Ryan is woken from a light doze by the thump of something on the floor. He rolls over and flicks the bedside lamp on in time to watch the stone finish its lazy, rolling path across the carpet.
“The f**k?” he mumbles to himself, rubbing sleep from his eyes with the heel of his hand, and meandering over to the window.
Alex is sitting in the nearest branch of the cherry tree, straddling the branch as if it isn’t so high off the ground, and getting thin enough to be risky, even for him.
“You could’ve just come in, you know,” Ryan says, and Alex shrugs.
He stands back to let Alex climb in through the window, with surprising grace considering the awkward manoeuvre that Ryan knows it is, and frowns at the downturned face.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
Alex says nothing, but when Ryan pulls him c
