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Leo watched him.

If Nate spent his time looking at Leo, Leo thought it was only fair that he looked back.

Nate’s hands were big. There was a scar across one knuckle that Leo didn’t know how he got it. And the tip of his tongue was sticking out of the corner of his mouth, the way it sometimes did when he was concentrating.

Leo had always thought that looked stupid.

It didn’t look stupid.

“Are you staring at me?” Nate asked, shooting him a glance.

“You told me to look at you.”

“When I’m looking at you.”

“That’s not what you said.”

Nate fixed him in his gaze.

Leo didn’t look away. He wasn’t sure he could have.

For a full minute or two, nobody said anything.

Then Nate went back to mixing. Two greens this time. He held them up, one next to each of Leo’s eyes, and his expression changed in a way that Leo couldn’t read.

“There,” he said quietly. “That’s you.”

Leo looked at the colors. “That’s me?”

“They’re the right colors.”

Leo looked at the two smears of green on the plywood, inches from his face. A dark one. A lighter one with yellow in it.

It was paint. It was also the closest he’d come to seeing his own eyes in fifty years.

“Huh,” he said.

“Turn toward the window a little. I want to see it in the light.” Nate’s free hand came up, fingers curled, reaching toward Leo as if he wanted to turn his chin.

He stopped an inch short, realizing.

Leo looked down at Nate’s hand. Big, careful, plaster under the nails. It would have gone through him.

Nate put his hand down.

“Just turn your head,” he said as if nothing had happened.

Well. Nothing had.

Nothing ever would.

Leo turned his head, and he wondered.

What would it feel like? A hand on his face.

He couldn’t remember it. He could remember that he’d been touched. Someone had been there in the dark. But the feeling of it, the actual feeling of skin on skin, was gone the way everything was gone.

He wasn’t going to get it back.