The butcher's son didn’t talk like his father. He didn’t yell. He didn’t insult people. He didn’t have that thick, rusted-knife kind of voice. He was... something else. Softer, like he didn’t quite fit into the skin and bones he’d been given.

Cagalera had heard him once, talking to his younger brother. He lent him CDs and showed him stuff on his phone. No one else did that with his little brother. Everyone called you “soft” for playing alone and refusing to kick balls. But he didn’t. He sat next to him on the curb and talked about Japanese music and sad movies. Sometimes he brought old comics, carefully cleaned.

“That dude’s weird,” Cagalera said one day to his friend Moloteco, spitting on the ground. “Bet he’s one of those.”

“People say he is,” Moloteco replied. “And that he’s always hanging out with your brother.”

Cagalera laughed, but something in his chest ached. Hurt like when they used to hit him with a charger cable. That night, without meaning to, he passed by the butcher shop again.

It wasn’t a coincidence.

He kept going back. Around the time he knew the boy came out to smoke. Or when the father wasn’t around. He’d stand in front, pretending he was just walking by, waiting for someone. But he always looked at him.

“What are you doing here?” the boy asked one afternoon, leaning on the doorframe.

“Nothing. What’s it to you?”

“Wanna come in?”

Cagalera didn’t answer. He just walked in.

Inside, it didn’t smell like death the way it did when the father was there. A fan was spinning, the radio played low in English, and a few crooked plants sat in a mayonnaise tub.

“Do you like reading?” the boy asked, showing him a dusty stack of books.

“Why would I read?”

“Alright.”

He didn’t argue. Didn’t push. Just offered things like it was no big deal. A soda, a place to sit, silence.

And that confused Cagalera more than anything else ever had.

The rumors got worse. That the boy was different. That he was too soft. That’s why he was so “nice”—because he wanted something.

Cagalera told his brother not to see him again.

He tried not to go back. But the next day, he passed by the butcher shop again.

There were no questions. No need for explanations. Just thick silence where sometimes their knees brushed, where sometimes Cagalera fell asleep listening to his voice. And once, he woke up with a blanket over his shoulders, the room quiet, the fan spinning.

That time, he was still awake. The boy’s hand barely touched his hair, gentle and slow.

Cagalera mumbled something he didn’t understand until later.

“I think I like you.”