Oscar came outside and stood beside me as I let Tiger roam on his leash. “The food is coming to the main house. Do you and Tiger want to join me in there?”

“Is Tiger okay to be in your house? I mean, I just got him so I don’t know…” I scratched my head as my words trailed off. Dog ownership complicated a lot of things.

Oscar laughed. “I’m your dog trainer, remember? If I am okay with your puppy in my house, then don’t worry about it.”

“True. Okay, sorry. I’m still figuring out this dog thing,” I said. We both watched Tiger sniff around in the grass, his little body waddling back and forth.

“We’ll watch him closely. When he needs to go out, we’ll take him. When he’s this young, the more often the better. Otherwise he will probably get tired and fall asleep by us.”

“Should I bring his crate?” I didn’t want to haul it anywhere if I didn’t have to.

“Yeah, I think you’d better. He’s still learning it’s his sanctuary.”

Later, Oscar and I sat on the floor, our backs against the couch front, eating Chinese take out at the coffee table. Tiger snoozed in his crate nearby. We sat side-by-side, so close we were almost but not quite touching.

“Do you want to hear a crazy confession?” Oscar said, lifting a noodle high in the air with his chopsticks and depositing it into his open mouth.

I wrapped noodles around my chopsticks, getting them tightly wound so I could eat them without mishap. “Sure! Does anyone ever say, ‘No, I don’t want to hear a crazy confession!’ when someone asks that?”

Oscar swallowed and laughed. “You’d be surprised. Some people are no fun.” He raised his eyebrows, mock mischief all over his face.

“Lay it on me,” I said. You can tell a lot about someone by their idea of what is ‘crazy’ or a ‘confession.’

“I’m twenty five years old, and I still feel like I’m getting away with something when I don’t eat at the table.” Oscar laughed.

“Hah,” I said. “So to you eating at the table is the not-fun way of eating?”

“When I was a kid, everything had to be done the ‘proper’ way,” Oscar explained. He rolled his eyes and grinned. “So, it’s juvenile but I like eating in non-traditional ways because it feels like rebellion.”

“Heh,” I said, and took another bite. People always want to talk about their childhoods. It’s best for me if I keep them talking about themselves.

“What about you? Do you have any crazy confessions?” Oscar tilted his head and scrutinized me.

“I’m boring,” I said, and took another bite. Chewing was also a great way to get out of talking.

Oscar waited. He wasn’t going to be deterred. I had to give him something.

I waved my chopsticks. “You already know about the modeling thing, so you got a cheat into my weird past.”

He didn’t look convinced, but he let it go.

“You were going to tell me about that text you got,” I pressed. “You have some food in you, and a friendly audience.” I waved my hand to indicate Tiger and myself. “What’s up?

Oscar’s shoulders slumped. He took a deep breath. “Okay. Do you know what I do for a living?” His eyes searched mine, back and forth as he chewed his lip.

“Um, train dogs?” I shrugged.

Oscar laughed. “Not exactly, though that was one of my goals.”

He paused again and I waited, tracing the art on my take-out box with the point of a chopstick. “Okay so tell me what you do for a living.”

“I had a YouTube channel,” he said. He paused, and then pressed forward. “I haven’t updated it in a long time, and…the money is drying up.”

I had a distinct moment of feeling old. “How does the money on YouTube work? Pretend I am dumb.”

Oscar frowned at me. “You’re not dumb.”

I flashed my most dazzling smile at him. “I know. That’s why you have to pretend.” I laughed out loud, so loudly the dog stirred.

Oscar smiled, momentarily distracted from whatever was bothering him. “I can’t decide if you are an insufferable egomaniac or the realest guy I’ve ever met!” He punched me on the arm and I swayed away from him.

I tipped my head back and laughed. “Why can’t I be both?” Then I swayed back his direction and pushed him with my shoulder. “So explain. You don’t have to use charts and hand puppets. Just assume I know nothing.”

Oscar took a deep breath and pulled his knees in toward his chest. “I started a YouTube channel when I was a teenager. I wanted to talk about stuff I knew about, like dogs, and…ugh.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his face. “I didn’t have any friends because my family was…different. I didn’t know how to talk to people, but I could talk to the camera.”

“Okay,” I said. “Then what happened?”

He folded his glasses and set them on the coffee table and covered his eyes as he spoke. “Then, I got better at it. The channel grew. It took time, and it didn’t happen overnight but, people followed me.”

“This sounds like a good thing, right?”

“It was, at first. But, then I started doing collaborations with other YouTubers. It’s a thing where you appear on each other’s channels, or do things together.”

I pulled my knees up to my chest too, joining in his body language. His breathing quickened. The poor guy sounded distressed. I put my arm around him to try to hold him in the here and now.

Sometimes people just need someone to sit with them. Being a fireman wasn’t always about chopping down doors in burning buildings. Sometimes it was picking something up for someone. Sometimes it was picking someone up. Most people just needed someone to listen to them.

Oscar leaned against me a little, and continued. “There was this one guy. Rory. He was a bigger name than me, but the viewers loved us together. So, we did more and more videos together, and pretty soon…I guess we were in a relationship.”

“You guess?” I said. “I don’t know much about relationships, not really, but usually don’t you know when you are in one?”

Oscar gripped his knees with his arms, tighter than before. “Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. We were. It’s just in the aftermath, you forget how things were when they started because you only see the rubble.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “Remember to breathe, you can tell this story as fast or as slow as you want.”

Oscar took a long deep breath. “It seems weird to forget to breathe, but I do it all the time.” He turned to me, his eyes crinkling. “You’re a fireman?”

“Yep,” I said. “Sometimes I help people, and not just by being a decoration on their calendar.” I wanted to see Oscar smile, for a moment, and it worked. Sometimes being a dumbass worked for me.

Oscar blew out a big breath of air. “Okay, air in, air out. I can do that. So back to my story. Now that I’ve started telling you, I want to get it out.”

“The floor is yours,” I smiled. Anything was better than talking about myself, and I wanted to know what made this elegant beautiful man so sad.