Chapter 10
ONE YEAR LATER
Easter again.
Shaw stood in the doorway of their apartment, taking a moment to just look.
The space was small—a one-bedroom in a building with good bones and neighbors who minded their own business.
Benny’s textbooks were scattered across every available surface, highlighted and Post-it-noted within an inch of their lives.
He hadn’t worked a club shift in eight months. Shaw paid for school now.
The cops had done their rounds, after the incident last year—one club owner shot in his own alley and his brother gone without a trace the same night.
Shaw had made the worst of that night disappear before the sun was all the way up, and the rest took care of itself.
So when every server and barback who’d worked that Easter weekend was hauled in for questioning, Benny sat through it like the rest of them, polite and blank, and gave them nothing.
Somewhere in the apartment the shower shut off. Shaw didn’t know how long he’d been standing in the door.
He shrugged out of his jacket and winced. His knuckles were split open and there was blood drying on his cheekbone.
“Is that blood on my floor?”
Shaw turned.
Benny was emerging from the bathroom in boxers and nothing else, hair dripping, a highlighter already back behind one ear. Bare feet, toes curling against the cool hardwood.
He looked soft like this. Unguarded. Nothing like the sharp-tongued disaster Shaw had met in a bloody alley, and nothing like the cool professional he became whenever he had sutures in his hand.
This was the Benny nobody else got to see.
The one who stole Shaw’s clothes and sang off-key while making breakfast.
“It’s my floor too,” Shaw said.
“Fine, your floor. Then you’re the one scrubbing it.” It was a familiar rhythm, the same argument they’d run a hundred times, worn smooth and friendly.
Benny was already moving, disappearing into the hallway and coming back with the kit. He’d built the kit himself, everything he’d need to patch up Shaw. He’d bought things for injuries that hadn’t even happened yet.
Benny didn’t ask what happened, just looked Shaw over and started setting out what he’d need. Shaw knew better than to reach for anything himself. “Sit down. Let me see.”
Shaw sat on the edge of the couch. Benny had stitched him up here enough times that the leather smelled like antiseptic when it got warm. Other couples had anniversaries for the first kiss and the first I-love-you. Shaw had one for the first time Benny had put a needle in him.
Benny knelt between Shaw’s knees and took his hand first. He turned it over, thumbed across the split knuckles with that clinical focus that still made Shaw want to go still and let himself be worked on, even after a year—the same way it had on the floor of a closed bar with a needle in his skin and a blood-stained bunny leaning over him.
“You hit somebody hard.”
“Several somebodies.”
Benny made an approving sound, then a disapproving one. He snapped on gloves, reached for the antiseptic, and went to work cleaning the dried blood out of the creases of Shaw’s knuckles—slow and careful, the way he handled Shaw whenever Shaw came home like this.
Then he tilted Shaw’s chin up and looked at the cut along his cheekbone. “That one’s getting stitched.”
“Figured.”
“This is getting ridiculous,” Benny muttered, threading the suture. “You’re going to run out of skin for me to stitch eventually. I’ve patched you up more times this year than I can count.”
“Good thing I locked you down.”
Benny’s mouth twitched. He shot Shaw a look—fond and exasperated, Shaw’s favorite of the bunch, the one he got at least three times a week. “Now hold still.”
Shaw held still.
The needle went in. He’d gotten used to this—the sharp initial bite, the tugging as Benny pulled the thread through. He’d stopped flinching months ago. He trusted Benny’s hands completely, relaxing into the pain instead of fighting it.
Shaw had spent most of his life patching himself up in motel rooms with shitty lighting and cheaper whiskey. Now he came home to Benny.
“Done.” Benny tied off the last suture and sat back, surveying his work. Neat and precise. “Try not to rip these out for at least a week this time.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“That’s what you said last time.” But he was smiling, and when he leaned in to kiss Shaw, he tasted like chamomile—his stress tea, the one he made when studying for exams.
Shaw caught his wrist before he could pull away. “Wait. I have something for you.”
Benny raised an eyebrow. “Is it another injury? Because I just used the last of the dissolvable sutures.”
“No.” Shaw reached into his abandoned jacket pocket—careful not to pull the fresh stitches—and produced a box. Small. Gold paper. “Open it.”
Benny took the box. His fingers were still slightly bloody from the stitching, but he didn’t seem to notice. He unwrapped it slowly, carefully.
Inside: dark chocolate truffles, dusted with sea salt and flecked with gold leaf. The good stuff—the really good stuff. The kind Benny had mentioned once, months ago, offhandedly. A bit too much for someone who grew up eating store brand everything. Maybe someday.
He’d laughed it off. Shaw hadn’t.
Shaw listened. He was always listening when it came to Benny. Professional habit, maybe. Shaw tracked details the way he tracked targets. He just put the intel to different use these days.
Benny looked at the chocolate. Then at Shaw. For just a second his guard dropped—that flash of disbelief he got whenever someone did something nice for him, like he was still waiting for the catch.
This time, there was one. “Under the bed,” Shaw said. “There’s a box.”
Benny narrowed his eyes. “What did you do?”
“Go look.”
Benny went, suspicious. Shaw listened to him in the bedroom—the rustle of cardboard, a beat of silence, then a slightly choked laugh.
“You did not.”
“Happy Easter.”
Benny stopped in the doorway. The ears were already in his hair—satin instead of the cheap polyester from the night they met, sitting straight and a little smug—and he held the pose just long enough for Shaw to take him in.
Bunny ears and nothing else.
“Happy?” Benny asked.
“Get over here.”
Shaw pulled him into his lap. He opened the box. Broke off a piece of chocolate—dark and glossy, salt crystals catching the light—and held it to Benny’s lips.
Benny opened his mouth.
Shaw fed him the chocolate. Watched Benny’s eyes close as the sweetness dissolved on his tongue, watched the tiny furrow between his brows go slack. Shaw wanted to give him that expression every day for the rest of his life. That was impractical, probably. He’d figure it out.
Then Benny’s hands were at Shaw’s belt and Shaw’s hands were sliding up bare skin, and the chocolate got set aside for more pressing matters.
Shaw ran his palms up Benny’s sides, sweat-damp under his hands and warm with the muscle moving underneath. A year of this and Shaw still hadn’t gotten tired of touching him. He’d given up pretending he ever would.
There was lube in the side table. Benny got it himself, slicked Shaw’s cock with one hand—eyes on Shaw’s the whole time, that little smirk that meant he knew exactly what he was doing—and the cold of it on Shaw’s overheated skin pulled a hiss out of him between his teeth.
Benny worked his fist up and down once, slow, watching it land.
Then he lined himself up without waiting to be asked.
He sank down in one long slide, and Christ, the heat of it.
The way Benny’s body resisted at first and then opened up around him, slick and tight enough to make Shaw’s hands cramp on his hips.
Benny took the whole length and bottomed out with a long bitten-off sound that Shaw felt in his teeth.
His head dropped back, ears tilting sideways with the angle of his neck.
He stayed there, stretched around Shaw’s cock, breathing through it. He leaned forward and dropped his forehead to Shaw’s. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“You look terrible.”
“You look like a million bucks.”
Benny’s lips twitched. He braced his hands on Shaw’s chest, careful of the stitches on his cheek, and started to move.
Slowly at first. The drag of him lifting off Shaw’s cock was filthy—slick and hot, that tight ring of muscle squeezing all the way up to the head and back down again. Then not slowly.
Benny got his rhythm and started fucking himself on Shaw with intent, lifting all the way off and slamming back down, the wet slap of skin on skin echoing through the apartment. His cock bounced flushed and leaking against Shaw’s stomach with every thrust.
“Christ, baby.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Benny rode him harder. Shaw was running on fumes—a long night and a job that had fought back—and Benny knew it. He wasn’t asking him to do anything but lie back and take it.
Soon Shaw could feel the muscle in Benny’s thighs shaking with the effort, sweat pooling at the small of his back where Shaw’s palm rested.
He kept his hands there and let Benny take what he wanted.
Shaw had spent the ride home picturing exactly this.
Benny in his lap, taking what was his while Shaw caught his breath.
Reality was filthier than the picture, the way reality with Benny always was.
Shaw broke off a piece of chocolate and held it up to Benny’s mouth without breaking the rhythm.
Benny moaned around it, lips wrapping warm and wet around Shaw’s fingertip, sucking the chocolate off along with the salt of Shaw’s skin.
Sweetness melted on Shaw’s fingertips. The room smelled like antiseptic and dark chocolate now, and Shaw was going to think about that combination at inappropriate times for the rest of his life.
“Love this,” Benny said, mouth still full of it. “Love you.”
Benny said it casually, the way he’d started saying it a few months ago—tossed out mid-breakfast or mid-sex, like it was just another fact. I love you. We’re out of milk. Shaw suspected Benny did it on purpose. Dropped it in mundane moments so Shaw wouldn’t make a big deal of it.
It was working.
Shaw caught the back of Benny’s neck and kissed him slow and deliberate, putting everything into it—and Benny made a low, knowing sound against his lips, reading it the way he’d learned to read all of Shaw.
Benny was getting close. Shaw could feel it in the way the clench around his cock got tighter and his rhythm started to break, in the way his thighs were trembling against Shaw’s hips.
Shaw closed his free hand around Benny’s cock, hard and dripping with precome, and worked his thumb in slow circles over the slit the way Benny liked it.
Benny’s rhythm faltered. A broken sound caught in his throat. Shaw stroked him once, twice, and Benny was gone—body locking down hot and tight around Shaw’s cock, ass spasming around him in pulses that matched the long hot stripes splashing across Shaw’s stomach.
He kept riding Shaw through his own aftershocks—oversensitive and shaking, sloppy with come and lube—and worked himself on Shaw’s cock until Shaw finally broke.
Shaw buried his face in Benny’s throat and came so hard the stitches on his cheek tugged when his jaw clenched, came inside him in long helpless pulses while Benny’s body clenched around him like it was trying to keep every drop. Mine, he thought.
Finally, Benny slumped against Shaw’s chest, breathing hard, a smear of chocolate at the corner of his mouth. The ears were barely hanging on. Shaw’s stitches had held, which was a minor miracle given the activity.
“Happy Easter,” Shaw said. His voice came out rough.
Benny laughed—breathless, genuine, the best sound Shaw knew. He leaned down and kissed him, and Shaw tasted chocolate on his lips.
“I didn’t used to keep track of what day it was,” Shaw said. “Easter, Tuesday, whatever. Just a fact for an alibi.”
“Yeah? And now?”
“Now I’ve got one marked.”
Benny sank against him. Shaw held on. Benny’s weight against his chest, solid and here, the apartment quiet around them.
“Same time next year?” Benny mumbled into his collarbone.
“Anytime you want, baby.”