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Spencer had had no idea what effect fucking his friend and his boyfriend at the same time would have on his life, but he probably wouldn’t have guessed none. He’d stopped by Raj’s the next morning for coffee, been greeted with a “Hey there, hot stuff,”

and gone about his day like usual. Ian had gone to work and texted him like he normally did when he had a spare moment. Maybe one day he’d start embracing that he could just have this because Ian had said they could. He’d have to talk to his therapist about it.

Spencer was lying on his couch with Norman squishing most of his torso watching TV. He had had dinner with Cat and come home to relax before passing out. He may or may not have been thinking about asking Ian when they should invite Raj over again when his phone started vibrating on the coffee table. “Hey.”

“Can I come over?”

Ian’s voice sounded far away, and there was ambient road noise like he was driving. Spencer’s heart immediately started beating harder. Ian never called when he was driving. Ian had never called him at all, come to think of it.

Spencer sat up, dislodging Norman. “Are you okay?”

For a second, all he could hear was the background noise, and the only thing keeping him from full-on panic was his therapy breathing.

“I just . . . Sorry, I’m sure you’re busy.”

“Ian, come over.”

Spencer had never heard Ian’s voice sound like that, and he fucking hated it. Ian always went directly home after a shift to shower and sleep it off, and Spencer already wasn’t a fan of changing routines, but he knew Ian wouldn’t change that routine unless something terrible had happened.

“Okay, yeah, I’ll be there soon.”

Spencer stared at his silent phone, then down at Norman, who looked more annoyed than anything. “I don’t know, bud.”

It took Ian about an hour to get there, during which time Spencer mostly tried to pretend he was still watching TV, but really he was absentmindedly petting Norman’s head while willing himself not to think of every awful thing that could have befallen Ian in the time they’d been apart. When his doorbell rang, he jumped a foot in the air. Then he raced downstairs and pulled the door open.

Ian looked terrible. He was wearing what Spencer now knew to be his hospital sweats, and he looked haunted. He walked upstairs without saying anything and collapsed on the couch.

“Have you eaten?”

That wasn’t what he’d meant to say, but it was the only thing Spencer’s brain was capable of processing at the moment.

Ian closed his eyes as though he couldn’t think with them open. “Uh, not since lunch.”

Spencer went to his fridge and pulled out his dinner leftovers, tossing them in the oven. He would never reheat fries in the microwave, not even in an emergency situation.

“You don’t have to do that.”

Spencer bit his lip to keep from snapping, Of course I don’t, but I want to take care of you, or, Yes I do because I fucking love you. Now really wasn’t the time.

And anyway, Norman had climbed fully into Ian’s lap, pulling focus while Spencer waited for the food to warm up and brought it over. Ian picked distractedly at the fries without sitting up.

“Do you want to tell me what happened?”

Spencer sat gingerly on the couch and pulled Ian’s feet over his lap, both so that he would fit and also because he wanted to offer some form of comfort beyond soggy reheated french fries.

“I . . .”

Ian blew out a long breath and closed his eyes again. “Tonight. In the ER. We had a car-crash victim. She . . . didn’t make it.”

Spencer swallowed against the lump in his throat. “Ian, I’m so sorry. That must have been really hard.”

He had been surprised when he’d learned that most of Ian’s day was taken up with mild and minor injuries rather than medical emergencies. It seemed almost otherworldly that he ever saw traumatic injuries at all, much less ones that reminded him of his own loss.

“I saw them.”

Spencer looked up sharply. “Huh?”

“The night of their accident . . . My parents were brought to my hospital. I was working that shift. If there hadn’t been another attending there with me, I would have had to be the one to pronounce them.”

“Baby . . .”

Spencer reached for his hand. “No one should have to see something like that. Jesus.”

He could see Ian’s tears running down his cheeks into Norman’s fur, and he had no idea what to do besides hold on.

“They were all I could see tonight.”

This was so far beyond anything Spencer had any understanding of. “Have you told your therapist? That you were there?”

Ian shook his head and clung tighter to Norman’s neck. “You’re the only one I’ve told.”

“Okay.”

Spencer squeezed Ian’s hand. He must have showered at work because his hair was slightly damp, and he smelled like hospital soap. Spencer vaguely wondered if he’d needed to after attending to the crash victim but pushed that out of his mind. Ian hated smelling like hospital, which was one of the reasons he always went right home to shower after work.

“I’m sorry I came here like this.”

“Shh, I’m not.”

Spencer would sit there with Ian as long as he needed.

Eventually, Ian laid his head back on the arm of the couch and inhaled deeply, as though he’d forgotten how to breathe. Norman looked up at him with concern in his eyes.

Spencer tried to brush the tears from his cheeks with his hands. “Can you eat?”

Ian looked down at what admittedly was a lackluster reheated patty melt and fries and nodded.

“I’m going to run a bath, okay?”

He kissed Ian’s forehead and went into the bathroom to start the water. Then he brewed tea and went searching for the bath caddy he knew was in the apartment somewhere. He also found lavender bath salts in an unused corner and figured that was better than the scent of hospital soap.

When everything was set up, he found Ian still on the couch but finished with his food. “A bath?”

he asked, as though Spencer’s voice had just reached him from miles away.

“Come on.”

Spencer held out his hand, and Ian took it and allowed himself to be led to the bathroom. Spencer stripped off his sweats and helped him into the tub before pulling the bath caddy forward so he could reach his tea.

“You’re not getting in?”

Spencer gave him a pained smile. “Next time.”

It was clear that what Ian needed wasn’t his dick. He put his own tea on the edge of the sink and grabbed a washcloth and his own unscented bar of soap. He knelt down next to the tub and belatedly decided to take his shirt off because it didn’t need to get soaked. Ian had leaned his head back and closed his eyes, and he at least looked less pale than he had when he’d first come in. “Can I touch you?”

Spencer whispered.

Ian opened his eyes and, seeing Spencer’s soapy washcloth, nodded.

Spencer wasn’t sure he’d ever bathed anyone before. But he’d bathed himself, and it was basically the same principle. He gently soaped Ian’s whole body, resisting the urge to scrub the day off him and instead trying to make him feel cared for. Ian had closed his eyes again, giving up his whole body to Spencer. He pushed the bath caddy away—really, why did people use these things?—to wash Ian’s legs and feet, then urged him to sit up so he could get his back. “Dunk your head under.”

Ian complied without saying anything.

Spencer squeezed shampoo into his palm—the bottle said it smelled like milk and honey, whatever that meant—and massaged Ian’s scalp. Ian made a small, content noise but didn’t move or open his eyes. “Back under,”

Spencer said, and he helped Ian rinse out his hair before sitting on the tiled floor and pulling the tea back toward him. Norman, who had been pacing outside the bathroom door during all the activity, came in and rested his head in Spencer’s lap. Spencer held his tea in one hand and Ian’s hand in the other.

“Why do you have this?”

Ian seemed to notice the bath caddy for the first time.

“Cat gave it to me as a housewarming present. I don’t think I’ve ever used it.”

He looked singularly focused on the idea of the bath caddy. “It’s not very . . . you.”

Spencer smiled weakly. “To be fair, she’d only known me for a few months at that point.”

Ian hummed, then squeezed his hand. “Spencer . . .”

“Shh, it’s okay, baby.”

They sat there in silence until the bathwater went tepid, and then Spencer searched his mismatched linens until he found his fluffiest towel and wrapped Ian up in it.

Ian fell into bed naked, so Spencer stripped down and lay next to him, kissing his dew-damp shoulder. Norman cuddled up so close that it looked like he was trying to crawl inside Ian’s skin, but Spencer knew Ian liked it, so he didn’t say anything.

———

Spencer had tried to be gentle with Ian all week, though he knew all he could do was support him and encourage him to talk to his therapist about what had happened. Maybe he could even get him to tell his friends since he was regularly going to friends’ night now. But in the meantime, Ian had seemed to want to be close to Spencer, touching him whenever he could, and Spencer was happy to let it happen.

Spencer was lying on Ian’s chest, startlingly close to sleep because of the way Ian was carding his fingers through Spencer’s hair, when his phone started buzzing incessantly on the coffee table. “Fuck, what time is it?”

Spencer tried to sit up without injuring Ian in the process, which was a lot less graceful than he’d have liked.

Ian reached over for his own phone. “Seven thirty.”

“Fuck.”

Spencer picked up his phone. “Hi, sorry, I’m fine.”

He slid into Mandarin.

“It was getting late, and we were worried,”

his mom said.

“I told you he was fine,”

his dad added, somewhat unhelpfully.

Sorry, Spencer mouthed to Ian. My parents. He wasn’t sure how good Ian was at reading lips, though, so he had no idea if that was helpful at all. Ian just sat up against the arm of the couch and smiled at him indulgently. Norman hopped up to take Spencer’s spot in Ian’s lap, and Ian started rubbing behind his ears and talking to him in hushed tones as though he and Norman were going to have a conversation while Spencer was on the phone.

“Have you eaten?”

his mom asked, apparently over the fact that he’d completely forgotten to call or willing to pretend, anyway.

“Yeah, we ate earlier.”

Spencer pressed his lips together, wishing he could take his pronoun choice back.

“You and Cat?”

his dad asked. Spencer tried to keep his parents vaguely up-to-date on his friends and the things he was doing, and since he was around Cat almost every day, most of his stories involved her somehow.

He could have lied. But he looked up at Ian and the adorable way he was acting like Norman actually understood what he was saying, and he knew Ian didn’t deserve to be lied about. “No, me and my friend Ian.”

He wasn’t sure if Ian was going to feel like he was being gossiped about behind his back. Technically, it was to his face, but it was in another language. But Ian didn’t even look up. Hell, if he could secretly speak Mandarin, Spencer wouldn’t be that surprised.

There was deafening silence on the other end of the phone.

“Is he a new friend?”

his father finally asked after clearing his throat.

“He’s, uh . . .”

Spencer took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “He’s my boyfriend.”

Another silence, this one also eventually filled by his father. “Well.”

“Yeah. And he’s still here, so I’m going to go, okay?”

“Okay, Spencer, we love you,”

his dad said.

“Love you, too.”

It wasn’t lost upon him that his mother hadn’t said anything before he hung up the phone.

“Do you want me to learn to speak Mandarin?”

Ian’s voice cut through the haze of his discomfort.

“What?”

“Or Cantonese. I’m sorry, I don’t know enough about Chinese to differentiate.”

Spencer let out a laugh that could have been a sob. “No, baby, that’s not necessary. My parents speak fluent English. They just spoke Mandarin at home so Jenny and I would learn, so it’s kind of a habit when I talk to them.”

Ian reached over Norman to hold the hand Spencer didn’t have gripped around his phone. “I’m glad I won’t have any trouble communicating with your parents, but I was mostly asking in case it’s important to you to speak at home.”

He paused, doing something complicated with his face. “Not that I live here. I just . . .”

Spencer felt like his heart was going to explode. “That’s a very sweet offer, thank you. But honestly, speaking Mandarin, like everything else about my family, is emotionally complicated for me at best.”

Ian’s face softened. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Spencer exhaled loudly. He had no fucking idea what he wanted. “I don’t want you to feel like I’m keeping secrets from you. But it feels like a dick move to complain to you about my parents when I know you wish your parents were here to be complained about.”

Ian booped Norman’s nose and kissed the top of his head before shifting him off his lap and pulling Spencer into it. “I can miss my parents, and you can have a complicated relationship with yours. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“I know,”

Spencer whispered, tucking his head against Ian’s chest. He was really warm, probably from being trapped under Spencer previously and then Norman.

Ian started rubbing calming circles on his back. “Both of my parents were born here, so I don’t have the same experiences that first-generation kids do.

They dealt with their parents trying to hold on to Chinese traditions, and they wanted me and Jenny to be able to pick our paths much more than they were allowed to.

They did the engineer-and-lawyer thing, but they didn’t mind that I wanted to study art at a fancy private college all the way across the country.

They wanted to see me because they love me, obviously, and I went home for holidays, and my parents came to visit New York every year.

Jenny was already graduating college and moving up to San Francisco, but she’d come home for Christmas, too. Then I met my ex. I’m sure you know how isolation factors into abuse.”

“Yes.”

Ian pressed a kiss to the top of Spencer’s head.

“It got to a point where I hadn’t talked to my parents for years. And they were so angry, assuming that I just thought I was too good for them now that I was living this fancy New York life. And when I moved here and finally explained to them what had happened—well, not everything that had happened but enough—I think they felt guilty. Because they’d been angry and because they hadn’t done anything to help me. And I tried to explain to them that there was nothing they could have done, but I think they were still a little angry, too.”

He could hear Ian’s heart beating against his ear, slow and steady. “So now we’re at this stalemate. I call home every Sunday, and we talk about our weeks and pretend that these big, ugly feelings aren’t sitting between us.”

“Have your parents been here?”

Ian asked.

Spencer shook his head, though that wasn’t particularly effective given the way it was pressed against Ian’s chest. “I haven’t been home, either. It all just feels too heavy, I think.”

Ian’s fingertips gently stroked up and down his arm. “I know there’s nothing I can do to fix any of that, but if it would be helpful at all to have a place for them to stay when they came here, you’re welcome to use the house. There’s obviously enough space, and I could stay here or in a hotel while you stay there with them. If that would alleviate any stress for you.”

Spencer sat up and looked at Ian’s face. “That’s very sweet of you.”

He leaned in and kissed him.

“I’m sorry I can’t make it easier for you.”

“You do.”

He wasn’t sure if he meant this situation specifically. Nothing had felt good with his parents in a long time. But he wasn’t even surprised Ian had offered to move out of his own house to let Spencer and his parents stay there because he knew Ian would always try to make things easier for him, in any way he could, and that was enough.