Yeah, I have a job, he thought. He imagined his father’s pinched face across the cold table of the prison’s visitation room. That’s right, Dad. I’m a fucking cleaner.

He’d been lucky, actually. In that first week—living off the small trust fund he’d managed to cash out before leaving Baltimore—he wasn’t sure how he would survive. He’d had no plan; he’d just left. After—after the tattoo, and after that odd encounter with Gardner, after he had witnessed Theo wild and degraded and out of control, he knew he couldn’t... Couldn’t continue the life that his father had shaped for him. Destroyed for him. And—

There was maybe a part of him, an unspoken and reviled part, which needed something from Gardner which Gardner was incapable of giving. He remembered that hand, reaching out, the way his skin almost hummed with longing. He didn’t want that; he wanted it too much. Four years of hating him and wanting him and lying to himself—he needed to forget that. He needed to pretend it wasn’t real.

He thought about Genni, her face when he told her that he was leaving. She’d put her hand on his shoulder and it ached with the absence of attraction, of arousal. Her eyes were clouded, sad for him and angry; and she was panicking, her own father nearly as culpable as his. She’d asked him why he was leaving but she knew the answer—most of it. And then she’d pushed him away, fierce.

“Go on.” She crossed her arms, looked down, glared up at him. “Run.”

So he left a curt note for his mother. He didn’t want to live through another moment when she barely acknowledged him, another confirmation of her well-mannered and long-standing apathy. And he did run, he kept running, taxi to airplane to glossy black cab, and then he was here, jobless, no idea of what he was doing, and he was filled with horror, and he was free.

He found an apartment, put down a deposit, counting his money and dreading whatever catastrophe which might come next. But he had still gone out dancing and drinking, night after night, raging against uncertainty, and he usually ended up at Danny’s when the pubs closed and the nightclubs opened.

His first gay club. His own place.

He nearly laughed at himself, walking along, thinking about those first moments when he could just be. Be Theo, not a Beaumont, and gay as a fucking picnic basket. It was absolutely terrifying. He’d gone a bit mad with it.