Of all of them in the car, Holden had the most steady employment, because who didn’t like to fuck? Fiona was probably a close second, because, although she wasn’t a prostitute, people also loved their fetishes. He was just plain fucked.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have enough work to survive, because he did. He worked for Dennis Caldera’s firm as their resident P.I., and working for lawyers (and corporations) was pretty much the steadiest employment you could get in the business, unless you spun off into private security. And if he had wanted to be a bodyguard or a security guard, he’d have become one in the first place.

Detectives were becoming dinosaurs in this day and age, and he knew it. But he didn’t imagine that he was cut out for much else.

They dropped Fiona off at her car, and then Holden drove back to his place, asking Roan if he had any solid leads. Roan found that funny, even though he knew he shouldn’t. He told him it was too early, but he felt like he was on the path to finding the guy, and he reluctantly thanked him for the lead. Holden accepted that somewhat smugly, but he didn’t expect any less from him.

Back at his place, Holden invited him in for a drink - Mr. Subtle - but Roan just thanked him for the lift and said he’d call him, which felt great in an evil sort of way. Like he was a trick he just pumped and dumped. Holden scowled at him like he knew it.

He drove home, wondering what his next move should be. The night was cool, the road slick under his tires, and he vowed next time he’d take his bike. On the bike he could just zone out, mentally enter a sort of Zen space where he could pretend he was almost bodiless, an empty thing nearly fading away. It was a nice thought that he could one day just disappear.

Once at home, he made a few phone calls, got the bureaucratic beast lumbering to its feet in the search for Zoë Williams. He then got himself a bottle of pale ale from the fridge and turned on his stereo before surfing the web, finding a few records here and there. The newspaper articles on the case were easy to find, but after a small spate they trickled down to nothing - there was always a new “freak of the week” tragedy, and two kids found with their dead mom was just another one in a long list of common disasters.

It was amazing how parents could fuck up kids even if they weren’t around. It also brought home how much he and Holden bizarrely had in common: both had mothers who died when they were young, and neither ever knew who their father was.

Roan was reading one of the first articles on the mother found dead In her apartment, and he noticed something a little odd, something that the reporter who wrote the article - one Alice Rothwell - apparently wanted someone to notice. (But he seriously doubted anyone did.) A man called 9-1-1 to report a constantly crying child, and a suspicion that something was wrong with the mother, which eventually brought the cops to the apartment. But the other neighbors - none of which were all that near, as her apartment was in a rather unfortunate spot next to the laundry room - reported having heard anything out of the ordinary, and Alice was unable to find the neighbor who called in the report to talk to him. Now she could have talked to him and he simply denied it. But why mention such a thing in a story? It could have been left out, and no one would have noticed. The most obvious answer was she was suspicious - she didn’t think the caller was a neighbor. Meaning someone knew she was dead, but like a chickenshit called it in anonymously. Since her death was ruled accidental (with probable suicide), no one probably thought anything of it. Who cared? It probably meant nothing.

But it could mean everything. He did a little poking around online, and found Alice Rothwell was still alive. She wasn’t working for the paper anymore - she was retired and living in a senior citizen’s only apartment complex known as Autumn Woods up near Caldwell. He was jotting down her phone number when there was a knock at his door. Very weird, as he was expecting no one, but when he neared the door he caught a scent of who was on the other side.

He opened the door to find Dylan standing there. He assumed he was stopping by before going to work, but his raven hair was casually messy, with a slight, natural wave to it, his jaw line was lightly stained with new stubble, and he wore loose jeans and an emerald t-shirt beneath a brown leather bomber jacket. If Roan knew anything by now, he knew Dylan wore tighter jeans and junkier t-shirts when going to work, and he was always totally clean shaven. “Hey stranger,” he said, holding the door open so he could come in.

Dylan did, and briefly looked towards the living room as These Arms Are Snakes raged over the stereo in all their noisy chaos. “You constantly surprise me, Roan. I thought you private detectives were supposed to listen to jazz and drink Scotch by the barrelful.”

“Yes, well we’re also supposed to go for the femme fatale, so right out of the gate I’ve fucked the image.” After shutting the door, he asked, “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, I just called in sick tonight. I haven’t taken a night off in a while, and I just didn’t feel like going in.” His dark eyes scudded to Roan, asking a silent question, and he nodded, so Dylan collapsed on the couch with a tired sigh. “Maybe I’m getting a cold or something, I don’t know.”

“Are the sales that bad?” he wondered, going to the kitchen to retrieve him a bottled tea. Dylan continued to hang in with him, although Roan had no idea why, as their relationship - if you could call it that - hadn’t really progressed a single iota. They hadn’t really kissed, not to mention anything beyond that. But they knew an awful lot about each other now.

Dylan was a teetotaler, so he knew by now not to offer him a beer (although the irony of a non-drinker being a bartender was pretty rich, and it always brought to mind that lyric in that Hold Steady song, “- hard drugs are for bartenders”). Also, along with the gallery his artist collective had downtown, he also had some paintings, sketches, and poster prints available at a bookstore on the East Side that supported local artists. Dylan was actually a very good artist, sort of expressionistic, who could sit down and bang out a wonderfully detailed street scene sketch in about ten minutes - he had actually seen him do this during one of their lunches when Roan unfortunately spent most of it in the phone. He found himself getting distracted by the way Dylan’s hand moved smoothly and quickly over the notebook paper, turning pen strokes into the street and buildings around them like he was rubbing charcoal over a gravestone. Roan had tried to buy one of his paintings only to have Dylan refuse the money, saying friends got pictures they didn’t buy them. But Roan showed up at the gallery when he knew Dylan wasn’t around and bought one anyways, a night cityscape, but Dylan didn’t know that as it was hanging up in his bedroom and he’d never been there.

Of course, the pictures he really wanted to buy weren’t for sale, just exhibition - if that. Dylan had several paintings and drawings he referred to sardonically as his “bleeding hardware” series. They were all art that featured blood - no people, no living things, just blood and inanimate objects. They looked like photographs of crime scenes after the bodies had been removed: a wall with peeling wallpaper and dusty hardwood floors, where a pool of crimson glistened like fresh oil; a mattress with disturbed white sheets splattered with dark blood; a hole punched in a wall and trickling blood from its blunt edges. They were startling and disturbing, to the point that that he often saved them for private or smaller exhibition, as many people wondered if he was sane after seeing them, but Roan got them. On that floor, for example, all you had to do was imagine the body of his father after he committed suicide, just like on the bed all you had to do was imagine his mother in the aftermath of her murder. This was Dylan dealing with the trauma of being the survivor of a homicide-suicide and seeing the bodies at such a young age - how that could have fucked him up. Working it out in his art was a lot more productive and healthy than many alternatives. And there was more trauma than that, of course. He knew that when he saw the painting of a rain dappled windshield spiderwebbed with cracks, and blood seeping through a cigarette sized hole in the middle: Jason. He wanted to buy one of those paintings - they were morbid in subject but gorgeous in composition - but the pain and rage was almost palpable, and he doubted that Dylan would ever want to see any of these paintings in someone else‘s house. He usually hid them in his studio in a closet, with a sheet over them. They were his dark side given form, and once he exorcized the demons on canvas, he was more than happy to put them away.

As talented as Dylan was, the terrible truth was you just didn’t make a lot of money as an artist, hence his night job as a bartender at Panic. Technically he could have gotten a better job, but then he told him how much he made in tips monthly, and Roan felt his jaw unhinge. Apparently a shirtless bartender in a gay nightclub with a beautiful chest and face could make enough to buy himself just about anything he wanted, or at least Dylan could.

As he brought him the tea, Dylan flashed him a smile and gave him a nod of thanks before his expression fell to neutral. “I actually sold one yesterday. It’s so weird, but I’m almost depressed when I sell a painting. It’s one of my babies going away.”

“Then don’t sell them,” he said, sitting back down and shutting down his laptop.

“And be a shirtless bartender all my life? I have a feeling I’ll be fired as soon as my boobs start to sag.”

“I’ll be your sugar daddy.”

Dylan shook his head and smiled, trying not to laugh. “You’re not already?”

“I’d have to make more than you, so I’m gonna say no. You could kill me with your tip jar.”

“Only ‘cause I’m one sexy motherfucker,” he joked, although it wasn’t actually a joke. He was a sexy motherfucker, only he was aware of it in a very abstract, removed way. Unlike most men who knew they were good looking - Holden, for example - Dylan wasn’t vain or self-impressed. In fact, he seemed at times almost embarrassed by how honestly handsome he was. Maybe it was a Buddhist thing, although maybe not - Richard Gere still seemed pretty smug.

Roan took a drink of his beer, then said, “I’m sorry I scared you today. When I get threatened by another cat, my lion side has a tendency to come out.”

He gazed at him steadily with his midnight dark eyes. “That wasn’t what scared me.”

“No?”

“No. What scared me was the fact that your first impulse when you saw a lion on the street was to tackle it. I mean, I should have known since you used to be a cop that you had that hero thing going on, but really. Hand to hand combat with a crazed cat? Jesus. You know you were almost hit by a car, right?”

Roan nodded. “But it didn’t hit me. What doesn’t kill you can be ignored until the immediate crisis has passed.”

“I love the way you create your own aphorisms.”

“Somebody has to. They don’t make aphorisms like they used to.”

“For a man who jokes as much and as easily as you do, you almost never smile. Why not?”

He hated the way Dylan did that, clobbering him with serious questions when he wasn’t prepared for it. “Dylan, please -”

“Would you tell me about Paris?”

Oh no. “You know about him. He talked to you at Panic all the time.”

“But you don’t talk about him at all. If his name comes up, you just shut down.”

He gulped down the rest of his beer and got up, trying hard to pretend he wasn’t seeking refuge in the kitchen. “I’m not up to this tonight.”

“You’re never up to this, Roan. I really think you need to talk to Doctor Thompson -”

“No I don’t. I don’t need a fucking grief counselor.” He tossed his empty bottle into the recycling bag with undue force, making it break. “Would you give it a rest?”

“I’ll give it a rest as soon as I think you’re not dying inside.”

He snickered humorlessly, admiring the drama in that statement. “I’m already dead, Dylan. When Paris died, I did too. I can’t believe I’m still walking around.”

Dylan stood up and faced him over the breakfast bar, his expression mostly neutral but his eyes very sad. “Tell me you don’t really believe that.”

He was going to tell him to leave it and let it go, but for some reason he just started talking. He was much more tired than he thought. “I’ve contemplated doing Ecstasy again just so I could feel something other than rage. I’m a burnt out husk. Why are you even bothering with me? Why don’t you just go and find someone who’s not a loser, huh?”

Dylan just stared at him in that unnervingly placid way. Dylan was younger than him, and yet oftentimes he seemed so much older. “Haven’t you figured it out yet?”

The idea made his stomach clench and burn, and inexplicably he felt tears sting behind his eyes. “What do you want from me?”

“Nothing. Just talk to me.”

“About what? About how men have a tendency to die on me? How if you had any sense or desire to live at all you’d run as far from me as possible? About how it isn’t fair that he’s dead and a useless piece of shit like me is still alive?” He didn’t want to cry, and frankly he thought he wasn’t such a wimp that he would, but he felt something deep inside his chest contract until he wasn’t sure he could breathe, and the tears just started coming. He turned away and tried to stop them, but a dam had burst and he couldn’t do it.

God, he missed him. He still missed Paris like he had just died yesterday. It was a physical ache more painful than the phantom remnant of the lion’s bite on his arm. But he’d have been all right if he hadn’t made him think about it.

Dylan pulled him into his arms and held him, resting his head against his, and while Roan’s initial impulse was to shove him away violently, he just felt too exhausted, physically and emotionally, to bother. He was so tired, and he wasn’t sure of what or why. It was extremely humiliating, and Dylan being kind to him only made it worse.

****

He woke up with his ear hurting and slightly numb, his nose so clogged he could barely breathe, and he discovered he and Dylan had both fallen asleep on the couch. Dylan was slumped back, still in a sitting position, and Roan had been sleeping curled up on his side, his head resting on Dylan’s thigh. He sat up and rubbed his ear - he’d been sleeping on it funny, and Dylan’s thigh wasn’t the softest thing in the world - and felt like a complete idiot. Could he blame the sidecar combined with a beer and a skipped dinner? Maybe he could. It probably wasn’t its fault, but he could still try.

The sun was just coming up, the sky outside starting to glow with the half-light of dawn, and he went upstairs to take a shower so he didn’t wake Dylan up. Oh fuck, what was he going to say? Maybe he could sneak out of the house before he woke up.

His own house. How low had he sunk? Okay, so he broke down crying - it wasn’t the end of the world. And it beat getting angry for a change, didn’t it? No it didn‘t, but he tried to tell himself that.

That was the problem when you got sick and tired on a fundamental, existential level. How did you know what you felt anymore? Beyond numb; beyond encased in ice.

He made the water in the shower as hot as he could stand it so it opened up his sinus passages, and it was nice to breathe again. His head still throbbed dully, so when he got out he took three Excedrin and figured he’d live with the gut ache. He looked in the fogged over mirror, and asked, “Well Paris, do you want to tell me I’m being an idiot? Do you wanna tell me anything at all?” His own face was a blur, a barely visible ghost, a reflection in warped glass.

There was no answer, of course - there never really was an answer. It was all in his head. It was amazing what you could make yourself believe, especially if you were lonely enough and desperate enough.

He threw on some sweatpants and went downstairs, wondering what he should say to Dylan. Should he simply apologize? Should he pretend he hadn’t broken down like a fucking baby? Maybe he should just see what Dylan said and follow his lead.

He approached the couch nervously - why he had no idea, as Dylan seemed pretty deeply asleep, slumped back like a weary traveler who nodded off while waiting for the red eye - when he realized the scent of him had altered vaguely. Just a bit, but it was there. Lots of thing could alter body chemistry, which altered scent in a way so minor that most people never noticed … but he wasn’t most people. He was sick, wasn’t he? He’d caught something, a bug, just like he implied last night.

Roan leaned in close, sniffing him, trying to see if he could tell what he had by scent. Paris used to hate it when he told him he had a cold before he even felt bad, but it did have a kind of a scent, at least in the impact on the body. Dylan had a fever, although it was mild right now; he could still feel the heat rising off his skin.

He smoothed his hair back from his forehead, and found himself admiring his face up close. He’d seen pictures of his parents, although Dylan didn’t keep them around - sadly, he’d seen them through file photos in news reports. Dylan was the spitting image of his mother: they were both olive skinned, dark haired and dark eyed, fine boned and lovely in an almost haunting way. They seemed to have an almost otherworldly aura about them, a sturdy patience in the face of their own impending doom. He just hoped he wasn’t Dylan’s doom.

Feeling oddly tender towards him, he kissed him gently on the forehead. He took his face in his hands, and desire blindsided him, hit him like a speeding car. He was that out of touch with himself, was he? Actually, that made a lot of sense. He liked to ignore himself whenever he could.

He kissed him softly on his closed eyes, feeling the crepe paper thin skin beneath his lips, and gave him a gentle kiss on the corner of his mouth, which woke Dylan up. He looked at him for a moment with a sleepy, half-lidded gaze, smiling faintly. “You didn’t take E while I was out, did you?”

“I’m sober,” he promised.

Dylan cupped the back of his neck. “Good.” He gently pulled him towards him, and they kissed passionately, like they had been waiting forever to do it. And Roan figured Dylan might just feel that way.

****

For a split second after the phone rang and woke him up, he thought the warm body next to his was Paris’s. It wasn’t, of course, and he knew that the second he thought it, but it was nice to imagine it was true for a millisecond.

Not that Dylan was a consolation prize. He was beautiful and sweet and frankly too good for him. He’d probably come to his senses one of these days, so he should just enjoy the time he had with him while it lasted.

Roan settled back into his pillow and was going to ignore the phone, but the bastard thing kept ringing, and he wondered if he had turned his machine on or not. Had he checked his messages and turned it off last night? He couldn’t remember.

He untangled himself from Dylan and reached over to grab the phone, hoping it was good. “What is it?” he grumbled, rubbing his eyes. The room seemed excessively bright, but then he remembered it was afternoon.

There was an obvious pause. “Are you still sleeping?” Holden asked, horrified.

“I was up late,” he shot back defensively, as Dylan nuzzled his neck. “What is it?”

Holden sighed heavily, like he wanted to criticize him further for his poor work habits, but he let it go for the moment. “I don’t suppose you caught the guy yet, huh?”

“No. Why are you calling, Holden?”

“Because someone beat the shit out of Cowboy last night,” he replied irritably. “He’s in the hospital.”