Love is Always Write Anthology Bonus Volume

catch up on besides, so I figured I'd just keep it warm. Chili gets better with a few hours of simmering anyway."
    He looked a lot better than the last time I'd seen him. Clean, in clean clothes that with his laptop on the table told me they'd visited his apartment, but Lilia had succeeded in bringing him home for another night. Of course she had. When she decided she needed to be, Lilia was a force of nature.
    "Does Lilia get migraines often?" Alan asked. "I was under the impression nothing stopped her."
    She was a sneaky force of nature. "Not often, but when she does, they can lay her low for days." That was true. It had happened once in the two years I'd lived with her, after a protracted shouting match with a man in a bulldozer who couldn't read a map and wouldn't shut his machine off while he argued his right to uproot a hundred-year-old maple. Lilia had stated after that it wasn't the shouting that gave her the migraine, it was fighting the urge to let the idiot kill himself with the tree.
    "Cheese?" Alan asked. "Sour cream? Onions? Crackers? There's cornbread. Lilia made that."
    "Everything but the crackers, please." I felt odd letting him serve me, but I managed. Lilia said when someone wanted to do something nice for me, once in a while I needed to just shut my face and let them.
    "Wash your hands," Alan ordered. He set my place while I did, as neatly as any restaurant with utensils and a glass of milk. "Lots of dairy," he said, "so you can grow big and strong!"
    "If I start growing again," I said, sliding back into the chair, "I'll know there was more than milk in my milk."
    "Back off, you clowns," Alan told the dogs milling around my chair as I picked up my spoon. "No one is going to feed beans to dogs."
    "Indeed," I said. "This chili is delicious."
    Alan inclined his head. "Recipes," he said. "They come in handy." He sat back behind his computer and typed something. "That pill I took last night," he said, keeping his eyes on his screen. "It makes me stupid, and it makes me forget being stupid."
    "You said 'fuck.'" I told him. "And you sang a little bit of Danny's Song."
    He frowned at me.
    "You know, Daydream Believer? Goes oh I could hide 'neath the wings of the bluebird as he sings …"
    Alan snorted. "Nice voice," he said. "Get some training; I'd put you in a show."
    "Thanks, but I like the other end of the camera."
    "Right." He typed some more. I ate some more. Twiggy finished her creep from the doorway to lay her head on his knee, and he scratched her ears then went back to typing.
    "She's fallen for you," I said.
    "She's a sweetheart." He petted her again. "They all are. I feel like an idiot when they scare me."
    "Early training?"
    "My aunt's idea of babysitting," he said, typing some more. "Aunt Ruthann had a couple shitty-tempered, fat as footballs chihuahuas. When I was two I stuck my hand in their food bowl and they tried to rip me apart. Bea punted one and bashed the other with a skillet and my aunt didn't speak to my folks for years. All according to Bea— I don't remember. All I know is dogs come around and I climb the nearest person and/or tree."
    "Go, Bea," I muttered, wondering how much he remembered telling me about his family. He hadn't ended his story with telling me who Bea was, so maybe he remembered it all?
    "So you leave at nine in the morning and you get home at one in the morning," Alan said. "That's a hell of a day."
    I shrugged.
    "And then on the weekends you clean house and yard and dogs to earn your keep. What the hell are you working so hard for ?"
    "I want my loans paid off before I graduate," I told him. "I've done the math. It's possible."
    "If nothing blows up. Including you."
    "I'll manage," I said.
    "If nothing blows up," he said again, closing his laptop, "and no one fucks things up." He slid out of the chair and walked over to me, grabbed a handful of my hair, tilted my head back and kissed me both soft and hard, deep and dizzying, and as fierce as before. My toes curled. My hand found his hip, the other his hair. I held on and kissed back. Then he took my hands off him, put them together between his, between us.
    "Thank you," he breathed. "I don't want to die." He let me go and walked away. I stared after him, breathless and brainless. All I knew was the taste of his lip gloss, the feel of him under my hands, and the pounding of my heart in my ears.
    ****
    Alan wasn't awake when I left in the morning on Thursday, and if he was still there when I got home that night,