After that things were different. He’d lost all interest in Downstairs. If I brought it up he’d change the subject; if folks were hanging out down there he wouldn’t come. When I finally asked him directly about this, he shook his head.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to be down there, that’s all.” He tried to play it off casually, but his jaw was set.

Something about him had changed. His wardrobe turned straight-laced. He went back to calling himself Nick. He watched a lot of sports on TV. And things were strange between us. Our conversations didn’t go quite right, didn’t fit in their familiar grooves. We’d get derailed, trail off. We started talking less. I couldn’t point to something specific that had changed, but the usual pleasurable tension between us, the taut bond of connection we’d had since the accident, was gone. He didn’t seem to need me any more. He seemed like just a dude. Just a Nick. Not mine.

I worked up my courage and did a few of my own solo expeditions Downstairs, without telling him, but I couldn’t convince myself to go very far. I hallucinated strange noises around corners: floorboards creaking, whispered sighs. I knew I was only scaring myself, but didn’t have it in me to stay down there for long.

I lay on my bed a lot and listened to records through my headphones. My dad’s old headphones: huge bulky black things with a coiled cord like old telephones. Sometimes I held my breath while I did it. This was an old technique of mine to shut the world out. After a while outside sounds would slowly slip away, and the thrum of blood and music would fill my ears, become my entire universe. As a kid I could hold my breath for three minutes. Enough sometimes to make it through a whole song without breathing.

I fell asleep one night doing this, headphones on, and dreamed about Niko, which happened now and then whether I wanted it to or not. In the dream I was at the hallway junction again, looking down into the shadows at the figure at its end. Only this time it wasn’t me down there, it was him, walking toward me. Not hesitant but confident, smiling, happy to see me. I grinned back, thrilling at the reciprocity between us, a bond that felt in that moment tinged with something else, something more primal.

But then I faltered, because I realized I wasn’t sure quite what that meant. There are a lot of primal emotions.

There were so many things that smile could mean.

I took a step back, afraid, but there was nothing but empty space behind me. I was standing at the lip of a drop-off.

He came right up to me, Niko, my Niko, looking into my eyes with something I was certain now was love, and the fear faded as he reached up to touch my cheek, and the warmth of it and the smell of him and the look on his face fused inside me into need so intense it parted my lips, as if for oxygen, just as he bent down with hunger to kiss them.

It was a beatific kiss, velvet, brain-melting, the kind you sometimes get in real life if you’re lucky but I’d only ever had in dreams, sweet and lingering and seraphic. Everything I’d ever wanted flowed through me into him and I imagined I could feel the same from him to me, echoed and amplified, conjoined. It went on and on and on. He pressed against me, arms wrapped around my back, holding me, and mine were maybe around him too but only limply, subconsciously, the kiss and its indescribable tangibility, its dream-forgotten trueness the only thing, the only thing. The only thing.

It wasn’t until I’d broken it, pulled back to look up at him, that I realized I was leaning back over the edge behind me, his arms holding me there, my toes the only thing still touching the lip of the drop-off.

I couldn’t read his expression. Had no idea what it meant at all.

I didn’t even know who he was.

He let me fall.

I plummeted down into darkness, gathering speed, faster and faster. I’d had dreams before that ended like this, a sickening fall and then an ejection back to wakefulness just as I hit ground, covered in cold sweat and shuddering. But this time when I woke, it was more like I’d chosen to do it, pulled away from the dream against its will. Like part of me knew if I’d stayed I’d have kept falling forever, because there was no ground down there to stop me.

The record was turning in its final groove. I stared at it dumbly, dad’s big headphones still muffling the outside world, transmitting only hissing, clicks and pops.

This has got to stop, I told myself, you’re over him. You got over him a long time ago. The accident had confused everything but in the months after it I’d sorted myself out, realized it was never going to happen. Put it away and moved on. I had. It was just my fucking dreams didn’t seem to have gotten the memo.

I felt Downstairs tingling at my back, beneath me. I switched the player off and took my blanket to sleep on the couch in the living room.

***

One night not long after that, everyone but Niko and I went out to a concert. The two of us were drinking, and it seemed to ease the friction between us, which made us both want to keep drinking. I found comfort in this, maybe the first acknowledgment that he felt the gap between us too, wanted as much as me to find a way to close it.

Deep into a bottle of vodka, we got into one of those hilarious drunken arguments about nothing: the final line to one of our favorite movies. I was sure it was one thing, he was sure it was something a few words off. I knew I was right, and also could see why he might remember it wrong, but he refused to believe me. He tried to pull out his cellphone to call a friend for a second opinion and got it stuck on something in his pocket: laughing, he ended up dumping everything out on the table, but then we got distracted by a text he’d gotten from an ex-girlfriend, which led to more drinking and another argument where I dutifully tried to keep him from replying, not just because he was drunk and she was terrible for him but because back then with those flip phones it would have taken him a fucking hour to peck out a reply.

Eventually, we ended up slumped in our chairs, the vodka bottle empty, listening to some spacey ambient music on the stereo.

I had about drifted off when I shook myself awake. Niko was out cold. Before I could wake him and convince him to drag himself to bed I noticed something out of the corner of my eye.

In the pile of stuff he’d pulled from his pocket (phone, wallet, keys, crumpled receipts) were two small brass keys.

They weren’t on his keyring, just loose in his pocket, and faintly corroded with age.

It was hard to tell for sure, but they looked identical.

Nothing about this was all that unusual but somehow I knew one of those keys would fit the fridge Downstairs. Don’t ask how I knew this, because I couldn’t tell you, but I did. Irrational.

That ridiculous locked fridge in that ridiculous kitchen atop a ridiculous empty pool.

He’d been keeping something from me too.

Had he found something in there?

Something that scared him off going back?

What inside a fridge could be that scary? Could make him lie to his best friend?

I’m not sure why I did it. The vodka, maybe. Repressed curiosity. Or maybe the growing frustration that something had happened to Niko, something had changed; but I wasn’t allowed to know what it was, or ever put it right.

Quietly, I took the keys. I shouldn’t have, but by then I already had.

This is just one way the story can go. In the final version of Subcutanean, no two stories will ever be quite the same. Find out more at https://igg.me/at/subcutanean