I spent two days sleeping, eating, showering, dressing, tattooing, and speaking to people like a human. I texted with Daniel about normal things, like music, and his second-semester classes, and weird clients who came into the shop. I made a schedule for getting my paintings done over the next eight days, and even amused myself by drawing a little menorah in each square, adding a candle as the days went on, in homage to Chanukah. It was gonna be fine, right?

On the third, I woke up in the middle of the night in a panic and tried to reassure myself by looking at the schedule to see that I had enough time to finish everything. Until I realized that wasn’t what I was panicking about. I was mentally groping around for Christopher—for evidence of his presence—and finding only empty space.

Then I broke.

I twisted in on myself in a panic of fear and shame and self-loathing. I told myself every mean thing I thought in the middle of the night. Every mistake. Every shortcoming. Every hurt. It was a controlled demolition, a ritual of psychic self-harm. I pulled every nasty thought around myself like a blanket, and went deep.

I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t yell. All I could do was lie there and tell myself over and over that it didn’t matter what I did, because I was selfish, mean, poisonous, egotistical, embarrassing.

When I finally fell back asleep it was like scratching a grave into sere earth; a shallow, grasping comfort, unsatisfying and unprotected.

For better or for worse, I forced myself to keep to my schedule. I’d already planned to take this last week before the show off from the shop so I could finish my paintings, only going downstairs a few times throughout the day to check on things.

The first time I went down, Faron’s eyes tracked me, his expression pitying. Morgan started to say something—something funny but cutting, no doubt—but Marcus elbowed her before she could. I looked away from him because it was too hard to maintain eye contact when I felt so ashamed for failing in a way that he was intimately familiar with.

I painted for hours, manic and frenzied, stopping only when I had to use the bathroom or got so hungry I couldn’t ignore it anymore. Going to the store was impossible, and even seeing someone who would deliver food felt excruciating, so I ate my way through all the open boxes of cereal that Christopher had bought for my birthday.

I saved the Lucky Charms and Count Chocula that Christopher had chosen for himself for last, since I didn’t like them. Kids’ cereal, too sweet and too fake tasting. But when they were all I had left, I ate them, forcing myself to linger over how much I’d hurt Christopher with every sickly sweet bite.

The knock at my door came when I was just on the verge of finishing a canvas, my eyes swimming with the strain.

“What?” I yelled, assuming it was Marcus and Morgan.

All the blood drained out of my head when the door opened and it was Jude.

Faron was standing just behind him, towering over him and looking a bit confused. “I’m sorry,” Faron said, and gestured to Jude with a graceful hand. “He just ran up here.”

Jude turned to look at him and whatever Faron saw in his face made him go very still. I wiped my hands on my overalls. Shame curled around my throat at the idea of seeing Christopher’s brother. Especially when I’d turned his very presence into the weapon that dealt a quelling blow.

“Uh, it’s okay, Faron. Thanks.”

Faron shot Jude an unreadable look, and loped down the stairs. I ran a nervous hand through my hair, as if that would do any good, and only succeeded in getting paint in it.

I was startled all over again at Jude’s otherworldly appearance. His bright hair was just as messy as it’d been at Christmas, but instead of being pulled back, it fell in his face in waves. He looked even paler, his freckles more dramatic. He had circles under his eyes, and he had his black wool coat wrapped tightly around himself.

“Obviously, I didn’t run,” Jude said as he closed the door carefully behind him. Then he just looked at me, arms crossed.

“I’m so sorry,” I blurted, shame strangling the words. He wasn’t the one I should’ve been apologizing to, but somehow it came easily for him, where I hadn’t yet found the words for Christopher.

Jude cocked his head, like he couldn’t see what that had to do with anything, and moved past me to examine the canvasses around the room. They were all pieces of portraits, photo-realistic to start, but then I’d pushed past realism to find the edge of strangeness in the ordinary human lines of them. Heightened the contrast slightly between light and shadow, hardlined the curve of bone beneath skin, wet a lip to mirror shine. Marcus’s hand, resting on his knee, the ink-spattered shop floor beneath his boot. The curve of Morgan’s shoulder where it met her neck, and her profile, with her hair blooming around her. Tara’s skinny shoulders, her backpack hanging low and her head canted forward.

He took his time looking, then stood before me without comment. It was the most nerve-racking assessment I’d ever experienced. He sighed.

“Christopher wants to be loved.” He sounded very tired, and very certain of what he was saying. “And he wants to be needed. It’s what he’s always wanted. What that means is that he will find someone to love him. He’s made for it. So if you’re done with him”—I winced at the words but Jude didn’t even flinch—“you can go about your business, secure in the knowledge that he’ll be okay.”

I knew that I should feel relieved at that, but it tore me apart all over again. I didn’t want him to be okay because I didn’t want him to be without me in the first place.

“He’s destroyed right now. He loves you, and you shat on it. But he will get over it. He’ll be fine, eventually, and once he’s fine, someone else will find him. Someone else will love him, Ginger. He’s very, very easy to love. And he’ll love them back, eventually. Because that’s what Christopher does. Probably not as much as he loves you, but what does that really matter, hm? He will love them. And when that happens, it will be too late. There won’t be any changing your mind, or apologizing and trying again. Once Christopher is done, he’s done. No looking back.”

Love, love, love. The word had fallen from Jude’s lips so many times it had lost its meaning. Did Christopher love me? Could he have, really? How? It was too late now, anyway.

Tears were running down my cheeks at the thought of someone else loving Christopher. I hadn’t cried once, not in all these days. But the image of someone else squeezing his arm in those weird colored T-shirts. Of someone else touching the soft spot under his chin. Of someone else eating the sandwiches he’d put together with his rough hands.

And the thought of Christopher loving someone else? Of never feeling the sunny warmth of his regard, or seeing his beautiful eyes narrow in amusement at something I said. Never hearing him snort when he found me ridiculous, or want to hear the details of something that no one else would care about. The thought of all that care turned away from me and toward someone else…it opened a chasm inside me.

Jude didn’t respond to my tears at all.

“I’m telling you all this because I don’t think you are done. I think you’re scared, and I think you’re not used to risking much, and I think you got very used to letting him be the one who made every move so that you never had to wonder if yours would be reciprocated. I’m quite familiar with that strategy, believe me. I have emotional stinginess down to an art.”

My guilt swelled. Emotional stinginess. Fuck.

“I’m not sure if you know this—actually, I bet you don’t—but Christopher has emailed or texted me every day since I ended up in that hospital. Sometimes more than once a day. He’s never missed a day, even once I got to our parents’. Sometimes I wrote back to him and sometimes I couldn’t, but regardless, he never stopped reaching out. He’s the opposite of emotionally stingy.”

I nodded. I didn’t know what to say, I just knew that I wanted Jude to keep talking. Because he was talking about Christopher, and I loved the shit out of Christopher, and—wait.

Wait.

Wait.

My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my ears, and I was sweating. When I looked back up at Jude, unblinking and startled, he paused. Then he seemed to slouch, his shoulders slumping and his hair covering his face. He looked exhausted, as if he had suddenly reached the end of his battery life. And given everything Christopher had said about Jude’s tendency to hide in his room and not even come out for meals, I could wager a guess that it’d taken a huge amount of energy for him to be here right now.

“Look,” he said on a sigh, the crispness to his voice gone, replaced by something less cutting but more desperate. “If you can’t hack it, then by all means leave my brother alone, because he deserves someone who wants him. But I’ve listened to him talk about you every day since the morning he found you on the floor of Melt, and if any part of this is about you not believing that he cares, let a third-party observer quash that doubt once and for all.”

I slumped too, my head pounding, my eyes scratchy. Jude took a step toward me and bent down a little to look me in the eye.

“I think I get it, a little. When things are overwhelming the easiest thing to do—the safest thing to do—is hunker down. If you don’t get anyone else involved, then no one can hurt you and you can’t hurt anyone. Am I close?”

I gave a jerky nod.

“Don’t think I can take my own advice or anything,” he said archly. “But it is shockingly clear when I’m watching someone else about to fuck everything up. Christopher is loyal and he wants to be needed. He’s the best person to have in your corner in those moments you hunker down. He’s the best person to have in your corner even when you don’t want him there.”

He wrapped his coat more tightly around himself and raked a pale hand through his messy hair. He turned his back and opened the door so slowly it was like it hurt him to move. Just before it shut, he looked right at me, his eyes burning like molten glass.

“Don’t fuck it up.”

Then the door shut, and the silence echoed around me.

An hour later, my phone chimed with a text. It was from an unfamiliar number, and contained nothing but a picture. Framed in the doorway, Christopher stood, looking at me with such a worshipful expression it took my breath away. I was turning to look at him, my face a little blurred with movement, and I was reaching out my hand as if I wanted to touch him but couldn’t quite let myself make contact.

He was love, and hope, and appreciation. I was yearning, and trepidation, and the fear of grasping at nothing.

I stared at the picture Jude had sent—because it must have been Jude—a hundred times. I zoomed in to look at the expression that lit up Christopher’s face, so often that I could almost believe he still felt that way about me. Tender and fond and delighted by…me.

Just me.

Then I cried. Great, tearing sobs that ripped me open and turned my stomach inside out.

Then I painted.

I didn’t extract just the piece I wanted, as I had with the rest of the series. I didn’t sharpen the lines or smooth the curves. I didn’t adjust the lighting for more dramatic contrast. I didn’t change the perspective to make a better composition. I painted it as it was in the picture, with the blip of an elbow in the lower left corner and the ugly wooden chair brought up from the basement ruining the clean line of the doorway in the bottom right.

I painted the expression that I’d stared at in the picture as if I were seeing it for the first time. And maybe I was.

I painted my own face, slightly blurred and unselfconscious, turning to look at Christopher as his family buzzed around us. And I painted my hand, reaching, reaching, and never touching.

It wasn’t the best thing I’d ever painted, not by a long shot. But it was maybe the most important. Because as I stared at my painted hand, more than anything in the world I wished for it to make contact.

When I first met Christopher, I thought of his happiness as obliviousness. As evidence that he hadn’t been ravaged by the world. But Christopher wasn’t some dude wandering around, oblivious of his privilege, uncaring of its cost. He’d said it several times: he’d done nothing to deserve his happiness. He’d meant it to underscore his guilt, but the truth was it cut just as easily the other way. He hadn’t chosen his emotional makeup any more than I had. Any more than Jude had.

I’d resented him because it seemed like all of this was easier for him than for me. As if he sacrificed less, stood to risk less. And he did, in some ways. But what if instead of being jealous of his ease, I could absorb it? Instead of coveting his consistency, I could depend on it? Instead of resenting his resilience, I could lean on it?

What if, with Christopher, I could burn the world down when I needed to, and he could extinguish a spot for us in the center of it, carve out a safe place for us while the fire raged outside.

Jude’s words echoed in my head. Someone else will love him. He’s very easy to love. It was true. And I also knew that the idea of someone else loving him…of him loving someone else, made my heart pound and my breath go shallow in horror. I wanted Christopher. I wanted him in my corner when shit was rough. I wanted him in my bed, holding me. I wanted his sun to shine on me.

I wanted to soak up his light like a moon, and glow with it.

I dialed Daniel’s number with tears streaming down my face and paint all over me, and when he answered I choked out, “I love him, and I think I really fucked up, and I need you to convince me I can fix it.”