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the
    hangover that Virginia nursed him through), Brian resolved to tell
    Tate that he was gay, and it was love, and that Tate could stop
    playing the teenaged-girl-he-likes-me locker game with the
    customer who was his latest crush.
    O f course, he would come home from school that day and find
    Tate all excited about his latest date.
    Brian watched Tate spiking his hair, choosing the exact right
    sparkly shirt and ripped jeans, pulling his favorite leather cuffs and
    studded collar out of his drawer, and thought, I’m right here!
    Dammit, Tate, you don’t need al that shit, I’m right HE RE !
    “Are you sure this is a good idea?” he’d ended up asking
    weakly. “You don’t real y know anything about this guy.” Aw,
    geez… lame much, Brian? “I mean—” he closed his eyes and
    swallowed,“—maybe you should have him here for dinner, or, you
    know, go to the movies or something.”
    Tate looked at him incredulously. “I’m not a girl in the Victorian
    age, Brian. I want to get laid, remember? I mean, I’m giving it up!
    It’s here! It’s free! How bad can this go?”
    It’s free? “Well, maybe it shouldn’t be free!” Brian snapped.
    “Maybe it’s more valuable than that. Maybe you should put a price
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    40
    on it, dammit, and wait for a relationship instead of some guy you
    think is going to pop your cherry just be-fucking-cause!”
    Tate’s body had given a convulsive jerk—yup, things just got
    too intense for him, no doubt about it. “I’m not into anything
    serious,” he lied. He pulled out face powder—he got his in the
    shade of ghostly white, and Brian reached out a shaking hand and
    took it from him.
    “Don’t,” he said gruffly, and Tate looked at him, surprised.
    “You put that shit on so no one has to see you. I like you. If this guy
    doesn’t like you for you, he doesn’t deserve to touch you.”
    Tate’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down several times in
    quick succession, and the skin around his high cheekbones grew
    tight. “Look, G ranola,” he tried to joke, “not everybody can carry off
    the homegrown look like you do, okay? Some of us need a little
    help.” He reached out to take his face powder back, and Brian
    found he’d clenched his fingers around it fiercely.
    “You spend your food money on this shit, Tate. I may be
    ‘granola,’ but I’ve got a feeling for what’s good for you. This date…
    this idea… these things are not good for you.”
    Tate sighed and looked down at his hand reaching for the
    powder. It was the hand with the scars, and although Tate had the
    entire sleeve tattoo done by this time (thank you, scholarship), the
    hand was too scarred to take the ink. It was, in fact, disfigured.
    There had been some muscle damage during the fire and two of his
    fingers and the side of his palm were only partial y functional, as
    well as withered and twisted. He had a variety of half-fingered
    gloves in leather, wool, and cotton, most of them black, to cover his
    right hand, but he wasn’t wearing one of those now. Although it was
    the hand he wrote with, very few people guessed how hard he had
    to work to make that happen.
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    41

    “It’s sweet of you to worry,” he said, looking at his fingers as
    they touched Brian’s. Brian looked, too, and deliberately moved his
    hand so that it covered Tate’s.
    “I care about you,” he said roughly, and his heart started
    hammering wildly. This is it! I’m going to tel him! I’m going to tel him and he won’t go!
    And then there was a different sort of hammering. Tate’s
    shoulders spasmed and he dropped the powder. The case
    shattered and the little cake inside crumbled on the peeling vinyl of
    the floor.
    “F uck!” they both said in tandem, except Tate was crouching
    on the ground, picking up the pieces, and Brian was stepping
    around him to go get the broom from the kitchen.
    “I’ll get it!” Tate commanded. “Just get the door.”
    The hammering