For Michael, it’s more than being trapped in New York. He’d been told to stay here. Commanded. It was the first instruction that had ever come to him, and the strongest, the most irrefutable. Even now, the thought of disobeying it is rattling. If he goes somewhere else and comes back, he tells himself, nothing bad should happen. He’ll still be living here. Right? That’s what matters.
He closes his eyes as Lee kisses him. It helps make things quieter behind his skull.
“We’re not going to Jersey on a plane,” he says. “You can walk to that dump. We have to go somewhere good. Like… all the guys at the office are always flying out to California. They come back and talk about the beaches and the sun and the trees. Don went to Hawaii once, which seems nice in theory but I think it made him wanna die.”