第44章
Slice of Life
Levi chewed slowly, standing at the counter in Asher’s kitchen in the morning light through the window over the sink.
Just toast today again because it was simple and he knew he could feed it to himself, it would stay down, and he’d be okay.
His jaw worked and his throat accepted the swallow and the food went where food was supposed to go.
He was on his third piece this week. Not third today — third in seven days.
But each one had stayed down and each one had been a piece of toast he put in his own mouth and chewed with his own jaw without Asher’s fingers or Asher’s hand or Asher’s voice telling him when to swallow.
The meal supplements were still on the counter.
He still drank two a day. But the toast was his.
He could almost think clearly.
That was the strangest part of the past week — the clarity.
As if someone had taken a damp cloth to the inside of a window he’d been looking through for weeks and the smudges were gone.
He still had brief moments where it would fog, Asher would tell him he was staring at nothing, or would flinch from Asher’s touch, but it felt like a little less every day.
The bite mark on his neck faded from purple to yellow, but Asher noticed when they were watching one of his bizarre documentaries, so it was back to purple.
This is my life now. The thought had stopped arriving with horror attached. It just arrived.
He left the kitchen and went to the living room.
His posters were on the walls — Asher had hung them, leveled them with a measuring tape, asked Levi which wall for each one with the earnest focus of a man curating a gallery.
Then he decided he liked the posters, demanded Levi tell him every game he’s ever played, and was slowly filling his house to resemble a nerd den.
The only thing Levi really had to put his foot down on was the horror game posters.
It wasn’t just the fact that he had spent three weeks living in a horror game, but the games he tried to play and the games he watched Ethan play were still a sore spot.
He wanted to believe that making it out of the system would have helped with some of the pain that still lingered with Ethan’s memory, but when Asher asked him why he had two Playstation 4‘s, he had to explain that one was Ethan’s.
He never used it or turned it on, because it was filled with all of his save data, and he had an irrational fear of destroying that.
Asher just let Levi talk about what was on it, and the next day, he had cleared a place on his bookshelf for it.
The Switch was still on the coffee table from last night.
They’d played Animal Crossing together — together meaning Levi played and Asher sat beside him and asked questions with total seriousness.
Why is the raccoon charging you to make the island better for him?
Is that legal? The island economy seems predatory, Levi.
Asher had opinions about Tom Nook. Strong opinions, including the raccoon is a monopolist and Levi laughed so hard he had to put the game down.
Asher was more okay with Animal Crossing than with the dating sim. It became something of an intrusive thought for Asher, which he always shared with Levi in the form of Have you deleted that game yet? and The lamp doesn’t deserve you.
All in all, it was sweet. Confusing, but sweet.
The nightmares still came, every few days now.
He’d wake up gasping and Asher would already be awake beside him, eyes open in the dark, and Asher’s hand would find his chest. Sometimes he’d hear or see things, and Asher always noticed.
Levi would describe whatever the blip was — eyes in the bathroom doorway, shadows moving on the wall, the sounds of the aliens — and Asher would produce a knife.
Levi had stopped trying to figure out where the knives came from. Under the mattress. Taped to the bedframe. Inside the couch cushions. Asher had knives the way other people had loose change.
Asher would take the knife and get out of bed and clear the room.
Methodically, silently, the way a person cleared a room who had been trained to clear rooms. He’d check the bathroom.
The closet. The hallway. He’d come back and say nothing there, put the knife somewhere, get back in bed, and pull Levi against his chest and the gesture was so…
Levi didn’t have a word for it. Protective wasn’t right. Sweet wasn’t right. Asher was clearing imaginary threats with a concealed weapon, he was a murderer, and somehow, the gesture made Levi feel safe.
He woke up because Asher wasn’t holding him.
The arm across his ribs wasn’t there. The chest at his back wasn’t there. The breath against his nape, the thumb that did its small idle circuit on his hip even in sleep — none of it. Asher had not slept without his arm around Levi a single night since Levi moved in three weeks ago.
The clock on the dresser said 5:14 and the bed was too warm, radiating heat from Asher’s side.
Levi had gotten used to Asher running hot—Levi was always cold, so Asher clinging to him every night was kind of nice because he never woke up with frozen fingers.
But this felt strange. He turned over slowly.
Asher was on his back. That was off too — Asher slept on his side, curled around Levi, or on his stomach with one arm thrown across him. Not on his back, hands open at his sides.
“Asher?”
Nothing.
Please don’t be a nightmare, please don’t be a nightmare…
“Hey.” Levi propped himself up on his elbow. “You okay?”
Asher’s lips moved.
Levi went still, watching his mouth in the dark shaping words, but no sound came out. He leaned closer.
“— changed it twice,“ Asher was saying. His consonants were soft around the edges, like he was talking through a mouthful of something. “Didn’t mean to…”
“Asher?”
“— fix it. Before he gets back in. I can rework the —”
Levi reached for the bedside lamp and turned it on.
As his eyes adjusted, he saw each detail in pieces — the flush across Asher’s cheeks first, high, patchy, and too red; then the wet sheen of his hairline, the damp dark of the pillow under his head; then his eyes, which were open, wide and glassy, looking at the ceiling.
Levi sat up. “Asher, hey. Look at me.”
Asher’s lips kept moving. His eyes did not.
Levi put his hand on Asher’s shoulder. The t-shirt was soaked through and the heat coming off the cotton was wrong. It was the heat his hand felt once on Ethan’s forehead during a flu that ended with a trip to the hospital.
“Asher, hey. Hey, it’s me. It’s Levi. Can you hear me?” Levi grabbed his shoulder and shook him gently.
“... the monsters,” Asher was telling the ceiling. His hand twitched on the sheet, the fingers spreading and closing without purpose. “You don’t like the monsters. I can take them out. It’s parameter work, it’s nothing, I’ll…”
Levi’s mouth went dry. He put both hands on Asher’s face, leaning over him. “Dovey, look at me. Please look at me.”
Asher’s eyes drifted toward his voice, almost found him, slipped past, then drifted back. He was smiling a little. The corners of his mouth had gone soft and pleased and his eyelashes were wet.
“Le-viiiii,” he said it like he was going to sing it and gave up before deciding on a note. “You’re here. Good. I heard the lock.”
The bottom of Levi’s stomach dropped. “What lock?”
“The lock. The bad one...” Asher’s hand came up, slow and uncoordinated, and found Levi’s jaw, but his grip was weak.
Asher’s grip was never weak. It could pin his wrists and close around his throat or stab a monster to death, and right now it could barely hold his jaw.
“If we’re in again, it’s okay. I have you this time.
I’ll do it different. I won’t let you be scared. ”
“Asher, you’re not — Asher, you have a fever.”
“I’ll fix it…” His thumb tried to move against Levi’s cheek and managed only a small twitch. “I don’t know…but I’ll change it…”
“Asher, stop. Stop talking about the game. We’re not in the game. We’re at your house. You have a fever, you’re — you have a fever, I’m going to —” Levi froze, his hands wanting to move and unable to decide which direction.
His leg.
Levi pulled the blankets back. Asher was in boxers.
The dressing on his thigh had peeled back at one edge — sweated off, maybe, or pulled at in his sleep — and the gauze was rucked up and the skin under it was bad.
The wound itself was mostly healed, but one broken spot in the center was red and weeping, with all the skin around it shiny and taut like something was pressing up under his skin.
From the edges of the wound, climbing up Asher’s thigh toward his groin in long thin tracks, were red lines. Oh no.
Oh no, oh no, oh no.
How long had it been like that? How long had Asher been walking around with that under a bandage?
“Asher,” Levi kept his voice level. “How long has your leg been like this?”
“— it has to be that way,“ Asher was telling someone above the ceiling. “If I increase the fear baseline, the system reads it as low engagement and generates less hostile —”
“Asher.”
“— I built it. I built it. I should be able to —”
Okay. He needs a doctor. Now.
“Phone,” he said to Asher, who was not listening. “Asher, where’s your phone?”
“— mm?”
It sat on the nightstand, plugged in, screen-down. Levi lunged across the bed for it. His hand was shaking and he didn’t try to make it stop. “What’s the passcode?”
Asher’s eyes found him. For a second, a pocket of him surfaced through the fever, his eyes focused on Levi with that same slack smile. “Your birthday.”
The information lodged somewhere Levi did not have time to feel yet, slotted into the pile of things he could be wrecked about later.
He typed it in. The phone unlocked. He opened contacts and scrolled and found it, just labeled DOCTOR H, with a note under the name: concierge, house calls, any hour.
He counted the rings and made himself breathe between them. Finally, a voice answered, “Yes?”
“Hi, this is — it doesn’t matter. I’m at Asher Kane’s house. He has a fever and there are red lines on his leg…he’s not making sense—”
“Slow down. Tell me about the lines.”
“They’re — they come up from the wound on his thigh. Red. Going up toward his hip. I can see them clearly. The skin around the wound is tight, and red —”
“How long has he been febrile?”
“I don’t know. I woke up and his side of the bed …he’s burning, he’s so hot, I don’t know how long, I’m sorry —”
“Tell him he’s lucky, I’m one county over handling another incident. I’ll be there in forty minutes.”
The line went dead.
Levi sat on the bed with the phone in his hand and looked at Asher.
Asher was still talking to the ceiling, quieter now, his voice thinning out.
“— nicer this time,“ he murmured. “Less death. More of the quiet parts. We can have a garden. In the game. Like with the raccoon —”
I need to lower his fever.
“I’ll be right back, okay? Stay awake.”
Asher’s hand twitched toward him.
Levi caught it and held it, just for a few seconds, then scrambled off the bed.
He didn’t even bother trying to find his cane, he just rushed to the kitchen and yanked open the freezer.
The cold dropped over him and he had not put a shirt on, had not thought to, and the cold was good.
It made everything come into focus. He grabbed a mixing bowl, held it under the ice dispenser and grabbed whatever he could from inside the freezer.
Frozen peas. Frozen corn. A bag of frozen edamame Asher had bought because Levi liked them.
A pint of vanilla ice cream he’d opened three days ago and immediately put back because Asher got too excited at the idea of feeding him.
He loaded all of it against his chest and carried it back up to the bedroom.
He packed the bags around Asher’s torso beneath the sheets around him; under his arms, against his ribs, the peas against the side of his neck where the artery would be.
He scooped loose ice from the bowl and pressed it to Asher’s lips as he crawled onto the bed.
“Small sips, just as it melts. Can you hear me?”
Asher’s hand came up to his wrist and closed around it, half limp. “Levi?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re cold.”
“I know.”
“You’re shaking.”
“I know,” Levi whispered, abandoning the ice cube as the water dripped around Asher’s mouth.
“Don’t go,” Asher said. Almost a whisper. “Please don’t go.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Levi said. He pressed his forehead into Asher’s shoulder. “Thirty-five minutes. Stay awake. Tell me about the garden you are going to put in the nightmare machine.”
You can’t leave me again, Asher. I won’t let you.
Asher tried to laugh, but it came out like a weak wheeze.
The words came slower. The garden had kale. The garden had a low stone wall. There were going to be bees but only the gentle kind that didn’t sting. Levi held Asher’s hand against the soaked t-shirt and counted Asher’s breaths, the ice cream melting and the peas thawing and Levi did not let go.