He awakens before the alarm and reaches across the bed for Justin’s warm body but finds only cool sheets. He brews enough coffee for two. He smokes too much. His footsteps seem to echo in the silence. He spends long hours at Kinnetik and plays pool at Woody’s and comes home exhausted and still looks for Justin’s jacket hooked over the barstool or his sketches strewn across the table. He blinks and remembers that Justin’s gone and the loneliness-pain-fear flares anew.

And then it is nothing like he thought it would be, nothing like it could have been before I Love You’s and wedding plans and country homes. Because he always thought that when it happened, when Justin left, finally, irrevocably, he would be able to fall back on old reliable -- his own arrogance. He didn’t need Justin, he thought he’d be able to say. He never loved Justin. Justin who?

There’s no point in repeating the lies that he’s been telling for four long years, because no one believes them anyway. Especially himself.

In rejecting denial, Brian discovers hope. And Brian has found that hope is the ultimate drug, the one that can lift him higher than he’s ever been, the one that can chase away the fears, stomp them into the dirt. When he crashes, when the high wears off, he crashes hard, but believing, letting himself believe for once in his goddamned life, is worth it.

As the weeks progress, the crash happens less and less. He finds himself saying “when Justin gets back” without flinching.

There are new clients and new campaigns, the best of his career, uncompromising, unflinching, and can almost feel the shift, the creak of the earth as the world starts to take notice. There are random blowjobs from faceless tricks in the bathroom at Woody’s, and long phone conversations deep into the night with Justin that end, though not as frequently as he had expected they would, in moans and whispered sighs and satisfaction more intense than he could have imagined. There are plans to visit Gus in Toronto in the summer. There is a plane ticket to New York tucked in Brian’s bureau drawer, and the absolute knowledge that this time he’ll use it.

Brian has always known that Justin was his first love, last love, only love. But now he knows that Justin feels the same. He knows, and the knowledge makes him almost dizzy.

He believes, and he’ll watch Justin soar, and they’ll make a life together. They’ll soar together.