You meet Aventurine at Quinn’s, a gaming parlor three streets from anywhere respectable. You’re there because you like it. He’s there because a business contact tried to lose him in the crowd, and Aventurine never lets anyone feel like their escape plan worked too well.

The contact is long gone. Aventurine, however, has discovered the darts. More precisely, he’s discovered you destroying three men from the freight yard who have begun, visibly, to sweat. Their friends watch in mounting horror. Somebody’s brother has started keeping score on a napkin because the chalkboard ran out of room.

And Aventurine does what he always does when he finds an interesting table. He buys in. “Room for one more?”

You turn around to size up the interruption, and you take your time about it. The coat is some pale, expensive thing with fur at the collar that has no business in a parlor with a fried-food smell soaked into the walls. Then the jewelry—rings, a bracelet, studs at the ears, all of it real, all of it worn like it’s nothing, which is how you can tell it’s real. The gloves. The posture, loose and open.

And then the eyes, which is where you stop. They’re unusual and draw people in immediately. You can tell he knows it, too. He’s used to those eyes doing a certain amount of the talking for him, and he’s watching you linger on them with mild, almost pleased patience.

You are, briefly, caught. You’ll admit that much. He’s easily the most handsome person to walk into Quinn’s. Then you file it, and look back at the smile.

“Fair warning,” he adds, into your once-over, entirely unbothered by being inspected. “I’m told I’m lucky.”

“Cool,” you say. “I’m told I’m good.”

Somewhere behind you, one of the freight yard men makes a noise like a kettle.

Something shifts in Aventurine’s face. You’ve handed him something he wasn’t expecting, and for just a second the smile he’s wearing isn’t the one he arrived with.

“Good,” he repeats, tasting it. He steps up to the line, rolling a chip down his fingers and back. “That’s a bolder claim than mine, you know. Luck, I can blame the universe for. Good—that one’s on you.” The chip vanishes into his palm. “I do admire a person who bets on themselves. It’s so much more interesting than the alternative.”

“You always talk like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like everything’s money.”

“My friend,” he says. “everything is money. The only question worth asking is what people are actually buying.” He tips his head, and those eyes do a slow, frank read of you and look delighted. “And I can’t work out your angle. That’s rare. Do you know how rare that is?”

“I don’t have an angle. I’m playing darts.”

“Everyone has an angle.”

“I have a dart,” you say, and hold it up. “That’s the whole plan.”

He laughs and something in the set of his shoulders eases a notch. “Alright then.” He gestures at the board with an open hand, all mock-gallantry. “By all means. Show me good.”

You demolish him. He’s better than the coat suggests, which you clock the moment he throws, but you’re better. You’re playing on instinct while he’s playing on calculation, and instinct is faster tonight.

You celebrate the first win by howling. He blinks at you.

“Problem?” you ask.

“No,” he says slowly, and there’s that under-smile again, wider this time. “No, I think that’s the most honest thing I’ve seen anyone do in a year.”

By the third game one of the enormous freight yard men has started howling with you, and then the man’s friend joins in. And then Quinn behind the bar shouts that if they break the light fixture again she’s taking it out of the tip jar, which is empty, which everyone finds hilarious.

The whole room has degenerated into something tribal and gleeful and entirely outside his operational parameters. And Aventurine keeps not leaving. “Best of seven,” he offers.

“You said that at best of three.”

“I’m an investor.” He retrieves the darts. “I believe in long positions.”

You squint at him. And there’s a beat where he can actually see you deciding something and it takes him a moment to identify the unfamiliar sensation in his chest as being looked at by someone who isn’t estimating his net worth.

“Okay, here’s what I’ve got,” you say, and hand him the darts. “You throw like someone who learned to aim under pressure. But the coat says money, so you got the money later, and recently enough that you still enjoy it.”

He goes very still, though the smile holds. You keep going. “The smile’s a sales smile. It’s a good one. But you’ve counted everyone in this room every single time that door’s opened, which is a thing people do when they’ve had reasons to. And you talk like the whole world’s a table you’re up at.” You shrug. “So. You’re either a cop, a criminal, or something weirder.”

For a moment Aventurine doesn’t say anything at all. People read his surface all the time. Nobody reads through it in a dingy dart bar over fried food, casually, like it wasn’t even difficult, and then declines to do anything with the information except make him throw again.

His pulse does something. His smile doesn’t move an inch. “Something weirder,” he says smoothly. “Definitely door number three.”

“Great.” You point at the board. “Throw, Something Weirder. Loser buys the fried stuff.”

You saw straight through the coat and the smile and the patter, said so to his face, and then you shrugged and gave the darts back. Aventurine does not know what to do with that. He finds he doesn’t want the feeling to stop.

He loses. He buys the fried stuff and he watches you eat it with your fingers while explaining a theory about dart weight. He asks questions to keep it going, and realizes somewhere in there that he’s stopped performing and is just talking. Which he also doesn’t know what to do with.

“You never said which one it was,” you note, around a mouthful. “Cop, criminal, weirder.”

He huffs. “I told you. Door three.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the most honest answer I’ve got." He says it lightly, and it happens to be completely true, and he enjoys that it’s completely true, and that you have no way of knowing it. “Tell you what. I’m feeling generous—losing does that to me, apparently, who knew. Heads or tails.” He produces a coin from nowhere, walks it across his knuckles. “Call it. Heads, I tell you exactly what I do for a living. No lies. No doors. Tails, you have to guess again next week.”

“Next week.”

“If your luck’s good.” The coin flips. “Well? Everybody gauges the day’s luck sooner or later. Might as well be now.”

You look at him and you get the distinct sense you’re being invited into a game with rules you can’t fully see, run by someone who does this for a living, and that he’s enjoying himself far too much.

“Tails,” you say. “I’ll take the rematch.”

He catches the coin without looking at it, and pockets it without showing you, and grins. “Would you look at that,” he says, delighted, and you never do find out how it landed.

When he settles the tab he leaves a tip large enough that Quinn chases him halfway to the door to make sure it wasn't a mistake.

He tells himself, walking home at two in the morning with grease on his gloves and your howl still ringing in his ears, that it was an amusing anomaly.

He’s back the next week.

(He tells himself it’s the darts.)

(It is not the darts.)

— ✦ —

Aventurine keeps waiting for the bill. Everyone charges eventually. He’s built an entire career on knowing what people want before they do. It’s the only real skill he trusts.

So when you keep showing up with no angle, no ask, no careful little pause before a favor, he does the only sensible thing: he opens an audit. He runs the numbers on you like a suspicious ledger, week by week, waiting for the line item that doesn’t balance.

By week two, he’s flirting, or something adjacent to it, because that’s his resting state and because he wants to see what it costs. You interrupt him halfway through a very good line to announce that romance is “a scam invented by greeting card companies to move product in February.”

“That’s cynical.”

“That’s economics,” you say. “You’d know. You’ve got economics face.”

He laughs and files the information away. He tells himself the feeling in his chest is relief. It’s certainly convenient. He does not examine the other half of the feeling. He is very, very good at not examining things.

You’re not against romance. You’ve simply never had the door. Somewhere you stopped expecting to, and it never felt like a loss.

(You do notice, walking home that night, that he’s ridiculous-looking. The kind of face that makes people lose the thread of their own sentences.)

By week three, you find out what he does. The corporation, the Strategic Investment Department, the whole gilded machine of it. He tells you himself, casually. He watches your face with total attention, waiting for the recalculation everyone does. The tiny shift from person to opportunity. He has seen it on a thousand faces.

You say: “Huh. So you can afford better fried stuff. And yet.” You get a triple twenty. You howl. Aventurine stands there holding a dart and an unspent expectation.

In week five, he tests it properly. He mentions, oh-so-casually, that he could get you into places. Exclusive tables, high society, rooms where the champagne has a birth year and the people have never once queued.

You make a face like he’s offered you homework. “Do those places have a dart board?”

“No.”

“Then what’s even the point of them?”

Aventurine doesn’t have an answer. He decides not to think about how much he enjoys not having an answer.

In week six, someone at the bar tries to flirt with him. Aventurine handles it and lets the person down so gracefully they leave feeling like they won something. Then he glances at you.

You’re mouthing economics face at him across the room with your eyebrows raised, and he has to turn around and cough into his fist for a full six seconds.

He does not sleep especially well that night. He assigns it to the coffee.

In week six, he’s strategically late. A full hour, no message. He arrives braced for the invoice. The wounded look. The pointed so nice of you to show up. The guilt.

You have made friends with Quinn, started a tournament bracket in his absence, recruited eleven people including the man who fixes the pinball machine, and saved him fried stuff in a napkin.

“You’re an hour late,” you say, not looking up from the bracket. “You’re seeded eighth. Don’t argue, it’s alphabetical.”

“That isn’t how alphabetical works.”

“Take it up with the committee.”

“Who’s the committee?”

“Me.” You finally look up. “And you’re seeded eighth.”

By week eight, he disappears. A job on the far side of nowhere, dangerous in ways he’d never put in a message, and—if he’s honest, which he tries not to be—a test with a longer fuse than the others.

Everyone leaves. Fine. He’ll simply leave first. And when he comes back to a cold shoulder or a list of grievances or to nothing, he can stop wondering, which has become an expensive and unfamiliar hobby.

He’s gone nineteen days.

You message him on day two. Something stupid—a photograph of a wall. On day four, a bad joke. Day six, a screenshot of the bracket with his name still in it. Day nine, nothing. Day eleven, nothing. On day thirteen you type are you okay and look at it for a long moment and delete it, because he never asked you to worry.

You go to Quinn’s anyway. Every week. You keep the seat.

On day nineteen the door opens. Aventurine looks like two days of no sleep. There’s a stiffness on his left side that he’s routing around so smoothly most people would miss it. You are not most people, and you clock it in under a second and file it for later.

You look up from the dartboard. “You’re alive,” you say. “Good. You’re seeded eighth again.”

“You kept me in the bracket.”

“Obviously. You’d have felt left out.” You pause. “It’s good to see you.”

You hand him the darts and a napkin. And Aventurine stands in a dingy bar and he thinks, with something like panic:

There’s no bill. There was never going to be a bill.

Oh no.

— ✦ —

In the past, people never got far enough to notice the real you. You get along with people. That’s different. You’ve always gotten along with everyone—easy in a room, quick with a bar, the person the freight yard men laugh with—and none of it has ever once required letting a single one of them all the way in.

You learned young that you came at things sideways. Too much, too odd, too loud in the wrong rooms, too quiet in the right ones. Somewhere back there is a person who told you that you were just too different. You agreed with them, and you got a little sharper at the edges after that, kept the humor and filed down the hoping.

But now things are changing and so are you. You laugh louder than you used to. You tell stories with your whole body now, the way Aventurine does. You’ve picked up his habit of narrating dramatic entrances, including your own, including at work, which has been noted. You hoard things all week just to bring them to him: dumb jokes, a weird bug, a cloud that had a funny shape.

You have a mental folder labelled tell him. It is never empty.

You have started numbering peculiar incidents on your phone, mostly so you can prove to yourself later that they happened.

Aventurine finds out in month four. It’s a Saturday at Quinn's and you’re typing with your thumbs while he’s mid-anecdote, which he takes personally, because he takes all forms of divided attention personally. “What could possibly be more interesting than this story?”

“You. Retroactively.” You don’t look up. “I’m logging the pigeon thing.”

There’s a silence. “You’re logging it.”

“It’s a list. I keep a list.”

"You keep a list.” He has gone extremely still. “Of me?”

“Of us. You’re a contributing factor.” You finish the entry. “Number thirty-one. The pigeon has been formally recorded.”

Aventurine holds out his hand. You give him the phone. He reads more slowly than you’d expected, so before long you’re reading along over his shoulder, occasionally filling in the gaps out loud.

1 — Quinn’s. Darts. Guy in a coat bought in. Name’s Aventurine. Lost three straight, then asked for best of seven. Bought the fried stuff without complaining. Possibly a cop. Possibly a criminal. Probably something else entirely. Verdict pending.

“'Verdict pending,'” Aventurine reads aloud, delighted.

“It’s still pending.”

“It’s been months.”

“These things take time.”

2 — Night market. The hat. He bought a hat purely to see if he could make me laugh in it. He could. I wore it for hours. Refused to acknowledge it as a joke. Wore it home.

He still has the hat. It’s on a shelf in his hallway, between a first edition and a piece of sculpture with a name, and every so often a guest asks about it, and he says, “Ah—that’s a very important piece,” and doesn’t elaborate.

4 — The arcade. Claw machine. We got banned. My fault for teaching him the physics. His fault for calculating drop trajectories out loud.

“That’s slander—”

“You did it in a voice.”

He’d started it in a normal register and escalated, chips flashing across his knuckles, addressing a crowd of children.

“The claw’s grip strength is randomized on a cycle,” he’d informed them. “The machine is lying to you. It fails on purpose. Seven times out of eight. All you have to do is be there on the eighth.”

“He’s making that up,” you’d said.

“I am not making that up.”

By the time management intervened there was a child on Aventurine’s shoulders acting as a spotter, a pile of plush animals, and a nine-year-old who had been promised a business card and, alarmingly, given one.

You got walked out. Aventurine handed the entire haul to the children on the way, keeping exactly one: a small purple dog with a lopsided embroidered face and a badge on its chest, which you’d won yourself on a shot he’d called impossible.

Kept one. The purple one. Officer Beans. Currently sitting on his desk at the office where he tells people it’s a psychological intimidation tactic. Nobody believes him. Nobody says so.

Aventurine reads that entry twice. He doesn’t say anything about it, and moves on, and you file that away too, in a place that isn’t the list.

7 — The bin.

He objects to this one on principle before he’s finished it. “This should be number six.”

“It’s number seven.”

“Six happened after this. You’ve filed them wrong—”

“Six happened after this and got numbered six because I wrote it down first. It’s a log, not a chronicle.”

He argues about it for forty minutes. Off and on. He brings it up again in a taxi.

Debt collector mistook me for one of his. Grabbed my arm. Poor decision. He is now in a bin.

Aventurine had arrived eleven minutes later to find you sitting on the closed lid of an industrial waste bin, eating an apple.

“I had a whole rescue planned,” he’d said.

“You can rescue him. He’s still in there.”

The bin had thumped, indignantly. Behind him, one of his subordinates had made a strangled noise and stopped existing as hard as she could.

“Was there a reason for the bin specifically?”

“It was there,” you had said, with your mouth full. “Location, location, location.”

He said it was the best day of his professional career. I assumed he was joking. Later realized he probably wasn’t.

Also: he’d prepared a line for the rescue and won’t tell me what it was.

You look at him. “You still won’t tell me what the line was.”

“And I never will,” he says, scrolling on. "It was excellent. Its power lies in its mystery.”

(The line was: “Nobody touches what’s mine.” Aventurine has decided you will never, ever hear it, because he’d have to explain why his voice did that.)

9 — Skateboard. Footage exists. Footage is my single greatest strategic asset. Balance of power in the known universe currently stable.

“Delete that.”

“Never."

“I’ll buy it from you.”

“It’s not for sale.”

“Everything’s—” He stops himself, mid-sentence, and something crosses his face that you don’t have a name for yet. “Right. Yes. Fine. Keep it.”

12 — The ear.

Aventurine goes quiet at this one.

Card game went bad. He texted me an address and the word “bored” with a winking face, which I have decided means “flare fired off a sinking ship.”

Went in as furious partner. Grabbed his ear. Apologized to four men for “this idiot, he does this every anniversary.” One of them apologized to me.

“Sweetheart—” Aventurine had tried, wheezing.

“Don’t you sweetheart me in front of these nice men.”

In the alley afterward he’d laughed until he had to lean on the wall. “You didn’t know if they’d buy it. You had no way of knowing whether I’d play along—”

“Nah.” You’d shrugged, checking the street with a caution you’d learned off him without noticing. “But I knew you’d catch it. You always catch what I throw.”

He went quiet after that. Walked me all the way home and pretended he wasn’t checking corners.

Note: he is always checking corners.

He reads that line about six times. “You noticed that,” he says.

“You do it every time we leave a building.”

“Mm." He scrolls on. “How embarrassing for me.”

14 — Restaurant with no prices on the menu. Ordered everything with an animal name in it. Waiter came to respect me. A. said nothing for most of the meal, which was weird, and afterwards couldn’t remember what he’d eaten, which was weirder.

“I remember what I ate.”

“What did you eat?"

“Something with an animal name in it,” he says, with enormous dignity, and scrolls on.

19 — The howling. It’s contagious. He does it now.

Ironically at first. A little aroo under his breath with his eyes flicking sideways to check whether anyone caught it. And then, at some point, it stopped being ironic, and now it’s a reflex he has had to actively suppress in meetings.

His coworker Topaz has heard it. “Was that a howl,” she said in a quarterly review. Aventurine denied it with such immediate silken conviction that everyone in the room became certain of it forever.

He would burn the evidence. But the evidence is a memory and it’s one of his favorites.

“You can’t possibly know that last part.”

“You told me. Three weeks ago.”

“Did I?”

“You tell me a lot of things, Aventurine.”

He does not respond to this. He scrolls. He reaches the bottom of your list. “That’s all of them,” you say. “So far.”

“Mm.”

He holds the phone a moment longer than the moment requires. Then he hands it back, and picks up his drink, and looks out at the bar, and says, in the lightest and least important voice in his entire arsenal: “You’ll keep doing it.”

Not a question, again.

“Doing what?”

“The list.” He shrugs. “It’s sloppy, obviously. But you notice—” he pauses, half a second, choosing “—useful things. It would be a shame to stop. That’s all.”

“You want me to keep writing about you.”

“I want the record maintained,” he says grandly, “for posterity, and for the eventual lawsuit regarding the skateboard footage,” and drains his glass, and changes the subject so fast you nearly get whiplash.

He has been written down before. Extensively. There are files on him: assessments, valuations, risk profiles, one very thorough document that lists his body under “assets.” Every word ever recorded about him was written by somebody deciding what he was worth.

And then there’s this. Thirty-one entries in a notes app, badly numbered, kept by somebody who wasn’t building a case and wasn’t running a valuation and had no plans to ever show it to anyone, including him. He would like it maintained. Yes. He would like that very much.

So you keep it.

22 — Laundromat, 1 AM. He has never used a washing machine. Refuses to admit he has never used a washing machine. Approached it like a hostile negotiation and won, at a cost of one white shirt now the color of a sunset. Wearing it anyway. Wearing it often.

26 — Friday. He fell asleep on the table during the fifth match. Woke him at 2. He didn’t check his surroundings once. First time I’ve seen that.

Aventurine asks about that one, weeks later. He asks to see the list every so often now, casually, the way you’d ask for the salt.

“This one’s short.” He turns the phone slightly, like the angle might help.

“Ran out of things to say.”

“You have never in your life run out of things to say.”

“First time for everything,” you tell him, and take the phone back, and go get another round.

(There had been another line. You’d typed it, and read it back, and something about it sat strangely in your chest, so you deleted it before saving and didn’t think about why.

You are extremely good at not thinking about things.)

31 — Quinn’s. The pigeon. A pigeon got into the bar. A. and I took opposing sides in the ensuing municipal debate. The pigeon escaped. Quinn has banned the topic. He will bring this up every week for the rest of my life.

(He does.)

— ✦ —

“Your boyfriend’s late,” Quinn says one day, setting down a glass.

“He’s not—” you start, and she’s already walked away, because she has been doing this for months and has never once waited for the end of that sentence.

The thing is, everyone does it. The pinball repair guy does it. The woman who runs the noodle cart on the corner does it and refuses to be corrected, in two languages. A taxi driver does it. A very sincere charity volunteer does it and then apologizes so profusely that Aventurine donates on the spot, absurdly, just to make her stop.

You correct them, every time, cheerfully, without a flicker. Oh, we’re not together. It’s easy. It’s a fact.

You never notice that Aventurine doesn’t correct them. He just watches you do it, with an expression that he keeps very carefully in the neighborhood of amused, and he says nothing at all, and then he changes the subject to something extremely interesting.

— ✦ —

Somewhere along the way the bar stops being the venue, and his apartment starts. The first time you’re there, Aventurine gives you the tour. “Welcome,” he announces, sweeping an arm at the floor-to-ceiling view like he personally arranged the skyline for your benefit.

He walks you through it like a gallery, narrating provenance he’s clearly inventing on the spot (“this is a very important chair, people have wept over this chair, I’ve never sat in it”) and a sculpture in the hall that he claims three separate collectors tried to fight each other over (“which is the only reason I keep it, honestly, it’s hideous, look at it”).

You’re laughing before you’ve made it past the kitchen. He notices you laughing and doubles down: he does the whole tour in the voice of a bored luxury realtor, gestures at a wine fridge he admits he can’t operate, opens a door onto a room whose entire purpose he cannot identify. “I’ve owned this apartment for three years and I have no idea what this room is for. It came with the square footage.”

And then he opens the door to the bedroom, still mid-flourish: “And here’s where the magic emphatically does not happen.”

You look in, and the joke sort of dies in your chest. Because the room is empty. A bed, enormous and expensive and pushed against the far wall. No lamp, even, and no nightstand for a lamp to sit on. One blanket. One pillow, and the pillow is at the head of the bed but it’s got that untouched look. For a place he sleeps in, it looks like nobody sleeps in it.

You don’t say any of that. But he watches you clock it and something flickers, and then he’s already smoothing it over, leaning in the doorframe, easy as anything.

“I know, I know. Spartan.” He waves a hand. “The designer wanted to do the whole—” a vague gesture, “—headboard, throw cushions, the little pointless pillows you take off before bed and put back on in the morning. I told her no. Can’t stand clutter where I sleep.” Then the deflection lands with a wink in it: “Besides, I don’t use the pillow half the time anyway. Bad habit. I’ve been told it ruins my neck and my mystique.”

He says it lightly, and you laugh because it’s meant to make you laugh, but you also file the shape of it, quietly. You don’t have the whole picture yet: the insomnia, the three-hours-in-pieces, the reasons a person learns to sleep like they might need to move fast.

“Very mysterious,” you agree. “Ten out of ten neck.”

“Thank you.” And he shuts the door on the empty room and steers you back toward the good part of the apartment, the part with the couch. You let him, and neither of you says anything else about it.

The apartment is beautiful, but it is impersonal. You change that.

You change it with a pair of abandoned hoodies, one of which is his and is never returning. With a blanket that migrates from a closet to the couch. With a drawer that is somehow yours now. You never asked for it, Aventurine never offered it, it simply happened, and one day you opened it and there were your things in it, folded, because he folds things when he’s thinking. With three mugs that don’t match anything.

The bowl on the counter now holds keys, receipts, a claw machine token, one ring he’s been looking for, and a rubber band.

Two months in, Aventurine gives you a key. He drops it into your palm on the way past, midsentence, while talking about something else entirely, and doesn’t stop walking.

“—which is why the whole sector’s overvalued, but nobody wants to be the one who says it. Anyway, that’s yours, don’t lose it, the locksmith was a nightmare.”

You look at his back, which has gone very slightly rigid. “Cool,” you say, and put it on your ring, and ask what he wants to eat.

He exhales. You hear it from across the room.

(He’d rehearsed four versions. He’d run odds on all four. He’d rejected a fifth for being too honest. In the end, none of it mattered, because you took the key like it was a key.)

— ✦ —

Friday nights have rules.

Rule one: terrible movies only.

Aventurine has impeccable taste in most things and catastrophic taste in cinema, and he defends this position with his entire chest. The cheesier the better. Wooden acting is a delicacy. Plot holes are a feature. When a boom mic dips into frame he celebrates, out loud.

“Do you understand what we’re seeing?” he demands, gesturing at the screen with a spring roll. “Someone was paid for that. Someone was paid, and someone else approved it, and someone else printed it—”

You once watched him reduced to genuine tears of joy over a movie shark that visibly ran on wheels. He said it was the wheels, and it was the wheels, and it also very much wasn’t.

You’ve worked out, over time, why. He doesn’t want the good ones. The good ones ask you to feel things on their schedule, and he has spent his whole life being asked to feel things on someone else’s schedule.

Bad movies ask for nothing. Bad movies can be beaten. You can sit in a warm room with a person you trust and win against a film, together, out loud, and nothing about it costs anything.

You don’t tell him you worked that out. You just start bringing worse and worse movies.

Rule two: gaming is war.

There is a console in his entertainment cabinet. You find it eventually, still in its box, purchased two years ago because an interior designer told him the shelf “needed a life signal.” The plastic wrap is intact.

“It’s a console, Aventurine, it’s got a whole—” you turn it over “—there’s a controller taped to the back of the box.”

“That’s how they come.”

“That is not how they come.”

You set it up on the floor of his expensive living room, and he sits on the couch behind you with his arms folded and an expression of enormous, unconvincing skepticism, and asks whether he’s supposed to be impressed by a machine that makes small men jump.

He is, within about nine minutes, extremely invested.

The learning curve is a comedy. His hands know cards. His hands know chips, coins, the weight of a die, four kinds of shuffle and one kind of throw. His hands do not know a controller. And for the first hour he holds it like it might be evidence, thumbs stiff, jaw set, absolutely refusing to look at the buttons because looking at the buttons would be admitting he doesn’t know where they are.

He walks his character into a wall for a solid minute. And then something clicks over in him and he stops playing the game and starts playing the math. He starts reading your habits the way he reads a table: you always dodge left when you’re panicking, you always get greedy after two wins, you telegraph your ultimate by leaning forward.

Within a month he is offensively good at fighting games. He counts cards in games that do not contain cards. You don’t know how. You suspect he doesn’t fully know either. He is also very lucky. And the smug little glow that comes off him at a certain point in every match is unmistakable. It makes you want to throw a cushion at him, so you do.

Your only counter is chaos. Strategies so unhinged they can’t be predicted, because they weren’t planned by anyone, including you. You start choosing characters at random. You start playing entire rounds with your eyes closed. You start making decisions based on what would be funniest.

The night your nonsense finally breaks his math, he stares at the screen in total silence for ten full seconds. Then he sets down the controller with great ceremony. “Teach me,” he says, “the way of the beast.”

Rule three: no rules apply to play fighting.

It starts over the remote, or the last dumpling, or an insult to Officer Beans’ professional integrity, and it ends in undignified grappling on his expensive couch.

You always win. Aventurine insists he lets you win. He has, exactly twice, resorted to biting, which he denies shamelessly. Once he attempted a maneuver so ill-advised that you both ended up on the floor with a cushion on his head. He lay there for a second longer than he needed to, breathing, with a cushion on his head, laughing.

And once you end up pinned. Both wrists, a fluke of leverage and momentum, and he’s laughing above you with his hair in his face and his tie somewhere in the wreckage, close enough that you can see all the details you’d never noticed in all those months of looking directly at him.

Something in your chest does a short, sharp thing you have no name for. You headbutt him in the collarbone. He goes off the couch entirely. Order is restored, honor is satisfied and the dumpling is yours.

You blame it on being winded. You don’t think about it again for weeks.

The first few weeks, when you grabbed him, his whole body used to go rigid for a fraction of a second before it went along with it. A little hitch, gone almost too fast to see.

Somewhere in there, it just stops.

Rule four: what happens at the end of the night stays at the end of the night.

Somewhere past midnight, when the movie is rolling credits and the take-out boxes are empty, his shoulders come down from wherever the job keeps them. His voice loses its polish. He stops sitting like he’s on camera and starts sprawling, one arm over his eyes, and the words that come out of him get slower, and truer.

That’s when you learn him. That he doesn’t really sleep. Three hours, four, in pieces, and then he works.

That he checks the exits in every room, even this one, even now—though lately, he told you once, half-asleep and unguarded, he only checks them once.

That the chips he rolls across his knuckles aren’t a flourish. His hands never learned to be still, and stillness is expensive, and a man who fidgets in the wrong room dies in it.

That he was somebody else before he was this. He mentions it the way you’d mention a country you visited once. Where I’m from. Never a name. Never twice in the same evening. Once, at three in the morning, he touched the high collar of his shirt without seeming to know he was doing it, and said, “It’s not a tattoo,” and then said, “Anyway,” and put the mask back on.

You never pry. You just leave the door open, every single time, and change the subject when he needs you to, and stay exactly where you are.

— ✦ —

You find out when his birthday is by accident, from a form he leaves on the counter, and when you ask him about it he does something with his face that isn’t a smile but is doing a smile’s job.

“It’s not a thing. It’s a date,” Aventurine says. “It’s an administrative fact about me. Like my height.”

“Your height is a thing. You bring it up constantly.”

So you bake him a cake.

You are not a baker. You are a person who owns one mixing bowl and a great deal of confidence, and somewhere between the flour and the oven the recipe stopped being a suggestion and started being a negotiation, and what emerges is dense.

You bring it over and put it on the counter, and say, “Don’t.”

Aventurine doesn’t say anything at all. He stands there in his own kitchen, at ten at night, still in his work shirt with the collar buttoned, looking at a homemade cake with a ribbon around the box and his name on top in slightly panicked icing.

The silence goes on a beat too long. “You made this,” he says. Then, with tremendous effort, back to normal: “Is it structurally—”

“It’s a brick, Aventurine. It’s a brick with a ribbon on it.”

He eats three slices.

You watch him do it. You tell him he doesn’t have to and he says something breezy about not insulting a chef and takes another. It’s a brick, you know it’s a brick, and Aventurine sits at that counter and eats it and asks you questions about your day between mouthfuls like it’s the most ordinary thing in the world.

And then, when the plates are in the sink and you’ve stopped paying attention, he takes the ribbon off the box and puts it in his pocket.

You don’t see it. He didn’t plan it either. He’ll find it in his coat two days later at the office and stand there holding it in the middle of a hallway.

He keeps it.

— ✦ —

Summer arrives. Somebody’s put an open-air cinema on the roof of a parking structure downtown. A bedsheet screen, a projector, forty folding chairs, a man selling popcorn out of a cart he clearly built himself.

The film is a shark movie. Aventurine is ecstatic. He’s dressed differently tonight. No luxury fashion. No jewelry beyond the studs. When a woman two rows up turns around because he’s laughing too loud at the shark’s first appearance, she just smiles at him. He seems briefly astonished by this.

Her name is Ruth. She’s about seventy. She has a thermos of something that is probably not coffee, and by the second act she’s on your side of the great critical debate about whether the shark is “in it enough.”

“It’s a shark movie,” Aventurine says. “The shark’s an antagonist. You don’t put the antagonist in the whole film, it costs you the dread—”

“It costs you the shark,” says Ruth.

“Thank you,” you say.

“You’re outnumbered,” Ruth tells him. Then, she looks between the two of you and says: “How long have you two been together?”

“Oh,” you say, automatic, “we’re not together.” And you go back to the movie.

You don’t see his face. Ruth does. She looks at Aventurine and then says, “Mm,” and turns back to the screen, and never mentions it again.

The shark eats a boat. He doesn’t laugh. Six minutes later he laughs at a thing that isn’t as funny, twice as loudly, and buys everyone in a three-chair radius popcorn.

On the walk back to the car, he’s talkative in the wrong register.

“You okay?” you ask.

“Perfect,” he says. “Why?”

“You’ve got economics face.”

He stops walking, and he looks at you with something on his face that doesn’t belong to any of his known expressions, and you feel your own heartbeat somewhere unfamiliar, in your throat. “Do I,” he says.

“Yeah.”

The moment stretches. Then he smiles and says, “That’s just my face,” and starts walking again.

You go home. You lie awake for a while, and you assign it to the popcorn.

(Aventurine sits in his car in a parking structure for twenty minutes before he starts the engine. He runs the odds, out of habit. The odds are terrible. The odds are so bad they’re almost funny.

He folds. It isn’t the first time. It’s just the first time it’s hurt.)

— ✦ —

Aventurine mentions it on a Tuesday, offhand.

“We closed the deal.” He says it into the fried food, not looking up, but there’s a particular set to his shoulders. “Eight months of work. It should have died four separate times. It didn’t.” A pause. “I may have had something to do with that.”

You know enough by now to read the understatement. He’s good at this. Genuinely, formidably good, and it’s one of the few things in his life he’s allowed to be openly good at, and for a second you get to watch him just enjoy that. It’s a good look on him.

“There’s a thing,” he goes on. “Company puts on a whole gala when a deal that size lands. Ballroom, ice sculptures, people in expensive outfits pretending to like each other. Deeply tedious.” He pauses. “I’ll add you to the list, of course.”

“The list.”

“The guest list. Plus-ones, friends, the usual.” He shrugs one shoulder. “You should come. See the natural habitat. It’ll be educational—you can watch me lie to three people at once and call it networking.”

“I’ll add you to the list, of course,” you repeat, amused. “You make it sound so special.”

“It’s a corporate function,” he says, with dignity.

You laugh, and say sure, why not, and he changes the subject fast—too fast, but you don’t notice, because you’re not looking for it.

(There is a list, technically, and your name goes on it, but he doesn’t need to “add” anyone. He could bring whoever he wanted, or no one, and no one at that company would blink.

He said “I’ll add you to the list” because “will you come with me, as mine, only you, I want you in that room more than I want anyone else on the entire guest list” was not a sentence his mouth could physically produce.

He is hoping that you’ll be his plus-one. Not a name on a list. His. He does not say any of this.)

The gala is at a hotel that screams money.

You feel it the moment you walk in. You’re not underdressed, but there’s dressed-up and then there’s this. Everyone here moves like they own the floor they’re standing on. You move like someone who learned to read a room in a bar with a stapled dartboard, which is a useful skill in most rooms and a strange one here, where nobody’s telling the truth and it doesn’t seem to bother them.

You spot Aventurine across the ballroom and your first thought, unguarded, is: oh.

Because he’s magnificent. You’ve seen him peacock-bright before, but this is the natural habitat. He is holding a flute of something pale and expensive he isn’t drinking, at the center of a knot of powerful people who are all leaning slightly toward him, laughing at whatever he just said.

He’s working, and the work is beautiful to watch, all that charm turned up to full and aimed at a whole room. He makes it look like the easiest thing in the world.

He looks so good. He looks so different. He looks like he belongs to a world with a velvet rope around it, and for one cold second he doesn’t look like the man who cries at movie sharks and eats brick cake and doesn’t use his pillow.

Then he throws his head back to laugh at something, and it’s the real laugh, and he looks, underneath the magnificence, exactly like the man you know, and somehow that’s worse. Because you can see both at once. The one the room gets, and the one you get. And in this room, surrounded by all these gleaming people who speak his other language fluently, you’re suddenly not sure which one is the real habitat and which one is the visit.

You make your way over. Aventurine sees you coming. His face does something, and he lifts a hand toward you.

“Hey,” you say. “Nice party.”

“You came.” There’s something under it, warm, but he’s mid-sentence with a man whose watch looks expensive, mid-deal, mid-dance, three conversations spinning at once. “Give me—ten minutes, I’ll be right with you, don’t move, I want—” someone says his name, another hand lands on his shoulder, the current of the room pulls at him “—stay right there, I’ll come find you—”

And he means it. He means give me ten minutes and then you have my whole night. He means hold on, let me shut this down, and then it’s just us and I can stop performing.

But you don’t hear that. You hear I’m busy, wait, in a room where you already don’t belong, and something small and cold turns over in your chest.

You’ve never felt it before, so you don’t recognize it. He’s got a hundred people here who know which fork to use and what the deal was and how to laugh at the right moment. He’s got a whole life that fits in this room. What does he need with the person who taught him to lose at darts?

You tell him sure, take your time, no rush. You smile, and then you drift toward the balcony doors, toward air.

The balcony is cold and blessedly empty. You stand at the rail and do a thing you basically never do, which is spiral.

He only invited you because you got wind of the deal. No. That’s not even it, you didn’t get wind of anything, he told you. He invited you to be polite. He added you to a list.

You think about how easily he moves through that room and how much he clearly doesn’t need you there, how you’re a novelty from his off-hours, the funny person from the dart bar, a story he tells. You think about the person years ago who said you were too different, and how they were right, and how you’ve just walked into the most expensive proof of it.

You think about leaving. It would be easy. You could slip out, send a text tomorrow: sorry, wasn’t feeling great, hope the party was fun.

You don’t clock the irony. That this is exactly what he did in the beginning. And now, given the same fear, you’re doing the thing he did. You’re about to leave first.

You’ve got your weight shifted toward the door when it opens behind you.

“There you are.”

You turn. Aventurine’s stepped out onto the balcony, and the room’s light is behind him, and he’s run a hand back through his hair at some point in the last few minutes. You can see the careful styling pushed wild, a strand fallen across his forehead. It makes him look less like the ballroom and more like the couch, and your traitor heart does a thing you also decline to name.

“You disappeared,” Aventurine says lightly, but he’s watching you closely, the disconcerting full attention. “One minute you’re there, next you’re out here, in the cold, alone, doing your brooding-at-a-skyline impression.” A tilt of his head. “It’s a good impression. Very atmospheric. What’s wrong?”

And you look at the one person you’re honest with, and you lie. You’re not proud of it. “Nothing. Wasn’t feeling great.” You wave a hand at the ballroom. “Loud in there. Just needed air. I might head out, actually, let you get back to it.”

Something shutters in his face. Not anger. It’s worse because it’s the smoothing, the working smile sliding back over the real one. You’ve watched him do it to a whole room. You’ve never once had it done to you, and it’s awful, and you did it, you caused it, by lying to the person who can always tell.

“Of course,” he says. “You should go if you’re not well. Don’t let me keep you.”

“Aventurine—”

“It’s fine.” He leans against the rail beside you, not quite touching, looking out at the city instead of at you, and his voice stays perfectly light. “It’s a tedious party anyway. I did warn you.” A pause follows. And then, still not looking at you, in a tone so casual it has to be costing him everything, he adds:

“For what it’s worth. You weren’t a name on a list.”

You go still.

“I don’t know what you’ve decided, out here, in the cold.” He turns the flute in his fingers, watching the liquid catch the light, doing the thing he does when the words are hard and he needs his hands busy. “I’m good at reading people. It’s the whole job. And you’ve got the exact face of someone who’s talked themselves into something stupid.” The ghost of a smile, not the working one, sadder. “I know the face. I invented the face.”

“That’s not—”

“There are three hundred people in that room I could have brought tonight. Or none. It does not matter to a single soul at this company who stands next to me holding a drink they won’t let me actually enjoy.”

He finally looks at you, and for just a second it’s him, all the way him, unguarded and quiet. “I asked you. Only you. Because it’s the one room in my life where I have to be entirely that—” a small gesture back at the ballroom, at the magnificent working animal he was ten minutes ago, “—and I wanted one real thing in it. One person who’s seen me lose at darts. That was the whole plan. You were the whole plan.”

The cold thing in your chest cracks right down the middle, and underneath it is just shame, and want, and the horrifying dawning shape of a feeling you still don’t have a name for. “Oh,” you say, uselessly.

“Yes. Oh.” And the smoothness is back, gentle now, letting you off the hook because he can see you flailing and he’s never once been able to watch you flail without throwing you a line. “Anyway. You’re not feeling well. Go home, get some sleep.” He straightens, the host reassembling himself. “I have to go lie to five more people. Text me when you’re back safe.”

He goes back in. You go home. And this time you lie awake, and you can’t assign it to the popcorn, because there wasn’t any.

You don’t talk for four days. He texts you back safe? that first night and you say yeah, thanks and that’s it, that’s the whole exchange.

And then the tell him folder fills up with a dozen stupid things, and for the first time ever you don’t send any of them. Because you’re ashamed. Because you did the thing he did and you don’t know how to undo it. Because every time you pick up the phone you see the shutters coming down over his face and you put it down again.

Aventurine doesn’t reach out either. Which is its own answer, and you read it wrong too: you decide it means he’s done, when actually it means he’s giving you room, because he learned a long time ago that the surest way to make someone leave is to grab at them. And he would rather sit in silence for four days than close his hand around something that might be trying to go.

Four days. It’s the longest you’ve gone since his business trip in the beginning.

On the fifth day you show up at his door. No text, no warning, the key you never use burning a hole in your pocket because using it feels presumptuous now. You knock. You hear him cross the room. The door opens and there he is.

“I was stupid,” you say.

His eyebrows go up.

“At the party. I got—there was a whole thing in my head, and none of it was real, and I made it up, and then I lied to you about it, which is the worst part, and I made you do the shutter thing, and I’ve felt like garbage for four days.” It comes out in a rush. “You wanted me there and I turned it into—I don’t even know. I put myself in a metaphorical bin for four days and I’d like to come out now.”

For a second he just looks at you. Then something in his face gives way, and he leans against the doorframe, and the real smile comes back. “A metaphorical bin,” he says.

“A big one.”

He laughs and steps back to let you in. “For the record,” he says, as you pass him, “you don’t have to be clever to be my best friend although you usually are. Frankly, I’m surrounded by clever people, they’re exhausting, every one of them wants something.” He shuts the door. “The job requires exactly one thing: a certain amount of weird. You’re wildly overqualified.”

“That’s the nicest insult anyone’s ever given me.”

“I have a gift.” He’s already heading for the living room, already back to normal, because with the two of you normal is the thing that never actually breaks, only bends. “Now sit down and tell me the things you didn’t send me for four days. You’ve got the look. I know you’ve been hoarding.”

You had. You tell him all of them, no matter how silly they are. He listens to every one.

— ✦ —

You’ve been fine. You’re always fine. Tonight you are, unusually, not.

You turned a corner and there they were, someone from the before, the one who did the too different speech, older now and perfectly pleasant, and you were perfectly pleasant back, and you talked for ten minutes about nothing and parted like adults.

Now you’re walking it off through a city that’s gone quiet, hands jammed in your pockets, jaw set, being fine very hard.

You pass a bar with the windows steamed up. A group inside, six or seven of them, mid-story, all leaning in. One of them throws their head back laughing. For no reason you can defend, it lands wrong.

You take out your phone before you’ve decided to. You don’t type anything true. You’d rather eat the phone. You take a photo instead. A sign in a shop window, a magnificent typo, FRESH SOULS DAILY where it clearly meant to say rolls—the kind of thing that goes straight in the mental folder marked tell him.

You send it with no caption. It’s the closest you’ll come, tonight, to I miss you. It’ll have to do the whole job.

The reply comes back before the photo’s even finished loading on your end.

Aventurine: still awake?

You stop walking.

You: were you about to text me

Aventurine: I was composing something. It was going to be very witty. You’ve ruined it.

Aventurine: the souls are a value at that price though

You stand on a dark corner and feel something in your chest loosen a full notch, just from the shape of his typing, and you think oh. You put the thought down where you put all of them.

You: come walk. no destination. I’m being weird and I don’t want to be weird alone.

Three dots. Gone. Back.

He is, you will find out later, extremely pleased. He is pleased in a way he has no idea what to do with and being pleased makes him nervous, and being nervous makes him deflect, so what he sends is:

Aventurine: walk with no destination? that’s just being lost with better branding

Aventurine: fine. where’s nowhere and how do I get there

Normally you’d fire something back. You’d tell him nowhere is three streets past the souls, turn left at his ego. You’ve got six of those loaded at all times.

Tonight you just send:

You: thank you <3

The dots start, then stop. They don’t come back for almost a minute.

Aventurine is standing in the middle of his apartment holding his phone in both hands and looking at a small heart like it might be a trap, or a gift, or both.

You don’t tease. You said thank you and there’s a heart, and he does not have a script for the version of you that doesn’t armor up. He finds, standing there, that he’d walk considerably further than three streets past the souls.

He’s already got his coat on. He put it on before he replied.

He finds you on the corner twenty minutes later. He’s wearing casual clothes. You don’t comment on it because commenting would spook it, but you clock it, and it goes somewhere warm.

“So,” he says, falling into step. “Nowhere. Ambitious. I’ve heard the nightlife’s dead.”

“Shut up.”

“The locals are a nightmare.”

“Shut up.” But it comes out with no teeth, and he hears that, and you feel him recalibrate beside you without a word.

For a while you just walk. And then he starts talking, low and easy, the kind he usually only does past midnight with a movie running. He fills the quiet on purpose, and steers it wide of you on purpose.

You don’t know what to do with it. So you just walk closer than usual, shoulder nearly at his arm, and let him.

Aventurine watches you sideways the whole time. You don’t catch it. He’s very good. He clocks the set of your jaw. The pockets. The way you’re laughing a half-beat late, which for you is practically a flare. He does not say you’re quiet tonight, so instead, when you pass a place with a glowing sign and a bored attendant and a row of little curtained booths, he stops dead.

“Right,” he announces. “That’s it. That’s nowhere. We’ve arrived.”

You look. “Karaoke?”

He’s already steering you toward the door with a hand at your back. “A scientific facility. For the study of whether you can be talked out of a mood by a machine that rates your pitch out of a hundred.”

(He noticed. He noticed an hour ago. He will simply never, ever say so.)

The first twenty minutes are exactly as stupid as you need them to be. Aventurine picks aggressively terrible songs—the cheesier the better— and performs them with total, catastrophic commitment, one hand on his chest, hitting the notes he can and narrating the ones he can’t.

He does a ballad so badly the machine gives him a 41 and displays a small cartoon of a wilting flower, and he takes it like a knife to the heart, clutching the microphone, demanding a recount.

You laugh and you take the mic off him and do something loud and ridiculous and he howls. It’s warm, and it’s easy, and the somber thoughts are very far away.

And then you queue something quieter. You don’t fully decide to. Your thumb just goes to a slow one, an old one, one of those songs about setting out and looking for something and not being sure it’s there, about a road with no one on it and a light you can’t tell if you’re walking toward or away from.

You sing it straight and somewhere in the second verse, a line about how you can be surrounded and still be the only one walking your particular road, something rises up in your chest without permission. Your voice thickens, and your eyes sting, and you keep going because stopping would be worse.

He’s gone completely still on the little vinyl bench.

The song ends. The machine, mercifully, doesn't score it. There’s a beat of quiet.

“That one’s not going in the study,” Aventurine says softly. “That one’s off the record.”

You breathe out, and something that was clenched all evening finally isn’t. “Your turn,” you manage. “Sing the flower one again.”

“I will not sing the flower one again, that machine is a critic and a coward.” And with that, he’s off. The booth is loud and stupid again, and he gave you the exit ramp and floored it. And you just have the enormous warm thing inside your chest.

You spill out onto the street near midnight, hoarse and lighter.

You walk the white line of a crossing like a tightrope, arms out. Aventurine critiques your form. You dare him, and he does it better, obviously, insufferably, with a little flourish at the end. You narrate a dramatic entrance into an empty plaza to an audience of pigeons. He bows to the pigeons. One pigeon leaves.

At some point you’re both just standing in the middle of a quiet square doing an escalating contest of the worst possible dance moves, and he catches your eye mid-move, and asks light but with something underneath it: “Is this one going in the entries?”

He’s right, it is, it’s already writing itself, and he knows you well enough to know that.

“Maybe,” you say.

And then, because the evening has taken something apart in you that’s usually bolted shut, you close the two steps between you and hug him.

Aventurine goes very still. Then his arms come up around you, and one hand settles between your shoulder blades, and neither of you says anything at all, because neither of you has the faintest idea what to do with this.

You’re not a hugger. He knows you’re not a hugger. You know he knows.

You hold on a beat too long, and he lets you. When you finally step back you’re both slightly wrong-footed, staring at anything but each other.

Aventurine recovers first, or pretends to.

“Right,” he says, a little rough, clapping his hands once. “You’re clearly delirious. This is a medical emergency. There’s a man three doors down who sells the fried stuff at criminal hours and I’m buying, because I refuse to let you make more major hugging decisions on an empty stomach.”

You share it out of one paper carton, standing at a vendor’s counter under a buzzing light, because Aventurine “isn’t hungry” and then eats most of it.

And it gets late. You yawn into your fist and he catches it and something crosses his face. “Just stay over,” he says, fast. Then, immediately, he adds: “It’s closer. It’s practical. You’re in no state to be trusted with public transit, you tried to tightrope a crosswalk—” a shrug, aggressively casual, “—and I have several spare rooms. Purely a logistics call.”

(It is not a logistics call. He has watched you flag and he does not want the night to end, and “stay over” is the largest thing he’s said all evening.)

You could tease him. It’s right there. “Okay,” you say instead. And you watch him not know what to do with that, either.

You don’t use the spare rooms. You end up on the couch, the way you always do. He puts on a comedy first—something dumb and warm, a palate cleanser—and you’re loose and laughing again, tucked into your usual corner, feet migrating into his lap by pure habit.

Then he switches to a horror movie. A bad one, naturally. But bad horror is still horror, and there’s a jump you both see coming and it gets you anyway. You grab his arm, and he grabs yours, and you both make undignified noises and then dissolve laughing. You don’t fully separate afterward.

You stay closer than the couch requires. Your shoulder is pressed against his side, his arm ends up along the back of the cushions and then, at some point, around you. On screen a rubber creature menaces a cabin. Neither of you is really watching. The credits could roll, and you wouldn’t move.

And in the dark, closer than you’ve ever let yourselves sit, you feel the exact moment his shoulders come all the way down. Further than midnight-Fridays. Further than you’ve seen them go.

That’s when he starts talking. “There’s a dream,” he says, to the ceiling. “The same one. There’s always the same one.”

You go still. You don’t turn to look at him. You just stay exactly where you are, warm against his side.

“I’ve never told anyone this,” he says. “People know pieces. Files know pieces.” He stops. “Pieces are easy. You give someone a piece, they think they’ve been handed the whole thing, and they stop digging. Very efficient.”

His hand, where it rests against your arm, has gone tense. “The whole thing is—”

“You don’t have to,” you say quietly.

“I know.” His breath catches on it. “I know I don’t have to. That’s why I can.”

He tells you about a place that doesn’t exist anymore and the people from it who are gone. About being small, and being sent away. About the mark. He tells you about his sister who taught him to count and told him he was lucky, and about what luck cost her. He says her name once, very carefully.

He tells you what he’s done to survive, and some of it is ugly, and he doesn’t sand any of it down for you which is its own kind of gift.

He tells you about the bets. The ones no sane person places. “You can’t lose what you already know is worthless,” he says matter-of-factly.

Your hands go cold.

“Everyone I have ever cared about before,” he says, “is gone. All of them. Every single—” His breath fractures. “And I lived. I keep living. I keep winning. Do you understand how obscene that is? The luck everyone envies—it’s not a gift. It’s the universe making sure I’m still here to watch the losses. That’s the joke. That’s the whole joke. I’m the punchline of the luckiest—”

“Hey.” You shift, get an arm around him, pull him in. “Come here.”

“I’m fine—”

“Kakavasha.”

(He’d told you the name fifteen minutes ago. He’d buried it mid-sentence in the story. He said it fast, and quiet, and moved straight on, and you found it anyway.)

He comes apart. Not like in the movies you two mock. There’s no swelling music and no dignity in it. It’s ugly and heaving and years deep. He cries into your shoulder. Your shirt is ruined. Your ribs ache from how hard he holds on, and you would not move for anything in the known universe.

You don’t say it’s okay. It wasn’t okay. It was never okay.

You don’t say everything happens for a reason. You’d fight anyone who did. You’d fight them in this apartment.

You say: “I’ve got you. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

You say it every time the shaking crests. You say it into his hair. You say it over the top of his apologies, again and again.

And at some point, wrecked and wrung out and still half-holding onto you, he surfaces enough to mumble the old reflex into your collarbone: “Kept you up half the night. That’s selfish of me. You should be asleep, you should—”

“Hey.” You pull back just enough to make him look at you. “I texted you. Remember? Souls, daily, at a very good price. I dragged you out tonight. You’ve been doing me a favor since ten o’clock.”

There’s a pause. Then he laughs. “You did,” he says. “You dragged me to nowhere.”

“Best branding you’ve ever seen.”

“It was terrible.” He drops his forehead to your shoulder again, but softer now. “You planned this. You engineered an entire crisis just so I couldn’t feel guilty about mine. That’s diabolical. That’s the most calculating thing anyone’s ever—”

“Go to sleep, Kakavasha.”

He goes quiet. For a while you just stay there in the dark, the bad horror movie forgotten, his weight against you and his breathing slowly evening out. And then, when the credits are rolling and you’re both wrung and starting to drift where you sit, he stirs, and mumbles into your shoulder:

“Not the couch. You’ll wreck your back. I’ve—there’s a bed, it’s a whole thing, it’s designed for this exact purpose.” He makes a vague, exhausted gesture. “Come on. Up we get.”

You’re too tired to make anything of it. You follow him down the hall, both of you unsteady, and he opens the door to the bedroom.

You’d seen it once, months ago, on the tour: empty. One blanket, one squared-off untouched pillow, no lamp, no nightstand, a bed shoved against the far wall. A space that looked like nobody slept in it, kept by a man who didn’t, really.

Now the bed’s been pulled out from the wall so it has two sides now instead of one. There are two nightstands, one on each side. There are lamps on them. There’s a book on the far one and a bottle of water. There are two pillows, and they don’t match the squared-off show-home look. They’ve got the faint dent of things that get used, or at least that get punched into shape by someone deciding how they should go.

“You got a nightstand,” you say.

“Mm.” He’s already peeling back the blanket, not looking at you. “Two, technically. The room was unbalanced. Bothered me.”

“And a second pillow.”

“A pillow has its perks,” he says, breezy, climbing in. “I’m told. I’m reliably informed that some people even sleep on them. Radical stuff.” He pats the empty side, the one with the book and the water and the lamp, the side that has clearly, for some unmeasured stretch of time, been waiting. “Are you getting in or are you going to audit my furniture all night? Some of us have had an evening.”

You get in. You don’t push it. You don’t say you did this for me, even though you both know that’s exactly what this is. You just take the pillow that was waiting for you, and lie down on the side that was made for you.

He turns off the lamp. In the dark, he says, very quietly, like it’s slipping out past the last of his defenses: “Told you. Perks.”

And then, somewhere in the quiet, his breathing lengthens and evens and drops, and Aventurine falls all the way asleep. And you’re tired too, so you turn your face into the pillow that’s yours now, and let your own eyes close, and follow him down.

It’s the first night in years Aventurine sleeps the whole way through. It’s the first time in your life you let someone see you need it back.

You wake before he does, gray light in the ridiculous windows, one arm long since dead beneath him. He’s warm and completely gone, face slack in a way you’ve never seen it, years younger without the running of it.

He surfaces around nine: disoriented and mortified, already reaching for the reflex, the apology, the offer to buy you a new shirt.

You hand him coffee you made in his kitchen and say: “You’re seeded eighth.”

Aventurine stares at you. His hair is a disaster. There is a pillow crease down one cheek. Then he laughs and drops his face into the coffee steam, and you know, watching him, that something between the two of you is different from that night on.

He starts talking earlier in the evenings after that. The mask comes off before midnight now. Then before the movie ends. Then somewhere around the point where the food arrives.

Then, some nights, it doesn’t go on at all.

You send the tell him things as they happen now, instead of hoarding them. You call when nothing’s wrong. Once, when a different bad five minutes finds you on a different corner, you don’t walk it off alone being fine. You text him a photo of nothing and he’s there in twenty, no questions.

And you get physically closer. The first time you end up properly leaned into him on the couch, he can’t resist: “Comfortable?” all arch and delighted, like he’s caught you at something.

You tell him to shut up. He does not shut up. Instead, he narrates it, he offers you a pillow he doesn’t mean, he asks whether he should charge rent for the shoulder. You elbow him in the ribs and stay exactly where you are, and he lets you. After that first time the teasing just stops. It quietly becomes ordinary: your feet in his lap during movies, his arm along the back of the couch and then around you.

And some nights you don’t go home. It’s never planned. A movie runs too late, or the talking runs too deep, or it’s raining, or neither of you can find a reason worth the effort of you leaving—and you end up in the room that isn’t empty anymore, on the side that’s yours now.

In the morning there’s coffee and nobody mentions the obvious thing. The obvious thing being: you both sleep better.

He doesn’t say that when you’re there he goes under in minutes instead of hours, that his three-hours-in-pieces sleep stretches into something almost whole. You don’t say that you sleep heavier and unguarded in a way you never once managed alone.

Some mornings you wake tangled up, an arm thrown over him or his face tucked into your neck, and there’s a suspended half-second where you’re both awake and aware of exactly how you’re wrapped around each other. And then somebody makes a joke, and you unwind, and don’t talk about it.

You also can’t sleep quite as well anymore in a bed that doesn’t have him in it, and neither can he.

— ✦ —

You’d always been fine alone. Friendly with everyone, close to nobody, and perfectly content with the arrangement.

People fell in love and got weird. Not you. Never you. Your heart was a fortress. And then this glittering lunatic howled back.

Aventurine made you more. More open, more ridiculous, more yourself. And you did the same for him. You’ve watched the mask come off earlier and earlier each evening, watched a man learn in real time that a room can be safe, watched him stop checking the exits twice.

So maybe you should have seen it coming. You didn’t.

It’s an ordinary Friday. An ordinary bad movie. An ordinary Aventurine sprawled on his half of the couch. His sleeves are shoved up, his hair is a mess, his feet are on the coffee table he once told you was an antique and he’s flicking popcorn at your face and laughing the wheezy laugh. The one only you get. And your whole ribcage goes warm.

The words climb your throat.

“I’m in love with you.”

The popcorn stops halfway to his mouth. Aventurine turns to you very slowly. “Come again?”

And that is when you panic. “Oh no,” you say. “Oh no. Okay. Forget I—no, wait, you can’t forget it, you remember everything, that’s your whole thing, you remember what I ordered at a restaurant fourteen months ago—” You’re on your feet. When did you get on your feet? “Okay. Okay okay okay. So. Funny story. I appear to be in love with you? Which is insane, because I don’t do that, you know I don’t do that, I have never done that—”

“Yeah, I know,” Aventurine says faintly.

“—and I don’t even know when it happened, there wasn’t a moment, there was no moment, you were just—there, being all—” you gesture at the entire length of him, betrayed, “—that, and howling at dart games, and eating the fried stuff, and letting me put my cold feet on you, and one day the wolf just—picked. Do you understand? The wolf picked!”

He opens his mouth.

You are so far past the point of stopping that stopping has become theoretical.

“And I’ve probably been ruining everything the entire time—oh no. Oh no, have I been a bad friend? I’ve been a bad friend. The cake.” You point at him. “Your birthday cake! It wasn’t spongy enough! It was dense, Aventurine, it was structurally a brick, you could have built a wall with it, and you ate three slices because you’re—because you just do that, you eat brick cake for people, and I let you—”

“The cake was—”

“—and I never gave your hoodie back, that’s theft, that’s a crime, I’m a thief, I’ve been stealing from you for a year and a half, and I got us banned from an arcade, and I grabbed your ear in front of four armed men, and I put a guy in a bin that one time which—okay, that one was justified, the bin was earned, but the point is—” Your hands are in your hair now. “And I breathe loud during movies! You never said anything but I know! I can hear myself! You’re too kind to say it because you’re—because you’re you, and you eat brick cake, and—”

“Sweetheart—”

“You know what? This is fine. This is fine, actually. I’m going to go find a nice hole, get in it, and live there. Best plan I’ve had all year. Top three plans, easily. I’ll leave the hoodie—no. No, the hoodie stays with you, it’s yours, I’ve made my peace. Officer Beans gets visitation, obviously, I’m not a monster—”

“Hey.”

His hands close around both of yours and pull them, gently, out of your hair. You stop. Mostly because it’s very hard to spiral with Aventurine standing this close, holding your wrists like they’re something breakable, wearing an expression you have never once seen on his face.

You brace for the deflection, the smooth laugh, the well, this is flattering, the graceful exit he’s surely drafted in the seconds since you detonated the best friendship of your life in his living room.

Instead his thumbs stroke once, slow, over the backs of your hands. And he says, very softly: “Do you have any idea what my odds were?”

You blink. “What?”

“My odds.” His voice is doing something strange. “I ran them. Ages ago. Obviously I ran them, it’s the only thing I know how to do." A laugh escapes him, unsteady at the edges. “The odds that you—you, who informed me in week two that romance was a scam invented by greeting card companies to move product in February—would ever stand in my living room and say that sentence.”

“Aventurine—”

“I don’t bet numbers that bad.” His grip tightens fractionally. “I have wagered my actual life on worse hands than I’ve been dealt tonight, and I did it smiling, and I would not have bet on this. Not for anything.”

Your heart is doing something complicated.

“So I folded.” He says it plainly. “A long time ago. I folded, and I kept the hand I had. Because what we have was already more than I ever expected to be dealt in this life—more than I thought was available to a person like me—and I have lost enough, and I was not going to gamble the one—” His throat works. “Not you. Never you. I could stand losing you to time, or distance, or your own good sense. I could not stand losing you to my own greed.”

The apartment is very quiet. The movie has been paused. Neither of you remembers pausing it.

“How long?” you whisper.

The ghost of his grin appears on his face, crooked and helpless. “There’s a bin,” he says, “three streets from a dart board, that could testify.”

"That was fourteen months ago.”

“Sixteen.” He winces. “Sixteen months. I’d like it noted that I’ve been extremely well behaved.”

And then his hands slide up until they frame your face. “And then you just walk in on an ordinary Friday, in my hoodie, eating my popcorn, and tell me this. You beautiful, brick-baking, ear-grabbing—”

“The cake—”

“I loved the cake.”

He says it with such force that you actually flinch.

“I loved the cake” His forehead drops to yours, and his voice drops with it, low and rough. “Nobody has ever—” He pauses. “It was the worst cake I have ever eaten and I would have eaten all of it. I would have eaten the box.”

He lets go of your face with one hand and reaches into his back pocket, and takes out his wallet, and takes out of his wallet a length of ribbon, folded flat and soft with handling.

You stare at it. “Is that—”

“Don’t,” he says. “I’m barely holding this together.”

“That’s from the box.”

“I’m aware of where it’s from, thank you—”

“You’ve been carrying a ribbon—”

“For months, yes, fine, yes—” and he’s laughing now, glassy-eyed, not hiding it, not even slightly. “The cake, the theft, the bin, the ear, the loud breathing—every single item you just apologized for is on a list I keep of the reasons this apartment stopped feeling like a showroom. So, no. You do not get to live in a hole. The hole is canceled.”

A wet, ridiculous laugh punches out of you. “You can’t cancel a hole.”

“I have people.”

“You can’t—”

“Focus,” he says, and takes a breath, and steadies himself. “I’m in love with you. Have been. Will be.” He goes quiet. “I choose you. I choose the chaos, the howling, the cold feet, the bin justice, the incident log, the brick. All of it. All of you.”

“Aventurine—”

“And I’m going to keep choosing you tomorrow, and the day after, and out loud, in words you can’t misinterpret, until you’re as sure of it as I am. Which, knowing your stubbornness—” the grin flickers back, soft at the corners “—gives us a timeline of approximately forever.”

His nose brushes yours. And suddenly there’s no tease left in him at all. “Can I kiss you?”

You close the distance yourself.

The kiss is soft. One hand slides into your hair. The other splays warm between your shoulder blades, palm flat, like he’s still half certain you’ll bolt and he wants to remember the shape of this in case you do.

You don’t bolt. You wrap both arms around his neck and stay. You feel the exact moment he understands that you’re staying, because his whole frame drops an inch and he makes a small sound against your mouth that he will deny later.

When you part, doesn’t go far. You can feel him smiling.

You end up back on the couch eventually, the movie resumed and comprehensively ignored, your legs thrown over his lap, his fingers laced with yours.

His thumb draws slow circles on the back of your hand, and his breathing has gone long and easy, and when you glance up his eyes are half-closed.

“Hey,” you murmur into his shoulder. “Kakavasha.”

He stills. Even now, maybe especially now, the name lands somewhere deeper.

“Mm?”

“I’m glad you sat down at my table.”

A breath. Then the barest press of lips to your hair, and words so quiet you almost miss them:

“Best hand I ever held.”

⋆ ✦ ⋆

A/N: Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it. :)