The idea pops into my head when I’m doing pull-ups. And it’s dumb, but I kind of like it too because it’s silly, and it’s the kind of thing Gray would do, and I know he’ll think it’s funny. I grab my phone and do one last pull-up, only this time, when I’m at the top, I shift around so I’m holding myself up one-handed, and I snap a photo.

  It’s not bad, actually. My arms look enormous, and my shirt’s riding up to show a hint of my stomach. I even got the expression right. Kind of cocky. The way Gray looks when he’s pulling shit off.

  Before I can think about it too much, I send it.

  It takes zero-point-zero seconds for him to write back, Hot.

  And there it is again. That feeling like electricity is running through my gut and all the way up my spine.

  I don’t let myself think about it too much. It’s not a big deal. He’s my friend—and that’s more of a surprise than anything else, the fact that Gray and I are friends now, and I’m not even sure how it happened. Anyway, he’s my friend, and friends send each other pictures all the time. Gay guys and straight guys can be friends. Gay guys can tell their straight friends they’re hot. Sometimes Gran watches Queer Eye, and that’s basically the whole premise. And Gray sent the first picture, so it’s not like—well, I don’t know if I’m supposed to ask for consent first.

  And then Gray asks me if he can use that photo for my Prowler profile, and the conversation moves on.

  Gran’s going out with Dr. Jacobson tonight, so after I shower, I make myself a quick dinner—a chicken breast, some vegetables, and a protein shake. I think about texting Gray to see if he wants me to drop off some food for him, but I don’t. I don’t want that to be a thing. Like I’m always bringing him food. Or he’s bringing me food. It would be weird, I think. Wouldn’t it?

  Gran’s wearing flamingo-pink capris and a lacy white top from the Pure Reba collection when she goes out for the night. Her hoops are so big she gets caught in the screen door and I have to rescue her, and then I have to wash the lipstick off my cheek from where she kissed me goodbye.

  I get out the workbook for Unmuzzled, but for some reason, I’m not feeling it tonight. I try the TV, but I can’t find anything good. I text Gray to tell him there’s nothing good on TV and for the first time ever—he won’t believe it—I don’t want to study, but he doesn’t reply. That’s okay; he’s busy with a lot of stuff at WISP, and I know in the evenings is when they have walk-ins. If you’d told me a month ago that Gray could sit and talk to somebody, that he’d done all the training and he knew what to say, that he could actually listen long enough without talking about some big-dicked jock he’d smashed pissers with—he actually said that once, and it was right when the Baptist Ladies were in the lobby trying to get donations for their quilts—if you’d told me Gray could do any of that, I probably would have laughed. But that was before I knew him. The real him, I guess. So now I know that if he’s talking to someone right now, he’s listening, and he’s helping, and he’s trying to do his best.

  I fall asleep on the couch because of the night before and the gym, and when I wake up, it’s almost eleven. I check my phone, but still nothing from Gray.

  Are you still at WISP? I text.

  No reply.

  I brush my teeth. I check my phone. I floss. I look at the screen in case he’s texted. I wash my face, and I’m only halfway done when I think I hear my phone buzz, so I’m dripping face wash all over everything when I check it again.

  Nothing.

  I’m in my trunks, about to climb into bed, when I think maybe I’ll drive by.

  No, I tell myself. That would be crazy.

  I pull back the covers, but then I stop.

  What if it’s not crazy? What if something happened? I’m a police officer, so my mind jumps to the reality of what happens at places like WISP. It’s not only the people who need help who show up. It’s not only people like Lexi. Sometimes, it’s the people they’re trying to get away from. Sometimes, it’s Charles. And this late at night, who would still be at WISP? Gray. Maybe Robin. It would be the two of them, all by themselves, if somebody showed up, somebody looking for trouble. Maybe just Gray.

  I went back and forth about it for almost a minute. And then I gave up. As I flopped onto the bed, I texted: Sorry, not trying to bother you, but wanted to make sure you got home okay.

  And still nothing.

  I close my eyes against the overhead light, but I’m not trying to go to sleep. Not everybody’s the same, but a lot of police, if they’re on the job long enough, get a sense for when something’s not right. It might not even be something you can point to, something you can say made you suspicious or worried or afraid. You can just tell.

  Against my closed eyelids, the ceiling light makes a red-orange ball.

  I launch out of bed, throw on my staples: shirt, shorts. I don’t even bother with socks—I shove my feet into my Adidas, grab my keys and wallet, and run for the car.

  13

  Sam

  When I get to campus, it’s after midnight and everything’s dark except the security lights. I’m alone as I cross the quad, but the way my sneakers scuff the sidewalk makes it sound like someone’s following me.

  The building where WISP is housed is dark too, and when I try the door, it’s locked. On the other side of the glass, a lone security light illuminates a stretch of worn vinyl flooring, and the rest of the building disappears into shadows. No sign anything bad happened. No sign anybody’s even still there. The whole thing was all in my head, as usual. The night’s cold enough that I shiver as I hop down the steps to head back to the car. At least Gray doesn’t know I freaked out and drove over here for no reason.

  As I start back the way I came, though, a sound reaches me. It’s someone breathing. A slow exhalation that I associate with smokers. Or somebody hitting a vape. I wait, and after a minute, the sound comes again. I move down the sidewalk, following a line of decorative hedges planted along the façade of the building, following the sound of those slow breaths.

  If I weren’t looking for him, I could have walked right past and never seen him. At night, the little opening in the hedge is only another shadow, and the stone bench tucked inside it is a pale glimmer. He’s mostly shadow too until he hits his vape again, and then the LED lights flare, casting a blue glow across his face. It only lasts a moment, but when you’re training to be a detective, you have to learn to take in details fast: red eyes, slack expression. He must see me, but it’s like he’s looking through me. Or like he’s not seeing me, although I don’t know how that’s possible. The cop in me says, Intoxicated.

  “Gray?”

  The LED light dims. He exhales again, and the candy scent of the vape rolls over me.

  I move into the little opening. Standing over him seems way too confrontational, so I sit. There’s not enough room, so I’ve got half a cheek hanging out over empty air, and our knees bump. He doesn’t turn to look at me. He doesn’t say anything. After a few long seconds, he hits his vape again. The little light almost seems too bright in this pocket of darkness, and the angle is just right so I can see the scars. One of them goes straight through his eyebrow.

  “Hey,” I say.

  Gray takes this long, tired breath. After a few seconds, he finally says, “Hey, Sammy. What are you doing here?”

  “I was worried about you.” I don’t mean to say it, but there it is, and anyway, Gran always says honesty is the best policy. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

  He shakes his head. In the dark, it’s barely more than a hint of movement.

  The cold seems worse back here. Goose bumps are crawling up my arms, and the air smells like that candy vape and the hedges and concrete that never gets any sunlight.

  “Something at WISP?” I ask.

  Nothing.

  “Is it the donors?” I say. “Did they change their minds?”

  “You know what?” Gray says, and he’s still talking in that awful, dead voice. “I’d appreciate it if you’d leave me alone right now.”

  Nothing’s moving. Nothing in the whole world right then. No wind. Nothing scurrying through the brush. Nobody out on the lawn.

  “Okay,” I say. But I don’t get up. And after a few seconds, I say, “Talking about it might help.”

  He’s so tense. Like every inch of him got pushed as far as it can go without breaking. He’s hinged at the waist, elbows on knees, hitting the vape again, and it’s like he’s made out of sheet metal and somebody welded him together like that.

  I almost say something. But one of the things you learn if you do enough trainings is that sometimes, the best way to get somebody to talk is not to say anything at all. Detectives do it all the time.

  “We had a walk-in,” Gray says. He sits up a little. “It was bad. And it brought up some shit. And I’m not trying to be rude, Sam, and I know you’re a sweet guy, but I don’t want to talk right now.”

  I nod; I figure if I can see him shake his head, he can see me nod.

  A long way off, tires hum on pavement. On the quad, under the security lights, the grass is black, each little blade like the tooth on a saw.

  “God fucking damn it,” Gray says, and his voice breaks, and he puts a hand over his face.

  “Hey,” I say, and before I can even consider if it’s a bad idea, I rub his back. “It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.”

  “It’s not going to be okay!” He looks over at me, and he’s shouting, the dead voice gone. “It really fucking isn’t! He’s going back to that fucking house, and it’s going to be business as fucking usual, and it’s going to happen again, and it’s going to happen again, and it’s going to happen over and fucking over, so don’t tell me that it’s going to be okay!”

  I keep rubbing his back.

  And then Gray relaxes. He drops his head, hands pressed to his eyes, and all that steel softens and folds, and I keep moving my hand slow and smooth.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, but real quiet.

  “Nothing to be sorry for.”

  “He’s seventeen. He’s not even out of fucking high school. And he has to watch his dad go after his mom, and he doesn’t know what to do, and I know what he’s going through, I know what that’s like, when nobody can help you, and—and Jesus fucking Christ, I am so fucking tired of feeling like this.” He tries to let out a breath, but it’s thick. “I’m so fucking tired of feeling helpless.”

  “Let’s call dispatch,” I say.

  Gray makes a sound that’s not quite a laugh. “I don’t know his name. I don’t know where he lives.”

  “It’s not that big of a town,” I say. “Tomorrow, a couple of uniformed officers can go to the school. If he’s a junior or a senior, that already cuts it in half.”

  He sits up again, dries his face, takes another hit of his vape. “And what happens? You know as well as I do that there’s nothing we can do. Not one single fucking thing. Because even if I found him, even if I tracked down his piece-of-shit dad, then what? The mom says she walked into a door, or she fell down the stairs, or whatever the fuck the story will be. And as soon as we’re out the door, he’ll beat the shit out of both of them.”

  “Not always. And that’s not the point. The point is we start doing something. There’s a report. The next time, we get more evidence. We build it up until the county prosecutor can press charges.”

  Gray shakes his head, but this time, it’s more tired than anything. “Yeah, well, that would kind of ruin the point of a safe space for people to come in and talk, wouldn’t it?”

  And I don’t know what to say to that.

  “Anyway,” Gray says, “I guess I’d better get used to it. Kind of comes with the territory of running something like this.” He’s quiet again, and he tilts his head back, looks up at the sky. No stars, not with so much light pollution. Just black. “Plus it’s a little late in the game to try to convince the whole human race we’d be better off if we left each other the fuck alone.”

  Maybe, I think. But maybe not. Because there might be a gap between being alone and being lonely, but it’s not a big one, and there’s kind of a downhill slide from one to the other. And maybe there’s no fighting, but there’s none of this either: his body, solid and warm under my hand, and the pressure of my knee against his, and the way his body feels like the only thing grounding me right now. Being alone, I want to say, is a lot of TV, and a lot of TV dinners. It’s beer in the fridge instead of food, and nights when he won’t come in from the garage because it’s easier to work than be with himself. It means a lot of noise you make because you’re afraid of the silence. And it means you do stupid things because you start to think there’s a reason nobody loves you. You find guys who are pieces of shit, and you act like a piece of shit too because then they act like you’re one of them, and that’s as close as you can get sometimes to not feeling so alone.

  “I’m going to go,” Gray says, but he doesn’t stand. “I’m sorry about this. I sent Robin home because I didn’t want—” He breaks off, brushes something from his leg I can’t see in the dark, and says, “I should go.”

  Go where? Go be alone?

  “I don’t think you should be alone right now,” I say.

  Gray laughs, short and brittle. “I’m all right, Sammy. Believe it or not, I’m not going to do anything stupid. I just need some sleep.”

  “Well, yeah, you need some sleep.” I can’t help it; I sound like Gran when she hears me say something particularly stupid. “You’re working yourself to death. Of course you need some sleep. And you won’t let anybody help you. And you’re not eating—”

  “I had that shake—”

  “One protein shake is not a fucking meal!”

  He actually rears back, like he’s trying to see me, bring me into focus, something like that. And all of a sudden, it’s not cold in this tiny break in the hedges—I’m sweating buckets.

  Then Gray starts to laugh. It’s shaky, but it’s not that ugly sound from earlier. The heat continues to rise in my face. “Good God, Sammy, Gran’s going to wash your mouth out with soap.”

  “I’m glad you think it’s so funny,” I say, and then I take his arm like I would Leonard Bint’s when Leonard’s had too much to drink and is trying to pee on the kiddie slide, and I stand, and that means Gray has to stand too. “Come on. You’re going to have something to eat. When you’re feeling better, you can go home.”

  I walk him out of that little dark cocoon, and in the relatively brighter light on the sidewalk, a half-smile breaks his face up in a white slash. “Am I under arrest, officer?”

  “Here we go,” I say and start marching.

  Gray comes along because he has to, and I know enough by now to know when he’s laughing at me even though I can’t hear him. “What if I resist?”

  “Go ahead,” I say, and tighten my grip. I give him a little shake because I’m still kind of mad at him, even though I’m not sure why. “Find out.”

  14

  Gray

  I’m not in love with the idea of leaving my car at the college, but there’s something so easy about letting Sam make the decision that I don’t even try to fight him. It’s been a long fucking year of making decisions. A long fucking year of trying to break toxic patterns, a long fucking year of trying to do better, to be better, a long fucking year of not falling back into old habits and actually thinking, actually taking time to consider the consequences, to make choices, to do the right and responsible thing.

  And I am so fucking tired of it.

  The drive back is easy too. His truck is clean—God, of course it is—and it smells like the little air freshener clips he’s got on the vents. He doesn’t say anything, and neither do I. The farther we get from that tiny black space where I told him way too much, the harder it is not to be embarrassed. I’m a detective. I’m older than him. I’ve seen a lot of bad shit. Some really, really bad shit. I had my face blown off, for fuck’s sake. I crawled out of my own fucking grave. And all the stuff from the past, I dealt with it, and it’s done, and I’ve moved on.

  So, it’s hard to explain to myself why, even though there’s this part of me that is cringing at how the words had rushed out of me—at the fact that Sammy heard it, heard all of it, heard how absolutely bat-shit bananas I actually am—I feel good. Or better, anyway. Definitely better than if I’d gone back to my apartment to lie there in the dark, alone, pretending I was going to sleep.

  When we get to Sam’s house, a single lamp is on in the front room, and it makes the window glow through the sheers. Sam parks his truck, and I’m half-suspecting he’s going to put a restraining hold on my arm and drag me inside, but instead he gives me this look like he knows he can run faster than me if it comes to that, and let’s be one hundred percent fucking real: it goes straight to my cock.

  And for the tenth time, I tell myself I better get that itch scratched safely before it comes back to bite me in the ass.

  We go inside. Sam even holds the door for me like a gentleman. The house is a nice balance between lived-in and cluttered—I suspect part of that is because Sam’s grandmother only moved here a few years ago, so there must have been some sort of purge. It’s got a lot of touches that tell you what kind of person she is—and, by extension, who Sam is. The VHS and DVD collection, which mostly consists of ’70s and ’80s TV shows. The way they’ve got the place laid out, with the couch and the TV, and the little folding tables for eating in front of the television. And the pictures of Sammy, of course. There are pictures of other family members—a middle-aged man who looks like a real hardass, and the resemblance is so strong he has to be Sam’s dad. But most of the photos are of Sam. Big surprise, I think, because I’ve seen them together, and it takes about half a second to see how much they love each other.

  Sam gestures to the couch and moves into the kitchen. He must be nervous because he’s bouncing his keys in his hand, and the jingling sound is the only noise in the whole house. But if he’s nervous, it’s not enough to make him back down. I think of that look in the truck, and I’m trying not to smile as I take a seat. The fridge opens and shuts. There’s a clink of glass. The microwave starts to whir. There’s a picture of Sammy on the side table. It must have been the day he graduated from the police academy because he looks like a baby. He’s got that horrible haircut, trying to spike his hair up, and he’s breaking out like crazy, and he’s such a quintessential skinny-ass country boy that I think again, in spite of myself, that he probably does have a huge dick. You can’t know anything about anybody, I guess. Because who the fuck could have known how he’d turn out? And I guess that’s still true, because everything’s changing. We’re all still changing. Always.