A/N: Finally done with this story! Thanks to all who read and left feedback. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the conclusion if you want to discuss.

For two days, I couldn't get in touch with any of them. Even Craig wasn't taking my calls, though I suppose that shouldn't have surprised me. Kenny had fired his entire household staff the day after the accident, and when I roamed through the empty rooms of his mansion in search of him I felt as if I was being watched by the apparitions of his dismissed butlers and maids. I also felt unprotected, afraid to turn a corner and come upon someone who'd wandered off the street to steal the candlesticks from the dining room table. Wherever Kenny was during the day, he managed to sneak back quietly under cover of night, and in the mornings when I would go looking for him again I would find plates with crumbs and dirty wine glasses on the counter near the kitchen sink, as if awaiting a dish washer. Finally, I washed them myself, thinking of Kyle in some grubby kitchen in Los Angeles, trying not to cry while he scrubbed restaurant cutlery.

On the third day I couldn't wait any longer, and I took a boat across the lake in search of Kyle. I wasn't sure of myself, piloting the thing, having had a bad experience with a speed boat in my youth. Cartman had been at my side that day, as he always seemed to be when I was getting myself into terrible trouble. I was surprised not to be received by anyone at Cartman's dock, and I parked the boat clumsily, then secured precariously with rope before jogging up toward the house. I already had a bad feeling about what I would find when I got there.

There was an eerie quiet as a I crossed the perfect back lawn. Something had changed: at first I thought it was just the absence of bugs singing, as if Cartman had removed all trespassing insects from his property, but as I drew closer to the pool I realized that the fountains had been turned off. A man was cleaning the pool, and he looked frightened when I approached him. I can only imagine what I looked like as the first suspicion about what had happened dawned on me.

"Is it alright if I go up to the house?" I asked, then immediately felt stupid for asking permission. I had been cowardly all summer, letting a wall of servants that Cartman had built keep me away from seeing Kyle when I wanted to, and letting Kenny avoid me by hiding away with his 'work.'

"The house?" the man said. He was short and stocky, wearing a gold chain, jeans and a t-shirt - not in uniform.

"I'm looking for Kyle," I said, more forcefully, and I started to walk off.

"Oh, they've left," the man said.

"Left?" I turned, my hands in fists. On second thought, I do know how I must have looked: like a murderer who had come to kill the man of the house and leave with Kyle slung over my shoulder.

"For the summer," the man said. "Left early this year."

"Where did they go?" I asked, disbelieving. I whirled to look at the house, noticing that the patio doors were all shut, the upstairs windows shuttered.

"I don't know," the man said. "Maybe Harris knows."

Harris was the head butler. He was extremely rude to me, and told me that he was not at liberty to disclose the location of the Cartman family at present. Hearing Cartman and Kyle described as a 'family,' I felt as if Harris had gently rolled a boulder onto me, flattening me instantly. I couldn't move for some time. Harris stared at me, frowning.

"They have a penthouse in Denver, don't they?" I said. I'm not sure how I knew this; Kenny might have mentioned it. Harris only stared at me coldly until I left.

I went back to the guest house, defeated, and tried Kyle's cell again. When there was no answer I cursed him, and hung up before his voice mail could record my fury. I wasn't sure that I should even be mad at him: perhaps this was all Cartman's doing. Kyle denied that Cartman was pulling his strings, but things had changed now. Kyle was a witness to the accident. I was shocked that police hadn't been to the house yet, but perhaps it hadn't been Cartman's car that was involved in the accident after all. Or perhaps Kenny was rich enough to pay the police to keep quiet about his hit and run. The only inquiries I'd dared to make were about the funeral arrangements.

I raided Kenny's booze that night and left him a drunken, angry note asking if he planned to attend the memorial service for Butters. Of course I knew he wouldn't be there. With his drivers dismissed, I called up Wendy for a ride in lieu of borrowing one of the gleaming cars in his garage.

"You don't look well," she said as soon as I was in the passenger seat of her Volvo.

"I haven't been sleeping," I said.

"I'm still in shock about Butters," she said, and she reached over to touch my knee. "I hadn't seen him in four or five years, but he was always part of the landscape, you know? When we were kids?"

"The landscape has largely deteriorated, yes."

"You haven't heard from Kenny at all?" She was looking at me while she drove. I wanted to point at the road to direct her eyes to it.

"Kenny is going through some things," I said. I had no doubt that he was devastated about the accident, and on one level I was surprised that he hadn't turned himself in, if it was him who had done it. I suspected, however, that he would compromise his morals for the sake of rescuing Kyle, which, it seemed, was still possible. For him, anyway. I didn't even have the means to reach him, wherever he was.

The turnout for Butters' funeral was impressive, and many people were weeping sincerely before the service even began. I hadn't been inside a chapel since college, and I felt guilty about this as I stood beside Wendy, holding a 'remembrance candle' with a little paper circle around its holster to catch wax drippings. I felt as if people would soon turn and point to me as the reason for this tragedy, or at least one of the conspirators. No one noticed me, however. Certainly not Clyde, who was so bent by grief that he could barely walk, his father holding one of his arms and Butters' similarly devastated mother holding the other. I threw up in the bushes as soon as the service concluded.

"Do you want to go on to the grave site?" Wendy asked, rubbing my back while I recovered. I was wearing the suit Kenny had bought for me, and I only really considered this when I wiped my mouth on the sleeve. "Or are you too sick?" Wendy asked when I turned to look at her.

"I think I need to leave town altogether," I said.

"Probably true," she said, softly, after studying my eyes for a moment.

We headed toward the crowded parking lot, and I was surprised to see Craig standing in a group that was gathered at the end of the chapel's main walkway. He spotted me and I was frightened, as if he would be the one to point me out as a contributor to the loss we were mourning. Instead, he came over to us with a sigh, and squeezed my shoulder when our eyes met.

"You look a little green," he said.

"Stan gets overwhelmed," Wendy said, somewhat defensively. Craig glanced at her, raised his eyebrows slightly, then returned his gaze to me.

"I threw up, is what she means," I said. "Over there, in the bushes."

"I'm sure God will forgive you," Craig said, and I had to brace myself to keep from stumbling backward. He shook his head very slightly. "I mean for throwing up in his bushes."

"I'm going to take him home," Wendy said. "I think he's coming down with something."

"Don't talk about me like I'm not here," I grumbled.

"Let me take him," Craig said. "I'm headed that way anyhow."

I knew this was a lie; Craig's apartment was on the opposite side of the lake from Kenny's manor. I wanted to go with him, though, to talk openly to someone - to the only person who was willing to talk to me, at last, after what had happened on the way back from Denver that day. As we walked together to his car it was all I could do not to grab him and make him hug me. I needed comfort, conversation - I needed to get far away from the lake and South Park and Colorado altogether, but I couldn't imagine anyone who wasn't part of what I was going through bringing me actual consolation. Craig was close enough to part of it, I thought.

"You're a mess," Craig said as he pulled out of the parking lot, me trembling and seasick in the passenger seat, correctly identified as a mess. "Where's Kenny? Not that I thought he would come, but. Did he really-? Was it - his car, that-?"

"I don't know," I said. "He's avoiding me. He fired all his servants."

"Is that what they call them, servants?"

"That's what Cartman called his, I'm sure. He's gone, left for the summer, shut up the house. I don't know if he took Kyle with him. He probably did, but I hate to think that Kyle would go willingly."

"It's worse to think that he didn't," Craig said, frowning. "I haven't heard from him. Tried calling-"

"Me too. No answer. Why does he even have a phone?"

"He must have been very shaken. He was in the car, saw the whole thing, saw Kenny drive off. If that's what happened. Jesus, it's just what he doesn't need right now. Just enough to send him crawling back to Cartman."

"What?" I turned from the window and glared at Craig, though this theory was hardly outlandish. "I don't understand. Kenny runs over Butters - maybe - and that reinforces Kyle's bond with Cartman? How?" I hated to think that there was any bond at all, aside from the financial one.

"Think about it," Craig said. "It's like last time. Kyle tries to be good for Kenny, to live up to however Kenny sees him, and it's not as fun as Kyle hoped it would be-"

"He's not been having fun? With Kenny?"

"Not that I've seen," Craig said, mumbling. "Kenny is so remote. Kyle needs someone who will either lash out at him or endlessly reassure him. Kenny is just - he's like a faithful dog."

"Don't reduce him to that."

Craig scoffed. "Well, he might have killed someone, so maybe that's an insult to faithful dogs, not the other way around. In any event, it's like last time. Kenny fails him, so Kyle runs to Cartman. Who else would have him?" Craig gave me a meaningful stare.

"Keep your eyes on the goddamn road," I said. "God knows when some other former classmate of ours might come tearing out into the street."

It was very bright out when we arrived at the guest house, and I was glad when Craig pulled the car under the trees that shadowed the driveway. It had been ruthlessly sunny all day, hot and dry. I could still taste vomit in my mouth, but I didn't want to be alone.

"Come in," I said, sliding my hand up Craig's thigh.

"What for?" he asked.

"I'd like to fuck you," I said, so shaken that I could only be honest. His eyes widened slightly, then sank at the corners. He turned off the car.

"Alright," he said, and we got out.

Inside, we passionlessly put things in order before heading to the bedroom: I took off my coat, tie, and Craig did the same. We gulped water from the filtered faucet at the kitchen sink. Craig kept eying me as if waiting for me to strike. I was enjoying the feeling, glad that he knew it would be different this time.

"Go undress and get in my bed," I said. "I need to brush my teeth."

I didn't, really; we wouldn't be kissing. He walked off to do as I'd asked, and I went into the hall bathroom to rinse with mouthwash and splash some cold water on my face. I felt as if Wendy was right, that I was coming down with something, and also that I didn't have time to be ill, because there were still mountains to climb to get to Kyle. I just didn't know where those mountains were exactly.

I unbuttoned my shirt as I walked to the bedroom, and in the doorway I stopped to remove my belt, observing Craig as he reclined, nude, in my bed.

"You could tie my wrists," he said, lifting them over his head. He had sparse black underarm hair and almost no hair at all on his chest. I remembered noticing that about him in the locker room in high school.

"You don't mind bottoming?" I asked, dropping the belt to the floor. I wasn't in the mood for theatrics, just something rough and fast.

"Mind?" he said, and he flexed; he really was rather beautiful himself, very pale and well-toned in a way that looked effortless, smooth lines and lean muscles. "I love it," he said. He brought his arms down again, resting his hands on his chest. "I've been waiting for you to ask."

I took him the way I'd taken every guy I'd been with when we did it for the first time, which, for many of those guys, was also the last: on his hands and knees, from behind, his head down, ass up. I liked to think that the cozy intimacy of face-to-face sex was reserved for my memory of having Kyle that way, which was ludicrous, both because we hadn't been alone when it happened and because I'd fucked a few other guys that way in the past, always regretting it when it didn't live up to my impossibly complicated first time with Kyle. I sometimes tried to tell myself it had only been the ecstasy that elevated my experience, but I knew that drug wasn't entirely to blame for any of it.

Craig came in my hand while I was still in him, which surprised me. He was laughing after I finished, breathless and sweaty, turning onto his side to peek at me after I'd slid out.

"What?" I said, the last throbs of my orgasm still pulsing through me.

"Nothing," he said. "It just figures that you'd give someone a reach around while you pound them like that. It's so like you."

"Don't make fun of me," I said, and I slapped his ass, trying to be playful. He didn't smile.

"You can be very dim," he said. "I wonder sometimes if it's intentional."

"Enough analysis," I said, and I went to get us some water.

Craig stayed with me that night, for which I was very grateful. We huddled together under a single sheet, Kenny's air conditioning flowing over us at an environmentally irresponsible temperature. I couldn't sleep and wanted to drink, or at least eat, but also didn't feel like moving. I was surprised when Craig went along with this without a word, his thumb occasionally moving through the hairs on the back of my hand.

"I'm much hairier than you," I said. Craig grunted.

"You fuck like a hairy lumberjack," he said.

"Sorry."

"No, it's. I liked it."

I closed my eyes, thinking about how unusual it was for someone with such dark hair to be so smooth, wondering if he waxed, and my mind drifted to Kyle as I began to fall asleep. The hair on Kyle's arms was a slightly softer shade of red than the curls on his head, and he was bushy between his legs, or had been. I wondered if he waxed now, if he would ever miss his old nose as much as I did, and if I would ever see him again.

When I woke, Craig was gone. I went to the kitchen in my boxer shorts, seeking more water, and found a note on the table, held down by an empty tea saucer with some crumbs on it.

I ate one of your mini wheat bagels. It was dreadfully stale, but I didn't have dinner, so I was desperate. -C

I felt accused by the word 'desperate,' though I doubted he'd meant it that way. I drank my water, picked up the bag of mini wheat bagels, then set them down again. Though there would be no staff to serve me over at Kenny's house, at least he had a pantry and several large refrigerators stocked with food, most of it still fresh.

I glanced at the lake as I always did on the way to the main house, in the direction of Cartman's estate, and was shocked to see Kenny down by the dock in his usual manner, standing and looking in that direction himself. I broke into a run, afraid that he would vanish like a mirage as I drew closer, or like a ghost.

"Hey!" I shouted as I approached, not bothering to hide the fact that I was angry with him. "Where the hell have you been?"

He was annoyingly calm in response to my outrage, smiling at me. I thought he looked pale, maybe because he was wearing white pants and a white jacket over a faded pink shirt.

"I ran out of clean clothes," he said when he saw me noticing his attire.

"I guess that's a concern when you fire all the people who manage your life."

"Yes, well. They were gossiping, and I can't take any risks."

"Why, because they might go to the police?"

He turned back toward Cartman's house - Kyle's house - and slid his hands into the pockets of his pants.

"Answer me," I said, walking down to grab his shoulder. "I was at Butters' funeral yesterday, for fuck's sake. People at the scene of the accident were saying it was a car like Cartman's that hit him." Kenny only stared at me. "Well?" I shouted, on the verge of shoving him. "Was it?"

"Are you going to have me arrested?" Kenny asked.

I tore my hand away from him in disgust, but at the same time, there was something in me that simply couldn't believe it. Whatever he'd done to win Damien's favor, I knew that Kenny had an unshakable, almost childlike core of morality that would never allow him to drive away from someone he'd hurt, and especially from someone like Butters, a childhood friend. It was the reason Kenny had left town after what we did to Kyle - he couldn't bear to be the bad guy, wasn't able to live with himself as a potential reminder of Kyle's pain. He would go to great lengths to protect his loved ones, as he had for Kyle, but he wasn't selfish. He never had been. My heart dropped when I saw the anxiety in his eyes and realized what had happened.

"Kyle," I said. My throat went dry; I needed more water. "Kyle was driving."

"You can't tell anyone," Kenny said, walking toward me when I took a few stunned steps away from him. "You won't try to, will you? You wouldn't - it was an accident, he was so upset. He was saying - he never gets to drive, that he's always a passenger, that he's never had any real control over his life. That's my fault, Stan. I did that to him when I brought Cartman those drugs. How could I not have seen what his plan was, why he wanted to do them with all of us - with Kyle, and with me and you there to fool Kyle into thinking he was safe? And I, and you - I just wanted him to feel like he had some agency. I offered to let him drive, and he lit right up. You'd think it was the first nice thing anyone had done for him in years. Maybe it was."

"You sound insane," I said, my heart hammering after what he'd said about Cartman's birthday, his culpability and mine. On the grim anniversary of that disaster, we'd driven Kyle to ruin again. "I won't tell anyone," I said when I noticed Kenny's jaw shifting as he stared at me, possible murder plots formulating behind his eerily serene blue eyes. They were like mine, dark blue. The color of the lake when the light touched it a certain way. "You know I'd do anything for Kyle," I said, angrily.

"Yes," Kenny said, and his shoulders relaxed slightly. "Anyway, it was an accident. Kyle is beside himself with guilt. But it does no one any good for him to go to jail. Does it bring Butters back if Kyle suffers? No. He's suffered enough, anyhow."

"Tell me about California," I said. "Tell me the fucking truth."

"What do you mean? I thought Kyle had told you everything."

"I feel like he probably hasn't."

"Well. I'm not going to tell you things that he might not want you to know. But there really wasn't much to it. He came to find me, to try to tell me it wasn't my fault. It was my fault, though, and he wouldn't leave until I denied this, but I refused to. He just - hung around, and I begged him to go and get on with his life, but I was too weak to really push him away like I should have. I watched him wasting away, with me, because of me - when Cartman came, it was like a nightmare, but I couldn't stop Kyle from leaving. He had to leave. I was killing him."

"What the hell do you mean? You were killing him?"

"I couldn't make enough money to feed him," Kenny said, and his voice cut away. He looked up at the house. "I thought," he said. "This - but no, he's going to leave Cartman. I can take care of him now."

"Have you been in touch with him?" I asked. "Since the accident?"

"He's going to call," Kenny said, and he turned back to me with a defiant look. "When he's tied up his last loose ends. He's going to call and I'm - we're going to leave together. I should sell this place. He says it's too big. He wants to live in a little cottage with a garden and-" Kenny saw the look on my face and stopped there. "I'm just waiting for his call," he said, sharply.

"Did you love him all along?" I asked, though it was a stupid question. Kenny was willing to conceal a murder - to take the blame for it, even, I suspected - just for Kyle, and there could be no other explanation as to why he would. "Like Cartman did, ever since we were kids?" Like I did; I didn't need to say that part out loud. I felt sure that Kenny knew, by then.

"Cartman never loved him," Kenny said, avoiding my question. "He can't love anything. He just lusts. Let's go up to the house. Let's have lunch."

"I've got no appetite," I said, which was true, though my stomach was achingly hollow. "Kyle - he just drove away? After he hit Butters?"

"I told him to," Kenny said. "I jerked the wheel."

"Yeah? I don't believe you."

"But you believe Kyle would do it?" Kenny asked, glaring at me. I scoffed, relieved to see an actual expression on his face at last.

"I can't put him up on a pedestal any more," I said. "It never did him any good, the way we - the three of us-"

"You call that a pedestal?" Kenny said. I thought he might hit me.

"You know what I mean," I said, and I left, unable to look at him any longer.

I would later regret that those were my last words to Kenny: you know what I mean. We all made too many assumptions about what the others were thinking, especially where Kyle was concerned. I expected Kenny to understand that Kyle had long been venerated by all of us in our own separate ways, even when Cartman had berated him mercilessly as a child. It was the only way he'd known how to express his fascination with Kyle, and his disgust with himself for this, at the time. Perhaps Cartman was still disgusted with himself for his feelings about Kyle; I didn't care, and I didn't care to hear any more of Kenny's version of things, either. I just wanted Kyle, and I wanted the truth from him, even if it devastated me. I'd heard enough about California: I wanted to know about New York, that summer when he fled from all of us and came back with a new smile that was glib and guarded. I wanted him to recount every painful minute of that summer he spent away from me, under the delusion that this would be cathartic for him. By the time I slammed the front door of the guest house behind me I had realized how incredibly selfish this desire was. Kyle had taken that time away from me, my chance to heal and explain and make things better, but it had been his time to take, and I couldn't beg to have it back without knowing that I was being monstrous to ask for it.

I began to pack, then lost steam. It seemed impossible to leave town without resolving things with Kyle, and I really had nothing to go back to in Connecticut, except for a stressful job search and the strained and temporary kindness of friends who would perhaps let me sleep on their couches until I found a place. My money was gone. I had enough for my next student loan payment, and that was all.

I watched Kenny's house all day, waiting for him to leave for the city, but he never did. As a result, I was stuck with the meager offerings in the guest house: I ate the remainder of the mini wheat bagels, which were like chewy cardboard in my mouth, and some grapes that were getting wrinkly. Between checking my phone obsessively and watching Kenny's driveway, I began to feel insane with isolated anger. Why was this whole thing uncoiling without me, always? How had I been demoted to least important, below Kenny and fucking Cartman? Bolstered by rage, I called Kyle's cell again when the sun went down, and this time I spoke after the beep that prompted me to leave a message.

"I've spoken to Kenny," I said, glad that I was sober and would remember not to say anything incriminating about the accident. "He's awaiting your call, as I'm sure you know. Why not just go away with him? What are you waiting for? I don't believe you ever loved Cartman - I could never believe that, even if you were with him for fifty years. Kenny has money now. Isn't that all you really want? All that matters in your current arrangement? So why not strike a deal with him? He gets to have you, you get to have his money. It's the same deal you made with Cartman, but Kenny is kind. You went to him before, when you were nineteen - you threw your life away just to clear up a misunderstanding. So why not now? Why wait? Where are you?"

The recording cut off, and I was glad, because I began sobbing pitifully after asking Kyle's voice mail that question. I should have called him every day when he was in New York. I should have gone there, that summer, should have stolen my father's car to drive across the country and throw myself at his feet. I'd thought he wouldn't want me to. I was still afraid that I'd been right about that.

I slept on the couch in the sitting room, resolving to leave in the morning. I would go away to the east coast and try to forget all of this, as I had done before. I'd been so sure that I was at least partially successful, but all it had taken was one letter from Kenny to put me right back in my childhood bedroom, in that lost world where I had tried to clean Kyle up after it was much too late to do so. I thought of the letter that Kenny had written to Kyle, the one that prompted his trip to Los Angeles and his strange resolve to stay there until Kenny confessed that he hadn't been to blame. Who was to blame, exactly? Certainly not Kyle. Me, I decided: I had encouraged him to take the drug with us. I'd pressured him until he gave in, because I thought he might kiss me if he was high. That was all I'd wanted when I watched with glee as he swallowed that pill. I had been responsible for everything that followed: Kyle and I both knew it when we woke together in the haze of the fading high. I should have said so then. I should have given him permission to hate me so that he could move past what had happened, so that he could get away from all three of us.

Gun shots woke me, though I didn't know that was what I was hearing. The sound startled me anyway, and I rolled off the couch in a confused panic, landing hard on the floor. I thought maybe I had dreamed those loud noises, which were distant but also too close. I felt confident that I had only dreamed it as I cursed myself and sat up, and then there was another. It was unmistakably a gun shot, just like the ones I'd plugged my ears against when they burst from the end of my uncle Jimbo's rifle during our hunting trips. I waited, heart pounding, for what would come next, but there was only silence.

It was nine o'clock in the morning, already bright and hot outside. I was still dressed in my clothes from the day before, very hungry and thirsty as I peered out the windows of the guest house, trying to see what was going on. There was nothing visible, only the stately west wing of Kenny's mansion and the pines that shaded the area around the guest house. I thought of Cartman and was jolted with shock: he'd found out for sure that Kenny was seeing Kyle. He'd shot him.

Too panicked to consider my own safety, and afraid above all that Cartman might have killed Kyle before heading over to take care of Kenny, I bolted for the mansion, shouting Kenny's name. I went in through the kitchen and ran from room to room, realizing only as I searched for him that I had no idea which room in that house was his bedroom. I couldn't find one; it was as if he didn't have one, like he slept in one of the twenty well appointed guest rooms, maybe a different one every night, not wanting to leave traces himself anywhere, as if he was only a guest in this lifestyle. Exasperated, in a room on the second floor and only just beginning to worry that Cartman might be stalking me through the house with a loaded gun, I realized where I had neglected to look, stupid in my panic: the dock. Where I always found Kenny. I went to the window of that bedroom, which faced the water, but Kenny wasn't on the dock. Below my line of vision, something caught my gaze. A discoloration in the pool. Blood, and Kenny floating above it as if he was suspended on a cloud of swirling pink, the red pooling below. He was wearing small black bathing trunks. His foam pool cushion had drifted away to the edge of the pool, where there was more blood leaking into the water. I thought he must have been shot there and landed in the pool, but then I saw Clyde, who was bleeding from his forehead, the gun still crushed under his lifeless hand.

I was in shock for several days that didn't feel like days at all. My waking life had begun to seem like the extension of one long hour that would not pass, police asking me the same questions again and again, Wendy patting my hand and telling me I should eat. The theory the police had was that Kenny had run down Butters and Clyde had killed him in revenge, and then himself. I allowed them to believe this. It was what Kenny would have wanted, and it was what I longed to believe myself, rather than the fact that Kyle had now essentially killed three people with his recklessness.

"Three people," I mused deliriously at one point, high on some muscle relaxers Wendy had given me to calm my nerves. "But not the right three."

"What?" she said, stroking my hair. We were at her mother's house in South Park. All of my things were still at the lake.

"Nothing," I said. I would take the story about Cartman's birthday and what had happened to Kyle to my grave, as Kenny had.

Karen McCormick was an emotional wreck when she arrived in town, and Kenny's parents were nowhere to be found. Karen choked out something about her mother being in Baton Rogue before dissolving into hysterical sobs again. It fell to Wendy and I to do most of the arrangements for the funeral and the shutting up of the house, which Kenny had left to Karen. All of his other assets had been left to Damien Thorn, which enraged me enough to somewhat abate the guilt of letting everyone believe that Kenny had died as a cowardly killer. He could have at least left something for Kyle, if not all of it to Karen. It seemed to me that Damien had plenty already.

Wendy and I called everyone we could think of, and there weren't many who came to mind. If Kenny had new friends in the city or through work, we didn't know them or how to reach them. Damien Thorn would not return my calls. He did not attend the funeral, and neither did the twenty or so former classmates that Wendy and I had tried to reach. Even Craig did not attend, which infuriated me. He hadn't taken my calls all week, though he'd sent me one text message after the news about the murders came out:

I need to distance myself from all of this for a while. I'd advise you to do the same asap.

I went directly from the funeral to Kenny's abandoned mansion, which we'd already listed on the market for Karen, who said she didn't even want to see it. She seemed to be under the impression that Kenny had gotten wealthy through illegal means, and I certainly didn't have any information to the contrary. I took a taxi to the mansion, leaving Wendy to clean up after the memorial service, which she'd hosted at her house, a pathetic party of seven that included my mother, Wendy's parents, Karen, Wendy, and myself. No one else came. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. The papers were suggesting that Kenny was the perpetrator of a deadly hit and run, and Clyde was painted as the true victim, driven to murder and suicide by the loss of his love. I had no plans to attend Clyde's funeral. It had been vile enough of me to show my face at Butters' service.

I dismissed the taxi at the gates of the mansion, wanting to spend some time on Kenny's estate before I left it behind forever. I wandered about, realizing only when I approached the pathway that led around the house to the pool deck that I was expecting to find Kenny somewhere, maybe down by the dock, and have some parting words with his ghost. Unnerved and suddenly feeling watched, I hurried to the guest house to pack up my things, to get it over with.

The front door of the guest house was unlocked. I hadn't been back inside since I'd bolted out to see if Kenny was bleeding to death with Cartman looming over him. I was surprised the realtor hadn't locked the door, as someone had been inside to cover the furniture. It was all hidden under white sheets, the kitchen neatened and smelling of cleaning products, the fridge emptied. I was glad that my things hadn't been disposed of in this effort to cleanse the place. My bags were in the foyer near the door, looking like a pair of tolerated but unwelcome guests. I unzipped one and went through it, surprised that someone had taken the care to pick out what was mine and what belonged to the estate, and further surprised that they had guessed correctly in every case. I frowned down at my t-shirts and socks, then sniffed them. They'd been laundered. I heard a noise from the back of the house and sprang to my feet, ready to confront an apparition.

"Hello?" I called. Another noise - bed springs creaking. It was coming from the room where I'd stayed all summer, on the first floor, at the back of the house, the room that had the best partial view of the lake. "Is someone there?" I asked again.

No response. I felt as if whoever was in the house was holding his breath just as I was, as if we could sense each other's every twitch in the disbursement of air inside the guest house. It was only then that I realized how stuffy and warm the place was, and that someone must have shut off the utilities already.

I think I knew what I would find by the time I started walking, taking long strides but not quite running. It was still a shock to see Kyle in the bed under the window where I'd slept all summer. I thought, absurdly, that the sheets hadn't been washed since I'd fucked Craig there, but there were no sheets. The bed had been stripped, and the furniture in the room was covered like it was in the sitting room. Kyle was lying on the bare mattress, hugging something to his chest, his chin and mouth hidden behind it. It was my sweatshirt, royal blue, with TRINITY across the chest in yellow lettering.

"Hi," he said, his voice muffled by it. He was dressed in my clothes as well, barefoot in my pajama pants and one of my favorite old t-shirts that I'd had since high school.

"What is this?" I asked. "Are you alright?"

Kyle closed his eyes. "I hate it when you ask me that."

"Well, fine. But are you?"

"Can we go for a walk?" Kyle asked, and he sat up. He didn't look well; he clearly hadn't washed his hair for some time. "Can I talk to you before you go away forever?"

"Yes, of course," I said, and then I remembered he had hit Butters with Cartman's car and left him for dead. I didn't want to confront him about that immediately, but it hardened me, and I moved away when he crossed the room and tried to take my arm. "You missed the funeral," I said. "Kenny's, I mean."

"I couldn't-" Kyle said, and when he lost his voice I almost forgave him. I held my arm out, anyway, and he took it.

"What's that smell?" I asked when he was close, walking beside me through the house.

"Oh," he said. He sniffed the sleeve of the t-shirt he was wearing. "It must be in my hair. Cartman tried to burn the house down."

"He - what? When? Where is he?"

"Not here - not this house. Our house. Our bed, actually. I told him I was leaving him, and he set fire to our bed. It was a pathetic little fire - I put it out with the comforter. Smothered it, you know. But there was a lot of smoke, and I haven't showered since then."

I was reeling as we walked out into the hot afternoon, barely able to make sense of anything he was saying, or at least to take any of it seriously.

"When was this?" I asked, tugging him a little closer as we walked through the modest garden in the backyard, toward the lake.

"A few days ago." He frowned. "I think? I've lost track of time. Anyway, I fled in a row boat. My arms are so sore. This part of the lake is really bigger than it looks, you know. Once you're out in the middle of it, it's so much bigger."

"You came here," I said, glancing back at the guest house. "Looking for me?"

"Yes," Kyle said, softly. He was staring straight ahead, seeming dazed. "But I guess I knew you wouldn't be there. I washed your clothes before they turned the power off. And dried them, folded them-"

"I saw. Let's sit, okay?"

We came to a gazebo that looked out at the lake and sat together on its wooden bench. In the shade, the heat wasn't so bad, and there were warblers singing in the pines overhead, boats humming through the water in the distance. We were quiet for a while, not looking at each other, both breathing hard.

"He ran right at the car," Kyle said. "Like, like - like he thought. Well, he must have thought it was Cartman. I tried to - there was nothing to do about it, he just ran right in front of us. And I was driving so fast. I panicked. Kenny told me to drive, he said - just drive, Kyle, it's okay, just drive away."

"Everyone thinks-"

"I know. He said he wanted it that way. He said, if the police came asking, to tell them he was driving. Would I have been able to?" He looked at me then, his eyes wide with horror. "Would I have, do you think?"

"We'll never have to find out," I said.

"Well." Kyle looked away again. "What am I supposed to do now? I guess you think I should turn myself in, to clear Kenny's name."

"No, I don't think you should. But Cartman - does he know it was you driving?"

"Yes." Kyle closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "I was frantic, I was - stupid, panicked. I told him. He calmed me down, told me he'd taken care of it. God, Stan, oh God-"

His hands were shaking. I took them between mine and held them. I didn't forgive him, but I also felt like I didn't need to, like we were in the afterlife ourselves, all of that mortal business long past.

"Now I'll never get his money," Kyle said, and he laughed bitterly. "He says he'll tell the truth about the accident if I try. It's stupid, he's got no proof, and he'd be culpable himself for concealing evidence. He's the one who washed the blood off the car. But I don't want to test him - I don't even want his money. It's good that I've got nothing now."

"You've got your freedom," I said.

"Oh," Kyle said, very softly. His eyes were beginning to overflow, tears leaking out. "I thought. For a moment there I thought you would say 'me, you've got me.'"

I didn't say that. We stared at the lake for a while, his hands pressed between mine. Just the sound of his breath and his sniffling was calming me into a near trance. I dried his cheeks for him after his tears stopped falling.

"I should show you the letter Kenny wrote me," Kyle said. "At the end of my freshman year, when I was eighteen. Nineteen? Whatever. I had started, you know, to move beyond all of that, and here Kenny was, apologizing for it, just - berating himself, promising me that he would never forgive himself, that he hadn't forgotten how badly he'd hurt me, that he would live the rest of his life in humble memorial to my lost innocence, or some - some insane thing like that. I was so fucking devastated, I didn't even finish the semester. I came straight to you."

"Me?"

"Yes, to Trinity. The whole time, I was trying to work up the nerve to show you the letter and ask you what the hell I should do about it. But it was like - not like you'd forgotten, because every time our eyes met I'd feel this jolt of horrible shame, and I knew you were feeling it, too, as guilt. But you were showing me the cafeteria, and the gym, and your dorm with your fucking Kandinsky posters, and I just. I didn't know how to talk about it. I left you to your new life and went straight to the source, to Kenny."

"And the two of you fell in love," I said, hatefully. "In L.A."

"Love?" Kyle wrinkled his nose; it looked more like his old one when he did. "No, well - we had a sort of affair, I guess, but it wasn't me Kenny loved, no. Not as, like, a person. He was in love with the idea of doing penance for me, for that day. For bringing drugs to Cartman's birthday party and taking money for them, and. All of it. I was this symbol to him in the worst, most alienating way - wretched and holy at the same time. I was something he was apologizing for. He couldn't even get it up for me, nine times out of ten. Oh, shit." Kyle winced again. "I shouldn't say that. It hasn't even hit me that he's dead. You found him?"

"I don't want to talk about it," I said, and a memory of the blood in the pool made me flinch. "I just, I wish you'd shown me that letter. At Trinity. I was trying so hard to act normal and cheerful, because I didn't know what else to do. I can't believe you didn't see through it."

"I did! It was worse that you were pretending. We'd both been pretending for each other ever since I got back from New York. I thought: at least with Kenny things will be real. And boy were they. I did drugs with prostitutes, Stan."

"You - what?"

"We lived with these call boys. Oh my God, they were the most pathetic, sad-eyed twinks you'd ever seen. I would come home from a nine hour shift washing dishes, smoke weed with them and talk about how I should change careers. They were making a lot of money."

"Kyle."

"I didn't, of course - Kenny wouldn't have let me. He did protect me from becoming an actual whore, which was what I felt like I was anyway. Then Cartman showed up and I sold my soul to him for a steak dinner."

"He doesn't own your soul." I pressed my hands around Kyle's more snugly. "You've left him now. You're free."

"Ha," Kyle said. "Free, right. I'll never close my eyes and not see Butters' face, right before the car - right before I hit him. His eyes were just - I'll never forget the way his face looked when he realized that I'd hit the brakes too late. Never."

I hugged Kyle to me, not sure what else I could do. We were quiet again, listening to gentle waves lap against the lake shore. There were a lot of people on the water that day, farther out, in boats.

"I'll never forget your eyes," I said. "That night. After I'd tried to clean you up."

"Clean me out, you mean," Kyle said, and he pulled away from me, taking his hands from mine. "God. I wasted so many years trying to hate you for letting that happen to me. I couldn't hate Kenny - he hated himself enough already. And Cartman was just being Cartman. He honestly never saw the harm in it. But you. You were there, you were there and you didn't even say you were sorry when it was over."

"Do you honestly think I don't hate myself for it?" I was beginning to shake all over, feeling as if we both had guns pressed to each other's heads. "Did you ever think I wasn't sorry? Ever, even for a moment?"

"You looked so devastated that night," Kyle said. He wasn't looking at me, didn't seem to be looking at anything precisely. "But mostly scared. Like I was this bomb that could go off at any moment."

"I wanted - I wanted to comfort you, Kyle, it's my biggest regret, I just didn't know where to begin, what kind of words could possibly convey how horrified I was when I woke up from that nightmare and realized it had all been real."

"But it wasn't a nightmare," Kyle said, frowning at me. "Or, yes, but not - during. I felt like we were gods or something. We were all so perfect. So high, obviously, but. I remember thinking we were perfect, the four of us, together, like that. It felt like this math equation I'd finally solved. When really I'd only ever wanted you."

I reached for his hands again, and held them more gently this time. He pressed his face against my shoulder and nosed at me, eyes closed. I swallowed down some wracking sobs that I didn't have time for.

"I still-" I said, and I swallowed again, trying to steady my voice. I couldn't. Kyle looked up, shook his head as if to quiet what I wasn't saying, and cupped my cheeks.

"I read this quote, once," he said, whispering. "In some trashy novel. Or maybe it wasn't trashy, but it was a love story. It was something like - 'I've always been faithful to you, if faithful means the experience against which everything else has been measured.' No, I'm lying. It wasn't something like that, that's the exact quote. I must have read it a thousand times, and I memorized it, because it struck me - it was you. That was my quote about you."

"I want to go back," I said. "I've got to fix this, we have to undo it all somehow."

"Shh." Kyle stroked my cheeks with his thumbs. He smelled like fire and sweat. "We could still find out. We could pretend, for one afternoon, you know? Before everything just falls apart for good. We could find out what it would have been like."

"What?"

"I've not - I've not been with anyone but them. And you, only that once. Don't you want to see what it would have been like if it had ever been just me and you?"

He stood, holding my hand, and pulled me up. I let him walk me toward the house, not entirely sure what was happening. Was he actually suggesting we have sex? It seemed insane to me, though I was aroused already, watching him tip-toe through the yard, his feet still bare, my pajama pants hanging over them.

"That day," Kyle said, as we walked into the house, "Cartman's birthday, at the start of it, when the drug first entered my bloodstream or whatever - I felt like we existed outside of time. I want to feel that way with you. Just with you. And I already feel kind of like I'm in a parallel universe, today. So let's - yeah. Shut the door, okay? And lock it. It's so hot in here. That's good, though. Let's pretend we're in the afterlife. That we're in your Christian hell together and we can just do whatever we like, because we're already damned."

We went to the bedroom. I was roasting inside my clothes, wearing the fucking suit Kenny had bought for me, again. I'd worn it to his funeral, though it hadn't been cleaned since I'd wiped vomit on the sleeve after Butters' memorial service.

"Kenny is dead," I said. Kyle and I were standing near the bed, facing each other, motionless.

"I killed him," Kyle said. "In a sense. But I think he wanted me to."

I opened my mouth to debate that, then felt a kind of feverish swoon move through me when I realized it was probably true. I reached for Kyle's shirt - my shirt - and took hold of the hem.

"Wait," I said when he leaned up to kiss me. "Wait, not like this. It wouldn't have been like this."

"What?" Kyle said, softly. "Stan -" He pulled free when I took his hand and tried to lead him from the room. His eyes were wet when I turned back to him. "Stan, please," he said. "I need this."

"I know," I said. I took his hand again. "Come here."

He let me lead him from the room this time, and I took him into the sitting room where he'd had his reunion with Kenny. It looked like a very different room now, with the furniture covered, no flowers crowding around us, no platters of cookies laid out on the table. The clock Kenny had upset had disappeared from the mantle. I walked to a short, boxy armchair that was covered with a sheet like everything else, and pointed it toward the sheet-draped cabinet that hid the TV - unless that had been taken, too. It didn't matter. Kyle stood watching me arrange the chair, and he looked at me with confusion when I put out my hand for him again.

"C'mon," I said. "Let me show you how it would have been."

I could see that it hadn't hit him yet, but he came to me. We sat down together, and I put my hands between my knees, leaned back against the cushion and stared in the direction of the TV. When I looked over at Kyle, he had closed his eyes. His lips were shaking.

"Oh, you're cruel," he said, and he opened his eyes. "The beanbag chair."

"I don't mean to be cruel. Look, just. Look."

I took his hand, nervous as a kid, the way I would have been back then. This, at least, was unchanged. I was afraid to try to have Kyle. His fingers were shaking as they twined through mine. We met each other's eyes shyly.

"But you wouldn't be wearing a tie," he said, running his fingertips down over it. I shuddered as if he'd touched my skin.

"Maybe I just got back from church," I said.

Kyle leaned back beside me, settling in. He was still playing with my tie, absently, the way he might have if we were boys, for the excuse to touch some part of me. I used to do the same thing with him, and was obsessed with the beanbag chair, where his thigh would press warm and snug against mine, and sometimes parts of us would overlap slightly, his elbow resting in the crook of my arm, tickling me there when he shifted. I watched his hands as he unfastened my tie, working slowly, as if it was a delicate procedure that could easily go wrong.

"Hey," I said when he had it mostly undone. He looked up at me, and I tried so hard to believe that we were back in the beanbag chair, safe and sound in the past. I kissed him experimentally, just a gentle peck on his lips. We looked at each other when I'd pulled back, and he moved in for another soft kiss. Just as I'd always hoped he would, if I'd ever been brave enough to try it.

"Stan," he said, and I didn't want to hesitate, but I studied his eyes. He looked different, already. I prayed that he wasn't just acting. He looked like he had back then, on the beanbag chair, afraid but brave.

"I love you more than they do," I said, as if Kenny was still alive and Cartman hadn't proven to be an inferior suitor long ago. Kyle nodded.

"I know," he said. "You love the bad parts, too."

"Ha. Didn't they?" Kenny had seen him kill a man, after all. God only knew what Cartman had seen.

"No," Kyle said, and he shook his head emphatically. "They wanted me to be better. Trust me, they did. They wanted me to be better than them, to be this achievement that they could hoard and polish. You don't care if I'm better than you or not. Do you?"

"Better – how?"

"Never mind, shhh." He kissed me again, his tongue sneaking out to caress my lower lip, then to press against mine when I opened my mouth, too. I let go of his hand and slid my arm around his shoulders, pulling him closer. I heard him saying, or maybe tasted it: I am a real person, remember? I did remember. I tried to tell him so as I ran my hands over him, up under the t-shirt he had stolen from me, over the bulge of his erection, through his greasy hair. Kyle climbed into my lap, straddling me, and kissed my neck, sucking and nipping in spots, making me throw my head back and moan. We would have done this on the beanbag chair, I thought, and when Kyle plunged his tongue into my mouth again I thought: fuck it, we are doing it there. This was time travel, because between the two of us we had the power to make all that had happened irrelevant, and we had done it. Nothing mattered, only that I could keep touching him, kissing him. That I could keep him, though of course I couldn't. I pushed the thought away and tore his shirt off.

"On that bed," he said, panting. "Please, I want to be on my back."

I carried him there, mouthing at his neck. For a moment I felt like I had that day, minus the drugs, or maybe my natural euphoria actually approached that level of mindless desire. I forced myself to calm down, and when I'd laid him on the bed I kissed him all over his chest, sucked at his nipples, tickled my fingers into his shallow belly button. Kyle was crying a little, but also smiling, and I knew that smile, had known it since I was three years old: it was real.

For a moment I was panicked about the lube prospects, but of course Kyle had kept some, reserved from my summer supplies, in the nightstand drawer by the bed. Of course he had known that I would come, and that it would come to this. I was never more glad to predictable, to have my needs anticipated. I opened him carefully, as if he was a virgin. He felt that tight, and gasped on my fingers, writhing and blushing, pulling me down for kisses when the intensity of what he was feeling seemed to frighten him.

"Ready?" I whispered when he was squirming on two of my fingers, biting at my bottom lip.

"Yes," he said, and he gave me the most unguarded look I had seen since he'd wept over the fact that all the girls in elementary school thought he was ugly – that kind of need, the shameless kind. He was shameless, I was guiltless: I slid into him and we both sighed, clutching at each other greedily, as if we weren't already as close as our bodies would allow.

I had been too high, our first time, to appreciate Kyle's noises, and as I fucked him I imagined that Cartman had never heard these, and that Kenny hadn't, that Kyle had never made these noises in their presence. He wouldn't have made himself vulnerable like this for Cartman, and wouldn't have wanted to burden Kenny with the obvious sadness in his little whimpers and groans. It wasn't a sadness about what was happening presently – I made sure of this by whispering entreaties against his lips, asking him if he was okay, if I should continue – it was a sadness that was bigger than sex, the kind of indistinct longing for something more than what our bodies were capable of doing. Despite this imperfection, Kyle came all over himself while I fucked him, pulling at his cock while my hand guided his, and I couldn't last much longer after that. I fell down onto him, using what little energy I still had to lick his neck while my hips twitched tiredly, pushing the last of it into him.

There was a deep stillness when we were done, and I felt how stuffy the room was again, the heat closing around me like something I had held back with my hands for as long as I could. I struggled up onto my elbows and reminded myself that being a coward had destroyed me when I was seventeen. I nudged Kyle's cheek with my nose until he'd opened his eyes, and stared down into them.

"Dude," I said. "Just let me take care of you. I know I don't have money. But I feel like I could. I feel like I could make you happy."

"Fuh," he said, and I felt like I was smothering him, so I moved off, slid out. He pushed at my chest and sat up, looking disoriented. I gave him space, watched him toy with his left nipple. He turned to look at me, and I began to feel worthless for being so predictable, because I had no idea what he would do.

"Yeah," he said, and he lifted his hand toward my lips. I kissed his knuckles. "Let's go home. Please, let's just go home."

We did. A taxi took us back to South Park. To his parents' house, precisely. I didn't go in to greet them with Kyle. That would have been too much, I felt, along with the news that he'd left Cartman. I walked to the house of the only person in town who I still trusted to shelter me: Jimbo Kern, who lived on the outskirts with his parter, Ned. I'm not sure any two people were ever happier to see me. We sampled several of Jimbo's home brews, ate venison chili, and capped the night off with shots of Wild Turkey. They made me a bed in the barn-like attic of their farmhouse, and I stared at the ceiling, thinking of Kyle, wondering if he would answer his phone when I called him in the morning as I'd promised that I would. I wasn't sure if the promise was more about me calling him or that I would at least wait until morning to call him.

Kyle answered when I called, and told me that he would change his number soon, because he would be back on his family plan. It heartened me so to hear him call his parents 'family,' after what I'd heard from Cartman's butler. Sheila and Gerald, for all their love of Cartman after he'd brought Kyle back to college and purportedly converted to Judaism, were instantly on Kyle's side when they heard of Cartman's infidelity, and the underplayed mention of Cartman's attempt to kill Kyle with fire – surely they smelled it in his hair, for he had still not showered. It was enough to push them into complete parental protectiveness. Kyle was fed coffee cake for breakfast, egg salad sandwiches for lunch, roasts and steamed veggies for dinner. I envied him, because my own family had dispersed for good, but Jimbo and Ned were kind to me, providing hearty meals and work on the farm to fill my unemployed hours. In the evenings and on the weekends Kyle and I huddled together like lonely teenagers, humping quietly when we could get away with it, kissing more than fucking. I loved it; I wept with gratitude when I returned to my bed in the damp attic of my uncle's house, knowing that Kyle was safe in his childhood bedroom even as I longed to have him in mine.

A month after I'd attempted to get Damien Thorn to attend Kenny's funeral, I had a voice mail from him. I'd gotten a part time job thanks to a friend of Jimbo's, stocking a liquor store. It was mostly heavy lifting, and I was glad for it, because Kyle squeezed my arm muscles and grinned proudly when we reunited each evening.

I didn't tell Kyle about my trip into Denver to visit Damien, partly because it fell on a weekend when he was already tense about an upcoming job interview. He was hoping to get a cushy job with the South Park DMV, and was obsessively reviewing the intricacies of the driving test, as if they would put him behind the wheel. I borrowed Jimbo's truck, glad to be driving such an ugly beast into the city. The last time I'd been to Denver I'd driven Cartman's Bentley, and that felt like a bad dream already. Sometimes it was too real in my memory, but I only had to find Kyle at the end of the day and hold him so close that his warmth eclipsed my past atmospheres: then it wasn't real enough to hurt me. It was only something that happened and was now not happening anymore – gravestones and automobiles, fortunes and ecstasies.

In Denver, I had Jimbo's rusty truck valeted and laughed to myself about it. The humor drained from me as I took the elevator up to Damien's office and began to wonder why I had accepted his invitation. The man wore human molars as cuff links, and I had already found what I'd been looking for in Kyle: what did I have to gain from meeting with a contributing factor to Kenny's downfall?

I think I realized, as I stepped into Damien's penthouse foyer, that I had come to him as a fellow factor in that downfall, to see what he had to say about it and how it would illuminate my own involvement. Damien had a new twink assistant with bored bedroom eyes and carefully styled hair that was meant to look lazy. I wondered what had happed to the previous boy.

"I've been thinking about you," Damien said when I was standing before his massive desk, which dwarfed him and made him look too young to be there. "In terms of a replacement."

"Replacement?" I said, with as disbelieving a tone as I could manage. I wasn't actually that surprised, just determined to communicate my disgust.

"I like you," Damien said. "You've got bigger balls than McCormick did. I think I could use someone like you, if you're interested in investment opportunities."

"No," I said, though every day was a humiliating exercise in things that I couldn't afford to buy for Kyle. "I'm not – I've got other commitments."

"Oh." Damien threaded his fingers together and grinned at me. Again I wondered why I had come, and I headed for the door. "He was a whore, you know," Damien said. I turned back to him.

"What?" I was ready to kill him there in his spacious office, assuming he was talking about Kyle.

"Kenny McCormick," Damien said. "He was my father's favorite rent boy when I met him."

"Who's your father?" I asked, ready to run.

Damien laughed, showing me his sharp canine teeth.

"You haven't figured it out by now?" he asked, grinning crookedly.

I turned to go, resolving never to leave South Park again. If that was where I could hide, ironically, from all the rest of it, I would accept what sanctuary I had, with Kyle there to hide alongside me. "I don't have time for these games," I said, grabbing for the handle on Damien's office door.

"Pity," Damien said, and I paused to hear the rest. "When you're like me, and you have all the time in the world, games are the only things that interest you."

Outside, I waited for the valet to bring the car around, convinced that he was stalling because Damien had given him instructions to do so, and I caught sight of something familiar on the street. It was Craig Tucker, and the companion he was talking with in a conspiring fashion was Eric Cartman.

I shouted to them, unwilling to let them escape my rage. They looked at me with banal recognition, as if they ran into people they'd half-destroyed all the time. Craig was always cool, but I had expected Cartman at least to sneer and spit at me.

"You missed Kenny's funeral," I said when they walked over to me.

"What?" Cartman said. He was sweating, patting at himself with a handkerchief. It was August, hot as hell in the crucible of the city. I waited for the crude comments about how I had stolen Kyle away at last, but Cartman only seemed overheated in a physical sense, ready to walk on.

"Kenny," I said, and I looked at Craig, giving up on Cartman. "He died. You may have heard."

"Of course we heard," Craig said. "A tragic ending to that whole story."

"That whole story," I said, as if Craig knew it. I glanced at Cartman to make sure that it hadn't been relayed without my permission – without Kyle's. Cartman glowered at me, then faltered. I don't think he'd ever shown that much of himself to Kenny or Kyle. I'm not sure why it was me that he'd always trusted with his smallest, most honest self, but I suspected that it was because he had the least use for me, and also the most grudging respect. I was sure, though we didn't discuss it then, that he knew I had staked my claim in Kyle at last. That was how he would see it: Kyle was land he'd tried to buy that had already been conquered. He was romantic about Kyle's love in all the worst ways. Kyle and I had talked about it at some length already.

"Well," I said, looking at Craig, "Here's my car."

The rusty old Ford was brought up by a valet then. I saw Cartman smirk as if in triumph. As long as his car cost more than mine, whichever bed Kyle slept in, he was still ahead of me in his own estimation. Craig tried to hold my gaze, but I wouldn't let him, still angry with him for ignoring Kenny's funeral like it was a bad investment.

Back in South Park, it was nearing sundown. The days were getting shorter. I helped Ned with the firewood that we were preparing to sell in bulk in a few months, and offered to take the truck for an oil change in the morning. I'd promised to pick Kyle up at nine and take him to Tartufo's for pizza before the midnight movie, which would probably be deserted except for the two of us.

It had hit me harder than I'd anticipated, on the way down from Damien's top floor office, that Kenny was gone. He seemed like a talisman we'd lost, when I considered it most callously, and like a guardian we'd neglected.

Cartman remarried, choosing a woman this time around. It was good for his company. Damien disappeared. I had a hard time finding any evidence he'd existed, five years later.

Five years later: Kyle and I were still in South Park, me working at a craft beer store that had become part of the community's minor tourism draw, Kyle shelving books at the high school library. He fought many battles to get banned books reinstated. I fought a few less publicized battles to get particularly potent beers on the shelves of local liquor stores. Kyle and I discussed our efforts over dinner, disagreed at times, and had each other without reservations after the plates were cleared, in the cramped apartment that we paid too much rent for.

I thought about Kenny all the time, and I know Kyle thought about Butters. What if Kenny hadn't written those letters, first to Kyle and then to me? By the time Kenny wrote to me, did he know what he was doing, that there was nothing left of the past but to bring Kyle and I together?

We invested in Christmas trees, a few overpriced Crate and Barrel accessories, and finally in a dog who reminded me of Sparky and made me cry outside a PetSmart in Colorado Springs. His name was Freddie Mercury. We were the most stylish gay couple in South Park – which wasn't a hard thing to achieve – eking out a living in retail and community service, showing up at holiday parties with our hands in each other's pockets. Every intricacy of domestic life swept me off my feet, at first: we used the same soap, he needed 700 count sheets to help his skin stay soft – my cheese grater was extremely inferior! Eventually the demands irritated me in the most pleasantly mundane way, because Kyle was mine, part of my life, inextricable, and if I ignored his opinion on my cheese grater I would be adrift, pointless, less than myself without his input.

We'd been living together for three years when Kyle sent me to town on Christmas Eve for a tube of Grands cinnamon rolls. My sister liked them, a detail Kyle had noticed and deemed important, and I was happy to get away for a moment, because Kyle and my mother were both a little drunk from wine and were talking about me in a fond but emasculating way. On the radio, I blasted the kind of music Kyle didn't like: dumb stuff from the eighties, dumber stuff from our own generation.

At the store, I lingered in the bakery, wishing there were freshly baked cinnamon rolls that I could provide as a substitution for the expected frozen drudgery. I was poking through coffee cakes when I felt someone staring at me and saw Craig Tucker near the sliced breads. I guess we were about thirty years old at that point. He walked toward me, unsmiling, and I felt like a spy who'd been caught, though I'd done nothing wrong.

"You're in town?" I said, as if he wasn't allowed to be. As if he'd broken some treaty.

"For Christmas," Craig said. He looked like he always had: polished, cool, untouched. I knew then, more concretely, that I'd loved Kyle most for being as messy as he was beautiful, for no longer being able to afford hair treatments.

"Welcome, uh," I said, twisting a bag of brussel sprouts that Kyle had requested; he liked to roast them with some olive oil and salt. "Back – welcome back."

Craig smiled, rolled his eyes, and walked past me. As he did, he touched my arm, and only then did I register that our meeting was awkward not only because we'd known each other as children but because I'd had sex with him more than once.

"I see Kyle's gotten what he wanted," Craig said, dragging his hand along my arm, already walking away. "I guess we all knew that he would."

I didn't say anything in response, but all the way home I composed angry rebuttals. None of my arguments really worked without me saying to Craig, theoretically, but you don't know what we did to him. Cartman had moved on to other conquests, Kenny was dead, and I was living with my guilt, fetching brussel sprouts on holidays. It was pointless to try to articulate to outsiders, and they were all outsiders.

"I saw Craig today," I said when I was lying in bed with Kyle that night, our beloved mutt curled up at the end of the bed.

"Craig?" Kyle said, already beginning to doze against my chest.

"From school," I said, as if he would not remember Craig from that afternoon at the Palace. We both woke with nightmares regularly, remembering Cartman's birthdays.

"Oh," Kyle said, eyes closed, clutching at me. "Yes – him."

They were all reduced to that, a 'him' that Kyle or I muttered about while drifting to sleep. I could feel that he was awake that night, though, that we were both clinging to each other so tightly because we were afraid we might be monsters. I thought sometimes that we must be: we were ruthless in our eventual resolve to not be apart anymore. It hadn't been intentional, but our acceptance of it was.

Sometimes I felt like Kenny was watching us, as if from across a lake, through the mists that had gathered over the surface of the water, seeking out the glow of our green light. I wondered what he thought about me having Kyle at last, and I often dreamed about him, but in the dreams I was rarely able to find him. I would search the rooms of that mansion, which were endless and inescapable, calling Kenny's name and looking for any signs of life: a glass of water on a bedside table, a jacket hung over a chair, a pair of shoes not tucked away in a closet. There was nothing, most nights. He was nowhere to be found, and I was left to draw my own conclusions about him, as I had been in life: that he had loved Kyle the way that Kyle described, as a symbol, as something too sacred to actually touch. I envied that, in a sense, for it had left Kenny the only innocent party in all of this, but I wouldn't give up my guilt in exchange for what I had: Kyle in my arms, his untamed hair tickling my jaw as he eased into sleep at last. It was a wealth I had once never dreamed I could possess, and, holding him, I understood the lengths that Cartman and Kenny had once gone to in order to amass their own fortunes.

I told myself I was not the same as them. I had turned Damien down. I lived modestly and clipped coupons. But there was something extravagant about having Kyle, and when I woke on cold mornings and cuddled around him to keep him warm, I felt victorious. It was a cynical thought and I pushed it away, buried my face in Kyle's hair and breathed in the smell of him, making myself remember how I'd felt on prom night, the first time I looked at him and thought, as he was laughing at some joke and adjusting his green tie: maybe I could kiss him someday.

The End.

(note: the book Kyle quotes is The Last Time They Met by Anita Shreve.