Chapter 22
Seth was in his bed.
Seth stirred again. His fingers curled against Zain's chest, grasping, even in sleep, at the warmth that had been absent from his life for so long that his body treated it as miraculous. The gesture was small and unconscious and it wrecked Zain completely.
He had never been this to someone before.
Never been the thing that someone's sleeping body reached for.
Rodriguez had been a partner but never this.
The women and men Zain had dated before Lakefront had been real but never this.
This was different. This was a man who had been broken by the world's cruelty and had chosen, despite every rational argument against it, to reach for Zain in the dark.
In his bed, in his room, breathing against his chest with the deep, even rhythm of actual sleep, the first unguarded sleep Zain had heard from him. No twitching. No aborted flinches. Just rest, pure and human and trusting in a way that made Zain's throat tight.
Morning light came in gray through the window. Detroit in December, the sun existed in theory, behind layers of cloud that turned the sky the color of old concrete. The refinery's flare stack glowed orange in the distance, a false dawn that never set.
Zain lay still and cataloged the moment the way he cataloged everything, with precision, with awareness, with the knowledge that it could be taken away.
Seth's hair against his collarbone, still damp from the rain that had washed the blood away.
Seth's hand curled against his chest, fingers loosely fisted, even in sleep, even in trust, holding on to something.
The bruise on his ribs from the gala's parking lot scramble, purple and tender against pale skin.
He was beautiful. Zain had resisted the word, it felt too soft, too simple for the complex, infuriating, extraordinary thing that Seth was, but lying here in the early gray light with Seth's weight against him, there was no other word that fit.
Beautiful, and his, and alive.
Zain pressed his face into Seth's hair and breathed and didn't move.
Downstairs, the knowing would be waiting for them.
Zain had seen the way Marcus looked at Seth during the gala planning, not suspicion but assessment, careful evaluation, a man running his crew and needed to understand how every variable affected the operation.
Marcus would have heard them come in last night.
Would have heard the rain-soaked stumbling on the stairs, the door closing with less precision than usual. Marcus heard everything.
And Jack. Jack would be impossible. Jack processed emotional information through humor the way some people processed it through therapy, and the prospect of Jack knowing about them was both warming and terrifying, because Jack's brand of knowing involved cooking elaborate meals and making pointed observations about acoustic insulation and generally being the most aggressively supportive human being in any room.
Ghost would pretend not to notice. Elijah would genuinely not comment. Nate would smile that smile, the warm one, the one that suggested he'd known before they did.
The crew would know, and the knowing would change the texture of the safehouse, and Zain wasn't sure if that frightened him or freed him.
Downstairs, the safehouse was waking. Jack's heavy tread in the kitchen. The smell of coffee drifting up through the floorboards. Ghost's fingers on keys, he never really stopped, just varied the intensity. The quiet sounds of men who'd built a life in the spaces the world ignored.
Seth stirred. His hand uncurled against Zain's chest. His eyes opened, green, unfocused, blinking into awareness.
"Hi," Seth said. His voice was rough. Sleep and screaming and rain and everything that had happened in the past twelve hours.
"Hi."
"Did that all really happen?"
"Which part?"
"All of it. The gala. Levi. The..."
"Yes."
Seth closed his eyes. Opened them. "I thought it might have been a dream. The bad parts and the good parts."
"It wasn't a dream."
"No." Seth's hand pressed flat against Zain's chest, feeling his heartbeat. "It wasn't."
They lay there for another five minutes. Then Seth said, "The crew knows. About us."
"The crew knew before we did."
"Fair point." A pause. "Are you okay with that?"
Zain considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. Marcus, Jack, Nate, Elijah, Ghost: these were the people he'd trusted with his life for years. They were the closest thing to family he'd had since his mother died. Their opinion mattered.
"Jack threatened to hold me down so you could yell at me if I didn't get my head out of my ass," Zain said.
Seth's mouth twitched. "I like Jack."
"Everyone likes Jack. It's deeply annoying."
"And the others?"
"Marcus will ask if it affects the operation. I'll tell him it doesn't. He'll accept that because he trusts me." Zain paused. "Ghost won't comment. Nate will make exactly one joke and then never mention it again. Elijah will pretend he doesn't know."
"And you?"
Zain turned his head. Looked at Seth: really looked, the way he'd been trying not to for weeks.
"I'm done pretending this is a mistake," he said.
The smile that broke across Seth's face was the first real, unguarded, fully committed smile Zain had ever seen from him. It changed his whole face, washed the wariness away and left something young and bright and fierce.
"Good," Seth said. "Because I was going to be really annoying about it if you tried to run again."
"You're already really annoying."
"Your annoying."
Zain huffed. Pulled him closer. Let the morning settle around them like something they'd chosen instead of something they'd survived.