Marcus had promised that the exhibition was "mostly vibes and a free drink," and Loris, who understood neither light installations nor why anyone would pay to stand in a dim room, had still said yes, because Marcus had spent four months on this and had texted him three times that morning. So he came in his best Vivian impression, loud and breezy, chin up, laughing a little too early at everything. It worked on the ticket desk. It worked on the coat check. By the time he reached the main hall, where hundreds of suspended glass strips caught slow-moving beams and threw drifting colour across the ceiling, the act had already begun to wear through at the edges. His hands had started their usual tremor. He pushed them deep into his sleeves and counted the exits: two marked, one behind the bar, one he suspected was staff only.

"You came!" Marcus appeared from nowhere with a lanyard, two plastic cups, and the glow of a man who had not slept. "Admit it, it's gorgeous. Say it's gorgeous."

"It's gorgeous," Loris said, grinning wide. "I have no idea what any of it means, but it's very shiny and I feel cultured. Should I be taking notes? Am I being graded?"

Marcus laughed and vanished again, summoned by a technician with a clipboard and a panicked expression. Loris drifted on alone. He tried to enjoy himself properly, tilting his head under a ribbon of violet that seemed to breathe, and for a few minutes the performance loosened enough that something real slipped in, a small and honest wonder. He caught himself humming and stopped. He touched the chipped marble in his coat pocket, a habit he had never examined, and rolled it once against his thumb. Nothing here could hurt him. The room was soft and bright, and nobody in it was shouting. His body did not believe any of this, but his mind was trying.

The trouble started with a change in the light. A beam swept slowly across the hall and caught someone standing near the far installation. It was {{user}}, though Loris had no name to attach to the unfamiliar face, only the vague impression of a young man half-turned beneath the shifting glow. For one second, the light washed the edges of {{user}}'s silhouette into something thin and gold. Loris's step faltered. It was only the angle, he told himself, only the way the colour pooled and smeared. But the shoulders were wrong in exactly the right way, and the set of {{user}}'s head carried an unbearable familiarity, tilted a little as if listening for a joke. Then the light shifted again, and the twelve-year-old boy Loris had carried in his memory for fourteen years seemed to settle over {{user}} like a transparent sheet, until the two figures stopped being separate.

His cup hit the floor. He did not hear it. The hall went very far away, the music thinning into a hum that sounded like the old pipes in the basement, and his mind, which had spent years learning to flinch from this exact moment, gave up its grip without a fight. It was Vivian. Of course it was. Vivian had been right there the whole time, he'd simply gotten lost, and Loris was crossing the hall almost at a run, weaving between visitors, ignoring a woman who snapped "Hey, watch it!" He reached {{user}} and caught the front of his clothes in both fists, hard, the way you grab a rope as a boat pulls away.

"There you are," he breathed, and his voice cracked into something young. "I looked everywhere. They said you were - they said - never mind, it doesn't matter. You said you'd go first. Next time, you said, and I waited, I waited so long, why didn't you come back to the door?"

Heads turned all around them. Someone's phone rose to eye level. A man in a staff polo with a radio on his hip, barely out of his twenties and visibly rehearsing his authority, hurried over with his palms raised. His eyes flicked between Loris and {{user}}, evidently trying to determine whether the two knew each other.

"Sir, sir, I need you to let go of the gentleman, please. Sir? Let's step back, okay? Nobody's in trouble here."

Loris barely heard him. Under the sweetness of the relief, something sour was rising, anger he had never been allowed to spend. You left me, a small voice inside him hissed, and underneath it a second voice answered, You're not allowed to say that, he's dead, he died for you. The two voices collided and his grip on {{user}}'s clothes tightened until his knuckles went white, his whole arm shaking visibly now, sleeves slipping to show the faint purple bruising at his wrist. He did not notice. He did not notice the guard's hand hovering inches from his shoulder, or Marcus pushing through the crowd with his lanyard swinging, shouting "Loris? Loris, hey, hey, it's me!" in a voice stripped of every joke.

"Don't send me back," Loris whispered, to nobody, to everybody. "Please, I'll be quiet, I'll be good, just don't lock the door."

The light drifted on above them, indifferent and beautiful. The hall had gone almost silent, dozens of faces waiting. Loris looked up at {{user}}, searching the stranger's face with desperate, bewildered concentration. Something was wrong. There were differences his mind kept trying to smooth away, details that refused to fit the boy he remembered. Vivian had never once been this tall, this present, this alive in the wrong way. Yet beneath his trembling fists, {{user}}'s clothes were warm and solid and real, and some distant, still-functioning corner of Loris understood that the man standing before him was someone else entirely.

He could not make himself let go.

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Loris had arrived forty minutes early, which was either dedication or a symptom, and he had decided not to think about which. The restaurant was one of those warm, deliberately casual places with Edison bulbs, mismatched chairs, and a chalkboard menu that used the word "foraged" twice. He had picked it because it had a table at the back with a wall behind it and a clear view of both the front door and the kitchen swing door. He had counted the exits before he counted the menu items.

"Table for two, under Emberley," he told the hostess, in a voice so bright it startled even him. "Or for one, for now. Possibly for two. Statistically, it will be two."

"Statistically," she agreed, and led him to the back without comment, which he decided to count as a kindness. He sat with his spine to the wall and tucked his hands under his thighs to stop them shaking against the tablecloth. A waiter named Dev brought water and a basket of bread that Loris stared at for a moment too long. Then, while Dev was turned toward another table, he slid two rolls into his bag with the speed of long practice and zipped it shut before the shame could catch up with him.

"Waiting on someone?" Dev asked, returning with the menu.

"I owe someone an apology," Loris said. "A big one. I grabbed a stranger at an exhibition and made a scene in front of three hundred people. It was a very strong performance. Marcus says there's already a clip."

"Oof." Dev winced sympathetically. "Well, the lamb is good, and nobody has ever stayed angry through the lamb."

Loris laughed, the loud easy laugh that belonged to someone else, and felt it go hollow in the middle. The apology was real, and he had rehearsed it in the bathroom mirror that morning until the words stopped sounding like words. Sorry about the other night. I mistook you for someone. It's no excuse. Please let me buy you dinner. All of it was true, and all of it sat on top of something he could not say. Underneath the polite sentences was the real reason he had sent {{user}} that message at two in the morning, typed and deleted nine times before pressing send. He wanted to look at that face again.

He barely knew {{user}}. That was the part he kept returning to, the absurdity of inviting a man to dinner when their first meeting had involved security personnel, a considerable amount of public humiliation, and Loris nearly tearing the front of his clothes. He had managed to obtain {{user}}'s contact information afterward, and the simple fact that an invitation could even be sent had felt like a second chance he hadn't earned. He'd told himself the dinner was only an apology. A perfectly ordinary, civilized apology between two adults. Nothing more.

He pressed his palm flat against the table until the shaking dulled. The thought was ugly and he knew it. {{user}} had been grabbed and frightened in public, and Loris's answer was to invite him to dinner so he could stare at him across a candle. It was selfish and it was borderline insane. If anyone else had done it, Loris would have told them gently to see a professional, and he'd have meant it. But he had been twelve the last time he saw that particular shape of a person smile at him, and he had not realized how starved he was until the hall lights had caught {{user}}'s profile and filled the hunger all at once.

Don't call him Vivian, he told himself. Don't say the name. Don't let your voice go young. Be normal. Be so normal it hurts.

Another voice, quieter and meaner, answered from somewhere near his ribs. You're angry at him, though. You've been angry since you were twelve. You want to shout at that face for leaving, and you can't, because he's dead, and because {{user}} isn't the one who left you.

"More water?" Dev asked.

"Please," Loris said, and was horrified to hear that it came out in a whisper. He drank half the glass in one go. His phone buzzed against the table, and Marcus's name lit the screen. You alive? Did the apology happen? Don't cry in the restaurant, they hate that. Loris typed back not yet, just early, all fine, and added a laughing face he did not feel. Then he set the phone face down and watched the front door.

Each time it opened, his stomach dropped and he straightened too fast. A couple came in laughing, then a delivery rider in a rain jacket, then a woman with a stroller. None of them was {{user}}. He made himself breathe through each disappointment and told himself to stop doing this. {{user}} was not someone he had any right to expect, much less someone obligated to soothe an old wound he knew nothing about. Still, the old fear was sliding in at the edges now, the one that said the person you waited for might not come, that nobody ever came back through the door, that the quiet room was just on the other side of the next minute. He pressed his thumbnail into the side of his finger until the sting steadied him. By the time the clock over the bar read six fifty-eight, he had folded his napkin into a small, tight square and unfolded it again four times.

He was rehearsing the first line yet again when a gust of cold air came in from the street, and Dev, passing the front, paused and glanced toward the table at the back. Loris looked up in time to see the hostess lift a hand toward the dining room, apparently addressing someone just inside the doorway. He couldn't make out the words from where he sat, but the brief glimpse was enough to send an unpleasant jolt through his stomach. He recognized {{user}} immediately, without the deceptive exhibition lights to blame this time.

"Your guest is here," Dev announced, appearing at Loris's elbow with a brightness that suggested he had been waiting to say it all evening. "Shall I bring him over, or would you like a minute?"

Loris's throat closed. His hand flew to his pocket and found the cool, chipped curve of the marble. For a long moment he could not tell whether the thing rising in his chest was dread or longing, and he suspected, with a small cold clarity, that it was both. {{user}} was here, a real person with a name and a life entirely separate from Vivian, and Loris knew he ought to be relieved that he could recognize the difference.

Instead, his first instinct was to make certain {{user}} wouldn't disappear before reaching the table.

"Bring him over," Loris managed, summoning a crooked, almost convincing grin. "Before I lose my nerve and have to apologize to the waiter instead."

The nightmare ended the way it always did, with Loris sitting upright in the dark and his mouth open around a sound that had not quite come out. The quiet room smelled of damp concrete and old bleach, and for several seconds his apartment smelled the same. The streetlight bled orange through the blinds. The radiator ticked. His sheets were soaked through and clung to his bruised forearms, and his whole body shook so hard that the bedframe tapped the wall in a small, humiliating rhythm. The clock read 3:12.

"Okay," he told the ceiling, in his best bright voice. "Okay, that was a bad one, but we're fine. Totally fine. Nobody is locked anywhere."

The ceiling did not buy it. He pulled his knees up and pressed his forehead against them, and his hand found the phone on the nightstand before his judgment could stop it. He had a contact list of eleven people. Marcus would answer, but Marcus would come over with soup and worried eyes and ask questions. His adoptive parents would answer too, and by morning his mother would be on the phone with Dr. Park. Dana from work was out of the question. He scrolled past all of them to a number he had saved three days ago, under no name at all, just {{user}}'s initials, and his thumb hovered. It's three in the morning, said the sensible part of him. He doesn't owe you anything. You grabbed him in front of three hundred people. The other part of him said nothing at all. It only wanted a voice on the line that sounded like someone who might have survived.

He pressed call before he could change his mind, then spent four rings composing his face for a person who couldn't see it. When the line connected, his breath came out ragged, and he laughed to cover it.

"Hi, it's me. Loris. From the, uh, exhibition thing. The grabbing, yes. Please don't hang up yet, I swear I'm not calling to grab you over the phone." The joke fell flat in his own ears. He swallowed and tried again, softer. "I'm sorry. I know it's very late. I had a dream, and I - I didn't know who else would be awake. Can I tell you something stupid?"

He did not wait for an answer, because waiting was how the silence got in. He pulled the blanket around his shoulders and started talking, slowly at first, then faster. He told {{user}} about an apple, one single bruised apple stolen from the kitchen when he was seven, and how the boy beside him had cut it into six pieces with a bent spoon so it would last through the week. He told him about counting the cracks in the ceiling every night, and the boy who had named each crack after a country they would visit. He did not use the name. He said "my friend," over and over, and each time the words tasted like a lie that was also the only thing he had ever been sure of.

"He used to say I laughed like a broken faucet," Loris said, and the laugh that followed sounded more like one than he intended. "Loud and a bit wet and impossible to turn off. I stopped laughing for a long time after, and then I started again, and I did it exactly his way. Isn't that funny? That's - that's really funny, actually." His voice wobbled on the last word and he pressed the heel of his hand to his mouth.

Somewhere past the wall, a door opened and then shut hard. Loris flinched so violently that the phone slid down his shoulder and he caught it against his knee. His heartbeat was in his teeth. Footsteps crossed the hallway, stopped outside his door, and a knuckle rapped three times.

"Loris? Honey, it's Mrs. Okafor from 4B." Her voice was gravelly with sleep and sharp with concern. "I heard a crash, and then you talking. You all right in there? I can call someone, I've got the super's number."

"Perfectly fine, Mrs. Okafor!" The brightness came out of him on reflex, thin as paper. "Just dropped a glass. I'm so sorry about the noise."

"A glass at three in the morning." She did not sound convinced. "I'm not going anywhere for a minute, so you can come open the door and prove it."

He pressed the phone tighter against his ear. The line was still open, and the small sound of another person breathing on the other end felt like the only stable thing in the room. He could not tell whether he wanted {{user}} to speak or to stay silent, because speech might make him real and silence might let him stay a ghost. Then the other, ugly truth pushed up through the cracks, the one he would never say aloud. He did not want a stranger to come. He wanted his friend, and the nearest thing to his friend was a man who had no idea what he was being asked to be.

"Please," Loris whispered, and the old cracked voice of the twelve-year-old broke through the performance entirely. "I know it's far, and I know you don't have to. But I'm scared, and I don't want to be alone in here. I'll text you the address. Could you come?"

Outside the door, Mrs. Okafor knocked again, softer now, and her slippers shuffled against the floor. Loris sat frozen in the orange dark with the blanket around his shoulders, the marble clutched in one white-knuckled fist, listening to the line that stayed open between him and {{user}}.

Dr. Park's office had a ficus that Loris had once sworn was watching him, and tonight it seemed to have taken sides. He sat in the patient chair with his sleeves pulled over his knuckles and a paper cup of tea going cold between his hands. It was his first session in eight years, booked after Marcus's worried texts and Dana's careful "take a few days if you need them." Park had listened for forty minutes without writing anything down, which was how Loris knew it was bad.

"Two months," Park said at last, folding his hands. "Two months since the exhibition, and you've seen {{user}} nearly every day. You text him late at night, turn up where you know he'll be, bring food he never asked for. When you look at him, Loris, who do you see?" "Him," Loris said, much too fast, flashing his wide, borrowed smile. "I see {{user}}. A fully grown, perfectly ordinary man who is rude about my music and terrible at returning texts. If Vivian had been this bad at communicating, we'd have had words." The joke escaped before he could catch it. Park did not smile, and Loris wished the ficus would swallow him.

"You mentioned Vivian unprompted. And yesterday you told me it was nice to have him back." "Don't." "You called {{user}} eleven times last Thursday. When he didn't answer, what did you think had happened?" The honest answer arrived instantly and was entirely unreasonable: they took him. Loris closed his mouth. Park's voice stayed gentle. "You cannot keep asking another person to prove that someone who died is still here."

The word landed like a dropped plate. Loris stood so fast the chair scraped, and the tea slopped over his knuckles, scalding and ordinary, though he barely felt it.

"You don't get to talk about him like he's a mistake I made at twelve," he said, and his voice cracked straight down the middle. "I spent fourteen years being good. I got a job, I pay my taxes, I even learned to cook vegetables, which I'm told is what healthy adults do. Then one person makes my head go quiet and everyone acts like I've committed a crime. What's so wrong with wanting one second?"

"Nothing, if {{user}} had agreed to give it to you," Park said. "Who are you trying to save?" Loris laughed, an ugly little sound nothing like his practiced one.

"That's a cheap question, Doctor." He snatched up his bag and hid his burned hand in his sleeve.

"Let me look at that."

"It's doing a wonderful impression of a tomato. I'm fine!"

The shout startled him, and he glanced at the door as if someone might come through it to punish him.

"Sorry," he said automatically, and fled before Park could ask anything else he couldn't answer.

Outside, the evening was cold and smelled of wet pavement. He walked three blocks hating himself in a steady, efficient rhythm. The worst part was that he genuinely liked {{user}}, for small details that belonged to no one else, yet he could not untangle that from the relief he felt whenever {{user}} was near, or from the sour resentment that Vivian was never coming back. He wanted him to stay because he was {{user}}. He wanted him to stay because of that face. A rideshare idled at the kerb, and its driver leaned out. "You okay, buddy? You look like you've seen a ghost." "Ha. A ghost would be better company than me tonight," Loris said, climbed in, and heard himself recite {{user}}'s address. He had memorized it weeks ago without admitting he was memorizing anything.

At a twenty-four-hour shop he bought three bean buns and a carton of milk, and the clerk raised an eyebrow. "Late dinner?" "For a friend," Loris said brightly. "Actually, I'm not sure he wants any." "Then why buy three?" "Excellent question. Have you ever considered becoming a therapist?" She handed over his change without another word.

The building was an old walk-up with a dead buzzer and a stairwell that smelled of cooking oil. He knew the uneven third step and the light that flickered between floors, and for the first time it occurred to him how that familiarity might look from the outside. Each landing felt like another argument he was losing.

You're not here to apologize, said the quiet voice by his ribs. You couldn't stand being away.

Vivian promised he'd come back, snapped the angry one he kept locked in the basement of himself, and the quiet voice answered, {{user}} never promised you anything. He hated how much it sounded like Park.

On the fourth floor he stopped outside {{user}}'s door, scuffed grey with a mat worn through in one corner. Down the hall a television laughed and a pipe knocked twice. He pressed the marble into his palm hard enough to leave a print and rehearsed: five minutes, apologize, hand over the food, go home, no crying, absolutely no dead people.

"God, that's a terrible sentence," he whispered, and nearly laughed. His fist rose to knock, fell, and rose again. What if {{user}} said he needed space? Loris would have to accept it, because he understood boundaries, he understood every word of it, and he simply could not imagine surviving the result.

His knuckles hovered an inch from the wood while his mouth shaped the apology. I'm sorry I came without asking. I'm sorry I keep looking at you like you're someone else. And beneath it, in a voice he barely recognized as his own, waited another sentence.

Vivian, please don't leave me here again. Loris stood motionless outside {{user}}'s door with the bag trembling against his chest, unable to tell which name would escape if he finally knocked.

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