It was the gentle hum of fluorescent lights that woke me.

Slowly, I opened my eyelids. They felt heavier than granite. The lights above my head were too bright. I couldn’t see a thing. My vision was covered in fog. There were only white and gentle yellow blurred bubbles floating around in front of me.

Somewhere near, people were bustling. There was an electronic beeping noise. Light from an outside window. And the low murmur of the fluorescent lights.

I knew that sound by heart.

It was etched into my brain since my parents’ death.

I must’ve been looking at someone because a voice—someone familiar—whispered to me and squeezed my forearm. I tried to smile. Or ask, stupidly, where I was, even though I knew.

But just as quickly as the buzzing sound woke me from the strange sleep I’d been in, easily, I fell back into it.

---

The next time I woke, the haze from my vision had all but diminished.

And I wished it hadn’t.

Danny stood next to the bed I seemed to be in. The expression on his face was… tragic.

“Hey, Ace.” His voice was constricted. The light that usually lived there had vanished. “Let me get the nurse.”

“Wait.”

Pathetically, I tried to reach out and grab him, only to realize my arms were filled with cement. Clear wires protruded from my wrists. A blanket covered my legs.

I began to panic.

“Whoa, whoa,” Danny said, holding his hands out as if to pacify me. “You’re okay, Ace. You’ll be fine. You’ve been out for a few days.”

“Why am I here?” The sound of my voice was waspish and dry.

“You had surgery.”

“Because…” I began, images coming back to me. Flickering streetlights. The burnt-brown color of glass shards. A small young man pressed up against the wall—pressed up against me.

“Because some fucking assholes beat the shit out of you.” His voice cracked.

I couldn’t say anything. I just closed my eyes and nodded, remembering that night. The words they’d called me.

“They broke your arm in three places, Archer,” Danny told me, voice hard and shaking. “And dislocated your shoulder.”

Danny never called me Archer. So, when he said my name, despite how tired I suddenly was, I turned my head toward him and opened my eyes.

There were dark half-moons under his eyes and his hair sat flat against one side of his head. His favorite red and navy striped T-shirt was on backward and askew. And most troubling of all, he looked like the cork in a champagne bottle about to burst.

“One of the tendons on your knee snapped when they—” He paused for a moment. “The doctors said the sooner you had surgery—for your knee and your arm—the better.”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I think I remember waking up and the doctor talking to me about it.”

“The cops haven’t arrested anyone yet. Do you remember what they looked like?”

I thought about it for a short moment and shook my head. “No.”

“Nothing?”

I tried to shrug but couldn’t move my right arm. So I simply said, “Nothing.”

Danny’s laughter crackled in the large room. It was harsh and foreign to my ears. It was only then I noticed that we were surrounded on two sides by a pale blue hospital curtain.

“Can’t you try? Don’t you care? That little idiot—William—he has to know who those assholes are. He lives in that small, hick town. He was there with you when—”

Again, his voice cracked.

He rubbed the palms of his hands against his eyes.

And then he mumbled something to himself that I fought to hear. I couldn’t bear the expression on his face.

Without a word, he turned from me. For a moment, I was worried he’d leave me there alone with nothing but the wires coming from my arms and the water-stained panel ceiling and the coughing of other patients heard from the hallway.

“What, Danny?” I finally managed to ask.

Danny turned back toward me. “This isn’t about me. I don’t want to make it about me. But Christ, it’s so hard not to.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was first out there, you know,” he snapped. “I saw you there in the alley, bleeding out on the concrete with your arm mangled and twisted and your knee cap misaligned. That William kid ran into the bar and grabbed his brother. He looked so scared. He said your name and my heart fell out of my damn chest. And then there you were.”

“You couldn’t have done anything if you were there, Danny.”

He scrubbed his hands over his face again. “When William told me why you two were in that alley…” His face fell.

I closed my eyes.

“Look at me, Archer.”

“Don’t think I can right now, Danny.”

“Christ.”

That almost broke me. I could hear the hurt in his voice. Even though my eyes were closed and it was all he’d said, I felt like he fell on me and began to cry. I could’ve dealt with anything but that, just then. I could’ve dealt with two broken arms and two broken legs and the broken heart I’d been carrying around for years, but not that.

“Danny—”

“Don’t, Ace. Don’t. Not now, not here. This isn’t about me—I know that. I’m not allowed to feel like this right now. I’m not allowed to be pissed at you when you’re lying there in that piece of shit bed looking like you’ve been hit by a train.”

Dread filled my small, haze-covered world. Danny knew. William told him. I hadn’t been the one to do it. I hadn’t been the one to tell my best friend the secret I’d been carrying on my back my entire life.

A stranger had.

And I wanted to tell him how sorry I was, and that he deserved to know from me. Because he did. He deserved that much after everything he did—does—for me.

But I couldn’t.

I was weak. And full of shame. And afraid that the one person who mattered most to me in the world would look at me differently if I’d told him.

I’d been afraid he’d look at me the way he looked at me just then in that hospital room.

“Will you talk to me about it?” Danny asked.

After a moment, I said, “Not today.”

“Ever?”

“When it doesn’t hurt so much.”

“You carry around hurt like a cop carries a badge.”

To that, I said nothing.

---

“Do you have anyone who can look after you for the next few weeks while you recuperate?” Dr. Hamstead asked. He was in his mid-fifties, I’d have guessed, and constantly looked exhausted.

“For a few weeks?” I sat up a little straighter in my hospital bed. It had been two days since I’d first woken up after surgery. I hadn’t wanted to stay in the hospital as long as I had, but they’d insisted on keeping an eye on me for the first forty-eight hours.

Dr. Hamstead nodded, looking down at his clipboard. “You’ll need someone around to help you with day-to-day living, at least for the first little bit. It’s going to be an adjustment for you, Mr. Hart. Do you have any family?”

“I— No.”

Danny, who was also in the crowded space with us, turned to look at me.

“No family at all, Mr. Hart?” The unbelieving doctor pressed.

“My brother… but no.”

Danny reached out and put his hand on my good shoulder. “Sorry.”

Earlier that day, Danny broke the news to me.

His face had been Valentine’s-Day-heart red but his expression was pinched and annoyed.

“Ace,” he’d said, “I called your useless brother. After what happened to you, I thought he’d want to know.”

It had struck me like a fork through the chest, but I said nothing, only nodded at my hand sitting in my lap.

Danny had said, “I told him what happened to you. He said ‘okay.’ Can you believe that? I asked if he wanted to come see you, but he said no. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Danny. I knew he wouldn’t come. We’re not… close.”

He’d laughed humorlessly. “There’s an understatement. I told him you could’ve died, and he still didn’t want to see you—or even call to talk to you.”

“We don’t talk.”

“Yeah, I kind of gathered.”

“We never have been close,” I divulged. “Not even before my parents passed.”

“Yeah, well, probably for the better. He’s an asshole.”

I agreed with him but didn’t say anything. I pressed my back against the unyielding hospital bed pillow behind me and closed my eyes.

“I’ll have someone to keep an eye on you,” Danny said, bringing me back to the present.

My eyes snapped open. “You have classes. And we don’t even live in the same building in res.”

“You’re not going back to school, Mr. Hart,” Dr. Hamstead interjected. “Not for a few months, at least. You’re going to be exhausted while going through the healing process. And you’ll be even more exhausted after you start physical therapy.”

“I—” There was nothing I could say.

“Don’t worry,” Danny said. He turned to talk to the doctor. “My dad’s going to look after him.”

“Mallory?” I coughed. Both Danny and the doctor turned to look at me. “He lives in Alberta.”

Danny rolled his eyes. “Yeah, thanks, Ace. I remember. You’re going to go stay with him.”

I gaped. “You asked him already?”

“Of course. He wanted to fly down here, but I told him it would be more useful to stay there and get the spare room ready for you. I can’t help you out because of school, and your brother is useless. My dad is happy to help. Plus, it’ll give him something to do.”

The idea of seeing Mallory again was… odd. When we’d parted months ago, I was sure I’d never see him again.

“Am I even able to fly?”

Dr. Hamstead clicked his tongue. “It’s not ideal. But it’s more ideal than you recuperating alone for the next few months.”

“Don’t look so miserable,” Danny said, fake smile on his face as he gently jabbed my arm. “You’re gonna live.”

---

That night, the encircling darkness began to twirl the faucet of my mind.

Monitors beeped softly. The hazy yellow light from the hallway poured in through the open doorway of the hospital room.

My mind drifted to my brother.

And then found its way to Danny.

And then Mallory.

And finally landed on me—and settled there as the pale moon sauntered across the sky—

which was the darkest thought of all.

---

An arrow through the heart might’ve been easier to take than Mallory’s expression when he looked at me.

“Hey, Archer.”

He played it cool, like the sight of me hadn’t bothered him. His tone was easy and without pity. But that flicker of expression on his face had said the words he wouldn’t say.

The flight to Banff hadn’t been easy. Danny had explained our situation to the airline, and they were kind enough to reserve a spot in first class for us with extra legroom. But the flight was rocky and the altitude made me want to throw up the soup I’d eaten that morning. My muscles ached and the pain in my shoulder had been almost unbearable.

Danny joked at me the entire flight. And I say joked at me because I’d gritted my teeth and barely said two words to him the entire time.

When he’d come to pick me up from the hospital, I knew things between us wouldn’t be the same. There was a bubble between us now. Danny still tried to crack jokes, but we could both hear the tension in his voice. It practically slapped me across the face each time he spoke.

The silences were no longer comfortable.

I wished he’d lash out at me—tell me what a failure I was as a friend. But that would’ve been selfish because it would’ve made me feel better. Instead, he remained externally the compliant best friend.

“Can I bring it with me?” I’d asked him when he pushed me out of the hospital in a wheelchair.

Without asking, he knew what I was talking about. The locked box under my bed. The thing that sometimes I pulled out in the middle of the night, when I was alone, to stare down the barrel of.

“Don’t think they’ll let it on the plane,” he’d replied.

My heart sank. “Can you—?”

“Yes. I’ll take care of it. It’ll be there when you get back home.”

Snapping me back to the present, Mallory asked, “How are you boys?”

“Tired,” Danny replied as he walked up to his father and wrapped his arms around him.

The drive from the airport to Mallory’s house had been uncomfortable, to say the least. I was in the backseat with my legs straight, lying on my side, as Danny drove and listened to staticky rock music on the radio.

When we arrived, Danny got out of the car and popped open the trunk. Moments after I heard it slam shut, he came around the side with the wheelchair. I awkwardly lifted myself into it using my good arm and leg.

“You look exhausted,” Mallory said.

My gaze snapped up and I realized he was looking at me.

“I am.”

“Let’s head inside,” he told Danny and me.

Without another word, the three of us, Danny pushing me in the wheelchair, made our way up to the house.

Getting up the front porch stairs was awkward. But not anywhere near as awkward as I felt looking at the double flights of stairs leading to the upstairs bedrooms.

“I was going to make up a room for you downstairs but there isn’t a lot of privacy,” Mallory said. We stood together at the bottom of the staircase, looking up. “And it gets cold as hell downstairs at night.”

“I don’t think I can make it up all those stairs,” I admitted. It hurt to say.

But Mallory just looked at me simply. “I can carry you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“C’mon, Ace,” Danny chimed in. “How else are we going to get you upstairs?”

“I’ve never felt like such an invalid,” I mumbled.

Mallory sighed as he looked at me, but there was a faint smile pulling at the corner of his lips. He reached behind his head and rubbed the back of his neck.

“Tell you what,” Mallory said, his voice trailing.

He turned toward Danny, put one hand on his back, the other behind his knees, and literally swept him off his feet.

“What the hell!”

Mallory laughed. Danny in his arms, he climbed up the first set of stairs and disappeared around the corner. From where I sat at the bottom of the landing, I could hear Danny’s bitching echoing through the hallway.

Moments later, Mallory descended the staircase and stood in front of me. “Your turn. Okay?”

I couldn’t help it—I smiled. It was faint and felt like moving mountains, but there it was. The simple gesture from Mallory tugged at my heartstrings.

Awkwardly, I sat up from the wheelchair, pushing myself up with my good leg. Mallory was careful to put all the support for my upper body on my good arm and kept my casted leg from knocking against the walls. He carried me up the staircase slowly, neither of us saying a word.

When we reached the top, he leaned me against the wall, gave me a small smile, and went back down to retrieve the wheelchair.

Danny tucked his shoulder under my arm and led me toward the bedroom where I’d be staying for the next few weeks. It wasn’t the same room that I’d stayed in before—it was larger, with a king-sized bed pressed against the far wall that was flanked by two large windows.

The moment I flopped back on the massive bed, my eyes involuntarily began to close.

---

Some time later, I woke to the muffled sounds of talking and a gentle glow from the sun setting outside. For a moment, I thought I was still in the small hospital bed. But the mattress beneath me was softer, and when I finally managed to peer out, I saw there were no tubes coming out of my arms.

I sighed heavily and once again closed my eyes.

“This isn’t about you, Danny.”

Through the fog of sleep and despite the hushed tones of their voices, I could hear Mallory and Danny arguing in the hallway, their voices fraught with tension.

“I know,” Danny snapped. “But that doesn’t mean it’s fair—or right.”

“People deal with things in different ways, Son.”

“He could’ve told me. I’m his best friend.”

After a brief pause, Mallory replied with, “He wasn’t ready.”

“Christ, Dad. We’ve been best friends for years. I wouldn’t have thought any less of him. How could he possibly think that I would? Does he not know how much I care about him? Does he think I’m such an asshole that I’d treat him any differently?”

“Danny.” Mallory’s voice was patient. “This isn’t about you.”

“If he’d told me, none of this would’ve happened. He wouldn’t have been in that alley with that guy feeling like he had to hide himself away.”

“Maybe not.”

“I’m so fucking angry with him.”

“No, you’re not.”

“But I am hurt. I’m so hurt. There’s nothing I keep from him. He’s the only one I talk to about Mom and—” His voice hitched.

I wanted to stop listening to them but knew I couldn’t.

Danny was right, of course. I’d hurt him by omission. But it wasn’t him I didn’t trust. It was something else altogether. Maybe I didn’t trust the universe. Maybe I didn’t trust myself.

Even then, as I lay in that bed listening to my best friend bleeding out in the hallway, I knew if I’d had a choice, I still wouldn’t have told him.

The wetness of tears began to pool at the corners of my closed eyes.

“Archer.”

When I looked up, Mallory stood next to the bed, glancing down at me. Our gazes caught. And that was something, because Mallory paused a moment, just as he was about to speak. But there weren’t any words for Mallory and me. A current passed between us, like when you’re at the grocery store and see someone wearing the same T-shirt as you. That common acknowledgment of something shared.

Between us, there was a lifetime of heartache.

Mallory glanced toward the doorway and then back down to me. “He won’t stay angry. He’s just hurt.”

“He’s right, you know.”

“There aren’t rules about these things, Archer.”

“Coming out?”

“Feelings.”

“I should’ve told him.”

“Would you now, knowing what you know?”

“No,” I answered honestly. I disliked myself a fraction more even for saying it out loud.

But Mallory just nodded. “People feel what they feel and deal with it the best way they know how. There’s no right or wrong when it comes to hurt.”

“But there’s right or wrong when it comes to friendship.”

“Archer,” he said sternly. His tone was clipped and commanding. I swallowed hard. “This isn’t your fault.”

“I just wish…”

What did I wish for? That I’d never seen that look in William’s eye? That I’d walked away from the fight? That Danny hadn’t found out I was gay? Or that my parents hadn’t ever left on that road trip?

“I wish I hadn’t hurt him.”

“Ah, Archer. We always hurt the ones we love.”

“Why’s that, do you think?”

“So that we know they love us too.”

I turned my head and looked out the window to the tops of the snowy trees and the whiteness of the sky in the distance.

I could feel Mallory’s gaze on my face.

“You’re still a little banged up. Split lip, bruised eye, scrapes along your jaw. Nothing that won’t heal, at least.”

I snorted. “It doesn’t matter.”

After a moment, Mallory said, “All right. Time for your medication. Danny explained the dosage to me while you were asleep. He thought maybe you wouldn’t remember.”

“Or that I wouldn’t bother.”

“That too.”

Mallory tipped his head toward the nightstand. Atop it sat an array of small orange bottles with perfectly white caps.

I took the pills along with the glass of water sitting next to them as Mallory went over the scheduled doctor visits with me. He told me things I already knew: recovery time, what to expect, physical therapy appointments, that I had to stay off my leg for a bit and keep my arm from moving as much as possible.

He paced a bit as he talked, and I couldn’t help but watch him. The room was large enough to accommodate his big frame as he moved back and forth, back and forth. It made me wonder if this was his room I’d taken. He would move to the window, glance outside as if expecting to see something, and then move away to pick something up from a dresser before setting it back down.

I found the entire show… charming.

It wasn’t that he seemed nervous or anxious, just that full of energy. Or with purpose.

“Knock, knock,” a voice said from the doorway.

Mallory stopped pacing.

Danny stood there, looking awkward, tired, and unable to meet my eyes.

“I’ll give you boys some time,” Mallory said as he passed Danny in the doorway. I didn’t miss the brief pat on his shoulder and the look they exchanged.

Danny walked over to the side of the bed, and I tried my best to pull myself up a little more against the headboard.

He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m flying out first thing tomorrow. And it’s getting late, so I figured I’d say goodbye to you now.”

I nodded slowly and looked down at the white cast on my arm and the frayed fabric ends of the sling.

“You’re the last person I wanted to hurt, Danny.” My voice was quieter than the snow piles outside.

“Then why, Ace? Why not tell me?”

“I don’t tell anyone.”

“Do you not trust me?”

“Of course I do. I trust you more than anyone. I trust you more than myself. And I’ll never be able to repay you for this.”

“And you’ll never have to,” he snapped.

I looked up at him then. He looked as close to tears as I’d ever seen him. “Danny—”

“You’re like a brother to me, Archer. You’re not perfect, but no one is. And if I met a billion people on this planet, I’d still choose you. You and your silent fucking depression—you and your quiet heart and your fear of living.

“But it hurts. It hurts that you wouldn’t tell me this—that you couldn’t tell me this huge part of you. And maybe I’m being selfish, but it’s how I feel.”

Every time Danny showed me what a good person he was, it only dug the knife in deeper. Because I wasn’t good like Danny. I wasn’t selfless and caring like him. I couldn’t be if I wanted to.

I was still living in this deep, dark pit composed of my own hurt.

“I’ve only ever told one person,” I admitted quietly.

“That you’re gay?”

I nodded, unable to say the words just then, or perhaps ever. “And it’s not that I think it’s… wrong. I don’t.”

“You’re just scared?”

“Yeah.”

“Because of what happened when you said it this one time?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, there’s your biggest mistake, jackass.” Danny almost yelled but not quite. He tried to play it off as a joke, but I could tell by his expression that it was the furthest thing from something funny Danny had ever said to me. “I’m not the person you told.”

“I’m sorry.”

He sighed. “Goodnight, Archer.”