Seven months in, since I met Harrison in the fluorescent light of the gas station corner store.

And four months of wondering what that look he keeps giving me means.

I catch it when his guard is down, out of the corner of my eye.

Or else, moments like these, when we're already tipsy, with a long day of picking through trash off dead streets behind us.

With my life the way it’s been so far, I’m realizing he’s my first true friend.

More than the way my siblings relied on me. That was care, allyship, but never reciprocal. I had to take care of them. Harrison and I take care of each other.

He talks about old buddies, stories I’m grateful he shares, but I get the feeling there’s a similar sentiment in reverse, at least during his last few years. How empty his days sound, when he describes them.

From the moment he followed me, we’ve woven just inches apart and never bumping, in and out of each other’s lanes. I led him through the graveways I’ve gotten so familiar with, and he’s taught me what he knows. He talks up the vendors at tin marketplaces, and I talk them right back down when they push their luck.

He lived cushier than me, but he has his share of stories to trade for mine. Crawling streets in totally different ways, pre-ascension, and realizing none of it ever mattered afterward.

Once everything fell apart.

He says he’ll follow me as long as I let him, and I plan to keep letting him.

But in recent days, his gaze has changed.

Some blend of- what? Admiration? Too formal a word for it.

Warmth is more accurate, but only because it's more vague.

The other half of the blend, though, is unmistakable.

A few beers in us, my buggy and his vintage racer underneath a haze of glowing stars. I ask him about it directly.

“There's that look again,” I start with.

His eyebrows are surprised. “Look?”

He's been growing out his beard since he left his hometown. It's a gray peppered cloud around his face, with two drak streaks down his jawbone at the sides. He combs through it with his fingers while he gives me the very look I'm talking about.

“That one.” I nod at him.

We sit on cinderblocks I dragged out of the crumbling maintenance shed off the road before we built our fire. They're close enough our legs brush as he leans in to add another chunk of branch. Oasis of light in a ceaseless suburban desert, our road planted between two very empty neighborhoods.

Empty of people, anyway. There’s still plenty of stuff inside the homes, and more left in the cars. That’s why we’re here.

“I'm sure I don't know what you mean.” His voice is coarse with two kinds of smoke. He pulls out a flask to hide the trembling of his lips, on the edge of a smile.

“Yeah, right.” I nudge him with my knee. “There's words behind it. And you don't just have a look like that.”

“Says who?”

“Says your Captain,” I say.

Harrison said we were pirates a few weeks ago. Like Kaitlyn Rice and the rest of them.

At first, I'd laughed.

“What; you a Captain, and me, your loyal first mate?” I said, “I don't think so. Besides, don't we need more of a crew than this? Two don't make pirates. We're trashpickers.”

He waved me off. “That'll come with time. How do you think they start? And, no,” he said. My amusement stopped when his tone got serious. “I want you to be my Captain.”

That's what I've been since.

“Says my Captain?” He says now, the smirk breaking free from wherever he was shoving it. “Well, Captain. You changed my life. I imagine the look must be gratitude.” He hands me his drink.

I throw some back, propping my boots up on the edge of our makeshift firepit. We're waiting on stew- warmed in the tin- to bubble just inside the edge of the fire.

I swallow and pant, the burn hitting the wrong passage of throat. I should be drinking water, but I left it in the back of Blueberry.

I shake my head. “I don't think that's it.”

“You don't?” He says. His voice turns down instead of up at the question, lowering to just above a growl.

“No. And I'm not playing games. I need you to be straight with me.”

He shakes his head and looks into the oncoming wind. The road goes on, flat, for miles, with not a light in sight besides reflections of the moon.

If I didn't trust him, I'd be afraid of the isolation.

I have faith in my own strength. My ability to scratch and bite. I’ve used it.

But, with physical strength, a man has the upper hand almost by default. Even an older man. If he tried something, I would likely have to take it.

I shift, widening my stance to reach forward and stir my dinner. The adjustment only makes the truth clearer- he doesn’t scare me like he should.

When he turns back to me, the smile is gone, and so is the look. Now, all I see on his face is stony determination.

He's double my age, but the shit I been through in my short life dragged out the years in me. We'd always ever spoken to each other as equals.

“I like you,” he says. His already resonant voice is lowered to the bottom of his register. I lean in to catch whatever he says next, so it can't be carried away by the prairie winds. “Leaving life behind and traveling like this saved me. It's no tropics, but it's- it’s not 'pretending shit is fine' like everyone else did."

He sucks his teeth, a short click. "And I don't want to fuck it up. So if you'll pardon some subordination, Captain, no. I won't explain my ‘look.’”

I frown and grab an oven mitt off the ground, avoiding the lick of the flames as I pull our cans off the heat. “Then I'll keep my assumptions.”

He braces his hands on his knees. “And what assumptions are those?” Amusement briefly graces his features, but he hides it away.

I dismiss him with a wave of my hand. “You didn't answer my question; I'm not answering yours.”

The sides of the tin are too hot to hold. I wrap the oven mitt around instead and blow on the first bite for a solid minute.

When I look back at him, he’s focused on his food, too, but his eyes twinkle with mischief.

“How about this, then,” he says, “A trade.”

“The terms of your trade?”

“We don’t start there,” he says, “We trade smaller secrets first.”

My spoon scrapes the metal loudly in the otherwise silent night, a corrugated rattle up the side of the ridged can.

It’s late fall, and even the bugs are more distant than usual. We’d heard coyotes the night before, but tonight they’re quiet, or distant.

“I’m not sure I have enough secrets for that trade to work,” I say.

He laughs. “Liar.”

He’s right, of course.

This canned soup sorely needs some toast, but certain things fell out of my life one the road. I'm used to that much by now.

Besides, toast? Bread? A rarity even before. The house was never stocked enough for that.

I’ve been dirt poor all my life. You’d think I could bake bread from the mud.

“Fine,” I say. I put down the can and hold out a calloused hand.

We shake on it.

“But you start,” I say, “Since I asked in the first place.”

He surrenders, the soup and spoon raised in front of us.

“Only fair. I had a brother, once,” he says.

I exhale audibly. “That’s smaller?”

Seven months, of course we’d told each other enough. Enough he’d earned my trust, and it seems I have his.

Some of the hard stuff- well, running off to endlessly drive is the mark of avoidance, and that trend continued in our conversations.

He nods. “To me.”

“Well, what was his name?”

“Tony,” he says, “Antonio. He was younger than me. Doctors all missed his heart failure, said he was too young and healthy for that. Died when I was thirty-one, alone in his apartment.”

I chew on that, and my soup.

“I miss him,” he says, “But he was a piece of shit.”

I laugh, and then cough on the bite in my mouth.

“Rest in peace, Tony,” I hold up my tin.

“Aye,” he says, “Rest in peace. Better not be haunting me, dickhead.”

My playful grin softens. “I had four siblings,” I say.

"All dead, over the years."

I choke on it.

Chris died more than a year ago, but the stab is just as sharp at the most unexpected times. Losing him was gradual, but grief is not.

I’ve never had to say it out loud before. The bluntness doesn’t help.

If I had run away sooner, stolen my car and taken him with me, would we have both survived that house?

Even farther back, would I have taken more of them out with me? Before the claws of that place buried them.

I push it away and swallow my tears, chasing them with more drink from Harrison’s flask.

“Chris lived longest. He overdosed,” I say, “My mother- was right there. Right next to him. He was stone dead and she was too strung out to notice."

"I beat the shit out of her and left.”

He frowns and nods, his sturdy brow drawing into a crease. If my tone is at all shocking, he doesn't show it.

“Rest in peace, Chris,” he says.

I nod, biting the inside of my cheek hard to keep the feelings locked in where I put them. “Rest in peace, Chris.”

“That- that can’t be a smaller secret than your assumptions,” he says, “You said that with mine-”

“Says who?” I say. At this point we’re both tiptoeing around the bush when all it wants is a beating.

He sighs, long and slow through his nose, and puts his soup down.

“My next secret,” he says, “I’d killed someone before you met me.”

Before now, I was under the assumption that the first blood on his hands was with me. That’s what he’d told me, anyway.

“Is that so?” I say now.

He nods.

“Who was it?”

The fire finds hidden fuel and briefly lights us both brighter. I’m watching his face, the trouble within. He’s sinking into aerated thoughts, stirred up by avoiding the obvious.

The beard completes him. It’s hard to imagine his broad face without one, now. It strengthens an already angular jawline, which now flexes as he bites down on his words. “Just a kid.”

There’s more to it than that. “What’d the kid do?”

He takes the last bite of his soup and tosses the empty tin into the waning fire.

I grab a handful of sticks off the pile at my side and breathe more life into the flames. I’m waiting on his answer, but it’s taking him a minute to find it.

“Nothing,” he says, “It was an accident.”

Ouch.

Accidents are harder than intention.

With intention, you can chase away regret. Claim the feeling. Or, that’s what I’ve always done.

With an accident, you’re left wondering, forever, if there was anything you could have done different. Like I wonder about Chris. Or David- Jeremy- baby Susannah.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

I’m not sure he will for free, since we’re doing this as a trade. My thoughts swirl with too many of my siblings to feel safe trading something back.

But he clears his throat.

“I was just a kid, too,” he says. “Twelve years old. 1987. We were dicking around at a construction site. He slipped and- I let him fall.”

I finish my soup much the way he did. How much could a kid do to save someone else? Without putting his own life in danger? I feel blame inside his skull, and I search for some way to drain it. “That doesn’t sound like-”

“Like my fault? You weren’t there. It was.”

I weigh debating, but he continues.

“He didn’t want to climb up, but I did. Three stories, concrete. We took a construction ladder and played tag- got too close to the edge.”

I grimace. My history combines with my imagination to give me a vivid image of what that must have been like. The bag of meat slap at the bottom.

“I bet climbing down was hard.”

“Hardest thing of my life,” he says, “Even now. Lucky I didn’t join him, how slick my hands were on that ladder.”

His words hang in the still air and I bite my tongue. I’m worried the conditions of our deal are being bent.

Break them.

“I think,” I break the silence, meeting his eyes, “that look of yours is hunger.”

He holds up his end of the stare. “I already ate, thanks.”

“Harrison,” I warn.

He breaks the gaze, turning to the sky. His mouth moves, but stays closed for a long, thoughtful minute.

“Less hunger. More craving,” he says, sighing into the truth.

I turn it over a few times, looking underneath the words. This is what I wanted isn't it? My thighs say so.

“It's not a need,” he says, “It's not survival-”

I twitch one eyebrow.

More or less.

He tries to ignore my face, but his forehead creases. “-But I like you. We spend all this time working together. Living together. And it keeps coming up that I like you more than- more than you'd expect. More than whats acceptable. And try as I do, there's nothing I can change about that.”

My sexuality has always been survival, but that was half for the chance to sleep in someone else’s house for the night. Traveling has rid me of that part of the need, at least- nonetheless, there’s a growing ache for what I miss about sleeping around.

Though the memories are often drunken, I’m sure he wouldn’t be the oldest dick I’ve ever ridden.

My own internal vulgarity is abrasive, thinking of Harrison. That’s just- not how I feel about him.

Or, not only how I feel about him. Truth is, I'm fishing because I see him in similar ways.

I huff, a single laugh without tone. “I have a few ideas."

His exhale becomes an inhale halfway through.

When he catches it, he shakes his head. “It's not funny.”

“And I'm not joking,” I say. If he would look at me, he'd see a challenge.

He sighs and gets to his feet. He drags over another log and hoists it into the fire. Every shadow of him avoids looking at me.

“Kid,” he says, “and I have every right to call you that-”

“Old man,” I interrupt, “what about it.”

His eyes leave the stars to bite at mine, a spark of disgust crossing his face. Funny, he can only look when he's throwing it at me.

“It makes me sick,” he spits. “Right here.” He presses a closed fist to his sternum. “That's ‘what about it.’”

I lean back in my seat, planting hands on squared knees.

Is that fair? To feel sick about your feelings?

I guess I'm not the type- If I have a feeling to fight, I mainly want to figure out where it's coming from.

“There's no one here to stop you.” I wave a wide arm over the desolation around us. Maybe that's the wrong thing to say.

“Jo,” he says, his voice softening, “I think we're both lonely.”

I shrug. “Only in the way you'd think.”

He shakes his head again.

He's been doing a lot of that. Deny, deny, deny.

“You're broken,” he says, “And I will not be the one to break you further.”

Is that fair?

I don't let it settle. I jut out my chin at him. “I won't stop you.”

It rings in the crackling air.

He looks smaller, standing across the fire from me with his arms crossed.

It's not defiance, but self-soothing. He closes his eyes and purses his lips against what he's going to say next.

“That's not the same as consent,” he whispers, “And you know it.”

I do.

And I don’t know why I don’t directly give it to him. Ask him for it.

Maybe I want to see how he takes all this. What happens if we wait.

I weave my fingers together in front of me, staring at the firelight shining through the gaps.

“I don't think it would mean the same to me as it does to you,” I say.

He's quiet.

We both are, for five long minutes as the fire pops and dims.

“That's part of the problem,” he finds.

When I look away from my hands, he's coming back to sit next to me. We watch the fire together as it burns away at the log he put on it.

It's the last wood we add for the night.

The stars move, tufts of cloud blow by, and I rest my head on his shoulder. Nothing else to say.

In silence, the fire eats itself to death.