Invitation #3
Oliver did not mistake the response for kindness. He filed it away anyway.
"You can want me here," Oliver said. Darkness gathered. His next admission took longer.
"I can want you here."
Saying it tightened something beneath his ribs. Bhodi moved fractionally closer without crossing the last boundary, and Oliver let the desire exist without rewarding it.
"Wanting it does not decide it."
Hunger reacted with something like offense, and Oliver's own appetite sharpened with it.
He wanted to give more. Wanted to discover how far the sensory overlap could travel before he lost the ability to tell invitation from momentum.
Wanted Bhodi inside every nerve until distinction became unbearable, then wanted the satisfaction of finding his way back.
The desire remained his. He still left it where it was.
"Not now."
Bhodi waited long enough for Oliver to notice because waiting was new enough to deserve suspicion.
Then something touched the edge of the dark, and distance changed. The pressure from Needle Rock arrived without body or voice, an awareness of separation becoming suddenly intolerable. Somewhere beyond Hunger, something noticed the space between itself and Oliver and wanted that space altered.
Bhodi turned. The darkness around Oliver did not loosen. It tightened. For one instant Hunger seemed to rise between him and whatever had reached across the distance. The meaning struck without language and with none of the uncertainty Oliver had felt when Bhodi tested his boundaries.
No. Mine.
The claim wrapped around him so completely that protection became the first, treacherous interpretation. Oliver rejected it almost as quickly. Bhodi was not defending him. It was refusing competition.
The other pressure lingered for less than a heartbeat.
Hunger pressed outward with a violence that had no physical direction, territorial in a way Oliver understood without possessing useful vocabulary for what he had just felt.
None of the hesitant learning Bhodi had shown with Oliver's boundary appeared here.
Another claim had touched what Hunger considered its access, and the answer came immediately.
For that brief contact, distance pulled taut around him. Something reached across it. Hunger closed harder around what it had already marked.
The distance-pressure withdrew. Bhodi did not pursue it. Hunger's attention snapped back to Oliver and remained there, dense and immediate, as though the interruption had only reminded it where its claim began. Bhodi stayed wrapped around him, and Oliver tasted metal where his mouth had gone dry.
"You do not share." Hunger gathered tighter.
Merrow had taught him the difference. Avarice kept. Hunger devoured. Sharing suited neither.
Oliver felt a laugh trying to become fear and permitted neither the dignity of winning.
"That was not protection."
Bhodi's attention remained fixed on him with almost insulting intensity. Oliver imagined, deliberately, another person trying to take a bite from a meal he had not finished. The comparison was crude enough to offend him and accurate enough that Hunger warmed around it.
"Charming."
A second thought followed before he could stop it.
If another Sovereign ever reached for Marin through him, would Bhodi answer the same way?
The possibility carried a flash of relief so immediate Oliver despised it.
He could imagine being grateful for Hunger's territorial violence if something worse arrived first.
That was how monsters acquired better arguments. "No," he said quietly, before Bhodi could mistake the thought for invitation. "You do not get to become a virtue because I dislike the competition."
The darkness remained close. "Yes," Oliver murmured. "I thought so."
The chamber shook hard enough to fracture the black water into reflections. Marin's voice reached him through the speaking tube.
"Oliver."
He found his mouth. Then lungs. Pain in his right hand. His ribs. The not-water around his ankles. Bhodi pressed close inside his shadow, no longer wearing his face and no longer pretending its claim resembled anything human.
"I'm here."
Marin exhaled audibly. "Do you want extraction?" The question hurt because part of him did.
He wanted her hands on him. Cold air. Saint Orra's terrible coffee. Jasper insulting the navy. A body with one set of appetites and no metaphysical dispute over breathing rights.
He also wanted another minute, another answer, another chance to see whether a boundary held because Hunger had learned anything or because the next invitation remained attractive enough to make waiting profitable.
Oliver closed his eyes. "No."
Silence held on the other side before Marin said, "Understood.
" Nothing in her voice made the choice noble.
She did not punish it either. Oliver loved her for that with enough force that Bhodi flared around him and reached toward the feeling.
He felt the movement begin. "There," Oliver whispered.
Bhodi stopped, and the line held for the moment.