Arlo Taylor

The keys were still in Arlo’s hand when he stopped outside the apartment door.

He’d noticed them first - the shoes. A pair of expensive sneakers he’d never seen before, kicked off carelessly beside Olive’s scuffed loafers. His tired brain had supplied a dozen explanations. A friend. A delivery. Someone who’d popped in for drinks. But his body already knew. The nausea that had been trailing him for weeks curled tighter in his stomach, and his joints ached with something deeper than the long shift at Starlight.

He should have turned around.

Instead, he pushed the door open.

The bedroom door was cracked. Not closed. Not quite open. Just careless enough to let the low light spill through, just thoughtless enough to let Arlo see everything.

Olive was on his back, one arm thrown over his head like he’d been caught mid-laugh. His tan skin looked darker against the rumpled gray sheets, and there was a hand splayed across his chest - not his own. The hand belonged to someone else. A younger man, lean and pale, curled into Olive’s side with the easy familiarity of someone who’d slept there before. Olive’s fingers traced lazy patterns down the stranger’s spine.

“Babe, relax,” Olive was saying, his voice low and rough in that way Arlo used to find intimate. “He’s not coming back until tomorrow. I told you.”

The stranger laughed - a soft, breathy sound. “You’re awful, you know that?”

“You love it.”

Arlo stood in the doorway of his own home, his own bedroom, and felt something crack clean down the middle of his chest. Not his heart. Something older. Something that had been holding up a wall he hadn’t known was there.

The nausea crested. His mouth flooded with sour saliva.

Olive turned his head. Their eyes met.

For one stupid, suspended second, Olive looked confused. Like Arlo was the one who didn’t belong here. Then recognition flickered in, followed by something that might have been guilt or might have been annoyance - Arlo couldn’t tell anymore. Couldn’t trust himself to know the difference.

“Arlo.” Olive sat up, shoving the stranger’s hand off him. The sheet pooled at his waist. “Shit. This isn’t - look, this isn’t what it looks like.”

The stranger had gone very still, eyes wide, caught between scrambling for clothes and freezing entirely.

Arlo’s voice came out flat. “It looks like you’re in my bed with someone else.”

“It’s not—we were just—”

“Don’t.” The word cut through the room like a scalpel. Steady. Precise. The same voice he used when a patient was panicking and he needed them to breathe. “Don’t lie to me. Not now.”

Olive opened his mouth. Closed it. For once, nothing clever came out.

Arlo looked at the stranger. “You should leave.”

The man didn’t need telling twice. He grabbed a handful of clothes and fled past Arlo, barefoot, not meeting his eyes. The front door clicked shut a moment later.

Silence. Then Olive sighed, running a hand through his blond hair. “Can we talk about this?”

“No.”

“Arlo—”

“We’re done.” His voice didn’t shake. That surprised him. “I’ll come back for my things tomorrow. Don’t be here.”

He turned and walked out. Didn’t run. Didn’t slam the door. Just left it open behind him, the same way Olive had left the bedroom door.

The hallway was too bright. The elevator took forever. By the time he reached the lobby, his legs felt like they belonged to someone else - rubber and bone and exhaustion so deep it had its own pulse. He pushed through the glass doors and into the night.

The air was cool. The street was nearly empty. A few cars passed, headlights sliding over the pavement, but none stopped. None ever stopped.

He patted his pockets for his phone. Then his wallet. Then both pockets again.

Nothing.

He must have dropped them. No—he’d set them down. On the floor. When he’d come in. He’d been so tired, so focused on getting out of his work shoes, and he’d left everything upstairs in that apartment with the cracked door and the rumpled sheets.

Arlo stood on the curb and stared at the building’s lit windows.

He couldn’t go back up. Not tonight. Not after that. His stomach turned again at the thought - Olive’s voice, the stranger’s hand, the way the sheets had smelled like someone else’s cologne. If he walked back into that apartment, he might not leave. Not because he’d stay, but because something in him might finally break all the way.

So he sat down on the curb instead. Right there on the cold concrete, knees pulled up, arms wrapped around them. The ache in his body had spread to his bones now - deep and gnawing, worse than any flu. He pressed a hand to his stomach without thinking. The nausea pulsed.

Eleven PM. No wallet. No phone. No ride.

A car was parked across the street. Dark color, engine idling softly, exhaust curling into the night air. Arlo hadn’t noticed it before, but now he couldn’t stop looking at it. The warm glow of the dashboard. The silhouette of someone behind the wheel.

He was so tired. Too tired to be smart. Too tired to remember all the warnings he’d given patients about getting into strangers’ cars. Too tired to care.

He pushed himself up. His legs wobbled. His vision swam for a moment before settling. He crossed the street on unsteady feet, approached the driver’s side window, and knocked twice - soft, almost apologetic.

The window rolled down.

Arlo met the stranger’s eyes. He didn’t know this face. Didn’t care. “Hey,” he said, and his voice cracked on the syllable. “I know this is weird, but I need a ride. My dad’s place is twenty minutes from here. I can pay you - I just left my wallet upstairs, and I can’t go back up tonight.” He swallowed hard. “Can you help me?"

Behind him, the apartment building loomed. Somewhere up there, Olive was probably already dialing someone else.

The breakroom smelled of instant coffee and antiseptic, but Arlo hadn't touched either.

Three days since the apartment. Three days since he'd slept in his father's spare room, borrowed a phone charger from a neighbor, and filed the shape of Olive's face into the part of his brain labeled Not Worth It. The label helped. The rest of him hadn't caught up.

He was on his knees in front of Room 7, replacing a worn pillowcase, when he realized his hands were shaking. Not from caffeine. From the same exhaustion that had been following him like a shadow for weeks now - the bone-deep fatigue that made his eyelids heavy by noon and his muscles ache by dinner. He'd told himself it was stress. The long shifts. The emotional whiplash. He hadn't mentioned the nausea to anyone. Hadn't mentioned the way certain smells made his stomach turn, or the way he'd started craving chocolate milk at odd hours like some kind of cliché.

He pressed the heel of his palm against his sternum and breathed.

"Arlo, dear."

He looked up. Annie stood in the doorway of her room, leaning on her walker with both hands. She was eighty-three, sharp-eyed, and had been at Starlight longer than anyone except the potted ficus in the common room. Her silver hair was pinned back today, and her gaze cut through him like a scalpel.

"Annie. You're supposed to be resting." He stood, dusting off his knees, and offered her his arm. "Come on. Back to bed."

"I'll rest when I'm dead." She waved him off but let him guide her anyway. "You look terrible."

"Thanks."

"I mean it. You've been walking around here like a ghost for days. Your smile doesn't reach your eyes anymore." She settled onto the edge of her bed, and he adjusted the pillows behind her back automatically. "Sit."

"I have rounds—"

"Sit, young man."

Arlo sat. The chair beside her bed creaked under his weight. He stared at his hands. The overhead light hummed. Somewhere down the hall, a television played a game show.

Annie waited. She was good at that.

"It's nothing," he said eventually.

"I've been nothing before. That's not what this is." She reached over and patted his knee. Her hand was thin, the bones delicate beneath papery skin. "You don't have to tell me everything. But you should tell me something. You've been crying."

He hadn't been. Not really. But his eyes had been wet more often than dry, and the pressure behind his sinuses had become a constant companion. "I broke up with my boyfriend."

Annie nodded slowly, unsurprised. "The one you never talked about."

"He cheated on me." The words came out flat. Clinical. Like a diagnosis. "I came home and he was in bed with someone else. In our apartment. In our bed."

"Oh, honey."

"I don't—" Arlo stopped. Swallowed. The ache in his throat was raw and familiar now. "I don't understand what I did wrong. Was I not enough? Was I too much? I keep thinking maybe if I'd been different, if I'd been home more, if I'd noticed earlier, if I'd—"

He cut himself off. His jaw tightened.

Annie's hand was still on his knee. "You didn't do anything wrong."

"Everyone leaves." The words scraped out of him, quieter than he intended. "My father left. And now Olive. And I keep thinking—maybe it's me. Maybe I'm the kind of person people don't stay for."

He hadn't meant to say that. Hadn't meant to let that particular wound bleed all over Annie's afternoon. But the exhaustion had stripped something away, left him raw and open and too tired to stitch himself back together before speaking.

Annie was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, "My husband left me for his secretary in 1987. I spent two years convinced I'd failed at being a wife. Do you know what I learned?"

"What?"

"That his leaving had nothing to do with me. He was just a man who couldn't keep his promises." She squeezed his knee. "You're not unlovable, Arlo. You're just surrounded by people who don't know how to love properly."

He blinked hard. The fluorescent lights blurred.

"My grandson is coming to visit today," Annie continued, her tone shifting into something lighter, almost conspiratorial. "He's about your age. Maybe a little older. Good head on his shoulders. You two should talk."

"Annie, I'm not really in a place for—"

"Talk, not date. I'm not matchmaking." She smiled, and the wrinkles around her eyes deepened. "You need someone who isnt eighty-three and confined to a walker. Someone who can remind you that the world is bigger than one unfaithful alpha."

Arlo opened his mouth to protest, but a knock on the doorframe interrupted him. One of the nursing assistants, Maria, poked her head in.

"Mrs. Annie? Your grandson is here. I told him to wait in the common room."

Annie's face lit up. "Perfect timing. Arlo, go with Maria."

"I really should check on Mr. Hendricks—"

"Mr. Hendricks is napping and you know it. Go." She shooed him with both hands. "Introduce yourself. Be friendly. And for heaven's sake, try to look like you've slept sometime this decade."

Arlo stood reluctantly. His body protested—the usual ache in his lower back, the strange tenderness in his abdomen that he'd been ignoring for weeks. He smoothed down the front of his scrubs and caught his reflection in the window. Pale. Hollow-eyed. His lilac hair had faded to something closer to silver at the roots.

"You look fine," Annie said, reading his mind. "Now go. He doesn't bite."

Maria was already walking toward the common room. Arlo followed, his footsteps slow on the linoleum. The hallway stretched ahead of him, lined with get-well cards and children's drawings taped to doors. The common room's double doors were propped open, and he could hear the low murmur of the television, the clatter of someone's knitting needles.

He stopped just before the threshold.

His heart was doing something strange—not the nausea, not the fatigue, but something else. A flicker of anticipation he didn't want to name. He barely knew this person. A stranger. Annie's grandson. Just another face in a long line of faces.

But Annie had said the world was bigger than one unfaithful alpha.

Arlo stepped through the doorway.

.