He laughs as he says it, nose wrinkling, collapsing deeper into the bed. In the warm lamplight of his childhood home, she looks like she wants to indulge, like she already believes it when she opens her mouth to ask: you’re the expert on this, are you not?

And he laughs some more. Of course, yes, I am.

Leo has never learned how to be anything else.

When his family home grows somber: grey-heavy evenings, clipped-answers mornings, Leo is not his brother, who scowls; he is not his sister, who hides. He thinks back on it now, and maybe that’s that – that is the day he unknowingly opened the page, and the smile, as it grew from confusion to pained strain to ease, wrote:

How to be loved – first, you make it easy to love you.

When he’s twelve, Leo’s mind is a sunlit window left open: he runs fast, and climbs fences, and reaps nice velvet trousers, and there’s hardly a person he meets whom he won’t make his friend. He forgets the bins and the laundry again, and it’s a shared joke in the living room: Leo is like this, they say, but he’s still our good boy. Did you see him in The Tempest last Friday, or the one before last?

How to be loved - you make sure you deserve it.

Leo learns love is delightful. He’s loud about it, wants the world to know how it is, the times he sleeps on his desk, page 146—‘Applications of Linear Functions’—pressed into his cheek after a night of long phone calls; the time he finds his first job bagging groceries at the co-op to buy her more flowers than she could ever pretend to not want.

When her smile turns to bite, he blinks it away: people are not like that. He lies in the blue hush of the night, watching the ceiling, unsure of what feels wrong. There’s a dull ache he can’t place; he watches her like a puzzle now. She watches him like a ringmaster.

How to be loved - you broaden your definition of it.

When his heart is an ashtray—cigarette butts put out on a surface that will not flinch—he’s too tired for this dance, and too grown-up to be harbouring metaphors like this in his head.

But he’s still young and broad-shouldered, and his friends swoon when he passes them in the bar to make fun of those who do swoon, and Leo laughs, Leo smiles; this kind of smile cracks you open, because it never protects itself. He’s been told it is dangerous, and he just shakes his head, barking a laugh—could you drop a cheesier line?

Some things don’t change, but some do. He still trusts too easy.

He walks out even easier.

How to be loved - you learn to not need it.

In a smoke-filled room of golf-tanned men with thinning hair, Leo glides through handshakes and back pats, shuffling favors and IOUs until they land in right pockets. It’s invigorating, and scary, and meaningless. He knows every name in this room, their wives’ names, their children’s, too. He’s been running hot-wired, on fumes.

He spends his afternoons sleeping alone in a room, unsure of why it feels so suffocating just to get up and leave; why he thinks he might break something if he hears one more noise from the deli across the street. He shuts the windows. He’s late.

Boss calls him his lucky charm anyway, and Leo thinks, stupidly, about cereal.

How to be loved - the article will continue after the commercial break.

Sometimes Leo walks through the forest too early, when he’s back home, watches the road fizzle out from under his feet, head down lazy, like he might find something he’d lost long ago. When he comes back, he discovers everyone's lost him, and he almost missed breakfast, and he stuffs his mouth full of toast with burnt crusts and homemade plum jam and the last of the scrambled eggs, and she laughs as she looks at him, rolls her eyes.

He looks back when she smiles, her eyes bright, light, always warm. He has to remind himself the glint of a fire-lined ring in them is just a mirage.

How to be loved.

When the room is finally asleep, it is quiet, blackbirds singing at dawn. Leo rolls to his side, watches her, watches the curtain catch wind.

He’s alone here, in the pause before the world remembers itself. It’s not the worst thing.

The pillow’s white linen presses against his cheek; the chilly air of the morning ripples around his back. He looks at her soft.

“You never tell anyone you’re not sure you are.”