Once outside we walked to a nearby bench.
“Remember the couple I asked you to do a cherry drop on last month?” I asked.
“The tall, overcompensating alpha type with the bodybuilder complex and the blond twink?”
“I knew that was the right term!”
“Yes, I applaud you,” Ezra said. “You’ve mastered the most commonly known archetype in our gay vernacular. An honorary degree in queer cultural studies shall be dispatched to you forthwith. Expect liberal applications of glitter and feather boas.”
“Excuse you, I’ve hit the peak of gay cultural competency. I’m so fluent I could pass as queer myself.”
Ezra snorted and slapped my back. “That’s not how it works, but points for confidence, misguided as it may be. Anyway, yes. I remember them. I got a bad vibe off the guy. When I handed him his drink, he grabbed my fingers. Hard. Not accidental. Like he wanted to show he could. I didn’t like it. Is the guy he was with okay?”
“Oliver, his name is Oliver, and... that’s kind of complicated. Oliver’s sort of staying with me now. Well, not sort of. He is living with me, for the foreseeable future.”
“Okay, so it was pretty bad, huh?”
“Yeah, when I pulled him aside at the club, I gave him my card. I didn’t think he’d use it, but about a week ago, he called. When I picked him up...” I swallowed against the memory. The swelling in Oliver’s face had gone down after regular icing, and he’d managed to open his bruised eye. Once he told me he could see fine, I stopped worrying he’d need surgery. Still, he looked like he’d been put through the ringer. But it wasn’t my place to share his trauma with a stranger. “Anyway, he needed a place to go so I brought him home. I told him he could stay as long as he needs.”
“And how are you doing with all of this?” he asked.
“Me?”
“Yes, you, you goon. You’ve got one of the biggest hearts of anyone I know. But you also have this tendency to set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm. Someone has to look after you when you’re in that mode. Taking someone out of an abusive situation, having them move into your home overnight... that’s a lot. And the way you were slamming me into the mat today like you were trying to win a title fight tells me you’re not unaffected. So I’m asking, how are you holding up?”
“I’m managing, I guess,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck. “It’s been a long week. I’m not trying to be his emotional handyman or whatever. But he flinches at shadows, Ez. He apologizes for having needs, or opinions, or taking up two inches of space on the couch. And he’s got this spark, you know? You can see it, this personality that wants to come out, but then all that conditioning slams into him and he shuts down again. I hate that someone made him that afraid of living.”
“And it’s getting to you more, being a personal case rather than one assigned through the firm,” he said, an observation not a question.
“Pretty much. At work I can compartmentalize. There’s structure, steps, boundaries. But this? I see it all, the full impact, every moment, all the ways it bleeds into his daily life.”
Ezra tilted his head, his voice soft but probing, the tone I called his signature bartender voice—nonjudgmental, patient, filled with compassion. I’d seen grown men sob into their whiskey because of that voice. Hell, even the guards at Fort Knox would spill secrets if he hit ’em with it. “It’s more than that, though, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it’s messing with my head because I look at him and I can’t not think about Carrie,” I whispered.
Ez nodded. That was the other thing he was annoyingly good at, silence as a truth serum. Nine times out of time it got me to fold.
“Seeing Oliver so scared, so trained to fit into someone else’s version of who he was supposed to be, it makes me wonder if that’s what she was like at the end. If she was already gone on the inside long before her body was. If the sister I knew, the bright, unstoppable woman who was gonna take on the world, got stripped away piece by piece by that jerk she was with. I hate thinking she might’ve spent her last days as a smaller version of herself.”
Placing his arm around me in a sideways hug, Ezra said, “I know it hits harder when you see her in someone you’re trying to protect. But Carrie’s story isn’t Oliver’s. And it’s not yours to relive.”
“Understood in theory, not so much in practice.”
“I get that. How about this? Why don’t you see if Oliver might want to come over to our place for dinner in the next few weeks? Nothing formal. Just the four of us. That way, he can start building a support network beyond you. I bet Micah would be a good friend for him. From walking through his own storms, he knows how to sit with others through theirs.”
“Yeah, that sounds good. I’ll ask Oliver if he’s interested.”
“Good. I can only imagine how insufferable it must be to be around you twenty-four seven,” he teased.
“Oof, straight for the jugular. At worst, I’m endearingly difficult, a character building exercise.”
“Endearingly difficult, sure, and tornados are mildly breezy.”
“Asshole,” I muttered, but with no heat in it.
Ez bumped my shoulder. “Keep me posted, alright? And take care of yourself too. I know you want to save the whole damn world, but I care about my friend not destroying himself in the process.”
“I know. But I’ve always got you on standby with the hose if I set myself on fire.”
