When they’re closing the gallery by themselves, Hughie and Ephraim touch their favourite artworks. Ephraim locks the permanent collection upstairs, where three polystyrene falcons hang from the ceiling. He stoops near a falcon to hold its tail between his fingertips. The falcons are white, cold and smooth, with outspread wings that feel to Ephraim like thinning bars of soap. The spotlights above them make trilateral shadows on the floorboards, which tell Ephraim where the falcons would crash if someone cut the twine suspending them. Ephraim loves their durability: hundreds of visitors every day, and the falcons remain unblemished.    

At the front desk Hughie stops the classical music playing from the surround speakers and blasts a Galaxie 500 song. They bob their head to its backbeat, hugging the iPad over their chest. After buzzing their hair last week, Hughie looks appealingly hostile.  

“I should become a DJ.” They click off the iPad and turn around to place it on its charging dock.  

“If I wrote something on the falcons,” Ephraim says, “how long before someone would notice?” 

“What are you writing?” 

“I wouldn’t actually do it.”    

Hughie and Ephraim collect their handbags from the back office and close the door behind them, where someone has tacked a photo of the Nullarbor Plain, its flat and oxidised horizon. Ephraim helps lift the shoulder of Hughie’s leather jacket when their handbag pulls it down, and they chuckle into their elbow.  

“I love bi cock. Twink pride. Ephraim was here.”  

“‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live,'” suggests Ephraim.  

 Hughie plunges to the ground laughing, their bag dropped sideways beside them. When they were nineteen, Hughie read The White Album and got its opening paragraph tattooed on their abdomen. They gather the escaped contents of their handbag—eye drops, a lighter, silver coins—and slowly unbend their knees.   

“Let’s go out for dinner,” Hughie says.  

Ephraim follows them toward the foyer, where Hughie types their passcode into a deadbolt near the sliding doors. There’s a clicking sound, exits arming themselves. A red light blinks for each division of the gallery. Once they’re outside Hughie and Ephraim stand on either flank of the entrance and watch the lights finish blinking. They remain across from each other, pointlessly evading the gallery’s alarm system. Then Hughie peels from the building and says, “I’ll pay.”  

Ephraim has been saving for his PhD fieldwork in New York, because he doesn’t earn enough to buy accommodation there. Friends give solutions, and Ephraim has trouble deciding which are serious: shoplift groceries, create a sham fundraiser, sell unethically priced clothing online. He cancelled his gym membership, which he felt was a meaningful sacrifice. Ephraim gets called beautiful. Appearing strong, he believes, endows his beauty with a capacity to impose and protect, when otherwise beauty only makes him feel diminutive.  

“I can’t go anywhere too nice,” Ephraim says now.  

Hughie leans down to kiss Ephraim’s cheek, their saliva instantly cooling in the glacial air. “I don’t have to save just because you are.”  

They’re walking from the gallery toward Elder Park, Ephraim zipping his jacket when a gust of urine-smelling wind prickles his face. Hughie loops their arm through Ephraim’s, tugging him closer. At the pedestrian crossing Ephraim observes his reflection gliding across dark windows and the exhausted-looking drivers barely visible behind them. He leans away from Hughie to sidestep a graffitied circle where someone has written either “fuck” or “fag.” They pass a man pushing a stroller, and he avoids the circle too.  

Ephraim’s PhD supervisor shows him where she injured herself assembling her daughters’ bunk bed. There is a purple scar above her collarbone, and Ephraim pictures the fractured edge of a timber plank. Dawn readjusts the neckline of her blouse and looks down to empty a sachet of sweetener into her coffee, a band of sunlight exposing whirls of steam.  

“I’m sorry that happened,” Ephraim says.   

Dawn sighs in agreement, and Ephraim is moved by her unembarrassed pain: someone who asks for sympathy would normally make a show of brushing it aside the moment it’s received. In the cushioned booth alongside theirs, two boys in white sweatshirts are hunching over a laptop. Ephraim smells the ziplock bag of peanuts sagging open between them.    

“Working at the gallery should help,” says Dawn.  

“I’m looking at fiction, mostly.”   

“Huh.” Dawn overturns her phone lying flat on the table and swipes it awake, the screen glowing on her palm. “Fiction could mean anything.” 

Dawn and Ephraim met three weeks ago, after his original supervisor, Leon, was accused of sexual misconduct by a student he tutored at the university where he finished his master’s degree. Leon was the only staffed academic with an expertise in AIDS literature. Most days Ephraim will google Leon to reconfirm whether anything has been publicised. He clicks the same researcher portal, Leon’s social media accounts. Ephraim was promised a spare bedroom in the Brooklyn Heights apartment Leon rents with his partner Matthew.    

Ephraim wonders aloud if he can travel this year, and Dawn scrunches her face, cheekbones and glasses pressing together. The sound of gunshots reverberates quietly beside them, where the two boys huddle at their laptop screen, its vague images of bloodshed sparking in Ephraim’s periphery.  

“The grant,” Dawn says. “Not enough, is it?” 

The volume on the boys’ laptop decreases, and Ephraim is unsure if the gunshots themselves have stopped, if they’re within a game or newscast.  

“I can afford the flight.” 

“That’s something,” Dawn says, flipping down her phone.  

On the transparent cover is a polaroid of herself and both her daughters curling on a brown daybed, wearing slippers and matching flannel pyjamas. Ephraim lowers his chin to avoid the glare bouncing off a glass decanter at another table, where it balances precariously on a stack of earthenware plates. He remembers the week during middle school he took polaroid headshots of the boys on his debate team – two of whom would later become housemates – and glued them inside the scrapbook he was keeping then. The photos annoyed him, because everyone looked the same: shocked and luminous.   

Dawn laughs to herself. “I can barely afford this coffee.”  

At a party celebrating their friend’s top surgery, Hughie offers Ephraim a thousand dollars. They and Ephraim lean against a column in the hallway, where pastel coloured mastectomy pillows have slipped from the gifts table onto the ground. Behind the French doors into the dining area, Ephraim hears a rap song pounding, its verses becoming legible every time the doors swing open.  

“You’re that rich?” says Ephraim, swilling his can of beer.  

“I’m not showy about it.”   

They and Ephraim look around themselves at the chrome light fixtures, the marble tiles, the floor-to-ceiling windows that face the driveway and its emerald screening plants. Ephraim guessed Hughie’s wealth from the quality of their T-shirts, and from Hughie’s description of their grandma, whom they visit on weekends at her vineyard cottage where she receives palliative care. He wants to understand if Hughie is conveying a moral judgement or an aesthetic one. He guesses that Hughie conflates the two.  

“It’s good Perry’s dad supports them,” Ephraim says. 

“Obviously.”  

“I can’t borrow from a friend.”  

Joanne – who Ephraim remembers from a gender studies elective he took three years ago – walks out of the dining area in a silk dress, vanishes into the bathroom, and reappears wearing an overcoat that grazes her chin. She asks Hughie and Ephraim if they would like to smoke in the backyard, and they follow her through the party, Ephraim leaving his beer on a timber shelf alongside a Newton’s cradle. When they’re outside he sees his breath whitewashing the horizon.     

“I want Ephraim to borrow money,” Hughie says to Joanne. They cup the flame on her cigarette, elaborating. Their upper lip stirs under their finely trimmed mustache.  

“Men will pay for anything,” Joanne says. “I once hooked up with someone who left me cash on his nightstand. If I’m honest, he wasn’t very attractive.” She looks at Ephraim and shrugs, tapping ash while it flickers orange into a bird of paradise. “It didn’t feel compromising.” 

Someone calls Joanne’s name then, a sing-song emphasis on its second syllable. The doors into the kitchen slide apart, and a girl wearing a pinstripe apron with nipples drawn on the chest asks Joanne for help decorating Perry’s cake. 

“Play to your strengths,” Joanne says to Ephraim before she goes inside.  

Hughie and Ephraim grin at each other, although Ephraim is unsure what they’re communicating. When his cigarette burns near the tipping paper, he presses his fingers onto his mouth, where theheat begins to feel dangerous. He contemplates the solicitations he’s received from older men on hookup apps, dollar signs bobbing under pixelated nudes. He can never gauge their seriousness, nor can he decide whether following through would feel effortless or traumatizing.  

“I’ve never gotten paid for sex,” Hughie says.  

“It seems easy, in the abstract.”  

“You shouldn’t.” Hughie touches Ephraim’s shoulder. “I know it’s like, not a big deal, but I think for some people it can’t possibly feel good.”

They and Ephraim have dropped their cigarettes, which has made Ephraim aware of his arms hanging frozen at his sides. He used to resent friends who overstated his naivety, but now he finds them reassuring. He doesn’t carry himself like someone hardened by experience. Nothing yet has compromised his fundamental niceness. Leon frequently complimented Ephraim’s appearance, and Ephraim only felt gently exasperated. He peers at the dots of ash between his and Hughie’s feet. When he looks up Hughie’s eyelids have lowered. They reach behind Ephraim’s neck and leave their palm sweating near the collar of his shirt. Ephraim smiles, overcome then by affection, which is unlike desire, he reminds himself, because it self-propagates through gratitude instead of discontent.   

“I don’t think,” Ephraim starts, and Hughie lifts their palm. They and Ephraim breathe white air, rhythms of laughter spinning.   

In the afternoon Ephraim walks from campus to North Adelaide. He arrives at the pinned address showing in his messages and waits on the porch, sunlight flashing through jacaranda trees. It occurs to him that he would have visited the houses in this neighbourhood after school, recalling now the bluestone cladding and brushwood, the cast-iron balustrades looped with ivy. Shane opens the door wearing a heathered shirt and sweatpants that rise above his ankles. His grey hair lies flat on one side, as though he were napping a moment earlier.  

“Come in.” He reaches out to stroke the back of Ephraim’s head, fingertips looping through curls. “Hugh, was it? Starts with an H?”

“Hugh is right,” says Ephraim, following Shane inside.    

Most hookups are like this, Ephraim tells himself. The transition between a choice and its manifestation feels spectacularly brief. An hour ago he was asking Shane for money. The request seemed unimportant, because he felt sure nothing would happen. Now Ephraim is undressing in Shane’s bedroom, the oil heater behind them burning his calves. Shane sits on the bed while Ephraim kneels painfully on the floorboards, his mouth numb when Shane joggles himself into Ephraim’s watering throat. Ephraim rises from the ground, and Shane scoots backward to rest his shoulders on a pillow. He groans prematurely seeing Ephraim lower onto him. Rocking himself on Shane’s dick, Ephraim’s breathing quickens with pleasure, or at least the pride of delivering and simulating pleasure.  

“Put your hands on me,” says Ephraim, and there on his thighs and hips Ephraim watches Shane’s thick fingers press into lineless skin. After they both finish, Ephraim climbs from Shane’s bodyand lays his cheek on the cold pillow beside him. Through a gap in the blinds he notices the sky variegating from blue to purple, little corella gathering on the road.   

“You’re beautiful,” Shane whispers. “An exotic look, you have.”  

Ephraim lets himself laugh, because complimenting multiracial people this way has only ever felt innocuously stupid to him. When Shane wraps Ephraim’s shoulders, his underarm smelling of laundry detergent and star anise, Ephraim wriggles upward to leave the bed.   

“You’re a student?” Shane asks. 

“I’m doing a PhD.” Ephraim slides on his underwear, meeting Shane’s eyes in a full-length mirror with dog-eared photos tucked into its frame. “I’d like to read archival stuff in New York, but obviously staying there costs a lot.”  

“It’s good you found me then.”

When Shane rubs the underside of his dick, Ephraim peers between him and a black-and-white picture where a different Shane, younger but recognisable, lies on the beach with two other boys. They wear tight swimmers and string bracelets, sunglasses holding back chin-length hair. Ephraim considers what they might survive, everything they would lose or fear losing, in addition to everything one suffers regardless. He wants to cry, but he realizes pity can seem condescending, even though he would be crying for himself too: the stickiness of history, some residual fear and mourning discovering an occasion to express itself.  

“Thank you,” he says now, buttoning his jeans. “I’ll go.” 

Ephraim doesn’t glance where Shane is firm and masturbating. He darts into the hallway, walks past a dim living room where every curtain is drawn closed, and hovers at the front door, its leadlight windows colouring the floorboards in shards of yellow. He remembers to message Shane his bank details. Then he lets himself out and paces quickly onto the tree-lined footpath.  

At the gallery Ephraim watches a surveillance recording of the permanent collection, where a man wearing coveralls drags his finger across an information board. The gallery closes in ten minutes. Ephraim opens his phone to refresh his bank account, confident now that Shane will never pay. When Hughie looks at the surveillance monitor they notice the man’s head is nearly touching a falcon.  

“We’ll send him outside soon,” Ephraim says. 

Hughie takes the iPad from behind Ephraim and pauses a bossa nova playlist mid-song, exposing the gallery’s unnerving quietness. They rotate Ephraim’s swivel chair so that they and Ephraim are facing each other, the toe of their boot resting on the seat beside Ephraim’s knee. The Korean pottery exhibit is getting deinstalled next weekend, they tell Ephraim.  

“I hugged a vase, the big celadon one, and I felt genuinely sad.”   

“What’s going there instead?”   

“Bobbleheads.” Hughie sets down the iPad and covers their face. “No. I’m actually serious. They’re supposed to be avant-garde, or whatever.”      

They rub their palm into both eyes, their cropped shirt lifting above the Joan Didion paragraph tattooed on their abdomen. The week Ephraim started working at the gallery, he got drunk atHughie’s apartment and asked them to describe their worst sexual experience. Hughie told Ephraim about a past boyfriend who had pinched their tattoo while they were fucking. “Do you cringe every time you undress?” the boyfriend had asked. Ephraim’s eyes watered, which allowed both himself and Hughie to forget that Ephraim didn’t give a story of his own. He kissed Hughie that night, although nothing else happened. It was somehow obvious they were establishing the kind of friendship where desire and expectation were volatile, appraised from scratch every time they saw each other.    

When Ephraim goes upstairs, Hughie trails behind and reads aloud the bobblehead artist’s Wikipedia page. She studied marketing in Perth, was arrested for drug possession while pregnant with twins. Her last artwork before she died was a seismogram she had reproduced and stitched onto canvas, enshrining the earthquake she had experienced a week into chemotherapy. Ephraim approaches the man lingering underneath the falcons and glares at Hughie to quiet them.   

“Hey there.” Ephraim is speaking at the man’s back, observing the steep arc of his shoulders and the grey-blue paint splashed on his oversize coveralls. When the man doesn’t move, Ephraim deepens his voice to sound more heterosexual. “I’m really sorry. We’re closing now.”   

The man turns around, his sparse eyebrows pushing together. The edge of his shirtsleeves are grazing the landscape drawing of Bonython Park displayed alongside the falcons. Ephraim glances between him and Hughie, remembering that Hughie possesses what Ephraim does not: an implicit forcefield, a tough and ambushing masculine beauty owing predominantly to their buzzcut.  

“We’re locking up mate,” Hughie spits.    

All three of them stand motionless, and Ephraim hears the blood pulsing inside his neck. When he reminds visitors they are closing, the response is typically immediate. The man walks to Ephraim and stands close enough for Ephraim to see the latticework of wrinkles on his forehead, the fleck of dandruff hovering above his mouth. He does nothing, and Ephraim’s panic dissipates. The man’s proximity becomes insipid the longer he spends deciding how to express resentment. At the gallery’s loading dock there is a concrete platform crowded with sleeping bags and trolleys, beer-smelling sweatshirts, bags from Ikea strung between metal bollards. When they open the gallery someone checks the roller doors are locked. The man’s breath warms Ephraim’s face, and Ephraim only feels ashamed.       

“Fuck this,” the man says, backing away. “You fucking faggots.”  

He slaps the falcon above him, awkwardly and without real intention, then turns around and stamps downstairs. Ephraim watches the falcon sway, the shadow underneath it bisecting other shadows, a greyscale kaleidoscope arranging itself on the ground. He looks at the falcon’s body for handprints and finds himself reappreciating its spotlessness. The falcon has nearly finished moving when Ephraim hears the entrance doors whoosh apart.     

Hughie and Ephraim don’t acknowledge what happened until they’re outside the gallery, watching the deadbolt stabilise. Hughie bursts into laughter, their leather jacket flapping open from the breeze, and Ephraim begins laughing too, although he understands his relief is less dramatic. Hughie’s eyes are glimmering. When they and Ephraim meander down North Terrace afterward Hughie kisses Ephraim’s temple, loping with their arm dropped on his shoulder.   

“You fucking faggots,” they say. “Like yeah, obviously.”  

They arrive at a red pedestrian light, and Ephraim takes out his phone, where he sees a payment of two-thousand dollars has been transferred into his bank account. Something hitches in his throat. He can’t stop himself from beaming.  

“Do slurs turn you on?” Hughie asks.   

A black car nudges through traffic, and Ephraim watches his and Hughie’s reflection slip along its tinted windows. “Let’s head to yours.”   

“Okay.” They cross the road, Hughie’s jacket squeaking against Ephraim’s neck as they pull him closer. “I’m surprised you’re not more upset.”

“What happened wasn’t personal.”    

“He was breathing into your mouth.”   

When they reach their bus stop, Hughie goes to sit on the steel benches, and Ephraim stands above them absently raking Hughie’s feathery hair.  A bus that isn’t theirs halts opposite them, comingalight while the sun descends on the River Torrens. Ephraim looks at Hughie as though to speak, surprised by his own equilibrium. He wants to understand himself, but he is thinking of New York, of sunlight careening off the edge of a skyscraper, packed streets, the city’s panorama glissading past a subway window scored with initials and lighting bolts. Ephraim last travelled overseas for a Year Twelve history excursion to Brussels. The flights disappointed him. When Ephraim had lived with his mother in a suburb near the airport, he would track planes cleaving the sky and imagine everyone inside them felt themselves soaring the entire journey, that landing afterward one remembered how much they could endure while remaining somehow unaffected.  

“Doesn’t matter,” Ephraim realizes. “I’m fine.”

He traces the doubled whorl on Hughie’s scalp, where their skin seems to throb with heat, looking then at both their reflections superimposing other faces. Ephraim makes himself forget the past hour, and Shane, and the money waiting in his bank account. He wants to believe he can understand the deepest wishes of everyone inside the bus, everyone deciding who they’ll become once they arrive where they’re going. Three girls in sparkling halter tops share a handrail. They jostle into each other, laughing, when the bus finally moves.