“So you lied to me about where your friend lives.”

Another heaping armload of clothing landed across Ari's waiting forearms, passed by Blake from the open hatchback of his old VW Rabbit. Blake was doing some housecleaning of his own, casting out the memory of Sadie by liquidating everything she'd left behind before jumping on a plane back to Texas.

This meant toting many, many heavy coats and jackets through the propped front door of Waterside Thrift, the waterfront beloved and much-frequented junk shop. 

"I misremembered. Jackson Street is, like, four miles that way." Ari swiveled his body to gesture in a direction he knew in the moment to be totally random. His burden rustled and flapped.

“Uh huh.” Blake hauled another open plastic bin of LPs - the ones he'd been unable to offload at Poppers or the other, less memorably named record store - out of the hatch. By his account, Sadie had lost interest in the hobby as rapidly as she'd lost interest in him. He balanced the bin on a knee and pulled the hatch shut. “You must be a real asset, working at a tourist trap and you can’t even keep directions straight for yourself. Come on.”

They walked around the block from where Blake had been forced to park in silence. It wasn’t until they were in the perfumed and sequined dank of the thrift shop, waiting in a line of other hawkers, when Blake finally spoke up again.

"So, does he live with his family?"

"No?"

"He's got to live with somebody; nobody your age can afford to live there." The line advanced slowly. Everyone not offloading the detritus of failed relationships needed to argue the value of their offerings, and this took time.

“Yeah, but he’s got, like, a real job.”

“Doing what?"

Ari fished around in his brain for words that skirted the truth. "Consulting or something like that." He shifted his burden as the line advanced. "Conflict mediation. People stuff."

"Huh." Blake bobbled his head in what Ari hoped was not approval, but disinterest. No such luck. "That scans with what I heard from the morning girls. They said he's very polite and sweet."

"I don't, uh, well. He's not like that with everybody."

The correction didn't faze Blake, or stop the conversation. "Sure, but if he makes that impression on strangers it makes sense that he'd be good at stuff like that." Blake heaved his bin onto one of the crowded countertops, one at the end of a long queue of similar bins awaiting appraisal. "So, why didn’t I recognize him at the shop all this time? I think I’d remember you bringing a pretty boy like that over to play Goldeneye.”

"I thought you didn't like guys." Ari's mouth was running away with him. 

This did not have the effect Ari desired, which was to annoy Blake to the point of dropping the subject. "Hey, when you spend enough time trying not to be a pretty guy, noticing pretty guys becomes habit."

Ari's head bobbled on his neck. He suddenly felt like he was being buried alive on a beach in August. Just floundering under the mounting weight of hot, dry sand. The coats were too much. He piled them on the counter, behind the bin. "Oh. Yeah. Well, we didn't meet in class or anything." His mouth had started to move and work in a panicked, irrepressible way. He was trying to eat his way out of the sand.

Blake studied him. The line moved, and Blake didn't move with it. Ari could feel the sand filtering into the hollows of his ears, hot and stinging.

"We were in the same after school program. Not classmates or anything.” Why not a club? Why would that be harder to say?

"Huh." Now, Blake moved with the crowd. "I don't remember you being in anything like that."

"You were at Holyoke by that point."

"Right." 

This was the retreat Ari had wanted, the decline in volume and the trailing speech that died away. If he wanted, it could be a chance to escape.

Unfortunately, Ari didn’t want that. He wanted to tell Blake everything, wanted to live in a reality in which doing so wouldn’t either make him look insane or endanger Blake. Or both, which felt extremely likely to Ari’s pinwheeling brain. He was deep in his inexpressible anxiety spiral when Blake, his arms freed from their loads at last as the clerk tallied the worth of the lot, embraced him.

He crushed him up in his big, sweaty, hairy arms, which immobilized him very effectively. Escape was now physically impossible on top of the mental.

Blake didn't call him or anybody else on Saturdays, and Blake didn't hug anybody, least of all Ari. As soon as Ari'd gotten big enough to grow hair anywhere but his head, Blake had joined everybody else in the world but their mother in treating him a little bit like nuclear waste.

"What's this about?" Ari kept his arms at his sides. And not just because Blake had pinned them there.

"I love you so much, little guy. Thanks for being here for me today."

Ari’s shoulders tried to crumble. The weight of what he had begun to learn was immense in that moment. This would become another invisible wedge between himself and Blake.

"No problem. Can I bum a ride back to work?"