longing, and what quenches it

by fifty_seven

Summary:

It's a lucky thing to be able to treat someone kindly. Lando and Oscar find different ways to be grateful.

Notes:

this fic is mostly 100% done! i'll be updating it as i finish editing the individual chapters. thank you to @adrenalines for beta reading for me ^^ and talking to me about bug lando intricacies...

Chapter 1

"Did you have any thoughts you wanted to share, Lando?"

The man in question is bending his book at the corner, flitting all the pages across his skin and emitting a sound not unlike insect wings buzzing against plastic blinds. His eyes are wide open and his body pitched forward in his chair as if he wanted to participate, but he's staring at the space in between Oscar and the man in the chair beside him, blank and unresponsive to his being addressed.

"Okay, then why don't we move onto the next chapter if nobody else has something they'd like to bring up?"

Their host pastes a clean, unforced smile on his face in response to the silence he receives. Oscar sees Lando sit back in his chair and flip to the appropriate chapter out of the corner of his eye accordingly and decides he's probably not deaf, at least.

Oscar himself hadn't even actually finished the reading for the week, but he doesn't mind the spoilers. He hardly comes here to participate, anyway. This is just homework.

It's a sci-fi compendium they'd started a month ago, twenty or so short narratives compiled into a little over two hundred pages. Oscar isn't terribly interested in scifi, but his attendance here is the only thing that actually keeps him reading, these days. Considering his line of work he thinks it's only natural, anyway.

This last story they've read is a twenty-page chronicle about a semi-sentient nanobot that can time-travel if it thinks hard enough about it, or something. It's metaphorical, Oscar can tell by the way it's written; it has all the hallmarks of that pseudo-wisdom books like these always try to capitalize on even when they aren't really saying anything Oscar hadn't already figured out by himself. He's always been interested in the nature of robots among humans though, so he entertains it for the time being.

From his angle with the rest of the cafe he can see most of the other people in attendance, as well as the rest of the cafe patrons huddled over their drinks and the main exit. Off to one side is the host who had just gone ignored—Charles, Oscar thinks his name is. He sits in a shoddy low-backed office chair lacking wheels while everyone else has seats on the couches or armchairs or floor cushions formed into a circle, as if he was too humble to be comfortable while he arrested everyone's attention at every opportunity and laughed far louder than he ever really needed to.

Oscar hasn't heard the names of anyone besides him and Lando, who looked like he wanted to be anywhere else right now. There's about ten other members apart from them, but the three of them are the only people who have been coming consistently for as long as they have been.

He thinks it's funny how many different personalities you can find within one hobby. Charles is loud and sunny, Lando silent and angry; Oscar imagines himself awkward and forgettable, probably. One of the other members is an older lady whose book always trembled in her hands (Charles had offered to set her up with printed copies of the stories individually, thinking that twenty pages stapled together were lighter than the entire book, but she declined), and on either side of her were two middle school aged girls who seemed to have no interest in speaking with each other but would readily converse with anyone else in the group if the desire arose.

Oscar spends more time thinking about the people around him than the actual reading when he comes here. He doesn't mind it. They were at least a little interesting most weeks, if not individually then the way they interacted with each other.

It's nice to people watch, is all.

When the clock strikes 6:45 their conversation starts to wind down, and by 6:55 they're all usually lingering awkwardly around, chatting on swaying feet and making themselves extremely marketable background models for passersby on the street outside.

Oscar never stays to join them. He's just zipped up his bag with a stand when from the corner of his eye he sees a jerky motion and the sound of someone stumbling. He barely sees Lando catching himself on the edge of a bookshelf while the man he's glaring at seems to have not even noticed that he'd practically bowled Lando over on his way to the door.

Lando straightens his coat over his shoulder with a frown and keeps his eyes to the ground as he leaves. Glancing around, it doesn't seem like anyone but Oscar witnessed the incident.

He knows what that's like. Shrugging his bag on his back, he thinks he'll forget he ever saw anything before he even makes it to his front door.

~

Another time, Oscar bumps into Lando while they're returning their coffee mugs to the counter.

The meeting has already dispersed, but Oscar stuck around to try their coffee of the day advertised in chalk above the register; it was expectedly subpar. He hadn't realized Lando was still somewhere in the cafe, too; when they bump into each other, Lando flinches backwards hard enough to nearly trip over his own feet, eyes wide with something that can really only be called terror.

"Sorry," Oscar says, but Lando's eyes just linger in the middle space between them before he reluctantly drags them up to meet Oscar's. His eyes are a strained shade of blue, hesitantly hazel and completely unreadable. His lips are parted slightly, looking for all the world like Oscar's just committed an outrageous crime against him and he was shocked into silence.

Lando doesn't say anything. It's an awkward stretch to reach between them to set his mug down on the return tray but he does so anyway before quickly turning on his heel and absconding without a word. Oscar, nonplussed, only feels a little bad at staring at the quiet flurry he makes packing up his laptop and notebook and rushing out the front doors.

He's still wondering about Lando's shyness the following week, too. In between a long tangent Charles is entertaining with one of the other members about the author's generation of writers that nobody but the two of them can follow and the listless and uncomfortable page flipping from everyone else, Lando excuses himself to the bathroom quietly enough that only Oscar seems to notice.

He's gone for long enough that the conversation changes and he forgets that Lando's even left. It's on his way to the bathroom himself that he nearly jumps when he finds Lando standing over a sink at the far end washing his hands; a combination of the rush of tap water and the intensity of his focus on his hands has Oscar's entrance going presumably unnoticed, but for a few moments he feels rooted to the spot, frozen. Lando is meticulous about the scrubbing of his hands and his eyes seem distant; for a moment Oscar swears he mutters something under his breath or else the movement of his lips was a trick of the light, too.

Whatever it is, he'll never know. He slips into a stall as silently as possible and holds himself deathly still against the door while the sound of water running drags on and on and on, Oscar's anticipation for when Lando will deem his hands clean almost enough to suspend time itself.

It stops eventually, of course. Just before the creak of the door opening is a rush of frustrated air that Oscar still isn't sure if it was real or not, but it almost sounded like the word idiot.

Or it could have been a cough or a shuffle of fabric. He doesn't know. Oscar's never known how to trust his senses, not fully. And maybe it's his senses that don't trust him, why he still manages to run into Lando after their meeting that day too—except this time it's before either of them have finished their drinks. The result is the slipping of the ceramic mug from Lando's hand and crashing to the floor between them, while Oscar accidentally spills half of his own drink onto Lando's clothes.

Oscar doesn't look up but he can feel the entire cafe turn their heads in their direction; quickly two of the employees behind the register come in a flurry with a mop and a bucket, but Lando is frozen stock-still with hot coffee painting an ever-growing dark stain on his t-shirt while the rest that didn't make it there is pooling on the floor around his shoes.

Oscar's too, really, but it's hard to pay attention to himself. Lando's eyes are darting around with blank, close-mouthed terror while the cashier mops up the mess, his feet frozen while the gray tendrils pass over the toes if his shoes pathetically.

"Here, do you want to dry your shirt? I'm sorry."

Oscar has the wad of napkins held out in front of him, but Lando just looks between them and his shirt silently—it's the same eyes as before. Empty and petrified.

His heart squeezes. He wishes he knew what to say. Eventually Lando finds himself again, taking a step or two backwards before fleeing the cafe with his things—one of the waitresses behind the counter calls to him about a complimentary to-go drink but he pays her no attention, nearly crashing into someone else while he makes his disturbed exit.

"Sorry about that," Oscar apologizes to the staff once the mess is cleaned up. He accepts their offer of a complimentary drink, maybe in some half-bid at apologizing on Lando's behalf, too.

The only free seat for him is the one Lando had occupied. When he gets there he sits on something sharp—with a stand he finds a pen on the wooden seat, fine-tipped with a logo on the side that resembles an open book with a heart in the center.

It looks vaguely familiar, but he doesn't know. Aware of all the ways he's unintentionally bothered Lando, Oscar feels guilty at the thought of returning it; but then he thinks maybe, if anything, this can be the time Lando can feel that he can look at Oscar with something other than fear. It looks expensive anyway, a hefty weight in his hand that betrays its quality. Mind made up, Oscar pockets it and finishes his coffee quietly. When he leaves, he thinks this is as good a motivator as any to keep up with the reading this coming week.

~

The thing about leaving the house, Lando knows, is that anything could happen. Literally anything. It never mattered what pains he took to make himself as invisible as possible; the more he tried to disengage, the more the world came tumbling towards him at terminal velocity.

This was the price Lando had to pay in order to keep his autonomy. He supposes it could be worse.

He's trying to be positive about it. He really is. The commute is a pain in the ass but the cafe had nice drinks and the chairs were comfortable. It was always nice to have an excuse to read something new, too; sci-fi isn't really something he would develop an interest in on his own, but it was a nice change of pace. They're still on the same anthology as they have been for the last week or two, a silvery book reading Ready-Made Bodhisattva in blocky, metallic font on the soft cover. The titular story was the very first in the compendium. Lando didn't find himself particularly drawn in then, and he still doesn't 150 pages in.

The other members of the reading group did, apparently, especially the two middle school girls. Twelve or thirteen is just about the age to be engaged by the question of the material of what it meant to be human, he thinks; the older men keep trying to steer the conversation towards the religious aspect of the piece, speaking authoritatively on biblical matters that Lando has no clue about.

The atmosphere is lighter today, which has him a little on edge. Amicability doesn't lend itself to being left alone. As he listens to the conversation develop he takes mental notes on the interpretive dispositions of the members; the two middle school girls, for example, tend to latch onto one character or another (which Lando thinks is bad practice)—typically the ones diametrically opposed within the narrative, which seemed likely considering their ongoing psychic warfare—while Charles almost always starts off his anecdotes with excerpts from the author's biography or a tweet he found interesting in their home page, or something. The two older men seem to just enjoy frowning and tapping their feet when their ideas are challenged, while the remaining members just agree with the majority opinion if they aren't drowned out by the more gregarious members in the first place.

Then there's the other guy. He's sitting directly across from Lando today, his ankles locked around each other while pristine white socks rise past his ankles and settle around pale, hairy calves. Lando doesn't lift his eyes any further than that. If he does, something might happen.

The truth is that despite their unfortunate encounters in the past, Lando has yet to categorize him as anything other than the guy who bites his nails. He also held the title of being the quietest person here aside from Lando. His head is often bowed just like his own, and the moments he isn't biting his nails could generally find him poking and scratching at the skin around his throat or pulling at his shirt hem while he listens to people talk. He's come every week for the last month just like Lando has. He hardly seemed present at all.

Maybe he doesn't really want to attend these meetings, either. Lando's only heard him speak those times they had bumped into each other, and in any case he could never remember what it is he had even said or what his voice sounded like.

"And you, Lando? Did you have a passage or quote you liked the most?"

Lando's heart rate skyrockets. The copy of their book he'd managed to snag is paperback and worn beyond its years. The pages are soft in his fingers where he flicks through them at the corner, a low buzzing punctuating the silence while they wait for him to respond.

He doesn't know why Charles does this. Or rather, he gets why, but he really wishes he'd just drop it. He really makes it a point every week to be as unnoticable and forgettable as possible. It'd be better for everyone if he just forgot about Lando rather than politely try and include him at every opportunity. The last thing he comes here for, the last thing he needs, is inclusion.

It's usually three seconds before Charles gives up and moves them along. Lando is more than familiar with short-term stall tactics.

Somewhere off to his side, one of the older men makes an annoyed grunt.

"Don't be rude, man, at least shake your head or something," he chides angrily.

Lando keeps fiddling with the corners of his book pages. They smelled like lavender and ocean salt when he'd first flipped open the worn pages at home. He'd held the yellowed paper and dulled print to his nose and felt privileged to step into another person's life, even if just for a moment.

"Let's just move on, shall we?" Charles offers hastily, and so they do.

His heart isn't going to settle until he's home, he thinks with some weariness. These stupid things never work out. He doesn't know why nobody will believe him.

Later, Lando is halfway through packing up his things when someone taps his shoulder. He turns around with a jump, reeling backwards and nearly tripping on the leg of a chair.

Jesus Christ, what? Lando thinks angrily through the shock as he recollects his balance. It's nail-biter, standing before him with a hand held forward awkwardly like he wanted to reach out and help but didn't.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to scare you."

Lando's hands aren't trembling but his heart is. The man's lips part as if he's about to say something else but then he freezes, dark eyes burning into Lando's own and breaking his nerve.

He dips his head and mumbles something Lando doesn't catch before skirting around him towards the bathroom. Lando watches the door swing closed behind him and grips his bag strap tightly.

This is awful. He wants to go home. But he told himself he'd get some work done today. He doesn't want his productivity compromised just because some weirdos tried to talk to him.

There's only one free space left in the cafe, a wide four-person table beneath the air conditioning and devoid of any privacy, almost dead-center in the entire establishment. He doesn't like it, but he doesn't need to. He just needs a place to work. There's an outlet built into the wooden legs anyway, so it's not so bad. He sets his bag down to claim his seat and returns to the counter for a drink; he recognizes nail-biter's sweater from behind and keeps a more-than-healthy distance behind him in line, lest he try and attempt conversation with him again.

His laptop has barely powered on when his wishful thinking is exposed as such. A shadow falls over the table and when Lando looks up nail-biter is back, hovering at the side of the table with a drink of his own held in both hands.

"Mind if I sit with you? There's nowhere else."

It's a wide table, wide enough that Lando would have to stand a little to reach his arm over to the far side. He takes the seat just opposite him when he doesn't respond, and suddenly Lando feels like he's had a horrible spotlight cast over him.

Nail-biter doesn't try to speak to him. He sips from his drink and scrolls something on his phone, expressionless. Lando types in his laptop password and opens up his work email and their latest manuscript, but it's impossible to focus. Something is about to happen, he knows it. He doesn't want to be caught off guard.

"You don't have to say or do anything if you don't want to, you know," nail-biter suddenly says, almost on cue. "That guy's just a dickhead."

Lando knows. He doesn't need to be told. His eyes don't rise above the edge of his laptop screen. He doesn't want to answer. His toes are curling with terror and he's hyper aware of how dry the skin of his hands are, like they'll start cracking and scoring any moment now. When Lando doesn't reply he says,

"My name is Oscar, by the way. If you ever need it."

Lando doesn't know what that means. Why would he need anything from him? Annoyance tickles at him beneath the skin. Something always fucking happens. Oscar keeps fucking happening. Lando really can't believe he's being subjected to this.

He doesn't have a choice. His heart will keep beating. Oscar is quiet after that, quiet enough that before long Lando is able to entirely forget his presence in the first place.

~

The atmosphere at the reading group is different, today.

For a long time, Oscar thinks he's just imagining it. He's actually caught up with the rest of the members this week, and though he's not exactly eager to share his thoughts on it, it feels basically nice to be in the loop about something for once.

They don't seem as talkative as usual, though, or at least not as forthcoming. There are always these intermediate pauses throughout the conversations, or to Oscar they're more than pauses—they're moments where the air seems to squeeze and compress, uncomfortably constricting them around the throat and the ears until they're freed by one anecdote or another from someone brave enough to speak up.

And someone always does. The snakish squeeze of the air is painful for them, he can tell. Oscar gets pulled to and fro by the rhythm of it, eyes trained on the Persian rug in the center of their meeting space while the heart of the group constricts with some pained tension before kicking out again with relief at the momentary space to breathe. If Oscar lets his eyes unfocus he notices that everyone's feet are turned somewhat at an angle, otherwise it's their knees or their shoulders; they all twist inward towards Oscar like they're waiting for him to speak, anticipating it.

It's not true. They aren't actually looking at him. Right now they're looking at Charles, who's in a poofy red coat today despite the tepid warmth, who Oscar thinks has actually been talking for quite a while, but he isn't sure. He has nice clean shoes too, and rings banded around slim fingers. He doesn't look like someone with an interest in sci-fi at all.

Oscar keeps watching him talk because it's interesting, the way he holds himself in this world. He has his head held high and his eyes are darting this way and that like he wants to make eye contact with everyone at once, and he sure has no qualm with making the attempt. Oscar notices as his eyes swing a little further left than they had been before, and suddenly his face dims a little as if struck by something, a half-flinch that he dodges by forcing himself to smile wider, twisting the gain knob just a little to compensate.

Oscar follows where his eyes had been scorned and sees what had unnerved him. Lando sits there in a dark shirt with his shoulders curled in, dark hair topping bright blue eyes that look outwards from his dark eyelashes and the deep shadow of his brow. With his bowed head and unfriendly posture and the intensity of his gaze, it looks like he's imagining all the ways he could skin their host while extracting the most screams.

It's not really a glower Oscar can tell, but it's clearly unnerving everyone around him with how they angle their bodies away from that harrowing dark spot in their otherwise warm reading room.

When their meeting is over, Lando is the first one out of the cafe in a frustrated hurry, obvious enough that even the other members cast a nervous glance at the door before shrugging amongst themselves and exhaling a relieved breath and pretending they hadn't seen anything at all.

Oscar has no inclination to pretend alongside them. He follows Lando out the door, down the street where he's carrying himself on swift feet in the same direction Oscar needs to go. He nearly jumps when he rounds the corner and finds that the distance between them has closed exponentially—Lando is stopped at a berm near the bus stop and Oscar is close enough to see the tears at the bottom of his bag where his laptop is poking through at the corner; he can see, too, his mismatched socks and the slight angle at the ends of his ears.

He hasn't noticed Oscar. His attention has been fully captured by a little dog that's wagging a curled tail and staring up at him excitedly, pink tongue lolling out of its mouth while Lando squats down to curl fingers into its head. The dog yips at him with joy and presses up to his knees to paw at his hands and his arms, and Lando is receptive to the begging, getting down into a full kneel so he can rub at either side of the dog's neck while it tries to lick at his face. Oscar assumes it's a stray given the lack of a collar, but Lando plays with it like it were his own dog, and when he turns his face just enough Oscar can see as clear as day the reciprocal joy on his face, his smile completely eradicating that blank frustration he's so used to.

Oscar doubles back around the corner as quiet as he can and takes a detour back to where his car is parked.

~

"So, how have your past two weeks been?"

Oscar's therapist sits across from him, legs crossed with a closed notebook and pen in her lap, watching him patiently. He's heard before that aspiring counselors and other psychiatric people sometimes have to speak with criminals in prison as part of their training. Whenever he meets with his therapist, he feels like he can imagine perfectly well both what it would feel like to be one of those prisoners, poked and prodded from behind iron bars, and what it would feel like to be the person with the stick, staring a lesser-than variation of yourself in the eye and wondering what is to be gleaned from such a meeting.

"Fine," Oscar responds to her. "I've just been going to work and going home. And I go to the reading group you recommended, sometimes."

"Oh, have you now?" She flips open her notebook, a little yellow thing, and scribbles something down. "How has that been for you?"

"It's okay," Oscar shrugs. "Sometimes I don't do the reading. But I go anyway. Because you told me to. For homework."

She hums an affirmative. "Have you made any friends there?"

Oscar shakes his head no. His therapist smiles at him, easy and analytical like psychologist types always are.

"Your posture is relaxed today," she observes, and Oscar can only assume she's right because he wouldn't know one way or the other.

"I've been okay," he says again.

She clicks the pen again and holds it to her notebook once more, this time anticipatory.

"Have you had any more violent thoughts since our last session?"

~

When Oscar gets to the cafe today, there's a sheet of printer paper taped to the front of the door announcing in bold letters:

NO READING GROUP TODAY 4/21/2025 DUE TO EMERGENCY

I'M SORRY!

He stares and reads it thrice over before it sinks in that he won't be seeing Lando today.

Or he will, maybe. Maybe he's already inside working on his laptop like usual. When he peeks inside, the only people he sees that he recognizes are one of the middle school girls and the father that usually comes to pick her up afterwards. They're sitting in the same seats he and Lando had taken for themselves the last time they were here. Seeing their new occupants defile the memory is uncomfortable. Maybe he and Lando should find their own cafe.

It's stepping out, though, that the man Oscar is thinking of materializes directly in front of him. He has a hand held out like he was going to reach for the door, but he steps back with shock upon seeing Oscar.

"Oh. Hi," he greets Lando. "There's no reading group today. Some kind of emergency. I was just stepping in—" To see if you were here, he doesn't want to admit, "—to see if anyone else was here."

Oscar watches Lando process the information with a single blink. He follows Oscar with his eyes as he lets the door close behind them and steps away so as not to block it, and then it's just the two of them there on the sidewalk together, the late afternoon sun stretching their shadows across the concrete. The array of buildings along the road blocks them from most of the light, but the intersection further down has a warm glow where the shadow of their concrete jungle doesn't quite make it to the center.

"There's a park near here," Oscar says, thinking about how he used to spend time there after school sometimes before heading home. "It's a nice day for a walk if you're free." There's a vending machine there too that sold ice cream and popsicles he's always liked, and the walking path is wide and shaded. It could be nice, maybe.

Lando's lips press together lightly, eyes dashing down to the sidewalk in thought before he turns his body to Oscar in full as if to say, lead the way.

Oscar's eyes get a little sore with how often he keeps looking to the side to make sure Lando is behind him still. He's also aware of the fact that there's no motion map of Lando in his mind—this is the first time they'll be spending time together upright. Right now all he can glean is the fact that Lando is dedicated to following him a pace behind, unwilling to even let Oscar slow down so they can walk side by side.

The park is only a few blocks down the road and generally isn't terribly populated once the sun starts going down. He can already smell the flowering trees in the warm breeze that blows just as they make it to the entrance; on the walking trail inch and silk worms dangle from the branches overhead, spinning in the air like the baubles Oscar sees on people's patios sometimes.

Lando seems more willing to stick closer to him here, he notices, but maybe it's just to keep out of the way of the occasional cyclist. Oscar doesn't know. He seems interested in the inchworms dangling from the treetops, craning his neck upward as they walk by them like he would snatch them from the air if he could.

"I used to collect bugs here as a kid," Oscar tells him. "I had a little plastic cup I would keep in my room and I'd just pile everything I could get in there and look at them all inside."

Lando doesn't look at him, but Oscar can see the smile crawling up into his eyes. It feels like he's won something.

At the center of the park is a grove of oak trees, tall and thick enough that the shadow they cast on the ground below is significantly cooler than other shaded areas. Lando follows Oscar off the walking path to some benches arranged in a circle beneath a pergola formed by woody vines. Oscar leaves a space for Lando beside him when he sits, but he doesn't take the silent invitation. Instead Oscar watches as he paces forward, eyes trained on the stone foundation of a little water fountain. He bends himself low and disappears behind it, only his hair sticking out above the mouthpiece; there's a sharp movement and then Lando is righting himself again, his fingers coiled around something small.

"What is it?" asks Oscar as he returns to him, and Lando opens his hands to reveal a little yellow-brown lizard, the eyes on either side of its head petrified with shock. Lando has its tail gently hooked and pinched between his fingers so it can't escape. He passes a thumb over the rubbery skin softly, inspecting it with interest.

"Pretty good eye," Oscar approves. He sets his hand down on the bench beside Oscar and releases the lizard, which immediately scurries between the planks of the bench back to freedom.

They walk through the grove a little more. The trunks of the trees have been pretty badly vandalized over the years. Beneath the little metal placards nailed into the wood, most of them starting with Fagaceae, are stone- and key-carved pairs of initials usually accompanied by at least one heart. Oscar spies one or two that have been crossed out as if clawed by an animal and wonders how many pairings advertised on the old tree bark have really lasted. When he points them out to Lando, he seems only dimly interested.

There's one tree with a wide split in its trunk and thick branches that bend towards the ground like a slide with applied weight. Oscar doesn't give Lando a warning before he gets his foot on the bark and hauls himself upward, Lando turning to watch him with puzzlement as if he didn't know trees were a place a person could be.

"Do you climb?" Oscar calls down to him. He doesn't respond, but he's still looking.

"I can help you up," he tries again with an outstretched hand, which Lando regards with disinterest.

He isn't sure what he expected, really, or what he had wanted to happen. Lando looks to his left and his right before peeling his bag off and settling between two heavy roots of the tree, legs crossing each other and his hands splaying in the short grass. From above all Oscar can see are his dark curls and the way they tip over to the side when Lando lays himself down in the grass before rolling over to lay flat on his back. His eyes are squinted against dappled light that falls over his brow, but if he minds Oscar wouldn't be able to tell.

He realizes his thigh burns a little with the position he's holding himself in, so he hefts himself up to the next highest branch. Lando's eyes blink open just for a moment to watch leaves fall down from Oscar's weight shaking them down, and even with the vertical distance his eyes seem to glow golden with the light.

If Oscar was a little less body-aware, it'd be easy to imagine himself toppling forward out of the tree as he peers down at Lando and breaking his face or something. As a preventative measure he tilts his head up the opposite way, and spots a streak of blue waving somewhere behind a particularly bushy branch. Pushing it out of the way he finds a lone flower bursting from a woody stem, its innards a soft yellow framed by four frond-shaped blue petals.

Oscar knows all about late blooming. He plucks it carefully from the base, tucks it gently into his pocket, and lowers himself back down to earth.

"Lando, do you like flowers?"

Lando doesn't indicate yes or no, but he sits up and watches Oscar expectantly, curious.

"Here." Oscar holds out the little flower in front of him but Lando only returns the gesture with a hand face-up so that Oscar has to deliver it into his palm directly.

His face turns sunny, eyes screwing up into crescents while a smile splits his face in two to reveal a slight gap in his two front teeth. His eyebrows rise to meet their own peaks above cat-curled eyes and he looks like a completely different person, all of the muscles on his face in perfect tandem with whatever is going on behind cold eyes. Lando twists the little blue flower in between his index and them at the stem, watching as their blue petals spin out and blur like a parasol being twisted in the breeze.

The moment doesn't last long. There are voices of joggers coming from somewhere beyond the grove and Lando jumps, crushing the flower in his hand while his eyes widen and body stiffens, staring dead at a pair coming up around the trail bend. They pass by talking and laughing loudly, and Oscar has to resist the urge to shield them from Lando—or shield Lando from them. When they're gone he won't meet Oscar's eyes, and the distance between them on the walking path is wider than it was before. When they part ways back at the cafe, Lando seems near catatonic.

Maybe I shouldn't have taken him anywhere, Oscar thinks as he twists the key in his front door later, but that doesn't seem right. Lando didn't strike him as someone who couldn't handle himself. He's just skittish, maybe.

There's no conclusion to come to in the end, none besides the reassurance that Oscar might not be a complete lost cause after all. He'd made a stranger smile. That had to be worth something.

~

Oscar isn't his guardian angel, but he certainly had an apparent knack for both timely and untimely appearances.

Lando really hadn't been in the mood for book club that day. His head was frazzled. He wanted an ice pack. He was hungry and nauseous, confused and irritable; he'd hardly understood what Oscar was even saying to him at the cafe entrance, his well-bitten nails restless at his sides like he himself was eager to get away somewhere.

Lando didn't know. It seemed too easy. Oscar had asked him if he had wanted to follow and Lando wasn't going to turn down the opportunity for a well-needed distraction.

Oscar had spoken to him quite a bit on their walk, babbling with a free giddiness about his favorite spots in the park and the quality of the cicada skins sticking out erroneously on tree trunks and the backs of the wooden benches. It made perfect sense to him that he had leapt into the tree without hesitation; when Lando had looked up at him through the branches, he had remembered what it had felt like as a child too look up at the sky and wish he could fall right into that wide, empty blue.

~

Oscar is five pages to being caught up with everybody else at the reading group today, but he couldn't quite swing it. He had been sitting in his car in the parking lot trying to skim through the last few pages but there was construction going on in the next building over and there was only so many times he could reread the same paragraph without understanding a single word before he had to put himself out of his misery. It's only on the way inside that he remembers that he doesn't really need to contribute to their conversations as much as he just had to look interested; and more than that, participation meant far less to him than it did being able to sit next to Lando. Even though they never say anything to each other, even though Lando never looks at him, even though neither of them have anything to contribute to the group itself. He's just exciting, somehow. Oscar has gotten really used to the way he fiddles with the pages in his book and the loose threads on the side of his pants, the flowery notes he takes in his little pocket journal and the otherwise complete stillness he holds himself in, like he wants to blend into the background and commit to anonymity.

It's a comforting image. Sitting beside the unknown. Lando is already inside when Oscar arrives, and the only acknowledgement he gets is a slight raise of his head when he sits beside him, his eyes hardly rising above Oscar's knee.

It's thrilling. Oscar feels like a pervert.

Midway through the meeting, Lando makes a silent exit to the bathroom. He's absent for long enough that Oscar forgets he's left at all; he remembers when he excuses himself to the same place ten minutes to the meeting's end in his footsteps and hears an angry voice filtering down the short hall to the toilets.

"...answer me or not?" it echoes angrily off the tile. "I know you fucking hear me. What's your problem?"

Oscar's heart rises to his throat. Peeking around the corner carefully, he takes in the scene: there's a burly man standing with his back to Oscar, threat obvious in his posture while Lando is pinched in between the wall and the edge of the sink, still-wet hands glistening where they squeeze at the sides of his pants. He hasn't noticed Oscar come in because his eyes are trained on the floor, his brows pinched like if he hopes hard enough the man leering at him will disappear.

"Look at me when I'm fucking talking—"

At the same moment the man raises a hand to reach out to Lando Oscar steps into the corridor fully, sucking in a breath to shout at the stranger—but just as he does so Lando moves too, finally lifting his head to look at his assailant. Oscar can't see his face properly at this angle, but he can see the burly man's spine freeze up and flinch, the hand that had been reaching out to grab at Lando now frozen mid-air. He takes a jerky step backwards before deciding to flee completely; he jumps when he meets Oscar's eye on the way out of the bathroom too, swearing under his breath and mumbling something about the freaks in this part of town.

Lando isn't unlike a frozen animal when he gets to him. He's watching Oscar warily, eyes trained on his collarbone or maybe somewhere just past his shoulders. Oscar doesn't mind the hostility being aimed at him. It's a hard world to be in.

"C'mon. Let's go."

Lando sticks close to him on the way out. A confused silence falls over the reading group while Oscar collects his and Lando's bags from their chairs wordlessly, but he finds it difficult to care. The meeting was almost over for the evening, anyway. There isn't enough time between the circle of lounge chairs and the cafe exit to get used to the extra presence at his side; his bag brushes Oscar's arm where they squeeze between tables and chairs and once they make it out onto the streetside Oscar takes each step worried that he or Lando will bump into each other. He only lets off once they're a decent ways away from the cafe down the sidewalk, trailing a little ways behind Oscar with dazed eyes.

"What's wrong?" Oscar asks him, though he doesn't know why. There was a lot that had gone wrong for him today. All Oscar can see is the latent fear in his hands where he grips his bag strap much tighter than he needs to and dark, dizzied eyes.

"Do you want me to drive you home?"

Lando reels back slightly, slowly, like a loose fencepost lurching in the wind, and gives a barely-there shake of the head.

"Can I do it anyway?" Oscar presses. It's not like he thinks Lando can't get home by himself and it's not like he looks scared or anything, either—he just likes the idea. Of going with someone. Silently. Maybe that was the perfect dosage of coexistence Oscar is willing to put up with. Maybe he's just a creep and wants to know where Lando lives.

Oscar doesn't want to touch him, but he can eke out a few steps when he tugs on the strap of Lando's bag. He can't read Lando's expression but he's holding Oscar's gaze like it means something to do so.

Lando follows him to his car. Oscar doesn't push him into putting his seatbelt on. He barely manages to show Oscar his address on his phone what with the tension he's holding in his body, and Oscar makes it a point not to remember any of what he's copied into his own GPS.

Oscar isn't brave enough to look at Lando while he drives, not even willing to sneak glances at red lights and stop signs. If he stretches his peripheral vision Oscar thinks he can see him fiddling with the hem of his shirt nervously and even that alone unnerves him, like he's seeing too much. Knowing too much.

Lando lives in one of those invisible buildings you only notice inasmuch as you only notice when the refrigerator's stopped humming once its new silence enters the air. Sat in between a private pharmacy and a daycare, Oscar follows Lando in through a poorly lit throughway up to the front of his paper-thin apartment building. He lives on the first floor, lightless and sequestered away from the world, and he twists his head to cast a hesitant look somewhere around Oscar's knees just as he's got the locks undone.

"Bye," Oscar says to him, voice feeling like static. Lando turns back around and disappears inside, wordless.

~

Lando's heart is racing all the way up until he closes the door behind Oscar, and in the silence of the entryway he can finally hear himself think beneath the roar of blood that's been burning through his thoughts since the man had tried to talk to him in the bathroom. In the tips of his fingers is an unpleasant tingling and he's vaguely aware of the smell of sweat on his clothes and in his hair; he lets his clothes fall where they will as he strips on his way to the bathroom and lets out a sigh once the door is finally closed. Without the lights on all the light he has to see with is an opaque glass square above the showerhead and it's nice like that, soft in the silence. He doesn't bother waiting for the water to heat up before stepping beneath the spray, gasping with a shudder as his body eats the bittercold from the surface and flushes all his thoughts and feelings from his system.

He can think better once the water starts to turn warm, then hot. He thinks—and there is nothing. He remembers the angry man in the cafe and the new cologne Charles had been wearing and the tug of Oscar's hand on the strap of his sidebag. And he remembers Oscar leading him out onto the street and nearly pushing him off of the sidewalk with how closely he was sticking to him; there was also the strange scentlessness of the inside of his car and the dizziness all the way up to his own front door.

God. Why had he done that? It's not safe to get in strangers' cars. They taught Lando that shit when he was like five. Yet here he is, apparently more than willing to be whisked away by someone he hardly knows because he had shut down like he always does when shit goes awry.

He doesn't know how he's going to recover from this one. Maybe he won't. It'll just be another scrap of mental fodder to chew on and chew on until it gives him a headache from thinking too much like he always does.

He'll skip the next reading group, he thinks, maybe even the one after that. He doesn't want to think about having to be around another person for the next week, at least.

So, whatever. He's had worse days. It'll be Sunday tomorrow and then he'll have the whole day to himself to think about anything other than the emails that'll await him in his inbox on Monday and the behemoth of a manuscript he's been slacking on out of lack of interest and the lingering terror that he hopes won't wake him up in the night like they tend to on days like this. Wanting to hang onto his little Saturday peace for a little longer, Lando shuts his eyes once he's in bed and breathes—in through the nose, out through the mouth, count the heartbeats.

Eventually, it goes quiet.

~

"Oh, hey! You're in today!" Lewis greets him in their office on Monday morning.

Theirs basically only technically, because Lando doesn't come to work in person enough to really lay claim to the space, in his opinion. Lewis disagreed. He never admitted to dusting off his desk once a week the same way he does with his own, but Lando knows the building owners won't allow them to hire cleaners; the only people who could keep their space clean and tidy were themselves, and Lando sure as hell didn't own a feather duster of any kind.

He doesn't mind sharing with Lewis anyway, invasive cleaning tendencies or no. That this office even existed in the first place was his lucky break. Their publishing company is a small one, only really getting through twenty or so manuscripts in a year and doing the most they could with their culture works grant. Seeing as he and Lewis composed their entire editorial department, Lando is lucky to get away with keeping his physical presence to an absolute bare minimum without really compromising anything in the way of their team's output.

"Indeed I am," Lando returns. There's a tray of plastic-wrapped biscuits on his desk when he gets to his chair and poking out from beneath it is a sticky note.

We missed you at the birthday party, but wanted to save you something!

GR.

"Was it someone's birthday?" Lando asks, fiddling with the note in his hand when he settles into his desk chair.

"George's dog," Lewis says with an air of defeat. "You know how he feels about that behemoth." His chair creaks as he leans back in it to regard Lando fully. A ray of light from the window falls in the space between his body and his computer screen and illuminates a sea of now-glowing dust particles before him.

"Was it a nice party?"

Lewis is amused at the question. "It's George. Of course it was."

Of course. That's good. Lando thinks his presence is only nominally missed, anyway. The only person he'd believe those words from is Lewis.

It is a little bit easier to get Lewis' opinions on the most recent manuscript they've been sent in person, he has to admit. While Lando keeps his desk in a corner with his back to the wall with the entrance in sight, Lewis keeps his front and center, catching all of the light from their third story window so that he glows when the sun hits the glass just right.

It's a fitting arrangement: Lewis soaking up all the sun at the center of everything while Lando keeps to his little shadowed corner, silent and out of sight. He gets a taste of what it feels like to glow like he does when he stands over him at his desk and talks about the most recent notes he's appended to their several-hundred page document—it's a narrative, this one, about a mother and her son and their dog and a harrowing trek through the South African wilderness. Its author is a first-time aspiring-novelist, a graduate from the local university that Lewis claimed was great for their company's publicity. Lando thinks the narrative style is a little bland in some parts, like the author lost interest in their own characters midway through; Lewis thinks it's fine as is and mostly just has issues with syntax.

At any rate, the discussion is nice. It usually is with Lewis. Not like how it is at the reading group, with people regurgitating the same ideas in different fonts and patting each other on the back in praise of pseudo-intellectualism. He thinks Lewis would agree with his assessment of the people there, though he would never use the same words Lando had even if his intelligence outshone his grace whenever it really came down to it.

Lando doesn't know very much about grace, but he could certainly handle intelligence. He can only assume Lewis felt similarly about him, which is why he's the only person who seems to understand exactly how Lando speaks and wants to be spoken to. That's what made it so easy with him. Lewis had been his lucky break in a lot of ways, too.

He drives the two of them out for lunch later when the clock strikes half-past noon, a bagel place a little ways into town that they've frequented for years now. The kid at the register smiles at Lewis when he sees him and smiles brighter at Lando when he recognizes his face. He tries to return it, but whether or not he really makes it there he doesn't know and doesn't bother worrying about it.

Lewis looks pleased once they're finally in their booth with their drinks. It's a secluded one, tucked away into a corner with the table and chairs only visible if you strained your neck. Lewis is always thoughtful like that.

"Did something good happen?" Lando asks him quietly, and he shakes his head.

"Just glad to see you," he responds brightly. "I was expecting you to be all sad and frowny today. But you're not. You seem to be in good spirits."

Lando bunches his eyebrows. "What, your natural image of me is mean and depressed?"

"You only come in when you're stressed," Lewis says matter-of-factly. "You told me that yourself, so don't try to act all cagey about it. I think I've got a right to be suspicious about your sudden appearance."

Yeah. Lando knows he told him that for moments like this, specifically. Lewis is the only one with his break-glass-in-case-of-emergency toolkit.

"I'm not stressed, though," he answers honestly. Work has been manageable, overambitious page length from an amateur writer notwithstanding, and his weekly rendezvous at the book club basically leaves him with no particularly interesting anecdotes to share.

"Did something happen, then?"

Lando shrugs. There were the incidents, of course, but those weren't exactly out of the ordinary in the grand scheme of things. He's gotten pretty good at forgetting the unsavory people he's met in his life, at rolling with the punches and plugging his ears and closing his eyes and pretending nothing is ever happening at all.

"Just an off day, huh?" Lewis concludes, and Lando nods. Just an off day. Everyone has those.

The lunch is nice, but he's suddenly exhausted by the time he's back in Lewis' passenger seat again and completely disinterested in any more conversation when he settles in at the office again.

You can call it early, you know, Lewis texts him on their office's messaging platform, but Lando doesn't bother responding to it. He imagines much of his existence in Lewis' mind was wrapped up in message-read timestamps and presumably muted notifications. He never seems to mind. His patience is beyond measure.

Lando gets a more personal text from him when he leaves—ten minutes before everyone else, to save everyone the shame of the awkward shuffle down the staircase up to their cramped rented office space—one directly to his phone number and not his email. Two, actually—the first is a Get home safe, was nice seeing you! with a flower emoji appended to the end. The other comes just as Lando is stepping onto the bus, a Facebook link to a video from a year and a half ago.

Lando's in the video sitting on a swing far too small for him at the public park he used to live by. Sitting crooked atop his head is a black graduation cap with a silvery tassel hanging off the left side of Lando's face; his eyes are bright and his face open, happy. The person filming is approaching him and he's already shy about it, his shoulders tucked in while his eyes dart around with a nervous smile.

"Why are you recording me?" he asks through his grin.

"Just for the memory!" Lewis' voice behind the camera says.

His demeanor changes, then. "Alright—you wanna see something? Watch this."

Lando watches himself spin around and around in the swing, the chains on either side of him wrapping around each other until they can't anymore. When he lets himself go the swing croaks slowly back the opposite direction, picking up speed until Lando is being twirled about as the chains undo themselves from the tight helix. His quaking laughter is mixing with the sound of the old chains cracking and clanging against each other, and even the camera shakes a little with the laughter coming from Lewis.

"Lando Norris, twenty-four and fresh out of college, still has fun on the children's swings in case anyone was wondering," Lewis laughs. The replay button appears over Lewis' chin after that and Lando can't even bother remembering what it is he had texted in response when he slips his phone back into his pocket.

He wishes Lewis weren't still grieving him, but he knows relationships don't work like that. It wouldn't be fair to ask him outright to stop caring for him no matter how much he wanted to. He's selfish, but he isn't cruel.

The end-of-day light feels nice on his face on the way back home. At this time of the year it doesn't get dark until well after five, usually closer to six. He's always liked that about summer, the way the light dragged on and on and on, refusing to be snuffed out completely and casting the world in a beautiful glow in the hours leading up to darkness.

Lando hadn't gotten to experience the descent into twilight himself. He had voluntarily snuffed out his own light like a flame in between fingertips, not even the momentary whiff of charred skin worth mentioning.

~

Oscar wakes up with water in his ears. When he passes a hand over them there's the full and scratchy sound of skin-over-skin magnified by the tunnels in his ears, but everything else seems quiet. Solidly quiet. Like he'd bump right into it if he wasn't careful.

He gets on with his morning, brushes his teeth and takes his medication with water from the sink cupped in his palm, puts on his work outfit indistinguishable from what he wears everywhere else, doesn't even forget his keys or his wallet or anything by the time he's settling into his driver's seat. At work he's not on reference desk duty until later in the afternoon, so he contents himself with shelving for the morning and lets the almost-silence cradle him.

It doesn't for very long. It never does. He can hear the telltale sound of misdirected feet shuffling back and forth indecisively before he sees movement out of the corner of his eye. A lady manifests at the other end of the aisle across from the book cart he's sorting, a shiny leather handbag clutched tightly in her hand while she smiles at Oscar with wide red-painted lips.

"Excuse me, do you work here? Sorry to bother you in the middle of—that," she gestures vaguely towards him, her smile strained with the pain of social etiquette.

"Yes, I work here, and that's okay. Did you need help with something?"

"Do you have a children's section by chance? For my son, he's five."

"We do," Oscar tells her.

The lady stares at him for several long moments, her brightugly smile waning as the stretch of it has uncomfortable lines folding out from her eyes. Bright because when you smile you're supposed to do it as much as possible. It's like a competition, Oscar knows. The bigger your smile the more real you were, the more worth looking at. Ugly because it contorts the face into all kinds of fucked up and unfamiliar shapes, uncanny and alien and impossible for him to take seriously, let alone imitate.

She glances somewhere over his shoulder as if waiting for something. "Okay, where is it?"

Oscar is shocked back into reality just like that.

"Oh. Sorry. It's this way."

He sets his stack of books back down where they were on the cart because who cares about workflow anyway. She's thankful when they make it to the little puzzle piece playmat decorated section of the floor, and when Oscar returns to the unsorted shelves, a head peeks out from around the corner to greet him.

"Did you think she was just asking if we had a kid's section out of curiosity?" Lance asks him.

"I don't think I really care."

"You're gonna have to start caring. We have children to be role models for, now," Lance tuts at him. Oscar looks left and right, up and down. The only kid he can see is an infant in the arms of a different mother standing over by restrooms.

"I meant the new guy," he reads Oscar's confusion. "You know, the one we're taking on for the internship? He's barely eighteen apparently."

Oscar blinks. "Uh."

"His name is Kimi," he continues, submitting to Oscar's listlessness. "His first day is today. He's being briefed by the big guy inside, but you know. Should at least try and be professionally friendly."

"Um," Oscar says again, not really sure what he should say next and knowing that it probably doesn't matter. He kind of doesn't really want to say anything in the first place. Lance sighs as the silence stretches on dispassionately.

"Alright, man. I'll see you around. Don't scare off any more women and children."

And with that he vanishes back around the corner. Oscar stares at where his head used to be and feels his head swimming. Should he have known Lance was there listening to him? Was someone else watching him, now? And what of the new intern, Kimi? He'd known he was coming of course, but somehow it had never really registered despite all the application pruning and meetings they'd had about it. His senses never wanted to extend beyond the surface. It feels like he's walking around blind.

Work slows down a lot, later. Forty-five minutes to his lunch break finds Oscar flipping through the pages of a dusty atlas that has a particular way of jutting out from its shelf that aligns perfectly with a storage closet a distance away behind it, just so that the door frame appears to stretch down the aisle all the way to his desk.The pages are glossy and the text small, and though his eyes have pored over the textured map of sixteenth century Kiev god knows how many times before, the borders and city names still appear to him as if it's his first time seeing them.

Fifteen minutes to his lunch break it gets pretty dire. The second floor of the library overlooks a parking lot, and beyond it is a residential road topped with shuffling tree crowns and an empty blue sky. When he presses his knuckles to the floor-to-ceiling window framing it all, a somber warmth sits atop his skin, shallow as if it feared the bone just beneath the surface. It's not that quiet in here—there are students chatting in the work space a few bookshelves down and the hum of the air conditioner is loud near the vents—but it all comes to him muffled. If Oscar were to step outside he thinks the world would shriek at him.

"Hello?" an uncertain voice apparates out of nowhere. Oscar turns to see a young man smiling at him, hands folded behind his back and brown eyes appraising him warily.

"Hi, did you need help with something?"

"Um, no," the boy says. "You're Oscar, right?"

"Oh. Yes?"

The boy's posture straightens a little like he's surprised.

"I'm Kimi. This is my first day here. They said I should come find you to introduce myself?"

Oh. Right. That's supposed to be his job, not the newbie's.

"I'm Oscar," he tells Kimi, forgetting that he already knows. "Sorry I've not seen you yet. Nice to meet you."

Oscar can watch the assessment in Kimi's eyes as he stares at him, rolling his weight from his heels to his toes before speaking again.

"There's donuts downstairs, as like a welcoming party thing. Fernando brought them in for lunch," he says. "Um, do you want to come hang out?"

"That's okay. I'm the only one up here, anyway. We try not to leave any section of the building unstaffed," Oscar explains. "Also, uh. Not to be rude, but for the record in general I prefer to keep to myself. You don't have to come searching for me to invite me to stuff. I'll probably just say no, to be honest."

Whether or not it's Oscar's inability to act or the wink of mischievousness in Kimi's brown eyes why he's compelled to be up front is hard to say, but in either case Oscar can't help but sense Kimi's propensity to work with the weirdos of the world rather than against them; and Kimi, as most people did, had clocked Oscar's strangeness from the get-go. The oddity of it is that he seems to have acknowledged and made amends with the discomfort rather than pretend it isn't there.

"Oh, okay. Alright!" Kimi agrees cheerfully, bafflement morphing into a sudden cheer in between words. "Everyone in there made a face when I asked why I hadn't seen you yet. So I thought, like, maybe you're a bad egg or mean or something. But you don't look like you hate your life. So that's good."

Kimi has the same disposition that Oscar tried to emulate in gradeschool once upon a time. Excitable and puppy-like and entirely forgivable in the wake of any possible faux-pas. He doesn't know where he'd picked it up from—maybe a movie or a comic book or a peer—but he'd never quite been able to pull it off, no matter how many times he bashed his head against the wall trying to make the personality work for him.

He sees why, now. He wasn't nearly cute enough. Kimi Antonelli looked like Fernando would have to keep him as far away from all their young-women regulars lest they distract him from the work he's supposed to be justifying the new line on his resume with. Oscar can see it in how he holds himself, too. Nobody was ever this bold unless they had a lifetime of charm to weaponize alongside it.

It's interesting. He's learned something new, today.

"Uh-huh," Oscar responds to him. He hopes his honesty won't be mistaken for camaraderie.

"Okay, I'm gonna go back downstairs now. See you later!"

Oscar is certain he will do his best not to.

He's tired when he gets home, later. He usually tries to keep the amount of people he speaks with on any given day to an absolute minimum, and even in those instances does his best to refrain from any genuine conversation. Whatever happened with both Kimi and Lance had taken a lot out of him.

He's glad to be home, though. He can feel his mind clearing up as he goes through his post-work motions; toeing off his socks and shoes, hanging up his keys on the wall hook by the door, switching the AC on. Wondering if he wants to have a drink or a smoke or an edible, deciding on tea instead because he prefers to save his vices for the days he really needs them. The works.

The days he stays sober and nicotine-free are the days he spends reading, generally. It's the easiest way to pass the time. He's been good about it these past few months, and likewise he's read more in the past year than he has in the twenty-three leading up to it.

Oscar's life isn't very interesting. Reading about other people seemed to fill the space where friends or hobbies are supposed to slot in well enough. It kept his head on straight and didn't eat up his paycheck each month; if anything, it made his job recommending books for patrons or curating their monthly themed recommendation shelf all that much easier when he was generally traipsing through two or three books at any given time. Oscar liked to read widely and read broadly; anything that took him out of his day-to-day was enough to pique his interest, generally.

He's been stumped lately, though. Oscar is a completionist at heart, but it was difficult when his heart was challenged. It's an Irving book, one of the fifty-cent ones they had at the used book resale booth on the first floor by the community resource center. Fifty cents for an Irving book! Oscar had thought with the bored shock he usually reserved for the stale conversations with patrons. He doesn't prefer Odysseys, but he understood that some stories simply demanded eight-hundred plus pages to be told, and he had liked Owen Meany when he'd tackled it in his last year of highschool, anyway. Oscar isn't in love with being a librarian, but he respected the art of writing. Fifty-cents is far less than what he believed to be John Irving's due reverence. He'd happened to have the change and he preferred to follow his heart wherever it lead him.

Little had he known that his heart was out to get him that day. The book is painful. It wasn't a slog by any means—the story is jarring and the characters compelling—but the content gave him a little more than an upset stomach most nights. He'd inhaled one-hundred-and-thirty pages that same night he brought the book home; it had taken about half of them for Oscar to realize why the heavy red book only demanded fifty cents for its time.

That had been two and a half months ago, and Oscar hates to spend more than two months on one book. He felt pressured to finish off the last three-hundred pages as soon as possible every single time he came home, and that pressure just made him avoid the book even more. If you don't like a story, you should just drop it; that's what Oscar thinks. Unfortunately, that belief doesn't really lend itself to completionist tendencies.

Such is Oscar's impasse in the shower, torn between how he'll lower his standards a little and only aim for fifty pages tonight, maybe even just twenty; but in the mental aversion to such an emotionally taxing task, his brain apparently finds it far more comfortable to run through the uncomfortable exchanges he's had today in the shower and weigh them up against every other word he's spoken in his life. There's no new conclusion to come to aside for the fact that he's still awkward and should probably try a little harder to make his presence unseen and unfelt—if not to save his own pride then at least to save another patron from his social ineptitude.

It's not really any less painful than reading the stupid book, in the end. Shit, that was the point of his reading as a hobby. So he didn't have to think about himself. He assumed people at the book club felt similarly—

Oscar's heart seizes in his chest, an uncomfortable shock settling into his knees where the hot water streaming down his legs is turning the skin pink. Lando is at the reading group, he remembers, and with the memory of Lando comes an inexplicable desire to ask him what he thinks of John Irving. And just what is that about?

"He makes me excited," Oscar reasons with himself in the mirror once he steps out. He's wiped the steam from the glass and his face and upper body only come out a little distorted in the lingering moisture. "He makes me excited so I want to see him, I guess. Is that normal?"

The face in the mirror doesn't answer his question. He meets the query with a blank, unfriendly expression, which isn't much of a deterrent.

"I mean, I like being with him. He's quiet and…I don't know. I want to talk to him. I always want to talk to him but he seems really shy, so I don't know how other than just following him around. Is that weird?"

There's still no answer for him. The man in the mirror and Lando would probably get along like a house on fire.

"But I really like him. And I don't have anything else in my life. I just work and come home, so can't I just have this? Even if it's weird?"

"He'd make it obvious if he didn't want you around, I think," the man in the mirror finally appends to Oscar's thoughts.

"I think so, too," Oscar agrees. "If he wanted me to go away, he'd say so. Or make it obvious, at least. So maybe it's okay."

"Yeah. I think so," says the man in the mirror, and then it's settled. He doesn't end up reading any pages from the fifty-cent Irving book, but it's a relief to finally be able to climb into bed with a clear conscience about the day after all.

~

It had probably been in an email or written somewhere on a sticky note he hadn't noticed, but Oscar finds out when he gets into work the next morning that Kimi is shadowing him for the day, apparently.

Though blindsided he does his best to roll with it. Most of the other staff, the ones with more authority by virtue of either their seniority or length of time at this particular library, have learned by now that Oscar could more or less be trusted on his own. He rarely needs to be told things twice and preferred to doublecheck before doing anything he was uncertain of. Two years of his no-frills, no-strings-attached approach to working at the City of __________ Public Library has qualified him, apparently, to cover for for their usual IT guy, Nico Hulkenberg, who has been sorting books and data spreadsheets and organizing community events for the same time Oscar has, plus a decade.

Oscar hasn't decided between flattery or terror by the time his lunch break rolls around. In the hours beforehand he spends the morning touring the second and third floors with Kimi, rattling off meaningless by-the-ways and just-in-cases and did-you-know-thats in lieu of anything particularly interesting or useful to say about the job at hand. The work here really isn't terribly complicated in his opinion, and just as he says so Kimi relays that Fernando is showing him the basement archives tomorrow, which actually is one of the more interesting parts of the building. Oscar wonders if he'll be allowed to invite himself.

Being among the more technologically literate workers here (the standards aren't particularly high), they've put Oscar in charge of running through the rules of use of the computer room as well as assisting in the basic technological literacy courses they have for children and the elderly. Kimi, who is closest in age to Oscar of anyone else, is willing to play dumb in order to get Oscar to explain to him how to run their mostly-forgotten educational copies of Minecraft on one of their computers—this, among other things, wifi speeds in different parts of the library as a whole and whether or not you could theoretically pirate media from their computers if you knew what you were doing.

"I mean, I wouldn't do it, obviously," Kimi says when Oscar points out the shortsightedness of doing so in a government-funded building. "But just in case I need to know, you know?"

And Oscar, whose primary method of understanding the world involved pushing boundaries, knows.

At any rate he's curious and seems to have no problem taking initiative, which meant that Oscar himself was unlikely to be bothered with any genuinely stupid questions. All in all, he doesn't dislike him.

When Oscar runs out of things to show him they wander around the vacant aisles of books to wait for their lunch break while Oscar fields miscellaneous questions about the job, his coworkers. He has a lot to say about the former; about the latter, Kimi seems a little put out by his lack of gossip fodder.

It's passing the computer room again that they hear voices. Oscar's mood tightens to irritation when he recognizes the shrieks of laughter and the overly baggy clothing that they seem fond of. They're teenagers from the highschool nearby that show up every once in a while to watch videos on their computers—nothing savory, generally, as Oscar has been privy to car crash compilations and bloody fistfights and the like—more than once he's overheard one of their security guys complain about logs of attempted Liveleak and Pornhub access requests on the days aligning with their presence at the library.

Oscar doesn't hate them or anything, but he also knows that they only come here because the librarian at their school has probably gotten sick of their antics and banned them from their computers. They're loud, too, with no concern for watching their language or not disrupting other patrons who are clearly here to get work done—and sure, the library isn't ever exactly overflowing, but Oscar believes in the sanctity of the institution, anyway. It'd be nice if people took it as seriously as he did.

Peering through the window, Oscar can't see them watching anything illegal, anyway, so he's forced to leave them be. He can't really keep his irritation in as they walk away, though.

"Don't entertain those pricks if you come across them," he warns Kimi. "They shouldn't be coming here at all. All they do is cause trouble and make a lot of noise. They're such jackasses."

"Um," says Kimi. "I mean, maybe they don't have computers to watch stuff at home?"

"There's no way people with clothes like that can't afford a computer just to play Minecraft and watch videos of people dying all day," Oscar asserts, indignant. He's hardly even aware that Kimi had suggested it—it may as well have just been a supposition blindly manifesting in the air around him just to piss him off. "You need like, what? Two gigs to run that game? It's literally playable on smartphones. Seriously, they're just pricks that come here to piss us off. They have no respect for anything."

Kimi doesn't respond to him. When Oscar looks up again he finds him aggressively avoiding eye contact, fiddling with some of the papers in the file holders and curling his body away from him.

"I mean, I know it doesn't really matter," he backtracks, guilt readily subsuming his frustration. "It's just a library, whatever. No one's really using the computers anyway, I guess."

"Yeah, I mean. Otherwise it'd just be a waste of money, right?" Kimi asks, back to his casual tone from earlier; the change is so quick that Oscar is almost certain he's affecting it for his sake. The thought only makes the shame compound that much more.

"Yeah. It would be," he agrees listlessly.

"I'm gonna go back downstairs, now. My lunch is, uh. Down there." Kimi says it as Oscar is skirting his desk to sit down again, his feet already angled to leave.

"Right. Okay," says Oscar. Kimi doesn't need the excuse. Oscar would flee from himself, too.

Kimi is out the door in a polite rush. In the reflection of the glass doors that swing out and back in, Oscar catches glimpses of his own sorry face and feels, all in all, like a loser.

Oscar drags his hands down his face and sighs. That really wasn't good. When he looks up at his monitor again he sees an unruly flash of color; a little sticky note shooting out horizontally from the plastic edge.

Kimi's shadowing you on Tuesday and probs Wednesday; Nico's on emergency leave. Nando's stressed, check ur msgs!

Lance

Oscar never checks his messages. That's why they leave sticky notes, usually, or just call up on the phone. Maybe he'd been in the bathroom when the phone rang or maybe the news had come after he'd clocked out yesterday. He supposes he'll never know—unless he asks, of course, which he probably won't.

There's a gas station at the nearest intersection where he takes his lunches in his car, usually. Sometimes he eats. Sometimes he doesn't. Today he spends about five minutes in the snack aisle wondering what candy can best convey an apology and a reassurance that he isn't insane, he swears, hell he's even medicated now and he used to be a lot worse so please don't hate him.

None of the colorful plastic packages are willing to rise to the occasion. He settles on some ring-shaped gummies he himself likes and a granola bar for his own lunch, and passes his time by the tire pump station scrolling his phone and listening to music as he usually does.

Back at the library, Oscar catches Kimi waving bye to Lance while they go in different directions; Kimi, evidently, is heading Oscar's way, because he turns his eyes to him almost immediately after and does a decent job hiding his flinch.

"Can I talk to you for a moment?" Oscar asks him hastily before he can find an excuse to turn away.

"Okay," says Kimi sadly, or maybe nervously. They find an empty corner near the entrance of the lobby, close enough to the doors that the summer heat has tempered the air to add to the discomfort.

"I didn't mean to freak you out earlier. I wasn't really that angry, I just get annoyed sometimes. Um. I shouldn't have said those things about the patrons. It wasn't appropriate."

"Oh," says Kimi. His eyes are wide open looking at Oscar, so he has his attention, at least. His feet aren't even angled towards the exit aisle.

"Yeah. And, uh. You seemed kind of scared. So I got you this candy as an apology."

Kimi eyes the pack of gummies before him with raised eyebrows. He uses so much of his face, all the time. Oscar has no idea what he's meant to make of the expressions.

"You're bribing me into liking you?"

"I'm not bribing you," says Oscar, taken aback at the sudden accusation. "I'm saying sorry. It's sorry candy."

"Uh-huh," Kimi replies, but he's smiling big, clearly amused by the whole gesture. Oscar's seen that face before. The mocking usually comes later, and the realization of what it was at some point with several years of hindsight to reframe the memories.

"I'm really not. I promise. I just…I don't know. I thought." He doesn't know what he thought. He doesn't want Kimi to think Oscar dislikes him, and he doesn't want to be disliked at all. He just doesn't know how to mend the slip-up.

Kimi takes a moment to gather his thoughts.

"To be honest, they gave me a bunch of warnings about you anyway. They said you're harmless, so I knew that already, but I didn't think you'd be like, nice." He holds the candy up to punctuate the last word, smiling a smile that makes him look cartoonishly jubilant. "So, don't worry about it. I'll forget it ever happened."

He doesn't really need to go that far, but whatever. The relief is slight, but he tries to content himself with the knowledge that he's done his social maintenance for the week.

He spends about thirty minutes after the exchange of pleasantries with Kimi pretending that it's over with, he can forget about it, before he makes it as far as the second flight up to the second floor that it's not over and he isn't forgetting about it. His own bitter tirade keeps replaying itself in his head, and he keeps seeing the fear on Kimi's face and wondering why it hadn't been enough to curb his own anger.

At his private circulation desk on the second floor Oscar swipes the blue stapler he keeps beneath his monitor and absconds to an empty workspace room, a small one with a whiteboard pressed up to the wall and a curtained window casting a glare on the shiny surface. He wheels it around so that it blocks the door and shuts the curtains—they're thin to really keep any of the light out, but with the room at least slightly darkened and the door locked and boarded Oscar feels a little safer.

The popping of the joint that keeps the stapler head held down is familiar. The undoing of the tiny metal slip that holds the two halves together cuts into his fingernail, but there's no blood. After that the rest is easy to take care of; the array of metal teeth fall out from its rack and the spring follows with some minor percussive maintenance. It's just pieces of useless metal in his hands now, all its constituents minimized to their most individually useless parts. Oscar runs the pad of his thumb over the flat ridge of staples and wills his nausea away.

It doesn't work like that. Clouds are riding over the horizon when he tosses the remains of the stapler on his desk later, and he just can't shake the malaise lingering from the exchange with Kimi earlier. It feels like he's being told on. Like they aren't all adults. Like they're getting ready to cast Oscar out from the playground with satisfied sneers. In the overcast light his own skin seems dull, almost grayish as if he were rotting away in real time. The horror that twists in his gut stays there all the way up until closing, and sitting in his car in the parking lot Oscar laments that he doesn't have any more staplers to pull apart. If he could just see the inside of something, if he could just understand something he could take a breath that actually felt real and set his head back on his shoulders straight and move on.

He has pens in his bag, he remembers. When he fishes one out from the bottom, he freezes. It's the green pen that he'd found at Lando's seat at the cafe. The same one he's been forgetting to return for weeks now, apparently.

He can't take this apart. It isn't his. More enticing than that, though, is the prospect of seeing Lando. The idea makes him feel better. He doesn't think he can go home like this. He's done that before and regretted it each time.

Lando will understand, Oscar thinks through his strained delirium. Shame wouldn't allow him to memorize Lando's address, but his visual memory has always been outstanding. The directions may as well be engraved into his windshield.

He doesn't let self doubt seep into his thoughts on the way up to Lando's front door. When he rings the doorbell, he doesn't even hold his breath. That had to mean something, right? That he was doing this the right way.

For a while there's nothing. He doesn't know if it's rude to ring a doorbell twice, if it'd be weird to call Lando's name. In the end his fist is poised to knock when the door finally opens just enough for Lando's face to barely show through.

"Hey," Oscar greets. "I'm sorry. Um. I was going home and I realized I never gave you back your pen. You left it at the cafe one day and I kept forgetting to return it. And I just randomly found it today, so I figured I'd bring it—my work is kind of close to your house, so…"

It sounds just about as stupid as he thought it would, but just the saying of it feels good. Lando doesn't take it from him but then their eyes meet he finds something of a little more substance than the usual disinterest at the reading group. Maybe it's anger. Maybe it's annoyance. He doesn't move, doesn't say or do anything. He blinks once. Waiting.

"Um…" Oscar starts. "I don't mean to bother you but, um. Could I come in? Just for a moment or two? I'm—I had a bad day at work and, um. I could just use the company for a little bit. If you're okay with it."

Lando is visibly perplexed now, if only in the way unchanging things seem to be impossible to ignore when they finally do. It's a barely there narrowing of the eyes, the blue in his eyes sinking into skin and incongruous with Oscar's memory of wide, scared ones. A shuffle of feet has him momentarily certain Lando is about to slam the door, but nothing like that is forthcoming. He just seems to sit and wait for Oscar to make sense.

"We don't have to talk or do anything," Oscar tells him. "It can be like at the book cafe. We can just ignore each other."

Lando doesn't look him in the eye while he speaks. His gaze hovers somewhere on the line of his nose, newly unreadable but lacking the blankness from before. Then he opens the door fully and steps aside to allow Oscar in.

Blue is the first word that comes to mind. First because of the long mist-colored curtains that seem to glow from the kitchen window, hanging forlornly over a sink that catches the sunlight on its edges even in shadow; then because of the vast emptiness of the air that settles around him, cool and lonely with the low humming of the refrigerator just barely breaking up the silence. Oscar toes his shoes off in the entryway and sets them neatly beside a pair of worn sneakers, the only ones he's ever seen Lando wear. Following him deeper in Oscar doesn't catch the lip where the entryway is recessed into the floor and he stumbles forward a little, just barely catching himself. Lando doesn't turn back to notice even when he swears under his breath.

Just past the entryway is Lando's blue living room with even longer blue curtains pushed aside to reveal thick white ones that don't hold as much sunlight as the ones in the kitchen. They seem to hold their breath before him, a calm periwinkle that seems to wish for something more violet to compliment the rest of the space; there's a couch perpendicular to a wide armchair, both unadorned but with their respective cushions and throw blankets piled up on the floor around them, just as patternless and unassuming as his curtains. A bookshelf sits pressed up to the middle of the wall between the entryway and where the wood floor dips into the living room. It isn't fully stocked but it's definitely on the way there, a colorful array of titles—primarily soft cover, Oscar notices—filling up three of six shelves and about a third of a fourth one. Some of the titles he recognizes, some he doesn't, and they're all organized by title alphabetically.

There's no dining room. A small island bar separates the living room from the kitchen, the countertop itself forming a window through which he can see his stove, his fridge. On the living room side are two tall barstools, and atop the marble is a napkin holder, a journal, and loose pens; closer to where the island meets the wall and cornered in shadow is a second barstool, almost invisible if not for the dust particles caught in the light giving away the curved edge of the dark wood. There's a vacant spiderweb between two of its legs and the footrest shuddering gently in the air from a nearby vent. Oscar wonders if there's anything in here that didn't look like it was trying not to be found.

A short hallway on the left cuts through to the rest of Lando's apartment but Oscar reins in his curiosity, instead following Lando to the island where he sits with both of his heels perched on the footrest of the barstool, bright, colorless eyes staring right at Oscar with anticipation.

Oscar, not expecting to make it this far, stands a few paces from him by the loveseat and stares right back. Then Lando turns around in the chair and bends himself over the marble top where he begins writing something in the journal.

"Do you mind if I read something from here?" Oscar asks, setting his bag down by the couch and shuffling back towards the bookshelf. Lando makes some kind of aborted half-flail gesture with his hand without turning to look at him. Oscar assumes it's an affirmative.

It's a gilded book that catches his eye, a thick one with an unmarred, factory-smooth cover as if it's never been read; the only betrayal that it has been at least once a thin white line cutting through the spine where it's been intentionally creased. It's the title, really—it's the same cinderblock of a book that Oscar has been avoiding reading back at home. He unfortunately remembers the page he had left off on over a week ago, now; Lando's back is turned to him at the island, completely disinterested in Oscar's mental-emotional conundrum over a book that is meant to elicit exactly the complicated feelings it did.

He resigns himself to Lando's dispirited couch and gets reading.

~

Oscar struggles through the reading again this week. It's hard when swimming through his thoughts after each period are images of dark curly hair standing out in a sterile blue living room.

The pain in his hand isn't great, either. Everything he had been able to forget while he was at Lando's apartment had sprung up again after he'd made it home, and in his anger he'd tried and failed to put his fist through the wall. There was no fracture, Urgent Care had said, but his knuckles are still sore and swollen for days following and it makes doing any work with his hands that much more frustrating.

The more frustrated he feels, the more he wants to talk to Lando. It's a baseless and confusing desire to have when he isn't even sure what he wants to say, but his mind has quickly grown attached to the idea, offering it up as the first solution to any hint of negative emotion like a sticky crutch.

Maybe it'll be enough to just see him, Oscar reasons while he's sitting in traffic, though enough of what he doesn't know. When was the last time he actively wanted to see someone? He can only assume it was a very, very long time ago, because the feeling is foreign to him. It's interesting to roll around in his mouth, blind to its origins but understanding the weight of it in his body anyway.

Lando is already sitting in their little circle when Oscar comes in. As if sensing his presence he looks up just as Oscar makes his way to their reading nook, and in the space of only a few moments where they look at each other Lando's face seems to solidify in Oscar's mind; the softly squared edges of his jaw, the oblique angle his eyes make with his dark eyebrows, the flat plane of his chin that holds up dull pink lips.

They sit together quietly. Oscar doesn't hear a single word spoken by anyone in the group no matter how hard he tries to pay attention because all he can focus on are the heavy hands thumbing through the book pages beside him and the small strip of ankle peeling out from beneath his pants. He has notes in the margins of the pages, clipped things with underlines and strikeouts and question marks that sit imperiously at the ends of his sentences as if demanding an answer from the text then and there.

Their story for the week was uninteresting and, like usual, it's mostly Charles and the women having excitable backs-and-forth while everyone else just sits and listens, rarely contributing but seemingly enjoying themselves anyway.

Oscar wouldn't call his own experience at the reading group enjoyable, but it helped his head from getting away from his body most weeks. It's nice to hear voices other than his own sometimes. It made him feel like he's trying, at least.

Lando never really seemed to be enjoying himself either, but the focus in his eyes is unmistakable and the notes he takes in the margins of his book are frantic and detailed. His letters form shapes not too unlike what Oscar would imagine a whip looks like moving through the air if you could admire its motion in freeze frames; there were long hooks and pointed tails, acute angles and ruthless connectors. The pen he uses is ballpoint and terribly thin, perfect for small letters crushed into the narrow text margins of the book pages.

"I'll come join you at the table soon? Gonna stop by the restroom first," Oscar says to him when the meeting disperses. Almost everyone seems to want to linger around in the reading space today. It feels natural that he lower his voice a little so nobody pays them too much attention.

Lando's response is a blink of pale eyes and a turn on his heel as he leaves to find a table. It's not as dismissive as Oscar has seen before, definitely. On the way back from the restroom Oscar is beckoned over by someone from the reading group, the silver and gold rings on his fingers glinting in the low light.

"Hey, Oscar," Charles greets. "Is your evening free? A few of us were gonna go grab some drinks down the road if you wanted to come. You don't have a wife and kids or anything, do you?"

"Um, no," Oscar says. "But that's okay, anyway. I was gonna stay here with Lando."

Charles raises his eyebrows. "The mute guy?"

"Mute?"

"Yeah, mute. Same guy, right? Curly hair, always looks pissed? He can't speak," he explains. "I try and include him anyway in case he wants to type a note to us or something, you know? But he never does. I don't really know why he comes here. I think he might be slow."

Oscar casts his eyes over to the other end of the cafe where Lando is preoccupied with something on his computer. He doesn't disbelieve Charles exactly, but something about him has Oscar bending to his inner skeptic.

"Did you really not know?" Charles continues, amused at whatever look must be on his face. "You were sitting by each other today, so I thought maybe you were friends."

"I thought he just didn't like talking," says Oscar.

Charles shrugs. "Well, maybe he just chooses not to. I don't know. But hey—Maybe another time? I'll see you next week, right?"

He pats Oscar's shoulder with a smile and then he's out the door with the others before Oscar can think of anything else to say.

Back at their table, Lando has his laptop open off to the side while he writes in a black notebook in front of him. He looks up when Oscar takes his seat across from him, and he isn't expecting those cold blue eyes to meet his own so boldly; in his flinch Lando laughs, or does something that Oscar thinks might have been a laugh if he had committed to it. There's air blowing out his nose anyway and his eyes have crinkled up at the corners, and it's a nice view so Oscar laughs it off with him and plays on his phone silently with his quiet company for the next hour.

~

Oscar likes the second floor of the library. It's cleaner, a bit less crowded than the more sociable and accessible atmosphere downstairs. Lance said it feels haunted up there. Oscar had taken it personally, a backhanded implication that he's supposed to be the ghost.

There are a number of computer rooms and private workspaces, too, generally frequented by a wide range of people who all nevertheless could be described as frazzled or lonely or uptight.

Oscar, recognizing that he's probably at home in the third category, likes it here. The rotunda where they keep the social sciences and world maps is up here, beyond the glass wall separating the bookshelves from the workspaces. He usually shares the circulation desk there with two others, but at this point in the year nobody is coming in often enough to warrant the forced company.

Summers are usually lax like that, so he wanders. Stretching his legs, if anyone happened to think he didn't have enough to do. Oscar really isn't paying much attention to the stack labels as he passes by them listlessly, but he only remembers himself when faced with a prim steel-white placard attached to the wood reading CHILD PSYCHOLOGY followed by a string of numbers in an inelegant font.

He isn't thinking about Lando when he turns down the aisle, but he can almost feel his presence. As Oscar's eyes dance over the books' vertical titles he grows more and more impatient the closer he gets to what he's looking for.

WHY KIDS CRY: TEACHING DISABLED CHILDREN

IN SILENCE: ADHD PRESENTATION IN YOUNG GIRLS

TOMASZ' ASPERGER'S SYNDROME HANDBOOK

MILLS & ROE - HOW TO COMMUNICATE WITH YOUR INFANT

A CHILD'S MIND: SPEECH THERAPY FOR INFANTS AND TODDLERS

SELECTIVE MUTISM IN THE 21st CENTURY

MUTISM & RELATED DISORDERS

LIVING WITH A SPEECH IMPEDIMENT: AN ANECDOTAL COMPENDIUM

It doesn't feel right to be looking at it all. He's never liked these kinds of books, how they turned people into statistics, data. He knows that's the point of science, though. There's not really any way around it.

The book titled MUTISM & RELATED DISORDERS slides out easily from its slot on the shelf, and the latest stamp on the card inside the cover is from just over a year ago.

Wandering back the way he came, he skims it. The medical language bothers him enough that he thinks maybe the anthology of anecdotes might have been easier to stomach, but the curiosity in his fingers makes it all too easy to keep flipping the pages.

He doesn't feel good about a lot of what he reads, but he has to admit that it's interesting at the very least. Lando could have been born mute or he could have lost it from something else; more likely it could be psychological, and an off chance he's just stubborn about keeping his mouth shut. Oscar wonders for an infinitesimal moment what Lando's voice might sound like before the idea is violently rejected by some shier part of himself.

A voice pulls him from his thoughts and he jumps, slamming the book closed with both hands conspicuously.

"'Scuse me, can you help me out with something?"

It's a girl today, probably highschool aged with a bright streak of pink in her hair and glitter in her eyeshadow. She has her hands on the desk bracing her weight as she leans forward slightly to speak to him.

"Sure, what is it?"

"Well, it's for our history project," she casts an eye over her shoulder to gesture at another figure sat at a worktable not far away. "She said you were too scary to ask herself, so I'll try and explain it I guess. There's this copy of a book that we'd found here once…"

Oscar only half hears her query. There's a violent rattling going on in his head not unlike if you placed a steel ball into a washing machine and let it go through its motions.

"Am I really scary?" Oscar gives in to the obsession on the way to the history shelves. They couldn't remember the title or the author or anything, but it'd been really helpful for one of her essays before and couldn't find it in the same place. Oscar's been here long enough to know exactly what questions to ask to narrow down where it could be, and though he's excited to be helpful for someone, he's more interested in hearing what the girl's answer to his question will be.

"Um," the girl stumbles a little beside him, as if she had run into something or tripped on a shoelace. The aisle is more than wide enough for the two of them and perfectly clear; when Oscar glances down, he notices that she's wearing flipflops. "I dunno? I mean, not to be rude, but you don't really seem that approachable."

"Oh."

"Yyy-eah." The girl drags out the diphthong like she wishes she'd never said anything.

"Like, how though?"

"Well, you haven't smiled once since I came up to you," she points out, shaking off her bashfulness when she realizes Oscar isn't offended at her bluntness.

Oscar has no idea about the frequency with which he smiles. He assumes she must be correct.

The girls are satisfied with their books and thank him earnestly. Oscar returns to his work at the circ desk, but if he was having a normaler day today, it's all gone completely out the window. He thinks Lance comes and visits him at some point, but if they exchange any words he can't remember. All he can think about is if that's what he really does: make people uncomfortable by doing absolutely nothing.

It's a little exciting for some reason. He thinks it shouldn't be, but it is.

Oscar agonizes every single day for the rest of the work week waiting for the next book club meeting. Scary is just a very specific word to use. He can't stop turning it around and around in his head. Is he scary? Is that something he was allowed to be? The single modifier has a tingling sparking in the tips of his fingers and his toes; could he hold scariness for himself, weaponize it, find peace in it, advertise it?

When the day of the meeting finally comes he's so jittery with anticipation pushing open the door to the cafe that he thinks he might be a little sick. He calms down, of course, when he sees Lando already sitting in the reading space. He has one leg folded over another while he types something on his phone intently. Oscar wonders if he looks like this everywhere he goes, morose and unbothered. Though the shadow his brow casts over his eyes is a dark one they seem to glow in the light anyway, sharp and intelligent.

He doesn't hear a single word of the meeting this week either, naturally. All he can think about is what he's going to tell Lando when they're sitting quietly together later. If there's anything he could say that could scare him away at all.

"Someone told me that I scared their friend today. Because I never smile."

Lando doesn't acknowledge him when he says it, pinching at the corner of his lip lightly, deep in thought about whatever's going on on his laptop screen. They're the only two that stayed behind today. It's nice. Being with someone. Oscar watches him with a muted excitement; he's usually so averse to being ignored. This just felt like he was in a confessional.

"It made me feel nice," he continues. "To be thought of as scary. I've never been called that before."

Lando shifts his weight a little. Dark pupils twitch slightly to the right. Oscar thinks he's about to go on being ignored when he finally flicks them up to meet Oscar's, blank and unreadable. It's not communication on his part, still not an acknowledgement. It's pure, self-interested observation. That he was able to perceive Lando likewise was just the circumstances of their physiology. This is still a confessional. This is still without consequence.

"It made me want to never smile again."

Muscles around Lando's lips shift a little, like he's biting his tongue or something. He takes a sip from his drink and returns to his computer work.

The disinterest is obvious, so Oscar doesn't feel bad for staring like he does. Lando's skin is tan, his dark eyebrows and light-colored eyes standing out in comparison. There's a faded scar on the bridge of his nose and his hair lies in defined hooks and curls on his head, waves rising high above water as if reaching to the sky itself, shifting skin highlighted by the overhead lights as if in a painting. Oscar's head is swimming.

"Do you style your hair?" he blurts thoughtlessly.

Lando's hands freeze over the keyboard. He half-raises a single eyebrow at him, as if he's imploring Oscar to continue while also making it clear he thinks his question is ridiculous.

His response is to burst into laughter, one that makes Lando wince a little—and though he feels bad for it he can't help but feel distantly charmed.

~

Lando, as a rule, is fairly unimpressed by other people. He spent a lot of his adolescence wishing he could communicate with others normally—as an adult he knows now that they rarely have anything worth listening to at all.

That's a large reason why he's able to tolerate Oscar, he understands. Apart from that day in the park and when he isn't actively trying to get Lando's attention, he seemed quiet to a fault—and stranger than that he seemed more than willing to engage Lando in his staring contests. Not even Lewis was willing to entertain those, usually, and Lando knows people are quick to look away from him on the rare occasion he chooses to make eye contact.

Oscar has no such inclination for whatever reason. He prefers the floor of Lando's living room over the couch, today. It's the third time in the past two weeks that he's shown up and the third time Lando has allowed him to sit in his home quietly while they both pretend the other doesn't exist. Lando keeps grasping at a reason to be unimpressed by him. Nothing is particularly forthcoming.

He seems to have forgotten Lando is here at all, which is a good thing. He has a small hand valiantly holding open one of his heavier books, an Irving one that Lando had read a couple years earlier than he should have. He probably only has a hundred pages left and his ring finger is straining to hold up the weight of the seven hundred that come before it, a tendon popping from his skin while his other hand is twirling a lock of hair falling to the side of his forehead with the rest of his weight on his elbow against the coffee table.

There's a tray of candles casting a pale orange glow on his fingernails but is otherwise static. Lando has only come out for a glass of water himself, but Oscar hasn't noticed him yet and his hand is really close to the crowns of the flames.

Skirting the couch, Lando hovers a short distance from him on the carpet and there is still no reaction. From the new angle Lando can see Oscar talking to himself, his lips moving to unvoiced thoughts. With a turn of the page his head twists just that little bit more to keep Lando out of his peripheral vision. He is completely lost in his own world.

Lando barely notices it in time. Just as Oscar moves his hand to flip the page Lando darts forward and shoots a hand out to grab his wrist; Oscar inhales sharply and flinches backwards hard, the book slipping from his hand and falling closed to the floor with his pale skin against Lando's just hovering millimeters from the flames. When he releases Oscar he pointedly nudges the candles a little further back on the table away from him.

Oscar doesn't say anything. He's looking between his own wrist and Lando's. There are white marks on the skin that slowly vanish as blood sinks back into his hand while Oscar stares with slightly widened eyes and lips just barely parted as if he's too tired to commit to shock.

I'm sorry, Lando wants to say. It's not polite to touch people without warning. You're supposed to ask, first—it's like people with service dogs. Lando always knew he'd never really be a good pet owner.

Oscar doesn't follow him when he moves away from him, but Lando swears he catches Oscar lingering outside of his office at least once, maybe twice some time later. He keeps the door open for a reason, but as someone who avoided new situations like the plague, Lando understood the hesitation.

When Oscar sees himself out later, he does so quietly and with a simple announcement of his leaving. I'm leaving, now. See you. Those are the words he invariably uses, like a spell he needed to really commit to packing up what little he brings with him and stepping out through the front door.

He never stays for more than an hour or two at most, and Lando has only ever seen him absorbed in a book or staring at random spots in his living room, lost in thought while he bites his nails or picks at his throat. There's an impression on the rug where he had been sitting reading with his back against the couch cushions; he runs his foot over the fabric so that it blends in with the rest around it as if he were never really there. He gets an urge to wash his hands afterwards and he does so until the skin is red; the hand he had saved Oscar with has this weird tremor inside that keeps tugging at his attention, and it's making him more than a little upset. Maybe he should throw out the candle, too, and all of the books Oscar has touched from his little library. When Lando glances up at himself in the mirror, he decides that he hates that Oscar knows what he looks like when he smiles.

He'll ignore Oscar the next time he comes. He wants his own space back. He needs to cleanse his home of things he doesn't understand.

When he thinks about it like that it makes more sense. He doesn't have a guard dog, and loathe as he is to admit it Lando knew he can be a bit impressionable. It's a good that he can take his own preservation into his own hands, sometimes, even if it tended to be a bit delayed. The autonomy is a reward in itself.

It took him a long time to realize that. He's always wanted a guide dog, ever since he was a little kid and was told to leave the blue vest-adorned dog at the doctor's lobby alone. In lieu of Pokémon, Beyblade, and all the other children's media that involved having some kind of fantastical familiar having any basis in reality, Lando thought that having a guide dog would be the best thing that could ever happen to him—he wouldn't have to pay attention to the world, then. The dog could do it for him and he could stay playing in his head like he's always wanted to.

It had only been around age ten that Lando realized that guard dogs and guide dogs weren't the same thing when he gets into a fight at the cafeteria over something he doesn't remember anymore.

It's the same kid who had been tormenting Lando all school year, in that infuriating way in which there was just nothing specific to tell on but it's obviously targeted and obviously intentional. Lando had suffered a lot of ear-tugging and name-calling in the months leading up to the incident, which ended with his bully kneeling over himself in the cafeteria with blood pooling down his wrist. Lando hardly even remembers what it was he did, but he recalls the food on his tray being snatched while he wasn't looking and nobody seeming to care about whether or not he got to eat that day. Maybe he'd been particularly hungry. Maybe the safety scissors he kept in his bookbag should have been manufactured just a bit duller.

He remembers, too, his peers moving away from him in a synchronized manner, at first because they were scared of him, he'd thought, and then because of the pee soaking his pants and pooling onto the marble cafeteria floor.

Later when he's deemed unfit for further classroom participation, he had sat outside the counselor's office swinging his legs on the too-big chair still deciding if he liked the school-loaned pants he was given or not.

"Your son is at risk," the tinny voice from the lady inside still replays vividly in his mind to this day; in his memory it had seemed more like a plead, but he can't be sure. Lando knows how memories are warped by time. It infuriated him for a long time that he couldn't recall what exactly he was at risk of, but at the age he is now he knows it doesn't matter.

When the reality of the situation sunk in several days later, when he'd finally understood that Lando Norris was not allowed to defend himself, he had dreamt of the ugliest dog he could imagine accompanying him to school and tearing his bullies to shreds the moment he even looked at Lando wrong, because what did he need a guide dog for? Lando wasn't blind. He could see the world exactly as it was. He didn't need help living. He just wanted to have sharper claws.

Oscar doesn't seem like he has very sharp claws, but he doesn't strike Lando as weak, either. He's clearly interested in Lando's company yet perfectly content to spend hours not speaking to him; he rarely asked for anything and never overstayed his welcome. It's frustrating. Lando can't decide if he likes him or not, if he wants to like him or not.

He hates the indecision. Outliers were dangerous. Whatever it is going on between them, Lando knows that it isn't going to have a nice ending.

~

Lando is doing a lot of typing on his computer today. His eyes are alert and focused on his screen and he keeps looking back and forth between his keyboard and the little notebook lying open on the table with a stern interest, as if he were checking to make sure the words on the page are staying exactly the way he had written them. Like they had a propensity to change when he isn't looking. Oscar wonders what it is he does why he chooses to stay here and work after each meeting, why he always seemed so stubbornly staid.

He doesn't want to ask. His mysteriousness and disinclination to interact with anyone or anything around him makes Oscar's mental investigative work interesting. Maybe he's a writer and he just comes here for inspiration. He wonders what kind of stories he'd have to tell.

Amid his thoughts Lando winces and flinch backwards, suddenly shooting up from his seat and darting to the bathroom. Oscar notes the haste but doesn't think anything of it until a long time passes and the space in front of Lando's laptop is still sadly vacant. Glancing around Oscar can see that the cafe is a little under half its capacity; he sits and stares at the back of Lando's silver laptop for a few moments more before standing to follow him.

There are only two stalls inside the bathroom and one of them is locked for maintenance. The white tile is stainless and the sinks unoccupied; there's only one closed door with no indication that anyone is inside.

"Lando?" Oscar calls. There's a shuffling of clothes and he starts to feel his heart start beating again.

"Did something happen? Can I come in?" he asks, setting a hand flat on the stall door.

For a long while there's just more incomprehensible shuffling; then a small click of the door lock and a slight pull inward. Oscar slides in quickly so Lando can close the door again—and here is Lando, sitting on the floor in front of the toilet with his hands held over his face and his knees tented. There's tissue paper sticking out between his fingers and Oscar can hardly see his eyes.

He doesn't want to talk to Lando while towering over him. Their feet slot between each other when he slides down the stall barrier to join him on the floor, and he has to tuck his elbows in to keep them from hitting the door and the edge of the toilet seat on either side. Lando looks at him through his eyelashes, unwilling to raise his face.

"I can stay here until you feel better," he offers. Lando's brows twitch together tightly. Oscar assumes he's frowning.

"I don't mind. Um. This is okay. Did something happen?"

Lando doesn't seem to like his question. Oscar watches his chest rise as he takes in a deep breath, letting his eyes fall closed on the exhale while he dips his head back into the cradle of his arms.

That's okay, too. He couldn't see any remnants of vomit or blood on the sides of the toilet or anything, so maybe nothing happened. Maybe Lando just needed some time alone. Oscar knows it's like that, sometimes.

They stay there like that for a while. It's dead silent in here. The only sounds are the hum of water in the pipes in the walls and the occasional steps passing near the bathroom but not entering. Oscar imagines the two of them occupying some secret world here, nothing but the sound of their breathing belaying their double occupancy.

Suddenly Lando's upper body rises with an inhale and he reveals a red-stained face with deep red streaks trailing down from his nose, down over and around his lips and past his chin; there's an erroneous clean swipe on his left cheek, the work of the tissue paper he assumes, but is otherwise only a little jarring to look at. He gestures a hand towards Oscar, again when he doesn't quite get it; then Lando shows him the crumpled up blood-stained tissue in his hands, and he gets it. It's a tight crush to twist his head around but he sees now that the toilet paper holder he was leaning his head on has nothing to show for itself besides an empty cardboard tube.

"Let me check outside," says Oscar with a stand. The bathroom only has two stalls and two sinks; there are no cabinets and no overhead shelves to speak of. Any of their bathroom storage must be in the room the workers use.

"I'll be right back," he calls to Lando before leaving.

The waitress he finds is nice about it. She's new there and doesn't know where they keep the TP, but she hands him a just-opened roll of tall paper towels just before she disappears off to some back storage room. In the bathroom again, he wets a few towels before rejoining Lando in the stall.

"Here," Oscar says, balancing the roll atop the toilet tank and two or three wet towels on top of it. He keeps one for himself and reaches out a hand to Lando; he flinches back hard but it doesn't register to Oscar, who is more concerned with wiping the dried blood from his face so he can be presentable again.

"Maybe because we're sitting by the vent?" he muses aloud to noone in particular. "Dry air causes nosebleeds. Do you get them often?"

Lando doesn't respond. He's patient while Oscar cleans him and even through the paper towel he can tell the skin of his face is rough. It's interesting. Lando tilts his head away when Oscar moves too close to his lips, suddenly regaining his composure and taking one of the wet paper towels to finish cleaning himself. None of it seems to have stained his shirt. Everything is alright now. All he has to do is scrub his hands.

"Should we leave?"

It wouldn't really be right to describe the life dimly reappearing in his eyes as perking up, but he seems to remember himself anyway, blinking away resignation before he raises himself into a reluctant stand.

After washing his hands of dried blood, Lando tucks himself in as close as he can behind Oscar without stepping on the heels of his shoes. There are two waitresses standing at their table looking upset; when they spot the two of them, they don't look any more pleased.

"Is something the matter?" Oscar asks.

"We would appreciate it if you don't spend too much time in the bathroom. The other patrons have been waiting to go in," one of them says with disdainful politeness. Oscar knows that if he turns around to look at Lando he'll find his eyes aimed at the ground. He just shrugs and gives them a listless apology.

Oscar doesn't need to drive him home, but he does. Lando doesn't seem to mind that he follows him inside, and the first thing he does once they're in is lock himself in his bedroom without preamble, giving Oscar cold-shouldered free reign over the rest of his apartment. He hovers for about a minute outside of his bedroom door, though, not really sure what to do with that.

He returns to the living room. He's spent enough time staring at the titles on his bookshelf, but he's yet to confront the shadowed stacks on the undershelf of Lando's coffee table. They're books and magazines, he finds out while wiping the dust on their surface on the leg of his pants, some of them more professional looking than others. At the very top of one stack is a staple-bound collection of papers folded along the center, the cover reading SPRING 2021 COLLECTION.

Flipping through it, it appears to be some kind of writing anthology. Most of them aren't any longer than a page, but some stretch to four or five while all of them are titled, dated, and attributed to italicized names he doesn't recognize.

There's one dog eared page, though. The paper seems to want to fold itself backwards here and there's evidence of wear over the black printed text, as if it's been rubbed off over a period of time—while the other pages are bold in black, Oscar passes his own thumb over text that's just barely starting to turn gray. There are brown amorphous smudges right beneath where he places his own fingers to hold the page open; at the very top of the page are the words KITCHEN WINDOW and directly beneath it an attribution to Anonymous.

In highschool, I tried to grow up at a friend's house, the work starts, but then there's a door opening down the hall and Lando reappears in the living room, now wearing sweatpants and a muscle shirt.

It's not like Oscar's never seen his arms before, but for some reason they're striking to him; they're toned but not huge, and though his shoulders frame his chest well giving him a sturdy appearance, they're still small, almost exaggerating the smallness of the rest of his frame. He slips an incense stick from its container and returns after lighting it on the burner, meticulously settling himself on the couch while the first strip of incense turns to a gray speck of ash.

Lando watches the flame-hot tip disappear and return as the gray ends fall into the incense tray almost blindly, his eyes open but not really seeing anything. His lips are parted just slightly and his body contorted like he would fold himself up like the paper cranes in the library vestibule if he could. The end-of-day light doesn't reach to his part of the couch but he seems suspended in the atmosphere anyway, like he was wearing the impending twilight like a cloak.

It suits him, Oscar thinks. He gets an itch in his fingers that he doesn't know what to do with.

"Why don't you talk, Lando?"

Lando can see the anthology settled atop the wood of the coffee table, the pages rising just slightly enough to indicate that they've been bent. It's cheap paper, stuff the department had nicked from the library and haphazardly thrown together with the help of the people in the printing facility.

They'd asked Lando personally to contribute. The shape the text makes on the dog-eared page will be familiar to him for the rest of his life, he thinks, but he likes looking at the Anonymous just beneath the title more than anything else. It felt nice to be unknown. He wonders if Oscar likes poetry.

As for his question, Lando doesn't know how to answer. Nobody's ever asked him that before, to be honest. For much of his life he didn't even think that was a question you could ask. Why would the mind reject the cornerstone of human communication? What was a man without his voice? What was a Lando who wouldn't even grace his parents with a mama, dada as an infant? Or was it a choice, willingly stripping himself of his voice and casting himself out of the world of men to seclude himself in the written word?

Nobody cared to find out when Lando was a child. Lando hardly understands caring about the why as an adult. The problem had to be fixed, not understood. If nobody ever had a conclusion for him, how was he expected to come up with one for himself?

Oscar is still looking at him though, waiting for an answer. Or a not-answer. Maybe he just asks to fill the air. Maybe he hadn't even realized he'd asked at all.

Lando finds it all too easy to imagine Oscar being unsatisfied with whatever answer he could give, anyway. They always are, with him.

~

Lando scrolls through the miscellaneous podcasts he's pulled up on Spotify and feels frustrated. Nothing interests him. He wishes someone would talk to him. Talk at him. Music isn't quite cutting it today.

He's trying really hard to avoid thinking about the incident with Oscar in the bathroom. Lando has never been good at expecting the unexpected. He's never had a nosebleed in his life before that point. He can only assume that Oscar had been right about the dry air from the vent. He'll have to start choosing a different spot or bringing Vaseline in his bag or something.

He should be grateful, he knows, but being grateful demanded the opening of a can of worms that he'd really rather keep in the back of his mental cabinet, shadowed and forgotten. He can barely handle himself most days. He doesn't need to stress himself out on purpose.

Still, the alarms going off in his head are difficult to ignore. He's gotten better at recognizing when he's about to have his bad days, at least. He's supposed to have a protocol for when he gets this way but the embarrassment of needing one in the first place didn't lend itself to helping him keep his nerve. Lewis has been telling him for years that if Lando ever needed anything, he was only a phone call away. With Lewis, even though Lando knows the last thing he'll ever do is fail to follow through, it's never been much of a comfort for anyone other than the person offering.

Still, it'd be the right decision. Still, Lando can't bear the idea of Lewis seeing him at his wits end again. It'll just make him spiral faster.

He passes a few days in that edgy discomfort, teetering on the edge of another horrible weekend. He treats himself carefully in the interim; does his breathing exercises, doesn't stay up too late, lays off the coffee a little. On the day the book club meets he spends the hours leading up to it fighting back vomit; it's halfway through more boring conversations he can't focus on that he realizes he has another option, one that seems too convenient to be true.

It's a spur of the moment feeling, one that's more than a welcome distraction from the dread that's been roiling in his gut all day. He knows Oscar doesn't tend to linger around once their meetings end, so Lando gathers his courage and approaches him where he's scrolling something on his phone idly as soon as the others begin gathering their things. He doesn't notice Lando in front of him, and at the light tug Lando gives his shirt sleeve he jumps and turns wide eyes on him, nearly flinching away like he'd really been scared. He relaxes easily enough when he realizes who it is, so Lando pulls at his sleeve lightly again and gestures towards the cafe exit. He doesn't have it in him to put on the pleading eyes even though he knows he could. He'd rather deal with Oscar's confused glances than put himself down.

"You want to go somewhere?" he asks, following Lando out to the front of the cafe. When he notices the car keys jangling from Oscar's belt loop, he tugs at them lightly instead.

"What, my car? You want me to drive you home?"

Lando nods. Oscar stands and thinks for a quick moment before giving him a simple sure, let's go.

That was easy.

Oscar plays music in the car this time. It's quiet, with a background rhythm guitar moving between two chords while a voice buried beneath reverb croons about something Lando can't make out. He taps a finger along to the rhythm on the steering wheel, sometimes; at a stop light he catches Lando watching him intently and smiles bashfully at the road ahead.

"You have a lot of books," Oscar remarks once they've made it in. He'd gotten the hint with another tug on his shirt sleeve in the car, giving him a blank look before pulling into the gravelly lot where before he was idling on the side of the road. He's looking at the spine of Lando's copy of The Little Prince, its shelf level with his nose. It's a lot of children's books, that row. Lando doesn't often touch them but it brought him a small comfort to know that they were there if he ever wanted to.

When he thinks about it, it seems perfect, though. He just wanted someone to talk to him. His mind wouldn't spiral, then, or at the very least it would be delayed a little. Oscar lets Lando bump into him when he reaches out to pull it from the shelf, taking it from his hands hesitantly when he holds it out between them.

"You want me to have it?"

Lando shakes his head. He opens the book in Oscar's hands and flips open to the beginning of the first chapter.

"You want me to read it?"

Lando points at his own chest.

"To you?"

Lando nods.

"Okay, sure," Oscar agrees. "In the living room?"

Lando takes the generally unused loveseat while Oscar sits at the end of the couch nearest to him. His posture is flawless, his knees bent at a perfect ninety degree angle and his shoulders perfectly straight and perfectly relaxed. It doesn't look very comfortable. Lando himself curls up in the chair like he tends to, feet curled in beneath his thighs and his upper body settled on the armrest, his head resting in the pillow of his arms.

He glances at Lando several times before he starts reading. Lando watches him with lidded eyes for the first few words before closing them and just listening. There's a serrated edge to Oscar's voice when he's dipping out of his vowels, he notices, like puberty hadn't done a good job smoothing over his vocal cords. The quality of his voice was grainy and he was carefully clear with his enunciation, but Lando can't help but notice how often he slips into a preoccupied softness, as if he's reading to himself and not to someone else.

Lando thinks he likes how he reads the most, though. He reads the same way he imagines printers jerk paper around in their innards. There was no story being told, here, no emotions being conveyed; this is just information being relayed through text on a page, toneless air from a stranger's lungs. His flatness isn't even really flatness—he knows perfectly well when to intone and where to inflect—but the range he was capable of pitching his voice up or down seemed throttled at both ends. It just makes everything he says come out like he's bored or unimpressed. Lando likes it. He doesn't enjoy being excited.

Maybe Oscar is a little like that, too. He had seemed impassioned enough when he had shown up at his door with his pen, and obviously was a slave to his own eagerness what with the shamelessness with which he pursued Lando's company. It's kind of hard to say, then. Oscar is just weird.

As it isn't an uncomfortable weirdness, however, Lando finds himself drifting off before long. Oscar is in the middle of dialogue with the talking rose when he notices Lando fall asleep. He doesn't know why. He just does. His sleeping face stuns him for a few very long moments. His face is softly blank, not how it usually is like he's rigidly concealing himself from the world. Oscar wonders if he's silent in his dreams, too, or if Lando even knew what his own voice sounds like.

In the absolute silence of his apartment Oscar can only hear his own heartbeats and the sigh of air that cuts through Lando's throat on each exhale. He thinks maybe it'd be appropriate to leave, but he doesn't want to. He wants to keep watching Lando, wants to keep watching the shadow of the tree branches cast dappled spots of yellow over his skin and the barren wall behind him, pale like the color of apple flesh and making his tan skin glow like brass meeting sunlight.

Oscar doesn't mean to drift off alongside him. When he blinks open his eyes again Lando's living room is completely dark, dark enough that he can just barely make out the edge of the couch when he casts his eyes to where he last remembers seeing Lando. It's empty now, but Oscar can hear the shuffling of feet just beyond the island bar in the kitchen.

The angle isn't great, but the curtains shrouding the kitchen window have been pulled open just slightly, light from a distant streetlamp illuminating a dark shape at the island bar. Lando's side profile blends in well in the low light and he has his body curled in slightly like he were trying to hide. There's music rising up from his fingers as well, the muted clicking of the spiny gears in a colorful music box before him just barely carrying over the simple metallic notes. It's a familiar melody, and although he doesn't remember the words something about it tugs at his heartstrings.

The longer Oscar watches the less he can resist pitching his body closer, pulling his head forward out from his body so he can see Lando better. It's not possible and it's none of his business but he just swears he can hear maybe a whisper, a barely-there start-and-stop of vocal cords that match up perfectly with the soft notes echoing in the dull light.

He doesn't know. Lando keeps spinning the little crank slow as molasses, and though his mouth certainly moves there is no sound Oscar can know for sure isn't being invented by his own mind.

He knows Lando can hear him step slowly into the kitchen because the floor is creaky underfoot, but he makes no sign of acknowledging him, not even when he's stood a few paces away at the other end of the bar.

"Please don't take my sunshine away," Oscar finishes the verse softly, hardly able to raise and lower his voice to meet the melody properly; it mostly comes out like a scratchy half-beg, faithless. But Lando is looking at him with those sharp blue eyes of his and in substitute of his usual cold shrewdness is a dim warmth that seems to make the whole of his person glow.

"You like this song?" Oscar asks as he pulls out a chair for himself. Lando nods—that's rare, too—and pushes the music box over to him.

The song starts from the beginning when Oscar starts turning the jagged arm. He gets about halfway through what would be the second melody before Lando's hand shoots out to rest atop his, squeezing at his fingers so he stops cranking.

"What?" Oscar looks at him expectantly. Carefully, Lando gets Oscar's thumb and index still pinched on the crank handle in between his own fingers and starts moving with a sleepy twist of his own hand. The notes ring out at the same speed they had been earlier, mercilessly slow; if the accompanying lyrics were being sung aloud they would sound like the languid and half-intelligible sighs of someone mostly asleep.

Lando lets him go when Oscar gets the pace steady how he wants it, looking pleased as the notes ring out listlessly. Oscar doesn't really know why it feels nice to be here, but it does. Hints of echoes and murmurs of what Lando might sound like even just humming the song dapple his senses here and there, and anticipation has him staring dead at Lando's face while he sits and returns the gaze lightly; and there the two of them stay together, letting the simple melody carry through the peaceful darkness.

~

Oscar, for a long time afterwards, cannot stop thinking about it. He doesn't think anything in his life has ever made more sense than wetting those cheap paper towels in the overlit bathroom of the cafe and bringing them to Lando's bloodstained face to blot them from his skin. He knows because he even thinks about not taking his medication the following morning. That's how illuminating it was.

He doesn't know what exactly is being illuminated—and maybe that's why the memories keep turning themselves over and over again in his head, nonstop while he's brushing his teeth and staring at the wall while he takes a leak and at red lights in traffic and all throughout their monthly meeting they have in their private television room on the third floor. While Nico and Fernando troubleshoot their computers so that the Zoom participants can be heard, while Oscar is supposed to be paying attention to the things Lance is reporting about book vandalizing and the homeless people sleeping in the garden by the lot, all his mind can zero in on is the tactile memory of Lando's face beneath his fingers. When he trips into the edge of the doorway on the way out, Nico pats his back and asks if he's had too much to drink the night previous; he doesn't even remember what his own response is. The stall had been so cramped with Lando. He wants to go back to that space desperately. There is something there that he needs to see again, needs to know.

There was the reading, too. He didn't understand that one as much, but it had been nice. It was nice that Lando had wanted something from him. Lando had smiled at him when he had played the little song from his music box, and the parts of his hands that Lando had touched to get him to slow down still simmer with shock. That he doesn't know what to do with, either.

It's a lot of unknowns, and Oscar generally doesn't like unknowns. Anticipation kills him. There's a lot of his mental space he'd need to rearrange to accommodate Lando. He should take it slow. He doesn't want to act on every little impulse he has.

So he sits with that in his parking lot later, letting the sun-scorned leather burn through the fabric of his shorts and testing his hands on the equally seething steering wheel. He curls and uncurls his fingers around it as if to flex his joints and doesn't mind the bead of sweat that falls down his temple from the oppressive heat that's collected in the car. It's only a single button to turn the AC on.

He doesn't do it. He puts the windows down and twists the key all the way so that the engine bursts to life, and he lets the burgeoning summer heat soak into his thoughts alongside the sight of Lando's blood on his own fingertips. There was no need to indulge all of his wants. He was just excited. And Oscar knew where excitement got him. The last thing he wanted to do is scare Lando away.

~

The teardrops that fall onto his pillowcase aren't really aesthetically cinematic like Lando's seen in movies or kitschy book covers. They glide over his lips first coating the skin with salt and disdain before tickling down his chin where they dangle on his stubble uncomfortably, and when he folds to his own stubbornness the water sticks to his fingers where he scratched at the malignity. More come though, following more or less the same water trail on his cheeks, and at that point it's worthless.

The hand he hadn't brought to his face is sticky with lubricant, still. If he forgets to wash it properly like last time it'll still smell vaguely like something tropical or fruity into the next day, where he'll be reminded of why he never does this in the first place. He thinks of it as a preventative measure that he uses that same hand to wipe the semen streaking across his bedsheet, burning the sweet scent through with whatever bitter things he held in his groin.

He couldn't sleep, is all. Oscar's presence had been nice, but it was treating a symptom, not a cause. Lando knew that. It was just offputting the inevitable. He'd read somewhere online as a teenager that orgasms made you feel tired, and seeing as his eyes were painfully exhausted from another day of staring at screens, he thought it'd be worthwhile. The digital clock on his dresser reads a disdainful two minutes past one in the morning in neon green and he wishes he hated himself enough to actually vomit instead of his stomach pussyfooting around the tension like it is now.

He isn't going to get to sleep like this. Riding the sudden burst of impetus Lando dresses himself, spends twice as long washing his hands as he needs to, grabs his house keys, and is out the door without letting any of his thoughts in his head finish themselves.

Lando doesn't know where he goes. He keeps to where the lights are low if not gone outright. The mid May heat is still trapped beneath all the pavement, radiating out up through the soles of his shoes and blending in with the dry air, the chemical heat of city life making him feel detached from it all. A bright intersection appears before him and hardly able to look at it directly he dashes across the empty tar to a darker sidestreet; not as empty as he had thought, though, because a truck horn blares at him loud enough to blow him backwards if his feet weren't lip locked with the ground as it was. When he looks down he can see the tips of his shoes are still glowing, and glowing brighter by the moment—this one honks at him too, but he dodges out of the way to the sidewalk just as it trumpets past him.

He just has to keep moving. As long as the thoughts don't have time to settle in his brain, it'll be okay. Lando scratches at his face and squeezes his eyes shut as hard as he can—he hopes he doesn't trip on any lizards or bugs or anything, he's done that before and it always eats him up inside—and when he opens them he's come to a small concrete bridge passing over an artificial creek, one that Lando knows is almost always flooded during the spring but now was nothing more than a barren canyon full of dead grass and sun bleached stone. He had seen during the April storms how the fish collected there in their newfound river, circling among each other in the reeds while pondskaters and dragonflies would flit about anxiously; when May came and the water dried up, all that was left were beached fish gasping pathetically for water that wouldn't come for another two months at least.

Lando stands in the middle of the bridge and peers over at the darkness. It's too dark to make out anything but he can hear the shuffle of the tall dead grasses and the lingering smell of rotting fish, a mix of saline and death.

He turns and keeps walking. The road is long and dark and empty save for the occasional car parked off to the sides of the road on low grass and gravel lots. The sidewalk only continues for a short distance before cutting itself off, its final bastion a gray building set in the Earth like an unadorned toy brick. It has big red LED lights atop its small entrance reading MIDNIGHT PUB, and from the small windows Lando can see quite a decent turnout for the night.

He doesn't know how long he's been out at this point. He isn't sure what he wants to do. He's still standing in the darkness when he slowly approaches the building, but then suddenly a side door opens and out comes two girls dressed in flattering skirts and tight fitting blouses, laughing and hissing and murmuring between themselves with their backs to Lando. He doesn't know why he stares. It feels like it's been so long since he's seen another human being at all.

He hardly realizes his body is inching forward bit by bit with a growing interest in listening to what they're saying. His foot drags when he comes to a stop and the ache of gravel underfoot gets their attention, two empty shapes twisting their heads sharply at the same time to look at him.

A lot changes. They appear to rise from their dark backdrop and the light appears to serve no other purpose than illuminating the terror on their shock-dropped faces; they seem all at once too close and impossibly far, like Lando is watching them on a movie screen.

"Hey, do you need some help?" one of the girls says, her words stalwart with concern even through her fear—and her voice is so sweet, too, like fresh strawberries dipped in powdered sugar. Lando wants to love her in the artificial bug-swelled light. Right now he mostly just feels like the fish rotting on pointed rocks.

"I think he's okay, let's just go," the sweetheart's friend says, tugging her by the wrist back towards the building.

"But he looked so…"

He doesn't hear what she says behind the squeak of the heavy metal door. Lando's lungs shudder under the weight of everything. He can't believe the outside oxygen is what sustains him as it does when the warmth of it seems to fill with spikes and cut at his insides with each pull and stretch of the muscles between his ribs. Maybe Sweetheart's friend had seen a monster. Maybe Lando had crawled out from the muck of the storm drain after all, was covered in shit and rot from the air-drowned fish that got stranded where the water receded from the rocks at the river flush. He shivers in the warm wet air thinking about it—were his organs sinking into his feet as he walked? Did his breath reek of bacteria and waste-of-life?

He doesn't know. He keeps walking. Lando knows he has to do something but he just can't figure out what. His mind is so foggy and his fingers twitchy and feeling perpetually empty no matter how hard he grips his wrists and no matter where he digs in his nails. He's confused. Doesn't know and has never known anything about anything. Nothing makes sense besides his own weight pushing back up from the concrete through his shoes and the haziness of his vision.

It's at a meaningless dip in the road that Lando stops to look up at the sky. He doesn't know why he does. It's blank and has nothing to say to him but through the slow movement of grayish clouds he can see the light of the moon overhead bleeding through the watery cotton, and Lando smiles. He smiles a really big smile. Somewhere up there was a man cutting bamboo or a rabbit twisting his head to get a better look at the myriad creatures down on earth below, or even an alien rose from a far-off planet having an edifying conversation with a little boy in princely clothes.

Lando remembers his own breath in his lungs again, the weight of his body in his ankles and the dark world around him. What other things were on the moon, he wondered. In elementary school someone had told him that it was made of cheese. He preferred the image of the man dangling a fishing line down from the crescent he'd seen at the beginning of movies better.

It was fun to imagine, is all. He had forgotten that. He's been too stuck in the real world, too focused on work and the incidents at the cafe and the strange but gentle man who occupies his living room sometimes. He always forgets. He always lets his head get away from himself.

Lando walks home and thinks about The Little Prince and the drawings of elephants in the shape of hats that adults just couldn't seem to get a grasp of no matter how obvious it is to the reader. The copy that Oscar had read to him contained little doodles in the margins of the pages that deformed the text on the page, and Lando had always liked that, too. The malleability of everything. It was easier for him when nothing was set in stone.

He doesn't run into any more oncoming traffic after that, but with his head firmly in the clouds he doesn't think he'd notice the impact, anyway.

~

Oscar gets up in the morning and makes it about five strokes into brushing his teeth before he concludes that he won't be able to make it through the day sober if he goes into work.

He'd only done it once. He had a fast metabolism, he knew, and he just needed something to keep himself calm until he could have a smoke at his lunch break. Nobody had noticed as far as he could tell, but he had definitely fucked up a spreadsheet Lance had spent the entire day on in his tipsy stupor. He'd rather avoid actively making other people's lives worse if he can help it.

So, Oscar calls out. Doesn't do it often enough, really. He makes his phone call to Fernando feigning exhaustion and sleeps in until ten-thirty and drinks his coffee on the edge of his bed like he usually does, spends an hour after that reading on his couch and another thirty minutes staring at the various walls of his apartment before deciding he's a little bored.

Between taking a walk or driving to some treat shop to eat alone or getting over himself and going grocery shopping like he's needed to for days, he thinks he's most likely to end up sitting in his car with his hands in his lap completely stationary. When he starts up the engine and pulls out into the street, he decides that this is the last time he'll show up to Lando's home unannounced.

It's not weird to ask to exchange numbers, Oscar tells himself on the way up to Lando's front door. It's hardly one in the afternoon. He's never seen the way the shadow falls above his door at this time of day. It looks almost happier in the earnest daylight.

Most of the time, the evenings Oscar spends in Lando's apartment don't amount to much more than reading on his couch while Lando did whatever in his office. When Lando answers the door, there's a new alertness in his eyes.

"Sorry. I know it's early. I figured you'd be at work, but I came anyway."

Lando quirks an eyebrow. Oscar is sufficiently intimidated.

"Um. I just took off today. Didn't feel like going in. Are you busy?"

Lando is busy. When he lets Oscar in he locks the front door behind him and swiftly turns on his heel down the hallway and into his office.

Oscar follows him. He has that amount of bravery today, apparently.

It's austere. The walls are barren and the window curtains are drawn shut, only letting in enough light to make the fabric glow faintly. In one corner is a haphazard stack of discarded boxes and in another a strand of a spider web that had broken from its post and was now floating along with the gentle air from the vent above it. Then in the center of the space pushed up to the wall—odd since Lando seemed so at home in corners and shadows—is a simple gray desk adorned with a laptop, a number of stacked notebooks and loose pens, discarded receipts, and a graphic mug holding a number of writing implements. Oscar can make out Don't Talk To Me Until I've Had My Coffee in a swirly font peeling out from around its curve, except the 'Until I've Had My Coffee' bit has been crossed out with thick black lines. He can't tell if it's part of the design or if it's something Lando did himself.

There's another bookshelf in here, this one much wider and taking up almost the majority of the wall it's pressed against. The shelves here are taller, containing things that look to be textbooks or anthologies or maps or encyclopedias; above and below it are smaller books, novels of names that Oscar mostly doesn't recognize. On the floor just in front of it lay a few titles, one of them spread open and containing a page of thin, snaking text around a number of historical artifacts; there are pens and notebooks scattered around here too, and on the wall a blank calendar with an image of a puppy and a kitten sitting beside each other with daisies in their mouths, flowery text reading May We Always Love Each Other! pasted over their tiny paws.

He turns his attention back to the laptop on the desk where Lando is currently sitting. There's some kind of text document open on the screen, and the font is huge and a little difficult to look at; he recognizes the dyslexic typeface they use sometimes for public classes at the library, the same one they'd gone over for Oscar's accessibility training at the library. Lando gets settled in his chair without preamble and completely loses interest in the world outside his computer screen.

Oscar stands a little ways away and watches Lando work for a little while, feeling not unlike a service dog with too little to do. Lando's eyes reflect the light of the screen in a way that has his pupils drawn tight into tiny black knots. He's pitched forward in his chair a little, one hand stretched out to scroll with his mouse wheel as he reads while a leg is folded beneath himself tightly.

It's some kind of narrative, Oscar thinks, considering the quotation marks and formatting. With how big the font is Lando scrolls often as he reads, highlighting section after section of text and appending comments that accrue at the side of the document software. He types really quickly. Oscar can't help but feel a little impressed.

He returns to the living room to read, comforted by the occasional scramble of plastic clicks that echo from Lando's office whenever he types something and the apprehensive quality of the late morning light falling around him. Lando comes out some time later to fiddle in the kitchen—from a distance Oscar can't tell what he's doing at the burner with his back to the living room, but when he sees the smoke rise over his head, he realizes that he was using the stove to light a stick of incense. A ritual, Oscar thinks. He gets that. Lighters were easier but there was something weighty and intentional about twisting the stove knob and watching the flames burst into existence; the solid force of it in the air was interesting to him.

The incense smells nice, anyway. It's something herbal, almost sweet. He likes it. He thinks if he'd smelled it anywhere else he wouldn't.

An hour or so passes. The mailman drops something into the mailslot and outside traffic waxes and wanes as lunch hour goes by. Lando himself doesn't come out to eat until half past three, grabbing nothing but a banana and a glass of water before returning to his office without any acknowledgement of Oscar's existence. He doesn't respond when Oscar asks if he can have one, too, so he helps himself.

Another hour passes. Oscar stares outside the window in Lando's living room, stretches his arms above his head and watches the dog at the street corner sniff around the base of a tree.

The sound of something metallic closing. Footsteps down the hall. Oscar turns to find Lando standing at the entryway, a bracing hand on the wall watching him blankly.

He comes into the living room then, goes to unlock the front door and steps outside. He leaves it open. Oscar comes to join him on the little stoop up, half of his ass hanging off the concrete because he's wary about sitting too close. He has his elbows resting on his knees, staring out at the world across the street. There are butterflies flitting around an array of pots at another doorstep; the road is a pale gray in the bright sunlight and the lack of shadows gives it an unreal quality that makes Oscar's eyes water. Beside him where the stoop drops off into graybrown dirt are cigarette butts and miscellaneous plastic wrappers. If Lando smoked, Oscar's never smelled it on him.

"This is a nice area," Oscar remarks about the summer silence. Lando pokes around at an earwig scratching up the gritty stone. It rears its fangs at him and flees down the steps, falling over itself in an attempt to escape Lando's curiosity. Oscar thinks he can just barely see a hint of a smile on his face. It makes him feel good. It's a good day, today. Above them a single cloud rolls by serenely. Oscar raises a hand to point at it.

"That kind of looks like a cat, doesn't it?"

Lando looks up, his eyes blank and twitchy as he tries to see what Oscar sees. He even gives his head a slight tilt about it, like dogs do when they're confused.

"Look. It's got two ears here and here, and the grayer bits make its eyes." Oscar draws his finger over the cloud as he speaks, Lando watching his finger likewise. He purses his lips and appears to come to some silent conclusion, though whether or not he agrees or disagrees is anyone's guess.

As it glides overhead, the cat's ears soften out into its head and its cheeks stretch out either way, elongating its shape and ruining the image altogether. Now Oscar thinks it just looks like something phallic.

"Look. Now it's got balls."

Lando's lips twist downward with distaste but he doesn't do a good job hiding the smirk beneath it. With a snort he stands and leaves Oscar on the steps, but he's definitely smiling. Oscar could see it as clear as day before he had turned his head away. He laughs after him, leaning his body back inside to call him back out to stay so they can call more cloud shapes, but then he hears voices walking down the sidewalk and thinks his returning inside had nothing to do with Oscar's middle school sense of humor.

Oscar locks the door behind him back inside. He grabs one of the puzzles from beneath the bookshelf by the entryway—it's Van Gogh themed, but something other than Starry Night that Oscar doesn't think he's seen before.

"You ever do this one?" he asks Lando, who has made himself comfortable on the unadorned armchair. He has one of the throw pillows settled in his lap while he plugs earphones into his phone. He looks at Oscar and shakes his head, watching him while he carefully spills the pieces onto the coffee table.

"I'll probably leave after I finish this. Maybe you want to take a nap, or something."

Lando studies him and says nothing. Then he puts in his earbuds and gets himself comfortable watching something on his phone.

He doesn't mean to fall asleep, but he does. Lando had slipped away to his bedroom or something and Oscar had just laid his head down to rest for a moment, the puzzle close to complete but his eyelids losing their strength. Something about Lando's home has his stomach settling around an unknown comfort that he never expects.

When he wakes, the first thing he notices is that the windows have taken on a dark blue hue, a long strip of navy sitting painted on top of Lando's kitchen cupboards, cascading down his refrigerator and losing its color with the pull of gravity. His knees are folded up beneath him with his head resting in a pillow of his arms on the couch cushions; his lower spine agonizes when he shifts his feet a little, blood squeezed out by his own weight, and it's that combination of striking pain combined with the gray of his hands in the twilight-drawn emptiness of the home around him that convinces Oscar that he's dead.

"Lando?" he calls, petrified, too petrified to care about the twinge of panic in his voice.

From somewhere beyond are two hollow knocks like a hammer on a casket. Oscar leaps to a stand with bee-rattled feet and chases the sound.

The lights are off in the bathroom but the door is left open ajar. Lando already has his head twisted towards him; though the ambient light from the living room is strong at the edge of the doorway its glow is swallowed by the navy darkness hanging over Lando in the bath. Oscar can smell the sweet soap in the air and hears the soft swiping of water at the edges of the evening-gray ceramic, as if Lando was waving a finger or tapping a foot beneath the water.

Even after all this time, Oscar keeps expecting Lando to speak. He doesn't. He stares at Oscar expectantly, his eyes almost impossible to see where they're shaded beneath the cliff of his brow. Oscar can see his lips better, though, and the shape they make on his face don't speak of anything at all. The darkness has stolen the gold from his skin. Maybe that's why he can't read him. Maybe that's why it feels like they're both dead. But they aren't. He's sitting up in the bath, spine a little hunched forward, enough that Oscar can see the ridges of his ribcage coiling around his side, sticking out behind his arm. The skin is pulled tight over the little rolling mounds—is Lando really that thin?—and with each silent breath he takes they shift and flex and curl in real time. The rise of muscle, the steady rhythm Lando keeps with his body is mesmerising.

He becomes aware, suddenly, of the fact that he's the one casting the shadow on Lando. When he shifts his weight a little enough light peeks through the gap between his arm and his side to cast an amorphous glow on Lando's throat, floating over his jaw and dipping down over his shoulders.

Oscar is overcome with a novel, surgical curiosity. He wants to stick his hands in Lando's ribcage and feel his organs humming against each other for himself.

He stumbles back out into the hallway. He can't go back into the living room. The deep blue end-of-day light there has tar-like dread sinking into the lowest pit of his stomach. Instead he continues down the opposite direction, darting into Lando's bedroom and diving towards the narrow gap between the bedframe and the wall.

It's dark in here too, but it's colorless, at least. It feels safer here. Lando's bedroom smells different from the rest of his apartment. It lacks the artificial scenting from incense and diffusers that are meant to vaguely evoke the experience of being in nature; instead it just smells like worn bedsheets and closer dust, sterile and starkly reminiscent of life. Of Lando.

He needs more of it. He can still see feel touch smell the motion of Lando's ribcage beneath his skin; it's so strong in his vision that it seems to be attacking his own respiratory system, his own heart; he can feel each pulse of blood moving in his jugular and in his wrists like cannons going off in his ears to his own physiological rhythm. It's terrifying. He needs to grasp onto it tighter or let it go completely; he moves before he even realizes, grabbing the loose blanket on the bed behind him and bundling it into his arms; he tucks the cold fabric into itself so it can feel firm, firm like a person would feel, maybe; he hugs it close to himself and presses his face into it all and breathes in deep.

The world lurches. There's so much Lando, here. Oscar can smell the sweat from his skin and his forgotten dreams and nightmares and echoes of his own bloodstream and maybe the humidity on his breath. He shudders and breathes in again, hugs the blanket closer to him, hard enough that he feels his own muscles strain with the effort of compression.

"Fuck," Oscar bites into the white cotton. A little swipe of his own saliva has come off where there's an imprint of his face in the fabric. He wipes at it, but it's already sunken into the white. Now Oscar is there, too, and again a dreadful feeling of wrongness passes up through his spine and makes his head feel weightless.

A shadow appears at his side, a darker one that shimmers at the edges. Lando is standing a few paces from him, blocking the exit out of the little corridor the side of his bed forms with the wall. Oscar looks up at him and says nothing. He's only in his boxers but he's donned a black sweater now, loose over his body. Oscar can see through it, can see through his skin and his bones right to the amalgamation of flesh settled in the left hemisphere of his chest. It glows inside of him like a sun behind overcast clouds.

Lando takes the blanket from him and stretches it over the bed again. Oscar stands when he gets within touching distance and does just that—he stretches out a hand and tugs at his sweater, an index finger hooked into the front pocket.

Lando looks down at his hand and then up at Oscar again.

"It looks soft," he says. "Is it soft?"

Lando's only response is to peel the sweater off—he's wearing a shirt underneath, but even that rides up to expose the flat of his stomach, the dark crescent-cut of his belly button—and hand it to him.

It's not that soft, but it could be made from barbed wire for all Oscar cares. He holds the sweater up to his nose in front of Lando and breathes in, smells the man's skin in the fabric, and feels his knees tremble.

Lando watches Oscar press his sweater up to his nose and feels like he isn't supposed to be seeing this at all. Whatever the desperation in Oscar's hunched shoulders he doesn't seem embarrassed. Maybe it's the darkness. He knows it's like that.

He follows Lando back out to the living room, close enough that his toes brush Lando's heels when he pauses to slip a stick of incense from the packaging on the side table. He can hear his breathing as he stands over him at the burner waiting for the incense to catch on the flame; after that he lays beside Lando on the couch, curled up with the top of his head an inch or two from Lando's thigh.

Lando reads the next chapters for the reading group meeting silently, oddly comforted by the soft snores of Oscar in his sleep.

~

In the morning, Oscar is still on the couch.

Lando is here, too, but they aren't touching. His heart coughs when he thinks about that. Touching Lando. He's here anyway, though, curled up into a ball with his head tilted over the soft edge of the couch back. His throat is stretched out and his lips parted just slightly. His jaw is strong, squared. So are his hunched shoulders and his thick, heavy fingers that are settled loosely over the blanket in his lap.

He looks so different, like this. He looks human. Distant. Alien. Oscar sits up and reaches a hand out to his shoulder, shaking him awake lightly. Lando's eyes fly open the second his hand makes contact.

"It's morning," says Oscar. "Thought I should wake you."

Lando rubs at his eyes with a frown, stretching his neck to one side then the other like there's a crick in it. Oscar thinks he's about to toss the blanket from himself and stand, but instead Lando tucks his legs in again and twists himself to face Oscar full-on. His eyes are still droopy with sleep and he's particular with how his blanket folds over his body as he pulls at it here and there to get comfortable.

"Or you wanted to sleep in," Oscar surmises. Lando doesn't smile at him but his expression is a light one, oddly stress free.

When he lays back down, the angle he has only includes the edge of the coffee table and the simple pattern of his rug. He just barely catches Lando's backside disappear into the kitchen a short time later, and Oscar follows him, drags the unused barstool closer to where Lando sits at the bar and rests his head in his arms.

Grogginess is tugging at his insides but Lando is writing in a little worn journal again and Oscar can't help but be a little curious. The viewing angle isn't great for reading moods, but he can't help but notice the seriousness returning to Lando's face. The letters in his diary boast a strong slant, and when Oscar finally blinks away enough sleep to sit up properly he's surprised to find Lando's penmanship exceedingly prim. His cursive letters look like arthritis-inducing embroidery, Ps and Qs flying mournfully and gracefully across the page like diving birds; they remind Oscar of the beautiful knotwork trinkets he's seen at craft fairs.

He isn't rude enough to actually try and read his writing, but he doesn't want Lando to think he's being nosy. That's why he averts his gaze from Lando's peculiar grip on his pen and asks,

"Why do you go to book club?"

Lando's pen freezes over the page. He scans around the table for something, pinching a napkin from its holder and putting his pen to dubiously recycled paper instead. He flips it around and pushes it towards Oscar.

Studying the reader's thought process

I'm a manuscript editor

Oscar reads the two snubbed lines over and over and over again, certain with each blink of his eyes that the words will disappear the moment they reenter his vision. It's the first time Lando has ever used words with him. Oscar feels like if he doesn't sink his teeth into this opportunity it'll never come again.

That's why he tears the tissue with how hard he jabs the pen into it to write his own message back, digging his canine into the tip of his tongue with frustration when he has to lightly fold the paper back out to continue from where the ink left off.

REALLY?

Oscar cringes internally as soon as he lifts his pen from the dot of the question mark. His blocky, angry scrawl is offensive even to him beneath Lando's delicate cursive above it.

Lando's response is quick.

Yes

Oh, Oscar almost writes before he realizes that'd be stupid. It occurs to him with a bit of embarrassment that he doesn't even need to be responding through writing in the first place. Lando isn't deaf.

Still, it feels right to do so, like he's seeing a bit of the world through Lando's eyes, letting himself sink down to his level with pleasure. He thinks about the skin cells from Lando's hand where it rested across the edge of the little napkin and is suddenly claimed by a desire to rub his own palm against it.

Do you like it? Oscar writes back, this time utilising that other half of the alphabet. Lando's reply:

Everyone there is illiterate

A laugh erupts from him, surprising Lando just as much as himself. Lando's flinched back in his chair and is looking at Oscar with wide eyes like he's just said something horribly offensive.

"Sorry," he says. "I wasn't expecting you to say that."

Lando taps his fingers on his half-filled journal page and looks at Oscar, his silent disapproval of Oscar's laughter fading from his expression.

"I guess that's why you have all those books, then? You like reading?"

Lando's fingers stop tapping and Oscar can see him balk through cocking one of his eyebrows. Taking his journal with him, he stands and disappears down the hallway after writing his last message on the napkin.

Observant, aren't you?

Oscar holds back his laugh this time, but with Lando not watching him he lets a smile stretch the muscles on his face freely. He likes that Lando has some snark. He can't wait to talk to him again.

He doesn't know where he's disappeared off to but he doesn't really care. He folds the napkin neatly and slides it fastidiously into his pocket, careful to keep it flush with his skin and the contour of the fabric so that there are no folds to ruin the exchange of ink. He pictures the comfort he'll have at night before bed now, holding the napkin in his hands and letting the saccharine excitement of reliving their first conversation sit on the back of his tongue and carry him to sleep.

Notes:

kitchen window is a poem by richard siken