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The ambulance came, and people ran.

I sat with the kid on the grass, safely out of the way as cars and trucks sped off into the darkness. Frightened shouts, the screech of music as stereos blared to life and were then snapped off, the smell of hot oil and metal and rubber breaking up the cool quiet. The kid slept through all of it, his head pillowed on my shirt. The wounds still bled, but not badly enough to be life threatening, and I was afraid of making things worse if I tried to apply pressure with the glass still in there. There was his eye, too. The way the shadows fell, at least I didn’t have to look at it. Somehow, my vape was still in my pocket, so I sat there and hit it and watched everyone else’s night fall apart. The dark felt like a breath on my back.

When the paramedics got out of the ambulance, I flagged them down, and after that, my part was over. All except the waiting. I watched from a distance as they checked the kid out. There were two paramedics, each with a flashlight. I didn’t know either of them, and I wondered what that meant—were we far enough from Wahredua that someone else had responded? Or had I missed some new hires? One of them was a woman, and when she shone her light on the kid’s face, the beam trembled, and her body locked up. She did better than the man; his hand dropped, and he said, “Christ.”

I could have told them, but they figured it out themselves: there wasn’t much they could do. There wasn’t much anybody could do.

“What happened?” the guy shouted to me.

The night was quieter now, and it felt like it was just the four of us.

“He got hit in the face with some glass.”

“Yeah,” the woman said. “How?”

I shrugged and hit my vape again.

They got him on a stretcher and were loading him into the back of the ambulance when the cruisers arrived. The deputy who cornered me was a white guy, twentysomething, losing his hair and trying to make up for it with a neckbeard. His name tag said Burrows, and his khaki uniform had DORE COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT on it. So, not that far from Wahredua after all.

“This your friend?” was his opening line. He might have said more, but that’s when he saw my face. In a book, somebody might say, He almost swallowed his tongue, like some kind of deep-throating bullshit. But it wasn’t like that, not really. It was like a word or a noise or something tried to get out, and then whatever it was, it got caught in his mouth.

The ambulance doors thudded shut in the night.

I shook my head.

“You do that to him?”

He was looking past me. It’s the eye, I think. Something about seeing blood in another guy’s eye makes people uncomfortable.

I shook my head again.

“How about this, then? How about you tell me who you are and what happened here?”

One thing about cops? About any guy with authority, actually? They hate it when you make them wait. I hit my vape, held the cloud of nicotine and chemicals and shit, and then let it out slowly through my nose. “Gray Dulac.” I wiped my hand on my shorts, but the blood was mostly dry by now. When I held it out to shake, he just stared at it. “Detective with the Wahredua PD.”

He looked at me again, a little longer this time before his eyes jumped away again. He knew. Everybody knew. And then he looked at me, shirtless, and he looked at the ambulance, and you could see all that neckbeard processing power putting the pieces together.

“All right, Detective Dulac. You want to tell me what happened tonight?”

“I don’t know what happened. I was leaving, and I saw him like that.”

His gaze came back to me. It’s the rubbernecking effect. You don’t want to look, but you can’t help yourself. But then I realized there was something different. Not just the usual horrified fascination.

“Detective, are you under the influence?”

“I had a few drinks.” And then, just in case, I grinned and went for relatable—two guys who know how life can be. “Maybe a contact high.”

His expression closed off. He put his hands on his belt. And then he said, “Let’s start from the beginning.”

It went about as you’d expect. He took his time with the questioning. He wanted to see my ID. The ambulance had been gone for a long time before he told me I could go, but to make myself available for further questioning .

I had my own question before I left. “What’s his name?”

Deputy Burrows shrugged.

He didn’t ask me if I was driving, so I deducted a couple of points from his score.

I drove home on autopilot, following the instructions from the Maps app, my body tense and my skin sticking to the seat every time I moved. It was almost dawn, the sky lightening, and the streets still empty as I drove into town. There was something unreal about all of it. About our street, in particular: the dew on the grass, the dogwoods losing the last of their blossoms, webs of humidity on insulated windows that had gotten moisture trapped inside.

Ours was a Craftsman bungalow like the others on the street, with a fieldstone foundation and clapboard siding and a deep porch where, if you wanted, you could have hung a swing. The lawn was full of crabgrass but neatly mown, the flowerbeds freshly weeded, the roses doing the best they could even though I’d planted them in a bad spot. Darnell was keeping them alive by sheer force of will (and fertilizer); he just wouldn’t let the damn things die. When I got out of the car, the morning had a quiet made up of a dozen soft sounds—bird wings, the rustle of leaves, the tick of the cooling engine. As I made my way around thehouse, blue started to tinge the sky.

He always left the back door unlocked for me. That wasn’t safe, but it was another argument we’d never had. It opened onto the kitchen, which was dark. Even the little light under the microwave was off. So, we were fighting. When we weren’t fighting, he left the light on. It was one of the things he could do for me. Or he thought he could do for me. Leave lights on. But the lights were off. Well, it was always something.

I waited for a sound, for anything, but silence met me. I eased the door shut behind me, slipped off my shoes. I ditched my shorts on the way to the bathroom, gave my dick and balls a jiggle to let the boys breathe, and caught the fading reek of cum as dried patches flaked away.

I showered with the lights off. The water was too cold at first. And then too hot. And then the heat was just right, so hot that it felt like the night’s aches could ooze out of loosening muscle. With my eyes closed, I saw him again. The boy coming out from between the cars. The way he had stumbled, one hand flying out to catch himself, and then the bloody print he left on the car window. His face. The glitter of glass. The ruin of his eye.

I remembered it as a flash, but the funny thing about memory is that you can’t trust it. They tell me that the explosion would have been almost instantaneous. The experts said that, with a lightbulb bomb, the lightbulb never actually lights up. That’s the whole point—the electricity activates the gunpowder, or whatever they pack in there, instead of making the light bulb turn on. But I remember this moment of light. The shape of the bulb. The glow.

Under the stinging spray, I washed my face. My fingers bumped over the scars. I kept my eyes tightly shut. For a long time, after, they’d told me not to get water in my eye. Don’t even wash your face, they’d said. There were wipes. There were other things you could do. Even after they told me it was okay, I wasn’t sure. That’s the thing about habit—it’s like memory, this thing your brain holds on to even when it’s not right.

I was drying off in the dark, with the whir of the fan and the faint scent of the shower gel for company, when I heard the heavy steps. I ran the towel over my face, gingerly, careful of scars and eye—motherfucking habit—and then briskly through my hair. One of my fraternity brothers had been sure that drying your hair would make it fall out. That’s the kind of thing you care about when you’re twenty. Then I thought about some of the guys I knew and thought, Or older.

The heavy steps moved through the house, and I traced their path in my head: from his bedroom to the kitchen. Across the dining room to check the back door. To my bedroom. They paused outside the hall bath. I thought I could feel him on the other side of the door. And then they moved away again.

After what felt like a respectable amount of time, I let myself out of the bathroom, towel riding low on my hips. The lights were on now, but the kitchen was empty. Darnell was moving around in his bedroom at the front of the house. I went into my bedroom, dropped the towel, and found a pair of shorts and a tee in the dark.

The heavy steps moved through the house again. They stopped in the kitchen. I told myself not to look, but I looked. You’re with someone long enough and you’re connected, even if things—everything—else goes.

Darnell was picking up the shorts I’d dropped on my way to the bathroom, of course.

It was strange how you saw people differently after a while. When I’d met him, all I’d seen was the big guy in overalls with the bushy beard. He was still big. He still had the beard, although he’d trimmed it a little, and he used a balm I’d gotten him when we’d first started dating. He didn’t wear the overalls anymore; I’d put my foot down about that. The vibe was more suburban dad now—khaki shorts and a polo. He looked good in them. He had good shoulders, good arms, good thighs. His face was thinner, and his eyes were hollowed out. He carried the shorts loosely in one hand and came toward me without looking at me. He picked up the wet towel from where I’d dropped it. He still didn’t look at me. On the way out of my room, he slammed the door behind him.

I could go to sleep, I thought. I should go to sleep.

Across the house, the lid of the washer banged.

He’d be here all day, I thought. He’d be in the house all day, the way he was every day. He’d work in the third bedroom we’d turned into his office, even though it was Sunday. Then he’d stop, and he’d work in the yard instead. And every time he moved, it would be this: the hammering steps, the slamming doors, like living with an angry ghost who, no matter what you tried, you just couldn’t make go the fuck away.

Even in the dark, I closed my eyes. Exhaustion warped my sense of balance. I felt like I was falling or drifting or something. Then I opened them again and took off the shorts and the shirt. I reached for the light switch. Instead, though, I opened the door; the ambient light from the kitchen was enough for me to pick out a pair of jeans and a gray oxford. I was cuffing the sleeves when he came back from rage-laundering and stared at me through the doorway.

I glanced at the clothes on the floor and said, “They’re clean.”

He hadn’t combed his hair. It was flattened on one side from where he’d slept on it. A little shaggy, maybe. Needing a trim.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

He stared at me a moment longer, and then his steps carried him out of sight. I took a pair of socks from the dresser. They were all there, clean and folded and organized by color. As I sat on the bed to pull them on, water ran in the kitchen. And then the coffee pot made a chiming noise when it bumped something. A headache was starting deep inside my skull, a combination of exhaustion and a hangover.

Darnell’s stride came back toward the room. When he reached the doorway, he said, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

It was hard, meeting his eyes.

“Where were you?” he asked.

I pulled on one sock. Then the other. His breaths were shaky. God, I thought, don’t cry.

I said, “When we agreed to have an open relationship—”

“When we agreed,” he said.

After a moment, I started again. “When we agreed, we said that we weren’t going to do this. We weren’t going to make it a thing.”

The bubbling sound of the coffeemaker rose.

“When we agreed,” he finally said, “you said you were going to come home.”

“I—”

He slapped the doorjamb. “Where were you?”

It was too hot for the o xford, I decided. I started unbuttoning it.

“We agreed on rules,” Darnell said. “Nobody we know. Nobody with a partner. No staying out all night.” His voice softened, and that was even worse. “You come home, Gray.”

I let the shirt fall to the floor and found a polo in one of the drawers. I pulled it on. He was still looking at me.

“Is the coffee ready?” I asked.

“If the rules aren’t working, then maybe we need to talk about this again.”

I slipped past him into the kitchen. “I’ve got to go to work.”

“Sure you do. On a Sunday.”

The coffee was still dripping. My sneakers were on the tray by the back door, so I stepped into them.

He was still looking at me.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“What am I supposed to do? Make threats? Yell?”

“You can do whatever you want.”

He laughed and rubbed his eyes. “Okay.” But when I turned the handle on the back door, he said, “Nobody can keep doing this forever.”

I had to count to ten in my head. It was hard to remember that, not so long ago, this all would have been different. I’d set the bed on fire once. The thought was distant. And he’d made me drag the mattress out to the curb myself.

When I spoke, I kept my voice low and even. “You can leave whenever you want. Or I’ll leave. Just tell me to go.”

The coffeemaker beeped, and he moved toward it, so his back was toward me when he said, “I wasn’t talking about me.”