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And lost his grip again.

Somewhere below, the coffee maker gurgled.

Leo thought of rocks. That memory would never quite leave him alone either. There’d been rocks. Or hadn’t there been? There’d been something.

He’d done something.

Something…

Wrong.

That feeling was massive. He couldn’t find the edges of it. There were guilt and fear, enormous and shapeless, soaking into everything, into the memory of the boy, and⁠—

Leo screamed.

He heard himself and he couldn’t stop.

Because he didn’t know, couldn’t tell, which was the wrong thing. The love he’d felt that he shouldn’t have felt? A whole world’s worth of knowing pressed down on him from somewhere. It was wrong. Boys like that. Boys like him. The rocks knew that, and the locked doors knew, the quiet, the drawn curtains, the whispers, the whispers, the whispers.

Leo screamed for them.

And he screamed because it wasn’t wrong.

It wasn’t. It wasn’t. It was the most wonderful thing. It was warm and vast and certain in a way nothing else in his life was. Nothing that felt so bright could be wrong, and anyone who said⁠—

Then why the guilt?

Leo stared down at the floor he was suddenly lying on.

There was guilt underneath everything. Humming along in the background like a sad song.

Leo stayed on the floor, reaching for the memory again, for the warmth of it.

Smoke. Blue. A wordless hush.

Fear.

Exhilaration.

Love.

There’d been love in his life once. Wrong or not, he didn’t know, but there’d been love in his life once.

Light crawled across the floor, up the wall and then it was gone. It came back pale. Marvin bumped through his rounds. The coffee maker gurgled again.

Time doing the thing it did when Leo was not paying attention to it.

Wonderful. Wrong. Wonderful.

What did I do?

Terror and love and guilt all washed through him until he couldn’t tell them apart anymore.

The boy was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

It was the worst.

No.