He stumbles from the loft and makes it as far as the alley before the bourbon and lager burn their way back up his throat. He coughs and retches and thinks: this is what love is. Watching the acid content of your own piss strip the sheen from your floors as you defile your lovers work. Ending up hands and knees in the dirt, recoiling from the stench of your own vomit. This is it, ladies and gentlemen.

He takes the jeep. He tells himself that he’s driven drunker than this, more wasted than this, even though his head is spinning and the painted lines on the road keep tripling. He figures it doesn’t matter anyway. He had the right idea on his thirtieth birthday. He just fucked up the execution.

The Liberty Spa sign beckons. Brian pays his money, takes his towel, and disrobes in the empty locker room. The place smells like perspiration and disinfectant and stale come, and he leans his forehead against the cool grey metal of his locker and wants to close his eyes. But he can’t, because then he’ll see everything, again.

He stands under the sputtering spray in the shower and lets the hot water cascade down his back as his fingers crabwalk across the tiles. He slaps away the questing hand of a Latino and ignores the enquiring eyes that signal from across the room. His eyes burn, and he tells himself it’s because he’s tired, so tired, fucking exhausted, because Brian Kinney doesn’t cry, and he definitely doesn’t cry in the musty shower room of a decaying bathhouse, and he sure as fuck doesn’t cry over...

Brian Kinney doesn’t cry.

By the time he wraps back up in the towel, Brian feels semi-human. The pounding in his head has lessened from tribal war drums to the bass of an outdated disco hit, and the vile taste of regurgitation has been washed from his tongue by the scalding spray. But his skin is still cold and clammy to the touch. He shivers as he slides back into his clothes. He wonders if he’ll ever be warm again.

The diner is nearly empty when he arrives; the after-club crowd long dispersed, the pre-work crowd not yet out of bed, leaving only Brian and a couple of rent-boys dispiritedly counting up the nights tally.

Kiki’s expression tells him that he looks exactly like he feels, but she wisely keeps her mouth shut.

“Coffee,” Brian rasps out, and realizes it’s the first time he’s spoken since he escorted two half-naked men out of his loft. Since he saw Justin and... Since he destroyed everything.

He picks up a magazine and flips through it, eyes not registering a thing, and thinks: this is what love is. This hammering in your skull that has nothing to do with the amount of alcohol you consumed. This corrosion in your stomach that causes nauseous flips at the slightest sip of coffee. This ache in your chest at the knowledge that he might have fucked up, but you know you did, royally, and there’s no way to put it right.

Brian remembers the man who only believed in fucking. He wants to imagine that he’d go back to being that man in a heartbeat.