“Hey, Mr. Chase. Sorry ‘bout that. You ready?”

“Yeah,” Robbie manages, and he clears his throat. He brings the soap back with him to the counter and feels illicit when he sets it down, like he’s buying porn.

Of course, Cal doesn’t blink at it. He scans the stuff, gives Robbie a total, and pops the box of soap into its own tiny plastic bag inside the bigger one that contains everything else.

Back in the parking lot, Robbie drops the plastic shopping bag into the passenger seat and slings the bigger sack of milk replacer into the back seat. Then, he gets back into the driver’s seat and gets out his phone.

He has a browser. He can type names into a search engine. It just never occurred to him to do it, which, according to Megan, makes him the equivalent of an unenlightened octogenarian.

He types in Lance’s name, and after about a half-second of processing, the phone lights up with a little grid of images above the text results.

All of the tiny pictures are of Lance.

Heat suffuses Robbie’s face. He’s had this feeling before—when he walked into a room and surprised someone, getting the distinct impression that he wasn’t welcome there or that he was seeing something he shouldn’t.

But he can’t look away. More than mere curiosity has him bringing the screen closer to his face, swiping slowly to the right so that he can bring more images into view.

Lance with his hair a little longer than it is now, his curls falling over his eyes, his shirt half-unbuttoned, on one knee on a tile floor. Lance, mile-long legs encased in some kind of shiny fabric, with a matching jacket open so that his lean chest and whipcord stomach are displayed more enticingly than if he were nude. Lance lying on some sort of dark, furred surface, a strip of glossy black material wound around his arm and between his legs, barely hiding his cock and balls…and not concealing their outline in the least.

Robbie scrolls, his whole body turning feverish the more photographs he sees, until he consciously stops himself and carefully sets his phone in the console. He’s in no state for the grocery store, abruptly, so he drives mindlessly, turning at random blocks. There’s the laundromat, which he frequented for a time after the fire, before he got the facilities put into the hayloft. There’s the drug store where he used to let Johnny and Danny get candy bars if they behaved during a Saturday afternoon spent running errands.

He isn’t surprised when the seemingly random route he’s taken to try to clear his head brings him to the police station and the vacant lot across the street, secured by rickety chain link. The cop lot usually doesn’t offer much to see except an assortment of rusty bikes and a metal storage container with unknown contents. But today, in the midst of the rust and junk, draped in snow, is the elegant outline of a blue luxury sedan.