I approached her, indicating my tricep, which still had the gouge and sucked-in indent in it.

“That seems to be a recurring thing,” she said. She had to sort out her own papers, setting them aside so she could get to my notebook, which I had handed her earlier. “And you’re a fun patient because you take extensive notes.”

Her legs kicked as she paged through.

“On your way to becoming a favorite,” Ethan told me, smiling.

“Long way to go,” Anne Lynn said, in a tone that was a stark contrast to her usual bubbly demeanor.

“Ooh, that’s interesting,” Ethan said.

“Shh,” I told him.

“Want to keep going, or—”

“No,” Anne Lynn said.

“—Or not.” He hopped up onto the stack of exercise mats, sitting with enough force that Anne Lynn popped up for a second.

He leaned back against the wall, but because the stack of folded exercise mats was so broad, it made for a very slouching backward lean, more like he was on a large couch than anything. It exposed his abdomen, flat, and no body hair, which was a bit of a mental disconnect for me. My exposure to boys’ bellies—one boy who had a near-identical body type—had me expecting at least a bit. It made me look twice to verify.

The disconnect was a bit of a switch-flip, the mental stumble seeing me going up and over mental walls I’d erected, the ‘over’ coinciding with a ‘woo’ thrill in my own belly.

What followed was a series of thoughts as I tried to navigate disorganized thoughts I really hadn’t explored enough in recent months or years. What about—no, spooky territory. Half-formed mental image banished. What if—no, felt like I was wading into ‘crutch’ territory, because it was almost identical to a Dean memory, just with someone else playing the part. Mentally banish every person in this facility except for him, lean over and lick or kiss every bead of sweat off his abdomen, his chest, reach down to his pants—

No. Thoughts dogged me from places I really didn’t want to go. Thoughts that had been bubbling up since Engel had hit me as hard as—

Didn’t want to think about it. Also sweat was ick and if I knew him better and loved him I’d roll with the more general bodily fluid things, like kissing away tears in a tender moment—which got me right back to thinking about something that I’d done with Dean. And now I was rationalizing my way out of this precarious state of mind and what if—no, that was bad porno. Or—no, that was back to dark places.