Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

After the seventeenth unsuccessful apartment listing in a row, Mac and Dennis were about to crack.

Mac was getting increasingly antsy. Before they even set foot in the eighteenth apartment, he was already bouncing around, tugging on Dennis’ sleeve like a little kid, hoping this was the one where they finally said yes, and Dennis was damn near ready to go postal if he kept it up.

“Tenant pays gas and electric,” the landlady said as she pushed the door open, Mac blowing past her in his haste. She had a lit cigarillo pinched between knobbly fingers and a grubby Dietz & Watson trucker hat shading her eyes, and Dennis kept trying not to look directly at her. “Water bill comes every quarter, you pay that separate. Couch comes free. Capisce?”

Standing two feet from the rickety door, Dennis wasn’t sure he wanted to capisce. His gaze flicked up to the ceiling’s flowery, cream-colored molding; then down the walls, where the weathered turquoise paint was already peeling off in long, curling stripes. He stepped further into the tiny living room, and warped wooden floorboards the color of brown ash squeaked under his sneaker. The free couch, the only given furniture in the entire apartment, wore battle scars of patches and worn, fraying edges.  

If there was something to love about this place, Dennis wasn’t getting it.

Mac’s head popped out of a room to the left. “It’s only got one bathroom,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “That could be a problem.”

The landlady sniffed. “Not my problem,” she said, and Dennis pressed his lips into a thin, tight line.

Sensing trouble, Mac flashed the landlady a disarming grin. “He’s just used to taking forever in the morning,” he said quickly, and he half-jogged over to Dennis, patting him loosely on the shoulder. “Excuse us.”

Mac had just finished steering Dennis into the hall when Dennis exploded, in a quiet abrasive hiss, “One bathroom, Mac, are you kidding me?”

“I know, but come on, Dennis, we can definitely make it work.”

“Make it work?”

“I didn’t say it would be easy.” Mac craned his neck around Dennis; the landlady was poking at her phone. “Right. I say we pick this one.”

“Absolutely goddamn not.”

“Look, we’ve gotta pick something at some point,” Mac said. “Dee’s landlord gave us two more days before the cops get involved. You really think we’re gonna find the perfect place in two more days?”

“We can find a place that’s infinitely more suitable,” Dennis said tightly. “One that has more than a single goddamn bathroom, perhaps?”

The set of Mac’s jaw was stubborn. He checked on the landlady again and then leaned in, lowering his voice. “I know this place isn’t perfect—”

“You think?”

“—but think about all the other places we’ve seen so far. Remember the one this morning? The kitchen used to be a meth lab.”

“And it cost practically nothing!” Dennis said. “I’m still pissed at you for passing on that one.”

“You don’t wanna go messing around on meth dealer turf, Dennis, even if you think they’ve closed up shop. They get territorial,” Mac said. “What about the one we looked at last night? The one with the brown tap water and the mold and the weird carpet stain?”

“And no street parking, either,” Dennis said, scowling.

“Exactly. Every single place we’ve looked at so far has been a piece of shit. And this one’s…  you know, less shit. And I don’t think we should be testing our luck anymore than we already are.”

“What luck? What luck, Mac? Our apartment burning down twice? Dee’s landlord kicking us out for squatting? Settling for an apartment because it doesn’t have a carpet stain and a meth lab in the kitchen, that’s your definition of luck?”

“Lower your voice,” Mac told him, as a vein jumped in Dennis’ temple. “No. Obviously it’s not. But we’ve checked out nearly every available, affordable apartment in the area and we’re seriously running out of options. And I for one don’t wanna start living out of your car. Or Paddy’s.”

His eyes turned up, imploring and puppy-dog, and Dennis was quiet for a moment. He cast a critical eye over the apartment, the cramped and ugly apartment that came up worryingly short on bathrooms, and let out a heavy sigh.

“I’m just as thrilled about it as you are,” Mac said, “but what other choice do we have?”

Dennis let the silence speak for him.

“We’ll make it work, man, I promise,” Mac continued; Dennis jammed his hands in his pockets and scowled, because promises were easy when they were all talk. “It’s not gonna be forever.”

“You say that now,” Dennis muttered. He squared his shoulders and marched after Mac into the apartment, a gladiator facing inevitable doom.

Mac grinned at the landlady, who cocked one thin eyebrow at him. “I think we’ve made a decision.”

The landlady tapped her cigarillo. “That so.”

Mac glanced at Dennis with a careful, hesitant grin, and Dennis hung his head. “We’re interested,” he said.

“Feh,” the landlady said, which wasn’t a noise Dennis knew humans could make. “One bed, one bath runs you $1450 a month, and I want first month’s rent and the security deposit in separate checks.”

“One bed?” Dennis said, brows furrowed in bemusement. “What do you mean, one bed?”

“This is a two-bedroom apartment, correct?” Mac said. He pointed at a door with a tacky jeweled doorknob on the opposite side of the living room. “What’s that?”

The landlady stared at them. “Never seen a linen closet before, huh.”

“Yes we’ve seen a linen closet before,” Dennis said. “That is not—”

The landlady opened the door to the smell of mothballs and rows of dusty shelves.

“A linen closet,” Dennis finished, shoulders slumping.

The door to the linen closet shut with a ghastly creak. The landlady flicked ash off her cigarillo again and crossed her bony arms. “$1450 a month, one bed, one bath,” she said. “Deal or no deal?”

Dennis turned around to discuss what were incredibly radical new developments with Mac and was startled to find him about four feet away, ever-so-slowly creeping towards the exit. Dennis caught up to him in a flash, clasping a hand around his forearm. “And just where do you think you’re going?”

Mac yanked his arm out of Dennis’ grasp. “Look, I didn’t know that it was a linen closet,” he said. He was patently avoiding Dennis’ gaze, scowling hard off to the side. “The photos on the website made it look like another bedroom, okay?”

“How did this place even make it on the list?”

“It’s close to the bar and it’s under fifteen hundred a month,” Mac snapped. “At some point, dude, you’re gonna start scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

“The bottom of the barrel?” Incredulous, Dennis’ eyes popped out of his skull. “It’s a one-bedroom apartment, Mac, it shouldn't even be in the barrel. This is way, way outside the barrel.”

“Great. Then let’s go,” Mac said, and he made a move for the exit and Dennis grabbed him by the collar of his shirt.

“Let’s go?” Dennis parroted, drawing out the oh as Mac shrugged him off hard. “As in, let’s just leave, right now. Nothing about that bullshit ‘this place is less shit than the others,’ or ‘it doesn’t have a meth lab in the kitchen and I don’t wanna get stuck living out of your car.’”

“Here we go.”

“You’re not even going to address any of that?” Dennis said. “Or are we supposed to pretend like you never said anything in the first place?”

Mac pressed his lips together. “We’ll find something eventually,” he muttered.

“Oh, eventually, now it’s eventually. You mean in two days, right Mac?” Mac’s scowl hardened. “Because here I thought you were all ready to go back to Dee’s, pack up all your shit, and settle. We only have two more days before Dee’s landlord throws us out, and hey, after a few rounds of kitchen meth labs and vile stains on the carpet, we should really stop pressing our luck before we get stuck with something truly awful, like a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment.”

“The lady is staring at us, will you please calm down.”

“I don’t give a shit who she’s staring at!” Dennis glowered daggers at him. “You know what? You don’t get to just decide we’re staying here one minute and then bail the next when shit gets too real. You want to settle so goddamn much? Well then, have it your way. Hey, landlady!”

“Dennis!”

“We’re taking the apartment!”

“Sonofa—”

Chapter Text

There was a time and a place for regretting decisions made out of spite, and for Dennis that came about fifteen minutes after moving in.

“Move,” he groused at Mac over a cardboard box stuffed full of clothes. Mac sucked his cheeks in and stepped back, hands held out in front of him. Dennis rolled his eyes.

He set the final box down in an alcove in the tiny bedroom, next to a radiator old enough to remember the Eisenhower administration; by the room’s only window, an arching monstrosity with chipped ivory paint that stretched all the way to the ceiling. A thick coat of brown dust sat heavy on the windowpanes—Dennis swept a finger through the mess with unmitigated disgust.

He was halfway through pulling out a crocheted blanket that he’d stolen from Dee’s couch when Mac clomped into the bedroom, saying, “Whoa, dude, what are you doing?”

Dennis whipped out the blanket with a flourish. “What’s it look like I’m doing?”

“Uh.” The gears in Mac’s head clanked as they turned. “It looks like you’re going to bed.”

“Exactly,” Dennis said. He dug around in the box and unearthed an old sweatshirt.

Battered combat boots scuffed at the mouse-brown floorboards. “You’re not hungry?” Mac tried. “I was gonna order pizza.”

“I’ll pass.”

“Oh.” More silence. Dennis punched his sweatshirt until it barely resembled a pillow. “It’s only nine o’clock. You know that, right?”

Dennis firmly shut his eyes. There were at least three nails gouging into his hip.

“Wal-mart’s probably still open. Or Sears,” Mac said. “We could go get actual pillows, so you don’t have to sleep on an old sweatshirt.”

“What part of ‘going to bed’ did you not understand?” Dennis sat up with the most ferocious glare he could muster. It must have been effective; the line of Mac’s shoulders stiffened up. “Was it the ‘going’ part, because that’s clearly been put on hold, or was it the part where I’m lacking an actual bed to sleep in?”

In the silence that followed, Dennis could hear the pointed click of Mac’s teeth clack together. “I was just trying to help.”

“Just trying to help, huh?” Dennis said with a sneer. “By keeping me awake. Yeah, that’ll definitely help with the adjustment period.”

Mac’s jaw clenched. “You’re the one who signed the lease,” he said. “Remember?”

“And you’re using that against me already, great, wonderful. Fantastic,” Dennis said.

Mac threw his hands up and backed off, finally, finally—“Holy shit, dude, I’m going to bed. Jesus goddamn Christ.” And he stomped out of the bedroom, slamming the door shut behind him, and then all Dennis heard was the sound of angry rustling, of cardboard boxes torn open with brute force.

There was silence, a tense one. Light from the living room spilled under the generous crack under the door. The silence prevailed, and the light remained on.

Scowling, Dennis kicked off his blanket.

Mac had squashed himself onto the couch, curled in a bulky lump underneath the duster. One eye snapped open as Dennis prowled into the living room.

“You left the light on,” Dennis remarked. “Jesus, how does that not bother you.”

“It just doesn’t,” Mac said, and Dennis scoffed; he hit the switch and the room fell into darkness. “Sorry.”

“Whatever.”

“You know, it’s hard for me too, Dennis, so hop off,” Mac then said, and Dennis halted mid-step. There was no follow-up, however, only the soft sounds of Mac punching a pair of sweatpants into a less shoddy makeshift pillow, and the sibilant hiss of the duster as he slid around underneath it.

Christ.

He stopped in front of the bedroom, one hand on the doorknob. “We’ll go to Sears tomorrow,” he said; Mac didn’t respond. “There, that make you happy? We’ll pick up pillows and get an actual bed and you can play homemaker to your heart’s content. Tomorrow.”

Again, no response.

“My God,” Dennis said to himself as he closed the bedroom door, without so much as a thank you to show for his troubles.

—

It was hard to qualify a hammock at Dee’s as a premier sleeping experience, but waking up the next morning at least put it in the running. Dennis had aged about twenty years in the span of six hours, if the way his tendons snapped like twigs or the soreness weighing like iron on his spine counted.

He shuffled to the kitchen. What would eventually be the kitchen. Apart from an elderly oven and an empty refrigerator, the only other kitchen appliance in the room was the coffeemaker he’d wisely thought to nick from Dee’s apartment.

Coffee helped. Coffee was what normal, functioning adults drank in the morning. Coffee was routine.

Even if he had to sit on a fucking orange-and-white tiled floor to drink it.

He was halfway through his second cup when Mac trudged in, hair sticking up in all directions and wearing a wince to match his slight limp. He poured himself a cup, then stood by the counter, drumming his fingers around the mug.

He kept trying to make eye contact; the backs of Dennis’ hands prickled as Mac’s efforts failed, bit by bit. With an unnecessarily loud slurp, Dennis continued to ignore him.

Mac tried clearing his throat. “Good thing you brought the coffeemaker,” he said, with all the finesse of a sledgehammer. “Think Dee’s noticed by now?”

Dennis didn’t respond. She probably had.

“She probably has.” Mac cleared his throat again. “You know, I actually forgot where I was this morning? When I woke up, I mean—I thought someone was holding us for ransom in a sketchy apartment.”

Dennis drank, deeply.

“Then I remembered, that’s right. This is our sketchy apartment,” Mac said. “Crazy how you can get so used to shit.” Dennis swallowed, and the sound echoed in the kitchen with faded yellow wallpaper and ugly patterned tiles, and Mac’s heavy sigh was quick to follow suit.

“You could at least tell me if you want me to go,” he muttered, and he was halfway across the kitchen when Dennis rolled his eyes in annoyance and said, “Will you please sit down already, Christ almighty,” and Mac stopped, shuffled, shifted his weight from one slipper to the other.

He sat down a safe distance from Dennis on the tile floor, wincing as he settled in. Dennis raised a brow.

“Slept wrong,” Mac said, shaking his head, dismissive. “That couch is way too small for me.”

Dennis took a sip of coffee, and said, “I had three nails up my ass practically all night.”

 Mac let out a chuckle almost despite himself. “At least you got nailed,” he said; it forced a smile out of Dennis, and he had to act fast to cover it with his mug before Mac could notice. “Seriously, dude, we need real beds.”

“Mm.”

“Sears has beds, right?” An affirmative grunt. “And kitchen chairs.”

“Kitchen table. Kitchen everything, really. This place don’t got shit.”

Mac’s nod was slow. “Forgot how much stuff we had. Last time we did this was—”

“Almost two decades ago,” Dennis said quietly. “I remember.”

 The mug shifted in Mac’s grip. “Feels like a lifetime ago,” he said. “You know? Like we were completely different people.”

Dennis’ gaze was pensive as he stared into the last black dregs of his coffee, watching them swirl around and around. “We had different mugs. You had, what was it. The Transformers one? Optimus Prime on one side—”

“And Megatron on the other,” Mac finished. “You had either a Spider-man or a Venom mug, I can’t remember.”

“It was Spider-man,” Dennis said. “And now we’ve got these.”

A stolen Jem and the Holograms mug raised to toast Mac’s equally stolen Josie and the Pussycats piece of memorabilia. Dee wouldn’t miss them, much.

“But hey. We’re still drinking coffee in the morning, aren’t we?” Dennis continued. “We’ve done that for the past twenty years. Maybe shit isn’t all that different.”

Mac cast a doubtful look into his mug. “Maybe,” he said, and he didn’t elaborate, and Dennis knew enough to sense the conversation’s natural end. He stood up and stretched, spine cracking luxuriously loud, then he walked over to Mac and stuck out a hand.

Mac’s gaze traveled upwards, and he considered Dennis for a long, long moment. A flash of a grin, then, and he grabbed Dennis’ hand and levered himself off the ugly tile floor.

“Truce?” Mac said, and he hadn’t let go of Dennis’ hand, and the offer was right there: forget everything from last night and start over together. No apologies necessary.

Dennis nodded. “Truce,” he said, because if he was going to be miserable about moving into a new apartment, it would at least be nice to have company.

—

They found a Sears that had seen better days, and Mac took charge of the shopping cart. Dennis lagged behind at a leisurely pace, engrossed in a thorough evaluation of the final shopping list. Bed, kitchen chairs, kitchen table. The usual suspects, but surprisingly easy to overlook after twenty years.

He caught up with Mac by a selection of marked-down picture frames. Mac held one in both hands, studying it like an archaeologist keen on deciphering an ancient tablet. “How do you get into stock photography?” he wondered aloud.

Dennis peered into the shopping cart with mild interest, wondering where exactly Mac had managed to score a lava lamp. “Say what now?”

“Stock photos. Like, check this out.” Mac pointed to a happy black-and-white family wedged beneath the glass. “I bet they’re not even a real family. You ever wonder how people get into this kinda thing?”

“Not really,” Dennis said. “How much is the lava lamp?”

Mac shrugged. “Thirty-five bucks. Why, you don’t have Frank’s card?”

“He wouldn’t let me take it,” Dennis said with a dark scowl.

“And you didn’t steal it because…”

“Because it’s surprisingly difficult to pick the pockets of a man that short,” Dennis said in irritation; Mac’s smirk, however, was gentle. “Fine, get the lava lamp. Just don’t put it in anywhere near the bedroom.”

“Copy that,” Mac said, and taking hold of the cart once more, he steered their way into Bedding.

They stopped on the shore of a vast and colorful sea of display mattresses, fluffed up with fancy throw pillows and covered in comforters as thick as a dictionary.

“You see full-sized mattresses anywhere?” Mac asked, squinting out over the floor. “No way is that tiny-ass bedroom fitting any bigger.”

Dennis quirked his head. “Full-sized mattresses?”

“Unless you think you can squeeze into a twin XL,” Mac said. “You are pretty svelte, so you probably could if you wanted—”

“I’m not squeezing into anything less than a queen, thank you,” Dennis told him, and a startled middle-aged man passing by rammed his cart into a shelf. 

Mac’s brow knit together, in a state of utter bewilderment. “So then where am I supposed to sleep?” he asked. “You’re not gonna be able to fit a queen and a full in that bedroom together, there’s no way.”

“Then I guess you’ll have to find someplace else,” Dennis said, and Mac’s jaw actually dropped.

“The hell do you mean, ‘someplace else’?” he said. “Like where, Dennis, the goddamn hallway?”

“I was going to suggest fixing up the couch in the living room, but if you’re gonna be all dramatic about it—”

“I’m not being dramatic. Dude.” Mac let go of the cart as he threw his hands out in frustration. “This is why I didn’t want to get the apartment when we found out about the bedroom. I knew you were gonna try and pull this shit on me, Dennis, I knew it.”

“Pull what shit on you?”

“Kicking me out of the goddamn bedroom!” Mac shouted.

Dennis grasped the cart. “It is my name on the lease,” he said, in a tone that brooked no argument. “And it’s my security deposit.”

“Yeah, you think I don’t know that?” With a belligerent groan, Mac threaded his hands roughly through his slick hair.

Of all the Sears stores in all the world; Mac had to pick the one that wasn’t failing to have a full-scale nuclear meltdown. And it was all over a goddamn sleeping arrangement.

“I don’t know what to tell you, man,” Dennis said. “Look, we’ll find you some nicer pillows, maybe even one of those memory foam mattress toppers? You can do whatever you want to the couch—”

“Memory foam? That’s your solution? Goddamn memory foam?” Exasperated, Mac shook his head. “Dennis, that couch is cramped and lumpy as shit. You’re not making me sleep on it.”

“It’s not that bad, Mac, you’re just exaggerating—”

“Then why don’t you take it,” Mac snapped as he jerked the cart out of Dennis’ hold, “and I’ll take the bedroom?”

He began a resolute march along the edge of the display mattresses, and Dennis followed in his wake, catching up to him by an opulent king-sized bed.

“The hell do you think you’re going?” Rounding the cart to grab both its sides, Dennis jammed his foot against the front wheel. Mac sucked in his cheeks and leaned back, thoroughly pissed. “You do not walk away from me in the middle of a goddamn discussion.”

“There’s nothing else left to discuss.”

“There absolutely is,” Dennis insisted, careful to hold on tight, in case Mac planned on walking away with the cart again. “Look, we agreed to a truce, right? We’re having a truce?”

Mac crossed his arms tight across his chest. But he didn’t disagree.

“We’ll figure out a way to solve this,” Dennis went on. “Now, as I’ve said, I’m not sleeping in anything less than a queen-sized bed, so there’s that.”

“And there you go again,” Mac muttered, with a hefty roll of his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Mac, but what do you expect me to do?” Dennis snapped. “Upgrade to a king so you can share the goddamn bed with me?”

He flung an arm out at the display mattress beside them; Mac froze, and then, so did Dennis.

“That’s not actually an option,” Mac said. His tone was a careful neutral, beige as the drapes above the display. “Is it?”

“No,” Dennis said.

He sniffed. Mac shifted his weight from foot to foot.

“What about an air mattress?” Dennis cleared his throat, and added stiffly, “Would you be okay with an air mattress?”

“Seriously, dude? An air mattress? Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Then let’s hear one of your brilliant solutions,” Dennis said. He stalked away from the cart and sat down heavily on the king-sized display bed, all the better to frame his imperious glare.

“I thought we would get two full-size beds,” Mac said shortly. “We’d be able to fit them both in.” But he kept eyeing the way Dennis sank further into soft bedding, as Dennis clambered onto the bed in full, kicking one ankle over the other as he laid back into an artistic throw pillow arrangement.

He rolled his shoulders into the pillows and frowned. “We’d be packed in like a goddamn tin of sardines,” he pointed out. “And again, nothing smaller than a queen.”

Mac was quiet, then, and a moment later Dennis felt the bed dip. Mac was bouncing the mattress with one tentative hand. “Are you even allowed to lay on these?”

“Do I look like I give a shit?” Dennis said. The bed then dipped sharply, and he craned his head forward; Mac had his legs stretched out before him on the king-sized display, hands folding loosely behind his head.  “And at least take your shoes off, Mac, goddammit.”

Mac shut his eyes instead. “Why? You didn’t.”

“Because I’m not the one wearing mud-encrusted boots on an expensive Vera Wang comforter.”

“They’re clean,” Mac said. A note of hedonism had crept into his voice. “Doesn’t she make wedding dresses?”

“She does that too,” Dennis said, and levered himself onto one elbow. There was a healthy bubble of space separating him from Mac, he noted. “But getting back to our discussion.”

“Dennis.” Mac’s chest rose, then fell as he released a long-suffering breath. “I’m not going to be sleeping on a crappy air mattress. Nor will I be sleeping on that lumpy-ass couch. I told you, firmly but politely, that I think we should get two full-sized beds. I’ve made you my offer.” He paused. “And this bed is really comfortable.”

“Don’t remind me,” Dennis muttered. “I’m not getting a full.”

“Then I guess we’re not getting beds,” Mac said levelly.

“You’re seriously going to blackball me on this one.”

“Dude, you wouldn’t even have that bedroom if it wasn’t for me,” Mac said, sitting up. The effect was mollified by a plush excess of throw pillows, but he managed a ferocious glare. “You don’t get to hog the whole bedroom just because you paid up the deposit.”

“I got to hog whatever room I wanted when I signed the damn lease,” Dennis countered. “And we wouldn’t even be in this mess if you knew how to check a goddamn listing.”

“I did check,” Mac shot back. “I checked everywhere. And if I hadn’t checked, right now we’d be sleeping curled up in the trunk of your car, or in the back office at Paddy’s. I provided for us, Dennis. I earned that bedroom.”

“Half of it,” Dennis said, with a contemplative sort of frown. He flattened his hand into the giant, pliant mattress, and sat awhile in thought.

Mac having a point was almost worse than Mac thinking he had a point—almost. Either way, he wasn’t going to drop it until either he won, or he dropped dead, or they reached a compromise that no one really wanted but everyone could live with. Dennis heaved out a deep, defeated sigh. “All right. Truce?”

Skeptical, Mac eyed him. “On what?”

“What do you think,” Dennis said. He bounced the mattress with gentle waves. “Guess.”

Mac did not break into the jubilations Dennis expected. Lips pressed into a grim line, his gaze traveled down the expansive length of the bed, then up. “Jesus,” he muttered.

“So it’s a truce?” Dennis said warily. “We're trucing on the bed, too?”

“Well, what else are we gonna do about it?” Dennis stared him down, until finally Mac sighed and relented in full. “Fine. Truce on the goddamn king-sized bed,” he said, with a limp gesture to the mattress beneath them.

“Good,” Dennis said, clearing his throat. “Settled, then.”

There was a lot of that going around these days, he noticed.

—

King-sized beds did not come cheap.

Neither did a kitchen table or matching chairs or a coffee table or a dresser, even if it was on sale. Or other essentials, like two touch-sensitive floor lamps and a full-length standing mirror, or a hand-carved ivory crucifix and a pan made just for cooking bacon. And any savings they might have accumulated with the purchase of one mattress were gobbled up by satin pillowcases and lemon verbena soap and a laundry hamper that doubled as a basketball hoop.

(Mac almost bought a votive candle, but quickly thought better of it.)

The point was, once they’d finished pooling all their funds, they came to the conclusion that there was only so much two perpetually-broke proprietors of an underperforming bar could actually hope to afford.

They downsized. It was fine. They were starting over, they had to strip down. Dennis stripped down very easily, eliminated all the fat and trimmed himself to lean financial muscle. Mac, on the other hand…

“All right, I'm definitely getting this,” he said, setting the ivory crucifix in front of their cashier.

Eyeing their ever-increasing total, Dennis' frown deepened. Mac was down to two items. The math was in their favor by the slimmest of margins, but the spectre of debt was sharpening its scythe. “One more.”

“Really?” Dennis' nod was shallow and grim, and Mac gazed wistfully into their cart. “It’s kinda hard to choose.”

“I know it is, but come on. Sometime today.”

Mac glanced again between a small pile of Ridley Scott DVDs and a box containing a tall, groovy lava lamp. He set them both in front of the cashier, and considered his choices critically, and his face crumpled once more with indecision.

“Good Christ,” Dennis murmured, pinching the bridge of his nose. The cashier quietly cleared her throat.

“What if you just rented movies from the library?” she said; Dennis wheeled around, narrowed a crushing stare in her direction. “Um.”

Mac arched a brow. “The library?”

“I work there part-time during the week,” she said, sidling away from Dennis’ piercing gaze, brown eyes wide behind coke-bottle eyeglasses. “Lots of libraries have their own DVD collections nowadays.”

Mac wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, but they're usually pretty crappy.”

“Not necessarily, the one I work at has a decent selection, actually—”

“And we didn’t come to a Sears to get a lecture on going to the goddamn library more often, okay Nancy?” Dennis said, with a thin smile that was more like a rictus. Mac pushed the DVDs forward, and Nancy the cashier squinted at Dennis in disapproval.  

(“I think she overcharged us somewhere,” Mac said, perusing the receipt on the ride home.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. There's no way we spent that much.” He frowned. “I think you really pissed her off.”

Dennis didn’t answer that one.)

—

The king-sized mattress arrived in a matter of days. The king-sized box spring and the king-sized frame, however, did not, because apparently ordering “just whatever the cheapest option is, all right? You don’t have to give me the entire sales pitch when I goddamn know what I want” excluded both of those items, much to Dennis’ immediate annoyance.

Annoyance that, later that night, was fast bleeding into an anxious frustration.

He stalled for as long as possible. The shower water already took forever to heat up to a bland tepid, so that ate up time. Blow-drying his hair was unnecessary, given how fast his hair actually dried, but he did it anyway. He took extra care in washing his face, moisturizing his skin; he grabbed a pair of tweezers and shaped and groomed his eyebrows for no goddamn reason.

He put the tweezers back in the medicine cabinet, by a new tube of toothpaste and an old orange pill bottle, and closed the door with a quiet click. The next several minutes were spent staring at the dull purple splotches underneath his eyes, the faint curve of laugh lines, the hints of gray at his temples.

He scoffed. “You’ve still got it,” he told Mirror Dennis, and Mirror Dennis curled his lips into a tired, yielding frown.

Mac wasn’t in the bedroom, which was a small miracle. He’d found time, however, at some point to hang up his brand-new ivory crucifix, polished to a blinding white and looming huge and luminous above the new bed. Dennis slipped under Dee’s borrowed couch blanket and tapped off his floor lamp and the room dimmed to a warm, faded amber.

Nestling into the pillow, Dennis shut his eyes. It still smelled like the plastic bag it had come in.

Mac walked in just before Dennis fell asleep, and Dennis tracked him against his own will—that was Mac walking into the bathroom. That was the toilet flushing, the faucet running. That was a light switch. That was Mac stopping, for some unidentified reason.

If he had to guess—that was Mac staring at him. The mattress. The new conditions of living.

He circled around, and the left side of the mattress dipped. Mac tapped his floor light. The room fell dark, save for soft patches of moonlight spilled from the bedroom window. Dennis listened to the rustle of Mac sliding under Dee’s blanket, scowled as it tugged away from his body. Then there was stillness. Then there was silence.

“Goodnight, Dennis,” Mac whispered. Dennis didn’t respond, and then there was only darkness.

He slept fitfully for three aimless hours, and then he wasn’t sleeping at all, he was sitting upright and his heart was hammering, in a pitch-black room with crumbling walls of soot, scorch marks scarring the rotting floor, and the acrid smell of smoke hung heavy over the wreckage—

“Den,” came a voice, and Dennis spun around, sharp twist at the waist, eyes shiny and wide and his face wretchedly pale. Mac struggled to focus, leaned up on one elbow. “Dennis?”

“Shut up,” Dennis hissed.

Mac rubbed at his eyes. “You okay?” he said, thick with sleep.

“I said shut up,” Dennis said again.

Mac shut up. More little miracles. Dennis focused on breathing, on the physical process of getting air in and out. He was aware of Mac’s eyes on him, and the fog there was lifting.  

It hurt to laugh, but Dennis forced out a weak chuckle. “Christ,” he said. “Goddammit.”

Mac said carefully, “Same one as before?” and Dennis grimaced at him in the darkness.

“Yeah,” he said, clearing his throat. “Yeah, same one as before.” 

Mac made a soft noise. “Least Dee wasn’t here for it this time,” he said.

So many miracles, they probably qualified for sainthood. Saint Dennis, the Burdened. Saint Mac, the Sad and Desperately Piteous.

“This isn’t going to work,” Dennis said.

“What isn’t?” Mac said.

“Take your pick,” Dennis said, “this, all of this. This apartment. The mattress. Having to share a goddamn mattress, it’s.” Brittle, his voice thinned into a dry husk. “It’s not.”

Mac sighed. “Dennis—”

“Not tonight, Mac,” Dennis snarled, “seriously, just. Just don’t. Just leave it alone and don’t.”

“All right, all right.” Mac held up his hands. “It’s alone.”

Still; reality suffocated him like smoke.

The best he could do under the circumstances was lay back down, back turned solidly to Mac’s awful considerate expression, and force himself to sleep. He managed everything but the last part, and laid awake until Mac fell asleep first, far away on the other side of the mattress, instead of staring after him like he could even do something to help.

—

Dennis awoke to the sounds of stifled cursing the next morning. He probably could’ve ignored it and drifted off back to sleep, until the stifled cursing was followed by the harsh scratch of chair legs over a wooden floor.

He sat up mostly to make sure Mac wasn’t screwing them out of the security deposit. Or maybe that wasn’t Mac at all—maybe they were in the middle of an active robbery, and it wouldn’t even be the worst way he’d woken up, wasn’t that nice to think about.

“What’re you,” he mumbled, “what’s.”

“Oh, shit, did I wake you?” Mac, at least, sounded sincere. Sincere and oddly muffled.

“What are you doing,” he said as he adjusted to the bright wash of sunlight. Mac had a nail sticking out of his mouth, and he had a hammer in one hand and a picture frame in the other.

He jerked the hammer over his shoulder at the wall. “I’m decorating,” he said, all matter-of-fact about it, like decorating was something everyone did at nine-thirty in the morning.

“Why,” Dennis said.

“Why decorating?” A grunt. “Oh. Because.” Mac shrugged. “You know. Trying to make it feel more like home in here.”

These were not the sorts of conversations Dennis was accustomed to having before coffee. Wildly perplexed, he ran a hand through his hair. “More like home?”

“Yeah! Look what I did.” Mac turned the frame around and held it out. Dennis squinted at what clearly looked like the DVD cover art for Gladiator, neatly trimmed to fit inside the frame. The same surgical skill had been applied to the art for the rest of Mac's new Ridley Scott movies, hanging proud and a little crooked on the wall behind him.

“I didn’t just want to hang up frames with nothing in them,” he was saying, “and I didn’t want to leave the stock photos in either, because, weird. So I got a pair of scissors and I improvised.”

He beamed at Dennis, then, and all things considered Dennis processed it quite well. “When did you get picture frames?”

“Oh. I returned some stuff,” Mac said breezily. “It’s not much, but by the time I’m done, maybe it’ll start to feel more like the old place a little.”

He could see them, the words nightmare and fire rattling in their cages, ready for Mac to break them out; but sudden yen for interior decorating aside, he looked on track to act like last night had never happened, if that’s what Dennis wanted.

He eyed Russell Crowe’s stern, shadowy stance, and said, “You had to go and do this at nine-thirty in the morning?”

Mac faltered. “Yeah.” The hammer twisted around in his hand as he added, hesitant, “You don’t like it?”

Credit where credit was due—Dennis hadn’t even thought about decorating. And in their own, weirdly kitsch way, the walls did seem less unfamiliar.

“It’s… creative,” he allowed. “Good job.”

Mac broke into a smile and returned to hammering up the rest of their impromptu movie tribute. Dennis fell back onto the mattress, rolling against it with a languid stretch, and listened to Mac’s offhanded organizational commentary without really paying it any mind.   

It was a while before he realized that the ornate ivory crucifix, the one Mac had hung above their bed last night, was missing.

—

October blustered into their apartment with an argument over a Halloween costume contest. Back in the old apartment, arguments would blow over as soon as Mac and Dennis had had enough time to separate and cool off on their own.

The new apartment wasn’t as forgiving.

Mac and Dennis had been arguing costumes for the past eight days.

“I got it. Jay and Silent Bob.”

“You’re not fat enough to be Silent Bob, Mac, at least not anymore.”

Mac frowned, and teethed the rim of his beer bottle. “What about Kirk and Spock? Or Kirk and McCoy?”

“I hate doing Shatner’s voice,” Dennis said, wrinkling his nose. “Too many damn pauses.”

“Yeah. Too nerdy, anyway. Okay, how about 21 and 24?”

“Way too obscure, man. And I can’t do a Ray Romano voice either, goddamn. Nothing that requires a voice.”

Mac snapped his fingers. “Oh! What if we went as Rick Grimes and Daryl Dixon? That could work,” he said eagerly. “I could carry a crossbow, and ride a motorcycle around, and you could get a sweet bomber jacket and do a Southern accent. Accent’s not a voice, dude, you’d kill it.”

“And that’s way too common!” Dennis said. “There’s no way someone’s not going as either Rick Grimes or Daryl Dixon, I guarantee it.”

Mac flopped back onto the mattress, sinking deep into the padding. “When did costume planning get so complicated?” he groaned.

“Since Dee ditched us for a spot on the judges’ panel and the grand prize went from a fruit basket to a thousand dollars,” Dennis said flatly. Mac groaned louder. “Come on, we’ve gotta think of something good. Iconic, but not too overplayed. Something that just screams us.”

“Batman and Robin. Boom, there we go. Easily the most dynamic duo of all time.”

“Also the most overdone.”

“Oh. Right.” Mac’s brow furrowed. “Ellen Ripley and the Xenomorph?”

“What, from Alien?”

“I'm Ripley,” Mac added quickly.

“No one is Ripley, Mac, because we're not doing Alien. They're not exactly a dynamic duo.”

“I know.” Mac clapped his hands together. “We’ll be Thelma and Louise.”

“Thelma and—what?” Dennis pitched forward and almost fell off the mattress in his surprise. “Now you're just listing movies off the wall.”

“They had a whole movie made about how badass their friendship was,” Mac countered. “I’d be Thelma, and you can be Louise.”

“That wasn’t what I was—wait, why am I Louise?”

“Why wouldn’t you be Louise?” Mac sounded genuinely baffled. “Dude. You’re definitely Louise.”

“Okay, but how?”

“You just are, dude, you can’t overthink it,” Mac said, and Dennis stared at him. “Also, Thelma was the one who suggested they jump off the cliff, which was totally badass so that obviously makes me Thelma.”

“So I’m Louise by default?” Dennis said.

Mac shrugged. “Again,” he said, “don’t overthink it.” He then considered Dennis carefully, rim of the beer bottle tapping his chin. “You’re determined like she is.”

“Determined.” Mac’s nod was serious, and Dennis blew out a deep breath. There was a lot he could say on the subject of determination at the moment, and about half of it concerned a grim determination to go to the contest not dressed as a murder-suicide. “Look, unless we’re staging an actual drive off a cliff to impress the judges’ panel, I don’t think anyone’s gonna get it.”

Mac dropped back to the mattress and splayed out, defeated. “Then I’m all out of ideas.”

“Short list of duos you got there, buddy.”

“Well, it’s tough to find a dynamic duo that matches our intensity and hasn’t been done to death on short notice.”

“We’ll find something,” Dennis said, frowning. “But it has to be us. For a thousand bucks in cold hard cash? We’ve got one shot to get this thing perfect, so we’ve gotta be at our level best.”

A contemplative look crossed Mac’s face. “Hear me out on this one, Dennis,” he said slowly. “What if it was us?”

Dennis let it register. He leaned in closer, intent. “Explain.”

“What if I dressed up as you,” Mac said, with a careful weight to his words, “and you got dressed up as me?”

“Mac.”

“Seriously, hear me out. We’ll switch clothes for the day, I’ll shave, we’ll get a marker and draw fake tattoos on you—”

“Mac.”

“I mean, come on, Dennis, who’s more better for this than we are? We know each other so well, there’s nobody else out who could pull us off like we could—”

“Mac!”

Mac cut his tirade short and finally looked up, tentative disbelief riding low on his brow. Dennis grinned, broad and bright.

“That’s the best goddamn idea I’ve heard all week,” he said, and all the worry clouding Mac's expression vanished like vapor under the sun.

—

“How does this not bother you?” Dennis said as he scrubbed his hand down two-day-old stubble. “Seriously, it itches like a mother.”

“You get used to it!” Mac hollered from the bathroom. He stumbled out a moment later, one leg caught awkwardly in a pair of Dennis’ jeans. “Dude, you have got to take these in a little less—”

“Oh, were you planning on wearing them again?” Dennis said, and even Mac’s scowl had adopted a familiar, supercilious sneer. It went well with the rest of his Dennis costume, even if it had mostly boiled down to “steal a button-down, squeeze into a pair of jeans, and use less hair product.“ He’d staunchly refused to lighten his hair, but it meant Dennis didn’t have to dye his, and it’s not like it wasn’t obvious who they were going as, either. Dennis was perfectly confident they’d manage.

On the other hand, how did Mac survive in short-sleeved shirts all the goddamned time? It wasn’t even winter and Dennis had goosebumps shivering down his arms. “You still have to draw my tattoos, hurry up.”

“All right, all right, God.” Mac half-hopped over. “You sure you don’t wanna try gluing hair to your face?”

“You remember how that came out last time, Mr. Gorilla Mask?”

‘Yeah,” Mac said, “convincing.” He rummanged around in Dennis’ dresser drawer. “Where do you keep your foundation?”

Dennis arched a brow. “Why?”

“For the costume,” Mac said. “Because you wear it all the time?”

“Well yeah, I do.” Leaning against the dresser, he tugged Mac’s blue pants up above his hips again. “Dude, you don’t even know how to apply it.”

“Pretty sure I’ll manage,” Mac said breezily, and he held up a small bottle. “A-ha! I found—uh, Dennis?” He was frowning. “Why’s it got my name on it?”

“Beg pardon?”

Mac rotated his wrist, black-lettered label facing Dennis like a pointed accusation. “Says it right there: M. A. C. Which spells…”

Fuming, Dennis snatched the bottle out of Mac’s hand. “It’s not your name, asswad,” he said, “it's the company. It stands for something.”

“Oh really. And what’s it stand for.”

“I have no idea,” Dennis said. “Anyway, you don’t know the first thing about applying it.”

 Mac’s eyes widened in skeptical surprise. “Dude, it’s foundation. You like,” and he wiped carelessly at his face, “you just smear it all over your skin. I’ve seen you do it.”

 “Okay, first of all,” Dennis said, after he’d picked his jaw up off the floor. “I do not just ‘smear it’ all over my skin, is that understood? There’s a process. It’s actually pretty involved.”

 “It’s actually just fingerpainting.”

Dennis took a deep breath and counted to four. Mac was smirking at him, and it went a little too well with the rest of his look. “All right, asshole, you want me to prove it?” Mac shrugged, unconcerned, and Dennis set his jaw with grim determination. “Fine. Go wash your face.”

“What? Why?”

“Because, I’m gonna show you,” Dennis said, shooing Mac in the direction of the bathroom. “I’ll prove that it’s a lot more complicated than just—” and he wrinkled his nose in distaste, “—fingerpainting.”

Mac obliged him with only a minimum of grumbling, and then returned and stood in front of Dennis with his cheeks pink and his scowl suspicious.

Dennis slapped a bottle of moisturizer into his hand. “That comes next,” he said. “You can’t skip it.”

Mac’s eyebrow soared sky-high.

“Dude, I know what I’m doing,” Dennis told him, “I know way more about this shit than you do,” and Mac looked like he was biting back a laugh. But he didn’t comment otherwise, and if one could excuse the messy application at least did as he was told.

Dennis pumped a sizable amount of foundation onto the back of his hand, exhaled a breath that came out in a loose shudder. Mac had his arms crossed in front of his chest and was waiting, watching him with a shrewd look.

“Now pay attention,” Dennis muttered, “‘cause this is literally nothing like fingerpainting.”

“Even when you’re using your fingers to paint me?”

Scowling, Dennis dotted foundation along Mac’s narrow cheekbones. “Do you know how important your skin even is? It is literally the face you present to the world,” he said. “It is the first thing everyone comes to notice, every blemish and imperfection and oversized pore right there on display unless you do something about it. And that’s just to achieve the look of a blank canvas, if this were summertime we’d be talking bronzer and tinted moisturizers and—are you even listening to me?”

He stopped mid-rant with his thumb resting below Mac’s eye, his fingertips light against the fringe of Mac’s hairline. Deep brown eyes flickered open in a daze.

“Mac,” Dennis said, “are you paying attention?”

“You said something about bronzer,” Mac said distantly. The tip of his tongue poked over dry lips. “I’m listening.”

“Well, listen better. You should at least appreciate me going this far for you,” Dennis said. He smoothed his fingers in soft circles along Mac’s face, blending foundation into his skin until it appeared flawless. “It’s a lot of work that goes into being me.”

“I can tell,” Mac said, and his voice sounded blurry, like it was sliding just out of focus. And his lids were hooded over pupils as black as ink, but his gaze was razor-sharp.  Dennis cleared his throat, and swept the pads of his fingers down Mac’s neck, gentle crosshatches blending into his throat. Mac tracked him like a hawk.

“So,” he said, after a moment. “It’s a little bit more complicated than fingerpainting. See?”

“If you say so,” Mac said, and it could’ve been his imagination, but Dennis swore that was Mac’s heartbeat thrumming under his fingertips, hard and fast, a rabbit on the run.

—

“You know what else pissed me off about their costumes?”

Dennis could practically hear Mac rolling his eyes from the bedroom. “What, Dennis.”

“The lack of sophistication. They were beyond unsubtle,” Dennis said. Craning his neck back, he squinted at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, inspecting a patch of stubble he’d missed. “Look, Charlie with the cat ears and Kitten Mittons and a bra over his regular clothes, that was bad enough, but Frank brought in a live penguin.”

“I thought it was funny,” Mac admitted, and Dennis almost nicked himself with the razor. “And it’s not like they even won.”

“They got second. Second’s better than nothing.” Once again clean-shaven, Dennis patted his face down with a spare towel and exited the bathroom. Mac had already stripped out of Dennis’ clothes and was busy tugging one of his own sleeveless shirts over his head. “You know Dee only voted for them because they had the gall to play ‘Kiss From a Rose’ during their bit.”

Mac grimaced. “I know.”

“It’s not even the right movie, that’s Batman Forever. They were doing Batman Returns. Catwoman and the Penguin, everybody guessed it. And Frank wasn’t even in costume, he just brought in a fucking penguin!”

“Dude, Dee doesn’t know dick about Batman,” Mac said seriously. “She wouldn’t have understood.”

“She understood enough to get the reference. She understood enough to vote for them,” Dennis said, as he pulled Mac’s borrowed shirt over his head and tossed it in the hamper hoop. “She wasn’t asking Charlie and Frank over and over what movie they were from.”

“We should’ve been so obvious to her,” Mac said, Dennis’ fury fast catching on. “How did she not get that we were going as each other?”

“Oh, she got it,” Dennis said, fuming. “She just thinks she’s so funny sometimes.”

He sat down heavily on the mattress, jaw clenching at the memory; the tiny smirk on Dee’s face as the other judges, polite in their morbid lack of comprehension, explained that they had no idea who Mac and Dennis were supposed to be and unfortunately had to disqualify them. Sincerest apologies.

“Probably still mad at us for making fun of her costume idea. Which I stand by. It was stupid then and it’s still stupid now. That goddamn bitch,” he said, all in a low voice, and he turned to Mac to seek agreement. But instead—he peered closely at Mac’s face. “Are you still wearing my foundation?”

“What? Oh! Yeah,” Mac said brightly. “Looks good on me, don’t you think? I feel all Hollywood, you know, like a movie star.”

“I mean, that’s the point,” Dennis said, in mild bemusement.

“And I made a great you out there today, come on,” Mac added, and that threw Dennis for a loop because, well, he had.

The bulk of his arm muscles tested the conviction of Dennis’ button-downs, and his speech pattern wasn’t nearly as polished or as perfect, but he walked and talked and commanded the room on par with the real McCoy. Like he’d spent all his life training for just one moment, and Dennis remembered the breathless mix of fear and flattery that had whirled to life inside.

The magic was in the makeup, according to Mac, but makeup couldn’t recreate the perfect sweep of a practiced smirk, couldn’t reconstruct a radiating sense of presence, a corona on his brow. That you couldn’t buy in a little foundation bottle. That you figured out when you spent all your time together, and sat this closely on a vast shared mattress, and woke up every morning separated by a few casual inches, never really mentioning it; and the thought that they’d somehow gotten used to all the madness threw itself into sharp relief.

He wasn't even a good actor. Mac just knew what a good Dennis looked like.

“I don’t want it getting all over the pillowcase,” Dennis said shortly, and Mac’s frown was soft; but he yielded and rolled to his feet. He padded around the mattress to the bathroom, and Dennis slid under the covers. His skin prickled all over like an electric field.

Strange was when someone knew you well enough to be you. The prickling feeling spread, fractals of static crackling to life.

When Mac returned with his face scrubbed pink, Dennis had squirmed to the farthest edge of the mattress, the space between them yawning open. If he noticed anything, he didn’t mention it; Mac tapped off his floor lamp, offered up a polite goodnight, and curled up in bed the same way he always did, facing the wall with his broad back to Dennis. He was out like a light before Dennis had a chance to respond.

Even fast asleep, there was no escaping his presence, steady as an anchor mooring a ship.  

Or an iron ball cuffed to his ankle, and Dennis was having a hard time deciding which was the more accurate way to put it.

Chapter Text

In November, Dennis woke up with a migraine.

He’d had exactly one other migraine in his life, before, on the eve of his general chemistry final in his first semester at UPenn. It lasted well into the final itself, he failed the final, he failed the course, and shortly thereafter decided that maybe biochemistry as a major was too nerdy for someone like him, and anyway veterinarians got paid a lot less than he’d imagined.

Nevertheless, migraines had the power to change the course of his life, and were not to be trifled with.

He made them stop at Wawa before work.

“You good there?” Mac asked, raising a brow at the box of Aleve and the coffee in Dennis’ hands. Dennis eked out a smile and another hollow bullet tore through his brain. He barely even winced. He drained the coffee on the way over and Mac watched him, carefully, frowning.

They opened up the bar, or more accurately, Dennis dropped Mac off to start opening up while he drove to the Starbucks with a drive-thru and sat impatiently in a line of cars for nine minutes for a grande blonde roast, two shots of espresso, and yes he was aware of how much caffeine that had, and he wasn’t paying for some whiny, self-important millennial with a degree in underwater basket weaving to lecture him on how coffee was going to give him cancer, thanks.

The girl at the register glared at him. Dennis didn’t care if she’d overheard.

He finished the second coffee just as he walked into Paddy’s. It was bright. It was too bright. Dennis scowled and turned off the lights.

Mac glanced up from the register. “Dude.”

Dennis sat hunched over at the bar. “Bright,” he grunted. A fresh wave of pain cracked through his brain like a tree branch snapping off at the root, sharp and hard and indiscriminate.

“Open,” Mac said, “as in, we are open,” and the lights flipped back on, and one of them flickered and buzzed like a vengeful hornet.

Dennis shuttered his eyes. “No one’s here.”

“Not yet, but—” Mac paused, and when Dennis slit his eyes open despite himself he caught sight of an awful, dawning comprehension. It dug into every corner and asked too many questions, and Dennis pointedly avoided it.

The lights switched off, and the bar was plunged into sweet darkness. “Just until the others get here,” Mac said, carefully neutral.

“Fine.”

Mac headed for the back office and paused, one hand hovering over the knob. “You’re good?” he said, and Dennis stared hard at the woodgrain, with his eyes peeled back and without seeing much.

“I’m good,” he said, and Mac didn’t say anything.

But he didn’t ask Dennis to do anything, either, just let Dennis sit quietly in the darkness, and that helped a little bit.

—

The coffee worked, but only for a few hours. The Aleve dulled the pain to a brooding throb, but by late afternoon it wasn’t enough. The bar’s stock was tempting, but as the day wore on the throb grew violent, pressure pulsing like a crack of lightning hard inside his skull.

After that, even grain alcohol wouldn’t do the trick.

Time blurred past in meaningless snatches of consciousness. Frank found a police scanner later that evening. The Gang went all in and threw a plan together in record time; then they asked Dennis if he was joining in and he didn’t have an answer.

Charlie disappeared into the back office. He came back out with the walkie-talkies and slid one across the bar. Dennis took it with a stilted nod.

The scanner crackled to life and the Gang hurried out; the doorbell tinkled merrily and the door slammed shut and Frank’s car peeled out of the street, and Dennis gripped the countertop. A shock of pain rattled around in his skull, strike-slip quake behind his left eye.

“Hey.” A girl in a Flyers sweatshirt was watching him carefully. “Um. Do you need to see a doctor?”

Dennis forced a smile onto his face, teeth and gums and pale chapped lips. His eye twitched maddeningly. “Do I look like a man who needs to see a doctor?” he said, and the girl grabbed her bag and left in record time. The bar was empty after that, so Dennis shut the lights off. Then he crawled behind the counter and sat down, resting his head against a cool shelf.

Another burst of pain. This was a mortar cannon. Shrapnel so sharp it sliced through the optic nerve, and either he passed out for a while or he actually went blind, but what Dennis remembered was he stopped giving a shit one moment and heard voices and footsteps and people saying his name the next.

“Dennis!” The lights cut on. Two large objects were moving above him, occasionally blocking out the light. A third object dropped in front of him, and there were hands on his arms, his shoulders, the back of his neck. “We’ve been calling you the past hour, man.”

“Jesus. Did he pass out down there?”

“He didn’t pass out.” Someone was tapping his cheek. “Dennis. You hearin’ me okay?”

“He looks like shit, dude. Is he sick?”

“He’s not sick either, God.” The closest voice dropped into a murmur. “Hey. Dennis.”

“The hell’s wrong with him then?” Frank. “You’re sure he ain’t sick?”

“I’m with Frank on this one, he looks pretty sick. Could be ebola.” Charlie.

“Ebola hasn’t even hit us, Charlie. And it certainly doesn’t do… whatever the hell this is.” Dee.

“We’re going home.” Mac. “C’mon.” Mac gently helped him to his feet. Dennis shook him off and his head exploded again.

“I’m not sick,” he snapped at all of them, “I have a headache.”

Four blank stares burned his skin like a brand.

“Probably from dealing with you four idiots all the goddamn time,” Dennis added.

“Your eye is…” Charlie grimaced, pointed; Dennis brought his hand to his eye and it came away wet. “It’s like, leaking.”

“It’s itchy.” He sniffed. “It’s very dry in here.”

“It’s raining out,” Dee said, peering closely at him. “I remember this. You’ve got a migraine.”

Frank and Charlie ahhed in understanding, and Mac rubbed a hand between his shoulderblades, and Dennis clenched both his hands into fists.

“It’s fine,” he gritted. “I’m managing.”

“You were passed out on the floor,” Dee said. “That’s not managing.”

“I said I was—” A wave of nausea rolled over him and he froze, eyes bulging and mouth pinched shut.

“You’re turning green, Dennis,” Frank said.

“Really green,” Charlie added. “Ebola green.”

“You’re gonna manage all over the floor in a hot second,” Dee said; Dennis shook his head and swallowed hard, bile burning down his throat.

“Yeah, we’re definitely going home,” Mac said grimly. It wasn’t worth it to argue.  

Mac steered him outside; the sting of cold rain was brief, but relieving. He was ushered into the passenger seat of the Range Rover, and he spent a minute with his forehead pressed against the cool window before Mac returned with a spare cleaning bucket. He thrust it into Dennis’ lap.

“So you don’t kill yourself later because you blew chunks on the upholstery,” Mac told him, keying the ignition, and Dennis gripped the sides of the bucket so hard they cracked.

—

Mac shepherded him upstairs and into their bedroom, pulling sweatpants and a thin T-shirt from Dennis’ dresser and tossing them in his direction. He was quiet, and he didn’t make Dennis talk; Mac gave him privacy to dress as he paced around the living room, talking on the phone in a low, even voice.

Then Dennis was sitting heavily on the bed and Mac was crouching in front of him. “Hey,” he whispered. “I’m taking the car to go pick some stuff up. Will you be good for like an hour while I’m gone?”

Dennis managed a nod.

“Great.” Mac grinned at him. “Bucket’s right here if you need it.” He shut the lights off and closed the door with a quiet click. Dennis didn’t even make it under the covers, he was out the second his head hit the pillow.

He only woke when he heard the rattle of the front lock, and took his time coming to, listening absently, adjusting to the darkness. The migraine wasn’t gone completely, but the hour or so of sleep had done something to blunt the trauma; it was enough, at least, for him to wriggle to a sitting position and turn on the floor lamp of his own volition.

The hinges creaked as the door swept open. “You’re up,” Mac said; Dennis grunted, and Mac shut the door quickly and plopped down on the bed in front of him.

“Where’d you go?” Dennis asked with a sharp wince; a philharmonic chorus of frogs had taken up residence in his throat.

“Manayunk. And Wawa, but that was after.”

“Manayunk?” Dennis’ brow swept into an arch. “You took my car to Manayunk?”

“I also came back with your car from Manayunk. I know how to park on a hill.”

“Did you bring me a coffee, at least?”

A knowing glint appeared in Mac’s eye.  “I got you something better than coffee,” he said.

“A lobotomy.”

Mac shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, “but they were fresh out of lobotomies,” and the dim light of the floor lamp made his grin mischievous. He then reached a hand inside his leather jacket and, like a rabbit from a hat, he pulled out a Dutch Master.

Newly puzzled, Dennis stared at the cigar. Then he stared at Mac. Mac twitched his brows in amusement, flashed him another rakish smile, and in seconds was dangling a tiny bag of fuzzy, purple-tinged bud right in front of his very eyes.

Dennis froze. “You got me weed?”

“I got you weed!” Mac said. “Best thing for a migraine, bro. Practically makes it medical.”

Tentative, Dennis opened the bag; the smell all but smacked him in the face. “Jesus,” he said, with a low whistle, “you went to Manayunk for this?”

“Uh huh.”

“Why there?”

Mac was fiddling carefully with the cigar, sliding it smoothly out of its wrapper. “My high school plug lives up there,” he said. “Remember Cornflake?”

“Cornflake—who, Eric Kellogg?”

“That’s the one.” Mac tossed the wrapper aside. “He lives with his mom, I think. Still sells, obviously. He’s been doing pretty well for himself ever since they decriminalized pot.”

“Well, then. Good for Cornflake,” Dennis said, more distracted by the way Mac was eyeing the cigar, studying it with keen interest. “You know how to roll a blunt?”

“I’ve done it once or twice,” Mac said. He brought the cigar to his mouth and flicked his tongue out, licking a small, clean stripe along the side.

Dennis wrinkled his nose. “You have to do that?”

Mid-lick, Mac paused in clear surprise. “Never seen anyone roll a blunt before?”

“Never,” Dennis said. He bent forward in morbid fascination. “We’re gonna be smoking your spit, dude.”

“Pretty much,” Mac agreed, with a final lick to the tip.

Dennis didn’t have much time to dwell on the fact before a burst of pain rang out behind his eye. The hiss that escaped him caught Mac’s attention.

“Still bad in there?” he asked. Dennis just snorted, and Mac shared a sympathetic frown. “This shouldn’t take long.”

He carefully worked off the outer leaf, unraveling it with more care than Dennis had ever imagined possible. Setting it aside, Mac held the naked cigar out to Dennis like a present. “Now. See the seam running along the side?”

Dennis had to squint. “Kinda.”

“That’s the part you have to split, and if you crack it just right…”

Fingers working as fluid as a surgeon, Mac pried the cigar open in neat increments. He held it out again once he was finished, the wrap laying in his hand like a log split in two. And maybe it was the migraine, or the extra Aleve, or the lack of proper sleep, but Dennis was in just the right frame of mind to be captivated by a cracked-open cigar. “Awesome.”

Mac grinned. “Don’t I know it.”

He nudged the tobacco out and made short work of grinding the weed with the careful use of a dollar bill. Dennis watched in eager anticipation as Mac rolled the blunt, packed and wrapped and carefully sealing it; he picked up the outer leaf and licked it again, and Dennis fell into a strange and heavy trance as Mac finished rewrapping the cigar. Light flickered over his features with each subtle movement, and Dennis studied and catalogued every delicate shape they made.

“Last part is you bake it,” Mac said. He procured a stubby lighter and ran the flame over the blunt, and then it was sitting pretty in his palm as he proudly held it out one final time. “And we’re good.”

Dennis eyed him shrewdly. “Once or twice, you said?”

“More or less. Maybe a little more,” Mac amended, and the laugh Dennis managed came as a surprise.

Mac scooted up the mattress until he was comfortably seated next to Dennis, his knee absently grazing Dennis’ thigh. He lit the blunt and inhaled, eyes closing as he held it in for a long, indulgent moment. His shoulders dropped and his head tilted back as he released a fat and shapeless cloud of smoke. The second puff went down much the same, then he was passing the blunt and the lighter without a word.

Dennis put the blunt to his lips and hit it, held it—

Coughed and spluttered as the smoke ravaged his throat. His head was still ringing as Mac snickered, low and amused. “You okay?”

“Christ, that’s strong,” Dennis said. “Ow.”

“That’s Cornflake for you.”

Dennis hit the blunt again. This round was significantly more successful, and his brain was already tingling in the faintest, fuzziest way when he finally exhaled. “Goddamn.”

“You said it.” Dennis passed it back, lingering on the way Mac’s long fingers pinched the blunt, flicked the lighter; the way his head tilted back as he breathed out, soft and slow and smooth. “Goddamn.”

“You feelin’ it?” Mac hummed, nodded. “Good. Pass that dutch, man, pass that dutch.”

Mac snorted out a laugh. “Missy Elliott?”

Dennis nodded solemnly. “Missy Elliott,” he said, tapping his teeth on the T. The next hit went down butter-smooth, rolled through him on a welcome wave of warmth.

“Wonder whatever happened to her. Hey, did she do ‘No Scrubs’? I heard that in the Wawa earlier and I couldn’t remember who did it. It was bugging me like the entire way home.”

Dennis’ lips unfurled into a smile, stretched so far his cheeks hurt. He curled in on himself and began to snicker.

Mac cocked his head. “What’s so funny?”

“Scrubs,” Dennis said, “it’s a funny word,” and his smile split even wider.

Mac pressed his lips together, which was a piss-poor attempt to hold back a laugh that Dennis saw straight through. “Dude, you’re goofy,” he said, and Dennis thought, scrubs, and he spluttered his way through a series of vicious giggles and leaned his face into Mac’s shoulder.

Mac was chuckling even as he took a hit. “Scrubs,” he repeated, arching an eyebrow, and Dennis straight-up cackled, sliding down the mattress until he was fully horizontal. He pressed his forehead into Mac's thigh and laughed so hard his sides split. “No no no, dude, c’mon, don’t let me finish this.”

“Gimme.” Dennis leaned up on his elbows for another two hits. Wheels of smoke spiraled above him as he relaxed into the bed, rolled his head on the pillow and into Mac’s leg. “Oh, shit.”

“You good?” Dennis tilted his head; Mac was watching him, waiting, thoroughly amused. Dennis grinned.

“I’m good, man.”

“No pain?”

Dennis thought about it. In his haze, pain had ceased to be a priority; he knew he had a migraine and he knew that it hurt but he didn’t feel it, if that counted for much of anything. He was far more concerned with the way Mac radiated heat like a furnace, for example, or the incredibly tiny fibers in the seam of Mac’s pant leg.

He scraped a nail over every bump in the fabric like he was decoding a hidden message. Mac let him do it.

Time forgot about them for a while. The blunt passed between them, seemingly forever until Mac dropped the roach in an empty beer bottle. Dennis glanced up, distantly aware of a low sound; Mac was gazing at a point in the distance, tapping an absent rhythm on Dennis’ pillow as he hummed something, curiously soft.

He rubbed his cheek along Mac’s thigh like a shamelessly spoiled cat. “What song?” he murmured; Mac startled, then chuckled, and the hand on the pillow threaded soft through his hair.

“‘Soul to Squeeze,’” he said as he lightly scritched at Dennis’ scalp. Dennis growled, utterly pleased. “It’s by the Chili Peppers.”

“Don’t know that one.” He tried to inch closer but his limbs were useless. “Gravity’s weird, bro.”

“Yeah?”

“I think it Hulked out on me.”

“Hulk Hogan or Hulk-comma-The?”

Dennis considered it. “Hulk-comma-The,” he decided. “Pretty sure it did.”

“You’ll be fine,” Mac said. He didn’t sound worried, and Dennis was content to let him keep carding a hand through his hair instead of trying to do something about it.

“I am fine,” he then said. “No more migraine.”

Mac made a sound that was half-triumphant, half-asleep.

“You saved my life, Mac,” Dennis told him. It settled in his chest like a soft rain.

“I saved your life,” Mac agreed.

“Do something about gravity. Later, though.”

“Later,” Mac promised him, and that was all he wanted.  

Dennis tried to dump as much of his body as he could into Mac’s lap. He succeeded in getting his head over Mac’s thigh and considered it a runaway success. Mac’s fingers traced aimless patterns along the nape of his neck, wandered in trailing curves, in arabesques. His thumb swept over the shell of Dennis’ ear.

Nothing hurt. Nothing made sense, either, but for the first time in so many hours, nothing actually hurt. Dennis closed his eyes and breathed in; there was the faded dark bite of Drakkar Noir and faint traces of Irish Spring, the lingering scent of weed and the rich smell of worn leather. Everything telling him nothing hurt.

He didn’t say thank you, because he didn’t need the words. Mac kept running his hand through Dennis’ hair long after he’d fallen asleep, and he didn’t say you’re welcome, because it was already understood.

—

Not that Dennis was much for holiday tradition, but he and Mac had one that spanned over a decade. They always stumbled home wasted on Christmas Day, after spending Christmas Eve with the rest of the Gang. But only one man was ever invited to celebrate Christmas Eve Eve with Mac and Dennis—and John McClane always answered that call.  

And because it was a tradition that spanned over a decade, they’d gotten incredibly used to having a TV and a DVD player and the complete set of Die Hard movies right there at their fingertips. Mac and Dennis were gearing up for the marathon when they realized, quite abruptly, that they lacked a TV. And a DVD player. And instead of a complete set of Die Hard movies, they had a handful of Ridley Scott films with missing cover art.

Video stores had them actively blacklisted. The Sears they’d visited a few months ago had finally gone under. Which was why, one cold December 22nd evening (Mac wanted to call it Christmas Eve Eve Eve, right up until Dennis threatened to file a motion), they found themselves bundled up, in Dennis’ car, circling the nearest Best Buy parking lot like vultures scanning the plains for a wounded gazelle.

It didn’t help that Mac kept shouting Spot! every time he saw one. Dennis gripped the steering wheel harder, and flicked his turn signal, and for the umpteenth time that evening a soccer mom in a dirty minivan rudely cut him off.

He rolled the window down. “Yeah? Yeah? Well fuck you very much, bitch. I hope your credit card gets declined in front of all your short goblin children and you have to return their presents right in front of them,” Dennis shouted as he threw himself on the horn.

“Dude, don’t bring the kids into it,” Mac told him, and Dennis growled long and low. “Oh, wait. On your left. Spot?”

Dennis grunted. “Smartcar.”

“Stupid Smartcars.” Mac wriggled around in his seat, testing the conviction of his seatbelt as he hunted down parking spaces in the swarming parking lot. “They’re gonna be picked clean by the time we get in there.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Dennis snapped, and Mac actually fell silent.

It took them eight more minutes to find a place to park—all the way in the back of the lot, and right next to a deep, slush-filled pothole that Dennis discovered the hard way. He came to face-down on the asphalt, palms skinned and his nose stinging.

Mac dropped into a crouch, peering at him like an overgrown owl in a bobble hat. “Dude,” he said, “yell timber if you’re gonna take a spill like that.”

Dennis snarled deep in his throat and refused Mac’s helping hand. “Can we just get inside?” he said as he clambered out of the pothole. He marched forward without waiting for an answer, one shoe squelching with every single step.

There were no carts, like he’d expected, and the lone handheld basket had its handle covers ripped clean off. The first touch of frozen metal on raw hands had him grimacing hard.

Mac motioned to the basket. “Want me to—”

“No,” Dennis said.

“Sorry,” Mac said, and of course he seemed offended, and Dennis took a moment to pray to a God he didn’t believe in that he wouldn’t actually hit Mac with the basket. “So I guess, since you’ve got the basket—you go get the movies, and I’ll find a TV and a DVD player?”

Dennis evaluated; the sweatshirt and the duster combined gave the impression of bulk, so Mac was better suited to scaring off hordes of last minute Christmas shoppers desperate for large electronics. And a TV wouldn’t fit in the basket. “Make it quick,” Dennis said. “Text me if you find something.”

“Dude, I got this,” Mac said easily, which wasn’t entirely reassuring, and then he dove into a passing stampede of shoppers and any hope of reassurance was declared dead on arrival.

meet me by the dvds if you cant find anything, he texted. Mac sent back a thumbs-up emoji. For a moment, it was comforting.

The two or three DVD shelves proved elusive, tucked between the massive floor space alloted for video games  and the massive floor space alloted for fancy laptops, and they were stuffed to the gills with people besides. The skeletal shelves had been nearly picked bare. Dennis stopped in the middle of the aisle, a weight low in his gut like it was lined with sharp rocks.

No. There was no stopping here. Nothing could put an end to their Christmas Eve Eve tradition; it was an old habit, and you know what they said about old habits.

Dennis set his jaw and went to work.

Hundreds of people—old people, short people, people in starchy peacoats and gloves, people in furry ushankas and big floppy mittens—glared at him as he shoved and shouldered his way through the forlorn DVD section. He scoured the titles for anything Die Hard; he checked D, for Die. He checked H, for Hard. He checked C for Christmas and W for Willis and A for Action. He made a fucking list and he checked it fucking twice.

But there were no copies of Die Hard to be found.

“Can I help you with something, sir?” Dennis wheeled around, and a tiny blonde girl in a ponytail and a blue polo jerked backwards in surprise.

“I’m perfectly fine, thank you—” she was a whole foot shorter, and he craned his neck forward to read her name tag. “Adrianne.” He smiled, hoped he wasn’t leering.

The curl of her lip suggested he was. “Oh-kay then,” she said in a stiff voice, and turned around to leave.

“It’s your store that has the problem,” he added quickly, and Adrianne stopped and spun on her heel and fixed him with a frown. “You’re all out of Die Hard. The whole series. You don’t have it. One of the greatest Christmas movie series in the world and you’re all out.”

Adrianne blinked. “Er,” she said. “Sorry.”

“Look, just go check in the back,” Dennis told her. “See if you’ve got any Die Hard movies on DVD. I will accept Blu-ray if necessary, but I’ll also want a discount, for having to buy what I didn’t want.”

“We don’t have any Die Hard DVDs in the back,” Adrianne said. “I’m like, ninety-five percent sure.”

“Then I’m betting on the five percent certainty that you’re wrong,” Dennis said. He flipped his hand at her with growing impatience. “Now go, go look.”

Adrianne scowled and disappeared, ponytail bobbing behind her, and Dennis pulled out his phone. She returned in a minute and nine seconds. “We’re all out.”

“You were back there for barely a minute!” Dennis cried. “What were you doing instead, huh Adrianne? Fixing your hair? Sneaking a cigarette? Updating social media instead of looking for my goddamn movies?”

Adrianne’s shoulders rose and fell as she exhaled a slow breath. “Why don’t you go check the bargain bin,” she then said, and she pointed at a cheerfully squat cardboard bin overflowing with DVDs. “Happy holidays.”

“Oh, I’m sure they’ll be happy,” Dennis muttered. Jamming his hands deep in his pockets, he stalked his way over to the bargain bin.

The DVD cases in the bargain bin were old and bruised, passed over by thousands of discerning and careless hands, and they all had garish yellow stickers announcing how budget-friendly they were. Dennis eyed the surface of the bin with distaste.

This would take a bit of digging.

He pushed past the first layer, skinned and abused hands shoving deep into the Sarlacc pit of entertainment. There was a pocket of action movies off to the right, and he greedily tore after those; he unearthed The Matrix Reloaded and Daredevil and Speed 2: Cruise Control, but nothing related to the exploits of John McClane.

There were too many movies to sift through like this. He grabbed a short stack of raunchy coming-of-age comedies and dropped them outside the bin. It helped, but not by enough; he’d need to get rid of a few more. Dennis eyed a pile of John Hughes movies in the corner and scooped them off a promising cover of Bruce Willis’ grim mug.

“Sin City?” Well. It wasn’t Die Hard, so out it went, joining Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club in the pile at Dennis’ feet. He kept digging, and the pile kept expanding, faster and faster as movies flew from the bin like furniture off the Titanic. Murmurs were beginning to leak in around him as people stopped, pointed, whispered behind their hands.

He was over halfway through the bin, up to his ankles in rejected movies. There was no going back. Dennis threw an entire handful of DVDs over his shoulder and someone yelped in pain.

 “Sir.” That was Adrianne’s voice, probably, or at least the bob of her ponytail in his peripheral. “We’d like you to leave now, please.”

“Where is it,” Dennis said.

“Where’s what?” she asked, and Dennis rounded on her with a copy of Terminator 2 clenched in each hand.

“Die Hard!” he thundered, “Die Hard, Die Hard, where’s the goddamned Die Hard?”

Adrianne flinched. Her face was extremely pale. “I—I don’t—”

“You told me it would be here,” he said, breathing hard, chest heaving. He stabbed a finger in Adrianne’s direction. “You told me. Where is it, Adrianne?”

“I said it might,” she stammered. “I don’t actually know.”

“Of course you don’t. Of course,” Dennis snarled, and he flung himself back at the bargain bin, clawing at it with a renewed drive. “I’ll find it. I’ll find it if it’s the last thing I ever do, or so help me—”

“All right, whoa, take it easy, guy,” someone said, and two strong hands clapped down on his shoulders and tore Dennis bodily away from the bin. Dennis latched on, hooking his fingers over the edge. With a loud, papery scratch, the cardboard ripped apart: DVDs spewed out of the bargain bin like sludge from a septic tank.

“Hey there, buddy,” continued the voice in an overly-friendly tone, clear-cut contrast to the viselike grip holding him back. “You wanna get going, maybe stop scaring the shit out of all the nice last-minute shoppers here?”

“Your friend—is he—”

“No, no, he’s fine—trust me, it’s not what it looks like,” the voice said quickly—Mac, Dennis realized, as a new wave of anger crashed through him. “Had a little too much nog today, isn’t that right, pal?” Mac slapped him on the back hard enough to bruise, twice.

“Let go of me,” Dennis growled, worming around in Mac’s ironclad grip. “Dude, I am not kidding. Let go.”

“Yeah, how ‘bout I don’t do that,” Mac said, in a paper-thin hiss of a voice, and he wheeled Dennis around and frog-marched him towards the door. “Merry Christmas, everybody!” he shouted with a cheery wave. “Sorry about that!”

“It’s ‘Happy Holidays’ now, asshole,” Dennis said, tight and snarling, as Mac all but threw him against the cold brick face of the store. He stood in front of Dennis with his arms crossed and his jaw clenched tight.

“Dude, what the hell,” he said. “I want a serious goddamn answer.”

Dennis scoffed and swept his arms out. “I was getting the movies.”

“That was getting the movies?” Sheer bewilderment darkened Mac’s face like a thundercloud. “You were destroying store property!”

“Why do you care? Since when did you get all up in arms over a few scuffed DVD cases?” Dennis snapped.

“Since I heard people talking about calling the cops on you,” Mac said. “They thought you were a deranged lunatic. You were this close to getting arrested.”

Dennis didn’t respond to that. He shrugged one shoulder, a shapeless hitch of movement; he fixed his gaze at a spot in the distance. “I wanted to see if they had Die Hard,” he said. “Had a lot of movies to go through.”

Mac scrubbed a hand down his face. “Jesus Christ, dude, I can’t with you sometimes,” he said softly; Dennis bit the inside of his cheek and didn’t respond to that, either.

“I was going to put them back,” he said, a bit lamely.  

“Great, great. Good for you,” Mac muttered, and he shoved his hands deep in his pockets.

The cold, damp bricks behind him had melted away the warmth of his jacket. Dennis shivered, tucked his limbs closer. “Did you at least get the other stuff?”

Mac raised his head. “What other stuff?”

“Y’know. The DVD player. And the TV.” Dennis wasn’t meeting Mac’s eyes. “You could probably run back in and get them, I won’t—I’ll drive the car around.”

There was a long pause, and then Mac sighed, frozen breath puffing white against the black sky. “All out,” he said, and he didn’t sound like Mac at all, he was a stranger with sad news—your home burned up. Your life's burning down. Want to add Christmas Eve Eve to the pyre? You might as well do it yourself, have a say in how it all ends.

“We could drive around the city,” Dennis said. “Find another place that’s open. We’ll just get the movies if we have to, we can watch them on my laptop. Somewhere they’ll have—”

“Dennis.” And Dennis looked up, at the pity on Mac’s face; it sank then in like a knife. “It’s not happening.”

It wasn’t happening. He was freezing his ass off outside a Best Buy at night while poor innocent employees picked through his wreckage, and it was all for nothing. Christmas Eve Eve was just another December 23rd.

Dennis pushed off the wet brick wall and headed for the car. Mac trailed behind him in silence.

—

Dennis slept in the next morning. He snuffled awake when Mac rolled over beside him, stretching and padding softly to the bathroom. The toilet flushed. The shower ran. The faucet cut on, then off. Mac reemerged, pausing in the doorway. Dennis pretended he was asleep and didn’t move.

It paid off the second Mac pulled open his drawer, getting dressed in near silence. He left a short time later. Dennis drifted off for real after that, and when he woke it was a quarter to four, and a fine layer of snow feathered the edge of their windowsill with soft white.

Dennis dragged himself and the blanket over. Mac wasn’t back from wherever he’d fucked off to, and the pit of his stomach curdled with dread at the thought of his return. They hadn’t had a Christmas Eve Eve without Die Hard in over a decade, and they didn’t even do much for it—someone made popcorn and someone grabbed beer and they watched the same movies they did every year, said the same lines aloud, made the same kinds of cracks. Same thing, every year.

They always joked that next year they'd do something different. Next year they'd make fun of Santa With Muscles and Jingle All the Way. They were never serious about it, though, they always went back to Die Hard, but the joke was as time-honored as the tradition itself. Grimacing, almost rueful, Dennis leaned into the window, while wild flurries swirled against the glass.

He'd relocated to the couch, still blanketed but now with a mug of hot chocolate, when Mac came home a couple hours later. “Christ it is cold out,” he sniffed, and jerked his head when he spotted Dennis staring. “Oh, hey dude.”

“Hey.” Curiosity got the better of dread. “Where’d you go?” Dennis said, eyeing Mac with suspicion. He was dusted in a fine layer of snowflakes that fell into his eyes when he shook his unruly dark hair. “Did you go out?”

“Could say that.” A brown plastic bag dropped carelessly to the floor. Mac kicked off his combat boots and stepped outside, knocking them against the doorframe. Bursts of snow fell from the soles in tiny geometric patterns. “Hey, is your laptop charged?”

“Yeah,” Dennis said slowly. He twisted and leaned forward, the blanket shedding like a carapace. “Why?”

“We need it,” Mac told him, annoyingly cryptic, worse if he didn’t mean it. “One second, I fucking—I thought it was gonna start snowing after I got back, not before.” He grunted and slammed his boot against the frame again.

“After you got back from where?”

Mac shook his head. “Go get your laptop,” he said. Dennis scowled, unimpressed, but he dropped off the couch and headed for the bedroom.

There was a bag of popcorn in the microwave when Dennis returned. Mac was opening cabinets seemingly at random. “What’s going on?” Dennis asked, carefully even.

“Is it worth it to go out and get a bowl for popcorn?” Mac said. “Your car was clanking a little.”

“Then no shit it’s not worth it,” Dennis said, thin-voiced. Mac’s newfound taste for crypticism was getting fairly old. “Why?”

“Can’t watch a movie without making popcorn,” Mac said, and Dennis’ grip on the laptop tightened.

They settled on the couch with the bag of popcorn and a six-pack, and Dennis booted his laptop. Mac snagged the plastic bag off the floor and pulled out a battered DVD case with a thick plastic coating that did nothing to mask the keen gaze of John McClane.

“Where’d you go for this?” Dennis crowed, so loud Mac almost dropped the movie.

“Jesus. The library,” Mac said, scowling as the drive clicked shut. “You almost knocked the popcorn over.”

“You went to the library?”

The Die Hard menu popped up on the laptop. “They literally had every movie,” Mac told him, sounding awed. “I even had to get a card, it was pretty legit. Nancy helped me out.”

“Who’s Nancy?”

“That nerd cashier chick from Sears, remember her? She found everything for me, dude, look.” Mac showed him the rest of the bag, full of gently-used copies of the entire Die Hard franchise.

“I’m impressed,” Dennis said. “I’m actually impressed.” The honesty in his voice, though, that surprised him.

Mac stretched out, rolling his spine along the back of the couch, and folded his arms behind his head. He was pretty damn pleased with himself, and Dennis would go on record saying this time it was completely justified.

Private record, preferably. Sealed if possible.

He lifted two beers from the six-pack on the floor. “Hey,” he said, nudging Mac’s thigh with the bottle. “Merry Christmas Eve Eve, Mac.”

Mac studied him carefully, face unreadable. Until he broke into a grin, then, and accepted the offered beer. “You too, Dennis,” he said.

They watched Die Hard in relative silence that year. Not that anyone minded. It was nice to change it up sometimes.

Chapter Text

“What do you mean, the pipes are burst?”

What the landlady meant, in no uncertain terms, was that shoddy plumbing worked as well as you’d expect after several years in an old apartment building, and no she wasn’t sure when they’d be fixed, and it would probably be best to bundle up for a few nights. The last line was delivered with the kind of glossy, sarcastic veneer that had Dennis jabbing End on his phone in a fit of fury.

“So we’ll just layer up,” Mac said, once Dennis broke the news. “Not that big of a deal.”

“She didn’t even sound like she cared!” Dennis shouted. He snatched up a blanket and flung it like an ermine cape around his shoulders, because holy shit the cold was settling in. “Couldn’t even tell me if she’d called anyone, much less when we could expect the pipes to be fixed—we are paying tenants, we’re not some filthy vagrants squatting in an apartment—”

Mac wrinkled his nose. “You think it’s illegal to fix pipes yourself?” he said. “Not me, I mean—my cousin, though. He owns a construction company, he could probably do it. Well, not him, his back’s all busted, but he knows people. He’s actually retired.”

Dennis made a noise of half-interest. “Sounds rough,” he said. “The back thing, I mean.”

“He says weed helps, but all he gets locally is high school kids selling stems and oregano. And he lives up in Jersey, so unless he gets cancer he’s not getting it medically.”

“You should hook him up.” Dennis marched over to the window and peered through the blinds. The incoming clouds were a dull, metal gray, the color of old armor, swallowing the horizon completely. “Set him up with Cornflake, and he taps people to fix our place up. Simple.”

“That’s… huh,” Mac said. His gaze grew thoughtful. “Never thought of that.”

“Well, you’re welcome,” Dennis said absently. He squinted at the sky. “We’re not supposed to get that much snow tonight, are we?”

“Now we are.” Mac waved his phone in Dennis’ direction. “They changed the tracker, we’re getting a direct hit. It’s gonna be over two feet in some places.”

Dennis scrolled through Mac’s phone, reading weather updates as his face fell grim. “Over two feet,” he echoed. “Awesome.”

Behind him, a fat snowflake drifted out of a moody gray sky.

—

Winter Storm Balthazar loomed over Philadelphia like an omen. Two hours later, Mac was pacing around the apartment as he nattered at Charlie on the phone.

“I know, it’s insane!” he was saying. “… They already canceled classes at Temple, I think. Maybe UPenn.”

From his huddle of heavy blankets on the couch, Dennis said, “What, forget to study for a midterm?”

“Hang on—what? Oh, no dude,” Mac said. “College kids at the bar tomorrow. We’re trying to capitalize on it.”

“We’re open tomorrow?”

“What? No, not you Charlie, it’s—why wouldn’t we be open? We do good business on snow days.”

Dennis just scowled, and tugged the blankets up past his chin.

Mac turned back to the window, shaking his head. “I know, it’s ridiculous how much we’re getting,” he said. “And it’s not stopping. … Dude, absolutely. Hang on one sec—hey, Dennis?”

“What.”

“Charlie and Frank are rounding up guys from their building for a snowball fight,” Mac told him. “You wanna go?”

Dennis boggled at him. “Are you crazy?”

“Since when are snowball fights crazy?” Mac said. “Dude, come on, snowball fight! When was the last time you were in one of those?”

“Do I look like I care?” Dennis said. “Mac, it is a frozen goddamn wasteland out there.”

“It’s a frozen wasteland in here! At least out there you’d be moving around,” Mac argued.

He didn’t want to admit that Mac was right, so he tightened the blankets around his shoulders instead.

“Charlie? … Yeah—yeah, no, I’ll be there. Don’t know when.” He lowered the phone. “Dennis.”

“Now what?”

Mac’s sigh was long-suffering. “Look, if you don’t want to go,” he said, “then can I least borrow your car?”

“You want to take my car.”

“Obviously,” Mac said, chopping a hand at the snow-covered window. “What, you think I wanna walk in that?”

“I’m not so sure you should drive in that either!”

Mac rolled his eyes. “Well then what would you have me do?” he said, and Dennis finally tossed the blankets aside.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, “if you’re that serious about this stupid fight, then fine. I’ll drive.” He crossed his arms, then, tucked his hands into his pits. It was abysmally cold in the apartment; he had to fight not to let his teeth chatter. “I’m staying with the car though.”

“Then stay with the goddamn car,” Mac said. He shuffled his weight then from foot to foot, and rubbed at his forearm. “Thanks.”

“Just get dressed,” Dennis muttered, thoroughly exasperated, already trudging into the bedroom in search of a third pair of socks. And a second sweater.

And his common sense, if he could even find it.

—

It was, admittedly, one of the smartest ideas Mac had ever come up with, even if curled up in the backseat of the car wasn’t the most comfortable position in the world to doze in. The blasting heat made a world of difference, enough that Dennis hoped the snowball fight lasted well into the evening.

It didn’t. Mac popped up in front of the window about an hour later, hair fringed with snowflakes and the tip of his nose bright red as he smushed it into the glass.

“You missed out,” he chattered as he slid into the passenger seat, “on the best, most craziest snowball fight I have ever been in, at least. It was me and Charlie and these two guys down the hall against Frank and Cricket and the family above Frank and Charlie, except no one actually knew who invited Cricket, so we weren’t sure if tagging him was supposed to count—”

“Mac,” Dennis said, and Mac stopped, still panting with exertion.

“It was pretty awesome,” he then said, but he didn’t go into detail, and Dennis’ internal sigh was one of relief. “Even you would’ve enjoyed it.”

“I’m sure I would’ve,” Dennis said, keying the ignition.

Mac had the radio cranked loud enough to cover the squealing coming from the engine—the first sign of trouble. And Dennis dismissed the second sign, a rattling noise like a spray of sharp rocks peppering the undercarriage—that was the usual infrastructure damage that always came with a bad snowstorm.

But the steering wheel locking up, they caught that pretty damn quickly.

The Range Rover ground to a halt in the middle of the road. “What just happened?” Mac said, suddenly very puzzled.

“Not sure.” Dennis tried the wheel again, jerking it hard to the side. It barely budged.

“What’s wrong with the steering wheel?”

He snapped the radio off. “I don’t know,” Dennis said, tight like his lungs were stuffed in his throat. The battery light came to life, and the Range Rover’s headlights flickered and dimmed, a dying rescue flare.

Mac was pulling out his phone. “Should I call triple-A?”

“I don't know yet. Maybe.” Dennis squinted at the dashboard. “Hang on, let me try something.”

He switched the ignition off, then on; the car clanked to life after a sluggish moment. The wheel still refused to move. He killed the ignition again, and dread thickened in his gut like tar.

“The hood’s smoking.” Peering through the falling snow, Mac pointed at darkness. “Dennis? The hood, look.”

“I see it.”

Mac glanced at the dashboard. Worry flashed over his face like lightning. “The battery light, too,” he said. “Is it something wrong with the battery?”

“Will you just fucking call triple-A?” Dennis snapped, and Mac drew back like he’d been stung. Dennis sighed for what seemed like forever and tried again, more careful this time, measured. “I’m—I’m going to go check. Call triple-A? Please? Before we end up freezing to death?”

Grim-faced, Mac nodded. Dennis steeled his resolve and pushed open the door.

Eddies of snow whipped into his eyes as the cold needled at his skin. His hands were useless blocks of wood, beating clumsily along the grill as he fumbled for the release. It took a few tries before he caught the latch, and Dennis coughed in surprise as the hood opened up in a haze of smoke, lazy ice-white tendrils uncoiling to greet him.

Still coughing, he quickly cleared the air. And then the pit dropped out of his stomach.

“Well?” Mac said as Dennis stormed inside, snow flurrying out of his hair. “Is it the battery?”

“It’s—no, it’s not the battery. The serpentine belt broke,” Dennis said.

Frozen hands slammed hard on the wheel as Mac’s brow furrowed. “Okay, and that’s…”

“The serpentine belt, y’know. The thing, it like—it powers the alternator and the steering and the goddamn water pump. Or it did until it fucking snapped in half,” Dennis said. The growl in his throat deepened to a snarl.

Alarm darkening his face, Mac said, “That’s not as bad as it sounds, is it Dennis?”

“What do you think,” Dennis said, and the way Mac blanched was answer enough. “What’d triple-A say?”

“I couldn’t get through to them. I’m trying again now,” Mac said, holding out his phone. Dennis watched until the call failed, then sat back. A pervasive numbness, dense as lead, was settling into his bones.

“That’s it,” he said. “We’re going to die out here. We’re actually going to freeze to death and die.”

“Dude, we’re not—all right, look, we’ll put the heat on until we can get a signal—”

“Mac, we can’t just leave the heat on, don’t you get that?” Dennis said harshly. “No alternator means we're gonna kill the battery, and no water pump means we can’t run the engine or it’ll overheat and destroy my fucking car. We won't get a signal before that.”

The mask of frustration slipped off Mac’s face. Bleak horror shivered alive beneath it.

“Should’ve expected this. No, really, I should have. I knew going along would be a bad idea,” Dennis continued. “I knew it, and what did I do? I went along with it anyway. Not like that’s never happened before.”

“What are you talking about?” Mac asked him.

“You.” His mouth worked on autopilot. “I’m talking about you.”

“What?”

“Oh, yeah. This is mostly your doing,” Dennis went on. There was this disaffected quality to his voice, like he didn’t have enough air to form the words correctly, and they all came out strangely deflated. “I knew I didn’t want to come out here, but you insisted. I had to do it, really. And look where it’s gotten us.”

“You didn’t have to come with,” Mac said bitterly. “Don’t go pinning the blame on me, okay? No one forced you to make a decision but you, dude.”

“No, of course! This is all my fault,” Dennis said, and even he couldn’t tell if he was joking. “I totally saw this coming.”

He slouched forward, shoulders shaking in madness or hysteria or both. His lips peeled back into a grimace, and he swallowed the urge to howl.

“You’re scaring me, Dennis, Jesus Christ,” Mac said, watching him like a timer was strapped to his chest, red numbers resolutely ticking down.

“I’m scaring you. Me, and not the fact that we’re about to die in my goddamn car.”

“We’re not going to die, okay? We’re not,” Mac insisted, and he kept fucking staring like Dennis would turn his head and make eye contact and reunite with a long-lost sense of hope. “We’ll wait out the storm until it ends, then we’ll call for a tow and get a lift back and we will be fine, got it?”

Dennis sneered. “Of course I do.”

“Good.”

“Christ,” Dennis said, slumping back into his seat. Mac could be so stubborn. Legs drawn against his chest, he hooked his chin over his knees and studied his hands. Already losing feeling in his extremities; the tips of his fingers were a dull, ugly white.

He heard Mac try for a tow truck again, and firmly shut his eyes.

—

A few hours later and they still weren’t dead, but God, if Winter Storm Balthazar wasn’t trying his hardest.

The battery died after an hour, and in the absence of heat the chill crept in like a shadow. They migrated to the back seat of the car; first Mac, muttering something about needing to stretch out, and then Dennis a short while later, shoving Mac’s legs down the bench seat so he could curl up under the window and sleep.

That last part kept evading him, because, as Dennis soon discovered, Mac’s teeth chattered in the cold.

“Will you at least keep your goddamn mouth shut,” he growled, kicking blindly at Mac’s ankle. “I am trying to sleep.”

“I can’t help it,” Mac said. “I have an overactive jaw.”

“That’s not even a thing.”

“Well, it is for me.”

“Well either figure out a way to stop it, or I will.”

Mac huffed. “It’s not like I’m not trying,” he said as he crossed his arms. “I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re trapped in the middle of a blizzard, okay?”

“Now do you believe me when I say we’re going to die out here?”

“No,” Mac snapped. His arms hugged across his chest. “… But it is really cold.”

Dennis shut his eyes and muttered, “Yeah, no shit.”

Mac went quiet, lost in his thoughts long enough for Dennis to skirt the edge of sleep. “I have an idea,” he then said, and Dennis opened his eyes despite himself. “I read this thing. If you imagine yourself in a warm place, you’ll automatically start to feel like you’re getting hotter.”

“A warm place,” Dennis repeated. His frown was utterly skeptical. “And what warm place did you have in mind?”

“I don’t know,” Mac said. “Mexico. Cancún.”

“Cancún? Mac, you’ve never been.”

“Neither have you! And that doesn't actually matter,” Mac said, and Dennis wriggled and sat up so they were face-to-face. “Just use your imagination.”

“Because that’s how I want to go out. Dreaming of a place I’ve never been,” Dennis said. “Torturing myself with the thought of all the places I could have gone, had I not agreed to come along for the goddamn ride.”

“Dennis, enough,” Mac said loudly. “All right? Holy shit, dude, it’s not like you knew that the belt was going to break.”

“No? I could’ve guessed,” Dennis shot back. “I should have guessed. The car’s been sounding off. It’s freezing cold outside. But I didn’t, and now we’re stuck here, with visions of maracas dancing in our heads. How’s that for a real life Thelma and Louise?”

Mac’s befuddled frown took the wind out of Dennis’ sails. “Huh?”

“They were—in the movie, they were going to Mexico,” he said lamely. “And hey, look how well that turned out.”

“I know how it turned out, Dennis,” Mac said, frowning. “And we’re still not dying.”

“No?”

His insistence bordered on fervor.  “We’re not freezing to death, we’re not dying in a car. We’re calling a tow truck in the morning and after we get your car fixed we’re gonna go straight to Mexico.”

“Okay. Sure.”

“Look, do you at least wanna try to get warm or don’t you?” Mac said crossly, and Dennis scowled at him and squinted; but then he’d swept his hand out at Mac and Mac straightened up with a tiny, self-conscious wriggle. “So. Mexico.”

“We just got my car back, it’s got a brand-new belt. Go on.”

“We pack up a Uhaul and drive out one morning, before anyone can stop us,” Mac said, shutting his eyes, gnawing at his lip as he thought up an impromptu plan.”We drive as fast as we can until we cross over the border and, I don’t know. Visit the Alamo or something.”

“The Alamo’s in Texas, idiot,” Dennis said flatly. “Jesus, you’re not even good at this.”

Brown eyes snapped open, a clear challenge. “Well then why don’t you try.”

Fine. Dennis dropped his shoulders, cracked his neck, and sat up: challenge accepted. “We skip to the part where we’re already at the border, right, crossing over the Rio Grande. So now we’re in Mexico, and once we convert all our cash into pesos, we start to drive all the way down the Gulf.”

“Not feeling any warmer.”

“I’m getting started, Jesus. Let me get into it,” Dennis said peevishly. “All right: so we drive along the Gulf of Mexico . And it’s all… like, it looks like a damn postcard. There’s all pearly sands and blue waters. A couple seagulls are wheeling around in the sky. We drive along the highway until we stop at this little bungalow of a resort, and we tip the owner a few extra pesos to spend the night on the actual beach.”

The deep furrows of stress on Mac’s brow relaxed, faded away. He slowly closed his eyes.

“It’s the most gorgeous beach we’ve ever been to,” Dennis continued. His voice had smoothed low into a murmur, honeyed, quixotic. “We’re completely out of the way, so there’s no one else around and we have the beach all to ourselves. Underneath us are sands warm and soft as silk. The white surf churns and froths along the shore. The breeze from the ocean is a gentle kiss.” The blizzard from the north, however, was a feral bite, a rabid animal; Dennis shuddered while the wind whistled and snapped.

“Okay, breeze, sandy beach, go on,” Mac prompted. Dennis shook himself, tried to concentrate. “Do we have anything to drink?”

“Of… course we do, Mac, we’re in Méjico. Tequila is at our beck and call.” He wrapped his arms around himself, imagined shot after shot burning down his throat. “We’ll be doing shots from sundown to Tequila Sunrise.”

“Nice.”

His bones and the frame of the Range Rover rattled. “Totally. And then we’ll just—just throw down a bedsheet, right there on the shore. Sleep in the next morning and wake up just in time to build up a base tan before we hit the road and—and—goddammit, Mac, this isn’t working.”

Mac’s eyes flew open. “Dude, you’re doing good,” he said. “You have to believe you're there or it won't work.”

“Believe I'm there? I’m fucking freezing,” Dennis spat. “Tell me how I'm supposed to believe I'm in Mexico when I'm this goddamn cold.”

“Well unless you wanna huddle together for warmth, or you get lucky and a taun-taun bites it right outside the car, I don’t know what else to tell you.”

Brows lifting, Dennis said, “Huddle together for warmth?”

“Yeah. Like what Bear Grylls would do?” Mac’s voice was clipped and bitter.

“Bear Grylls works alone.”

“Well, if he had a partner!”

“Well maybe Bear Grylls had the right idea,” Dennis snipped, and Mac rolled his eyes hard and flipped around, hands tucked under his armpits and legs drawn in close.

Outside, the wind screamed agony. The cold leeched through the frozen window. There were needles shooting through Dennis’ fingertips, he’d lost feeling in the tip of his nose. And the shuddery exhale he managed was pure white frost.

Dennis squirmed across the bench seat and all but grabbed Mac’s arm.

“Yo, what the—Dennis!” Mac squawked as Dennis pried him loose. “The fuck are you doing?!”

“Hey, you suggested this,” Dennis said, piercing Mac with an icy glare. “It’s what Bear Grylls would’ve done, right? That’s what you said?”

He continued to work Mac’s limbs free from their hold around his torso, and wound an arm behind Mac’s waist. “Yeah, and then you bitched at me about Bear Grylls working alone!” Mac said.

“You’re not Bear Grylls,” Dennis said, “and neither am I.” Their legs hooked together sharply; they pressed together like magnets, without so much as a whisper of space between them. Mac was stiff to the core with shock. “Look, I know this is a little unorthodox—”

“Dennis, you fucking jumped me!”

“—but it’s freezing cold and I’m out of working ideas,” Dennis snapped.

“Working ideas?” The fire in Mac’s eyes blazed bright. “It was working just fine for me, bro. Not my fault you didn’t believe in it.”

Dennis’ mouth thinned. “You know,” he said, deadly quiet, “if you’re just gonna—you know what, fine, but it was your idea, remember that when you’re identifying my dead and frozen corpse down at the county morgue—”

Mac grabbed hold of his parka just as he tried to pull back; Dennis paused, wary. Mac’s expression was clouded and unreadable.

Someone’s heart was racing. Dennis couldn’t tell whose. But he could hear it above the howling winds.

“Just. Here,” Mac muttered, and he shifted around, rearranging their bodies; the blocky puzzle Dennis had forced them into gave way to two twined threads. He ducked his head, and Dennis ended up resting his cheek against Mac’s shoulder.

“You’re supposed to worry about your core,” Mac was saying, and he was so close but his voice was the faintest echo. “‘Cause of your organs? You’re supposed to worry about keeping them warm.”

“I actually can’t feel my fingers,” Dennis said with a bleak laugh. “Think my organs are all I’ve got left to worry about.”

“Try thinking about Mexico again. But this time think about it like you’re already there, that’s how it’s supposed to work,” Mac said.

“Forget it.” Dennis huffed. “We’re not going to Mexico.”

His heart thudded in his throat. Mac’s arm tightened around his shoulders and he wanted to pull away.

“You know where I really wanna go?” Dennis then said, bitterness rising in him like bile. “Home. Our old home. Our old apartment. I want to go home and I want to sleep in my own bed and I want my life to go back to goddamn normal.”

Mac had nothing to say to that. Not that Dennis expected an answer.

“But no. I get this, and I get burst pipes, and I get a broken serpentine belt. I get to sleep on a mattress when I am home. I get to cuddle you like an oversized carnival prize so I don’t end up freezing to death, but yeah, let’s talk about how we’re going to go to Mexico one day.”

“That’s because we will,” Mac told him. “We will go.”

“Sure.”

“Also?” Mac went on with religious conviction. “We’re gonna fix your car’s belt and get someone to fix up the pipes, and we’ll even move out of our apartment one day, and get a real bed with a real, actual bed frame underneath it. Maybe even a box spring. And after all is said and done, we’re going to go to Mexico, but first we’re going to not die.”

Dennis shook his head. The tip of his nose brushed Mac’s neck—he couldn’t even feel it. “And I thought you couldn’t tell a story to save your goddamn life,” he said, with a harsh bark of laughter.

“It’s not a story, okay Dennis?” Mac said. “It’s a promise.”

And Dennis could have said something about how much a promise was worth—Mac could promise that they’d live forever and he’d be right up until the day one of them croaked, and either Dennis would go first and he'd die believing in a falsehood; or Mac would, and Dennis would never get the chance to tell him he was wrong after all.

He could’ve said something. He closed his eyes instead. He listened to the steady, thrumming pulse of Mac’s heartbeat, like it was one dispassionate moment away from proving him exactly right.

—

Even in a car in the middle of a snowstorm, Dennis was a light sleeper, and he woke as dawn broke, gray threads of light filtering through the cloud cover like spiderwebs. He’d fallen onto his side in his sleep, wriggling to the edge sometime in the night. The question of how he hadn’t rolled into the seatwell answered itself: the heavy weight of Mac’s arm tightened over his waist, and Mac nestled closer behind him.

Dennis had almost forgotten what real warmth felt like.

A thin layer of frost coated the Range Rover’s window, but inside was another story; Mac had his pointy nose pressed into the nape of his neck and his thigh slotted between both of Dennis’ legs. While the back seat of a Range Rover wasn’t necessarily comfortable, they’d scrunched and contorted themselves to somehow make it work, and the result was a reassuringly solid spell of warmth that had Dennis drifting back off, eyelids drooping shut.

His bladder had other ideas.

Dennis lifted his head from Mac’s arm and carefully disentangled his legs, dropping catlike into the seatwell. Above him, Mac snuffled. Dennis froze. Mac’s mouth squirmed for a second, nose twitching, but he relaxed after a moment and Dennis sighed quietly in relief.

If he believed in God, Dennis would’ve sent Him a quick thanks for the layup. As it happened, he merely crept into the front, grabbed his keys, and slipped out into the snow-covered street.

The temperature hovered a few degrees above the freezing point, which had Dennis unzipping in record time. Everywhere he looked glittered white and silent; even the plows hadn’t found them in this part of the city. He finished and zipped himself back up, squinting at the horizon as the sun peeked through the cracks.

It was entirely possible that he and Mac were alone out here, which was too big a thought to deal with this early in the morning. Shivering, Dennis tucked his hands into the pockets of his parka, and thought.

He now had the option of crawling back into the car, possibly curling up in the back seat again. Mac wasn’t awake yet. Dennis could slip in quietly, lie back against him, steal warmth and sleep until someone could come and rescue them.

Either that, or go visit the Starbucks blinking to life across the street.

It didn’t take a genius to decide.

The barista yawned at him as he reached the counter. “Can I help you?”

Dennis chuckled. “You too, huh.”

“Don’t even get me started,” the barista told him with a good-natured snort. “I barely slept, it was so cold. You hear that wind last night? Thought I was gonna wake up in friggin’ Munchkinland.”

Dennis thought about last night, and waking up next to Mac. He thought about waking up at all. “Uh, yeah,” he said, “me too.”

He cleared his throat, and ordered two coffees, one with extra vanilla. Mac sent a text as he was waiting for the drip coffee to brew: ?

sbux, Dennis sent back, and two coffee emojis.

Add vanilla to mine, Mac texted, and Dennis almost had to smile.

He’d crawled out of the Range Rover by the time Dennis got back, and greeted him with a stretch and a yawn. “Forgot to ask for extra,” he said.

“I got you your extra,” Dennis told him. “You’re welcome.”

A bare grin flickered across Mac’s face.

They drank their coffees leaning back against the Range Rover. The sun had crested the tops of the buildings, by now, temperature rising at a steady pace. A fragile shell of silence stretched the moment thin and brittle, waiting for the wrong words before it finally shattered.

Even thinking too loudly might do it.

They kept quiet until the first snowplow muscled down the street, and then they snapped out of it, Mac clearing his throat right around the time Dennis was saying, “So,” in strictly non-confrontational tones. Mac raised his cup first, nodding at him, and Dennis bit the inside of his cheek. “You can probably get a signal now.”

Mac studied him, expression shuttered. “Should be able to,” he agreed, and drained the rest of his cup.

“Yep.” A beat. “Shouldn’t be waiting long.”

“Half an hour. More or less.”

Dennis stared down at his coffee. “Mm.”

“Hopefully it’s less,” Mac added. “I wanna go home already.”

And Dennis thought of waking up in the back seat of the car, tucked close into Mac’s body, and the soft glow of warmth he exuded like a beacon; and he blamed the cold weather for the sudden icy pit in his stomach.

—

They never talked about January.

Consciously, he’d forgotten it; Winter Storm Balthazar was the last major nor’easter that winter, and they limped along well enough while the Range Rover was in the shop. But the memory lingered like a ghost in the back of his mind, surfacing especially in the early hours of morning, when Dennis would wake up mere inches away from Mac on the mattress, curled close in his direction.

It felt like widespread bodily mutiny, irritating to say the very least. And it wasn’t letting up.

He wondered if it was any noticeable. Or maybe he was just losing it. At any rate, Mac never said anything, small wonder that that was. Nothing had changed for him, it seemed, and it was beginning to drive Dennis a little off the rails.

“Dennis.” Mac’s voice came in hushed and urgent over the phone. “Slight problem with the movies.”

“Okay.”

“So I don’t think they have Clueless,” Mac whispered, while Dennis stood in the middle of a Wawa aisle and tried to remember if Mac liked Twix or not. “I asked Nancy and she said it’d be on the shelf if they had it, but I don’t see it.”

“So someone else probably has it,” Dennis said. “It’s a library, Mac. It does happen.”

“Yeah, but that means we’re one short. So we’ve got a couple of options.” There was a plasticky shuffling noise. “The Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, 10 Things I Hate About You, or Mean Girls, but that’s from 2004, which technically means it doesn’t fit.”

“Who’s in that one?”

“Uh. Lindsay Lohan and that chick from The Notebook,” Mac said, sounding surprised. “I think it’s supposed to be good. Nancy actually owns it.”

“Fine, go with Mean Girls.”

“Oh.” There was an extended pause. “But I heard Buffy was supposed to be bad, but like good-bad? Which fits with our theme more, so—”

“Then go with Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Dennis said. “It’ll be fine either way.”

“I was just asking,” Mac said, mulish. There was more shuffling. “I’m gonna go check these out. You almost done over there?”

Dennis scowled. “Almost.”

“All right, I’ll be back at the apartment in fifteen. See you there,” Mac said.

“You sure will,” Dennis muttered as he hung up the phone, and then grabbed Twix anyway, and a handful of York patties, and several tubes of mini M&Ms, indiscriminate and uncaring. He’d regret them all the same tomorrow, he always did.

The cashier raised a bushy eyebrow as he approached, arms chock-full of candy. “Movie date for Valentine's?” she said. “Buffy's pretty bad, you know.”

“What?” A flush burned up his neck, his ears. Dennis glared at her. “No. And I don’t think I asked.”

The cashier quirked her lips and said nothing, and that was far worse.

His phone buzzed as he left the Wawa: a teasing scowl and an equally disdainful Kristy Swanson took over the screen as Mac mugged for a selfie with a copy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Dennis shook his head, smiling fondly. Then he realized what he’d done. He hastily stuffed his phone in his pocket.

Maybe he’d take his time getting back to the apartment.

—

Home!!!!!! Where r u?

Dennis?

Dude hello where the fuck r u

Its been 15 minutes...............?

YO!!! Answer ur fucking phone!!!

DENNIS

Im calling 911 if u dont call me in 5min fair warning

Dennis rolled his eyes when Mac answered on the first ring. “Finally! Dude, where are you?”

“A bar,” Dennis said, which was sort of true. He was standing in front of a bar. Hadn’t worked up the courage to go in, though.

“A bar?” He could almost hear the baffled wrinkle scrunching between Mac’s brows. “Where, Paddy’s?”

“Skinner’s. It’s on Market,” Dennis said, peering up at the weathered sign. “Weird name, right?”

“Why are you at a bar on Market Street?”

There was a note of hesitation underlying Mac’s tone, and Dennis almost stopped himself, almost. “I met someone,” he lied.

“You met someone,” Mac said.

“Yeah. At the Wawa,” Dennis went on. “Cashier and I got to talking, she said she got off work in a few minutes, if I was sticking around. I stuck around. She got off work. Now we’re at a bar.”

“Dennis.” Mac’s voice was full of disbelief. “So you’re, what, on a date?”

“Looks like it. I mean, it is Valentine’s Day, so I guess it’s kind of appropriate.”

“Yeah,” Mac said, drawn-out, “but what about the movies?”

“What, our thing?” Dennis shrugged, before he realized Mac wasn’t around to witness. “Do it another day.”

“Dude. It’s Valentine’s Day,” Mac said. “We always make fun of bad teenage rom-coms from the nineties on Valentine’s Day. That’s the whole point.”

“It’s not that big a deal, man,” Dennis said with a short laugh. “Look, if you’re that put out about it, start watching without me. Maybe I’ll strike out and come back early.”

Silence, for a long moment. “Just give me a heads-up,” Mac said, without emotion.

Dennis almost hung up on him without answering, but decided against it, claiming overkill. “Will do, buddy,” he said, overly cheerful, and he pressed End with a high sense of accomplishment. A high, fleeting sense of accomplishment, a sense that abandoned him and left a resounding hollow of emptiness in its wake.

At least he hadn’t lied about the bar part. And if he was going to kill time with a fake girl on a fake date for Valentine’s Day, he might as well buy her a damn drink.

—

It was almost three in the morning when Dennis stumbled into the apartment. He caught his hand on the doorknob and hissed loudly, and Mac jolted up from the couch.

“Dennis?”

“Sonofabitch,” Dennis said, cradling his palm with his other hand. He kicked the door shut behind him and staggered inside, stopped when he saw Mac squinting hard, light-red couch prints creasing his face. “Goddammit that hurts.”

“Dude, it is.” Mac glanced at his phone and his eyes widened. “Where’ve you been?”

“You know, I don’t really get people’s sense of humor these days,” Dennis said. “Or maybe I just don’t ‘appreciate’ it right. Is it a millennial thing? Is that it? Have the millennials killed having a sense of humor?”

Utterly perplexed, Mac said, “What?”

“You think it’s funny,” Dennis spat the word out like a vulgar swear, “to, to play the Cure at a goddamn bar on Valentine’s Day? Knowing full well, full goddamn well, that a bar is typically where the lonely and the broken-hearted go to congregate and drown their sorrows—on Valentine’s Day. And then there’s this jag-off, and he goes over to the jukebox, and what does he do?”

“Dude, I don’t even—”

“He plays the fucking Cure,” Dennis said, collapsing with a thoomp into the couch cushions. “Like ha ha, so ironic, right? I wanted to go over there and strangle him. I almost did, mind you.”

“Cure for what?” Mac was saying. “Dude, you re not even making real sense.”

“Not a cure. The Cure,” Dennis said, and he waved his hand around, the world's sloppiest conductor. “Band. From like, I don’t know. Sad goth people music. With the dude that wears eyeliner.”

“So some guy—played sad goth music and wore eyeliner?”

Dennis sighed heavily through his nostrils, and touched his hands to his temples. “No,” he said, “he wasn’t wearing the eyeliner. He played this song—you wouldn’t know it. ‘Lovesong.’”

“Okay?”

“Mac, it's a love song.”

“I kinda got that,” Mac said.

“On Valentine’s Day?” Dennis added, like it was obvious.

“Okay,” Mac said again. He wasn’t getting it. “That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

“Not at a bar!” Dennis cried, swinging an arm at the coffee table. Rented copies of Can’t Hardly Wait and Never Been Kissed tumbled to the floor. “You take a heartfelt, emotionally-wrenching piece of poetry like that and you just—you just set it loose? Do you know what that did to all those poor lonely women?”

The arch of Mac’s eyebrow was highly unamused. “Since when did you know so much about goth people music?” he said.

“I don’t!” Dennis said with a screech. It had no effect on Mac. “Look, it’s not important, it’s obvious what happened. Everyone could see it. All these women, you know, suddenly they're too sad or too broken-up over their boyfriends or their ex-boyfriends or their almost boyfriends. They're so sad that they're all like get away from me, weirdo—and it's not weird, what's weird is that they can't see a good thing when it's sitting right in front of them. That's what's weird. That's what happened.”

Dennis thumped his fist against the couch.

Mac’s gaze narrowed in suspicion. “I thought you were already on a date,” he said.

“I was,” Dennis said quickly; Mac didn’t budge. “You know what? Fine. I wasn’t! I lied, Mac. I lied.”

Mac flattened his mouth into a frown, and a spark kindled behind his eyes.

“I was trying to be on a date,” Dennis added, “until some millennial asshole with a twisted sense of humor came in and killed the mood. I had to sit and do shots with the goddamn bartender while everyone around me bitched about their friends getting married on Facebook all the time. Goddamn nauseating, is what it was. I would've had a chance if it weren't for that kid.”

Scoffing, Dennis hung his head over the back of the couch. The room whirled. He closed his eyes.

“Why didn’t you just come home?”

One eye snapped open. “What?”

Mac’s expression was unreadable, and whether that was his doing or the room’s general blurriness was anyone’s guess. “If you struck out,” he said, with a delicate bitterness, “then why didn’t you just leave?”

“It’s not like the song went on forever,” Dennis explained. “The vibe could’ve picked up.”

“Did it?”

“No! And it ruined my whole goddamn night!”

“Your night—” His fists clenched and unclenched at his sides. A vein was throbbing in his neck, and if Dennis listened very closely, he could hear the grinding of teeth. The spark in Mac’s eyes blazed, bright and fierce.

Good. He could use a distraction.

Ten tense seconds tore past them. Dennis coiled back, ready to strike. They locked eyes, and Dennis didn’t breathe; then, sudden as a gunshot, Mac dropped his shoulders and broke away. He stared down at the floor, slumping like a broken puppet, and one hand rose up to pinch the bridge of his nose.

“It’s been,” he said. His voice sagged with exhaustion. “Dennis, it’s been a long, long night, okay?”

“Okay,” Dennis said, wary.

“Okay,” Mac said again, not looking up. “You should go to bed.”

Wait. “What?” Dennis jerked back in surprise. “You’re not mad at me?”

“Do you want me to be mad at you?” Mac snarled, tensing.

“No,” Dennis said quickly. The flashpoint of rage that had flared in Mac’s eyes cooled in dense, sluggish waves. Shades of anger still flickered, obscured his face in shadow.

Mac stood up abruptly and hauled Dennis off the couch. Before he could react, Mac was steering him into the bedroom. Dennis was either too disoriented by the recent turn of events or still disoriented from the events of a few hours ago, but any way you sliced it, it ended up with Mac giving his parka several disgruntled tugs.

“What are you doing?”

Mac was pointedly not looking at him. “Making sure you don’t end up getting hot and kicking me in my sleep,” he said.

“I can do it myself, Jesus.” Dennis shook him off and fumbled out of his parka. Mac rolled his eyes, left him to strip down to boxer-briefs and a shirt. He stumbled into bed while the room spun in lazy pirouettes.

Some Valentine’s Day.

He shut his eyes. The insides of his brain had taken up ballet. His brain stem was threatening to wobble out of his body in pointe shoes. Dennis gently lowered his head, hoping the cool pillow or the feeling of being horizontal or a even surprise meteor would do something to help him out of this swirling sinkhole of misery.

No such luck.

Some fucking Valentine’s Day.

He’d almost resigned himself to a tragic end when the door opened. It had to have been Mac, because no one else stomped around that loudly without meaning to. Mac crouched beside him and poked him hard in the side.

“Christ,” Dennis grunted, “what.”

Mac stuck out his hand. Two white pills. Dennis’ sharp glare glinted in the moonlight.

“It’s aspirin, asshole,” Mac said. “Here.” His other hand shoved a glass of water into Dennis’ arm.

Dennis took both the water and the aspirin and swallowed the pills down, still glaring at Mac over the top of the glass rim. “I don’t need your help,” he then said.

“Yeah, well.” Mac snatched the glass back. “Sucks to be you.”

Dennis glared even harder. Mac broke away first, muttering threats about what would happen if Dennis threw up on him later that night. The floorboards squeaked as he stalked out.

Dennis crawled under the covers and tugged them up all the way past his shoulders, shutting his eyes again. He would’ve been just as fine without Mac’s nannying, and Mac was just doing it to make himself feel useful, and he could be so cloying sometimes, so desperate. It was no way for a grown man to treat his best friend. Honestly, and he hated to use the word—it was embarrassing.

The sounds of Can’t Hardly Wait filtered in low from the living room. They always ended the night on it—Dennis would come up with ridiculous nicknames for Jennifer Love Hewitt’s breasts and Mac would belt out “Paradise City” completely off-key and they would always, always point out how, for a movie set in Philadelphia, the weather was awfully nice.

Dennis snapped open his eyes, and tried to sit up; then the bedroom was a carousel off its axis, and that was the exact reason why his gut lurched and he laid back down in defeat, that awful spinning feeling and nothing more.

—

He wasn’t sure if he’d slept, but he stirred anyway at the sound of the door whispering open.

Mac slipped in silently, shucked his clothes and dropped them manually into the hamper. He padded back in only boxers and a T-shirt and socks, and he lowered himself to the mattress with an unexpectedly fluid grace.

“Hey,” Dennis murmured, speech softly slurred, and Mac shot up like a cat on a live wire.

“Jesus H.,” Mac said, palm slammed over his chest. “Holy shit, you scared me.”

Dennis made a low noise, one eyelid shuttering. Mac dropped back down.

“Did you even sleep?” he asked, and Dennis mumbled something vague. “Dude, seriously, go to sleep already.”

A noncommital whuffle of air from the nose. Mac slid carefully under the covers, and he kept glancing oddly at Dennis as he tugged the blanket close. He finally shut his eyes with a dismissive little shake.

“Thank you,” Dennis said. His eyes were open, gleaming, barely slits.

Brown met blue. Mac’s were creased with worry, with wariness. “For what?”

“For.” Winnowing thoughts squirmed against the tide, too narrow to grab hold of. But there were a few, and Dennis grappled at them with useless clumsy hands—a glass of water and a few pills and the undeserved crush of mercy all slipped from his grasp. “Before.”

“Before.”

His mouth was dry, ash and bone. “Think I should’ve come home,” he said.

There was a heavy pause. Mac was unreadable, unfathomable; moonlight traced him dreamy with blue, veiled his features in shadow. So maybe Dennis should’ve been more surprised when Mac leaned forward and pressed their foreheads together—he hadn’t had a chance to expect it, after all.

Mac was warm against him.

“Dennis,” Mac said in a quiet voice. “You’re really fucking drunk.”

He pulled away when Dennis nodded, and settled back down on his pillow, finding sleep in minutes.

Dennis followed.

—

If the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning is run and stick your head over a toilet bowl, statistically speaking, your day can’t get any worse. Excluding your more phenomenal class of horrors—news of your favorite celebrity dying, or a pink slip at work, or the thing you threw up in the toilet bowl blinking at you—starting out your day with the worst possible course of action is, by and large, the best way to guarantee that everything you do afterwards is simply better by default.

Or so Dennis tried to tell himself.

He groaned into the porcelain bowl again, resting itchy eyes in the crook of his elbow. Even if you were a seasoned alcoholic, everybody had that one drink they avoided at all cost, and for Dennis Reynolds, that was bottom-shelf pomegranate vodka.

He blamed the bartender. And the Russians. And whoever the hell invented pomegranates.

Probably the Russians. Probably Communists.

“How you holding up?” Mac said, in a voice that was too cheery for this time of day. Dennis just groaned, loudly at that. Mac snickered.

“I hate Russia,” Dennis mumbled into the toilet. “Communist pricks.”

“Uh huh.” Something crunched.

It was an effort to move his head, but Dennis pulled it off. Bleary-eyed, he squinted at Mac’s form in the doorway; he had a plate in one hand and what looked like a blackened-brown strip in the other. “Is that bacon?”

Another crunch. “Yup.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” Mac sucked bacon fat off the tip of his thumb. “Do you even need a reason?”

“No, Mac—dude, shut up.” Dennis sagged against the toilet bowl again. “Don’t enjoy this.”

“You brought it on yourself, bro,” Mac said, and God. He was smirking.

“I have at least twenty more years before I have to start worrying about this shit happening,” Dennis groused. He lifted his head and it miraculously held. “This—this was a misfire.”

“Still pulled the trigger.”

“So I deserve this?” Combative, and yet it rang out hollow, echoed off the chipped bathroom tile. “What is this, divine retribution?”

Mac set the plate of bacon down. “You don’t need to be overdramatic.”

“So it’s not a punishment from God for ditching you yesterday. Great, thanks. Give Him a thumbs-up from me next time, would you.”

Mac shrugged. “Like I said, you did it to yourself. Doesn’t have to mean you deserve it.”

“Make less sense, Mac, I dare you.”

Mac rolled his eyes. But the sense of schadenfreude had dissipated, at least. And while last night was pretty hazy, it couldn’t have been all that catastrophic if Mac was still talking to him in the morning.

“For what it’s worth,” he hiccuped, and Mac’s ears pricked up. “That bar was really shitty.”

Mac’s lips quirked, fleeting. “Should’ve come home and watched Buffy.”

“Yeah, I know I should’ve,” Dennis said, but his mind was dragged back the really shitty bar, and the really shitty shots of pomegranate vodka, and his stomach made a really shitty gurgling noise.

Mac had the good graces to not exploit Dennis’ misery any further, and he left quietly, shutting the bathroom door with a click behind him. And it only occurred to Dennis, several minutes after his stomach finished howling up the rest of its lining, that Mac had forgotten the plate of bacon, and he preferred soft and rubbery to hard and crunchy, and for what it was worth, bacon was a damn decent hangover food if you needed it to be.

Chapter Text

That March was Mac’s turn to pick where they went for their monthly dinner, which had never been a problem until Mac decided he was keeping his choice a secret. “It’s in Philly,” Dennis said.

“Well, obviously.”

“It’s… somewhere we’ve been to before.”

Mac had to think about it. “Not together,” he allowed.

Huh. Interesting. There weren’t many places he and Mac had been to separately. “Is it new?”

“Nope.”

Dennis frowned and stalled for time, flicking through his dresser in search of a shirt. “Formal or casual dress?”

“Pretty casual.”

Dennis paused with his hands hovering over a navy-blue oxford. “It’s not Chipotle, is it?”

“It is not Chipotle,” Mac said. “Two more guesses.”

“It’s in Philly, we haven’t been there together. It’s not a new place.” Dennis thought screw it and pulled out the shirt; there’s no such thing as too over-dressed,  his mother’s voice floated through his head. “The Italian place on Spruce?”

“Dennis, come on. Italian?” Mac made a face. “I’m cutting, not bulking. One more guess.”

“Is it an Italian place?”

“Just told you I was cutting, dude.”

“French.”

“No.”

“Korean? Oh! The Korean barbecue place Dee was talking about yesterday.”

Mac grinned in triumph. “Strike three, bro.”

Dammit. Dennis was very suddenly in the mood for Korean barbecue. But, it was Mac’s month to pick, and screwing with the system would almost certainly threaten the reservations he’d made for April. “Fine. Where are we going.”

“You’ll see.”

Dennis cocked an eyebrow. “And I’m supposed to drive us there how?”

“You’re not. We’re taking a car.” Mac proudly held up his phone. “Parking’s crap over there.”

There were far more questions than answers by now, but Dennis did know when to fold.

—

They were sneaking in booze, which ruled out any respectable restaurant. And Mac was dressed… not quite as upscale as he usually did when Dennis got to pick. Black leather jacket, pressed shirt, his nicer pair of blue pants. His hair wasn’t slicked back. He was wearing a tie.

He looked good, but not the kind of good that saw them through even a three-star door.

It was all extremely curious, and Dennis still hadn’t figured it out when the car dropped them off on South Street. The location threw him; Dennis wondered if maybe he’d pissed Mac off some time ago, and was now being subjected to an elaborate, prank-filled revenge scheme. Too elaborate for Mac alone, however, and Dennis started scanning the sidewalks for a gleeful Charlie, or Frank, or Dee.

“Yo. Dennis, let’s go.” Mac waved a hand at him.

“You picked a place on South Street?”

Mac started walking, pace unhurried, hands comfortably stuck in his pockets. Dennis matched his strides easily. “You’ll love it.”

“South Street’s a tourist trap,” Dennis said. “I’m going to love a tourist trap?”

“Dennis? I have a plan.”

“Seriously, where the hell are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

“You know I can just Google it.” They passed one of the more tawdry sex shops, and an old man with a missing front tooth and his hand down his pants beamed at them. “On my phone? I bet I could find out immediately.”

“Dude, come on, we’re almost there,” Mac said, and he was grinning in this pleading way, cracking around the ends—Dennis thought, ultimately magnanimous, What the hell. It is our monthly dinner.

Except that they soon stopped in front of the Johnny Rockets.

And Mac looked at Dennis like he’d just won the lottery.

Flat, without affect, Dennis said, “Mac.”

“I told you—I have a plan,” was all Mac said, and he grabbed Dennis by the wrist and led him to the door. There was a neon sign outside that proclaimed they were open. There was a neon sign of the logo above the entryway. There were neon lights running around the shiny white 50s-themed diner.

There was neon, was the thing of it. And Dennis realized with dawning horror that yes, Virginia, you could be overdressed for somewhere, if that somewhere glowed with a radioactive abundance of neon.

“All right,” Mac said in a stage-whisper, peering over the heads of tourists stuffing the diner full. “So we gotta find one of those tables with a working jukebox.”

“They all have working jukeboxes,” Dennis said automatically. A lot of higher functioning had suddenly kicked into autopilot.

“Not all the time,” Mac told him, as they found an unoccupied booth sat by a dusty plastic plant. Of course, Mac jumped into the seat opposite it.

Dennis slid in and accidentally disturbed the plant. His sneeze made their waitress jump.

“Geshundheit,” she said. “Um.”

Off to a great start, Dennis thought miserably. He summoned what was usually his most winningest smile. “Well, thanks,” he said, and his eyes carefully skirted her chest for a nametag, “Valerie. Great song, by the way.”

“By Amy Winehouse?” Her eyes lit up.

Dennis’ heart plummeted. “Steve Winwood,” he said, and her face registered a blank, and Dennis looked helplessly to Mac.

Mac took pity on him. “He’s just a really big fan, is all,” he told the waitress.

“Oh,” the waitress said. Dennis didn’t believe her, and mentally docked her tip.

The waitress left them with plastic-covered menus. When she was out of earshot, Dennis attacked. “What. The hell.”

Mac was rifling through his wallet. “You got a dollar bill on you? I only brought my card.”

“Out of all places to go for our monthly dinner,” Dennis said, as he dug into his pocket, “why in God’s name did you pick a Johnny Rockets?”

“You’re not mad, are you?”

“I’m certainly very perplexed,” Dennis said. He handed over the dollar. “Now what are you doing?”

“I need nickels.” Mac went over to the counter, and Dennis sat there wondering if he should’ve asked a brick wall out to monthly dinner this time. It might’ve been easier to get anything out of.

It certainly wouldn’t have settled for a kitschy hamburger joint.

Mac returned with an impressive handful of nickels. Dennis was curious despite himself. “You have a plan, you said?”

“And it is gonna blow your tits off,” Mac said. He was studying the jukebox like an ancient relic, flicking through the tabs with due diligence. “Hang on, I gotta find Tom Jones on this. Gimme one sec.”

“Tom Jones?” Dennis said, puzzled, and Mac made an absent noise of assent. The thought tumbled over in his mind until it clicked, all the pins unlocking at once.  

“Mac,” he said, “absolutely not.”

“You mean ‘Mac, absolutely,’” Mac said. “Wait, got it.” He fed a nickel into the machine, and then queued up one round of Tom Jones’ “What’s New, Pussycat?” And then he queued up another. And then he queued up a third and a fourth and a fifth.

“This is the most,” Dennis was flustered, actually flustered, “preposterous, asinine—”

“Uh, fucking hilarious.”

“—this is our monthly dinner,” Dennis hissed. Mac was down seven nickels and hunting for a round of “It’s Not Unusual.”

Which he found on the next page. “So?”

Dennis furtively glanced around, as though one of the tourists would catch on to Mac’s nefarious plot. “So,” he said, “this is supposed to be—it’s a—Jesus Christ, Mac, a John Mulaney bit?”

“You love that bit.” Two more rounds of “What’s New, Pussycat?” Dennis wasn’t sure he’d brought enough alcohol. “Dinner and a show, dude.”

“Everyone loves that bit. Everyone who’s ever heard that bit loves that bit. It is a ridiculously popular bit. But don’t you think,” and Dennis leaned in, glowering fiercely over the formica tabletop, “it’s a little overplayed by now? Mac, how many Johnny Rockets do you think have been hit up by people thinking they’re oh-so-original because they can redo a comedy bit? Probably all of them, especially the one most frequented by drunk tourists.”

“Yeah, exactly! We’re totally gonna stick it to all these drunk tourist bozos,” Mac reassured him, as he dumped the rest of the nickels into his pocket. There were eleven Tom Jones songs waiting to be heard. Dennis almost certainly didn’t have enough alcohol. Mac leaned back in his booth with his hands behind his head and grinned, clearly proud of his devious little scheme.

Dennis definitely didn’t have enough alcohol. “This is beyond insane.”

“It’s a funny bit, though, you gotta admit. And once people catch on? Dude, they’ll be losing it left and right.”

Dennis blinked. Glanced at the jukebox, then the unsuspecting people around them. Three more couples and a family with two toddlers had shown up. Mac had at least done his homework. “I mean, yes, no one’s disputing that—” The dad of that family looked frazzled already, he would pop like a balloon once he cottoned on—

“Then sit back,” Mac nudged his leg with the toe of his boot, “relax, and enjoy the show.”

Dennis pulled out his flask and drank until their waitress showed up a few moments later, then eyed her, just daring her to say something.

She took their orders from Mac instead. In addition to two servings of deep-fried carbs, Mac happily ordered the biggest vanilla milkshake on the menu and asked the waitress for two straws. With a deeply entrenched scowl, Dennis set the flask down. “Two straws, huh.”

“What? They have really good milkshakes, hop off.”

“Five dollar milkshake-good?” Mac made a face. “Come on. Pulp Fiction?”

“Oh.” Mac shrugged. “Eh.”

Dennis balked at him. “Did you just ‘eh’ Pulp Fiction?”

“Dennis, I don’t actually care that much about Tarantino,” Mac said with a frown.

“We rented both Kill Bill volumes the other night!” Dennis protested. “You sat through both of those.”

“And she only spent like ten minutes actually killing anyone named Bill. The rest of it was basically false advertising.”

“It wasn’t just about Bill,” Dennis said, rubbing at his temple. “The rest of it was how she got there. You liked the action scenes just fine.”

“Yeah, the action scenes were cool,” Mac agreed, which was a bit of leeway Dennis gratefully snatched up. “But the rest of it was just a bunch of talking. All of his movies get like that.”

“It’s not just talking, Mac, it has a point. It’s character development, it’s exposition,” Dennis tried to explain.

“That’s not exposition! Bullshit, dude. Like when the Bride was getting the sword? All she needed to say was, ‘Hanzo-sensei, your student Bill almost killed me at my wedding rehearsal, and now I’m getting revenge and you owe me a katana.’ But she went on and on for like five whole minutes beforehand.”

And this was why Lethal Weapon 7 was held up in pre-production. “She couldn’t just waltz in there and say she needed a sword—”

“Absolutely she could’ve! Dude, that’s what I’m saying, all Quentin Tarantino movies have a scene where the characters sit and talk about nothing.”

“It’s subtlety, Mac, you don’t understand. You're subtly getting to know the characters. It’s actually all relevant to the plot—”

“Relevant to the plot? Dennis,” Mac exclaimed, “if they wanted to do something relevant to the plot, then they would actually do something. Not sit around talking about warm sake or five-dollar milkshakes.”

Their waitress arrived—two cheeseburgers, two heaping paper cartons of fries, and a vanilla milkshake of ludicrous proportions. Two straws. Dennis swallowed.

When the waitress walked away, Mac slipped a flask out of his jacket. “You mind?”

Dennis stared forlornly at his paper carton. There was a ketchup smiley drawn in it, mocking him. “Do I mind what, Mac.”

“This.” And Mac knowingly shook the flask. He unscrewed the top, glanced secretively off to the sides. No one was watching. With childlike glee, he poured the contents into the milkshake.

“What is that, whiskey?”

“Bourbon,” Mac said. He looked up at Dennis, grinned and pushed the glass over. Dennis glanced at it, then Mac.

He was only human, and it was unfairly delicious, and Mac’s smug expression was the stuff of nightmares.

“See, that’s my whole point,” Mac said, as Dennis continued to sullenly drink the bourbonized milkshake. “I could’ve talked you into trying that. I could’ve talked about how good it would taste. I could have said, ‘Dennis, putting bourbon in a vanilla milkshake is the most pants-shittingly awesome thing ever, try it,’ but instead I made you do something.”

A quarter of the milkshake was already gone, and the slurping sound stopped as Dennis stared at Mac.

“See, Dennis,” Mac was saying. “It’s good, right?”

Dennis shoved the damn milkshake back before he finished it out of spite.

—

“It’s gotta be the next one, bro, I’ve been counting.”

“You’ve said that about the past six songs already.” Dennis tried his best to look sincere. “It’s okay to call it quits.”

Mac squinted at the table jukebox, squirrelly-eyed and with his mouth pinched into a frown. “One more.”

Officially exasperated, Dennis slouched back in his seat.

“It’s gonna happen,” Mac said, and Dennis rolled his eyes so hard spots formed behind them. “I promise.”

“You promise. Okay, great, you promised. And what, the jukebox song list or whatever’s gonna magically hear your promise, and magically bump your eleven Tom Jones songs up the list so we magically get a good show?”

“Dennis, they’re on there, I swear.”

“Mac. Please.” Dennis propped his elbows on the table, threaded his hands through his hair. It had been over an hour: the cheeseburger Mac had gotten him was sitting uncomfortably in his guts and his foundation felt cakey and melted under the harsh fluorescent lights and he’d licked off most of his lip balm, and in a rush had forgotten to bring the tube with him, so now his lips were cracked and dry. “Can we please go home? Please.”

Mac stared at him. The song flipped over: Elvis, again. Mac dropped his shoulders and finally admitted defeat.

“Thank God,” Dennis sighed, deeply relieved. He flagged their waitress down, and Mac was sullen and downtrodden as he slipped his card into the billfold.

“I know you were excited,” Dennis said, because Mac’s disappointment would last for hours if he didn’t try and do something about it. “But I bet everyone’s already heard it before, yeah? No one would’ve found it funny, it’s old news. Really, you’re just sparing yourself the embarrassment.”

“You’re trying to help, aren’t you.”

“Of course.”

“Don’t.” He glanced up when the waitress came back. She had a weird crinkle to her brow, and her smile was pressed onto her face like a cheap sticker.

“There was a problem with your card,” she said in a low voice. “It’s been declined.”

“Ha! Good one,” Mac said.

Her sticker-smile rippled, peeled at the edges. “I, um,” she said. “I wasn’t joking, actually.”

Disbelief swept over Dennis like a massive dust storm. “That’s ridiculous,” he cut in, while Mac’s mouth slipped and hung open. “The bill’s like, what, twenty bucks? Your machines must be broken.”

“Do you have another card?” the waitress said, grim-faced. “I’m really sorry, I can’t do anything else about it.”

Mac cocked his head at Dennis significantly, telegraphing—he had something to tell Dennis in private, anyway, what that was he didn’t know. “Give us five minutes,” Dennis told the waitress.

The waitress opened her mouth, but quickly rethought matters. She left them fast enough for Dennis to rethink his decision on tipping.

“Dennis?” Mac said. “Bail.”

His eyes were fiercely wide, the whites shiny with fear. Dennis held back a startled laugh. “You kidding?”

“Not kidding,” Mac said. “I don’t have another card.”

“So pay with cash.”

“I didn’t bring cash! I just—” Chewing on his lower lip, Mac snuck a look off at the waitress. She was busy at another table; her back was turned to them. “Okay, on the count of three. One.”

“We are not dining and dashing on a twenty dollar bill, Mac. And how are you so broke that you can’t even afford to spare twenty bucks?”

“Look, I don’t have time to explain,” Mac hissed, and glanced nervously at the waitress again. She hadn’t heard his outburst. He grabbed his card and hunched over the table. “It’s now or never. Two.”

“How do you not have time to explain? No no no, you listen to me—we are going to sit right here and you are going to explain how you don’t even have twenty dollars in your bank account five full days after getting paid—”

“Three!”

Like a deer sensing hunters with guns, Mac bolted.

Dennis gaped after him, still seated. Still processing. Mac flung a hand out and hooked the edge of the doorframe, skidding to a halt and swinging a full 180 degrees around. With all the subtlety of a drunk mime, he panicked hard and motioned to Dennis.

“Dennis, come on!” he shouted, and their bewildered waitress made a questioning noise, and everyone’s heads whipped around, their eyes burning holes through his nice navy-blue shirt—

WHAT’S NEW, PUSSYCAT?! WHOA-OH OH-OH!

And Mac just shattered completely.

“Goddammit,” he whimpered, and he motioned hard and fast again, “Dennis! Now!”

With the notable exception of Tom Jones, the diner was deathly quiet.

Dennis placed a couple of bucks on the table, in a spot where the waitress would find it. Then he ran like hell for the door.

—

The alleyway was dark and full of terrors and they dove into it headfirst, tucking themselves behind an empty dumpster. They were three blocks away, and they weren’t exactly being chased, but Mac darted into the narrow crevice first and yanked Dennis in after him and they hunkered down in what was hopefully just a puddle of mud and listened intently for the sounds of justice hot on their heels.

A minute passed, and Dennis braved standing up. Carefully, sneakers squelching, he peeked out at the street.

“We good, Dennis?”

Mac needed to learn how to stage-whisper. Dennis shot him a stern look. “I don’t know.”

“Well? Do you see cops?”

“I don’t see cops, no.”

“What about a cop car?”

“Okay, you know, I think you can just talk to me normally,” Dennis said with a glare. “I don’t see any cop cars either.”

The low, solid thunk of Mac’s skull on the damp brick wall echoed around them. “That’s a relief.”

“A relief, oh really. Running out on our monthly dinner is a relief. Not even having twenty goddamn dollars to cover a couple of greasy cheeseburgers and an oversized milkshake is a relief. Causing a complete scene in, of all places, a Johnny Rockets is what passes for a relief, now. The bar’s been set that low.”

Mac didn’t answer for a long, long time. Then, quietly, “I meant about the cops.”

“You just absolutely—goddammit.” Dennis left the mouth of the alleyway to glower at Mac with his arms tightly crossed. Hopefully he came off as austere and disapproving, instead of mildly chilly.

Mac cast his gaze downwards, jamming his hands in his pockets. He froze, very suddenly.

“I know that look.” Lip curling, Dennis narrowed his eyes. “What is it now.”

Mac fished a crumpled twenty from his pocket.

They gaped at it for a full ten seconds, open-mouthed and incredulous. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Dennis then said. The twenty in Mac’s hand spoke otherwise, and Mac was utterly silent, and Dennis thunked his head against the brick wall. “You have got,” he repeated, “to be kidding me.”

“Dude, I totally forgot about this,” Mac said. Blank shock morphed into astonishment, maybe even a hint of glee. “I swear I completely forgot.”

“No shit you forgot!” The winds of hysteria were whipping up; a ragged howl of laughter was cresting in Dennis’ throat. “You’re a dumbass, dude, holy shit—”

“A dumbass with twenty bucks,” Mac said, and with a shit-eating grin he added, “but hey, free monthly dinner.”

“Free monthly—Jesus Christ.”

He was laughing, high and tight. A fist pressed against his mouth and he shut his eyes.

“Dude,” Mac said. “You okay?”

“Christ,” Dennis said, “no,” and he stuck a hand out at Mac, “you’re such a fucking—how in the shit did you forget that?”

“Spent my last fifty on the bourbon, had change, stuck it in my pocket,” Mac said. His brow knit in surprise as Dennis hauled him up, and Dennis was still laughing. Mac peered at him closely. “It’s that funny?”

Dennis nodded, then shook, then nodded his head. “God,” he said, “no, it’s just—goddammit, you,” and Mac was heavy-lidded, chuckling, the impression of a grin on his lips.

“Hang on.” He drew his thumb under Dennis’ eye, showed him a black mascara smudge. “Running a little.”

“Oh.” Mac nodded, rolled makeup off his thumb. Gently rubbed under his eye again. His hand rested warm on Dennis’ hip, so close that Dennis could trace the rise and fall of his chest, trace the sweep of his lashes as they fanned against his cheeks.

Dennis closed the gap and kissed him.

He drew away with his heart wedged in his throat, beating a painful bruise. Mac’s eyes were blown wide, dazed, dizzied. “Dude,” he tried, “what—”

“Don’t.” Dennis shook his head, tight like a coiled spring. No words, the safest way to go. Just do something.

“Right, got it,” Mac said with a short nod, and he leaned in and kissed Dennis—nervously, at first, and then all in.

The back of his shirt ended up soaked, and Dennis blithely wondered if Mac with all his newfound wealth would pay for the dry-cleaning. The thought was obliterated when Mac opened his mouth, and made a small noise; Dennis slipped a thumb to hook in one of Mac’s belt loops, drew him closer, in, in.

And his lips were stunningly soft, and his stubble scratched Dennis’ skin, and he kissed like he was sincere about it, but had no idea what to expect. Dennis marshaled his thoughts and tilted his head, only a casual couple of degrees. And out of sheer curiosity, he opened his eyes a crack.

Mac, of course, was staring straight at him.

Dennis broke away panting; everything stung and demanded more. “You kiss with your eyes open?”

“Not usually,” Mac protested. His hand fumbled at Dennis’ hip, unsure. “I just, y’know,” and he bit his reddened lower lip.

“Dude, seriously, close your eyes,” Dennis told him, and Mac nodded and clenched his shut. Goddammit. Dennis sighed, patted Mac’s hand on him like a spooked horse. His hand then slipped upwards, curved behind Mac’s neck, trailing a thumb along his throat. Underneath the pad, a heartbeat like a broken 808 jittered in staccato. “Breathe, all right.”

Mac snorted. “Can you blame me?” he said, somewhat disparaging. Dennis drew him in closer, until the tips of their noses were touching. Then he waited, and waited, and waited.

Carefully, Mac kissed him again. It was slower and more magnified; it was a hyperawareness of Mac’s lips against his. This time, when Mac opened his mouth, Dennis didn’t wait for an invitation; he slipped his tongue inside with a short groan. It was messy, there wasn’t much finesse, sharp angles softened with nervous sincerity. Mac could’ve gripped him hard enough to bruise; Dennis remembered thinking no one else had ever done that, and Mac was strong enough to leave a mark, and the hands on his hips were gentle instead.

Mac’s crotch settled heavy against his. Dennis made a startled noise and quickly broke apart. “We should. Uh.”

“Yeah?” Mac said, low. His hands flexed around sharp hipbones, and his voice was gasoline and gravel.

“Not in an alley,” Dennis told him.

“Oh.” Mac dropped back an inch. His chest was rising, falling fast; his shoulders shuddered. “Yeah, I—I get that.”

“Good.” There was a beat for them to collect their senses, and then Dennis said, “We should get back?”

Mac nodded, and he was gnawing at his lower lip, like he had something else to offer up.

The surprise twenty paid for a taxi ride home, with them plastered to separate sides of the back seat. Dennis stared out the grimy window, up at the yellow-orange streetlamps flickering by, one after another.

His heart was still racing. Eyes peeled back, wide and aware; he remembered that Mac tasted like vanilla and bourbon and his stomach roiled and flopped and a heavy swollen weight settled hard in his groin, enough to render him temporarily blind.

When, now, not if. He sucked in a breath and held it as long as he dared; expelled it, twice as long. When.

The taxi dropped them off at their apartment.

Dennis got his first good look at Mac since the great escape from the diner once the taxi had sped away. Mac had his hands firmly jammed in his pockets, thumbs hooked out, head hanging low. The effect hooded his eyes in the kind of way that left Dennis’ throat dry and useless. He was staring up at Dennis through his lashes.

Hunger carved his expression out of stone.

Dennis approached their building, let them in. They headed for the stairwell; the heavy clomp of boots echoed on musty concrete. Their landing, their apartment, the key sticking and stuttering the first two times Dennis jammed it in. They made it inside on the third take, they shut the door, they bolted the locks.

Dennis whirled around and was ready when Mac kissed him.

The damp button-down was the first to go, Mac batting at his hands when he got too impatient. Too distracted and losing patience himself, Dennis jerked out of reach as the last button escaped its hole.

“I like this shirt,” he muttered.

“You’re so—” Mac slid it off his shoulders, scraping rough palms down newly-bare arms. Dennis shivered, kissed him. “—Fucking slow,” he finished in a rasp.

“Whatever,” Dennis said, and set to work on a little quid pro quo as they fumbled into the bedroom. Mac’s ensemble was far easier to divest, if only because the living room had claimed the leather jacket and Dennis popped the last three buttons on his shirt mostly on accident.

Collapsing on a mattress was downright painful, and they both hissed, wincing as they rubbed at their sides. “Sonofabitch that hurts,” Mac said. “Tell me why you didn’t get a goddamn bed frame again?”

“Dude, you are the last person to bitch at me about his personal finances,” Dennis said, and Mac glared, and lunged; the kiss was a clatter of teeth. Hands flurried to belts and whipped them out of belt loops, and with a pointed bite to Dennis’ lower lip, Mac’s hand fanned out over his belly, striking lower to rub over the crotch of Dennis’ jeans.

And as good as it felt—and it felt good, unable to resist humping forward, the slow curve up into his palm—it kicked his world too much off the axis. Retaliatory strike. Luminous and wild, Dennis’ eyes snapped open. “Get ‘em off.”

“What?” Processing must’ve been on backlog. Mac gave himself a rudimentary shake, then shucked his pants and tossed them to the side.

“Underwear too, asshole,” Dennis said, breathing harshly. Mac frowned.

“What about you?”

I’m getting there, was what he intended to say; but what came out was a surprised squawk when Mac yanked at the waist of his jeans. It took Dennis a few tries to swat his hands away. Mac leaned back on his palms and stared, open-mouthed and practically panting, as Dennis tumbled out of his jeans—and his boxer-briefs, immediately after.

That’s when Mac’s eyes really went wide.

“You’ve seen me naked before,” Dennis reminded him, sitting back and tugging at a dressy black sock. “What, Mac?”

“This is pretty real, isn’t it,” Mac said, and Dennis froze up just as the second sock came off.

“The hell does that mean?” he said.

“This,” Mac said again, leaning forward, cast in a glow of quiet… something. Dennis wasn’t about to start listing anything now, because the effect was reliably the same: arresting, unsettling.

But he settled for a scowl. “You wanna make it more real?” he said, and crawled in between Mac’s parted legs, hands clapped to his inner thighs and pushing, gently, outward. “Lose the goddamn boxers already.”

Dark threads of want snapped taut at the way Mac flushed a rich blood-red, hooking his thumbs in the waistband of his boxers. They slid down his legs with little resistance, and he sat back again, waiting for Dennis in a state of suspended animation.

Or a state of deadlock.

They sat staring at each other until an apartment door slammed downstairs; then Mac startled and Dennis snapped out of it, locking eyes as he reached out. He traced a thumb down Mac’s thigh, blood pounding in his ears. Mac spread his legs wider in response, automatic unfurling at the lightest touch.

“Dennis,” Mac whispered, and Dennis snapped up; Mac’s hand on his shoulder guided him forward, until their noses were an inch apart. “Dennis.”

Dennis’ eyes glittered, and before he had time to stop himself his hand was closing around Mac’s cock. There was a sharp hiss of air like a blown fuse; Mac jerked his hips and his cock twitched and thickened.

He pulled away to spit into his hand; then it was back to smoothing his soft palm up softer, smoother skin. Mac’s eyelids were fluttering, his cock hardening rapidly. Dennis pressed the flat of his thumb into the base and dragged, all the way up, swiped it quick over the slit. Mac tugged his lower lip between his teeth, worrying at it while Dennis panted out a laugh. Attention focused laserlike and Mac surged forward, shoving their foreheads together, licking a broad wet stripe across his palm.

Dennis couldn’t help the way his eyes flickered shut, or the quiet, breathy Oh he let escape when Mac’s hand slid around his erection.

“Hey,” Mac murmured, unsteady smirk wavering up his lips, “you think I can—” He paused, took a breath. “Can I fuck you?”

“What?” Dennis flinched in surprise, and Mac just shrugged, lopsided and lazy. “Dude.”

“What?” Mac slowed his hand. “Isn’t that where we’re going with this?” A cloud of confusion fogged over his features.

“Not now,” Dennis said. He thrust into Mac’s hand again, a pointed plea for much-needed attention. “You know how much prep work goes into that? A fair goddamn amount.”

“I’ll go slow.” Mac sidled closer. “Use like a ton of lotion.”

“That’s not really what I meant,” Dennis said, and before Mac could object again he’d leaned forward, smirking, seductive. Mac was falling wide-eyed back onto the mattress. “Hey. This is nice, right?”

“Yeah.”

Dennis stretched his hand around both their cocks, stroked up slow and torturous. “You really wanna ruin the good thing we’ve got going?” he said, with Mac shuddering out a breath beneath him.

“Not—really,” Mac said around a groan. “But—”

Dennis dropped lower, lips to the shell of Mac’s ear. “I didn’t say it wouldn’t happen.” He nipped Mac’s earlobe, and his hand moved faster. “Got it?”

Mac groaned, low and heavy, matching Dennis’ pace, and Dennis sat back up for a better view. The ardent blush of red bloomed well into Mac’s chest, escaped in flushed bursts  in his neck and cheeks. Panting hard, Dennis pinned his gaze on Mac’s contorted expression, and their hands were a rhythmic blur.

He felt Mac’s orgasm before his own, felt Mac twitch sharply in his hand, and he had time to blink and stifle a moan before he came over their hands and Mac’s belly. And then he almost pitched forward, caught himself in time to sag boneless between Mac’s parted thighs.

“Goddamn,” Mac breathed, and after a moment picked his head up. “Dude, you came on me?”

He actually sounded annoyed. “You did it too,” Dennis pointed out, and crawled out of their tangle of limp limbs to the other side of the bed. He collapsed, face up. “Shit, I needed that.”

“You did?”

It had been some time since Dennis had gotten laid, and he almost said so. “Only in like, a general sense,” he said quickly.

“Oh.” A frown creased Mac’s face. “But it was still good.”

Dennis quirked an eyebrow. “Yeah.”

The frown transformed into a tired smile as Mac settled back into the pillow. “Good.” He crossed his arms behind his head and didn’t elaborate, and Dennis rolled over, suspicious.

“What, did you think it wouldn’t be?” He propped himself up on an elbow. “Dude, who exactly are you talking to? Whose tape collection have you obsessively pored over?”

Mac fixed his gaze idly on the cracks in the ceiling.

“Literally who else do you know that’s better than me in bed? Than me.”

“I dunno.” A loose shrug and a wry grin. “Your mom’s got game. Had game, I mean.”

Mac quickly crossed himself, leaving Dennis to stare at him in rapt silence. “Unbelievable,” he managed eventually, falling back into the bed. Mac chuckled, and the mattress shifted, and their arms were brushing together, almost accidental.

“That—actually counts,” Mac said. His tone was oddly blank. “As. Y'know.”

“What,” and Dennis turned his head, gestured between them, “this?” He shrugged. “Why not?”

“Even if it’s just hand stuff?”

“We both got off on it,” Dennis said, “so, yeah. It counts.”

Mac’s face was unreadable. “So this is…” He frowned like he couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t solve this impossible problem. Dennis narrowed his eyes. “Like, what do you call it?”

“I don’t call it anything,” Dennis said carefully. “I don’t have to.”

“But if we wanna do this again.” Mac sat up and faced Dennis, earnest in his expression. “We still can?”

“I mean, give it a few minutes,” Dennis said, and slowly sat up as well. “I guess so?”

“Because you did say I could fuck you.”

“I said—I said no such thing!”

“Well like you intimated it,” Mac said, and Dennis groaned and rolled off the mattress.

“Good God,” he said, heading for the bathroom to grab and soak a hand towel.

“Your mom let me do it!” Mac called, and Dennis groaned even louder, and he threw the sopping towel in Mac’s general direction. It landed on his face with a satisfying splat, and Dennis found himself leaning in the doorway, snickering, watching Mac splutter and yank the hand towel away.

The warmth settling in the pit of his belly, that was usual. This wasn’t that much different from their lives before. There wasn’t much changed between them.

There really wasn’t, and that wasn’t a sword hanging over his head.

Chapter Text

Mac and Dennis threw a housewarming party after Dee got really into upcycling for a while. Two days after she made a Pinterest account, she enlisted Charlie’s help in amassing cartons, crates, pallets, anything with a “rustic” look. After about a month, pre-treated and splintering wood dominated the bar, lining every wall and crowding every booth.

Dennis threatened to file a motion. Dee refused to clear out. Then Dennis did file a motion, and it moved to arbitration, and a week into April Dennis was the plaintiff of Case #449: One Man’s Trash v. One Woman’s Treasure.

Counsel for the plaintiff made his opening statement: Dee’s trash was literally everywhere. Counsel for the defendant opened up a statement of his own: Dee’s trash was making a serious fortune. Then Charlie submitted into evidence Exhibit A, a manila folder of impressive receipts. Frank whistled, low. One look had Mac gnawing his lip in worry.

“Dude, she’s making a killing,” he whispered to Dennis.

“I don’t care if she’s making the Eiffel Tower out of goddamn toothpicks, it's trash, Mac. Trash! She leaves her goddamn recycling trash all around the bar, and it reeks and it's disgusting and I won’t stand for it,” Dennis said in a low, vehement hiss.

“I know, dude.” Mac stroked the bones of his wrist, gentle, unthinking. “But if Frank rules in her favor—”

“Charlie, switch with me, I’m gonna be counsel.”

“What!”

“I’m tired of being arbiter,” Frank said. “I’m going in on Deandra’s upcycling business.”

“I’ll allow it,” Mac said quickly. Dennis kicked his ankle. “Jesus Christ that hurt—”

“You’re allowing it?”

Still wincing, Mac lowered his tone to a conspiratorial whisper. “Go with me on this one,” he said, which wasn’t reassuring at all—but he was already standing and striding towards Charlie, so as far as options went, Dennis had slim pickings.

“Before we begin—Charlie,” Mac said. “Quick question. How can we trust you to be a neutral party?”

Frank and Dee rolled their eyes. “I’m incredibly neutral,” Charlie said, vaguely offended. “Mac, I don’t care about Dee’s trash at all. In the bar or out of it, you know, I don't give a shit.”

“Yes, of course, but you were also Ms. Reynolds’ former counsel. And I understand you worked with her closely on this… recycling project.”

“Business, Mac,” Frank called, “it’s not a project. Projects don’t make money.” He tapped the manila folder.

“Whatever, business. Anyway—you worked with her on this, correct? Gathered crates with her, found wooden pallets together. Sewed… throw pillows?”

“Cushions.” Charlie looked doubtful. “For the crates? You make neat little stools out of them, glue cushions on top.”

“Interesting. Now I’m sure she paid you for this,” Mac said. He had something up his sleeve, and Dennis leaned in, swore he saw something brilliant flash in Mac’s eyes. “She cut you in, right? Spread the wealth around? Look for yourself, Exhibit A, you see how wealthy Dee’s recycling business project is. So brother, may I ask: did she spare you a dime?”

Comprehension was dawning on Charlie’s face. “No,” he said. “She didn’t.”

“No she didn’t,” Mac repeated, turning to a captive audience. Dee was glaring daggers. “And after all that help you gave her—sewing cushions, lining up pallets, finding old crates in the cleaning closet. Speaking of which, all her shit lying around the bar—it hasn’t hindered your Charlie Work, has it?”

Pensive, Charlie said, “It has a little.”

“It is hindering his Charlie Work, lady and gentlemen,” Mac said, spreading his arms out wide. “At least tell us she thanked you for your help.”

“Mac, this is incredible bullshit.” Dee shot up, her chair knocking backwards. “I thanked him like a million times!”

“She did say the words,” Charlie said with a shrug.

“But did she mean them?” Mac said, and Dennis caught his eye; Mac winked at him, and if he hadn’t been sitting down already—

“Objection, you are leading the goddamn arbiter.”

“Overruled.”

“Appeal!” Frank brandished the manila folder. “Charlie, she’s making a fortune off this crap.”

“And who gets that fortune, Frank?” Dennis twisted in his chair. “Is it Paddy’s? Is she cutting us in? Have any of us ever seen a cent of Dee’s upcycling scheme money?”

“It’s not a scheme, Dennis. It’s a business,” Dee snapped, and everyone’s spotlight hit her. She wiggled her hand. “I do Paddy’s Pub-related merchandising, sometimes. Off-brand. Low-key. Trying to avoid that market, more or less.”

“Off-brand. Or, in other words, not Paddy’s Pub,” Dennis said. “So, it’s all for you.”

“I have worked hard to set myself up as a legitimate businesswoman,” Dee said, “I have an established brand and a base of loyal customers—”

“She’s keeping it,” Frank said. He tossed the folder down on the table and Mac and Charlie and Dennis all groaned.

Dee crossed her arms. “Of course I’m keeping it, it’s my business! Why should I cut you in?”

“Because you’re using our bar to store your shit,” Charlie said. “At least keep it confined to your apartment if you’re not gonna split the take.”

“My apartment’s loaded with this crap. I can’t keep any more of it,” Dee said.

“So then downsize,” Mac said. “Or find someplace else to put it.”

“Like where, your apartment?”

“Absolutely not,” Dennis said, just as Mac was saying, “Would you cut us in?” and Dennis jerked his head so hard he thought something snapped.

Dee’s gaze was shrewd. “By how much.”

“Fifty-fifty.”

She scowled. “Fifteen.”

“Forty.”

“Fifteen.”

“Thirty-five.”

“Fifteen.”

“Dee, I know what you’re trying to do here and I’m telling you, it won’t work. Thirty.”

She raised a brow. “Ten.”

“Goddammit, fifteen.” Mac wore a hunted look.

Dennis jumped in as Dee immediately stuck her hand out. “Look, no one’s storing any upcycled recycling shit in our apartment, okay? Dee, put your hand away.”

“Dennis, it’s free money. We could probably even use some of this shit.”

Dee cut over Dennis’ exclamation this time, an indignant, “I never said anything about you using my shit, now hang on,” just as Dennis said, “We’re not using Dee’s pet recycling project for our goddamn furniture needs!” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Mac, what the hell would we even use?”

“I don’t know. A couch?”

“We have a couch!”

“That we hate using!” Mac kicked over a medium-sized crate with a patchy floral cushion hot-glued to the bottom, and sat down on it decidedly. “At least this shit feels like you’re sitting on a goddamn actual cushion!”

Dee snickered. Dennis rounded on her.

“Oh, you think this is funny? Well, why don’t you try sitting on that couch for more than twenty minutes and see how your bony body handles things,” Dennis said, paling with rage. “You wanna stash your garbage at our place? Buy us a brand-new couch and you can upcycle all the goddamn trash you want, Dee!”

“I’m not buying you guys a goddamn couch,” Dee said.

Frank nodded. “Done.”

“What?!”

“Wait,” Dennis said, “serious?”

Frank was serious. “Third of her shit stays at her apartment, no one gives a rat’s ass. One third stays down in the basement, kick back profits to the bar. The last third goes to your apartment, and you guys get a new couch.”

“And fifteen percent of the profits,” Mac added quickly.

Frank squinted. “Ten.”

“Deal.”

“What, no, no deal! Frank, who let you muscle in on this?” Dee said.

“You did,” Frank said, “when you started using my bar like a goddamn museum of modern trash.”

“That is ridiculous, I’m not buying them a couch—”

“All right, counselors, if you’ll shake on it, make it official,” Charlie was saying. Mac and Frank shook on it and signed the arbitration papers and Dee cursed them out for a full four minutes. Dennis stopped paying attention after the second, fumbling with a drink coaster made of knotty popsicle sticks and glitter glue while Mac, Charlie, and Frank hashed out details.

Fewer pallets and crates in the bar, that was a good thing. But it was just a smokescreen. The problem was ultimately displaced; someone would have to deal with it. Evidently, that someone would be him.

A popsicle stick broke off the coaster.

But hey, free couch. Silver lining, right.

—

So Dee, newly rich, bought Mac and Dennis a couch, a luxurious leather sofa in a beautiful jet black. The night before it arrived, Mac and Dennis rented a Uhaul, loaded the old ratty couch into it, and drove out to a landfill with a book of matches and a couple tanks of gasoline.

Dennis let Mac do the honors. It was only fair; he’d actually spent a night on it. They doused the couch and Mac struck the whole book, grinning broadly when it went up in a brilliant blaze. Little orange sparks danced in the night sky; Dennis watched them flicker, tasted ash and smoke on his tongue, in his throat.

He bumped Mac’s shoulder, and Mac turned his head and smiled. Flames licked up the side of his face.

The couch arrived the very next day, and it was sufficiently exciting enough to declare the event the Official Housewarming Party of Mac and Dennis’ New Apartment. Charlie and Frank brought booze. Dee brought recycling.

“Dee, it’s a party,” Mac complained.

Dee shot back that she was now entitled to about twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth of free space in their apartment, and shoved a pallet at him.

Once they’d stored Dee’s recycling in every available nook and cranny—the linen closet more than redeemed itself—and arranged the couch in the center of the living room, it really did turn into a party. Dennis ended up with a handle of Malibu and, thoroughly drunk, splayed over one arm of the couch.

“It sticks out like a goddamn sore thumb,” Frank kept saying, laughing.

Dennis hated coconut. He made a face as he took a swig.

“Yeah,” Dee said, wrinkling her nose as she scanned the living room, the high, cracked ceiling with its ornate flowery molds. “You guys did not give a shit about décor.”

“It’s so comfortable,” Mac said, wriggling into the leather. But Frank and Dee had a point—it was the gleaming diadem in a royal crown of dirt.

So comfortable, though. Dennis nodded and took another swig and made another face. “Coconut’s so gross,” he said.

Snickering, Mac shot him a grin. “Why’re you still drinking it?” he asked; Dennis’ shrug was sloppy. “Trade if you don’t want it.”

“You drink it,” Dennis grumped, shoving the bottle into Mac’s chest. Mac traded him for whiskey and lifted the Malibu to his lips, brows twitching as he stared Dennis down. He was going to taste like coconut later, how revolting.

They should’ve nicked peppermint schnapps from the bar when they had the chance. The inside of his mouth tasted sickly sweet, and Dennis stifled a burp behind his fist.

“Weak sauce,” Charlie said. He was sitting in a crate, as opposed to on top of it, and his opinion didn’t count.

“For a rum burp? Not half-bad,” Dee said.

“Thank you, Dee,” Dennis said, and she belched out an impressive you’re welcome. “Whoa.”

Frank clinked his beer to hers. “Nice.”

“Oh, you think that’s nice? Watch this.” Mac’s cheeks puffed out like a blowfish, and he swallowed, the plane of his chest rising, falling. Dennis’ mouth went dry, and his tongue was uselessly heavy.  

The sound Mac made was pathetic, though, and Dennis burst out laughing, bowled over, grinning from ear to ear. The bottle of whiskey dropped to the floor.

“But for a rum burp? For a rum burp, though? Come on!” Mac punched his thigh. Dennis’ sides hurt from laughing so hard; he flapped a hand at Mac and glanced up and laughed even harder at how pissed Mac looked. Strange gasping demons clawed out of his chest—it was fucking exhilarating, even if that scowl promised a swift revenge.

Mac snatched his wrists up, deceptively gentle as he pinned Dennis’ arms above his head. Dennis was wheezing as Mac slowly, steadily shoved him into the couch and loomed over him. Shadows stretched long throughout the room, and all he could see was Mac for miles.

“Better than what you could do.” Mac leered at him, knees settling on either side of Dennis’ hips. Dennis hiccuped, grinned. “I am king of the rum burps.”

“You.” Dennis shook his head. “You were so, so bad.”

His eyes caught the hazy, dying sunlight, flecks of gold sparkling bright within brown. His face hung close; their noses could’ve brushed. Instinctively, Dennis tilted his head back, exposed the pale, vulnerable line of his throat. Mac growled, low and soft.

“What’s going on?” Dee said.

They turned their heads in unison; Mac’s eyebrow had an exquisite arch to it, and Dennis smiled like a pit viper. “Why, Deandra,” he said, “whatever do you mean?”

“She means this,” Frank said. The this was barbed with accusation.

Dennis looked at Mac. Mac looked at Dennis. Mac smirked, and Dennis almost forgot how to breathe.

“What, this?” Careless, Dennis shrugged. “Nothing.”

“Don’t look like nothing,” Frank said.

“It looks kinda,” Charlie said, and he interlocked his fingers. “You know. Together-ish.”

“All coupley and shit,” Dee added, nose wrinkling.

“You two fuckin’?” Frank asked, and Mac went very, very still.

Dennis let out a snort. “‘Coupley’?” A bitter, dusty taste coated the back of his throat. “Yeah. Right.”

“Well, what would you call it? I mean, this?” Dee’s beer bottle pointed at Mac’s hands, loosely manacled around Dennis’ wrists. “Or that?” A gesture to their easy tangle of limbs.

“I would call it ridiculous,” Dennis said smoothly. “Seriously, me? And Mac. As ‘me and Mac.’ Together.”

“They think we’re together.” Mac said it like an inside joke. Dennis started to snicker.

“Right? Like, like. What do you think, honey?”

Mac’s chuckle was unsteady, but warm. “Oh, dude, we’re totally together. Uh, sweetheart.”

“Totally. Hey, hey Mac. Mac.” Dennis was smirking. “Wanna go pick out draperies tomorrow, sugarplum?”

Charlie made a face and mouthed sugarplum?  at Dee and Frank while Mac choked on an ungainly snort. He recovered quickly, and said, “Only if you take me to that fancy department store—the one with all the frou-frou lace shit I like, muffin top.”

“That one’s not…” Dee trailed off. They weren’t listening.

“Right, right right. Lace draperies for our wonderful new apartment. Should we get matching carpets too, dear? Maybe even,” and Dennis widened his eyes, drew Mac closer, “hand-knit doilies for the kitchen table?”

Mac tried to gasp in between actual laughter. “Fucking doilies, dude?”

“Doilies are like the gayest shit in the entire goddamn world, of course we’d get them. You know, since we’re so together and all, loverboy.”

Mac couldn’t help himself: he collapsed in a lively heap, practically giggling into Dennis’ shirt. “I’m done, dude. I’m fucking done.” The warmth of Mac’s weight and the alcohol mingled, crackled down his skin in a pleasant current.

“Yeah. Heavy too, God, off.” A gentle shove; Mac tipped to the side with a grunt. Dennis pushed himself to his feet, and the back of his neck prickled—sat on spare crates (or inside one), Frank, Charlie, and Dee shared the same indecipherable stare.

He was too drunk to take them seriously. He hoped they weren’t taking him seriously. Dennis narrowed his eyes to paper-thin slits. “What?”

“Dude,” Charlie said, and “Where to even begin,” Dee said, and “Jesus H.,” Frank said.

“So, nothing,” Dennis said, lightly smacking Mac’s hand from worming around his shin, encouraging him; come back and lay on the couch with me. “Thanks for the couch and everything—”

“Yeah, thanks!” Mac piped up.

“—but it’s late, and Mac and I have to pick out draperies tomorrow. Lock up when you leave, mmkay?”

Another swat at Mac’s hand. He let it linger for a moment, then he headed to the bedroom.

First, Frank and Charlie and Dee all looked at each other. Then, Frank and Charlie and Dee all looked at Mac.

“You know we’re not actually picking out draperies, right?” Mac told them. “We have the bedsheet.”

“Way off base, buddy,” Charlie said.

“Oh. Then.” Mac trailed off, a second-grade kid faced with an impossible third-grade question. He then jerked his thumb over his shoulder, and said, “You know, I’m kinda gonna turn in, too…”

No one said anything.

“Right. Uh. Thanks for coming,” Mac said. “You guys can see yourselves out, right?”

He left with a short, awkward wave, and the bedroom door clicked shut. There were sounds coming from behind it—low whispers, snickering. Silence, then a muted thud against the door, shivering in its frame. Another thud, low to the ground, and the unmistakable sound of a zipper.

“Well then,” Dee said.

“That’s,” Charlie said.

“Oh yeah,” Frank said.

“So we’re counting it?” Dee said, and Charlie glanced nervously over at Frank.

“Is there any way we can’t?” he asked.

“They were practically dry-humping in front of us,” Frank said. “How could you not?”

“So we’re counting it,” Dee said again, and she stuck her hands out. “All right, losers, pay up.”

“Goddammit,” Charlie muttered.

“Told you they’d get into it sooner,” Frank said.

Dee stared at the peeling face of the bedroom door, silent, contemplative.

—

April showers brought May flowers, May flowers brought allergies, and allergies were an underhanded attempt to reconcile Dennis’ otherwise perfect immune system with the horrors of living in the mortal coil. That said, it wasn’t until Mac had actually threatened to make him sleep on the couch that Dennis decided, maybe he could check out, like, Benadryl or something. Couldn’t hurt. The couch was magnificent, with less chance of a nail digging into your spine, but two solid months of waking up without the need to avoid Mac’s boner wasn’t something you just gave up.

(Mac had grinned, and kissed him long enough to make his head spin; he’d crawled on top of Dennis, warm and heavy and straddling his hips. And then he said, “Seriously, you sound like Gilbert Gottfried,” and Dennis threatened Mac with the couch for that.)

The weather was ridiculously balmy, even for May. He’d woken up to morning sex and gotten off twice, lazy and indulgent; he’d hit every green light on his way to Wawa. They had the day off today, so once Mac got back from the gym they were going to lock the door, day-drink like college freshmen, and after that—

Dennis plucked a box of condoms off the shelf.

He was having a good day, even if he was a bit sniffly, and he was going to keep having a good day, allergies and Gilbert Gottfried be damned. An Ellie Goulding song lilted out over the PA and he willingly whistled along to it.

He didn’t really care for the song, but whistling was par for the course; it was going to be a good day, even if he didn’t know who or what an Ellie Goulding was and he’d heard this song five times today on the fucking radio already and a short young woman slammed into him and exploded coffee all over a shirt Mac said especially brought out his eyes.

At least she was cute, the way Tribbles and throw pillows were cute, both fluffy and diminutive. She was apologizing at breakneck speed, jabbing a wad of napkins like a prizefighter at Dennis’ chest. “Sorry, sorry, I am so so sorry—”

“It’s fine,” Dennis managed, stepping back. “You’re good.”

“Again, I am so sorry.” She dabbed at her own shirt, where the coffee-stained logo of the Red Hot Chili Peppers stretched far across her chest.

Very far across. “Here, let me get that,” Dennis said, whisking a napkin from a nearby holder.

The woman plucked it from his hand and immediately blew her nose. “Sorry,” she said. “Allergies.”

“Well, they’re not supposed to affect your sense of direction,” Dennis said, bright-eyed and oddly keen, and the short young woman’s thick black eyebrows knotted together hard.

He was going to have a good day or he would die trying.

“I, uh.” With a dignified sniffle, he cleared his throat. “I like your shirt.”

“Oh! This?” Her face brightened, almost bashful, and she tugged loosely at the hem. “This isn’t mine, actually, it’s my boyfriend’s? He’s the big Chili Peppers fan.”

“Oh,” Dennis said, with a casual attempt at a nod, “your boyfriend. Yeah, that’s—mine too.”

Meanwhile, down in the pits of Hell, Satan pulled on a sweater.

“That’s cool,” the woman said. “Did you like, meet him at a concert, or…”

She didn’t trail off so much as Dennis stopped listening, backing away like she wasn’t a reasonably cute and bewildered stranger but a faultline, trembling and yawning wide. He retreated into the back of the Wawa and slumped against a freezer.

Snow and static whited out his mind. It was comforting until it wasn’t, and then all that blank space was suffocating, and he had to get out of the Wawa immediately.

You think you know somebody, Ellie Goulding said, because Ellie Goulding was mocking him.

But that was insanity, they didn’t know each other. Whoever or whatever she or it was didn’t know a damn thing about Dennis Reynolds. He knew everything he ever needed to know, even the parts he didn’t, because at least he knew he didn’t know. He knew all sorts of things, right down to the words and feelings and categories and compartments he alloted other people. Knowledge was power, and absolute knowledge was absolute power, and Dennis’ power was absolutely knowledgable and why was he at the Wawa again? Oh, right, condoms. And allergy medication.

He didn’t need either, honestly. Best to just leave. Lie. They didn’t have condoms. Or allergy medication. He didn’t have allergies, the apartment was just dusty. He didn’t have to buy condoms, Mac could pitch in on prophylactics instead of making excuses for being broke all the damn time. No condoms, no allergy meds, and a huge brown splotch of coffee on his shirt—all the hallmarks of a really good day.

At least the shirt wasn’t his fault. Mac would still be upset. One Dennis Day, a few years back, he’d booked a disastrous photo shoot at King of Prussia Mall, and when they’d ended up on the five o’clock news that night, Charlie had commented that Dennis’ eyes in the few surviving prints were an especially intense shade of blue. It’s the shirt, Mac had said, Dennis, that shirt is great on you. And Dennis had said that it actually belonged to the stylist, informed him with a tinge of envy and regret. A week later, Mac had acquired the shirt—and every time Dennis wore it Mac went around with an extra strut in his step, unquestionably and especially proud.

Why I got you on my mind. You think you know somebody.

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Dennis muttered, dropping the condoms and the allergy medication carelessly to the floor. He screwed his eyes shut and it was not enough. Someone kept reminding him that he didn’t understand it, rueful and sincere. Someone kept saying, you think you know somebody.

He stormed out of the Wawa like disaster about to strike. He jumped in the Range Rover and snapped the radio on, eager to drown out the screaming cauldron of his own thoughts and impulses.

And goddamned Ellie Goulding.

His day had been too perfect, he’d come to conclude. Dennis had been having far too good of a day, and nature abhorred a vacuum. This was the universe’s parting shot before it disintegrated. That was why, when Dennis turned the volume up, the Red Hot Chili Peppers came crooning out of the speakers.

Something else he didn’t know, though he’d heard it a million times; in the car, Mac's day to pick, shoulder pressed to the window as he tapped the rhythm on the door. Fly away on my zephyr, said Anthony Kiedis, but it was Mac's lips moving around the words, Mac's voice, a low and earnest longing. We’ll find a place together.

Dennis seethed, seeing red, and his fingers formed a fist.

—

“Dude!” Mac’s beer dropped to the coffee table with a noisy thunk. He leapt up from the couch and rushed over, gaping at the bloodied mess of Wawa napkins plastered to Dennis’ hand. “Are you okay? Holy shit!”

“Fine,” Dennis said. It had stopped hurting ages ago.

“Then what the hell happened to your hand?”

Dennis glanced at it. “I had an accident with the car radio,” he said mildly. “It’s good now.”

“You had an accident?”

“It’s stopped bleeding. See?” Little pieces of dried blood flecked off when Dennis peeled the napkins away.

“At least get a real bandage or something,” Mac said, briefly interrupted by a look of utter revulsion. “Jesus Christ, man, how did you have—”

Dennis simply looked at him, for a very long time, until Mac sighed and shook his head.

“Never mind,” he said, frowning.

“See?” Dennis said again. “It’s all good.”

There was no need for Mac to worry.

He headed to the bathroom, and Mac picked up his beer and padded after him, propped himself up against the frame. “Did you stop by the Wawa?”

Dennis had opened the medicine cabinet, was rifling through the contents. “Yep.”

“You get allergy stuff?”

“All out.”

“Huh. Weird.”

“Mhm.” A tube of Neosporin sat by a packaged roll of gauze sat by an orange bottle. He grabbed the first two and closed the cabinet door.

Without warning Mac approached him, trading beer for bandages;  he unrolled the gauze like a seasoned boxer. “Drink that,” he instructed, taking Dennis’ injured hand in both of his.

Baffled, Dennis said, “What? Why?”

“When the alcohol evaporates,” Mac told him, “it’ll clear out your sinuses a little. Plus, the carbonation. It should help.” Then he frowned and leaned back. “Dude, what happened to your shirt?”

“Mac, it’s been kind of a long day,” Dennis said, and it was tired but polysyllabic, human, and Mac accepted it without restriction.

His fingers worked fast and sure, almost mechanical. He removed each bloodied fleck of napkin and liberally applied the Neosporin and he never quite met Dennis’ eyes, someone always looked away. Curiosity could’ve nudged his head to the left, spied on Mac in the cabinet mirror, but there was a sign in the taut set of Mac’s shoulders that advised a sense of caution.

“You like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, don’t you?” Dennis asked.

“Mhm.” Mac tucked in the ends of the strip. Dennis was good as new. “Weird, I heard them in the gym earlier today.”

He gently tested his new gauze glove. Mac had done a good job. He could even flex his fingers. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, but. In the showers, dude. Like it was coming out of one of the stalls.”

Dennis frowned. “Wait. How?”

“No idea. I wanted to find out, but the guy had already left by the time I got finished,” Mac said. He then raised a brow. “Why’d’you ask?”

You think you know somebody. We’ll find a place together. Why I got you on my mind.

“No reason,” Dennis said, as his heart twisted, constricted. “Just wondering.”

—

They thought a lot about decorating the apartment.

Right around the time they accepted Dee’s thriving business as a steady part of the décor, they also accepted the fact that they’d spent about nine months getting to know a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room, in roughly that order and with precious little to show for it. “Rustic” ottomans and “deconstructed” stools formed ambitious towers and kissed the living room ceiling, and one of Dee’s larger pallets blocked off the door to an outside balcony that they never used anyway. But that was all Dee’s handiwork, Dee’s mess cluttering up their life. They had nothing much to show for themselves, and by June, it was less an effort to hold out hope for a better apartment than it was an attempt to keep treading water.

If the water were an ocean, and you’d been treading in place for nine months.

They gave the bedroom the most attention, for the sound logical reason of they spent all their fucking time in there (or time fucking, Dennis wasn’t picky). Mac’s homebrew Ridley Scott tribute remained in its place of honor, but over time, every now and then Dennis brought home an actual movie poster, only four dollars, wouldn’t kill his wallet. His half of their kickback from Dee’s upcycling operation paid for a Predator poster that Mac vowed immediately to hang above their bed. On the ceiling.

They had thankfully never needed a ladder.

Embellishment crept in like moss through a cracked sidewalk—gradual, but persistent. First one end table sprung up, then another. A sturdy cabinet. A dope stereo set. Even the expensive Vera Wang comforter he’d seen months ago ended up making a comeback.

He had to be patient for the box spring and the bed frame, but it was worth it the first night he could roll over without almost puncturing a kidney. (Neither of them slept much that night, for an entirely different reason.)

It was humming along, he told himself at times. The apartment was coming up on its own, magpielike, one knick-knack and accessory at a time. Though the posters didn’t do much to cover up ancient, mottled boards. And the kitchen was still agonizingly yellow. The floorboards still squeaked and the paint was still peeling and standing underneath towers of redecorated crates in a room no bigger than a deluxe prison cell did set off an unnerving sense of claustrophobia every now and then—but it was a far cry better than the nightmare of a year ago, and anyway, if Dennis could plaster it in enough posters and comforters and box springs and bed frames, he’d forget everything lurking underneath it and that was that.

(He bought a fire extinguisher for the kitchen and the bedroom. Mac bought two more fire extinguishers, for the living room and the bathroom. He never mentioned it, and Dennis never brought it up. Some of the only things Mac did purchase, actually. Not that it mattered—Dennis technically owned their shit the last time, too. Mac could save his pennies for a rainy day.)

It would be fine. He told himself, over and over. Gold was a pliant, adaptable metal; it should follow for a Golden God, as well.

One especially sunny afternoon in June saw Dennis working with pliant more than adaptable, for the most part. A warm breeze brushed through the window, and the air had a soft sweetness to it, and Mac’s neon pink SUN’S OUT GUNS OUT tank made its seasonal debut. Sunbeams crawled and dipped between the floorboards, filtered through dusty windowpanes and trailed long rays over the couch.

The jet black couch.

The leather jet black couch.

He had a vague notion of Dee somewhere, cackling on a throne of pallets and paisley cushions.

Either way, it meant that he kept squirming as his shoulders and neck and the small of his back stuck to the leather cushions. That wasn’t the problem. Mac was the problem, because every time Dennis moved Mac moved with him, insistent, swollen lips dark pink and brown eyes close to black. They’d been making out on the couch for the better part of an hour; slow, unhurried, self-indulgent kissing that lacked a sense of direction, and Dennis was sure Mac would break before he did. Though, he didn’t exactly relish abusing Mac of the notion.

This was fine, too. Even if they were fully-grown adults with a fully-assembled bed not ten feet away, and Dennis had been ready to pick that direction and run with it twenty minutes ago. And anyway, Mac was enjoying himself.

“Should we get real curtains?”

Busy with nipping at the curve of his throat, Mac didn’t answer until Dennis flicked him in the ear. “Ow, watch it.”

“Wouldn’t have to if you were paying attention,” Dennis said, and Mac frowned at him. Dennis jerked his head behind them as a bedsheet swayed in the delicate breeze.

Mac made a face, crossing his arms on Dennis’ chest. “Do we need to get curtains?”

“If we value ourselves a little more highly than trailer trash, we do,” Dennis told him.

Mac scratched rough stubble across his skin as his eyes grew plaintive. “Dude, if you’re gonna go crazy decorating the apartment, at least get cool shit. Don’t get curtains.”

The curl of his upper lip telegraphed precisely what he thought about that. Dennis’ eye roll was quick and tolerating, and he drew his thumb across Mac’s damp fringe, swiping hair out of his eyes. “Like what?”

“I don’t know.” He paused, wrinkling his nose. “What did we have up at the old place?”

Dennis tensed up for a brief fluttering moment. “Modern art, I think? It was left over from the last tenant.”

“Huh.” Mac considered their tiny living room. “Really?”

His thumb stroked over his chin as a grimace captured his features. “Yeah, I don't think I was too fond of those, either,” Dennis said, and Mac snorted, rubbed his cheek on Dennis’ chest. “Actually I think I hated them.”

He stretched out, and Mac moved above him, a passive sinusoidal wave. “I don’t even remember what they looked like,” Mac said absently. “But I saw them every day.”

“Probably ugly as shit, then,” Dennis said around a yawn. “And speaking of ugly, Mac. What we really should do? Is paint.”

This time Mac rolled his eyes and groaned.

“We’ll get your cousin to help! Call him up, he calls his people, they come over and I don’t have to look at a disgusting strip of paint ever again.”

“He’s busy,” Mac mumbled into Dennis’ chest. “Not him, I mean—”

“I know, I know, busted back, boo hoo, your poor goddamn cousin.” Mac scowled up at him. “Well then why don’t you suggest something, huh Mac? What do you got?”

Mac shrugged, light and casual.

“See, at least I’m trying to fix the place up. Get rid of all the gnarled, peeling paint strips on the wall,” Dennis said peevishly, and Mac was hovering close to him again, eyes bright. “Mac, the mood’s dead and you actually killed it.”

A wicked grin. “Bet I can get it back.”

“You bet, huh. That what you’re doing with your half of Dee’s kickbacks?”

“Dennis, I told you.” Settling on his haunches, he traced a thumb down the ribbing of Dennis’ tank. “Saving it for a rainy day.”

“It’s sunny as shit out,” Dennis said, and Mac’s smile was enigmatic. “Just—look, promise me you’re not actually buying Internet porn?”

“Bro, I did that once and it was totally worth it at the time.” Mac’s thumb had reached its target, and he flicked Dennis’ left nipple with a hard, determined look.

Ah. Dennis squirmed on the couch and then raised an eyebrow. “Those are sensitive, you know.”

“Huh.” Mac shuffled around until he was straddling Dennis’ waist. “Weird.”

“Yours aren’t?”

“Dude, not at all,” Mac said. He still hadn’t taken his eyes off Dennis’ chest as he circled his thumb, eyes narrowing as he watched the fabric perk.

“Really. Not even a little.”

Mac shook his head and dragged the flat of his thumb over the nipple. Dennis pressed his lips together, stifling a moan.

“You’re way sensitive,” Mac said, with sudden heavy interest. A glint of fascination danced in his eyes, terrifying as it was thrilling. Dennis’ spine arched, just a little. “I never knew that.”

“Why would you have known how sensitive my nips were?” Dennis asked him, as Mac’s hands slid down and slowly rucked up his shirt. “Literally when would I have told you that?”

“I feel like it would’ve just slipped out, you know.” Mac would answer a rhetorical question about nipples. “Like one of those things you just pick up about someone? Totally hurt you didn’t tell me.”

“I’ll keep you abreast of shit for the future,” Dennis drawled. Mac missed it by a mile and loomed before him, bright eyes and a rakish grin curving through silver-flecked stubble.

“You promise?”

Dennis rolled his eyes. Pleased, Mac chuckled, and bent to nip at his throat.

Finally.

Mac trailed his way down Dennis’ throat and lingered on the collar bones for a bit before arriving at his actual destination. He chewed thoughtfully at his lower lip, and flicked his gaze upwards.

“The hell are you waiting for, an invitation?” Rough-throated, scratchy. Unintentionally so.

Mac didn’t answer. He looked away, and darted his tongue out; Dennis’ nipple tightened up immediately. Mac jerked his head up when he hissed, and said, “Dude, you good?”

“Christ, Mac, it’s just—” He settled for rolling his eyes instead.

“Yeah, but like.” Mac’s frown was slight, unsure. “It’s not weird. It feels good.”

Weird. Intimate. A blur of names and faces like a kaleidoscope in his mind, and Dennis couldn’t remember anyone gazing at him so openly. There weren’t many methods of escape, either, so he forced it from his head and let a sneer lift his lips. “Use your teeth, bitch,” he said, harsher than he’d imagined but it worked, Mac took him right at his word—and more importantly, looked away.

A heavy weight was swelling between his legs. Mac’s hand, traveling unchecked down his side, curved over the jut of his hip. Dennis slid fingers through Mac’s hair and shoved his head down again, just as Mac stuck a hand in his boxers.

Mac invented a rhythm. He’d slide his hand up Dennis’ cock, circle the tip of his tongue at the same time. Then he’d reach the head and twist, smooth his palm over the tip, and he’d seal his lips over the nipple, sucking the flesh softly, grazing it with his teeth. Repeat. It drove Dennis to madness in mere minutes and he was damn near ashamed of that.

But not quite. Dennis twitched his hips lazily, biting his lip past the point of pain. And anytime he tried to watch what Mac was doing it brought him to the edge way too goddamned soon. Mac pushed his thighs apart and pulled off, pressed a path of kisses towards the other, sorely neglected nipple. Dennis remembered at the last second not to yank at Mac’s hair too hard.

“Oh shit,” he hissed, shuddering; Mac rearranged himself and pulled Dennis’ boxers down, refocused his attentions. He spat into his hand and let Dennis rut, tightened his grip, intent on his study.

Dennis came hard enough to blow his brains clean out. Everything was tender and hazy and exhaustingly warm when he came back around, and he watched Mac through heavy lids as he wiped at Dennis’ belly with a napkin.

“That wasn’t a used napkin, was it?” Dennis said.

“Nah.” Mac sat back on his haunches with a hazy, affecionate smile. Dennis couldn’t look at it for more than a few unguarded seconds, so he forcibly brought his attention to more easily readable parts of Mac—namely, the obvious outline of an erection in heather-gray boxer-briefs.

Dennis frowned. “Are you wearing my underwear?” Unless Mac was secretly splurging on Calvin Klein.

“What? Oh. Yeah.” Mac sheepishly rubbed the back of his neck. “Mine were in the laundry.”

His gaze laser-focused on the tent in Mac’s-but-actually-his-underwear, and the dark gray spot blooming on the stretchy fabric. “Whatever happened to going commando?”

“At the gym? Dude. Not a good idea.” The unfathomable half-smile shone like a beacon when Dennis looked up.

It was going to drive Dennis crazy if he didn’t do something about it.

He traced a finger along the heavy outline of Mac’s cock in his boxer-briefs. “True,” he said, “very true.” Mac was shivering already. “Safety first.”

“Yeah.” His voice broke out over a moan.

“Christ. You’re so easy,” Dennis murmured, and Mac bit at his lip, pleading.

He was nothing if not gracious, and he pushed forward and lowered his body, mouthed at Mac through his boxer-briefs, suckling the dark patch by the head. The unmistakable taste of salt came away on his lips, and Mac sucked in a sharp breath above him.

Delicate, gentle drifts along the shaft accompanied an intense focus on the head, and Dennis shut his eyes for a moment to take it all in. He nuzzled Mac softly, felt more than saw the electric twitches of his thighs as they settled in closer, and hooked his boxer-briefs down without prompting.

Going down on Mac was usually something of a performance piece. Not in a bad way, but Mac had this tendency to shift onto his elbows and stare, with his eyes hooded and his mouth parted. So Dennis took it slow, all lips, tongue, lustful look. His hand slipped around the base. His other hand traced lower, curved up the cleft of Mac’s ass.

He’d pulled his hand away before he could register a reaction. One day, someday. Not today.

Mac slipped a nervous hand into his hair, pressed his lips together. His hips bucked up, languid as Dennis let him fuck his mouth, let him drag his swollen cock over the flat of Dennis’ tongue. Dennis never once looked away; like a cracked piece of pottery someone repaired with gold, Mac’s heavy-lidded stare was jagged and shattered and broken in fascinating places.

Dennis hollowed his cheeks, applied gentle, insistent suction. The tip of his tongue traced around the smooth head, tasted precome at the tip. The hand in his hair yanked a little.

“Dennis,” Mac panted, and he mouthed the words I’m so close; generosity had Dennis pulling up, fisting Mac’s cock while he suckled at the head. A morbid coil of satisfaction released, somewhere deep-seated and primal, at the way Mac crumpled so readily, and he came in Dennis’ mouth with a deep, drawn-out groan, flash of teeth as they dug into his lip.

Which. Yeah. Ever the gentleman, Dennis waited until Mac had finished and pulled out in a state of blissful exhaustion, then plucked an empty beer bottle off the coffee table and quietly spat into it.

“I don’t taste that bad,” Mac said sullenly. His chest rose and fall in short breaths, and a bright red flush bloomed out from it, flooded his neck and arms.

“Little salty there, buddy,” Dennis said. He wiped his lips on the back of his hand. “At least I let you come in my mouth.”

Mac sighed. “I guess.”

“Hey, look, I don’t get all bent out of shape if you don’t swallow, do I?”

“No,” Mac admitted. In his defense, it was an unfair question—Mac actually liked doing it.

With a frown, Dennis slid closer, propping his chin on Mac’s chest. “Too much sodium’s bad for you, bro,” he tried.

“You know, jizz is technically protein, not sodium,” Mac said. “Like, it’s actually good for you.”

Dennis blinked. “You’re serious.”

“I mean, I’m not putting it in my workout shakes or anything, but—”

“God, dude, no, please,” he groaned, burying his face in Mac’s eyesore of a shirt. “Don’t make me imagine that.”

“What, me jizzing in a workout shake?”

“Yes.”

“Dude,” Mac said, but he was laughing; his chest was rumbling and his arm slung around Dennis’ back and he was finally laughing. “Not that crazy.”

“I never know with you,” Dennis muttered. “Go from curtains and modern art to jizzing in protein shakes in the span of one blowjob, it’s goddamn ridiculous. You’re ridiculous.”

“Ah, you love it,” Mac said carelessly, and Dennis stilled, listening to him snicker.

It was meant as a joke, that was infinitely obvious; Dennis knew enough to recognize a joke when he heard one. And it was funny, too, like jokes about a meteor crashing into Earth were funny. Hilarious when it happened in the abstract, when it was an obnoxious response to the smallest of problems—when you knew it couldn’t actually happen. And it stayed funny like that until, of course, it happened; and then it was damn near incomprehensible when the air sirens started wailing.

Chapter Text

The story of how the Gang came across a gramophone is an interesting one, but otherwise unimportant. What was important was that, midway through the stifling heat of July, the Gang acquired a gramophone, and Frank dispatched the others to the heart of Philly suburbia in search of cheap garage sales. Their fourth trip yielded results: boxes and boxes of vinyl records lining bowed plastic tables on someone’s front lawn, and the Gang descended like vultures to a carcass.

Mostly.

“This is a disaster,” Dennis declared. He was thumbing through a milk crate stuffed with dusty records, and the frown on his face spread in sheer disgust. “An absolute disaster. I mean, no labels, no organization. Who’s running this? Is anyone?”

Charlie made a face. “Dude, it's a garage sale. You don't really get organization out of a garage.”

“It's half the fun,” Mac added, and he nodded off at Dennis’ find. “What’s in there, anything good?”

Dennis scoffed. “Solid gold oldies and prog rock. Perfect complements. Like chocolate and sauerkraut.” Charlie perked up in interest and nudged Dennis out of the way, and Dennis’ thin scowl cut deeper into his face.

The temperature was getting to him.

“Dude, you can’t be so picky,” Charlie said, sliding a stack of records from the carton. “Try something new, there’s a ton of great shit here.”

“I know what I like, thanks.”

“Dennis.” Dee’s frown was long-suffering. “Is this about the Sade albums?”

“I had my eye on it first, Dee. I called that goddamn box of Sade albums and that asshole goddamn heard me.”

“We'll find you some Sade albums, Jesus, just let the box thing go already,” Charlie said, and Dennis was fuming, and the heat crawled into his head, wormed under his skin like an itch.  

“You’ll definitely find something,” Mac said, and that was easy to say when Mac already had his arms loaded with every album Seattle gave birth to in the 90s, and Dee had a healthy mix of riot grrls and singer-songwriters—and Charlie had them all beat by a mile, records stacked so high they almost touched his chin, and that wasn’t counting the boxes already loaded up in the Range Rover.

Dennis had a Traffic album.

“Don’t take his side on this,” he said, with a sharp glare at Mac. “Don’t do that.”

Dee shrugged. “He’s only trying to help.”

“Dee, no one asked for your opinion,” Dennis snapped, and everyone stopped and looked at him.

“I’m just saying,” Dee said. Her tone was frosty. “You don’t have to be a dick about it.”

“You know what? I don’t have to listen to this.” Dennis stalked off, down rows and rows of boxes until several tables separated him from the Gang.

They didn’t have to be so patronizing. Dennis would find something, he was damn capable of that; he didn’t need the Gang to tell him the goddamn obvious. He doubted he’d find it in a box of Engelbert Humperdinck records, but he forced himself to browse the titles anyway, just in case.

And it helped him ignore Mac’s pathetic attempt at subtlety as he sidled closer. “Dennis? It’s just me.”

They were alone at the end of the row. Dennis finished with the Humperdinck records and moved on to the next carton.

Mac’s voice was low and carefully neutral, and he’d caught up to Dennis fully, had gently invaded his space. “What’s up?”

He knew by now that not answering was worse than lying; Mac would pick at him like a scab. “Nothing.”

“You just seem… I dunno.” He fumbled around, because he always did; never graceful or subtle, Mac always barged in, messy with care and concern. “Like you’re out of it.”

Calmly, Dennis said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

There was no reaction from Mac for a few curious seconds, and Dennis fixed his gaze on the plastic carton. He eventually heard a sigh. “Well, if you do,” Mac said.

“You’ll be the first person I come running to,” Dennis said, as a sneer sat curling on his upper lip. Mac left him alone after that, and being alone suited Dennis just fine, thanks.

He shivered, despite the scorching heat.

The carton he’d been browsing heralded minor success—Dennis scored a couple of albums out of the deal and that proved encouraging enough, at least, to sniff out the rest of the table. Few people had ventured this far back, and Dennis perused titles at his own pace, with a vague, detached interest. Dappled sunlight flickered through the leaves and over dusty covers and they were interesting, sure, but not enough to commit to exploring, not enough to bicker with the Gang over use of the gramophone, not enough to give a shit, never enough for the commitment involved—

He was poking through one of the cleaner cartons when he recognized one of the covers, and the rush of adrenaline made his gut lurch. He slid it out hastily; it hadn’t even been opened, still wrapped in a shiny veneer of cellophane. Dennis stared at his own reflection in stunned silence.

He returned to the Gang in slightly lifted spirits, the record tucked safely between a decent enough haul, he thought. Paled in comparison to Charlie’s and Dee’s and Mac’s finds, but on the other hand, quality over quantity.

Which—the others had really gone for broke.

“I had to get them, you know?” Charlie was saying with no small measure of pride, as the woman at the register directed her teenage sons to drag another carton down to the Range Rover. “It’s Kate Bush, man. You can never find good Kate Bush records anymore.”

Mac squinted. “Not like Bush the band, right,” he was saying offhanded, but before Charlie could reply he'd spotted Dennis, was eagerly waving him over. “Yo! Dennis!”

At least he was eager about it, even smiling. This gift horse's mouth was staying shut. “You’re all done?”

“Almost. Charlie practically cleared them out,” Mac said. He then nodded at the small stack of records in Dennis’ arms. “Told you you’d find something.”

Dennis rolled his eyes, but he didn’t really mean it, and he stepped up to the cash register mostly to avoid the way Mac had grinned at him.

Dee was inspecting each record as the woman at the register added it to their total, and she didn’t say anything until the woman dropped Pretty Hate Machine into a large brown bag. Bony claws snatched it up. “Oh, shit!”

“Dee, don’t touch that,” Dennis said, swiping after it. Dee held it out of reach and then, in a truly stupid maneuver, flung the record over his head like a goddamm Frisbee, and thank God Mac had quick reflexes, what with Dennis suddenly recovering from three heart attacks in a row and all. Mac plucked the record out of the air, and Charlie leaned over his arm as they peered at the cover together.

“Dude. Dennis.” The surprise on his face could have easily passed for discomfort. “Nine Inch Nails?” 

“Mac.” Dennis kept calm, barely. “Give that to me. Please.”

“Wait. I’ve heard of them.” Charlie scrunched his nose. “They’re like creepy weird 90s shit, right?”

Dennis stalked up to Mac and ripped the record from his hands. “They’re not creepy.”

“They’re called Nine Inch Nails,” Charlie said. “The name of the band is Nine Inch Nails, and they’re supposed to not be creepy?”

Dennis fumed. “I don’t have to explain it,” he ground out; Mac and Charlie shared a strange stare, then, not understanding but unnerved all the same. Dennis tore his gaze away, shoulders stiff as he stalked back to the register.

Dee was smirking a little when he shoved the record back in the bag, and he decided that if he ever snapped and killed them all one day, he would start and finish with her.

—

Frank wasn’t in when they returned to the bar, so they dropped his card off in the back office and spent the afternoon breaking in the gramophone without him. It should’ve been a fun way to pass the time.

“Dennis, come on—again?”

The needle dropped into the groove. Dennis’ shrug was careless. “I’m sorry, Mac, but it’s my turn with the gramophone and you’re gonna have to deal.”

Dark and predatory, Pretty Hate Machine prowled through the bar for the third time that day, and three faces shared one exasperated look.

“You are playing it a bit thin,” Charlie said. “You got other records at the garage sale, whatever happened to all those?”

“I’ll play them eventually.”

“You heard this one twice today already.” Dee shot the gramophone an unsettled look. “You really can’t play anything else.”

“Literally anything,” Mac added. “Lighten the mood a little bit.”

“You know, I don’t recall complaining about any of your music selects,” Dennis said, with a lofty sneer for each of them, and it didn’t matter if they were stunned into silence or they simply agreed with his point, because they shut up after that and Dennis didn’t care about much else.

Frank waltzed in during the third track. “You were right! Deandra, you were right,” he announced, and it was utterly bizarre to see him suddenly beaming at Dee. “They loved the gramophone.”

“What’d I tell you? Do I know my base or do I know my base?”

Mac frowned. “Hang on. Dee was right about a base now?”

“And who’s ‘they’?” Charlie added.

Instead of answering, Frank frowned, held a finger up. Then he jabbed a thumb at the gramophone. “The shit is this?”

“The sweet sounds of success, Frank,” Dennis said with pride. “We found a garage sale.”

“Yeah, no shit. I meant this.” He lifted the needle off the record, and then the record off the gramophone, and Mac, Dee, and Charlie groaned in various shades of immediate relief.

“Thank God—“

“Goddamn finally—”

“Frank, you have no idea—”

“He’s been playing that all day, like, every turn with the gramophone he gets has been that same exact record—”

“And all the tracks on it are just super dark. I mean, talk about issues—”

“Like all the guy sings about is how messed up he feels he is, and we had to listen to it twice,” Charlie finished, and then everyone went deathly quiet, and Dennis shifted on his barstool, straightening out his shoulders and ignoring the way the back of his neck burned.

“Who was it that loved the gramophone, Frank?” he asked, as he checked his nails with extreme prejudice.

Frank pointed the record at them. “Investors.”

Dennis quickly snapped up the record, clutched it close as Frank explained: impressed with Dee’s upcycling operation, a select group of investors were making noises about remaking Paddy’s Pub into a trendy hotspot. They were coming in tomorrow morning. “And they had a serious hard-on for the goddamn gramophone.”

Dee shrugged, shoulders loose and wide. “It's millennials, Frank,” she said. “They're all into weird antique shit, who am I to judge 'em.”

“Millennials?” Dennis’ lip curled.

“Oh, yeah, they're like two-thirds my customer base,” Dee said, attempting casual and rocketing straight into smug. “They’re way big on the upcycling game.”

Mac frowned. “That include bars?”

“It’s a whole thing—you take a trashy already bar, throw up a couple wooden pallets, serve cocktails in Mason jars, and you mark up the prices like a shitload.” Dee shrugged. “Again, I don't judge 'em, I'm just here to make bank.”

“So… you want to upcycle Paddy’s,” Charlie said.

“Why not?”

Dennis decided to nip this in the bud straightaway. “Frank, no, we are not selling our souls to an entire goddamn generation, we’re just not,” he said.

The glint in Frank’s eye was vicious. “Wait until you see the offer.”

Mac and Charlie actually whooped when they saw the letter the investors had written. “Holy shit that’s a lot of dollars,” Dee said, eyes going wide.

“To serve drinks in Mason jars. Just Mason jars. Holy shit.” Mac’s grin stretched from ear to ear.

“It’s more than just Mason jars,” Frank told them. “Millennials are a fickle bunch, all right? They’re hard to pin down. They like fancy, but not too fancy. Real, but not too real. They need the right kinda atmosphere, the right mood music.”

“Well, I can tell you the wrong mood music, that’s for sure,” Charlie said. Mac and Dee broke into a laugh, and it was about that time Dennis realized he didn’t need to sit there and listen to this. Who gave a shit what millennials or the Gang thought, or how much money investors threw at Paddy’s, it would always be a dive with a rotten miserable core, and dressing it up in a few bells and whistles and Mason jars wouldn’t change a damned thing, someone would always see right through it, someone would always hate what they saw.

He trashed Pretty Hate Machine in the back office, beneath a rotting and yellowed stack of papers that hadn’t been touched in years.  

—

“—And whatever happened to our history, Mac? Aren’t you and Charlie always going on and on about the rich cultural history of South Philadelphia? And what, you just want to see it all flushed down some eco-friendly toilet so a gaggle of entitled yuppie vultures can come gentrify the goddamn roost?”

“‘Ood,” Mac was saying, with a toothbrush in his mouth, “they’re ‘aying uh a ‘itload.”

“So that’s the price you’re willing to pay. For Paddy’s soul. Thirty pieces of fair-trade, organic silver,” Dennis said over the rush of the shower.

He heard Mac spit into the sink. “Dude. Did you actually just try and Bible me.” The water cut off and the shower curtain zipped back; standing at the sink with his arms crossed and a brow arched, Mac stared Dennis down. “And since when did you give a shit about Paddy’s soul?”

“Since always,” Dennis sniffed. “Pass me my towel.”

A skeptical look accompanied the terrycloth. “Since always,” Mac repeated.

“Look,” Dennis said as he scrubbed at his hair, “we don’t need to change who we are to impress people. We don’t need to change Paddy’s to get people on board.”  

“You saw the letter though, right? We can buy like ten bars with the money they’re offering,” Mac said.

“What do we need ten bars for? Why can’t we just stick with the old one, what’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing’s wrong with it, dude.” Dennis reemerged from under the towel; Mac was squinting at him, prying for a hidden message. “You’re making it sound like I hate Paddy’s or something.”

“I don’t see you trying to defend it.”

“Because it’s not that big a deal! Oh my God. Dude.” Both palms slapped the lip of the sink as Mac slumped backwards. “Look, some guys come in, slap up a coat of chalkboard paint, we serve shit in Mason jars, and a bunch of millennials get a kick out of a real working gramophone. We’ve done worse to the bar ourselves, Dennis, and we haven't exactly made bank before.”

Dennis had the towel pressed to his face, in a valiant attempt to not just yell at Mac until he understood. “Those were all our ideas, Mac. Our schemes, our plans. We weren’t changing the bar to fit all nice and neat into a goddamn investment portfolio.”

“Dude—”

“I mean, where does it end? Where, Mac? They're not gonna stop at Mason jars and wooden pallets. Sure, one day that's all there is, they're happy with gramophones and a few chalkboard signs here and there, and then next thing you know it's a hashtag fucking everywhere and the sign comes off the door, again, and Dee's trash is back to filling up the goddamn bar and, Mac—where does it end?”

“You know they’re not buying us out, right?” Mac said seriously, and Dennis halted mid-tirade. “It said right in the letter.”

“I don’t—it’s just—Mac, it’s the principle of the thing.”

“The principle? Dennis,” Mac said as he took a step closer, “the goddamn principle isn’t gonna go anywhere. We’ll always know deep down that it’s our shithole bar.”

Dennis was scowling.

“Only now it’s our shithole bar with a shitload of cash,” and Mac was in Dennis’ space, gleaming bright, flushed with the promise of untold capitalist fortune. “Like, now we’re definitely taking that trip to Mexico.”

Warm sands and tequila shots and the thought held intense appeal, honestly it did. He had no quarrel with the cash itself. But Dee's trash all over the bar again, and sitting on his goddamn hands while investors picked Paddy's to pieces—and Mac was pressing into him, and that shouldn't have been so distracting. “You’re not trying to get me going with this, are you?” he said. “I mean, good job on a chance to join the rest of us in the black—”

“Here we go.”

“—I’m still pissed you couldn’t make up your half of the water bill,” Dennis finished, and the way Mac rolled his eyes diametrically opposed the way he rolled into Dennis’ thighs. “One good investment scheme doesn't change that.”

“I didn’t know it would cost that much more! It’s water, dude, like.” Mac reached behind himself to flick the faucet on and off, like it made some sort of a salient point. “It was way cheaper last time around. I said I’d pay you back anyway.”

“Yeah? When?”

A devilish smirk, and Mac ground his hips torturously slow, and Dennis was almost pissed at himself for such a predictable response.

Even more so when he considered letting Mac off the hook for it, when Dennis was laid out flat and panting on the mattress; Mac had been fucking the velvet-soft crease of his pelvis and thigh until Dennis wanted to scream with impatience. Mac bent closer, pressed his lips to Dennis’ ear.

“See,” he said, grinning. “Payback.”

Dennis had a score of replies loaded in the chamber; that’s not even what I meant, or this doesn’t count and you goddamn good and know it, or if payback’s a bitch what’s that make you.  But Mac ground into him again, and his heavy cock twitched, and his groan of “Will you goddamn fuck me already, Jesus Christ” could have been less wanton.

Mac dropped a kiss to his lips and let up, reaching into the nightstand. Then he frowned. “Dennis?”

Dennis was trying to catch his breath. “What.”

“Big problem,” Mac said, and the box of condoms he dug out of the drawer was strikingly empty.

Dennis scrubbed a hand down his chin, because this would happen to him. “Whose turn was it to pick up?”

He remembered before Mac answered, but the truth stung all the same. “Think it was yours,” Mac said, face falling. Then he snapped his fingers. “Oh, wait! In your wallet, do you have—”

“Two days ago in the car,” Dennis said flatly. “Remember?”

“Goddammit,” Mac all but whispered. He chucked the empty box off the bed and gave Dennis a forlorn look. “So, what, handjobs? Or we can keep doing grinding if you want. I’d blow you, but I kinda just brushed my teeth, so…”

“Forget it.” Dennis had his eyes shut. “It’s fine.”

“I mean.” One eye snapped open; Mac half-hovered over him, offering him a smile. His hand traced up Dennis’ inner thigh. “I can just brush them again.”

“I meant about the condom,” Dennis said, with a more pointed stare, and Mac’s hand froze in its tracks. “Seriously. It’s not like it’s a big deal, I just hate dealing with the wet spot.”

“You’re serious?”

“Have you never slept in the wet spot before?”

“No, not—like, Dennis. We can just do other shit,” Mac began, and it was enough for Dennis to roll his eyes and snap his head back with a frustrated groan.

“Sweet Christ, it’s not supposed to be a goddamn ordeal,” he said. “Unless you feel like running out to the condom store—if it’s not too big a problem? I really just want you to fuck me, all right? Don’t make it into a thing.”

Mac studied him carefully. Then, with the barest hint of a grin, he said, “Just to be clear, you’re definitely on the pill, you said?”

“Holy God above, Mac—”

Mac kissed him, then, shaking with silent laughter, slotting smoothly between parted thighs.

Dennis thought he knew impatience until Mac took extra time in opening him up. He squirmed violently against Mac’s hand until Mac said, rough with arousal, “I’m doing the best I can here.”

“You’ve done this before.”

“Not like this,” Mac said, “y’know,” and Dennis stared at him. A flush crept into Mac’s cheeks. “Look, just—bear with me.”

“Hurry up,” Dennis said, bordering on petulant, and Mac crooked his fingers and Dennis almost yowled out a moan.  

Mac lined himself up. “Hey,” he whispered. “Dennis.”

“Christ, what now.”

“Last chance,” he said, with a gentle nudge, and Dennis opened his mouth and nothing came out.

Mac waited. Dennis exhaled. Mac did nothing, and Dennis said eventually, “God, yes, just go for it,” and then Mac nodded and moved a careful hand to his hip.

“Okay,” he said, “I'm trusting you on this.”

He eased inside with his eyes blown out, inky black lined with warm brown. The difference was faint, unless you paid attention, and then the slight tug of resistance and the coursing rush of heat eclipsed his entire mind. Mac swatted at his shoulder until Dennis groaned, “Dude, what?”

“Breathe,” Mac said, breathless himself. “Jesus, that’s.”

If anything, enviable, for the way Mac hung his head and the muscles of his arms trembled. He slid in further and Dennis felt more than heard him moan. “Yeah?”

Mac nodded with his lip between his teeth.

He stuttered through the first slow thrusts, damp hair already stuck to his forehead. Already tense. Dennis bumped his hips up. “Go faster, a little.”

“I will, just. Just give me a minute.”

Another bump, and Dennis said, half-incredulous, “Seriously, a minute?”

“Dude, there’s a lot going on.”

“You sure you’ll even last a full minute?” Dennis said, and then Mac scowled at him, pushed their foreheads together like a challenge. “Bro, you might not have the stamina.”

“You so know I've got stamina, Dennis, don't even joke,” Mac growled, and to prove it slid in smoothly and without stopping once. Dennis’ rapid inhale made Mac chuckle. “See? What'd I tell you.”

A brief head shake, then Dennis brushed the tips of their noses together and said, “You’re so goddamn weird sometimes.”

“Yeah.” Mac shut his eyes, shivered. Slipped out a little and breathed sharply in. “Fuck.”

“You’re sure you’re good,” Dennis said, eyes narrowing.

“Yeah, no, I’m good, just.” He was panting softly; a hand clawed at the bedsheet. “Yeah.”

And he kept going, and he shut his eyes; he leaned in and cursed under his breath and kissed Dennis, soft and artless. Dennis stroked a hand down his spine and squirmed, insistent.

“Dennis,” Mac said, voice breaking, “are you—”

Dennis shook his head, and Mac swore quietly. “Why? You’re—” Mac jerked his head. “So just do me after.”

“Do you after? No, Dennis, dude. Come on.” Mac slowed his pace and wriggled around, worked a hand between Dennis’ legs. “Not happening, bro. No man left behind.”

It startled out a bark of laughter; Dennis levered himself up on his elbows as Mac synced rhythms, and spluttered, “Did you just quote from Thunder Gun?”

Mac’s starry-eyed grin left Dennis reeling, and he was laughing when Mac pushed him back, saying no hesitation, no surrender! in his ear as his hand twisted a final time, and Dennis could barely breathe beyond the unfamiliar tightness in his chest. He was gasping out laughs with his sides splitting apart when he caught Mac’s gaze, raw and tender like a flayed-open nerve, and then his ribs were burning, and every breath still trapped in his lungs made him want to choke.

Months of practice kept Mac from collapsing on Dennis. He pulled out and fell limply to the side, and Dennis stared at cracks in the ceiling.

“That,” Mac said, muffled, “was the most Thunder Gun thing I have ever, ever done.” He turned his head when Dennis didn’t respond in time. “Dennis.”

“We should’ve put down a towel,” a disembodied voice told the cracks. They looked nothing like rabbits, Dennis thought, with a dislocated pang of disappointment. They honestly looked like nothing.

“A towel? What—oh. Oh,” Mac said, and he offered up a grimace. “Yeah.”

“Mm.”

A wrinkle of the nose. Mac said, “It doesn’t feel weird, does it?”

Dennis shrugged. It did, but he’d signed up for it, hadn’t he?

He was vaguely aware of Mac rolling off the bed, and he disappeared into the bathroom; Dennis heard the water cut on, then off, and Mac reemerged with a wet hand towel and a larger bath one.

“Slide over,” he said, and Dennis obeyed, and Mac pulled the comforter back and swept the bath towel over the wet spot with a flourish.

He crawled back into bed and nodded his head at Dennis' lap. “Want me to,” he said, and he held up the wet hand towel.

Laying back into his pillow, distant and tonelessly, Dennis said, “You should shower.”

Mac shook his head, something like a smile playing about his lips. “I’m ready to pass out,” he admitted. Dennis splayed his legs and Mac bent between them, the wet rag warm as it swept between his thighs.

Mac chucked the rag at the laundry hoop and scored. “Three points,” Dennis said, as Mac crawled under the comforter with an agreeable yawn.

“Kobe,” he said, and sidled closer, lids already drooping.

“Mac,” Dennis said, wrenched from his throat, and Mac hummed and shut his eyes fully. Dennis said nothing.

—

Something woke him, a bad dream, a hypnic twitch; all Dennis remembered was a memory gap with brittle edges, charred and black with soot. A mulligan, and not on his terms—but easier than forgetting a nightmare alone.

He used the bathroom without turning on the light, while Mac was still asleep. He avoided the shadow that slipped into the mirror. It lingered in the corners, it copied him, it stole everything but his eyes; Dennis kept them fixed to the floor, unseeing. He left and opened his drawers quietly, dressed in darkness, in silence.

There was a soft stirring behind him, a susurration of covers rustled back. Dennis turned around; Mac sat up, naked and blinking. Moonlight spilled across his skin, infused him, made him glow.

“Hey,” he murmured, “you came back,” and Dennis thought, where else did he have to go.

Barely nodding, barely above a whisper, he said, “Yeah, I came back.” Mac smiled at him drowsily, and some would call it heartache, what tore wild through him, swelled and broke and bled behind his ribs.

You had to have a heart first. Dennis had nothing.

Chapter Text

The sun had barely risen and the shadows wore soft coats of purple and blue-gray, and Dennis woke from a dream that morning, another one. He woke from a dream and again couldn’t remember, only that there were flames, and a hundred darkened hallways with a thousand darkened rooms, and every room he obsessively checked was empty, walls blackened to ash and the floorboards rotting away.

He woke from a dream that morning, and again he couldn’t remember, and he squirmed backwards, closer to the center of the bed. Mac snuffled, grunted, and the possessive arm around Dennis’ waist tightened its hold.

Dennis shut his eyes and saw glowing coals; he turned over and nosed Mac insistently and ground his thigh hard into Mac’s erection. A minute of that same urgent pressure, and Mac was blinking awake, semi-dazed with a languid roll of his hips; Dennis was murmuring c'mon, biting at Mac’s lip, c'mon, fuck me, and dark eyes narrowed to slits.

Dennis flung an arm out for the lube and flattened his belly to the bed. Mac hesitated, a hand on his hip.

But he didn’t ask. He opened Dennis up and he kissed down the faint ridges of spine and he eased Dennis’ thighs apart, but he didn’t ask. Dennis gnawed at a corner of the pillowcase until Mac was pressing into him, and then he shoved his face into the pillow.

Mac slid in, carefully, and Dennis clawed at the sheets. It wasn’t long before Dennis growled at him to go deeper, and Mac pulled at his hips, shifted the angle of his thrusts. Dennis arched his back with an irritated whine and Mac groaned, curved sharply over him.

It wasn’t working. Dennis rubbed himself against the sheets and tried not to seem desperate.

Mac’s thrusts were picking up speed. He gripped Dennis’ hips hard enough to bruise and he panted like a dog in Dennis’ ear and it wasn’t enough, Dennis was nowhere near close. He maneuvered his hand awkwardly between his legs, closed his eyes, closed his fist and he was still goddamned soft and nothing was helping, nothing. Mac ground against his ass one final time and stilled, gasping oh fuck, Dennis, Dennis into his skin over and over, pressed close enough for Dennis to feel his heartbeat.

Dennis removed his hand with a sinking feeling of betrayal, a violent sense of blindness.

It was halfway through Mac mouthing at the join of his neck and shoulder when he asked, mostly as a joke, if it made the earth move for him too—Dennis went stiff and Mac stopped, dropping back in a cold wave of surprise. “Wait. You did come, right?”

“It’s whatever,” Dennis said. “It’s fine.”

“It’s fine? Dennis.” Mac sat up, stunned. “You didn’t get off.”

Dennis shut his eyes, pressed them into the heel of his palm. He rubbed and rubbed until colors swam across the black.

“Were you even close? Dude, if you weren’t close why didn’t you just say something?”

“Because,” Dennis said, tight-lipped. “I just said it was fine.”

“Well… shit. I’m sorry, man.” Mac was too sincere, too earnest. He was a lost little pup staring up at Dennis and the itch crawled all over, burned hot with inflammation. “You want me to blow you?”

“I want you to drop the subject.”

Mac's brow creased hard. “I’m offering to suck you off,” he said, wildly perplexed. “I want to do it. I like doing it, Dennis, you know I do. It’s not like it’s a problem.”

“I’m taking a shower,” Dennis said, and he kicked off the blanket and rolled to his feet, wincing as he headed for the bathroom.

Several seconds of singular shock, and then Mac shot up after him. Dennis shut the door in his gobsmacked face, the click of the lock punctuating Mac’s shout of Dennis, open the goddamn door! and the heavy, assailing thump of his fist on the splintering wood. He protested for a minute before he gave up, stomping away the recalcitrant sore loser—and Dennis took a moment just to enjoy the silence.

He glanced at himself in the bathroom mirror, scraped a hand over dark bags under his eyes, over graying stubble. Laugh lines. Thin, sallow cheeks. Persistent flab under his arms and pasty-white translucent skin and a stubborn doughiness padding out his hips, and Mac's come dripping hot down the inside of his thighs.

Shit.

You look tired, dear. His mother’s voice in his head, and it twisted in with Mac’s distress, constricted with Mac’s concern, and he shut his eyes and there were the embers again, scattered over the crackling floorboards.

First his dreams, then his body, now his brain; the whole animal was rotting apart, the carcass ripe in the blistering sun.

The least he could do was not be so damn pathetic, and he snapped the medicine cabinet open, brushing past his razor and a pill bottle and floss and gauze. He grabbed toothpaste and toothbrush with an undying vengeance because this was a normal day in the life, even if he had to force it into acting like one.

—

The summer heat was oppressive, and the sky in the past day or so had taken on the color of a fresh bruise. Dennis squinted off at the horizon, at the ominous thunderheads looming in the distance, and frowned.

Jogging out of the apartment, Mac caught up to him by the car. He mirrored Dennis’ gaze and drew up a frown of his own. “Think it’ll rain?”

Dennis cut his eyes over; Mac had skipped the shower, and his shirt was noticeably wrinkled. Perfect way to impress the investors. He snorted and ignored Mac's question and dipped into the Range Rover.

They pulled out of the street.

It was Dennis’ day to pick the music, but the blank static fuzz of his brain was already enough; music and melodies and Mac singing along, the mere thought had the wires jammed with interference.

Silence was a form of music, wasn’t it? Should’ve been a damn hymn compared to earlier. Simon and Garfunkel 1:37: No one dared disturb the sound of silence. A verse Mac must have skipped, for all his religious adherence; he lasted about a minute before he said, all forced and casual, “What do you think the investors are gonna be like?”

Traffic on Broad. Cars sat in a line, fat metal toads baking on the pavement. Dennis sucked in his cheeks, bit and gnawed at the flesh.

“My guess? College kids. Probably a private college. Maybe it’s Bryn Mawr,” Mac offered.

The car behind him laid on the horn, and Dennis jolted, curled his lip. The Range Rover inched forward.

“What do you think?” Mac asked him, and the car moved a few feet more, and Dennis kept his mouth shut. “Oh, the silent treatment, okay. Nice.”

“I don’t have anything to say.”

“Well, you can start by saying that.”

“I don’t have anything to say to you,” Dennis clarified. It cut like a diamond, sharp and lifeless.

Mac exhaled. “This is about this morning,” he said quietly, and Dennis pressed his lips together, could neither confirm nor deny. “Dennis, I said I’m sorry. And I wanted to make it up to you. Not my fault you’re the one guy in all America who can turn down a free blowjob.”

Thinly, Dennis said, “Wouldn’t have had to turn it down if you’d done it right in the first place.”

“Excuse me?” He regretted it the exact moment Mac’s eyes burst open wide, adding, “Done it right?”

His throat felt puffy, words too soft, useless. “Yep.”

“And what the fuck does that mean?” Mac demanded to know, and Dennis wanted to take it all back, he didn’t want this, arguing the wrong points with Mac in a hot car on a sweltering July morning before faceless investors from possibly Bryn Mawr staked a claim on his life. He wanted the sound of golden fucking silence, and he had Mac snarling defense of his precious masculinity. “You have never complained, Dennis, not once.”

“Christ, there’s a first time for everything. Lean back,” Dennis snapped, craning his head forward. Mac ratcheted back as Dennis turned onto South Carlisle, but then sprung forward, shoulders squared for a fucking fist-fight.

In the middle of the goddamn road. In the goddamn car. “You could’ve said something.”

“Said go deeper, didn’t I?”

“You’re serious with this,” Mac said, deadened, bleached tone to match the lack of comprehension smeared over his features.  

“I told you to drop it,” Dennis growled. “You’re the one who brought it up.”

“I wanted to know if I did something wrong!”

“Yeah? Well? Truth hurts, doesn’t it.” Tight and calculated, ice-cold, and a forest fire swept through Mac’s eyes, the sparks from the embers burning brilliant into Dennis’ skull. “Don’t blame me when you’re the one who can’t handle it.”

He was making the turn onto Dickinson when Mac darted a hand to his seatbelt. The buckle clicked and the belt went slack, and Mac snatched the door handle and jerked it hard.

The door of the Range Rover snapped open like the crack of a whip. “The fuck are you—Mac!” Dennis shouted, the car hobbling to a crawl. “The fuck do you think you’re doing?!”

“Not listening to any more of your shit, for one,” Mac muttered, scraped out of his throat with nails, with teeth. The belt had him in a tangle, and he sliced at it like a machete to thick black vines.  “I’m done with it.”

“Jesus Christ—will you fucking stay in the goddamn car?” Mac wriggled free of the constricting belt and rolled out of the car, landing hands-out on the cracked sidewalk. Dennis saw him wince; his palms were bloodied bright red.

A horn blared. Mac wiped his hands on his thighs, then stood.

“MAC!” Dennis screamed, hanging over Mac’s vacant seat, one hand clutching at the swinging car door. Mac looked up, looked him squarely in the eye.

He started walking.

The horn blared again, chorused with two others, and Mac was walking down fucking Dickinson. Dennis tracked him like a hunting dog with a trail, shutting the door and rolling the passenger window down. “Are you fucking joking, Mac?” he said. “Are you seriously goddamn kidding?”

No response. Mac stared straight ahead.

“This isn’t funny, man, knock it off.” The car jerked to a stop, nosed up to the bumper of another car. Mac plunged ahead. “Like, even for you? This is immature. Actually, it’s worse than immature. It’s fucking asinine.”

“For me?” Mac hollered, throwing a sharp glare over one shoulder. “You’re the one who’s fucking immature, Dennis. You’re the one bitching at me like a little pissant when I was only trying to help!”

“That’s the goddamn problem!”

“Fuck you!” Mac shouted, and Dennis shouted back, “Again, the problem!” and Mac flipped him off, stalked forward, and the car in front of him turned and Dennis shot down Dickinson like a hollow bullet, leaving Mac behind in the cracks and the dust, reeling from the recoil.

Let him walk to work. Or fall off the face of the Earth, what did it matter anymore. The faultlines would swallow them all soon enough, everything once known and beloved screaming in the cracks.

—

The bar was a mausoleum this early in the morning.

Gray light filtered through the dust as Dennis swept in, loose and lurid and his thoughts swirling through endless thick sludge. He came to a stop in the middle of the bar, keys clutched tight in his palm and leaving toothy indents. His other hand struck through his hair, clawed at his skull.

Investors. They had made up a plan the night before, to prep. Set up the chalkboards. Set up the crates. Set up the gramophone. Investors with their windfall of cash would be here any minute. Mac would be here any minute. The Gang, and investors, and Mac, and—

Dennis ripped his hand from his hair and walked into the back office.

It was ten minutes later when Mac walked in, drenched in sweat; hair sticking to his grimy forehead and sporting fresh pit stains. Cool and clean and calm, Dennis turned from the gramophone as the needle scratched away.

He smiled. Mac froze.

“You know something? I think the investors might actually be impressed by this,” he said, tapping at the gramophone box. The needle juddered and started over, whisking through the grooves of Pretty Hate Machine. “I know it’s a little out of their age range, but they’re all what, twentysomethings? Real big on the nineties, I take it. If they’re worth their salt they’ll have at least heard of Lollapalooza.”

Mac’s mouth pinched, lemon-sour.

“Dee and I went, back in ’91. Our mom brought us up to Saratoga Springs that summer, probably just to get away from Frank. Not much better, but whatever. Now there is no one, not a single goddamned soul in all of Saratoga Springs willing to slip us anything stronger than a flute of champagne. So we decide to sneak out. We steal a handle off someone’s yacht and then we’re off.”

“What are you doing,” Mac said, wary. “Dennis?”

“We scalp a couple tickets to this music festival that’s in town, only we get there late because Dee’s a goddamn lightweight who almost needs to get her stomach pumped. But we do get there, and we’re just in time to see this one group go on, Nine Inch Nails. We didn’t know who they were, of course, but a name like that in Saratoga Springs? Well, we were already there.

“So this guy comes out—everybody’s screaming. He’s weird as shit. All tattered, kneeling, crawling around on the stage; he’s Cricket on a less-decent day. The music kicks in and the crowds are still going, Dee and I can barely hear the words. But he’s angry. That carries; this weird tattered guy gets into it like a fight with the goddamned audience. He’s been betrayed by everyone; his friends, his lovers. Even his God—more his problem there but now he has nothing. He feels like nothing. He wishes he could feel nothing, but there you go, he doesn’t. And he’s hurt, and so angry.”

Mac said nothing, and the gramophone said, I’d rather die than give you control.  

“Especially because he doesn’t deserve it,” Dennis said. “He practically deserves worship. Anyway, I thought it was great—and this is basically a darker runoff of 80s synth-pop, which I think makes it even more attractive to the goddamned investors—”

Squaring his jaw, Mac marched forward, shoving the needle off the record. You’re going to get what you dese— cut off with a violent squeal.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Mac glared at him. “Look, you wanna listen to—whatever, this,” he spat, “fine. You do it on your own time. But right now, we’re sticking to the plan we made for the investors, and that plan?” He held up Pretty Hate Machine. “Doesn’t include this.”

Dennis’ face drained, bloodless and pale, as he stared at the surface of the record. With a deadly softness, eyes narrowed to shiny slits, he said, “That had better not be a scratch.”

Mac went still. His gaze flickered over the record, and Dennis watched him angle it, just a hair, out of the path of light.

They snapped: Dennis lunged for the record just as Mac leapt backwards, arm cutting a wide arc. Dennis made a swipe as Mac tried to dodge, caught his wrist; Mac stumbled back, boot heel jamming into a low table made out of pallet.

The record flew out of his hand. The crash was swift—Pretty Hate Machine shattered on impact, splintered into shards, shivering and clattering on the dusty, dirty floor.

Slow as a dirge, Dennis turned to Mac. “Oh,” he said, and it was barely above a whisper. “I see. So that’s how you want to play it.”

Mac was practically stupefied, but jolted alive when Dennis stalked over to the refurbished wooden shelves holding their vinyl haul. Mac took up a shelf of his own, as well as half of Dennis’; with a vindictive sneer, Dennis reclaimed some space on his shelf by force, upcycled furniture shuddering as cases flew out of it.

“Let’s see,” he began, soft as he brushed his hand over a cover. “Now, what do we have here.”

“It was an accident, Dennis. You know it was.”

“Quite a lot of selects, Mac. I’m impressed.” Dennis indicated his stack with a hard grin. “Pretty focused on the 90s grunge, though, don’t you think?”

He held up the case for Nevermind, pinched the edge between two fingers; then his hold went slack and the case swung down ninety degrees and a Nirvana record slipped out and broke clean in half.

Mac’s wide-eyed shock gave him an advantage and he pressed it. “Stone Temple Pilots.” Crack. “Alice in Chains.” Crack. “Pearl Jam, nice. You know that means semen, right. The band name?” Crack.

He had Blood Sugar Sex Magik ready for execution when, spurred into action, Mac ripped one of his records off the shelf. “Oh, look,” he said, snarling low. “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, by Traffic. Steve Winwood’s old band, right?”

Dennis curled his lip, and Greedo and Han shot at the same time.

Close to the shelf, Mac was quicker to reload, but Dennis had choices. He flung an armful of albums towards the pool table and they shot out of their cases, big flying discs crashing and breaking. With a heavy grunt Mac ripped cases from the shelf at random, snapped them out one by one like a discus, and Dennis wouldn’t lose this too so he grabbed his own handful and—“The hell are you guys doing?!”

Mac and Dennis rounded on Charlie and Dee.

“He started it,” Dennis spat, glowering.

“It? What it? To go insane, is that it?” Dee said, shock sweeping her in seismic waves as she took in all the carnage.

“Pretty much,” Dennis said, and Mac grabbed Dennis’ Chaka Khan album and threw it at his feet, smashing it to pieces all over his shoes. “See? He’s gone completely off the deep end.”

“Real funny coming from you,” Mac growled, and Dennis’ nostrils flared and he threw three cases straight at the wall.

“Dude!” Charlie grasped at Mac’s hands and the innocent albums he hadn’t yet destroyed. “The investors are gonna be here in any minute, you can’t just—”

“Is that my Alanis Morissette record?” Dee said.

Mac and Charlie and Dennis stopped and looked at her.

“That’s my Alanis Morissette record,” Dee said. She’d gone unnervingly still. “Dennis, give that back.”

“Why do you have Dee’s Alanis Morissette record?” Charlie asked, suspicious, and Dennis hadn’t actually meant to grab it. This did, in fact, have a specific target. But Dee was waiting like a cobra poised to strike, and Charlie wanted an answer, and Mac—

“Mac’s got your Elton John albums,” Dennis pointed out, screwy-pitched and tensed. “See? He’s got all of them.”

Even Mac looked astonished, although Charlie was fast losing patience. “Dude, what the shit? Don’t bring my shit into it, or Dee’s shit, break your own records if you're gonna break anything—”

“Dennis,” Dee said again, without any trace of a tone. Charlie and Mac scuffled around the gramophone in a whirlwind of a blur and Dee was motionless and cold. “Give me back my record.”

Dennis looked at the record in his hand. Dennis looked at Dee. Dennis looked past Dee, to the wreckage of a record behind her, and Dennis had a terrible thought.

“This record?” Dee’s nod was imperceptible. Enough, though, to arc his arm back, to watch her face morph in horror, to offer her a toothy, terrible grin. “Sure thing, sis. Catch.”

She didn’t even turn her head, after she’d failed to catch it—after it sailed through her giant talons and crashed into the entrance. She just stood there, shoulders drawn in tight and narrow, lips pressed in a livid line.

“Would you look at that,” Dennis said cheerfully. “Jagged Little Pill is in jagged little pieces, isn’t that ironic.”

“Oh. I see what this is.” Dee’s strikes were vicious—she stormed over, crushing vinyl in her wake, she snatched up someone’s record with a vengeance. She was sneering. “I get it.”

“Dee!” Charlie yelled, and Mac broke free of Charlie’s chokehold, flinging records still in his hands; Dee threw albums at Dennis with a mutilated screech and they shattered in a million pieces; Dennis ripped the top shelf of records off and it thundered to the floor—

They all backed and crashed and stumbled and fell into the gramophone at the same time. A heavy, final groan, and the makeshift table below caved in with a skeletal clatter, and the gramophone, with its beautiful cherry-wood turntable, and its mother of pearl-handled crank, and its gleaming brass horn—the gramophone plunked to the floor.

The four of them stared at the gramophone, the dented horn, the crank skittering away to a booth, the turntable shattered in thousands of splinters; and they rapidly realized what the words mortal terror meant.

And then the doorbell tinkled merrily, and three elder gentlemen in neatly-pressed tweed strolled in after Frank.

The first hint of failure came not from the Gang, nor the gramophone, nor the sea of broken records in the back. Frank’s Croc cracked over the shards of an Alanis Morissette record, and he glanced down in sheer confusion. “What the—”

His gaze trailed up. Mac and Dennis and Charlie and Dee stood by a dead gramophone, all wearing big, plastic smiles. Behind them shone a sable sea, wall to wall, rocky pieces of vinyl stabbing through the surface. Dressed in floral prints and Washi tape and coats of careful chalkboard paint, Dee’s trash desecrated the bar like disfigured remains.

And no one had put out the Mason jars.

The first investor politely cleared his throat. “Is that the gramophone?” he asked.

“Yes,” Frank said, dully.

“We assumed it would be in proper working order,” said the second investor. “And—oh. Those would be the records, I take it.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, dear.”

The third investor peered at the Closed sign in the window. A well-manicured finger swept over the neon tubing, came away fuzzy with gray dust. Frowning, he scratched at his closely-trimmed white beard, and then straightened up with a mild-mannered cough.

“I believe we’ve seen enough,” the third investor said, somewhat stiffly. “Thank you for your time.”

“Yes,” Frank said.

“Ta,” the first investor said, and the doorbell tinkled again. A breath of summer heat puffed at the door as the investors walked out, and then the door shut, and a cold dread oozed back in. Dennis glanced at Dee and saw murder, the curve of her snarl hooked like a scythe. He glanced at Mac and Mac wasn’t looking at him. The dread crawled into his stomach and sat there, putrid and sore with rot.

“Huh,” Charlie said. “I didn’t think they’d be British.”

—

Frank chewed them out for an hour. A full hour. Dennis counted. They sat on four barstools and faced away from the counter and Frank taught them five brand-new swears that day—although two, he claimed, were common in New Jersey.

Dee sat up ramrod straight, a live wire humming with enough current to kill an elephant. And Dennis couldn’t decide which was worse, the fear of electrocution from sitting next to Dee for too long… or Mac.

He had his shoulders sloped low, hung his wrists limp over his thighs. He stared at a fixed point on the floor, neck bowed, chin almost to his chest. His face was worse than blank, it was empty. Dee was scorching him on one side but there was nothing on the other. Radio silence filled the void.  

Dennis couldn’t see Mac’s eyes, shadowed under thick brown lashes, and it was probably better that he didn’t.

Activity resumed when Frank ordered the four of them to get brooms and dustpans and clean up the goddamn mess. Charlie and Dee came in hot with protests.

“Mac and Dennis started it. Charlie and I had nothing to do with this shit,” Dee said.

“We wanted to show off the gramophone. We wanted to play music for the investors,” Charlie said. “We wanted their British dollars in the bar.”

“Pounds, Charlie,” Dee said. “Not dollars. Pounds.”

Charlie pounded the counter. “Point is, we wanted that shit, Frank. When the investors walked in? We weren’t the ones throwing records at people for no good goddamn reason.”

Three heads turned, expecting a response. Mac barely looked alive. Quietly, to the floor, Dennis said, “There was a reason.”

“Ask me if I give a shit,” Frank said, and for once, four smart mouths kept silent. “Fine. Mac, Dennis, a broom and a dustpan. You get the records and trash the gramophone in the dumpster. And I’m taking it out of your paychecks this period, too.”

Mac snapped up with a brief flash of fear, and Dennis—didn’t even want to bother, anymore, didn’t want to care. Didn’t want to give a shit. He rubbed the bridge of his nose and nodded, defeated.

Frank vanished into the back office, and Charlie and Dee vanished into the bathroom, and Mac vanished into the basement. Dennis slid off the stool and stood by the records, a weathered statue in a desert of wreckage.

Mac emerged a minute later with a broom and a dustpan. He thrust the broom at Dennis’ chest, then settled down on the floor with the pan and growled, “You sweep.”

So he did. And if he swept too roughly and Mac got dust and vinyl in his eyes, then it was his fault for not looking away.

—

Dennis had never been so happy to have an opening shift before. He all but bounded across the floor and jogged outside, keys in hand when he heard footsteps crunch on the gravel behind him.

The sky threatened thunder. Fat purple clouds hung low and swollen, and the air had a faint, metallic tang. Dennis had one foot in the car when Mac stopped in his tracks, when he realized where he was headed.

“Sorry.” The set of his jaw indicated anything but. “I forgot.”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets, about to pass the Range Rover, and if Dennis let him he would be the idiot to try and walk home during a thunderstorm. Dennis drummed his fingers on the wheel and swung the passenger door out; he said abruptly, without looking, “Mac, get in the damn car.”

They didn’t talk on the way back. Or as they walked up to their apartment. Or when they were inside. They only talked when Mac called first shower: with his hair limp and soaked black with sweat, and his shirt peeling off like a window cling, he sorely needed one. Anyone could see that.

“Absolutely not,” Dennis said. “You had first shower yesterday.”

“You had first shower this morning! How could you possibly forget from this morning?”

Dennis glared. “I didn’t forget,” he said. “I didn’t expect I’d be cleaning up the bar like a fucking zookeeper, either.”

“Oh, and you think I did? You think I wanted that. Like I wanted the rest of your bullshit today,” Mac said.

“My bullshit, that’s rich. You’re the one dealing with my bullshit.”

“Well, what else would you have me call it?”

“I don’t know, Mac, let’s see. How about a response to your bullshit, and your prying, and your offers to help, and you always sticking your goddamn nose into things.” Dennis sneered. “See, you’re the one that started all this, okay?”

“I started it?” Mac’s jaw dropped. “Dennis, it was a fucking accident.”

“Of course. Of course it was! You just accidentally threw a record in the air, I should’ve known.”

“I didn’t throw it! Why would I throw it? I was going to put it away so we could play millennial shit for the investors,” Mac said. “You’re the one who kept blasting it at me like you were making some sort of a point, so maybe you’re the one who started all this bullshit, Dennis.”

A razor-thin smile glinted at Mac. “You’re mad at me about that?” Dennis said, laced with treachery and spite.

“Jesus Christ, dude.”

“No, no, it’s fine. It’s good. Get mad. In fact,” and Dennis stalked into his space, shoved at one bare, freckled shoulder. “Do something about it.”

Mac didn’t answer. Stared at the spot where Dennis had shoved him. He widened his stance, and he squared his shoulders, and his gaze locked with ice-blue.

“You got something to say, then say it. Or don’t, and simply do something about it. Go on, show me you’re mad. Or I’m just gonna keep doing shit. Is that really what you want?”

A vein pulsed in Mac’s neck as he said, “Don’t push me, Dennis.”

“Why not? Clearly you’re mad at me.” Dennis shoved at his shoulder again, harder. “Either you just roll over and take it or you fight back.”

Thunderclouds rolled dark and terrible over Mac’s brow. “I mean it,” he said, so low it was more of a rumble. “Don’t.”

Dennis grit his teeth, then pushed Mac’s other shoulder.

He was up against the bedroom wall before he could even blink. Mac was inches from his face, pinning him, breathing hard like a winded bull. The laugh Dennis coughed up was a weak flutter.

“There we go,” he said, and he grinned with a mouthful of glittering knives. “That make you feel better?”

Mac had his hands fisted in Dennis’ shirt, one thigh pressed between his legs. Dennis spotted an advantage. He slid down the wall just enough to carefully rub his groin against the meat of Mac’s thigh, exhaled a warm, inviting sigh that bled into a moan. And it worked like a charm—Mac’s eyes flew open with a violent pulse of fear.

“Makes you feel powerful, doesn’t it,” Dennis murmured. He undulated, serpentine; he arched his neck and Mac’s heartbeat pounded into his chest. “Finally get some of your own back. Bet you think I deserve it, don’t you.”

Mac jerked backwards, and the whites of his eyes were wide, round and shiny like freshwater pearls. “You’re messed up.”

Dennis was smiling. “Maybe,” he said. “What’s that say about you then, anything?”

“Enough already!” Mac’s voice was wavering and he practically tripped over himself as he tried to get away. “Dennis, enough!”

“Is it?” Dennis shot back. His own voice was unsteady and cracking and that just had to be Mac’s fault too. It always circled back around, an endless downward spiral. “You sure you’ve had enough?”

“Dude, stop it!”

“Make me,” Dennis snarled, and he shoved Mac with both hands, and Mac crashed into the dresser. Dennis advanced on him, and his blood was throbbing in between his ears, and he lifted his hands again—

Mac’s arms snapped out in front of him, and he pushed Dennis so hard he fell backwards, stumbled and landed on the floor.

His tailbone took the brunt of the hit, slamming into a bent floorboard nail. It hurt like fucking hell, and Dennis sat up with a heavy, winded hiss. “Motherfucker that hurts, god-fucking-dammit—you could’ve given me tetanus or something, asshole, Christ on a cross—”

He looked up, and Mac was leaning back into the dresser, a last stand against the force of gravity. And it was dim, their bedroom, a veil of shadow with only patches of brilliant vermillion light. But it was enough to prove that he wasn’t seeing things, that it wasn’t just the light, that Mac’s deep brown eyes were a little wet.

Everything shut down, then, everything.

Mac sniffled. Swiped his hand over his left eye, his right. The light played over his cheeks, and a soft smudge of wetness shone like amber under his lashes. Dennis stared openly, unable to hide his sudden astonishment.

“Jesus,” he whispered, “I didn’t—”

“Dennis, shut up,” Mac said, and Dennis shut up. Mac scoffed, grimaced, and sniffed again. When he realized Dennis was waiting for further instruction he actually laughed, dry and cold and awful. “There. I made you stop. Happy?”

Dennis faltered. “I didn’t mean for you—I mean—”

“I hate you sometimes. You know that? I really do,” Mac said. His face was blank again, page after page of emptiness, a book of unreadable nothing.

It didn’t even register until Mac had pushed himself off the dresser. He dug around in a drawer and pulled out a T-shirt, tugging it over his head while Dennis scrambled to stand up.

“Don’t follow me,” he told Dennis, not meeting his eyes. “Leave me alone for a little bit.”

“Where are you going?”

“Dennis?” Mac said, careful. “Don’t follow.”

He headed for the door. Dennis caught right up to him, demanding an actual answer; it was going to rain and he wasn’t taking the car and you didn’t goddamn leave in the middle of a discussion, Mac, goddammit; and Mac looked at the hand with a bruising hold on his forearm, and Mac looked at him.

Dennis let him go.

Mac shut the door without locking it, and thunder rolled again, closing in. It wasn’t yet raining, and this wasn’t at all what he’d thought drowning would feel like—and here he was anyway, desperate to breathe under the sudden crush of water.

—

He returned after an hour.

He returned after the downpour began, drenched to the bone, hair sticking in smooth tendrils to his forehead and the back of his neck. His boots squelched as he kicked them off, and his socks were a lost cause. He stripped out of his shirt and his pants and his briefs and balled them up; they landed with a wet splat in a bulge of a lump on the floor.

He returned after 47 text messages, nine missed calls, four novel-length Facebook messages, and the group chat was still on mute after Frank picked up from that afternoon.

He returned after Dennis panicked so hard he dry-heaved into the toilet.

He returned after Dennis told himself to get a fucking grip.

He returned after an hour, and he went straight to bed, and the relief was as powerful as the rising irritation. Dennis stopped by his side of the bed, torn between his thoughts, and absolutely lost for words. All he really had to say that he hadn’t shoved into a text or a phone call or out of his head or through his fucking skull was that Mac would ruin the pillowcase with his hair soaking wet like that, and that wasn’t much of anything, anyway, that wasn’t exactly important.  

Chapter Text

They didn’t talk to each other for over a week.

It wasn’t a question of who had wronged whom. Mac had hurt him, no arguments there, but Dennis needed Mac to understand. Then he could go about making proper amends, but the effort was pointless if Mac never learned his lesson first.

This wasn’t about refusing to be the bigger man and apologize. It certainly wasn’t an ego thing. This was about whatever future they had together, if it even existed anymore. He wasn’t sure some days. But this right here was about not getting hurt.

Dennis didn’t talk to Mac, and Mac didn’t talk to Dennis. They lived their lives like normal.  

They still had movie night. (They sat glued to the ends of the couch and it was Mac’s turn to pick that week and he hadn’t said anything about his selection, just dropped a faceless DVD case down by Dennis’ laptop, and they watched G.I. Jane together and no one made popcorn or ridiculous comments or laughed much, not that it was a comedy, but it had never before been such a stirring tragedy, and he remembered none of it afterwards, though he hadn’t taken his eyes off the screen not once.)

They went out to monthly dinner. (The calendar ticked over into August and Dennis had made reservations for this charmingly cozy Italian place right by Columbus Square, appropriately named August; Dennis drank most of his meal, straight vodka in a large water bottle, while Mac stared sullenly at the wall and nursed his beer and picked at his food even though he was bulking again, supposedly, and then Mac drove them home after Dennis wobbled back from the bathroom, capillaries close to bursting from throwing up so hard.)

They slept in the same bed. (Dennis thought about bringing a girl home, which would make Mac upset, but then he thought about bringing a guy home and that would render Mac homicidal, so he thought about that more—a guy with broader shoulders and a higher benchpress and a bigger dick and a loving family, really needling at Mac’s insecurities; Dennis thought about it and Mac rolled over, and his features were so gentle and relaxed in his sleep, Dennis hated noticing and he hated Mac for making him notice and he resigned himself again to yet another morning jerking off in the shower).

So, life was normal. And if the most Dennis said to him was a scathing “Wow, that’s original” when Mac’s day to pick the music started with the speakers blasting “You Give Love a Bad Name,” then that was normal too, and so was the hollow, wounded look Mac wore the rest of the way to work.

Everything was fine until Dee lost the upcycling business.

—

“Thanks a lot, assholes,” Dee called out. “Thanks a goddamn lot.”

Right, this called for a headstart. Closest open bottle was Cointreau, so Cointreau it was.

Dee slammed her purse down on the counter and said, although nobody had asked, “Thanks to you three turkeys and your little ‘debacle’ last week, my whole goddamn business is going under.”

“Sounds bad,” Charlie said, and then sat up, nose scrunched. “Wait, three turkeys. I didn’t do anything.”

“Well, whatever,” Dee said, “you certainly didn’t help.”

She stole the Cointreau and a swig, in that order. “Word got out about Paddy’s not being as ‘hip’ or as ‘authentic’ as the investors hyped it up to be, and once a couple of sore goddamn losers connected the dots and got a Twitter hashtag going, that was really the end of it. It’s basically over.”

Mac perked up from his slouch across the counter. “Over?”

The weight of the impending business loss weighed hard on Dee; her shoulders sagged and she spoke in a dull voice. “Advertisers pulling their content. Sponsors canceling their contracts. Suppliers suggesting I ‘seek other arrangements.’ Hipster millennials taking my products to Burning Man and actually burning them, that define ‘over’ well enough for you?”

“So you’re…” Mac said, and Dennis stepped away from the Cointreau before the force of her grip shattered the bottle.

“It means I’m closing up shop, Mac, what do you think,” Dee snapped. “Once I sell off the rest of my shit, that’s it, I’m out of there. I’m gone before someone can lie their way through another thinkpiece about me.”

Charlie and Dennis exchanged bewildered looks, as Mac said, “So what happens to our kickbacks?”

“For my shit in your apartment?” Mac nodded. “I don’t need them there anymore, so just take inventory and I’ll clear it out, I guess.”

“But we’ll at least get a cut of that.”

Dee snorted. “I’m selling this shit dirt cheap,” she said, “what kinda cut is there to even take?”

“There’s at least something,” Mac insisted, and Dennis rolled his eyes, Mac was so needlessly vehement sometimes. “And if you’re gonna make us do inventory—”

“For the love of God, it’s not gonna make much difference,” Dennis said loudly. “You’ll still be broke as shit, so what does it even matter?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mac’s jaw tense. “This doesn’t concern you,” Mac said, in clipped tones.

“Like shit it doesn’t. It’s still my apartment. It’s Dee’s shit in my apartment.” Dennis turned to Dee. “Sis, sorry that the younger crowd doesn’t actually like you, so whenever you wanna move your shit out is fine with me. And you keep your money, you earned it. I’m not stingy like some people.”

“Oh wow, stingy, great insult.”

“It’s not even my best one, I’ve got tons more.”

“I’m sure you do, Dennis.”

“Oh, but you don’t sound convinced. Want me to rattle off a few?” Dennis glared at the side of Mac’s neck, aimed his words like strikes at the flesh, hollow fangs sinking deep. “How about ‘passive-aggressive,’ that one work for you? Or maybe just ‘aggressive,’ I’m sure you can work with either.”

“You wanna see aggression?” Mac said, rounding on him. A vein pulsed in his temple. “I will show you goddamn aggression—”

“You sure about that? Last time you didn’t seem so sure, I remember a lot more walking out last time, didn’t seem too aggressive to me, it was pretty pathetic if you sit down and think about it—”

“The only thing pathetic about it was me even bothering to come back—”

“Holy SHIT, will you shut the fuck up,” Charlie said with a slam of the Cointreau to the counter.

“Charlie, this needs to get hashed out now,” Mac said. “It’s not stingy to ask for your fair share if you’re doing work for someone.”

“Well why don’t we ask Dee if it’s stingy?” Dennis said, gesturing. “After all, she’s the one putting in the work towards her failure of a business—”

“My business failed because of you and Mac in the first place!” “We’re the ones keeping her shit in our goddamn living room! She wants us to catalogue all that shit, I’m not doing it without a price—”

“SHUT UP!”

Charlie stood and stepped back from the bar and took the Cointreau with him. “What the shit are you guys actually arguing about? Like, do any of you even know?”

“Dennis calling me stingy, in case you weren’t listening.” “Doesn’t matter if Mac gets paid for taking inventory or not, he’s gonna be broke by the end of the day anyway.” “What are you yelling at me for, they started it! Again!”

Charlie held out a hand, a very tense hand, and Mac, Dennis, and Dee all quieted.

“Let me explain something,” he said, sounding terribly restrained. “Frank is currently out dredging the Schuylkill River for fresh river clams. And while he’s out, he’s left me in charge of the bar. So if I have to call him, and if I have to clamjam him, and if he has to come down here, he’s not gonna be a very happy man. And it’s in our best interests if that doesn’t happen, yes?”

Remembering the hour lost to Frank’s spittle and scathing, the three of them quickly nodded.

“So.” Charlie tapped the Cointreau against his thigh. “Solve your problems calmly…”

Mac had raised a hand. “Why aren’t you out dredging for river clams with him?” he asked, and Charlie pressed his mouth into a grim line.

“That seems like it’s right up your alley,” Dennis added.

“We don’t mind if you wanna go,” Dee said, and Charlie rocked the Cointreau back like a fastball and the three of them flinched hard.

“I will throw it,” Charlie warned. “So help me God.”

Mac tested the waters first, and turned to Dee. “How about this. You pay us a flat fee for taking inventory, and that’s it,” he said.

“No sales cut.” Mac shook his head, and Dee frowned, clearly not loving it. “Fine. Deal.”

“Good,” Charlie said. The bottle lowered by a hair. “Dennis, Mac?”

“Oh, we’re just gonna not talk again,” Dennis said, and Mac managed a rusty nod, after a moment. “See? Solved that problem. We’re good, you got this.”

Charlie uncapped the bottle of Cointreau and drank like a river clam.

—

Dee had a system for doing inventory. It involved differently-colored dot stickers and cross-referencing suppliers and compounding state sales taxes and it shouldn’t have been so complicated for what was essentially trash rehab, and especially since she had straight-up admitted most of the inventory at their apartment would ultimately be trashed.

Which was why Dennis had suggested they get rid of the more explicit trash first, to make room for whatever Dee did want to try and hawk. Mac, of course, reached up high and knocked a crate off a precariously-tilted tower.

“What are you doing?” Dennis asked, and Mac said nothing. “Dude.”

Mac flipped the crate over, maintaining his silence.

Dennis shook his head. “If you want to be efficient,” he said, “start big.”

Big, in this case, was the pallet leaning against the far wall. Dee had never managed to sell it, so it gathered dust and took up space and Dennis tugged hard on a repainted slat.

“You know, you can help,” he grunted, as the pallet groaned and budged an inch. “For once in your goddamn lifetime, Mac? Your help is actually wanted.”

Another inch. The edge of the pallet scraped by a tilting stack of crates. “If she's not keeping a ton of this shit, it's easier to just catalogue the shit she does want,” Mac said.

The pallet slid out two more inches, and the towers of crates trembled like a forest. “It's easier to just get rid of shit first.”

“Dennis—”

Two inches again. A tower shuddered, but he almost had it. Goodbye, hideous waste of space. “Mac, we'll have a lot more room to go through all of Dee's inventory if—”

The most rudimentary understanding of physics would give you this: light traveled faster than sound. Given enough distance, you saw events happen before you heard them. Mac could argue the scientific method all he wanted, but facts were facts; the indisputable truth of the matter was that, as the first tower came crashing down, Dennis should have seen the crash split-seconds before the heard the crates rip and shatter apart in a shower of splinters and shitty craftsmanship.

Strangely, he heard it all happen first. A wire crossed somewhere, or he came unstuck in time for a minute. But when the first massive pillar of crates shifted and trembled, Dennis heard the wood snap, brittle and dry and a second before it did. He jumped and flattened himself to the wall and the second stack collapsed, the third, the rest. He screwed his eyes shut tight.

The entire forest was felled in under twenty seconds. Stakes stabbed through cutesy pillows, fluff poured out like guts; Dennis squinted through puffs of dust, eyes watery with airborne splinters.

And from across the room—“Jesus Christ.”

“I’m fine,” Dennis coughed, “didn’t get me.”

“You’re fine? What about all of Dee’s shit? You just goddamn destroyed it,” Mac shouted.

“You care more about Dee’s shit than me almost dying?”

“She was paying us!” Mac said, white with anger. “And if you hadn’t tried to remove the goddamn pallet like I said—”

“I was getting rid of the trash first, so we actually had some goddamn room in this place. We would’ve taken way longer if we stuck to doing it your way!”

“Stuck to doing it—no, you know what? I can’t,” Mac then said. “I can’t goddamn do this. I’m not doing this again.”

He strode towards the coffee table and sat heavily on the edge, hunched over, one hand scrubbing hard at his eyes. Dennis narrowed his gaze. “Doing what again?”

“Arguing!” Mac said. He whipped his head up and he had a smile plastered on, the hysterical kind, the kind that gave a raw, horrible meaning to the phrase cracking up. “Again, it’s like all we know how to do now. Either we’re not talking to each other or we’re at each other’s throats, and there’s no point to it. Any of it. And I’m done with it.”

His cheeks were awfully blotchy, and Mac swiped the heel of his hand across his nose with a loud sniff. But his eyes were dry. Still, taking care to lower his voice, selecting his words with a rare delicacy; “We’re not arguing. I was just… explaining—”

“Oh, explaining, that’s what you’re calling it. Explaining. Like it even matters—you’re explaining, you’re making excuses. If something’s always wrong, who gives a shit what you wanna call it? We always end up back here. ‘Explaining’ doesn’t make a goddamn difference, bro.”

“It would if you ever listened,” Dennis muttered, and Mac threw up his hands, and the taut smile pressed into his face, tested the foundations. “Then what happens next? Exactly where do we go from here?”

Hands on his thighs, and not looking at him. “I don’t know.”

“It’s not like we’re gonna stop,” Dennis went on. “So, what, do you keep walking out for longer and longer periods of time, or do you want to make it a clean break and just walk away for good?”

Mac stilled, then lifted his head. “What?”

“I’m not seeing a lot of other options,” Dennis said. His voice was stretched thin, on a rack and bruised. “In case you don’t remember—Mac, you said you hate me.”

If it was meant to come out light and piercing as an arrow, it missed the target. Mac instead knit his brows together, studied Dennis with unsettling acuity. “I said sometimes.”

“Yeah? Well. I hate you too, sometimes,” Dennis said. “But you actually walked out. You left, Mac.”

“Dennis, I came back,” Mac said, and that careful consideration hadn’t left him. In a tiny, dimly-lit room, packed with rubble and without a place to hide, it was the next-best thing to an active searchlight.

Dennis hated it. “And what happens when you don’t? We keep going in circles like this until one day you decide that’s enough, you’re not doing it anymore, and you walk out for good.”

Mac gaped at him. “Dude, why would I want to walk out for good?”

“I don’t know! I’m not you.” Dennis scowled, folded his arms. “Maybe you decide it’s not worth it. You decide you deserve something else.”

“What?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve never thought that before.” His tone dripped accusation like a vile acid. “You’ve never, not once, wondered how much you’d put up with before you walked away.”

“No!”

A shrewd, suspicious gaze. “Never wondered if shit was getting too real for you, and you couldn’t handle the ugly parts maybe like you thought.”

“What ugly parts? Specifically, Dennis,” Mac said, and he wasn’t so much exasperated, lacked that kind of genuine exhaustion. He was actively involved in his own growing bewilderment. “Besides all the arguing, we’re past that.”

“Yeah, now we’re arguing about arguing. That’s so much better.”

Mac suppressed an eye roll. “What ugly parts have you so convinced I’m gonna walk out?” he asked. “Ugly how—your O-face?”

“I beg your goddamn pardon?”

“What else did you mean by ugly?” Dennis legitimately spluttered—he wasn’t even sure Mac had meant it as a joke; his bewilderment was becoming bemusement and Dennis had no idea what to think, how to treat the unsteady quirk of a grin he swore flashed over Mac’s features. Schrodinger’s smile, and Mac tilted towards him. “Dude, you so know what I’m talking about.”

“I know you’re talking crazy talk,” Dennis countered. “What do you mean, my O-face is ugly? It’s a goddamn privilege.”

“It’s all like.” Mac attempted the worst possible expression in the world. “See? And you get all red and sweaty, and your eyes bug out. Bro, it’s pretty gross.”

Dennis actually remained silent for the next fifteen seconds, hung up on the living gargoyle Mac had twisted his features into, until Mac got impatient and waved a hand in front of him. In a delicate voice, he said, “Well. If it’s so gross, I don’t see why you should have to put up with it. You’re just playing yourself at that point. That’s on you.”

Mac sat back a little, shoulders dropping. “I mean,” he said. “I kinda like it.”

“Now you like it? Jesus Christ, Mac, make up your goddamn mind. You like that—that grotesque abomination you have confused for the throes of hysterical fucking paroxysm?”

Any other day, the trap would’ve worked. Throw in enough syllables and lose the thread of conversation, until they were speaking different languages and Mac gave up out of sheer frustration. This time around, Mac merely shrugged. “Yeah,” he admitted, and before Dennis could fire back he’d added, “it’s like the second-best part about making you come. It’s funny.”

Click. Click. Every time Dennis tried to shoot off a response, an insult, he met with the realization that the gun had jammed and the chambered ammunition was melting. “Second-best part,” he said, and Mac nodded. “Christ. What’s the first?”

Mac… actually didn’t answer, and Dennis was ruthless; he seized Mac’s hesitation with a vengeance.

“Mac.” He was leering, stalking over to the couch, sitting decisively in front of Mac even as the coffee table scooted back a generous foot. “What’s the first-best part?”

“You wouldn’t get it.” His gaze snuck off to the side. “It’s stupid, all right?”

“You just insulted my O-face,” Dennis said. He was giving no quarter and it was making Mac squirm, and if Dennis had ever been entitled to schadenfreude at any point in his life, it was now. “You don’t get to walk away from that one. If you get to try and embarrass me, I sure as shit get to embarrass you. Quid pro quo, dickhole.”

With a resigned sigh, Mac pinched the bridge of his nose. “Jesus,” he muttered, and Dennis said nothing, kept his stare intense. Mac shut his eyes. “First-best part?”

A solemn nod.

“It’s just… it makes me feel good, all right,” Mac said, and he kept his eyes closed, missed the way he’d stunned Dennis into shock.

“It makes you feel good,” Dennis said, after several spacious moments. His voice was a thousand miles away, howled through a tornado in the sepia-tinted distance. “That’s the best part. You feel good.”

“Dennis, I feel awesome,” Mac said abruptly, throwing his arms out wide. “Like Christmas and my birthday and Saturdays and Mac Day, all rolled into one. Or like how surgeons feel when they save a patient’s life—it’s totally badass and it’s completely worth the effort and it’s still as awesome as the first time it happened. Happy now? Every time I make you come I feel like king of the goddamn world.”

Mac dropped his head to his hand, chiseling his stony scowl into a much more approachable grimace; and while a million broken voices shouted in his head a million broken responses, Dennis himself was left speechless. A full minute passed, in a weightless, mutual effort at silence.

Mac soon cleared his throat. “So,” he said, “that’s the first-best part.” Like it wasn’t obvious, but Dennis could appreciate a segue.

“Yeah—but hey, ease up on the Oscar bait, Leo. You won already.” It earned the weakest of chuckles, which in their economy counted for a lot. “You’re not kidding, are you.”

“Knew you wouldn’t get it.”

“It’s just sex, Mac,” Dennis told him. “What’s there to get?”

“That’s not what I—”

“And I’m surprised at you, bro, honestly,” he continued. “Here you are, repulsed by my hideously haggard O-face—”

“I never said repulsed, Dennis, I said funny.”

“—and yet you get off on getting me off.”

Mac said shrewdly, “I’m handling the ugly parts pretty well then, huh,” and Dennis’ rising fury was mostly directed inward, for letting himself walk right into that one. “Seriously, can you think of literally anything weird, or ugly, or messed up—”

“Like I have to try?”

“—that I haven’t actually seen by now?” Mac said, and Dennis closed his jaw with a click. “We’ve known each other over twenty years, Dennis. I’ve seen it all.”

“You never saw my O-face before.”

“I saw it all the time! Your tapes were practically a compilation.”

Dammit. “Mac, there is always something,” Dennis insisted. “Everyone, I mean everyone, has a limit somewhere. A hard limit. One they don’t come back from.”

“Haven’t found mine.”

“Yeah, but you will. It exists, bro, it’s out there.” A ghost of a smirk haunted Mac’s features. Dennis curled his lip. “I told some chick at a Wawa you were my boyfriend. You think you could handle something like that happening?”

The smirk vanished. Stymied, Mac said, “Wait, what? What chick at a Wawa?”

“This girl came up to me and spilled coffee on my shirt and she coerced me into talking about you,” Dennis said irritably. “You’re not the least bit pissed off?”

“Dude, I’m completely lost. Back up.” Mac hesitated, frowned. “You told some chick at a Wawa I was your boyfriend?”

“Not… directly,” Dennis said, mulish. “It was more of an implication.”

“Why?”

“Look, she was in a Chili Peppers T-shirt and she was talking about her boyfriend and, I don’t know, it just happened like that, all right? Move past it, that’s not the important bit.”

“It’s a very important bit,” Mac countered. A wounded crease had broken over his brow. “I thought we weren’t calling it anything.”

“So did I,” Dennis snapped, “and look what happened. I slipped up and someone thinks you’re gay and you don’t count that as a pretty hard limit?”

“I guess I don’t, Dennis,” Mac said in a thin, brittle voice. And then he startled, and then, so did Dennis.

“Dude.” Dennis stared at him. His ears were ringing. “You—heard what I said, right.”

“I heard you,” Mac grit out. Tension corkscrewed out of his frame, then, and he pressed his hand to his eyes. “Sonofabitch.”

“I didn’t mean for you to,” Dennis said, and the sentence finished in his head, a lonely echo: come out suddenly and for nothing. Mac hadn’t looked up. “I’m just trying to tell you, man.”

“I know, Dennis.”

“Oh.” Dennis squirmed on the leather cushion. “You can take it back, if you need to.”

A deep, shuddery sigh, and Mac said, “I’ll think about it.”

“But that’s what I’m saying,” Dennis went on, softer. “Everyone has this limit. Either you’re arguing shit until the cows come home, or maybe you just argue shit with the cows, but eventually someone gets fed up with all the bullshit and walks away for good.”

“Jesus, could you be more depressing.”

“It’s either that or you die,” Dennis retorted. He’d assumed it would cut Mac short, hopefully kill the conversation.

What he hadn’t banked on was Mac’s airy huff, the dismissive chirp of his hand. “That’s covered.”

“Covered? Like what, picking out matching headstones? Because that’s really, incredibly g—” Mac stiffened up. Contrary to popular belief, Dennis did understand remorse—especially remorse less a minute old. “Gratuitous.”

Mac allowed it. “No, dick,” he said, which was relieving—and faintly disappointing, a fact reflected in the set of Mac’s small, sorry smile. “I meant like, every night before I fall asleep. I toss out a quick reminder to the man upstairs to nab us both at the same time, if He has to. Just in case.”

“… What?”

“I’ve been doing it a few years now, so He’s probably made a note of it somewhere. Not that I wanna find out anytime soon, but—”

“You’re serious about this?” Sometimes Mac was infuriatingly blithe.

“Well.” There it was; he curled forward, primed to pounce. “I usually ask to go like a minute earlier? But only a minute—I promise, dude, you’re right after.”

Baffled, brows pulling down, Dennis searched Mac for anything but open honesty. “Why?”

“Making sure it’s safe, bro. Gotta secure the area,” Mac said.

“Again—why? We’re dead,” Dennis pointed out. “In this beyond inane scheme of yours, Mac—we are undeniably and reliably dead. Who gives a shit who goes first?”

Mac’s shrug was subtle, shoulders pressed in, a shift of the spine. “I do,” he said. “If it means I don’t have to watch when you—”

He cleared his throat abruptly, and didn’t finish his thought. Not that he needed to; it stuck in Dennis’ throat like an arrow all the same, burned and bled, breath caught and pinned before it escaped.

“So—don’t worry about that,” Mac was saying, with another busy cough. “I got heaven all squared away.”

“Wait. Heaven?” Dennis snorted. “Now I know you’re making this up.”

“I’m not making it up!”

“Mac,” Dennis said, and an abrasive laugh scratched out of his throat. “There is no way, literally no way, that you and I are getting into heaven together. At least I’m not, and I don’t know if hell’s real but if it is—”

“Oh, it’s real. And weirdly layered? Like one of those Russian stacking dolls,” Mac said, “but it’s made of all fire and brimstone, except at the end where turns into, like, Antarctica. I think the entrance is in New Jersey.”

“Then it sounds like my kinda party,” Dennis said, dull, and Mac shook his head.

“If God’s got a plan for everyone,” he said, “and He does, then there’s no way He would’ve made it so I end up in heaven and you get stuck in Russian doll hell. No way, dude, you’re coming with.”

“You can’t promise that,” Dennis said; bitterness soaked and ate at his voice like lye. “You can’t promise me shit, dude. You can’t promise heaven and you can’t promise you won’t leave because you can. Something could go wrong at any goddamn moment, without any sort of a warning.”

Mac’s gaze softened, blurred. “I’ve noticed.”

“Have you?” Dennis said, laced into a sneer.

Mac nodded. The coffee table scooted a few inches forward. “All year, Dennis,” he said quietly. “You’ve been… not you.”

“Not me, well. That answers everything.”

A shrug, and Mac was saying, “The Dennis I know doesn’t go around breaking old vinyls, or destroying DVD bargain bins, or punching in the car radio for no apparent reason. I know that’s what happened too, dude, I figured it out the next day.”

Dennis bristled. “I wasn’t exactly hiding it.”

“Yeah, clearly.” The coffee table inched closer. Mac’s tone was not unkind. “And that’s just off the top of my head.”

“So then what should I do about it, hm?” His glare was cruel, ice-cold. “This the part where you get me to lay my head on your broad, muscular shoulder while we hug it out and cry?”

“You don’t have to cry at all, dude.”

“Oh, no? I mean—you otherwise got it in one.” Dennis stretched his hands wide, a martyr on an imagined cross. “Yeah. All right. I’ve gone a little off the rails this year, just enough to make poor, devoted Mac jump at the shadows, and you don’t want to take every last piece apart.”

“I want you to stop giving me shit when I’m only trying to help,” Mac said levelly. “I mean Christ, dude, you freaked me the fuck out a week ago. You scared me.”

Blood pooled hot in his cheeks, boiled below his eyes. He hadn’t forgotten, couldn’t.

“I thought you were gonna attack me at one point,” Mac went on, inching forward again, and Dennis bit his tongue. “Jesus, Dennis, I thought I was going to hurt you.”

Would’ve had it coming—and for a split second, Mac would have hurt as much, as hard. “Good thing you left, then,” he said, a hollow echo. “Can’t say coming back was the right idea.”

“Do you at least know why I did?” The coffee table was an inch beyond its original position; their knees could have been touching. Dennis was careful to avoid contact.  

“Mac, I don’t know. I’m tired of the runaround,” he said. “If you’re gonna tell me, then just tell me, and don’t make it into a big production—”

“You let me go,” Mac said simply. Dennis dropped his head back over the couch with a loud groan.

“And? That’s what you told me to do, man. Sting’s got a whole goddamn song about shit like that. You want me to feel like shit for fucking attention to detail?”

“No, dude. That’s my whole point. You tried and you listened and you actually gave a shit,” Mac said, and Dennis lifted his head. Mac made eye contact and held it like a lifeline. “We probably are going to keep arguing stupid shit for the rest of our lives. And I don’t know if we’ll get any better at it. But you chose to listen, so I chose to come back, and that’s gotta count for something, man, it has to.”

Dennis had to shut his eyes, shut out the light. He scrubbed a hand down his chin and breathed, slow, deliberate.

“I’m not gonna force you to open up, Dennis. You know that. And I know you better than most, dude. I’ve known you longer than I haven’t.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning there’s a better Dennis Reynolds in there than you think,” Mac told him, which was just cryptic enough for Dennis to let it go—and Mac wore a look of such open earnestness, it was impossible to put down.

Dennis exhaled. He knocked his head over the couch again, tracked and traced the trefoils on the ceiling. “Maybe it’s our apartment,” he mused aloud.

“What, this one?”

“It’s so goddamn small compared to the old place. When we’re up each others’ asses so much of the time, it’s like we forget how to be people outside each other,” Dennis remarked.

“Dude, are you being literal or metaphorical right now? I can’t tell,” Mac said, squinting at him.

“Just a metaphor, bro.” He wrinkled his nose. “Only half-true anyway.”

“That doesn’t bother you, does it?” Mac asked, and Dennis sat up slowly; Mac was eyeing him, assessing him. “I mean. You just never.”

“Never thought you’d be interested,” Dennis admitted.

One shoulder jerked in a lopsided shrug. “Guess you don’t know everything about me, then,” Mac said, and Dennis’ eye roll was magnificent enough to tease out a real smile, one that lingered, one that Dennis lingered over, long after it was gone.

“Do you ever miss our old apartment?” he found himself asking, quite suddenly as it surfaced, still subconscious waters rippling and cresting and breaking. He drew his gaze up, braving eye contact, and that was all they needed to see everything, reject nothing.

“All the time, bro,” Mac told him quietly. “All the goddamn time.”

A dull leaden ache behind his ribs, and Dennis said, “Yeah. Me too.”

—

They spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning up wreckage, salvaging what they could for Dee to pick up later. It was another afternoon they passed in silence, but this one was companionable, a calm oasis to collect themselves again.

It was nice. Nice was the right word for it. Dennis didn’t give it much thought; the dust had started to settle, and he knew he’d be dissecting all of Mac’s comments and protests and declarations well into the night, but for the moment it was nice, just nice, to spend some quiet time together.

Mac ended the spell first, hours later, just before bed. “Long day, huh.”

Dennis nodded. A bright pang like a shock to his chest; it was first night in over a week where he didn’t feel like a stranger in his own bedroom. “Yeah.”

Mac eyed him carefully, but they’d reached a truce somehow, a tacit one; they’d exhausted their emotional quota today. Still, it didn’t stop Mac from lowering his voice. “Surprised Dee wasn’t more mad about earlier.”

“She’s scrapping everything anyway, Mac, I told you.” Dennis smoothed a hand over the Vera Wang comforter they’d seen a year ago, that he’d purchased a few months back on impulse. “Mac, are we cool?”

Mid-sliding into bed, Mac paused, lifted both eyebrows.

“We never really said yes or no,” Dennis explained, the comforter twisting in his grasp.

Mac raised his chin and said, not unkindly, “That kind of applies to a lot.”

“I know it does, just.” His exhale was soft, long-suffering. “Please.”

A slight, slow nod; Mac observed him, and something passed muster, because all he said was, “No more Nine Inch Nails Emo Power Hour, right?”

Dennis quickly shook his head. “So that’s it? We’re good?”

“If you want.”

“No, that’s not—I mean, that’s it?”

Mac shrugged. “What else is there?”

For one, the persistent feeling of getting far more than he deserved. The universe had a way of balancing out in the end; too much of a good thing now spelled trouble for the future. But Mac yawned, blinked sleepily, and it really had been a long day, hadn’t it. “No, I’m just—relieved, I guess.” He crawled under the covers; Mac hummed, eyelids shuttering. “You would’ve been a helluva priest, dude.”

The veil of sleep flew off, then, and a bewildered Mac quirked his head.

“I don’t know,” Dennis said, vaguely annoyed, “you’re just good at forgiving people. Like, what’s it called—absolving them. You’re good at it.”

The vague annoyance formed a solid coat of irritation, when Mac’s gaze grew round and luminous as the moon; then he burst into full-blown ire as Mac slowly sat up in bed.

“What?” Dennis scowled, following suit. “Just an observation.”

“Dennis.” Mac was as sincere as could be. “Thank you.”

“Uh. Okay?”

A smile like a bud in spring, pink and new and fragile, and even at night Mac’s voice held the warmth of the summer sun. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” he said.  

Dennis squirmed under the comforter. “Well, don’t read too much into it,” he muttered, before finally kicking it off, sliding out of bed. “Forgot to brush my teeth.”

He could feel Mac’s gaze trailing him, and it wasn’t intrinsically awful, but it was too much, too bold and alarming—and it had been a long, long day. The same excuse served him well when he snapped open the medicine cabinet and a shower of toiletries rained out: Mac’s razor, his razor, gauze, floss. Long day, long long—

The orange prescription pill bottle, the bottle of pills Dee made him fill in the pharmacy below the psychiatrist’s office, the bottle with Dennis Reynolds printed carefully on the label, the bottle he’d never quite managed to remember to throw out—it sat neatly in the palm of his hand. He’d hesitated before putting it back on the shelf.

It had been a long, long day. It was now a long, long night. Dennis stood alone in the bathroom with his thoughts and they washed over him, clean and sharp, for a long, long time.

—

The end of summer flushed through Philadelphia. A dry heat swept like a brushfire through their apartment, and they poured themselves over the couch one evening, too hot to do anything except watch a movie on the laptop. Mac fell asleep barely fifteen minutes in, resting with his head pillowed in the crook of Dennis’ neck, back settled warm against Dennis’ bare chest.

He didn’t comment. He tucked the top of Mac’s dark, unruly hair under his chin; his thumb swept soft strokes down the thick muscle of Mac’s bicep. Mac murmured senselessness in his sleep, shifting, curling close. It made Dennis smile, fondness both rare and reserved.

His attention drifted back to the movie. I always wanted to travel, Thelma was saying, almost rueful. I just never got the opportunity.

The camera cut to Louise’s slip of a smirk. You got it now. Thelma grinned, however brief, and they drove all night to Mexico.

When Dennis was younger and when Frank was around, he’d described Mexico as a series of wildly improbable business trips, lurid descriptions of donkey shows and dysentery and cartels that preyed on wealthy foreigners. Since January, the picturesque image of Mexico as a beautiful postcard with gleaming white sands, azure waters, and endless tequila shots hadn’t strayed far from his mind, either.

On-screen, the low crackled voice of Marianne Faithfull lamented Lucy Jordan, who at the age of thirty-seven realized she’d never ride through Paris in a sportscar with the warm wind in her hair. Mexico, at least, was doable—even if Dennis had no idea what it was actually like.

The truth lived somewhere in the middle of its extremes, it usually did.

In the dead of night, under a darkness that heralded dawn, Louise parked the car. The music faded, giving way to lonely crickets. Louise stood beneath craggy mountains, took in the flat blocks that cut mesas and plateaus into the skyline. She wore a look of awe or terror or both.

Thelma quietly approached. What’s goin’ on?

Nothing, Louise said, her smile a rare shade of sorrow.

Mac stirred against his chest, then, and Dennis pulled back. Mac blinked up sleepily at him; grinned, all soft around the edges. “Hey,” he said, warm and full of affection, and Dennis paused the movie and kissed him.

The heat made them lazy, and time stretched out for them. Dennis yielded to it easily; to Mac, heavy over him. Halfway through a trail of kisses down his throat, he tapped at Mac’s bare shoulder. Mac nodded against him.

“No—I want to do it,” Dennis was saying, as Mac reemerged from the bedroom, bottle of lube already uncapped. “Do you mind?”

Mac caught on fast enough; he recapped the bottle and tossed it to Dennis, grinned.

It wasn’t his first time topping, but it was his first time topping Mac, and that had its own category, their own collective of records to set and break and reset. So he was more than a little surprised when, in the middle of opening him up, Mac flicked at his thigh. “Ow, what.”

“You can do two fingers,” he said, rolling his hips. “I won’t break.”

“Yeah, you say that.”

“Dude, I’ve practiced,” Mac informed him, which floored Dennis immediately. “You did say you were interested.”

His cheeks flushed a bright, bright red. “Show-off,” Dennis muttered, slipping in another finger.

Though—the extent of Mac’s practice came into question the exact moment Dennis crooked his fingers just right. Mac’s sharp hiss made him smirk. “Thought you’d done this before.”

“Not that thoroughly.” Mac bore down on his hand, undulated on the couch when Dennis obliged his request. “Jesus Christ.”

“Call me Dennis,” Dennis said, and he smirked when Mac groaned; he crooked his fingers again and the groan shot from painful to painfully aroused.

The smirk evaporated when Dennis lined himself up. He pushed one leg back a little, bumped his cockhead against Mac’s hole. “You good?”

“Guess we’ll find out.” Mac let out a somewhat shaky laugh.

“We can stop.” Dennis hesitated; Mac shook his head. “Switch if you want.”

“You’re just gonna have to trust me, bro,” Mac told him, nudging his hips closer. And Dennis was careful when he slid home, despite the heat despite the slickness despite the insane pressure. He didn’t realize he was holding in a breath until halfway through, and he released it, and Mac chuckled. “It’s crazy, right.”

“Way better than I remember,” Dennis answered, and Mac lit up absolutely with pride. “What about you?”

“Dude,” Mac said, “it’s so weird,” and he said it so honestly, so naturally that Dennis snickered uncontrollably, dropped his head to Mac’s collarbone while his shoulders shook with sudden laughter. “All right, it’s not that weird.”

“It gets better,” Dennis said. He was still smiling. “Trust me.”

“Always do,” Mac said, and the way he said it was offhand, a casual affirmative; but it caught and snagged on a vine, tangled and thorny around Dennis’ ribs, and then it was his and his forever.

Dennis withdrew, pumped in again, slid an inch deeper. He bottomed out with a throaty groan; Mac’s lids fluttered, eyes rolling back for an instant. Another thrust and a quiet, sharp hitch of breath, and Dennis lowered his head, drew his lips over Mac’s cheekbone. “That it?”

Mac nodded, offered his hips up, plaintive. Dennis could take and take and take, if he wanted.  

He shifted Mac’s legs, gently leaned forward. A deeper inhale, and in his peripheral Dennis swore Mac’s cock jumped. A few even thrusts confirmed it. He worked a hand between Mac’s thighs and nipped at Mac’s lower lip, and Mac had a hold on the back of his neck; Dennis’ thrusts were short and sharp and Mac clenched around him, fingertips digging tight into his neck and shoulder. He pumped his hand until Mac jerked his hips back with a quick, quiet hiss.

Dennis brought his hand up. A thin stripe of come lay across the knuckles, and he made sure to lock eyes with Mac as he licked it off.

Mac made a strangled noise of protest. “I just came, man, don’t do that to me,” he said, and Dennis tried to laugh, ended up halfway through a rapid inhale as Mac clenched around him again. “C’mon, you next.”

Mac let him build up to it, taking his thrusts with a slow, natural luxury. One hand graced his waist while the other trailed to the back of his neck, tangled in damp dark curls at the nape. He snapped his hips faster, and Mac guided him closer, noses barely brushing. Up-close and personal, it made Dennis shiver; nowhere to hide and nowhere to go and the surface nothing but a weak, transparent layer wrapped around the rest. He panted hard, red-faced and splotchy, hair plastered to clammy skin—Mac pressed a kiss to his forehead, each cheekbone, his lips, and Dennis shut his eyes, sought release, stilled.

He came to realigned, rearranged with his cheek just under Mac’s collarbone. Not entirely pleasant in the middle of August, especially with a thin sheen of sweat covering them both, but no power below or above could ever force him to move beyond a token effort to pull out. “Holy shit.”

Mac wasn’t keen on making him do much else. Small mercy. “You said it,” he murmured, rough-voiced; his words were loose and shimmering in the heat, warm as aged whiskey. He tilted his head over the couch, drew his arm up behind Dennis’ back. “That was.”

Dennis said I know into Mac’s chest, and Mac sighed so deeply it echoed in his own.

They were quiet. The laptop shut off with a tiny beep, and a car sped down the road. Shadows arced long over the living room, broken with shapes of orange streetlamp light. Settling closer, Dennis pressed his cheek into Mac’s neck, near his strong, even heartbeat.

His hand curled into a loose fist on Mac’s chest. Mac absently traced fingertips down the ridge of his spine, aimless and gentle as he hummed something familiar. Dennis frowned. “‘The Zephyr Song’?”

“Yeah—good job, dude,” Mac replied, head tilted in approval. “Didn’t know you knew it.”

“I know things,” Dennis said, “okay, I know plenty,” and Mac chuckled, and his other hand trailed up Dennis’ arm, curving over the hand on his chest.

“I know you do,” he said. A gentle squeeze, and Dennis’ throat tightened when he looked up, caught the soft affection written in the twist of Mac’s lips, the crinkled corners of his eyes. He raised Dennis’ hand, pressed his lips against the knuckles, he kissed the tip of each finger—and then he smiled, and that same tightness was there in his chest, right where his heart belonged.   

It occurred to him then, and was just as soon dismissed—the bizarre idea of a heart that lived outside the body. Senseless, that. He hurriedly cleared his throat. “Hey.”

“Hm?”

“Remember that time we planned a trip to Mexico?”

“In January? A little,” Mac said. “What about it?”

“We should do that someday,” Dennis said, distantly. “It kinda sounded like fun.”

“As long as your new serpentine belt holds up,” Mac said, grinning—and this far away, from January and winter and a looming gray endlessness, it was almost even funny.

Dennis hummed. “Think we will?”

“Drive down to Mexico?” A nod, shuffling his cheek along Mac’s chest. “Anything’s possible.”

Dennis remembered Louise in the darkness, surrounded by craggy mountains and miles of silence; wondered if she'd realized then, or maybe just before, the impossibility of freedom in Mexico—or the equal extreme at the merciless hands of the law. Either way, impossible, and she had to have figured it out by then, the cold and fateful ways of the world.

On the other hand, Dennis had never shot and killed anyone for Mac. They weren’t on the run. He wasn’t poised to drive the Range Rover off a cliff. They could someday visit Mexico, if they really wanted.

Mac believed it, most of all, even when Dennis didn’t. If nothing else, it counted as a start.

“Let’s do it,” he said, with a lazy yawn. “Vamos a Méjico, yeah?”

“Whatever you want, bro,” Mac said, chuckling, and then he was patting at Dennis to get him to move. He led Dennis off to the shower, bitching good-naturedly about how now he saw the point of using a condom because man was that a weird feeling, and he was definitely gonna be walking funny tomorrow, and if anyone asked Dennis had to swear to tell people that Mac had roundhouse-kicked three armed robbers in the face at a PNC Bank.

And if it made Mac happy, Dennis could live with that.

—

The day that dusty turquoise chips snowed off the wall after the front door closed with a gentle slam—that was the day Dennis decided to do something about the paint.

He was still shaking the flecks out of his hair when he returned with their small stack of mail. “Mac, have you seen the lease anywhere recently?”

“Which lease?” Curious, and with only half of his hair slicked back, Mac’s head popped out of the bedroom.  

“This one. The apartment lease.”

“For what?”

Dennis sat down on the couch and shuffled through the mail, flicking bills one by one onto the coffee table. “I think we should paint,” he said with a firm nod. “It’s beyond acceptable at this point. I’ll do it myself if I goddamn have to, but this is definitely some type of health hazard in the making.” He flicked a brittle chip off his forearm, almost like it proved his point.

Mac had disappeared again, and his echo bounced off the bathroom tiles. “Painting’s not as easy as it looks, bro,” he called. “You’d be surprised how much skill it takes to do good.”

“It can’t be that hard,” Dennis said, dismissive. “I’m betting we can charge the landlady, too. Bill her for repairs or something?”

The last item in their stack of mail was a small bubble mailer, addressed in large block letters to one RONNIE MCDONALD. Dennis flapped the mailer out of sheer curiosity—something thin and lightweight slid around inside. Mac reappeared a minute later, wiping excess gel on unzipped blue pants, and Dennis waved the mailer at him.

“What’s this?”

“From someone who calls you Ronnie, apparently,” Dennis said, squinting as a clueless Mac tore the mailer open with his teeth. “Seriously, who calls you Ronnie anymore? Someone from high school? Wait—that’s not weed, is it? Is that from Cornflake? Christ, Mac, if that’s weed from Cornflake and you were dumb enough to have it sent in an unsecured mailer to our goddamned apartment—”

“Dude, shut up a minute.” And—surprised completely into silence—Dennis shut up. One peek inside the mailer had Mac dropping it like a hot pan, darting back into their bedroom without another word.

Well then. Ever-so-casually, Dennis set his sights on the mailer.

Sooner or later, Mac would have told him what was in it anyway. He was going to find out at some point, that was just a fact. Cautiously, with all the care of a negative in a darkroom, Dennis picked up the mailer by opposite corners and tipped its contents into his lap.

Six silvery keys fell out of the mailer. Dennis was confused.

“—So you’re done-done,” Mac was saying, cell phone pressed between his ear and shoulder as he smoothed a dark ribbed tank down his stomach. “Like, we can come check it out today? … Yeah, no, we’ll take care of that, don’t worry about it. Dude, seriously, I owe you like a ton … Yup, I’ll mail it out tomorrow. No problem. Bye.”

Dennis was completely torn between asking who the hell was that and why do I have keys in my lap, so he chose the diplomatic option and just said, “Mac?”

Mac was beaming when he hung up. “Dennis? Dude, listen: I kind of have a confession to make, but you have to promise to at least hear me out. I mean it, too, you gotta let me finish before you jump in.”

Dennis’ brain caught up with reality. “Confession?”

Mac nodded, and took a deep breath. “We’re moving out,” he said.

“Okay,” Dennis said, with a faint buzzing in his ears.

“Not today, I mean—and probably not for a week? I dunno how long it’ll take us to pack. I figured we could get everyone to help us, but the point is—”

“Wait. Did you say we’re moving?”

“Yeah! The others would help us, right? At least Charlie would. And it’s not like we’ve got a lot of stuff to pack up, so it shouldn’t take long—”

“As in moving out?” Dennis said, and Mac nodded. “Why?”

“You didn’t figure it out yet?” Mac cocked his head. “Dennis—I got our old apartment back.”

Sometimes, before disaster strikes, the brain will appear to slow the perception of time. Colors brighten, sounds intensify. Life slices at you, each moment crystallized under the microscope. This turned out to be unequivocal bullshit—Mac’s confession hit him like the fist of an angry god.

“You got our old apartment back,” Dennis said.

Mac’s grin was brighter than gold. “Surprise.”

“Our old apartment that burned down,” Dennis said. “The one that burned down twice. And you think you got it back.”

“No, I actually got it back,” Mac said, near to bursting with pride or joy or both. It was a lot to take in, whatever it was. “I asked him to make copies of my keys for yours, ‘cause he didn’t know about you, so we should probably test all of them, just to be on the safe side.”

“He?”

“My cousin—the one up in Jersey, remember? Owns a construction company, knows a lot of crews in the Tri-State area, busted his back and was kinda forced to retire. He’s cool, you’d like him.”

Dennis agreed just for the sake of it. “Okay. He fixed our apartment.”

“Not exactly,” Mac said, seesawing his hand. “It’s kind of a long story—”

“I want every motherfucking word,” Dennis said, very suddenly, very stiff. Mac instantly held up his hands.

“Okay, Jesus. Deep breaths, Dennis.”And he actually waited until Dennis relaxed his shoulders, stopped clawing a hand so hard into the couch. “Uh, right. You kinda gave me the idea, actually. Remember that big-ass winter storm we had? You said something like, we should get my cousin down here to fix up the pipes for this place, and I got to thinking, well—what about fixing up the old place instead?”

You kinda gave me the idea. It rattled in his head like a grenade with a loose pin.

“I called up my cousin, we shot the shit, and before I can start feeling him out about our place, he starts talking to me about his back. He can’t get weed for it, it’s the only thing that helps, Jersey sucks a bag of dicks. So I get a great idea—why not hook him up with Cornflake?  So I made a few calls around, I got my cousin hooked up, and in return he called in a shitload of favors and basically fixed up our entire apartment.”

There was a lot to unpack in this. Buying time, Dennis rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “Fixed up like—like fixed up?”

“Pretty much,” Mac said with a shrug. “I think they were about to condemn the place before my cousin agreed to help. They had to rewire the electricity on account of all the wires being fried. Obviously structural damage from the fire. He called in an HVAC guy, a professional painting crew, and I think the plumbing still used lead pipes, so he fixed that for us too. And then he had to get in touch with a couple legal eagles, so they wouldn’t kick any of his guys out.”

“Sounds expensive,” Dennis said bitterly.

“You have no idea, dude,” Mac muttered. “Even with the family discount, and I was basically paying him on layaway, and I fixed him up with Cornflake. It was brutal.”

“Wait,” Dennis said suddenly, narrowing his eyes. “You paid everything.”

“Uh, no shit I did,” Mac said, arms out at his sides. “You know how hard that was, Dennis? Not only was I paying my half for this apartment, I was paying for a completely separate apartment at the same time. I used all my kickbacks from Dee, I skimmed from the register more often. I had to beg Frank not to cut my paycheck after the investors bailed on us, Dennis, it was literally humiliating.”

“Then why the fuck didn’t you tell me?” Dennis shouted as he hit the flashpoint, consumed with fury after so long under smoke and suffocation. “For one thing, you barely kept up with bills back here, so don’t be so quick to pat yourself on the back.”

“Yeah, but now you know why!”

“Two,” Dennis barreled on, “I could have helped! Jesus, Mac, that was my apartment too, and you just—just kept it a fucking secret?!”

“I told you now. And I did it on purpose, dude. I wasn’t hiding it to be a dick.”

“For what fucking purpose could you have hidden something as big as a goddamned apartment?”

The set of his jaw was resolute. “You couldn’t kick me out if you didn’t know about it,” Mac said. “I didn’t want you to bump me off the lease, again. For the third goddamned time.”

Well past the point of confusion, the dimension Dennis entered was dominated by chaos. “That’s a completely different subject, Mac,” he said, this close to abject pleading. “You could never pass a credit check. You couldn’t sign for an apartment.”

A gleam in Mac’s eye, and he lifted his chin like a boxer. “I can now. So no more kicking me out to marry your high school girlfriend for a week, no more signing for a shithole like this just because you’re mad. It’s our apartment now, dude—it’s yours and it’s mine.”

Dennis didn’t know what to say.

The silence stretched, rubbery and awkward, until Mac coughed quietly into his fist. “It’s all finished, too,” he said, and without a segue or a warm invitation it was effortlessly clumsy. “I called my cousin, he confirmed.”

“Finished like we can visit it.” A crack ran through the vowels, shiny like scar tissue. “Today?”

“I was kind of thinking right now,” Mac said.

A hideous, hateful screech in the back of his head claimed he should be more upset, threw out words for Mac like deceit and duplicity and dickhat; and then he remembered why he should be upset, and he remembered the apartment, and he remembered everything about it.

Dennis quirked his lips, a small note in a vast and cosmic production. He glanced at the keys in his lap and they twinkled up at him like stars.

“Guess we don’t need to paint after all,” he said, and Mac actually laughed, and Dennis closed his eyes and let his smile brighten, burn, a brilliant supernova in a black and boundless sky.

—

They made it to the old apartment in record time, including the night Dennis ran four red lights to make Game 1 of the 2008 World Series. He even parked the car in his old spot, and stepping outside was like trespassing in someone else’s daydream.

He and Mac hadn’t talked, much. Too excited. Too disbelieving, too afraid to break the spell. But Mac shot him a grin over the top of the Range Rover.

“You got the keys, right?” he said and Dennis nodded, patted his front pocket. The keys jingled back at him. “You ready?”

“No,” Dennis said truthfully, “not at all, dude.”

It had never stopped them before.

They took the stairs, and the stairwell smelled familiar, launched a barrage of memories—stumbling upwards, Mac slung drunk over his shoulder, climbing the stairs like Kong and Faye Dunaway in a giddy, dizzy reverse. They reached the second floor, their landing, their hallway, and the apartment door was in front of them literally before they knew it.

It looked the same as it ever did, and he still would’ve stared just shy of forever.

A nudge to his wrist. “Hey.” Mac vibrated with energy, rolling off in constant waves. “You ready?”

“You said that already.” Dennis studied his key. The horrible thought of what if the key doesn’t fit and we have to wait demanded his attention and he hesitated, turned to Mac. “You sure you don’t wanna do the honors?” Mac shook his head. “Push it open with me?”

“Just open the door already,” Mac said, oddly tight. And Dennis understood what he meant.

The key fit the lock, turned without resistance. Dennis’ hand shook as he tugged it back out. Mac put his hand on the door, and they glanced at each other; Dennis turned the knob, and Mac pushed it open.

The walls were a warm, dark olive, some sections still rich and soft with new color. Dropcloths and tarps dressed the floor, and a few used putty knives and empty buckets of spackling barely weighted them down. In the middle sat a cluster of paint cans, brushes with paint dried on the bristles. Nothing else was in the living room, and everything smelled like vinyl, like fresh paint, like brand-new.

Dreams never smelled like this before.

A fine coat of sawdust settled on the tops of their shoes as they drifted away, farther and farther into the room. After so many years of living here, Dennis had forgotten what it looked like devoid of furniture or people or little touches of personality—it was roomier than he’d imagined, too generous with empty space. A thick stream of light burst through the window and bounced off of more dust motes than he’d ever seen before, floating like gold dust over the rumpled tarps on the floor.

It smelled so different, it smelled like a hardware store, and like warm sunlight, and like nothing he actually remembered.

He whipped around when he heard a noise from Mac’s room—and the thought alone of Mac’s room had him running. Mac inhaled sharply with his hand on the doorframe and his head poked like an ostrich into his old bedroom.

“You can’t even tell it burned down,” he whispered. His fingers tightened, the knuckles turning white.  

Dennis went to his old room and walked inside and had to shut his eyes because it felt like walking through someone’s candid shot of you, the shot they never told you they had until years later—memories of a completely different life flooded back so hard that it actually made him dizzy. His bed was gone, his bookshelves, his camera and all his possessions had gone up in smoke, but he could still see them if he closed his eyes, if he tried his absolute hardest.

The hardwood floor smelled of wood polish. Dennis couldn’t remember if he’d done that before.

He went back outside and Mac was standing in the light, glancing awkwardly around the room.

“Never realized how big it was in here,” he said, rubbing his forearm. “You know? Without the couch and the TV and stuff. It’s way more bigger than I remembered.”

Dennis nodded.

“But, you know, it’s—it’s done. All of it. We can move in officially once the lease is taken care of.” He wrinkled his nose. “Were the walls always this color?”

“They were lighter,” Dennis said softly. “Sage, I think.”

Mac made a dismissive noise. “I think I liked the old color better,” he said, and the corners of Dennis’ mouth twitched up, unbidden. Mac hooked his thumbs in his beltloops, then, and faced Dennis, gnawing at his lip. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

Not about sage, not about olive, not about anything to do with paint. Not about the bittersweet taste of a life that didn’t fit as well as you remembered. Here was the only constant Dennis could ever remember, waiting for a response with his freckled shoulders lowered, with his gaze earnest and honest and hopeful; and it didn’t much matter where he was, surrounded by the space of an empty apartment or a broken sea of recycled trash, Mac had come all this way just to take Dennis home.

“You do like it, right?” Mac was saying, sounding concerned. So Dennis answered him honestly—he crossed the empty living room in two long strides and he kissed Mac for all he was worth in the world.

—

Here are some tips no one ever tells you about moving.

1) Pack toilet paper. The first thing everyone forgets is toilet paper. The last thing anyone wants to run out of is toilet paper.

2) Sleeping on a floor is much more uncomfortable than it sounds, and it already sounds like hell on your joints. And your hips. And your spine. And everywhere else, so figure out the bed situation as soon as possible.  

3) You have accumulated a lot, a lot of mundane shit in your life, without even noticing it. At one point you rationalized the need for something you now find completely useless, so to make packing less of a living hell, accept the fact and move past it.

“What did we need a marble soap dish for?” Dennis said, inspecting it like an archaeologist. “Who uses bar soap around here?”

“I use Irish Spring,” Mac pointed out, and they ended up keeping the marble soap dish, even if it had never seen a bar of Irish Spring in its entire life; at some point Dennis would remember a brief flirtation with lemon verbena soap and the marble dish would feel completely vindicated.

That was how all packing went. Little details in cardboard boxes were touched on, frowned over, discussed, dissected. Even in a sparse one-bedroom apartment, they grew all over it anyway.

So it was oddly lonely when they ended up in the bedroom again, down to a mattress and Dee’s stolen blanket, while every last piece of stuff sat neatly piled in the living room.

Mac didn’t quite share his view. “Last night in the apartment,” he said, lascivious grin working up his face. “Got any ideas?”

A thousand fluttered to life like paper cranes, and each one had Mac written in the wings: Mac in a new position; Mac spread out and panting; Mac coming apart, shuddering, until Dennis put him back together. Or Dennis was the one lavished with attention, either way.

All he managed was a shrug. “Does a good night’s sleep count?”

“If you want it to,” Mac said, stretching his arms out high, and that was simple enough, that was absolutely perfect.

It had been some time since he’d slept on just a mattress. “Told you we should’ve kept the box spring and the frame,” Dennis said.

“You’ll thank me tomorrow when all our shit’s in one place and ready to go,” Mac said. He cast Dee’s crocheted blanket over Dennis’ shoulders and Dennis wriggled close. “Still pretty comfortable on its own.”

Sleepy-eyed, Dennis nodded. “The bed thing really worked out for us,” he said. “Glad it did.”

“Yeah?”

A hum. Mac drew him in. “We figured it out eventually. We’re a good team,” he said.

It was nice having Mac on his team, Dennis decided.

“We figured out the bed thing and we’ll figure out moving. Tomorrow, though.” Mac yawned openly.

“Why did you get the apartment back anyway?” Dennis said. He hadn’t meant to say it, but he didn’t attempt to take it back either, once it was out there. It was a genuine curiosity at this point.

As well as he could, on his side and on a plush king-sized mattress, Mac shrugged. “We weren’t happy with this place,” he said. “I wasn’t happy. You weren’t happy. I wasn’t happy with you being unhappy. So.”

It all seemed so simple, when you laid it out like that.  

“And it seemed like a good idea at the time, too,” Mac added. “Sure as shit would’ve thought twice if I knew how expensive home repair shit was.”

Dennis’ eyes were drifting shut. “You did a good job,” he said.

“Thanks, man.”

“You’re welcome,” Dennis murmured, even though Mac had never needed to hear it; even though thanks was always implied, it was nice, sometimes, just to hear it all out loud.

—

In the middle of the night, Dennis woke to a quiet whimpering noise that instantly had him on high alert. It took him a few bleary seconds to realize the sound was coming from Mac, that his face was screwed and distorted, that he was on his side facing the edge of the mattress. A nightmare, maybe the first—or maybe just the first he’d noticed. Either way, Dennis did something about it, pressing in close, familiar and warm; the pads of his fingertips gentle on Mac’s temples, his cheekbones, his jaw. At first, nothing, for twelve despairing seconds there was flat, void nothing. Then Mac’s features slowly smoothed out, the fist on the mattress relaxed and unfolded, and Dennis absently linked their hands. Mac was okay again, and Dennis went back to sleep.

—

Moving day came and went almost immediately. The key word was almost, because dragging the final box out of the apartment reminded Dennis, very heavily, of just how much moving sucked. The Uhaul was packed full—this would have to go in the car.

“Dude!” Like the goddamn Dukes of Hazzard, Mac was hanging out of the rolled-down window of the car to lean over the roof. “What took you?”

“Nothing took me, Mac, Jesus Christ,” Dennis said. He glanced at the Uhaul parked behind them; from the driver’s seat, Dee gave him a quick thumbs-up. “Where are Frank and Charlie?”

“They are in the Uhaul.”

“Ah. Right.”

“You know honestly, it’s probably safer, there’s a lot of unsecured boxes and shit back there. All our crap could go flying,” Mac said. “They can like, hold it down and stuff and make sure nothing breaks.”

“Good thinking,” Dennis said. He shoved the final box in the trunk, and Mac opened the driver’s seat door for him. Dennis climbed into the Range Rover and sat staring at the wheel.

“Dennis?” A hand waved in front of his face. “Dude, you in there?”

“I still can’t believe it’s happening,” Dennis said, before he could take it back. “You get like that sometimes?”

“It’s gonna be weird as shit, bro,” Mac said. “I’m gonna walk in one day and wonder why all our old shit’s been replaced with new shit. Like, I’ll just forget we ever lived somewhere else.”

Dennis hummed. “We can re-rearrange shit,” he said. “Put the couch on the other side of the room, see if it looks nicer that way. We can turn your room into a keg room. Or a man cave. We can really do whatever we want, we’ve got a blank canvas.”

“You’re turning my room into a man cave?” Mac said, arching a brow.

“Dude. Man cave,” Dennis repeated. “We can’t make my room into a man cave, it’s too big. Wouldn’t be as cozy. Your room’s the perfect size, bro, and it’s not like you need it any longer.”

The Uhaul honked behind them. Mac closed his mouth, nodded. “Not really. Oh, dude—combo keg room and man cave. Keg cave.”

“Now you’re talking.”

Dee slammed on the horn again. “Jesus,” Dennis muttered, starting the car with only a minimum of fuss. The repaired car radio flipped to whatever station Mac had left it on; the familiar voice of Anthony Kiedis spun out lazily from the speakers, promising someone he’d find his peace of mind.

Mac had a little smirk on as he nodded at the radio. “You know this one?”

“Come on, man,” Dennis said. “‘Soul to Squeeze,’ it’s not even a hard guess.”

Mac wore pride like a crown, and acquiesced without a fuss. He peered across Dennis and out the driver’s side window, squinted at their apartment building one final time. “You were right all along, bro,” he said decisively.

“About what?”

Mac jerked his chin. “This place, the new apartment. We definitely could’ve done better.”

“You’re not gonna miss it just a little?”

“Probably not,” Mac admitted, “it always felt a little too cramped for me personally. Why, are you?”

Dennis glanced back at the new apartment. He found himself missing it already—just a little.

“You have to admit,” he said with a smile, “it really had its moments.”

Chapter Text

Later that evening, the Official Housewarming Party of Mac and Dennis’ New New Apartment had slowly but surely morphed into a reasonably good-natured argument over where the couch should go, which Frank found boring without any alcohol. Hunting in vain through a mass of cardboard boxes, he raised his voice and said, “Charlie, which one’s got the booze in it?”

“I either put it under B, for beer, or A, for alcohol,” Charlie said.

“Oh, wait, that reminds me. Frank,” Dennis said, “when you find the right box, open up the bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue?”

“Johnnie Walker Blue?” Frank scowled at him while Dee whistled. “You didn’t nick that from the bar, did you?”

“Jesus Christ, Frank, I did pay for it.”

“You got us Blue Label?” Mac squeaked, practically lit up in sheer delight.

Dennis grinned back at him. “Hells yeah, baby. Gonna celebrate this shit in style.”

The box was actually marked with a large L, for liquor. “It’s really more appropriate anyway,” Charlie was saying as he tore packing tape off the box, “alcohol alone includes things like ‘rubbing’ and ‘methyl,’ lot of your more acquired tastes, not exactly for unrefined palates—and beer obviously only covers beer—” He stared into the box and frowned. “Yo, it’s not in here.”

“What, the scotch?”

“Nope!” He rustled through the box and shook his head. “You sure you packed it?”

“Of course I’m sure!” He sounded otherwise.

Dee snickered. “Two hunno bucks down the drain, bro.” A beat, as everyone looked at her. “What? He probably forgot it back at the old apartment. No way it’s there now.”

Mac’s disappointment was the most audible. “Dude, seriously, how could you forget that.”

“I did not, it just—look, whatever, it doesn’t matter,” Dennis said, thoroughly irritated. He dug his keys out of his pocket and tossed them at Mac. “Just move past it and get it before they change the locks.”

“What? Me, why me?”

“Mac, just do it, all right? Don’t ask questions,” Dennis said, and he went back to fussing with the couch, and Mac frowned, speculative.

“Frank.” The moment Dennis was truly distracted, bickering with Dee about where the coffee table went in the arrangement, Mac had slipped over to Frank and Charlie and the open box of liquor. “Do me a favor?”

Meaningfully, he held out the keys to the Range Rover, and Frank cocked an eyebrow. “The shit would I do that for?”

“Because,” Mac said, so low Frank had to strain to hear him. “Dee drives like crazy and Dennis would kill me if I let her use his car. Charlie’s on my side in regards to the couch, and you don’t give a shit, so you’re perfect to go.” He jangled the keys at Frank.

Frank looked at Charlie, who simply shrugged and uncapped a beer. “They’re just gonna be arguing about the stupid couch all day, man,” he said, “you might as well take a break.”

“Exactly,” Mac said, and he jangled the keys again, and Frank finally just grabbed them, because Charlie had a point.

The locks still hadn’t changed in the several hours they’d been gone, and the room was as ugly as ever, flowery and fancy and brazen in its disrepair. Missing the box (he had definitely stolen it from the bar), the bottle of scotch sat in a patch of hazy sunlight on the floor, amber-colored light shimmering wavelike through the glass and over uneven floorboards. There was also a piece of notebook paper tucked under the bottle, hastily folded, still fringed with curly strips.

First, with deep reverence, Frank opened the bottle. Next, he took a long pull, really taking his time to savor it. Then he bent down and picked up the paper. The script was plain enough, maybe a little on the pointy side, and several lines had been scratched out and rewritten. It was still only a page long, so Frank peered at it and read.

To my Thelma,

I’ve only got about five minutes to write this before you start getting suspicious as to why I’m taking forever up here. I’m pretty good at coming up with things on the spot, and I’ve been thinking about this at least all morning, but just in case it comes out kinda subpar? At least there's a reason why.

Remember last night, when I asked you why you did what you did? And you said I wasn’t happy? I don’t know how much of that was circumstantial—maybe like some of it, but probably not all. I know for me it wasn’t all because of this place—not that this place helped much. It’s too small, the paint always bothered me, the floor creaks. I imagine you weren’t too big a fan yourself.

But you never really treated it like shit. You gave it the old college try, which I guess is ironic in a sense? I sure didn’t. But you kept trying to make it all work, and I think maybe that was part of the reason why I seemed like I wasn’t happy. Here you are, trying your heart out when I’m so clearly not—and despite my best (worst?) efforts, you made the place feel like home.

I figured it out when we visited the new (old?) apartment, and it didn’t feel like it used to—the paint was off and your cousin’s people went a little hard on the polish and, obviously, all our original stuff was gone forever. You asked me if I liked it, though, and I gotta say I kinda didn’t. But it felt like home anyway, and then I realized you were the reason why. You made me feel like I was home again.

I’m not saying I’m gonna try harder for you, whatever that means, or try for us or shit like that. And I’m definitely not promising I’m gonna be a better person, because despite what you like to think, I’m pretty sure that this is it. It’s still nice that you believe in me, so if I do try any harder, it’ll be for me—but it’s because you showed me I could do it. I hope that means something to you.

I really hope I’ve earned it.

Forever your Louise

Chuckling, Frank shook his head. “Well,” he said, “if that ain’t the cutest shit.”

He capped the bottle of scotch and folded the letter up, as carefully as he could. With a smile he set it down on the floor, in the exact same spot he'd found it. And he was still smiling as he walked out of the apartment, more hopeful for the world than he'd been in a long while.

The letter fluttered like a wing as he shut the door behind him.