Graham’s headache had started earlier in the day, when he had been trying to the last few pages of some comic. Wracking his brain over the palette, straining over the image of his agent’s pinched frown the last time he turned a project in late. That festered in his head, coppery, smooth. It built up in his chest to make his lines shake. It stung behind his eyes until all he could see was the violently pale light of the last page, empty besides a half-hearted sketch. His mind was starting to roar, white noise. Tumbling and shouting—

       Are you sorry, Graham?

       The pain was porcelain-cold at the top of his spine, wedged nicely under his skull. Graham blinked away the tears, held his pen hard enough to crush it, and thought about it all in a practical way. He decided it was better in the long run to pick his tablet up. Only when Auggie came home, snapping Graham’s mind back into his body, did he clamber to the white-bright bathroom to fumble for the Advil bottle. He found it empty.

       A trip to the corner store was all he could do, especially if he wanted to get any more done that night. Such was adult life, whether Graham liked it or not. He decided he did like it, thanks for asking, but there was still that bittersweet feeling of being your own parent. Morbid joy, like washing a chalk drawing and sending rainbows streaming into the gutter. The healing itch of a broken bone.

       By the time Graham and Auggie walked into the corner store, Graham was only vaguely aware what he was there for. The store was exactly what he didn’t need; lights brighter than blank pages and congealed floor wax and road salt in the air, turning everything a sick, blurry grey. He found himself suddenly standing at the cash, a stack of        Auggie’s assorted snack foods on the counter, and two bottles of Advil amongst them. They rattled when the clerk picked them up. Graham figured there was some deliciously fucked up irony in the sound of Advil making his headache worse before it made it better. Down payment. Show you’re good for the rest of it.

       He started a restless sway, swiping at his burning nose. “Auggie,” he said, pressing his fist to his forehead. He was only partly sure the name came out, and only partly sure Auggie would hear it over the steady beep, beep of the cash. Graham’s mind was racing with his agent’s face and the lights and the way the store clerk had stared at him and Auggie when they walked in. That circled in his head, enough to make him nauseous. The clerk was the sort of hard-faced, thin-haired problem that Graham would have avoided had he the choice. Like his agent. After the store closed they both probably went to go drink beer with their buddies. Watch a football game, Graham thought. The smoky, coppery smell of a bar with the crack of peanuts and shoes sticking to the ground and the tinny jangle of a sports game.

       His sore brain remembered being a kid, grabbing a beer for his dad while the game played. He was proud to get a sip and be a grownup and be tough and for the next two decades he’d wretch through beer to keep feeling like that.

       “Augg​ie,” Graham said, a little more force. It pushed the pain forward, a slow crawl towards the center of his forehead. Right between the eyes and sinking down the bridge of his nose. Graham’s headaches liked to do that. Like a punch.

       No response. Graham’s mind seemed to work in strobes. Incessant chattering of the lights and swish of the clerk filling the bag. The sounds of cars outside battling miserably through half-melted slush. The beep of the scanner sounding petulant, whiny, annoying. Graham caught a glimpse at his reflection in the plate-glass window to his left, and wasn’t sure if he was sweating now or if that was just sleet and road salt tracking down the glass. The storm had started around noon, but Graham hadn’t noticed it then.

       Graham’s nose stung and he swiped his arm over it. The point between his eyes and back a bit screamed like a whistling crowd. His mind rang with a voice that wasn’t his: Between the eyes got you right between the eyes (the lights were burning through Graham’s jacket and into his skin) you know you should have seen it coming (Beep. Beep. Beep) when you go around looking like that maybe it’ll toughen you up (he couldn’t feel his hands) why are you crying I’ll give you something to CRY ABOUT—

       “Augustine,” Graham finally said. It was water rushing from his dry lips, ringing in his ears, washing the corner store into a chalk-drawing blur. That was a name used in moments of utmost urgency, which usually only got as bad as ‘Augustine come to bed or you’ll be miserable tomorrow’ or ‘Oreos aren’t a meal, Augustine’. Graham figured his head busting open from the inside was a special occasion.

       Auggie looked up from the tabloid magazine he had been flipping through. He was leaning on the rack under the spluttering lights, reading glasses pulled down and foot swinging placidly, bumping the high-heel of his boot against the dingy tiles.

       Graham’s lips fumbled against each other. He felt sweat crawling over his temple. He felt the clerk staring and couldn’t dare look to the reflection to double check that. He didn’t have to. He could feel it burn.

       Finally his lips mashed together exactly right: “Are you buying it?”

       Auggie pursed his lips, tilted his head, and fluttered the pages languidly. “Perhaps.”

       Deep in Graham’s chest, sinking towards his increasingly unhappy stomach, he felt some small flutter of warmth. He wanted to follow it down and grab it, but the clerk pulled him away:

       “Is that all then?”

       Graham could barely hear it through a ringing in his head, like his skull had cracked off cement, leaving him dazed. It sounded quick, clipped. Was he angry? Did he sound frustrated? If it turned into a fight, what would Graham do then? The lights were chattering in their strange language with the fridges humming along. It echoed in the air. Graham analyzed those four words again while he squinted at the clerk and pictured him shouting so loud his veins stood out.

       Between the eyes right you should have seen it coming if you’re going to act like that then what do you expect toughen up Graham shut up Graham what are you gonna DO ABOUT IT, GRAHAM—

       A copy of Vogue slid onto the counter and sat glossy above the dull collection of lottery tickets. Auggie had strutted over (he had a personal vendetta against walking and considered himself far above it) and nudged his knuckle into the small of Graham’s back. It was one of several unspoken gestures between them. They all meant the same thing:

       ‘Posture, Graham. Don’t walk around looking sorry.’

       Graham couldn’t manage to straighten up, but it brought his feet back onto the floor.

       “And this,” Auggie said with a wink. “She’s never done me wrong before.” Graham knew the only thing Auggie trusted more than his hairstylist was Vogue, and the only thing more than Vogue was his mother, but barely. Auggie smiled. Graham wasn’t sure of a lot at that moment, but he was sure of that smile. That was clear in his head while everything else—including any knowledge of if he was even real at all in a store that looked like a dream—was washing into the gutters.

       “Auggie, can we go?” Graham mumbled. It bubbled on his lips. He felt the store sucking him into that colour-leached dream-world, falling into the clerk whose eye Graham couldn’t meet. Had he ever met the eye of one of those hard-faced, thin-haired problems?

       ‘Posture, Graham. Don’t walk around looking sorry.’

       His father’s voice: Should have seen it coming—

       Auggie looped his arm through Graham’s, but he felt like limp weight. Graham’s face had paled two shades. There was a greasy film of sweat over his lip. Auggie thought his eyes looked vaguely drugged—the hard stuff and not something you pop to have a ‘good time’ with the fellas. Auggie hated that look on Graham as much as he had hated it in club mirrors.

       Auggie handled the rest of the transaction. The clerk was efficient about his job and Auggie found that admirable. Though he had never worked at a corner store or any other gruelling minimum wage job, he had always respected the people who did. He tried not to sit in his ivory tower. He shuffled his arm from Graham’s and pulled him in by his shoulders, said his typical “thanks, love,” to the clerk who nodded in response, and pulled some change from his pocket to drop into the frankly sparse tip jar. He made his exit as quickly as he could, tugging his scarf higher against a bitter gust of wind.

       The washed-out corner store gave way to the sleet-slicked night; dull black lit up by the neon of store signs and street lamps bravely persevering, colour trickling into the gutters. A back corner of Auggie’s brain knew those signs would go out soon, time to be either partying or home and he felt too old for the former even at just 29. So home it would be.

       But the front of Auggie’s brain was much more aware of the gentle thwick of the door shutting, and Graham jolting back into his body to claw for the shopping bag.

       A car raced past and sent slush and the smell of exhaust spattering at Auggie’s legs. He tried to back Graham up against the window where the overhang would keep them dry and the cars couldn’t reach them. Graham fell into the shadows against the glass. The fading shine of the car’s red taillights and the steady amber-orange of the stoplight carved down the side of his square face.

       “Sit down,” Auggie said. He heard the worry in his own voice, and wondered what that would seem like to Graham and the magnifying glass in his head. “You look horrendous.”

       “My head just hurts. Eye strain, from drawing,” Graham mumbled. He sank until he was half-sitting against the concrete sill. He pulled the Advil out, his fingers pale and fumbling at the cap, shivering and jittery, too many other things that Auggie really didn’t want to think Graham’s hands were. Not when those were hands that gave him his morning coffee, and were held so often in his own.

       “Let me get it,” Auggie tried to say, but Graham had already popped the cap. It fell onto the paper-thin ice on the pavement along with the cotton. Graham shuffled three fat gel capsules into his hand. They glowed with the store’s purple sign and turned green with the stoplight, alien. “Don’t chew them you know it makes you sick—"

       Graham had already split them all between his teeth. It soured his tastebuds. Curdled in his cramping stomach—Auggie was right; half the time Graham just ended up sick from the taste, but at least it would already be working. He pictured the liquid dripping black down his throat. He swallowed anyway.

       Gets right into your bloodstream, Graham’s father had once said, seemingly a thousand years ago. Graham had been ten then, leaning his head back with the lip of the sink porcelain-cold under his skull. The taste of Advil mixed with the taste of his bloody broken nose. If he were older, he would have said that you were supposed to sit forward with a nosebleed, but he was too young then to consider his father any less than superhuman. He couldn’t remember if it had tasted as awful then, but he remembered staring up into the sheer white of the bathroom ceiling, blurred through his tears. Remembered smelling nothing but blood. Feeling nothing but burning shame, not even any pain. He remembered puking, but would always attribute that to the blood rather than the Advil. Could never blame the Advil. No. That was the good guy in everything. That was superhuman.

       Now Graham had been catapulted forward nearly two decades to sit on the icy cement with the air wet and cold around him, seeping into his clothes and right down into his cells. His stomach lurched and he breathed in until his lungs hurt too much for his stomach to complain.

       He held it there.

       Auggie, patient as his sainted parents, crouched in three-inch heels. He waited.

       The pain seemed to inch back from the front, quiet until Graham could hear the cars and the tap-splatter of sleet. The first thought through the haze was the deadline on those fucking pages, and then his agent’s frown, but then it was Auggie who was a little clearer. He crouched in front of Graham with his eyebrows pressed tight together and the Advil cap tumbling in his hands.

       “It’s getting better,” Graham said.

       Auggie nodded, slow. “Hmm.” Not convincing. Not for Graham at least, who was never convinced of anything save that chewing makes it end faster. There was a layer of sweat between him and the fleece lining of his denim jacket, cold as the pavement he sat on or the glass at his back or the look in his father’s eyes when he had picked Graham up off the driveway so many years ago.

        “Are you mad at me?” Graham had said then, and said again a million years later. It spun in his head while the cars streamed past and spit slush that didn’t reach them. He heard it in the voice of a petulant ten-year-old, streaming tears and blood and snot and smudged with coloured chalk, thunked into a chair to lean his head back against the sink and burn with shame. Two Advil pushed into his fist. No water. Chew and swallow, Graham. Toughen up.

       Are you sorry?

       Graham focused on the exact pitch and timbre of Auggie’s voice. Any quirk in his mouth. Twitch of his eyes. Waiting for them to spark. “Why would I be mad?”

       That I let it get this bad without saying anything that I let it happen—“Did the clerk seem mad?”

       Auggie paused. Graham wanted him to grin his big stupid Auggie smile and say something easy like ‘no, don’t worry!’ or maybe even ‘yes, Graham, you’ve really done it now’ because then Graham would just cross this off the list of places to go to and he’d be done with it. If he had to walk another two blocks for Advil then that’s what would happen because in the long run he’d chew and swallow and if he got sick off it then fine—

       But Auggie skipped right past the clerk; he leaned a little farther forward to put his hand on Graham’s knee. “I’ve never seen it that bad before.”

       “Eye strain.” After being reminded that it had a job to do, Graham’s headache sent another pang into his stomach. Graham almost keeled forward, but fought that until tears pricked his eyes. They turned Auggie into a smudge of colour against the dark street. A chalk drawing on black pavement.

       Auggie’s voice was soft, but that just sent another rolling wave of unease. Soft voices come before harsh words. Better to see it coming, and get ready to be sorry. “Just eye strain, Graham?”

       The taste of Advil twisted and pooled at Graham’s tongue, and he thought distantly of how blood tastes, and how it looked splattered and pooled on his driveway, right in the middle of his chalk drawing. What had he been drawing the day his nose broke? Where did he get rainbow chalk in the first place? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t even remember who punched him, what sound it made, what it felt like.

       He only remembered his father looming over him as he lay dazed, a titanic shadow against the violently pale sky.

       Chewing makes it end faster, so might as well bite the bullet now. Graham’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t patronize me, Auggie.”

       Auggie felt something prick in his head. His hand left Graham’s knee and grabbed awkwardly at the bag still hanging on his other arm. He swayed like he’d stand up. Part of Graham wanted him to. That’s where it was heading, he thought. He chewed to get to the end, didn’t he? Go on, Auggie. Stand up. Walk home.

       “Fine then. You’re too smart to think this is just a headache,” Auggie said. He thought about reaching for Graham’s leg again, but kept his face set and his hands still.

       Graham was silent. Auggie thought he heard him sniff, but couldn’t see.

       Auggie stopped, looked down between his shoes. His knees were already aching from crouching in heels. He'd certainly bought those boots long ago, back in the days of chewing on the moment without thinking of getting sick later. The pain in his legs was a good reminder that he’d outgrown wanting to rock and roll and put on something with a beat you could forget to.

       Auggie was focused on the way Graham’s hands had shook, on the chill in the air, on figuring this out here and now. On not getting sick this time.

       “If you’re always looking for someone to say something, you’ll see it everywhere," Auggie said, still looking down. His shadow was doubled from the yellow street-lights, and he found a quiet sort of charm in that. Auggie was always looking for those quiet things, just to stay in the moment. That’s what he loved about Graham. Made good coffee, dog eared his books, said ‘I love you’ easy enough but showed it in a million other, better ways. Bought Auggie new pens before the old ones ran out, rinsed the dishes, kept the snack-shelf well-stocked. You only noticed those things if you didn’t chew them to pieces or drown them in a ‘good time’. If you took your time, no jumping the gun and crunching the bullet in your teeth.

       He heard Graham open his mouth, try a response, swallow, and go again. “If you’re never looking for it then you’re never gonna see it coming.” Graham’s voice choked, and he swallowed again in a bubbly sort of way. “Auggie I don’t want… I…” He took a rattling breath, sucked in through his teeth. “I don’t want someone breaking your nose and leaving you on the ground because you weren’t looking for it.”

       The sleet seemed to pause.

            “Jesus,” Auggie said. It came without thought, slipped out from his chest rather than his lips. He looked up, and Graham was still shadowed. Just the curve of his face and something wet around his eyes. “I won’t be gay-bashed in the street. I like to think people are a little more civilized than that now.”

       “You think a lot of things,” Graham muttered. It wasn’t a compliment, and Auggie didn’t think that was fair. “That doesn’t make them stop.”

       A bruised part of Auggie’s mind knew he was right, but didn’t want to think past the white-picket edges of his optimism. He kept to the parts of town with rainbow crosswalks and Pride stickers on the windows. He liked those places better, that was all. He was more than aware that Graham had those stickers memorized as checkpoints, necessity.

       Graham heard slush in the gutters, but it sounded like a running sink. Felt like a cold cloth on his nose and blood down his throat. Shouldn’t have worn that shouldn’t have talked like that shouldn’t have quit baseball serves you right can you blame anyone for popping you one right between the eyes I’m sorry Graham but you should’ve seen that coming maybe it’ll toughen you up.

       The sour taste doubled in Graham’s mouth. He wanted out of the conversation. He wanted it packed back up in his head for another time, maybe for never. The storm seemed so much louder all of a sudden, stuffing his head. His headache had backed off a fair bit, but was still clawing at the center of his brain, a deliberate taunt. “I’m just tired, Auggie. I just want to go home.”

       Auggie thought of a million more things he could say to distract from the problem and move on—maybe that would just be better, to stop thinking about it. About broken noses when they were kids a million miles apart and how the poison of that seeped down their throats like cracked Advil. How it stayed and made you sick decades later. Made you party all night or never leave the house at all. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, Auggie-dear, and there’s a million ways to drag your soul from your mouth and leave you hollow.

       Auggie decided his next move. “I can’t promise it will all be sunshine and parades,” he said. He made sure he heard that too. Auggie had never worked a minimum wage job, and he tried not to sit in his ivory tower. He tried to consider looking past the white-picket edges of his optimism. “All I can do is make sure you aren’t worrying yourself to death over things that haven’t happened yet.” Good, leave it, you’ve said your piece. “But you can’t just fold,” Auggie said. His chest felt tight, angry. Not at Graham, never at Graham. “You’re not allowed to let your dad stand over you after you’ve gotten out, Graham, I won’t let you. I’m not letting you walk around with his shadow on you.”

       Graham paused. Auggie’s eyes were hard, shadow-black and lit with the neon of the city. Those were the eyes of someone who flipped off people shouting slurs from cars, or put daggers in his smile for anyone who turned their nose up at him. Who strutted down busy sidewalks—never walked, Auggie didn’t walk—and expected the crowd to part for him. That was a side of Auggie that Graham all at once worshipped and feared. Look away but be not afraid.

       He was anyway.

       Not of Auggie. Never of Auggie.

       Graham nodded, slow, pensive. He’d think about the hard look in Auggie’s eyes for a while after that. He thought that even with a copy of Vogue in his shopping bag, even in three-inch heels, Auggie seemed tough. Not the poisoned kind, like Advil dripping from your teeth. It was something else, something sublime that terrified him down to his still-sick stomach. The Advil weighed in his pocket like a cinder block. He wanted to ignore it. He wanted neon in his eyes instead. He wanted to be more than some scared kid in the driveway, apologizing for existing in the first place.

       Auggie could only see a shine of light across the side of Graham’s face, switching with the street light, glowing with the neon of the blue OPEN-sign.

       He reached for Graham’s hand, some tether to keep his mind from spinning, to keep his eyes from stinging. To keep both of their hands from turning sharp. Graham’s fingers closed cold around his.

       Auggie heard a car behind them slow to a crawl.

       He held his breath.