"What do I do now?" His voice shakes. "Eli, what do I do now?” 

I cross the room silently, and take his hand in mine. I know the contours there, I know every vein. I don't look at his face. "Now," I say instead, voice low and soft, soothing him like the baby bird we found once when we were eight, "you let me decide." My thumb traces down the line on his palm, until it stops, jagged and short lived. 

His breath is fast and rattling. I don't count for him, in, one-two-three, out, one-two-three, like I might have once. Instead, I keep my own breath steady and even, and wait for him to mimic me. He always does. "Okay," he whispers, "okay." His breath begins to ease up. Something inside me loosens and calms. His eyes look up at me, big and dark underneath his hair, and I let my fingers slide down to his wrist before I break away. 

We take the Jag, my father be damned. Adam doesn't question where we're going, when we slide into the car, which is good, because I'm not even sure I know at this point. He picks out the music, after a questioning glance at me, by-passing the radio and putting on Come On Eileen. The music doesn’t do much to settle his nerves, I can tell, and he barely sings along like he normally would. It makes me wish I'd brought along booze of some kind, vodka maybe, or one of my father's fancy bottles of whiskey, the ones he keeps behind his desk in the study, which cost more than a ten thousand dollars a bottle. I want to see Adam flushed and giggling, like when we were sixteen and got way too drunk off of champagne. I don't want him to think, and overthink, like he always does. I want him to forget. Let him forget. 

My hands tighten on the steering wheel, too minutely for Adam to see, and I flip up the volume on the stereo. I force myself to sing along with it, the way I don't usually, my voice lower  and raspier and more out of tune than his. I pretend I don't see the way his lips stretch in the tiniest, most pained of smiles before he sings along with me. 

We pull out onto the interstate, headlights flashing behind us. I speed: five over, ten over, fifteen over, twenty; jolting out faster and faster into the night as if this is something we can outrun. We head south, on pure instinct. I think he’d like to see the sea. The song has changed, onto one of those quiet indie songs he likes so much. I catch him staring at me in the reflection of the rear-view mirror, and he doesn’t look away. I do, instead, gritting my jaw and looking back out onto the open stretch of road in front of us. Adam rests his head on his palm, and looks at me in that quiet way he always does, like he’s got something to say but he won’t say it. I don’t ask what it is. He won’t say even if I do. 

“Eli,” he says, his voice just slightly softer than usual, like it gets when he’s sleepy. It’s late, and he should be resting, anyway. I glance over at him; he’s leaning against the window now, and his sweater has rucked up in a way where you can see some of his collarbones. 

“Yeah?”

 “Hm. Nothing.” He says, like he’s the same goddamn bratty kid he was when we first met. “Just thought I’d say your name.” 

“Weirdo.”

 He laughs at me, but it’s more breath than sound. Outside the headlights glow brighter than the stars. 

"Eli," Adam calls again, probably pouting like a child. 

I roll my eyes. I'm not falling for that again. What does he take me for, an idiot?

 "Eli," He sing songs again, “Elijah." 

I sigh. "What."

 "Pull over. I want a Pepsi." 

I sigh again, but I'm already puling off of the freeway and onto the next exit. "It's late. I'll grab you something without caffeine.”

 “Spoilsport," he says, but doesn't attempt to hide the fact that he's grinning. 

We pull into the first gas station I see. "Wait here. I'll be back." 

"Yes sir," he mocks, leaning back up against the window with a tired smirk in his eyes. I climb out of the car and let him rest.

The florescent lights of the 7/11 are so bright they almost hurt, at least after so long of driving through the dark. I blink repeatedly, haphazardly grabbing a bag of Fritos off of the shelf. Convenience stores this late at night are always so eerie, like nothing's real. Liminal Spaces, Adam had once told me when we had just met, reciting facts out of a big book that didn’t have many pictures. Things that are there, but also kind of aren’t. I didn’t know how much I believed that, then, but I hadn’t said anything to him. I hadn’t said a lot in those days, but the fact still stands. 

Overhead, some over played popping jingles in the background, and I grab an orange Fanta out of the fridge until a catch a glimpse of purple. Oh, they have the grape kind. Adam loves the grape kind. I grab one immediately. I’ll drink the orange one, I guess. 

The cashier stares at me blankly as I root through my pockets for my wallet. My coins and keys jingle in my search, and then once I grab it, my phone falls out of my pocket with it. It lights up, when it does. One message: Father: Eli, we need to talk. It stares at me. I have to drag my eyes away, handing over the my debit card to the cashier. I slip my phone back into my pocket. The weight of it feels like an accusation. I take the plastic bag of snacks and head back to the car, and I ignore everything. 

“They had the grape kind,” I say instead, passing the bag to Adam. He smiles, and I let my breath even. 

I drive away. 

 

I don’t stop driving until hours later; until it’s well past midnight and my eyes are so heavy I can’t bear to look at the road anymore. I pull into the parking lot of a motel in some town by the sea. We’re in Virginia, I think, or maybe North Carolina, one of those forgotten southern states nobody thinks about outside of geography tests. Adam’s been asleep for the past three hours; I don’t wake him as I check us into a room. The receptionist stares at me with blank eyes, and runs the platinum card without issue. There never is. 

“Two Queens or a King?” 

“A double.” 

He hands me a key, the real kind, not a keycard. “Room 104.” His voice is toneless, tired in a way that probably has nothing to do with how late it is. I wonder if I would’ve been him. Before. 

But the key is cold in my hand, and I’m too tired for this. 

Adam is still half asleep when I prod him out of the car. He clings to me like a leech as I guide us to our room, barely detaching from my arm long enough to let me unlock the door. His fingers slip underneath the collar of my jacket, cold and scrabbling along my collarbone. “Eli,” he mumbles, as I fumble the door open. 

He collapses onto the closest bed. I swing the door shut behind me, and peel off his shoes, one by one. I don’t bother doing anything else, and he doesn’t either. He’ll be asleep within seconds; he can’t even bring himself to slip under the covers. 

In the moonlight, like this, his skin looks as white as milk, or maybe marble. He looks statuesque. Like Michaelangelo’s David, maybe, I don’t know. I never paid too much attention in art class. There’s something classical about him like this, though, something immovable. Unchangeable. As if time could stop right now, just to keep him here forever. 

He never looks fragile when he’s asleep. 

I sigh, and step away. I shake off my jacket and set my phone on the bedside table, and I don’t look at it. The sky, outside the window across from me, is black and empty, aside from the moon. I shuck off my shoes, and keep my face turned to that window. It doesn’t stop his breathing from lulling me to sleep, but that’s more of a given, at this point. 

When I wake, the room’s full of that pale, early morning light, and the only sound is the sputtering of the lackluster AC and my breathing. I sit up along the side of the bed and stare out the window across from me. Adam won’t be up for hours yet. Even in school, it took him six different alarms to wake up in time. I suppose there’s really no reason for me to be up until he is, now, it’s not like I had any kind of plan. It's not like I thought any of this through. 

On my phone, the notification for my father’s message still glares up at me, singular and commanding. He’s not the kind of man who sends more than one. He’s sure as hell never had to before. I can practically feel the cold, restrained anger through the glass, and I can practically hear what he’s going to say. 

In two days, I’m supposed to be getting on a plane. In a week, I have my official admissions interview at Oxford. And I am not going to be there. 

I sigh, and set my phone down again. Across from me, Adam turns over in bed, and I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling. I wonder what my mother would think, if she were here. I wonder where she is. I watch the dark outline of my hands against the ceiling, and suddenly I’m so damn tired. 

“Wake up,” I say, shaking Adam awake like I have a million times before. 

He groans underneath me, turning over and burying his face in his pillows. “Five more minutes, he mutters, and his skin is warm with sleep. I pull my hand away. 

“No, now,” I say. “Let’s go to the beach.” 

He curses at me, but gets up and stalks to the bathroom, anyway. I pull his prescriptions out of his bag and count out the dosage for his morning pills, and set them aside the shitty vending machine coffee I grabbed for us. He makes a face when he emerges, but he takes them without complaint. “Is this decaf?” He asks, eyeing me suspiciously. 

“Caffeine isn’t good for your heart.” 

“Nothing’s good for me,” he grumbles, but drinks it anyway. 

 

It’s cold, this early in June, and the beach is gray and chilly and empty. 

I pick up shells, pink and shiny, out of the tide, and roll them around my hands. I have to be careful not to break them as I wash off the sand, letting the grains disappear into the water.

Adam’s rucked up his pants and cuffed them below his knees, and he wades out into the water, staring at his reflection. He looks like a painting like this, or something out of a poem, or a fairytale; like he’s the little mermaid and will dissolve into sea foam before the sun sets. 

He catches my gaze, and I look down. The shell I had been holding has slipped out of my fingers and disappeared into the sea. 

 

Afterwards, Adam picks at his dinner piece by piece in that finicky, baby bird way he does when something’s on his mind. I don’t have to ask to know what it is. 

The silence is heavy and comfortable all at once. I know what to say and I know what not to. I don’t tell him to eat more, and he doesn’t. I count out his pills for him again, and he watches me while I do it. 

“I’m not a kid anymore, Eli,” he says. “I can do this myself, you know?” 

I brush him off. “It’s fine, I don’t mind,” I say. It’s easier for me like this, I don’t say, I like to pretend that taking care of you will make a difference. He looks at me with an emotion that I can’t quite understand, like he’s about to say something else—but then he looks away.

 The little white pills feel like pomegranate seeds as I pass them over to him, like this is some old greek myth, and with every pill he takes he has to stay another month more. I wonder if this is what prayer feels like, but it’s been so long that I can’t remember. 

I never was very religious. 

 

We play chess after dinner, my phone perched between us on the nightstand as Adam leans over and makes his move. He moves his queen over to E6, even though it’s directly threatened by my knight, but I won’t take it just yet. Adam’s never really been good at chess, anyway. It’s best to give him a fighting chance. 

“Eli,” he says, and I pick up my rook and move it forwards. He’s looking at me with that expression again, the one I don’t understand and I hate— “What do you want? Like, really.”

 “What do you mean?” I say, and he picks up a pawn and moves it. 

“Do you actually want to go to Oxford? I know your dad’s always talking about how he wants you to go there, but like, do you actually want to go? What do you actually want, Eli?” 

“I want…” I say, picking up my bishop and drawing out my answer like that question isn’t ridiculous. “To beat your ass at chess. Check.” 

Adam groans and rolls his eyes as he moves his king out of harm’s way. 

“What can I say, chess is a gentleman’s game.” I say, nowhere near an actually good imitation of my father, but it makes Adam laugh anyway. “Which is why you suck at it.” My bishop takes his knight. 

“Guess again,” he says, and he moves his pawn again, this time all the way to the end of the board. I blink. His pawn becomes a queen, and that means—“checkmate.” He says, “I’ve been getting better.” 

I stare blankly at the board, wondering how with all of my father’s various chess lessons I hadn’t managed to see that one coming. 

Adam flops back onto his bed, and stares at the ceiling. “Hey, Eli?” 

“Yeah?” 

“Do you remember when we first met?” 

“Sure, why?” Shortly after I’d first came to live with my father, our parents had introduced us. Our fathers ran in the same circles, and they both figured we needed more friends our own age. Appropriate friends our own age, as my father might’ve said, or any friends our own age, as Adam’s might’ve. It’d been an arranged friendship the way the nobility used to have arranged marriages. It’s probably a miracle it turned out as well as it did. 

“It’s nothing, I’ve just been thinking a lot, lately. Never mind.” 

“Okay,” I say, and blink off the non sequitur to get ready for bed. 

 

What do you want, Eli? I can’t sleep, and the question echoes around my brain. Why he’d even ask that is beyond me. It should be obvious, shouldn’t it? I want— 

I want— 

I stare at Adam, asleep across from me. My fingers itch. I look away. 

I want to see my mother again, I think. My memories of before are faint but warm. I can remember what she looks like, if I try. Pretty, dark hair, dark skin. She smiled a lot, I think. Either that or I liked to make her smile, maybe. I wonder if she’d be proud of me. I wonder what she’d want for me. 

That’s a lie, I know. I know what she’d want for me, that’s why she let my father take me away. She’d want me to be his son, with all of the money and the privilege and prestigious schooling that comes with it. And it’s not a bad life, of course. It’s a lot more than a lot of people have. A lot more than I probably would’ve had. It’s easy. Money makes things easy. It’s just— 

It would be nice, to see her again.

 

The next day, I wake up to knocking on the door, and my stomach fills with ice. I can’t push it off any longer, I know. So I drag myself out of bed silently, and open the door. It’s best not to keep him waiting. 

Outside stands my father, tall, dark and imposing, out of place in a suit that probably costs more than this building. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t have to. I can see his jaw working in silent rage, and I close the door behind me. 

“Father,” I say tonelessly. 

“Elijah,” he says. “You’re coming with me. Now.” 

I take a breath and turn my hands into fists. Brace for impact. “No,” I say, and then, before the full wrath can descend on me, “give me more time.” 

“This is not a discussion.” 

“Just a week,” I say. “Two.” 

“So you can gallivant across the country without a care in the world?” He scoffs. “No. I have been too careless with you. I see that now. But you are still my son. My only son, Elijah, and you are a child no longer. You have a responsibility to me and to this family, and it’s time you grow up.” He’s not the kind of man you argue with, my father. He never has been. “Come. We should still be able to make it in time. If we hurry.” 

“No,” I say. And my father goes very still. 

“No?” 

“I can’t.” 

“You can’t.” He repeats. 

“You don’t understand,” I say. “Adam is—“ 

He sighs. “Of course. I should have known.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, and then says calmly, clearly— “Eli. That boy has been living on borrowed time since the moment he was born. It is sad, yes. But you cannot simply throw away your future like this! Do you have any idea how hard I have worked to give you this opportunity?” 

He asks me this like I don’t know that it’s all I was raised for, like I don’t know that the sole reason he took me in was just to show the world that this was a family of gentlemen, not just some nouveau riche upstarts. That he and I are just as good as some little lordling from a country that still clings to the monarchy. “I’ll be there,” I promise, “Just—give me more time.” 

He eyes me carefully, like he does when he’s weighing the risks of a new business deal. “Fine,” he says. “You have twenty four hours. That is all.” 

I know better than to ask for more than that. 

I don’t tell Adam about my father. I don’t know how. Later, I think to myself, as I step back inside of the room. Later, I think again, as he bemoans salads for lunch and snipes about me picking out his food for him. Later, I think, walking along the beach with him again, not wanting to ruin this day. 

Then I come back from picking up dinner to find Adam hunched over in the coughing fit to end all coughing fits, and later goes straight out the window and turns into never. 

I rub his back and breathe with him, searching frantically for his inhaler, murmuring whatever soft words I can think of until the coughing eventually subsides. It does subside though, thank god, and he leans against me as he breathes through the aftershocks. I can’t stand the thought of him going through this without me. I can’t stand the thought of him going through something even worse without me. The thought of leaving him like this makes me feel nauseous. 

“Ever since we met, it’s always been just you and me, yeah?” I say. 

Adam just looks back at me with that unknowable look again—I don’t like it, that look. Even when he’s been quiet—and Adam is always quiet—I’ve always known what he was thinking before. “Yeah,” he says, finally, looking away. “It really has been, hasn’t it?” 

“So—“ I say, swallowing, and it feels like the weight of the world is resting upon my tongue, crushing my throat, “So—listen, Adam, I don’t care about it, about any of it, alright? I don’t. Not my father, not Oxford, not anything. We can just—we can just run away.” And it’s stupid, I know it’s stupid, the moment I’ve said it, but suddenly every idiotic kiddish fantasy I’ve ever entertained for a moment is streaming out of my mouth, and I can’t stop it. “We can run away, go and find my mom, maybe, I don’t know, I don’t care, but I’ll be with you, I promise. You and me against the world, alright?”And I do sound stupid, I sound like the kind of rich kid that I hate, the ones who don’t even realize how lucky they are, how dependent they are on money and their situation, the ones who don’t realize that they only are where they are because their father chose to swoop in and raise them, the ones who aren’t good the ones who aren’t grateful— 

“Eli,” Adam says, “Eli, we can’t do that.” 

“Why not,” I say, and now my voice is breaking, “Goddamn it, why not?” 

“Eli,” he says, and his voice is too calm and he has that look on his face again, the one that I can’t understand and goddamn it— “Eli, you need to stop living your life for me.”

“What do you mean?” 

“You know what I mean,” he says, “Ever since we first met, all you’ve ever done is just take care of me, and I’ve just let you, and—I’m trying to be better, alright? But Eli, it’s not healthy. I can’t just—I can’t be the only person in your life.” 

“Why not,” I’m saying again, goddamn it, because I’m happy with this, the two of against the world. I don’t want anyone else, I don’t need anyone else— 

“Because I’m dying, Eli,” he snaps, “And pretending like I’m not isn’t going to do anything, okay?” 

“You don’t know that,” I say, and it sounds weak even to me. “You can get better, Adam, you’re going to get better, alright?” 

“No, I’m not,” he says. “Just because I’ve had a couple of good days right now doesn’t mean I’m getting better. It just means that so far I’ve been lucky, okay? It just means that this is the best it’s gonna get and I can’t—I don’t—I won’t let you see me like that, okay?” 

“Adam—” 

“And I can’t be the only person in your life because I’m not gonna be here soon enough, okay?” His breath is heavy and uneven. “I think it’s time we go home.” 

“Adam,” I say, like his name is the only thing I can hold onto. “Adam, stop it.” 

“No, it’s time,” He says, swallowing like it’s a hard decision to make, but the decision has been made, and suddenly I can’t stop myself anymore— 

“I love you.” 

He just looks up at me with a pained sad smile and makes a noise halfway between a laugh and a gasp. “I know.” 

I know. My stomach plummets and my throat feels hollow. I know, as if that’s any kind of answer. I know. 

“I’m in love with you,” I say again, and I reach my hand out and touch his face. His skin is softer than cashmere. I can feel his breath go quick. His eyes are dark and wide, and I keep his head turned towards me when he tries to look away. 

I kiss him. 

He tastes salty, like seawater, and I’m reminded faintly of those fairytales and myths we had to read in tenth grade English: Aphrodite, who came from the sea, and the little mermaid, who had to dissolve into sea foam at the end of the story. 

I can feel his breathing against my lips when we break apart. It’s warm. He’s warm. Alive. 

For now, he is alive. 

“I love you.” 

“Does it matter?” 

“Of course it does.” 

“Eli,” he says, and a sad whining sound escapes his throat, “I—“ he breaks off. He doesn’t speak after that. 

He kisses me. It’s everything and its nothing, and all of a sudden I’m struck with how strange it is that so much has depended on this, that I have dreamt about this second for years and years on end only for it to come down to this. Our lips brush together. He sighs into me. It’s all so simple. He loves me back.

I want to devour him whole. I want to kiss him until theres nothing left in the world but the two of us. I want to pick him up and run forever, nothing but him and me and the car. We will be fine, I think wildly, irrationally, impossibly. He loves me back, how could we not be fine? He’ll be fine. He has to be fine. I’ll keep him that way by force of will alone if I have to. 

Then he breaks away from me, and I can feel his body shaking in the way it does when he’s trying—and failing—to hold back a coughing fit. He turns away. He shudders. 

Let me have this, I think, to God or the universe or whoever will listen. Let me have this, let me have him, let me have something. Just this once. Something that’s mine. But he starts to cough again, and I know, somewhere, deep down in the hollow of my bones, that this isn’t the kind of story that ends prettily. 

His hands slip off of my shoulders. He lets me go. I want to cling to him as he does, take his hands in mine, hold onto him like that could somehow stop time, stop fate, stop him from leaving me behind. Instead, I just watch as his hands drop to his sides. I close my eyes, I don’t watch him step away. I count my breath, instead. In, one, two, three. Out, one, two, three. 

I let him go.