Chapter 9
Zain sat across from him at the kitchen table and fieldstripped a Beretta with the precise, practiced focus of a man who was definitely not thinking about anything.
The gun came apart in his hands like a sentence being diagrammed, spring, slide, barrel, frame, each piece laid on the cloth with surgical care.
Seth watched his hands. He couldn't help it.
Those hands had been on him, had held his wrists against the mat with a pressure that was control without cruelty, had traced the line of his ribs with a tenderness that contradicted everything about the situation.
Those hands were now handling a weapon with the same focused attention, and Seth's body, his stupid, traitorous, Pavlovian body, couldn't tell the difference between the two kinds of touch.
"You're staring," Zain said without looking up.
"You're avoiding."
"I'm cleaning a weapon."
"You cleaned that weapon yesterday. And the day before."
The hands stilled. For one second, Seth counted, Zain's composure cracked. Something moved behind his eyes. Then the walls locked back into place, and his hands resumed their work, and the moment passed like a cloud shadow over concrete.
"It was a mistake," Zain said. Quietly. To the gun, not to Seth.
The first morning, Wednesday, Zain missed breakfast. Seth told himself it was nothing. People missed breakfast. Adults with complicated lives and dangerous jobs sometimes ate alone or early or not at all. It didn't mean anything.
The second morning, Thursday, Zain was in the kitchen when Seth arrived, but he left.
Picked up his coffee, nodded, and walked out with the fluid efficiency of a man executing a tactical retreat.
Seth stood in the doorway and watched him go and felt the sting of being treated like a threat by someone whose hands you could still feel on your skin.
The third morning, Friday, Zain didn't come to breakfast.
Seth sat at the kitchen island with his coffee, black, too strong, exactly how he'd come to need it, and waited. Seven o'clock. Seven-thirty. Eight. No Zain.
The gym was empty. Seth checked. The rubber mat still held the faint impression of their bodies, or maybe he imagined it. The air still smelled like sweat and something headier, muskier. Or maybe he imagined that too.
He didn't imagine the way his skin still buzzed.
The way his wrists remembered being held.
The way his body kept replaying the feeling of Zain's weight against his back, Zain's breath in his ear, Zain's hand right there, and the precise, devastating control of a man who could take someone apart without any of it being accidental.
Seth leaned against the doorframe and pressed his forehead to the cool wood and said "fuck" very quietly to himself.
Back upstairs.
Ghost was in the meeting room, which meant Ghost hadn't been to bed. The laptop's blue glow painted his face in spectral light, and the four empty energy drink cans beside him suggested he was operating on chemistry rather than rest.
"Have you seen Zain?" Seth asked.
Ghost's eyes didn't leave the screen. "Out."
"Out where?"
"Just out. He does that."
"Does what?"
"Leaves when he doesn't want to deal with something." The typing paused. Ghost looked up, and for a moment those dark, shadowed eyes held something almost like warmth. Almost. "He'll be back."
"I didn't ask if. "
"You did, though." Ghost went back to his screen. "There's leftover pasta in the fridge. You should eat."
Seth stared at him. Ghost stared at his laptop. The conversation was apparently over
Zain came back at noon.
He walked in, nodded at Nate, went to the armory, and closed the door. Came out fifteen minutes later cleaning a handgun. Sat at the kitchen table and fieldstripped it with focused precision.
Seth sat across from him and said nothing.
Zain said nothing.
The gun came apart. The gun went back together. Zain's hands were steady. His jaw was tight. He didn't look up.
"So we're not going to talk about it," Seth said.
"Nothing to talk about."
"You had your hand on my –"
"I remember what happened."
"Then... "
"It shouldn't have happened." Zain's voice was flat. Controlled. The same voice he used to give orders during ops. "I was responsible for you. I crossed a line."
"I asked you to cross it."
"That doesn't matter."
"It does to me."
Zain looked up. Those dark eyes, shuttered now, the warmth that Seth had seen on the mat locked behind something hard and practiced.
"You've been through something traumatic," Zain said, each word measured. "You're in a vulnerable position. I have authority over your safety. What happened was -"
"If you say 'inappropriate,' I'm going to throw this coffee at you."
"…a mistake."
The word hit like a slap.
Seth stood. His chair scraped back across the floor, loud in the quiet kitchen. He didn't trust his voice, so he used his feet instead, walked to the stairs, took them two at a time, and closed his bedroom door with precisely enough force to make a point without making a scene.
He sat on the bed.
His hands were shaking.
Not from anger. Or not just from anger. From the whiplash of being held like he mattered and then told it was a mistake.
From the nauseating familiarity of wanting something and having it taken back.
From the quiet, devastating understanding that Zain was probably right, which made it worse, because being right and being cruel were not the same thing but they hurt exactly the same