Lark appreciates that. The lack of pressure gives him space to think. Why he reached out for Oli, he’s not sure. There’s a block around the memory, a heavy curtain that draws closed when he tries to think about his feelings. The thoughts that do arise are angry and inward-looking: he should know better and act better, or at least have some explanation for the way he is. The weight of that is enough to silence any meaningful introspection.


    Oli sits up next to him and smiles. Lark rubs his eyes.


    “I didn’t mean anything,” Lark says. “I’m just—”


    Oli cuts him off with a wave of the hand. “I know. Don’t worry.” Really, Oli isn’t sure what Lark wants to say. Touch-starved is probably the real truth of it. Lonely. “Are you seeing anyone?” Oli asks him.


    Lark nods solemnly, and Oli understands that Lark thinks he means a therapist, not the significant other Oli had been trying to suggest, searching for a clue to Lark’s sexuality.


    “You have local friends still?” Oli adds in an attempt to make his meaning more apparent, and Lark turns his face away to hide an embarrassed flush.


    “Not really,” he says. He picks at the grass, pulling up two blades and tying them together with a simple knot. Tying another knot on top of that. “I’m not seeing anyone like that. Just Reed and Cassie. ”


    Oli knows, before that day, Lark hadn’t spoken to either of them for months, but he doesn’t point that out.


    “Maybe there are more people around. I haven’t felt up to calling anyone,” Lark admits. “I deleted my Facebook, got a new phone. It’s been a weird year.”


    “It must be lonely,” Oli says.


    Lark hasn’t thought of it that way, perhaps because he never feels alone. He is living with his parents, and they are very present. Their expectations pervade the house. Even when he isn’t with them, Lark feels the twist of their disappointment in the insurance bills on the kitchen table, the prescription pills in the bathroom cabinet, his coat on the pegs in the hall. Other, more distant voices crowd his head, too; his sense of failure dresses up in old friends’ accents as part of his internal rituals of self-flagellation.


    Lark knows, still, that Oli is right. Something is missing from his life. He has always been guided by others, always moved forward only hand-in-hand with people he trusted. For better or worse.


    Months of floundering without real friendship have not taught him independence, but they have left him aching.


    <hr>


    Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.