The way the last twenty-four hours had gone, Cooper would not have been half surprised to wake up to Eli perched on his knees or rooting around in his underwear drawer. Fortunately, he woke alone and much later than usual. Without even getting out of bed he could tell it was a beautiful day. The air had that still, bright and clear quality. The sun shone through the windows and Cooper could hear crows angrily berating something or other. He could also hear the TV on downstairs and, remembering his houseguest, wondered if he might need to revise the prediction of a beautiful day.

Still in sweatpants and a T-shirt, Cooper didn’t bother getting dressed before going downstairs. Concern for what Eli was getting up to unsupervised outweighed any desire to feel a little more put together when facing him.

Formality seemed a moot point anyway after they’d polished off the rest of the wine bottle last night, both too hopped up on adrenaline to go to sleep right away. Eli had seemed determined not to reveal anything else about himself and kept the conversation focused on prying into Cooper’s past relationships. His romantic and sexual histories were normally not things Cooper would share with another person—he mostly avoided thinking about them himself—but if there was one thing about Eli’s situation he could easily empathize with, it was how gross it felt to expose so much of yourself, to be so known by someone without learning anything in return—the inequity of it. The vulnerability, the paranoia that the other person was laughing at you, pitying you. Opening up had obviously been hard for Eli; Cooper didn’t want to make it worse.

So he’d talked. He’d talked about his first girlfriend Sophie, now married to his brother—Incestuous!—his first boyfriend in college of one short month who had been sweet, if a bit stiff, and very vanilla—Are you absolutely certain you weren’t dating a waffle cone? He’d even told him about his first partner in the FBI who was older, much older, someone intended to be a mentor, who had been a mentor as a successful queer man in undercover...he’d just also liked Cooper’s dick a lot, at the same time.

Eli hadn’t quipped about that one. Maybe beneath Cooper’s light words, he could sense a glimmer of the darkness, if only just the part that reflected his own story. The joy and loyalty of recognizing someone like you, that led to letting down certain guards, twisting certain hurts even deeper.