A gaggle of highschoolers stumble out of the front door, too wrapped up in their own bubbles of conversations to pay much attention to the man with hands shoved deep into his jacket pockets. One of the girls turns up her nose as he stands off to the side to let them through, but drunk on laughter and cheap perfume, she goes back to grabbing onto her boyfriend's arm.

Inside, the place is as quiet and empty as Ricky expected a Denny's to be at 2AM on a Wednesday. There isn't much to do in this corner of Colorado, so teenagers out this late shouldn't have taken him this much by surprise. Still, he keeps glancing over his shoulder as he beelines for the men's restroom, barricading the door with a trash can.

Fuck. Fuck. The jacket's going to have to go away now. He paid good money for it, too.

The water that spews out of the faucet is piping hot but he doesn't care. He shoves his hands under the spout, watches as red stains the white porcelain, becomes pink, then turns clear. Ricky's hands are now red for a different reason, but he can't really feel them. Hell, he can't feel much of anything as he continues to stand there, staring at the dark circles under his eyes.

He looks rough. He's gonna need a haircut. There is blood on his jacket, he was seen in this jacket, and now it's going to have to go away.

Fuck.

Pockets turned inside out, he scrubs them as clean as he can get them. Then, he shoves the jacket in the trash can. And then, in a trick he learned while briefly working at Burger King, once the blood is gone from every surface, he takes a ball of paper towels and wipes everything down. Every surface, every crack, and every divot in his immediate circumference. No evidence, no evidence of a clean-up of evidence.

Pushing open the door with his knee and slipping back out without further physical contact, Ricky smiles at the lady leaning against the greeting counter. She looks annoyed, as if shafted to work the graveyard shift after telling her manager she couldn't. "Can I help you?"

"Can I get a coffee?"

"Anything else?"

He's flat broke and doesn't even have his wallet on him. He's already sized up the place and wholly intends to make a break for it before she can stop by with the bill. "Just a coffee. Extra sugar."

The booth squeaks when he drops himself into it, and the night rushes in all at once.

The original plan of six months before heading out to California had been dashed when the gas station manager made a disgusting comment towards a little girl who'd stepped inside to buy Tylenol, her dad gassing up the car outside. She had asked for the liquid medicine, and Jason had delivered a "What's the matter? Don't know how to swallow yet?" that landed like a physical blow. He always rubbed Ricky the wrong way, but most managers throughout his life did.

Ricky shouldn't have done it, but Jason was a fucking idiot. Opportunities to not be a scumbag came and went but that man's head was denser than a jawbreaker, and every push, every warning made him more wary of Ricky than the other way around.

"What's a tranny like you gonna do about it?" he'd said. "Say weird shit again and it's gonna be you in the trunk."

Well. There's no one in any sort of trunk, but Colorado has enough beautiful and inaccessible ravines to not merit the usage of one.

"Are you sure you don't need anything else?" the waitress says, slipping a plastic forest green mug onto the table and pouring steaming black coffee. "A stack of waffles and a whole pig looks like'll benefit you. Maybe some ibuprofen."

"Right on," he says, wrapping a hand over the hot surface and relishing in the slow return of physical sensation. "I'm good, thanks."

"Cream?"

"Please." She pours cream into the cup, then fishes for a handful of sugar packets inside her apron's pockets. "You guys are open all night, right?"

"We sure are. You certain I can't get you anything else, sug?"

Ricky shakes his head, and she leaves the carafe on the table.

Three cups in and his heart is racing like a jackrabbit. He's going to have to go down to the station and check the bus routes. Here's to hoping he's got enough cash for a one-way to Nevada until he can figure the rest out. Stupid, stupid, stupid. You're gonna—

"Is this seat taken?"

There are at least five answers to that question, each as rude as the last, but words leave Ricky's brain as readily as the air that is punched right out of his lungs.

No way.

There is, literally, no fucking way.

The probabilities at play here are slimmer than a jackpot rigged in the house's favor, and Lady Luck abandoned him well before he was even conceived.

Ricky nods his head, thinking the man a hallucination. Could be. Two days without sleep, high from a murder, and at least twenty-four ounces of coffee can do serious shit to someone's head. The man — god, what was his fucking name? — sits down across from him with a smile that can only be described as pleasantly surprised.

The powers that be were about to A-Christmas-Carol Ricky with the Ghost of Christmas Past, but said past was only a little over a year ago.

"Now, this? This is one heck of a surprise. Of all places to bump into you, I did not expect a run-in while out visiting family."

"Mr. Raglan," he says, his voice triggering the name like a thunderclap.

"Please, call me Steve, since you're no longer my counseloree. Though, that was one time and I'm going to be completely honest…You're going to have to remind me of yours."

"It's Ricky."

"Ricky! Yes, yes, of course. Ricky Kronbach."

"How did you find me?"

Raglan pushes his glasses up his nose. "That implies that I was out looking for you." He's wearing a cardigan over a plain shirt, looking fresh out of a shower. "I couldn't sleep so I decided to grab a bite after remembering I skipped dinner," he continues after a short laugh. "Speaking of. Let me get you something to eat."

Dreaming, then. "I'm not really hungry."

"You'd let company eat all by themselves? I'm sure your mama raised you better than that."

He orders two Grand Slams with an extra side of hash browns slathered in gravy. The egg is runny and touches the bacon on Ricky's plate. He's too nauseous for this. His hands are shaking, so he goes by dipping toast in the yolk and just sitting there like a ghost.

Raglan eats with gusto, eyeing him over the rim of his glasses. "Everything alright?"

"I didn't expect to be having breakfast with my former career counselor."

"Small world."

"Infinitesimally small. Like, cosmologically infinitesimal levels of small."

Raglan takes a sip of his coffee, nodding his head. "That's right. You're a scientist, aren't you? Computer science. Right, right, it's all coming back to me. I've heard Bell opened a research and development sector further north."

"I'm not working for Bell." Then, because the remark felt unfairly hostile, "not my kind of computer science." Ricky picks up a fork and presses the tines lengthwise over the stack of pancakes. "How'd you know that? About Bell?"

Raglan shimmies in his seat, a hand in his lap while the other stabs a piece of bacon with his own fork. Back hunched and hair tousled, he looks more like an old friend rather than a virtual stranger who materialized out of the blue. "I have a small interest in technology. Robotics. I would have made a career out of it if not for the old ball and chain."

"Sorry to hear that."

"Oh, it's… Sometimes, stuff happens and it sets you down an unexpected path, and you just learn to follow the sidewalk."

"Totally." Ricky tops off both their coffees. "Never too late to go back to college. Computers are the future."

"That they are," Raglan says, fixing him with a smile he knows all too well. Ricky's cruised the underbelly of cities enough times to recognize the desperation of self-proclaimed straight men. "What plans have you got for this bright future?"

"Anaheim," Ricky answers without thinking.

Raglan gulps hard enough to hurt, then laughs. "The Happiest Place on Earth?"

He nods. "Always wanted to go there when I was a kid."

"I'd argue you're no longer a kid."

Ricky grabs a piece of bacon. "I didn't know being a kid is a prerequisite to having fun. Maybe I like it when families enjoy themselves, when the grownups are having just as much fun as their kids." It's gone cold and rubbery, but the taste remains acceptable. "Times are getting scarier and having a place where you don't have to think about any of the bad stuff? Fuck, dude. Even if I don't reinvent the wheel, it would be gnarly to help design attractions."

Raglan's eyes are wide, and the light, coupled with their silvery blue hue, makes them look wet. It makes him look pathetic, like the most harmless man in the world and Ricky's face grows hot.

He didn't mean to rant. There's a part of him which insists he shouldn't have ranted, that it is imperative he keep things such as future locations close to the vest. It would've been a thoughtless task on any other day, but something about the man in front of him inspires a tangle of both comfort and dread so intricate that klaxons begin going off. He cannot decide which is worse, or why Raglan makes him feel as such.

Ricky grabs his knife as discreetly as possible. Just need to cut my bacon, see? Don't worry about it.

Raglan's face goes on a parade of emotion — from frown to smile, to impassiveness, before settling back into a thin smile that betrays more than it hides. Ricky knows that look. He knows it well because he's seen it in the mirror dozens of times. That's longing. For what, he doesn't know, but he's afraid to dig.

Something's up with Raglan. And he knows that something is up with Ricky.

The air in that Denny's smells like mutually assured destruction.

"I once had a similar dream," he says, but elaborates no further.

Raglan finishes up by joining the Happy Plate Club, not a speck of yellow on that white porcelain as he wipes his mouth with a napkin that he then places over the clean plate. He leans back in the booth, the corners of his eyes crinkling.

"Do I get a glimpse of said dream?" Ricky says.

Raglan's shrug is almost coquettish, and it's such an absurd gesture to witness from a man like him that Ricky is charmed by it. "Are you interested in knowing?"

"Maybe. You did buy me a meal."

The old man considers it. "You're young enough to be my son."

"So's more than half the population. You can't go limiting yourself this way, dude."

"Do buses run this late?" he asks, and Ricky shakes his head. "Do you need me to drive you home? To yours, I mean, of course. I can drop you off wherever you're staying."

"It's fine. I can walk."

Raglan appraises Ricky's arms and he tenses before realizing that can't see anything out of place on them. It's more that he's not wearing a jacket late at night in early autumn.

"It's really no trouble," he says, splaying his hands on the table. "In fact, in case we never see each other again, I would feel a lot better knowing that you're someplace safe, Ricky."

The sound of his name in the man's Midwestern drawl sends a shiver right through him.

This is how gay men disappear. It's always the unassuming looking men with an underlying attractiveness that are the most sadistic fuckers out there, but the odds of two at a table are slim to none. Then again, so were the odds of bumping into his former counselor.

"Fine," he says. "Take me home, Mr. R."

Raglan sucks in a breath and has the audacity to look flustered, fishing for his wallet to drop a twenty on the table.

There are only so many ways the rest of the night can go, and it takes stepping out into the frigid pre-dawn air for Ricky to realize how badly he's fucked up. He's tasted terror on the back of his tongue twice before, that metallic essence of reality going viscerally wrong while he stands around powerless to stop it.

He racks his brain, wishes he could piece it together on the fly, to understand why, connect the dots, unbury the memory. But he can't. There's nothing but fog where sensory images should be.

Raglan unlocks the driver's side door of the magenta 1975 Chevy that shines purple under the parking lot lights. He looks up with a smile Ricky barely manages to reciprocate, well-versed in the art of playing along for the sake of survival.