Chapter 41 #2
He looked at Levi when he said the last part. He couldn’t help it.
“I went looking for a feeling,” Asher said. “Or to kill a fear. I didn’t go looking for a game and I did not go looking for a person.” His voice had gone quiet and certain, the precise register, the one for things that mattered. “I came out with you.”
Levi was looking at him with an expression Asher couldn’t fully read, but he understood, dimly, that the thing he’d just said as the happiest sentence of his life landed in Levi as something else.
He didn’t know which parts. He set the not-knowing aside to turn over later.
He’s here with you still. Be satisfied with that.
So he changed the subject. “Do you want to watch something?”
“Sure.” Levi’s voice was rough. He cleared it. “Yeah.”
Asher picked up the remote. He had every streaming service and never cancelled any of them, but he didn’t open those. He opened the video app, and his account, and the long list of the only thing he actually watched.
Manufacturing videos. How things were made — float glass, ball bearings, fountain pens, the machines that made other machines. He found them soothing. Process without people. A thing going into one end of a system and a correct, finished thing coming out the other.
But not the straight ones. He scrolled past those to the channel he kept coming back to, the one where some man had taken the factory footage, stripped the original narration off, and recorded his own — and the new narration was confident, authoritative, and gloriously wrong.
Asher couldn’t have said why it worked on him.
He’d found it eighteen months ago and watched most of it twice.
He picked the one about ball bearings and pressed play.
On screen, the narrator, in a voice of total authority, explained that ball bearings were harvested. That the spheres were the eggs of a docile industrial animal and the factory’s job was mostly to keep them calm.
Levi made a sound.
Asher looked over fast. He thought, for a second, that something was wrong — and then he understood that the sound was a laugh, a real one, surprised out of Levi and caught halfway behind his hand.
“What is this?” Levi asked, his hand still in front of his face.
“I don’t know,” Asher said honestly. “He’s wrong about all of it. He’s been wrong for forty episodes.”
On the screen the narrator was describing, with deep concern, the ball bearings’ migration patterns. Levi laughed again — fuller this time, his shoulders coming down at last, the cane sliding to lean against the couch arm because his hands had stopped holding it.
Asher watched him laugh and did not watch the screen at all.
This was the thing. This was the thing under all the other things.
Levi loose against the cushion with his guard somewhere on the floor, laughing at a man lying about ball bearings, in Asher’s house, in the warm stripe of the kitchen light.
Asher’s arm was along the back of the couch behind Levi’s shoulders, not touching, almost, and the house was quiet and the acreage was dark outside the windows and Levi was here and Levi was laughing.
He is on my couch in my house laughing at my television and tomorrow I’m going to get his posters and put them on my walls and this is what it’s for. This is the feeling. This is the thing the machine was supposed to find and the machine found it and now it just lives here.
Levi’s body, over the course of the video, listed one inch to the left. Toward Asher. Away from the arm of the couch and toward the arm along the back.
One inch. Levi probably didn’t notice.
Asher noticed. He noticed and it sat in his chest, bright and unbearable.
The video ended. The screen went to the auto-play menu. The room was dark except for the TV glow and the kitchen light and the quiet of the acreage pressing in through the windows.
“This was nice,” Levi said softly. His voice had that quality it got at the end of a day exhaustion had won and something softer was underneath. “Thank you for — the house is nice.”
Asher’s chest was full. His arm was almost on Levi’s shoulders. Levi had leaned one inch toward him during a video about ball bearing migration and the evening was the best evening of Asher’s life because Levi was in his house, and —
“Maybe I’ll spend the night,” Levi said. “We can figure the rest out tomorrow.”
The warmth inside of Asher’s body stopped and he felt the cold edge of disconnection settling in again. His muscles ached. His thigh throbbed. Everything that felt good and right dried up.
Maybe.
The night.
Levi said maybe. Levi said the night — singular, one, a single night in a house Asher had brought him to so they could live in it together. Levi was sitting on Asher’s couch one inch closer than he’d started and Levi was treating this like a sleepover he was deciding whether to attend.
He doesn’t want to move in with me?
No.
The thought landed once. Heavy.
He’s forgetting again. I need to remind him.
He turned toward Levi on the couch and closed the foot of space between them in one movement.
His hand went to Levi’s jaw — the same grip, the one his hand knew, the one that said look at me — and his mouth found Levi’s before Levi could finish the breath he’d been taking.
His other hand found the back of the couch behind Levi’s head and then Levi was pressed into the cushion with Asher’s weight on him and Asher’s mouth on his.
The disconnection went quiet.
It went quiet the way it always went quiet when there was zero space between them — the glass wall that had been between Asher and every person he’d ever met could not exist at zero distance. His chest against Levi’s chest. The gap closed and the pain stopped and he felt the warmth coming back.
You’re not leaving. There’s nowhere to leave to. There’s nowhere in the world where I wouldn’t be and you know that and I know that and the word “maybe” is something you said because you’re still forgetting. I’m going to remind you right now.
Levi made a sound against his mouth, the one that was shaped like stop but didn’t have the force of stop behind it, and his hands came up to Asher’s chest. Levi’s face was right there — flushed, breathing hard, his eyes wide and his pupils blown.
“Are you scared?” Asher asked.
Levi’s throat worked. “Yes.”
“Good.” He watched Levi’s eyes. The shine in them — the wet, terrified brightness. “You’re so beautiful when you’re scared of me, Levi. You have no idea.”
Levi’s breathing stuttered and Asher could feel it against his chest — the catch, the hitch, the place where Levi’s lungs forgot what they were doing because Asher’s words had taken up the space the air was supposed to go.
He kissed Levi’s jaw. Then his neck, below the ear, and Levi gasped. Asher held still with his mouth on the spot and listened to the gasp fade before he bit down, just a little. Levi yelped. A small, high sound — surprised out of him. His hand slid from Levi’s jaw to his throat.
Levi’s body had remembered it wanted to be alive because Asher reached in and reminded it, and afterward Levi had cried against his chest and held on.
This was the same thing. There was a wrong word in Levi right now — maybe — and the word was in the way, and Asher knew how to move things that were in the way.
“You’re not just spending the night,” Asher whispered, his mouth against Levi’s ear now. “You’re staying. Say it.”
“Asher —”
He squeezed. Enough that Levi felt the edges of it — the airway narrowing with the promise of closing. “Say it.”
Levi’s mouth fell open and Asher smiled, because he knew that open mouth, he had seen that open mouth dozens of times.
It was the mouth Levi made when he wanted to be kissed and couldn’t admit it.
Levi was asking. Levi’s body was asking even while Levi’s voice stayed quiet, and Asher loved him so much in that moment he could barely hold it.
Levi’s hands were on his wrist, but the grip was going soft.
His fingers were loosening, one at a time, the tension draining out of them — and Asher felt that too, and he wanted it, because a hand that stopped fighting was a hand that had decided.
The fight was leaving Levi the way it always did, the way it had left him in every room Asher had ever cornered him in, and what came after the fight left was the part Asher lived for.
This is what the flat water and the thin air was about. This is what was missing from every room I’ve ever been in. You, underneath me, arriving. Choosing to stop fighting.
He was hard against Levi’s hip. He wasn’t hiding it.
The arousal and the warmth and the quieting of the disconnection were the same event happening in different parts of his body at the same time.
Levi could feel it — Asher could see Levi feeling it, the awareness in his eyes, the small shift of his hips that was involuntary and that they were both going to pretend was involuntary.
He wanted to be closer. He was pressed against Levi with his full weight and it wasn’t close enough.
He wanted to be inside Levi’s chest. He wanted to live behind Levi’s ribs where the heartbeat was.
Pinning was the nearest approximation and the approximation wasn’t enough, and it would never be enough.
The not enough was its own kind of ache — better than the empty ache, richer, the ache of wanting more of a thing he already had. He could live with that.
He loosened his grip on Levi’s throat and pressed his forehead against Levi’s. Their noses touching. Breathing each other’s air. “Say it, Levi.”
Levi closed his eyes and Asher watched the tears track down his face, catching along the tube that still marred his face. He wrapped his arms around Asher, his hands shaking, and whispered, “I’ll stay.”