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takes off his shoes and carries them in and up to his room, walking past Milo without speaking a word. The sun is setting, and the room has grown very dim, but he doesn’t dare turn up the lights.
    When his father finally comes back, the first thing he does is get a garbage bag from under the sink. He snaps it open and holds it next to the table.
    “Am I supposed to throw this away?” Milo fidgets. He’s scared of speaking, but holding his tongue when he’s meant to reply is just as bad.
    “Read them all. Every grade and every note.”
    John Graham is an imposing man, over six feet tall and well built. A life of leadership in the communities they’ve lived in have taught him how to project. When he speaks, people listen. His eyes, a lighter version of Milo’s, are incredibly changeable. Milo has seen him use them to charm and disarm people. His father is good at manipulating people and knows how to change his expression to fit each situation.
    At home, he doesn’t need to change anything. Here, he’s himself first; the look in his eyes, steel and disappointment, is as natural as his breath.
    Milo swallows and forces himself to maintain eye contact as long as he can. The last thing he wants to do now is to show his father his fear or any weakness. He can’t help that he’s flushed, because his coloring always gives him away, but he’ll be damned if he’ll let his hands or his voice shake. He knows that for every poor grade and every conversation deemed inappropriate, he’ll be punished. The least he can do is take it like a man.
    °
    He can’t tell if his father has become harder over the years, or if his expectations are more demanding, or if it’s just that Milo can grasp how awful his home life is in a different way because he’s older, but everything feels like too much, all the time. Some days he wakes up feeling as though he can’t breathe, days when his heart hurts from beating so hard, days when it’s almost impossible to get out of bed.
    The free time he does get, scant as it is, he tries to spend at Andrew’s house. Andrew’s family knows that Milo’s home life sucks. His parents are kind and make room for him every way they can. But as things escalate in his house, and as his father becomes rougher, Milo finds himself keeping secrets from Andrew again. When he was a kid, his father rarely bruised him; his words and anger and booming voice and threats had been too much and enough to keep both Milo and his mother cowed. Sometimes now he has bruises from his father grabbing his arms, and a couple of times he’s been slapped, but that doesn’t leave marks.
    What he can’t hide is his fear, the overwhelming anxiety that comes over him—not from Andrew, because it always hits him when he’s with Andrew. Andrew says he thinks it’s because Milo feels safe with him. All Milo knows is that after it happens; when his breath comes so short it feels like his heart will come out of his chest, when his vision goes dark with panic, he feels weak and embarrassed.
    One day Andrew pulls him into his closet and closes the door, so that his voice is the only thing guiding Milo through breathing and calming, and eventually crawls out to get Milo tissues. Milo cries into his own arms, folded up on his knees, shaking and wishing the floor would swallow him for being so childish and fucked up. Andrew is always the calm in the storm, and when Milo needs it, he always puts his arms around him or lets Milo lean against him, and never complains about the time he takes up when Andrew surely has better things to do.
    “I used to do this when I was little,” Milo says. It’s dark and Andrew’s body is warm—too warm. He’s sweating in the closet because of the stifling air and the heat of his own breakdown seeping through his skin. But it’s good.
    “I remember; you told me once,” Andrew whispers. Milo cries, silently, and shakes with his face buried against Andrew’s shoulder. Andrew’s all bony angles and