Because he had noticed. There was only one person Andrew had ever liked. The only person who had been able to convince him not to run off after Tucker and get turned into a vampire by the Church of the Eternal Night. The only person he ever even talked about other than Tucker. Jonathan felt so stupid that he hadn’t noticed it sooner.

“You like Warren,” he blurted.

“What? No!” Andrew stumbled over a crack in the sidewalk. With a wince, he barely lifted his shoulders in a defeated shrug. “Okay, well, yeah, I do. I did. Now he’s dead, and there’s a chance that we could die at any second too. But—”

“But he was awful to you!” Jonathan interrupted. “He called you names and made fun of you! He hid your Boba Fett action figure in the toilet tank!”

“You liked him too,” Andrew shot back.

“Not like that!” Jonathan said.

Andrew rolled his eyes. Jonathan felt guilty for being so defensive. How many times had he said something unconsciously homophobic in front of Andrew? Even implying that it would be bad to have someone think he was gay, even for just a second, probably made his friend feel less safe with him.

“You liked him enough to live with him,” Andrew said, his tone even. “To follow him around. Take orders from him! Why would you do that if you thought he was so bad?”

“I don’t know!” Jonathan exclaimed. And he didn’t. He’d never had to think about it before. He’d been fourteen when Warren had taken him under his wing, protecting him from bullies and telling him that he could use his brain to get the revenge his body wasn’t capable of exacting. Warren had shown him how to sneak into the Sunnydale High digital gradebook and flunk the guys who had tortured him since kindergarten. Even before the Mayor had proclaimed himself a liaison between hell and earth, Warren had brought Jonathan to the Metaphysical Boutique and shown him that magic was real. They’d gone in on a cursed pendant together. They used it against Percy West, who had trapped Jonathan in a locker with all of the basketball team’s used jockstraps. After he’d worn the pendant, Percy’s skin erupted in lime-green pustules that burst on the hour like horrible, stinking geysers all over his body. He’d transferred schools afterward.

It was the first time Jonathan had ever felt any kind of power. And he’d loved it. Thinking of it now made him hate himself.

“I think maybe I was afraid of not taking orders,” he admitted to Andrew. “If nothing was my idea, then it was never my fault if it went wrong.”

“And maybe liking a guy who was never going to like me back meant that I never had to wonder if someone could like me back,” Andrew said.