This is not the first time these words have been uttered between us. The summer before I started grade twelve, we were joined at the hip in public. In private, we were joined at other parts, but neither of us would fess up to that. One August night as we sat on the beach doing post-coital bottle tokes and trying to shimmy the sand out of our arse cracks, he stared up at the clear, ceilingless sky and said those exact words to me: “So. What’s the deal here? What are we?”

And I laughed. Not to be mean, but because it just seemed so random, so out of the blue. We’d been doing this kind of thing off and on for years. It seemed silly that all of a sudden it needed to have a name. That there was even a “deal” or a “we.” That there was anything other than a mutual desire to smoke and laugh and fuck. A wounded look sunk into his faraway eyes, and right then I knew there was nothing funny about it to him.

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “This is perfect. This is what all the other wankers out there with their cheesy pet names and promise rings and four-month anniversaries of their first dry hump, this is what they really wish they had. Why fuck up something good with a label?” Then I sucked back my bottle toke, grabbed Gimp by the face and stuck my tongue in his mouth. Or something like that.

So now, I am lying here praying like hell that he won’t say the same thing. Because while I was puking my tumour-riddled brains out in the bathroom just now, I had my own epiphany. I don’t want to be alone on a hospital ward, with no one but my mother to bear full witness to my life and death. I need a steady, consistent supply of partnership, of love, of high-quality mutually orgasmic sexual encounters before I die. I want it carved in stone. Labelled for everyone to see. And I want it with Willy Gimp. I think.

“Ahhh, the ol’ ‘what are we’ conversation.” Gimp sighs. My eyes stay glued to the ceiling. Still, the room spins, my stomach churns again, and in my peripheral vision I can see pale grey clouds tinged with a sour yellow and royal blue gathering around Willy’s head. And I suddenly wish I’d kept my big mouth shut.

“Crow, you know I can’t —” and that’s the moment his phone rings. “Shit. I gotta take this.”

He yanks on his boxer shorts with one hand and presses his phone to his ear with the other while he shuffles to the bathroom and closes the door. Three minutes later, he is off the phone and pulling the half-buttoned white dress shirt over his head.

“What’s up? Something at the garage?” I say, using Occam’s razor to cut through all the wild assumptions and speculations I managed to jump to in the span of a three-minute hushed phone conversation.