21. Chapter 21 #2
He doesn't know how to name it. The anxiety has been building all day, compounding in the quiet spaces between tasks, and now it's lodged under his sternum and pressing outward.
He busies himself with Penny's bedtime routine because that, at least, is uncomplicated.
He gives her a bath and brushes her hair and reads her a story, and she falls asleep halfway through the second chapter with her stuffed animal crushed against her chest. He pulls the blanket up over her shoulders and watches her for a moment and then he turns off the light and closes the door and goes to the living room, where Erath is waiting.
They sit on the couch. Erath at one end, Sidney at the other, and the distance between them feels deliberate even though Sidney didn't plan it.
"Are you alright?" Erath asks.
"Fine," Sidney says.
Erath looks at him. It's the look that says he doesn't believe him but he's not going to push, and that's almost worse, because if Erath pushed then Sidney could push back and anger is easier than this.
This fragile, terrified thing sitting in his chest that he can't name and can't quiet and doesn't know what to do with.
They sit in silence for a while. Erath reads. Sidney pretends to do the same, but the words swim and blur and he reads the same paragraph four times without retaining any of it. Eventually he gives up and leans his head back against the couch and closes his eyes and just breathes.
"You should go to bed," Erath says quietly.
Sidney should. He's exhausted. His body is tired and his mind is tired and there is a very warm, very large bed in the next room with an immortal man who will hold him through the night and ask nothing.
But going to bed means lying in Erath's arms and being held, and being held means being close, and being close means the walls he's spent the entire day rebuilding will come down again, and he'll be right back where he started: open and raw and dangerously invested in someone who could decide tomorrow that this was a mistake.
"Come with me?" Sidney asks, because he's a weak man. He's so very weak and he wants so much it hurts.
Erath follows. They undress in the dark and slide under the covers, and Erath's arm comes around his waist the way it always does, firm and steady and unasking.
Sidney lies there and stares at the wall and listens to the low ambient hum of the underworld and feels the warmth pressed against his back and tries to sleep and can't. His mind won't stop.
It catalogues every reason this will end, every precedent, every failure.
It reminds him that men don't stay. That he's not the kind of person men stay for.
That the last one told him he was too much work and the one before that told him he wasn't enough, and both of those things were true at the same time, and neither of them has stopped being true just because Erath is patient.
Erath's breath is warm against the back of his neck. His arm is heavy across Sidney's ribs. He is perfectly, impossibly still, the way he gets when he's in that resting state that passes for sleep, and Sidney lies there inside the cage of his body and waits.
He's not sure how long he lies there. Time in the underworld is a suggestion at best, and Sidney has no clock and no windows and no way to measure the hours except by the weight of his own exhaustion.
He thinks about the morning. About Penny's question and Erath's face and the word forever and the way it felt landing on him, too heavy and too bright and too much.
He thinks about the three men before this and the wreckage each of them left and the fact that every time he was the one who stayed too long and gave too much and broke himself trying to hold something together that was never going to hold.
He thinks about Penny, asleep down the hall, trusting him.
The thoughts run and run and run and then, gradually, Sidney becomes aware that something has changed.
Erath is still behind him. Arm around his waist. Chest against his back.
But the quality of his presence has shifted.
The steady, measured breathing that Sidney has come to know, the rhythm that isn't sleep because Erath doesn't sleep, has slowed.
Deepened. It's no longer the deliberate, conscious breathing of someone who is resting by choice.
It's something else. Something involuntary.
Sidney goes very still.
He listens. He counts breaths. He waits for the telltale sign that Erath is awake, the subtle adjustment of his arm, the slight change in the pressure of his chest, the alertness that lives under even his most restful state.
None of it comes. Erath's body is heavy against his in a way it has never been, a true heaviness, the dead weight of a being that has given itself over to unconsciousness completely and without reservation.
Erath is asleep.
Not resting. Not in the deep quiet state that passes for rest. Asleep, the way living things are asleep, the way humans are asleep, lost and unaware and entirely gone from the waking world.
Sidney didn't know that was possible. In all the nights he's spent in this bed, with Erath's arm around him and Erath's breath on his neck, Erath has never once been asleep.
He's been still, and he's been quiet, and he's been close to something resembling rest, but there has always been an awareness beneath it, a watchfulness, the vigilance of a being that has spent eternity on guard and does not know how to stop.
And now he's stopped.
Sidney turns over, carefully, inch by inch, and Erath doesn't stir.
He's on his back now and Erath's arm has slipped from his waist and settled against the mattress between them, and Sidney can see his face in the dim green light that filters through the walls from the river outside.
He looks different. The severity that lives in the line of his jaw and the set of his brow has loosened, not disappeared but eased, the way a fist unclenches when it forgets it's holding something.
His lips are parted slightly. His lashes are dark against his cheeks and there are shadows beneath his eyes that Sidney has never noticed before, or maybe they were always there and he'd never seen Erath still enough to find them.
He looks, Sidney thinks, with the ache of someone who is in so far over his head that the surface is just a memory, human.
Sidney reaches out. He doesn't think about it.
His hand moves on its own, drawn by the gravity of seeing something unguarded in a person who is never unguarded, and his fingers touch Erath's face.
His jaw. The place where the severity usually lives.
He touches it the way you touch something you can't quite believe is real, gently, with the pads of his fingers, and the skin beneath them is warm and the bone beneath that is solid and Erath is asleep because he feels safe, because Sidney is beside him and he feels safe enough to stop watching, and the enormity of that trust is so far beyond anything Sidney knows how to carry that it makes his throat close.
He is in over his head. He is so far past the line of recoverable distance that he can't even see it anymore, and the thought is terrifying and inevitable and tender all at once, and his fingers trace the line of Erath's jaw to his chin, and Erath's face is soft under his hand, and Sidney is falling apart with the quiet certainty that this is it, that this is the thing he's been afraid of, the thing that will ruin him when it ends because nothing this consuming has ever not ended, and he can't stop touching him, and he can't stop wanting this, and he is so completely and irrevocably gone.
Erath's hand closes around his wrist.
It happens fast. Faster than anything Sidney has ever seen Erath do, and he's seen Erath move through the underworld with the speed of something that doesn't answer to physics.
One moment Erath is asleep and Sidney's fingers are on his face and the next Erath's grip is locked around his wrist and Sidney is on his back and Erath is over him, pressing him into the mattress with the full, crushing weight of his body.
Erath's other hand comes to Sidney's shoulder, pinning it, and his eyes are open and they are not his eyes.
They're somewhere else. They're looking at someone else.
Sidney knows this because Erath's face is a ruin of something old and terrible and private, the face of a man who has been woken by a hand on his skin in the dark and whose body remembers what happened the last time that happened, the last time someone he trusted reached for him in bed, the last time he was this unguarded and this close and this vulnerable, and his response is not thought.
It's reflex. It's the muscle memory of a betrayal that taught him to sleep with one eye open for the rest of eternity, except tonight he didn't, and the hand that found him dragged him back to the worst moment of his life before his mind could catch up and tell him where he actually is and who is actually beneath him.
Sidney knows all of this. He processes it in the fraction of a second between being pinned and what comes after, and the knowing doesn't help.
It doesn't help because his body has its own memory and his body's memory is louder than his mind and what his body remembers is this.
This exact thing. A man above him. Hands on his wrists.
Weight pressing him down. The inability to move.
The inability to breathe. The inability to do anything except go still and small and wait for it to be over.