CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Rodney woke up and didn't know where he was.
The bed was too soft. The sheets were too smooth.
The room smelled like cedar and something clean and expensive, and there was no humming fridge, and the light coming through the curtains was warm and golden instead of the gray-white fluorescent leak from the hallway that usually woke him at six-fifteen.
Then he moved, and his back screamed, and he remembered everything.
He lay still for a long moment, breathing through the pain.
It was duller than it had been, shifter healing had been working while he slept, knitting the broken skin back together, reducing the welts to angry pink lines, but his muscles were stiff and sore in the deep, bone-level way of a body that had been through sustained violence.
The bite on his shoulder throbbed when he moved.
His wrists ached where the chains had bitten in.
Mordechai was beside him. Not sleeping, Rodney could tell by his breathing, which was too even, too controlled. He was lying on his side, facing Rodney, still holding his hand. His eyes were open.
"How long have you been awake?" Rodney’s voice was rusty. He needed something to drink.
"I didn't sleep."
"At all?"
"No."
Rodney looked at him. In the morning light, Mordechai looked not older, exactly, but more human.
Less armored. The composure he wore like a second skin had been stripped away by the night, and what was underneath was rawer than Rodney had ever seen.
There were shadows under his eyes. The scratches on his sides had healed to faint pink lines.
His hand around Rodney's was tight in a way that suggested it had been tight all night.
"You need to sleep," Rodney said.
"I need to make sure you're okay first."
"I'm okay."
"You're not."
Rodney considered this. His back was a mess.
His wrists were bruised. His mind was replaying the red room in fragments, Inuit's cold hands, the crack of the whip, the sound of the masked bear's laughter, on a loop that he couldn't seem to turn off.
He was, by any objective measure, very much not okay.
"I'm not," he admitted. "But I'm here. And you're here. And that's enough for right now."
The tightness in Mordechai's face eased, not completely, but enough. He released Rodney's hand, for the first time in hours, Rodney suspected, and sat up.
"Bath or shower?" he asked.
"Shower. I think if I get in that tub again I'll fall asleep and drown."
"I won't let you drown." But he led Rodney to the shower, a massive walk-in with multiple heads and a bench built into the tile, and turned the water on.
He adjusted the temperature with the same careful precision he'd used with the tube hours earlier, testing it on his own wrist, then helped Rodney step in.
The hot water was bliss. It hit his shoulders and ran down his back and the sting of it on the healing wounds was sharp but brief, fading quickly into warmth. Rodney braced his hands against the tile and let the water run over him and felt, slowly, the tension of the night begin to loosen.
Mordechai didn't get in with him. He sat on the bathroom counter, fully dressed, he'd put on slacks and a button-down at some point, the morning routine of a man who structured his days down to fifteen-minute increments even when the world was falling apart, and watched Rodney through the glass door. Not with desire. With vigilance.
"I called Sarah," Mordechai said over the sound of the water. "Told her I'm working from home today. She said—" A flicker of a smile. "She said 'good, you need a day off, and tell Rodney I'm making him soup.' She's going to drop it off later."
Rodney's throat tightened. Sarah. Who knitted blankets and checked horoscopes and had loved a panda once. Who would make soup for a man she'd known for four days because her boy had brought him home. "Tell her thank you."
"I will. I also called your landlord. Your lease is month-to-month, correct?"
Rodney blinked water out of his eyes. "Yes. Why?"
"Because I'd like you to move in with me, and I'd prefer not to pay rent on an apartment you won't be living in."
The water ran. The steam rose. Rodney stood in the shower and stared through the glass at Mordechai, who was sitting on the counter with his legs crossed and his expression calm and his voice carrying the same matter-of-fact tone he probably used to present closing arguments.
"You're asking me to move in with you," Rodney said.
"I'm telling you that I want you to. The asking is a formality, you can say no, and I'll respect that.
But I'd like you to know that the offer is genuine and permanent and not contingent on last night.
I wanted you here before the sharks came back.
What happened accelerated the timeline, but it didn't create the desire. "
"We've known each other for a week."
"Yes."
"That's fast."
"By conventional standards, it's insane.
" Mordechai uncrossed his legs and leaned forward.
"But nothing about us has been conventional, Rodney.
We met at an auction. Our first date was a private room where you were blindfolded and I was a stranger.
Our second date involved scent-marking. I killed a man for you last night.
I think we're past the point where normal timelines apply. "
Rodney turned off the shower. The sudden silence was loud. He stood dripping on the tile, and Mordechai handed him a towel through the door and waited while he dried himself.
"I don't have much stuff," Rodney said. "The apartment came furnished. Most of what I own fits in two boxes and a duffel bag."
"Is that a yes?"
"That's a 'I'm telling you I don't have much stuff so you don't expect a moving truck.'" He wrapped the towel around his waist and stepped out of the shower. "Yes, Mordechai. It's a yes."
Mordechai went still. Not the composure-cracking that Rodney had seen before, this was different.
This was the stillness of a man absorbing something he'd wanted so badly he'd braced for the refusal, and the brace was no longer needed, and his body didn't know what to do without it.
His eyes were bright. His mouth was soft.
He looked, for three unguarded seconds, like a man who'd just been given something he didn't think he deserved.
"Good," he said. His voice was slightly rough. "I'll send Geoff to pick up your things this afternoon."
"You know Geoff?"
"Everyone knows Geoff. He's Lady Leo's best man. Reliable, discreet, and he drives a truck." Mordechai paused. "He also likes you. He told me so. Said you were brave."
"Geoff said that?"
"He said: 'The panda's got guts. No sense, but guts.' I believe it was a compliment."
Rodney laughed. It came out creaky and slightly wet and it hurt his back and it was the best sound he'd made in twelve hours. Mordechai visibly eased at the sound of it, a physical loosening, like watching a knot untie.
"Come eat breakfast," Mordechai said. "I can't cook much, but I make excellent toast, and I have three kinds of jam and very strong opinions about all of them."
***
They ate breakfast in the kitchen, a bright, clean space with windows that looked out onto the desert and a table that was clearly designed for one person but had two chairs pulled up to it.
Mordechai made toast and coffee and laid out jam jars with the focused precision of a man conducting a laboratory experiment.
"Strawberry is the best," he said, spreading a piece with the confidence of someone stating an objective fact. "The orange marmalade is acceptable. The fig is—" He paused. "The fig is for guests I don't like."
"Why do you have jam for guests you don't like?"
"Because not offering jam would be rude, and offering bad jam is a more subtle form of hostility."
Rodney stared at him. Then started laughing, really laughing, the kind that made his ribs ache and his eyes water and his back protest violently, and he couldn't stop, because the idea of Mordechai, this man who had killed a polar bear with his teeth twelve hours earlier, engaging in passive-aggressive jam warfare was so absurdly, perfectly, specifically Mordechai that it shook loose the last of the tightness he'd been carrying since the warehouse.
Mordechai watched him laugh with an expression of bewildered pleasure, like a man who'd accidentally performed a magic trick and wasn't sure how to do it again.
"Eat your toast," Mordechai said eventually.
Rodney ate his toast, and it was the best toast he'd ever had. The strawberry jam was, as promised, exceptional.
They sat in the kitchen and drank coffee and didn't talk about the warehouse.
They talked about small things, Mordechai's opinions on coffee beans (strong, almost violent opinions), the view from the kitchen window (desert, more desert, a single stubborn cactus), Sarah's upcoming retirement and the logistics of the handoff.
Normal things. Domestic things. The kinds of things that people talked about when they were building a life together and hadn't quite realized they were doing it.
At some point, Rodney reached across the table and took Mordechai's hand. Just held it. The way Mordechai had held his all night. Not because he was scared, not because he needed comfort, but because the hand was there and it was warm and it was his.
Mordechai looked at their joined hands. Looked at Rodney.
And his expression, the one he usually kept locked behind composure and control and the careful architecture of a man who'd built his entire life around not needing anyone, was open and raw and full of something that looked, in the morning light of the kitchen, very much like love.
He didn't say it. Neither did Rodney.
But the toast was good, and the coffee was strong, and the kitchen was warm, and outside the cactus stood in the desert sun, stubborn and alive.