Lance can’t remember when he last felt so breathless over a gift. He’s always liked to have small and pretty things, so much so that he has a sordid history of taking them for himself. Some of the memories this feeling evokes are darker and uglier than others, but those threads of bad memory are quickly stifled by the thrill of the present.

Lance plucks the soap from its box and steps around the kitchen island countertop, and he rolls the edge of the soap against his opposite wrist, then lifts his arm toward his face and inhales the residual scent there, eyes half-closed.

Robbie looks like a feather could knock him over.

Lance continues to wander closer. “I do like it,” he tells Robbie in a low murmur, stopping just within reach—if Robbie wanted to grab him. And he does; Lance can see with satisfaction that there’s a fine tremor in his arms, the one still raised, his hand frozen on the back of his head, and the other, which dangles at his side, though his fingers have curled into a tight fist of restraint.

Dreamily, Lance recalls the first time he ever got in front of a camera. How the terror subsided and gave way to a pure sense of liberation. The wonder he felt at how he could lose himself in a performance. For Lance, it wasn’t becoming someone else, as he’d heard others describe performing in the past. It was becoming a version of himself that was unbound by expectation.

He knows this dance with a man very well. It’s been a performance, too, but one that he’s grown to resent. This moment with Robbie, though, feels like being in front of the camera lens. That stripping away of restraint, that infusion of confidence that seems to have come from the ether and insists that he knows what he is doing; that if he gives in, he can’t lose. He is a hawk on a thermal of air, lifted higher and higher. Nothing can reach him and bring him to Earth unless he agrees to return.

He lifts the bar of soap to his neck and rubs it there, looking at Robbie through hooded eyes, his eyelashes blurring the edges of Robbie’s image. Somehow, that half-focus intensifies all the darkness of Robbie’s beard and hair and eyes, which are snared by Lance like he’s hypnotized.

“What do you think? Does it suit me?” Lance takes another step forward, head tilted, neck bared, and with a strangled sigh, Robbie leans forward to smell his neck. He isn’t touching Lance, but there’s a blooming heat from the proximity of their bodies, and Lance thinks Robbie must be aching just as Lance is, because the heat and energy he’s radiating feels as tangible as a touch. Robbie’s face hovers just over Lance’s throat. His hair falls forward and brushes Lance’s shoulder, but otherwise, they are bodies apart as Lance listens to the rasp of Robbie’s inhale.

“It’s—” Robbie begins to say, but the gust of his warm breath on Lance’s neck as he speaks makes Lance gasp, which makes Robbie groan, and then, abruptly—