“The baby took a shit,” he tells Robbie proudly, holding up the bag. Then a gust of wind hits him and he steps back into the hayloft quickly, eyeing the bags in Robbie’s hands and the sack of something over his shoulder. “Need help?”

Robbie smiles as he scales the deck stairs carefully. The snow he shoveled away earlier has already been replaced by a fresh, soft layer.

“I’ve got it,” Robbie assures him. “But if you can take these sacks when I get up there?”

Lance nods, waiting in the doorway, shivering and peering at the silvery sky until Robbie is within reach. Lance is hurrying to take the sacks, which means he doesn’t have a chance to figure out a way to take the bags without their hands touching. When he dips his crooked fingers through the handles, lifting the weight off of Robbie’s hands in a silent signal to let go, he misses Robbie’s cold fingers as soon as they’re gone.

The intensity of these feelings is ridiculous, he thinks around his racing heart. Ridiculous even for Lance, who has never reacted proportionately to anything. Ridiculous even for feelings Lance has for Robbie, and the complex and tormented history of Robbie’s place in Lance’s heart.

Lance backs out of the doorway with the shopping bags, giving Robbie room to shake off the snow and shed his outer clothes. He busies himself putting milk, a dozen eggs, and a brick of cheese into the mostly empty fridge. In the second bag, he encounters the cereal, which makes him laugh. Robbie, now stripped down to jeans and a crewneck long-sleeved shirt in a navy blue so dark that it’s almost inseparable from the spill of his hair and his beard, glances up from the calf he’s knelt to pet with a smile. Lance can’t meet his eye for more than a second before his stomach clenches and he remembers jerking off in Robbie’s bed, to thoughts of Robbie, with a flash of guilt and shame. And excitement, too, that if Robbie knew, he might not mind. He might even….

Distracting himself by combing through another bag, Lance finds the box.

“What’s this?”

The lid isn’t taped down, so just Lance’s handling has it tipping back and the smell of the contents wafting up at him.

Lance looks up to find Robbie on his feet where he was kneeling a moment before, staring back. There’s a splash of red on each of his cheeks. Lance feels that strange sense of being a second behind an important realization, and looks back down at the box. He pushes the lid out of the way altogether and a murmur of surprised pleasure escapes him as his thumb runs over the ridges of a cake of molded soap. It smells wonderful. He didn’t see anything like this in the rows of economical bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and bodywash in Robbie’s shower.

“What’s this?” he asks, glancing at Robbie again.

“Um.” Robbie lifts his right hand to rake it through his hair, pulling up the hem of his shirt. The resulting flash of smooth, hard abdomen grazed with a trail of black hair makes Lance’s heart jump. “I guess it made me think of—I thought you might like it. It seemed nice.” His smile eases toward teasing. “You know, fancy.”