Ro's couch had become my spot. I'd been there three nights that week, watching Eurovision with a guy who outweighed me by a hundred pounds and treated his pug like a firstborn child. The woman on screen was wearing silver and hitting notes that shouldn't be legal. Ro leaned forward like he was witnessing a miracle.
"Watch the key change," he said.
The key change happened. Ro made a sound like he'd been personally blessed.
His pug, Ukko, was burying a sock behind the cushions, little snorts of effort coming from somewhere near my hip. "Your dog is broken," I said.
"He is not broken. He is Finnish."
My phone sat on the armrest, the screen dark. I'd checked it four times since I sat down, which was better than yesterday.
"You are staring at it again," Ro said.
"No, I'm not."
"Okay." He didn't push. That was why I kept coming back.
The apartment smelled like whatever Ro had cooked for dinner, something with fish and dill that should have been weird but wasn't. Outside, Vegas was doing its December thing, the strip glowing in the distance while the desert cold crept in through the windows. Ukko gave up on the sock and climbed onto my lap, turning three circles before collapsing with a grunt.
Around nine, Ro turned off the TV.
"Enough." He stood, and the ceiling seemed closer with him upright. "We are going out."
"I don't really—"
"You have been on my couch for three days. You check your phone every five minutes. You don't sleep." His voice was gentle, which made it land harder. "Whatever is happening, sitting here will not fix it."
I scratched behind Ukko's ears. The dog's eyes rolled back in his head.
"Where?" I asked.
The club was called Prism. I knew the name because I'd looked it up once, late at night, one of those spirals where you search for things you can never actually have. The photos showed rainbow lights and bodies pressed together, men with their arms around other men like it was nothing. I'd closed the tab, cleared my history, and stared at the ceiling until my alarm went off.
Now I was standing outside it with Ro, watching people disappear through the door.
"This place," I said. "Ro, this place is—"
"Fun." He was already moving toward the entrance. "Best music in the city."
"It's a gay bar."
"It is a bar where gay people go, yes." He glanced back at me. "Also, everyone else. Is this problem?"
If I said yes, I'd have to explain why. If I said no, I'd have to go inside.
"I used to go to places like this with my boyfriend," Ro said. "Back home in Helsinki."
I'd known Ro for almost a year. We'd shared a locker room, sat next to each other on flights while he showed me pictures of Ukko in various costumes: a hot dog, a reindeer, and once, inexplicably, a banana. He'd never mentioned a boyfriend. I'd never asked because I'd figured he was like everyone else on the team.
"In Finland, this is not problem," he continued. "Is normal."
People kept walking past us into the club. Nobody looked twice at the massive Finn and the shorter guy standing frozen on the sidewalk.
"The guys," I managed. "If anyone sees—"
"Then I am the weird Finnish one who likes clubs with good music." He shrugged, and his shoulders were so big the movement looked like a geological event. "No one questions what I do. I am too big and too foreign."
He wasn't asking me to explain anything. He was just standing there in the cold, waiting for me to figure my shit out.
