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A certain kind of tension ebbs out of Tim when he steps off the bus at Glynco. The air is swampy and hot, the new recruits dressed in training uniforms all around him, and for a minute it’s like he’s back at Fort Benning for basic. He touches a hand to his tags beneath his shirt automatically. GUTTERSON TIM, one of them reads, O NEG, just like it always has, but now the other says PETROSYAN ALEXANDER N, AB POS, and he thinks he can tell which one it is by feel. One for the body, one to take back. Petrosyan’d stopped wearing his, but he put them back on when they swapped one for one and that makes something relax in Tim a little, as much as Tim ever relaxes.
The only personal things Tim brought are two books that Petrosyan gave him—The Magician’s Nephew, the copy he bought back when they were living together in New York, and that worn-out copy of Paradise Lost that Petrosyan used to carry around back in Afghanistan. The first night, when they hit quiet hours, Tim shuts himself away in his room and opens it up.
It must be the version of it that Petrosyan first read in school. The handwriting looks funny at first until Tim realizes it’s because he’s got used to Petrosyan’s scratchy left-handed writing from his letters. This is graceful, though it starts to slant forward whenever it seems like he got excited about something. He’s written in an awful lot of the margins and drawn brackets around phrases and Tim can imagine Petrosyan with a pen, just about giddy as he reads one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flames / No light, but rather darkness visible. In the margins, Petrosyan started out writing Job 10 land of darkness where light is darkness— and then caught himself as his letters got cramped together and added Riddick sight in darkness and then years later must have come back and added Euripides, my revel rout—for light he may have pitchy gloom. It all clusters around that one set of bracketed lines, and it feels like having Petrosyan there in bed talking into his ear. Tim grips the pages of the book tight as he feels an awful wave of missing Petrosyan, different than he did the whole time he was out in Afghanistan, and he grasps frantically for that clean mental space of before, when everything felt just like being back at basic training, simple and familiar. Eventually, he just turns off the light, shuts his eyes, and figures grimly that there’s only so many hours until morning.
You know, I’m going private after this, Barry says. You should think about it, otherwise you’ll probably get stuck with Travis.
What? Tim’s got Petrosyan’s first letter folded up inside his jacket pocket, the creases starting to get a little soft. You’re too hard on him. I went out with him a couple times, he’s not so bad. Not much of a conversationalist.
Yeah, I guess if you get used to Petrosyan, maybe quiet sounds weird to you. Barry gives him a funny look. They pay a whole lot better, in the private sector.
No, Tim says. No, I’m done. The words come out of his mouth like somebody else is saying them. This is my last tour. He hadn’t even realized he’d decided it.
Barry shakes his head. Should’ve known. You were never gonna stick around much after Petrosyan went, one way or the other.
Yeah, well. I’ll find some other job where they let me shoot shit, where there’s real food and liquor and girls around.
Barry snorts into his MRE. Gutterson, we both know you only give a shit about one of those things.
That’s me, insatiable. Petrosyan taught him that one. Satiety, from satis, Latin for enough.
Barry crumples up his napkin and throws it at Tim. Jesus, shut up already.
Tim wakes up breathing hard. He goes for a run and then washes off in the communal showers—one more mark in favor of his Fort Benning deja vu, except there’s nobody else around, nobody counting down the seconds ‘til the water shuts off—and changes into the training uniform, then goes to breakfast. There’s only a couple people there right at 6 AM, and Tim figures, what the hell, this shit’s always easier with friends, and takes his tray over to their table. “You mind?”
“Go ahead.” The woman gestures to the open seat next to her and he sits. “Angela Diaz.”
“Gutterson,” he tells them, and then reminds himself he’s a civilian now and amends it to “Tim.”
Diaz—Angela—is Hispanic, taller than him, probably thirty, and curly-haired with a smile like Barry’s, except maybe he just thinks that because he was dreaming about Barry. “How long’ve you been back?”
“Pretty obvious, huh.” Tim’s halfway through his food already. Back at Ranger school, somebody’d be bellowing at them to get their asses up by now. “Couple months now.”
The guy across the table squints. He’s a white guy, thick-necked with a good six inches on Tim, hair buzzed so close Tim can’t tell if he’s bald or just likes it that way. “Gutterson, huh. Were you at Sykes? With the Rangers?”
An uncomfortable feeling creeps along Tim’s spine. “Yeah, that’s where I came from.” He hopes this guy isn’t going to be the kind who wants to relive the old days by comparing kill counts or some shit like that.
Fortunately, the guy just nods. “Food here’s already a lot better,” he says, and Tim makes his shoulders relax.
Angela snorts. “Listen to Curtis here, pretending those Air Force officers weren’t eating caviar and drinking champagne while the rest of us had chili mac MREs.” Tim can just make out the USMC tattoo on her dark skin. Curtis laughs and doesn’t deny it.
“Hey now,” Tim says. “Chili mac was my favorite.” It’s not really true—he’d be hard-pressed to say he’s got a favorite kind of food, taste-wise, but he’s got the most memories associated with them. It gets another smile out of Angela, though, and he was wrong, hers is a lot kinder than Barry’s. “Me and my spotter, sometimes we’d open up one of those and one of the beef taco MREs and mix up chili mac tacos on our way back in.”
Curtis shakes his head. “I’ll take that caviar and champagne any day, thanks.”
Tim’s long done with his food by the time anybody else starts showing up, and there’s an itch down his spine to do something already, but breakfast runs until 8. “Gonna go look around,” he says. “See you later.” He spends the next hour walking the perimeter, and then the interior, of Glynco. It makes him settle a little more, knowing what the place is like, where everything is.
The first time one of the instructors decides to smoke them all because one dickhead mouths off, Tim feels this almost indescribable calm settle over him, like something clicked into place. He ducks his head and stays a couple guys back from the front of the pack as they run—he knows better than to draw attention to himself in this kind of situation—and thinks, yeah, he can do this shit all day. Times like this, the trick is never to be fastest or strongest or most anything, and for all Tim hates his old man, if there’s one thing he knows how to do, it’s perform a shitty physical task while having somebody scream at him. By the end of the smoke session, it’s pretty obvious who came out of the military not too long ago and who came here expecting to spend most of their time in a classroom. Later, when they’re all in the showers, the guy who mouthed off glances at Tim’s tattoo and sneers a little. “The hell is that supposed to be?”
“Rorschach test,” Tim tells him. “What you see is what you get.” He’s not very impressed. The guy’s cop through and through, and for all Tim’s trying to be a Fed, he’s not a big fan of cops as a general rule. Most of the guys here, they’d never’ve made it through Ranger school, and Tim knows the marshals are a whole lot less rigorous, no offense, but he’s probably regressing some, being here.
It’s a couple days before he actually gets around to writing to Petrosyan. He sent an email to say he was here, right when he first started, but that’s different than having long enough to really think about writing something out, and Petrosyan likes writing out letters on paper to practice his handwriting.
Being here feels like being 17 again, he writes, and he means to make a joke out of it, but instead he keeps going. I graduated early to get away. He died before I got back. Probably good. Somehow it’s easier to say a little of the worst of it to Petrosyan like this, without him here, without having to see his face.
He gets a letter five days later in Petrosyan’s new handwriting. There’s a thought-experiment called the Ship of Theseus. If you gradually replace every piece of a ship as it wears out, when does it stop being the same ship? If you took all of those parts that you were replacing and built a second ship out of it, which would be the real ship? How many things could you take out of a person’s history before they weren’t the same person anymore? Tim thinks he gets the point.
When it comes down to it, Marshals training isn’t much different than anything else he’s ever done. It goes pretty quick when he doesn’t think about missing Petrosyan, and he’s had some practice at that now—even better, he’s got something to occupy him just about all the time, not like over there, where half the time it was just waiting around for something to happen. He mostly eats with Angela and Curtis and runs and doesn’t make trouble, except when the loudmouth cop hears him say something about his spotter that must’ve sounded too affectionate and says, “You have some big gay love affair in the Army?”
There’s a moment where Tim can’t decide how to respond, and then he finds himself saying, “That shit gets you kicked out.” He can’t stand the smug look on the cop’s face, though, so he adds, “We waited ‘til I left to start fucking.” Angela snorts and Curtis laughs and the cop looks uncomfortable, like he’s not sure whether Tim’s even telling the truth about any of it.
Tim sits down on his bed that night, after he’s finished up the work he’s supposed to do, and opens Paradise Lost again randomly. It falls open where the spine is wearing right through, to the page where Lucifer cries out,
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same?
It’s highlighted in faded yellow, and Petrosyan’s writing in the margins starts out normal-sized, then has to bend around the corners, and then the newer comments are written in tiny letters, so small Tim can barely read them. defiant, Fr. mistrustful, makes sense for Lucifer, Petrosyan wrote a long time ago, and then fundamental self/fundament/fundāre, establish. In a corner of the page, he’s written Γνῶθι σαυτόν / know thyself / tat tvam asi / universal principle and then, even smaller, Heraclitus “it belongs to all men to know themselves and think well” delphic oracle sulfur fumes like hell—brimstone is divine retribution. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
Tim closes his eyes and it’s like he can hear Petrosyan saying out loud in his ear, No matter where you go, you can’t get away from yourself. He doesn’t like that idea much.
* * * * *
There’s enough to occupy him that time goes by easily, even with missing Petrosyan. They send letters back and forth, but Petrosyan’s better at thinking of things to write than Tim. He’s got lots to say, so much that Tim doesn’t even know if it’s stuff he’s learning in his classes or just things he’s reading for fun, remembering. Some people have family come visit them on the weekend, about twelve weeks in. Mostly it’s the married ones, the people with kids, and Tim feels a particular strange discomfort watching the way Curtis hoists his four-year-old son onto his shoulders while the kid laughs out loud. Curtis’s wife is there too, a small blonde woman who sticks close to his side like he’ll disappear if she lets go of him, and it’s not like Tim’s never seen a whole family that wanted to be together before, but—but it sticks in his throat like he swallowed something sharp, seeing them.
He’s been good about not drinking much, keeping it to just a couple beers with Angela and Curtis at the canteen every so often, but he goes to the canteen that night and finds himself a corner of the bar with his back mostly to the wall and drinks steadily, as steadily as he can without somebody noticing. It’s pretty quiet, everybody gone who’s got someplace else to go, but eventually Angela shows up and sits down at his table. “Dunno how he does it,” Tim says. It’s the first time he’s said something other than “Another one” for a couple hours.
Angela shrugs. “What, you and your spotter haven’t started adopting a pack of orphans?”
Tim shakes his head slowly. Usually he’s pretty good at keeping it light, never actually confirming if him and Petrosyan are even what he said or if he was just joking, but he’s rubbing his thumb back and forth over Petrosyan’s tag around his neck. “You got—somebody?”
“No.” Angela’s voice is blunt.
He nods once. The ice is melting in his empty whiskey glass and there’s something awful and scratchy in his throat. “Dunno how anybody does it.” He thinks about Petrosyan’s last letter, how Petrosyan didn’t ask if Tim wanted him to come out to visit, how Tim can see the excitement again in the shape of the words when he writes about his classes, how Tim can’t imagine that when he’s done here, Petrosyan won’t’ve thought better of being with Tim. “Hard enough tryin’ to be good enough for one person.”
“Shit,” Angela says. “I thought you were joking.”
“I never figured on us getting out at all.” Tim puts his glass to his lips and sucks the ice cube into his mouth, then crunches on it. It sends a cold shock through his jaw. “We got blown up,” he says, once he’s swallowed the shards. “He lost his hand. Shooter’s no good without his spotter.” He doesn’t know why he’s telling her. For all they’re training buddies, they don’t know each other like that. Maybe the whiskey’s just hitting him harder than it should because he’s been semi-sober for so long.
“Tim,” Angela says, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but—you should probably talk to somebody.”
“Not sure what the wrong way to take that is. If you’re sayin’ I’m fucked in the head, nobody’s disagreein’.”
For a minute, Angela smiles at that, and then it fades. “You’re drunk and you’re probably going to say something stupid to somebody,” she tells him. “Go sleep it off.”
Tim doesn’t want to sleep it off. He wants another drink, and another, ‘til he drowns out everything else. But his glass is empty and Angela is right there and he can’t afford to fuck up here, because he really will go insane if he gets bounced and has to find some other shit to occupy his time. So he gives her a weary smile and stands up and walks back to his dorm room. He’s got a cell phone, hasn’t let himself use it because—because it’s one thing to write letters, where he can think awhile about what he says, and another to talk on the telephone, with Petrosyan hundreds of miles away, where Tim might fuck up saying something right in the minute. He hasn’t checked the messages, either, even though he’s had a couple voicemails for weeks now, but he’s just drunk enough to be stupid and listen to them.
“Gutterson, I don’t know if you already heard from somebody, but—” It’s Wood’s voice, and that alone makes Tim’s heart seize up some. “I figured you should know, that contractor Barry was working for—they got hit. Barry didn’t make it. And—” Wood’s a tough guy, Tim’s never heard or seen him cry, not even after Muñoz, but the waver in his voice has bile rising in the back of Tim’s throat. “And Travis, when we all heard, he—” Tim’s ears roar. “I just figured you should know.”
Tim sets his phone down very carefully. His hands aren’t shaking, but he feels like they oughta be. Muñoz dying, well, that happened the same time as Petrosyan getting hurt, and if Tim’s honest with himself, he was a whole lot more focused on the Petrosyan-shaped hole in his life than Muñoz being dead. But Barry—Tim knew Barry since basic training, as long as he’s known Mark, and Travis—well, Barry and Travis were never the same as him and Petrosyan, but—
He doesn’t even realize he’s picked up the phone again until he hears it ringing and Petrosyan says, “Hello?” Tim’s struggling to breathe, let alone talk. “Tim, are you all right?”
“Barry’s dead and Travis killed himself,” Tim says all in a rush.
“Oh, God—”
“I used to think sometimes—if you’d died out there, when we got blown up—I kept havin’ this dream where you were lyin’ there dead and I just sat down by you and pulled out the shrapnel and let myself bleed out—” It’s better if he says it like that, like it isn’t something he used to think about awake.
“Jesus, Tim.” Petrosyan’s voice is sharp. He doesn’t ask Are you okay because he knows better than that by now.
“I know you never liked Barry much, but I figured you’d wanna know—and Travis—”
“Tell me you’re not drunk at a bar somewhere about to do something stupid,” Petrosyan says. “Tell me you’re somewhere safe.”
“‘m just in my room,” Tim tells him. “Everybody’s family’s visiting, I drank some at the canteen and then came back and finally listened to my messages—”
“Promise me you’ll stay there,” Petrosyan says urgently. “Don’t go drink any more.”
“Nope,” Tim agrees. “Can’t afford to get kicked out, really might go crazy that way.”
“Tim—”
Tim doesn’t know how to reassure Petrosyan that he’s okay, that he’ll be fine, so instead he does the least reassuring thing he can and says, “I’m gonna sleep it off, I love you,” fast as he can so he can get the words out, and then hangs up the call. Petrosyan doesn’t call him back, like maybe he knows Tim’d spook even worse if he did.
Tim takes the beat-up copy of The Magician’s Nephew and huddles up on his bed—people talk about curling up in bed in books, like it’s someplace warm and friendly instead of just a little more shelter, but the only time Tim’s ever curled up in bed it’s been around somebody else. He’s steered clear of this book because he remembers how mad The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe made him, the miserable lump at the back of his throat whenever he thought about the kids who’d got away from their lives being dragged back into them, and what it was like trying to read it out loud at that one emergency foster shelter, just trying to quiet some kids down because it was like they didn’t understand that if they made too much noise, somebody’d start paying attention and that’d only be worse. It takes him too long to open it up and start reading.
Shit, Gutterson, I never saw somebody put it away like you do, Barry says. How the fuck are you still walking straight? He gestures at Mark, passed out on the couch of the motel room they got to celebrate. For once, he’s the normal one.
Good genes, Tim tells him. You oughta see my old man kill a bottle. There’s some whiskey left in Mark’s cup, and he finishes it off, then squeezes the cup until it crumples up in his hand. He hefts the empty bottle by the neck like a bat and gives it an experimental swing. Barry’s face makes him put it down.
Don’t do it. It’s a shitty idea, Gutterson. He wins.
No, Tim says. This time, I’m finally gonna win.
Tim runs hard the next morning. It’s been awhile since he felt this lousy, not since before he started at Glynco. Their training class is down four guys by now—two from injuries, one who quit, and one who got bounced pretty early on—and he likes almost everybody who’s left reasonably well. People have started talking about where they might go, what office they want to work in, and that’s another minefield for Tim to start contemplating, isn’t it. He can’t imagine staying in Los Angeles, where it’s oppressively hot and dry and he gets flashes of desert sometimes, but he doesn’t know if Petrosyan’ll be up for leaving, not with college and his family and all that. He shoves it down deep, down alongside a whole host of other things he can’t quite contemplate, and runs right up until the last minute before he has to be in a classroom.
In the end, he puts in applications to a whole bunch of offices, to Los Angeles because he figures he owes it to Petrosyan, to Lexington because Mark’s there and Mark’s the closest he’s got to family, Anchorage because he thinks about cold clear nights and he likes the idea of snow everywhere, a couple others that he picks out just about at random as long as they’re noplace he’s ever lived before.
He gets the offers back two days before Petrosyan shows up for his graduation. They haven’t talked on the phone since that night Tim got drunk, but Tim made himself write a letter saying You should come for graduation if it works with school, nobody believes me when I tell them about you.
If you want me there, I’ll be there, Petrosyan wrote, and the letters were steady and even. His handwriting’s got a whole lot better over the last months.
The graduation ceremony’s a blur, mostly because all Tim can see is Petrosyan’s face, only sound he can hear is his voice, and maybe he oughta introduce him to Curtis or Angela or somebody but he just wants the ceremony overwith so he can get someplace where there’s nobody else around. But then everybody’s going out and Petrosyan looks to Tim and Tim feels like he should show how he’s not a fuckup, how he can be normal, and they go to out too, out to a bar. At least they find a table apart from everybody, so Tim can just drink in the sight of Petrosyan again, skin tanned dark from the summer sun. He moves easier now, like he’s not so off-balance, and he wears his sleeves rolled up without bothering with a prosthetic.
Tim wants to say a hundred different things to him, but all that comes out is, “Got an offer from the Los Angeles office.” He tries to keep his voice casual.
Petrosyan looks sharply at him. “You want to stay in Los Angeles?”
Tim shrugs. “Ain’t the only place I applied, but I figured you would, and I want—” to stay with you is so honest that he thinks it’d burn his throat to say, so he takes a drink instead.
“Where else?”
Tim can’t tell what’s in Petrosyan’s head. “Lexington and Anchorage both said they’d have a spot for me if I wanted.”
There’s a hint of a smile in Petrosyan’s eyes, at least. “Those don’t have much in common.”
“Sure they do.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure Kentucky is a better school than Alaska,” Petrosyan says, and Tim suddenly can breathe again.
“You don’t—”
“I’ll lose my mind if I stay in Los Angeles much longer.” Petrosyan’s dark eyes are steady on his. “Promise me one thing, though.” Tim oughta say anything, but he finds himself holding his breath instead. Petrosyan lowers his voice. “I’m not asking you to—start wearing a rainbow bracelet or something, I know it won’t be that kind of place. I’m not expecting to be able to kiss you in public, and I know you might have to keep your mouth shut for your job, at least for awhile. But don’t—” He breaks off like he’s not sure how to say it.
“I told ‘em here,” Tim says. “Dunno if they all believed me, but—I won’t.” Petrosyan’s breath catches and Tim reaches across the table to brush their knuckles together. “Nobody’s tried to throw me out yet.”
“Okay.” Petrosyan grins a little, and Christ but Tim missed that smile. “Lexington it is. I’ll buy you a cowboy hat.”
Tim’s about to argue when he feels somebody coming up behind him and turns. It’s just Angela, bottle in one hand and glass in the other, and she says, “So this is the famous spotter, huh?”
Tim wants to say, yeah, now go away and lemme have him to myself, but he can tell Petrosyan likes the thought that Tim talked about him to somebody. “Just like I told you,” Tim says instead. “You gonna finish that bottle all alone?” He hooks his foot around the leg of a chair to pull it out for her.
They take a taxi back to Petrosyan’s motel, because they’re both too drunk to drive and hell if Tim’s spending the night at FLETC when he’s finally got Petrosyan here again. Petrosyan leans warm against him and Tim remembers that first time in Vegas when they’d barely made it into the hotel room. The motel here only has three stories, nothing like the mirrored elevator they rode at the hotel in Vegas, but Tim still kisses him as soon as the stairwell door swings shut. Petrosyan breathes hot and shaky against his mouth and Tim licks the taste of whiskey off his tongue, pressing him up to the cool concrete wall. Petrosyan’s body is restless against his and eventually he breaks away and gasps out, “The room is—one flight of stairs away—”
Tim lets go of him reluctantly, because he knows Petrosyan’s right and it’d be hell to get caught like this in a stairwell, but fuck if he doesn’t miss the feeling of Petrosyan as soon as he lets go. They stumble up the rest of the stairs and Petrosyan fumbles the keycard one-handed for a minute before Tim gets too impatient and snatches it out of his hand, and then they’re inside, door slammed shut behind them, so Tim can finally get his hands on Petrosyan’s bare skin. Petrosyan works his fingers into the knot of Tim’s tie and undoes it one-handed, then goes for the buttons of his shirt, and Tim’s lighting up everywhere they touch. He means to take his time but instead he gets Petrosyan’s pants open and sides his hand inside to find the hard heat of his cock. Petrosyan groans against his mouth and Tim kisses the side of his neck, lingers there so he can hear the sounds Petrosyan makes even better. When Petrosyan gets a hand on his cock—well, it’s been 18 weeks just thinking about this, and Tim hitches forward into his hand, strokes him a little faster too and breathes, “Fuck—Alex—” into his ear, and the feel of Petrosyan coming sets him off too.
They wash off in the lukewarm water of the too-small shower and Tim feels like his skin must be steaming. Petrosyan catches him just looking, flushes a little red, and says, “I started running again,” a little defensively.
“Yeah you did.” Tim skates soapy hands over Petrosyan’s thighs, hears the sharp breath and thinks that if the shower was just a little bigger, he’d get down on his knees and see if Petrosyan missed him enough to come again. But the shower’s so tight there’s barely room for even this much, and instead he just keeps on touching Petrosyan like this until the water actually starts to run cold and they have to get out.
“Here.” Petrosyan passes him a towel and dries off himself, smiling at Tim.
Tim looks at his messy dark hair and the grin on his face and feels this awful swell in his chest. He says abruptly, “Gotta—tell you somethin’. Some shit I been meanin’ to.” It’d be better if he was a little more sober, but seeing Petrosyan, he can’t stand the thought of him keeping on loving Tim, if that’s what he’s going to do, without knowing. Tim wraps the towel around his waist and walks over to the bed to sit down.
Petrosyan stiffens. “Something bad?”
Tim’s not so drunk that he doesn’t realize what Petrosyan means. “Nothin’—not like that, no. I know I never told you how I grew up or anything—” He shoves a hand through his wet hair. “I was gonna kill my old man, when I finished basic.”
“Jesus, Tim.” Petrosyan stares at him. “Did you?”
It says something, both that he thinks Tim might’ve and that he didn’t just take off right then and there. Not like he’s never seen Tim kill somebody, Tim supposes. “No. He was dead. Got arrested for somethin’, guess he went too long without drinkin’ and died from DTs like I said.” He can’t stand to look at Petrosyan’s face. “I never understood why he took me in the first place—near as I can figure, my momma died when I was little and the state found him somehow, got him to take me. Maybe he got money for it or something, dunno, but he hated me. Not just didn’t want me around, even, but—” This might be the most words he’s ever said out loud about it.
“God.” Petrosyan says it so softly that Tim thinks he didn’t mean to talk out loud. He sinks very carefully on the bed next to Tim, not quite touching him.
“Child services used to take me away, now and then, if he was too drunk and hit me hard enough someplace that somebody’d see it and report it.” Tim laughs a little. “That made me maddest sometimes, when I was older, because it was such a fuckin’ hassle and I always went right back to him anyhow and then he was mad ‘cause he thought I’d gone and told somebody myself.”
“I’m—”
Tim shakes his head to whatever Petrosyan’s gonna say. “I don’t—I just wanted you havin’ some idea what you’re gettin’ into here, okay? Us—movin’ in together for real, for good—I’m not sayin’ I can’t figure out how to be—better, but I know I can’t fight right and I know I drink too much, and I’m never gonna be like—like the people in your classes, and I woulda killed him—”
“Tim.” Petrosyan moves slow enough that Tim has time to recognize it before he lays his hand on Tim’s shoulder and grips it tight. “I’m going to try to say this the right way, so bear with me. I know what I’m getting into and I want it, all right? I know you’re pretty fucked-up.” He gives Tim an unbearably gentle smile. “Yeah, you can’t fight right and you drink too much, and I’m not saying that that’s all right, but—I’d rather figure all of that out with you than not be with you.” His smile turns a little wry. “I might not know all the specifics, but I know you.”
“Okay,” Tim mumbles. “Long as you’re sure, I’ll try not to fuck it up too bad.”
“I’m sure,” Petrosyan promises.