第46章
Unskippable
Paul brought noodles — two kinds, because he wasn’t sure which Levi preferred, and asked about Levi’s recovery without asking about the game. He’d laughed at something Levi said about Animal Crossing and the laugh was real — surprised, warm, the laugh of a man who hadn’t expected to laugh tonight.
Halfway through dinner, Paul set his fork down and cleared his throat, but when he spoke, it was to his plate. “Marianne’s estate is entering probate, and her will specified that half of it be donated to a charity of your choos—”
“Who signed the death certificate?” Asher asked without looking up. “Did we get an NDA?”
“I um…I called my brother to complete it,” Paul said softly. “You know how he is, so you don’t have to worry.”
“How he is?” Levi asked. He had stopped eating as well.
“Uncle Bob is the concierge doctor you don’t like. Paul got all the empathy, Bob got the ambition. If you combine the Henley brothers, they probably would have been TV doctors ,” Asher said. He held out his fork with some noodles twirled around it. “Eat.”
It’s hard to eat when we’re discussing the cover up of the murder you did. That’s what he wanted to say, but this whole evening was already so bizarre, he decided to just open his mouth and accept the food.
“Did she leave you anything?” Asher asked Paul, still smiling at Levi as he chewed.
“I got the house,” Paul said. “My income covers it. I’m fine.”
“I’ll sign papers to leave half of my share to you.” Asher said this without looking up from his noodles. “I’m going to be busy with Levi, and I don’t want to have to take care of you. You’ll get checks and you go to work and you don’t bother me about it when you’re older and need nursing care.”
The words sounded harsh to Levi, borderline cruel, but Paul’s eyes were huge, as if he translated what Asher said into I want to make sure you’re okay. “Thank you,” Paul rasped, reaching for a napkin to dab at his face. Asher just shrugged.
Am I going insane? That wasn’t a nice reason to…half? Half of how much? Does he really not care?
“What charity?” Paul asked after a moment.
“You were doing a charity stream,” Asher said to Levi. “When you went in. What charity?”
“NAMI.” The name came out of Levi’s mouth with a weight Asher probably couldn’t feel, but Paul probably could.
“The National Alliance on Mental Illness. The local chapter. They were the ones I called after Ethan... They had a hotline and the person who answered talked to me for forty-five minutes and then helped me find a counselor. The counselor is the reason I started streaming and the streaming is the reason I’m —” He stopped.
The reason I’m here. The sentence had too many meanings to finish.
“They were underfunded. That was the whole point of the stream.”
“Donate all of it to them,” Asher said to Paul.
“Wait —” Levi looked at his own hands on the table, searching for words in a place that was embarrassing and specific and real.
“Can you split it? Can some go to organizations that help, um, gay kids? Like the Trevor Project? There are people out there who don’t have support and might be sitting in their rooms at night thinking they’re —” His voice caught on the rawness of it — he was asking a man who had never once questioned his own identity to fund something for kids who were drowning in theirs. “They save lives. Those hotlines.”
Asher stopped eating.
“Both,” he said softly to Paul, but his eyes stayed on Levi. “Split it. Half to NAMI. Half to the Trevor Project.”
Then he grabbed Levi’s chin, tugged him closer, and kissed him on the cheek. Then his mouth. Then his forehead. Then his mouth again. Then his nose.
“You’re —” Kiss on the cheek. “The most —” Kiss on the mouth. “Ridiculous —” Kiss on the forehead. “Beautiful —” Kiss on the nose. “Person I have ever —”
Levi tried to smack Asher’s hand away from his face, just so he could pull back, but Asher’s grip strength had returned and suddenly Levi wished he was still a bit weaker.
He felt like he was going to catch on fire with how hard he was blushing.
“Stop, Paul is right there,“ he snapped, slapping at Asher’s wrist.
“I don’t care.” Another kiss landed on the corner of his mouth. “You always do such strange things that are for other people, and I think it’s cute. I want to kiss you. Paul can cope.”
Paul stared at them like he was watching a nature documentary about a species he’d been told was dangerous, but now that species was exhibiting a behavior no one had ever seen before.
Paul left early after that. The taillights disappeared down the gravel driveway and the house settled back into its quiet and Asher pulled Levi against him on the couch.
“That went well,” Asher said.
“Your stepdad is scared of you.”
“Everyone is scared of me.” He kissed the top of Levi’s head. “Except you.”
I am scared of you. I’m just scared of you differently than I used to be.
The sheets were the good ones. The ones Asher wanted him to feel on his first day there.
Asher was doing his nightly sweep, using his arm brace again for balance after the infection.
He checked behind the curtain, under the bed, the closet, the gap behind the dresser where nothing could fit, but Asher checked anyway.
The knife stayed in his hand the whole time, low at his side, the way a person carried a flashlight in a power outage.
He’s checking under the bed for monsters with a knife, Levi thought. Because I sometimes think I hear things. This is fine. This is a healthy bedtime routine practiced by well-adjusted people across the country.
“You don’t have to do that every night,” Levi said.
Asher was crouched by the dresser, peering into the four-inch gap. He didn’t look up.
“I do.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“I built the thing that puts them there.” Asher straightened, knee popping, and dusted his hand on his sweatpants. “So yeah. I do.”
It landed flatter than it should have, the way the worst things Asher said usually did — stated and moved on from, because to Asher they were just facts, and facts didn’t require a performance. He turned and started on the closet.
He had built it. He had said so out loud. And he checked under the bed every night because of it.
Okay, Levi thought. Okay.
“Then take me to see it.”
Asher’s hand was on the closet door. “Take you to see what?”
“The building. Where you made it.”
The closet door stayed half-open. Asher’s face was angled into the shadow of it and Levi couldn’t see what was happening there, but he could see Asher’s shoulders stiffen. “Okay,” Asher said.
He closed the closet and crossed the room in three steps, abandoned his arm brace to the ground, and his hand was on the back of Levi’s neck before Levi had registered the second step. His mouth came down on Levi’s a second later and the question was gone, walked out of the room on Asher’s tongue.
Oh, Levi thought. That’s how we’re doing this.
He could have stopped it. He could have pulled back, kept the question alive, said no, I want to talk about meeting the people who helped you make the game. But he didn’t want to talk right now anyway. Not about that.
He kissed Asher back.
He fisted both hands in Asher’s shirt and pulled him closer. Asher made a low sound into his mouth — the sound he made when Levi did something he hadn’t engineered — and his weight came down onto Levi on the bed.
Asher tasted like the wine Paul had brought and the garlic from the noodles and the mint from brushing his teeth, and Levi almost laughed at the inventory — Paul’s dinner still in his mouth, in a kiss that was no longer about dinner.
The laugh moved against Asher’s lips and his fingers slid up from Levi’s neck into his hair and closed there, not hard, just enough to keep Levi’s head where Asher wanted it.
“Don’t laugh at me,” Asher murmured, smiling against his mouth.
“I’m not laughing at you.”
“You are.”
“I’m laughing at garlic noodles being in this kiss.”
Levi’s hands went under Asher’s shirt because his hands decided that’s where they wanted to be.
He felt along the scars he first noticed in the game; most of them were from Asher’s time in the military, but some of them were earned by being a rebellious child who was bad at climbing fences.
Asher said, with complete sincerity, that he was much better at climbing now.
Asher’s mouth moved to his jaw, his neck, down to the bite mark, and Levi bit his lip. His hand came up to the back of Asher’s head and held him there, because the press was warm and the warmth was reaching into something Levi hadn’t said out here.
He’d said it in the game with a knife at his throat.
He’d said it in the white room. He’d had it in his mouth when he woke up and abandoned it because he thought Asher was gone for good.
He’d been carrying it around for weeks like a coin in his pocket, polished smooth on one side because he couldn’t stop touching it and was too afraid to take it out.
The first time you said it…it was bad. Even if he can’t mean it or understand it like you, he deserves better out here.
“I love you.”
Asher went completely still, his mouth on Levi’s neck, not moving, and Levi could feel his heartbeat because everything else had stopped.
Then Asher pulled back and looked at him.
His eyes were wide, his lips were parted, and his face had gone past delight into something with the delight’s brightness and none of its safety.
He looked at Levi the way he had looked at him in the sanitarium, except the looking had I love you in it now, and the I love you made the looking bigger.
“Say it again,” Asher urged.
“I love —”