Chapter Six #2
Grainger's thumbs moved in slow circles against his stomach.
"You'll love our life together. I know it doesn't feel that way now, but you will.
Once you settle in, once you see how peaceful it is out here, you'll understand.
The city isn't good for someone like you.
All that noise, all those people. That club.
" The word came out soft and pitying, as if KK were something to be ashamed of.
"All that exposure. Men looking at you, touching you, using you.
That's not a life, little cub. That's a performance. I saved you from that."
I saved you from that.
The words landed like a blow and Amani's vision went white at the edges. His hands were shaking on the spatula.
The chicken was smoking.
Grainger was pressed against his back, rewriting his entire life as something Amani needed to be rescued from.
Amani couldn't breathe because the hands on his stomach were gentle. The voice in his ear was kind. The lie was so enormous and so sincere, for one terrible second he almost couldn't find the truth underneath it.
"You'll be such a wonderful mate," Grainger whispered. "Now that I have you away from all of that. We'll read together and cook together and watch the sunsets and the horses, and you won't have to perform for anyone ever again. Isn't that better? Isn't that what you've always wanted?"
No. What he'd always wanted was the bar, the music, the tiny shorts, and the feeling of a room full of people who came to his space because they trusted it.
What he'd always wanted was his mother's frittata, his sister's terrible driving, the walk home at four in the morning under an orange sky.
What he'd always wanted was to be exactly who he was, in exactly the place he'd built, surrounded by exactly the people who knew him.
Not this. Never this.
The chicken burned.
It wasn't on purpose. Amani's hands were shaking too hard to flip it in time, and the smoke rose up between them in a sharp, acrid curl, and the smell hit the air like an alarm, and Grainger's hands stopped moving.
Everything stopped.
The circles on his stomach. The breath on his neck.
The soft, terrible voice in his ear. All of it ceased at once, as if someone had reached into Grainger's body and turned off a switch.
His hands didn't leave Amani's stomach but they went rigid, the fingers pressing in just enough for Amani to feel the strength in them, and behind him Grainger's body went very, very still.
The silence lasted three seconds. Maybe four. It felt like a century.
Amani didn't move. Didn't breathe. The chicken smoked around them.
The kitchen filled with the smell of burning.
While Amani stood with an old man's hands on his stomach and understood, with perfect clarity, that the warmth he'd been enduring all day was a performance.
Underneath it was something else. Something that made the grip on his shoulder feel like a handshake.
Then Grainger exhaled.
His hands softened. He stepped back. When Amani risked a glance over his shoulder, the old crane's face rearranged itself into something calm and pleasant, the warm smile back in place as if it had never left.
"It's all right, little cub." His voice was gentle. Forgiving. "We'll try again tomorrow. These things take time."
He turned and walked out of the kitchen with the slow, graceful steps of a bird crossing shallow water.
Amani was left standing at the stove with burned chicken in the pan.
The ghost of those hands still circled on his stomach.
In that moment the knowledge grew of every kind word, every soft touch, every "little cub" from that point forward had something cold and still living underneath it.
Something that came out when the fantasy cracked.
Something that would keep coming out, a little more each time, until Amani stopped cracking it.
With hands that wouldn’t stop shaking, he scraped the burned chicken into the trash.
They ate rice and vegetables for dinner, which Amani managed without burning anything, mainly because rice involved water and a button on a rice cooker and the vegetables just needed to be cut and steamed and he could handle a knife even with trembling hands.
Grainger ate without complaint and talked about the sunset. Which was admittedly spectacular, a smear of orange and violet across a sky so wide it made Amani feel like he was standing at the bottom of an ocean.
He hated that it was beautiful. He hated that Grainger was right about that, that the desert was stunning, the light extraordinary, and the silence had a quality to it that was almost sacred.
He hated that any part of that place could be anything other than a prison.
But the sunset didn't care what Amani thought of it.
It was gorgeous and indifferent, the way nature always was.
It would look exactly like the same the next day whether Amani was free or not.
After dinner, Grainger moved to the living room. A different room than the one with the bookshelves. It had a large couch, a television, and windows that faced west toward the fading light. Grainger turned on the evening news and settled into one end of the couch with a blanket over his lap.
Then he patted the cushion beside him.
Amani had been standing in the doorway, hoping he could watch from the armchair across the room.
A safe distance. Enough space to not be touched.
But the pat was not an invitation. It was an instruction.
The cold thing that lived underneath Grainger's warmth was close enough to the surface Amani could feel it without looking.
He sat.
Grainger's arm came around his shoulders immediately.
Not roughly, smoothly, naturally, the way an arm settles around someone it's held a thousand times.
He pulled Amani against his side so that Amani's head was near his shoulder and their bodies were pressed together from hip to knee.
The blanket was extended over Amani's lap as well.
As if they were a couple on a quiet evening. As if this were love.
Amani went rigid. Every part of him, every muscle, every tendon, every nerve, locked into a stillness that was the opposite of relaxation.
It was the stillness of a prey animal in the jaws of something that hadn't bitten down yet.
Grainger's hand found his hair and began to stroke.
Long, slow passes from his forehead to the back of his skull, his fingers grazing the top edge of the collar each time they slid down the back of Amani's neck.
The touch was gentle and rhythmic and it made Amani want to crawl out of his own skin.
"This is nice," Grainger murmured. His eyes were on the television but his hand was on Amani's hair. "Edward and I used to do this every evening. He'd fall asleep right here on my shoulder. I'd have to carry him to bed sometimes, when the program went late."
Amani said nothing. He stared at the television and saw nothing.
The news anchor was talking about something, weather, traffic, sports, the meaningless machinery of a world that didn't know he was missing, and Grainger's hand moved through his hair and the clock ticked and the desert outside turned from violet to black.
He thought about the bar. About Friday night, which was only yesterday even though it felt like it belonged to a different lifetime.
He thought about the deer shifter and the Shirley Temple and the gorilla's boyfriend with the blue curacao.
He thought about Sero on his stool, the faint smile when Trevor texted.
He thought about the wolf watching scenes from the rail, learning the culture the way Amani had told him to.
He thought about all of them going about their lives right without knowing the bartender who made their drinks, remembered their names, and watched over their scenes was sitting on a couch in the desert with a dead man's hand in his hair.
Not a dead man's hand. Grainger's hand. But it felt like a dead man's hand, because Amani was filling a dead man's place, and the hand didn't know the difference.
An hour passed. The news ended. Grainger turned off the television and the room dropped into a silence so complete that Amani could hear his own heartbeat.
"Time for bed, little cub."
The bedroom was large and white. A massive bed with expensive linens, too many pillows, a headboard carved from dark wood.
The windows were uncovered and the desert night pressed against the glass.
No light anywhere, just the stars and the vast black nothing of a landscape that wanted people beneath it to understand exactly how alone they were.
Grainger pointed to the bathroom. "Change for bed. I've put things out for you."
The things were sleep pants, soft cotton, laid on the bathroom counter the way the day clothes had been.
Amani changed quickly with the door open, he didn't try to close it, and came back to find Grainger already in bed, propped against the pillows, watching the bathroom doorway with the patient look of a man who knew exactly when his companion would reappear.
Amani stood at the foot of the bed and every part of him said no.
Not this. Not the bed. Not lying down next to this man, not in the dark, not with those hands and that breath and that voice calling him a name that wasn't his.
Everything else he'd endured today, the cooking, the reading, the couch, the kitchen, all of it had been horrible but it had been vertical.
Standing or sitting, with space to move, with the option of stepping back even if stepping back meant nothing because there was nowhere to step back to.
The bed was different. The bed was horizontal, enclosed, intimate in the way that beds were.
Lying down next to Grainger meant giving up the last physical boundary Amani had.
Grainger watched him. The warm smile was there but so was the patience that was not patience: the patience that was waiting, that was a countdown, that was the cold thing underneath saying you have about ten seconds before this stops being a request.
Amani got into the bed.
Grainger turned off the lamp and pulled him close.
One arm across Amani's chest, the other hand finding his hair again.
The old man's body was bony and warm and pressed along Amani's back so that every breath Grainger took pushed against him.
Grainger's breath was on his neck. The room was dark. The desert was silent.
Amani lay there with his eyes open. His jaw locked. His fists clenched under the blanket. He did not move.
Grainger's thumb traced circles on his chest. Slow. Absent. The way you'd touch someone you'd been sleeping beside for thirty-two years. "Goodnight, my little cub," he murmured. "Sleep well. We have a lovely day planned for tomorrow."
His breathing changed within minutes. Deepened. Slowed. The arm across Amani's chest grew heavy with sleep. The thumb stopped its circles. Grainger's mouth went slack against the back of Amani's neck.
Amani didn't move.
He waited. Five minutes. Ten. He counted Grainger's breaths until they were deep, even, and uninterrupted. Then he counted a hundred more. Being wrong about his plan, being wrong, having Grainger wake up to find him trying to leave, was not something he could afford.
At one hundred and twelve, Grainger shifted in his sleep and rolled slightly away. The arm across Amani's chest left.
Amani lay in the dark. He listened to the clock ticking somewhere in the house. Outside, the wind sang across the desert. Next to him was the slow, steady breathing of the man who had bought him.
He thought about the front door. It had been unlocked when they came in.
He'd watched Grainger walk right through it without reaching for a key.
Because where would Amani go? There was nothing for miles.
No car keys visible anywhere. No phone. His had died on the sidewalk two blocks from KK, the screen cracked under his hip when the sharks took him down.
Just the door, the desert, and the road that had to be somewhere to the south.
There was also the silver collar that meant even if he ran he couldn't shift.
The road.
He didn't have shoes. His feet were bare on the cool sheets and outside those sheets was tile and outside the tile was desert, rocks and scrub and hard-packed dirt and things that bit and stung and cut.
Running barefoot through the Mojave was not a plan.
It was a way to die with more steps involved.
But staying was not a plan either. Staying was rice and reading.
Enduring hands on his stomach, breath on his neck, and a bed that got harder to leave every night because compliance was a muscle and the more you used it the stronger it got and the harder it became to remember that you had ever moved on your own.
He was a lion. He could run fast and far.
He could handle pain. The collar kept him human but it didn't keep him weak.
Somewhere out there, at the end of a road he couldn't see, was a highway.
On the highway were cars. In those cars were people who didn't know his name, but who would stop for a barefoot man running out of the desert at dawn.
Maybe. Hopefully. If he ran far enough.
Grainger's breathing hitched. Amani froze. The old man changed position, mumbled something, Edward, maybe, or something else Amani couldn't make out, and then settled again, his breath deepening back into sleep.
The next night. When Grainger fell asleep. He would go.
Amani closed his eyes. He would not sleep, he was certain of that, as certain as he'd ever been of anything, but he closed his eyes and lay still in the dark with a dead man's mate pressed against his back. He waited for the night to end.