It was 10:03 p.m. and Larkin lay in bed with a hand pressed to his forehead. Between the fight with Noah, all of it right there, sitting on the surface, still too painful to even look at from the corner of his eye, chugging ZzzQuil, and the subsequent meltdown, his headache was back in full force. He heard the fairy lights click off in the main room, and then the french doors opened.

“Can I have some Tylenol,” Larkin asked.

“That depends on how much ZzzQuil you took.” Doyle turned off the bedroom light.

Larkin could feel the glow from the touch lamp on the bedside table. “I wasn’t measuring.”

“Then, no.” Doyle drew back the covers. He climbed into bed, his body a furnace as he draped himself over Larkin’s chest.

Larkin moved his hand to Doyle’s bare shoulder and drew it up and down his arm, fingertips skating along defined muscle, dark hair, encircling the occasional freckle. It was familiar, and somehow entirely new. Larkin’s stomach fluttered when Doyle slid a hand underneath the ratty T-shirt he wore to bed.

“This okay?” Doyle asked, raising his head.

“I’m ticklish.”

“Are you really?”

Larkin narrowed his eyes.

Doyle smirked but pulled his hand free. “I won’t tell anyone.”

“You better not.”

Doyle propped himself up on his right arm. “Did you ever watch Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood?”

“Of course.”

“He talked a lot about love.” Doyle rubbed his hand up and down Larkin’s chest, a sort of wonder in his touch, like all this time he’d actually been holding back, and tonight he was touching—really touching—Larkin for the first time. “He said love is at the root of everything. Love or the lack of it.”

“Are you looking to have a moral debate at ten at night.”

Doyle said, “I don’t want you using ZzzQuil anymore.”

“What does OTC medication have to do with love,” Larkin asked.

Doyle shook his head once. “Everything.”

Larkin felt himself shrinking inward under Doyle’s studious gaze. He’d never called out Larkin’s behavior for what it was—he was addicted to pharmaceuticals, plain and simple—nor did he use derogatory terms that made the truth about himself all the more difficult to accept. Doyle hadn’t brought up what had happened on Sunday, May 10, either. But he didn’t have to. His actions had spoken louder than any sort of intervention.

—thunder boomed outside the bathroom window, so close, so loud, the walkup shaking and shivering from the onslaught of the summer storm, Larkin trying to silence Patrick’s screams, trying to silence the crack of his own skull that repeated over and over like a warped record, and Doyle finding him before he could asphyxiate on his own vomit—