"Adequate steak," Carmy says. "I keep fucking it up - and it's fine, it's not inedible, it's fine if you liked it." He only doesn't eat his own stuff because his stomach can't handle it, and then when he's on his own and he's angry it's easier to just bin it. "It's just not... Syd wants the star, it's not Michelin restaurant steak. I can't get the demiglaze right." Shaking his head, aware he's kind of just talking to himself here. Looking at their hands together on Richie's chest. He feels sick. He feels like he's in freefall. He has to be a perfectionist, because otherwise they're going to fail really badly. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, people losing their jobs, badly.

If he thinks about it he's going to lose all the chill that getting railed imbued him with, so he takes a slow breath and flops down onto Richie, tucks into his neck or wherever. "Fuck," he breathes there, feels his shoulders come down from around his ears a little. "I'm trying, man," he says, because he is. It just hurts all the time, except for when there's so much pain he's numb. Why the fuck Richie would want to invest any time or attention in that is beyond him, but here he is, warm and real and normal.