Chapter 23 Luca
Chapter twenty-three
Luca
“You brought contraband.”
Thiago had his nose in the air, sniffing, when I came through the door.
I set the paper bag down on the rolling tray beside him. “That description would offend my mother.”
“It smells like honest cooking.”
“She hasn’t made a bad meal in over thirty years, and she isn’t about to start now.”
The room was quiet. It was after usual visiting hours, but the nurses allowed me in as long as I came alone.
Machines spoke in low electronic rhythms. Somewhere farther down the corridor a cart rattled once and stopped. The light panel above the bed was at its lowest setting. It made the room feel less like a hospital.
Thiago was propped slightly against the pillows. A rigid brace kept his left arm anchored across his chest. Bruising along his ribs had darkened through the afternoon into the dull yellow of healing.
I opened the bag and laid the food out on the tray: rice, braised greens, and a small container of stewed beans.
“You’re aware this is a liability,” Thiago said.
“For whom?”
“For the nurses who discover their patient is eating better than the staff.”
He pushed himself up a fraction. The movement made him inhale sharply once.
“Easy,” I said.
“I am being easy.”
“You are being stubborn.”
“Also true.”
He ate slowly at first, then with more appetite than he seemed to expect. I poured coffee from the thermos and set it beside him, settling into the chair at his right side with a book I’d brought but wouldn’t read.
The gris-gris pouch was in my jacket pocket. Not for protection. For remembrance.
Thiago finished the meal without rushing. I folded the containers back into the bag and moved the tray aside.
A knock sounded lightly against the doorframe. Dominic stepped in.
“The nurses were reluctant.” He smiled briefly.
Approaching the bed, Dominic focused on Thiago. “You look less like a patient,” he observed.
“That’s encouraging.”
“Your color has improved. That will please the doctors.” He glanced at the brace and monitors before looking at me. “You’ve been here all day?”
“Yes, except for leaving long enough to pick up food.”
“You should go home, eventually.”
“Eventually.”
He studied me for another second. “Not tonight,” he said. “Celeste is staying over to monitor my progress. Whatever that means.”
He stepped to the foot of the bed and rested one hand briefly against the footboard. Then he looked directly at Thiago.
“Mr. Reyes,” he said. “Thank you.”
Thiago shifted slightly against the pillows.
“I was doing my job.”
Dominic inclined his head to the right.
“Even so.”
He moved toward the door.
“Rest,” he said to both of us.
When he left, the room closed quietly around us again. Thiago watched the door for a moment. “He notices everything.”
“Yes.”
“That must be exhausting.”
“It is occasionally inconvenient.”
He leaned back into the pillows and looked at the ceiling. I stood and moved to the side of the bed.
I traced the edge of the bandage where the dressing met his skin at the shoulder. The tape sat flat and clean. The bruising below it was deepest at the deltoid. His skin was warm.
“It’s clean,” he said.
“I know. I’ve read the discharge paperwork for tomorrow twice.”
I adjusted the tape along one edge and straightened it .
“Tell me more about what happened after Afghanistan.”
He was quiet for a moment, choosing the starting point.
“There was a long administrative process,” he said finally. “Designed to make something complicated look procedural. And then private security work.”
“Did it take long to find?”
“I took whatever was available. For a while, that meant a pharmaceutical warehouse in New Jersey. Night shifts. A loading dock. Watching trucks instead of people.”
I thought about the man I had watched move through Dominic’s house for twelve days, staring at trucks. Eight months of checking shipping manifests and monitoring security cameras covering a loading bay at two in the morning.
“Eight months,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Before Eamon found you.”
Thiago nodded. “He told you.”
“When you were in surgery. In the way he tells things.”
“Which is.”
“Three sentences. No editorializing.”
“He walked into the loading bay one morning,” Thiago said. “Looked around as if he were taking inventory of everything wrong with the picture and then asked me one question.”
I waited.
“What’s the job of protection?”
“And you said.”
“Get them home and always protect the individual first, not the surrounding institutions.” He exhaled once, slowly. “He said: come work for me. We’re based in Seattle, but you can live in New York. That was the entire conversation.”
I looked at him.
“And since then,” I said, “you’ve been careful not to let anyone depend on you longer than the job requires.”
He was quiet and stared into the distance.
I hadn’t planned to say it that directly, but I had learned across twelve days that Thiago didn’t need things softened.
“You arrive,” I continued. “You secure the space, and you get the person through intact.” He looked back at me. “And before anything settles, before anyone can count on you to stay past the contract date, you step back.”
The room was silent.
“Because if I stay,” he said, his voice low, “I’ll start building something.”
“And the last time you built something,” I added, “the institution took it away.”
“Yes,” Thiago said.
I reached into my jacket pocket. The gris-gris pouch settled into my palm, warm from the fabric. I placed it on the bedside table.
Then I looked at him and whispered his name, “Santiago.”
He glanced at the pouch and then met my gaze.
“Everything can be unmade,” I said. “You can demolish a building. You can alter a score and place it in a box someone trusted. The levees can fail.”
Thiago didn’t look away.
“None of those are reasons not to build in the first place.”
He exhaled and then looked up at the ceiling. When he spoke, his voice was lower than it had been all evening.
“I don’t know how to do that,” he said. “Stay.”
“I know.” I remained standing beside him. “I’ve been watching you try to figure it out for at least the last week.”
Neither of us moved.
Then he reached for me with his right hand, his fingers closing loosely around my wrist, and I sat on the edge of the bed beside him.
The physical arrangement was complicated. Thiago’s injured arm changed everything: the brace, bandaging, and the IV line trailing from the back of his right hand. I shifted my weight carefully and braced one hand at his uninjured side.
He reached up and touched my face. I kissed the side of his hand and then leaned in to kiss his lips.
He tasted of coffee and the garlic in my mother’s food.
His hand moved from my jaw down the side of my neck and rested at my collar. He stared into my eyes as he unbuttoned the top button.
I drew back enough to look at him. “Tell me where you are,” I said.
“Here,” he said. “Right now. That’s where I am.”
I kissed him again, and he unbuttoned another button, sliding his hand inside my shirt, touching my bare skin.
I reached under the edge of the thin hospital blanket. Beneath it, Thiago wore the loose cotton pants the hospital had provided. I ran my palm along the outside of his right thigh, feeling the muscle there.
Thiago’s breathing grew more rapid.
I kept my movements slow and deliberate, watching his face for any sign that the shoulder pulled or the bruised ribs protested. When his jaw tightened once, I stopped.
“Shoulder or ribs?” I asked.
“Ribs. It’s fine.”
“Tell me if it isn’t.”
He gripped my hair and then released it . I slipped my hand beneath the waistband of the cotton pants.
Thiago exhaled through his nose. I wrapped my fingers around his cock and his head dropped back against the pillow.
He was already hard.
I worked him slowly. A long, deliberate stroke from base to tip with the pad of my thumb tracing the head. His hips shifted upward toward my hand. I kept the pace slow.
He rubbed one of my nipples with his thumb, and I bit my lip. I watched his face.
The discipline was still visible in him, but it was losing ground. His breath was shallower. The line of his jaw softened.
I tightened my grip slightly on the upstroke, and his breath caught audibly.
“Luca.” Thiago’s voice was rough.
“I have you,” I said.
He pulled his hand out of my shirt and rested it on my wrist. Not directing my movement, merely being present.
I kept my steady, measured pace. With his right hand, Thiago reached for the bed rail, gripping it tightly. He pushed his head back against the pillow, with the long line of his throat exposed.
Seconds later, he came quietly, small gasps breaking through his control.
Thiago’s body arched once and then settled. He released his grip on the rail. When his breathing evened out, I walked to the restroom to prep a warm, wet hand towel to clean him up.
I returned and settled on the edge of the bed beside him.
For a long time, we didn’t speak. He reached for my hand and held it.
“My apartment in Washington Heights has a second room,” he said at last.
I turned my head to look at him.
“It has a window that looks out over the Hudson.”
“Is that an observation or an invitation?”
He rubbed his thumb across my knuckles. “I’m still deciding,” he said.
“Take your time.”
“I don’t know how New Orleans and Washington Heights coexist,” he said. “Logistically.”