"The lighting is terrible."
"You look green."
"You look green too. We're both green and I love you. Come home."
His face crumbles. The mask doesn't fall off so much as dissolve, and underneath is everything. The exhaustion. The fear. The desperate, furious hope of a person who wants to be loved and doesn't know how to let it happen.
"I love you too," he says. "I love you and I've been sitting in this laundromat for an hour and a half trying to figure out how to tell you I don't have a home and the whole time I had one and I was too stubborn to go to it."
"Come home."
He picks up his backpack. The one backpack. The whole life. Puts it on his shoulder and stands up and he's still small in the fluorescent light but he's looking at me now, and the looking is different. Not managing. Not editing. Just looking, with everything visible, the way you look at someone when you've run out of masks and the only thing left is the truth.
"Let's go," he says.
I take his hand. We walk out of the laundromat. The bell chimes behind us. The elderly woman folds her towels.
* * *
Robin is waiting.
He's on a barstool, apron off, hands washed, a cup of tea in front of him that he hasn't touched. The moment Devin walks through the door, Robin stands.
He doesn't cross the room immediately. He looks at Devin, the backpack, the bruise, the red eyes, the boy who's been hiding in a laundromat, and I watch Robin's face cycle through everything: fury, grief, recognition, love, and then back to fury because that's the one Robin knows how to use.
"You absolute idiot," Robin says.
"I know."
"You were kicked out FOUR DAYS AGO."
"I know."
"And you came to work. Every day. Smiling. Making coffee. While you had NOWHERE TO GO."
"Robin —"
"Do you know what that did to me? Finding out from a stranger? Brian calls me, a man I've never met, and tells me that my — that you —" Robin's voice breaks. He presses his hand to his mouth, holds it there for a second, then drops it. "You're family, Devin. FAMILY. And you chose a laundromat over us."
"I didn't choose —"
"You DID. You chose to handle it alone. You chose to hide. You chose to sit in a plastic chair instead of walking five blocks to the people who would have come to GET you." Robin steps closer and his voice drops and this is worse than the yelling, the low, shaking intensity of someone who's not just angry but wounded. "You know what you remind me of? Me. When I cut my hand open and told no one. When I was bleeding into a dish towel and performing fine because asking for help meant someone would see the mess and I couldn't — I wouldn't —"
He stops. His breath is ragged.
"I did that," Robin says. "I hid. I performed okay while I was falling apart because that's what I knew how to do. And it was the worst mistake I ever made. Because Vaughn found out and the look on his face, the look that said you didn't trust me enough to tell me, that look almost cost me everything." He's crying. "And now I'm watching you do the exact same thing and I want to shake you because you're TWENTY-ONE and you'vealready learned that hiding is safer than asking and that's not — Dev, that's not how it's supposed to work."
Devin is shaking. I can see it from where I'm standing, the fine tremor that starts in his hands and moves through his whole body. Not the mask. Not the blankness. The thing that happens underneath when someone loves you hard enough to be angry about it and you've never had that before. Caseworkers are gentle. Foster parents are polite. "We're sorry, Devin. Rules are rules." I'm sure nobody has ever stood in front of him and shaken with fury because he was sleeping in a laundromat. Nobody has ever been this angry on his behalf.
"I didn't know how to ask," Devin whispers. He's crying now. Not the silent tears or the careful kind. The messy kind. The kind that comes with shaking and snot and the complete collapse of every wall he's ever built. "I didn't — nobody ever — I've never had people to ask. I've never had —"
Robin closes the distance and grabs him.
Not a hug. A claim. Both arms around Devin, crushing, the embrace of an older brother who didn't know he was one until this exact moment. Robin is shorter than Devin by an inch but it doesn't matter. He pulls Devin in and holds on with the ferocity of someone who has been exactly where Devin is and survived it and will be damned if he watches someone he loves drown in the same water.
"You have people now," Robin says into his hair. Fierce. Absolute. "You have ME. And I swear to god, Devin, if you ever sleep in a laundromat again when I am alive and breathing on this earth, I will burn the laundromat down."
"That's arson," Devin manages, muffled against Robin's shoulder.