Chapter Twenty-Five
Three months to the day after the ranch, Amani asked Nero a question.
They were on Amani's couch in the loft. It was a Saturday afternoon.
Amani had the next two nights off, Lady Leo had enforced it despite his protests, and Nero had come over with takeout and a bag of groceries for breakfast. The sun was going down over the warehouse district and the light through the big windows was the warm slanting gold that Amani had always loved about his apartment.
Amani was lying across the couch with his head in Nero's lap.
Nero's hand was in his hair. They had been watching some movie neither of them was really paying attention to, and the movie was paused, and Nero was reading a book one-handed because the other hand was occupied with Amani's hair, which was a new development Nero had embraced with the calm thoroughness he embraced everything.
"Would you still have wanted me," Amani said, "if none of it had happened."
Nero's hand stopped.
The question had come out without planning.
Amani hadn't meant to ask it. It had been sitting in him for weeks, or maybe months, the quiet worry that his relationship was built on the scaffolding of trauma, that Nero loved the wreckage more than the man, that if Amani had never been taken, if Nero had never been the one to bring him back, they would have passed each other in the club and never noticed.
Nero set the book down. He looked at Amani, and his hand resumed, slowly, fingers threading through hair. "What brought that on?"
"I don't know. I was thinking about how we met."
"You were thinking about how we met."
"I was thinking about what version of us would exist if I had just been a bartender and you had just been a cop who came into a club once and ordered a screwdriver."
Nero thought about it. He was not a man who rushed answers. The silence stretched, not uncomfortable, the specific quality of quiet that Amani had come to associate with Nero thinking carefully about something that mattered.
"The honest answer," Nero said, "is I don't know.
I can't run a simulation on a life that didn't happen.
I can tell you that if I had walked into KK and seen you behind the bar, I would have noticed you.
Anyone with eyes would have noticed you.
I can tell you that I have a very specific type and you are it.
I don't mean the obvious thing, I mean the combination of sharp and soft and loud and quiet that is specifically you. I would have been interested."
"Interested isn't the same as this."
"No. It isn't." Nero's hand moved through his hair in long, slow strokes.
"What we have now was built on top of something specific.
The rescue, the couch, the quiche. If those things hadn't happened, we would have been a different couple, or we wouldn't have been a couple at all.
I can't promise you that the version of us that didn't go through a kidnapping would have found each other. I don't know. Nobody knows."
"But?"
"But I can tell you that what I feel for you now is not about the rescue.
It stopped being about the rescue a long time ago.
If you decided tomorrow that you were done with all of this, done with the club, done with Vegas, done with me, and you wanted to move to a cabin in Oregon and learn to make pottery, I would follow you.
Not because I saved your life. Because you're the person I want to be with, and who you are is who you are now, and I don't have a version of you that I want more than this one. "
Amani closed his eyes.
"I would not make pottery," he said. "Just for the record."
"No?"
"I have terrible hand-eye coordination. I dropped a tray six weeks ago."
"Noted. No pottery."
"Glass art, maybe. I could blow glass. That seems dramatic enough for me."
Nero laughed. "Whatever you want, Amani. Glass, pottery, running the club, opening a second location in Reno, moving to Oregon, staying exactly here. Whatever you want. I'm not attached to any particular version of this. I'm attached to you."
Amani opened his eyes. Looked up at him. The late afternoon light was catching the side of Nero's face and the angles of him looked softer from this vantage, the permanent cop watchfulness relaxed for once, the book forgotten beside him, his attention entirely on Amani.
"Okay," Amani said.
"Okay?"
"Okay. I believe you."
"Good."
They stayed like that for a while. The movie remained paused.
The sun finished setting. The loft filled with the blue-gray light of dusk.
Eventually Nero picked up his book again with his free hand, and Amani closed his eyes and let the rhythm of Nero's fingers in his hair pull him toward sleep, and the last thing he thought before he dozed off was: I am the most loved person I know.
***
It was Bethany's idea.
"Body shots," she said, one Friday night, three months and change after the ranch. "On the bar. You. Me in a crown."
"Absolutely not."
"Why not?"
"Because we're adults and because Mom would disown both of us."
"Mom is in Reno for a convention. That's the point."
Amani was behind the bar. Bethany was in front of it, in her usual crop top and the tiny shorts, her hair up in a ridiculous ponytail that flopped around when she moved, like a pony with opinions.
She'd just finished her shift at the front desk.
The club was packed. It was nearing midnight.
Bethany had clearly spent the last six hours building up to this proposal.
Reza had the rail. Amani had been floating all night, working the creative orders while Reza ran the volume, and the rhythm had been good. This proposal.
"Mom will find out," Amani said.
"Mom will absolutely find out. But by then it'll be over and you'll have done it and we'll both have great stories to tell at Thanksgiving."
"I'm not doing body shots off you."
"Obviously not off me, off you. You're the star. I'm merely the emcee."
"You're the emcee."
"I'm wearing a crown. I already told you."
Nero, who had been sitting at his stool listening to this entire exchange, lost it.
He laughed, actually laughed, head tipped back, the full laugh that Amani had been collecting like seashells over the past three months.
It was a good sound. It made Bethany laugh too.
Then Amani laughed. Then the three of them were laughing like idiots at the end of the bar and half the club was looking at them.
"Fine," Amani said. "Fine. One. Limited engagement. Tequila."
Bethany shrieked and vanished in the direction of the storage room. When she came back, she was wearing a plastic tiara she must have had squirreled away for exactly that eventuality. She climbed up on a barstool and clapped her hands twice.
"Excuse me!" she called out to the club.
She had her mother's carrying voice when she wanted it.
"Excuse me, regulars and newcomers alike!
Tonight is a historic night at Kinky Kritters, a night of celebration, a night of recovery, a night of my brother being talked into something he swore he would never do—"
"This is happening?" Nero asked Amani.
"This is happening." Amani took a deep breath and centered himself. It was going to be a real test of his recovery.
"I'm going to need to document this for evidence."
"Don't you dare."
"Officially for evidence. Unofficially to put it in a frame on my desk."
Amani hopped up on the bar. He did it without thinking about it, the way he used to hop up on the bar when he was nineteen and invincible, and only registered halfway up that he had made the move without hesitation, without the careful body-check that had been his default for months.
The motion was his. The bar was his. The room was his.
He was wearing the tiny shorts, no shirt, with the collar scar was visible and he was laughing.
He lay back on the bar. Bethany produced a lime and a saltshaker and a shot of tequila.
Amani closed his eyes and grinned. The whole bar started cheering.
Someone was whistling. Nero was there at the edge of the bar with his phone absolutely out despite Amani's threats Amani did not care, did not care, did not care.
Sero, who had been at his usual stool, lifted his Coke in a salute.
Marco, the gorilla bouncer, whistled from the door.
Lady Leo, wherever she was in Reno, absolutely had a sense that her children were doing something in her club that she would have stopped if she'd been there. Amani could feel it in his bones, and Amani did not care.
Nero did the shot.
It was, it turned out, the point of the whole exercise.
Bethany, tiara slightly askew, had set the whole thing up so Nero could be the one to take the shot off Amani's stomach.
Nero, recognizing an ambush when he saw one but also recognizing that refusing would have made things worse, shook his head at Bethany, bent down, and did the thing with more precision than strictly necessary, the salt off Amani's collarbone, the shot off his stomach, the lime from his own mouth which Amani was still making fun of him for a week later.
The bar whooped. Amani was laughing so hard his stomach hurt and the tequila burned on his skin where it had spilled. Nero's face when he came up from the lime was a mix of mortification and I'd-do-it-again-in-a-second that Amani filed away forever.
Amani grinned. His real grin. The one that used to live behind that bar before the ranch.
It broke across his face wide and unhinged and showing teeth.
A few people in the room who had really known him before made a sound, like a quiet, collective exhale, because the grin was back.
The lion's specific grin that had been the signature of this bar for years, the one that said I am twenty years old and I know exactly how beautiful I am and it is your problem, not mine.
There he is.
Nobody said it out loud. Nobody had to. The club knew.
Amani sat up on the bar. Bethany handed him a shot for himself.
They clinked glasses with Nero and Sero across the room.
The four of them drank. The bar cheered again.
Amani was twenty-one in a week. He was home.
His back was unmarked. His collar scar was visible.
The music shifted to something with a heavier beat and the crowd went back to the floor.
He got down off the bar and got back to work.
Twenty minutes later Lady Leo texted him from Reno.
I don't know what you did but I have a feeling. We will discuss on Sunday. I love you.
Amani showed it to Nero and both of them lost it.
Nero put his hand on the back of Amani's neck briefly, casually, the way he'd been testing the touch for weeks in small, careful doses.
This time Amani didn't flinch. Nero noticed.
Neither of them said anything. The hand stayed for three seconds longer, then lifted. That was everything.