Aidan shot out of bed in the darkness, unsure where he was or why he’d woken, and then Oz flipped on the lights. He was grinning, already in a suit with his blond hair slicked back. What the hell?
“Learn to knock.” Aidan lobbed a pillow at him, which he caught.
“No time. We have an interview to get to. We have three interviews to get to. Get up and get dressed.” Oz’s grin grew even wider as he examined Aidan and the rumpled bed, where Caleb was blinking blearily awake, his cheek still pressed to the pillow. Aidan had been spooning him.
Not on purpose.
“By the way, the public thinks you’re ‘surprisingly cute’ and ‘less of an asshole than I expected.’ Those are direct quotes. People don’t tend to write full sentences about Caleb, but I can show you some of the images if you want. There’s a lot of women swooning and buildings bursting into flame.”
Why had Aidan sat up? If he was still lying down, he could smash his face into the pillow and pretend this wasn’t happening.
“Why is Oz in our room?” Caleb asked, still groggy but now sitting up. He was only wearing underwear. Aidan adjusted his glasses, which had been knocked askew when he’d sat up, and tried not to look. They hadn’t discussed this—waking up half-undressed in bed together—in the woods yesterday. And Oz was watching, which made it weird.
“Quint is in our room because you’re too damn charming and now we have to go on TV again.”
“Oh.” Caleb yawned. “But that’s good, isn’t it?”
Aidan grunted. He got out of bed and picked his jeans up off the floor.
“You can’t wear yesterday’s clothes,” Caleb said, coming more fully awake. “If O—Quint is going to look put together, we should, too.”
“I don’t have other clothes. I wasn’t expecting to become a public figure—at least not the kind people judge based on his clothes.”
“You already were one. You think people were judging you solely on your ideology? Everybody gets judged on their clothes, whether they want it or not,” Caleb said.
“Caleb is right,” Oz said. “Besides, a lot of the commenters really don’t like you, so whatever we can do to fix that, we should.”
“I don’t think new clothes are going to change much,” Aidan said.
Oz ignored him. He turned toward the door and called over his shoulder, “Whatever you need for this, it’s on me. We leave in an hour. Don’t be late.”
In the first few years of the Runners’ Union, Aidan had taken Caleb with him on some of his trips. Caleb had gotten to see more of the world; Aidan had gotten someone friendly and talkative to smooth things over with strangers. But the Union had grown, and grown more secretive, and now there were members Caleb didn’t know.
Two of them—a white man with sandy blond hair and a Black woman with impeccably tight curls—had just appeared in his bedroom.
Well. Not his bedroom. A bedroom at one of Oswin Lewis Quint’s many homes. If Caleb wasn’t mistaken, the eyeglasses they were both wearing were disruptors. They knew the house might recognize them.
“Uh,” Caleb said, glad he’d finished dressing a second ago, and then Kit and Laila showed up. Aidan hadn’t warned him about this. “I guess some kind of announcement went out?”
“We heard you got famous,” Laila said, and the two runners in disruptors nodded and held up the shopping bags in their hands with apologetic smiles. “And I heard we only have an hour, so let’s get started.”
“Hi Caleb,” said the woman. “It’s Lisa. And Craig.”
Oh. He did know them, though it had been years. Squinting at their faces got him nowhere.
“Aidan said he needed our help,” Craig said. “Other people called in favors from connections, but all I had to offer was my services as a delivery man.”
The interviews. There were three lined up today not merely because the first one had gone viral, but because people in the Runners’ Union had made it happen. Aidan had planned this. Caleb hadn’t known any of that. It was bewildering, but also impressive.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I do actually have a job,” Lisa said. She vanished and so did Craig.
“I have way more than just one job,” Kit said, cranky. “You’ve put us in a shitty situation, you know.”
“We’ll be as quick as we can,” Caleb said, placating Kit on instinct more than anything else. A week was hardly any time to redistribute Quint’s vast wealth, but it was an eternity to keep Quint at Facility 17.
Kit rolled his eyes and disappeared, leaving Laila in the room with them. She was already bending down to sort through the shopping bags, tossing things onto the unmade bed. “I’m staying,” she said unnecessarily, since Kit had already left. “I’d rather be down here than up there sharing recycled air with—”
“Yes,” Aidan interrupted. “We understand. The air in this house is much nicer.”
“Oh, I bet,” Laila said. She gave him a wicked smile, folding one of the thick black lines drawn down her cheek, further emphasizing the asymmetry of the abstract expressionist work she’d painted on her face. “I’m excited to take the whole tour. But not now.”
She pointed toward some of the clothes she’d laid out. “Let’s get you dressed.”
Clever of Aidan to call on the Union for help, even though he’d cringed through Laila’s makeover. He shouldn’t have—he looked good. Better, with the disruptor replaced by regular glasses. The familiar topography of Aidan’s real face inspired a strange feeling in him, like passing by an old apartment, one he hadn’t known he’d miss until after the lease was up.
Now that they were on set, Aidan was managing to smile for Jenna, their host, since the camera had turned its eye on him.
Jenna had a waterfall of impossibly glossy blond hair and a face that didn’t move quite as much as it should. She sat in her armchair and directed her unchangeable smile at Aidan. “We’ve heard a lot from Oswin about how inspiring he found your relationship, and we’ve heard a lot from Caleb about when he realized he was in love with you. Aidan, I’d like to hear from you. Did you know you were in love with Caleb? Did you know he was in love with you?”
Caleb couldn’t freeze, not when they were on camera, but his smile tightened. Even breathing shallowly, he could smell the strong solvents used to clean this set. Bleach wafted through the air. He gripped the arm of the couch, the knobby weave of its upholstery under his fingers, to keep himself from reacting further.
Of course one of their interviewers would eventually shift the focus to Aidan. Caleb couldn’t control this forever. He had to let Aidan handle it.
Aidan crossed his legs and angled his body toward Caleb. On his other side, Oz perked up with interest, that drama-loving asshole.
Unlike Oz, Aidan wasn’t wearing a suit. They’d decided it was out of character. His jeans weren’t as ratty as normal, and his hair was wild in a more flattering way than usual. His shirt and jacket weren’t wrinkled and baggy.
Caleb was loath to admit how much impact these slight changes had on him. He’d only ever thought of Aidan as Aidan, and all that entailed: fierce, scrawny, sharp, messy. He was still all of those things, or at least he would be tomorrow when no one was managing his wardrobe and hair for him, but there was something else there. Aidan didn’t have the kind of beauty that made itself obvious at first glance, or all at once, but he wasn’t bad-looking. It was a beauty that crept up on you, something that revealed itself in the angle of the light or the crook of his smile. Caleb found himself unmoored by this new knowledge; he wanted to stare at this person he’d known all his life, and it embarrassed him.
Then again, he was supposed to be staring. Playing it up. Might as well lean in.
Caleb had almost forgotten that Oz and Jenna were in the room, until she prompted Aidan by saying his name. Right. She’d asked Aidan a question. He gave her a weak smile. “I’m sorry, the truth is I don’t know when I fell in love with Caleb. We were friends, and we were friends, and we were friends, and then… my feelings changed. I can’t pinpoint the moment it happened.”
Shit. What a disaster. That might be true but it was too true. It sounded like exactly what you’d say if someone had forced you to pretend to be in love with your best friend and you were a terrible liar. At least Aidan had been too reserved to sound nervous, but that wasn’t much consolation. Caleb tried to catch Aidan’s eye, to communicate some silent message about how to do better next time. Put some feeling into it. Aidan could be passionate about the plight of runners in the modern world. Why couldn’t he conjure up some of that excitement for Caleb? When they’d been alone in the woods, he’d said he was fine with this arrangement. If that was true, he should commit to the role.
“And did you know Caleb was in love with you?” Jenna asked.
Instead of answering her, Aidan sought Caleb’s attention and said, “Do you remember when Anna dumped you?”
Caleb blinked in surprise. The question was unexpected, and not in a promising way. “Dumped? Wait, which Anna are you talking about?” Probably Anna Keewatin, but there’d been an Anna Norris, too. And a third, technically, but that had only been one date.
“Right, because there have been so many women—it gets hard to keep track!” Aidan paused, smiled, and right on cue Jenna laughed, and the audience followed her lead. It was jarring to watch. His first answer had been so lackluster, and Caleb didn’t know where he was heading with this. “And yes, I do mean dumped. I’m talking about Anna with the black hair and the high heels. You know, she was my favorite of your girlfriends.”
Aidan was avoiding her last name. Then again, maybe it was wise to keep other people as far from this charade as possible.
Caleb said, “Oh, that Anna.”
He hadn’t always introduced Aidan to his girlfriends—for some reason, it rarely went well—but Anna had made the cut. Aidan was telling the truth about liking her, as far as Caleb could recall. She was a charismatic person. An actress, as warm in personality as she was beautiful. Caleb hadn’t realized she’d made such an impression.
“I thought our break-up was amicable enough,” Caleb added. They all had been. He didn’t inspire strong feelings in anyone—including, it seemed, his best friend who was supposed to be pretending to be madly in love with him.
“So you don’t remember what she said?”
Caleb did remember, and his stomach dropped. He couldn’t say why. They’d already been mixing truth and lies for public consumption. It shouldn’t make any difference to reveal one more thing.
He made a show of struggling to recall something, biting his lip. “I think she said—” he was getting good at blushing on command “—that the sex was good but that I had already made an emotional commitment to someone, and it wasn’t her.”
“Yes. That’s exactly what she said.” Aidan turned toward Jenna. “She was a really lovely woman, Anna. And great taste in shoes.”
Where had that winning smile and sense of humor been earlier? And Aidan had never noticed anyone’s shoes in his life. He’d grumbled about this morning’s hasty styling session. Their host gave a tinkling laugh and Caleb smiled to hide his irritation.
“Perceptive, too,” Aidan continued. “Anyway, Caleb was a little sad that this marvelous woman was ending things. He told me what she said mostly because he couldn’t make sense of it. He hadn’t ever been unfaithful. He wouldn’t do that. So he didn’t know what she meant.”
When Jenna produced an “aww,” Caleb nearly rolled his eyes. It wasn’t cute, having your private emotional moments aired in public. Was this how Aidan felt yesterday when Caleb talked about him? Caleb should apologize.
As Caleb remembered it, he’d shared Anna’s comment about emotional commitments because he’d wanted Aidan’s reassurance. She doesn’t mean you, right? I mean, we’re just friends. I’m allowed to have friends.
The memory made him wince internally. What had Aidan said in response? Caleb couldn’t recall anything beyond Aidan getting up from the couch and pulling a couple of beers out of the fridge.
“So,” Aidan was saying to Jenna, not sounding nearly as chipper as he had at the beginning of this story, “that’s when I knew Caleb was in love with me.”
“Wow—” Jenna started to say.
“Bu that was three years ago,” Caleb blurted, all thoughts of performance having fled.
Aidan put a hand on his knee and squeezed.
Caleb took a deep breath of bleach-scented air and felt a little faint. His urge to bolt might have stranded him in the Nowhere, except Aidan’s fingers were digging into the flesh of his thigh. Stay, he thought, and almost burst out laughing. It was absurd to issue commands to his body like it was an unruly dog, and yet here he was.
Aidan and Jenna were talking to cover his silence, but they might as well have been on another planet. It was one thing for Oz to twist the events of Caleb’s life into some new shape to suit his purpose—Oz was a stranger, and they were paying him to lie—and entirely another for Aidan to do it.
Aidan had witnessed firsthand everything in the story he’d just told. There’d been a conversational flourish or two in the telling, but the facts were there. The sudden reversal put Caleb in mind of an optical illusion, as though they’d both been staring at the same drawing, one of them seeing a duck and the other a rabbit. Aidan had shown him the rabbit, and now he couldn’t un-see it.
“Well, I think that’s all the time we have for today,” Jenna was saying, and then after a perfunctory goodbye, Aidan was ushering him off the set.
“Hey, did you mean that?” Caleb asked, before they were even really alone. A woman with a headset on rushed by, forcing them into the green room, a small, white-walled space furnished with a red couch and two matching armchairs around a low, round table. Neither of them moved to sit. Aidan shut the door, keeping his hand on the doorknob. His knuckles nearly matched the walls.
“I don’t think it’s wise to talk about what we mean,” Aidan said in a low voice. “But no, of course not. I had to say something, and I’m not great at improvising, so that’s what came out. If anything, it was wishful thinking on my part.”
The whole room slid out of focus. “Wait, what?”
“You heard me.” Aidan still had his hand on the doorknob, like he was poised to leave at any second, his whole body pulled taut. He kept glancing at the closed door.
Next to him, Caleb felt ponderous and slow. He quashed an urge to lean against the door. “You... wish… I was in love with you? That’s what you mean by ‘wishful thinking’?”
“No, no, that’s—no, I just meant—God, I feel like I’m crossing so many lines here, but that night was memorable, okay? Your girlfriend had just dumped you, you were looking for comfort, you came to me. It didn’t go anywhere, but it could have.”
“Oh. That kind of wishful thinking.” Caleb laughed, but the explanation left him unaccountably disappointed.
The carpet was patterned in a dizzying grid of polygons in red, orange, and yellow. It was hideous, but the whole rest of the room carried with it the risk of looking at Aidan’s face, or the certain knowledge that Aidan could see Caleb’s face and every emotion that passed over it, which was worse. It was just jerking off, for fuck’s sake. They both did it. He should be able to forget this, or at the very least, laugh it off for real.
Caleb wasn’t going to do either of those things, and from the way Aidan was clearing his throat, neither was he.
“Sorry. I know that makes this—” his hand drew a looping squiggle in the air “—even weirder than it already was, and I know you’re straight, and I won’t ever bring it up again.”
Caleb’s head shot up at those words. “How do you know?”
“What?”
“How do you know I’m straight? Because I don’t.”
“Oh,” Aidan said, far less panicked. “Okay. Sorry for assuming.”
That wasn’t the tone of someone finally seeing a rabbit after staring at a drawing of a duck. “You don’t sound surprised.”
“Do you want me to be surprised?”
Caleb wanted to grab him and shake him—or maybe he wanted to shake himself. “I don’t know! What I don’t want is for you to keep things from me. If you knew, you should have told me.”
“Caleb,” Aidan said, like Caleb was the unreasonable one here, when Aidan had been hoarding secrets for years. “It’s hard to know what other people are really feeling, and even if you do suspect, people have to come to their own conclusions in their own time. If that’s what you’re doing, that’s cool. Good for you.”
“I mean, I—you’re not mad? You don’t think this is shitty timing? You don’t feel like I’m using you?”
“I’m not mad and I don’t think this is shitty timing,” Aidan said carefully. “If you need to use someone, it might as well be me.”
“Shit, Aidan, that’s not what I meant.”
“I’m serious. You know my work makes a real relationship impossible. This temporary arrangement is as close as I’m ever gonna get. It doesn’t all have to be for public consumption.”
Aidan smiled, a confident offer that rearranged his features into an unfamiliar shape. It made Caleb’s heart bound in his chest with jackrabbit force.
Oz banged on the green room door, startling both of them, and called, “You two done in there? We have two more of these to do.”
“Yeah,” Caleb said, the door still closed, his eyes on Aidan. “Yeah, okay, let’s do that.”