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“I’ve never had anybody do that, just walk up and . . . and dress me.” He looked down at himself, turning the buckle over in his fingers, marveling. “I don’t hate it. Is that crazy? I think I don’t hate it.”

No, I thought, watching the straps rise and fall on his chest, keeping the exact look on his face when he’d said, “I’m at the party,” saving it for some braver, closer, impossible future in which I might be the one allowed to buy him the leather and buckle it on myself. You don’t hate it.

“It suits you,” I said, which was as close to the truth as I could come and still keep my seat.

Near midnight I decided to be brave. I’d like to say it was a grand resolution, but it wasn’t. It was three bourbons of accumulated ache and a whole night of bare shoulder eighteen inches from mine and one beautiful stranger’s hands on a chest that should have been mine to touch. Some final domino tipped over in me that said, “Enough. Get up, walk over there, and tell him. Let it cost whatever it costs.”

So I set down my glass and stood.

My heart, which did not do this, did this.

I still don’t know what this was.

I got most of the way across the floor, close enough to see the sweat at his temple and the cold prickle on his arms and to smell the bourbon and the warm cedar of whatever he’d put on for a night that wasn’t going to work. I got close enough to reach out. I lifted a hand toward that broad, bare shoulder, and I opened my mouth to say the unsayable thing—

And another man got there first.

He was younger, half in leather, the other half naked. He slid in on Mark’s other side and said something I couldn’t hear. Mark’s whole face opened up, and he laughed, big and surprised and delighted, that laugh, my laugh, the one I’d been rationing myself on all night. He spent that laugh on a stranger who’d arrived one second ahead of me.

I stopped with my hand half raised in the middle of a leather bar, a large man reaching for nothing. I put the hand in my pocket. I went back to my stool. I sat down and I thought, with the clarity that comes right after cowardice, There he is. Pechorin. The man who feels everything and lets himself act on none of it, and loses the good thing to a faster, braver, lesser man, and tells himself the losing was inevitable so he won’t have to admit it was chosen. I’d discussed that book with Mark across the bar not two weeks before. I’d described the character with the calm authority of a man discussing someone else.

The young stranger didn’t last—none of them lasted—but I’d had my chance and handed it away. So I watched the rest of the night play out from the wrong side of twenty feet.

Sometime after, when the crowd had thinned and the bourbon had run its course, Mark gave up. He came back, turned his stool to face me, and put his elbows on his knees. I could see that the hope had drained out of him. Shirtless like that, arms crossed against the cold, he looked like a tired man who’d been made to take his armor off at the door.

“That’s it,” he said. “Oh-for-the-night. Oh-for-the-month, if we’re being honest, and I’m always honest. It’s a character flaw.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself.”

“You’re looking in the wrong places.”

“I’m starting to think I’m the wrong place.” He said it lightly, a joke, though it landed like a stone going into a well, going down a long time before it hit anything. He turned his glass in a slow half circle on the bar. “You know what the worst part is? It’s not the striking out. I can take striking out. It’s that I keep thinking maybe this is just it now. Maybe I had my window, and I was too busy to notice it was open, and it’s shut, and this is the rest of it. Maybe it’s just me and the bar and a truck full of nobody, doing this dance in a smaller shirt every year till I’m the oldest thing in the place by a decade.” He huffed something that wasn’t a laugh. “Sorry, that’s a lot to put on a wingman.”

And then he looked at me.

Really looked.

He looked the way he looked at his numbers when they wouldn’t come out right, patient and stubborn and certain there was an answer if he just held still long enough. I felt his attention find me and settle. I knew I’d let the wall slip somewhere back around the ninth failure of the night, because his face had changed.

“Hey,” he said, slower. “You’ve been kinda off all night.”

“I’m fine.”

“You didn’t go after one single guy. You wore an armband to a leather bar and read the crowd like a book and looked at every guy who spoke to me like they were up to something. And . . . you’ve had the same drink for the past two hours.” He tilted his head. He’d noticed that? “That’s not fine. That’s a man doing a job he hates. What’s going on with you?”

“Nothing’s going on.”

“Dante.”

“It’s late. You’re cold and tired. Let me drive you home.” I reached for my keys, for the exit, for the shape of the night I knew how to survive. “We can—”

“No.” He put a hand on my forearm, not hard, just there, warm and heavy and stopping me, his bare skin against mine. “Don’t do the thing where you hand somebody an errand so they’ll stop looking at you. I’ve watched you do it to customers for two years. Don’t do it to me.” His thumb moved once against my wrist, absent, unaware. I felt it in my teeth. “Talk to me. What’s wrong?”

I gave him a smaller wall. “Nothing’s wrong, Mark. I’m just quiet. I’m always quiet. You said so yourself.”

“That’s quiet with a lid on it. This is quiet with something under it.” He wasn’t letting go of my arm. He wasn’t letting go of any of it. “You’ve done this for me every single night I’ve made a fool of myself. You show up. You sit with me. You keep the wolves off and you never once ask for a thing back. I let you. God, I’ve been so far up my own misery’s ass that I’ve been letting you take care of me for weeks and never asked you one real question. So I’m asking now. Let me do it back. Just once. Whatever it is.” His voice dropped, and the whole warm, stubborn weight of him bent toward me. “You’re one of mine, you hear me? You’re one of mine, and I take care of what’s mine, and something’s hurting you, and I’m not moving off this stool till you tell me what.”

You’re one of mine.

He’d said it twice now. Three times, if I counted the truck, and I counted everything. I’d caught the habit from him. He said it like it cost nothing. He said it sitting eighteen inches from the answer to his own question, bare-chested and cold and kind, with his hand on my arm and his thumb on my pulse and his tired face turned up to mine, waiting, certain, the way he waited on his numbers. He had no idea, none, that the thing hurting me was him, was this, was being held by a man who thought he was holding a friend.