Archive of Our Own ^beta

It takes about six hours for Logan to respond.

But that’s not exactly how it starts.

*

Jess, dividing her attention between muttering into her phone and trying to shield Kendall with her body, successfully gets them out of the congested press room in record time, while Greg, looking winded and clutching his empty folder, falls into step on his other side. It’s a little like having Muppets for bodyguards, but Kendall’s glad for them, the only two people in his orbit who (probably) haven’t started plotting his untimely demise.

He inhales, staring straight ahead. “You okay, man?”

“Um,” Greg says, and then he says it three more times before Kendall claps him on the arm, like resetting an old Playstation. “Are we even, like, allowed to leave? Do we have to, um, talk to, or, uh, have a dialogue with, like, the police? Or something?”

“We’re moving,” Kendall says. “We’re just gonna keep moving.”

He’s never been great at the “walk tall” thing — his posture has always pretty much sucked — but right now, his feet are more confident than the rest of him, carrying him through the crowd, parting the seas. (If you strut around like your dick is huge and you have a fuckton of money in the bank, Stewy told him once, you can basically get anywhere, to which Kendall had quipped, Who said that? Plato?)

There’s a car waiting for them when they make it outside, and although they have to take about fourteen detours just to lose the string of news vans tailing them, it gives them time to come up with a game plan: Attempting to go home would be suicide, and there’s not exactly anyone he can call, which is how Kendall finds himself being ushered through the back entrance of the Carlyle. Up in the penthouse, he makes himself a drink and, ignoring urging from Jess to cut himself off from communication, turns on his phone.

He can’t say why he’d been expecting any different, but — holy shit. Holy shit, it’s like walking directly into the eye of the fucking shit storm.

There are the tweets (his stony-faced expression has already been memed to hell, which is probably bothering Connor more than his literal betrayal of their father), and the pseudo-intellectual TikToks explaining what his “bomb” means for “the future of media.” Somehow, there are already think pieces (The Atlantic’s top story: The Dismantling of Waystar Royco’s Flailing Empire), and the documents are splashed across the homepages of the Times and the Post and the Journal. His press conference had even aired in time for Wendy Williams to comment on her show, sipping from a steaming mug and prompting her audience, Clap if you know who Kendall Roy is, to scattered applause.

He ventures into his texts last. He’d had the foresight to mute his notifications, but it’s done nothing to curb the incessant tidal wave of messages (Roman, Shiv, Roman, Shiv, Rava, Connor, Roman, Karolina, Roman, Naomi, Naomi, Roman; nothing, of course, from his dad), which he skims over without really absorbing, the words and exclamation points and question marks blurring on the screen until they no longer resemble anything legible. The prevailing question seems to be, from members of his family to members of the media to members of the Reddit community who go by aliases like “DildoFaggins”: What the fuck just happened?

The answer is both simpler and more complicated than he would ever actually be able to explain. He doesn’t want to talk, anyway. He wants a shower. He wants a beer. He wants to sleep for eight weeks. He wants to get so belligerently high he forgets the events of the past twenty-four to seventy-two hours. He wants—

“Stewy’s on the phone.”

He looks up at Greg, dazed. Says, dumbly, “Stewy?”

“Yeah, your friend? Well, I guess I don’t know exactly what he is to you, but it seems safe to assume a, um, friendship — uh, your — Stewy, he’s on the phone,” Greg says, shifting from foot to foot. He’s been pacing the length of the suite since they got in, moving in and out of different areas at random, like an anxious ghost. “He told me that if I didn’t let him speak to you he’d keep calling. He also said he has a lot of practice being, um, ‘professionally annoying’?”

Someday, when Kendall looks back on this whole ordeal, it will always seem right that the first thing Stewy barked in his ear, the first time Kendall heard his voice after that disastrous aborted meeting on Paxos, after he killed his dad on live TV, sounding incredulous and furious and maybe a little thrilled, was, “Are you on fucking crack cocaine, bro?”

“Uh,” Kendall says. “Like. Yeah, dude.”

“When you saw me, you knew you were going to pull this shit?”

“I did not know,” Kendall says. He tips his head back against the cushion, cradling Greg’s phone between his ear and shoulder. “Would you believe me if I told you I didn’t know until, like, three hours before I did it?”

“I would not,” Stewy says. “I wouldn’t believe anything you told me right now. If you said, ‘Hey, Stew, water’s wet,’ I’d probably give it a Goog, just to be sure.”

Kendall grins. “Hey, Stew, water’s wet.”

“You’re crazy,” Stewy says. “Understand that. I’m surprised I got you on the phone at all, I thought you would’ve been skinned alive by now.”

Kendall shrugs. “I’m in hiding. So to speak. How’d you get Greg’s number?”

“I have everyone’s number,” Stewy says, scoffing. “And you weren’t answering my calls. Fuck, man, what’s going on? Is this some kind of manic tirade? Are you spinning out?”

“I have some shaking,” Kendall admits with a glance down at his free hand, which is trembling violently. He doesn’t know if it had just started or if he’d gone on live TV quivering like an elderly chihuahua. He felt pretty steady up there, but he’d felt that way tons of times in the past, only to be informed after the fact (often by Roman) that he’d made a complete ass of himself. “But I don’t think I’m manic. I don’t feel manic. I’d know if I was manic.”

“Oh, you would? Really? Because the last time I saw you, you were doing your freaky reanimated corpse routine and threatening to rip my dick out through my taint or whatever, remember that?” Stewy releases a heavy-sounding breath, right into the speaker. “Well. Congrats on your spinal growth, man. It usually doesn’t take forty years for those to develop but you’ve always been great at doing the exact opposite of what a normal person should do. And thanks, I guess, for handing me the keys to your dynasty. I promise I won’t redecorate the place too much.”

Kendall figures he could say something to that, or he could say what he wants to, and the second option actually sounds way more beneficial to him in the present, so he sinks down in his seat and asks, low-voiced, “Where are you right now?”

Stewy quiets for a moment. “I’m sitting in traffic. On the FDR.”

Kendall’s pulse quickens, just a tick. “You’re in New York?”

“I’m in New York,” Stewy confirms, cagey.

“Uh-huh. Since when?”

“About forty-five minutes ago. There was a change of plans, vacation-wise.”

“Uh-huh,” Kendall says again. For a long stretch, neither of them says anything. He wonders if Stewy can hear Greg’s footsteps, or the sirens outside. He wonders how long it’d taken Stewy to sense bullshit. He wonders what Stewy is wearing. He rests his shaky hand on his stomach, fingers curling between the buttons of his shirt, and shoots his shot: “Wanna come pick me up?”

“What is this, high school? You wanna go to the mall, too?” But it lacks the necessary bite and arrives about three seconds too late to come off as careless as he knows Stewy wants it to. “Are you at home?”

“Are you insane? I’m at the Carlyle,” Kendall says. “I’ve, uh, been instructed not to leave unless it’s, like, under the cover of the night. Real Sound of Music shit.”

Stewy says, borderline playful, “You’re such a fucking rebel, aren’t you? Going rogue all over the place.” 

“That’s right,” Kendall says. “Fall in line, motherfucker.”

*

It actually starts like this:

When Kendall gets in the car, Stewy’s staring at his phone, legs crossed daintily, one bare ankle bouncing idly in the air. He has on dark pants and shiny, pointed loafers and he only acknowledges Kendall’s presence to grumble, “Took you long enough.”

“Yeah, I got busted on my way out,” Kendall says.

(“Dude, Jess told me not to let you go anywhere,” Greg said, trailing a few steps behind. “And she seems, you know, slight, but, like, stern?”

Kendall slipped his sunglasses on. “It’s fine, man, you’re not actually my babysitter.”

“But, I mean—”

“I’ll be back later,” Kendall lied. He fished around in his jacket pocket until he produced his vape, which he tossed to Greg. “Get stoned, relax a little, don’t answer any calls.”

“Okay, hey, thanks, Ken, but seriously, I don’t think—”

“Later, bud.”) 

“Settle down, bad boy, you’re gonna hurt yourself,” Stewy says, finally casting him a sidelong glance from under his lashes. “Am I technically harboring a fugitive?”

Kendall’s throat tightens. He swallows around it, folds his hands in his lap. “Not yet. Not until they sort through all the documents.”

Stewy looks bewildered. “Where’d you even get those?”

“That was all Greg.”

“Right, the Slender Man-looking fuck I talked to on the phone. Does he always sound like he’s five seconds away from bursting into tears?”

“I think that’s just your general effect on people,” Kendall says. He smiles thinly. “So, good flight? You get to relax a lot?”

Stewy rolls his eyes. He looks disturbingly fresh for someone who’d just spent ten hours in the air, like he’d holed up in the bathroom icing his under eyes and changing into a clean shirt and messing with his hair until every strand was combed into place. Which, realistically, he probably had.

They’re halfway to Stewy’s place in Chelsea when he speaks again, rousing Kendall from where he’s been nodding his head idly to the radio and staring out the window. “Page Six got your girlfriend leaving your Julius Caesar dress rehearsal early, you know.”

And it takes Kendall a few seconds to locate the meaning of the words, to figure out what creatively cunty remark Stewy’s lobbing at him this time, but when he does, he blinks in slow disbelief. “Are you acting like you don’t, what, know who Naomi is? Is that for real what’s happening, dude?” 

“I know of her,” Stewy says, flicking an imaginary piece of lint off his jacket, some collarless monstrosity he’s actually pulling off. “Logan sent her away on the speedboat? And she actually went? Amateur.”

(Here’s a story: The summer after graduating high school, Kendall talked Stewy into ditching his own family vacation to join the Roys on the yacht for a week. He’d spent days begging after finding out Connor was bringing the girl he was dating and Shiv had some CEO’s son tagging along—

“Bro, you get the implication here,” Stewy said.

It stopped Kendall in his tracks, genuinely puzzling him. “No. Wait. What’s the implication?”

—only for his dad to pitch a fit on the first night when he caught Kendall, Stewy, Shiv, and Roman smoking on the deck after everyone else had gone to bed. Stewy centered himself in the blinding spotlight of Logan’s rage with an air of nonchalance and a handful of cuttingly faux-polite with all due respect, sirs, and it ended with Logan begrudgingly allowing him to stay. The incident became something like lore among siblings, spoken about with reluctant reverence: Remember the time Stewy out-Dad-ed Dad?)

I told her to leave, Kendall wants to say, or she was cool about it, actually, or like I haven’t seen the dead-eyed twinks you date in Page Six a million fucking times — anything, any attempt to defend himself, but instead all he’s able to manage is a flat, “She’s not my girlfriend,” which sounds horrible, and then, “Or, I mean, if she was, she’s, uh, definitely not now,” which sounds worse.

“She’s not your girlfriend,” Stewy says, nodding. And Kendall realizes he dug his own grave with this one, but before he can react, Stewy decides he’s done paying attention, returning to his phone like they hadn’t spoken at all. 

Anyway. Yeah. That’s how it starts.

*

When the news breaks, Kendall’s first thought is that he should’ve made sure his dad’s pulse had stopped before walking away from the body. His second thought is that he’s going to puke, and he’s never really been a puker, not even in his darkest, drunkest moments, so the nausea is sort of a new sensation, an unprecedented reaction to an unprecedented situation. 

They’d taken the elevator up to Stewy’s in relative silence, and Kendall didn’t even notice he was leaning into him until their hands brushed, and when he looked up he did so just in time to catch the reflection of Stewy’s smirk on the elevator’s mirrored walls before he ducked his head. Inside, they lingered in the entryway, just sort of existing near each other, Kendall feigning curiosity in the ugly contemporary art on the walls (the whole apartment is a palatial nightmare with its muted color palette and too-modern furniture) while Stewy created a lengthy production out of removing his shoes. They circled each other warily, two wounded, mangy lions in a den, until Stewy sighed and said, “Okay, well, if we’re going to do whatever this is for the rest of the night, I’m at least making myself comfortable,” and they’d been shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the TV since.

That’s what they’re doing when shit hits the fan: stretched out on the couch watching the Knicks lose their fourth game in a row, commiserating about the abysmal score, like absolutely nothing else in the world is happening. Like they’re just two guys.

If he’d known how catastrophically everything was about to come crashing down, he probably would’ve tried to appreciate the moment a little more.

“Oh, fuck,” Stewy says. “Oh, fuck me.” When Kendall doesn’t deem that worthy of a response, Stewy shoves him. “Hey, asshole,” he says, pushing his phone into Kendall’s hands, which is open on a TMZ article with a screaming headline that takes up at least half the screen: Exclusive: Inside Kendall Roy’s Decades-Long DRUG-FUELED AFFAIR… With Potential Waystar Buyer Stewy Hosseini. The lead photo is a blurry, zoomed-in shot of Kendall in front of the Carlyle, recognizable even behind his nondescript baseball hat and glasses, climbing into Stewy’s car.

“What the fuck,” Kendall breathes.

“What the fuck,” Stewy agrees, snatching the phone back. There’s a brief scuffle when Kendall, not through reading the story, bats at his hands, and Stewy pushes his face away, and Kendall buries an elbow in his side, and Stewy snaps, “Fucking get your own, bro,” but it ends with Kendall leaning over his shoulder as he scrolls through the article, up and down and back up again.

The piece alleges, among other things, that Kendall Roy, son of Logan, and Stewy Hosseini, the fly that’s spent the past year buzzing in the proverbial ear of Waystar Royco, have been engaged in a deep, passionate, secret affair since attending Harvard together in the early 2000s. It alleges that Kendall Roy and Stewy Hosseini have maintained their deep, passionate, secret affair through rehab stays and a marriage and an attempted hostile takeover. It alleges that Kendall Roy brought Stewy Hosseini onto Waystar’s board as part of his plan to seize the company from his ailing father, that Kendall Roy spent months saving face in front of his family while feeding information to Stewy Hosseini, that Kendall Roy put the final nail in the betrayal coffin with his televised patricide, which he’d planned as the final step in his plan to help Stewy Hosseini and Sandy Furness gain control. It alleges that Kendall Roy is an unstable cokehead who can’t be trusted. It alleges, quite convincingly, that Kendall Roy is fucking finished.

(And it doesn’t matter how off the timeline is, or that he and Stewy first touched dicks in high school, or that they’d barely spoken in months, or that barely forty-eight hours had passed since he’d been wilting at his dad’s elbow, avoiding Stewy’s eyes from across the table. 

No, facts don’t actually matter at all. Kendall knows that good and well.)

His own phone is tucked away in his jacket pocket and forgotten somewhere near the front door, but it takes all of five minutes after the story’s publication for Stewy’s, which had already been buzzing with a steady influx of messages, to begin lighting up unrelentingly. They look at each other for a long, tense beat, broken only when Kendall asks, in a strangled voice, “Can we do drugs?”

“Fuck yeah,” Stewy says, looking relieved.

*

They snort three lines each in quick succession, and the high he gets is nothing like the languidly horny one he’d experienced on the yacht with Naomi before his dad’s helicopter touched down. This feels like more of a necessity, just enough to dim the harsh panic coursing through him, right down to his toes. It doesn’t quite straighten him out, but it gives him enough clarity to gather himself, to acknowledge each all-consuming feeling as it hits, weighty as a different stage of grief before tapering off into hollow nothingness. It helps him remember to breathe as he watches Stewy alternate between sitting and standing, getting to his feet and taking a few steps forward only to collapse on the couch again, which goes on for a few dizzying minutes before he turns to Kendall, deceptively relaxed. “Okay, I have thoughts.”

“Right,” Kendall mutters. “What’s your take?” The question feels so familiar in his mouth, spoken in the presence of this person: What’s your take, he’s asked Stewy one thousand times in one thousand conference rooms, one thousand sparsely populated cafes, one thousand bedrooms as they redid their belts.

“We can ignore it,” Stewy says, pinching his lower lip between his teeth, nodding to himself as if to confirm his own idea. “We should ignore it. The tabloids are gonna do their thing, your virulent homophobe of a dad will get his invitation to Ellen’s birthday party rescinded, one of those fucking documents is gonna reveal that, I don’t know, Connor’s the Zodiac Killer, and everyone’ll forget about it in three days. It’s going to wear itself out, so it’s better to just not give it the dignity of a response.”

Kendall bristles. At the nonchalance, the ease with which Stewy thinks he can determine for the both of them that something that very much matters, in fact, does not. “Yeah, uh, well, maybe that’s how it is for you. But I’m not, like… I mean, you know?” Off the raised eyebrow Stewy aims in his direction, Kendall hurriedly tacks on, “Like, I’m cool with, you know — I’m obviously cool with gay shit, it’s just not even, uh, accurate.”

“You’re cool with gay shit,” Stewy says dully. His gaze is hawkish, inescapable. “Sure.”

Not for the first time in his life, Kendall really, legitimately hates him. “I’m fucking serious.”

“I know you’re fucking serious, bro. I know you think you’re being completely serious” —when Kendall tries to protest, Stewy just gets louder— “but you know as well as I do that this is just a last-ditch attempt at a distraction. It’s the mean girl telling everyone at school that the bitch who stole her boyfriend is anorexic. It’s fucking… dribble, it’s pathetic.” Stewy throws himself back against the couch cushions and adds, in a tone like he thinks what he’s saying is going to help, “No one important to this whole thing gives a shit about whose cock you’ve had in your mouth.”

“My dad gives a shit,” Kendall says before he can stop himself, and Stewy’s reaction, a groan followed by a withering frown followed by another, longer groan, is enough to make Kendall shrink into himself, bruised. 

“This is embarrassing,” Stewy says, sounding so righteously angry, so disappointed in that way he’s all too frequently disappointed in Kendall. “Are you serious? After the shit you pulled today, you’re still — man, you’re unbelievable.”

Kendall says nothing. He feels… he feels, period, which is a problem, because there’s an edge to Stewy’s voice, a tone almost like a challenge, a tone that has some of his faulty circuitry reluctantly sparking to life. That’s the thing about Stewy, he’s never been afraid to stick his hands into the mess of broken wires that comprise Kendall’s internal make up and touch a bunch of them together until he gets the reaction he’s looking for. He’s nothing if not a tenacious fucker.

Kendall clenches and unclenches his jaw. He makes a decision. He says, “Fine, fuck you, so let’s not ignore it.”

Stewy wrinkles his nose. “That means nothing. What? What are you talking about?”

Kendall inhales. “I’m saying we lean the fuck in.” The word he wants to say next gets stuck in the back of his throat like a bad cough. He says, as if he’s being held at gunpoint, “Date. Like, for the cameras. Play happy fuckin’ couple, the whole thing. Call my dad’s bluff, rub it in his face, however you want to think of it.”

“Okay,” Stewy says slowly, like he’s speaking to someone suffering from head trauma. “So. Few things. I hear you, I see you. Glad you’re sharing, no such thing as a bad idea. I’m kidding, there definitely is. Most of your ideas are pretty bad, and this one fucking reeks of mania. Are you good, dude?”

Kendall waves him off. “Bro, he leaked this because he thinks the, uh, shame I have about this, us, whatever, is bigger than anything else.” (He’s not entirely convinced that isn’t true, but it seems to go unsaid.) “This was a warning. Now he only has one thing left to hold over me and I don’t, I mean, I just don’t think he would implicate himself any further.” Off Stewy’s narrowed eyes, Kendall implores, “What?”

“Nothing,” Stewy says. “You ever just have one of those moments where you realize you’re talking to, like, an unwell person?” He shakes his head, bemused. “I’m sorry to say this, man, for real, but you’re fucking radioactive right now. Aligning myself with you, especially like that, will absolutely backfire in negative three seconds. I’ve done enough Roy family circuses for one lifetime.”

Kendall’s gaping emotional wound smarts at that, just like it always does when Stewy hits him with the no-bullshit truth. He scratches at the back of his head, pushing his fingers through the short strands of hair, trying not to rip them out in an act of pure frustration.

“Look,” he says, his voice gruff. “I blew up the house with my whole family inside and then my dad used his dying breath to shoot me in the leg. It’s over, and we could spin it in a way that makes you look like the good guy, which is a fucking feat considering that, uh, you’re you.” Stewy makes a face, insulted. “You’re trying to take over his company. I just significantly helped your chances of making that a reality, which means he wants to ruin you only, like, marginally less bad than he wants to ruin me.”

Stewy looks at him, appraising. “You’re on a lifelong mission to make me regret giving you coke, aren’t you?”

“Can you listen to me? It’ll never end if we ignore it,” Kendall says. He curls his hands tightly around his knees, trying to ground himself. “He’ll just keep fucking pushing, and eventually it’ll be too late for us to get ahead of it.” A beat. Then, “Also, I trust you. I trust you with this.”

“That’s a you problem,” Stewy shoots back. He tilts his head infuriatingly. “Ken, I’m not a pawn in your weird-ass game of Get Back At Daddy. I don’t play sucker for anyone.”

“Yeah, no, uh, I know that,” Kendall replies. He could use another bump, but it doesn’t seem like the right time to ask. “But, like. So?”

“So,” Stewy mocks. He licks his lips, brows furrowed. “The thing he has on you, it’s the thing? Like, the thing?” Off Kendall’s nod, he asks, “And how the fuck are you this sure he won’t use it?”

“He won’t. I know he won’t.”

Stewy sighs. “Dude, this is the whole problem with you. He looks you in the eye while he stabs you in the chest and you’re still like, ‘Okay, uh, wow, I wonder who put this knife in me.’ At this point, you can’t believe he’s above anything.”

“He won’t use it,” Kendall repeats, firm. It occurs to him, only after he’s said it, that he actually believes what he’s saying.

“No? Did he tell you that while he was face-fucking you?”

Stewy stares at him for a few excruciating seconds. Kendall balks; he can barely look at him. There’s that saying about desperation making men fearless, which is something he’s never personally found to be true.

“I just think if you—”

“No,” Stewy cuts him off curtly, patting Kendall’s thigh as he gets to his feet. “Stop having thoughts. I’m going to make a few calls, you should take a nap. Maybe fall into a little coma.” Adds, halfway out of the room, “You look like shit, bro.”

There’s a loud, definitive click of a door, and that, it seems, is that. It’s not what he wanted to hear, certainly less than ideal, but Stewy’s letting him stay. Even with all the posturing, he hasn’t thrown Kendall out on his ass. That has to count for something.

For lack of anything else to do, he goes back to the TV, unmuting the post-game. The Knicks have long since lost, and Stephen A. Smith is on ESPN shaking his head in theatrical dismay, crowing that tonight was an unmitigated disaster! For the New York Knicks and for all of us!

He ends up nodding off right there, head against the armrest, letting an uneasy, dreamless sleep drag him under. He has no concept of how long he’s out for, but when he comes to some time later, Stewy is sitting at the other end of the couch, staring ahead with a faraway expression, face aglow in the bluish light of the TV. It’s late enough that it’s all just highlights now, white noise droning on for the sake of droning on. Kendall yawns, nudging Stewy’s leg with his foot.

“If we’re doing this thing,” Stewy says, as if they’d been in the middle of a discussion, “you understand that you finally have to tell me what the hell happened.”

A warm coil snakes its way around Kendall’s insides. “You’re saying yes? You wanna do it?”

“Oh my god, with the fucking need for validation, what’s wrong with you?”

But Kendall’s done listening, too busy pushing himself up, holding Stewy’s eye as he inches closer. Stewy, wearing a deep frown, parts his legs almost involuntarily, like it’s just his body’s natural reaction to having Kendall nearby. It’s encouraging, spurring Kendall to move until he’s seated in Stewy’s lap, knees bracketing his thighs, their stomachs pressed flush through their shirts, the line of him solid and searingly hot — Stewy always runs so hot, fucking human furnace. He’s missed this.

“Plausible deniability, bitch,” Kendall murmurs, swallowing up Stewy’s aggrieved sigh with a kiss.

*

Jess doesn’t raise a single question when Kendall calls to ask her to get him a dinner reservation at a nightmarishly trendy French restaurant downtown, the type of place one goes when one wants to be seen, which is something Stewy, a person who is often trying to be seen, reminded him of that morning over breakfast. “Of course,” is all she says, and ten minutes later the confirmation pops up in his inbox. At noon on the dot, she crosses the threshold into Stewy’s apartment, armed with five suits, an overstuffed duffel bag, and an iPhone fresh out of the box.

“New number,” she explains. “Just in case.”

Kendall nods, peering into the bag. Also over breakfast, Stewy proposed, off-handedly, like it’d only just occurred to him, that the best course of action was for Kendall to just — “Stay here for a while, dude,” and then, like an afterthought, “It’ll look more believable,” which was difficult to argue with. He’d spoken to Jess right after that half-conversation where Kendall was pretty sure he’d agreed, in so many words, to move in with Stewy, and gave her essentially zero instructions as to what he wanted from home — uh, I don’t know, I guess, like, my laptop? — but she’d packed well, bringing him clean shirts and a toothbrush and all the necessary chargers. 

“My place is a war zone, I’m guessing?”

“It’s like one of those New York Times photos of Florida after a hurricane,” she says. “The whole block’s a mess. Your neighbors are… not thrilled.”

They both look up when Stewy emerges from his office in a hoodie and underwear, phone to his ear. “Look, it’s obvious to anyone that Logan is scrambling right now,” he’s saying, “and he’s looking for anything to grab on to. I mean, I guess I should be flattered, right?” He lets out one of his irritating public laughs before pouring himself a cup of coffee, saluting Jess with gusto, and disappearing again. She watches him go, frowning slightly. (She’s never said so directly, but Kendall’s always gotten the distinct impression that she fucking hates Stewy.)

“We’re, uh, together, by the way,” Kendall says once he’s gone. The statement hangs between them like a particularly difficult riddle he wants her to unscramble. He sounds clinically insane. “Dating. That’s the story. In case anyone asks.”

Jess has the grace to not look alarmed. “Got it. I’ll tell Out Magazine no when they call.”

“Please,” Kendall says.

*

The photos come out the next morning. 

One of Sandy’s tabloids gets (“gets”) the exclusive and releases a flowery story in tandem, which somehow goes live with no more than the vaguest of allusions to Waystar or the press conference or Logan in general, though it is rife with “sources” affirming Kendall and Stewy’s vibrant, burning devotion to each other. Every picture is more ludicrous than the last: In one, they sip wine and poke coyly at each other’s hands across the table; in another, Stewy reaches over to steal a bite off Kendall’s plate. (What the cameras didn’t catch was Kendall’s muttered assurance of, “Bro, if you do that one more time I’m stabbing you with my fork.”) The shot of them leaving, in which Stewy’s hand can be seen tucked conspicuously in Kendall’s back pocket, goes implausibly viral for an afternoon.

(Sorry don’t cancel me but they’re kinda cute, one tweet reads, and a reply: not to ride for two billionaires but ia, and the reply to that: isn’t this the same guy who gutted the shit out of Vaulter lol???)

It’s surreal, even for someone like Kendall who’s had his every move covered by the press since he got caught doing coke at a Fashion Week after party in ‘03. Still, against all reason, their stunt does what it’s supposed to, and in a matter of hours, the “scandal” is forgotten — or buried in the Google search results, which is essentially the same thing — and replaced in the public consciousness by a triumphant love story. The lack of immediate response from the Waystar side tells Kendall all he needs to know.

“Yeah, Tom didn’t give me a lot, but from what he did say, they weren’t expecting you to do that,” Greg tells him at lunch, which is something they apparently do now, both because he’s one of about three people Kendall is actually speaking to and also because neither of them have much going on currently. It’s hard to lie low with Greg towering over everyone, so they end up in a lot of back rooms usually reserved for finance guys cheating on their wives.

Kendall takes a sip from his glass — too much soda, not enough vodka. “You’ve been talking to Tom?”

“It’s mostly, uh, him talking,” Greg says, wincing. “And by ‘talking,’ I mean yelling, you know, expletives. At me.”

“Is he saying anything else?”

Greg makes a wobbly so-so gesture with his hand. “I got it out of him that they’re not planning any other attacks, as it were, on you right now. He said something about ‘retreating,’ and then I think he realized he’d actually given me information? And then he, um, hung up.” He adds, quieter, “I don’t really know why he keeps calling if he’s just going to rush off the phone like that.”

Kendall grins, impressed as he always is when Greg does something a little under-handed, like watching a dog walk on its hind legs. He relays it to Stewy later over a pizza, a faux-casual Greg says they’re pretty fucking shocked right now. Stewy, busying himself with tearing off little pieces of his crust and popping them into his mouth slowly, which Kendall is fairly certain must be an indication of sociopathic behavior, arches an eyebrow.

“It’s okay, dude, you can admit you have a raging boner about it, I won’t tell anyone,” Stewy says.

“They backed down fast, is all.”

Stewy shrugs. “Isn’t that what you said they’d do?”

Kendall shrugs back.

He keeps thinking, lately, about the days after the vote, about rotting away in bed while his dad orchestrated public attacks on him with all the nonchalance of someone ordering a cup of coffee: It’s all part of the game, Logan told him, a comment that’d struck Kendall as ironic, maybe even deranged, at the time. He feels like he gets it now, like he’s spent his whole life reading the instruction manual upside-down and has only just flipped it right. It is a game, and they’d all been dealt the same shitty hand. Kendall had just been the first one to start playing like a cheater.

“Well, Sandy’s happy to have one of his rags cover our friendly homosexual outings whenever we want.” Stewy points a finger at him. “Direct quote.” He picks half-heartedly at the label on his beer bottle, leans back in his chair, eyeing Kendall thoughtfully. A piece of hair has fallen over his forehead, curling a little with the heat, no match for New York’s particular brand of suffocating humidity. “He’d talk to you, you know. About next steps, wherever you’re at. I mean, he’s way more focused on the fact that you Fredo’d your dad on live TV than the fact that we take it up the ass from each other sometimes.” He eats another piece of crust. “From a business stand-point, anyway. From a personal stand-point, he’s, like, five minutes from bribing us into making a sex tape.”

Kendall scratches his nose with a thumbnail. “You can’t Fredo your dad, you can only Fredo your brother.”

“Okay, well, you did very much also Fredo your brother.” Kendall has no reply to that, only a short, morose laugh. “You’re Fredo with, somehow, an even worse haircut. I’m just saying, man. You could think about it.”

“Sure,” Kendall says. “I could.”

Stewy smiles, a corrosive thing. “It’s nice when you completely bullshit me right to my face. You know I fucking live for that.”

Kendall huffs another half-laugh at that. He stretches his legs out under the table, freezing when they brush Stewy’s own. He doesn’t pull away, though, and neither does Stewy, settling against each other until their plates are cleared. It’s Stewy who moves first, pointedly not making eye contact as he heads toward the kitchen, the phantom pressure of his calf still warm on Kendall’s skin.

*

The thing about him and Stewy — well, there are a whole lot of things about him and Stewy.

*

Here’s one: Before this, before any of it, Stewy wasn’t explicitly out, whatever that even means, but he’s also never claimed to be in. Everyone’s heard the rumors, the stories about the Wall Street guys and the male models at the Met Gala, and, as the great lore went, that one pop star, the closet case: “He fucked like it, too,” Stewy quipped the day the blinds leaked, wearing a pleased little grin, the face of a man who loved being speculated about.

There were the guys from college, the ones who came long before gossip bloggers started giving a shit about Stewy, who live on only in Kendall’s memory. Not because they were such scintillating company, but because every time he and Stewy fought about the dumb shit they used to fight about, Stewy’s method of exacting revenge was to bring them to the parties he knew Kendall would be at, to station them right where he knew Kendall would see, to lecherously make out with them until he got what he wanted — and what he wanted, typically, was Kendall shoving him into a bathroom stall, fumbling clumsily with his shirt buttons as he slotted their legs together. Muttering, drunk and high and incandescently angry, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, all while Stewy laughed: Yeah, bro, that’s the idea.

All these years later, Kendall remains largely convinced that only part of it is done out of genuine attraction to the poor bastards. The other, he suspects, is the perverse joy of being the center of attention, of knowing he’s always at the forefront of someone’s mind, wondering but too afraid to ask. That’s just textbook Stewy.

Such as: Kendall’s wedding, where Stewy played the dutiful role of best man for all the pictures and, when the cameras weren’t pointed at him, paraded around with his date, a younger guy named Jason or Jake or something, who shook Kendall’s hand and smiled serenely when Stewy grabbed his ass on the dance floor. Later — naturally, inevitably — Jared or whoever was nowhere to be found behind the locked door of a hotel suite as Stewy’s head bobbed between Kendall’s thighs, one of Kendall’s hands fisted in Stewy’s hair, the other clamped over his mouth, the cold metal of his ring pressing into his lip. They didn’t speak for weeks after. 

Up until recently, it was the latest in a long line of things that have almost destroyed their friendship (a list that includes, but is not limited to: cocaine; vodka; three separate vacations; Kendall’s children; a 1998 Beastie Boys concert; Roman, several times) but never fully succeeded. Only one thing ever did, and well. Look where that had gotten them.

*

The shareholders formally request for the meeting to be pushed to the end of the month, citing the need for more time to review their options “in light of recent events.” On the same day, Kendall and Stewy decide to make out in public.

(“You don’t need to be Bennifer 2.0 or anything, but it can only help if you guys are seen presenting a united front,” was how Stewy’s publicist, Erica, a woman Kendall is not confident has a corporeal form since he’s only ever interacted with her via phone, explained it. She always spoke in one of those perennially relaxed timbres that reminded him of Karolina; he wondered if that was just a requirement of going into crisis management, if they all saw the same vocal coach or something.

“I think Bennifer is technically Bennifer 2.0,” Kendall said.

“Bennifer 3.0,” Stewy tried, feet propped up on his desk. He’d dragged Kendall out of bed for this, herding him into his office and pushing him down in the chair across from him like they were about to engage in some elaborate teacher-student roleplay.

“In any case,” Erica said. “People are responding well to you two, and it’s providing a decent distraction from your, um, revelations, Kendall. It’s actually… surprising.”

The end of her sentence — because everyone hates you both — seemed to go without saying.)

It’s unseasonably warm for early June on the day of their pap walk, the sun just about cooking the pavement under their feet, and it’s easy to focus on the stifling air instead of on the click of the cameras all around them. Less easy to ignore is Stewy’s voice in his ear, complaining about how sweaty Kendall’s palm is when he threads their fingers together.

They’re headed in the direction of the park, as if either of them are the kind of people who enjoy long strolls among the trees, but it seems to be doing what it’s supposed to; he doesn’t miss the way a small group of women eating brunch on the sidewalk pull out their phones as they round a corner.

“I haven’t just walked around like this since—” Kendall pauses; he has no clue. He checks surreptitiously over his shoulder to make sure his security detail is still trailing a few paces behind them.

Stewy sips from the iced coffee melting in his free hand. “Feels weird slumming it among your fellow man, huh?”

“A little,” Kendall admits. Their hips are sort of bumping together with every step, and he feels the sweat stains growing on his linen shirt every time they touch, which means they’ll probably be visible in the pictures. Maybe an intern can cut them out or something. He doesn’t know much about photo editing, but it can’t be too hard. “Why? How often are you out here slumming it?”

“That girl I was dating used to fucking love bar-hopping, dude,” Stewy says on a wistful sigh.

“Hey, wait, where… is she?” Kendall asks, her role in Stewy’s life occurring to him for literally the first time since he was last forced to make stilted conversation with her. To her credit, she’d been one of the smarter ones, always giving Kendall these unsettlingly measured looks as they talked about the weather or whatever. She’d always kind of made him squirm in a bad way. “Like. Have you talked to her?”

Stewy faces him and Kendall imagines he’s squinting in disbelief, but he can’t tell from behind his sunglasses. “We broke up, like, four months ago. You knew that. Don’t act like you didn’t know that.”

Kendall’s pretty sure he didn’t know that. He tries to remember what he’d been doing and where he’d been (both physically and mentally) four months ago, but he comes up empty. Nearly every memory he has of the past year revolves singularly around the looming presence of his dad, like he’s one of those horses with the blinders on. Even in the depths of his mind’s eye, it’s all just drugs and dread and Logan.

“Uh,” Kendall says.

“Oh my god,” Stewy says, disgusted.

“We weren’t exactly,” Kendall trails off, searching for the right words, “On amazing terms. Uh, then.”

“I knew about every fucking move you were making,” Stewy says, a huffy clip to his tone that betrays his carefully neutral expression. They wait at the crosswalk, watching the cars and bikes whizz by. “And not because I was interested.”

“Uh-huh,” Kendall mutters, rolling his eyes. “I knew about the important shit, right? I knew you were in Greece. That mattered.”

“I’m not doing the dick measuring thing with you right now, it’s too hot,” Stewy says.

He leads them across the street toward the park, past the families and the groups of confused tourists and the small band near the entrance playing an okay cover of an okay Billy Joel song. No one looks twice at them — not in Central Park on a Saturday, the ideal location for blending in, or for looking like you’re trying to blend in — but Kendall’s acutely aware they’re being seen, anyway.

“You knew I was in Greece because I have an excellent fucking Instagram, by the way,” Stewy says after a while. He sucks the final dredges of his coffee through the straw noisily, like he’s trying to be as obnoxious as humanly possible.

“Your Instagram is a virtual nipple ring museum,” Kendall says dryly.

“Proving my point even further,” Stewy says, stopping them right there in the middle of the walkway, surveying the perimeter as he hauls Kendall in with an arm around his shoulders. He raises his eyebrows expectantly and Kendall clues in, hands landing on Stewy’s hips. Their breath mingles wetly, and he stiffens at the sudden press of Stewy’s plastic cup to the back of his neck, chilly droplets of condensation sliding into his collar. “Relax, bro. Act like you’re crazy in fucking love with me for five seconds, will you?”

Kendall starts to respond but then Stewy’s kissing him and the thought completely exits his brain. There’s just a hint of demand to it, and Kendall leans into it because it feels like the thing to do, slumping forward, his whole chest deflating. He curls a fist into Stewy’s shirt (a demonstrably stupid tank-top Kendall had specifically told him not to wear), clutching at the gauzy material. One of Stewy’s hands slips down to rest against the small of his back, pulling him in closer.

When they pull apart, there’s a mean little grin on Stewy’s face. “Yeah, that should do it,” he says, leaving one more quick kiss on Kendall’s slack mouth before stepping away, hands tucked casually into his pockets. Kendall risks a glance down at himself, groaning at the sight of his whole front, soaking wet.

*

Gaze Upon These Images of Kendall Roy, America’s Sweatiest and Horniest Rich Guy, Kissing His Boyfriend in a Park

Gawker runs with that headline. Stewy laughs about it for ten fucking minutes.

*

Convincing Rava to let him see the kids is a whole goddamn production. It involves making a lot of promises — yes, he’ll work around their schedule; yes, he’ll finally look over the divorce paperwork that’s been sitting in his inbox for god only knows how long; yes, holy shit, he’ll be fucking sober; yes, yes, yes — and not putting up a fight when she insists on being there the whole time, which is how he finds himself sitting cross-legged in the living room of her new place in Yorkville, only partially keeping up as Iverson explains Minecraft to him.

“You can die in this?” Kendall rubs at the corners of his eyes, watching a pit of lava consume the screen.

“Duh,” says Sophie, who doesn’t give two shits about Minecraft but has been periodically holding out her own Switch to show Kendall the updates she’s making to her Animal Crossing island. “See, Daddy, this is what happens when you get stung by wasps.”

He looks at the fucked up face of Sophie’s little avatar and then to Rava, eyebrows raised. “Do you know about this? Are these games, like, good for them?”

Rava, who’d accepted a bloodless kiss to the cheek when Kendall walked in and has otherwise barely spoken, looks at him with a wry tilt to her mouth. She trills a short laugh and asks, “Really, Ken? Are the games good for them?”

Which — okay. Fine. Fair.

It takes another round of cajoling for her to get her to let him take them out for ice cream, but it’s easier with Sophie and Iverson there to beg on his behalf. (Seeing them in person after months of existing solely on the screen of his phone via sporadic FaceTimes he could barely remember had just about brought him to his knees, and he’d guiltily sworn to get them basically anything they wanted, a declaration they were taking quite literally.) They’re sent upstairs to change, which seems pointless as they’re both going to come home sticky, but his attempt at challenging it is met with nothing more than an impassive stare.

He and Rava are left alone in the kitchen, totally silent and stationed on opposite ends of the island, like the heads of warring crime families. It’s her who speaks first, arms folded over her chest and mouth pinched tightly, the universal body language signals for I am so fucking mad at you, you piece of shit, and like, yeah, get in line.

“I got a call from Shiv the other night,” she says, sounding reluctant. “She said you’ve been ignoring them since the press conference.”

He flattens his hands on the marble, clears his throat. He has been ignoring them, but fuck Shiv for ratting him out. “What’d you tell her?”

“I mean, the fact that she thought you’d be talking to me was funny,” she says, full of mirth. She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear, her eyes flitting away, toward the clock on the wall. It’s not like he was surprised to see how good she looks, but it definitely does feel like the last twist of the knife. “Otherwise, I didn’t say anything. I wouldn’t.”

He nods. Says, quiet, “Thank you.”

Rava frowns. “It’s not a me protecting you thing, it’s a me not wanting anyone in your family to think they can use me as a source for Kendall updates thing.” She glances up at the ceiling, like she can will the kids into the room. “She asked if I knew about Stewy. I told her no.”

Kendall swallows, heat tingling at the base of his neck. “Rav, listen, I—” His voice breaks off, mouth forming stupid, soundless shapes; he doesn’t know what he is.

She holds her hands up, shaking her head definitively. “I don’t care,” she tells him, and it makes him think of Stewy, of I’ve done enough Roy family circuses for one lifetime. The scene is, laughably, something of a sequel to the last time they’d gone through this whole song and dance: Kendall, fresh from rehab, trying to convince her he was worth sticking with, her telling him, I don’t want to see Stewy around here, I’m serious. He doesn’t give two shits about your recovery. It was, and still is, completely valid, but the fact of it, the actual core of the issue, is that Kendall’s never really given two shits about his recovery either.

“But for the record, between us,” she says, leveling him with a hard stare, “Of course I knew. You’re a lot of things, Ken, but you’ve never been fucking subtle.” He doesn’t have time to unpack that before Sophie skids into the room and wraps herself around him tightly. A second too late, he pats her shoulder with stuttering, unsure hands, and when he looks up to catch Rava’s eye, she’s already turned her back on him.

*

They keep going. They move forward.

Between them exists the shorthand of two people who have known each other since they were skinned knees on the playground age, which makes the rules of the arrangement straightforward enough to internalize. Reaching for Stewy when they’re outside, leaning into him at restaurants and bars and coffee shops — it gets easier every time until it just becomes second nature, like they really have been doing it like this their whole lives. The weight of Stewy’s arm around him isn’t foreign, but it carries new meaning now that it’s usually accompanied by a kiss to his temple, a soft murmur in his ear when a waiter stares at them for a second too long.

In the safety of Stewy’s apartment, they move around each other the way they always have: drifting apart and together again, over and over. Kendall has so many fucking habits, but Stewy will always be his oldest one, and falling back into him is as simple as another relapse.

He puts his shit in the guest room but spends most nights in Stewy’s bed; they get high and they get drunk and they get into little spats constantly, over what movies to watch and what music to play in the car and the names of mutual friends’ spouses (which, nine times out of ten, they’re both wrong about). In their downtime, they play Call of Duty to see who can kill who first, until the loser (usually Kendall) distracts the winner with a fuck on the couch. Dinner is almost always a photo op, but there are the rare occasions Stewy gets in after a long day of sucking the wrinkled dicks of Waystar shareholders and he’s so drained that they end up just standing at the counter and picking at the cold remnants of whatever takeout containers they recovered from the depths of the fridge, their hushed bullshitting echoing throughout Stewy’s ridiculous open floor plan.

And, yeah, there are those moments where he wakes up with Stewy snoring into some part of his anatomy, moments where he catches himself staring as Stewy stifles a yawn against his hand, hair loose and dressed disarmingly down in the worn joggers he lounges around in. It’s been a long time since Kendall’s seen him like this — even after sex, Stewy tends to be all business, on to the next thing before the cigarette can even be stubbed out — and now he bares witness to these details, these small oddities that make Stewy up, nearly every day. Even his blindingly white teeth, when he flashes them in a quick grin or barks out one of his ugly-sounding real laughs, seem less intimidating in low evening light. Kendall doesn’t know what to do with any of it, has no way of differentiating the things he feels in private from the things he does in public.

A therapist would probably have something to say about all of this, but he hasn’t been to see one of those since his last outpatient program was over. So. Whatever.

*

In mid-June, the FBI comes calling.

His lawyers — the non-Rava lawyers; he has lawyers for everything these days — advise him to cooperate, so he has Jess arrange the helicopter to D.C. early enough in the morning to hopefully avoid cameras, but he’s not convinced at least one member of his family hasn’t been tipped off. Aside from the odd three A.M. drunken rage email from Roman, their attempts at contact have largely petered off, the line in the sand officially drawn, but he’s not new here. He knows a person can never quite fall off Logan Roy’s radar as long as he wants them there.

“This is just like the time you got arrested on spring break,” Stewy says from where he’s sitting up in bed, smirking against a small mountain of pillows. There’s still a reddish indent on his cheek from where he’d fallen asleep on his hand the night before, mumbling protests of it’s fine, I’m comfortable, fuck off when Kendall tried to move him.

“I’m going voluntarily, Stew, I’m not being held,” Kendall says, doing up the last few buttons on his shirt. “I can’t believe you remember that.”

“You fully pissed on that lady’s lawn, dude. You couldn’t Men in Black that shit out of my brain, it was humiliating.” He adds, “For you.”

Kendall smooths his fingers over his collar. “And you bailed me out, so what does that make you?”

“Uh, it made me super annoyed, you totally ruined the rest of that trip with your” —he throws up air quotes— “‘alcohol poisoning.’” He stretches his arms over his head, groaning when something cracks. “Hey, I have dinner with Sandy tonight, but drinks after?”

Kendall nods his agreement as he goes to grab his watch from the bedside table, dropping an absent-minded kiss on Stewy’s bare shoulder while he’s there and then promptly pretending he didn’t just do that, hurrying out of the room without another word.

The questioning itself is relatively uneventful. This is something, miraculously, Kendall can do (“Performing normalcy,” as Roman had once put it), and it’s easier when he doesn’t have to flirt or be funny (“You’re never funny,” Stewy would probably say) or pretend to be anything at all, really. All he has to do is tell the truth, which he does, for at least the second time in recent memory.

It’s still a long day, and by the time he makes it back to Manhattan, the sun has set and the heat has broken for the night, a temporary respite. He takes off his jacket and rolls up his sleeves and finds Stewy at the bar at Scarpetta, drinking an Old Fashioned and scrolling through his phone. The restaurant’s doors are flung open in honor of the slight breeze in the air, and the place is surprisingly pretty dead, though it’s still the type of tightly packed, dimly lit spot that’s kind of bad for pictures. He decides to keep that grievance to himself, since Stewy bitches whenever Kendall dares to question his judgement and he’s too tired tonight. He ghosts a hand along the line of Stewy’s shoulders, sliding onto the stool beside him. “How many until I’m caught up?”

“I’ll let you know when you get there,” Stewy says, knocking back the rest of his drink and signaling for two more. “How’d it go? You’re here, which I guess means it wasn’t all a trap to haul you off to federal.”

“Watch how you talk to me, man, I’m a fucking whistleblower,” Kendall says, which earns him a champion eyeroll. The bartender sets new glasses down in front of them; Kendall taps his against Stewy’s before downing half of it in one big swallow. “Hard part was already over, this was just final touches. Wrapping the present, whatever.”

“Merry fucking Christmas indeed, Sir Logan,” Stewy says, laughing softly. “To be a fly on the wall when the old man gets questioned, holy shit.”

Kendall props his head up in his hand, leaning his elbow against the bar, conscious of how he’s angling himself toward Stewy. “Yeah, I don’t know what the vibe is over there right now. Greg said he heard Marcia, like, left my dad for real? They’re trying to keep it contained, at least until after the meeting, but who knows how that’ll work out.” Greg told him in this long-winded, roundabout way when they’d met up the day before — it was revealed to me, in so many words, that, um — and it had taken a few minutes for Kendall to drum up a response, a reaction that seemed appropriate. Weird, he’d muttered after a while, flagging down a waiter to order himself another Bloody Mary.

Stewy hums. “Good for her.”

That surprises a laugh out of Kendall. “Oh, what, are you two best bros? You and my step-mother, meeting up for yoga and brunch?”

“We talk,” Stewy says in a cool, lilting tone, the kind that sounds like a joke but also might not be. It’s annoying as fuck. Stewy’s always so annoying. “I’d say she should take him for everything, but I guess I’m about to do that, huh?”

In spite of, or maybe because of, the irritation, and the fact that the melting ice in his drink is slowly watering it down beyond repair, and the bone-deep exhaustion that has wedged itself into every muscle, and a million other things, Kendall knows the unmistakable shock of unbridled arousal when he feels it, inappropriately timed as ever. Lately he has trouble figuring out what he’s feeling minute to minute, but he can always recognize this — the bare greed of his own want, clawing at him from the inside in a distinctly teenage way.

It’s in the smirking tilt of Stewy’s mouth, in the way he’d left the top few buttons of his shirt undone, a couple inches of skin peeking out. It’s in the way he looks at Kendall, ferocious and predatory. Kendall shivers with the unexpectedness of it, and thinks, inexplicably, of the night Rava had split with the kids, of the phone clutched in his grip as he choked out an unfinished plea — I need, I need — before Stewy shut him up hurriedly: Ken, I understand, I got it. He’d been at the door thirty minutes later, face-down on Kendall’s bed ten minutes after that.

Noticing this, Stewy’s eyes widen, delighted. “Oh, you’re disgusting,” he murmurs, making Kendall flush, averting his gaze until two of Stewy’s fingers land on the line of his jaw, forcing him to look up again. It occurs to him that this might actually be too much, the antithesis to their unassuming corporate gays image, but he can’t sort out the words to protest. “Freud wouldn’t know what the fuck to do with you.”

“Fuck you,” Kendall says, swallowing hard as Stewy’s fingers trace the line of his throat, over his Adam’s apple, landing on his collarbone. His dick moves.

Stewy smiles, a lewd edge to it. “We could…” He trails off, sparing a little nod toward the signs pointing toward the bathrooms.

Kendall dismisses with an unsteady-sounding scoff. “Fuck no, dude, too many eyes,” which earns him nothing more than a frown, but he’s too busy gulping down the rest of his drink to pay attention to the indignation. He’s halfway to the door when he calls over his shoulder, “Meet me in the car.”

They only make it as far as one of the big floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room, their suits taken apart piece by piece and tossed carelessly on the floor, a breadcrumb trail to where they’re moving fast against each other, breathing bourbon-soaked breath in each other’s mouths, leaving ass prints on the glass. Think you were loud enough? Stewy murmurs after, right against his mouth, Kendall’s cum spilling over his fist. Maybe we should do it again, I don’t know if the whole building heard you, or — But Kendall’s laughter cuts him off, going bright red all the way down his chest, hiding his face against Stewy’s shoulder.

When Kendall wakes up disoriented and dehydrated in the early hours of the morning, he spends a few bleary-eyed minutes Googling both of their names before accepting that he can’t find a trace — not a single effusive story, not one grainy iPhone picture — of them from the night before. 

*

The event is one of those classic New York disasters, the kind where you have to go to an at best forgettable restaurant co-owned by a moderately successful actor, where half the guests are dressed in black tie and the other half are in fashionably ugly streetwear, where the air conditioning is cranked up but there are so many people crammed into such a small space that the place is sweltering anyway. It’s a birthday party for a friend of a friend of a friend of Stewy’s, which seemed like a loose enough connection that Kendall wasn’t sure why he had to go at all.

“Because you sowed a bunch of shit and for the first time in your life I’m forcing you to reap it,” Stewy told him. He’d been jade rolling at the time, like he was making himself competitive for the position of President Asshole.

So he goes. He gets kind of drunk, almost immediately. (They’d gotten a little high on the way there, too, Stewy’s hand cupping the back of Kendall’s head while he did bumps off the inside of his wrist.) He mingles. He sticks mostly by Stewy’s side, until Stewy drifts off to go greet someone, and then Kendall’s alone with a bunch of strangers who have no idea how to treat him. Honestly, he doesn’t know what to say to any of them either, has no idea how to interact with people without agenda, and so when one woman asks, well, what’s next for you? he just spouts the first thing he can confidently pull out of his ass: “There’s some pretty dope, innovative shit happening in tech right now. I had a fund for a while, not sure if you heard about that?”

Some unidentifiable amount of time later, he leans against the bar, nursing a vodka rocks. He’d passed a Real Housewife in deep conversation with the mayor on the way here, and if she’s balling the guy in charge of the city, why are the rags wasting their time on him and Stewy?

“Probably because Stewy’s way hotter than the mayor,” comes a voice he definitely recognizes, and he looks down into his glass, taking a moment to feel betrayed by the fact that his friend, the alcohol, apparently let him say all of that out loud before he actually takes note of who’s sidled up beside him.

Kendall’s heart drops directly into his ass. He forces a smile and Naomi hits him with one right back. “Does that make me the Housewife?”

“The way you’re going, I’d say it’s a safe bet that you’ll be getting a call from Andy Cohen any day now.” She waves down the bartender, motioning toward Kendall’s drink. “Whatever he’s having, please.”

“Bold move.”

“I lead a bold life,” Naomi says, nodding her thanks when a glass is placed in front of her. She takes a sip, eyeing him over the rim. Her hair’s a little longer, maybe, tied back at her nape, but that’s the only marked difference he can spot, and then he realizes he’s staring, and she’s staring back, and all he can think to say is the dumbest thing in the world:

“How are you?”

She grins, bland and wide. “You didn’t seriously just ask me that,” she says.

*

They scope out a corner at the back of the room, an unoccupied booth half-obscured by a pillar. She’s fine, she tells him. She’s been working, she’s been reading, her hair is longer — she’s growing it out. She knows someone who knows someone who knows someone and that’s who invited her, not like she ever has a problem getting invited anywhere, but he wonders if she and Stewy know the same someone.

“Maybe,” she says. “Where is he, by the way?” She has a coy little arch to her mouth, one that tells him she hasn’t forgotten all the times he complained to her about Stewy’s god-awful Instagram posts, about the bitter asides he forced her to be an unwilling audience to every time Stewy's name came up. That was something about her that had always reminded him of Stewy, actually, the way she made sure to file all that shit away in her memory, a walking encyclopedia of his most degrading moments.

“Probably microdosing with a Peloton instructor,” he says. “He’s around.”

“He seems fun.”

Kendall laughs, a short sound. “Okay, uh, I get it, shut the fuck up.”

Naomi grins this grin that feels like a bite. “What? He does.”

A beat. “Hey,” he starts, and, “No,” she interrupts. He blinks, perturbed.

“We’re not doing this,” she says. “Period, but definitely not here.” Her eyes soften a little, looking at him like she’d been before she — well — yeah. “You don’t always have to be so intense about everything. You know what I mean? Sometimes shit just is what it is.” She says it with so much kindness, so much affection, but it still lands like a kick to the balls. It’s one of her more troubling qualities, the way she can reduce him down to his barest bones with just a few words. He’d been drawn to it at first, addicted to the squirming feeling of being made to feel so wholly uncomfortable, but now he wants to recoil, sink into his seat, put miles between them.

“I just feel… some regret,” he says stiffly. “About the way things ended. With us.”

Naomi groans, slumping forward. Her eyebrows scrunch in pitying concern. “Oh, Jesus, Ken. Come on.” She reaches out, circling her fingers loosely around his, prying them from his vice-like grip on the glass. “You feel regret about what? Not sending me, like, one text?” He laughs, hapless, and she squeezes his hand. “Hey, it was fun, right? We had fun. But it always had an expiration date. As long as your dad’s around, there’s an expiration date on everything with you.” She strokes a thumb over his skin in something resembling a soothing motion. “I hope it’s different this time. Genuinely.”

“With — what, with Stewy?” He chokes out the words around the tight knot in his throat, shaking his head. “It’s not really — that’s not—”

“Well, hello,” says Stewy, appearing out of thin air to lord over their table and ruin Kendall’s life. When he looks up, Stewy’s lips are set in an angry line, his eyes fixed on where Kendall and Naomi are touching, and that’s not right either, but he doesn’t get the chance to explain because Naomi’s already pulling back with a breezy smile, sliding out of the booth.

“Stewy,” she says. “I’ve heard so much.”

Stewy laughs humorlessly. “Naomi, yes. It’s a pleasure. Is Ken boring you to death?”

“Nah, he’s not a bad drinking buddy once you get him going.”

“I can’t argue with you there.”

Kendall watches the scene unfold, powerless to put an end to it, powerless in the face of these two people. These two people who know him all the way through, right to his rotten core. These freaks of fucking nature who make his insides feel like a fifth grade science experiment gone wrong.

“Listen, I was supposed to be on my way to meet a friend, like, fifteen minutes ago, so I’m going to try to Irish goodbye on out of here,” Naomi says, smooth as anything. “It was great to finally meet you.”

“Likewise,” Stewy says, and then they both turn Kendall at the same time, and as it happens, the only thing worse than listening to them make small talk is this, being under the twin scrutiny of their gazes, sharp and knowing.

Naomi smiles wanly and holds her hand out for a low five, which Kendall weakly grants her, their palms making a muted sound when they slap together. “Way hotter than the mayor,” she says, and he watches her retreating back until she disappears into the crowd, then looks to Stewy, who’s staring at him evenly.

“You dickless fucking shit for brains,” Stewy informs him.

Kendall nods.

*

He thinks it has to count for something that they at least find privacy before they start ripping into each other.

They never do this, not really. Their version of fighting usually involves trading smirks and insults in public, talking shit in the press, and the eventual peaceful exchange of handjobs in lieu of actual apologies, but they rarely raise their voices at each other. Stewy rarely raises his voice at all: “Yelling has never benefitted me,” he’d explained once. “I might as well just bend over and show my whole ass.”

They end up in the coat room, which tonight is otherwise empty aside from a few blazers and stacks of birthday presents of various sizes and shapes, which strikes Kendall as a little tacky. In fairness, he doesn’t think anyone’s actually supposed to see this, but it’s not his fault no one locked the door. There’s also the fact that he still has no idea whose party they’re making a valiant effort at sucking the fun out of. He’d ask Stewy, but— 

“Do you even get how something like that could come off? If someone saw you two, that’s it, the whole thing falls apart.” 

“We weren’t doing anything,” Kendall snaps. “We were talking. What, are you fucking jealous, dude?”

Stewy makes an irritated sound. “Ken, I really can’t stress enough how little of a shit I give about the creative new method of self-sabotage you’re trying out this week, but this is about me protecting my-fucking-self.”

An angry blush climbs up Kendall’s neck. He shoots back, venomous, “Isn’t it always?”

Some indecipherable emotion passes over Stewy’s face. “Bro, this whole thing was your idea,” he says, measured, like he’s trying to steel himself. “You talked me into it, and half the time I still have no clue what you’re thinking. We have to be on the same team here, you’re not allowed to blindside me again. That’s not how this works.”

“Okay, well, that goes both ways,” Kendall says feebly, an asinine attempt at a comeback. “I mean, look in the mirror.”

Stewy’s expression hardens minutely. “I don’t fucking lie to you.”

Kendall clenches his jaw. “I had a drink with her. Not as some personal fucking slight, you fucking moron, because I was left alone at a party you dragged me to.” He adds, unable to keep the petulant whine out of his voice, “I told you I didn’t want to go, dude.”

“Shit, you’re totally right, this one’s on me. God forbid Little Prince Butthurt is even the slightest bit inconvenienced,” Stewy says, letting out an empty, horrible laugh. “Fuck you, you were all over her. The same chick you were dating right before you threw yourself a one man Pride parade for the sole purpose of getting back at your crazy fucking family.” He rubs his hands over his face harshly. “You know what, man, I’ve dealt with a lot of shit from you, but every time I get involved in some messy-ass plan of yours, something goes wrong and I end up getting fucked. Every time I try to look out for you, because I fucking care, I’m the one left standing around with my dick in my hands. And you just keep going on. You keep doing your thing.”

The words hang heavily in the air. They’re as starkly sincere as anything that’s ever been spoken between them, and Kendall can’t drum up a response because he never knows what to do in these rare moments where the things they say to each other don’t come cloaked in layers of pithy innuendo. It all feels like one big mistake.

Kendall kicks his shoe against the ground, just for something to do. Shrugs his shoulders, once. “They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different result.”

“Blow me, you fucking robot. Who talks like that?”

“No one forced you to do this,” Kendall says, spreading his arms. It’s fucking aggravating, the way Stewy can keep him riled up even as all his self-preservation instincts tell him to shut down. They should both be wrapped in bright yellow caution tape every time they get within five feet of each other, warning, danger, do not cross unless you have a death wish. “Yeah, fine, it was my idea but it was your choice to go along with it. So, like, whatever, if you’re this unhappy — if you hate being, uh, associated with me so much—”

“Wow,” Stewy says, under his breath.

“—then you might as well fuck off.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, man. Do it. Fuck off, fuck you.”

Stewy squints at him, lips parting in disbelief. “Very convincing, I’m fucking shaking. Okay, now call me Stewart while you piss your pants in the corner.” He tears his eyes away from Kendall and takes a step back. Tucks an errant piece of hair into place, redoes the button on his jacket, pulls his phone from his pocket. Putting himself back together, resetting, like he’d activated a different mode specifically for this argument. “Alright, fine. Fuck you, too.”

Kendall doesn’t move. He watches Stewy leave as easily as he leaves anywhere, listens to the noise outside briefly rise and fall again as the door swings shut behind him. There’s a churning in his gut that makes him feel unsteady on his feet. He closes his eyes, pressing the heels of his hands into the sockets until he sees bursts of stars behind his lids. The room is too fucking small, or maybe he’s too big, or maybe the walls are closing in, or— 

Before he even really understands what’s happening, the anger has intensified into something so red hot and visceral that he feels it in his fingertips. He reaches blindly for the first thing he can latch onto, which happens to be a meticulously wrapped gift box, and sends it hurling across the room. It’s followed by another, and two more after that, shiny paper tearing open to litter the floor with clothes and books and Cartier boxes. He’s barely aware of what he’s doing, teeth gritted but not making a sound, his body overtaken by some Incredible fucking Hulk-like presence that has rendered him incapable of rational thought. And then, inevitably, all the fight drains out of him, the Gucci bracelet he’d just ripped from its case landing on the floor with a clatter.

“Fuck,” Kendall says, looking around at the evidence of the luxury goods massacre that had taken place. He starts to bend down, hands already outstretched to pick up a silk blouse lying in a crumpled pile near his shoe, but it’s an aborted movement. He inhales, straightens, slipping out of the room, and subsequently the party, undetected.

*

He goes back to the Carlyle.

Greg’s still posted up there on Kendall’s dime — not in the penthouse; his generosity only goes so far — since he feels sort of bad the guy still can’t go home, but he’s not around when Kendall texts to ask if he wants to grab a drink, and he figures he has a choice between drinking alone at a hotel bar until the sun comes up or sending another text he really doesn’t want to send. He makes it through one on his own before deciding, with resigned finality, on the latter.

Roman doesn’t have a conspicuous bone in his body so when he arrives he does so with his arms spread and a booming cry of, “Wherefore art thou Cain? It is I, Abel, back from the dead and seeking revenge!” It attracts the attention of a few alarmed patrons and Kendall sighs, sinking down into his seat, hunching his shoulders as Roman slides in across from him, wearing a big toothy grin.

“Really, dude?”

“Nuh-uh, you’re definitely not allowed to ‘really’ me, I’ll be doing all the ‘really’-ing tonight, thank you,” Roman says, drumming his hands anxiously on the table. He grabs for the wine list, glances at it once, and promptly shoves it away. “Does anyone work here? Hello?”

Kendall pushes his half-empty glass toward him. “Can you chill?” 

“Can you chill?” Roman says in a mocking approximation of Kendall’s voice. He throws the rest of the drink back in one big gulp, swipes indelicately at his mouth with the back of his wrist, and looks away, faking interest in the wallpaper, running a careless thumb along the outline of one of the cartoon trees. “Didn’t think I’d ever see you again without the sentient tumor you’ve had hanging off your side for the past month. Hey, nice retouching in those pap shots, by the way, is anyone from Sandy’s graphic design team available to do my dick pics? They’re really hiding your general puffiness.” He reaches across the table to try to poke at one of Kendall’s eyebags but Kendall pushes him away, wrapping his fist around his finger and bending it back until Roman retracts with a hiss. “All that slime,” he says, faux thoughtfully. “Bet you two don’t even need lube, huh?”

Kendall locks eyes with a server as she passes by, waving his glass around. “Can I get another?”

Roman smiles, acidic. “And I will have a bottle of Cabernet for myself, which you can put on my brother’s tab.”

“This was probably a bad idea,” Kendall says once she’s gone, kneading his knuckles into his forehead.

Roman’s practically vibrating in his seat, like a powder keg about to be set off, and he lets out an icy bark of a laugh. “Oh, you can dish it out but you don’t want to take it? Get fucked.”

Kendall throws his hands up, exasperated. “Why’d you even come?”

Roman pulls a face, caught somewhere between incredulousness and rage. He makes a derisive sound, his lip curling the way it does when he’s trying and failing to school his face back into a picture of indifference. “You sent up the Bat-Signal,” he mutters. “I thought you — maybe — I don’t fucking know, shut up. I’m here, I have wine on the way, fucking deal with it.” He takes Kendall in, his eyes flickering up and down and back up again. “Okay, so, what? What is this, are you in trouble? Aside from the obvious total mental collapse.”

“Not, uh.” Kendall swallows around the sudden dryness in his throat. “Not explicitly.”

“Oh, cool, this game where you force me to spend twenty minutes trying to decode whatever the fuck it is you’re trying to say,” Roman says, jerking his head, alarmed, when their waitress returns. “And it ends up being the most boring thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Great. Cheers, asshole.”

There’s a long beat where they both drink like their lives depend on it. This, he knows, is what Roman hates the most: when Kendall won’t fight back. He needs an evenly matched adversary in order to feel like he’s getting anywhere, and of the three of them, Kendall is historically the one who recuses himself, leaving Roman and Shiv to duke it out with each other. She can meet him at his most vicious level, and he’ll push every last one of her buttons until she’s trying to claw his eyes out. For his part, Kendall learned early on that the best course of action is always to take any means necessary to keep his own threatening avalanche of unwieldy emotion to himself. Or at least he’d learned that he should.

Finally, Kendall says, “I just wanted to see you. I fucking missed you. Is that okay?”

Roman pauses in his drinking. “I can think of at least one person who would respond to that question with a resounding ‘fuck no.’”

“Is he—” Kendall stops, not sure what he’s trying to ask. He raises his eyebrows meaningfully.

“I — what? Dad?” Roman shrugs, sagging back into his seat. “All he does is fuckin’ yell and throw shit and bitch about you, so it’s pretty much business as usual.”

“Right. And Marcia?”

“You heard about that?”

“I have my sources.”

Roman feigns a gag. “Don’t call Greg a source.” He sighs, shaking his head. “God. Fucking Greg. I still can’t believe Anemic Gumby had it in him.”

“Yeah, well,” is all he says, watching as Roman grabs for the discarded napkin that had come with Kendall’s refreshed drink, occupying his hands with shredding it up. “How about you?”

“How about me?” Roman flicks a balled up piece at Kendall’s nose. “Just another day in paradise trying to make sure your” —he grimaces, exaggerated— “boyfriend doesn’t successfully face fuck every member of our family. Some of us aren’t as into scraping the bottom of the sex cult reject barrel.”

“I’m not gonna let him fuck you,” Kendall says, firm.

“Do you have fucking brain damage?” Roman frowns, wounded. “You already did.”

“Rome, look at me.” When he won’t, Kendall glares down into his glass, wracking his mental dictionary for any collection of words that will make sense, that will still Roman in his fidgeting movements. “It’s not what you think it is, okay? It’s not what Dad — like—” He loses steam and starts over, frustrated: “Yes, we’re — I mean, whatever, but he’s not why I did it. He had no idea. I don’t know if that helps or hurts from your POV, but I think you deserve to know that this all came, uh, after. I wasn’t just fucking conspiring against you the whole time.”

Something like understanding flashes briefly across Roman’s face, only to be quickly replaced with another hardened sneer. “Bullshit,” he says, but he doesn’t sound sure.

Kendall takes a sip. “Facts.”

Roman shakes his head, nose scrunched, the wheels turning. “Okay, but you’re still gonna sit your ass on that CEO throne when the time comes. I know you are.”

Kendall lets out a disbelieving laugh. The truth of it might actually be funny — the fact that he and Stewy have barely broached the topic, the unspoken understanding that it simply isn’t in the cards. It’s like Kendall’s upgraded his software and Roman’s still using the outdated shit.

“Dude,” Kendall says, imploringly. “No, I’m really not.”

There’s a long stretch where Roman looks at Kendall and Kendall looks at the floor, at the bartender, at the kitschy lamp in the corner. The whole place is the definition of forced ambiance, with its orangey lighting and its cutesy decor and the piano player taking requests amid the sea of tables — the antithesis to this whole interaction.

“I don’t believe you,” Roman says, all false defiance. “Why should I? You literally love lying.”

Kendall smiles, a little sad. “Okay. Well, I guess you and the rest of the world can wait, like, a week and see for yourselves.”

“Every time I try to sort through this shit in my head I just hear carnival music,” Roman says. His hands tremble a little on the neck of the bottle when he goes in for a refill. “Stewy can’t be okay with you being here.”

That makes Kendall laugh in earnest, imagining what Stewy would say if he knew about this, but Stewy had taken their car and left him chain smoking on the street and struggling to figure out how to use the Uber app, so Stewy can, quite frankly, suck a dick.

“He’s already pissed at me,” Kendall says dismissively. “Speaking of, I have a favor to ask.” He ignores Roman’s retort of you can’t have it and goes on, “There might be some photos of me from tonight that I need you to make sure Dad doesn’t get his hands on.”

Roman pulls a face. “Ew, what, did you finally get caught jerking it to a picture of him or something?”

“I ran into Naomi, you sick fuck,” Kendall says, rolling his eyes. “Nothing happened, but Stewy thinks — I mean, it could look, without context — listen, I obviously can’t guarantee some other outlet won’t pick it up first, but if you could just put feelers out there, I’d appreciate it.”

Roman tilts his head, nonplussed. “Check out the big balls on this guy.”

Kendall huffs. “Okay, Jesus, I’d owe you.”

“You already owe me.” Roman takes a breath, rubbing a hand over his jaw. Says, a little pained, “Ugh, fine. I’ll… look into it. No promises. And if it’s really good, I might just decide to fuck you with it myself.”

“Thanks, man. Seriously.”

Roman nods, his face relaxing into a smirk. “Stewy’s mad at me, fucking listen to you. You two have always fought like middle-aged lesbians.”

Kendall feels a blush creeping up his neck. “I’m just trying to diffuse a situation before it can become a situation. I have, like, a ton of situations already.”

“Situations, sure,” Roman says, amused. Knowing, unnervingly so. “So that’s what your lover’s quarrel is all about? Princess Platinum Pussy?”

Kendall points at him with his glass. “You can’t call her that unless you’ve fucked her.”

“Is she asking about me?” Roman bats his eyelashes demurely. “I’d actually love to be eskimo bros with my girlfriend.”

“Yeah, well, I know you guys have really been looking for a way to take it to the next level so I told her you’d be down.” He starts laughing, taken aback by himself. “Fuck. That’s so fucked up.”

Roman laughs too, a surprised gust of sound. “That’s what you think is fucked up?”

Kendall covers his face with his hands and laughs harder.

*

When the elevator lets him out in the foyer, it’s well past two in the morning. All the lights are off and one glance at the half-empty whiskey bottle on the bar tells him how Stewy had spent the rest of his evening. He bypasses the guest room and stumbles right to the master where Stewy is asleep, face-down in the center of the mattress with his arms flung out wide like he’s trying to prove a point. Something twinges, a curious pull, in Kendall’s chest, drawing him forward to crawl across the sheets, to push the faded old Harvard shirt Stewy’s wearing up around his middle, to trail a hand down the warm arc of his spine and rest it just above the curve of his ass.

“Thought I told you not to come back here tonight,” Stewy mumbles, attempting to bat Kendall’s hand away.

“You never said that.”

“Meant to,” Stewy insists, rolling over so he’s facing away from Kendall. “You fucking smell, get out.”

Kendall does the opposite, flopping down next to him. “I just saw Roman,” he says, like that’s an answer.

“Don’t care,” Stewy says, gravel-voiced. “I’m not even awake.”

Kendall ignores that, draping himself over Stewy’s back. He kisses Stewy on the shoulder, behind the ear, on the side of his neck.

“Ken,” Stewy says, a warning.

Kendall noses into his hair, inhaling. “What?”

A sigh. “What is this, what’re you doing?”

“I’m just hanging out, bro,” Kendall says, manhandling Stewy back onto his stomach. He settles between his legs, tugs his boxer briefs down. Frames his ass in his hands, kisses one cheek and then the other, sinks his teeth into the crease of his thigh, earning him a sharp gasp.

“You’re a fucking pain in my ass,” Stewy says, but he sounds awake now. He certainly looks awake as he pushes himself to his knees, back arching expectantly.

“Literally,” Kendall murmurs. “Get me the lube.”

It’s so easy to think nothing at all as he fingers Stewy open, lapping gently with his tongue as he presses in and out. That last drink Roman had goaded him into left a haze hanging over him (drinking used to make him a lot more fun, he’s pretty sure) but the rhythm of this is like muscle memory; Kendall knows just how and when to add another finger, when pulling away will earn him a needy moan and how hard he has to push back in to drag another one out, when to replace his fingers with his tongue. He’s always liked this part with anyone; it’s why he’d started going down on girls in college after finding out how many guys don’t. He’s always liked knowing what to do and being rewarded for it.

“Oh, fuck,” Stewy whispers, like he’s reading Kendall’s mind, and Kendall squeezes his calf, just because. 

Kendall eats him out like he’s going for the gold medal in Drunk Idiot Sex. Responsive as he always is, Stewy is rock hard and groaning into the pillow under his head, trying to writhe back against Kendall’s tongue and grind forward all at once, fruitlessly seeking out friction until Kendall takes pity on him and gets a hand around his cock. He makes a desperate sound, fucking Kendall’s fist, the noise of it wet and obscene in the quiet of the room.

They’ve been in this exact position more times than he’d ever be able to count and it still hasn’t gotten old, the way Stewy will bend over for him, eager and willing, how quickly he can be reduced to the kind of person who has to beg for what he wants. It doesn’t matter that Kendall can tell Stewy’s still mad at him, can feel it in the painful dig of nails into his shoulder, because it’s never really been about that. They’re always kind of mad at each other; if they waited until they weren’t, neither of them would ever get laid.

“Ken,” Stewy chokes, prodding him with his heel. “Ken.”

There’s sweat beading Kendall’s forehead when he comes up for air, his mouth hanging open inelegantly. He says, “Uh-huh, I know,” and leaves Stewy with one more long lick before sitting back on his haunches. It’s a flurry of limbs and fabric as they both struggle out of their remaining clothes, but Kendall’s only undone the top two buttons of his shirt before Stewy’s grabbing for him impatiently, pulling him on top. They sink into a frantic, messy kiss, their heavy breaths lost in the heat of each other’s mouths. One of Kendall’s hands buries itself in Stewy’s hair while the other comes up to palm at his chest, thumbing teasingly over the fucking absurd gold hoop pierced through his nipple until Stewy whines. His thighs bracket Kendall in, holding him right where he wants him.

Kendall’s dick is throbbing pathetically, interested but unable to get hard thanks to all the alcohol coursing through his system. He’d been hoping he could get it together, but for once Stewy spares him the humiliation of making him say the thing by cutting right to it.

“Want me to fuck you?” The words are whispered somewhere around Kendall’s collarbone, where Stewy’s yanked a few more buttons open and is biting at the skin there.

“Yeah, okay,” Kendall says, and Stewy sets about undressing him for real, shockingly attentive in removing each article of clothing, placing them aside instead of flinging them away to wrinkle on the floor. The chill of the air conditioning is nothing compared against the buzzing heat of Stewy’s body, but Kendall shudders anyway, overwhelmed and overstimulated.

They don’t do it this way often and have argued about it before, mostly because Stewy can never seem to comprehend that getting fucked is, in fact, much gayer than doing the fucking, but there are times like this where Kendall’s far enough out of his own head to push aside the unavoidable shame that will creep up on him later. So he sits with the discomfort of Stewy’s fingers entering him, muscles tensing until it gradually begins to melt into something more pleasant, until the embarrassment seems too far away to hurt him. He concentrates on the hungry glint in Stewy’s eye, the singular focus he has on him. That’s part of why the sex is always so good, even when it’s kind of shitty — when Stewy’s in, he’s all the way fucking in.

“I can’t believe you’re not even hard right now,” Stewy says, mouth to the trail of hair under Kendall’s belly button. “I feel like I should be insulted.”

“It’s not you,” Kendall admits, smacking gently at Stewy’s cheek when he sucks inquisitively at the head of his cock. It does twitch at the obscene sight of Stewy’s lips stretched around him, the familiar warmth of his mouth, but declines to do much more beyond that. “Not gonna work, don’t waste my time.”

“You’re in no position to be telling me what to do, limpdick,” Stewy says, but he follows his cue, rearranging himself and hauling one of Kendall’s legs up to wrap around his waist, pressing inside with an unbearably slow rock of his hips. Kendall closes his eyes through the initial burn, adjusting to the intensity, clutching at Stewy’s shoulders.

“You good?” Stewy asks.

“Yeah,” Kendall breathes. “Yeah, I’m good.”

“Good,” Stewy says, kissing his jaw. “So don’t be a fucking virgin about it.”

Kendall’s laughing, despite himself, when their lips meet harshly, like they’re trying to eat each other up. Stewy moans, a guttural sound that comes from somewhere deep within, and speeds up in his movements, fucking harder into Kendall, his knees slipping on the sheets.  It always goes from zero to one hundred with them in a flash, and he can’t hear anything but Stewy’s panting, can’t feel anything but the drag of his cock and the rhythm of his hips. He grips the back of Stewy’s neck tightly, thinking about how much he wants to flip them over, how much he wants to stay right where he is, how much he wants to ask for something he can’t verbalize.

The fog in his brain is so thick, nothing more than a relentless feedback loop of Stewy, Stewy, Stewy, making Kendall roll up into him, an involuntary movement. When he pulls out halfway only to thrust unceremoniously back in, Kendall cries out, a mortifyingly bare sound, which seems to be it for Stewy, one of his sweaty hands slipping down Kendall’s side to pull his other leg around him as he comes with a deep groan, keeping him close as his hips jerk through it.

“Fuck,” Stewy says on an exhale, his forehead against Kendall’s throat.

Chest heaving, head full of white noise, Kendall touches a fingertip to his scratchy, tingling chin and winces — fucking beard burn.

They lie beside each other for a while, listening to the hum of the air conditioning. The sheets are twisted in a damp tangle beneath them, which Stewy only tolerates for so long before he moves into a drier spot on the mattress, reaching lazily for Kendall until he acquiesces, scooting closer. He says nothing of the arm that slides around his back, folding him against Stewy’s side.

“Not even gonna ask why being around your brother made you horny,” Stewy says, yawning.

Kendall pinches Stewy’s nipple, making him hiss. “Yeah, fuck you. He says hi.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Kendall says. They laugh. “I talked to him. I, uh, took care of the Naomi shit. Or, I mean, I think I did. I tried.”

Stewy groans, which is not the reaction Kendall was hoping for. “You fucking told Roman, dude? Roman, famously in possession of history’s greatest gaping black hole of a mouth?”

“He’s — we talked,” Kendall says, pushing himself up to squint at Stewy in the darkness. No one should be able to look that affronted so soon after an orgasm, Kendall thinks. Ungrateful shit. “We talked. He’s gonna try to do me a solid. Me, us, whatever.”

Stewy gives him a flat look. “Can you do anything other than create problems for me or is that, like, your default setting? I want a gift receipt.”

Kendall bites Stewy’s chin. “Uh, good luck finding a store with a thirty-year return policy.” Adds, irked, “I wasn’t going the rest of my life without talking to him.”

“A wildly different tune than the one you were singing a few weeks ago,” Stewy says, his put-upon tone betraying the way he tilts his head, opening his neck up. “Ken, you don’t trust the stranger in the unmarked van no matter how much candy he says he has, how many times do we have to go over this?”

“You’re the one who left me at that party unsupervised,” Kendall says, his lips to Stewy’s pulse point.

“Because you were acting like an obtuse little bitch,” Stewy says matter-of-factly. “I know, I get it, you’re sensitive. You love getting your fucking feelings hurt and then doing something batshit. That’s your kink. But sometimes I need a break.”

Kendall considers this. He settles back down, idly stroking the hair on Stewy’s chest. “You do the same shit. At least I don’t grovel. You always grovel.”

“This isn’t about me, and I’m not groveling,” Stewy says. “Putting my dick in you doesn’t count as groveling. Actually, anything that keeps you occupied for longer than five minutes is technically considered community service.”

Kendall reaches up to grab roughly at his face, wrenching it toward him. He meets Stewy’s dark gaze and growls, “You can never just fucking say thank you, huh?”

Stewy snorts. “Give me a reason to,” he says, and knocks Kendall’s hand away so he can kiss him instead, slow and deliberate. Kendall accepts it as thanks enough.

*

He’s woken up around sunrise by the rattle of his phone on the nightstand, a text from Roman lighting up the screen:

it’s done

And then, a minute or so later:

you’re still a total bitch ass

*

Three days before the meeting, he comes home to find Sandy Furness sitting at the kitchen table.

This isn’t exactly unusual; Sandy is usually around in some capacity. He and Stewy are in near-constant contact, which is something Kendall’s had to adjust to, though their meetings don’t often happen in the apartment, as Sandy doesn’t travel below 50th if he can help it. But today Kendall gets back from his biweekly pilgrimage to the gym, sweaty and disheveled, only to be met with the sight of Sandy, sipping a latte and wearing an unbothered smile. Stewy’s sitting adjacent, the surface in front of him scattered with papers, his iPad propped up in its stand.

“Uh,” Kendall says, pushing his oversized headphones down around his neck. “Hi.”

“Hello,” Sandy agrees, vacantly cheerful.

“Why are you back?” Stewy says it all accusatory, the shithead.

Kendall mops at his face with the hem of his shirt. “I mean, I live here.”

Sandy knows the truth — Sandy, by now, probably knows what his ballsack looks like — but it doesn’t negate the fact that Kendall hasn’t set foot inside the place he owns in almost a month. He’s sent Jess back a few times to retrieve more of his shit, but he has no clue what’s still left in there. A couch, maybe. He’s pretty sure he had a couch.

“Why are you back so soon, you pedantic fucker?”

They could easily spend a lengthy amount of time bickering about how long Kendall’s workouts normally last, but they’re saved by Sandy, who is indifferent to their bullshit and interrupts with a cool, “Actually, it’s good you’re here, Kendall. I’ve been wanting to speak to you.”

Stewy switches gears, turning to Sandy with an inscrutable look on his face. “Hey, no.”

Kendall’s stomach lurches. He hasn’t moved since he came in, hanging back near the door in case he has to make a run for it. “Okay. About what?”

“As you know, the shareholders are meeting soon to finally put an end to this shit show,” Sandy says, cheerful as anything, sipping from his cup like he doesn’t have a care in the world. “And, in the interest of not getting ahead of ourselves, I’ll just say that we’re very optimistic about things going in our favor. Stewy’s told you as much, I imagine.”

“Uh-huh,” is Kendall’s reply.

“I know you still have your board seat, but I wanted to ask about your plans for the future,” Sandy says. “What I’m saying is that I don’t know when the hell you grew a dick, son, but we’d love to have you join the circle jerk. In whatever capacity you’d like.”

Kendall looks instinctively at Stewy, but Stewy’s too busy frowning at Sandy to acknowledge him. He feels a little like he’s been dunked underwater, and not just because of the sweat making his clothes cling uncomfortably to his body. It’s over, he’d told Stewy weeks ago, just a few paces away from where he’s currently shifting his weight from foot to foot. He still feels that way, which is a little surprising. It's strange to think that he has the thing he spent his whole life chasing after laid out in front of him, unobstructed. Stranger, even, to know that he’s turning it down.

That’s what no one ever warns you about — what happens if, after all the fighting, you don’t actually want what you went to battle for? He doesn’t know what it means, whether he really is a greedy monster with an insatiable, cavernous hole inside him that will never be satisfied, or if he’s just a guy who’s fucking tired. Maybe both.

He catches himself picking at his cuticles and realizes how long he’s let the silence stretch on. Sandy’s still watching him with the serene expression of someone who’s been there, done that in every area of life. Whatever Kendall says won’t really affect him — which, remarkably, kind of helps.

“I appreciate the offer,” Kendall says. “But, yeah, I think I’m out. At least for now, that’s the right move for me.”

Stewy smiles faintly, nodding down at the table. Sandy sips his coffee pensively.

“Had to give it a try.” He laughs, sleazily good-natured. “In that case, we should discuss buying you out soon. Once all the Ts are crossed and Is are dotted and all that.”

“Half a bill,” Stewy affirms. “It’s yours if you want it.”

Kendall nods. “It’s not uninteresting.”

“Excellent,” Sandy says, gathering the few possessions he’d brought with him — coffee cup, jacket, phone. He pats Stewy’s shoulder and, on the way out, extends his hand for Kendall to shake. “We’ll be in touch.”

Kendall waits until the whir of the elevator fades away before facing Stewy. He’s sitting with his arms folded, his legs crossed — smiling still.

“Shower,” Kendall says, feeling suddenly wired, keyed up.

Stewy shrugs, shifting his papers into a pile. “Cool.”

“You can come,” Kendall says.

Stewy blinks, tossing the papers away. “Cool.”

Later, they’re sacked out on the couch, damp and warm and flipping between ATN (currently running a story about Kendall being a gay traitor), CNN (interviewing Eavis about how the hearings will factor in to the potential takeover), and, just for shits, Fox News (Tucker Carlson is telling his audience not to get the flu shot). Stewy has an absent hand tucked in Kendall’s wet hair, his blunt nails scratching pleasantly over his scalp.

Anderson Cooper throws to commercial and Kendall pokes Stewy’s leg. “You think it’s a good idea?”

Stewy grabs for the remote. “I’ve been telling you for years it’s a good idea.”

“Right. I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do now, though.”

“It doesn’t matter, bro. You take the fucking money and you get the fuck out. You just go.”

“Go where?”

Stewy sighs, bored of this line of questioning. “It. Doesn’t. Matter. Where-the-fuck-ever, as long as you have the option to leave and you take it.”

Kendall quiets. It’s so similar to a conversation they’ve had before, even more so by the fact that he still feels, as he did then, like they’re talking about two different things. Like Stewy’s five steps ahead of him and he’s running to catch up.

“I need you to talk to my brothers and my sister,” he says, instead of just about anything else he could’ve said.

“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.”

“No, listen to me, I’m serious. I don’t want them getting screwed.”

“Fucking CEO of perfect timing over here.” Stewy huffs an unhappy breath. “What exactly am I supposed to talk to them about?”

“They should be able to decide whether to let you guys buy them out or to stay with the company. In, you know, some way.”

“They should probably be more concerned with avoiding prison time,” Stewy says flatly.

Kendall pulls a face. “Dude.”

Stewy laughs in disbelief. When he sits up, his hand falls away from Kendall’s hair. “Ken, come on. I’m not spending the rest of my life arguing with your siblings over which of these ugly fuckers” —he switches back to ATN, where a group of anchors are clustered behind a long desk, chattering away— “to keep around when we gut the place. It’s called new management. They have their trust funds, they’ll fucking live.”

“You can figure out an agreement,” Kendall says, craning his neck to look at him. “They’ll want to, I know them. Look, Shiv’s going to be pissed she’s not in charge, but she’s smart, she’s good to keep around. Roman just wants to feel important, and Connor’ll go with whatever choice leaves him with the most disposable income and the least amount of investment in the actual business. It’ll be painless.”

Stewy points a finger at him. “Dealing with you fucking people will never, in any version of this universe, be painless.”

Kendall drops it, but notes that Stewy never actually said no.

*

“Dude, where’s Connor? Is he coming or what?”

“Oops,” Roman deadpans, flicking his finger leisurely across his phone screen. “Did I forget to invite him? My bad.”

“He should seriously be here. This is, like, important.”

Shiv, who’s been pacing a hole in the floor for five full minutes, halts, planting her hands on her hips. “Oh, don’t worry, I have no problem filling him in on your generous offer to push us off on the people stealing the company from our family.”

“They’re not really stealing,” Roman says mildly, and when they both look at him sharply, he smiles, entirely innocent. “Sorry, am I not helping?”

They’re at his place, which was deemed neutral territory when Kendall asked him to help rally the troops, though Tabitha had gotten the fuck out of Dodge almost instantly, saying her hellos and goodbyes all at once, throwing their pitiful trio two thumbs up as she left, and that hadn’t exactly felt reassuring. Kendall and Shiv have been in their separate corners since, with Roman, their woefully unqualified mediator, holding court in the center.

Kendall sighs. The Klonopin Stewy slipped him before he left is doing jack shit. “Okay, so, what, should I have not done this? Should I have let you walk in there and get ass fucked?”

Shiv holds her mouth in a tight line. “Maybe,” she snarls, and then stomps out onto the balcony, slamming the door behind her.

With great effort, Roman sighs. “I guess we’re going outside.”

*

“You know, Dad’s not backing down,” Shiv says, blowing smoke right in his face. “Like, not until the last possible second.”

Kendall coughs, stealing her cigarette. “Yeah, well, neither is Stewy.”

Shiv shakes her head in disbelief. “I feel like I’m fraternizing with the fucking enemy. God, I should’ve known.”

“I’m not involved,” Kendall says, directing a plume of smoke toward the inky black sky. It’s another hot night; he can feel droplets of moisture slipping down his back. “I’m just here for you guys.”

“Oh, please.”

“I have no reason to lie to you.”

“Oh, please.”

A safe distance away, Roman tells them, “You both look a lot like Mom right now.”

*

“You fucked us,” Shiv shouts from her side of the kitchen island.

“I am trying to apologize for that,” Kendall shouts from his.

Roman opens another beer.

*

“You really want me to believe you didn’t do all this for him.”

Kendall groans; he can only be expected to go through this so many times. Shiv’s watching him from the other end of the couch, where they’d ended up after exhausting all other location options — there’d been a brief interlude in the hall, as well as a weird, cramped one in the bathroom — while Roman looks on from a chair, his legs thrown over the arm.

“When the story broke, we did what we had to do to protect ourselves,” Kendall says, careful, like he’s reciting lines from a script. “You guys let Dad put that out, you know. Which still feels, uh, pretty fucking low.”

Shiv snorts. “I’m sorry, do you think we were consulted on that? You think Dad was going around the table soliciting opinions from everyone? Ken, we found out at the same time you did. And then you went and burned yourself off the family tree, so.” She lifts her shoulders. “Do the math.”

Kendall looks at her, then at Roman — their matching concerned expressions. He rubs his hands over his face, his skin feeling rough and rubbery and numb, like it doesn’t belong to him. It’s like he’s coming down from a high, or worse, waking up from a particularly destructive bender. A month ago, he’d felt untethered and unmoored, vibrating with the kind of freedom that made him feel fine about cutting them out, his own inflated ego convincing him it was the most sensible move.

He can’t say the newfound clarity is exactly welcome.

Shiv, annoyed with his lack of response, pulls out her hot poker again: “I’ve never understood the deal with you two, anyway. Stewy’s an asshole, but he’s smart. He knows his shit, he’s good at what he does, and you’re, I mean, come on. What does he gain from keeping you around?”

She gives him a hard, challenging look and he averts his eyes, wonders if they can hear the sound of his heart thumping against his ribs.

“A dick in his ass,” Roman chimes in. “But he can get that anywhere. And, oh, does he make sure everyone knows he can get it anywhere.”

“Okay,” Kendall starts, his voice sounding, to his own ears, like the skeleton of a voice that had once been commanding, firm, “Maybe one day I’ll be able to explain myself to you guys in a way that makes sense, but for now, this is happening, alright? I’m not fucking with you. This is real shit.” He gestures, a vague flap of hands. “I’m out, which means I won’t be there to make sure you guys don’t get screwed, and the only way I can think to make any of this right is by making sure someone else is.” He adds hurriedly, clocking the way Shiv starts to open her mouth, “Don’t say anything to that.”

She rolls her eyes, showing him her profile.

“God, you’re like the human embodiment of a suicide note,” Roman mutters, eyes narrowed in suspicion. “The real you isn’t about to jump out from behind the wall yelling, like, sike, bitches, I’m the king now, right?” Kendall shakes his head, trying to communicate his sense of finality in one short motion, and something about it seems to resonate with Roman. “Well, shit, man. Getting disowned might be the best thing that’s ever happened to you.”

Kendall’s eyebrows shoot up. “Wait, is he seriously disowning me?”

“He talks about it constantly and has taken exactly zero legal steps into making it happen,” Shiv dismisses. “There’s no way Stewy’s actually interested in making nice with us.”

Kendall smirks. “Stewy’s interested in whatever makes him richer than he was five minutes ago.”

Shiv and Roman exchange one of their unsettling telepathic looks, the same kind that used to result in them both crying to whatever nanny was on duty that day after Kendall refused to let them play with him. He still hates it, as it happens.

“Yeah, fine, you can unclench,” Roman says, looking grim. “We’ll try to work with your butt buddy.”

“Try being the operative word,” Shiv adds.

“I know, it’s so horrible of me to make sure you guys don’t go broke in a year,” Kendall says, rolling his eyes. “Rome, the only reason you even hate him is because you never got over that time he pushed you off your bike.”

“I was seven,” Roman shoots back. “I sprained my knee.”

“If we’re getting into this again, I’m leaving,” Shiv warns.

*

“Is it real?” Shiv asks when it’s just the two of them in the quiet of the elevator.

“I don’t know,” Kendall admits, a hushed burst of truth.

“Do you,” Shiv pauses, looking for the right words. She makes a face like she’s giving up, settling for, “Okay, do you want it to be real?”

“I don’t know,” Kendall says again, and thankfully, mercifully, the doors open.

*

Logan won’t look at him.

He’s had this nightmare before, his anguished screams for his dad’s attention falling on deaf ears again and again, but in real life it’s a lot less dramatic. In real life, Logan just strikes an imposingly statuesque figure outside the glass doors of the conference room, his steely gaze roving slowly over everyone crowded around the table, stopping just short of where Kendall is seated. Stewy keeps turning in his chair to aim his shit-eating grin in Logan’s direction, eyes bright and posture relaxed, like he owns the place. Which, well, he’s about to.

Sandy Furness becomes chief executive officer of Waystar Royco on a Friday morning. Kendall watches as Stewy is subsequently appointed COO, coaching his face into a supportive smile, keenly aware of all the eyes looking to him for a reaction. When they adjourn, Roman bolts for the exit, turning only once to catch Kendall’s eye. He nods, reassuring, and Roman nods back, jogging after their dad as he storms away.

“I can’t believe you were telling the truth,” Shiv says, suddenly at his side.

Kendall crosses his arms over his chest. “Told you, man. No reason to lie.”

She observes him. Decides, “You’re going to make a really shitty trophy husband.”

It surprises a laugh out of him, makes him turn his head to where Stewy stands across the room, a big shark-like smile pasted on as he hugs Sandy, shakes hands with various shareholders as they get up to greet their new overlords. Over the top of someone’s gray head, his gaze finds Kendall’s, and a look passes between them. Stewy’s eyes widen just a bit — amused, private — before returning to his conversation.

Shiv, who’s been — he realizes, chagrined — watching the whole scene unfold, just makes a whistling sound, feigning sympathy.

“Disgusting,” she says, reaching out to punch Kendall’s arm before turning away, her heels clicking as she disappears in the same direction Roman and their dad had gone.

He starts to migrate toward Stewy but is intercepted by a few people who want to speak to him, to try to drag information out of him — if you’re not CEO, well, not to pry, but, I mean? — and he gives them nothing more than the previously agreed-on canned line: A change has been much-needed around here, and I know Stewy and Sandy are going to do great work. At one point, Jess extracts him to bring him downstairs to the press conference, and he and Stewy cross paths for half a second, their bodies angling briefly toward each other as Stewy follows Sandy to the podium and Kendall is escorted to watch from the back of the room.

Sandy only says a few words, leaving the bulk of the statement to Stewy, who loves nothing more than situating himself in front of a camera.

“It’s been a long, bumpy road here, but we’re thrilled to usher in a new era for Waystar,” he grandstands, utterly at home behind a sea of microphones. He takes a few questions, one from a reporter who can’t help asking about Kendall’s involvement, to which Stewy comes back with another smoothly delivered publicist-approved response: “We should all be thanking Kendall Roy for exposing the truth of what was going on behind the scenes under old leadership. I hope you all can respect that our personal relationship has nothing to do with what happened here today.”

Which is about all Kendall can handle, and Jess helps him slip out of the building discreetly, wordlessly producing his AirPods, hat, and sunglasses from her bag. He loiters on the plaza for a while, bumping the playlist he made specifically for occasions like this — being broke is childish and I'm quite grown, Jay-Z reminds him. The afternoon is sweltering, but it’s preferable to being inside.

When Stewy finally emerges, he’s flanked by a large group that he’s clearly only half paying attention to. He scopes out Kendall in the crowd, a strange look on his face, and nods to their car, idling in front of the curb.

That’s where they eventually find each other, in the stillness of the back seat. Kendall was expecting to have come up with something to say by now, maybe a joke Stewy wouldn’t laugh at or shit talk he’d been holding in all day, but here, in this moment, his brain is totally empty. Stewy seems to feel the same, releasing a short breath as he reaches a hand over to rest on Kendall’s thigh: an uncomplicated gesture, free of expectation, and apparently all Stewy wants, leaning back against the headrest with his eyes shut. Kendall runs a nail over the band of Stewy’s watch, the ring on his pinky, the exposed skin of his wrist. He hesitates for half a second before letting his own hand cover Stewy’s. They stay like that all the way home.

*

Someone tweets a grainy picture of Kendall in front of the building, hunched over and blank-faced behind his flimsy disguise, which gets his name trending again for a few hours: lol why Kendall Roy always look so sad, the tweet reads, followed by five crying emojis.

Someone replies, How did u even recognize him w the sunnies n hat?

The original tweeter responds, bruh that walk…unmistakable.

*

Greg moves back into his apartment not long after the meeting, when the dust has settled a bit. Kendall visits him on the same day, avoiding the penthouse entirely in favor of showing up right at his door with a vape and a bottle of champagne: a depressing little housewarming party.

“Stewy said he wants to talk to me,” Greg says. “Um, about a role. At the company.”

Kendall hums; he’s known about this. That slippery motherfucker is good to keep around, isn’t he, Stewy said, and Kendall of course nodded, feeling like he owed it to Greg, too.

“You proved yourself, dude,” Kendall says. “Go collect what’s yours.”

Greg laughs, a nervous, reedy sound. “I can’t believe you’re, like, retired now.”

“I’m not retired.”

“Well, in a way,” Greg says, not unkindly.

Kendall sips from his glass, the bubbles fizzing pleasantly on his tongue. “How can I retire from a job I never had?” 

“That’s fair,” Greg says. He makes a face like he’s thinking about it. “Maybe it’s like you’re, uh. Retiring from Roy-dom. Kind of. You know?”

Kendall looks at him askance before bursting into a full-on belly laugh. He wheezes, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

But it sticks with him into the night, long after he’s gotten home. He disappears into the bedroom to change and catches himself staring in the mirror for a moment too long. I’m not a Roy, he’d said once, half a lifetime ago, but he didn’t really believe it then. The words seemed foreign in his mouth, a poorly delivered last-ditch effort of a lie. He’d wanted them to be true so fucking badly, or at least he thought that was what he wanted. The last month has been an excruciating exercise in realizing he’s never had a fucking clue as to what he actually wants. He thinks he probably has to start figuring it out sometime.

He makes a stop in the bathroom before going to track down Stewy. The door to his office is ajar, but Kendall gives a courtesy knock before ducking inside.

“Yo,” Kendall says.

“Yo,” Stewy agrees, his head lifting. He clocks what Kendall’s holding and pushes his laptop aside, looking intrigued.

Kendall smiles, holding the clippers up. “Wanna help me with something?”

*

“I haven’t done this since college,” Stewy mutters from his perch on the closed lid of the toilet. “Remember? That party with the frat dude, I almost chopped his fucking ear off? I’ve for sure never done this sober.”

Kendall discards his shirt. “You’re definitely not sober right now, bro.”

“You know you don’t have to do this like a fucking pilgrim, right? Like, you know how fast we could get a legit professional over here to take care of it?” Stewy sighs, standing up and pushing at Kendall’s sternum until he leans back over the sink. “Okay, fine.”

The blades vibrating over his scalp are almost soothing. It’s all in the muted whirring and repetitive motions as Stewy shaves, pausing every so often to brush errant hairs off Kendall’s cheeks. He has nowhere to look but at Stewy’s face: the little line of concentration between his brows, the way he pinches the tip of his tongue between his teeth every time he gets close to Kendall’s ears. In his periphery, he sees his hair falling into the sink in dark clumps, lining the basin. It probably only takes about fifteen minutes total, but when it’s over Kendall feels loose-limbed and sedated in a way he can only usually achieve with drugs or an orgasm. He watches through hooded eyes as his makeshift barber checks for any missed spots, rotating his head wherever Stewy guides him.

“You look like a school shooter,” Stewy says, tracing Kendall’s hairline with his forefinger. “Or Eminem.”

“Are you, like, rehearsing your tight five or something?”

“Keminem,” Stewy says gravely. “How does it feel?”

Kendall turns to take in his reflection, rubbing over the peach fuzz where his hair used to be. It’s softer, and looks lighter in color, somehow. It makes everything else on his face seem more prominent: his nose, his forehead, the purplish smudges under his eyes. Mostly he looks like he did before, maybe a little older. It’s not bad.

“Pretty much the same,” he replies. “Good job, dude.”

Stewy plucks a stray hair off himself and sticks it to Kendall’s chin. “It’s kind of hot. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s working for me.”

“Oh, yeah?”

Stewy shrugs, coy, so Kendall crowds against him, hands dropping to his waist. “You like knowing you were the one to do this to me? That you had all the power?”

Stewy rolls his eyes. “Alright, relax, you’re covered in hair.” He brushes Kendall’s shoulder off and then reaches up to touch the crown of his head, trailing down one side of his neck. Kendall’s eyes fall shut, leaning into the pressure of his hand. “You’re not getting in bed with me until you clean yourself off.”

“Okay,” Kendall says, feeling obedient, but not in the overwhelming way he usually does, where doing what he’s told feels like the only way out, the only means of escaping. He leans away to reach for the towel hanging near the sink, folding it into Stewy’s hands. “Help me out.”

“Demanding as fuck,” Stewy tells him, his voice pitched low and silky, all indulgence. “You think I’m not busy? You think I didn’t have plans for my night, Ken?”

Kendall moves the collar of Stewy’s t-shirt aside, puts his mouth to his shoulder. “I think any plans with me are better than, uh, rubbing one out to your own CNBC appearances or whatever you were gonna pretend to care about tonight.”

“You’re in a mood,” Stewy concludes.

“Am I?” Kendall says, but he kisses Stewy silent instead of waiting for an answer.

Stewy ends up riding him right there on the heated tiles of the bathroom floor, guiding Kendall’s cock into him with a sigh, setting a maddening pace with his hips. When Stewy presses their mouths together, it’s deep and possessive, knocking the wind right out of him.

“I want,” Kendall tells the hollow of Stewy’s throat, but he never finishes the thought, just comes on a feverish thrust, holding on to Stewy until his body relaxes. Stewy rests his forehead against Kendall’s and he thinks about how easily he could destroy all of this, the option right there in the vulnerable bend of Stewy’s neck, a panicked voice in the back of his mind begging him to throw the grenade, blow it up. To run for the hills before he gets brought down in the fray, too.

He shivers. He stays put.

*

Later, he buries his confession against Stewy’s hip bone, his head pillowed on his abdomen, describing, in a hushed whisper, the drugs and the car and the water and the boy. The blood. The lie. The all-encompassing heaviness of his dad’s embrace.

The words tumble out of his mouth in a harried rush, toppling over each other, each more improbable than the one before it. Stewy lets Kendall talk uninterrupted, waiting until he’s done to touch the hinge of his jaw, making a dissatisfied noise when Kendall won’t look at him. And then, maybe thinking better of it, he reaches for Kendall’s arm, grazing a thumb over the raised scar on the inside of his wrist. Kendall’s heartbeat stutters; he’s afraid he might stop breathing.

“You shouldn’t have told me that,” Stewy says, just above a whisper.

Kendall’s stomach sinks. “I know.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Not because—”

“I,” Kendall tries, then snaps his mouth shut, feeling like he might be sick. Like he’s getting confirmation of something he’s known for a very long time. Like he’s opening his fucking eyes. Oh, god, he thinks. Oh, fuck. “I know. I know, Stew.”

*

On the Fourth of July, Kendall takes the kids to Brooklyn to see the fireworks.

He’d persuaded Rava into the idea and gotten a hotel rooftop closed down (one had been considerably easier than the other), but it’s still a total mess: Iverson is deeply distressed by the explosions and the noise-canceling headphones don’t really help, so he spends most of the evening hidden under Kendall’s arm, and Sophie throws a mini-tantrum when she drops her hot dog on the ground.

Going great, he texts Stewy alongside a photo of Sophie facing away from him with her skinny arms crossed huffily. It reminds him, eerily, of a younger, even brattier Shiv. 

Smart kid, Stewy replies.

Trying to console them is like trying to learn Greek in one sitting — has he ever been good at this? Has any version of him ever known what to do? — and when they end up leaving early, Kendall, entirely out of ideas, takes them to run around the Nintendo store.

“Can I shave my head?” Sophie asks after she’s cleared the place out, her arms full of new games and a stuffed white dog, a character whose name she’s told Kendall at least five times. They’re waiting for Iverson, who’s inspecting Lego sets with the precision of an overworked surgeon. It’s dead aside from the three of them; apparently the store was supposed to close early for the holiday before Jess called.

“Ask Mom,” Kendall says, tugging at her ponytail until she swats him away. “I like your hair.”

“But your head feels so cool now,” she says, stretching up on her tiptoes to try to touch; he bends down to offer it to her. “Do you think Stewy would do it for me too?”

Kendall laughs, trying to imagine how that conversation would go. He remembers unsuccessfully trying to wheedle Stewy into acting as Sophie’s godfather (“Dude, I’m not even Catholic,” was just one of the many reasons he’d given for his hard no) and he’s pretty sure, before recent events, Stewy used to forget he even had kids.

“Yeah, hey, I’ll ask for you,” Kendall says.

Sophie gives him one her shrewd little girl looks. “You can bring him to hang out with us sometime, if you want.”

It catches him off-guard; he’s avoided talking to them about Stewy in anything beyond ambiguous terms, largely because children love to ask questions and he’s not sure he has answers. Rava’s told him about Sophie’s shithead classmates, the ones who try to fuck with her by sending her the articles reporting on whatever Kendall’s up to that week, and sometimes he’s afraid he’ll die like this, without ever feeling anything but deeply set shame when he thinks about his kids.

“Maybe,” he manages, and thankfully Iverson chooses that moment to announce his Lego selection: Bowser’s castle, which seems like as good of a choice as any.

He drops them off on the Upper East Side and blows off the questioning look on Rava’s face as she surveys their wares. She waits until Sophie and Iverson are out of earshot to ask, “Not above buying your kids’ affection, huh?”

He kisses her cheek, already halfway out the door. “I’m not above anything.”

Stewy’s at the bar when Kendall gets home, half-watching TV as he makes himself a drink. He’s still dressed from the day but with a few pieces of the puzzle missing: jacket hung over the back of a chair, socks and belt off, about as rumpled as Stewy ever gets. He glances up from where he’s slicing a lime. “Well, well, if it isn’t Father of the Year. Want one?”

Kendall kicks off his sneakers. “Okay. What is it?”

“G and t.” Stewy licks a drop of liquid off his thumb and sips from the glass in front of him, apparently deeming it acceptable enough to press into Kendall’s hand as he passes by.

Kendall tastes it, humming at the citrusy bitterness. “How very, uh, first college party of you. Hey, is business school everything you ever dreamed it would be?”

“Yeah, but my roommate’s annoying as fuck. I might pants him later.”

He leaves Stewy to play bartender and shuffles toward one of the large windows. The fireworks are still going in thunderous bursts that reflect on the surface of the river. He’s always liked the view from up here, in all its expansiveness.

A hand snags around his bicep, squeezing once before falling away. “You good?”

“I’m good,” Kendall says. “We left almost immediately and then I bought them everything in the Nintendo store.”

“Your remorse is their reward.”

They stand there for a while, drinking in companionable peace, watching as the booming explosions of color light up and then promptly dissolve in the sky, again and again. There’s been a prickle under Kendall’s skin for days, an itch he just can’t seem to scratch. An uncomfortable needling that he knows will keep prodding at him unless he lets go, which he decides to, right then and there.

“I think we can stop whenever. If you want.” Kendall sucks his bottom lip into his mouth, feeling strange — dizzy almost. He doesn’t look at Stewy, though he also doesn’t miss the way his head turns in his periphery. “Right? My dad’s, he’s… he can’t really, uh. Get to us in any significant way. Anymore.” His hand shakes as he lifts the glass for another slow sip. “I know we never really… I just thought, like. If there was ever a time.”

Stewy’s quiet for so long Kendall starts to wonder if he’d actually said anything at all or if he’d just convinced himself he was speaking. But then: “Is that what you want?”

Kendall does face him this time, at a loss. He finally stutters out, “Is it what you want?”

“I asked you first,” Stewy says evenly. He looks, if Kendall’s not mistaken, a little rattled.

“Dude, I’m the one who brought it up,” Kendall protests. “Like, that’s how conversations work. One person brings up a topic and the other responds.”

“Doesn’t matter to me,” Stewy says, like Kendall’s asking him what he wants for dinner. Like anything about this is easy.

“Me neither,” Kendall says, meeting him where he’s at. “I don’t care.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

They stare at each other. Kendall feels scraped out, weightless. Stewy looks like he might say something else and then, instead, drapes an arm around Kendall’s shoulders, pulling him in against his side. “Can we just fucking do drugs?”

“Fuck yeah,” Kendall says, relieved.