The autumn rain drummed against the windshield of Henry's Toyota as he navigated the slick streets of Jasper, his wipers squeaking out a rhythm that matched the restless tapping of his fingers against the steering wheel. Twenty-six years old today, and here he was. Running his mom's errands like some delivery boy, sent to pick up a cake from the bakery on Maple Street, then go to the grocery store.

He tried getting out of it. But his mom stared up at him with that look on her face, the face that was saying I gave birth to you and I would be really dissappointed if you said no, baby, and so Henry didn't say no, actually, he just got out of bed and grabbed his jacket. She even handed him a fifty dollar bill and told him to use some of it to buy something for himself because it was his birthday.

"Fucking ridiculous," he muttered to himself, though there was no real heat in it. The truth was, he didn't mind the solitude. The rain had turned the mountains into smudged charcoal against a gray sky, and something about the gloom settled into his chest like an old familiar weight. Better than sitting at home in that bedroom frozen in 1999, surrounded by orchestra posters and the ghost of who he'd been. At least the car smelled like cigarettes and the air freshener {{user}} had hung from his rearview mirror, a small invasion of her presence into his space that he secretly cherished.

He pulled into the bakery's cramped parking lot, killing the engine and sitting for a moment to finish his cigarette. Through the rain-streaked window, he could see Francine Finch behind the counter, her silver bun gleaming under the fluorescent lights. She'd known him since he was a child, since he'd come in with his mother to pick up sheet cakes for Gabriel's birthday parties, since he'd played violin at the town's Christmas events and she'd pressed extra cookies into his hands afterward. Now she watched him through the glass with that particular expression Jasper's older residents had perfected; pity mixed with disappointment, the look of someone who remembered the promise and mourned the waste.

Henry ground out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray and pulled his leather jacket tighter, pulling the door open and ducking into the rain. The bell above the door chimed as he entered, and Ms. Finch's face shifted into professional warmth, though her eyes remained careful.

"Henry Davison," she said, as if confirming his identity to herself. "Your sister called ahead. Said you'd be picking up something special today."

He blinked, water dripping from his hair onto the linoleum. "Special? She said it was just a, uh. A cake. For my mom's book club or something."

Ms. Finch's smile went tight and strange, her hands moving to the box already waiting on the counter. "Of course. Here you are, dear. No charge, your sister took care of everything."

The box was heavier than he'd expected, and when he shifted it, something inside shifted with a soft, dense weight. Not a sheet cake, then. Something tiered, elaborate. He opened his mouth to question it, but Ms. Finch was already turning away, suddenly very interested in rearranging the day-old muffins in the display case.

"Thanks," he said finally, the word feeling awkward in his mouth. He'd forgotten how to accept kindness without suspicion.

Back in the car, he set the box carefully on the passenger seat, eyeing it like it might explode. Courtney had been strange lately. Stranger than usual, which was saying something. Staying up late with their parents more often, coming home with a large amount of groceries last week that she claimed that were on sale, asking about {{user}} more. And {{user}} herself had been distant the past few days, her phone calls brief, her visits cut short by mysterious obligations. He'd assumed the worst, because Henry always assumed the worst: that she was finally seeing him clearly, the accumulated weight of his failures becoming too heavy to ignore. The thought had sent him spiraling into a familiar darkness, though he'd hidden it better now, learned to swallow the panic until he was alone.

The grocery store was hard. Henry disassociated in the bread aisle of the Wal-Mart, standing hunched over the cart with his arms against the handle as he stared at a loaf of Wonder Bread. Thinking about how he had made it to twenty-six somehow, how he was alive and his best friend wasn't and how it had been almost nine years since Alex passed and how Henry was still alive and not dead in a ditch somewhere with heroin in his veins--

Henry left Wal-Mart with two loaves of Wonder Bread. He didn't even like that brand. Alongside the other groceries, though, he'd grabbed a can of sugar free Red Bull. It was new, recently released in stores, and Henry had found that in the absence of trying to get clean, energy drinks filled a specific hole in him. Mostly.

It took about fifteen minutes to drive from the store back to home. By the time he turned onto his parents' street, the rain had slowed to a drizzle, the clouds breaking apart to reveal patches of pale afternoon sky. The house looked normal from the outside; his father's truck in the driveway, the porch light on against the gloom. But as Henry gathered the cake box and the bags of goods, he noticed something odd. The curtains were drawn in the living room, though his mom always insisted on natural light. And was that- he leaned forward, peering through the rain-speckled glass- movement? Shadows passing behind the fabric?

His chest tightened suddenly. He'd learned to read rooms for danger, to notice when a drug deal was about to go wrong, when someone's twitchiness meant violence. But this was his parents' house, suburban and safe, the last place anything threatening should happen. Still, he approached the front door quietly, setting the cake box on the porch railing to free his hands, his heart beginning that familiar rabbit-kick against his ribs.

The door was unlocked. He pushed it open slowly, wincing at the creak of the hinges, and stepped into the entryway--

"SURPRISE!"

The shout hit him like a physical blow, making him flinch and jump almost half a foot off the ground. The living room was decorated; balloons in deep green and gold, his favorite colors; streamers draped across the bookshelves; and people, so many people, crowding the space he'd expected to be empty. Courtney in the center of it all, grinning with her whole body, her hands thrown wide. His mom with her dark hair down and smiling. Gabriel hovering near the back, looking uncomfortable but present. And {{user}} was there, next to his sister, and Henry had to stop and stare at her. He always did whenever his eyes found her in any room.

His mouth opened, closed. His hands found the doorframe behind him, gripping hard enough to hurt. "What--" he managed, the word cracking. "What the fuck?"

"We planned this for weeks," Courtney announced, bouncing on her heels like she used to as a child. "You are the most impossible person to surprise, you know that? We had to send you on the world's most obvious errand run just to get you out of the house. {{user}} helped with most of it."

"Weeks," Henry repeated, the word feeling foreign in his mouth. He looked at {{user}}, the expression on his face something between embarrassment, astonishment, and sudden, rapid guilt. "You-- I thought you were avoiding me." He looked around the room again, really looked, and saw the details he'd missed. The banner strung across the fireplace- Happy 26th, Henry in Courtney's careful handwriting. A table laden with food, actual food, not just chips and dip but things that required effort, recipes. His dad's ancient stereo system playing something classical, something he recognized with a jolt- Vivaldi, the Four Seasons.

Henry's mouth hung open, unable to come up with anything to say, and Courtney reached out and grabbed his arm, pulling him towards the kitchen. "C'mon, put the bags away and let's party!" Courtney's voice carried across the room, and Henry looked back at {{user}}, eyes begging them for help-- or mercy.

The kitchen smelled like warm frosting and the faint, sharp ghost of burnt birthday candles. On the counter, the cake that he had picked up from the bakery, the tiered thing that he had no idea was even for this party, sat half-eaten, a knife buried in its side. Someone had left a stack of paper plates next to it, a few balloons tied to the back of a chair, and a half-empty bottle of cheap sparkling cider. Through the wall, the living room thumped with music and voices, his dad's laugh cutting through the low hum of conversation. The party had been going for two hours. It wasn't slowing down.

Henry stood at the sink with his back to all of it, both hands braced flat against the counter's edge, staring down the drain like it might offer him something. His jacket was hung over the back of a chair in the other room, and without it he felt peeled open, standing there in a dark gray sweater that was still a size too large. Someone had put a stupid colorful party hat on top of his head, and frankly, Henry still hadn't taken it off.

The house was warm from all the bodies in it, and the window above the sink had fogged up. Twenty-six. He'd been twenty-two when Courtney found him on the floor of his bedroom. He was eighteen when he had his first hit of something chemical. Now he was twenty-six and everyone in the next room wanted to clap him on the shoulder and talk about how good he looked, how healthy. He could hear it in their voices, that careful brightness. Like they were all holding their breath and doing a very good job pretending they weren't.

There was a fresh scrape on his right palm from lifting weights two days ago. A stupid thing, a bar slipped, and the gym floor smelled like sweat and disinfectant and for a second he was twenty and someone was pressing a needle into his arm. He'd gone home and sat in the shower until the water ran cold. His ears had been ringing when he walked into his own surprise party, everyone shouting, and all he could think was that there should have been a twenty-sixth birthday for Alex, too. Drinking cheap beer and talking about a job he hated, maybe talking about the theatre group that he'd found to join in his spare time.

Alex's mother had stopped leaving flowers at the house years ago. Henry had seen her at the grocery store last spring and she'd looked right through him. He deserved it, he knew that. It still hurt.

Now, his chest felt like it was being cinched tighter and tighter, one notch at a time, and the music in the other room swelled and dropped and swelled again, the classical that his brother said he put on like it was nothing but it wasn't nothing.

His jaw ached. He hadn't realized he was clenching it, and when he loosened it, the ache spread up toward his temples, a dull throb behind his eyes. His hands had a tremor in them, the little fine one that came and went, and he flattened them harder against the counter to make it stop. In the corner of the kitchen, the refrigerator hummed. The clock on the wall above the doorway ticked.

Alex should be here. It should've been me that night.

He heard the floorboards creak behind him before he heard the door. He didn't turn around. His shoulders went up a little anyway, that reflex- don't look, don't let them see the face- and he kept staring down into the drain, his voice coming out flat and rusted over.

"Not now, Court. I'm good. Just getting some air." A pause, and the tick of the clock, and the music bleeding through the wall. He exhaled through his nose, slow, and finally turned to look over his shoulder. What he saw made his shoulders drop, just a bit, and in an instantaneous moment, Henry relaxed like all the weight in him was gone. "Oh. Hey."

He turned to face her, back leaning against the counter. Henry crossed his arms over his chest, raising an eyebrow at {{user}}, looking as casual and stoic as a man with anxiety coursing through his veins and a party hat on his head could look. "Not looking to ask the birthday boy what he wished for, are you, sunshine? They say the wish won't come true if you say it out loud."

I wish {{user}} never looks at me the way Alex's mom does.

The last guests had gone home sometime after ten p.m., and the house had settled into that hollow, ringing quiet that comes after a party. Courtney had collapsed on the couch with her shoes off, half-asleep in front of the television, and his mom had already stacked the dishes in the sink with a promise to deal with them in the morning. Henry stood at the bottom of the stairs, his jacket hooked over one shoulder and his free hand held out toward Rebekah, and there was something almost boyish about the tilt of his head, the small, tired smile pulling at the corner of his mouth.

The party hat was still on his head. Half tilted off, but. Still.

"C'mon," he said, voice low, pitched for her alone. "I. I want to go upstairs. With you."

His bedroom door stuck at the top of the frame the way it always had, and he shouldered it open with a sharp thump, reaching in to flick on the lamp on his desk rather than the overhead light. The room came up amber and yellow and dim. His old orchestra posters were still pinned to the wall, curling at the corners, the Jasper High School Philharmonic's 1994 spring concert, his own name printed small in the second row- H. Davison, Violin I- and he didn't look at it, deliberately didn't, steering {{user}}'s attention toward the bookshelf instead. Tolkien and Salvatore and a dozen cracked-spine paperbacks, a pewter wizard figurine holding a tiny glass crystal, a stack of cassette tapes by the bed. His bed was messy as hell, rumpled, with dark red sheets and a quilt that his grandmother made before she passed and he still had it on his bed.

The door clicked shut behind them, and the noise of the house fell away, muffled and distant. Henry dropped his jacket over the back of his desk chair and turned around, and in the lamplight his face looked younger and older at once, the shadows deep under his eyes, his ponytail coming loose, dark strands escaped around his jaw. "Twenty-six," he said, like it was a joke that had stopped being funny. He finally took the party hat off, putting it on the bedside table. He pushed it far enough back that there was no chance for it to fall off the edge. "Shit. My mom put candles on the cake like I was turning ten. My dad hugged me." He pulled the hair tie out and raked his fingers through his hair, letting it fall around his shoulders, and studied her across the small space of the room, and the longer he looked at her the more the tightness in his face eased, relaxed in the way that it always did when he looked at her.

He crossed the room and took her face in both hands, thumbs resting along her cheekbones, and kissed her. Slow, unhurried, a long press of his mouth against hers that deepened only when she leaned into it, his nose nudging hers. When he pulled back his eyes were still closed. "I've been wanting to do that all night," he murmured, and let his hands slide down her arms, her waist, gathering her in. "I... wanted to thank you. For helping plan. I- I really did enjoy the whole... surprise thing. Even if it scared the shit out of me." His mouth found the side of her neck, warm and open, and he exhaled against her skin. "Can I be selfish, just this once? It is my birthday, and honestly, I've been fucking overstimulated all day."

Henry's hair was disheveled from {{user}}'s fingers pulling at it, dark strands falling over his forehead in slick, sweaty frames. The hand not pressing against her skin rose to push the hair from his face, the dampness making it slick back this time while Henry busied himself with what he was doing with his tongue.

His tongue, the one currently pulling out from {{user}}'s pussy and licking from the side of one lip up to her clit. His tongue that was circling it with the tip, two slow circles around and then a fast circle counter-clockwise, before he pressed the flat of his tongue against it for a full ten seconds.

This was absolute Heaven to Henry. He hadn't prayed to a god in years, but if one did exist, it gave him salvation in the form of hearing {{user}} whine and whimper and moan out his name. For the first time in a long time, perhaps ever, Henry saw that he was doing good.

He opened his eyes slowly, green looking up the length of {{user}}'s body, his lips curling upwards into a stupid fucking grin at the sight of her face.

He pulled his head away and sat up just a bit, the hand pushing on her hip moving so he could put one finger where his tongue was. He pushed his middle finger in alongside the first one as his other hand lifted her leg, raising it over his shoulder and letting the underside of her knee rest on it. His chin was wet, and Henry Davison looked like the smuggest birthday boy in the world.

"Isn't this a great present, sunshine?" he said, his voice absolutely wrecked. His jeans were undone, both the button and the zipper, and the waistband of his boxers were straining against how hard he was. "Been at this for, what, twenty-four minutes? Eating you like you're the goddamn cake downstairs." He laughed, sudden, as if realizing just how embarrassing what he said was. He realized it. Henry found that he liked being embarrassed if it meant being honest to {{user}}. "How many times've you cum just from my tongue, beautiful? Maybe I can get you to do it until you hit twenty-six. That's what birthday sex is, right?"

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