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Dinner arrives within half an hour. We eat on the couch, neither of us saying much for the first few minutes because we’re both hungry. I steal his fries and he steals half of my burger. We are, in every important way, the same as we have been since we became closer after I graduated from college and came back home.

He pours a second round. Then a third.

It’s not lost on me that we don’t do this often. Neither of us likes waking up with a hangover, but I don’t care right now. I want to drink my sorrows away and forget for one night that Fox is going to leave after Christmas and I have no idea how I’ll keep breathing when he does.

“Okay,” Taylen says, thumping down next to me. “Truth game.”

“Oh no.”

“Yes.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Finn.”

“We haven’t played the truth game in years.”

“Which is exactly why we should. It’s been too long.”

I groan and drop my head back against the couch cushion. “Fine. But it has to be low stakes.”

“Deal. First question.”

“Fine.”

“Who was your first crush?”

I laugh. “That’s your low-stakes question?”

“I’m starting soft. To ease you into it.”

“Yeah, sure you are.”

I take a long pull of whiskey.

“Jackson,” I say.

The silence that follows is short-lived before he laughs like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard. “My brother?”

I throw a napkin at him. “Shut up. He was hot.”

“He was my brother.”

“Yes, and he was hot. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“Oh my god.”

“He was twenty, and I was fourteen, and he had that smile. And the shoulders. Girls used to swoon whenever he took his top off during the summer.”

“You’ve never told me this.”

“You’d have laughed because not only was I crushing on a much older guy, he was also extremely straight, so it was a fairly hopeless crush.”

“He was extremely straight.”

Taylen is quiet for a second. Then he says, gently, “If he’d been into men, I think he would have loved you.”

I snort.