Release(50)

“Linus–”

“I tried for you, Adam. I really, really did.”

“Linus, I know–”

“I don’t think you do. You’re not the easiest guy in the world, you know.”

Adam faltered, that knot in his stomach again. “What do you mean?”

Linus made a rushing motion with his hands on either side of Adam’s head, spilling a little beer on Adam’s shirt. “All this stuff,” Linus said, “always going on. Always the world tumbling down on you. Always you trying to hold it all up.” He sipped his beer and said, more quietly, “It’s no wonder you only notice the guys who treat you badly.”

Adam swallowed and turned the rose in his hands, turned it round and round. “The pizzas,” he said. “The pizzas were meant to be a last gift to Enzo before he moved away. He didn’t say as much but that’s what we both meant.”

“Yeah, I got that. Look, Adam–”

“He tried to pay me for them.”

Linus hesitated, clearly not sure where this was going.

“That’s how he sees me,” Adam said. “I hoped and hoped and hoped. For a year and a half. And then he dumped me. For the worst, stupidest reasons. And I guess… I guess I still hoped. Even when I knew I shouldn’t. Even when I had better things right in front of me.” He looked over at Linus. “He was the first way out for me. The first way out of all the rest of this stuff that races and races. The first window to a world that could be, a world I’m kind of desperate for. And he had my heart, I admit that.”

“That much was obvious, Adam. To anyone who looked.”

“But he tried to pay me for the pizzas. He wouldn’t even let me be generous. Which I think is what I was secretly hoping for all this time. He didn’t calculate it or anything. There was just … no connection left for him there.” He turned the rose again. “Whatever I was before, I’m now just a guy who did him a favour he needed to repay.”

Linus eyed him. “That must have hurt.”

“Who cares, Linus? Who cares? It woke me up. I’ve… God, do you know how little I think I have? How much I think goes wrong for me? With my parents and work and Angela moving away?”

“But that’s all true, kinda,” Linus said, gently. “Don’t pretend things aren’t–”

“Yeah, but they’re not the only things that are true. There’s so much more that’s also true.” He still turned the rose around and around. “You sure you won’t take this?”

“Feels like it’s kind of overweighted with meaning now. That’s an awful lot to put on one rose.”

“Probably.”

“Here’s the thing, Adam. I know what I want. Not all of it, but the right amount. I want you, but not at any price. I want to get through my senior year with friends and I want you to be one of them and I want you lying in my bed and I want you naked in my shower and I want us to laugh and I want you to actually be there. All of you. Not seventy per cent with the rest still wondering if Enzo is ever going to come back after burrowing so far into the closet it’s like he’s looking for straight Narnia.”

Adam laughed a little at this, but Linus’s face continued serious. “Do you know what you want, Adam?” he asked. “You want out, I know that, but there are lots of ways out. Do you just want that one?”

He waited. Adam still spun the rose, the rose that seemed destined now to be given to no one, the rose bought on the spur of the moment after he’d pricked his thumb. He put a thorn back to the wound again, idly pricking himself once more, just wanting to feel the pain for a second–





–and saw it again, an entire world, fast as a gasped breath, of trees and green, of water and woods, of a figure that followed, dark, in the background, of mistakes made, of loss, of grief, of a world ending, ending, ending–





He blinked and put his bloody thumb to his lips like he had at the beginning of this eternal, pivotal day. Here at the end of it, there was only the coppery taste of blood on his tongue.

He knew what to say.

“I want to take you back to the party, Linus,” he said, low, like he was asking for a permission he was terrified of not getting. “I want to kiss you in front of everyone there. I want everyone to know.” Raising his eyes to look directly into Linus’s face was maybe the scariest thing he’d had to do all day long, but it was only the free-falling terror that always accompanied hope.

“I want to love you,” Adam said. “If you’ll let me.”





“I do not know how to let her go,” the Queen says, directly to the faun, and this, too, shows the terrifying diminution of her power. Not just admitting to a lack of knowledge, but the implicit request to an underling of the court for help.

“Does she know how to let you go, my lady?” he asks, trying to stay calm. “It was her spirit who first caught yours.”

“It was not,” the Queen says, as if admitting an embarrassment. “I saw her there. I was curious. There was a loss, an unanswered question. And now–”

“The binds of the world are coming loose, my lady. We have until the sun sets. That’s all the time given to a spirit to wander. You know this. She will die, and if you die with her–”