Lance avoids all of the creaky places in the floors of this house he loves and knows so well, until he’s upstairs and halfway down the hall to Danny’s door.

But he doesn’t make it there in the end, because Robbie’s light is on and his door is half-open. He calls out as Lance passes.

“Lance, is that you?”

Today.

Lance doesn’t sleep. He stares out the window at the piling snow and the moonlight, until the marbled silver wall of clouds passes over the moon and there’s only darkness.

Robbie wasn’t kidding about how noisy the air compressor is. He scared all three cats into hiding under the sofa while he ran it. Under any other circumstances, Lance would have laughed until his stomach ached. But in the aftermath of his conversation with Robbie, he found no humor in the situation. He just lay still with his back to Robbie and pretended the noise was nothing, watching the window.

Before he laid down himself, Robbie explained he was leaving his phone where Lance could use it if he needed it. He wrote down the password on a slip of paper in case Lance forgot. Then, he got down on the air mattress, in the dark near the bathroom door outside the span of the moonlight. Even when Lance snuck glances over his shoulder, he couldn’t see Robbie. He could hear the blankets rustling, though, for a while—quite a while. He wondered if either of them would sleep at all. But then, eventually, Robbie’s breaths grew deep and even, leaving Lance alone as if he were the only person awake in the world.

He thinks of his father’s house across the creek. He thinks of his younger self in his room, facing the window framed by curtains laced by a mother he can’t remember. So many years have been spent thinking of his inability to sleep the way he’s imagined everyone else in the world does, slipping under and out with the lights…another thing that’s made him different. Another aspect of himself that’s separated him from other people. It wasn’t until he was almost through college that he got his sleeping pills. He thinks of the little bottle tucked into his luggage in the trunk of his—or rather, Niall’s—car, which would solve his sleeping problem in just fifteen to twenty minutes. Then, he thinks about those dreamless nights on the pills, veiling a deeper problem with a surface remedy, but not letting himself consider it too carefully. Focusing instead on the way he could lie down next to Niall and not have to spend the whole night staring at him and hearing his snores.

He tries not to think about how soundly he slept, unmedicated and nestled in Robbie’s arms. He fails.

To torture himself a little more, he thinks about how he chased Robbie out of the bed they were sharing and across the hayloft, for reasons he can’t even untangle in his own mind, let alone hope to explain to Robbie. Shouldn’t he have been relieved when Robbie heard the truth about Niall and wasn’t angry or disgusted?