第43章
Earthworm Slim
The bite mark was the kind of sore that sat in the tissue and pulsed with his heartbeat. He was on his side of the bed, with Asher’s arm across his ribs, and the bite mark was pulsing against the pillow.
His jaw was sore, his lips felt swollen, and his whole body was carrying the evidence of yesterday the way it carried evidence after every encounter with Asher — each soreness in its own location, its own register, like a permanent record of what happened and where.
He lay still and waited for the shame.
It didn’t come the way he expected.
It was there — underneath, in the place where shame had lived after the boiler room and after the shower and after every time his body did things his mind hadn’t asked for. But something else was sitting on top of it, as a singular thought:
I’m still here.
That was the thing, and the thought was simple.
He did that to me yesterday, and I’m still here, and I didn’t break.
He’d fought. He’d shoved. He’d bitten Asher’s lip hard enough to draw blood, and the biting felt like the most honest thing he’d done in weeks — the first act that came from the person who lived and died and learned.
The bite on his body was his. He’d earned it.
Under the covers, his fingers found the bite mark. He pressed.
The pain was immediate, producing the same confusing comfort it always had in the game. I belong to someone. He pressed harder.
Asher shifted behind him, and his arm tightened.
Asher held him like this every night, tight and unmoving, as though Levi were an old baby blanket and Marianne would show up in the middle of the night to throw it away.
Levi lay still for a while longer. He had gotten a taste of sleeping with another person in the game, but actually having someone there with him, every single night and every single morning, was a kind of suffocation he was beginning to enjoy.
He knew it was fucked up. He knew all of this was fucked up.
He could live with fucked up.
He moved Asher’s arm — carefully, the way he’d learned, lifting the wrist and sliding out — and got up.
His legs held better than they had a week ago.
Asher had dialed a concierge doctor, which apparently was a thing wealthy people could do, and had a strange man with cold hands and an even colder demeanor come out to check on them both.
He gave them packets of exercises and said he would come back in a week since Asher insisted they didn’t need to leave the house.
He could cross the bedroom without holding the furniture now. Levi was convinced Asher must have been part machine, because he only used his arm brace in the morning and late at night; every other time he moved about, which was constantly, he only had a slight limp around the house.
Levi stood in the bathroom with the door that didn’t lock and stared at himself in the mirror.
The bite mark was dark on the left side of his neck, going onto his shoulder.
Purple-red, in the shape of Asher’s mouth, precise, in the same placement from the game.
It was back. He should have hated that it was back.
But he smiled at it, and his smile was wrong, because the tube was still in his face.
The bite mark said you belong to someone.
The tube said you are a body being maintained.
The bite was from a man who said he loved Levi, and whether or not that was the right version of love, or the right interpretation of it for someone like Asher, Levi knew he meant it.
The tube was from a woman who had sat in a chair, told him none of it mattered, and sent him home to stare at the ceiling.
They didn’t belong on the same body.
He peeled the edge of the medical tape off his face slowly, the adhesive pulling at the raw skin underneath with a sharp sting. The tape came off his cheek in a slow strip, and the skin underneath was red and angry, but it was breathing.
It didn’t slide so much as it did worm. A long, wet, sinuous thing that had been nesting in the dark tunnels behind his face.
He could feel every inch of it dragging through the delicate membranes of his nasal passage—scraping, tugging, unraveling something that had grown almost intimate with his sinuses.
His eyes flooded with reflexive tears. The deeper it came, the thicker the sensation became, until the tube finally slithered over the soft palate and triggered his gag reflex like a finger jammed down his throat.
For one hideous second, he was certain it had hooked on something inside him—some fleshy root or hidden fold—and that he was about to rip out a piece of his own throat.
The tube kept coming, longer than seemed possible, glistening with mucus and streaked with faint rust-colored threads of blood.
When the weighted tip finally cleared his nostril with a wet pop, it felt like something vital had been forcibly evicted from his skull.
He looked in the mirror again.
He looked like…he didn’t know what he looked like. He still felt a bit lost on what he was now…but he knew that he was still here.
That’s good enough.
He heard the bed creak. Footsteps — uneven, favoring one side. Asher was up.
Asher appeared in the doorway, leaning against the frame, his weight shifted off the bad leg.
There was sweat at his hairline, a fine sheen, the kind that didn’t match the temperature of the room.
His face had that just-woken quality, soft at the edges, his hair in wildly angled tufts that Levi wanted to smooth down, mid-yawn as his eyes found the sink.
He blinked several times, squinted, and then looked to Levi, his jaw dropping.
Is he going to be upset? I probably should have waited for the doctor…
Asher reached out and touched the red patch on Levi’s cheek — one fingertip, light and careful. The same hand that pushed Levi to his knees yesterday was touching the raw skin with the gentleness of a person touching something new and fragile.
Levi felt like he was going to vomit. Quiet Asher was always scary, because it seemed like Asher always had something to say.
Then Asher smiled so wide it looked painful, like whatever thing he was experiencing in his body was foreign and wrong and he was enduring it anyway as his eyes began to shine too much with unshed tears. “Welcome back, Levi.”
Levi grabbed Asher’s face and kissed him. It was small and close-lipped, but it was Levi’s choice in that moment.
It lasted two seconds. Maybe three.
He pulled back. Asher’s face was…the only way to describe it was sunshine. Full, unfiltered, with unmodulated delight and surprise. It made Levi want to laugh, but he pursed his lips and waited.
“What was that for?” Asher asked breathlessly.
“I don’t know.” Levi shrugged. “I just wanted to.”
“Do it again?”
Levi did it again.