The person he’d always, his whole life, woken up wanting to see, and the person he’d cleave to until he closed his eyes for the last time.

“You what?” Theo’s voice was like gravel. He stubbed out the cigarette. Cleared his throat.

“Beg. I’m here to—”

“Fuck off.”

“No.”

Theo stared, running his eyes from the top of his head to his knees. “You’re bleeding, Gardner.”

Jack looked down. The blue-and-white china had indeed cut him, and he was bleeding—maybe more than a little. “That would explain the pain, then.”

He stayed kneeling.

“Oh for fuck’s sake.” Theo took a swallow of whiskey. “Get up.”

Jack’s knees creaked as he stood—he may have felt like a teenager, inside, but his body was one hundred percent thirty-seven years old, and it hated him.

“Come here.” Theo jerked his head.

Jack walked over, dripping, and when he stood next to Theo, Theo used the edge of his sleeve to wipe at the cut. Jack hissed.

“It’s just a scratch, Gardner. Don’t be so dramatic.” Theo squinted up at him, his refined features going all pointy, like they had been when he was a boy. “So?”

Jack frowned.

“Beg!” Theo lit another cigarette—God, how could he still smoke like this—and offered one to Jack. “Sweet mother of God, what the fuck.”

Jack sat down next to him—moving, just in time, a razor-sharp piece of splintered glass stuck in the carpet (which he thought that maybe Genni had left there, just for him)—and fiddled with the cigarette. He opened his mouth, and nothing came out. He coughed, tried again.

Theo snorted. “Why did I ever bother with you?”

“I’m sorry, I... Oh, what the hell.” He lit the cigarette, breathed in, got instantly buzzed, “I’d forgotten how disgusting and wonderful these things are. Let’s not tell our children about this, all right?”

Theo got very still. “Yes. You always preferred to keep me your dirty little secret.”

A dizzy flash of shame, remorse, and Jack crushed the cigarette. “That’s not what I meant, Theo.”

“No?” Theo started laughing, acidic, eating away at the unnaturally stagnant air of the study.

Jack sat, mute.

“You can’t do it, can you? Telling me you’re here to beg—to beg me to—” Theo’s voice broke off, thick. “And you can’t. Just another fucking lie.” He threw his cigarette across the room.

It was Jack’s turn to curl up on himself, forearms on knees. He felt the space between them, the space where Theo wasn’t touching him, like an endless chasm. He remembered the green hill, a bandaged lip, his hunger.

“I realized, in the end,” Theo’s voice was casual, relaxed, like they were discussing the weather, “That you didn’t mean it.”

“What—”

“We were young, I know that now, though it didn’t feel like it at the time. Maybe—maybe you thought that telling me that you—that you—ugh.”

Theo picked up the bottle, drank for three precise seconds, and offered it to Jack, who shook his head. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, marked with Jack’s blood.