Are you dead? The words hit Alex like a punch to the balls and for a moment his hands trembled as he barely managed to clutch the cheap plastic coffee mug with one hand. The orange cherry of his cigarette traced tiny circles in the dark of the night before he managed to move it to more steady lips to take a drag. Am I? he wanted to respond. No, not yet. Not again, not yet. Fuck, fuck. He didn't need some stranger just reading his shit like that.
He tried to calm down, telling himself this dude was probably so fucked up he had no idea what he was saying at the moment. That was all this was, just some rando junkie rolling on whatever, saying whatever weird fucking things came to his mind. The fact that, in Alex's case, he'd have been right 99 times out 100, was really irrelevant. It didn't matter.
When Klaus continued on, it was easy for Alex to calm down a little. That was obviously it. Now he seemed a little more lucid. Okay, so he lived in the Park. He could deal with that. He couldn't remember if he'd seen the guy before but the truth was he really hadn't paid too much attention to the neighbors. He followed the other's eyes upwards, and couldn't help remembering a line from a song, something from his childhood, as it had been. Remembered another night when he'd said the same thing, to Luke, as they sat in the grass drinking from a fifth of his dad's whiskey, the first time either of them had drank. They were fourteen, and Luke - always such a nerd - had been trying to point out constellations. But it wasn't the Big Dipper that night, it was 'that one there looks like a dick with big swollen balls.' Alex had giggled, and replied, as he did now, softly to Klaus:
"Look at all those stars. Look at how goddamn ugly the stars are," with just enough of a cadence to his voice to indicate that he was maybe quoting something and not voicing his actual thoughts on the heavens that night. It actually was kind of pretty, but he was still a little shaken and not in the mood for pretty.