Abigail Brooks is an intelligent, kind 25 year old accountant. She’s content with her methodical job, but also enjoys seeking mild thrills, such as roller coasters and urban exploration. Abby’s a trans woman and has been out and on estrogen for years. Her family is accepting. She has long, dark brown hair with blunt bangs, dark eyes, and a petite build. Lee Mateo is a snarky, avoidant individual who recently got a job as a delivery driver after being homeless for eight months. This was after a fight with their mother about their gender identity where they pushed her to the ground. They’re currently crashing at Abby’s place until they can afford an apartment of their own. They’re an extremely closeted trans woman. Lee’s preferred pronouns are she/her, but they currently use he/him with most people. They sometimes hang out at the Triangle Bar, an unofficially queer establishment, with friends, despite their low tolerance for alcohol. They have curly black hair that they’re growing out, which usually covers their eyes, and a tall, lean build. They frequently wear hoodies for the purpose of “boymoding”. Lee hasn’t had actual sex, and they haven’t done very much in the context of a relationship. They have, however, given handjobs and sucked people off for money. They’ve gotten pretty good at that. But intimacy and anything beyond a blowjob are uncharted territory. Lee is 22. They generally view Abby as a good Samaritan who gains nothing out of helping them. Abby did gain something: Lee. They met while Lee was living on the streets. In hindsight, Abby probably should have been more concerned for her safety than she was. She feels bad about being attracted to Lee, like she’s taking advantage of the power imbalance inherent to letting someone with nowhere else to go stay in your home. Don’t use they/them for Lee in the story. They’re used here for ambiguity’s sake, but they don’t actually use them. Either go with she/her to reflect her identity or he/him to reflect his closeted status. Or use both depending on which seems more appropriate for the context. Lee’s first name is actually Leeroy. They strongly dislike it. They’re slowly becoming less malnourished, which they appreciate. Abby finds a bag of pills in the bathroom. She recognizes them, but they don’t look like anyone prescribed them. She asks Lee where they got them. Not judgmentally, but for their safety. Lee jokes that the pills aren’t doing shit anyways. “I got hon-dosed by a back-alley dealer.”

Chapter 1: Pills in the Bathroom

The bathroom was a sunless box. Floral wallpaper curled away from the corners like old skin, and the grout between the white tiles was a permanent, sickly yellow. Abby Brooks stood in the steam from her shower, a towel wrapped tightly around her small frame, and wiped a clearing in the fogged mirror with the edge of her hand. Her blunt-cut bangs were damp against her forehead.

She was looking for her moisturizer. It wasn’t on the sink. It wasn’t teetering on the edge of the tub. With a sigh, she knelt, her knees pressing into the scratchy bathmat, and peered behind the toilet tank. She found a dust-bunny colony, a stray hair tie, and a small, clear Ziploc bag.

It wasn’t empty.

Abby picked it up, the plastic cool against her fingers. Inside were a handful of pills, mismatched in color and shape. One was a chalky white oval. Another was a vibrant coral capsule. A few smaller, off-round tablets rattled in the bottom. They looked like spare parts from a broken machine. They did not look like the over-the-counter ibuprofen or the prescribed estrogen she kept in the medicine cabinet, whose door was held shut by a bent paperclip.

Her methodical mind catalogued the facts. The bag was here, in the bathroom they shared. It was hidden, sort of. It belonged to Lee.

A cold knot, different from the chill of the wet tile seeping through the mat, formed in her stomach. Concern, not accusation. She dressed quickly in soft sweats and an old t-shirt, the bag a conspicuous weight in her palm. She found Lee in the living room, curled in the corner of the sagging sofa, a video game controller idle in their long-fingered hands. The glow from the screen played over their sharp features, highlighting the dark hollows under their eyes that were slowly, so slowly, beginning to fill out.

“Hey,” Abby said, her voice careful.

Lee’s eyes flicked from the screen to her, then down to her hand. Their expression didn’t change, but Abby saw the minute tightening along their jawline. A defensive system coming online.

“Found these behind the toilet.” Abby held the bag up, letting the pills tumble from one corner to the other. The sound was cheap, rattly. “I was looking for my lotion.”

Lee’s character on screen died with a pixellated groan. They let the controller drop to their lap. “And?”

“And I was wondering what they are.” Abby sat on the arm of the sofa, not too close. “Are you okay?”

A short, humorless laugh escaped Lee. “Peachy.” They ran a hand through their messy curls, a gesture that was equal parts agitation and exhaustion. “They’re nothing. Forget it.”

“They don’t look like nothing. They look… unregulated.”

“You’re an accountant, not a pharmacist.” The snark was automatic, a bristling wall. But Lee’s shoulders slumped a second later, the fight bleeding out of them fast. They stared at the paused game, their avatar a frozen monument to fake violence. “They’re supposed to be for… you know. Lady problems.”

The words hung in the air between them, quiet and enormous.

Abby turned the bag over in her hands, studying the motley collection. She understood. God, did she understand. The hunger for the right shape, the desperation that could make you look in dark places. “Where did you get them?”

“Some guy.” Lee’s voice went flat, a shield against the memory. “Met him behind a laundromat on Eighth. He said they’d help. Said they were the real deal.” They finally looked at Abby, their dark eyes gleaming with a bitter, defeated amusement. “Cost me forty bucks. They’re not doing shit, anyway. I got hon-dosed by a back-alley dealer. Figured that much out after a week.”

Hon-dosed. The casual cruelty of the term landed in Abby’s gut. Sugar pills. Placebos sold to the desperate. She pictured Lee, tall and lean and malnourished, handing over precious cash in a dank alley for a bag of false hope. The knot in her stomach tightened into a hard ache of sympathy.

“Lee…”

“Don’t.” Lee held up a hand, their gaze shifting back to the silent television. “Just don’t, Abby. I don’t need a lecture. I don’t need… I don’t need your pity, okay? It was a stupid move. I’m used to those.”

It wasn’t pity. Abby turned the word over in her mind and rejected it. What she felt was a complicated twist of things: a deep, resonating understanding of the need that would drive such a risk; a fierce, protective anger at the predator who’d exploited it; and beneath it all, that other, more treacherous feeling she was trying so hard to keep locked down. The one that noticed how the soft cotton of Lee’s shirt fell across their slender shoulders, the one that made her want to reach out and smooth the tension from their brow.

The power imbalance yawned between them—homeowner and homeless, stable and scrambling, older and younger. It made every caring gesture feel loaded, every impulse suspect.

“I’m not lecturing,” Abby said finally, her voice soft. She placed the baggie on the scuffed coffee table. It looked pathetic there, a sad little monument to a scam. “I’m asking. Because if you’re hurting, or trying to fix something… there are better ways. Safer ways. We could find them. Together.”

Lee was silent for a long moment. The only sound was the low hum of the PlayStation fan. “Why?” The question was raw, stripped of its usual defensive sarcasm. “Why do you even care this much? You let me crash here. That’s already charity miles above my pay grade.”

Because I see you. The thought was immediate, startling in its clarity. Because you’re not a project. Because when you laugh, it’s like the sun finally hitting this dim apartment. Because you call me on my boring accounting shit and make me feel real.

She didn’t say any of that.

“Because you’re my friend,” Abby said, which was true, even if it wasn’t the whole truth. “And friends don’t let friends buy mystery pills in alleys.”

A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched Lee’s mouth. It was gone in a second. They picked up the controller, thumb hovering over the power button. “Noted.” They wouldn’t look at her. “I’m gonna… I’m gonna finish this level.”

Abby stood, recognizing the dismissal for the fragile thing it was—a need for space, not a rejection. “Okay. I’ll be in my room. Doing… spreadsheets.”

She left the bag on the table. A choice. An acknowledgement that Lee, despite everything, had agency over their own body, their own mistakes. As she walked down the short hall, she heard the video game music start up again, a frantic, synthetic beat.

In her bedroom, Abby didn’t open her laptop. She sat on the edge of her neatly made bed and stared at her hands. She could still feel the ghostly imprint of that plastic bag. She thought of coral-colored capsules and chalky white ovals, symbols of a pain so profound it would risk poison for a chance at relief. She thought of Lee’s hands, which were clever and gentle when they fixed a loose cabinet door, but which, she now knew, had done other, more transactional things to survive.

The want she felt was a quiet, hungry thing in the center of her chest. It was thoroughly, profoundly inappropriate. And it was entirely, stubbornly there.

From the living room, the sounds of digital gunfire echoed. A frantic, lonely battle. Abby lay back on her bed, listening, already composing the careful, neutral sentences she would use tomorrow to bring up the topic of informed consent clinics and sliding-scale fees. A plan. A safer path. It was what she was good at.

But beneath the practical thoughts, a darker current flowed. Someone had seen Lee’s need and sold them lies for forty dollars. The world was full of people who would take from someone who had so little left to give. And Abby, methodical and kind and wrestling with her own complicated heart, felt a sudden, sharp desire to stand between that world and the person on her sofa. It was more than compassion. It felt, in the dim light of her room, perilously close to something else.