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“Mm.”

“That man is wearing a cage.”

“He is.”

“On his—it’s on his—”

“I see it, Mark.”

“What’s even the—how do you—is that comfortable?”

“I don’t imagine comfort’s the point.”

A man in a leather harness and nothing else squeezed past us with a cheerful, high-pitched, “’Scuse me, fellas.” Mark flattened himself against me to make room with the wide-eyed rigidity of a man in a haunted house. All his bare skin pressed to my side for one electric second. Then the high-pitched man was gone, and Mark peeled himself off me and pretended, valiantly, that neither of us had noticed.

“I’ve owned a gay bar for seven years,” he said, dazed, turning slowly to take in the full scope of The Anchor. “Seven years, Dante. I thought I’d seen everything. I run a business in this community. I march. I sponsor a float at Gasparilla, for Christ’s sake.” He watched a shirtless man walk by in a leather kilt and matching gauntlets. “I don’t know what half of these things are, Dante. That man is wearing a harness with a—is that a handle? Why does he have a handle?”

“So people can find him in a crowd,” I said. “And handle him.”

Mark gaped at me.

“I’m guessing,” I admitted, another smirk sneaking free.

And then it happened, the thing I hadn’t expected, the thing that undid me more thoroughly than any harness in the place.

Mark laughed.

And it wasn’t the polite laugh he gave us at work. And it wasn’t the mortified one I expected, given our environment. No, this was his real one, surprised up out of him by the pure absurdity of where he’d ended up, big and helpless and delighted. He was a shirtless, forty-eight-year-old bar owner standing in a sea of leather men trying and failing to identify a harness handle’s use. The laugh rolled through his whole furry chest and lit his tired face ablaze. I stood there in my sensible black shirt and my one vain armband and understood, with the doomed clarity of a man watching the tide come in over his own feet, that I’d have strapped into every single item in that milk crate by the door if it kept him laughing like that.

“Okay,” Mark said, wiping his eyes, still grinning, hugging his own bare arms. “Okay. When in Rome . . . or when in—whatever this is. Buy me a drink before I lose my nerve and put on a hood.”

“You’d look good in a hood,” I said, deadpan. “Robin.”

“Do not—”

“Very mysterious.”

“Dante, I swear to God.” But he was laughing again.

I steered us toward a corner of the bar, a shirtless man and a black guy in an armband cutting through a menagerie of leather. For a few minutes, before the night turned into everything, it was just the two of us laughing our way through a ridiculous scene. I let myself have it, and I didn’t count the cost, which wasn’t like me at all.

Mark ordered a bourbon and told me it was on him, which meant I let him, because letting Mark do a small kindness was its own kindness back. I’d learned that much at least. I watched his forearm flex when he lifted the glass, the tendon and the graying hair and the old nick of a scar near his wrist, some construction wound from a life spent building things. My mind whispered, Ask him where that scar’s from, and then said, Ask him a great many things. I told my mind to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.

It did not sit down. It noted the way the low light moved on his shoulder when he turned. It noted the gray at the center of his chest going darker. It noted that he was cold, that bumps had raised on the bare skin of his arms, and I wanted, with an intensity that frightened me, to do something about that.

“You see somebody you like, you go,” he told me. “Don’t wait on me. Tonight’s for both of us.”

The somebody I like is telling me to go find somebody I like, I thought. There’s a Russian novel in that. There’s four of them, actually.

“Go get ’em,” Mark said, clapped my shoulder, bare hand on my sleeve, and went to work.

And dear God, he was terrible at it. I mean that with the whole of my heart. Watching Mark flirt was like watching a bear try to thread a needle, every ounce of that strength and care bent to a task his hands were the wrong size for.

He approached a man in a leather vest with the grim resolve of a soldier going over a wall. He bought the guy a drink. He got four minutes in before the vest’s husband came back from the restroom. Mark shook the man’s hand and congratulated them, eleven years, and returned to our corner slightly grayer around the edges.

“Married,” he reported.

“Happens.”