It's a heavy thing, for how lightly they tread over it. A heavier thing than Jude's ever--well, openly had. Parker had been heavier. Parker had been two people, in a way. He could burn up sometimes and catch Jude with the flames, and they never talked about it. Not really. Not that second presence, or how it burned his friend away little by little. Not why he was so afraid to lose him.

He's lost him anyway. He doesn't know who there is to make Charlie dinner and who Parker calls when he wakes up a county away in a bus stop he can't remember hitching to. Were those important things, what he amounted to in his own home? This feels like one of those things.

People don't always need complicated things. But they still need them. "That's fine," he says, a little slower, like he's processing the fact that it is. They're--fine. Not great, not with everything going on, but in his piles of stress, there's one thing to set aside. "The drink," he adds, just to get his own kind of distance, and make sure it doesn't get cold. "My mom used to give it to me, help me sleep." He doesn't know if it'll do anything for either of them now, but it'll be warm.