I am naked in front of a mirror, examining myself again. Mid-20s, average build, ungainly to someone in the spotlight but perfectly acceptable for a chef; mine is a body worn by the average everywhere. A softness to the edges, flat yet firm ass. That’s my body, a space I scrutinize way too often, a bad habit I would love to break.

There is classical music playing from the portable speaker on the dresser. I can taste the heartbeat of the timpani and swell of the violins on my spine. I towel off, my inspection complete, and begin to choose clothes for the party. Before a decision is made, Parker makes his entrance, carrying a sack with new hand towels from the store. He follows me as I dip into the walk-in closet, but I pivot at the last second and turn to the dresser instead, throwing on a pair of underwear before considering the outfit further. By the time I’ve thrown on the tightest pants I own, the blackest shirt, and a windbreaker, Parker is already off showering, getting ready for his own evening, apart.

The two of us have been moving synchronized swimmer silent around the apartment for the last few weeks. While it’s true there are no fresh problems in our six-year relationship, we’ve felt (and acknowledged) some gap forming between us lately. We partially wonder if it’s just the territory of long-term partnership, partially wonder if we need to go to therapy, but we’re still in the uncharted waters of reaching a final decision, which doesn’t make things particularly comfortable.

Tonight, I am going to my best friend’s house party and Parker is off to a bar crawl with his pharmacy classmates. As I wait for my coworker Nori to arrive, I lay back on the couch and watch the night blossoming, stars turning themselves on behind the smog of the city. When I hear Nori’s callused knuckles rap on the door, so, too do I hear the shower curtain opening in the bathroom. Before I can say goodbye to Parker I am ushering Nori out into the night, a weightlessness entering me as we walk down the stairs. Freedom.

Before his lips and words there is the party, a gathering of mostly college students and a few coworkers. My best friend Masa is hosting, a current student of anthropology who works weekends at the market with Nori and me to make a few dollars. It gives him the opportunity to practice his already-decent Japanese with our coworkers; after he graduates, he plans on moving to Japan.

Nori and I are sharing a bottle of whiskey, something I’ve recently introduced him to, each of us outsiders on different sides. I am a college graduate, at least four years older than everyone at the party, and he is near the youngest, a few days over nineteen, no immediate college plans, but with “soul of someone at least 23” (his words). We’re friends without either of us being entirely sure why. He is the straightest friend I have without a doubt, and I’m positive that I’m his only gay friend. There are times when I think I’ve cracked the code, that he only hangs around me to get closer to our coworker Cecilia, she who bonded with me because of our shitty arts degrees and lack of employment outside of a Japanese supermarket. But then the logic would fail, he would ask me on walks, or out to eat just the two of us, or want to carpool with me to a party, like tonight, so he could ride the wave of alcohol into another knot on his string of days.

And so here we are at the party, wallflowers together. I had known him long enough now to grasp his inner turmoil, some mixture of jealousy that he was not living the idealized college lifestyle of Masa and a sense of some stubborn pride that his current routine allowed him to save money, even if it did mean living with his parents.

The other partygoers are sectioned off in the rooms of college house, which is exactly as you’d suspect: painted-over light switches, scarred wood flooring, everything shoved to the walls to make way for a beer pong table underneath the ancient chandelier. People make their way over to us every so often, and I can tell that Nori is sad that Cecilia wasn’t invited, she not being as close to Masa as we are. A kid named Kyle seems to like our conversation. He’s in Masa’s Japanese class, half-Japanese himself, and it’s clear he’s obsessed with learning the language. He tells us he wants to move to Japan to become a professional wrestler, completely serious, not a joke. Oh, to be 21. He talks to Nori in Japanese and I, being an idiot American who only understands English, look at Nori’s face, try to guess what he’s thinking about Kyle The truth according to Nori: his eyes fail to connect with Kyle’s, instead focusing on the blonde tips of his frosted hair. He seems drunk and bored, the mouth a taught, horizontal line. Even his already angular jawline pulses slightly, as if chewing on a problem.

I walk away to the window, not caring of the rudeness required to leave Kyle mid-sentence, look at the lawn pelted in a slurry of empty cans, and wonder about Parker, where the crawl has led him and his mediocre friends, all alarmingly beautiful in crop tops and skirts, in fitted Express shirts and shiny shoes and thin ties and thin bodies. Teeth in a row. Future pharmacists. How had Parker made his way in with those people? He was the boy who fell in love with me over my knowledge of 90s video games. He was the boy who bought me a paper airplane kit on our first Christmas. Now he would be home well after bar close, in an Uber with a brown bag filled with late night tacos. I knew he had become friends with them because of his expert ability to read others for filth, the way he could slice through people’s defenses with arrant skill. People adore that skill in a person, especially those types. Before, he had chosen to be flip only when necessary, only in private, but they had unlocked something inside him, so that each sentence dripped with disdain. He became a monster when he was around them, which was why I rarely joined in on their nights out on the town.

From across the lawn, endless white static is coming from a third-story window up the street. A feeling of magnetism, of being drawn to the strangeness, latches onto the hook in my soul, that unidentified space between my heart and my ribs. Is it part of a leftover Halloween display, the work of an insane person? I look at my watch: past midnight, officially the first of December, too late for Halloween displays to be sanely lit. The classical music from before, Shostakovich if I remember correctly, returns, playing inside my head. I want nothing more than to leave the house, walk across the street, open the door to the other house (it will be unlocked, as if waiting for me), climb stairway upon stairway, perhaps thousands of steps, millions, find the room with the strange glow, and be locked away there forever, trapped by brightness and static confusion, at once standing still and being flung through chaotic matter of space.

Behind me, I hear Kyle shout “Shut the FUCK up” and turn to see Nori looking strained but a little cocky. The amateur wrestler must have stumbled onto a conversation about fitness, and Nori, drunk and wanting to show off, has lifted his shirt to reveal the set of abs that Kyle had told to shut the fuck up, each stacked on top of one another like blocks in a play chest. Kyle, drunk himself, asks to cop a feel, and Nori obliges. I ask too, half joking, a dare. He looks up and pauses before saying “Sure.”

The drive home consists of extreme concentration. If there was ever a time to color inside the lines, it is now. I do sneak a few peeks over at Nori at red lights, gauging the amount of alcohol coursing through his veins. His eyes are closed, but it is clear he is not asleep. The red light stains his face, bringing out the dark shadows under his prematurely tired eyes. Through the residential neighbors toward my apartment, I cannot help but think of the static window. My eyes wander from the road when there is no oncoming traffic. I’m hoping to see the window again, as if it is sentient and alive, able to follow and stalk its prey. But this is not one of those worlds.

Few lights are on, just the occasional warning light, a lamp kept on keeping intruders at bay. In one window there is a Christmas tree adorned with multicolor lights. To me, they are the first Christmas lights of the season, likely turned on a minute after midnight, left to glow happily until morning. I tell Nori to look, but he has either actually fallen asleep this time, or is too deep within himself to hear me. Whatever the case, I don’t press the matter, let the lights disappear behind me as the car plunges onward into the darkness.

Nori and I are back in the apartment, and it is clear that Parker won’t be home for a while. He and I have taken to sleeping in different rooms, which feels odd to think about but feels natural in the story of our life together. I lead Nori to my room and ask if he’d prefer to sleep in bed with me or would like a spot on the floor. He is not too drunk to be cautious around me, especially after my little stunt at the party, so he chooses the floor. I lay out the blankets and pillow, a routine repeated more times than not. He falls into the blankets without a word.

When I’m sober I hate sleeping. I try to avoid it at all costs, staying up late into the night. By morning, I wrench myself awake as soon as I can, and never fall back to sleep, even if that means sleeping for two or three hours. In bed I am left with nobody except myself, and am reminded of my lack of permanence. How this is what dying must feel like, moments away from the edge of some horrible void, left senseless and without ability. To think of death as an adventure is to think of life as a joke. In bed I take life too seriously, missing the day lived, not looking forward to the day to come. I didn’t do enough, I’ve wasted the day circling all around the sun.

But when I am drunk all that falls away. Tonight, sleep beckons me into her clutches, and I am merciless to her powers. I dream of nothing, or I dream of blackness, but am awoken by pressure on top of me, a body, and a mouth that smells of liquor hovering over my face. My eyes open to see Nori’s figure silhouetted against the dim light coming from the hall.

“I want you.”

His words are uttered so quickly that I don’t have time enough to register them before he dives into my mouth, filling it with his tongue and the syrupy remains of the whiskey. My hands wrap around his hips, pushing him down, shorts pressing against one another. We continue kissing, growing comfortable in each other’s mouths the longer we go on, until we are both half-naked and grinding into each other. With one fluid motion I pull his shorts off, sliding down the bed and taking him my mouth, tasting the day on him, savoring it, wanting more. He moans and it almost sounds familiar, a sound dreamt a million years before, the sounds of the universe colliding into the edges of reason. In the back of my mind, another voice. It whispers what I already know: that this is his first time going past kissing. I blot out the inner monologue, careless to anything but the present moment, and return to him, testing his resistance by taking all of him in my mouth. He responds with an exhale, his body shivers. As he releases, I feel the disappointment building within me; I blindly know what will happen next, that this may be the end of our friendship, that I have traded one drunken night for a quick thrill. But, for now, just right now, savor it, goddammit.

I reach for his abs, wanting to circle the night toward that which began it, but feel nothing but flatness. My eyes, through a film of booze, have failed to adjust to the dimness. All I can see above me is a face adorned in shadows, a shade of humanity. From the floor I hear a rustling of blankets, and peer over to see Nori’s outline shuffling in the oversized comforter. He was never on top of me, in the space of ambiguous time that filled me with both dread and longing, both desire and shame. Then there was only one answer to the question of whom, and it burnt my insides to think of the deception born from sincerity. They, the pair of them, the other parts of the threesome that never was, must never know.

The outline of Parker is still above me, the shadow smiling down, his cheekbones turned upward in the shard of light leaking through the bedroom door. He is smiling because he believes our problems are solved. (He stands up, shuffles past the sleeping Nori, who he must not have noticed.) He is smiling because our dry spell, the several months of no contact, has ended. Our dry ocean, he calls it, has been crossed. (The light in the hallway is switched off, and all that is left is the blue light of the moon hanging through the window.) In my mouth I can taste him, sour and inescapable. (The door to his room clicks shut.) I tell myself that it was Nori all along, that this is one of those worlds, where dreams are fabricated in the vacuum of desire, that problems are solved when you want them to be. (His bed springs creak and he is probably still smiling over there, to himself; to his complete disregard of reality.) In the dark of my heart it was never Parker and was always Nori, though it can and never will be. It is my own turn to disregard reality. In my mouth I pretend that I can taste his secrets, the essence of him. And it is sweet.