Quentin woke to a sharp strike of hallway light and the sound of a door whining softly on its hinges.

He sat up, bidding his eyes to work the way they intended. He couldn't make out much of the shape blacking out that light, apart from the soft, bone-pale curls of sleep-mussed hair.

"Jaylin?"

The shape shut the door behind it, the lights flipped on and Quentin rubbed at the pain in his eyes. Sure enough, Jaylin stood there, sleep still warm on his face. Quentin observed him for the briefest moment and caught the way he was clutching his stomach.

"Does it hurt?" he asked, searching at his sides for the shirt he'd flung off in the middle of the night.

"It feels like knives," he heard Jaylin say. Quentin found the white cotton somewhere in his spill of blankets and pulled it on over his head. Turning like that had to take a lot out of a person. Especially when they were impaired of energy to begin with.

"We'll have to find you something," he said, rising from his bed.

"Room service?"

"It's—" Quentin paused and looked to the clock on the wall, "—three in the morning. Jesus, three in the morning."

"I'm sorry."

He felt like falling back into bed, but Jaylin was there—leaning against the frame of his door, that look of needy desperation on his face. He was a rumpled mess of sleep—shirt halfway tucked in a pair of shorts that reached his knees, hair stuck up on one side and flat on the other. Quentin couldn't help but grin at the sight of him.

Jaylin caught it, shifted a bit, like he felt vulnerable. "What?"

Too many things, Quentin wanted to say. Instead he took his room key from the night stand and killed that upsurging urge to reach out and touch him as he gave the door a shove. "Let's go."

He led Jaylin downstairs and into the foyer, where the lights had dimmed considerably. A new woman sat at the service desk, trying to push through her dreary night shift with half-mast eyes. He could hear the laugh-track of a sitcom, whispering through her computer speakers.

"What do you want?" Quentin asked him, searching through his collection of keys for the one to the rental car. "Beef, chicken? Name an animal."

Then he felt a warm touch on his arm as Jaylin caught him by the bicep. He stopped and turned, watching the way Jaylin raked his hand through the hair on his head, only for it to flop back over his eyes.

Quentin shoved his hands in his sweat pockets to keep them to himself. "What is it Jaylin?"

"Flapjacks." He said it like a question, with the abashed shrug of his shoulders.

"Flapjacks," Quentin repeated. "Nothing I can go and get you from a deli or a takeout joint. It has to be flapjacks?"

Jaylin grinned then—the kind of grin that made his nose wrinkle. "Yeah."

Damnit. As if. As if there was a single thing in this world that could seem unreasonable with that smile.

Quentin gave a painful sigh. Not because he minded a three-AM grocery haul, but because he was running out of places to put his hands.

"Alright. Flapjacks."

Apart from themselves, the store was nearly empty. Jaylin sat in the cart like an overgrown child, snatching things from the shelves that Quentin took from his hands and put back on most occasions.

"I can never have cheese puffs again," Jaylin said, the grim realization shrouding him. He slumped in the cart, a figurative cloud over his head. "No more Pop-Tarts, no more Twinkies..."

"There are organic alternatives," Quentin said, glaring down the ingredients on a package of unbleached flour. "On occasion, those things are fine. But chemicals make us sick. Lethargic."

"I've noticed," Jaylin said, frowning at the chip bags he was rolled past. "There were only a few things I could eat at campus."

"You have to be selective," Quentin told him, tossing him the flour. "Drugs and alcohol, too. We can handle liquor, beer—but you were drinking other things, weren't you?"

"Just the sugary shit that comes in unnatural colors."

"Oh, then I'm sure that's fine," jested Quentin. He wasn't prepared for the laugh that came from Jaylin. It felt like so long since he'd heard that sound.

"I know... I didn't care what I was doing to myself," Jaylin said. He took another bag of something he wasn't supposed to have from the shelves. "I just wanted to be drunk."

Quentin commandeered the package and tossed it aside just like the others.

"Seriously?" Jaylin moped. "Those too?"

"You have to start taking better care of yourself," Quentin told him. "Might just need you later." He selected a carton of organic eggs and handed them off to Jaylin, who rested them carefully on his lap.

"For what?" he asked. "You gonna fire Felix as your sheriff and hire me?"

Quentin laughed, shoving the cart towards an end-cap. "He'd break my legs."

"Mine too," Jaylin said. "He's like a jealous girlfriend."

"He's my sheriff until the day he decides to resign. But once this all blows over, who knows. Maybe you'd be a fitting patrol. Sentinel, even. They never said anything about male lichund joining the sentinels."

"Oh," muttered Jaylin, moving his leg a bit to the right so Quentin could toss a bag of sugar in. "I could be one of the girls."

"You could. If you're good enough."

"How do we know if I'm good enough?" Jaylin asked. "I'm not good at most things."

Quentin gave the cart a sudden shove and Jaylin had to grip the sides for balance. "We'll know once you're crowned." But Quentin knew already. He'd said it from the start. Jaylin was so much more than a boy or a wolf or a lichund. He was going to change things, for the better.

It was nearly five in the morning by the time they'd stolen an electric skillet and a spatula from the catering supplies and snuck back up to Quentin's room. He set the groceries out on the top of the dressers, and turned the notch to heat the skillet. Jaylin had pulled himself up on the edge to watch as Quentin readied the ingredients.

"Can I help?"

"How about I do the cooking? You can mix the batter." He pushed the bowl and the whisk into Jaylin's hands and the boy scoffed.

"You don't trust me?"

Quentin dumped a cup full of flour into the bowl, and Jaylin had to turn his head as a cloud of it deluged up like smoke.

"With this?" Quentin asked, setting the cup aside and gripping the dressers on either side of Jaylin. "Not one bit."

And that was a mistake. Putting his hands there, situating himself between Jaylin's knees, because the whisk went still in Jaylin's hands. It was the rarely-parted lips, the slight swallow in his throat. And those eyes. Those ocean eyes. They hooked into Quentin like teeth and claws and he was so undeniably okay with being ripped to pieces by them. 

They swallowed light like precious stones—but it was the look on Jaylin's face that had been throwing him off guard all night. The exhausted rings, the cut on his lower lip where he'd torn too deep at the skin. He was more weathered now than ever, but Jaylin had this look almost always; a tired complexion, threaded thin  by the world. His skin was always pale as a ghost, his lower lids a tired pink. Quentin couldn't remember a time he'd seen him without tears on his lips or fatigue beneath his eyes. They were sad, beautiful stains. They were Jaylin.

He wanted to reach for him, but Quentin drew away. Reluctantly, he pushed himself from the counter. "So we just need eggs," he said, and searched around the mess for the carton.

"Quentin," Jaylin said—almost beneath his breath, it was so quiet.

"I'll use extra bacon this time. You need to catch up on protein."

"Quentin," Jaylin said again. "Forget about the flapjacks for a second."

He couldn't touch. He wouldn't. Jaylin wasn't ready for touch. Was he? Was he ready for that? He opened his mouth to protest with something, anything, but he shut it again when he caught the look on Jaylin's face.

"It's okay. I just want to say thank you," Jaylin told him.

"You don't need to—"

"The day my mom died, I was pulled out of a lecture," he said, stirring the flour in his bowl. "They told me she'd collapsed at home. My aunt hadn't told me she'd gotten sick, but there was no controlling mom toward the end. She wanted to go out, playing in the snow. She wanted to make her own trips to the grocery store. Part of me thinks she just wanted to feel alive, but another part of me thinks she wanted this all to end.

"She'd caught the flu... I guess, I don't even really know. I didn't know anything until I was standing there, in front of her." He was looking at his reflection in the bowl, so, so far away from Quentin's eyes. "She wasn't awake by the time I... I didn't get to say goodbye." There was a fault. An unexpected swallow of emotion. That pain ticked in Quentin's ribs. "I said goodbye, but I don't think she—can you hear someone when you...?"

Quentin felt helpless watching him. He didn't trust himself to see those tears again. But he stayed quiet, and Jaylin pulled himself together with a deep breath.

"I didn't want to talk about it, because I didn't want to acknowledge it. And not talking about it, I think it messed me up. Everyone wants to tell you shit like it'll be okay, and things will get better but half of the time you just want them to stop fucking talking. All anyone wants to do is talk." He dropped the whisk against the side of the bowl. "You didn't make me talk."

Quentin took the bowl from him and set it aside, and with a gentle hesitance, he broke his own rule: he took one of Jaylin's hands, turning it over until the veins shown in the warm room lighting. "You feel nauseated, don't you?"

"How'd you know?"

"Because that was a big part of why I kept my feelings to myself. Because talking about Anna made me physically sick. And I can see it on your face." He pressed his fingers to a spot on Jaylin's wrist. "Tap here when you feel sick. If that doesn't work, rub your wrists. Acupuncture." And then, as he was going to let go, Quentin lingered there for a moment instead, feeling the pulse beneath his finger. "I can't feel your heart anymore," he said.

Jaylin looked panicked for a moment, touching a hand to his throat in a desperate search for his pulse.

Quentin laughed and dropped Jaylin's wrist. "Not like that," he said, reaching up, his fingers gently exploring Jaylin's neck until he fell upon a spot where his heartbeat strongest and Quentin stayed there on the artery. The gentle flutter beat against his fingertips. "I can't feel it as my own. I miss it."

Jaylin's voice was raw and quiet. Quentin felt the movement of it beneath his fingers. "A heartbeat's a heartbeat. Isn't it?"

"Yours was different," Quentin said. "It was like a voice in my head. Like a song."

He wasn't expecting Jaylin to move, then. To reach out, press a hand to the dead center of Quentin's chest. It was like he'd reached into him. Like he'd gone through skin and bone and his palm rested there now, on the desperate lurch of his heart. It terrified him, but for some reason he didn't mind the thought. The idea of Jaylin taking it in his hand and plucking it from his ribs. He didn't mind the thought of Jaylin taking it for himself, because it already belonged to him.

Then the door flung open and Jaylin jumped, snapped his hand away like he'd touched an open flame. It was Matt who stood there, looking pale and red somehow both at the same time, like an unripe strawberry.

"Jay, I need to stay with you," he sputtered. "I need—I can't live with that guy for the next week. Please."

Jaylin took the bowl and went back to mixing, and Quentin minded the skillet because there was nothing else to busy his hands with.

"I guess," Jaylin said. "Why, what happened?"

"I just walked in on him and another dude." He paced around in a circle for a moment, then puttered over to Jaylin. "I stood there for a good thirty seconds, Jay—he hardly even acknowledged me. Just glanced over and asked if I had a lighter for his fucking joint."

A snort escaped Quentin, and he hid his laugh in his arm while he measured out the sugar by the spoonful. He'd forgotten to mention that part. He'd forgotten to tell them about perigee.

"What were they doing?" Jaylin asked. "Were they in bed or?"

"Nope," Matt said, a bit too loudly for five in the morning. "Bailey was standing there and the other guy was on his knees and—"

"Just now?" Jaylin asked. "It's barely dawn out."

"Last night," groaned Matt. "I slept in the wrangler, freezing my ass off until I saw your light on."

"Why are you so freaked out?" Jaylin asked. "You've seen that before."

"It's different, alright?" Matt clawed at his hair. "Different when you're watchin' it on a screen. No one expects to walk in on that, and,"—he turned to Quentin—"dammit Bronx, it's not funny!"

Quentin dumped the sugar into the bowl in Jaylin's lap and looked to Matt with a grin he couldn't snuff out. "I just forget these things aren't normal for you."

"In what universe is this normal?"

"In ours," Quentin said. "Do you know why the exposition was held this week?"

Matt shook his head, his hair a disheveled mess that stuck up at his brow.

"It's perigee," Quentin said. "The summer perigee has a special kind of control over us. Two days marks the closest moon we'll have all summer."

"So wait," Matt said. "The moon is the reason my roommate was up there gettin' head from a guy in a cummerbund?"

Jaylin laughed into the mix as he whisked it idly about. "Matt, it's not a big deal."

"It's not just that, okay?" Matt griped. "The past two nights the couple next door have been goin' at it like wild apes."

"The summer perigee is like a mating bell," Quentin said. "Keeps our kind in population."

Matt turned a slight shade of white. "So you're sayin' everyone in this fuckin' place is here to crack in the headboards? God, I can't take it. I can hear their moaning. It's there in my head, just bouncin' from ear to ear."

"Maybe that's because there's nothing in between," Jaylin said and held the bowl out as Quentin tapped an egg to the edge and dumped it from its shell.

"Jay, I'm glad you're feelin' better," Matt said, "but fuck you—" he pointed to Quentin "—and you. And can I please have the room key?"

Jaylin reached for the card in his short pockets. Matt took it with a heavy frown and stomped out of the room to make up for the sleep he'd lost.

In the end, they'd forgotten to buy syrup, but Jaylin seemed satisfied enough, eating the flapjacks with heaps of butter smeared on top. Quentin had made too many and Jaylin conceded after only three.

His appetite was something that would have to come back in time. Quentin knew exactly what was quelling it; it wasn't so much losing his mother that had made him sick of food, but the alcohol he'd been drinking. The things he'd been eating, the cigarettes he knew damn well he wasn't supposed to smoke. Quentin could smell the lightest scent of them on his clothes.

"Were you serious about that?" Jaylin asked, poking at the last bit of his flapjacks. "The perigee thing?"

"There was a time when our kind were going extinct," Quentin explained, seating himself on the edge of the bed. A safe distance from Jaylin. "Before Qamar and Ziya, before our society was reformed, our queen was named Aisha. She believed in superior breeding—she'd send out representatives who would marry wolves based on their physical attributes. Their beauty and their strength. What she failed to consider was attraction, sexuality. In turn, they stopped conceiving.

"Aisha realized she'd thinned our numbers by dictating who we can love. So she abolished the law, allowed us to choose our own partners. Our numbers soared and we came back from the brink of extinction. Perigee celebrates the day her mating law was abolished and our people thrived."

"So it's like a sex festival," Jaylin said—but he said it so simply, that again Quentin found himself laughing. He couldn't remember the last time he'd laughed so much in a single night.

"Kind of," he said. "Sex is something we celebrate. It's a part of our culture. We're not ashamed of it." But there was something unsettling that brushed the forefront of his thoughts and Quentin swallowed his smile. "Jaylin," he said. "Be careful of the people here. There are only so many I trust."

"What do I need to be afraid of?" Jaylin asked.

"Stay away from the Den," Quentin told him. He rose from his bed stepped out onto the balcony, and he heard Jaylin's footsteps as he followed him to the railings—the ones that overlooked the city for miles. There weren't as many stars here—but there was a galaxy spread out before them. A tinsel sea of glittering city lights.

"Do you see that building, about a mile out? The one with the green lights that look like eyes?" Quentin asked, pointing to the hillsides, where lights glared through the black outlay of what looked like a warehouse turned to a hill-top home.

Jaylin searched for a moment, and then nodded.

"That's the Den."

"That's the Den? What's so bad about it?"

"When Aisha first began the exposition, it was a way of revealing who we were to those just like us. A way of meeting someone for the first time and never having to hide the wolf from them. That was why she called it the exposition; because it's an exhibition. Of ourselves. Our talents, our lives, our other-halves. But not everyone is invited in."

Jaylin glanced up at him, a faint insecurity in his eyes. "I thought it was for the East and the West."

"It is, but there are others. There are some of us who don't belong to a pack, who don't have an alpha. They're called rogues and for years, they've been demanding a place in the exposition, but a wolf without an alpha is a dangerous, uncontrollable thing. For the last five years, they've hosted their own exposition called the Den. We're free to go there, but they can't come here. By Qamar and Ziya's orders, they're forbidden from joining the exposition."

"Okay, but what's so bad about the Den?"

"The rogues take the exposition into more literal terms. Their celebration is an actual exhibition. Anyone who walks into the Den is giving up their right to concession. That means anyone can do anything they please, so long as they're stronger than you. They can take your money, they can fight you; break your bones for sake of thrill, but usually they're in it for the sex. Sometimes sex is purchased in the Den. Sometimes it's just taken. It's all part of the process."

"Why would anyone go there?" Jaylin sounded sick to hear it. He was thankful for that. If Jaylin ended up in the rogues' Den—if anything happened to him, Quentin would burn that place to the ground.

"Rogues don't have packs," Quentin explained. "But they have clans. They're like gangs. The Den is initiation for some people. For others, it's fun."

He allowed himself to move closer this time, stepping just behind Jaylin, hands on the railing at either side of him. From over his shoulder, Quentin watched the sun peak over the California mountains, turning the city to shades of pink and gold.

"I won't make you promise me anything," he said, leaning into his ear. He felt Jaylin stiffen—he could catch his heartbeat from so close. Hear it strum, strum, strum, just a bit faster. He lingered there, watching the wind push through Jaylin's hair. Watching the bare skin of his neck gilt in the morning sun, so close, all he'd need to do was lean in no more than a nod to feel it against his lips. He took in a breath and willed himself to step back. "Just... be careful."

He wished he could make Jaylin promise such a thing. He wished he still had that authority he'd had before—the ability to demand anything of him. Because if Jaylin were to step foot in that place, Quentin knew without a shard of a doubt that he'd go in after him. And the Den was a hell he wasn't ready to revisit.

an; it was probably a mistake publishing this so late at night i am very tired and this is not reading well for me ):