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They stumbled out of the woods and back to the trailer with the sunset behind them, leaching the last of the heat out of the day. Adrian slumped against the wall, panting and laughing as Chris unlocked the door, then weaved his unsteady way into the living room where he dropped his mask on the coffee table and collapsed onto the couch.
“Dude, I did not think that explosion was gonna be that big!” he exclaimed, face flushed and grinning, excited as he always was following their two-man assault on any appliances and totaled cars they could drag out into the woods. “My ears are still ringing!”
Stripping his gloves off, Chris squinted at him critically. “You good?” he asked. “You did just take a grenade to the face and get shot like, a week ago.”
A week ago. Saying it out loud made it true: his father and the cow snuffed out somewhere between only a week ago and a week ago already. The sound of tapping at the window called Chris back to the present; he opened it for Eagly, who landed on his perch with a squawk.
“Yeah, I’m good,” Adrian said, patting the spot on his side where the bullet had torn right through his guts. “Told you, I just needed a nap.”
“Whatever, weirdo,” Chris said as he dropped onto the couch next to him. “I don’t need you dying on me right after I got my name cleared.”
“That was super cool of Adebayo,” Adrian gushed, producing his glasses from somewhere and pushing them up his nose. “I offered to kill someone for her, but she said she couldn’t think of anyone.”
A sidelong look showed him serious, taken in by the incomprehensible logic that churned away inside his head. Chris should really be used to it by now. “Vig, you know most people don’t walk around with a hit list,” Chris explained because hey, maybe he didn’t.
“Adebayo isn’t ‘most people’,” Adrian air-quoted. “She’s our friend, and she’s from Gotham. I thought everyone from Gotham had like, a crazy clown story or something.”
“Crazy clown? Dude, she’s not Batman,” Chris said.
“Yeah, she saved our lives,” Adrian said, as if illustrating an obvious difference. “That makes her cooler than Batman.”
Chris opened his mouth to argue on principle, shut it again. “Ok, yeah,” he said. “Bar’s low, but yeah.”
“So, she’s gotta have an even crazier clown,” Adrian went on.
“What? That doesn’t make any sense,” Chris said.
“But you just agreed that’s she’s cooler than Batman,” Adrian said earnestly.
Jesus. Talking to the guy could be like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube blindfolded. “Adrian, what the fuck are you talking about?”
He shrugged expansively. “I don’t know, I just wanna kill a crazy clown. Preferably with a chainsaw.” Adrian blew his breath out, evidently still itching to cross murder with a chainsaw off his bucket list. He nudged Chris’ leg with his knee. “What d’you wanna do now?”
“I don’t know,” Chris said, leaning his head back against the couch. He wanted to dig the ghost of his father out of his brain, but letting Adrian’s endless babble drown it out was the next best thing.
“I’m off tonight. We could go to a bar, try to pick up some chicks,” Adrian suggested, waggling his eyebrows.
“Nah. Last chick I picked up tried to kill me.” Chris rubbed at one of the still-healing cuts on his face. “I don’t want to have to explain this shit, either.”
Adrian cocked his head like a dog. “Did you get your shot today?”
“Yeah,” Chris said; he’d visited the clinic that morning. “Uh, thanks for thinking of that,” he said awkwardly. “By the way.”
From the way the nurse had told it, dragging him out of the hospital’s waiting room and jabbing prophylaxis into his arm while she spouted rapid-fire raccoon questions, Adrian had refused to lay down and let them operate until they’d promised to treat Chris’ comparatively minor scratches.
“Rabies is a nasty way to die,” Adrian said, suddenly serious. “By the time you start exhibiting symptoms, it’s usually too late to treat.”
“I’m fine, dude. That raccoon probably didn’t even have rabies,” Chris said.
“Raccoons are nocturnal. Economos said that one was out during the day and let you get close enough to grab it and tie a helmet to its leg,” Adrian told him. “Raccoons are also one of the most common carriers of rabies in the United States.”
It didn’t sit right. Out of all the things that had tried to kill him within the space of twelve hours—his father’s cadre of white supremacists, an alien invasion, Amanda fucking Waller framing him for murder—and a mammal the size a fucking cat might’ve come the closest to actually succeeding. “Ok, so why don’t we hear about more people getting raccoon rabies?” he asked.
“Because most people don’t go around grabbing wild raccoons,” Adrian said smartly. “Most Americans who get rabies either get it from dogs when they’re traveling abroad—or from bats.”
“From bats?” Chris echoed skeptically.
“Yeah, man,” Adrian said, slipping into Intense Adrian mode. Intense Adrian could be fun; he usually only came out when he was killing someone or planning how to kill someone. Occasionally, Chris even learned something.
Intense Adrian could also be kinda hot—or at least, it’d been hot when they’d brought that girl home, when Vig (not Adrian yet, because Chris hadn’t known) had disappeared beneath the covers and made her scream. Chris shoved that thought back into his hindbrain as Adrian kept talking.
“Their little teeth are so small that you might not even know you’ve been bitten. You get sick for a few days, and then you get better, and you think it was just a cold or the flu, and then bam!” Adrian slapped his palm against his leg. “Typically between thirty and ninety days later, although it can take up to two years, the virus travels from your muscles to your nervous system, and then it’s paralysis, hydrophobia, aggression, the whole nine yards. It fucking nerfs you, dude.”
A chill went down Chris’ spine. “Fuck.”
“Yeah, it’s gnarly,” Adrian said with enthusiasm.
“Vig...Adrian…” Chris trailed off, a morbid thought taking shape in his head. “Did you kill someone with a rabid bat?”
But Adrian just smiled, serene as the fucking Buddha. Then, Intense Adrian disappeared. Regular Adrian said, “So, no bar. No chicks. You wanna go to the hospital, visit Harcourt?”
He did, but—“She said if I didn’t go home for a few days and rest, she’d have security drag me out. I talked to her earlier. She’s ok,” Chris said. As ok as she could be with multiple gunshot wounds. He didn’t want to think about it, how close they’d all come to dying. “You wanna order a pizza, watch a movie?”
“Yeah!” Adrian said, bounding off the couch like he was spring-loaded and heading towards the kitchen. “You got beer?”
“Of course I have beer!” Chris called after him, even as the sounds of the fridge opening and glass bottles clinking together rendered his response moot.
At Adrian’s (evil-clown-obsessed) suggestion, Chris dug out his old VHS of It—the one from the ‘90s, not the fucking remake—and rewound it to the beginning. They worked their way steadily through two six-packs and a large pepperoni pizza as Tim Curry terrorized a bunch of kids on-screen, Adrian laughing at all the least appropriate parts.
Chris glanced at him in amusement, rapt attention bathed in the blue-white light of the flickering TV. The past crashed into the present like shattering glass. Gut Chase’s scrawny kid brother, tearing after them even with his nose bloodied and knees scraped from the other kids pushing him down, mouth still running a mile a minute. Vigilante, busting through the basement windows of that meth lab at the same time Chris kicked down the door, teaming up out of wordless necessity as the meth heads turned and attacked them both. Leaving Chris with his number and a, Hey man, this was fun, hit me up sometime.
“What?” Adrian asked, turning from the TV. The reflection of it still played in his glasses.
“Nothing,” Chris said, looking quickly away and taking another swig of his beer.
Like a dog with a bone, Adrian bumped their shoulders together and said, “C’mon, what?”
“Do you really think I’m a bully?” Chris asked, the question out of his mouth before it registered in his brain.
“I guess. You can be a real dick sometimes,” Adrian said honestly, neutrally, like describing the fucking weather.
Scoffing, Chris asked, “Yeah? Then why do you hang out with me?”
“You’re not a dick all the time,” Adrian replied practically. “Peacemaker and Vigilante are cool. I mean, we’re a team, right?”
“Yeah,” Chris said, swallowing a mouthful of beer and his stupid urge to apologize. He didn’t need to make this weird.
Adrian turned back to the TV. “You used to be nice to me. When we were kids,” he said. “And then you weren’t anymore. I didn’t get it at first, but I kinda figured out it had something to do with your dad.”
It was them sitting on the couch in the dark, and Adrian in flickering light, and the probably too-much alcohol Chris had consumed, and he was thinking about the picture again, a dead fish floating to the surface. He hadn’t thought about it in years.
“You fell asleep on me,” Chris said.
“Huh?” Adrian asked, brow pinching in confusion.
Desperately, Chris wanted to take it back. Except he’d taken the plunge, now, and the only way out was through. “Gut and I were playing video games. Defender, I think. You used to like to watch us, even though we wouldn’t let you play. Gut didn’t want you to mess up the high score,” Chris said, cracking a grin in memory.
It faded as he continued, “The summer after eighth grade, Gut and I were fourteen, and I remember you’d just turned six ‘cause your mom made a cake. You were climbing all over the couch while we played, and you ended up in my lap. I think I would’ve pushed you off, but I”—he choked down the lump in his throat—“I missed Keith. You fell asleep, and I didn’t want to move you, and I guess I must’ve fallen asleep, too.”
He closed his eyes, easier to get out the rest. “Your mom thought it was cute and took a picture. She showed it to my dad and…” Chris took a deep breath, said in a rush, “My dad called me a faggot and beat me so badly he had to call me out of school for two days.”
“Fuck, dude. I’m sorry,” Adrian said quietly.
When Chris opened his eyes, he found Adrian watching him with unbearable attention. He looked away, said, “Don’t be fucking sorry. It wasn’t your fucking fault that he—”
In the corner of the room, the ghost of Chris’ father snickered at him, grinning like a skull. “ You gonna talk about your feelings now? Faggot. Fuckin’ pussy.”
Forcibly, Chris turned to Adrian instead, to Eagly on his perch by the window, head tucked beneath his wing. “Shit. Fuck!” he swore. “What the fuck am I gonna do with his house?”
“Uh.” Adrian bit his lip. “You can’t just sell it?”
“No, it’s got the—the fucking quantum storage space. I can’t just sell that,” Chris said. “And I can’t afford his property tax and the mortgage on this place”—he gestured vaguely to the trailer—“and I’d rather fucking shoot myself than live there.”
The following silence poured in syrup-thick. On the TV screen, Tim Curry cackled over blood-exploding balloons. Eagly ruffled his feathers and resettled on his perch, going back to sleep.
A few minutes later, Adrian caught Chris’ eye. “You know,” he began, rubbing his chin in thought. “Your dad did have a lot of appliances.”
*
On Adrian’s next day off, he picked Chris up in the Sebring bright and early. Ok, he picked him up at half past ten, but that was bright and early enough. Chris drank the Starbucks latte Adrian had bought him as they drove and didn’t even comment on how gay it was. His heart already beat double-time, palms sweating at the prospect of seeing the house again.
In contrast, Adrian hummed along to the radio and practically vibrated with excitement, seemingly oblivious to Chris’ mood. A small, mean part of Chris wanted to resent him for it, slip into easy anger and an easier target, but that was his fucking father in him, and he wasn’t going to give the ghost the goddamn satisfaction. Adrian was Adrian, and Adrian didn’t do the empathy thing. Expecting him to had about as good a chance as expecting a flopping fish to start breathing out of water.
Adrian pulled into the driveway, and Chris opened the garage door for him to park inside, sending up a prayer of thanks that the annoying neighbor was for fucking once nowhere to be seen. Closing the door, he helped Adrian unload boxes and duffel bags out of the trunk and into the house. They made it to the kitchen before his heart really tried to climb up his throat, muscles tense with the conviction that his father would walk in any second and—
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing in my house?”
His father stood in the doorway to the kitchen, and Chris stopped breathing. Blinked. The white dragon suit replaced the earlier mirage, fists raised and swirling with fire. He blinked again and found the doorway empty.
“Chris? Chris!” Adrian said insistently, like he’d been trying to get his attention for a minute. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” Chris said, tearing his eyes away from the empty space and to Adrian, handing him a large, black trash bag.
“Here, hold this,” Adrian said.
Automatically, Chris did, holding it open and looking inside like it could offer some explanation. “What’s this for?”
“We gotta get rid of the food first. It’s a pain in the ass to clean up after, and it’ll be roach city in here if we don’t,” Adrian told him.
Which was a good point, and more foresight than Chris would’ve given him credit for. “Ok, sure,” he said.
The contents of the fridge and cabinets went unceremoniously into a series of bags, Adrian tossing as Chris clutched black plastic in his fists and tried not to look at the food, tried not to think about his father buying this with plans to eat it, not to wonder how much of it he’d bought after he got out of prison with thoughts of killing his son already circling in his head.
Finished, they took the trash out—still no neighbor, thank fucking god—and returned to the kitchen where Adrian pulled a scroll of paper out of a duffel and unrolled it on the table, using empty glasses as paperweights for the corners. It took up nearly the entire surface and featured boxes labeled with words and numbers—a floor plan.
“Is that the house?” Chris asked, peering over Adrian’s shoulder.
“Yeah, I requested it from the clerk of courts,” Adrian said absently as he looked it over, tracing lines with his finger.
“Ok,” Chris said, and since Adrian wasn’t volunteering anything, “What for?”
Looking up, Adrian blinked behind his glasses. “Hmm? Oh, well, you said you wanted to wreck the place. Cut through walls and shit. So, I thought we’d better find the foundation wall first, so we don’t bring the roof down on our heads. Here,” he said, tapping a line representing one of the living room walls. “Leave that one alone.”
This had to be what entering the twilight zone felt like. “How the fuck do you know this shit?” Chris asked.
“If you’re gonna blow up a building, you gotta know where to set the charges,” Adrian told him with a smile and just a glimpse of Intense Adrian again, peeking through the curtains.
“Shit. I’ll give you this,” Chris said, looking at him critically. “You can be real fuckin’ dumb, but you ain’t stupid.”
“Thanks!” Adrian said, all dimples and delight.
Chris shook his head. “C’mon. I wanna see what’s here first.”
What was there, packed into the closets and the crawlspace attic and under his father’s bed, was a fuckton of white supremacist paraphernalia and no small amount of books in the same vein. Chris kicked an honest-to-god copy of Mein Kampf onto the growing pile in the living room, landing on a Confederate flag and knocking over a figurine of Jesus doing the Nazi salute. Jesus.
“What are you gonna do with it?” Adrian asked, looking at the pile like a dog had shit on the floor, an expression Chris found eminently relatable.
“Burn it,” Chris said, clipped-off and immediate.
The dirt pit of a backyard, a legacy of his father’s total indifference to lawn care where the HOA couldn’t see, suited his needs perfectly. With Adrian’s help, he transferred the shit pile to the middle of the yard and then dragged out most of the furniture for kindling—tables, the couch and armchairs from the living room, his father’s nightstand and bed, which made Chris’ skin crawl to touch.
“How about his clothes?” Adrian asked, hands on his hips and breathing a little heavy, his foot perched Captain-Morgan style on one of the kitchen chairs.
“Yeah, but...I don’t wanna touch ‘em,” Chris said honestly, too fucking honestly.
Nodding, Adrian said, “Ok. I’ll get ‘em if you can get the gas can from the car.”
A few trash bags later, Adrian upended the contents of the bedroom closet and dresser (built into the wall, so they hadn’t removed it) onto all the gasoline-soaked, worldly possessions of Auggie Smith. Stepping back, he fished a matchbook out of his pocket and handed it over. “Wanna do the honors?”
The Zippo in Chris’ jacket might’ve been more efficient, but there was something satisfying about striking a match, tiny and fragile between his fingers, the destructive potential in the spark of flame. Chris flicked it onto the pile, and fire rushed over it like something with a life of its own, something wild and hungry.
He sat on the back stoop to watch it burn, sweating in the heat while Adrian went out and returned with sub sandwiches and fountain drink cokes for lunch. They ate without speaking and finished just in time to piss in the smoldering ashes. Chris tried not to look at Adrian’s dick. He checked the fence a few times, half-expecting to see the annoying neighbor peering over curiously, but he thankfully failed to appear.
Back inside, Chris breathed easier. The house barely looked like his father’s anymore. Adrian squatted down next to the duffels, now on the kitchen floor by the rolled-up blueprint, and unzipped them with a flourish, smiling proudly over the array of tools and weapons now on display.
“Pick your poison,” he said, holding his hand out to them, palm up like an offering.
Kneeling next to him, Chris pulled out a crowbar and weighed it in his hand. Then, in a single, fluid motion, he stood and swung it into the microwave hard enough to shatter the glass plate.
Adrian whooped in delight, and just like that, everything spun into chaos. Swinging again, Chris knocked one of the cabinets off the wall, switched to a pistol for the fridge and shot a peace sign into the freezer, added a zigzag below for variety. Somewhere behind him, Adrian smashed through the living room, switching on the TV and radio and filling the room with a few, awful words of conservative talk show before he took them out. Chris followed him with a handful of knives, throwing them into the far wall—not the foundation one—using a yellow stain as target practice and clustering them as close together as he could.
The next barrage of gunfire, through the wall separating the living room and kitchen, set off the smoke detectors; Chris ran through the house, smashing them with the crowbar until the screeching stopped. He ran back past Adrian, cutting a heart shape into the wall with a chainsaw, and stepped on a compound bow to flip it up and into his hands. Nocking a trick arrow—with a moment’s gratitude to Green Arrow, brony conventions notwithstanding, for putting them on the market—Chris let it fly into the remainder of the kitchen cabinets. The charge at the end exploded on impact, knocking him back into the wall and reducing the wood to splinters, the metal sink cracking the tile floor as it fell. Coughing and laughing, Chris brushed off his jacket as a spout of water burst from the wall and then slowly died, the last in the pipes after they’d turned off the meter.
“Hey, Chris! Chris!” Adrian called from the other room.
Kicking half a cabinet door to the side, Chris called back, “What?”
“Say, ‘oh no’!” Adrian said.
“Uh. Oh no?” Chris repeated.
A crash brought Adrian through the already weakened wall, causing Chris to yell and jump back in surprise. Adrian slid to the middle of the floor, and, in a deep-voiced imitation of the Kool-Aid man, said, “Oh, yeah.”
He laughed, and Chris laughed, and it all went sideways, jumbled together. Chris was looking at Adrian, bright-eyed and laughing and shaking white plaster out of his hair; and he was hearing his father, the memory and not the ghost, in this same room and not so very long ago, looking down at the now-burnt kitchen table in abject disappointment as he said, How did my fucking sperm grow into a nancy boy like you? And he felt the salt-wet of Keith’s blood on his knuckles and the warmth of six-year-old Adrian Chase sleeping on him like the trust and forgiveness he didn’t deserve and the crunch of a nose breaking under his hand belonging to the first man he’d fucked and delivered for the mistake of trying to cuddle after—
And Chris was shoving Adrian against the wall and kissing him.
For a second, Adrian froze, and Chris was sure, fucking sure down to the dread pooling in his stomach that Adrian would laugh, make it into some kind of face-saving joke, squirm away. This wasn’t prison, and it wasn’t for the sake of a woman’s heavy gaze before they fucked her, and it wasn’t late-night handjobs on Chris’ couch with convenience and a hangover-inducing amount of alcohol as an excuse.
Instead, Adrian fixed him with a long, unblinking look, leaned in, and, very slowly and deliberately, kissed him back. Heat rushed through Chris like the funeral pyre of his father’s possessions, like an altar and burnt offering. He kissed Adrian, digging teeth into his lip and pushing his tongue in his mouth, needy and fucking filthy and so hard it fucking ached.
The second the impulse took him, Chris dropped to his knees before he could stop or think. He looked up to Adrian once, to his red cheeks and swollen, open mouth, to get his nod of permission, and then pulled Adrian’s jeans and boxers down past his ass without even bothering with the zipper.
Adrian hissed, either at the scrape of denim or the cold air hitting his cock—hard, and definitely not a fuckin’ thimble, and Chris thrilled with pride and terror. He put his mouth around the head and licked the tip, chuckled in his throat at Adrian’s gasp, and took him deeper. Gagged, hard, and forced his mouth back down anyway, forced his jaw loose as tears pricked in the corners of his eyes.
The ghost of Chris’ father sneered in his head, Sinner, sodomite, faggot, faggot, faggot, and Chris thought back an endless litany of fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyou. He shoved Adrian’s cock into this throat, pain and lack of oxygen to distract him, a tactic that almost worked.
“Chris,” Adrian said, voice thready and hand urgently tapping Chris’ shoulder. “Chris, I’m gonna—”
Ignoring the signal, Chris dug his nails into Adrian’s hips to hold him in place and sucked harder. Adrian whined as he came, dick pulsing and spilling into Chris’ mouth, and Chris swallowed it like all of his dirtiest, most shameful jerk-off fantasies come to life. Pulling off, he sat back on his heels, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and breathing hard.
Above him, Adrian had his head thrown back against the wall, mouth open in the afterglow. Chris felt stuck, quicksand-trapped, watching the rise and fall of Adrian’s chest as he breathed. Then, Adrian looked down at him and offered a dopey smile before pulling his underwear and jeans back up and sliding down the wall to the floor.
“Let me,” Adrian said, pressing a palm firmly to Chris’ crotch.
Even that hint of pressure nearly made his eyes roll back in his head. Adrian pushed at his shoulder, and Chris went with it, lay down right there in the middle of his dead father’s kitchen and let him—unbuckle his belt and unzip his jeans, get the band of his underwear just low enough to pull out his cock.
Adrian spit in his palm and pumped the length of it twice before taking him in his mouth. It took all of Chris’ willpower and teeth clenched so hard they hurt not to buck up into that wet heat, to keep still and let it happen. He folded his arms behind his head to watch Adrian better, to see his eyes closed and his lips stretched obscenely around Chris’ cock while his hand kept jacking the base—because he needed to see him, couldn’t forget for a second that it was a man’s hands and mouth on him, a man’s come still coating his tongue and teeth.
“Fuck,” Chris said faintly, pleasure drawing his balls tight and his body to a singular point. At the sound of his voice, Adrian opened his eyes and looked at him like he had Chris under a microscope, and Chris could only gasp out, “Adrian,” a second before he came.
Humming around him, Adrian swallowed it—to Chris’ muted surprise, though he would’ve been miffed if Adrian hadn’t returned the favor—and then pulled off his softening cock and tucked it back into his underwear in a way that made Chris’ chest feel funny. Cracking his jaw, Adrian flopped down next to him and sighed.
It was only then, staring up at the stained ceiling, that Chris felt the wet tracks on his cheeks. He blinked rapidly, but the ceiling blurred and the tears kept coming, and there was something too big to be contained inside him, in his chest and his throat and sobbing out of his mouth like magma bursting from the earth.
“Chris?” Adrian asked, and Chris wanted to run, wanted to make up some ridiculous, nonsensical lie that Adrian would still believe, but he couldn’t get enough breath to speak.
He wanted to hide his face, but Adrian’s chest was the only place close enough. Chris rolled into him, held him around his middle like a piece of driftwood at sea and sobbed like a child, sobbed out all his rage for the man his father had been and his grief for what he hadn’t been. Tentatively, Adrian’s arm came up and rested gently across his shoulders like he was scared of Chris shoving it off.
Slowly, the tears trickled to a stop. Chris peeled away from the wet spot on Adrian’s shirt and onto his back again. He pulled a napkin from lunch out of his pocket, wiped his eyes, and blew his nose. A glance showed Adrian looking at him like a puzzle he couldn’t figure out. Chris wanted to say something, but couldn’t think of what.
“Were you lying about the face exercises?” Adrian asked.
Chris half-shrugged in admittance, his shoulder nudging Adrian’s where their bodies still touched. “Yeah, I was lying.”
“That’s not nice. You know I don’t understand that kind of stuff,” Adrian told him. “I don’t like not knowing when you’re sad.”
“I know, I know,” Chris said. “I was just—I was embarrassed. I didn’t think anyone was gonna see me.”
“Oh.” Adrian jiggled his leg like he needed the motion to jump-start his brain. “Are you sad now?”
What the fuck sort of stupid-ass question is that? Chris didn’t say, if only because sex and tears had drained him of the requisite pissed-off annoyance Adrian’s cluelessness usually inspired. “Yeah,” he said shortly.
“Oh,” Adrian said again. “Why?”
“I’m still pretty fucked up over my dad,” Chris said.
The jiggling leg stopped, and Adrian turned to him with his face a picture of abject confusion. “Your dad tried to kill you.”
“But he was still my dad.” Chris swallowed past his raw throat, trying not to fucking cry again. “I know he wasn’t a good dad. He never loved me like he should’ve. But as long as he was alive…there was hope, I guess. That he could change, or he could love me back. And now there’s not.” He looked at Adrian, asked, “Does that make sense?”
“I think so,” Adrian said, and the clenched fist around Chris’ heart loosened just a little.
They fell silent, the weight of it filling the room like a ton of cotton. Chris shifted and moved a wooden chunk of former cabinet pinned under the small of his back. When he looked at Adrian again, he was staring up at the ceiling, impassive and weirdly quiet.
“You’re quiet,” Chris commented.
“Mmm,” Adrian intoned.
“You’re never quiet. It’s fucking weird.”
Stretching his arms over his head, Adrian grunted and rested his weight more heavily against Chris’ side. “I was thinking. You might be able to move the quantum storage space.”
“What?” Chris asked, off-balance from about the last thing he’d expected. “How the hell would you know?”
“I’ve been doing some reading on quantum mechanics, and I emailed a couple of professors,” Adrian said like it was the kind of thing he did all the time. “Anyway, foreclosures can take awhile, so we don’t have to do anything like, today.”
Chris stared at him like he’d grown a second head. “What the fuck?” he asked.
“What?” Adrian asked in turn, frowned. “Are you mad at me?”
“No, I’m not mad, I’m—” Chris broke off there. “Just, since when do you know shit? Dude, if they weren’t all starving to death, I’d think you’d been fucking butterflied.”
Adrian’s frown deepened into something reproachful. “I’m not fucking stupid, Chris.”
“I didn’t say you were stupid!” Chris said, couldn’t stop the aggravation creeping into his voice.
“Everyone thinks I’m stupid because I don’t know random shit!” Adrian sighed through his nose. “Like, why am I supposed to know that a butterfly’s a bug and not a bird? I’m not an ornithologist.”
“A what?” Chris asked.
“An ornithologist. A bird scientist.”
Like solving a Rubik’s cube blindfolded and underwater. “You know what a bird scientist is called, but not that a butterfly isn’t a fucking bird?”
“I didn’t,” Adrian said precisely. “I looked it up because you seemed to think it was important.”
“What, did you Google ‘bird science’?” Chris asked drolly.
“Yeah, and now I know what a bird scientist is called,” Adrian said. “I don’t know, I guess this is the kind of thing people are supposed to know for some reason.”
Rubbing at his temples, Chris said, “Dude, no one knows what a fucking bird scientist is called.”
“Right, but everyone knows a butterfly isn’t a bird,” Adrian scoffed.
“Yes,” Chris said flatly.
“Why? Why is that important?” Adrian insisted, like drilling a fucking hole through his skull.
What little remained of Chris’ temper snapped. “I don’t know!” he shouted.
“Neither do I!” Adrian shouted back, then deflated. “I know stuff if it’s important. I knew this was important to you, so I thought I should know about it.”
All at once, Chris felt like a dick, familiar and uncomfortable as wet shoes in the rain. “You’re right. I’m sorry,” he said. “And, uh. Thanks.”
“Sure,” Adrian said.
The warmth of his body still pressed into Chris’ side, and Chris hadn’t zipped up his jeans or buckled his belt yet, transforming the argument into something ridiculous as soon as it finished. He thought about getting up and didn’t.
“I figure once we move the storage space,” Adrian was saying, “you can burn it down, sell the lot, do whatever you want. Oh!” The back of Adrian’s hand smacked lightly against Chris’ stomach. “Dude, you could get one of those dinosaur machines!”
“A what?” Chris asked, floundering again.
Miming his hand like he was using it to dig, Adrian said, “You know. With the big scoops on them.”
“A mechanical shovel?” Chris asked.
“Yeah!” Adrian said enthusiastically. “You should totally put a dummy on the toilet and reenact Jurassic Park.”
That’s fucking stupid, Chris thought. “I love you,” he said before he knew it or could stop it, the words out in the air and irretrievable.
Adrian beamed like the sunrise. “I love you, too, man!”
With that, he got up and drifted into the living room, leaving Chris laying on the floor like something dead. Probably a good thing, too, because not even Adrian could’ve missed the oh shit, oh shit, oh fucking shit expression on Chris’ face. He stared up at the popcorn ceiling like trying to sight-read braille, then redid his jeans and belt and pulled himself off the floor before his father’s ghost came back, following Adrian into the living room.
As he heard Chris behind him, Adrian swung an ax into the wall, removing a chunk of plaster with a manic, “Heeeere’s Johnny!” Then, he started talking about dinosaurs again, but Chris wasn’t listening. He was thinking about what he’d said and maybe even meant, about calling Adebayo and asking her how to deal with gay shit like feelings. He was thinking about the picture again, about finding a roundabout way to ask Adrian’s mom if she still had a copy, how he might want to see it again.
Shit. He might just want to get it framed.
***