Chapter 36
Bathroom Meter
Asher was awake.
Levi knew before he opened his eyes. The breathing behind him was wrong for sleep — too uneven, too controlled, the deliberate breathing of a person who was conscious and choosing not to move.
An arm was across his ribs, there was warmth at his back, and Asher’s breath ghosted across his neck with every exhale.
He didn’t know how long Asher had been like that. Watching. Waiting. Breathing against him in the morning light of a studio apartment that had one room and no doors except the bathroom.
He opened his eyes and let his mind do what it did.
He’d been wrong. He’d told himself when he was put back in the game that the real Asher would be different on the outside, that every terrible thing Asher did and every simple thing he didn’t understand was because he had been playing too long. It made sense, at the time.
But he was wrong.
This was always him. That was what Levi realized as Asher cut him free from the chair when Levi said he was tired.
He had been, he didn’t lie about that, but he needed more time to think as well.
Everything was still foggy everyday. His thoughts moved slower than they did inside the game, but the one thing he kept coming back to was simple:
There are no resets.
The thought was a pulse with his heartbeat. No resets. No resets. No resets.
“You’re awake,” Asher whispered, tugging Levi back against his chest and nuzzling into his hair.
“How long have you been up?” Levi made no effort to turn over or look at Asher.
He stared at the poorly painted wall near his face.
When he laid down on the bed, facing the wall, he thought Asher would clean up and give him a moment to think, but Asher only blew out the candles, kicked off his boots, and crawled in behind him and just…
stayed there. Asher’s arm banded over his chest like the duct tape on the chair, pulled him close, and Levi found himself trapped between Asher and the wall.
“A while.” Asher kissed his shoulder. “Your breathing changed about twenty minutes ago. Did you know you cry a lot in your sleep? I liked holding you for that.”
Levi didn’t want to tell him the sequence of dreams he had that probably caused the crying.
“I need to use the bathroom,” he said instead.
“Okay.”
Asher’s arm lifted and Levi felt him moving on the bed, allowing him to get up. Levi stood slowly, his legs wobbling beneath him. His cane was still by the front door where he collapsed, but he wasn’t going to ask Asher to grab it for him. It felt like the wrong move.
His weight shifted wrong on the second step. Just a slight wobble, so small the cane would have caught it. Asher was beside him before the wobble finished, his arm shoved haphazardly in his own arm brace to support his weight.
“I’ve got you, baby,” Asher assured him as he grabbed Levi’s arm and slung it over one shoulder.
Levi let him.
The bathroom was small, even for one person.
Toilet, sink, and a bathtub shower stall combination with a concerning black growth along the grout that Levi had long since stopped trying to get fixed.
With Asher in there with him, the room was full.
Asher’s hand went to the waistband of Levi’s pajama pants and started to pull down.
“I can do it.” Levi’s hand caught Asher’s wrist.
Asher furrowed his brow, confused, looking at Levi’s hand on his wrist. “But I want to help?”
“I want some privacy when I pee. Please.”
Asher slowly pulled his hand back, his face still scrunched up like he was trying to figure out what he did wrong, and then his eyes widened. “Oh.”
He turned around and faced the door. He did not leave.
Good enough, Levi thought as he sat, because standing felt like too much for basic bathroom functions. I don’t want to find out what his help looks like if I piss myself.
“You know what’s funny?” Asher began, facing the door.
Levi closed his eyes. I don’t want to know.
“We never had to do this in there,” he continued. “It was one of those things we discussed. Should bathroom breaks be required? I decided against it…do you think we should have left it in? To make things more immersive?”
MORE immersive?
“I know what it feels like to die, Asher. I’ve been strangled, shot, stabbed, drowned, crushed, literally eviscerated, and shot again,” Levi scoffed as he flushed. “It was immersive enough, trust me.”
After last night, Levi tried really hard not to flinch, but he was sitting on a couch with a man he convinced himself didn’t exist. He honestly wasn’t even sure if this was real.
What if he was hallucinating? What if he was in the game?
What if he had stopped moving on that landing yesterday, had a heart attack, and this was just some sort of dying fantasy in his head?
So when Asher suddenly reached for him again, he jerked back, his hands coming up between them. Asher’s expression hardened.
Shit.
Asher’s hand closed over his throat, shoving him back into the couch and climbing on top of him. “I told you not to do that again,” Asher whispered, pressing a kiss to the tip of Levi’s nose. “Why did you do that again?”
He wanted to explain. He wanted to tell Asher he was scared, that the person who came back to the apartment wasn’t the person he had been in the game with, but Asher swallowed his answer with a kiss.
The grip on his throat loosened as Asher’s tongue met his, deep and unhurried, and the tension Levi had been carrying melted out of his spine in a single shudder.
He made a soft sound somewhere in the back of his throat as Asher’s other hand slid up beneath his shirt, his palm hot against the bare skin of his stomach.
His fingers trailed upward until his thumb settled just below one of Levi’s nipples and ghosted over the pebbling flesh.
Levi gasped.
“I knew you’d still like this,” Asher murmured against his mouth, and then his lips were moving — slow and open along Levi’s jaw, down the line of his throat, the wet heat of his mouth leaving cool patches behind on Levi’s skin — and Levi could feel Asher’s grin against the hollow under his ear.
I want him.
I want him so bad.
Asher’s teeth grazed the spot the bite mark used to live, and Levi tilted his head, his fingers threading through Asher’s hair to keep him there.
No, you fucking idiot. He’s a real life murderer.
Wanting this was an idea — a fantasy. An intrusive thought he’d entertained in the depths of his loneliness— not this, not his actual mouth on your actual neck, not his fingers actually under your shirt —
A moan ripped out of him as Asher pinched his nipple and sucked hard at the skin of his neck, his hips jerking forward of their own accord, looking for friction and finding Asher’s thigh wedged between his.
“You’re shaking,” Asher rumbled against his throat.
“You always shake at first. And then you stop shaking and you let me make you feel good.” He abandoned Levi’s nipple, moving down until he pressed the heel of his palm against the hard length of Levi through his pants in one long, unbroken stroke that made Levi’s breath catch on something close to a sob.
“This is better. This is real. This is the version where I get to keep you.”
His hips shifted. Levi felt the deliberate press of Asher— hard against his hip — and he knew exactly where this was going.
There are no resets. There are no resets. There are no —
“I’m hungry,” Levi blurted out in the least convincing declaration of hunger in the history of human speech. Hungry. Be hungry. Be a problem he can solve.
Asher pulled back an inch. “You’re hungry?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to cook you something,” Asher said with a brilliant smile. He nodded to himself once, kissed Levi on the cheek, and stood up.
“The tube —”
“Not through the tube. Real food. We’re going to figure out the eating thing, baby.” His eyes fell to Levi’s lips and lingered. “Then everything else.”
Asher began humming as he started cleaning up the kitchen.
What the fuck is happening?
It was the first normal thought he had had since he walked back into his apartment.