Steve’s apartment was slowly filling up with Billy’s tokens of affection. The window seat had become a shelf for Steve’s shoe boxes; only three so far, but Billy intended to get him a proper shoe rack, or renovate his closet

Or have Steve move into his place. Billy wanted nothing more in the world. To get home to Steve slumped on the couch, immediately complaining of incongruent television plots as if Billy had never left the room. To see Steve’s shirts and clutter in their closet despite Steve being gone for work. To put his shoe collection on display in any room Steve wanted, so he could live in the open with his interests, instead of walking laps in their closet.

Not all of his gifts were expensive. That proved the trick. The key to Steve’s locked tight heart. Most were certainly pricey, but once Billy knew what he liked, what he constituted as worth it, then he couldn’t help himself.

A coffee table book of The New Yorker’s covers, spreads, and topmost articles throughout the 20th century. Steve stared at that thing for hours.

The elephant ear pillow clutched to Steve’s chest now, among other plant cushions. Steve claimed he couldn’t keep anything alive, so Billy gave him a pink and blue sedum succulent, a purple and green echeveria, and a monstera leaf. He now lay in his garden, sound asleep despite Billy’s rolling a cold tennis ball around his heel.

It was dangerous, this bruised ache in his chest.

Even with Steve right here, Billy felt sore with affection. The desire to wrap an arm around Steve’s waist was ever present, to pull their bodies flush together, or to tuck himself into Steve’s chest and never leave.

This ravenous greed dulled with Steve nearby, soothed with Steve happy and content, but Billy knew he had to be patient. Steve sometimes retreated inside himself, behaving as if Billy were already one step out the door. He had no idea what power he wielded over Billy.

He eased Steve’s slippers onto his feet and returned the tennis ball to the freezer. He put some of the dishes and pans from the drying rack back in the cabinets. He straightened the rug underneath the coffee table. Tidying. As self-sufficient as Steve lived, Billy had picked up quickly enough that his outward affections were done through actions.

He liked making dinner with Billy at home. He even coerced Billy into the first grocery store he’d stepped into in years.

Steve enjoyed pulling Billy onto his chest to watch a movie. Billy liked that too, even though he wished Steve didn’t stuff his utility invoices into the kitchen utensil drawer before Billy arrived.

They were both strong personalities who valued control, but Billy had learned such a thing came in different mediums. Steve didn’t like the leash of money. “Don’t collar me in diamonds. I’m not a poodle,” he’d once said.

Billy did not take kindly to commands. To exist like a bull guided by the ring in his nose.

Yet here they both were, Steve slowly allowing Billy to furnish his interests, and kissing Billy’s cheek when he reluctantly accepted the task of chopping onions.

Billy sat on the bed and rubbed his arm. If anything, Steve only fell deeper inside his slumber. Slowly, Billy lifted him out by planting kisses along his hairline. All at once, Steve emerged with a shake of his head, as if to swat Billy off before the chuckle in his chest made Steve moan, “Bhh…lly?”

He slanted his arm across Steve’s body, pressing his hand into the bed. “Hi, baby. I’m heading out. I should be back next Friday.”

Steve’s full, parted lips twitched with a puzzled grimace. “Huh?”

“I’m going out of town.”

One of Steve’s eyelids hung lower over his groggy eyes. Billy thought it looked cute. “You wait till I’m half-asleep to tell me?”

Billy huffed a laugh, but it faded quickly. “I told you during dinner. I asked you to come, but you said you couldn’t get the vacation days.”

Steve’s eyes sagged closed in a long blink. He sniffed loudly and rubbed a palm over his nose while he shifted for better attentiveness. “I can’t get vacation days with only a twenty-four hour notice.”

“There was something about sick days from two jobs not aligning for an extended vacation,” Billy recalled stiffly.

Steve did not respond well to the bitterness. “I’m not my own boss. If I’d had more time, I could’ve done a long weekend—”

“I’ll be gone for two weeks.”

That left Steve’s mouth open while he shifted to sit up more on the pillows. “You didn’t say that during dinner.”

It should’ve been some consolation, Steve’s being upset at such a time frame. Two weeks apart was hardly unbearable. For regular people. For Billy, it only confirmed his distaste for Steve’s unrelenting schedule.

“Now you want to go?”

Steve’s eyes hardened as much as they could for being freshly disturbed from sleep. “It was never about not wanting to go. I literally can’t without being thrown off the payroll.”

“You work two jobs.”

Steve’s eyes wandered, as if searching for his meaning. “Yeah?”

Billy didn’t want to talk about this the night before he left but his frustration won out. “You don’t have to work two jobs. You know that, don’t you?”

He could see something wilt behind Steve’s face. “What are you saying?”

“You know what I’m saying.”

“No. I don’t.”

“Steve,” he sighed, lifting off his hand to sit on his own. “You know I don’t mind paying for things.”

“You’ve made that clear,” Steve returned stiffly.

Billy pointed turquoise eyes at him. “Money is meant to be spent. Why won’t you let me spend it on you?”

Those eyes locked on the muscles in Steve’s jaw clenching. Steve could feel those irises on him, dissecting him. He wondered if Billy saw his mother’s closet. More like a bank vault. Full of insurances for the day she finally saw fit to drop her husband and all of his betrayals, all of his business blunders that she was tired of dishing a sapphire out for to cover the losses.

An ironic thing, Mr. Harrington’s greatest business scheme: apologizing with luxurious things. Marrying a woman smarter than himself. Maybe that’s why Steve had sought out Nancy all those years ago. Why he loved Robin’s company and conversation. He did feel safe in strong women’s company. But their safety was hard earned and shrewdly won.

Respect how a woman spends her money, Stevie. Even if you don’t know where it comes from.

Sweetheart, you’ll never understand what it is to be a woman in a man’s world.

I love your daddy as much as he infuriates me beyond belief. But where I come from, nobody is handsome enough. Nobody is wealthy enough. A Rolex is a man’s prideful status symbol. A woman’s bags are her divorce lawyer’s payments. A man’s car is the steed to a shining knight. A woman’s diamond necklace is her first apartment out of an unsafe home.

Am I really just a trust fund kid? Steve had been brazen enough to ask. Another diamond in his mother’s closet.

She had stroked his cheek, raked her fingers through his hair and around his ear before pinching his earlobe in that way she did. Like she wanted him to keep looking right at her. Don’t turn your head.

Anyone who treats you like a trust fund for money or a good time is plastic, baby.

She hadn’t taught him how to navigate this, though. Maybe if he’d been a daughter, he’d have gotten that lesson. How to not be ensnared by money. How to keep wealth as a key to a cage.

But Steve only knew the cage. Had grown up in it. Had to face heartbreak and loneliness to break out of his gilded bars.

He did not judge his mother for relying on his father. As she’d said, she came from a different world with a different mentality. But Steve couldn’t do it anymore. He couldn’t meet all of his father’s caveats. Had too much fun being broke with Robin to desire gilded masks and grey grey grey grey grey suits.

A warm hand touched his arm. “I don’t like it when you do that,” Billy said. “Go somewhere I can’t reach.”

Steve’s hand overlapped his. He hoped it came across as encouraging instead of farewell. “Get your work done. There’s no point in me taking a vacation if you’re working the whole time.”

It didn’t work. Billy’s features stiffened, far from pleased.

And when he left the apartment, Steve felt his path like a negative space dug out of his home. Billy Hargrove had always dominated a room, but Steve was afraid of being wrung out before he left with permanence. Steve didn’t think Billy was a cage at all.