Chapter Fifteen
Nero almost didn't hear the knock.
He'd been at the kitchen table with case files spread out in front of him, the shark arrests moving through processing, Dale and Mako booked, Paulie still in the wind, Harold sending updates every few days that amounted to "still sniffing, the bastard's fast for a fish.
" The knock was so quiet it could have been a branch against the siding.
But Nero's ears were sensitive, tuned for frequencies that bigger animals missed, and something in the rhythm of it, two taps, a pause, a third, sounded like a person who wasn't sure they wanted to be heard.
He opened the door and Amani was standing on his porch.
The hoodie was zipped to his chin. His arms were wrapped around himself the way they always were since his rescue, hands hidden in the sleeves, shoulders curved inward like he was trying to take up less space.
His feet were in the soft-soled sneakers.
His eyes were wide and glassy in the porch light.
Overall, he looked like he hadn't slept in days, which he probably hadn't.
"I can't sleep," Amani said.
He didn't say more. He didn't need to.
Nero stepped back from the doorway. "Come in."
Amani came in the way a cat enters an unfamiliar room, one step, then a pause, then another step, his gaze moving over everything.
The living room was small and unremarkable.
A couch that had seen better decades. A coffee table with a ring stain from a mug Nero kept meaning to sand out.
Bookshelves along one wall, mostly procedural manuals and crime fiction, a few field guides to desert wildlife that he'd picked up when he first transferred to Vegas.
The kitchen was visible through an open doorway, clean counters, a single plate in the drying rack, the case files he'd been reading.
"It smells like coffee," Amani said.
"I can make you some."
"I don't want coffee. I just—" He stopped. His jaw worked. Whatever he'd come here to say, or not say, was caught somewhere between his throat and the air, and the effort of not saying it was visible in the tendons of his neck.
"Sit down," Nero said. Not a command. An offer. The couch, the chair, the kitchen table, wherever felt right. "I'm going to make food. You don't have to talk."
Amani sat on the couch. He pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around them and tucked himself into the corner of it the way Nero had seen trauma survivors do in interview rooms, making themselves small, putting their back against something solid, reducing the number of directions a threat could come from.
It was instinct, not conscious choice. The body remembering what the mind was trying to forget.
Nero made burgers. Not because burgers were the right food for four in the morning, but because they were the only thing he could make without thinking.
Thinking would have meant looking at Amani.
Looking at Amani in that moment would have meant showing something on his face that this kid was not ready to see.
So, he cooked. Seasoned the meat. Shaped the patties.
Heated the pan. The sounds of cooking filled the small kitchen, the sizzle of beef hitting hot cast iron, the click of the gas burner, the quiet scrape of the spatula.
Ordinary sounds. Safe sounds. The sounds of a house where someone was making food because someone else was hungry.
That was all. Nothing terrible was happening in the kitchen.
The doors were locked. The desert was miles away.
When he brought the plates to the living room, Amani had uncurled slightly. His feet were on the floor and his arms were looser and he was looking at the bookshelves with the expression of someone cataloging titles out of habit.
"You read crime fiction," Amani said.
"Occupational hazard."
"You read field guides to desert wildlife."
"I like knowing what's out there."
Amani took the plate. He looked at the burger the way he'd looked at Nero's card at the bar, like an object he wasn't sure he'd earned.
Then he ate. Not much. Half the burger, a few bites of the other half.
But he ate, and the act of eating seemed to settle something in him, the way it does when the body remembers that it has needs beyond survival and starts attending to them again.
"Your house is quiet," Amani said.
"Yeah."
"Not desert quiet. Just—" He set the plate down on the coffee table. "Regular quiet."
Nero understood what he meant. There was a difference between the silence of an empty desert and the silence of a neighborhood at four in the morning.
One was absence. The other was presence, sleeping families behind lit porches, a dog barking three streets over, the distant hiss of a sprinkler on a timer.
The sound of a world going on around you. The sound of not being alone.
"You can stay," Nero said. "Couch is yours if you want it. I'll be in the kitchen."
Amani didn't answer. He pulled the hoodie tighter around himself and turned sideways on the couch and put his head on the armrest and closed his eyes.
After eating his own burger, Nero went back to the kitchen and sat with his case files and listened to the kid's breathing slow by degrees, still ragged, still catching, but settling, settling, the way a stone settles in water, finding its way down through the resistance to the place where it can finally stop moving.
Amani slept for forty minutes. It was the first real sleep he'd gotten since the ranch and Nero knew that because of the way he woke up, not the sharp, gasping jolt of someone startled out of a nightmare, but the slow, disoriented surfacing of someone who'd actually gone under.
He sat up and looked around the room and for a second his face was open and confused and young, and then the armor came back, piece by piece, and he was Amani again.
"I should go," he said.
"Okay."
"This doesn't mean anything."
"I know."
"I'm not going to make a habit of this."
"Okay."
Amani stood. He pulled the sleeves of the hoodie over his hands and walked to the door and opened it and the predawn air came in, warm and dry and carrying the faint chemical sweetness of the Strip. He stood in the doorway for a beat longer than leaving required.
"The burgers were acceptable," he said.
"High praise."
"Don't let it go to your head." He stepped off the porch. "Goodnight, Detective."
"It's morning."
"Goodnight, Detective."
Nero watched him walk down the sidewalk until he turned the corner, and then he closed the door and washed the plates and sat back down with his case files and did not think about the way Amani's breathing had sounded when it finally evened out, or the way his hand had been open on the cushion instead of fisted, or the forty minutes of peace that a kid in a gray hoodie had found on a terrible couch in a ferret's living room.
He didn't want to think about any of that. He was a professional.
He thought about it constantly.
***
The four AM visits became a pattern.
Not every night. Not even most nights. But often enough that Nero started keeping burger ingredients stocked, and then eggs, and then the stuff for quiche because it turned out that quiche was the perfect four AM food: warm, filling, and impossible to eat aggressively.
Amani would show up on the porch in the hoodie with his arms wrapped around himself.
Nero would let him in. Nero would cook. Amani would eat, and sometimes they talked.
Sometimes they didn't. Sometimes Amani fell asleep on the couch.
Sometimes he just sat there in the quiet until the sun came up. Then he went home.
Nero learned the rhythms.
The bad nights were Tuesdays and Thursdays, the nights Amani closed the bar alone, when he was in the club at two AM doing inventory and the silence reminded him of other silences.
Those nights, Amani would show up around four fifteen, which meant he'd gone home first and tried to sleep and failed and spent an hour staring at his ceiling before giving up and walking to Nero's house.
The walk was twelve blocks. Nero had measured it.
Twelve blocks at four in the morning through a neighborhood that was mostly dark, along with the fact that Amani was willing to walk twelve blocks in the dark, to get to a couch he claimed to hate, said more than either of them were ready to discuss.
The worse nights had no pattern. Something would trigger him: a smell, a sound, a word someone said at the bar that landed wrong, and he'd spiral.
Those nights he showed up earlier, sometimes before midnight, and his body would be vibrating at a frequency Nero had learned meant don't touch me, don't ask, just be here.
Nero would be there. He'd cook whatever he had: quiche if he'd planned ahead, eggs if he hadn't, toast if the night was bad enough that even eggs felt like too much production.
He'd set a plate down and go to his end of the couch.
The house would hold them both. Eventually Amani's breathing would slow.
The vibration would ease. He'd say something, usually an insult, which meant the worst had passed.
The quiche became a thing. Nero had made it on accident the third visit.
He'd had the ingredients for a division potluck he'd forgotten about, and quiche was the only dish in his repertoire that qualified as real cooking.
Amani had eaten two slices without comment, which for Amani was the equivalent of a standing ovation.
After that, Nero kept the ingredients stocked.
Eggs, cream, cheese, whatever vegetables were in the crisper.
He got better at it. He started experimenting, spinach and feta one week, mushroom and gruyere the next.
Amani never complimented any of them, but he always finished his plate, and once Nero caught him scraping the dish with his fork to get the last of the crust. The look on Amani's face when he realized he'd been caught was so mortified that Nero had to turn away to keep from laughing.
"Your couch is terrible," Amani said one night, around week three.
"You've slept on it nine times."
"Nine times on a terrible couch. That doesn't make the couch less terrible. It makes me desperate."
"Would you like a pillow?"
"I'd like a couch that wasn't purchased from a discount furniture store in 2019."
"It was 2018, and I'll have you know it was full price."
Amani almost laughed. The almost-laugh was getting closer to an actual laugh with each visit, the muscles remembering more of the gesture each time, like a door being eased open inch by inch. Not there yet. But closer.
Nero bought a pillow. Not an expensive one. He wasn't going to make a production of it. Just a decent pillow from the Target on Flamingo, firm enough to support a head and soft enough to be worth using. He left it on the couch without mentioning it.
The next time Amani came over, he stopped in the doorway of the living room. He looked at the pillow. He looked at Nero. His mouth opened, and Nero braced himself for the insult, the comment about the thread count, the color, the presumption of it.
Amani said nothing.
He used the pillow. He fell asleep with it tucked under his head and his hand curled around the corner of it and his face slack and unguarded in a way that Nero had never seen when he was awake.
The hoodie had ridden up on one side, showing a strip of brown skin at his hip, and his socked feet hung off the end of the couch because the couch was too short for him but he'd never complained about that, only the quality, and his breathing was even and deep and the house was quiet around them both.
Nero sat in the kitchen with a cold cup of coffee and watched the strip of light under the living room windows and listened to Amani breathe and thought about nothing.
About everything. About a pillow on a couch and a kid who wouldn't say thank you but who curled around it in his sleep like it was the first safe thing he'd touched in weeks.
He was in trouble. He knew he was in trouble.
The percentage of this that was about Amani was no longer a percentage he could pretend was professional, and the four AM visits were building something between them that had no name yet, but had weight, substance, the gravity of two people who kept ending up in the same room at the same hour because the alternative was being alone with the dark and neither of them wanted that anymore.
But Amani wasn't ready. Nero could read that as clearly as he could read a crime scene, the flinch that was still there, the armor that went back on every morning, the "this doesn't mean anything" that he said less often but still said.
The kid was healing. The kid was finding his way back to something.
And Nero was not going to be the person who rushed that, because rushing it would make him no different from every other person who had ever wanted something from Amani without waiting for Amani to offer it.
So, he waited. He made quiche. He bought a pillow. He sat in his kitchen at four in the morning and drank cold coffee and listened to a lion breathe on his couch and he waited, because waiting was what ferrets did best, and this particular wait was going to be worth it.