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As soon as Jack registers that there’s a person-sized shadow huddled on the front steps to his apartment, he knows that it’s Robby. He recognizes the contours of the body backlit by the bulb which illuminates the steps: short hair disarrayed, limned with gold in the light; the line of his throat, starkly pale beside the soft thick darkness of his beard; the defeated slope of his shoulders under the same green long-sleeved shirt he wore during his shift. Jack slows his pace as he approaches. Robby must notice him, the only figure on the empty street, but he doesn’t move.
The sun has been up for a few hours but it’s still ominously dark, the ceiling of clouds looming heavy and low, the wind tempestuous and wild. The heatwave that has plagued the city the past few days could only be broken by the apocalyptic summer thunderstorm that is swiftly approaching. Jack has spent his walk home eyeing the sky, walking as fast as he can on exhausted legs to race the oncoming rain. The sunlight is weak and diffuse behind dense clouds, the unsettled wind swallowing any stray sounds. A few times he thought he saw a flash on the horizon, maybe lightning, maybe imagined, but the growl of thunder that now rolls through the humid air is unmistakable.
Jack’s townhouse is one of many that line the block, tucked closely against one another’s sides, each with its own tiny rectangle of green yard between sets of identical concrete stairs. His little yard is verdant, spilling over with the mess of hydrangeas he planted there a few years ago and doesn’t prune back quite frequently enough to look tidy. The foliage spills over the handrail, the pointed tips of fat green leaves brushing Robby’s sleeve as they are stirred by erratic gusts of wind. In the midst of the hydrangeas Jack made a lumpy little brick patio, on which sits a somewhat battered enameled metal garden table and two chairs, but Robby isn’t sitting there.
The leaves of the trees that line the street whip and flutter in the wind, surfaces fervidly, glossily green, flailing undersides pale and matte; in another life, Jack’s dad said that a sure sign that a storm was coming was that trees were showing the undersides of their leaves. Thunder rumbles again and there’s a flash, much closer, much brighter, that is definitely lightning.
Jack can see Robby better once he passes his two-doors-down neighbor’s gnarled ash tree, stepping over the jagged rift its root tore years ago through the sidewalk. Robby still doesn’t look at Jack. Though the air is thick with oncoming rain Robby sits unmoving. Jack wonders what his plan would have been if the rain had begun before Jack got home.
“Thought that was you,” Jack says when he’s finally a few steps away.
Robby glances up at him, but just as quickly he rubs a hand over his face so that Jack can’t read his expression. “Sorry. I was gonna text.” His voice sounds hoarse.
“Lose your phone?” Jack teases gently.
“I couldn’t… couldn’t think of how to phrase it.”
The admission sets off alarms in Jack’s head but he swings his backpack off casually, setting it on the ground next to Robby’s. “That’s okay.” He uses the cast-iron handrail to lower himself down onto the steps, pivoting on his good leg, stretching the other out in front of him to get his weight off the prosthetic. Robby stays hunched miserably beside him, angling his face away; with the lightbulb behind them, Robby’s expression is entirely obscured. Thunder rumbles again; closer, now. Robby doesn’t speak.
Jack busies himself with unzipping an outside compartment of his backpack and delving through its contents blind. A Uniball pen, a neatly coiled phone charging cable, a small packet of tissues, a utility knife in its ripstop case, a tin of Altoids, and, finally: the slim plastic casing of his vape. When he takes it out its light shines brightly white, thank god. He takes a hit and silently offers it to Robby, exhaling a stream of smoke that is immediately whipped away by the strong wind.
Robby turns his head to stare at Jack, melancholy air entirely replaced by sheer bafflement. “What the hell is that?” he asks, almost in his normal voice.
“It’s just nicotine.” Jack continues to hold it out, though it’s becoming increasingly clear that Robby will not take it.
“Is that a vape?”
“Oh my god.” Jack takes another hit. “And they call me grandpa.”
“I didn’t know you smoked.”
Jack shrugs. “This is better than cigarettes, and I quit trying to quit.” He wiggles the Juul between his fingers as though he were holding a cigarette. Its glowing light bounces merrily in the darkness. “I’m a cheap bastard, so I could never bring myself to throw away a half-smoked cigarette. With this it’s one and done.” He tucks it back into his bag.
“Or two,” Robby says dryly. The irony seems to escape him, which annoys Jack just enough.
“Wanna tell me why you’re posted up on my front steps within moments of getting rained on?”
Robby’s sudden stillness gives away as much as an uneasy shift would.
After a taut moment, Jack relents. “Not that I don’t appreciate the chance to say a real goodbye.” Yet goodbye hangs in the air between them so painfully that Jack hastily tacks on, “before you leave for your trip,” wondering if Robby, too, can feel the awful finality of the word. Wondering if Robby’s spent all day feeling nothing but the finality of the word.
“Yeah,” Robby says, dragging his hands over his face and then scrubbing them roughly over the back of his head, further disarraying his hair and beard. The underarms of his shirt are dark with sweat. “Yeah, the trip. Fuck.” He sighs heavily. Jack waits for the torrent of words that should follow this, but Robby doesn’t say anything more. A very light rain begins to fall.
“For the record,” Jack gestures between them vaguely, “This is good. Leaving right after a twelve-hour shift was a stupid fuckin’ idea.”
Robby makes an agonized noise that tells Jack this is not the first time he’s heard this today. Good. The vague worry Jack has felt regarding Robby over the past several months had only yesterday crystallized into genuine fear, but he’s consoled by the fact that at least some other people are also expressing concern about the stupid choices Robby is making. The raindrops grow larger and more frequent, spattering coolly on Jack’s arms and the top of his head, darkening the concrete they’re still sitting on.
It’s raining. Jack just finished a grueling shift. He’s exhausted and hungry and his many-times-sweated-through shirt clung damply to his chest and arms even before the rain began. The ache from his earlier glancing bullet wound has spread to encompass most of his back and he’s known for about six hours that one of his ribs is cracked. He probably still has that girl’s blood spattered on his chin and throat. His foot hurts maybe even worse than his stump. His eyes feel dry and his hands feel damp and grimy. The longer he sits here, the worse his body feels, and the longer it will take him to recover in the afternoon when he wakes up. And he wants a real shower, a hot one, indoors.
“Okay,” Jack says, hauling himself into motion, using the handrail to ease himself up and leaning heavily on it as he makes his way up the stairs. He pulls his keys out of his pocket and props the screen door open with his body as he unlocks his front door. When he glances back, Robby has grabbed their backpacks and ascended the stairs. The sky has grown even darker and the rain is falling consistently now.
The house is as it always is: quiet, sparsely decorated, damp with the night air and uncomfortably warm. The few windows Jack left open have not allowed enough cross-breeze to clear out the hot still air still trapped inside. It’s stifling compared to the cool rain and buffeting wind outside. A moth has gotten into the house despite Jack’s perpetual efforts and it batters its body uselessly against the overhead light, its soft white wings fluttering frantically, zagging between the walls and ceiling and light as though one of these uncompromising surfaces will suddenly provide some respite.
Jack takes off the prosthetic first, not spending the extra effort required to balance it so it clatters loudly to the floor. Taking off his shoe is even better, and Jack peels off his sock, too, while he’s at it, then spends a moment blissfully digging his knuckles into the sole of his foot, cracking his toes with the other hand. Robby drops their backpacks and toes his shoes off, still standing. Under proper lighting Jack can see how deeply carved the lines of his face are, how exhausted the set of his eyes. He doesn’t think Robby’s looked directly at Jack for more than a moment. Robby’s shirt droops pathetically off his body, sweated through too many times and now soaked with rain. In such close proximity Jack can smell the thick unwashed scent of him, old sweat that’s been held close to hot skin for hours and hours, the sour sharpness of adrenaline pressed into synthetic fabrics.
“Shower first,” Jack orders Robby. Robby’s sweat isn’t actually that big of a problem for Jack; given the choice, Jack himself would shower first. But Jack doesn’t trust Robby to choose something for himself to eat from Jack’s well-stocked collection of single-serving microwave meals. It will be easier to prepare food for Robby and place it in front of him. Jack does not feel better about the situation when Robby goes obediently, uncomplainingly toward the bathroom. Robby usually slouches a little, empathetically aware of how intimidating his height can be, but now there’s nothing self-aware in how he carries himself. He just looks miserable.
Jack goes to the kitchen. As he’d suspected, washing his hands feels fucking incredible. After lathering and rinsing up his forearms twice he leans down to scrub some water over his face, just enough to pep himself up for whatever is coming next. Hands clean, somewhat refreshed, he lets rivulets of cool water air dry on his skin as he hops around the kitchen. Glasses of water, plates, paper towels. He leaves his crutch propped against the counter while he digs through the refrigerator, considering the caloric content of various microwave-ready meals. The shower begins to run in the other room. Jack realizes Robby doesn’t have any clean clothes.
“Fuck.” He takes up the crutch and goes into his bedroom. The blackout curtains are thrown open, letting in almost no light but allowing rain to spatter the sill. The overhead light is too harsh when he tries it so he leaves it off, crosses the room to turn on the reading lamp next to the bed. It throws a cozy yellow-orange glow over the white walls and gray plaid sheets. He fishes a pair of worn-soft pajama pants and one of his larger shirts from his dresser and tucks them under his arm, then heads over to the bathroom.
Jack gives a perfunctory knock while cracking open the door and announcing, “Clean clothes,” tossing the shirt and pants onto the counter beside the sink and then helplessly watching them slither off the counter and crumple on the floor. Between the white noise of the rushing water and the quick sharp sound of the door closing, he can’t tell whether Robby acknowledges him.
Cardboard package, still cool from the freezer. Side perforation; messy tear, curling shreds of paper. Microwave. Peel back plastic covering. Stir. Microwave. Stir. Scoop onto plate. Repeat. The marble countertop grows warm where Jack leans against it, hips and palms. The damp cardboard buckles in the humidity. Sweat prickles against Jack’s scalp and back.
It’s too hot to eat hot food. Jack curses, then curses again, more vehemently, not that it does any good. He hops over to the thermostat to turn on the air, then moves painstakingly through the house, closing open windows. He only ever opens the ones that are easy to get to but it’s still a ridiculous process that requires him to surf between the bookshelf and the back of the couch and the dining table. The last one he closes is the one in his room. His hands are wet from the rain-spattered sills; he absently dries his palms on his thighs before taking up the crutch again. As he watches the rain cascade outside, suddenly very far away now that the window is closed, the grudging relief he feels standing under the cool air that streams from the vent directly above him is immense. He hates air conditioning.
The door to the bathroom opens, issuing Robby amidst a cloud of sweetly scented steam. When Jack meets him in the hallway Robby’s hair is dark, his skin pink, Jack’s shirt too tight across the shoulders and clinging to his damp body. The direness of the situation is thrown into stark relief when Jack realizes that the thought of Robby freeballing in Jack’s pajama pants does not arouse him at all.
A tiny, genuine smile does break across Robby’s face when he sees the plates of macaroni and cheese that Jack has prepared. “That bad?” He asks with an echo of his old self-conscious humor.
Jack raises his eyebrows. “You shoulda seen yourself. Anyway, it’s got broccoli in it. For health.”
“For health,” Robby repeats skeptically, but he does sit next to Jack and, thank god, he eats his damn macaroni and cheese with broccoli for health. The house hasn’t fully cooled yet and Jack is still sweating, leaning over his steaming plate of mac and cheese. They don’t talk while they eat; between the HVAC and the storm outside there’s a lot of ambient noise, but Jack still feels very acutely the quiet between them, familiar but not comfortable. The worry gnaws and yawns.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Jack says when he can stand it no longer. He can hear the strain in his own voice. “Glad—you felt like you could come.”
“You said call if it gets dark,” Robby’s voice is soft and rough.
Jack tilts his head in acknowledgment. “I do appreciate the immediate implementation, that’s good, very efficient.”
Robby wisely ignores this. “It’s… been dark.”
“Yeah,” Jack says. He gives the acknowledgment a moment to hang between them. Steels himself. “Scared yourself?”
Jack sees Robby nod in the periphery of his vision. Okay. Good. That it still scares him is good, Jack tells himself, it’s when the thought becomes comforting that you’ve really got a problem. But, god, does the admission make his stomach swoop, anxiety sweat springing up at his chest and underarms and back, pulse ratcheting higher. He’s scared, suddenly, to look directly at Robby, as though any sudden movement will upset the delicate balance that has drawn forth Robby’s pained honesty.
Distantly, Jack recognizes that he is having an extremely intense emotional reaction to something he thought he was prepared to hear. He knew the answer: it should not shock him. It’s useless to ask his rabbit heart to slow so he rides out the initial panic, breathing in two three four, holding two three four, exhaling two three four, holding two three four. Robby is still next to him, still breathing, gaze fixed somewhere far beyond his scraped-clean plate and the fork he still loosely holds in one hand. In two three four. Hold two three four. Out two three four. Hold two three four. Jack’s heart is fucking pounding.
“Okay,” Jack says, pushing away from the counter and grabbing his crutch, lightheaded, untethered. “Okay. Clean up while I shower.” He turns and heads down the hall before he has to witness Robby’s uncanny obedience. In two three four. Hold two three four.
The bathroom is still uncomfortably hot and humid from Robby’s shower; sweat prickles at Jack’s hairline before he even turns the water on. As soon as he does, steam billows from behind the glass door. He drops his dirty clothes on top of Robby’s and then grabs the wall bars, hops into the stream, lets himself relax under the heat and pressure for a long moment. He wonders whether Robby actually let himself sit on the accessibility bench in the shower or whether he stood the entire time, feet aching, miserably forcing himself to endure another tiny, unnecessary discomfort. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
The shower is the only solitude Jack is going to get for the foreseeable future, so he tries to savor it. It’s not that he’s angry at Robby for showing up during Jack’s precious downtime—the worry far outweighs anything else he could be feeling. But Jack is very cognizant that he is going to be on one-to-one with Robby for as long as it takes them to get Robby the help he needs. Even now, with a closed door between them, white noise of the running water drowning out any sounds Robby could be making, he’s acting on faith that Robby wouldn’t try anything stupid in Jack’s apartment. He got himself here. That means something.
It’s a dangerous time to examine his own panicked reaction to Robby’s admission: he’s on a strict time limit, and when he’s done here he has to give wholly, whatever of himself he can, to Robby, who is in profound crisis. Still, he can’t resist a masochistic little peek.
In two three four.
“Scared yourself?” He had asked. Robby: hand tightening on the fork, shoulders sloping and chin dipping, tucking protectively toward his chest before he turned the motion, somewhat belatedly, into a stuttering, jerky nod. Jack’s eyes aching from the strain of looking at Robby out of the corner of his vision. He thought that maybe Robby’s own eyes had been closed.
What Jack is feeling is not the discomfort of recognition. Jack experiences suicidal ideation all the time, it’s the white noise in the background of almost everything he does; he talks about it to his therapist, hears about it from his combat buddies who survived, sees the aftermath of suicides regularly enough in the emergency room. He talks to the ones who survive, talks to the families of those who don’t. Black charcoal. Red blood. Recognition is not enough to scare Jack. He’s held their hands.
Robby, though—in Robby, it scares him. Robby is empathetic, he is helpful and kind, he is relentlessly competent, but Jack has seen in him lately a brittleness less easily disguised than it used to be, something too fragile too close to the surface. Both Dana and Perlah had found a moment to mention to Jack that they didn’t think Robby had been wearing a helmet as he came into the hospital on his “midlife crisis donor-cycle,” per Perlah; they all call them that, but in context it was a chilling reminder of the fallibility of the human body.
They know better than most how the body can be, simultaneously, tremendously resilient and absurdly fragile. Jack has seen a patient survive a point-blank gunshot to the temple, he’s seen massive blood loss and compound fractures, traumatic amputations and lacerations so deep the white curve of bone is visible beneath pulpy red flesh. He’s felt the hot spongy give of a man’s brain under his bare fingers while lying to his face: it’s not so bad, you’re going to be fine. Of course she knows you love her.
Jack has stood in the morgue as the Allegheny County Medical Examiner methodically draws plump organs and soft, perfect viscera from the increasingly empty cavity of a young woman’s chest and sets them in shiny stainless steel bowls with soft wet sounds: healthy, functional, nothing giving any sign why she collapsed during a college class (Comp Lit, he remembers). Her skin had barely grayed at the lips and fingertips even as the autopsy continued; when he glanced back at her before leaving the room, white sheet tidily pulled over the Y-incision, he thought for one panicked second that she was going to be so uncomfortable when she woke up on that metal table.
It’s only when he’s out of the shower, toweling himself off, that Jack realizes he didn’t bring in any clean clothes for himself. So he emerges from the bathroom with a damp towel wrapped around his waist, holding it up with the hand that isn’t braced on the crutch. Robby’s eyes sweep over his body without the sharp interest Jack’s used to seeing from him; Jack isn’t exactly surprised by this but it’s still worrying. Usually Robby is an insatiable horndog, particularly about Jack freshly out of the shower. Jack has, historically, found it pretty hot. Now, he ambles to the bedroom, neither inviting Robby to follow him nor closing the door while he dresses in his own worn-soft sleep clothes.
Past fifty, there’s something refreshing about being desired for purely aesthetic reasons, by someone who doesn’t fetishize Jack’s medical competence, or his amputation, or his post-traumatic stress. It makes hooking up with Robby easy and diverting. Usually it only happens when Robby is between fucking someone else from work, usually some woman to whom he’s technically in a supervisory position, which is definitely pathological, though Jack “Grindr hookups and occasional park cruising, no women since his wife died” Abbot isn’t keen to psychoanalyze himself, either. But it’s always easy with Robby, no power dynamics, no attempt to impress one another; usually they have a beer or two and make out on the couch like teenagers while the Penguins or the Pirates game plays quietly in the background, then they relocate to the bed for the sake of the upholstery and their backs, fucking each other efficiently but thoroughly. Sleeping politely side-by-side in one another’s beds because they’re always too tired, afterward, to safely return home; sometimes touching one another lazily in the morning, sluggish and sleep-warm, before sharing coffee and going their separate ways.
Whatever is happening tonight—today—it is not that.
Robby finally drifts toward the bedroom, hovering uncomfortably in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest, hands tucked into his armpits. He has the same glazed look as before, seeing through Jack rather than seeing him.
“Okay,” Jack says, sitting down on the bed with immense relief. “Are we gonna talk about this?”
Robby flinches and closes his eyes. “Do we have to?” His voice is hoarse and high.
“I mean, at some point,” Jack says. “I would kind of prefer to sleep first, if that’s an option.”
Robby nods, eyes still closed.
“Come here.”
Robby doesn’t move.
“Hey,” Jack says, and Robby finally looks at him. Jack tries to smile. “You wouldn’t reject a disabled vet on the fourth of July, would you?”
The stillness breaks, a tremor shaking through Robby’s body as he laughs despite himself. He drags his hands over his face; when he meets Jack’s gaze, his eyes are pink-rimmed and glistening. “Jesus Christ, Jack,” he says thickly, but he goes to sit on the bed, a careful little distance between their bodies.
Jack closes the distance immediately, shuffling closer to Robby and taking him into his arms. Robby collapses against him, warm and close, smelling like Jack’s body wash, tucking his face into the space between Jack’s neck and shoulder so that Jack can feel his eyelashes flutter against the sensitive skin of his throat. Tears prickle behind Jack’s eyes; they hold one another tightly. Robby exhales violently.
Nothing Jack can think to say sounds right. He doesn’t want to lie: it’s not so bad, you’re going to be fine. He isn’t naive and Robby isn’t stupid. But, fuck, Robby is here, breathing hard against Jack’s skin, wearing a free promotional t-shirt from a 5k Jack never actually ran; Robby came here, waiting on Jack’s front steps for long enough to reconsider the decision even as this violent, apocalyptic storm swept closer and closer, allowing Jack to feed him, to care for him, collapsing, finally, now, against him, stifling a sob into Jack’s neck and clutching weakly at Jack’s shirt with one hand, alive, still alive, so alive.
Proximity to death does not suddenly render the average person poetic. In Jack’s experience, the opposite usually happens: the vast majority of last words Jack has heard over his many years of experience with the dying have been heartbreakingly mundane. The girl tonight, the MVA, the stumps of whose field-amputated legs had gushed thick hot arterial blood all over Jack’s face and neck when he leaned in to peer at the hack job the EMTs had done—there had been nothing any of them could do for her. It was a minor miracle and went against all medical logic that she even survived the ambulance ride to the hospital. And so, improbably, it was Jack Abbot who had held her weak hand just before she lost consciousness for the final time, Jack Abbot who had heard her last words: “Don’t let my mom see my room. It’s such a mess.”
And so it is this imperfect, absurd, fervently human urge which impels Jack to say, stupidly, “I love you.” He has never before articulated or even really thought this about Robby, who would before this moment have been best classified either as Jack’s closest work friend or as his most consistent hookup. The truth of it strikes him as so immense and so profound that it seems ridiculous to Jack that he only just now realized it.
Robby shudders against him, the miserable curve of his body heaving away even as his hands curl more tightly into Jack’s shirt, as though he can’t decide between shoving himself back and clinging closer. He keeps his head tucked low against Jack’s shoulder and gasps something wetly against the sodden patch he’s cried into Jack’s shirt. Jack holds him up, drawing him close again, splaying his hand at the back of Robby’s head to coax him back into the embrace. “I fucking love you,” Jack says again, sure this time, “we’re getting you help, we’re going to fix this.”
Robby does not cry prettily. Jack is going to have to change his shirt. It doesn’t matter.
The storm is still raging outside; every few minutes there is a loud roll of thunder and a bright flash, and they’re coming closer together. Jack can’t help counting, even as he holds Robby. Thunder. One one-thousand. Two one-thousand. Three one-thousand. Four one-thousand. Flash. Robby’s body is so warm against his, trembling so delicately. Jack strokes his thumb against the soft skin below Robby’s ear. Thunder again. One one-thousand. Two one-thousand. Three—and then the flash. The house feels quiet and contained, very safe.
After a while, Robby exhausts himself. Jack fetches some tissues, of which Robby grabs a handful and swipes desperately at his face, then blows his nose into, noisily and very wetly. Jack politely looks away. Thunder rattles through the house, followed by a long, shimmering flash of lightning.
“I was so, so scared of lightning as a kid,” Jack says. “Remember how houses used to have lightning rods on their roofs? I asked my mom about it, once, and the way she explained it made it seem to me like every house was definitely, inevitably going to get struck by lightning at some point. You know, it was only a matter of time. And the reason I had asked was because our house didn’t have a lightning rod, so naturally I thought our days were numbered. There was a burnt-out husk of a tree in a field near my elementary school that everyone said had caught fire because it got hit by lightning. I had this—this image, in my mind, of lightning hitting the tree and it just absolutely exploding. Like, huge action-movie fireball. And, you know, to your little kid mind, that scales to houses, right?”
“Yeah,” Robby rasps, still blotting at his face, scrunched and ugly, brightly red like a newborn’s.
“Yeah, so like, in my mind, our house was going to get hit by lightning, and when it did it would explode. I guess I didn’t really consider that this wasn’t a thing I had ever heard of happening to anyone I’d ever known. It just seemed inevitable. Like, why would they put lighting rods on houses if they didn’t regularly explode? And why didn’t our house have one?”
“Made sense at the time,” Robby says weakly, holding the sodden tissues helplessly in his hand until Jack grabs them and tosses them toward the trash. Jack wonders if Robby will be offended if Jack changes the shirt that Robby got snot all over.
“Looking back, what I was having were panic attacks. Do you want to go clean up or something?”
“I didn’t want to interrupt while you were mid-stream,” Robby says wryly, voice hoarse.
“Go—go,” Jack says, waving his hand vaguely, and Robby goes, and Jack takes the opportunity to change his shirt. Even over the sound of the storm, he can hear the water running in the other room for a long time. There’s another bone-rattling roar of thunder outside, with the next flash of lightning almost concurrent to the sound.
When Robby returns to the bedroom his face is freshly washed, flushed pink, though with an angry red tinge still rimming his eyes and at the tip of his nose. A few drops of water glisten in his beard and there are dark splotches mottling the neck of his borrowed shirt. Jack sees him clock Jack’s new shirt, sees the crow’s feet around his eyes deepen as he winces in embarrassment.
“Come here,” Jack says, before Robby can overthink this, too. Jack lies on his back on the bed, settling comfortably against the pillows, stretching out one arm in clear invitation and then alternately coaxing and manhandling Robby until he is tucked against Jack’s side with Jack’s arm curled around his shoulders. Robby is stiff at first, reserved and uncomfortable, neck tense with the effort of not resting the entire weight of his head against Jack’s perfectly ample upper arm, which would be insulting if it weren’t heartbreaking.
“So,” Robby says, somewhat to Jack’s surprise, “you’re having panic attacks about lightning exploding your house.” His voice is low and soft, very close to Jack’s ear. The rain outside sounds very distant.
“I guess if I’d had like, normal parents, or a healthy childhood or whatever, I’d have gone to one of them about it. But, you know…” Jack lets it hang. “Anyway. I spent a lot of time at summer camps, in the woods and shit. I don’t know who—I mean, it’s gotta be a product of the times, right, putting a teenager in charge of a passel of eight-year-olds and sending them all into the deep woods to camp for a week? Nobody would do that now.”
Jack feels Robby shrug. “It was the eighties,” Robby says, gently humorous. There’s another peal of thunder from outside, then, after a moment, lightning.
“I actually don’t think it was camping, because I remember being in the top bunk. It was probably a cabin or something. Of course, you know where this is going: huge thunderstorm, lightning, all that. And I’m fucking terrified. There’s no way this cabin has a lightning rod.”
“Definitely not.” Jack can hear a little smile in Robby’s voice.
“I just remember the counselor sitting with me. Everyone else asleep, rain thundering against the roof. Looking out the screen door at the field, rain pouring, you know, thinking, even if we survive tonight there’s no way they’re gonna let us play soccer tomorrow in all that mud. I don’t—” Jack suddenly finds his voice breaking. “It’s so weird, I don’t even remember his name. The camp counselor. He sat with me for hours. If not hours it certainly felt like that. He explained that something like eighty percent of lightning happens in the clouds, never touches the ground at all. He also—I don’t know how ethical this was, but he told me that there were people who had been struck by lightning and survived. That kind of changed it for me. I hadn’t even thought that was possible. Surviving it.”
Thunder rumbles, sounding distant; lightning, eventually, flashes.
“And he told me how light moves faster than sound, how you can use the time between thunder and lightning to time how far away it is. Five seconds for a mile. And we sat there, together, in the darkness, counting. Doing math. Tracking the storm as it got closer and then passed over us.”
Jack waits. Thunder rolls again. “One one-thousand. Two one-thousand. Three one-thousand. Four—” the room is illuminated, bright white, stark shadows. “It’s already passing.”
“Is that what this is?” Robby asks, not unkindly. “Are you my camp counselor right now?”
“If you forget my name we’re going to have a problem,” Jack says.
Robby laughs, as Jack had intended, turning his face against the soft inner part of Jack’s arm so that Jack can feel the hot puff of his breath, the prickle of his beard against the sensitive skin there. Jack holds him tighter; instead of resisting, Robby curls closer against his side.
“What I’m saying is. Maybe you just haven’t had the right person explain the lightning to you before.”
Robby takes a deep breath, his whole body heaving with it, shoulder rising against the arm Jack still has curled around him. Jack thinks about all the invisible biological processes that make this possible: the millions of tiny alveoli in his lungs all filling with air, the muscles and cartilage that allow the structure of the ribcage to expand with each breath. How monstrously delicate the human body; how capricious each biological mechanism, how prone to failure. How inextricably bound we are to these processes.
It’s easy to half-roll toward Robby, to use the arm already curled around Robby’s shoulders to pull him close, and Robby goes so sweetly, their bodies fit together so perfectly: Robby’s head tucked under Jack’s chin, chest to chest, hip to hip, Jack’s knee nestled between Robby’s thighs. Robby’s skin, where it was exposed to the air, is a little cool against Jack’s; the dampness of sweat is already collecting under his arms and at the nape of his neck. His hair smells of Jack’s shampoo.
“Thank you,” Jack says.
Robby scoffs softly. “For what,” he asks, voice muffled against Jack’s chest, “crying on you?”
“Yeah,” Jack says easily. “For coming here. For coming to me.”
Robby lets out a helpless little noise.
“I meant it, before, you know,” Jack continues. Robby is silent but Jack can feel his heart pounding between them, or maybe it’s Jack’s own heart. Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe the difference between them is smaller than Jack had thought.
Robby shifts slightly, untucks himself just enough so that the weight of his arm can wrap around Jack’s waist. “Yeah,” he says, soft and close between them. “I love you, too.”