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I thought of my beach house, which had been all hardwood floors and white drapes and windows, and the joy leached from my day.

All of the fun stuff had ended up at Vinnie’s house. It all belonged to his parents now. His family. From the Hairy Otter throw we’d gotten in Monterey to the 3-D poster board of
Shrek 2
we’d actually bid $100,000 on at a charity auction.

And the steak plates.

Ooh—I bet someone here has some moose-head plates
, Vinnie’s voice said, pressing its nose against the window like mine had been.

We’re here for a bike.

Oh, come on, Connor—if I’m living through you, you’re doing a piss-poor job of it.

Where do I start, Vinnie? Do I start with the plates? With that picture on the wall from the artist who retired? Do I buy a
Dora the Explorer
blanket and hope the collection gets better? Everything. Everything we loved was in your house, and now it’s just me, floating like a ghost—

But you’re not anymore! You’re here, in this new place. Remember when we used to split the heel of the bread because it was the only thing in the house? You’re not in that place! You will
never
be in that place again! Now go get some fucking steak plates to prove it!

“Where do I start?”

Noah and I jumped—both of us startled by my voice in the quiet car.

“I don’t know—how about we start at the far end and walk down the boardwalk to the other side where we’ll buy the bicycles? We can ride them around and then back to the car. How’s that?”

God, he had the best ideas. “What if I want to get something?”

“Don’t worry—the stores have a co-op and a delivery truck. Fifty-mile radius. You’re more than within limits. And I can always fetch it on the way back. Or—” He wrinkled his nose with impatience. “Whatever. There’s ways. Do you want to see the town or not?”

I smiled, feeling shy. “Yeah!” I was feeling it! “Let’s go shopping!”

I did not find plates that looked like big cuts of beef—but I did find a complete set with pictures of small dogs instead.

“I love these,” I said, looking at them in awe. A Shih Tzu stared back at me, limpid eyes peering out from a gray pouf of hair. “I . . . I mean . . . imagine finishing off your chicken tetrazzini and seeing this?” I held the plate up so Noah could see.

He blinked, very, very slowly.

“That’s terrifying,” he muttered, almost to himself.

“You wouldn’t come over and make lasagna if you had to eat off a Chihuahua?” I held up that plate too.

“I would,” Noah said. “But I’m
gay
.”

I blinked, and it occurred to me that I was not having the most “heteronormative” of conversations. “Not all gay people like small dogs,” I said with dignity. “V—”
Vinnie
hated them.
“Very many of my friends who are gay don’t like small dogs at all.”

Noah gazed at me with this baffled, irritated expression that I pretended I couldn’t read.

“Seriously—we can’t be friends if I get the small-dog plates?”

He had dark, brooding eyebrows, and they did something complicated as his eyes narrowed and widened by turns. “Sure,” he said after a pause. “But only if you get the cat coffee mugs too.”

My relief suffused my entire body and beamed out in my smile.
Thank you, Noah. Thank you for playing along and pretending you don’t see what I don’t want you to see.

He did that for me for the next couple of hours. I bought—well, random crap, mostly, but almost all of it was for the house,
any
house since this setup was only supposed to be temporary. I bought a delicious seascape from the art gallery and a lawn sculpture from the woodworking place. I found a quilt that featured movie werewolves and a matching set of throw pillows that did the same thing for vampires.

Noah added a T-shirt to match. We had the other stuff set to ship, but I kept the T-shirt. I was just about to do a quick change in the back of the store with Noah blocking the sight lines, when it hit me.

Sorry, Vinnie.

What, we’re the only ones who change our shirts in the store?

That’s not what I’m sorry about.

You can’t do T-shirts with the other guy?

He’s a friend.

Connor—

No. No, I’ll take it home.

I stopped then in the act of pulling my shirts off, and winked at Noah, trying hard to hide the fact that the laughter and the momentum that had carried us here had disappeared in one random Vinnie-and-I thought.

“I’ll take it home,” I said, keeping my best actor smile in place. I turned abruptly and walked out of the store, T-shirt shoved back in its little bag.

Noah caught up to me, and I felt him moving his arm restlessly, like he wanted to do something with it but couldn’t.

I turned to look at him, affecting amusement. “What? Are you twitching?”

“Yes,” he said, irritated. “I am definitely twitching. You know, if you and Vinnie did a thing with T-shirts, it’s not going to destroy my world if you say so. ‘Gee, Noah, I’m sorry, but Vinnie and I used to buy stupid T-shirts together and now I’m sad.’”

“‘Gee Connor, you’re always fucking sad. Get over it, people fucking die!’”

I swallowed in the suddenly shocked silence.

“That came out with a little extra bitterness,” I apologized. “I, uh . . . you know. I’m not that callous, I swear.”

“No.” He took a big deep breath. “Grieving—you know, I get it.”

Here was the place where in the movies, I’d say something self-serving, like, “Yeah, who’d you know who died?” But when you asked that question in the movies, the other person’s story was way worse than your own, so I decided to skip the humiliating come-to-Jesus moment and be a human being.

“I’m sorry,” I said softly. “Did you lose someone close to you?”

He nodded, like we both should have expected this conversation. “Yeah.” He paused. “You know when you’re too young to know about sex, and your best friend is the most important person in your world?”

I thought about that. “No,” I said honestly. “I . . . My whole life, when I looked at . . . a friend, I looked at the potential to crush.”

“Huh.” It sounded innocuous enough, but the look on his face was akin to horror. He shook his head, like he was trying to shake it off, and continued. “Well,
I
had a friend who was like that. Her name was Sharra and we were . . .” He held up his crossed fingers.

“Peas and carrots?” I said gently.

“Yeah.” Benches were situated periodically on the boardwalk, and as the morning mist burnt off, they beckoned invitingly from spots in the sun. He chose one of them and gestured for me to sit down. I did, and he sat next to me, not so close that we were touching, but close enough to feel the heat from his body, and to smell whatever it was he wore that just sort of turned my key. Rum and musk and spice—so, like a car freshener with some horse sweat thrown in.

Whatever—I had a sudden instinct to nuzzle his neck, to offer physical comfort, to throw my arm around his shoulder at the very least. Oh dear God—what was the math? 366 days plus fourteen plus two, that equaled 382 days without a ma . . . without Vinnie?

The silence between us stretched, and I reminded myself that I was trying to be there for Noah like he’d been there for me.

“What happened?” I asked, remembering his friend.

“Drowning.” He looked away. “It was . . . Well, they lived in one of those houses that fronted the sound, sort of like yours. They think she went wading and slipped and—it’s cold. She could swim in a pool, but . . .”

“But not in the sound.”

Unforgiving. Just like the rest of life.

“That’s horrible,” I said, hating the thought of children and tragedy—and a child living through a tragedy. “I’m so sorry. How old were you?”

“We were twelve,” he said. “But see—that’s how I know. You lose that friend—that peas-and-carrots friend, and for months—even years—you’ll be thinking to yourself, ‘I’ve got to tell Sharra—’”

I swallowed and nodded. I couldn’t even fit “Yeah” out through the tightness of my throat.

“You know, like, ‘Hey, Sharra, the first day of high school sucked,’ or ‘Hey, Sharra, I think I’m gay.’”

Oh. Oh fuck. “Who’d you tell?” I wanted to know.

“My father,” he said, surprising me.

“How’d that go?”

“‘Dad, I think I’m gay.’ ‘Son, I’m pretty sure I still love you. You think all you want.’”

I choked and ran my thumbnail against the weathered wood of the bench. “Your dad sounds too good to be true.”

“He yells,” Noah said, but it sounded like he was fishing for reasons his dad wasn’t perfect. “What are your folks like?”

I buried my face in my hands for a second. “Oh God. Noah—there is nothing we can talk about, do you understand? There is nothing we can talk about that isn’t a tap dance through a minefield. If you haven’t read it in a certified interview, I . . .”

And this time he really
did
make a growl of frustration.

And he draped his arm over my shoulders, which I needed so, so very badly.

“What’s the worst that could happen?” he asked softly. “The absolute worst that could happen?”

I turned to look at him, wondering if there were paparazzi around the corner, or under the boardwalk, or stalking us through the stores.

“I could tape a seven-minute video with the sound off, so stinking drunk I don’t know what the fuck I was singing.”

He nodded, dark eyes unfathomable. Then: “‘Sloop John B.’ You wanted to go home.”

I looked away. “I was in my own living room. You may recall the wine.” He didn’t say anything, so I stuck to a safe topic: him. “When did it . . . when did it get better?”

“What?” he asked.

“The . . . the ‘I’ve got to tell Sharra’ thing?”

“It never goes away, not completely,” he said.

“Not
ever
?” I asked, suddenly near tears. “
Never
? Because—”
Vinnie, I can’t do this all the time. I can’t be this sad. It’s pressing down on me so hard, I can hardly breathe.

“Well, yeah,” Noah said, his voice gentle and absurdly close, like he was talking into my neck. I couldn’t have shaken him loose or made him move farther away in this public place—not if there were explosions and bullets across the street. Not if there were paparazzi or the top reporter from
Variety
walking down the boardwalk.

“But . . .” Oh hell. I had to say it. “But . . . it
hurts
.
Everything
is something he won’t hear or see, and I want to tell it to him, and there’s no space in my head for
me
because it’s all about telling
Vinnie—
”

“Shh . . .” He just held me, face next to mine, arm around my shoulder like a comforting anchor. “It gets better. If you talk about him. You don’t have to get personal, but . . . you know. My friends from school, my family—we all
talked
about her. And when we had an ‘I’ve got to tell Sharra’ moment, we
all
had it. And we shared it. And we all sort of filled in the comfort when we needed it. Man, the way you and Jilly
don’t
talk about Vinnie, it’s making it hard for
me
to breathe.”

“He loved to watch me shop for kitsch,” I said, wondering why
that
would be the first thing out of my mouth. “We taught each other how to shop. We
filled
his place with . . . memorabilia and stupid junk and color and pictures and . . . and Jilly made me stop wearing his T-shirts because they were falling off my body.”

I felt him stiffen next to me and thought,
Oh. There’s the line. Now I know.

But he relaxed in a moment. “Well that was probably a good idea,” he said. “So, the T-shirts?”

“That was a thing,” I told him. God. It was a personal thing. It was a
living with another man
thing. But I couldn’t help it. “We . . . we only got one T-shirt whenever we went somewhere together. And then we . . . we’d fight over who got to wear it. But then we got . . . you know. Paparazzi were everywhere when
Warlock Tea
got big, so we couldn’t wear them in public—speculation was fun for the fanfic sites, but Jilly was like, ‘Guys. No.’ So if we just wanted to—” Oh God “—hang out and play video games or something, we’d . . . steal the shirts from . . .” We’d kept them all at my house, because his got all of the fun decorator stuff. “You know. Our kitschy travel T-shirts were like a ‘let’s have a friend day’ signal.”

If friends used the T-shirt for a cum rag after they were done doing inventive, consensual, sexual things to each other’s bodies because that was their favorite way to spend time when they were alone.

“Friend day,” Noah said without inflection.

I shook my head and turned my face to the emerging blue sky. “That’s what I said.”

“I think I’ve had ‘friend days’ like that.”

An image of Noah—naked, head back, face contorted in climax, while someone younger, hotter, and with less baggage than me swallowed his cock down to the root—rocked me.

I stood up, no longer interested in T-shirts or sadness or even, God forgive me,
Vinnie
.

“There’s a jewelry store,” I said, because Captain Random does random shit. “Let’s get something for Jilly. She’s . . . stressed.” Two kids with substance-abuse problems and I was her best client? Yeah. Jilly was fucking stressed. “I think we should do something for Jilly.”

And I took off across the boardwalk like I was shot out of a cannon.

I hovered over the jewelry counter for a while, which was ludicrous, because the giant chest piece in turquoise and jade was the obvious choice, fuck the price tag. Noah lingered outside, pinching the bridge of his nose and squinting, like he was trying to comprehend a particularly irritating child.

Well, fucking sue me. I’m an actor—emotional maturity is
not
the hallmark of my people.

“Excuse me—you’re Connor Montgomery, aren’t you?”