Chapter Six
Trevor's apartment was, as advertised, immaculate.
After working an early shift, Sero stood in the doorway on Saturday evening and took it in.
Not merely clean. Curated. Every surface dusted, every object placed with intention.
The living room was minimal and warm: low gray couch, a single bookshelf organized by color, which Sero found either admirable or psychotic, he hadn't decided, a glass coffee table with nothing on it except a single potted succulent that looked like it had been positioned with a protractor.
The kitchen was open-plan, copper pots hanging from a rack above a marble island, and everything gleamed in a way that suggested the pots were both functional and decorative, which was the most housecat thing Sero could imagine.
"It's very clean," Sero said.
"Thank you."
"I'm not sure it was a compliment."
"It was to me. Come in. Take your shoes off at the door, please."
Sero removed his shoes and placed them beside Trevor's, which were aligned at the edge of the mat with mathematical precision. He added his at a deliberate angle, just to see what would happen. Trevor glanced down, twitched, and straightened them without comment. Sero smiled.
The apartment smelled like something good: butter, cheese, herbs, the warm yeasty scent of dough that had recently been in an oven.
Trevor was in socked feet and a white t-shirt that was tighter than anything Sero had seen him wear, and his hair was slightly damp, and he looked so domestic that Sero had to look away before his face gave him up entirely.
"The quiche is almost done." Trevor led him into the kitchen. "I also made a fruit plate for you because I know you can't eat the quiche."
On the island sat a wooden cutting board arranged with sliced mango, fanned strawberries, grapes, and Sero leaned closer, thinly sliced persimmon.
"You bought a persimmon," Sero said.
"I bought three. I had to look up how to cut them. Did you know there are two kinds? Hachiya and Fuyu? Yours is a Fuyu, by the way. I could tell because it's flat on the bottom."
"You researched my persimmon."
"I research everything. It's a cat thing." Trevor pulled the quiche from the oven, golden, perfect, smelling of Gruyère and caramelized onion, and set it on a cooling rack. "Give it ten minutes. Tour?"
The apartment was larger than Sero's, a two-bedroom on the ground floor of a five-story building, with actual hallways and actual doors that closed.
Trevor showed him the bathroom first, and the bathtub was, as promised, enormous.
A deep soaking tub that could comfortably fit two people, tiled in dark stone, with a wooden tray across the rim that held bath salts and a candle.
Lavender Epsom salts. The scent was already faintly present, as if the tub's memory of past baths lingered in the air.
"You weren't kidding about the tub," Sero said.
"I never kid about bathtubs."
The bedroom was next: a king-sized bed with white sheets pulled so taut he could bounce a coin off them, a single nightstand with a lamp and a book, blinds drawn against the evening light.
It was spare and deliberate and it smelled like Trevor, cedar and black tea, the scent Sero had come to associate with safety, which was either beautiful or alarming depending on how much self-awareness he was willing to apply.
At the end of the hallway was a second door. Closed.
"What's in there?" Sero asked.
"Workshop." Trevor's voice didn't change, but his posture stiffened, the same subtle shift Sero had seen when Trevor talked about his freelance work. A door closing behind his eyes to match the one in the hallway.
"Can I see it?"
"It's a mess. Not fit for company." Trevor was already turning back toward the kitchen. "Quiche should be ready."
Sero looked at the closed door. It was just a door, plain wood, brushed nickel handle, no lock visible from the outside.
But Trevor had walked past every other room in the apartment with the casual ease of a man showing off his space.
It was the only door he'd kept shut. The only room he hadn't offered.
Sero filed it. Added it to the count: the duffle bag, the tubes, the freelance deflection. And now a workshop he couldn't see.
He followed Trevor back to the kitchen.
They ate at the island, Trevor with his quiche, Sero with his fruit plate, and it was disarmingly normal.
Sero sat on a stool and ate persimmon slices and watched Trevor eat quiche with a fork and knife, which was another housecat thing, the kind of unnecessary precision that should have been annoying but was actually endearing.
"I have a question," Trevor said, midway through his second slice.
"You always have a question."
"True. What's the deal with the pain tolerance? Is it all bats or just you?"
Sero considered this while chewing a strawberry.
"All fruit bats have a higher baseline than most shifters.
We hang upside down for hours, that's a lot of blood pressure in the head that would give anyone else a screaming headache.
We squeeze through spaces that would injure bigger animals.
And our echolocation in bat form is basically a constant low-level sensory assault that we've evolved to tune out. So pain tolerance is baked in."
"But yours is exceptional, even for a bat."
"How would you know? You said you've never been with another bat."
"I haven't. But I've read about bat physiology.
" Trevor set his fork down and leaned forward.
"The average fruit bat's pain threshold is maybe two to three times a human's.
Yours is significantly higher than that.
The amount of impact you took in our sessions, a normal fruit bat would have safe-worded at thirty lashes.
You took fifty-three and asked for more. "
Sero blinked. "You researched bat physiology?"
"I told you. I research everything."
"You researched bat physiology because of me."
"I researched bat physiology because you're extraordinary and I wanted to understand why.
" Trevor said with the same matter-of-fact directness he used to describe the mechanics of his machine.
No flattery. No performance. Just a man stating what he believed to be true.
"You're an outlier. I want to know what makes you different. "
Sero covered the flush creeping up his neck by eating a grape.
"I don't know why I'm different. I've always been like this.
When I was a kid I fell out of a tree and broke my arm and didn't cry.
My mother thought something was wrong with me.
Took me to three different doctors before one of them, a shifter doctor, explained that some bats just process pain differently.
The signal reaches the brain, but the brain categorizes it as information instead of emergency. "
"Information instead of emergency," Trevor repeated. His eyes were bright with interest. "That's exactly what I saw. Your body responds to pain stimuli, your pupils dilate, your heart rate increases, you perspire, but your subjective experience of it isn't distress. It's data."
"Until you push it far enough. And then it becomes something else."
"The space."
"Yeah." Sero looked at him. "The space."
They were quiet for a moment. The kitchen hummed with the small sounds of an apartment at rest: the refrigerator cycling, a clock ticking somewhere in the living room, the faint ambient noise of the building around them.
"I want to ask you something else," Trevor said. "And you can tell me to fuck off if it's too personal."
"You've had your hand inside me. I think we're past too personal."
Trevor grinned. "Fair point. Why do you come to KK alone? You don't have friends there, other than Amani. You don't come with a group. You sit at the bar by yourself and watch, and then you go home. Why?"
It was a good question. It was also an uncomfortable one, because the answer revealed something about Sero that he'd prefer to keep folded up and stored in a dark closet alongside his depression figs.
"Bats are solitary," he said. "In the wild, fruit bats roost in colonies, but they don't socialize the way pack animals do.
There's no hierarchy, no bonding rituals, no grooming.
You hang near other bats because it's safer, not because you like them.
In human form, that translates to—" He gestured vaguely.
"I like being around people. I don't like being with them. There's a difference."
"Being around versus being with."
"Around is proximity. With is connection.
Proximity is easy for me. I can sit in a casino for eight hours surrounded by hundreds of people and feel fine.
Connection is—" He stopped. He was about to say hard, but that wasn't accurate.
"Connection is something I want but don't know how to maintain.
I'm good at the beginning part. The meeting, the interest, the first few weeks where everything is electric. I'm terrible at what comes after."
"What comes after?"
"The part where someone has to actually know me.
Not the surface stuff, the blackjack dealer, the fruit bat, the high pain tolerance.
The real stuff. The fact that I hang in my closet when I'm sad.
The fact that my phone has almost no contacts.
The fact that every relationship I've ever had ended because the person got bored once they ran out of new things to discover about me.
" He was saying too much. He could feel it, the exposure, the vulnerability, the bat-brain screaming at him to fold his wings and go dark.
But Trevor was watching him with those blue eyes, and the kitchen smelled like quiche and persimmon, and Sero was tired of folding.
"I come to KK alone because I don't know how to come with someone," Sero said. "Not yet."
Trevor reached across the island and took his hand. The grip was firm and warm and said, without words, I'm here.
"For what it's worth," Trevor said, "I've never cooked quiche for someone before. Or researched their fruit. Or bought three persimmons and watched a YouTube video on how to cut them. I'm not good at this either. But I'd like to keep trying, if you would."
Sero looked at their joined hands on the marble.
Trevor's fingers were long and precise, the fingers of someone who built intricate things, who tied perfect knots, who knew exactly how much pressure to apply and where.
Sero's were shorter, blunt-tipped, the hands of a man who dealt cards and ate fruit and had never held anyone's hand over a kitchen island before.
"I'd like that," Sero said.
They moved to the bathtub.
Not for sex. Sero had been clear about that, and Trevor hadn't pushed.
For the bath itself. The enormous tub, the lavender salts, the warm water that rose around them like an embrace.
Sero sat between Trevor's legs, his back against Trevor's chest, and felt the tension of the past week dissolve into the heat.
"This is obscene," Sero said. "This bathtub is obscene."
"I know." Trevor's arms were around him, loose and warm. "It's the reason I took this apartment. Everything else is average, but the tub is magnificent."
"You chose your home based on the bathtub."
"I chose my home based on the one thing that mattered most to me. That feels rational."
Sero laughed and tipped his head back against Trevor's shoulder. The ceiling was white. The steam made it soft at the edges, like a watercolor. Trevor's heartbeat was steady against his back, slow, regular, the resting pulse of a man who was, in this moment, completely at ease.
"Can I ask you something?" Sero said.
"Always."
"The workshop. What do you actually do in there?"
The heartbeat against his back didn't change. But Trevor's arms tightened, not much, just a fraction, just enough that Sero felt it.
"I told you. I build things. Custom equipment."
"You said it was hard to explain. But you explained the machine to me pretty easily. The synchronization, the controller, the silicone durometer. You're good at explaining technical things. So what's in the workshop that's harder to explain than a custom sex machine?"
Silence. The water lapped gently at the sides of the tub.
"There are some things about my work that are complicated," Trevor said carefully. "Not illegal. Not dangerous. Just complicated in ways that would take more context than I can give you right now."
"That's a non-answer."
"I know." Trevor's voice was quiet. "I'm asking you to give me time. I'll tell you everything, Sero. I want to. But I need to figure some things out first."
Sero stared at the ceiling. The steam was thick enough to taste, lavender and salt, warm and slightly bitter.
He could press. He could sit up, turn around, look Trevor in the eye and demand the truth the way he'd demand a player show their cards.
He was good at that. He'd spent his career reading faces for lies.
But Trevor's arms were around him, and the water was warm, and Trevor had said ‘I'll tell you everything.’ Not there's nothing to tell. Not you're imagining things. He'd acknowledged the secret and asked for time.
That was something. That was more honesty than Wade had given him in four months.
"Okay," Sero said. "But Trevor, whatever it is, I'd rather hear it from you than find out on my own."
"You won't have to find out on your own. I promise."
The word promise sat in the water between them. Sero let it float.
They stayed in the bath until the water cooled and Sero's fingers pruned.
Trevor wrapped him in a towel the size of a bedsheet, warm, soft, smelling of the same lavender, and they ended up on the couch in borrowed sweatpants, watching a documentary about octopuses, which Trevor insisted on calling "my people. "
Sero fell asleep with his head on Trevor's chest.
When he woke, the TV was off and a blanket had been draped over them both, and Trevor was asleep beneath him, one arm still around Sero's shoulders. The apartment was dark except for the kitchen light, which Trevor must have left on deliberately, a small, warm glow against the night.
Sero closed his eyes and listened to Trevor's heartbeat and didn't think about the workshop or the duffle bag or the things that didn't add up. He thought about persimmons, and the way someone who researched your fruit might be someone worth staying for.