Billy's calmed down enough that when he hears it, he doesn't flinch. But he also doesn't look up right away. He needed to compose himself. To suppress the urge to tell Mike to just go away. To insist on being alone. Anyone else would have been a comfort. Even Briggs, though Johnny was the one who'd help the most. But it was Mike he needed to figure out. And yet there he was. Billy had chosen this spot because it was hard to see a single person. No one from the house came out here, and he knew for a fact it was impossible to make out the end of the pier in the dark from the house. And yet Mike had found him still.

He just turns back toward the water, leaning both his arms on the rail, folded and resting his chin on them.

"Starting to wonder if you've got me chipped for GPS," he said, managing to sound almost like himself. But there was a faint resignation in his voice.

He didn't ask Mike what he wanted, because he didn't want to talk about it. Any of it. He just needed time to put everything back in the boxes where they belonged. Including his heart. That was perhaps why it had hit him so hard, why that cold monster in the hotel had frightened to his very core. It wasn't that Mike was a monster. Billy had been dealing with monsters on a daily basis for years. It was that he'd let himself open up. And he'd left that box open when everything else exploded. And it had been exposed when he put up that wall. Once he repaired the worst of the damage and got the lid back on that particular box, everything would be okay.