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“Hey,” he slurred. “We were looking for you.”

“Yeah, man,” Charlie said. “Where did you go? We looked for you… like everywhere, man.”

“What happened to your clothes?”

“Hmm?”

“Your clothes,” I repeated, but Charlie lost interest and turned his attention to the unlit cigar hanging out of his mouth.

Joe had one too, but, though he didn’t appear to be smoking it, it was lit and hot ash was threatening to fall onto his bare skin. I pulled it out of his mouth and flicked it across the street. “What about
your
clothes, huh? Dude, you’re practically naked.”

It was apparently news to both of them. After talking in circles, it transpired that they’d performed an impromptu striptease on the dance floor of the club and forgotten to locate their clothes when they left. They’d walked more than a mile through the city in their underwear.

I’d seen people arrested for a lot less. I told Joe as much as I hauled him to his feet.

“I did see a cop,” he said, swaying. “But I don’t think he was a real one. He was looking at my ass too much.”

“So you liked the gay bar, huh?”

“Not bad, not bad. Hey, can you still hear the music?”

Sighing, I put his arm over my shoulders and led him inside. He leaned on me, whistling, until I deposited him by the elevator.

“Hey, where did you go, anyway? I was worried when you disappeared. Charlie said he saw you getting your freak on and….” He stopped and blinked. “Oh, man. You’ve totally got sex hair.”

I turned to go back for Charlie. “Shut your mouth, or you’ll be sleeping right there.”

Ash was waiting in the hallway when we got upstairs. He relieved me of Joe and took him to the kitchen to clean the ultraviolet paint from his face. I did the same with Charlie in the bathroom, then dressed him in some of Ash’s clothes and shoved him unceremoniously onto the couch.

I flopped down beside him with a heavy sigh. Babysitting hooligans had ruined my postcoital buzz, and now all I had was a hangover.

Charlie nudged me with his elbow. “That place was awesome. We should definitely go again.”

“Something you want to tell me, Chas?”

He opened a dopey eye. “Hell, no. Not that there’s anything wrong with it… shit, you know what I mean. It was cool as fuck, you know? Like no one cared who you were or where you came from. I didn’t know gay bars were like that. I thought they were like strip clubs with dicks.”

“Then why did you want to go?”

Charlie hiccupped as he slid further down the couch. “For you and Ash. You two need to be you.”

I never got the chance to figure out what he meant because Joe barreled over the back of the couch a few seconds later and landed on top of us. Ash helped me wriggle out from underneath them and once he was sure they were both out cold, he pulled me to the bathroom.

“Take a shower with me?”

M
UCH
,
MUCH
later that day, after a round of the quietest blowjobs known to man and a bit more sleep, I found myself in the living room with Joe. Ash had dragged Charlie out with him to get food, but Joe had remained slumped on the couch. He kept his head down while I got ready for work, but he gave me an easy grin when I dropped onto the big old chair.

I punched him on the shoulder. “Feeling better?”

Of all of us, he’d suffered the worst hangover. Charlie got wasted every weekend, but Joe had fallen into the same sober routine I had. Without the buzz of some fuck-hot sex to distract him, the poor guy had been hanging all day.

Joe nodded. “Yeah, dude, finally. I don’t know what they put in that green shit I drank, but it came out the same color it went in.”

“Nice.”

“Not really. It sure got me singing, though. Sorry we woke you up. I don’t even remember coming back here.”

I shrugged it off. It had been Ash who wanted Joe and Charlie in and off the street, not me, though, in hindsight, having them around all day had been a good thing. In quieter moments, I’d noticed Ash looking reflective. Having people around helped when his mood dipped.

“Do you need me to stay tonight?” Joe asked, as though he could read my mind.

I hesitated a moment before I shook my head. It would’ve made my night easier knowing Joe was with Ash, but it had been a while since Ash had started spending the nights I worked on his own again. He would be fine. It was my own imagination that made things hard. “I think he’s got some work to do. Should keep him out of trouble.”

Joe hummed. He seemed distracted, which wasn’t like him. Though the dude was as laid-back as they came, beneath it all, he was as sharp as a tack. Zoning out wasn’t his style.

“What’s up?”

“Hmm?”

“You’re all quiet and shit. Something wrong?”

“Nah.” Joe leaned back and stretched his legs out. “I’ve got some stuff going on back home. I should’ve gone and dealt with it this weekend, but I was too busy getting my gay on.”

“Busy?” I countered. “Or distracting yourself?”

“Okay, you got me, but I had fun doing it.”

Joe sighed, and the heavy sound marred his halfhearted grin. I considered his pensive expression. He was a friend, a good friend I would feel forever indebted to. It bothered me to see him down. “What’s going on back home? Is it your parents?”

“Not really, although I guess if it wasn’t for them this would be easy.”

“What would?” My job, and living with someone who struggled to articulate how he felt, had taught me the art of patient questioning, but I’d never had cause to use it on Joe. He was usually an open book.

He sighed again. “You remember when Ash got sick?” I nodded. As if I could forget. “Yeah, well, before that I was supposed to move back to Seattle again, to see how it went.”

“With your girl?”

From what I could gather, he’d been on and off with a girl in Seattle since his second go-round at college. He’d met her in Philly, when she was playing jazz with Charlie in a backstreet blues bar. He made her sound like Nina Simone, but I always indulged him when he started rambling about the wild boho chick who’d stolen his heart. She’d left her home city of Philadelphia and followed him to Seattle when he’d gone home to deal with his kid brother’s death, and it was clear he loved the bones off her. But they had a tempestuous relationship, and recently, they seemed to have been more off than on. Enough for him to leave her behind in Seattle and date other women.

Joe nodded. “She wasn’t done with her master’s at UDub yet, and the company I work for has an office in every state. At the time, it made sense for me to go back and be with her there. At least, it made sense to her.”

“What stopped you?”

It was a stupid question. Even without the ongoing shitstorm he had with his parents, I’d pretty much begged him to stay in Chicago and hold my hand while I cared for Ash.

He saw the guilt on my face before I could hide it. “Don’t go there, man. This has been going back and forth for years. She knows I can’t live there. Being that close to my folks would destroy us before we’d even got started. We just need to find our place. We’ll be all right then.”

I’d heard that before. It was all I ever heard when people tried to talk to me about Ash. My mom, Ellie, her father—even his therapist liked to tout that line. But I knew it was bullshit. Ash didn’t need to find his place in society so he could slot right in and conform. Fuck that. He needed to find
himself
.

On cue, the front door opened with its strange quiet swish. Charlie appeared a few moments later, a bag of doughnuts in one hand and a tray of coffee in the other. Ash dumped another bag on the table and handed me a wrapped package.

“Eat it later.”

I accepted the sub from my favorite deli with a roll of my eyes. He knew as well as I did that the sandwich would be in my belly long before I set foot in the firehouse. I swiped a coffee. Something pink on the table caught my eye. “What’s this doing here?”

Three pairs of innocent eyes met mine as I held up the Day-Glo strip of silicone beads.

Charlie shrugged. “Some drag queen gave it to me with her… his, fuck, phone number. What is it, like a glow stick or something?”

I waited for the laughter to start, but nothing happened. I glanced at Ash and Joe and they both shrugged, like Charlie’s question was completely valid. Sighing, I put the sex toy back on the table. It was kind of perturbing to know I was the only one who knew what it was. “I’m outta here. I’ll see you boys later.”

Joe and Charlie nodded their good-byes. Ash followed me back out into the hallway, and the moment we were out of sight, he pushed me up against the door and kissed me.

“Thanks for the last couple of days,” he said when he pulled away. “I know you didn’t want to go that club. I don’t think I’d ever want to go back, but it was… um… interesting.”

I stifled a snort. I’d seen the wide-eyed looks he’d tried to hide every time a proper, beautiful twink breezed by, all fairy wings and glitter. If we hadn’t been so wrapped up in each other, I was sure his eyes would have bugged right out of his head. He wasn’t innocent, by any means, but the gay scene wasn’t something he’d ever experienced. Still, if the mind-blowing sex we’d had afterward was anything to go by, perhaps it had been something he needed. We’d lived in our little bubble a long time. Maybe it was time for a change.

“I think I’m going to quit drinking.”

“Huh?” I looked up from hooking my thumbs in his belt loops. “You feel that rough?”

“Not yet, but it’s not that.”

I waited for him to gather his words. The delay would mean a jog across town, but who cared? Not me if Ash had something he needed to say.

“I think I liked it too much. Being drunk,
really
drunk. It was fun, but it reminded me of something else.”

“Of getting high?”

“Maybe. I mean, last night was
way
more fun than that…. But I think it kinda clicked that getting drunk could be as effective, you know?”

Not really, but then, I hadn’t gotten hooked on heroin to block out years of sexual abuse and trauma. “Abstinence-based recovery.”

Ash raised a quizzical eyebrow.

“That’s what it’s called,” I said. “A lot of addicts find they switch the focus of their addiction to something else—drink, coffee, sex. Something socially acceptable, so no one really notices. Sometimes
they
don’t notice.”

“I’m not a drunk, Pete.”

“I know, but if you want to quit, now would be a good time to do it, right? You haven’t been drinking for ages now. You probably won’t miss it.”

Ash nodded, and I knew that in his own way, his mind was whirling. Getting wasted had been a lot of fun, but if it affected his recovery and state of mind, it wasn’t worth it. I was too hungover myself to figure out how I really felt about it, and perhaps that was why he’d let it slip on my way out the door. Maybe he didn’t
want
my opinion.

Ash tapped the side of my head. “Stop thinking.”

I grinned and kissed him again. “Sorry. And you’re welcome, by the way. I had a great time… a
really
great time.”

The double meaning wasn’t lost; it never was. Ash smiled and stood back so I could open the door. I leaned in to kiss him one more time, and then I was on my way. I had one foot still in the apartment when something stopped me. “Hey, what’s Joe’s girl’s name? He’s never told me.”

“Danni,” Ash said. “But I don’t think they’re together right now.”

“I
DON
’
T
get it.”

I glanced at Mick and then shook the unresponsive man on the couch. We’d arrived at the apartment in the yuppie part of the city twenty minutes ago, but we still hadn’t figured out what the problem was. The young guy’s buddies said he was acting weird: blanking out and falling unconscious. After witnessing the random bouts of unresponsiveness for ourselves, we were as puzzled as they were.

When he was alert, the kid was slow to answer questions and his focus was off. I stared at his distant, glassy eyes. Though he looked nothing like Ash, the vacant haze reminded me of the bright spring day I’d been forced to sedate him. It was a memory that often haunted me, even when he was doing well. Holding him down on the kitchen floor… jamming a syringe into his arm while he curled himself up so small I didn’t think he’d ever raise his head again…. Man, I’d cried like a bitch that day. Despite the sunshine streaming through the window, it had been the darkest day of my whole life.

“Pete?”

Right. Work. I shook myself and focused on the passed-out kid. I considered narcotics, but his friends swore blind he didn’t do drugs, and I believed them. I knew someone cranked when I saw them. This guy was clean. Mick thought it was a series of absence seizures, but my gut told me it was his blood sugar. It had been low when we got here; low enough for Mick to administer a dose of dextrose. It should have been rising by now.

I moved to check. As I did, I caught sight of the discarded drug box on the floor. Something wasn’t right. I looked closer, and sure enough, it was the box for the pediatric dose. I picked it up. “Is this what you gave him?”

Mick nodded, his face blank. I frowned, but with an audience looking on, it wasn’t the appropriate place to call him out. He realized his mistake as I pushed the correct dose. “Sorry, man. I’m so tired tonight, I can hardly think straight.”

I waved his apology away. I understood. We all had shifts like that; he just should have warned me so I could double-check any important decisions. His mistake with the dextrose was fixable because the dose was too small. An overdose could have killed the guy, and drama like that came back on both of us.

Later that night, we pulled up by the lake for a well-earned break. I slouched down in my seat with a coffee and my cell phone, while Mick jumped in the back to catch a nap. I sent Ash a few messages. He was home alone and on his way to bed, exhausted from the five-mile run Joe had dragged him on. That made me laugh. Like me, he didn’t care for exercise, but Joe occasionally got him to run or lift some weights. He’d gotten real lean when he was sick, and his damaged lungs had left him shaky and weak. He was ripped now, and it suited him. It
really
suited him. And running helped him sleep. Always a good thing when he was spending the night alone.