"That's not what I'm thinking," he protested, although really, he had been: Jude was always bemoaning his own lack of imagination, his own unswervable sense of practicality, but Willem had never seen him that way. And it did seem a waste: not that he was at a corporate firm but that he was in law at all, when really, he thought, a mind like Jude's should be doing something else. What, he didn't know, but it wasn't this. He knew it was ridiculous, but he had never truly believed that Jude's attending law school would actually result in his becoming a lawyer: he had always imagined that at some point he'd give it up and do something else, like be a math professor, or a voice teacher, or (although he had recognized the irony, even then) a psychologist, because he was such a good listener and always so comforting to his friends. He didn't know why he clung to this idea of Jude, even after it was clear that he loved what he did and excelled at it.

The Sycamore Court had been an unexpected hit and had won Willem the best reviews he'd ever had, and award nominations, and its release, paired with a larger, flashier film that he had shot two years earlier but had been delayed in postproduction, had created a certain moment that even he recognized would transform his career. He had always chosen his roles wisely-if he could be said to have superior talent in anything, he always thought it was that: his taste for parts-but until that year, there had never been a time in which he felt that he was truly secure, that he could talk about films he'd like to do when he was in his fifties or sixties. Jude had always told him that he had an overdeveloped sense of circumspection about his career, that he was far better along than he thought, but it had never felt that way; he knew he was respected by his peers and by critics, but a part of him always feared that it would end abruptly and without warning. He was a practical person in the least practical of careers, and after every job he booked, he would tell his friends he would never book another, that this was certain to be the last, partly as a way of staving off his fears-if he acknowledged the possibility, it was less likely to happen-and partly to give voice to them, because they were real.

Only later, when he and Jude were alone, would he allow himself to truly worry aloud. "What if I never work again?" he would ask Jude.

"That won't happen," Jude would say.

"But what if it does?"

"Well," said Jude, seriously, "in the extraordinarily unlikely event that you never act again, then you'll do something else. And while you figure it out, you'll move in with me."

He knew, of course, that he would work again: he had to believe it. Every actor did. Acting was a form of grifting, and once you stopped believing you could, so did everyone else. But he still liked having Jude reassure him; he liked knowing he had somewhere to go just in case it really did end. Once in a while, when he was feeling particularly, uncharacteristically self-pitying, he would think of what he would do if it ended: he thought he might work with disabled children. He would be good at it, and he would enjoy it. He could see himself walking home from an elementary school he imagined might be on the Lower East Side, west to SoHo, toward Greene Street. His apartment would be gone, of course, sold to pay for his master's program in education (in this dream, all the millions he'd earned, all the millions he had never spent, had somehow vanished), and he would be living in Jude's apartment, as if the past two decades had never happened at all.

But after The Sycamore Court, these mopey fantasies had diminished in frequency, and he spent the latter half of his thirty-seventh year feeling closer to confidence than he ever had before. Something had shifted; something had cemented; somewhere his name had been tapped into stone. He would always have work; he could rest for a bit if he wanted to.

It was September, and he was coming back from a shoot and about to embark upon a European publicity tour; he had one day in the city, just one, and Jude told him he'd take him anywhere he wanted. They'd see each other, they'd have lunch, and then he'd get back into the car and go straight to the airport for the flight to London. It had been so long since he had been in New York, and he really wanted to go somewhere cheap and downtown and homey, like the Vietnamese noodle place they had gone to when they were in their twenties, but he instead picked a French restaurant known for its seafood in midtown so Jude wouldn't have to travel far.

The restaurant was filled with businessmen, the kinds of people who telegraphed their wealth and power with the cut of their suits and the subtlety of their watches: you had to be wealthy and powerful yourself in order to understand what was being communicated. To everyone else, they were men in gray suits, indistinguishable from one another. The hostess brought him to Jude, who was there already, waiting, and when Jude stood, he reached over and hugged him very close, which he knew Jude didn't like but which he had recently decided he would start doing anyway. They stood there, holding each other, surrounded on either side by gray-suited men, until he released Jude and they sat.

"Did I embarrass you enough?" he asked him, and Jude smiled and shook his head.

There were so many things to discuss in so little time that Jude had actually written an agenda on the back of a receipt, which he had laughed at when he had seen it but which they ended up following fairly closely. Between Topic Five (Malcolm's wedding: What were they going to say in their toasts?) and Topic Six (the progression of the Greene Street apartment, which was being gutted), he had gotten up to go to the bathroom, and as he walked back to the table, he had the unsettling feeling that he was being watched. He was of course used to being appraised and inspected, but there was something different about the quality of this attention, its intensity and hush, and for the first time in a long time, he was self-conscious, aware of the fact that he was wearing jeans and not a suit, and that he clearly didn't belong. He became aware, in fact, that everyone was wearing a suit, and he was the only one not.

"I think I'm wearing the wrong thing," he said quietly to Jude as he sat back down. "Everyone's staring."

"They're not staring at you because of what you're wearing," Jude said. "They're staring at you because you're famous."

He shook his head. "To you and literally dozens of other people, maybe."

"No, Willem," Jude had said. "You are." He smiled at him. "Why do you think they didn't make you wear a jacket? They don't let just anyone waltz in here who's not in corporate mufti. And why do you think they keep bringing over all these appetizers? It's not because of me, I guarantee you." Now he laughed. "Why did you choose this place anyway? I thought you were going to pick somewhere downtown."

He groaned. "I heard the crudo was good. And what do you mean: Is there a dress code here?"

Jude smiled again and was about to answer when one of the discreet gray-suited men came over to them and, vividly embarrassed, apologized for interrupting them. "I just wanted to say that I loved The Sycamore Court," he said. "I'm a big fan." Willem thanked him, and the man, who was older, in his fifties, was about to say something else when he saw Jude and blinked, clearly recognizing him, and stared at him for a bit, obviously recategorizing Jude in his head, refiling what he knew about him. He opened his mouth and shut it and then apologized again as he left, Jude smiling serenely at him the entire time.

"Well, well," said Jude, after the man had hurried away. "That was the head of the litigation department of one of the biggest firms in the city. And, apparently, an admirer of yours." He grinned at Willem. "Now are you convinced you're famous?"

"If the benchmark for fame is being recognized by twentysomething female RISD graduates and aging closet cases, then yes," he said, and the two of them started snickering, childishly, until they were both able to compose themselves again.

Jude looked at him. "Only you could be on magazine covers and not think you're famous," he said, fondly. But Willem wasn't anywhere real when those magazine covers came out; he was on set. On set, everyone acted like they were famous.

"It's different," he told Jude. "I can't explain it." But later, in the car to the airport, he realized what the difference was. Yes, he was used to being looked at. But he was only really used to being looked at by certain kinds of people in certain kinds of rooms-people who wanted to sleep with him, or who wanted to talk to him because it might help their own careers, or people for whom the simple fact that he was recognizable was enough to trigger something hungry and frantic in them, to crave being in his presence. He wasn't, however, accustomed to being looked at by people who had other things to do, who had bigger and more important matters to worry about than an actor in New York. Actors in New York: they were everywhere. The only time men with power ever looked at him was at premieres, when he was being presented to the studio head and they were shaking his hand and making small talk even as he could see them examining him, calculating how well he'd tested and how much they'd paid for him and how much the film would have to earn in order for them to look at him more closely.

Perversely, though, as this began happening more and more-he would enter a room, a restaurant, a building, and would feel, just for a second, a slight collective pause-he also began realizing that he could turn his own visibility on and off. If he walked into a restaurant expecting to be recognized, he always was. And if he walked in expecting not to be, he rarely was. He was never able to determine what, exactly, beyond his simply willing it, made the difference. But it worked; it was why, six years after that lunch, he was able to walk through much of SoHo in plain sight, more or less, after he moved in with Jude.

He had been at Greene Street since Jude got home from his suicide attempt, and as the months passed, he found that he was migrating more and more of his things-first his clothes, then his laptop, then his boxes of books and his favorite woolen blanket that he liked to wrap about himself and shuffle around in as he made his morning coffee: his life was so itinerant that there really wasn't much else he needed or owned-to his old bedroom. A year later, he was living there still. He'd woken late one morning and made himself some coffee (he'd had to bring his coffeemaker as well, because Jude didn't have one), and had meandered sleepily about the apartment, noticing as if for the first time that somehow his books were now on Jude's shelves, and the pieces of art he'd brought over were hanging on Jude's walls. When had this happened? He couldn't quite remember, but it felt right; it felt right that he should be back here.

Even Mr. Irvine agreed. Willem had seen him at Malcolm's house the previous spring for Malcolm's birthday and Mr. Irvine had said, "I hear you've moved back in with Jude," and he said he had, preparing himself for a lecture on their eternal adolescence: he was going to be forty-four, after all; Jude was nearly forty-two. But "You're a good friend, Willem," Mr. Irvine had said. "I'm glad you boys are taking care of each other." He had been deeply rattled by Jude's attempt; they all had, of course, but Mr. Irvine had always liked Jude the best of all of them, and they all knew it.

"Well, thanks, Mr. Irvine," he'd said, surprised. "I'm glad, too."

In the first, raw weeks after Jude had gotten out of the hospital, Willem used to go into his room at odd hours to give himself confirmation that Jude was there, and alive. Back then, Jude slept constantly, and he would sometimes sit on the end of his bed, staring at him and feeling a sort of horrible wonder that he was still with them at all. He would think: If Richard had found him just twenty minutes later, Jude would have been dead. About a month after Jude had been released, Willem had been at the drugstore and had seen a box cutter hanging on the rack-such a medieval, cruel instrument, it seemed-and had almost burst into tears: Andy had told him that the emergency room surgeon had said Jude's had been the deepest, most decisive self-inflicted incisions he had ever seen in his career. He had always known that Jude was troubled, but he was awestruck, almost, by how little he knew him, by the depths of his determination to harm himself.

He felt that he had in some ways learned more about Jude in the past year than he had in the past twenty-six, and each new thing he learned was awful: Jude's stories were the kinds of stories that he was unequipped to answer, because so many of them were unanswerable. The story of the scar on the back of his hand-that had been the one that had begun it-had been so terrible that Willem had stayed up that night, unable to sleep, and had seriously contemplated calling Harold, just to be able to have someone else share the story with him, to be speechless alongside him.

The next day he couldn't stop himself from staring at Jude's hand, and Jude had finally drawn his sleeve over it. "You're making me self-conscious," he said.

"I'm sorry," he'd said.

Jude had sighed. "Willem, I'm not going to tell you these stories if you're going to react like this," he said, finally. "It's okay, it really is. It was a long time ago. I never think about it." He paused. "I don't want you to look at me differently if I tell you these things."

He'd taken a deep breath. "No," he said. "You're right. You're right." And so now when he listened to these stories of Jude's, he was careful not to say anything, to make small, nonjudgmental noises, as if all his friends had been whipped with a belt soaked in vinegar until they had passed out or been made to eat their own vomit off the floor, as if those were normal rites of childhood. But despite these stories, he still knew nothing: He still didn't know who Brother Luke was. He still didn't know anything except isolated stories about the monastery, or the home. He still didn't know how Jude had made it to Philadelphia or what had happened to him there. And he still didn't know the story about the injury. But if Jude was beginning with the easier stories, he now knew enough to know that those stories, if he ever heard them, would be horrific. He almost didn't want to know.

The stories had been part of a compromise when Jude had made it clear that he wouldn't go to Dr. Loehmann. Andy had been stopping by most Friday nights, and he came over one evening shortly after Jude had returned to Rosen Pritchard. As Andy examined Jude in his bedroom, Willem made everyone drinks, which they had on the sofa, the lights low and the sky outside grainy with snow.

"Sam Loehmann says you haven't called him," Andy said. "Jude-this is bullshit. You've got to call him. This was part of the deal."

"Andy, I've told you," Jude said, "I'm not going." Willem was pleased, then, to hear that Jude's stubbornness had returned, even though he disagreed with him. Two months ago, when they had been in Morocco, he had looked up from his plate at dinner to see Jude staring at the dishes of mezze before him, unable to serve himself any of them. "Jude?" he'd asked, and Jude had looked at him, his face fearful. "I don't know how to begin," he'd said, quietly, and so Willem had reached over and spooned a little from each dish onto Jude's plate, and told him to start with the scoop of stewed eggplant at the top and eat his way clockwise through the rest of it.

"You have to do something," Andy said. He could tell Andy was trying to remain calm, and failing, and that too he found heartening: a sign of a certain return to normalcy. "Willem thinks so too, right, Willem? You can't just keep going on like this! You've had a major trauma in your life! You have to start discussing things with someone!"

"Fine," said Jude, looking tired. "I'll tell Willem."

"Willem's not a health-care professional!" said Andy. "He's an actor!" And at that, Jude had looked at him and the two of them had started laughing, so hard that they had to put their drinks down, and Andy had finally stood and said that they were both so immature he didn't know why he bothered and had left, Jude trying to call after him-"Andy! We're sorry! Don't leave!"-but laughing too hard to be intelligible. It was the first time in months-the first time since even before the attempt-that he had heard Jude laugh.

Later, when they had recovered, Jude had said, "I thought I might, you know, Willem-start telling you things sometimes. But do you mind? Is it going to be a burden?" And he had said of course it wouldn't be, that he wanted to know. He had always wanted to know, but he didn't say this; he knew it would sound like criticism.

But as much as he was able to convince himself that Jude had returned to himself, he was also able to recognize that he had been changed. Some of these changes were, he thought, good ones: the talking, for example. And some of them were sad ones: although his hands were much stronger, and although it was less and less frequent, they still shook occasionally, and he knew Jude was embarrassed by it. And he was more skittish than ever about being touched, especially, Willem noticed, by Harold; a month ago, when Harold had visited, Jude had practically danced out of the way to keep Harold from hugging him. He had felt bad for Harold, seeing the expression on his face, and so had gone over and hugged him himself. "You know he can't help it," he told Harold quietly, and Harold had kissed him on the cheek. "You're a sweet man, Willem," he'd said.

Now it was October, thirteen months after the attempt. During the evening he was at the theater; two months after his run ended in December, he'd start shooting his first project since he returned from Sri Lanka, an adaptation of Uncle Vanya that he was excited about and was being filmed in the Hudson Valley: he'd be able to come home every night.

Not that the location was a coincidence. "Keep me in New York," he'd instructed his manager and his agent after he'd dropped out of the film in Russia the previous fall.

"For how long?" asked Kit, his agent.

"I don't know," he'd said. "At least the next year."

"Willem," Kit had said, after a silence, "I understand how close you and Jude are. But don't you think you should take advantage of the momentum you have? You could do whatever you wanted." He was referring to The Iliad and The Odyssey, which had both been enormous successes, proof, Kit liked to point out, that he could do anything he wanted now. "From what I know of Jude, he'd say the same thing." And then, when he didn't say anything, "It's not like this is your wife, or kid, or something. This is your friend."

"You mean 'just your friend,' " he'd said, testily. Kit was Kit; he thought like an agent, and he trusted how Kit thought-he had been with him since the beginning of his career; he tried not to fight with him. And Kit had always guided him well. "No fat, no filler," he liked to brag about Willem's career, reviewing the history of his roles. They both knew that Kit was far more ambitious for him than he was-he always had been. And yet it had been Kit who'd gotten him on the first flight out of Sri Lanka after Richard had called him; Kit who'd had the producers shut down production for seven days so he could fly to New York and back.

"I don't mean to offend you, Willem," Kit had said, carefully. "I know you love him. But come on. If he were the love of your life, I'd understand. But this seems extreme to me, to inhibit your career like this."

And yet he sometimes wondered if he could ever love anyone as much as he loved Jude. It was the fact of him, of course, but also the utter comfort of life with him, of having someone who had known him for so long and who could be relied upon to always take him as exactly who he was on that particular day. His work, his very life, was one of disguises and charades. Everything about him and his context was constantly changing: his hair, his body, where he would sleep that night. He often felt he was made of something liquid, something that was being continually poured from bright-colored bottle to bright-colored bottle, with a little being lost or left behind with each transfer. But his friendship with Jude made him feel that there was something real and immutable about who he was, that despite his life of guises, there was something elemental about him, something that Jude saw even when he could not, as if Jude's very witness of him made him real.

In graduate school he'd had a teacher who had told him that the best actors are the most boring people. A strong sense of self was detrimental, because an actor had to let the self disappear; he had to let himself be subsumed by a character. "If you want to be a personality, be a pop star," his teacher had said.

He had understood the wisdom of this, and still did, but really, the self was what they all craved, because the more you acted, the further and further you drifted from who you thought you were, and the harder and harder it was to find your way back. Was it any wonder that so many of his peers were such wrecks? They made their money, their lives, their identities by impersonating others-was it a surprise, then, that they needed one set, one stage after the next, to give their lives shape? Without them, what and who were they? And so they took up religions, and girlfriends, and causes to give them something that could be their own: they never slept, they never stopped, they were terrified to be alone, to have to ask themselves who they were. ("When an actor talks and there's no one to hear him, is he still an actor?" his friend Roman had once asked. He sometimes wondered.) But to Jude, he wasn't an actor: he was his friend, and that identity supplanted everything else. It was a role he had inhabited for so long that it had become, indelibly, who he was. To Jude, he was no more primarily an actor than Jude was primarily a lawyer-it was never the first or second or third way that either of them would describe the other. It was Jude who remembered who he had been before he had made a life pretending to be other people: someone with a brother, someone with parents, someone to whom everything and everyone seemed so impressive and beguiling. He knew other actors who didn't want anyone to remember them as they'd been, as someone so determined to be someone else, but he wasn't that person. He wanted to be reminded of who he was; he wanted to be around someone for whom his career would never be the most interesting thing about him.

And if he was to be honest, he loved what came with Jude as well: Harold and Julia. Jude's adoption had been the first time he had ever felt envious of anything Jude had. He admired a lot of what Jude had-his intelligence and thoughtfulness and resourcefulness-but he had never been jealous of him. But watching Harold and Julia with him, watching how they watched him even when he wasn't looking at them, he had felt a kind of emptiness: he was parentless, and while most of the time he didn't think about this at all, he felt that, for as remote as his parents had been, they had at least been something that had anchored him to his life. Without any family, he was a scrap of paper floating through the air, being picked up and tossed aloft with every gust. He and Jude had been united in this.

Of course, he knew this envy was ridiculous, and beyond mean: he had grown up with parents, and Jude hadn't. And he knew that Harold and Julia felt an affection for him as well, as much as he did for them. They had both seen every one of his films, and both sent him long and detailed reviews of them, always praising his performance and making intelligent comments about his costars and the cinematography. (The only one they had never seen-or at least never commented on-was The Prince of Cinnamon, which was the film he had been shooting when Jude had tried to kill himself. He had never seen it himself.) They read every article about him-like his reviews, he avoided these articles-and bought a copy of every magazine that featured him. On his birthday, they would call and ask him what he was going to do to celebrate, and Harold would remind him of how old he was getting. At Christmas, they always sent him something-a book, along with a jokey little gift, or a clever toy that he would keep in his pocket to fiddle with as he talked on the phone or sat in the makeup chair. At Thanksgiving, he and Harold would sit in the living room watching the game, while Julia kept Jude company in the kitchen.

"We're running low on chips," Harold would say.

"I know," he'd say.

"Why don't you go get more?" Harold would say.

"You're the host," he'd remind Harold.

"You're the guest."

"Yeah, exactly."

"Call Jude and get him to bring us more."

"You call him!"

"No, you call him."

"Fine," he'd say. "Jude! Harold wants more chips!"

"You're such a confabulator, Willem," Harold would say, as Jude came in to refill the bowl. "Jude, this was completely Willem's idea."

But mostly, he knew that Harold and Julia loved him because he loved Jude; he knew they trusted him to take care of Jude-that was who he was to them, and he didn't mind it. He was proud of it.

Lately, however, he had been feeling differently about Jude, and he wasn't sure what to do about it. They had been sitting on the sofa late one Friday night-he just home from the theater, Jude just home from the office-and talking, talking about nothing in particular, when he had almost leaned over and kissed him. But he had stopped himself, and the moment had passed. But since then, he had been revisited by that impulse again: twice, three times, four times.

It was beginning to worry him. Not because Jude was a man: he'd had sex with men before, everyone he knew had, and in college, he and JB had drunkenly made out one night out of boredom and curiosity (an experience that had been, to their mutual relief, entirely unsatisfying: "It's really interesting how someone so good-looking can be such a turnoff," had been JB's exact words to him). And not because he hadn't always felt a sort of low-key hum of attraction for Jude, the way he felt for more or less all his friends. It was because he knew that if he tried anything, he would have to be certain about it, because he sensed, powerfully, that Jude, who was casual about nothing, certainly wouldn't be casual about sex.

Jude's sex life, his sexuality, had been a subject of ongoing fascination for everyone who knew him, and certainly for Willem's girlfriends. Occasionally, it had come up among the three of them-he and Malcolm and JB-when Jude wasn't around: Was he having sex? Had he ever? With whom? They had all seen people looking at him at parties, or flirting with him, and in every case, Jude had remained oblivious.

"That girl was all over you," he'd say to Jude as they walked home from one party or another.

"What girl?" Jude would say.

They talked about it with one another because Jude had made it clear he wouldn't discuss it with any of them: when the topic was raised, he would give them one of his stares and then change the subject with a declarativeness that was impossible to misinterpret.

"Has he ever spent the night away from home?" asked JB (this was when he and Jude were living on Lispenard Street).

"Guys," he'd say (the conversation made him uncomfortable), "I don't think we should be talking about this."

"Willem!" JB would say. "Don't be such a pussy! You're not betraying any confidences. Just tell us: yes or no. Has he ever?"

He'd sigh. "No," he'd say.

There would be a silence. "Maybe he's asexual," Malcolm would say, after a while.

"No, that's you, Mal."

"Fuck off, JB."

"Do you think he's a virgin?" JB would ask.

"No," he'd say. He didn't know why he knew this, but he was certain he wasn't.

"It's such a waste," JB would say, and he and Malcolm would look at each other, knowing what was coming next. "His looks've been wasted on him. I should've gotten his looks. I would've had a good time with them, at least."

After a while, they grew to accept it as part of who Jude was; they added the subject to the list of things they knew not to discuss. Year after year passed and he dated no one, they saw him with no one. "Maybe he's living some hot double life," Richard once suggested, and Willem had shrugged. "Maybe," he said. But really, although he had no proof of this, he knew that Jude wasn't. It was in this same, proof-less way that he assumed Jude was probably gay (though maybe not), and probably hadn't ever had a relationship (though he really hoped he was wrong about this). And as much as Jude claimed otherwise, Willem wasn't ever convinced that he wasn't lonely, that he didn't, in some small dark part of himself, want to be with someone. He remembered Lionel and Sinclair's wedding, where it had been Malcolm with Sophie and he with Robin and JB-though they hadn't been speaking then-with Oliver, and Jude with no one. And although Jude hadn't seemed bothered by this, Willem had looked at him across the table and had felt sad for him. He didn't want Jude to get old alone; he wanted him to be with someone who would take care of him and be attracted to him. JB was right: it was a waste.

And so was this what this was, this attraction? Was it fear and sympathy that had morphed itself into a more palatable shape? Was he convincing himself he was attracted to Jude because he couldn't stand to see him alone? He didn't think so. But he didn't know.

The person he would've once discussed this with was JB, but he couldn't speak to JB about this, even though they were friends again, or at least working toward friendship. After they had returned from Morocco, Jude had called JB and the two of them had gone out for dinner, and a month later, Willem and JB had gone out on their own. Oddly, though, he found it much more difficult to forgive JB than Jude had, and their first meeting had been a disaster-JB showily, exaggeratedly blithe; he seething-until they had left the restaurant and started yelling at each other. There they had stood on deserted Pell Street-it had been snowing, lightly, and no one else was out-accusing each other of condescension and cruelty; irrationality and self-absorption; self-righteousness and narcissism; martyrdom and cluelessness.

"You think anyone hates themselves as much as I do?" JB had shouted at him. (His fourth show, the one that documented his time on drugs and with Jackson, had been titled "The Narcissist's Guide to Self-Hatred," and JB had referenced it several times during their dinner as proof that he had punished himself mightily and publicly and had now been reformed.) "Yeah, JB, I do," he'd shouted back at him. "I think Jude hates himself far more than you could ever hate yourself, and I think you knew that and you made him hate himself even more."

"You think I don't know that?" JB had yelled. "You think I don't fucking hate myself for that?"

"I don't think you hate yourself enough for it, no," he'd yelled back. "Why did you do that, JB? Why did you do that to him, of all people?" And then, to his surprise, JB had sunk, defeated, to the curb. "Why didn't you ever love me the way you love him, Willem?" he asked.

He sighed. "Oh, JB," he said, and sat down next to him on the chilled pavement. "You never needed me as much as he did." It wasn't the only reason, he knew, but it was part of it. No one else in his life needed him. People wanted him-for sex, for their projects, for his friendship, even-but only Jude needed him. Only to Jude was he essential.

"You know, Willem," said JB, after a silence, "maybe he doesn't need you as much as you think he does."

He had thought about this for a while. "No," he said, finally, "I think he does."

Now JB sighed. "Actually," he had said, "I think you're right."

After that, things had, strangely, improved. But as much as he was-cautiously-learning to enjoy JB again, he wasn't sure he was ready to discuss this particular topic with him. He wasn't sure he wanted to hear JB's jokes about how he had already fucked everything with two X chromosomes and so was now moving on to the Ys, or about his abandonment of heteronormative standards, or, worst of all, about how this attraction he thought he was feeling for Jude was really something else: a misplaced guilt for the suicide attempt, or a form of patronization, or simple, misdirected boredom.

So he did nothing and said nothing. As the months passed, he dated, casually, and he examined his feelings as he did. This is crazy, he told himself. This is not a good idea. Both were true. It would be so much easier if he didn't have these feelings at all. And so what if he did? he argued with himself. Everyone had feelings that they knew better than to act upon because they knew that doing so would make life so much more complicated. He had whole pages of dialogue with himself, imagining the lines-his and JB's, both spoken by him-typeset on white paper.

But still, the feelings persisted. They went to Cambridge for Thanksgiving, the first time in two years that they'd done so. He and Jude shared his room because Julia's brother was visiting from Oxford and had the upstairs bedroom. That night, he lay awake on the bedroom sofa, watching Jude sleep. How easy would it be, he thought, to simply climb into bed next to him and fall asleep himself? There was something about it that seemed almost preordained, and the absurdity was not in the fact of it but in his resistance to the fact of it.

They had taken the car to Cambridge, and Jude drove them home so he could sleep. "Willem," Jude said as they were about to enter the city, "I want to ask you about something." He looked at him. "Are you okay? Is something on your mind?"

"Sure," he said. "I'm fine."

"You've seemed really-pensive, I guess," Jude said. He was quiet. "You know, it's been a huge gift having you live with me. And not just live with me, but-everything. I don't know what I would have done without you. But I know it must be draining for you. And I just want you to know: if you want to move back home, I'll be fine. I promise. I'm not going to hurt myself." He had been staring at the road as he spoke, but now he turned to him. "I don't know how I got so lucky," he said.

He didn't know what to say for a while. "Do you want me to move home?" he asked.

Jude was silent. "Of course not," he said, very quietly. "But I want you to be happy, and you haven't seemed very happy recently."

He sighed. "I'm sorry," he said. "I've been distracted, you're right. But it's certainly not because I'm living with you. I love living with you." He tried to think of the right, the perfect next thing to add, but he couldn't. "I'm sorry," he said again.

"Don't be," Jude said. "But if you want to talk about any of it, ever, you always can."