Chapter Four #2
"It's fine." He considered elaborating, then decided Trevor had asked a direct question and deserved a direct answer.
"I'm good at it. I can count cards, which I obviously don't do for the house, but it means I can track the deck in my head without trying.
Management likes me because I'm fast and I don't make mistakes.
The hours work for me. I'm nocturnal by nature, so working nights feels right. And the pay covers rent and grapes."
"And the magnificent persimmon."
Sero kicked him lightly. "It's a good persimmon."
Trevor grinned and caught his foot, holding it for a moment before letting go. The touch was brief and warm, and Sero felt it travel all the way up his leg like a current finding ground.
"What about you?" Sero asked. "What do you do?"
Trevor's expression tightened, a slight narrowing around his eyes, a fractional change in the set of his mouth. If Sero hadn't been watching closely, he would have missed it. But he was a bat, and bats noticed small movements in the dark.
"I'm... freelance," Trevor said.
"Freelance what?"
"I make things. Custom work. It's hard to explain.
" He picked up a grape and studied it. "I've got a workshop at my apartment.
I build devices, like the one I used on you yesterday.
That's my own design. I sell them sometimes, or variations of them.
There's a market for quality equipment in the kink community. "
It was a plausible answer. It was also, Sero sensed, not the whole answer. But he didn't push. They'd known each other for three days. Whatever Trevor wasn't telling him, he either would eventually or he wouldn't, and pressing would only make him defensive.
"The machine is impressive," Sero said instead. "Did you really build the whole thing?"
The tension in Trevor's face dissolved, replaced by genuine enthusiasm.
"Every component. Took me about eight months.
The hardest part was the synchronization, getting the vibration patterns of both attachments to coordinate so they amplify each other instead of canceling out.
I went through about thirty prototypes of the controller alone.
" He was animated, his hands moving as he talked, sketching shapes in the air.
"The materials matter too. The sleeve is custom-molded silicone with a specific durometer, soft enough to feel good but firm enough for the suction to work.
The dildo has a flexible core so it can be angled for prostate stimulation without being rigid enough to cause injury. And the tubes—"
He stopped abruptly.
"The tubes?" Sero prompted.
"Connect the attachments to the base unit." Trevor’s voice had gone flat. "For power. That's all."
There it was again. The door closing behind Trevor's eyes. Sero filed it away the same way he filed card counts at the casino, quietly, automatically, without letting it show on his face.
"It's a hell of a thing," Sero said mildly. "You should patent it."
Trevor laughed, and the tension broke. "I'd have to explain what it does on the patent application. I'm not sure the patent office is ready for that."
They talked for another hour. The documentary shifted to octopuses, their intelligence, their ability to change color and texture, the way they solved puzzles with a distributed nervous system that was more alien than anything in science fiction.
Trevor compared himself to an octopus, adaptable, clever, good with his arms, and Sero told him he was more like a sea cucumber, cylindrical, defensive, expelled his internal organs when stressed. Trevor threw a grape at him.
It was easy. Stupidly, dangerously easy.
Sero had spent years building careful walls between himself and the men he dated, walls made of caution and precedent and the accumulated evidence that nobody stayed.
But Trevor kept finding gaps in the mortar.
Not by pushing through, by fitting through.
He was funny without trying too hard. He asked questions and listened to the answers.
He was physically present without being physically demanding, respecting the boundary Sero had set about not wanting anything physical tonight without ever referencing it or making Sero feel like he needed to justify it.
And he'd brought grapes.
"I should go," Trevor said eventually, though he didn't move. The TV was showing a time-lapse of coral growing, years compressed into seconds, a reef building itself one tiny polyp at a time. "Unless you want company while you sleep."
"Not tonight." But the refusal was softer than Sero intended. "Maybe sometime."
"I'll wait." Trevor stood, stretched, his shirt riding up to show a strip of lean stomach, and gathered his jacket from the arm of the couch. At the door, he turned back. "Wednesday still good?"
"Wednesday's good." Sero was still on the couch, knees drawn up, watching Trevor stand in his doorway. The light from the hall was behind him, turning his edges gold. "Trevor?"
"Yeah?"
"Thank you for the grapes."
It was a stupid thing to say. It was grapes, not diamonds. But Trevor's composure cracked, just for a second, the careful mask falling away to show the face underneath. The look of someone who wasn't used to being thanked for small things.
"Anytime," Trevor said. Then he was gone.
Sero sat in the quiet apartment and listened to Trevor's footsteps fade down the hall. The TV murmured about coral. The grapes sat on the coffee table, red and shiny and ridiculous. On his neck, the claw marks had scabbed over, small, precise, already beginning to fade.
He touched them.
Then he turned off the TV, ate one more grape, and went to bed.
***
He dreamed about the session. Not the pain, not the orgasms, the sound. The sound Trevor had made when Sero came for the eighth time. That small cry, pulled out of Trevor like something torn loose. The sound of a man losing control.
In the dream, Sero was on his knees at the pole, arms above his head, and Trevor was standing over him with the flogger.
But the flogger was made of light, each fall a strand of gold that left warmth instead of welts.
And when Trevor struck him, the gold sank into Sero's skin and stayed there, glowing, until his whole body was luminous.
A bat made of light. A creature of the deep brought to the surface.
Trevor dropped the flogger and knelt in front of him. In the dream, his eyes were amber instead of blue, cat eyes, the real ones, the ones that came with the shift. He put his hands on Sero's face and said something Sero couldn't hear.
He woke up reaching for someone who wasn't there.
The apartment was dark. The Strip's light leaked through the blinds in colored bars, red, gold, blue. Sero lay in bed and let his heart rate settle. His wrist, the one Trevor had tied on Halloween, tingled with phantom pressure.
Wednesday was two days away. He could wait two days.
He wasn't sure he wanted to.