It had been an odd twenty-four hours.

Farid had visited me on that first day and stayed for half the day. We spent the majority of it talking. At first, about nothing at all, and then slowly the conversation got into deeper and deeper things. In spite of how quiet he was, Farid had this sophisticated, eloquent quality that might have just been my appreciation for his accent—because who didn’t like a sexy accent, right?

He had managed to get a surprising amount of information out of me, though. It’s not as though Farid was grilling me about my life, more like I was making a new friend.

“So why do you live so far away from your parents?” he asked, having brought me another cup of jello, and was digging into one himself.

I scrunched up my face. “Are you kidding? My family lives in the boondocks. Being gay in a rural area is stupid hard. If I hadn’t left, I wouldn’t have been able to…well, do anything, really.”

Farid shrugged. “But you also said you didn’t quite like living in the city.”

I nodded my head. “That’s true, I did say that,” I replied. “But I think I’d prefer the city to living so isolated from the rest of the world.”

“Is that why you said you’d like to buy a home in the suburbs one day?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I replied. “It’s a pipe dream of mine.”

“You don’t think it’s going to come true?”

I shook my head. “Not when I’m as messed up as I am now.”

Farid turned to look at me and gave a noncommittal shrug. “I don’t know. I think you’re well on your way. Besides, you told me you’d dreamt of having kids one day. I should think that raising them in a big city would be difficult.”

I gave a little smirk. These little British-isms he had were kind of growing on me. Dreamt.

“Realistically, I can’t even take care of myself,” I replied. “I don’t think I can take care of a child.”

“I think you don’t give yourself enough credit,” Farid answered back. “You have a good job and take care of your body well. You’re also aware—perhaps too aware, even—of your weaknesses. You’re doing much better than you think. Some people go through life completely oblivious.”

I stared back at him for a moment, raising an eyebrow.

He regarded me back with a questioning look. “What?”

“You’re unsettlingly observant,” I responded.

Farid grinned. “I do try.”

It was strange, honestly, to have someone be so interested in the smallest minutiae of my day-to-day existence.

Now, it was Farid’s turn to look at me intently, and when I noticed, I looked at him with a tilt of my head.

“What?” I asked.

“Do you know that when you’re deep in thought, you have a tendency to bite your lower lip?” Farid said, setting aside the empty jello cup.

I blinked. “What?” Immediately, I tried to school my features.

Stop thinking so hard, I told myself. I felt rather exposed in front of him, even more so when I realized his eyes were scanning over me every so often. He really observed every little detail. It was almost disconcerting.

“Just act normally,” he said, glancing down at my lips. “I told you about your quirks not because I wanted you to be self-conscious about these little things, but because I found them…noteworthy.”

Noteworthy. That was such an odd thing to say, but of course I just let it slide. I didn’t know if it was because I liked him, or if it was because he was my boss’s boss, or something else. Either way, he was important to my place of work, and he was feeling like a bit more than a normal acquaintance at this point.

Still, I wondered why he was trying to get so close to me.

He arrived again the next day, this time with doughnuts and coffee. Farid looked a lot more casual today, in a pair of slim-fit jeans and a plain white tee that clung nicely to his muscles. The sleeves were rolled ever so slightly, revealing a little more bicep. I could see the gold chain he wore around his neck a bit more than yesterday, too. A pair of sunglasses hung on the neckline of his shirt, dipping it to reveal a hint of that trail of hair I’d admired. Honestly, that sort of casual look could only really be pulled off by someone who was both attractive and confident, and, well, he was both in spades.

“Hello again, Noah,” Farid greeted me with a little smile. “How are you feeling?”

“Better today than yesterday,” I replied easily, smiling. “And are those doughnuts? Can I even have good food right now?”

“I asked the doctor yesterday if it was okay, and he said it was. It’s not as though they had to wire your jaw shut,” Farid said. “So, I decided to get the best doughnuts in the city.”

I looked at the box he was carrying and laughed. The green dots and bright red letters of the name at the top told me everything. “So, you’re a big fan of the commercial stuff?”

“Only the original glazed,” Farid said. “They melt in your mouth when they’re fresh. Plus, coffee tastes better with a little sugary treat from time to time.”

“That’s surprising,” I answered back.

Farid tilted his head. “What is?”

“That you like desserts and sugary treats,” I explained. “You seem to take care of yourself well, and that led me to believe maybe you’d avoid this stuff like the plague.”

“Oh, I do,” Farid agreed. “But every so often it’s not so bad.”

I grinned. Farid opened the box of doughnuts. Twelve fresh, original glazed doughnuts, and a side of coffee—and my mouth watered at the sight of them. With my good hand, I grabbed one of the doughnuts and immediately bit into it. The soft dough basically melted in my mouth, and I groaned.

Almost a little too sexually, but aside from the way that Farid’s eyebrow raised at me when he scooted closer to my bedside with his chair, we spent a moment of silence together, just enjoying each other’s company.

When I finished scarfing down a doughnut, I took a sip of the coffee. I offered a little smile to Farid as I watched him. I grabbed my phone and, for the first time since calling my parents yesterday, opened it.

It looked like my notifications screen had blown up. I had messages on every app I was on, including on a couple of gay dating apps. But I couldn’t very well answer the onslaught of dick and ass pics I was getting. My phone would melt just loading all of them.

Text messages from concerned acquaintances, some family members, and old friends popped up. Maybe someone had posted what had happened to me on social media.

Maybe I was some kind of news item.

It was probably just people who had read about me getting my ass beat outside a club. I didn’t really feel like responding to any of them, though. I simply cleared my notifications from my screen, sighed, and placed my phone back to the side.

I grabbed another doughnut and took a bite. Throughout it all, I had forgotten that Farid was right beside me. Well, I didn’t really forget he was there—how could you forget someone who loomed so tall and took up so much space, right? Especially when he was basically oozing charisma. It was just that my mind was preoccupied.

“Bad news?” Farid asked. I looked up at him and shook my head.

“No,” I replied. “Just a lot of people suddenly messaging me on social media, some even flooding my wall.”

“Is that not a good thing? It seems that a lot of people are showing how much they care for you.”

I shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess,” I said. “Some of those people haven’t talked to me in a long time. I’m not really sure they even care.”

I looked at my cellphone, but then looked up at Farid, who was regarding me intently.

Those amber, nearly gold eyes almost seemed like they were piercing my very soul.

All at once, my shoulders tensed and I hunched my body a little bit. My defenses rose and my hackles raised. Layer by layer, the mental walls I learned to have built up sky high. It was as though I was retreating from Farid. There was something in the way he looked at me, and it shook me to my very core.

It was almost as though Farid’s eyes were watching me slowly become unhinged, and I didn’t like it. It was like I was in his head, right at that moment, and I could see what he could see. My mind filled in the blanks for me, and it told me that Farid was now seeing all the things that made me broken, that made me fucked up. I didn’t like the keenness of his gaze, those hawk-like eyes that told me I couldn’t make a mistake or else he’d see it—like an acrobat on a tight rope, under intense scrutiny from an audience. I felt as though he was observing me like I was some kind of science experiment for a class, even though it was all in my head.

I knew I was making it all up, though. Logically, that wasn’t what was happening. I knew my mind had a tendency to play tricks on me, especially when I felt vulnerable. And at that moment, I felt more vulnerable than I ever had before in Farid’s presence.

But almost as soon as my thoughts hit a fever pitch, Farid gave the slightest of nods. “You may be right,” he acquiesced.

I shrugged, feeling myself slowly come back from that fortress in my head. Still, I felt the need to justify myself. “My social media is filled with guys who either want to fuck or who’ve fucked me before, or guys who are on the other side of the country, or the world, even, who just want to know if I’m alive.”

The way I answered him bordered on blasé, as though I honestly didn’t care about my social media presence or the people surrounding me. To some extent, I knew I did care, but I also knew that caring meant being hurt.

Caring meant expectations.

Caring meant showing vulnerability, and my life couldn’t really afford to have those kinds of weaknesses. I’d been burned too many times before.

“The fact that they even care about your continuing existence is showing care in and of itself,” Farid answered. His voice was even and soft as he sipped his coffee and looked me straight in the eyes. “It just might not be the kind of caring you expect or desire.”

I knew, deep down, that Farid was right. Maybe I just didn’t think these people actually liked me. Maybe the fucked-up things that had happened in my past had cast a large shadow over almost everyone I knew.

I still felt highly defensive, though, especially because he was so new to my life and it seemed as though he was quietly judging me beneath the almost stoic facade he put on. I frowned. “I suppose I’ll update them later about the situation, then,” I mumbled through gritted teeth, about to grab my phone.

“You shouldn’t feel as though you have to do anything, Noah,” Farid said, his voice gentler than it was earlier. “I was merely offering a contrary viewpoint. I wasn’t attacking you.”

The tension in my shoulders lifted slightly, and I sighed. “I know.”

That moment was the first time the hollowness came back in full force, and it was only when I started thinking about going back to my life outside of the hospital. Back to the nameless hookups at the club. Back to the apps, the dick pics, the flirting, the shaming when they realized I was a little swishier than they thought or my voice was a little higher-pitched than they expected.

It was odd, not wanting to leave a place where people got sick and died. But here, they didn’t care that I was effeminate, or that I was hot. The nurses and doctors here just wanted to see me get better. They wanted to see me walk out of here as recovered as I could be to face the outside world again.

There was a certain comfort in knowing these people were doing their jobs, but it was a job that brought solace and helped me patch myself up. There was a comfort in knowing these people simply wanted me to be better, that they were dedicating their lives to helping so many people, and had no personal stakes in whether my survival meant having a go at my ass or flirting with me on an app. They just wanted me well.

And honestly, I appreciated it more than words could say.

“You don’t have to take what I say as law simply because of workplace hierarchy,” Farid said. “Outside of the office, I’m just another person. No one else. In fact, as your boss, I shouldn’t even be butting into your personal life. As someone who wants to be your friend, however, it’s up to you whether you want to listen to me or not.”

I offered the slightest grin and sipped on my coffee. It was kind of nice to hear Farid downplay himself. It made me a little less tense about my own situation, too. “Honestly, it’s just…a lot,” I said, trying to find the right words to explain everything going on in my head.

Financially, I was stable. I helped design an app and was now maintaining it and worked under Dan at our start-up to make sure the app was as bug-free and functional as possible. Emotionally, I was a mess, and anyone within a hundred-foot radius could see that.

Farid nodded. “That would seem to be an understatement, yes?” he asked, sipping his drink afterward and offering a cheeky smirk. “Considering what had gotten you into this mess in the first place.”

I sighed but offered a little smile of my own. “Yeah, I know,” I conceded. “I can’t pin the blame squarely on the girl and her brother. I mean, I can blame them for beating me up. They can totally rot in jail if the police actually do their jobs, but I wouldn’t count on it. I don’t blame them for reacting poorly, though, because I did sleep with someone who I shouldn’t have slept with.”

Farid shrugged. “Enjoying sex isn’t a sin, you know, much as the puritanical might want you to believe.”

I nodded. “I know. But I also know that sex for me is like…a release. And not just in the usual way that it is,” I explained. “It’s also an emotional release. It’s a way for me to feel alive, rather than like clockwork.”

“But you’re bothered by this behavior,” Farid said. It wasn’t so much a question, but a statement made from another one of his accurate observations.

“Honestly, yeah,” I replied, sipping on my own coffee and sighing. “At the same time, I don’t know if I can just…stop, you know? At this point, it’s almost like an addiction.”

Farid took the last bite off his doughnut and sipped his coffee to wash it down. “If it bothers you, then stop.”

I couldn’t help but raise my eyebrow at what he had said. “That’s your sage advice?”

Farid smirked. “I never claimed to be good at giving advice, just that I’m very good at listening.”

I pondered his words, and after a moment, I gave a little snort. A smile pulled at the corners of my lips. “I didn’t expect free therapy today when you visited, honestly,” I said. “I really don’t know how to take any of this.”

“Well,” Farid started to say, finishing up his coffee and setting the empty cup aside. He leaned a little closer and placed a warm hand over mine. There was a zing that rushed through my body from where his fingers touched the back of my hand. I almost wanted to pull away.

“You don’t need to think of it as anything more than friendly advice from someone with a vested interest in your well-being and happiness,” Farid finally said. “An interest that grows with each passing day. It’s not something I can aptly put a name on aside from that, but whatever this is does make me want to stick around to see whether or not this might work. Maybe it’ll grow into something more.”

I didn’t expect total honesty.

I gulped.

“But…why me?”

“Why not you?”

Farid’s question rattled me. It was so simple—three little words—and separated the Farid from mere moments ago, who was just a friend, to this new Farid, who suddenly came with limitless potential and all these possibilities.

And I was scared because I didn’t know what it all meant. He was a guy who clearly paid attention, and cared, and committed little details to memory, but was I enough? Was I worthy of all this attention? Was I ready for this kind of attention from a man who seemed to be stable, in more ways than one?

Not to mention, a guy who cared, who was romantic—those were men from movies. The real world didn’t have men like this. If it did, they certainly didn’t last very long. People could be cruel, and in some small ways, I felt like I was being cruel…but I was doing it to be kind, too. Farid didn’t deserve the constant looming darkness that I’d bring into his life.

“No offense, but I’m not really in the best place for anything serious,” I admitted.

“I think you’re exactly in the right place for something serious,” Farid retorted.

I tilted my head at him in question. “And what makes you say that?”

“Because anything other than serious, stable and grounding would make you lose yourself even more,” Farid replied matter-of-factly. “I can’t really explain it other than this gut feeling. Perhaps I’m working on a lot of assumptions, but it seems to me that anything less than serious would make you feel…empty.”

I looked at him. No, I stared, right into those amber-colored depths Farid had for eyes. “You know, your ability to read me is scary good, but it’s also scary in the way serial killers are. I hope you don’t wear my skin as a jacket when you’re done with me.”

Farid smirked. “But it’s such cute, smooth skin.”

A moment of silence passed between us, as Farid glanced back into my eyes, and then away. “Anyway,” he started, breaking the quiet. “I said I was interested in seeing where this goes, if it even goes anywhere, but I don’t know if you feel the same way.”

I scrunched up my face. “You mean like, if I want to go on a date, or something?”

“Not just a date. But we can start there. Multiple dates, hopefully,” Farid said. “You don’t know if you fit with a person on a single date, even though your perception of them could all but change in a single instant.”

“You’re gay?” I blurted out, and immediately cringed. “Shit, that was a terrible thing to say all of a sudden.”

Farid burst out laughing. “Yes, yes I am. Bisexual, to be exact.”

I gulped.

“You know, I’m surprised that you even want to date,” I said softly.

“Why is that?”

I blinked. “I don’t mean to be rude, but…isn’t there like, a cultural thing?”

“What cultural thing?” Farid tilted his head.

I shifted uneasily. “You know. You’re not…” I gestured into the air.

There was a moment of silence. Farid looked at me, his face as impassive as ever.

“You mean I’m not white,” Farid said. “And to clarify, I’m Pakistani on my mother’s side, and Arab on my father’s side.”

“Oh God, I’m putting my foot in my mouth, now, aren’t I?” I muttered, and Farid looked at me, highly amused. “I just…isn’t there like, a thing? A cultural thing?”

“Normally, yes, there would be. I understand what you’re getting at,” Farid said as calmly as possible, but the corners of his lips were quirking up into a smile. “But not in my case. I came out to my mother when I was eighteen. My father had passed when I was quite young. She was accepting. Also, I didn’t grow up in the Middle East. I’m from London.”

“God. I’m sorry about how I went about asking all that,” I said.

“Don’t be. I knew you would be quite curious, as I’m also curious about where you’re from,” Farid said, and grinned through the wince that most certainly appeared on my face. “Besides, I don’t see what any of this has to do with the fact that I admitted you’re interesting, and I want to spend more time with you.”

“I’m a mutt. Irish-German on my mother’s side, English-Danish on my father’s side,” I replied. “With little drops of Italian somewhere in there, but it’s all very repressed and white.”

Farid nodded, his eyes still trained on me like he was a hawk and I was this…rabbit he was about to pick up and eat, or something. Honestly, I was grasping at straws. I didn’t get why he was so focused on me.

“But…why me? You know how messy my entire situation is. Why…why me?” I asked. I was getting confused to the point of agitated. Whatever frayed wires there were in my head were telling me that this was too good to be true. This might have been—or most likely was, with one hundred percent certainty—a trick.

Farid regarded me intently and offered the slightest smirk. “You’re treating this as though I’ve asked you to move in with me. I just wanted to see if you maybe wanted to go on a date. Is it any different from a man you meet on an app, just because it’s me?”

I sighed and shook my head. “It’s not, it’s …”

Farid tilted his head. “It’s what, Noah?”

That telltale numbness slowly spread from my stomach and radiated outward, through my body. I tried to find the right words to tell Farid that none of this was really about him, but more about me. I didn’t know how to deal with a stranger who cared too much. I didn’t know how to deal with someone who was emotionally open enough to actually ask me, flat out, for a date—rather than the roundabout way that most people seemed to do. I didn’t know if I was worth all the effort he was putting into getting to know me, spending hours upon hours chatting and talking.

He was the one who was getting a bad catch, so to speak. If he were fishing, I would be the old, grimy boot that had somehow gotten into the water—not the prize catch. Not at all.

“I’m the lemon in this situation,” I blurted out loud, as the maelstrom of bad thoughts and self-criticism began to fill my head.

Farid raised an eyebrow at me. “Beg your pardon?”

“I’m the lemon,” I repeated. “You know? When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. I’m the very picture of making the best of a bad situation. Farid, it’s not that I don’t want to date you, because I do,” I said softly.

As I said those words, I realized them to be right. I did find myself curiously attracted to Farid, and I had been ever since we met. Just because we had spent hours talking, and just because I was in a hospital bed recovering, doesn’t mean that I forgot the little things that made Farid even more swelteringly hot than he probably was. From how he sat, I could see the neck of his shirt dip down to reveal that tell-tale trail of hair again. Earlier, when he took sips of his coffee, I could see his throat bob up and down. His biceps were on display, and every so often, he flexed, and it made me gulp.

Still, I knew it was a bad idea to push through with it. I knew it was a bad idea to get myself in a situation where I could ruin not only myself, but another person. I don’t know if I could ever handle that.

“But if you date me, I’m assuming it isn’t in the same way that the guys I meet on apps and in clubs would,” I finally answered. “You said it yourself. You want to see if this could turn into something more serious.”

He nodded. “I do.”

I parted my lips to say something, and that’s when Farid placed a hand on my cheek. It was a swift motion that brought his thumb up to gently caress my face, and I felt heat rush up faster than it ever had before.

He was so warm, but his palm was strangely both rough and smooth at the same time. All I could really feel was the heat of his hand pressed up against my face, and I reacted in a very visceral way. I had to stop the soft moan that bubbled up inside my chest from springing forth.

“You’re hesitating,” Farid said matter-of-factly. He’d had a hundred percent success rate on reading my emotions thus far, it seemed.

I nodded. “I’m scared.”

His thumb gently caressed my cheek. “I can see that,” he answered. “You’re overthinking things. I’m not asking you for the world—I’m asking you for a couple more hours, perhaps in the next couple of weeks, or months. I want to get to know you better. And I want you to get to know me, too, and see whether or not this might work out between us.”

“I know, but—” I started to say, but his thumb moved right above my lips, and he smiled.

“Didn’t you say that you wanted to have a date, at least?” he asked. “Give me one. Then we can see if there are more on the horizon.”

That stopped me in my tracks. One date. He wanted just one date. A single evening where we would see where this was going—if it was even going anywhere.

I sighed. The two sides dueling in my head were in agreement, at least, that one date wasn’t going to hurt.

“One date,” I finally agreed. And the way Farid smiled, it was like someone had told him he’d won the lottery or something. The reaction made me want to crack a smile of my own, but something deep inside was still dragging me down.

“Thank you, Noah,” he said. There was something more that he wanted to say, something that seemed to be on the tip of his tongue, but he kept it to himself. Instead, he gently rubbed his thumb over my cheek once more, then withdrew it.

I scrunched up my face. “You don’t need to thank me. It’s not like I did anything big or important. It’s just a date.”

Farid shrugged. “When someone gives you something you want, you thank them, right?”

He looked at me. I had to look away, but I couldn’t help but feel a little bubble of warmth spread through my stomach at the thought.

At the forwardness of his answer, I felt my cheeks heat up once more, the heat traveling from my gut and spreading through my body. I knew he was right, though, so I did nod.

Almost as soon as the moment had passed, in came the beautiful, pale doctor who had admitted me. Her lips were bright red, a contrast to her dark hair and her fair, snowy skin. It was almost as if she had been waiting this entire time for us to be done with what we were doing or saying before she barged in.

Maybe she was waiting.

“Doctor Savard,” I acknowledged. She had a beautiful name to go with how pretty she was. And when she looked at me with her icy blue eyes, I could only really gawk. Regardless of whether I was gay or straight, I knew she was out of my league.

“Hello there, Mister Linkletter,” came her soft, monotone voice. She pulled up her tablet and immediately started tapping and swiping on it.

“Please. Mister Linkletter is my father. You already know to call me Noah.” I smiled.

“And you already know you can call me Cece, yet here we are.” The smile on her face was a little awkward, and even though I could tell it was wholly against her nature, I appreciated her trying. “Your latest lab results are back, Noah.”

I tilted my head. “They don’t say anything bad, do they?”

“On the contrary,” Cece said, smiling. “Your labs are fine. You’re free and clear to go home by tomorrow. I’ll get the paperwork started so that you can be back on your feet ASAP.”

She gave a smile and a nod, did another little flourish of a swipe on her tablet, and then started walking out of the room without saying another word.

Just before Cece left, she gave me a little smile and a wink, tilting her head toward Farid, who was still looking right at me.

“You heard that? This is great news,” Farid said, placing a hand on my shoulder.

I felt my insides swoop slightly at the thought of a date with Farid looming so close on the horizon, now that I was about to be discharged. “Yeah,” I replied, looking right up at Farid.

Farid grinned. “You need to rest for a while longer. A proper date can wait, you know? But I hope you’re okay with me taking you home tomorrow.”

When Farid placed a hand over mine and I finally met his gaze once again, I felt all my worries melt away. Those amber-colored eyes melted everything away around me.

I could think about all my problems later.

For now, I could just enjoy this moment with him.

And when he broke the space between us, moving slowly, ever so slowly, until his lips touched my cheek and I felt the prickliness of his beard against my skin, I felt a flutter flow through my body in a way it never had before.