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“But is it bragging if it’s the truth?” Cally asked, turning to address my friends. “No one on our roster works harder than Mikey.”

I did work hard.

I’d spent my whole life out-grinding everyone, trying to prove that I was worth taking a shot on. That effort hadn’t always panned out—hadn’t always gotten me where I thought I deserved to be—but I’d finally done it. And having Cally validate that effort in front of my oldest, closest friends made me feel like the king of the world.

I bumped my knee against his under the table. “Nobody on any roster is smarter than this guy. He sees the play unfold three steps ahead of anyone else.”

Dave leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table, only to abruptly pull back. “Fucking hell,” he muttered, revealing a wet splotch above his left cuff. “I hate wet sleeves.”

“It’s the ‘tism,” Soren stated matter-of-factly, taking a long pull from the mug in his hand. He set it down with a hard clink against the table, his thick blond mustache coated in foam.

I tapped my upper lip to alert him to the residue, and he dragged his sleeve across his mouth to wipe it clean.

“I’m not autistic, asshole,” Dave argued. Soren simply shrugged, but Dave kept going. “Just because you are doesn’t mean everyone else is.”

Soren fixed his pale eyes on Dave, then held up his index finger. “One: hyper-fixating on World War II to the point where you could teach a college-level course on it alongside the physics course you already teach.”

“Knowing your country’s history is a good thing,” Dave sputtered. “Especially now with all the fucking fascists.”

“Fucking fascists,” the group—Cally included—murmured with a collective shake of our heads.

“Two,” Soren continued, ticking up another finger. “Your total inability to function if your environment isn’t organized exactly to your liking.”

Dave waved his hands around wildly, encompassing the loud, chaotic bar surrounding us. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“And you know and love every inch of this place,” Sal interjected.

Dave snorted and muttered something I couldn’t quite make out, but I thought was, “That doesn’t prove anything.”

“Third,” Soren said, popping up his ring finger. “You have a giant callus on the outside of your left thumb from where you’ve been rubbing at it for years. That’s how you sooth yourself.”

“We all have calluses,” Dave argued, looking between each of us.

“Yeah, but that’s your only one,” Axel replied. “And the rest of us work with our hands.”

He was a firefighter. His hands weren’t just callused; they were burned and scarred to hell.

“Speak for yourself,” Pauly—who worked for the city in the Department of Public Works—held his hands out, gazing at his well-manicured fingers admiringly. “My hands are baby fucking soft.”

My gaze fell to Cally’s hands, which were as callused as mine, though he also had the weird one on his right thumb he picked at whenever he was nervous.

Never in a million years would I have thought I’d like the way rough hands felt dragging against my skin, but fuck. There was something about the way his touch was never soft—not even when he was being soft—that just did it for me.

My dick gave a happy little twitch thinking about Cally touching me. I slid my hand from the table and lowered it to my crotch, pressing hard, and telling my dick to behave while I pictured every unsexy thing I could think of.

I managed to drag my mind out of the gutter in time to see Dave shoot a frustrated look at Soren, making me realize I hadn’t heard a word either of them had said in the last several seconds.

“And what about you?” Dave fired back, firing off a a list of “quirks” that had led Soren’s girlfriend to recommend he visit a neuropsychologist.

“You spit out your food if it’s the wrong texture—you’d rather starve than eat oatmeal. And don’t get me started on your clothing! I’ve seen you throw out a whole pack of new boxers because a seam felt wrong. And you freak out if one of us changes plans on you with less than an hour’s notice. Oh! And you literally cannot make eye contact with strangers unless you’ve practiced the entire conversation in your head first.”

Soren nodded, his face lighting up like Dave was finally getting it. “Yes. Because I am autistic.”

It wasn’t lost on me that many of these were similar to behaviors I’d observed in Cally—his aversion to chicken thighs because of what he called their “tubes” and the “fat pockets” that felt gross in his mouth, or the way he had six of the same sweater because it was the only one that “didn’t feel weird” when he wore it, and how I’d learned not to spring things on him because it took him a long time to recalibrate if I did, or the fact that he routinely rattled off facts and figures about the most niche topics with the knowledge of an expert. But most of all, it was the way prolonged eye contact seemed to make him so goddamn uncomfortable.

Not that any of that mattered one fucking bit. If I loved Dave like a brother, I loved Cally like … well, like the goddamn love of my life.

How his brain functioned was what made him so uniquely him.