubles.

“Stop,” Dennis snaps. “Just give them a minute to cool down.”

“But then they won’t be as good,” Mac says, and yelps again. “What were we talking about?”

We were talking about you asking other people about their boyfriends, Dennis thinks, but now he can’t remember why it bothered him so much. All that he has left is the feeling of getting his hackles up, ready to hiss and spit, the irritability still reverberating around the back of his throat. “Forget it,” he says, because otherwise Mac will smell it on him and then nothing Dennis says will make him drop the subject. He’ll worry it like a dog with a bone, sniffing around for details Dennis doesn’t have and wouldn’t give out if he did. “Let’s figure out how to make Frank crazy, right? That’s what we’re working on. Let’s not get sidetracked.”

“Okay, well,” Mac says, in the tone of voice that means he knows Dennis won’t like what he’s going to say next, but is hoping that if he’s wily enough about it Dennis might not notice. “I know we were going to do that, but hear me out.” He pauses for so long that Dennis wants to reach over and grab him by the face and and tell him to spit it out. “What if… we didn’t?”

“When have we ever not done something?” Dennis says. He stares straight ahead, hands clenched on the steering wheel. “Why are you being so weird about this, Mac? Since when have you cared this much about Frank? I mean, if anyone should hate him, it’s you. Or have you forgotten about the whole year when he refused to be in a room alone with you? When he got his back to a wall every time you were within five feet of him? Once you came into the bathroom while he was peeing in the sink and he tried to shoot you. Or did you forget about that?”

“That was a misunderstanding,” Mac says, and then he winces. “Well, it was more that he misunderstood what was happening and I kind of got the sense he was looking for an excuse to shoot me at that point. But — but we got past that! Anyway, all I’m saying is that I don’t really get the point of making him think he’s insane. Like, what’s in it for us, you know?”

Dennis sees the light change to red and runs it anyway, just because it always makes Mac nervous when he does, and revels in his startled little intake of breath. “Why does there have to be something in it for us? Isn’t that kind of self-interested? Why can’t we just do something to do it? For the sheer joy of doing? Don’t think, Mac. You’re not a thinker, you’re a doer. So just — do!”

They sit in silence for a minute. Mac chews and Dennis seethes, keeping one eye open for the turnoff onto their street and the other on Mac. The strain is starting to get to him by the time Mac finally shrugs and says, “I guess you’re right.”

“Thank you,” Dennis says. The surge of relief he feels about getting Mac to roll over almost eclipses his rage that Mac didn’t keep prying. How could he not know that Dennis wanted to tell him but couldn’t just come out and say it? Wasn’t it written all over Dennis’ face for any idiot to see? Typical Mac, he thinks. Just stupid enough to be useful in the worst possible way. Still: He’ll take what he can get.

“Plus, we haven’t done anything like this in a while,” Mac goes on. “Most of the time now we’re just spinning our wheels.”

“Yes! Thank you.” Dennis smacks his hand against the steering wheel and nearly misses their turnoff. He takes the corner a little wide, but nobody’s watching. “We have to stay sharp. Just because we’re getting older doesn’t mean we have to get boring.”

“You’re not boring,” Mac says, too quickly.

“I mean, I wasn’t talking about me,” Dennis says. “I’m consistently interesting.” He looks at Mac out of the corner of his eye to see if he reacts — if he really means it.

Mac stares blankly back and then says, “Oh!” and holds up the bag of fries. “You want some?”

“No,” Dennis says, miffed, and then realizes that under these circumstances, sticking to his principles will probably require explaining his convoluted internal emotional process to Mac. It’s a particularly grim prospect. He reconsiders. “Actually, yeah, you caught me. I guess one fry couldn’t hurt.”

“No way, bro,” Mac says, and passes them over. “You have to eat something. Keep your strength up.”

Dennis takes a handful of fries. He watches Mac lick grease from his own fingers and then wipe them on his thighs, and salt floods his mouth. He wants to reach over and brush Mac’s shirt clean, flick the crumbs from his lap, feel all that muscle for himself. When did he start wanting to touch Mac all the time, and when did he stop letting himself? These days Dennis carefully rations the number of times he reaches out. Every time feels like tempting fate, running a risk he can’t identify because every time he tries to think about it his mind slides away like an ice cube in its own meltwater. Not that it’s ever easy for Dennis to keep track of that kind of inflection point, the difference between was and is, past and present and possible future: Half the time he can’t even tell what he’s feeling or whether he’s even feeling anything at all or whether he’s borrowing somebody else’s emotions, using their anger or happiness or sadness for a secondhand hit. Sometimes it happens between one sentence and the next — he falls out of the conversation and the moment, and time freezes for him; he slips into a memory and can’t pull himself back, or he plays out what he thinks will happen next and forgets that it isn’t already done. It’s happening now, he can tell, but nobody else ever seems to notice, and if he tried to explain it would make him sound crazy, and not the kind of crazy he wants people to think he is. Dennis wants to be the kind of crazy that screams stay away, poison dart frog crazy, snarling dog crazy. He wants people to think that if they get too close, he could do anything, and then he wants them to fuck off and leave him alone, because that’s what they always do anyway. They ask Dennis how he’s feeling and then they make fun of him for it or don’t believe him or tell him he’s doing it wrong. If they’re afraid of Dennis, then at least he can be sure it’s his own fault that nobody cares. Mac is the only person, the only fucking one, who sits and listens every time, with that look on his face like he knows absolutely nothing — but then he always ruins it, because even though he never leaves when Dennis lashes out, he doesn’t come any closer, either. He lets Dennis claw the shit out of him and he doesn’t run away but he doesn’t pin Dennis down, either, twist his arms behind his back and tell him that he knows it hurts, that it’s okay to stop fighting, that he can just—

“Hey,” Mac says. “Where’d you go, man?”

Dennis blinks. “What?” he says, and realizes abruptly that he’s been staring at Mac the whole time — or rather through him, at a vanishing point a million miles away.

“Are you feeling faint?” Mac says. He reaches over to press the back of his hand to Dennis’ forehead, which instantly feels hot. Maybe that’s it. Now that he’s paying attention, Dennis feels like he’s burning up inside. His ribs are spattered with napalm and if he opens his mouth all that’ll come out is an endless coil of black smoke and the occasional spark like a dying star. “You feel okay,” Mac says. “Was it the fries? Aw, man, I should have known. It’s the sodium, right?”

“I’m fine,” Dennis says. He pushes Mac’s hand away, and tries not to notice how easy it is to put space between them. “I just thought of something.”

“Oh,” Mac says. Dennis can tell he wants to ask what, but he won’t, so Dennis doesn’t have to come up with a lie. That’s fine. That’s for the best, probably. “Okay. But you’ll tell me if you start feeling sick?”

“Jesus, yes,” Dennis snaps — and there it is again, the way Mac just sits there and takes it. If he tried this shit with Dee, for example, she would tell him that she didn’t care if he lived or died, and if it was Charlie, he would start talking about some rat disease he caught in the sewers that scientists had never heard of before, So they kidnapped me in order to study it, you know, like scientists do all the time, with their unmarked white vans and the bags they carry to put over children’s heads, and at least half the story would clearly be a metaphor for sexual abuse, but if anyone pointed it out Charlie would say no way, how did they get that from a story about scientists that wore gloves to make their hands looked bigger, Jesus, guys, every time! And Frank wouldn’t even ask if Dennis was feeling sick or not. He would just glance over him, as if he preferred not to make even cursory eye contact, and presumably cross his fingers that Dennis would die sometime soon so that he could cash out the life insurance policy he’d probably had one of his alleged lawyer buddies draw up behind Dennis’ back on the theory that sooner or later he’d meet a disappointing, humiliating end, as Frank had always predicted.

Once, Mac would have pushed back, or maybe punched Dennis in the shoulder, or if Dennis was really being a dick about it he might have wrestled him to the ground to really make a point, but now the only way Mac ever touches him is with solicitous care, like he wants to show that Dennis matters to him but not too much. It all started when Mac came out. Not the first time — sometimes when he’s trying to sleep, Dennis still remembers holding his breath as the room tilted and filled, the strange blue underwater light, the way Mac’s hand was the only point of warmth in the world — but the second time, which was Dennis’ fault anyway, so he probably doesn’t get to be angry about it. After all, he was the one who sat in that arbitration room watching Mac lie to all of them and to himself and felt sick to his teeth, felt a tug behind his collarbone that he couldn’t identify as anything other than fellow-feeling, but then again that hadn’t stopped him from panicking when Mac said, I’ve been gay forever! And the first thing Dennis had thought after that, even though he knew it was wrong, even though he knew Mac was telling the truth for the first time in his fucking life, was Take it back. You can still take it back.

But Mac hadn’t, and now he’s gay, and he doesn’t touch Dennis anymore except in the way that he would a stranger in need. He makes Dennis shakes and carries him home when he twists his ankle and lets Dennis tear strips out of him all day without reacting, even though all Dennis wants is for him to push back, to shove him up against a wall and get nose-to-nose with him and threaten to pound him senseless if he didn’t take it back. And he seems happy, which isn’t fair, because that means it doesn’t make any sense for Dennis to be as fucking miserable about it as he is.

Something’s changed between Mac and Frank, too, but Dennis doesn’t know what. He does know that Frank hasn’t tried to shoot Mac for at least a few months now, but he would rather chew his own leg off than ask Frank what it was, and if he asks Mac then he’ll just get a lecture about how Frank can be a real asshole, that’s definitely true and Mac’s not trying to say he isn’t, but has Dennis tried talking to him lately, because at least he doesn’t have to keep track of visiting hours to have a conversation with his father through an inch-thick sheet of Plexiglass that more often than not ends with his father hanging up on him to his face. Blah blah blah. Dennis wishes his father was currently serving the first of eighteen consecutive life sentences. He wishes all their interactions involved the supervision of an armed guard, and that he could leave Frank hanging and know there’s no way for him to barge back into Dennis’ life without the extensive involvement of a parole officer at the very least.

That’s where Dennis would like his father to stay: where Dennis can keep an eye on him, aided by a 24-hour rotation of wardens and the full might of the carceral state. Just because Mac has apparently found it in him to forgive Frank for trying to commit hate crimes against him every time he had even the shadow of an excuse doesn’t mean Dennis has. After all, he was the one who had to spend all those decades listening to Frank’s periodic rampages about fairies and fags and how they were pushing their perverted agenda everywhere now, even on kids, and there was a word for that in his time, for people who wanted to teach kids about diddling before they were even out of diapers, and it was pedophiles, just in case that wasn’t obvious, and all those gays were just making shit up to justify their fetishes anyway, their degenerate lifestyle, and Dennis was to tell him immediately if anyone tried anything like that with him, got it? Good. Because no child of Frank’s was going to turn out like that if he had anything to say about it. He wasn’t going to have a faggot for a son, no way, not if it meant he had to beat it out of Dennis himself.

Fuck! It’s happened again: They’re inside and Dennis has no idea how they got here, whether he unlocked the door or Mac did, where the empty McDonald’s bag went — did Mac leave it in the car or did he get rid of it somewhere along the way? — or whether either of them said anything on the way up the stairs. He looks down and realizes that he’s kicked one of his shoes off under the coat rack, so that’s a good start. He leaves the other one next to it and then stands there for a minute, trying to figure out what to do next so Mac doesn’t notice that between one moment and the next Dennis has jumped 30 years into the past and back again via the scenic route. “I think I’m good without a shake tonight,” he says, feeling like a tightrope walker taking his first step onto the cable to see if it’s going to hold. So far, so good. “I filled up on fries,” he adds. That part is a flat-out lie: All his miserly handful of fries did was remind him what real food tastes like, all that salt and fat almost too much for his famine-withered palate to bear. He can still taste them in his mouth.

It would be so easy to look in the fridge for leftovers. Maybe Dennis could help himself to half a box of still-pliable pizza that Mac brought home from the bar last week after they ordered in, or maybe one of Mac’s absurd protein shakes or those green juices he’s getting really into these days even though they’re mostly just chlorophyll and sugar, overpriced soda replacements for people whose idea of nutrition is informed mostly by their understanding of primary colors. For a moment, Dennis’ mouth waters, and then he thinks about how he can already feel the fries weighing him down, turning into a soggy mass of starch in his stomach, and his throat tightens. Better to go to bed hungry than wake up remorseful. He’ll just open the window in his room and sneak a cigarette before he sleeps, and then he’ll take a shot of NyQuil to counteract the nicotine jitters, and that’ll put him out like a light. It’s easy once you get the hang of it, and Dennis is an expert when it comes to the careful calibrations involved — balancing his uppers and downers until they cancel each other out and he drifts away.

There were a few months — not so long ago, even — when every time Dennis headed for his room for the night, Mac got to his feet, as if he thought maybe this would be the time Dennis asked him in. And sure, maybe Dennis noticed, and maybe he started keeping one eye on the clock at work so that he could spend the last few hours of his shift behind the bar sipping tequila out of a tumblr. He’s never claimed to be a good person, after all, just a bred-in-the-bone opportunist with an eye for provocation, and who would he be if he passed up an opening like that? By closing time, he was always well and truly wasted, not so drunk that he couldn’t walk but certainly far enough gone that Mac wouldn’t let him drive. He would put Dennis’ arm around his shoulders and pour him into the passenger seat and drive both of them home more carefully than Dennis ever did, sober or not, and when he tried to get Dennis through the door of his room so he could take Dennis’ shoes off and shake two Advil out on the nightstand and then just leave him there — every time, like this wasn’t the kind of opportunity he’d spent years waiting for — Dennis would dig his heels in and refuse to move, no matter what Mac said. Every time Mac would get more and more frustrated, and every time there came a point when he was right on the verge of saying what he really meant, and that was always when Dennis kissed him, cutting him off mid-sentence, Dennis, come on, I—, because it was the only way to make Mac stop trying. He never kissed Dennis back, and he never let it go on for more than a minute, but until he pushed Dennis away Mac was always perfectly still and quiet. The only indication he ever gave that anything had even happened between them was the way he exhaled every time, so soft and slow, like this was all he’d been thinking about for thirty years’ worth of Christmases and birthdays and Mac Days and Easters — like a hundred Lents’ worth of self-denial all ending at once.

The only time Dennis had ever seen Mac quiet like that was on the intermittent Sundays when he had let Mac drag him to Sunday Mass for the umpteenth time, not because Dennis thought it would do anything for him but because it mattered to Mac and so it couldn’t hurt that much to try. Every time, when Mac had closed his eyes and held the holy wafer on his tongue, time stood still for just a moment. Silence filled up the whole church like a physical presence, somewhere between reverence and hostility, the perfect pause between the end of the sermon and the communal Amen, and Dennis tried desperately to taste anything other than wheat paste filling his mouth with the flavor of dust and wasted prayers. He had always come up short. Every time he went to church with Mac, when he stood or sat or kneeled and looked around with his eyes, not moving his head, Dennis had wondered what all these other people had that they could get something out of this, that the marble and the candles and the singing did anything for them other than made them feel like they were missing part of their insides, whatever it was that gave people the ability to believe. And every time he had kissed Mac, breathed in that long exhale and held it on his tongue like Communion, he’d wondered how far he’d need to push before Mac finally snapped.

Dennis had been practically begging for it at that point, getting himself trashed every week so he could make a clumsy pass at Mac and give him the perfect excuse. If their places were switched, if it was Dennis who had spent years looking at Mac like a starving man stumbling into Eden, he knows what he would say in a circumstance like that: He made the first move, I swear, I was just going to take his shoes off and leave him to sleep it off but then he kissed me and I figured he couldn’t be that wasted after all — and so he had thought, okay, why not make it easy? Why not give Mac the excuse? Then it wouldn’t be his fault but it wouldn’t be Dennis’ either and they could finally just get on with their lives. But Mac had never made a move, and eventually Dennis had stopped because he couldn’t think of what else to do — at least not until now. Now he knows just how to get under Mac’s skin, and if it means Mac knows how to get under his as well, what does it matter? Dennis has found every possible way to hurt himself at this point. He can take it.

If Mac tries to follow him into his room tonight, Dennis realizes, he isn’t sure what he’ll do: whether he’ll kiss Mac in the doorway, but this time with intent, with teeth, to see how hard Mac will let him bite down; or maybe with tongue, to see what Mac tastes like and whether he’ll pull back or press closer, or whether he’ll close the door in Mac’s face. He won’t let Mac in, either way. He’s already hated and forgiven Mac enough for one day. Is this how it’s going to work between them from now on? Every time Dennis learns another intimate detail about Mac, another skin-secret, he finds himself torn between fascination and repulsion. He wants to know more, but he hates himself for it, and he hates Mac for making him feel this way. He wonders if Mac feels like this all the time, now that he’s busy living his most authentic life or what the fuck ever, whether it’s like walking around with no skin, so that a light breeze feels like a gale-force wind and a drop of water feels like drowning. Wouldn’t that be ironic, if now Mac feels the way Dennis has always felt for as long as he can remember, for his entire life maybe? It’s so much, all the time. The only way to make it easier to bear is to blur it with booze or sex or, best of all, crack, which wipes everything else away. God, Dennis wishes he had some crack. But he doesn’t have anything besides the pack of cigarettes at the back of his nightstand drawer and a hard drive full of porn that he can’t watch because it feels too weird and fraught right now. What if Mac hears? What if, halfway through, Dennis starts thinking about Mac? It’s happened before, those random thoughts that pop up and ruin the mood. It feels like too big a risk to take right now.

“I’m going to bed,” Dennis says, and Mac doesn’t do anything.

“Okay,” he says, one boot up on the coffee table as he unlaces it. Folded up like this, he looks much younger, like at any moment he might make a crack about how his plans for the night involve much less sleeping and much more of Dennis’ mom. “Don’t forget, we were gonna get up early tomorrow and go to Frank and Charlie’s.”

Dennis pauses. “Right,” he says. “You know, I almost forgot about that.”

“That’s what I’m for,” Mac says, but this time he doesn’t look up.

Dennis closes the door to his room and stands there for a moment, wondering what just happened, or rather what just didn’t happen; it feels like a moment went by that should have gone differently. Normally Dennis doesn’t think twice about that kind of thing. If he wasted time crying about every moment in his life that he should have seized, then he’d never get out of bed in the morning, and he already lives a little too close to that possibility to risk it. But this is him and Mac, the way it’s always been, ever since Dennis started cutting his computer literacy class to sneak out to the field and smoke too-thin joints with Mac and Charlie under the bleachers. It was always muddy and he always ended up getting grass stains on his jeans — Frank gave him hell about it every time — but it was better than spending yet another week allegedly learning how to open a file on a CD-ROM but actually learning how to beat Reversi every time. Not to mention that Dennis hated wasting a whole class period in the library when he could have been doing anything else: trying to get onto the school roof, for example, or looking for the secret disused pool that seniors always talked about sneaking into for parties. Everyone always said that Dennis and Mac wouldn’t stay best friends like that when they grew up, that people changed and grew apart and met other people and stopped talking to each other, that it was sad but natural, but Dennis has always known that they were going to be different. It’s the only thing he’s believed for his entire life with even a tenth of the conviction that Mac has about God.

He jams a towel under the door and opens a window and lights up. If Mac knew he was doing this, he wouldn’t be angry, but he would look at Dennis in that worried way that he sometimes does, as if he wants to protect Dennis from himself but doesn’t know how. If Mac really cared, Dennis thinks, wouldn’t he figure it out?

He smokes one cigarette and then half of another, to stop the hunger pangs, and chases them with a shot of knockoff Nyquil, the generic brand that tastes both more like cherries and somehow worse. Then he crawls into bed and has just enough time to think, Fuck, but I wish every day could be like this — which makes no sense, because it was a miserable day like all the rest of them, one interminable tomorrow after another, and what was so different about this one when everything is said and done? There was something, Dennis knows, but he can’t remember what. It eludes him like a blur at the edge of his vision, a shadow in the corner of his eye, dancing just out of reach, and then doxylamine succinate, that reliable seductress, gathers him up in her syrup-slow, sticky-sweet embrace and puts him out like a candle.

Daylight is always terrible, from the minute that Dennis wakes up until the last dregs of sunset, but daylight in Frank and Charlie’s hovel-by-any-other-name is the worst kind of all. The place reeks, for one thing, of piss and cat food and burnt peanut butter, a smell Dennis can only identify because he wouldn’t put anything past Charlie at this point, and there’s another unidentifiable odor that he can only categorize as toe. The bed is indistinguishable from a pile of newspapers. There’s a stain on the floor in the shape of a naked man wearing a Pilgrim hat. Paint is flaking off the ceiling in big fragments, like architectural dandruff, and the mini-fridge sits in something that Dennis hopes is a shadow and not a puddle.

“Dude, what the fuck are we meant to change to make this place worse?” Mac says. “I honestly think we could set this place on fire with them inside and the only thing they’d notice was that it was getting a little warm.”

“No, come on,” Dennis says. “You’ve lived with Frank and Charlie before, right? So you should know how their routine works, where we can put a wrench in things. I mean, there has to be something.”

“I did, but it was nowhere near this bad.” Mac kicks at a newspaper that emits a cloud of dust, or maybe spores. “Maybe we should just get them on one of those home improvement shows, you know? Call in the experts or something.”

“We’re not actually trying to make their lives better,” Dennis says. The smell is really fucking with his ability to think things that aren’t just Jesus Christ over and over to himself.

“No, I know, but seriously, I don’t think there’s any way to make them worse. Besides maybe killing Charlie, and I’m not doing that. I mean, the guy has it bad enough already. Unless you want me to! In which case I guess it would be okay.”

“We’re not killing Charlie!” Dennis says. “Jesus Christ.” He snaps his mouth shut before he just starts screaming profanities like some kind of slightly more inland Boondock Saints pastiche. “Why would you — are you telling me you’d just kill our best friend if I asked you to? Why would you do that?”

Mac blinks at him. “Because you asked,” he says. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to and I’d probably be really sad about it afterwards, but still.”

Jesus Christ! Dennis thinks. “Okay,” he says, forcing his voice to stay even, or at best only slightly vibrating with fury. “I’ll keep this very simple. Do not kill Charlie. In fact, don’t kill anyone, because there’s no way you’d get away with it and then I’d have to visit you in prison and I am not looking to get shanked in the visiting room or whatever. I know you’d probably love it in there, especially now that you’re a top and everything, but I’d have a terrible time, and we both know that’s what really matters here.”

“Okay,” Mac says, and he’s smiling a little. “I don’t want you to have a terrible time.”

“Great,” Dennis snaps. Even though he’s won, he somehow feels like Mac is the one coming out on top. “Are you going to help me now or what?”

They start in the fridge. It’s a very upsetting place, largely occupied by half-open cans of cat food, a single jar of creamy Jif, a mostly used pack of Kraft singles, what looks like a sock full of pickles, and a single chicken drumstick neither on a plate nor wrapped in foil but instead balanced delicately on top of the peanut butter.

“No chocolate syrup,” Mac says. “That’s dark.”

Dennis looks from the contents of the fridge to Mac and back again and decides it just isn’t worth opening his fucking mouth this time.

“So what are we doing?” Mac adds. “Drugs? We could fit so many laxatives into that drumstick, bro. That would definitely make their lives worse.”

“That drumstick looks so old it doesn’t need to be full of laxatives to hurt them,” Dennis says. “No. You know what, this is real character development for us. No powdered shrooms in the peanut butter or acid in the cat food. For one thing, that would be a waste of perfectly good drugs. No, you know what we’re going to do?” He pauses for effect, and Mac looks at him in perfect silence and perfect trust. This time it’s okay, because he’s looking to Dennis for an answer that he has ready, a plan that he thinks is absolutely top-tier, an order that he has absolutely no problem giving. These are the moments that Dennis lives for, the reason that he’s the brains of their Ocean’s Three — but also the George Clooney, because even if 2001 had been one of Brad Pitt’s peak years, he hadn’t worn a single good shirt in that movie, which definitely makes him more of a Mac type. Make him wait for it, Dennis tells himself, withhold the peak, and he takes one last moment to savor the suspense before unveiling his magnum opus, his Margaritaville, his Mona-Lisa-but-with-bigger-tits. Then he leans in conspiratorially and says, “You and me, Mac — we’re going to fix their lives.”

They start with the fridge, because it’s what they’ve already spent the most time staring at, and because it’s a nice little discrete unit of work that will give them a ready-made zip of dopamine without taking too much effort; plus with any luck the room will smell slightly less bad once they’ve gotten rid of the cans of off-brand Fancy Feast. Dennis pulls the case off one of the pillows embedded in the futon, and Mac holds his breath and uses a coat hanger to fish garbage out of the fridge and knock it into the makeshift sack. The drumstick is the worst part, of course. It’s a faint sickly green in areas, and overall emits a miasma that extends for a good foot in every direction. No matter how much Dennis glares at Mac, he won’t go near it, so eventually they come to a hard-won compromise and Mac just holds the pillowcase vaguely nearby while Dennis shakes the entire fridge to try and dislodge it, which takes a lot more time and energy than he wants to think about and involves a quantity of gelatinous secretions that he never wants to see again, in any context, ever. Then, high on the fumes of his own minuscule success, Dennis looks at Mac — still on his knees holding the disgusting pillowcase; Dennis wonders whether they should try and draw a biohazard symbol on it in Sharpie or just find a Dumpster a few blocks away and hope for the best — and he thinks, At least there’s no way I could find this situation erotic.

Ten minutes later, of course, he’s up against the wall breathing hard into Mac’s shoulder as Mac jerks him off with a quick, light touch that does absolutely nothing for Dennis except make him more desperate and irritable. He asked first, of course, because that was the only thing that could make their circumstances less arousing — oh Dennis do you absolutely consent to a handjob and maybe some light ball fondling, you can withdraw your consent at any time, please know that I think you’re a teeny tiny baby bird who could be traumatized by the slightest miscommunication and I must protect your feelings at all costs because I, Mac, am a good person and emotionally healthy — and Dennis had said, Jesus, don’t get all fucking touchy-feely on me, if you’re going to do it then just do it! And now they’re here and Dennis is so hard it aches, even though the room still smells like toes and salmonella and the light has a certain murky quality that he associates more with pond scum than sunshine, even though Mac won’t stop fucking teasing him, tap tap tap with the tips of his fingers right where Dennis is the most sensitive, the smooth frictionless glide of a fingernail up along the vein and then just for a second the pad of a finger pressed against that sensitive spot again. It’s wet and messy and noisy to match, implausibly enough. Mac spat on his palm before he unbuttoned Dennis’ jeans, but spit gets tacky fast, so the only reason for it to be this filthy loud is because Dennis is so hard he’s dripping everywhere, which again makes no sense because Mac is hardly doing anything — just playing with him like a bored secretary with a desk toy. God, is he bored? Is Dennis’ dick boring to him? That would just be the cherry on top, if Mac has spent all these years thirsting for his cock while Dennis has spent approximately the same number of years strategically withholding any more than a glimpse of frenulum and after decades and decades of winding each other up Dennis has turned out to be an utter penile disappointment. That would be just Dennis’ luck.

It would be humiliating, too, because whether or not Mac is into this, Dennis is, or at least his dick is, that much is obvious and kind of mandatory, but the rest of him seems to be as well, because his body is gearing up for yet another all-timer of an orgasm: hips jerking out of control, hands clenched in Mac’s shirt because they would be doing God knows what if Dennis left them to their own devices, breath coming short and harsh like he’s a set of human bellows, gusting into Mac’s neck. On every inhale, Dennis smells his own hair product smeared haphazardly on the collar of Mac’s shirt, one of the few that Mac bought on his own and didn’t pilfer from Dennis’ castoffs. Now every time Dennis looks at it he’ll think of this, of how fucking good it felt when Mac finally stopped fucking around and got into a good rhythm and pressed him into the wall with the weight of his hips and shoulders and all that mass Dennis can’t stop thinking about. He can’t stop wanting to put his hands all over Mac’s bulk, to scratch and pinch and bruise just to see how it pinks and purples and find out whether Mac will just take it or if he’ll make the full-volume versions of the muted noises he’s making right now into Dennis’ shoulder. He must think that Dennis can’t hear them, can’t feel the way they start in his chest. He must have no idea what that does to Dennis.

That’s a rookie mistake, and Dennis is no rookie. No matter how close he is to coming, and he’s pretty fucking close, he’s paying close attention — out of strictly professional curiosity, of course. There’s an underrated art to a handjob, and Mac has pretty clearly spent a lot of time refining his approach; only now does Dennis remember just how many times Mac has brought home a woman who was a perfectly respectable eight or nine, bangworthy babes one and all, and then spent the next day talking up all the “hand stuff” they did as if that was some great brag and not just a sad reflection of his clear inability to seal the deal any time a vagina was involved. That’s the kind of detail you only pick up from sex, which is why there’s always a small part of Dennis that’s a little bit removed, always observing, making detailed notes in his mental file. Even now, every muscle in his body straining, he’s keeping track: So this is almost definitely how Mac jerks off, so this is what he likes best; a grip so tight it almost hurts, a lot of body-to-body contact, the dirtiness of getting off somewhere he shouldn’t, a quick fuck and then back to business as usual with the sweat still drying at the small of his back and the lingering buzz of adrenaline, wondering if everyone else can tell — hoping they can, probably.

Dennis comes thinking about that, how Mac probably does this to himself every morning in the shower when he thinks Dennis is too busy putting his face on to notice the extra ten minutes Mac spends with one hand braced on the wall, probably, maybe with his forehead pressed to the tile and his legs spread just wide enough that he can really get into it without losing his balance. He’s a creature of instinct and he probably fucks like one too, which Dennis has thought about many times before but never like this, as something that might be relevant to him, and that cracks something in him wide open — what if, he thinks, what if — and the world stops for him in that moment of wide-open possibility, caught between realization and impact. He comes on his shirt and on Mac’s thighs and he drips on Mac’s hand and all down his wrist. It’s simultaneously nothing new and the dirtiest thing he’s ever seen, because it’s Mac’s hand, Mac’s stupid ornamental bicep, his interchangeable navy pants, all flecked with his come, and it’s better than any facial Dennis has ever given a ten, though his dick twitches gamely at the thought of coming on Mac’s face. Mac makes a noise at that, something that could easily be laughter, low and under his breath, and Dennis goes rigid. “What’s so funny?”

Mac jumps away from him and holds up his hands, which would probably be a better deescalation tactic if not for the semen. “Nothing,” he says, realizes what he’s doing, looks at his own hand with an expression of betrayal, and wipes it on his shirt. “Sorry. I just thought — sorry, bro, I didn’t mean it was funny or anything. I just meant,” and he gestures at Dennis, which makes him even more aware of how he’s just standing there with his dick hanging out. Even he has to admit that it would be funny if it wasn’t so humiliating.

“What?” Dennis says, and takes refuge in affront. “Jesus. You’re scaring him.” He gestures at his dick. “See? He’s running for cover.”

“He looks fine to me,” Mac says with absolutely no hesitation. If anything, he sounds slightly strangled. “I was just trying to say, but you wouldn’t let me, that it seems like you had fun. Maybe he’s just tuckered out.” Awful, Dennis thinks. Stop talking. The look on Mac’s face now is about thirty seconds away from the cheesy grin he wears whenever he feels like he’s had a stroke of genius and thinks he’s about to receive recognition for it. If he smirks at Dennis like that right now, here in the toe-smell and the sewer-light as reality reasserts itself through the post-orgasmic endorphin haze, there’s a ninety percent chance that Dennis will never be able to reach climax again.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says. It’s a fine line between dismissal and cruelty. If he’s cruel to Mac now, then it might be the last straw and push him to some previously undiscovered breaking point more serious than all the others Dennis has gaily shoved him past already. It used to be a fun game, finding all Mac’s pressure points and exposed nerves and jabbing at them repeatedly: first to see how he’d react, then to see how much he could take, then to see if it would ever be too much, then to see if he would ever leave. What Dennis had learned was that Mac would protest at first, but then give in, rolling over to bare his belly like a Great Dane cowed by a purse puppy, and once he’d done that, it was impossible for Dennis to push him too far or make him leave. And that had been fun, once upon a time, when it meant that Dennis could use him as an indestructible scratching post any time he wanted, but now it makes him absolutely apoplectic with rage. Mac finally found something that Dennis couldn’t beat him at, and then he stuck around anyway and made Dennis live with it. There’s no way for him to make Mac leave, apparently, because Dennis has done his absolute best and it hasn’t been enough, and now that he’s out and proud there’s no way for Dennis to dig his fingernails into that particular exposed nerve either. It’s a no-win scenario, mutually assured destruction with no way out, and the only way to deescalate is by pretending it’s not a big deal. Even Machiavelli would quail. “Was shooting off all over your pants not clear enough for you?” Dennis says, because admitting defeat is out of the question. “Yes, I enjoyed it. In the strictest physiological sense, mind you. Don’t think I didn’t notice you had some fun yourself, by the way.”

Mac reflexively hunches over, which is so pointless that it’s almost funny. There’s no mistaking what’s going on in his pants. “Yeah,” he says, and looks up at Dennis with what can’t possibly be big fuck-me eyes, because that would imply that he thinks it’s a possibility. It definitely isn’t, because sure, Dennis has a pulse, so he isn’t going to turn down a free orgasm and he might not be too picky about where it comes from, but there’s a big, bright, clear line between letting Mac give him a handy and going anywhere within ten miles of another man’s dick himself. In a more metaphorical sense, of course, Dennis is the one giving Mac a hand, but as long as things remain firmly in the realm of the allegorical, he’ll stay on the right side of the big red line in his head labeled NO SON OF MINE IS EVER GOING TO BE A FAG. And Dennis knows, he knows that’s not a word he gets to say about anybody else, because getting a history lesson from Mac on the subject was such a singular experience that it’s seared into his memory forever, but it doesn’t count when he’s talking about himself. Hypothetically, of course, it’s just a thought experiment to say that’s what Dennis would be if he wanted what Mac wants. It’s just as well that he doesn’t, anyway. Sure, he thinks about it sometimes, but who doesn’t — sure, he tries to imagine what it would be like if he was in Mac’s shoes, but he can never quite get there. He’s just too straight, probably. There’s no point wasting too much energy or time thinking about it.

“Hey,” he says. He tucks his dick back into his jeans and does his fly back up; he gestures at the pillowcase full of trash. “Why don’t I take that and find somewhere to dump it where Charlie won’t find it within twelve hours? That way you can have, uh, a minute to yourself? And you can… take care of things.”

Mac nods, still looking up at Dennis like he’s been caught, a little pathetic and a little desperate and maybe even a little bit coy: Oh no, Mr. Reynolds, what are you going to do about it? As if there had been any question in the first place about whether Mac was enjoying this or not; as if Dennis hadn’t been able to feel him getting hard against his thigh, every second of it — as if he hadn’t pushed back just a little so that Mac had some pressure to rock against, because that’s what friends do when one of them is jerking the other off. Nothing unusual about it, nothing to see here, just two bros getting hot and heavy in the same room: Really it’s basically the same as watching porn together, just with a little more audience involvement, Dennis tells himself, except that if they were watching porn together, he’d get to watch Mac come as well. He wonders if it would be different like this, just the two of them without his laptop as a nominal focal point, without the background noise of impersonal moaning filtered through its shitty speakers; whether Mac would blush more if he knew Dennis was watching specifically and only him, whether he’d get showoffy or shy, whether he’d keep mostly quiet or whether he’d let himself get loud for once. Would he try to make out like it was no big deal, come into a tissue and then get up like they did this every day, or would he get off harder because Dennis was watching — because of Dennis — and not be able to hide it? What the fuck are you doing, Dennis snarls at himself, sharp like a slap across the face, and his body jolts back into action before he can waste any more time on speculation. He stops looking at Mac. He grabs the pillowcase. He’s halfway out the door before he can even starting thinking about it.

“I’ll meet you downstairs,” Dennis says, “don’t forget to lock up,” and then he’s gone, gone, gone, feet pounding beneath him down the stairs, hand reaching out to shove the front door open, out into the sunlight and the smell of uncollected garbage and cat piss. Even that doesn’t do enough to shock him out of it. He walks in a random direction for one block, and then another; buildings pass and he doesn’t bother to keep track of them. At every crosswalk Dennis thinks, Okay, surely this is far enough, and every time he changes his mind and keeps going. He should be keeping track of where he is and how to get back to the car, because sooner or later Mac is going to come downstairs and realize that Dennis isn’t where he said he’d be, and then he’ll start texting and calling Dennis in a panic, and then Dennis will have to reply or he’ll be the asshole. The whole point here is that he can’t be the asshole or Mac will start saying things like, Are you sure about this? and Maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all, and Dennis will have to come up with a plausible reason to say that yes, he’s sure, and no, he doesn’t want to stop, that doesn’t involve figuring out why or explaining himself.

That’s the real, horrible, burned-out truth of it, when you get down to brass tacks, when you get down to glistening white bone. If Dennis really wanted this to stop, it would be so fucking easy. All he’d have to do is push Mac away once where people could see it happen, maybe snap at him in front of a cashier or some other disposable person he’d never have to talk to again, or make a particularly pointed joke in front of Frank — that would really be the way to go if he wanted to score a few points towards Frank’s favor at the same time — and Mac would back off immediately, like a kicked puppy, a kid with a burned finger. On the one hand, Dennis knows it would work, because he’s done it before; once, for example, he staged an entire seminar so that he could tell Mac to stop kissing him in front of an entire room of people, and every time he had tried to drunkenly plant one on Mac after that, Mac had held him off gently but firmly, hands planted on his shoulders, keeping him a good foot away. On the other hand, the other reason Dennis had gone to all the trouble of renting event space and paying off two speakers and gathering a good hundred strangers to sit in chairs with stainproof upholstery and listen to two hours of drivel that any idiot with an Internet connection should have been able to put together for themselves was so that he could see what happened to Mac’s face when he said, It’s never going to happen. That part hadn’t been quite as effective, but so what, Dennis had told himself. Feelings like that didn’t go away overnight; he should know. Give it a month, he told himself, and then when a month had passed with no change he had revised that estimate to six months, and then a year, and now here they still are.

If Mac could just let it go, that would make things so much easier for Dennis. In an ideal world, Mac would have gotten over this years ago, back when Dennis didn’t even think it was something he had to explicitly clarify, because obviously nothing was ever going to happen. They were just two guys just lived together and watched porn together and checked in every hour and ate all their meals together and said good night to each other and slept with the same women and had a standing monthly dinner and a weekly movie night, and Mac just took care of Dennis because that’s the kind of person he’s always been, a big stupid bleeding heart of a man who scoops up his mangy flea-ridden possibly immortal dog every time it emerges from the sewers, or the gutters, or wherever it goes when it isn’t shedding all over their couch, and fusses over it like a best-in-show purebreed. Mac has a soft spot for living refuse, apparently. Dennis can’t explain it, but he knows it’s true, because every time he can remember being sick, he remembers Mac being there too, with soup from a can and those stupid tissues with the aloe vera lotion that made Dennis feel like he was wiping his nose with a piece of Spandex, and every time he’s had a hangover, there Mac has been with blue Gatorade and a handful of whatever pills he’d found floating around in a kitchen drawer, and every time he’s cut himself shaving Mac has been standing ready with a full-sized novelty Band-Aid — just the kind of thing you want to plaster directly on your face, obviously — and no matter how good Dennis has gotten over the years at dodging him, there Mac always is, waiting to meet his every need, practically bursting with his desire to dole out dubious advice or hold an ice pack to Dennis’ latest black eye or rub out the knots in his calves, which everyone knows are the worst kind of all.

The real problem is that no matter how many times Dennis has tried to push Mac away — how many little fires he’s stamped out — Mac always finds some new way to get his heartbleed all over Dennis. If Dennis tells Mac to stop bringing him soup, he wakes up the next morning to find eight microwave-ready cups in the fridge, taking up half of their beer shelf. If Dennis tells Mac to stop hovering when he shaves, he finds a styptic pencil next to the sink, leaving waxy marks on the porcelain. He just can’t seem to find a way to stop Mac from caring, and that means Dennis has to think about what it means that Mac cares so much, which in turn means that he has to repress what he thinks about why Mac cares so much. Otherwise he has to deal with it, which Dennis can’t do because he just can’t — it’s a non-question. It’s none of his business why Mac looks at him like he invented the concept of happiness, and it shouldn’t be such a big deal that he can’t get Mac to stop. It only is because there’s only one thing that has ever made Dennis feel worse than Mac looking at him like that, and it’s the comedown from literal crack cocaine, which is actually a pretty good comparison, now that Dennis thinks about it, because both of them make him feel really fucking good at first, but then he has to deal with the consequences and as it turns out that makes him wish he was dead. Thinking about this for too long also makes Dennis wish he was dead, as does trying to figure out why. A lot of things make Dennis wish he was dead, but that’s kind of par for the course. That’s how everyone feels when they’re forty-four and have run out of reasons to live.

An unexpected curb rises up underfoot, and Dennis stumbles for the first time in a long time. Jesus, he thinks; how far has he walked? Charlie and Frank’s building is nowhere to be seen, and he has no idea where he is besides in the middle of a long block, which tells him precisely nothing. His feet hurt too much to walk any further right now, and he squints but the street signs on either side are too far away to read. God, does he need glasses? Or those awful orthopedic soles that Mac is always pointedly clearing his throat at in Walgreens? That’s too much for Dennis to think about right now. All he wants to do is find a conveniently located step — and there’s one, thank God — so that he can sit down for a minute, just until his legs ache a little less, just so he can get his bearings. He sinks gratefully down and pulls his phone out of his pocket.

He only has two new messages. The first one reads: Hi Dennis. Did you find somewhere good 2 throw away da trash? I hope you did… U said u would meet me downstairs but I am at the car and I don’t see you…?…? Did you get lost? It’s OK if you did, I kno how hard it can be to keep ur bearings when U R and unfamiliar surroundings. If you got lost, just text me… and let me know so I can come find u…not becuz I don’t think you can handle anything but bc I worry about you. As a friend. If U don’t need me to come find you just text me anyway so I know you are okay. I know sometimes u prefer to be alone so I try to give you space because I looked it up and all the websites say it’s important to give the ppl you care about room 2 live their own lives… and obviously U R someone I care about, as a friend, and I know you care about me as a friend too even if sometimes it’s hard 4 you to show it. Anyways I just wanted to check if u needed me to get you!!! I guess I will wait 2 see if u text me back…plz do…but no worries if not!!!!!

Dennis scrolls to the next one.

Dennis…are you ignoring me again or is something wrong…I was trying 2 give u space in case that was what u wanted but now I am getting worried in case you were snatched or maybe you fell into the sewer like that 1 time me n Charlie were trying to prove that nobody could actually fit thru a manwhole. Lol that word looks funny. N e way are you okay?!??!?!???? Please let me know, u kno how stressed it makes me when you don’t reply to my texts!!! I don’t like 2 think about how anything could have happened to u and I’d never know. OK I guess I’ll wait 4 u in the car becuz I’m sure you’ll be back soon. Text me!!!! Ok I’ll stop bothering u now lol I hope to hear from u soon x

“Jesus,” Dennis says to himself, and puts his phone away. He can text Mac in a minute, when he’s recovered from both the wholesale assault on the English language and also the effort of figuring out what Mac was actually trying to communicate in the first place, but first Dennis has a few more pressing questions to answer: Why is he sitting here, who knows how many miles from his car and what he’s actually meant to be doing today, talking to himself? Why is his head all mixed up? What was he thinking about before he came to and found himself here? Dennis remembers that he was in Charlie and Frank’s apartment, and that suddenly all he had been able to think about was getting out of there, getting as far away as possible from himself, but that doesn’t really clear anything up, because here he is anyway with the only person he’s never been able to outrun, the only person he’s never been able to ditch, the person he most wishes he could leave behind — besides Mac, of course. Was it something to do with Mac? Dennis’ mind slips away from the question like a turned-around magnet, which means the answer is probably yes but that he doesn’t want to actually know. Great. Useful. The hits just keep on coming.

“The fuck are you doing on my stoop?” somebody says.

Dennis looks around for a good minute before the rags piled up outside the door of the next building down shift and reconfigure into two arms, a pair of alleged legs, a long and unkempt beard. “First of all, it’s not your stoop,” Dennis says. “It looks like that’s your stoop, you know, the one that you’re sitting under. Second of all, wow, you have not been taking care of yourself, man. This is a seriously subpar street for roughing it. What happened to your whole cardboard box situation?”

“Your asshole friends took it,” Cricket says. “Said they were going to build a time machine so they could go back and find out where the rat kings hid their stolen treasure.”

“Ah,” Dennis says. “That would be Frank and Charlie, and actually, only one of them is my friend. Kind of. Well, it depends. Frank is just an asshole.”

“All of your friends are assholes,” Cricket says. “So are you. It’s whatever.” He rummages around in his pile. “Got a light?”

Dennis recoils. “Not for you.”

“Seriously? Come on.” Cricket pulls out a joint, only slightly battered, almost definitely laced. “Give me a light and I’ll solve all your problems.”

“You can’t even find a box to sleep in,” Dennis says, but he digs around in his pockets anyway. There’s a half-empty gas station lighter in his jeans. He tosses it to Cricket. “What exactly do you think you can do for anyone else?”

“Hey, I spent four years in seminary school learning how to help people,” Cricket says. He lights up. “Plus I could stand to hear about someone else’s issues. Otherwise I’m just stuck with mine, and I think about those all the time. And when I say that, I really do mean — all the time,” he sing-songs to the joint. “All — the — time.”

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Dennis says, mostly to himself. “Okay. You know what? Sure. Why not. So first of all, obviously, I’m out here fucking miles from civilization talking to a street rat, so clearly my life has gone very badly off the rails for me to be considering taking advice from you, which is in and of itself arguably such a dire situation that there’s no point talking about anything else because it would pale in comparison. But on the other hand, having said that, I do actually have a bigger problem, which should give you some idea of just how far I’ve fallen.” He pauses to let that sink in. “So — okay, well, first of all, this isn’t going to make any sense to you, because nobody has ever loved you in your entire life, so just bear with me while I explain how that works, I guess. You know what it’s like when somebody cares about you and you just can’t make them fucking stop, no matter what you do, and that makes you the bad person, because they just keep trying and trying no matter how many times you’ve told them that it won’t work, because all it does is make you feel like you’re suffocating? But every time you tell them not to do something specific, then they just listen to you and they don’t take it personally — they just decide that they’re going to find some other way to make your stupid life better because that’s all they do, all day every day, and you just keep kicking and kicking like they’re a stray dog hanging onto your ankle and they just won’t let go? That’s my problem. And I know to you it might sound like a pretty good problem to have, but it isn’t. You’re just going to have to take my word for all of that, by the way.”

“Actually,” Cricket says, exhaling smoke, “as it happens, I also have recurring problems with dogs.”

“Right! Right,” Dennis says. “So actually maybe you do know what I mean. You just keep throwing things at it and calling it names and trying to find ways to make it leave you alone and it keeps running right back with those big stupid eyes, treating you like some stupid bitch, some long-haired purse-sized lady dog that it wants to slurp spaghetti with in a back alley and then hump until the sun comes up, but in a romantic way, and if you were a girl dog then maybe it would work, because he’s not bad for a mutt — strong jaw, good coat, even smells pretty good — but you’re not, so it doesn’t matter and he should just leave you alone, but he won’t. So one day you’re like, okay, this dog keeps coming back, he knows I’m not going to let him hump me under the table but he keeps bringing me — I don’t know, what do dogs bring you to show you they care?”

“Ringworm, mostly.”

“I’m certain you’re wrong, but no matter,” Dennis says, and wishes he had a cigarette. He watches Cricket take a drag and itches for a sweet, sweet hit of nicotine. “Ringworm, or old slimy tennis balls, or the neighborhood cat, or whatever. Anyway, whatever it is, then you end up with this giant pile of garbage you don’t know what to do with, and after a while you’re like, okay, well, I may as well put this garbage somewhere else so I don’t have to look at it all the time, and hey, dog, what if you brought me something else instead, like wallets or purses or something useful? And then the next day the dog brings you a nice wallet, surprisingly nice for something a dog has been chewing on for an hour, and you think, oh, what’s the harm, go on, give him a scratch behind the ears. But it’s never just one scratch behind the ears, no, no.” Dennis shakes his finger. “It’s a scratch behind the ears and then a belly rub and then the next thing you know the dog is sitting on the sofa next to you for movie night and you’re buying the dog’s favorite brand of microwave popcorn, and then the dog is falling asleep in your lap and you’re thinking to yourself, oh, he looks so precious when he’s asleep, wouldn’t it be nice if I could see this every night when I got home from work? And then you really have to be careful. Oh, yes. Because then it’s a hop, skip, and a jump before you’re letting the dog sleep in your bed, and who knows where that’s going to go? It’s a slippery slope, I’m telling you. Actually, I still don’t know why I’m telling you any of this. God, I wish I had a cigarette.”

Cricket looks at Dennis for a long, long minute. His good eye is surprisingly clear, not drifting around all over the place; it’s like he can see right through Dennis. Maybe there’s something to all those theories about drugs unlocking your inner potential, Dennis thinks. He always figured that if there was any truth to those stoner myths, he would know, because he would be the smartest person on earth — and he’s already a bona fide genius, so what would that make Cricket? Maybe even smarter than him. No way, Dennis tells himself. That can’t happen. But when Cricket opens his mouth, he still finds himself leaning forward, like he wants to be sure he won’t miss a word.

“Sounds to me,” Cricket says — with all the gravitas he might employ while vouchsafing the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything; Dennis leans in further — “like you want to fuck dogs.”

Dennis stares at him, and then he gets up. “I don’t know what I expected,” he says. “I want that lighter back.”

“No no no,” Cricket says, clutching it to his chest. “Seriously, man, I’m not fucking with you. I wouldn’t do you dirty like that, even though I hate you and your evil jezebel of a sister.”

Despite himself, Dennis nods along. “She is a heinous bitch.”

“Right,” Cricket says. “See? I can be right about things. And I’m right about this, or you can have my other kidney. And then,” he murmurs, so quiet that Dennis thinks it must be to himself, “maybe finally I’ll be able to die. You, my friend,” he says, back at full volume, “sound like you really want to get physical with that dog. You want to go down to pound town and clown around. You want to bone. Work that rawhide. Go undercover in the K-9 unit. Am I right or am I right?”

Dennis, who started wincing at clown around and has no idea what his face is doing anymore, feels a little bit like he’s having an out-of-body experience. “I don’t think I’d put it like that,” he says.

“You can call it whatever you want,” Cricket says. “Ain’t no shame in being plain about it, though. You want to—”

“All right! Jesus,” Dennis interrupts. He doesn’t know if he’ll survive another round of Cricket’s excruciatingly specific euphemisms. “Fine. First off, you’re wrong, but let’s say for argument’s sake that I did want to fuck the dog. Or at least that sometimes when the dog was, I don’t know, bringing me my slippers or whatever, that I wondered what it would be like. Which I don’t want, by the way. Just to be clear.”

“To fuck the dog,” Cricket supplies.

“To fuck the dog! Yes,” Dennis shouts. Thank God the street is empty. “But the thing is, Cricket, and you might not know this because you are literal gutter trash, but normal people, we can’t just go around sodomizing animals. Or getting sodomized by them. Whatever your whole deal is. Please don’t tell me.”

“Whoa, I never said anything about being a dog bottom,” Cricket says, completely ignoring Dennis’ plea — what else is new. “That’s nasty. I mean, I’ve done it, but still. I don’t need to know that kind of thing about you, man. Do what you want. Just don’t drag me into it.”

“I’m not! Either of those!” Dennis makes himself take a deep breath. “That’s my whole point, Cricks. Normal people can’t just go around having loving missionary-style penetrative sex with dogs or whatever kind of bestiality is socially acceptable. Does that help? People like me, we have morals, and standards, and we don’t have ringworm. We have respectable human-to-human sexually transmitted infections, like HPV and maybe a bout of chlamydia every once in a while when we’re feeling downmarket. Someone like you might be able to do whatever they want, but that’s because nobody expects any better of you. I mean, hell, at least you’re getting laid. But can you imagine what would happen if someone found out that I wanted to fuck a dog? Me, Dennis Reynolds, a respected member of society. Why, I’d never hear the end of it. Every time I walked down the street, people would look at me and know I was a dogfucker. Also, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but really? You’ll suck or fuck for Two-Buck Chuck but getting sodomized by animals is where you draw the line?”

“Well, yeah,” Cricket says. He stubs the roach out and then, as Dennis watches in horror, pops it in his mouth and swallows. “Like I told your boy Mac, Rickety Cricket is gay for pay only. Being gay for free is a chump’s game, and dogs can’t buy liquor.”

“First of all, he’s not my boy,” Dennis says. “He’s a full-grown adult and he has no master. Second of all, Jesus, but you’re dense. Mac is the dog in this metaphor; didn’t you get that? Everything I said, that whole thing, was about Mac and how he just won’t leave me alone, no matter how much I try to White Fang him. What it absolutely wasn’t about was bestiality, though I guess it makes sense that you’d make that assumption, given your degenerate lifestyle.”

Cricket squints at him. “So all of this was actually about how you want to fuck the beefcake? That’s old news, man. Why should I care about that?”

“What? No!” Dennis says. “No, no, no. I don’t want to fuck — where would you even — how do you even get that from what I said? Old news? No way. You might want to spend a little less time dancing with the angels, dude. It’s clearly done some real damage upstairs.” He points at Cricket’s skull.

Cricket grunts. “Never mind,” he says, and gets up. “Pay no mind to old Cricket, what do I know about spending your whole life so in love with someone you end up hating them for it? Just an old pile of junk, that’s me, waiting for the world to let me die. Speaking of which, it’s about time for me to find a new stoop before the dogs follow my scent. Take my advice or leave it, man, it’s no skin off my back. I’m a candy wrapper on the wind. I come, I go, one day I’ll end up in the landfill and I’ll finally be home. Garbage to garbage, that’s what they say. Just try not to think about it too much. That’s what I do. I’ll be seeing you around,” he adds, and then he’s gone, clambering to the top of the stoop and from there to the hanging ladder of a fire escape. Rusty paint flakes briefly rain down on Dennis and then Cricket’s footsteps fade away and he’s alone again — just a man who got so wrapped up in his own feelings that he ran away like a scared teenager and thought a homeless junkie was actually going to help solve all his problems and tell him the secrets of the universe; just one more meaningless indignity in the endless pratfall of life.

Before Dennis can decide whether he should text Mac back or take his chances with walking, there’s a honk. He looks up and there Mac is, hanging out of the window of the Range Rover, the keys to which Dennis knows for a fact are still in his pocket. Mac looks like a dog left to wait for its owner outside of Del Frisco’s, close enough to smell ribeye and resigned to suffer its deprivation but hanging onto one last little tragic morsel of hope anyway. “I found you,” he announces, like it’s a surprise to him as well. “I had to look everywhere and I was so worried because I didn’t know if I was supposed to be looking for you or whether you were going to come back and be mad that I wasn’t there, which is why it took me so long, because I kept going back to Charlie and Frank’s in case you were waiting but you weren’t. Obviously, because you were here the whole time. But now I’m here too. Hey, did you find somewhere to dump the trash?”

Shit, Dennis thinks, and hopes Mac can’t see the pillowcase next to him on the steps. He nudges it out of the way with his foot, holding eye contact with Mac the whole time so he can’t look down and see what Dennis is doing. “So your genius idea was to just drive in circles until either you found me or you ran out of gas?” he says. There’s a faint rotten thud as the garbage sack falls off the stoop and out of sight, finally. “How did you even get into the car?”

“I didn’t break anything!” Mac says, too quickly. Dennis starts looking for scratches. “I got the coat hanger and used it to—” He gestures in a way that is presumably meant to communicate jammed it down through the window and used it to snag the locking mechanism but actually conveys that Mac either assassinated Caesar — death by a thousand oddly erotic stabs — or jerked him off first and then murdered him anyway. “I was worried you fell into the sewers,” he adds, plaintively.

“No shit,” Dennis says. “I got your texts.” He waves his phone. “It only took me about an hour to figure out what they meant. Wait. Did you hotwire my goddamn car again?” He doesn’t wait for Mac to reply. “I get a whole new car and you just rip its guts out all over again?”

“You always get like this when your blood sugar is low,” Mac says, which both does and doesn’t answer the question. “When was the last time you ate?”

“Oh, probably yesterday,” Dennis says. “Don’t change the subject.”

“Yesterday?” Mac leans over and reaches into the glove compartment. He holds out what looks a lot like an energy bar, but can’t possibly be, because Dennis doesn’t keep snacks in the car — only at home or at work. The only food he eats in the car is carefully portioned out: a bowl of cereal or a shake, usually, so there’s no risk that he’ll get into the habit of eating while he’s mostly focused on doing something else. That’s the edge of the very slippery slope to mindless consumption, and from there it’s only a series of baby steps to decrepitude and grotesqueness. It’s already hard enough for him to keep his skin clear and his weight carefully balanced and his teeth whitened, no thanks to the brief foray he’d taken into binging and purging a few years earlier when Mac had gotten him into chimichangas and monitoring his caloric intake just hadn’t been enough to stay on top of things anymore. Dennis knows more about his own ability to run on empty than most professional marathoners; he’d put money on it. He’s an expert at balancing on the knife’s edge of hunger, making sure he eats just enough that he doesn’t pass out. He learned his lesson: When you pass out, people start paying attention. They start asking you whether you’ve eaten a solid meal that day, or whether you want to take a break for lunch, or whether you know how many calories are in beer — that had been a particularly dark fucking conversation — or, worse, they decide that they know more than you about how many calories a perfect human specimen at the peak of performance, the absolute apex of realized potential, needs to consume on a daily basis, and then they start hiding snacks in your car and making you disgusting workout shakes and carrying you places when you’re too fatigued to walk and driving your car in enormous stupid circles to find you when you don’t text them back soon enough.

Mac is still holding the energy bar. It’s probably melting in his hand, if it hasn’t already gotten the glove compartment irrevocably sticky. Dennis bites his lip. Despite himself, he’s really fucking hungry, and usually he can ignore it, but not now. Sometimes this happens: His body reasserts its demands, as if to demonstrate that mind over matter only works when the matter in question doesn’t have a mind of its own. He doesn’t know what did it this time; maybe it was the walk, or maybe it’s the look on Mac’s face, like he knows he’s fighting a losing battle but has to try anyway. “If you eat this,” he says, “I promise not to make you a shake tonight.”

“Done,” Dennis says instantly. Why Mac makes that sound like it’s some great forfeit, he has no idea. Mac might the bluntest spoon in the drawer but even he must know at this point that Dennis pours each and every one of those shakes down the drain. Surely it’s a win-win if he doesn’t spend the time and effort blending who knows what into a concoction that’s just going to add another layer to the gunk choking their bathroom plumbing. “Give me that.”

He climbs into the car and unwraps the bar as Mac pulls away from the curb. It’s nothing special — dark chocolate, rock-hard oats, an unidentifiable quantity of peanut butter that immediately makes the car’s interior smell like it’s been liberally painted with Smucker’s — but he takes his time over every bite. He’ll have to eat something later, nothing too fancy, just something to stave off the shakes. Maybe they can pick up some microwave dinners while they’re replacing Frank and Charlie’s groceries, some chicken Lean Cuisines or something, or a few packs of La Croix. No White Claw, though; if Dennis wanted to consume calories in the triple digits with his barely flavored seltzer, he’d just add a capful of Everclear. Speaking of which, maybe it’s time for him to take crème de menthe back out of rotation and start drinking tequila again — but not the shitty stuff he used to drink back when all he cared about was quantity and not quality. Maybe it’s time to upgrade. God, does he want to fuck Mac? Fucking Cricket, getting in his head and reading all kinds of things into a perfectly straightforward metaphor. What does Cricket know, anyway? He’s just an idiot who threw his whole life away at the first opportunity that came up, and for someone who would never see him as anything other than a means to an end, a mouse to bat between her paws and torture for no reason other than the sheer joy of doing it. That means he has much more in common with Mac than he does with Dennis, really, so what kind of insight could he possibly have into Dennis’ side of the story? And what the fuck did he mean, What do I know about spending your whole life so in love with someone you end up hating them for it? What absolute horseshit: Dennis hates Mac, that much is true, but it’s mostly because Mac — and usually Dennis tries not to look at this too closely, but he knows it’s the truth, and maybe he’s known for a long time now, so what — well, Mac doesn’t hate Dennis, anyway. That’s the whole problem. That’s why Dennis can’t stand him. That’s why it’s all so screwed up between them now — definitely not because Dennis wants to fuck Mac, and not for any other reason, either.

Who would want to fuck Mac, anyway? Dennis thinks about it for the whole drive to the grocery store. A fair number of women, probably, because gay men have that kind of effect sometimes, according to all the research Dennis has done out of purely abstract curiosity. It’s the personal grooming, maybe, or the willingness to talk about their feelings: all that stupid fem shit that doesn’t actually have anything to do with gayness, because Dennis has big feelings that he talks about sometimes and he takes good care of himself and he isn’t gay. Anyway, it’s kind of stereotypical to associate those things with being gay. They’re just things people do. They don’t necessarily have anything to do with wanting to fuck other men, even men who look the way Mac looks now, like he’s finally grown into his body after all these years of not knowing what to do with his shoulders and the beard he never remembers to trim until it’s borderline unkempt and the way he’s shaped like a collection of right angles, not a single wasted plane, just a series of perfect tangents. Most people figure out how to live in their own skin in their twenties or maybe their thirties, after a decade or two of well-meant trial and error spent working out all the kinks that puberty left them. Maybe that’s why Mac is only getting around to it now that he’s come out, now that he knows what kind of person he is and what he wants. Lucky fucking him, Dennis thinks. Not everyone gets to just figure out they’re gay and have that be the answer to all their questions, the piece that’s been missing all their life, a place to belong and people cheering for them and a sense of meaning. Some people just have to drag themselves through one fuckawful day at a time, even if they want all those things, even if it would be easier for them to be gay, actually, at the end of the day, but they just aren’t, so they don’t get to have that. Not everyone gets lucky. Some people are Dennis.

He follows Mac into the produce section and thinks, Twinks. That’s probably the kind of gay man who wants to fuck Mac, lithe naturally hairless men who want Mac to pick them up and fold them in half as he fucks them, who don’t care whether he believes in evolution or not so long as he’s willing to leave beard burn all over their necks. Maybe they even get off on the whole Tommy Bahama truck stop hooker thing Mac has going on, the battered shitkickers and same old pair of navy Dickies, the way he wears the same shirts over and over again until they fall apart in the laundry. Dennis isn’t a twink, which should mean that he’s safe. It should mean that he can stop thinking about it — that would logically follow, right — but Mac keeps picking up fruits and vegetables and most of them, it turns out, look pretty fucking sexual when you’re in the wrong frame of mind.

This kind of thing never used to be a problem for Dennis, not before he knew it was on the table. It was all well and good before Mac was gay, when Dennis knew he could push the envelope as far as he wanted and it would never mean anything, because they were just two straight guys, two heterosexual men. They could jerk off together and sometimes even make eye contact during and sleep with the same women and leave the door ajar so they could watch each other having sex, though now that Dennis thinks about it he’s never watched Mac actually seal the deal — as far as Dennis knows, Mac’s entire sex life has just been one long string of handjobs and dry humping — but anyway. That was the kind of thing Dennis used to be able to contemplate at length without it being a whole big thing. He could think about what it might imply that Mac has never bothered learning how to use a condom, that maybe Mac never has actually gone all the way, and he could even get a little hard about that without it mattering. It’s all fun and games until someone actually comes out. Now all the stupid little things Dennis used to do without thinking about them have taken on new significance and unknown possibility. Even his own thoughts aren’t immune; once Dennis could wonder, for example, whether Mac was the type to ease it in slow or bottom out fast and rough, and it would just be just an idle question, bored speculation to pass a slow afternoon, but now there’s a little part of him that nags and nags, that says, Why are you so curious, huh? Why do you want to know?

“I’m going to go get some more energy bars,” Mac says, turning down the first aisle. “So that you can have more energy.”

For the first time in twenty minutes, Dennis looks at the contents of the cart he’s been pushing around. No carrots or zucchinis, thank God; that would really be the last straw. It’s a pretty respectable grocery haul, actually: good butter, the kind you have to let soften on the counter before you spread it; a fresh loaf of Wonder Bread, or at least one that didn’t expire so long ago that it’s sitting in a funk of its own sweat; a wedge of Jarlsberg. “Wait,” Dennis says, and steers after Mac. The cart has a sticky wheel, and it keeps listing to the side and coming dangerously close to the side of the aisle. He holds up the cheese. “You can’t get them this. They don’t have anything to cut it with.”

“Oh, shoot!” Mac looks up from where he’s crouched down, contemplating various kinds of nut butter. “I forgot about that. We’ll have to stop at a knife store.”

“A,” Dennis says, and then he stops himself. “You know what? That’s not how I would have put it, but it actually isn’t a bad idea. We could go to that place, what is it, the one in Deptford. You remember? We ended up there after that one time we ruined Dee’s couch and we needed to buy new cushions before she got back and tried to kill us?”

“Yes! It was like Bed Bath and Beyond, except it wasn’t named that and it felt totally weird in there and it was completely different in every way,” Mac says. He picks a jar from the shelf at apparent random and drops it into the cart. Dennis cranes his neck and spots the word NUT-URAL! on the label.

“What’s this?” he says. “You can’t get them that, it’s the kind that separates and you have to stir it every time. Think about it, man. Do you really trust Frank and Charlie to stir their peanut butter? No. They’ll just drink the oil, and that defeats the whole purpose. With minds like theirs, you have to take every possible precaution. No, we need an entry-level condiment. What about that?” He points to a jar of Nutella. “Perfectly straightforward, and this way we don’t have to buy them chocolate syrup as well.”

Mac pouts; there’s no other word for it. “Okay,” he says. “But I get to pick something too.”

“What is there left to pick?” Dennis says. “You already found everything else while I was distracted.” Not that he isn’t still distracted, looking at the way Mac’s hair is starting to get long and curl into his face. Is he growing it out again? Dennis hopes not. He’s spent so many years waiting for Mac to realize that he can just get a haircut once every six weeks without worrying that God will strike him down for pride, or that he’ll lose all his strength, or whatever else could have kept him away from the barber’s for so long that his best option really was to plaster it to his skull with so much pomade that only driving headfirst into the Delaware could dislodge it.

Mac grins. “Wait right here.”

“I can’t follow you when you keep just abandoning me with this anyway!” Dennis shouts after him, giving the cart a little shove, but it’s too late. Mac is already gone, probably convinced that he has a great idea, and he’ll almost definitely be back laden with boxes of Triscuits in different flavors or six different kinds of juice, still beaming like he’s discovered the eighth wonder of the world and it’s that you can buy cranberry and grape juice in the same bottle. Nothing makes Dennis want to wipe the smile off Mac’s face as badly as when he’s so clearly proud of himself for achieving absolutely nothing. Just because Mac only experiences shame when the stars are in a very specific alignment doesn’t mean that Dennis doesn’t experience it on his behalf when he does something like shout, Bro, did you know you can buy just egg yolks? In a carton, like milk? This would be so good for Fight Milk, dude! I gotta tell Charlie! We could just get a whole bunch of these, and some cartons of milk, and — Oh! We could put Fight Milk in cartons! Get it? Because it’s milk! You get it? Do you get it, Dennis?

Who could possibly find that attractive? Nobody, if Dennis had to guess, which is why Mac spends so much time complaining about his perpetually blue balls, or used to; now that Dennis thinks about it, Mac hasn’t complained once since he and Dennis started — what are they doing, exactly? Dennis realizes for the first time that he has no idea what they should call it. Their mutually beneficial arrangement, perhaps — that has a nice ring to it, a noncommittal kind of connotation. It doesn’t imply attraction or emotional involvement or anything messy like that. It doesn’t suggest that Dennis wants to shove Mac up against the shelves of canned whatever, tomatoes or beans or eggs for all he cares, and pin him there, holding eye contact until Mac goes quiet and pliable, sinking into that instinctive place where he looks and moves like he’s just woken up, when everything is soft and slow and easy. It doesn’t suggest that Dennis has been thinking about it for the last ten minutes, ever since Mac started pouting.

“Lunchables!” Mac announces, coming around the end of the aisle with his arms piled high: several boxes each of extra cheesy pizza, turkey and American cheese, and whatever the fuck a chicken dunk is. “I used to love these when I was a kid because I ate them for every meal. My parents just filled the closet with them so they didn’t have to cook for me. You see, they trusted me to be self-sufficient and they didn’t want to hold me back.”

“We’ve discussed this many times,” Dennis says, as Mac loads the cart up. “The only reason your parents didn’t abandon you in the wilderness to be raised or eaten by wolves is because the last wolf in Pennsylvania was hunted to death a century before you were born.”

“More proof that I was born too late,” Mac says mournfully. “Running with wolves would be such a badass origin story.”

Dennis frowns and pushes the cart towards the self-checkout. “Poppins might count.”

“Poppins!” Mac’s face lights up, and then falls. “I haven’t seen him in a few months. I hope he’s okay.”

“Oh, that old bag of bones is fine,” Dennis says. “Wait, when did you get eggs?”

“Oh, I just grabbed them, before, when you were waiting, you know, when I was getting them. When you weren’t there.”

“Obviously I wasn’t there.” Dennis watches as Mac unloads and scans a bag of pita chips, two tubs of hummus, microwave rice, shrink-wrapped chicken breasts, and a bag of broccoli florets. “What’s all this? Don’t you want to stick to the green juice? You’ve been looking super vascular lately, bro. It really makes your, uh, your iliac furrows pop.”

“Oh, bro!” Mac says, straightening up. “My Adonis belt? Thank you, man, that means so much to me. I always worry about whether it pops enough.”

“Oh, it pops all right,” Dennis says, pulling out his wallet. “Last call for green juice.”

Mac pulls the cart around him and starts bagging groceries. “Nah,” he says. “I actually started reading the labels and you know what? You were right. They’re mostly sugar. I was thinking, you know, why not try meal prep for once?”

“Are you sure? I still remember the last time you tried cooking at home,” Dennis said.

Mac grimaces. “That was a dark time and I don’t like to think about it,” he says. “I’ve turned over a new page. That was suburban Mac. He was a loser with a bad haircut. This is new Mac. New, gay, together Mac. Plus, how hard can it be to microwave rice?”

Three hours later, Dennis rubs his temples and tries to ignore the fact that Mac is holding the microwave out the window. “It’s stuck,” he yells, shaking it as its door rattles back and forth. “I can’t get the rice out, bro, it’s everywhere — oh,” he says, sounding guilty. Dennis listens to several stories’ worth of silence and then the sound of glass breaking somewhere far below, followed shortly by the screech of brakes and a hollow metallic crunch. Looking slightly haunted, Mac pulls the microwave back inside and slides the window shut. “So,” he says, “I just learned that the thing you put your food on is not attached to the rest of the microwave.”

“Jesus Christ,” Dennis says, and gets up. “I just cleaned that.”

“I know,” Mac says quickly. “And I should have known the rice would get everywhere, because I always mess up that kind of thing. But you can still cook it on the stove, right?”

“Me? Absolutely not.” Dennis gets a glass and opens the freezer for the bottle of Kamchatka that lives next to their empty ice cube trays. “I won’t enable the consumption of carbs. You know that.” He finds a clean glass and starts pouring. When his blood pressure goes down, Dennis thinks, that’s when he’ll stop.

“I know, I know. You just know so much more about food than I do,” Mac says. He makes a face like he thinks he’s being super subtle and is very proud of himself. It looks idiotic. “I mean, I can’t even microwave rice without ruining it, but I guess I could probably figure it how to do it on the stove.” He starts opening and closing cabinet doors, looking for a saucepan, no doubt, and Dennis has a sudden cold-sweat premonition, a vision of what the next three hours will look like if he doesn’t do something fast: rice everywhere, on the floor, all over the counters, stuck to the walls, clogging the sink and burning on the stove, and Mac standing in the middle of it all with that hangdog look on his face, saying something like Sorry bro, you know how it is with rice.

“You know what? Let me do it,” Dennis says, reaching for his phone. How hard can it be to heat their one remaining packet of Uncle Ben’s on the stovetop?

Three hours later, there’s rice in the sink but not on the walls and two plates of totally unseasoned broccoli and chicken on the table, on either side of the novelty chess set they haven’t used once since Charlie came over, saw the puzzle they had laid out two weeks earlier and on which they had made precisely zero progress, said, “Oh, I get it!” and executed a perfect two-move checkmate.

“Yum,” Mac says, looking at his plate with absolutely no irony in his voice or expression. Dennis squints at him and thinks, He has to be kidding, right? The chicken is the same color as fake muscle padding, or the inside of a push-up bra. The broccoli is sickly green and smells suspiciously like Brussels sprouts. The rice at least looks edible, but then all Dennis did was stand it in a pot of boiling water for a few minutes. He’s never actually bothered learning how to cook, for the same reason that he doesn’t buy groceries or keep snacks around. It’s easier to skip meals when there are additional steps involved in producing them. What’s the point of restaurants and drive-throughs and microwaves if not to cut out all that extra work and reduce food down to what really matters: an arbitrary collection of nutrients and a calorie count you can depend on? For all Dennis knows, he missed his window to learn how to cook. Maybe it’s like how children have an easier time learning languages than adults do, or like how you have to catch someone at just the right age to make them believe in God. Maybe it’s just something else that Dennis can’t do because he’s so fucking empty inside that nothing good will ever be able to take root in him. But Mac’s enthusiasm seems genuine, even after he’s taken a bite of chicken and broccoli, so Dennis takes a deep breath and starts sawing away.

He was right: It’s awful. The chicken is overcooked and rubbery — for all he knows their oven runs hot; it’s not like either of them has ever used it before — while the broccoli is somehow borderline raw. Taken together, they make a dentist’s dream of a bite, simultaneously impossible to bite into and impossible to chew. Dennis does his best and then swallows, which makes him feel like one of those snakes that unhinge their jaws to swallow birds’ eggs whole. He looks up, hoping that while he was choking his own mouthful down Mac will have realized that he’s not only wrong but insane and that they can call the entire farce off, throw their plates out the window to join the microwave’s shattered turntable, and call it a night — but Mac is still eating, with every appearance of pleasure, no less. Does he somehow have a more complex palate than Dennis? Is he picking up on some nuance of flavor and texture that Dennis has missed? More to the point, what the fuck is wrong with him? Dennis wants to reach over and sweep his plate onto the floor and tell him to stop eating this garbage, that he doesn’t have to pander to Dennis or pretend that this is anything other than inedible. Instead, he eats the rice and the very center of the chicken breast, which is at least slightly less overcooked and thus easier to chew than the rest, and the smaller broccoli florets, which are still a little too crunchy for comfort but at least don’t make his teeth hurt, because he’ll be damned before he owns up to being bad at something, but he can’t eat any more. He just can’t. This is the first actual meal Dennis has eaten in days and if he tries to force the rest of it down, there’s a very real chance he’ll never be able to bring himself to eat solid food again, and then he’ll either have to subsist entirely on one of those powdered food substitutes or die of starvation. Both options are equally unappealing.

“Wow,” Mac says. His plate, against the odds, is totally clean. Did he pour his food into his lap? Dennis pretends to scratch his ankle in order to get a look under the table, but there’s not a single dropped grain of rice to be seen. “You’re a really good cook, man. And that was super healthy too! No gluten. We should do this from now on!”

It took six fucking hours and destroyed our microwave, Dennis thinks but doesn’t say. “I don’t know,” he says. “I mean, is it really worth the effort? We could get the same thing from Guigino’s and then we wouldn’t have to do dishes. And it would have sauce.”

“Sauce is super easy to make!” Mac says. “It comes in a jar. You just pour it on top.”

“Sauce that comes in a jar is full of sugar,” Dennis says.

“And restaurant food only tastes so good because it’s full of salt,” Mac says. “That isn’t good for your blood pressure.” He starts clearing dishes. The sink is already piled high with pans that Dennis found, tried to use, and then discarded. He doesn’t know where half of them are from: probably the period when they were living with Dee and spent a lot of time in the clearance area of the supermarket near her apartment, looking for ways to add clutter and make it feel more like home. They ended up buying a lot of three-dollar pans and novelty spatulas, Dennis remembers now, and one oddly large mug that can fit an entire can of tomato soup at once. Most of them are in the sink at this very moment because Dennis had no idea which ones to use for the chicken, so he had pulled all of them out to test for size, and then realized that none of them could go in the oven without their handles melting anyway. That had been funny, at least, the sound that the raw chicken breast had made while he was slapping it desperately into one pan after another. He and Mac had glanced at each other like teenagers and then started laughing. A minute later, the broccoli had boiled over and put an end to that, but still.

“You cooked, so I’ll wash up,” Mac says, turning the water on. “Why don’t you put your feet up, take a break?”

“All right,” Dennis says. Vodka and accomplishment have made him feel expansive and generous. He moves to the sofa and relaxes, spreading out, kicking his shoes off and throwing an arm over the back, and then he thinks about how good Mac looks from here, his broad shoulders, the muscles of his back, the way his ass looks in sweats and how he’s probably splashing water all over the counter and himself — if he turned around, Dennis thinks, those sweats would probably cling in just the right way for Dennis to get a look at his dick print, and those thighs — Fuck! he thinks, so abruptly that he startles himself, because Cricket was right. Goddamnit! He wants to fuck Mac so badly that it’s all he can think about, all he can see, all he can feel. He can even taste it, the way he wants to know how Mac’s dick would feel in his mouth, whether he’d be able to fit it all the way back into his throat; the way he wants Mac’s hands all over him, in his hair, pulling, on his ass, scratching his back to ribbons; everywhere. He wants, God help him, to go down to pound town and clown around long past sundown. He wants to fuck Mac every way there is, and then to invent a few more for good measure, and then he wants Mac to do it all to him, to show him how his body is meant to work and what it can do, to light him up like a barrel of fireworks and then put all the pieces back together so he can do it all over again. Dennis has never wanted anyone quite like this, he realizes, so much that he feels like he’ll burst into flames if Mac even looks at him — so much that it must be written all over his face. He finishes his vodka in a single swallow and it goes down like water in the desert, evaporating on its way down his throat.

“Dennis?” Mac says, and Dennis realizes he’s staring, and has been for a while now. “Is everything okay?”

“Oh yeah,” Dennis says, smooth, reflexive. His entire life is on fire, which makes it easy to pretend that nothing is wrong. He’s a knife perfectly balanced on the tip of a finger, the overextended tendon about to snap in a ballerina’s ankle, the last indrawn breath before the toaster hits the bathwater. As long as he stays in perfect control, he can stretch this instant out forever, like Zeno’s paradox of emotional avoidance, staying always one millisecond ahead of impact, splitting the atom as far as it’ll go and then further so that the cows never actually come home and he never has to pay the piper. He can just keep spinning this moment out longer and longer, running on adrenaline and muscle memory. His face, he realizes distantly, is hot. He’s probably bright red. That won’t do. He should go splash cold water on it and pretend he’s drunk. That should get Mac off his back. “I just forgot this isn’t water,” he says, and holds up the empty glass. He gets up, acting more unsteady on his feet than he really is. “Time to break the seal, you know?”

“Okay,” Mac says, but Dennis can tell he isn’t buying it. Fuck, he thinks. He isn’t nearly drunk enough to pull it off. Maybe Mac can tell; maybe that’s the problem. Maybe Dennis just needs to prove that he’s well and truly wasted and then Mac will back off, just like he always does, because he’s a fucking coward who doesn’t recognize a golden opportunity when he sees one, who doesn’t know what it looks like when somebody really is asking for it. Isn’t that what Dennis has been doing all these years? Getting himself fucked up so that he can see what Mac will do, whether he wants Dennis badly enough to take advantage when Dennis offers himself up on a silver memory-impaired platter or whether this is just another situation where all that matters is that Dennis will make all the right noises and move in all the right ways? Because he always does; what else is he for? Dennis can’t think of a single other reason that anyone would spend years bending over backwards for the smallest morsel, the meanest crumb, the way Mac has. But he’s also never considered that Mac might want him so badly that he wouldn’t settle for that, which is worse — so much worse — because it means that Mac wants something else from him.

And Dennis doesn’t know what else he has to give. As far as he’s concerned, all that matters is that he looks beautiful and lays pipe accordingly. It’s the only reason anyone has ever spent any time with or paid any attention to him. Otherwise he’s a fucking loser, a forty-something-year-old who wakes up an hour early every single day to make himself look like he’s in his thirties again so that he can spend another hour every night on Craigslist’s activity partners section, like it isn’t just a catalog of men too old or insecure for dating apps who think that “Man seeking woman for wet times” is a title that will appeal to literally anyone on earth. Dennis doesn’t even bother reading most of the emails he gets these days — what’s the point? They all mean the same thing: that he’ll have to put on a new face, sound like he’s interested in making small talk with a woman who just wants him to tell her what she wants to hear, convince her that he actually loves giving oral and doesn’t get why so many guys aren’t into it — after all, who wouldn’t want to get up close and personal with a vagina for an hour as his dick slowly goes soft and his knees feel like someone has hammered nails into them, and yes, he does want to be in charge, yes, he’ll choke her but in a feminist way, yes, he’ll dress like that hot young but not too young dad she works with, the one whose hands she always fantasizes about. Yes, he has a wedding band in his back pocket, no reason, it’s just something people like sometimes, yes, he does have those paternal vibes, some people just do, yes yes yes, who’s his good girl, taking it all for him, doesn’t that feel good, isn’t that what she wants. Blah blah fucking blah.

It’s all patter, like a stage magician telling his audience to keep an eye on his hands, don’t let him sneak anything past them, now, nothing up his sleeve, just good clean fun. At least half the reason Dennis does it is for himself, anyway. Doesn’t that feel good? Isn’t that what he wants, to feel good? Never mind that it isn’t even really a question, because it’s what he’s supposed to want, so the answer has to be yes either way. Never mind that Dennis hasn’t actually had sex in years, even though he’s spent easily a hundred hours kitting out his room to be the perfect sexual entrapment setting, even though he still updates his standing Craigslist ad (“Looking for a night that won’t disappoint?”), even though once upon a time he would have spent months spiraling about why he can’t seem to find the motivation to do something about it. Not anymore: He’s too tired for that, too busy sprinting in place to avoid slipping into the past, except for now — this new kind of starvation he’s discovered, where everything he wants is just within his grasp but he can’t figure out how to make his hand work, how to actually reach out and take it.

“You know what?” he says, putting the glass down on the arm of the chair. It slips off and smashes, but he’s already halfway across the room. “Fuck this.” Mac’s eyes are wide and getting wider. Has Dennis thought about this before? Of course. He’s gone further, dozens of times, full of tequila and spite in equal proportion, but never with this kind of intent, never mostly sober, never with any kind of purpose. The real question is whether Mac has thought about this, and judging by the look on his face and the hope blooming there despite his clear misgivings, he has. His face is so bright that it almost hurts to look right at him. That won’t be a problem for much longer, because Dennis is almost close enough to grab him by the shirt and press their mouths together — to kiss Mac like his life depends on it, steal his fucking breath and bite his lip and pull his hair and make him look like he’s had the fuck of his life after only a minute of necking like teenagers, and then who knows what will happen next, what Dennis will want, where it’ll go. Is this how everyone else feels about sex? Is this what everyone else means when they talk about wanting to screw someone’s brains out? Jesus, how do they live like this? How does anyone get any work done? Maybe this just one more way that Dennis is too much, too volatile, too sharp, too dangerous. God, but even if that’s true, he just doesn’t care. In another second none of it will matter, anyway—

Mac takes him by the shoulders, so gently that Dennis doesn’t notice until he realizes he isn’t moving forwards anymore, and says, “You’re drunk.”

“I’m not,” Dennis says. “I swear.”

“No, you are,” Mac says. “And I know this is all fun and games to you, but it’s just not fair.”

“Fair?” Dennis feels like he’s going to have a stroke, or maybe his head is just going to explode like a greased watermelon on a hot day. “Who the fuck cares about fair? You want this,” he says. Mac takes a deep breath and closes his eyes for a moment. Dennis is standing so close that he can feel the rise and fall of Mac’s chest. “I’m drunk, I’m throwing myself at you, I won’t remember anything in the morning, what are you waiting for? What more could you want?”

When Mac opens his eyes, he looks so fucking sad that Dennis wants to scratch his face off. He wants to grab Mac by the ears and scream: How dare he look sorry for Dennis; how dare he act like this isn’t normal; how dare he make Dennis feel like he’s missed a step going downstairs and fallen on his face and now everybody is looking at him because they saw it coming and didn’t have the good fucking grace to pretend they didn’t notice, so now not only is Dennis is on the floor but they all know, everybody fucking knows, everyone is too polite to point or whisper but they all want to and the minute he leaves them alone it’s all they’ll be talking about. Did you see that idiot, they’ll say to each other, can you believe he didn’t realize, can you believe he thought that was normal? Do you think he’s been lying to himself all these years? Wouldn’t that be just so sad, if he’s spent his whole life telling himself that it was fine, that he hasn’t been walking around kneecapped this whole time when everyone else could tell just from looking at him? Wouldn’t that be just so embarrassing? It wasn’t rape, no matter what everyone keeps fucking saying, because Dennis was there and he’d know, so why does everyone keep acting like he’s crazy, nodding to each other like, Oh there’s Dennis, there he goes again, lying to himself, isn’t it sad, but we all know the truth about what happened in the library, so who cares how he feels about it?

Nobody ever fucking cares how Dennis feels. They didn’t care when he was a kid whose only friend was his mother, who had to follow his own twin sister around or else she wouldn’t pay attention to him, and they didn’t care when he was a teenager who spent every single second of his life feeling like his skin was too small to contain his feelings, and they didn’t care when he was failing his way through college because every other night he got so drunk that he woke up in the hallway outside his dorm room at all hours of the day and night, head pounding, liver aching, swearing to himself that this was the last time, because next time he wouldn’t wake up at all and it would finally be over. Nobody except, of course, fucking Mac, who had been there the first time Dennis ever cut a class — that stupid computer literacy lab they took every week in the library — and went to lie under the bleachers instead. Mac and Charlie had been there, smoking, and Charlie had said, Do you think he’s dead? and Mac had said something stupid, because he had been blazed out of his thirteen-year-old mind on stems and seeds and most of his brainpower seemed to be occupied with keeping his bangs, which were cut like a paranoiac’s curtains, out of his eyes; then he had offered Dennis a hit. And Mac had been there when Dennis was drinking his way through undergrad, waking up in a puddle of puke every morning right alongside him, and he had been there when Dennis graduated and realized that you couldn’t do anything with a minor in psychology besides go back to school and get a more useful degree, and he’s here now, looking at Dennis like his heart is breaking about something that isn’t even that big a deal. If Mac doesn’t want to fuck Dennis, all he has to do is say so. It doesn’t have to be a whole big thing.

“You’re drunk,” Mac says, “and you won’t remember anything in the morning.”

I take it all back, Dennis thinks. It is a big fucking deal. He’s going to smash every piece of furniture they own; he’s going to break all their windows; he’s going to set the fucking place on fire and wait for all the skin to melt off his body because that’s the only thing that will make him feel anything close to okay. “You know what?” he says, and takes a careful step back to show that he isn’t so drunk after all and that Mac is making a huge fucking mistake that he’ll regret for the rest of his life. “You’re right. This was all a misunderstanding.”

Dennis watches it hit Mac right in the chest, just the way he hoped it would. Sometimes giving someone exactly what they want is the only way to hurt them more than never giving it to them at all.

But why stop there? “I thought this was working for both of us,” Dennis says — give him a touch of hope — “but no, obviously that was stupid of me. Maybe we should just stop.” Tug the line, set the hook. Twist the knife one last time to really make the point. “And you know I’m not that drunk. You’ve seen me get hammered. I get uncoordinated, I slur my speech,” he goes on, making sure to enunciate perfectly. “Half a glass of vodka? Please. That’s barely enough to get me buzzed at this point. But that isn’t why you’re standing there with your metaphorical dick in your metaphorical hand, telling me that it’s all for my own good, because you’re such a saint. No, no. The feast day of Ronald McDonald this is not. You and I both know why you’re doing this, and it isn’t because I’m anywhere near drunk enough to forget all of this by tomorrow.”

“Why—” Mac says, and it’s the beginning of Why would you say that then, but Dennis doesn’t let him finish.

“No,” he says. Mac might not be letting him get any closer, but Dennis can still reach out and poke him in the chest. “It’s because you’re a fucking coward—” he starts, but he doesn’t get to finish, because Mac isn’t pushing him away anymore. His hand is on Dennis’ wrist, his touch startling against the thin skin there, his fingertips pressing against the pulse point, and the angle between them is doing painful things to Dennis’ elbow, but it doesn’t matter because Mac is kissing him like it’s the last chance he’ll ever get to do it — like the apartment is burning down around them, like they’re the last two people on the Titanic and the band is playing Chicago. It’s a kiss like any other, because the genre is inherently pretty limited, and at the same time it’s like nothing Dennis has ever done before: because it’s Mac, because it’s been decades, because this is what he had hoped Mac would do all those other times, when all he got was a chaste close-mouthed peck and then nothing. He’s been waiting decades for a kiss like this, a Hollywood kiss, a light-the-fireworks-and-call-Grace-Kelly kiss. It’s a triumphant swell of music, a wide shot of the French Riviera, a close-up on cigarette smoke: emphatically dirty and impossible to mistake for anything else, impossible to take back, impossible to forget. I would have called Mac a coward a long time ago if I had any idea that this was all it would take, Dennis thinks, astonished, and then it ends and they’re still standing so close to each other that he can feel the gust of Mac’s breath against his mouth and, just barely, see the way that his ears are blotchily flushed.

Dennis has to get the last word in, he realizes abruptly, or it’ll be up to Mac, and who knows what he’ll say. Dennis doesn’t want to find out whether it’s going to be That was a mistake or I’ve been in love with you for as long as I can remember. Even if both are true, he can’t deal with that right now or maybe ever. It was just a kiss, just a handy, just a blowjob between friends. Why make it anything else? Guys do this kind of thing all the time and it doesn’t mean shit. It makes sense that Dennis wants to fuck Mac, because Mac is nearby and willing and that’s how it works for men, even if that isn’t what usually does it for Dennis, even if Mac is also a man. All that means, Dennis tells himself, is that he knows his way around a dick. What straight guy wouldn’t take that as a nice bonus?

“Okay,” Dennis says. Mac’s eyes are still closed; he only opens them when Dennis steps away. “Okay,” he says again, and there’s still broken glass on the floor and vodka soaking into the carpet but but who cares; he still needs to use the bathroom, but who cares.

“Dennis,” Mac starts to say, but Dennis never hears what comes next, because by that time he’s in his room with the door closed and he doesn’t have to listen anymore. He doesn’t have to pretend that everything is fine. He doesn’t have to be a person, in fact, because nobody is looking at him, so he can just be whatever he is the rest of the time. He stands for a minute, doing nothing in particular, and then he sits down on his bed and bites his lip, and then he gets up again, because being anywhere near a bed feels dangerous right now, and then he unplugs his alarm clock because the last thing he needs is to set off the bondage facility protocol by accident, and then he sits down on the bed again, holding the blank-faced clock like the lone survivor of a building collapse clutching the only possession they managed to save from the wreckage. His face is still hot. His mouth is stinging; it’s probably that particularly obscene shade of just-kissed red. His elbow aches a little. Dennis can’t remember what it felt like when Mac grabbed him by the wrist, but he can remember the quick filthy flicker of Mac’s tongue, the way it made him feel the good kind of used, which is ridiculous — like suddenly his libido is a collage of romance novel covers from the drugstore’s magazine aisle. Shit, is he hard? Has he been hard this whole time? What if Mac noticed? It doesn’t matter. Dennis has a whole hard drive full of porn for occasions just like these, when he needs to get off as quickly as possible without thinking too much about it: lots of sexy teachers and improbably endowed students, MILFs with huge tits, naughty babysitters, that kind of thing. He doesn’t even need to turn on the audio; in fact, most of the time it’s better if he doesn’t, because that way he doesn’t have to tune out the fake porn moaning, high-pitched and grating. It’s a little awkward to shuffle around his room getting everything together when he’s this turned on, but finally his laptop is open and the video is fullscreen and there it is, full penetration front and center, just the thing for a staunchly heterosexual man like himself.

Five minutes of intense chafing and three different videos later, Dennis ends up scrolling through every thumbnail in the folder with increasing frustration. Why is he having such a hard fucking time tonight? It must be that he’s gotten used to somebody else doing all the work, or maybe it’s the genre of porn. He switches folders and clicks on the first creampie file that comes up: just your standard lowest-common-denominator porn fare, a woman he wouldn’t be able to pick out of a lineup with cartoonishly large breasts and a man with short dark hair cut square in the back, arms like he spends all his time on the seated row machine, and a dick Dennis wouldn’t mind having himself, nice and just the right side of average, not so big that it looks garish but not too small either. His ass isn’t bad either, Dennis decides, when the camera switches angles to get some stock footage of the man hammering away with the athleticism of an Olympian. None of it is particularly inspired — there’s nothing new under the sun in pornography — but at least Dennis can switch his mind off and focus on how good it probably feels for the people in the video, the man probably grunting the same way Mac does whenever he doesn’t have time for the gym and just does pushups in the living room instead, the woman clearly having a great time if her face is anything to go by, getting absolutely railed and loving it. Who wouldn’t love to get fucked by a guy like that? Who wouldn’t want him to come deep inside them so that they could feel every twitch, every pulse, and know that they’d done such a good job of taking it that he hadn’t been able to help himself? And then to get dressed and go about the rest of their day knowing: Fuck, who wouldn’t want that, Dennis thinks, and comes so hard that he thinks he might have sprained something.

When he wakes up the next morning, he bolts upright, unable to remember if he wiped the splatter from his laptop screen before he went to sleep or whether it’s still there, dry now and flaking off into the keyboard. Dennis isn’t proud of himself, but it’s happened before. He reaches over: His laptop is clean, thank fuck, but in the process of checking he wakes the screen up to find that the video is still open, paused on what couldn’t more clearly be the O-face of a porn star who may as well be Mac’s heterosexual twin. “Jesus!” Dennis hisses, and tosses the laptop towards the end of the bed, but he bumps the space bar as he does, unpausing the video, so then he has to scramble after it and spend an undignified moment shutting the computer down entirely, just to be safe. As if last night hadn’t been enough — “Oh, fuck,” Dennis says out loud, and freezes like a robot asked to divide by zero as it all washes back over him. The horrible rubbery chicken, and the vodka, and the amount of time he must have spent sitting there watching Mac do the dishes and thinking just the most absolutely depraved thoughts about what he wanted Mac to do to him, and then, God. It’s like he’s in his twenties again, except that at least in his twenties Dennis wouldn’t wake up still aching all over from walking eight thousand goddamn miles for no good reason and sitting on a stoop asking a street urchin for philosophical advice and then spending another six hours trying to make the worst dinner in history and then kissing his best friend who he hates and then jerking off about it, apparently to a video of a man who looks just like the same best friend who he, again, fucking hates.

If Dennis was still in his twenties, yesterday would have been a day just like any other, and then he could have gotten drunk enough that he couldn’t remember any of it without thinking about what it’ll do to his skin and his liver and his ability to stand upright for the rest of the day. Aging is the worst thing that’s ever happened to Dennis. Now a wild day is one where he goes not just to the bar but to a secondary location of some kind, like another bar or the grocery store or, Jesus Christ, that weird imitation Bed Bath and Beyond in Deptford that he’s meant to drive Mac to later so they can pick out a fucking cheese knife for Frank and Charlie. Great: It’ll be just like shopping for wedding presents except that he won’t even get to neg whichever bridesmaid is most desperate for a pity fuck. Plus, to add insult to injury, it means that his millionaire shitbag of a father will get something out of him for free. If there was any justice in the world, Frank would have to hand Dennis a hundred-dollar bill every time they found themselves breathing the same air, and even that wouldn’t make Dennis like him, but if he waited for long enough he might end up with enough cash to hire a dark web hitman to kill the old fucker, and that would probably help him achieve emotional closure. In the long run, anyway.

Speaking of indignities, Dennis thinks: Why had he gone and fucking thrown himself at Mac like that, anyway? He tries to blame the vodka and then remembers that, like a fucking idiot, he went ahead and told Mac that he wasn’t actually drunk, so that won’t fly even if he decides to remember it differently; so much for plausible deniability. And it can’t be that Dennis wants to fuck Mac, no matter what his dick has to say about it, because he isn’t gay — that just isn’t an option. It can’t happen, because it just can’t, so he can’t be. Thinking about that particular syllogism for too long makes Dennis’ head hurt, anyway. What he needs right now is a shower, hot enough to leave his skin red and stinging, so that he’ll have something to focus on other than a train of thought that’s never going to go anywhere. There’s no sign of Mac in the living room — he must still be asleep — so at least Dennis has a little more time to get his story straight. He locks himself in the bathroom and turns the water all the way up and waits until the mirror is fogged over to get undressed, but even that doesn’t help, because when he gets undressed his dick registers its interest in a reprise, even though it’s seen more action in the last week than it has in years. Dennis might be able to ignore it if he turns the water all the way to ice cold, but maybe not; this might be the kind of opportunistic erection that keeps waiting for the worst possible moment to crop up throughout the day, in which case maybe he should just take care of it now, before it becomes an even bigger problem. Maybe it’s just the smart thing to do, getting his hand all slippery with the body wash that Mac steals in travel-sized bottles from the gym, bracing his other arm against the wall, pressing his forehead to the tile and giving in to physical compulsion.

Dennis tells himself that it’s just the once and never again. He gets one free pass to jerk off thinking about Mac, not that he’s even doing it on purpose — it just keeps popping into his head and after a certain point he can either focus on getting off or controlling what he’s thinking about while he does, and that’s a real no-brainer of a question. He finishes; he sticks his head under the spray until his head is pounding from lack of oxygen and waits for the roar of water to drown out the wash of shame and humiliation that sometimes sneaks up on him after orgasm, making him jumpy and useless for the rest of the day; he turns off the shower and dries off. It’s just a one-time thing, just because it gets him off fast and hard and then he can stop thinking about it. It doesn’t have to mean anything.

Then he waits for Mac to wake up so they can go to Deptford, and not five minutes into the drive, taking I-95 over the Delaware, Dennis looks over at Mac staring out the window as railyards roll past beneath them, nothing but blue sky overhead for miles and miles, and he thinks, What if this could make me happy?

It’s a perfect Thursday in May. The windows are rolled down and the radio is playing the Eagles. Dennis can’t think of anywhere he’d rather be than here in the Range Rover with Mac; neither of them is saying anything, but in a second he might start singing along, take it easy, take it easy, and Mac will probably join in, come on, baby, don’t say maybe. What if every day could be like this? They’ll go to the bar later, and maybe the last few days have been kind of weird but after a couple of beers everything will go back to normal. They won’t talk about their feelings and they won’t cook dinner together and Dennis won’t waste any more time trying to figure out what it means that he’s never gotten off harder than he does with Mac, or thinking about Mac, because if he doesn’t think about it then it isn’t an issue. He can just go back to doing — what? It’s not like his life was so great before, anyway. Maybe this isn’t actually so bad by comparison; maybe Dennis can just keep doing this except without the weird game of sex chicken or whatever it is — except that’s the only part of his life that has changed, so without it things will probably just go back to the way they were a week ago, when he hated every second of being alive and hoped it would be over soon.

What if he just doesn’t think about it? What if he just keeps doing this and it doesn’t have to mean anything? Dennis is good at that. He can keep up this kind of ruse for decades if he has to; he’s done it before. It’s just a matter of figuring out some simple ground rules and then following them scrupulously. Control, that’s the name of the game, now and always. First, Dennis tells himself, he has to make sure that this stays between him and Mac; nobody else can know, because they’ll definitely jump to the wrong conclusion, and then they’ll ask all kinds of questions that Dennis doesn’t want to answer because it’ll take too much explaining and he just doesn’t want to waste too much time figuring out how to say that, for example, this doesn’t mean that he’s gay, because he’s just doing it to help Mac out, and no, that isn’t a contradiction in terms, and so on. Second, he and Mac aren’t going to talk about it either, not now or ever, because as long as they don’t talk about it then Dennis doesn’t have to think about it and then it doesn’t have to mean anything. Quod erat demonstration or whatever. Nice, easy, no discussion, no big deal.

“I think we should talk about last night,” Mac says, like a bolt from the perfect clear sky, and Dennis nearly drives them into oncoming traffic.

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea, man,” he says. “What is there to talk about?”

“Oh,” Mac says, and for a second Dennis thinks he’s going to drop it — maybe he’ll say, Never mind in that case, I guess it was just me — but no such luck. “Well, dude, I guess maybe you don’t remember this so much but you kind of, uh, kissed me.”

Clever boy, Dennis thinks, hating it. “That’s not how I remember things.”

“Oh, yeah,” Mac says. “You got drunk and I said, are you sure about this, and you said yeah. And then you really went for it. So… what does that mean?”

“Wow,” Dennis says. “I guess I must have been really wasted.”

“See, that was what I thought too!” Mac said. “But then you swore up and down that you weren’t.” The way Mac is looking at Dennis makes him glad that he has to keep his eyes on the road. It’s like he’s talking around something he isn’t saying, an unspoken question implied by negative space that he doesn’t quite know how to ask yet. It makes Dennis want to deny everything, just in case.

“Now, I don’t think there’s any point splitting hairs,” he says. Their exit is coming up. “I kissed you, you kissed me, does it really matter? I think we can both agree that sometimes the details don’t really matter.”

“Sure, sure,” Mac says. He still sounds like he’s turning it over in his mind, even as he has one arm hanging out the window like a teenage fantasy, John Travolta in Grease, James Dean in a baseball shirt. It’s absurd. “I don’t really care about that kind of thing anyway.”

Liar, Dennis thinks with a pleasurable little thrill. Mac is getting better and better at pulling people’s strings. He isn’t so good yet that he can get one over on Dennis, and when that day arrives Dennis will have to make sure he’s on his A game, but until then he takes a certain pride in watching Mac test his abilities, like a kitten learning to stalk its tiny roly-poly stalk for the very first time. If Mac really didn’t care, then he wouldn’t have brought it up in the first place, and he also wouldn’t have lied about who kissed who, but even that was a smart move, because really who can keep track of that kind of detail? And now Dennis is thinking that maybe he did kiss Mac after all, that maybe he was the one who leaned in those last few inches. If he wasn’t so used to having memories that jumble and scramble like a motorized kaleidoscope, maybe this would throw him; but Dennis is used to writing off the fine print, so he waits to see what Mac is going to say next, how he’s going to give away the game. Patience is always the real key to pulling off this kind of scheme, and Mac just doesn’t have the hang of it yet. Sure enough, he says, “I just wanted to know, like, what are the rules here? Like, I really appreciate you doing this for me, man, it’s such a huge favor you don’t even know. I just want to make sure I’m expressing that appreciation, you know?”

It’s like watching a fourteen-year-old try to convince his teacher that no, a dog really did eat his homework, and yes, he doesn’t have a dog, but his best friend does, and that street mutt would eat anything, he swears, Cross my heart! “And I appreciate you asking,” Dennis says, in the same tone of voice he’d use to say, I can’t believe you’d do something this stupid. “I mean, just because the rules seem pretty obvious to me doesn’t mean that’s the case for you. So really you’re the one doing me the favor by asking. First of all, we keep this between us. That one is non-negotiable,” he says; first the carrot, then the stick. “You know how people are, they find out something like that and then they want to ask all kinds of questions, and that takes all the fun out of it. It makes it this whole big thing, and then people might get the wrong impression. Not about you, obviously, but about me. And I don’t know about you, but I would hate to have to call this off over a little misunderstanding like that. I mean, clearly I don’t get nearly as much out of it as you do, but I’d feel bad if I had to leave you in the lurch. That would just feel like such an unnecessary step to have to take. Wouldn’t it?”

Mac shifts in his seat. “Oh, absolutely,” he says. “And I know I’m asking you for a lot already, so I read you loud and clear, man.” He’s remembering his place, Dennis thinks. Good. Unless — is he being sarcastic? Dennis doesn’t typically think of Mac as capable of that kind of sophistry, and he’s almost always right. It must be a trick of tone, an unintentional slip of timbre. No point getting all hung up on it.

“Great,” he says. “Second of all, we’re not going to get all analytical about this. No looking for subtext or reading too much into it or anything, because there’s no deeper meaning or anything. I’m just helping you out because I was sick of listening to you bitch and moan all day about how you aren’t getting any, even though you never go out or meet people. This has nothing to do with me, and it doesn’t change anything. For example, I might like coming in your mouth, but I’m not going to be gay, because I also love pussy.” The parking lot is pretty empty, which is the one upside of trading shifts with Dee so they can be here during the week. The downside, of course, is owing Dee anything. Dennis turns down the first aisle, absentmindedly looking for a spot. “I mean, as much as anyone does, so I guess if we’re being honest with ourselves I don’t like it that much, but nobody really likes pussy. You just learn to like it because that’s part of being an adult! Learning to enjoy things that are objectively unappealing is just part of life. Obviously it’s different for you,” he adds, turning into an empty spot right by the front doors. “Everyone else just has to make it work.” When he looks over to see why Mac isn’t saying anything, Mac is looking at him like he’s said something so crazy that Mac doesn’t even know where to start disagreeing. Dennis plays it back in his head just in case. Even the second time around, it makes perfect sense to him, but Mac is making him nervous, so he adds, “Why are you making that face at me?”

“No reason,” Mac says, in the same glaringly cautious tone of voice Dennis imagines he’d use to negotiate a hostage release. “But — I don’t know that it actually is that different for me?”

“Oh, it definitely is,” Dennis snaps, turning off the engine. “Don’t you think everyone would be gay if it was that easy?”

“Dennis,” Mac says, but he’s too slow and too late, just like he always is. Dennis is already out of the car and moving fast. The thing, the real awful thing that he’s only just realized, is that when he puts it like that, it sounds really fucking sad — almost as sad as Mac had looked when he said You’re drunk and you won’t remember anything in the morning. And what Mac had meant when he said that was that he wished more than anything that he was wrong, so what Dennis has to do now is find some way to distract himself from the possibility that he’s in the same boat, because he doesn’t wish he was gay. Or maybe he does, just a little bit, but it’s not the same thing at all: Real gay people figure it out when they’re kids or maybe in high school, and then they join their college’s pride club or learn to sing a cappella or whatever and they have tons of gay sex before they’re in their forties, and everyone sees it coming and nobody is surprised, and maybe it isn’t easy but it’s not the kind of thing that can sneak up on you. If you’re gay, you know it, and then you just get on with your fucking life. Unless, of course, you’re super Catholic, like Mac, or maybe if you’ve been molested or abused or whatever, then maybe you don’t figure it out quite so early. But Dennis isn’t super Catholic and he wasn’t molested or abused. He’s just fucked up in the unfixable way where he’s always felt wrong inside, like everyone else understands their place in the world in a way that he’s never been able to figure out or fix. That’s not the same as being gay. It’s just sad.

“Hey,” Mac says, catching up. “I’m sorry, man. I didn’t mean to make it a whole thing. You’re right. I’m sure it’s totally different for you. I won’t talk about it anymore, I promise.”

“No, look. It’s not that I don’t want you to talk about it,” Dennis says. The sliding doors open, exhaling a gust of cold conditioned air. “It’s just that — you have to be cool about it, okay? I really need you to be cool. Because this is kind of a big deal, man. Not the part where we have sex, obviously, because that doesn’t mean anything, but the part where you’re into it, because that has real implications, if you get what I’m saying. And if you ever tell anyone I swear to God I’ll tell them you made me do it.”

“Oh yeah, of course,” Mac says. “But are you into it?”

Dennis nearly walks straight into a column of shopping carts. “What?”

“I mean, if you aren’t into it, you should tell me so I can try some new stuff, you know, spice things up,” Mac says. “This is a big problem for lesbians, actually, so it would make total sense.”

“First of all, if I’ve learned one thing from porn, it’s that lesbians are always into it,” Dennis says. “You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. I mean, just think about it. Two chicks? Who could get bored with that? Second of all, yes, obviously I’m into it.” His voice is louder than he expected, and he winces, but nobody seems to be paying attention, which is one of the few benefits of the off-brand Bed Bath and No Further. It doesn’t exactly attract active listeners. “I kind of thought that was clear from the enormous loads you keep wringing out of me, and also the very real chance I’m never going to be able to have sex with anyone else ever again because of that. And don’t make that face at me, it’s a basic physiological response. I can’t help it. Wait. Why are you asking? Are you not into it? Is it because I’m so obviously straight? No, it can’t be; I have a universal metropolitan appeal. And it can’t be the lack of body hair, because I’ve seen the kind of porn you watch and let me tell you, most of those budgets are going to waxing and laser. Are you just sugar-coating this because you think I can’t take it? I can take it! I can take criticism! I’m a fully formed adult who doesn’t subsist entirely on external validation. You don’t have to treat me like some kind of child. In fact, I’m kind of offended that you wouldn’t just come out and say so, but it’s my dick, isn’t it? It’s the slight rightward lean. I knew it. It’s the goddamn asymmetry. You hate my dick. You know, I don’t know why you wouldn’t just tell me. It’s not like I go insane at the slightest hint of rejection or anything.”

The weird look Mac gives him isn’t sad this time. Dennis would call it fond, if he wasn’t so certain that nobody could ever look at him that way. “I don’t hate your dick, bro.”

“Then what is it?” Dennis says. “Is it my natural ashiness? Because I’ve tried to change that but I just burn, you know that. Or I turn orange, and that’s a pretty big faux pas these days. Wait, is it my hair? Oh, I knew it. I knew that maniac witch of a stylist left the toner on too long and now it’s black and yes, I may look like a hotter version of Billie Joe Armstrong in his prime, but it doesn’t match my warm undertones. I look all wrong. I told her, I said don’t you do it, don’t you walk away to eat lunch or use the bathroom or do whatever stupid inconsequential thing you’ve been waiting to do for two hours because I made you remix the color five times, because if you do then it’ll pull dark! It’ll pull dark!” His gestures are getting bigger and bigger, his voice louder and louder. Dennis feels like an out-of-control amusement park ride. “And what did she do? She went to sit down for five minutes because she’d been on her feet all day. I mean, what kind of an excuse is that? Maybe that’s something heart surgeons get to do but not stylists! Not when it’s a matter of life or death. I mean, I literally look like a corpse. I look like my own dead body. Oh, I knew she was a monster. See if I ever let her trim my eyebrows again.”

“It’s not your hair,” Mac says. By now he’s out-and-out smiling, the earnest kind that Dennis has only seen on his face a few times, although now that he thinks about it he doesn’t know if Mac looks at anyone else like this. “I’m into it, man. I’m into you—” The vowel stretches like taffy, one long endless pull. Dennis holds his breath, waiting for it to break. “—r erotic presence,” Mac says, and then makes a face as if to say to himself, I can’t believe you said that.

Neither can Dennis. “My what?”

“Your erotic presence,” Mac says, and then makes the face again.

“Okay,” Dennis says. “Great. You know what, you’ve put my mind at ease. Well done. Please don’t say that ever again.”

“No, hey.” Mac trails him through the As Seen On TV shelves towards the down escalator. “I mean it, I swear. I wouldn’t joke about shit like that. And I think you look great.”

For just one second, one stolen moment of possibility and delusion, Dennis lets himself believe it. “Okay,” he says. He can’t look Mac in the eyes. He focuses instead on the soft stupid curve of Mac’s mouth, the way he’s just looking at Dennis without saying anything, the phantom touch of his hand hovering half a foot above Dennis’ shoulder, afraid to land. Good call, Dennis thinks, because if Mac touches him there’s no saying what he’ll do: scream or cry or shatter into a thousand tiny sharp-edged pieces, probably. Maybe all of the above. Then he thinks, Fuck, is this kind of thing why people go to therapy?

“Okay,” Mac says. His hand is still hovering. Dennis feels like a magician’s assistant, hanging six feet in the air unsupported by any mechanism known to man. If Mac gestures, he’ll follow, pulled along by an unknown magnetism.

“One of those,” he says, blindly nodding at the shelves, because someone has to break the tension — don’t they? “We should get Frank and Charlie one of those.”

Mac turns, and looks, and squints. “A mirror… that doesn’t work.”

Dennis stares at him. “That’s an empty picture frame.”

“Oh yeah!” Mac says. “Sorry, it just looks a lot like a mirror.”

“You’re not wrong,” Dennis says. “That’s what makes it so modern. Is it a painting? Is it a mirror? Who can say? Art is a reflection of the human condition. You can make some real points with a frame like this.”

“Dude,” Mac says. “That’s the classiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“I know.” Dennis picks it up. “Hey, why don’t you go get a cart?”

“You got it,” Mac says. “Hey, should we get one of those?”

“Are you out of your mind? Not in silver,” Dennis says. “Now Frank and Charlie’s walls are a cool green, somewhere between seafoam and aqua, so this frame will help brighten up that single room and make the space feel bigger. But not against our earth tones. No, it’ll just make everything and everyone look sickly and cheap, and the only thing worse than looking garish is looking cheap.” Yet another of Frank’s favorite sayings rendered ironic by his decision to embrace his leanings towards the fringe class, of course, but when did Frank ever let a little hypocrisy get in the way of doing whatever he wanted? “Now, antique gold, that’ll go nicely with our color scheme. In fact, I tell you what, I know just the place for this.”

“Sombrero?” Mac says.

“Sombrero, baby!” Dennis points at him for emphasis. “Exactly. Right next to the front door. It’s the perfect spot for an accent piece like this.”

“You have the best ideas,” Mac says. “Don’t wander off without me!”

He jogs back towards the carts, and Dennis watches him go for all of a minute before he jams both frames back on the shelf and makes a break for the bathroom section. As soon as he’s relatively certain that Mac is out of earshot, he nestles himself deep between two shower curtains hanging on display and calls the first contact in his phone.

Artemis picks up on the first ring and says, “I always knew this day would come, and the answer is no, I will not wear the wanna-hump pumps while we frot to completion.”

“What?” Dennis says.

“They’re bad for my arches,” Artemis says. “Now if you’ve got a thing for shearling Birkenstocks, that’s a whole other story. I got turned onto those when I got my ingrown toenail removed.”

Dennis sees movement through the shower curtain and freezes. “No,” he hisses. “I do not want to have sex with you, Artemis.”

“Then why the hell are you calling?” she says. “Are you whispering? And what’s that noise?”

“I had to find somewhere private to talk,” Dennis says, hears how that sounds, and hastily adds, “Not for phone sex! Just because I’m here with Mac and you know how he is.”

“Oh, say no more,” Artemis says. “That man spends every day of his life halfway up your ass already.”

Dennis winces. He wants to say something like Don’t ever say that again, or maybe I can’t think about that, but he can’t figure out how to translate what happens in his mind — the way that gravity suddenly vanishes and leaves him floating between one thought and the next, language out of reach, all his senses suddenly wrapped in a thick layer of cotton wool — into words. “We’re in Deptford, buying stuff for Frank and Charlie’s apartment,” he says, because that’s how a conversation works, right; he has to say something, even though suddenly he can’t remember what they were talking about or why he called Artemis in the first place. He just has to jump-start his brain and get back to a place where he can turn thoughts into speech, the same way he has to kick his feelings back online sometimes. It’s fine. It doesn’t mean anything.

“Oh, Face Values and More,” Artemis says. “Yes, that’s where I buy all my personal massagers. From the clearance section, of course.”

“Okay,” Dennis says. “I have no idea why I thought you’d be helpful. I’m hanging up now.”

“No no no,” Artemis says, with all the practiced panache of a stage magician. “Nobody calls me unless they’re in need of my very specific insights and intuitions. It’s my aura. It calls out to those who are open. Who are relaxed and receptive. Who are ready and willing to take the big truths and hard wisdom that only I can dispense. What’s on your mind?”

Something occurs to Dennis. “Wait,” he says. “Are you still sleeping with Frank?”

“First of all, we don’t sleep when we’re together,” Artemis says. Dennis hears the click of a lighter, the sound of an enormous bong rip, and then a long exhale. “Second of all, I have a policy of strict confidentiality. You don’t see me going around telling everyone what Frank and I do with cheese in a can, now, do you?”

“The fact that you just leave it there is actually worse than if you just came out and told me that you spray cheese onto the asshole of the man I used to think was my biological father and who I now realize just tortured me as if he was,” Dennis says.

“Oh, no,” Artemis says. “That’s not where the cheese goes.”

“Great,” Dennis says. “Please don’t tell me. My point was actually that sometimes it’s worse to leave things to someone else’s imagination than — oh, why bother? Who cares. Nobody I know can keep a secret anyway; it’s probably only a matter of time. Tell him, don’t tell him, I don’t care. But if you tell him, just keep in mind that I know where you live and where you work and all the routes you can take from one to the other, and what kind of car you drive, and the eight most secluded spots in Philly, and how to drain all the blood from a human body in fifteen minutes.” He smiles wide enough that Artemis should be able to hear it in his voice. “What were we talking about?”

“I thought you weren’t calling for phone sex,” Artemis says, sounding distinctly sultry.

Dennis shakes his head in disbelief. The serial killer shtick has never failed him before. “All right! Please!” he says. “Jesus. You were right, I have a problem and I need help, can we please just talk about it now and then pretend this never happened?”

“Wow. You know, I get that a lot,” Artemis says, and takes another drag. “But sure. Hit me.”

“Okay,” Dennis says. Another shadow moves past, and he hunches up again until it’s past. “So me and Mac are at the store, whatever, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I was trying to figure out why he isn’t interested in sex anymore, and he told me that he thinks I look great, and then he told me I have the best ideas. Can you believe that? So you see why I had to get away from him for a minute.”

For a long, long minute, Artemis says nothing, and then she says, “Are you and Deandra on crack again?”

“No!” Dennis says. “Why would you even ask that?”

“Well, I don’t understand your life or why anybody would choose to live the way you do,” Artemis says. “So it’s perfectly possible that what you just said makes total sense and I’m just high. But the way you put that makes it sound like you’re hiding in a shower curtain so you can complain to someone who doesn’t even really like you all that much about how your boyfriend thinks you’re a hot commodity with a big brain. Am I right or am I right?”

“What do you mean, you don’t like me that much? Of course you like me,” Dennis says. “Literally one minute ago you were propositioning me for phone sex.”

“That has absolutely nothing to do with liking or not liking,” she says.

“Horrible, thank you,” Dennis says. “Mac’s not my boyfriend. Where are you getting this? What kind of — maybe you’re the one whose aura needs adjusting.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Artemis says. “Did I misunderstand? We talk a lot, Ronald and I, and I suppose I just made certain assumptions about the nature of your relationship, given how often you come up. And now as you know I’m not the forward type, but if you asked me to guess, I would not have hesitated for a moment to describe him as, let me see. Your side piece. Your friend with benefits. Your booty call. Your bit of rough. Your stunt dick. Your closet key. Your helping hand. Your warm, wet, and willing. The plug to your socket. The foot to your glass slipper. The uh to your oh. Your twunk versatile.”

“Actually, he’s a top and an aspiring bear, although I don’t think he’ll ever be hairy enough,” Dennis says. “And it’s just sex. It isn’t even sex, really. I’m just helping him out with his, you know, journey of discovery. His gay journey of discovery.”

“His gay journey of sex discovery,” Artemis says.

“Yes! No,” Dennis says. “I mean, yes, I guess, technically. What are we counting as sex? I mean, is it sex if I’m never — I’m always receiving. Not that — I’m not a bottom,” he adds. The conversation is spiraling wildly out of control. This has been happening to Dennis a lot lately, usually because of Mac. He doesn’t like it. “I’m just letting him try stuff out, you know, on my dick. To see what he likes.”

“Uh huh,” Artemis says. “And what does he like?”

“That’s the problem! Or at least part of it,” Dennis says. “He likes everything. And I know for a fact that can’t be true. Nobody likes sucking dick. That’s why us men get off on it so much, because people go ahead and do it anyway.”

“So you’re telling me he likes anything that has to do with your dick,” Artemis says.

“No!” Dennis says. “Jesus, you aren’t listening to me. Nobody listens to me. I’m saying there’s no way he likes any of this, but he keeps acting like he does, and now he’s talking to me the same way he always does but now it’s like he knows something new about me, like when he gives me compliments I actually feel something. That never used to happen. He would say nice shit and I’d say to myself, well, that’s just Mac, he’s a fucking moron, so you can’t listen to anything he says. But now he says it and part of me is like — you know how it feels when you’re getting waxed and they have to move your bits around and it’s weird because they’re touching your junk but it’s not because they want to bang? That’s why I switched to laser, by the way. I highly recommend it.”

“Oh, I never wax,” Artemis says. “But I do dye my nether forests. I have a seasonal color rotation. In summer I like to add caramel highlights, to bring out the gold in my complexion.”

“Great,” Dennis says. “But do you see my problem now?”

“No,” Artemis says. “You sound like you’re living out the wet dream of a narcissistic slut. You have someone who’s just your type — don’t think I haven’t noticed that, by the way, dark hair and dark eyes and a brain you could fit through the eye of a needle — who gets his rocks off spending quality time with your danglers while you just lie around and let him do all the work. Plus now he strokes your ego as well. What’s not to like?”

“Well — the part where he doesn’t get anything out of it!” Dennis says. “That just doesn’t seem right. I mean, I’m not what you’d call a sexual altruist, but a man’s got to have a code.”

“And why—” Artemis pronounces it hwhy “—are you so firmly of the belief that McDonald obtains no gratification from your sordid little liaisons?”

“Because I’m straight, of course,” Dennis says. “And there’s just no way he could achieve any true satisfaction from a heterosexual such as myself.”

“Ah,” Artemis says. “Now actually it’s interesting that you bring that up. While on a first pass that might seem perfectly logical, it is in actual fact true that some gays actually attain an even greater level of fulfillment from bringing someone of an incompatible attraction to orgasm. But in your case, of course, that’s not really relevant, is it?”

“Isn’t it?” Dennis says. “Why not?”

“Well, you aren’t that straight, are you,” Artemis says, and there it is, that’s what Dennis wanted to hear all along, isn’t it; that’s why he snuck off and called the person he knew was most likely to just come out and say it, having ended up at the same conclusion he’s been sneaking his way towards for forty years — forty fucking years! — keeping one eye on it all the fucking time to make sure he never actually got too close. Does he want it to be true? Dennis doesn’t know. There’s so much he doesn’t know, so many times he’s told himself the answer doesn’t actually matter if he never thinks about it. Maybe this is just one more test, yet another chance for him to prove that mind will always win out over matter. Gay people can’t argue their way out of it, right? Maybe if he can talk Artemis around it’ll prove that she’s wrong. And if he doesn’t — well, that doesn’t have to prove anything, does it? These things don’t always work both ways. She doesn’t have to be right.

Take it back, he thinks, desperately. You can still take it back.

Say something, Dennis, quick: “I don’t know where you could have gotten that idea,” he says, but he already knows he’s waited too long. He isn’t going to convince anyone. It’s too late.

“I can tell you,” Artemis says, sounding almost sorry for him, “but you won’t like it.”

And Dennis Reynolds, golden god, forty-four years old and going nowhere fast, thirty and suicidally brave, twenty-something and just plain suicidal, fourteen and only beginning to learn how bad it’s going to get, is no coward. Anyone can tell you that. He’s crazy, sure, and kind of scary, and maybe his friends are kind of weird but he’s always knee-deep in puss and he has a sweet ride, and the last thing on Earth he could ever be is a coward, because he just keeps going. He keeps all his feelings inside, even though they carve him up, and he always keeps it together, and he never lets anyone else see how much it hurts, because he’s not a coward. He’s an adult, and that’s what adults do. They keep going because nobody else is going to help them and the alternative, as Frank always said, is the coward’s way out. So Dennis isn’t a coward. He can’t be. He’s spent too much time being brave for that.

But he fucking ran, didn’t he? With his tail between his legs, looking for somewhere to hide and someone to tell him that it was all going to be okay: Mama’s boy, Frank would say, if he could see Dennis now. Pansy. Chinless wonder. You’re wet, that’s what you are. And now Dennis is going to prove him right all over again, because that’s what he is, a fucking coward who doesn’t want to know the truth. He wants to go home and hang his stupid heterosexual picture frame on the heterosexual wall with a heterosexual hammer and then, heterosexually, he and the man whose dick he wants more than anything else on earth are going to go and redecorate their friends’ apartment, like the absolute straightest of buds, and then they’ll spend the rest of their fucking lives together, and it won’t mean anything. It won’t mean anything, because Dennis can’t let it, because everything Frank ever said about him was true, as it turns out, down to sissy fairy queer, and Dennis just can’t let him have that. He can’t let Frank be right about something he isn’t even sure about himself.

“I have to go,” he says into dead air, and hangs up without even bothering to make an excuse.

How is he going to explain what he was doing to Mac? Dennis checks his phone. It isn’t as bad as he thought; only fifteen minutes have passed, against the odds. All right. Maybe he can say that the chicken last night was undercooked and he had to run to the bathroom and couldn’t wait for Mac to get back — but then Mac will say that they should leave if Dennis isn’t feeling well. He might even scoop Dennis up right there in the middle of the store and then Dennis would have to put his arms around Mac’s neck to keep himself from falling and then he might be close enough to press his face into the crook of Mac’s neck and scrape a nice little red mark with his teeth, something to show he was there, and he doesn’t know if he’d be able to keep himself from doing that if the opportunity was right in front of him like that. So that’s right out. Maybe he saw something in the bathroom section that he thought Frank and Charlie would like? But Frank and Charlie don’t have their own bathroom and it might be a waste to spend money on something for a facility that all their neighbors share as well. Dennis doesn’t even know if they have a way to bathe. Shit. He doesn’t have a lot of answers, and Mac is probably getting closer by the second, combing every aisle of the store in a panic because Dennis keeps running off and turning up miles away from where he’s meant to be. He looks around, desperate, for something — anything — that will raise more questions than his sudden disappearance. Finally something catches his eye.

No, Dennis says to himself, maybe out loud; he can’t tell, because he’s losing his fucking mind, apparently. “This is a terrible idea,” he says, like that’s going to make any difference. “I should not do this.”

Mac is exactly where Dennis left him, holding his phone and bouncing up and down on one foot, head swiveling around like an owl on uppers. When he spots Dennis his face opens up and his entire posture changes. Dennis half-expects him to drop his phone and abandon the empty cart he’s guarding and bound across the aisle towards him like a Great Dane or some other absurdly large dog that travels by flinging its body forward first and hoping its legs will catch up later. “Dennis!” he says, like a child pointing at the crayon and yelling Cwayn! “What did you find? What is it? What did you get?”

“Easy,” Dennis says, “down,” and Mac stops bouncing. “Good.” He looks both ways for bargain hunters ready to mow him down with murder in their eyes, determines that the coast is clear, and crosses over to the cart. Mac is bouncing again. “Do you want to see what I’ve got? Do you? Yes you do,” Dennis says, as Mac nods furiously. “You want to see what I’ve got. I want to show you what I’ve got. But first I need you to calm down. Can you do that? Can you calm down for me?” Mac goes still again, though he has the distinctly frenetic air of a greyhound waiting for the starting gun. “Good,” Dennis says. “Wait. Settle. Sit,” he adds, mostly to see whether it’ll do anything. Mac’s knees buckle, but he stays upright. Interesting, Dennis thinks. “Good boy,” he says, and holds out the box for Mac to read.

He does so with single-minded focus, and then frowns. He looks at Dennis, then back at the box, then back at Dennis. One of his eyebrows slowly twitches its way upwards. “Is this,” he says, “a bidet?”

“Yes,” Dennis says. On the outside, he keeps his expression neutral, but on the inside, his face is slowly melting off. “Actually, it’s a piece of precision-engineered personal hygiene equipment with adjustable seat temperature, a warm air dryer, and a feminine wash setting, among other highly modern amenities.”

“It’s called the Splosh Elite,” Mac says.

Dennis stares at the box. “Yes,” he says. “Well, that could definitely be better.”

“Why do you want a bidet?” Mac says.

“Me? Oh, no,” Dennis says. “This isn’t for me. This is for you! I thought, well, since we’re here, why not get something for our place as well? It’s not like we’ve updated it since I moved back in, except for my room, that is, and if I’m being totally honest with you the place feels a little, well, outdated. Don’t you think?” He puts the bidet into the cart and grabs the frames as well, piling them on top to cover the label. “So I thought, what does a guy like Mac need? And there you have it. So we’re getting it.”

Mac squints as if he’s doing a very difficult math problem in his head. “So you think,” he says slowly, “that a guy like me needs to make sure my asshole is squeaky clean every second of the day.”

“No!” Dennis says. “God, I knew you were going to read too much into this. Never mind. I can put it back. I should just put it back.”

“Are you going to use it?” Mac says.

“Me? I hadn’t really thought about that,” Dennis says, which is a lie, because in the two minutes he spent in front of the shelf looking at the demo model and the packaging and the three-digit price tag he’s trying not to think too hard about, he did in fact have time to consider the merits of pressure-washing his otherwise impeccably maintained nethers, and yes, he did end up drawing some conclusions of his own. “I guess so, yeah. I mean, with the way the world is going, what’s more open-minded than adopting a household convenience the Europeans have been pushing since the seventies? And look, I know what you’re thinking, is this all secretly because Dennis thinks I’m a bottom, and the answer is no, buddy.” He slaps Mac’s shoulder. “I read you loud and clear on that one. Don’t worry about it.”

“All right,” Mac says, looking a little bit like Dennis has taken the box and beaten him about the head with it. “As long as you’re planning on using it — too,” he adds, after pausing for just long enough that Dennis narrows his eyes suspiciously. “Because of course I am also going to use it, being an enlightened twenty-first century man.”

“Excellent,” Dennis says. Is his face twitching? It better not be. He can’t tell, because his entire head is numb from the effort of not just lying down and waiting for the sweet merciful release of death. “So let’s just — let’s just be cool. All right? Can we do that? Can we be cool?”

“We can absolutely be cool,” Mac says. “Can we be cool in the kitchen section, though? Because I’ve been doing some research—” he holds up his phone “—and I think what Frank and Charlie really need is some hanging storage. See, I’ve been reading about how to maximize your space in a small kitchen, and that’s definitely what they have, because I don’t know what else you could call it when your hot plate is in the same room as your dining table and also your bed sofa—”

He rambles on, pushing the cart ahead of him, and Dennis follows, only half-listening, as he often does when Mac gets like this: talking for the sheer pleasure of doing so as a release valve for all the half-absorbed knowledge he’s crammed into his skull, because he’s excited to have learned something new and just wants to put it to use immediately. Mac largely does it, as far as Dennis can tell, for himself, so it doesn’t really matter if Dennis is paying attention or not, which is just as well because he keeps thinking, What the fuck did she mean? What does Artemis even know about him anyway? Everything she’s heard has probably come from Dee, who hates Dennis and has been looking for a way to kill him and get away with it since they were in the second grade and she learned that you could smother someone by holding a pillow over their face while they slept. After that, Dennis had woken up more than once kicking and gasping for breath, flailing around until he could grab Dee’s wrists and scratch the living shit out of them until she backed off and let him sit up, wheezing.

He feels much the same way about Artemis saying, Well, you aren’t that straight, are you, like that’s something she just gets to say to other people — like that’s something she just gets to say to him. And obviously it isn’t true — but then why is it eating at him? Why does it keep chasing him around in endless ever-diminishing circles, like a penny in one of those coin vortex machines that supermarkets set up to emotionally blackmail shoppers into giving their pocket change to fight infant leukemia or whatever? Any second now Dennis will just find himself spinning in place and then it’ll be the long quick drop for him. He keeps thinking about why he even called Artemis in the first place, how he must have known that she would just tell him what she thought; how he must have already known what that would be, like when you solve a puzzle from the outside so that you know what shape the missing pieces will make. He knows what that shape is. Of course he does. Never mind that everyone else seems to have figured it out before him: every woman who he’s ever come onto who’s been comically surprised that he’s into pussy — and is he, really? — and every member of his family who ever patted him on the head and told him not to get mixed up in any of that queer stuff, now, because a handsome little man like him was going to get all kinds of attention from that crowd — and obviously Dee, who has spent her whole life trying to find out where his pressure points are so that she can jab her stupid bony elbows into them as hard as possible. He’s sixteen and she says, Did you know you’re what people call a twink? He’s twenty and she says, It’s just as well you’re into women, because the gay crowd doesn’t deserve to have to deal with you. He’s thirty and she says, You’re not gay, you’re just really, really vain. It’s like you’re an old married couple. You don’t have any feelings. Don’t you think that’s a little bit pathetic?

But that’s just Dee, Dennis tells himself. That’s just how she works. Being mean to people is the only way she knows how to be friends with them. It’s different with him because they’re twins, of course, and she really does want to kill Dennis, because that’s always what happens when you spend your entire childhood forced to live with another child who your parents pit you against even as everyone else tells you they’re meant to be your best friend in the entire world. But — the point is. The point, Dennis, get to it — maybe Dee has just been trying to pick off the scab this whole time, to expose the only raw nerve she hasn’t been able to touch all these years, the only one he’s kept so carefully guarded. Maybe he called Artemis because he wanted someone to say it, finally, and he knew she was the only person who would.

Dennis can’t even think it, not yet, because maybe he’s wrong; maybe if he looks at it head-on it’ll incinerate him. Maybe he’s just looking for an answer, something to explain every part of his life that has ever felt wrong, that hasn’t made any sense, that makes him feel hollowed-out and empty and totally fucking meaningless, and maybe that’s just how everyone actually feels deep down inside. Why should Dennis get to be any different? Maybe he’s just trying to take the easy way out, the coward’s way, or maybe it’s just because he somehow caught it from Mac and from seeing how much more comfortable he is these days. Maybe he’s jealous of the fact that Mac, of all of them, against the odds, is the only one who’s achieved not only a second act but a third. He’s a different person now than he used to be, while the rest of them are just the same as they ever were, or maybe worse. Anyway, maybe Dennis just wants that for himself and can’t think of any other way to get it. How is he supposed to be sure? How is he supposed to know?

Who knows, who cares. The real answer is that Dennis has to stop thinking about it, because the more he does, the closer it gets. It’s like a Goosebumps story, the one with the haunted camera that takes photos with a shadowy figure in the background that gets closer in every shot. All you want to do is scream, Stop clicking the shutter! But maybe that’s not something everyone can do; maybe it’s just Dennis who can make himself stop thinking about something so thoroughly that he forgets it ever existed to begin with. No matter what, the first thing he has to do is stop coming up with so many other possible explanations and excuses. It doesn’t look good, if he’s being honest, and if he ever has to lay it all out for someone else to understand, they’re just going to conclude that he’s going to a hell of a lot of effort to find reasons he can’t be gay. There, Dennis thinks. That’s a phrasing that works. It includes the relevant word, the big one, but it doesn’t actually make any concrete statements on the subject. That’s great. That’s something he can work with.

In the kitchen section, he watches Mac pick his way through knives and cutting boards and hanging racks for pots and pans that Charlie will never learn to use, and he thinks about objecting when Mac picks out a Cuisinart set in stainless steel — chef’s knife, paring, and serrated — and then says nothing. I have sex with women, he thinks. I have sex with women and they enjoy it, kind of, and women don’t enjoy having sex with gay men. Mac picks out a brightly colored plastic cutting board that folds up into a scoop shape so you can pour your chopped ingredients into a pot without spilling them all over the kitchen. “Great choice,” Dennis says, but what he’s thinking is, I enjoy having sex with women because I enjoy getting off, which is something you do with women when you’re a man, unless you’re gay, but I guess I don’t really know if I enjoy having sex with women or if it’s the only kind of sex I’ve really had. How do people figure these things out? It’s like beating his head against a brick wall. It makes his brain literally physically ache.

“Okay!” Mac says. There’s a saucepan in the cart now, too, and a collection of cooking utensils with big idiot-proof handles and a ceramic crock so they can sit on the counter ready to be used. There’s more hidden underneath, but Dennis doesn’t have it in him to care about more than one thing at a time right now, and his resources are already allocated. “Should we take a look at bedsheets?”

“Sure,” Dennis says, and he stands among the racks of pillows and jersey sheet sets and thinks, Does what I’m doing with Mac count as having sex with a man? Because he’s had full-on sex, the kind that people always mean when they talk about how gay men fuck, and mostly he doesn’t remember it. Mostly when Dennis thinks about it he goes numb all over, in fact, and the only way out is to try and remember how it felt, like waiting for Novocaine to wear off. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but either way it never makes him feel anything except a vague lingering sense of shame and discomfort. That isn’t how a gay man would feel, is it? Never mind that he was so blackout drunk on tequila that he has no memories from most of the next day either; never mind that most of what he remembers from the night itself is thinking, Oh, so this is happening now, in a blurry abstract startled kind of way, as if he was watching from the other side of the room rather than taking part. Does what he and Mac are doing override that somehow? It feels so different; there’s no way it counts as the same thing. For one thing, Dennis has never gone anywhere near Mac’s dick, although yes, he will admit that over the course of their years jerking off together, he’s snuck a few glances, and in his opinion Mac has nothing to be ashamed of; for another, it feels so different from any actual sex Dennis has ever had that there’s no way it’s even in the same genre. When it’s Mac getting him off, Dennis is always involved, always aware of his own body and always overwhelmed by how intensely it can experience touch. He’s never anywhere except inside his own skin, held firmly in place, a new constellation triangulated by every fizzing, sparking point of contact.

In the bathroom department, looking at shower curtains; in the long maze of the checkout line, as Mac picks up and puts down one travel-sized item after another, cooing about how small they are; when Dennis pulls out his credit card without even bothering to look at the total; it’s all one long blur. Dennis shows his receipt to the security guard on the way out of the store and he says all good, yes, thank you very much, but what he’s thinking about is the way Mac’s mouth tasted exactly the way he expected it to, exactly like anyone else he’s ever kissed except that Dennis had wanted more in a way he never has before; he could have gone on for hours, necking like a teenager until his mouth was red and chapped. He drives both of them to Frank and Charlie’s and Mac puts on the radio and sings along to Paul Simon, drumming along to the synths, a man walks down the street he says, and normally that would be where Dennis would join in, but instead what he’s thinking about is how he’s never once understood why people talk about sex like it’s some big-deal world-moving thing, like they’ll die if they go too long without, like it’s the kind of thing that’s worth throwing away careers and marriages and futures over — it’s never made any sense to him before now. He had always listened and nodded along and made all the right noises in all the right places, of course, because that’s what Dennis always does; a man walks down the street and Dennis smiles and nods at him and then for the rest of the block he tries to recreate the expression on his own face so that he has practice in case he needs to convey the same emotion at a time when it doesn’t come quite so naturally. But now he gets it, maybe. Now it makes sense.

He stands in the horrible shared doorless hallway bathroom and watches Mac put up a navy blue shower curtain with little white arrowheads all over — “That way it won’t show the stains, Dennis! Obviously” — and what he’s thinking about is how much time and energy he’s invested in being a perfectly unremarkable heterosexual man like any other, and just how much goddamn work it takes. He pays so much attention to how other men dress and how they look and how they walk and then he goes home and makes sure he can do all of it perfectly, just in case. He pays attention to how other men talk about men and women and sex and then he runs every thought he ever has through a filter in his brain to catch anything that might stand out before he ever opens his mouth. When he goes online to find new jerk-off material, he always starts in Pornhub’s trending section so he knows what kind of porn he’s meant to be into, and maybe sometimes that doesn’t do it for him, but at least he’s trying. He always used to look at other men and scoff to himself, thinking, Not bad, but imagine how much better you’d be if you put a little work into it — but what if that isn’t how everyone else does it? God, what if that’s just him, and what if he’s the only person on Earth stupid enough to actually believe that’s how it’s meant to work? What if he’s spent forty-four fucking years breaking his back to live up to a standard that, now that he thinks about it, doesn’t even seem to matter that much? Look at Charlie, Dennis thinks. Charlie gets by just fine doing whatever the fuck he wants. Look at Mac, who maybe took a long time to figure it out but who at least got there on his own. Look at Frank, even, who spent decades telling Dennis what it meant to be a man — what he could and couldn’t do, how he should and shouldn’t act and talk and think — and then turned out to be a giant fucking hypocrite who married another man for the Costco perks and lives in a one-room apartment with a fold-out sofa for a bed and a fridge full of cat food.

They’re back in the apartment and Mac is hanging the frame and making the bed and stocking the fridge, and what Dennis is thinking about is whether it’s even worth torturing himself like this when his life is already more than halfway over. What he wants to do is run away, but he can’t, because last time he did that Mac came and found him anyway. He wants to lock himself in his room and never come out again; he wants to curl up in the middle of his bed and turn to stone so he never has to feel like this again; he wants someone to just tell him the answer so that he doesn’t have to figure it out himself when doing that feels like peeling his own skin off a layer at a time. He wants to call Artemis and say, Please, tell me what I am, like the last of the creatures in the Garden of Eden waiting for a name, waiting to find out what he’s going to be. He wants to be done with this part, the interminable wait for the executioner’s blade, so that he can get on to whatever comes next without ever having to wonder about this again. He just wants something to happen so he can start picking up the pieces when it’s all over.

“What do you think?” Mac says, and Dennis thinks, Do you know what would be a really stupid idea, and takes one, two blind steps towards him and gets on his knees. “What are you doing,” Mac says, but even if he doesn’t know his body does, because his dick is getting hard. Dennis has never watched it happen from this angle before. He’s never done anything like this, actually, which is a real fucking downer because if he had put more than two seconds’ worth of thought into this then he would have gone to the bathroom and watched some videos on his phone, maybe, googled “first time blowjob tips” or whatever nervous virgins do these days instead of begging their friends for advice and reading stolen copies of Cosmo, but whatever. How hard can it be? This isn’t really about Mac, anyway, so who cares whether it’s good or not. Dennis just needs to do this so he can figure out whether he likes it or not, and then that’ll prove something. It has to, because he wants it to, because he wants it, so there.

“What does it look like I’m doing,” Dennis says, and rubs his palms on his thighs.

“It looks like you aren’t appreciating my redecorating work,” Mac says, and Dennis must be thrumming with nerves, because why else would he laugh? It’s a nervous reflex, that’s all.

“Do you want me to,” he says, and then he stumbles over the next thought, but there’s no turning back. “Do you want me to suck your dick or not?”

“Are you okay?” Mac says. None of this is going the way Dennis wanted or expected it to; for a start, who turns down a free blowjob? He always thought Mac would jump at the chance, at the offer of something he’s wanted for years. Dennis never expected him get all weird and sensitive about it. If he’s being honest, he kind of hoped that Mac would make him go through with it either way, would hold his head in place like one of the tops in the porn he’s watched — and of course Dennis has watched gay porn, for research, obviously, just because he wanted to make sure he knew what he was talking about — and yes, okay, maybe he kind of hoped that Mac would pull his hair with one hand and take his dick out with the other and rub it on Dennis’ face a little, just enough to get him all red and flustered and make his cheeks sting with shame, before he nudged the head against Dennis’ closed mouth to make him open up just enough to lick, to get a taste for it. And then, sure, maybe he hoped that Mac would fuck into his mouth and not stop when he gagged, or when tears started running down his cheeks. Maybe he hoped that Mac wouldn’t stop until he came down Dennis’ throat or maybe all over his face — if he’s being honest. What does he have left to lose, anyway?

“I’m fine,” he says. “What’s the problem?”

Mac frowns. “I don’t know, dude. This seems kind of — are you sure you want to do this?”

“Okay. I need you to not ask questions,” Dennis says. “There’s no possible way for me to explain in a way that you’ll understand. Do you want this or not?”

“Yes,” Mac says immediately. He nods. “Yes, absolutely, definitely, yes.”

“Great,” Dennis says, and starts opening Mac’s fly. He’s a little clumsy; he tries not to think about how undoing someone else’s pants is like having two left hands. He hopes Mac doesn’t make him stop.

“But what about you, dude?” Mac says. “Do you? Want this?”

Jesus, Dennis thinks. Clearly this is going to call for drastic measures. He pretends he’s going to get up, and Mac puts a hand on his shoulder. “Good,” he says. “Yes. Finally you’re starting to get it. Put your other hand on my head. That’s right.” Mac’s fingertips push at his scalp. “Now push me down.”

“Okay,” Mac says, still sounding a little uncertain, but he pushes Dennis back to his knees, and oh, that’s good. That’s what Dennis wants. Now he’s starting to get hard too, and that’s just perfect. That’s exactly how he wanted this to go.

“Good,” Dennis says again, “that’s exactly how I want it,” and Mac finally relaxes, which is good because Dennis finally gets Mac’s fly down far enough to pull his dick out and God, God, he’s wasted his fucking life, the whole thing, every minute that he spent telling himself that he didn’t want this, every day he spent pretending that this wasn’t what he was meant for, every useless year that went by while he was doing anything but this. What a fool he was, what a pompous ass, pretending he knew who he was and what he wanted, putting all that time and work into meaningless distraction when the whole time what he wanted was knocking down his door, clamoring for his attention, hiring planes and writing it in the sky, and all the while he had ignored it even as it got harder and harder to do so. He had covered his ears and turned away and kept his eyes on the ground and his head low and what had that accomplished? Nothing except buy him empty, useless time that he’ll never get back when he could have had this the whole time: Mac’s hand tight in his hair as he mumbles under his breath, something that could be a litany or a catalog of non-definitive acts or just good old-fashioned profanity, god god fuck god in all lowercase; a small god for a little death.

For once in his life, Dennis doesn’t sweat the details. For once, they come naturally.

Afterwards, he swallows and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He’s still hard, but it doesn’t feel urgent, just like an ache at the back of his mind that he should pay attention to eventually. His jaw aches sharply, and he presses a knuckle into the joint on each side. His knees don’t bear mentioning. The apartment is carpeted, sure, but it’s the thinnest possible layer of wall-to-wall over what feels like cement. Every part of Dennis’ body has an objection to register, and he pays attention to precisely none of them.

“Do you want a hand?” Mac says.

“Sure,” Dennis says, and is surprised when it comes out in English and not some other mysterious language; if everything else in the world is different now, why wouldn’t that be, too?

“You, uh,” Mac says, and he nods at Dennis’ crotch. “Do you want me to take care of that for you?”

“Yes,” Dennis says, and then he thinks about it. “No.” His knees are starting to twinge in earnest now. He sits down on the edge of the bed. “I can get it.”

“Oh, sure,” Mac says. He looks a little disappointed. “I can just go finish setting up in the bathroom.” It’s a blatant lie, and he knows it. They both do. There’s nothing left to do in the bathroom.

“No,” Dennis says. “You can stay. If you want. I want you to stay,” he says, and adds, “If you want to watch, anyway,” and Mac looks like Dennis has hit him over the head with a chair.

“Okay,” he says, and sinks to the ground right there, one knee drawn up to his chest.

“Great,” Dennis says, and starts the way he always does, with the heel of his hand over his jeans, just some nice generalized pressure, nothing too intense. He watches the rise and fall of Mac’s chest, the way his eyes keep flicking back and forth between Dennis’ face and his hand. He thinks about how, right before he came, Mac had said ah, I’m — oh fuck! — as if he couldn’t quite remember how to put words together, and he thinks about the hurt little noise that Mac had made when Dennis figured out just how to press his tongue against the secret guarded spot on the underside of his dick, and he thinks about the way that Mac’s hips had jerked forward and back like he didn’t know whether he wanted more or whether the sensation was too much already. Dennis gets his jeans open and shoves his hand into his briefs and knows that it’s already too late for him not to make a mess of himself. For once, he doesn’t care.

“I wish I could go again,” Mac says, and when Dennis looks at him, it makes him feels absolutely fucking naked.

“Ah,” he says, “shit,” and he’s flushed bright red, he can feel it, which means that Mac can see how embarrassing this is for him — that he’s ready to pop not five minutes after sucking his very first dick, like a teenager who barely lasts through getting the condom on. Tell me to come, Dennis thinks. Tell me that it must be so humiliating to be this much of a cockslut, to be this easy for it, so ready to get on my knees for any man who asks, just a wet willing mouth, tell me that’s what I was made for, tell me I was made to take your dick — fuck, he thinks, and, “Fuck,” he says, and orgasm hits him in a series of heart-stopping waves, fault lines shifting, impact on a meteoric scale.

Dennis collapses back on the bed and lies there for a long minute, wiping his hand on his shirt, staring at nothing, waiting for his heart to stop pounding and his head to clear. As experiments go, the results seem pretty conclusive — but he can’t think about that right now. For one thing, first he has to focus on remembering how to breathe.

“Did you come on the sheets?” Mac says, looking worried, and Dennis sits up. Every muscle he can still feel protests.

“The sheets? You’re worried about the sheets?” he says. He doesn’t want to think about his expression. He feels like he’s wearing a mask of his own face, and behind it he’s throwing a temper tantrum for the ages. See if I ever suck your dick again, he thinks so emphatically that for a minute he doesn’t know whether he’s said it out loud. No, thank God, because again would be the only word Mac heard, and then they’d have to talk about that, too. They’ve done enough talking lately. It’s gotten Dennis into all kinds of trouble.

“No!” Mac says, and then he makes an apologetic face and says, “Well, yeah, man. I mean, if we’re keeping this on the down-low, you wouldn’t want to leave any evidence behind, right?”

“I mean, Frank and Charlie aren’t exactly Ken Starr,” Dennis says.

“I have no idea who that is,” Mac says, “but I’m guessing he’s like the guy Ice-T plays on SVU.”

“Ken Starr and Odafin Tutuola have absolutely nothing in common except the need to have things spelled out in the most lurid way possible,” Dennis says. “Which is actually a pretty good point. Yes. Let’s pretend you meant that. But no, I actually have very precise control over the trajectory of my ejaculation, since you mention it. Stain-free since ’93, baby.”

“Right, right. Besides, Frank and Charlie already know we pound off together,” Mac says, and for a moment Dennis’ life flashes before his eyes. Frank knows? But then he remembers. Yes, Frank knows, and he doesn’t seem to care. He would care about this, probably, if he knew, even though they’re basically the same thing — but when has a little outright contradiction ever bothered Frank when he could find a way to use it to his advantage?

“Yes, well,” Dennis says. “I think that’s more than enough already.” He does up his jeans. “Hey, I’m going to go back to the apartment, grab a new shirt. Do you want to drive through somewhere before we go back to the bar?”

“Oh!” Mac’s face lights up. “No, because I planned ahead. See, I got some of those glass Tupperwares you can clean instead of just throwing them away once they’re dirty, and I was going to pack some leftovers so we can take them to work. That way we don’t have to get fast food and you can actually eat lunch. Is that good?”

“Oh, no,” Dennis says. “Oh, no, no. Mac, I—” I hate your cooking — no, don’t say that, Dennis. Fuck, he thinks. Is there a nice way to tell someone that they shouldn’t be allowed within thirty miles of a kitchen? Probably not, but why does he care? Why does he, suddenly, feel like he needs to be mindful of Mac’s feelings when the man is doing his absolute utmost to give Dennis fatal food poisoning? This is the problem with fucking your friends, he thinks; because yes, that’s what they’re doing, and no, he doesn’t want to think about it, but it’s the only way to describe the jam he’s in, so fine. Fine, he’ll call it fucking, fine, he’ll say that Mac is his friend.

It’s not a big deal, these little concessions, to acknowledge how he’d describe this if it was happening to anyone else. The only problem is that every time Dennis sleeps with someone he actually likes, even a little, even if it’s only someone he likes better in hindsight, like Maureen Ponderosa, he ends up hating them. He rolls over afterwards, sweat cooling on his skin, and can’t help but notice the dead tooth, the unfortunate constellation of moles, the genuine interest in his wellbeing, whatever it is that gets his hackles up and his stomach churning. There’s never any putting the rose-colored glasses back on after that. Sometimes he can replace them with beer goggles, if he’s lucky, but not always. It’s a one-way trip from lust to loathing, a short walk and a long fall, and if Dennis isn’t careful then it’ll happen here too. He’ll lean back one day and notice that Mac has gotten really into manscaping but never bothers with making it look natural, for example, or that he spends way too much time on beard maintenance, or that he might have successfully cultivated mass in his upper arm region and thighs, for example, to name a few spots where Dennis’ eyes have lingered on occasion, but he still has a trim little waist.

You could wrap your legs around that no problem, Dennis thinks, which is how it usually starts — with picking somebody apart like a dead bird on the side of the road — but when he thinks, All right, then, get on with it, there’s no follow-up, none of the usual disgust that cuts through the afterglow and leaves him cold. He still wants to hook his fingers into Mac’s belt loops and pull him close so that he can press his own hips to Mac’s narrower ones and map all the other ways their bodies are different. A little alarm bell starts ringing in Dennis’ head somewhere. Quick, a diversion: Mac is still waiting for him to explain why he doesn’t want to eat leftovers for lunch. Right — that should take up a few minutes, get Dennis back on track.

“I’m just not that hungry,” he says. Nailed it.

“That’s okay!” Mac says. “I can make you a shake instead.”

“Ah,” Dennis says. The only thing he can imagine worse than the memory of rubber chicken and uncooked broccoli is one of Mac’s under-blended, over-flavored health shakes. “You know what? You’re probably right. I should eat some solid food.” It physically pains him to say, but he presses on. “Let’s do your idea.”

Mac seems more surprised than pleased. “Really?”

“Really,” Dennis says. “Frankly, I’m surprised you aren’t happier about that.”

“Oh, no, I’m happy,” Mac says, unconvincingly. “Leftovers. Right. Let’s do it! No shake! Yay!”

Sitting miserably in the back office an hour later, Dennis pokes at his leftovers with a plastic fork. Not only does he leave no impression, but the chicken resists so emphatically that the fork’s tines bend. If Mac wasn’t behind the bar doing something or other, Dennis would try and sneak out to the Dumpster so he could bury his alleged lunch under yesterday’s garbage and pretend he’d already eaten it, but no such luck. Whatever Mac is doing involves a lot of yelling and a high-pitched voice that sounds like Charlie on helium, which is to say Charlie in a snit of some kind, which means that Mac is probably casting around for a distraction with the ferocity of the truly desperate. Dennis stands absolutely no chance of sidling past with his lunch clearly uneaten and escaping notice. If he tries, he knows what’ll happen next: Mac will try and get him involved in whatever asinine argument he’s having with Charlie, and then he’ll notice that Dennis hasn’t touched his food, and then it’ll be a whole thing and he won’t shut up until Dennis either eats in front of him — which is absolutely the last thing Dennis wants to do under any circumstance; he hates it when people watch him eat — or drinks a shake. Either way, Dennis will spend the rest of the afternoon in the bathroom, trying to make himself throw up The Snack That Bounces Back or shitting his guts out until he ends up so dehydrated that he has to drink actual water, even though he works in a bar. What an unimaginable indignity.

“Wow,” Dee says, not bothering to knock. “Solid food while the sun is still up. You must have finally given up on yourself.”

“People only watch your Instagram stories because they enjoy secondhand embarrassment and can’t believe anyone as basic as you could truly believe they have anything interesting or new to say,” Dennis says. “Also, you look like a bird.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Dee leans on the doorframe. Nobody pulls off a malignant lean quite the way she does: It has something to do with the way she always looks like she’s about to deliver bad news and can’t wait. When Dennis leans on a doorframe, he looks like BTK trying to be unobtrusive, which has a surprising number of applications but doesn’t typically lend itself to a casual setting. “So what’s this? Did you finally figure out that you aren’t going to drop any more weight by not eating? Because let me tell you, that isn’t news to anyone else. It’s just going to make your skin look saggy. Plus you might get osteoporosis, like a woman.”

Dennis glares at her. “My skin will not sag.”

“Oh, it will.” She gives him an angelic smile and frames her own face. “Unless you hop on board the Botox express. All aboard!”

Chemical youth does look good on Dee, much though Dennis hates to admit it. She has a certain evergreen smoothness now, the way Barbara had when she was in her forties and fifties, before she swapped out injectables for surgical options. Not that Dennis is ever going to admit it, but he wonders sometimes if now is the time to invest in preventative cosmetic work — more than the few touch-ups he’s had here and there, a few dozen units here and there to smooth out the worry lines on his forehead and between his brows, nothing worth writing home about — or whether he should commit to aging gracefully. At least he’s a man, which means that he’ll gain gravitas rather than losing fuckability, especially as the Overton window of “sexy older man” shifts closer and closer to septuagenarianism. Not that anyone should ever tell Frank that. Nobody should ever give Frank good news.

“What do you want?” Dennis says, instead of letting that train of thought run away with him. The only way he stands a chance in hell of getting Dee to drop it is by openly appealing to her pathological narcissism. If he’s lucky, she’ll give him a straightforward answer, and then they can just be done.

“Me? Oh, nothing,” she says. “I just got tired of listening to Mac and Charlie argue about how you’d know you were in heaven if you died without realizing it.”

“Charlie does have that thing about thinking he’s dead, doesn’t he,” Dennis says. “You know, sometimes I worry about him.”

“Really?” Dee frowns. “He seems pretty happy, all things considered.”

“Well, yeah. The man lives in a totally self-generated delusion most of the time,” Dennis says. “Wouldn’t you be pretty happy if you lacked the cognitive function to understand that you should actually feel miserable about yourself, and your life, and almost all of the choices you’ve ever made?”

“I guess so,” Dee says. “That actually sounds pretty nice.”

“Right.” Dennis gives up on the chicken and pushes the Tupperware aside. Dee’s eyes flick to it like a predator spotting a baby gazelle. “Look,” he says. “I need you to cover for me, okay? Just go out there and make a commotion, throw a chair at the wall or something. That way I can sneak this out to the Dumpster without Mac noticing. Can you do that for me?”

“Maybe,” Dee says. She’s already preening a little, which means her real answer is yes but I want to make you work for it. “What’s my motivation? Is this a religious intolerance thing or what?”

“I don’t fucking know,” Dennis says. “Aren’t you the one who’s meant to figure that out? What if your motivation is that your brother needs you to do him a favor so he can throw out his inedible fucking leftovers without it being a whole huge deal?”

Dee narrows her eyes. “I don’t know,” she says. “Something just isn’t lining up. Why can’t you just throw them out in here? Or in the bathroom? I mean, why does it have to be a whole thing if you don’t eat? You already do that all the time.”

“Look, do you want the part or not,” Dennis says, because he can’t think of a euphemistic way to say, Well, I just realized that I’m fucking my roommate who is also my best friend who I also maybe don’t hate, though I’m not so clear on that particular point because I don’t know how else to describe a feeling this strong, and now he wants us to make dinner together except that I’m pretty sure he only knows how to cook things that come in boxes, so I also have to find a way to either make him better at cooking overnight, which seems impossible, or stop him altogether, which also seems pretty unlikely, and in the meantime I don’t want to die of botulism because that would just be too fucking ironic, so I can’t actually eat the food he makes, but if I tell him that then he’ll guilt me into drinking his awful health shakes, which taste like carpet and have the texture of concrete, so I think starvation might actually be my best option here. He has a lot going on in his life right now. The last thing he needs is to answer probing questions, particularly from Dee, who only ever wants to know more about his emotional landscape so she can take more accurate aim when she inevitably decides to use it as a Battleship grid for her own entertainment.

“Fine,” Dee says, and — finally, thank fuck — un-leans. “But you owe me for this.”

“I absolutely don’t,” Dennis calls after her.

The bar has gotten suspiciously quiet, presumably because Mac and Charlie have settled into the silent unblinking staring portion of their standoff, which means that Dennis hears every syllable with perfect clarity when Dee says, “Mac, Dennis wants me to cause a distraction so he can throw his weird little married-couple brown bag lunch in the Dumpster without you noticing.”

“I will put you into a woodchipper and use you as mulch for an apple orchard,” Dennis screams, standing up so quickly that his chair falls over. He storms into the bar, lunch in hand and blood roaring in his ears. “And then every fall I’ll pick the apples and turn them into hard cider, the finest hard cider on the entire Eastern seaboard, and we’ll keep it on tap here and call it Little Bird-Dee. Do you get it? Do you understand? Because I’ll name it after the little birdie who just couldn’t keep her big beak shut.” He turns to Mac and puts his reasonable face back on. “Don’t listen to her, Mac. She’s just trying to rile you up. You’re not going to listen to her, are you?”

Mac’s eyes are so big and sad that he looks like a living Precious Moments figurine. “You were going to throw your leftovers away?”

“No,” Dennis says. He sees Dee opening her horrible mouth again and adds, “Okay, fine, yes I was! But not because I didn’t want to eat them. It was for a totally unrelated reason.”

“Oh, so you do want to eat them?” Dee says. She snatches the box from him and puts it down on the bar, then reaches behind it and roots around in their loose items box until she finds a fork. “Then why don’t you?”

“Because,” Dennis says, and wishes for the eight trillionth time that he had been an only child. “Because I — because I can’t, Dee, you know why.”

“I do,” she says, grinning her awful enormous Courtney Love caricature grin. “It’s because—”

Dennis realizes abruptly and all at once that he has no idea what she’s about to say and doesn’t want to find out.

“Look, man,” he says to Mac. “I didn’t want to tell you this, but you can’t cook.” Rip the Band-Aid off, right? Isn’t that meant to be the kindest option? “I know it was a big deal and you wanted to eat clean at home and all that but please, just sign up for one of those subscription things where you get all your ingredients in a box and they give you a nice little recipe and it’s all idiot-proof. Please. I know this meant a lot to you and I didn’t want to be a dick but seriously, nobody should eat that. The chicken bounces!”

“It does,” Charlie says with his mouth full. “You know what it actually reminds me of? Those bouncy balls from the laser tag place. It’s pretty good.” He picks up another piece and adds it to the unyielding mass already in his mouth.

They all look at him for a moment before Dennis says, “You know what, I take that back. Charlie can probably eat it and be fine. I mean, the man eats stickers.”

“He does eat stickers,” Mac says. He still looks crestfallen, but then he brightens up a little. “Does that mean you want me to make you a health shake?”

“No!” Dennis yelps, then collects himself. “No, that won’t be necessary.”

“You haven’t had one in a few days now,” Mac says. “You don’t want to start getting the shivers again, do you?”

“Huh,” Dennis says. That hadn’t occurred to him. He thinks back over the past few days, selectively. “You know, I’m actually feeling much better now. Maybe I don’t need the shakes anymore. What? What are you doing with your face? Are you trying to wink at me?”

“No,” Mac says, too quickly. He keeps aggressively twitching half of his face at Charlie, who isn’t paying any attention. “This is just something I do sometimes.”

“You know, you’re acting very weird and squirrelly,” Dennis says. He isn’t as good at sniffing out blood in the water as Dee is, but he’s no idiot. He can tell when there’s something Mac isn’t telling him. “Why is it such a big deal if I don’t want to keep drinking your shakes? You said it yourself — I haven’t had one in a few days and I feel better than ever. If anything, you should be proud. Your health shakes made me… well, healthier. Isn’t that the point?”

“Oh,” Dee says, and she hasn’t looked this happy since she handed him a packet of makeup wipes and ruined his entire fucking month.

Mac looks at her and goes white. “No,” he says.

“Oh, yes,” she says.

“No no no no no,” Mac says, “you can’t,” and she just grins wider.

“Oh yes I can,” she says, and at the same time that Mac yells, “Dennis, don’t listen to her, she’s a bird and a liar and she doesn’t know anything and she’s just jealous because she doesn’t have anyone to take care of her the way I take care of you,” she says, “Dennis, Mac doesn’t want you to stop drinking his health shakes because he’s been using his intimate knowledge of your food sensitivities to slowly poison you so that you become totally dependent on him.”

“Dee!” Mac says. He looks utterly betrayed.

“Mac,” Dennis says. He doesn’t even know what he’s feeling. “Is this true?”

“No,” Mac says. “Well, yes, but I wasn’t poisoning you!”

“You definitely were,” Charlie says, popping the last piece of chicken in his mouth and starting in on the broccoli. “You know, guys, this is kind of a big moment for me. I’ve never actually eaten a vegetable before.”

“That just can’t be right,” Dennis says, “but for once I don’t actually care that you constantly find new ways to one-up yourself with these horrifying little bombshells that you drop like they’re totally normal things to say. Munchausen by proxy, Mac? I am so disappointed in you.”

“I know,” Mac says, head hanging. “I’m sorry.”

“I mean, sure, it’s cute and everything,” Dennis says. “But it’s the kind of work I’d expect from a rank amateur. How many times have I told you? First, you have to demonstrate value. You can’t jump straight to nurturing dependence! That’s a rookie mistake and a recipe for disaster. You have to establish that you’re someone dependable before you make someone else totally reliant on you, emotionally, physically, and sexually, otherwise you’re just setting yourself up for failure.”

“Do you not value me?” Mac says, looking genuinely confused.

The question knocks Dennis flat on his back. Fuck, he thinks, because there’s no way to answer that won’t make it easy for Mac to box him in. Cornered, he resorts to his weapon of last resort: the truth, but only part of it. “I value… your input?”

“What he means is that he doesn’t value you at all,” Dee says.

Dennis whips around to glare at her. “I wish you had never been born,” he says. “I wish you had stayed in the womb forever like an overgrown tumor. That way you and Barbara would have been stuck with each other forever.”

“You wouldn’t do that to your precious mommy,” Dee says, looking aghast.

“Bitch, try me,” Dennis says. He turns back to Mac, who has his hands on his hips in the classic pose of someone who’s prepared to make their point by walking away if they have to, but is really hoping it won’t come to that. It’s a kind of petty ultimatum that Dennis knows well. “Of course I value you,” he says, the same way he’s acceded so many times before. Of course I don’t think your roommate is hot. Of course I don’t care if we don’t have sex every time I sleep over. Of course I love you.

“Tell me one way,” Mac says.

Dennis blinks. “What?”

“Tell me one way that you value me,” he says. “Or—”

“Okay!” Dennis says. He doesn’t want to know what Mac is about to say next. He especially doesn’t want to find out in front of Dee and Charlie. “Okay, okay. Jesus. I value, uh, give me a second here. You’re really putting me on the spot.”

“This doesn’t look good, man,” Charlie says, crunching away merrily.

“You aren’t helping,” Dennis says through gritted teeth. “Okay, I’ve got it. You know what I really value about you? Your honesty. There. How’s that?” He turns to Dee. “Are you happy? This is what you wanted, isn’t it? You ruin everything. Every time I want something you take it and every time I like something you ruin it and every time I try to do the right thing you never believe me! You never believe me. You always assume I’m trying to be an asshole and you think I don’t have any feelings and that I’m just this heartless monster who lives to make other people unhappy and sure, okay, maybe I’m a monster, but big fucking deal! Who isn’t? You’re a monster too! You’re the same as me and that’s why you hate yourself so much, because anyone would hate themselves if they were like me, and you never say ‘I love you’ back to me! You always just say whatever like it’s no big fucking deal. Like it’s so easy and it doesn’t matter and you don’t even care. How can you not care? I care so much,” he says, and his chest is rising and falling like an opera singer’s because he can’t keep air in his lungs — he just pulls it in for a second and then he can’t stop talking, so it all rushes back out again. Something is happening to his body, taking him over from the inside like water filling a soap bubble, and soon the surface tension will burst and he’ll drown the entire room. “I care when I say that I love you and I care when I try to do the right thing for you assholes and I care about not fucking this up! And you just keep making it so hard. Why do you have to make it so hard? Why can’t you just let me have this? You wouldn’t even care if you didn’t know it mattered to me. Why are you like this?”

He runs out of breath, and nobody says anything. They might not be breathing, either. They’re all just staring at him. Dee looks frozen, like he’s just poured ice water over her head and she’s only just realizing that she’s cold. Charlie looks resigned, like he isn’t thrilled about this but isn’t surprised, either. And Mac — his expression makes Dennis feel hysterical and wild, because it isn’t pity and it isn’t shock and it isn’t fear, and that’s all Dennis can say for sure because nobody ever looks at him like that when he’s like this. People whisper and they pretend they aren’t looking or they run away, or they’re Frank, who always used to scream at him to nut up and stop being such a whiner. Otherwise they look at him with pity or disgust. They don’t look at him like they know him, like they understand him, like they’re on his side, the way Mac is looking at him right now: Dennis can’t look back or he’ll go to pieces.

“Just to be clear,” Dee says. Her face hasn’t moved, like she doesn’t know what to do with herself. “When you say this, as in whatever it is you don’t want to fuck up — what are you talking about?”

“This! Just — this,” Dennis says, gesturing to the space between him and Mac. “I don’t know. I mean, you’re obviously jealous, just because you don’t have any friends of your own, and you can never keep a guy around — I mean, that goes without saying — and so you always just try and screw things up for me, because you think that’ll make it better. But it won’t. Nothing is going to make it better. Nothing is going to make you better. This is just how it is. You just need to get used to it.”

“Oh,” she says, and looks from him to Mac, and then back at him. “Wow. I get it. I think I know what’s happening here.”

“You don’t,” Mac says, one hand reached out as though he can physically stop her. “You don’t know anything.”

Dee looks at Dennis, and opens her mouth, and then she looks at Mac and closes it. “Sure,” she says. Her expression is canny, her eyes narrowed. “You know what? Okay. I don’t know anything. If that’s how you want to play this, fine. You know, when you were in the closet, I didn’t feel bad for you. Not once. I thought you were kind of a pussy, especially when you decided you could go back in, but I never once felt sorry for you, because I thought, Wow, that’s pretty shitty but I guess that’s just how it works sometimes. But this?” She jerks her thumb at Dennis. “This is just fucking sad.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mac says, but he’s looking at Dennis, like he’s saying it to Dee but it isn’t actually for her benefit at all.

“Oh, I absolutely do,” she says, but before she can take the bait — before she can say whatever she’s been thinking, whatever it is that Dennis knows he doesn’t want to hear — Charlie burps enormously.

“So, vegetables, huh,” he says. “Turns out I don’t like them.”

All three of them round on him, relieved.

“Of course you don’t like vegetables,” Mac says, “you only like flavored preservatives.”

“God damn it, Charlie,” Dee says, “do you have absolutely no sense of dramatic timing? I was setting something up there and you ruined it!”

“You can’t judge all vegetables according to the ones Mac cooks,” Dennis says. “You may as well judge all bars according to, well, us.”

“Uh huh,” Charlie says, nodding with the buoyancy of a bobblehead, which means that he’s listening to all of them while understanding precisely nothing. “Hey, do you think that’s because all vegetables taste bad in heaven? Because they’re earthly and sinful and that’s why they taste like dirt?”

“Why do you think,” Dennis says, and then he remembers Dee saying, I just got tired of listening to Mac and Charlie argue about how you’d know you were in heaven if you died without realizing it. “Oh, I get it. You’re just trying to get us involved in your weird theological debate. You know, I don’t know why you bother. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times: There is no God, and if there was one, he definitely wouldn’t care about any of us.”

“You just say that because you haven’t accepted His love into your heart,” Mac says, and Dennis can hear the capital H. “If you would just let me read to you from the Bible more often, you’d understand. God does exist, and he does care. He just shows it by ignoring everyone so that they have to work twice as hard to prove that they still love him even though he never answers any of their prayers. Well, almost never.”

The way Mac talks about God always used to make Dennis absolutely crazy. Then he had realized that Mac was never going to change his mind — he’s always going to be hung up on this big man in the sky with a cotton-ball beard and a sixteen-pack whose entire purpose is apparently to neglect his believers and expect them to show up on Sundays anyway. Meeting Mac’s parents had been a real turning point in Dennis’ understanding of his relationship with religion; once Dennis had that context, it all made a horrible kind of sense. Of course Mac’s preferred God is an indifferent motherfucker. Mac’s whole thing is having blind faith that authority figures love him despite all the clear indicators that they couldn’t care less. Why would his approach to Christianity be any different? Catholicism fits him like a thrift-store tee with the sleeves cut off, which is to say perfectly.

“I don’t want you to read to me from your Bible because I know what you do alone in your room when you say you’re meditating on the Scriptures,” Dennis says. “The fact that you’ve figured out how to read it while riding a fisting bike doesn’t surprise me at all, but I’m amazed you can still turn the pages on that thing.”

“Only kind of,” Charlie says. “Some of them are really sticky.”

“You read my Bible?” Mac squawks.

“You bet I did,” Charlie says. “And I have to be honest, I don’t really get why everyone makes such a big deal about this Jason Curtis guy.”

Dee turns to Dennis and says, “He’s talking about Jesus Christ, isn’t he.”

“Oh yeah,” Dennis says. “The man is totally illiterate. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is,” he says, and then trails off. What is the point? First it was that Dee was blowing everything up for him, and now it’s got something to do with Charlie and broccoli and sticky Bibles. It’s hard to keep track of continuity in their arguments sometimes. “The point is! Charlie, I don’t know what you’re talking about and frankly I don’t care. Dee, you don’t know anything.”

“But you do care,” she says.

“So what if I care,” he snaps, and of course that’s when Frank rolls in: like a Weeble with legs, at the worst possible moment.

“What are we doing? What do you care about?” Frank says. White powder is caked under his nostrils and his trousers are damp up to the knee.

“Were you snorting blow in the sewers again?” Charlie says. “Without me?”

“Ah, Charlie,” Frank says. “It was nothing. Just me and a couple of friends. Well, rats. Me and a couple of rats. And let me tell you, they know how to party.”

“You and the rats? Frank!” Charlie looks hurt. “This is heaven! You aren’t allowed to leave me out of your rat parties!”

“All right, all right. I’ll make sure you’re at the next one,” Frank says, heaving himself onto a stool. “So come on, what’s the action? What are we arguing about?”

“Oh, we’re just trying to figure out why Dennis cares so much about me not screwing up his special fucking connection to Mac or whatever,” Dee says.

Suck-up, Dennis mouths at her, but it’s too late.

“Huh,” Frank says, taking a swig of beer, and then he makes a series of other horrible bodily noises as his internal fluids slosh around until they reach equilibrium. When the grunting and snorting and gurgling dies down, he looks back at Dee. “So what’s the answer? Why do we care?”

“Dee, you morally bankrupt sow, if you say anything I swear I will decorate this bar with your organs,” Dennis says.

“Don’t talk to your sister like that,” Frank says. Everyone ignores him except for Dennis’ blood pressure, which ticks upward another notch.

“How do you know we don’t already talk about it?” Dee says, unfazed. “Huh? Remember when it was Mac? Sorry, Mac,” she says, turning to him and then back to Dennis. “How can you be sure we don’t know about it already and we’re just waiting for you to actually say it?”

“Say what? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dennis says. But he does, he does; there’s only one secret that could make Dee light up like this, a cat with a mouse, a fisherman with a big juicy catch hooked right through the gills.

“Oh, Dennis,” she says, and he knows that tone of voice. He’s used it. He didn’t realize it would feel this absolutely godawful for someone else to use it on him. “Don’t make me say it.”

“I have no idea what you mean,” Dennis says, drawing himself up with as much dignity as he can muster. There’s only one way to get ahead of this, and like all good cover stories, it involves a little selective memory and a lot of careful phrasing, a handful of little lies and one genuine whopper. “Unless you’re referring to my mutually beneficial arrangement with my roommate, but I can’t see why you’d think that’s such a big deal to me. You can’t seriously be telling me you wouldn’t consider it yourself. In fact, I seem to remember something very similar happening when we were in college. What was her name again?”

“That was different,” Dee says. “I just wanted to wear some of her clothes sometimes. But it’s different with girls. That’s just normal girl stuff.”

“Her clothes? You wanted to wear her skin,” Dennis says.

“Oh, whatever. You’re trying to change the subject,” Dee says. “Mutually beneficial arrangement, huh?” She makes a jerk-off gesture. “Sounds like you’re going Greek. Crossing swords. Raising fighting cocks. Is that what you’re trying to say, Dennis? Come on. You can tell us. We don’t care.”

“First of all, I’m not telling you anything, because I don’t negotiate with terrorists,” Dennis says. “Second of all, even if that wasn’t the case, why would I want to tell the rest of you? I already know you don’t care. All you ever do is ignore what I’m actually trying to say, and decide that what I actually mean is whatever you want me to mean, and then blame me when you mess everything up. But not today. No, not today. Today you’re all going to stand there—”

“Or sit,” Frank says.

“Frank, you will shut your yaphole or I will break a stool over your head,” Dennis says. “Today, you’re all going to stand there or sit and you’re going to listen to me for once in your lives, because I’m only going to say this once, and I’m going to be very clear, because you are the absolute worst people on earth and if I give you a single solitary inch of room then you’re going to take a hundred miles. Have you all got that? Great,” he says, and takes a deep breath. “I? Am not gay. Just because I’m in a relationship with another man that involves a mutual appreciation for each other’s physical forms, the penises in particular, does not mean that I, Dennis Reynolds, am a homosexual.”

“Wow,” Dee says. Dennis doesn’t know what kind of face she’s making, but at least she doesn’t look sorry for him, and at least she isn’t smiling anymore. Nobody else says anything. The look on Mac’s face is one that Dennis can’t even start thinking about yet. “First of all, newsflash, boners, we all knew the two of you were doing the nasty. Honestly I’m surprised it took this long, but you are both emotionally incompetent, so it’s not actually that much of a shock. Second of all, how is, what did you call it, a mutual appreciation for each other’s ding-dongs — Jesus Christ — how is that not the definition of gayhood?”

“I can see why you’d ask that, and as a result I’ve given it some thought,” Dennis says, and holds his empty hand out to Mac, who says nothing and passes him an already-open beer. “The answer is very simple. Just call to mind the astronomical, and frankly very heterosexual, number of women I have bedded over the years.”

“So what?” Charlie says. Frank hasn’t said anything, yet. Maybe he’s having a stroke and any second now he’ll fall over dead. On the one hand, that might be the best-case scenario. On the other hand, killing a man by changing his relationship status will probably leave Dennis with some new and distinctive psychological damage — but what’s a little more for the pile? “Mac’s banged lots of chicks, and he’s still gay. This is heaven. You can do whatever you want. We just want you to be happy, man.”

“Not me,” Dee says. “I want him to be miserable forever.”

“Actually,” Dennis says, “Mac hasn’t banged lots of chicks, at least not if you subscribe to the traditional standard, which is to say full penetration.”

He braces himself for the possibility that Mac will vault over the bar and try to put Dennis’ eyes out with his thumbs, but Mac doesn’t do anything nearly so drastic. He just says, “Ah,” and winces with his entire body. Dennis wheels around to stare at him.

“You can’t seriously expect me to believe that you’ve ever actually made it all the way around the bases,” he says. “I mean, a home run is no easy feat, especially for a man of your proclivities.”

“I have!” Mac says, and winces even more when he adds, “But only… only once. We don’t have to talk about this, guys! Maybe it’s better if we just, you know, we don’t have to talk about it. Sometimes you just don’t have to talk about stuff and then it’s fine, when you never talk about it. Ever.”

“Oh,” Dee says, and starts smiling again, even as she shakes her head. “Oh, are you telling me — wow. Wow. That is just too rich.”

“What?” Charlie says, and then it hits Dennis and he starts shaking his head too.

“I don’t want to know this,” he says. He picks up his beer again. “I don’t want to know this!”

“Oh, none of us want to know this,” Frank says. He sniffs and burps at the same time. “Especially not me. But that don’t change it.”

“Change what?” Charlie, destroyer of worlds, says, and Dennis wants to leap across the bar like a man diving in front of a bullet, but it’s too late.

“Why, that the only woman he ever plowed was my whore wife, may she burn in hell,” Frank says, totally nonchalant, and something right in the middle of Dennis’ brain goes snap.

“How dare you make me know this,” he screams at Dee, as everyone else starts shouting at each other: Charlie at Mac, and Mac at Frank, and Dee just in general. God, leave it to Frank to fucking ruin this for him, to make him wish he’d never said anything in the first place. What did he fucking expect? Nobody ever pays attention when Dennis tries to talk about his feelings. Dee gets to bitch and moan all day, and when Charlie is sad nobody gets a minute of peace until they’ve launched a full-scale operation to make him feel better, and Mac mopes so loudly that it’s impossible to ignore, but when it’s Dennis it’s all oh you poor baby and what if you weren’t so sensitive and Jesus, this shit again? And, apparently, Yeah, man, the only woman I’ve ever had an orgasm with was your mom. What kind of sick fucking cosmic joke, what kind of twisted bid to render Dennis totally psychotic is this, and when does he get to have just one normal day where his father isn’t having a coke party with rats and his sister doesn’t figure out he’s fucking his roommate and he doesn’t have to tell everyone he knows just to spite her? “You,” he spits at Dee, “should have listened the first time when I said you just ruin things. And you!” He turns to Mac. “We are going to talk about this later. And what about you, Frank?”

But of course Frank is just sitting there, paying absolutely zero attention, drinking a second beer and cutting lines directly on the filthy bar with a credit card out of the lost and found box. “Huh?” he says.

“Oh, I can’t do this,” Dennis says — and even though everybody keeps screaming, even though Charlie is still watching all of them like it’s the best show he’s ever seen, even though Mac is yelling no don’t and Dee is shrieking back about his rancid dick and two prospective customers have walked in, taken one look at the shitshow, and walked right back out, suddenly the world for him is very still and quiet and clear. It’s all too much and he’s gone, to the place where lost time lives, beyond the ability to know where he is or what year he’s in or what he’s doing. He’s in the eye of the storm, and all around him is destruction and chaos, but the place where he’s standing is perfectly firm and steady. It’s the center of the world, and he’s in it, and that makes him a god, which means Dennis can do whatever he wants — and what he wants is to leave.

He wants to be done with all this shouting and all this dragging each other down, all the ways they make each other the worst possible versions of themselves and all the ways they’ll never, ever stop, and he wants them to be better, and he never wants them to change, and he knows they never will anyway. These people are his best friends in the world, the people he wanted to die with, once upon a time, when that felt like a grand and noble thing to do rather than the sad inevitable end of a story that started long before they knew it was happening and that they’ve never figured out how to escape. He wants it to be this quiet forever, for the snarling rats trapped in his chest to tear each other to shreds so he can just find somewhere quiet to lie down and disintegrate until he’s just a pile of bleached bones, an empty polished ribcage under an endless clear sky. He wants to stop thinking so much all the time — he’s doing it again, he knows — and to stop having so many feelings, because all of them hurt him. He just wants to stop hurting.

On that awful cruise ship, when the brig was filling up with cold saltwater and Dennis first felt his feet lift off the floor, he didn’t think No, not like this, and he didn’t think about all the things he’d never do or the places he’d never go or the people he’d never get to see again. What he did think was, Isn’t drowning meant to hurt? Just my luck, and then he thought, Well, at least the onion didn’t go to waste. And then he didn’t think anything useful until there was only a foot of air left at the top of the room, when he realized that actually he could change all the parts of his life that he didn’t like — he could walk away from the bar, if he had a good enough reason; he could go anywhere he wanted, do anything he wanted, become a different person, slip on a different skin — but none of that mattered anymore.

But he couldn’t stop treading water, could he? Not until it was just him and Mac and Charlie, the way it had all started, three stupid kids under the bleachers getting high on spray paint and cough syrup, telling each other that they didn’t get why people made such a big deal about getting good grades and making a lot of money and buying houses and getting married and all that bullshit, because what was so bad about just doing this forever? Everyone would be much happier if they just had two or three friends they actually liked, not like all those fake popular kids — and enough money to buy weed, of course. Good weed, not this shit, Dennis had said, and Mac had said, Hey! and shoved him, the way he used to when it didn’t mean anything and it was easy for them to come up with excuses to touch each other, and then they had rolled around in the mud trying to break each other’s arms until they had eaten about a tablespoon of dirt each and remembered that they should check whether Charlie was still breathing or not.

It had been easy to sink once that was the only choice left. Isn’t that how it always goes? Dennis doesn’t make choices; he waits until he gets backed into a corner and then takes whatever option is left. He can count the actual decisions he’s made in his life on one hand: buying the bar, moving to North Dakota, moving back. That’s it. Everything else is just window dressing, nothing that actually matters, nothing that’s actually lasted. Even diving down to the bottom of the sea hadn’t stuck. One last deep breath, then the water had closed over his head and the world had gotten quiet the way it is now, echoing and blurry and cold, and all he had really been able to see was Dee on his left and Mac on his right and the holes starting to eat into his vision around the corners — and then, when that ray of perfect light had cracked the darkness in half, he had been the first one out of the water, and then Mac, and Dee had come out last, half-drowned by that point, which meant that Dennis had long since finished coughing up water and getting wrapped in towels and shock blankets, and what he was doing was sitting in the sideways corridor thinking, Now what?

Now what? Mac is looking at Dennis with the same face he had made when he found out that Dennis had torn up all the letters his father had written him from prison. Dennis doesn’t have an onion, and he doesn’t know if he could muster any kind of performance at this point anyway. His friends don’t care about him and his father — his godawful nightmare of a father, the monster who ruined his childhood and has continued to terrorize him into adulthood, the person who taught him what a faggot was and why he didn’t want to be one, the reason he doesn’t know how to have feelings or talk to people or live like a fucking person rather than a stupid haunted marionette, a facsimile of humanity whose friends replaced him with a sex doll and didn’t notice any difference — is just sitting there like he couldn’t care less that Dennis just told him how much he loves dick. Like it doesn’t make any difference at all to him. Like it wouldn’t matter if Dennis picked up a stool, like this, and threw it across the room, like this, and if when Frank looked up he leaned in very close, one elbow on the bar, like this, and said, “I know you couldn’t care less if I lived or died, and I know sometimes you forget my name, but given all the years you spent telling me it was the worst thing I could possibly be, I have a really hard time believing you truly don’t even fucking care that I just told you I’m gay.”

Frank spits out a peanut shell and doesn’t even bother to look up. “Why would I?” he says, reaching for his beer. “You can do whatever you want. Go fuck animals for all I care. It’s no skin off my back.”

Dennis doesn’t know why he expected anything else, but it’s still a slap in the face. It feels like being ripped open from collarbone to navel and then told that he’s making a big deal out of nothing. Maybe an actual slap in the face would be better. “Okay,” he says, and there’s absolutely no tone left in his voice. If he was braver, he would scream. He would tell Frank to go fuck himself, or that he’s never hated anyone more, or that he’s the reason Dennis has wasted his entire life on a lie that it turns out nobody actually cared about in the first place. But the truth is that Dennis a coward, which is why he’s only figuring this out now, which is why he’s forty-four years old and miserable, which is why his son lives in a different state and never hears from him, which is why he has squandered every opportunity he’s been given to be someone else, something more, somehow better.

But he has a choice now. He can leave. He can try again somewhere new. He can slip into a new person’s skin. He can pick a new name and a new past and if he works hard enough, they’ll become real. He’ll be better and braver and people will know the version of him that he wants them to and they’ll like him, they’ll care about how he’s doing and whether he’s happy, and they’ll say hello and smile at him in the street and it won’t feel fake. He’ll actually be able to enjoy it, because he’ll have earned it by being the kind of person who deserves it. And maybe, just maybe, he’ll be happy.

“Okay,” Dennis says again, and then the bar door is swinging shut behind him, and the sun is poised right between the afternoon and the early evening. The light is starting to get a little deeper and richer in color, angling towards golden hour, and the alley looks like something out of a photograph of the good old days everyone talks about that exist only in memory. When they were happening, they were the present, which always sucks, but now that they’re gone, everyone wishes they would come back. That’s what Dennis will become. He’ll go, and with time his memory will fade and burnish to a fine antique gold, all the tarnish buffed away and the details polished with care and handling. Where will he be? Who knows. North Dakota is too small, but there’s at least one other Dakota, or maybe he’ll strike out for the west coast and try out life within a stone’s throw of a different ocean. Maybe he’ll head for the Midwest and disappear into the endless sprawl of suburbs, or maybe he’ll drive south to the Mojave and find somewhere to serve drinks with pineapple wedges and parasols to overmoneyed tourists, or maybe he’ll take cover in the Bible Belt and make a living on historical revisionism. Who knows where he’ll end up: anywhere the Range Rover will take him that’ll have him, is the real answer. Anywhere he can find parking that feels far enough away that there’s no chance his past will find him.

“Dennis!” Mac shouts after him, and he just keeps walking. “Dennis!”

After another minute, he stops, because otherwise Mac will just keep yelling until he does. “What?”

“Where are you going?” Mac jogs up next to him.

“I don’t know,” Dennis says. “Somewhere. Not here. What are you doing?”

“Oh,” Mac says. “I thought — coming with you?”

Dennis rounds on him. “Why?” he says. “What part of that made it seem like I wanted you to follow me?”

“Oh, none of it.” Mac grins. “I just thought, okay, Dennis is leaving, so wherever he’s going, I want to go too. You know?”

“No, Mac,” Dennis says. “I don’t know.”

Mac shrugs. He’s still smiling. “Okay,” he says.

Dennis starts walking again, and so does Mac. “Stop following me,” Dennis says. He doesn’t stop this time.

“I don’t want to,” Mac says, and he doesn’t either.

“But you should,” Dennis says. “I keep trying to tell you that but you never listen. I push you away and you just keep coming back, like some mangy old mutt who doesn’t understand that it’s for his own good. Don’t you get it? I ruin people.” His feet keep carrying him onward, even as his heart becomes heavy as a stone. “Everything I love, I destroy. Look at Dee. Look at my whole life. Hell, look at you. Do you know how lucky you are? You get to just be yourself, and Frank likes you, and Charlie is your best friend, and people look at you and they think, there goes Mac, maybe he isn’t the sharpest spoon in the shed but hey, at least he knows who he is. Good for him. Good for Mac, isn’t it such a pity he keeps hanging out with that other shitbag, does anyone remember his name? No, he’s just some asshole, you know the type. Thinks he’s still twenty even though he’s closer to fifty, isn’t that embarrassing, oh well, what can you do. Some people just aren’t worth the time.”

“I don’t think you ruin everything,” Mac says. He’s still keeping pace with Dennis, shoulder to shoulder. “You make me happy.”

“See, that’s what I’m talking about! You just think that because I made you,” Dennis says. “Because I fooled you, the same way I fool everyone, because that’s the only way I can make anybody like me. Because I’m a horrible person, and secretly you don’t know me at all.”

Mac puts his hand on Dennis’ shoulder. They’re nearly to the car now, so close to escape, but Dennis stops dead anyway. “Dude,” Mac says. “I know you.”

“You don’t,” Dennis says. His voice comes out sounding wretched. “You just know the person I pretend to be, this cool guy who always has a plan and is always in control and knows what he’s doing and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.”

Mac snorts. “No way, man,” he says. “You care about what everyone thinks all the time. That’s why you’re so vain.”

“Wow. Thanks,” Dennis says.

“And you don’t always have a plan. You’re just good at thinking on your feet, sometimes,” Mac goes on. “Except sometimes you aren’t, which is why I’m the brains. And I hate to break this to you, bro, but you aren’t actually that cool.”

“If you’re trying to make me feel better, you aren’t,” Dennis says.

“I know you,” Mac says again. “You can’t pull that shit with me. I know you, and I just — I like you anyway.”

“Don’t,” Dennis says.

Mac gives him a long, searching look and then, picking his way from one word to the next like a tightrope walker, he says, “You know I like you a lot.”

“Please don’t say it.”

“I won’t,” Mac says, but he’s smiling. “You don’t have to, either.”

“Great,” Dennis says. There’s something delicate fluttering in his throat, butterflies ready to burst from his mouth in a great effusion of color and movement. How many times has he looked at the alley at this time of day, really looked at it — the way the sunlight pools in the cracked pavement, the cloud-streaked sky turning the color of cotton candy? It’s a shitty little corner of the world, full of uncollected garbage and rats and people like himself. It’s where all the lost socks and lost causes of Philadelphia end up, drawn by the inescapable pull of entropic attraction, broken glass ground into the pavement so that it sparkles when the light hits it just right.

Maybe he’s just never looked at it right.

“Maybe you’re a bad person,” Mac says. “Maybe I’m a bad person. I’m probably not, because I go to confession at least once a month and I read the Bible every night, but hey, who can say? Well, God, I guess. God judges all of us, and He doesn’t play favorites, but if He did, then I would totally be one of them.”

“You would not,” Dennis says.

“I definitely would,” Mac says, “but that isn’t the point. The point is, I know you and I still like you, whether or not you’re a bad person. And if you’re going somewhere, I want to go with you, because — because that’s what it means when you — like someone. Do you not want me to come? Because you keep saying that I shouldn’t want to, but I don’t know what you want. I mean, I know what I think, but I don’t know for sure. What do you want? I just want to know what you want.”

“I want,” Dennis says, and then the metaphors all stop. His mouth isn’t full of butterflies and his heart isn’t made of stone and the sky is just a sky, not made of cotton candy at all. The glass in the pavement is just that. The light is pretty, sure, but it isn’t liquid gold, and the potholes just mean that he has to get his tires aligned every three months. But Mac is still himself, still waiting to hear what Dennis is going to say like there’s nowhere he’d rather be and nothing he’d rather be doing, like he actually cares what Dennis wants. What does Dennis want? He wants forty-four years of his life back. He wants to have figured this out when he was a teenager and wasn’t afraid of anything, when he was ready to devour the world whole, when he still believed he could have anything he wanted. He wants to go back and find whatever decision led him here and — what? Change it? Maybe not. If his entire life has led him to this moment, does that make it all worth it? But you could have had so much more time, he thinks. But he might not have ended up here. So what’s the answer, Dennis; for five hundred dollars in the category of yearning, answer today’s Daily Double. The clock is ticking, and the entire history of human desire has been leading up to this, and everyone is holding their breath.

If this was a movie, Dennis wouldn’t have to answer, and Mac would know what he was trying to say, and he would break into a smile the size of the world and then put his hands on either side of Dennis’ face and kiss him and the camera would pan up to the burnt-purple sky, where The End would appear in copperplate script. Or maybe Dennis would be the one who kissed him, who put his arms around Mac’s neck and pulled him close and pressed their mouths together like he only wanted to breath the same air forever. Or maybe neither of them would have to do anything, because Dennis would know the right words to say to get to the next part, to make it come sooner, to make the future the present and the present the past.

“I don’t know what I want,” he says, and Mac smiles anyway.

“Do you still want to go?” he says. “Wherever you’re going.”

“No,” Dennis says, testing the word out, feeling the way it falls from his mouth like a stone into a perfectly still pond.

“Do you want me to go?” Mac says.

“No,” Dennis says. It’s easier the second time.

“Do you want to hang out here for a while?” Mac says, and Dennis nods.

“Yes,” he says. It feels good. It feels new.

“Okay,” Mac says. His smile is wide now, as big as the sky. “Do you want to talk?”

“No,” Dennis says, and then he thinks about it a little more. “Not yet.”

“Okay,” Mac says again, and he leans up against the Range Rover.

They stand. The sun goes down, down, down; the clouds light up pink and gold, and the great deep shadow of night creeps across the sky. The air gets cooler. Lights come on in the buildings around them. At the end of the alley, shadows cross, laughing, talking on the phone, texting. One steps into a doorway for a moment to light a cigarette. Another pauses for a moment, peering at the street sign, and then moves on. Mac looks at Dennis once or twice, sneaking glances out of the corner of his eye, but he doesn’t say anything. Dennis doesn’t talk, and he doesn’t think; he just stands there and feels: the evening breeze, the faint salt smell of the tide coming up the Delaware, the distant hum of footsteps and conversation and traffic, the warmth of Mac’s body next to his.

After a long time, he says, “I don’t want to go anywhere.” He waits until Mac nods, and then adds, “I don’t want to keep feeling like this.”

“I know,” Mac says, and Dennis can tell from the look on his face that he really does.

“I don’t know how to do anything else,” he says.

“It isn’t easy,” Mac says. “But you figure it out eventually.”

“I,” Dennis says, and for a moment he forgets how to speak again. “Can you help? Can you help me not feel like this anymore?”

“Only you can do that, bro,” Mac says. “But I can be here for you. You know, if you want.”

“I do,” Dennis says, “I do want that.” It’s the first time in a long time that he’s been able to say that honestly and without thinking about it for an hour first. It’s the first time it’s ever been so easy.

“Okay,” Mac says. “If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure,” Dennis says. “Okay? Don’t make me say it again.”

Mac nods. “Okay,” he says again. “Do you want to go back?” Dennis shakes his head. “Do you want to talk?”

“Maybe later,” Dennis says. “Hey.” He leans up against Mac, like they’re bumping shoulders, but he doesn’t move away — just stays pressed to Mac’s side. Mac startles at first, but then he settles, and his hand brushes against the small of Dennis’ back and then settles, tentative, on his waist. “Why does Charlie keep asking how to tell if you’re in heaven?”

“Ah,” Mac says, but his smile is so big that Dennis can hear it. “Well. You know how we were trying to make Frank feel like he’s crazy by making everything in his life better?”

“That wasn’t quite the reasoning, but for the sake of getting to the answer faster, sure,” Dennis says.

“Right, so it turns out Frank is so fucked up most of the time that he actually has no idea what’s happening around him, like, at all,” Mac says. “Seriously, we could kidnap him and drop him in the middle of the desert and he’d probably have no idea that he wasn’t still in that shitty apartment. But Charlie has lived in that apartment ever since he got together the money to move out of his mom’s house. So he’s pretty familiar with it. And his life, obviously, is shit.”

Dennis nods. “It’s so bad.” He likes the way Mac’s hand feels on his waist, he decides. It makes him feel anchored in time and space.

“Right? Oh my God, I don’t know how he lives like that,” Mac says. “But anyway, he totally forgot that we were doing a thing and then he got home and his apartment was all nice, not horrible and full of garbage like it usually is, and I guess he has this thing where sometimes he thinks he’s already dead and this is what comes next? Which is kind of sad, honestly, but I guess his life is so awful that this feels like an improvement. So he saw the new sheets and the refitted kitchen and all the little accent touches and the new wallpaper and the fresh food and the wall fixtures and—”

“Please,” Dennis says. “Get where you’re going.”

“Sorry,” Mac says. “Right. So he saw all the nice new stuff we got him and he figured, hey, if my everyday life was purgatory, why shouldn’t this be heaven? And he wouldn’t listen when I told him that heaven, obviously, is a big empty space where the floor is made of clouds and God sits in a big chair with no shirt on and His chosen ones sit next to him as he ignores the prayers of the faithful. And you know how it gets me going when someone isn’t willing to listen to me about God. I mean, I was ready to throw him out of the bar.”

“I know how you get,” Dennis says. “Hey, we should probably tell him that he isn’t actually dead at some point, don’t you think?”

“Eh, whatever,” Mac says. “Who cares. That’s not important. What’s important is that I really don’t think it’s too much to ask people to believe me when I tell them what I absolutely know is the one hundred percent factual truth about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Is it? Do you think that’s unreasonable of me? Because I don’t!”

“I mean,” Dennis says, but Mac rolls right along.

“I mean, don’t even get me started on what he gets wrong about martyrdom,” Mac says, and Dennis knows this could go on for a while, and he doesn’t care. Mac keeps talking and his hand stays on Dennis’ waist and he doesn’t let go — and this might not be the kind of adventure Dennis always thought he was in, where the good guys win and the hero gets the girl and they all live happily ever after, and it might not be the kind of movie that ends with a wide-angle shot of a perfect blue sky, nothing but sunny days ahead, but maybe it’s the kind of story he gets to come home to every day. Maybe it’s the kind where trying actually makes a difference. Maybe it’s the kind where it could get better from here — if Dennis could find it in himself enough to try. If he was willing to work for it. If he could learn how to want it.

Dennis Reynolds is forty-four years old, and he doesn’t know what his future will be, but he can feel it getting ready to arrive — like a train just out of sight, about to pull into the station — and for the first time in his long and wayward life, he thinks he might actually want to know what comes next.

EPILOGUE

June is perfect: end-of-school weather, time to turn on the air conditioning in the day and leave the windows open at night. The bar’s crappy little blender whirs away all day, cranking out margaritas that taste only marginally better than the bagged lime-flavored coolers Dennis used to steal from Duane Reade so that he could spend finals week blasted on whatever naturally flavored wine product is.

“Hey,” he says to Charlie, “could you run down to the basement and grab another case of whiskey for me? No? Okay! That’s on me for assuming you listen to anything I say. What are you doing? Are you taking your shoes off? No! Keep your shoes on! Is that — Do you have cheese between your toes? Jesus Christ, that’s disgusting. Why can’t you do that in the back office? Please. I am literally begging you here. Forget about the whiskey. Just go pick your toe cheese in private where the customers can’t see you. At least do it behind the bar!”

“He’s not listening,” Dee says.

“I have eyes,” Dennis says. “I can see.”

She picks up her glass and peers into the bottom of it. “Hey, we need more whiskey,” she says. “Someone should go and grab a case out of the basement.”

“Someone like you?” Dennis says, and she straight-up laughs in his face.

“Please. You’re not going to trick me that easily.”

“I’m not trying to — oh, for fuck’s sake,” Dennis says, and goes downstairs himself. On the way back up, he puts a foot wrong and his ankle rolls. He doesn’t fall or drop the case, but he swears under his breath and takes the rest of the steps a little more gingerly, trying not to put too much weight on that side. It’s the kind of thing he’s been noticing more lately, these little bodily deficits that catch him by surprise: the way his back aches more or less continuously and the way his knees aren’t quite as reliable as they used to be and the way that more often than not he finds himself squinting to read the labels of bottles on the other side of the bar. So far nobody has noticed, so it hasn’t been a problem, but he’s not stupid enough to think that’ll last. Sooner or later Mac will figure it out — probably later, given Mac — and then he’ll probably make Dennis get glasses, which will completely throw off the look he’s been cultivating. Worldly modern men who are too mature for athleisure but too hip for chinos don’t wear glasses. They wear contacts or they get laser surgery or their vision remains perfect in the first place, because they don’t spend all day working in windowless bars with insufficient lighting.

“Oho,” Charlie says when Dennis drags himself back behind the bar, leaving the whiskey on the floor to deal with when he feels up to it. “I know that limp. You’ve been working out on Mac’s exercise bike, haven’t you?”

“What? No,” Dennis says. “I was carrying something up from the basement and I twisted my ankle. You saw me just five minutes ago! How would that even work?”

“You never know,” Charlie says. “Maybe you wear those pants with the slits in the back.” He taps his nose. “You’d be surprised. People have all kinds of tricks.”

“First of all, no they don’t, because nobody on Earth except for Mac has ever needed to come up with a workaround so that they can stealthily fuck themselves with a dildo bike in the basement of their workplace without getting caught,” Dennis says. “So you can just say Mac, because the only person you could be talking about is Mac. Second of all, again, no, I am not using the Ass Pounder Five Thousand, because I am not a sexual deviant. A connoisseur of carnality — certainly. A modern man who has no problem acknowledging that attraction is fluid and changing and, yes, sometimes quite gay — absolutely. But I am not a pervert of the most depraved kind.”

“I thought it was only up to four thousand,” Dee says.

“It was, but then Mac realized that he could incorporate — no!” Dennis says. “That isn’t the point, and I’m not telling you. No. The point is, I just twisted my ankle. I’m not using the bike. That would be unsanitary, and also horrifying. In fact, I’m a little insulted that you’d even ask.”

“Well,” Charlie says, licking toe cheese off his fingers, “I mean, you are a power bottom.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” Dennis says.

“Oh, I think we do,” Dee says.

“What do we know?” Mac says, coming out of the backroom.

“That I twisted my ankle!” Dennis shouts, before anyone else can say anything, and Mac frowns.

“Were you carrying things again?”

“Yes,” Dennis says, slumping dramatically over onto the bar. “I know it was a mistake, but I asked Charlie, and he was busy with his toe cheese, and then Dee tried to trick me.”

“Dee!” Mac says.

I hate you, you piece of shit, she mouths at him. I hope you trip and break your dick. I can’t believe we’re related.

“She was so manipulative,” Dennis says. “I was afraid to say no to her.” He turns his head so that Mac can’t see and mouths, Eat shit and die, bitch!

“You can’t work with a twisted ankle!” Mac says. “You’re already on your feet all day, and you know I worry about that. What if you tear a ligament? What if you tear a ligament and then fall down the stairs? What if you tear a ligament and then fall down the stairs, landing at precisely the wrong angle and breaking your neck? What if you tear a ligament and fall down the stairs and break your neck and nobody knows where you are, because everyone is always trying to trick you into doing their work for them, so I don’t find you until three days later when the rats have eaten your lips and eyelids and all the blood pooling in your brain has made your head swell up to the size of a watermelon? We have to get you home.” He comes around the bar and puts his arm around Dennis’ waist. “Put your arm around my shoulder. Can you walk? Should I carry you? I can carry you, if you want. I won’t drop you this time. I’ve been working on that.”

“I think I can walk,” Dennis says. “I want to try. I want to carry my own weight.” He winks at Dee.

“The two of you really deserve each other,” she says. “Also, seriously? You aren’t even going to refill my whiskey?”

“You can refill your own whiskey, you wizened crone,” Mac says.

“Yes,” Dennis says, leaning most of his weight on Mac just to see how it feels. Very self-indulgent, is the answer. He likes it. “Get your own drink, you old bat.”

“We’re the same age!” she squawks.

“I’ll get you a drink,” Charlie says, wiping his toe-cheese-covered fingers on his shirt.

“Oh no,” she says, “Please don’t—”

Outside it’s summer-gorgeous, just warm enough that Dennis wishes he’d worn a lighter shirt and just sunny enough that he has to squint. The pavement is starting to pick up heat, and in a month or two it’ll be hot enough to cook an egg on, so long as you like your eggs runny and full of grit and intestinal parasites. The sky is nothing special — just washed-out worn-denim blue — but hell if it isn’t easy on the eyes. It’s also easy, though not so long ago it wouldn’t have been, for Dennis to settle into the passenger seat and pass Mac the keys. It’s easier to roll the Range Rover’s windows down than it is to wait for the air conditioner to kick in. A lot of things have been coming to Dennis more easily lately than they once did. A lot of other things are more difficult. He’s starting to think that this is what change feels like: good, bad, who knows? Mostly, it’s just different. He hasn’t seen Frank in a while, but the bar hasn’t gone under, so presumably he’s still alive. He gets the sense that Charlie and Dee are treading a little carefully when it comes to the subject. If he asked Mac, he would probably get an honest answer, but he hasn’t — not yet. It feels too hard, and not in the way where it feels like he might get something out of it anyway. He might, in a few weeks, when it doesn’t feel quite so much like something he doesn’t want to know. Right now, what Dennis wants to do is turn on the radio and exist in the moment or whatever. “Oh shit,” Mac says. “I love this song, man.”

“Everyone loves this song,” Dennis says. “It’s Elton John.”

“Actually, I’m pretty sure most people don’t know who that is,” Mac says, and Dennis doesn’t have the heart to correct him. He just nods and makes a face out the window, where it won’t hurt Mac’s feelings, and doesn’t wait for Mac to start singing along: God is dead and the War’s begun. It’s a good day, he decides. He doesn’t have to stay at work. He’ll probably spend the rest of the afternoon on the sofa with his foot up, being ineptly fussed over, watching Predator for the eight thousandth time. Mac is singing too — and he shall be a good man — and so what if it isn’t perfect? So what if sometimes it’s still awkward, if sometimes Mac touches Dennis and he can’t keep himself from flinching away, if sometimes he prefers to turn the lights off before he gets undressed, if he can’t always sleep when he can feel Mac’s breath on the back of his neck. It’s better than it used to be. The dildo bike lives in the closet, for the most part, and sometimes Dennis pushes the coats out of the way so he can sneak a peek, and every time so far he’s shuffled them back into place, spacing the hangers so there’s no sign that anyone ever moved them, and carefully closed the door again.

Once, Mac had said, “So do you want to talk about — that?” And Dennis had shaken his head, because the answer was yes but it was also no and not yet and I don’t know how to. He knows that at some point he'll have to figure it out, how to explain why he has so many hangups, and what they have to do with the fact that he can’t drink tequila without throwing himself at bad ideas in order to get hurt, and what that has to do with the fact that he still has trouble saying that he’s gay, sometimes — not because it isn’t true, but because of the shape the word takes up in his mouth — and why he’s so weird about letting go of control when they’re having sex. Not talking about it isn’t a long-term solution, Dennis knows; there’s no outrunning that particular boulder, not with all the hats and bullwhips in the world, but just for now, he wants to pretend it isn’t rumbling right behind him. He wants to enjoy things being easy while he can, and one day he’ll have to turn around and face it, but maybe not just yet. Dennis thinks he’ll know, when the time is right. He’ll be able to tell.

A week ago, after Charlie had installed their bidet, a process that had somehow involved both a hacksaw and a hammer — “What the fuck do you need a hammer for?” Dennis said, but passed both tools to him anyway — he had wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and nodded.

“I bet you could have a lot of fun with that thing,” he said, and Dennis had prodded him in the side with his foot before he could elaborate

“Out,” he said. “Take your cheese and go.”

“All right,” Charlie said, and Dennis had followed him out into the dining room. “Whoa, Velveeta? You guys didn’t have to get all fancy! It’s just a little plumbing.”

And later that day, after spending a suspicious amount of time allegedly shitting, Mac had emerged from the bathroom looking slightly sheepish.

“I feel very clean,” he said, tugging at the seat of his pants.

“How nice for you,” Dennis said, not looking up from his phone.

“You know, while Charlie was hammering away, I did kind of wonder how it would work,” Mac said. “Like, I didn’t know if I was going to need to aim it or what. I mean, everyone’s butthole is different.”

“Oh, sure,” Dennis said faintly.

“But you know what? I don’t know why I expected anything else,” Mac said. “It felt exactly the way I thought it would.”

“Can we talk about anything else?” Dennis had said, finally putting his phone down. “Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate your newfound interest in personal hygiene, but I can’t express how much I don’t need to know all of this.”

“Oh, sure,” Mac said, and he had dropped the subject, but Dennis hadn’t been able to quite so easily. As they pull up to their building, he thinks, What if?

“Let me carry you up the stairs,” Mac says, and Dennis doesn’t say no. There’s a dicey moment on the second-floor landing when he briefly fears for both of their lives, but they make it through unscathed, and Mac props him up against the wall while he fumbles with his keys.

“I can get that,” Dennis says, and as he unlocks the door, Mac slips his hand into Dennis’ back pocket.

“Okay,” he says, and he’s very close and warm, which makes Dennis feels known and lightly degraded and sexily patronized. He can hear Mac’s smirk.

“Don’t go getting any ideas,” he says. “Remember, I’m injured.”

“I can work with that,” Mac says, and Dennis laughs.

“All right,” he says, and opens the door. “Maybe later.”

Mac grins. “I can wait.”

“Great,” Dennis says, and then he thinks, Why not? “Hey, can you help me get to the bathroom?”

It’s not a big deal, he tells himself. It’s just about hygiene. No big deal, no stakes: If he doesn’t like it, he never has to say anything. He can take it to his grave. It can just be Mac’s bidet and this doesn’t have to be a big thing; it doesn’t have to be about seeing whether he likes it; it doesn’t have to mean anything.

He locks the bathroom door behind him anyway.

What is he so scared of, anyway? That he’ll like it? That he can’t just write the whole endeavor off forever? Would that really be such a bad thing? It’s just a bidet. Plenty of people use them and don’t find anything erotic about it. This isn’t some kind of gay Rubicon or whatever. It’s just the babiest of baby steps, nothing worth writing home about, nothing to throw a parade about, nothing that matters to anyone except him.

Dennis undoes his belt and unzips his pants and shoves them down his thighs and sits down.

Did the crew of Apollo 11 feel like this before liftoff? he wonders, and then, Is it offensive to compare this to such a monumental human achievement?

Who cares, he decides. Just press the button, Dennis: What do you have to lose? What’s the point of change if it doesn’t scare you, if it doesn’t reach into your chest and take you by the heart and squeeze, if it doesn’t make you ask yourself the hard questions and do the necessary things you’ve been putting off for years and take the risks you once thought would destroy you? He’s forty-four years old, for Christ’s sake, and he doesn’t want to waste another second of his life being afraid. He doesn’t want to spend another moment wondering what could have been if only he had been braver.

“You can do it, Dennis,” he says out loud, under his breath. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

He presses the button.

The world moves.