No, thought North as he reached the closed door to Shaw’s bedroom and paused, his hand on the knob. No, it wasn’t the physical damage that worried him, not really. It was the rest of it. It was the simple facts of the diagnosis: Matty had been Shaw’s first; Shaw really only had one setting inside his head, and he loved harder and hurt deeper and felt more intensely than anyone North had ever known. Matty had taken the best part of Shaw, the most vulnerable part of Shaw, and broken it. The times when North couldn’t breathe, the times when he had to stand up and pace in Tuck’s cramped hospital room, were when he thought that maybe, just maybe, Matty had broken it past repairing. And then North would think about the later years of college, watching Shaw slowly fall apart until he couldn’t even leave the apartment they shared, until North was hurting inside so much, just watching Shaw, that he thought he might go crazy too, until one day North had finally lost his mind and kicked down the bedroom door and dragged Shaw outside.

His fingers felt cold around the doorknob. Or maybe the doorknob was cold. Or maybe the world was just a fucking cold place. It was hard to tell sometimes. North turned the knob, and it stuck. Locked.

Terror buzzed, rising like a swarm inside North’s chest, and he had a picture of Shaw doing something stupid, of a knife, of a rope, of pills, and he hammered on the door. “Shaw! Hey, Shaw. You in there? Shaw!”

The door flew open, and Shaw stood there in nothing but a pair of mustard-colored briefs that were practically falling off his bony ass and two mismatched socks. One came up to his knee and featured a sparkling unicorn. The other looked like it was one of North’s black cotton running socks.

“What? Are you ok? What’s going on?” Shaw poked out his head, looking down the stairwell. “Is it Pari, is she—”

“No, sorry. I just didn’t know if you could hear me. I just—” North felt his cheeks heating, and he shrugged.

“What time is it?”

North eyed his friend, taking in Shaw’s flush, the briefs that were barely clinging to his ass, the mismatched socks. “Were you watching porn?” The unicorn sock. “Some sort of weird anime porn?”

“What?” Shaw blinked and looked at himself, seeming to realize only then what he was wearing. “No. Wait, what? Have you actually seen some of that stuff because—hang on. What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Five. Five-thirty.”

“Dang it.” Shaw sprinted back into the room.

North followed, watching with a grin while Shaw dragged open dresser drawers, pulled a turquoise guayabera off the corner of the mirror, and shrugged into it. He did up the buttons while he sprinted down the hall toward the living room. “Have you seen my pants?”

“Which ones?” North took in the apartment with careful slowness. A litter of socks and shirts and underwear. A pile of torn-out pages, and the ruined binding of the book they had come from—Christ, what kind of experiment or self-help practice or life hack was Shaw trying?—and four kettles lined up on the windowsills, which made North vaguely uneasy that Shaw had been trying to make sun tea again, and an enormous ficus that had not been here two days before. Aside from the darker patch of wood in the hall, it still looked like a Shaw Aldrich apartment. More importantly, it still felt like a Shaw Aldrich apartment. “Those panties you were running around in at the Lucky?”