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Spencer woke up the next morning with a sense of dread he couldn’t shake. He could feel adrenaline pumping through his body even though there was absolutely no use for it. He closed his eyes, hoping that maybe he could fall back asleep, recalibrate, wake up like none of this was happening. But that only served to increase his focus on how unsettled he felt, how uncomfortable he was in his body. He ate breakfast, walked Norman, kept to his schedule as much as possible. He did the breathing exercises his therapist had taught him. This wasn’t what new-project jitters normally felt like. Maybe he was dying. “Are you going to enjoy living with Cat when I die?”

he asked Norman, who was lying in bed next to him where he’d sprawled out fully clothed when he’d realized this feeling was going to persist all day.

Norman wasn’t a trained emotional-support dog. Honestly, he was barely trained at all. But Spencer liked to think he knew how people were feeling and wanted to help them as best he could without any real skills.

Spencer wrapped his arms around Norman and tried his breathing exercises again. He felt his phone vibrating somewhere on the bed but ignored it until he’d slowed his heart rate a bit.

He had four missed calls from Cat, but he opened the text from Raj. Cat wanted me to check in on you because she hasn’t heard from you all day. You good?

I’m just having a day. Not that Cat hadn’t seen him at his worst, but he didn’t like putting all his moods on her. Plus, he knew she was spending the weekend at a spa with some of her friends from high school, and he didn’t want to interrupt with his silly feelings.

It had been a long time since he’d been taken out completely by one of these moods, probably since right after he’d moved to Pittsfield. It seemed entirely out of the blue.

Do you need me to come over?

Spencer checked the time. It was only eleven. You’re working. Raj worked more than any other person Spencer knew.

Selena is here. She won’t miss me.

Five minutes later, Raj was ringing Spencer’s doorbell. When he made it downstairs, he found Raj with a big pastry box and two coffee cups despite only having two hands.

“Come on.”

Raj pushed inside and led Spencer back upstairs, kicking his Converse onto the shoe rack before plopping down on the couch and turning on the TV to a mindless cooking-competition show.

Spencer sat on the other side of the couch, and Norman jumped up between them, shoving his head into Raj’s lap to be petted behind his ears. Spencer squeezed his hands into fists in his lap, willing them to stop shaking.

If Raj noticed Spencer was falling apart in front of him, he didn’t mention it. He opened the box with his free hand and grabbed a cookie. “Wanna talk about it?”

Spencer blinked. Did he? If he talked about it, he’d probably have to admit that Ian had somehow gotten under his skin, more so than Marty’s flirting, or even Raj’s. Ian hadn’t even flirted with him, had he? Spencer couldn’t really name what it was that had his breath stuttering and his heart pounding. “Nope.”

He focused entirely on eating a Danish, which did not at all cure his anxiety but did give him a nice shot of dopamine. At least until his stomach somersaulted and he had to put half of it back in the box.

“Will you at least text Cat to let her know you’re not dead and Norman hasn’t eaten your body to avoid starving?”

At the sound of his name, Norman looked up at Raj but then returned his focus to crumbs and pets.

“Norman would never eat my body. He’s too lazy.”

But Spencer pulled out his phone and texted Cat: I’m alive. Enjoy the spa. See you tomorrow.

“Want to hear what this tourist said to me this morning?”

Focusing on Raj’s absurd customer-service stories calmed Spencer down until he could no longer feel his individual cells vibrating against one another. Raj had done this for him before a few times—distracted him with his vibrant charm and laid-back attitude until Spencer had forgotten momentarily that his mind was causing his body to rebel against him.

“Spence?”

“Hmm?”

Spencer looked up to find Raj grabbing a croissant from the box, Norman having basically climbed up his whole torso to get as close as possible to the food while still maintaining plausible deniability that he was just cuddling. Raj seemed unperturbed.

“Do you want to do something else?”

Spencer shook his head. “No. Sorry. My head is just kind of fucked today. Thank you for coming over.”

Raj smiled, brilliant, devastating. “That’s what friends are for.”

He grabbed the remote from the coffee table and flipped channels again until he got to the home-renovation shows. Spencer groaned on instinct.

To be fair, that’s all he’d known about home design when he’d moved to Pittsfield. It had taken his own apartment renovation and few community college classes to give him a better understanding of what it was actually like in real life.

“Come on. Tell me what you’d do to this place if you were these straight white people.”

Raj put more pastry in his mouth, letting crumbs fall indulgently so Norman could lick them off his T-shirt.

Spencer opened his mouth to go on a tirade about how none of this was actually real and the budget was entirely unfeasible and Cat would do a way better job than this stunt-cast contractor, but then he realized what Raj was doing. He was giving Spencer a project, something for his brain to do that wasn’t worrying about whatever it was worrying about. So he closed his mouth and focused on what the clients were asking for, what the limitations of the room were. “Well, first they’re going to need new floors.”

“Mm-hmm,”

Raj said, looking at Spencer, not the TV. Spencer knew none of this mattered to Raj, couldn’t possibly matter to Raj with the hand-me-down castoffs he chose to live with despite definitely being able to afford at least a new couch. But that’s what friends were for.

They spent the rest of the morning judging people’s taste in paint colors until the café closed at three and Raj needed to go balance the cash drawer and lock up. Spencer felt fairly certain he wasn’t going to have a complete breakdown, but just in case, he ordered dinner and went to bed early. Cat didn’t need him on-site once construction started, but he wanted to show up for morale, and he wanted to not be losing his shit when he did that.