Chapter Eleven
Weeks passed.
Sero worked. He dealt blackjack five nights a week, ate fruit in the break room, and watched documentaries alone in his apartment.
He shifted every evening before bed, hung in the closet for an hour, let his bat brain reduce the world to echo and scent, then shifted back and slept in his bed like a human person who didn't have a second body that craved the dark.
He did not contact Trevor. Trevor did not contact him. The silence between them was not the held-breath silence of their first fight. It was larger, more deliberate, a clearing that had been burned and was now waiting to see what grew back.
He noticed the change in his own habits before anyone else could have.
He was eating apricots again, good-mood snacking, but he was also still eating figs.
He'd never mixed moods before. The fruit drawer had become uncharted territory, and Sero didn't know what it meant to want both comfort and hope at the same time.
Thanksgiving fell on the second week. Sero worked a double at the casino because holidays paid time and a half and because the alternative was eating dried figs on his couch while the rest of the city pretended to be grateful for things.
The casino floor was quieter than usual.
There were fewer tourists, more regulars, the desperate and the lonely shuffling chips under fluorescent light while somewhere in the city normal people ate turkey with their families.
Sero dealt blackjack for eleven hours and ate a persimmon in the break room at midnight and called his mother, who told him she was proud of him and that he should eat more papaya.
He didn't mention Trevor. She didn't ask.
The pronghorn had taught her not to ask about Sero's relationships until Sero brought them up first, and Sero was grateful for that particular piece of damage, which was not the kind of gratitude the holiday was designed for but was the only kind he had.
***
He went to KK on a Friday, two and a half weeks after the night he'd poured the gold down the drain.
The club was busy. A normal Friday was filled bodies and music and the particular energy of people who'd come to the one place in the city where they didn't have to pretend.
Someone had decorated for the holidays since Sero's last visit.
Gold tinsel looped along the bar, and a miniature Christmas tree sat on the counter near the register, hung with tiny ornaments shaped like paddles and handcuffs.
A string of white lights traced the edge of the ceiling where the Halloween cobwebs had been two months earlier.
It was tasteful by KK standards, which meant it was absurd by anyone else's.
Sero sat on his stool. Amani appeared with a Shirley Temple before he'd opened his mouth.
"You look better," Amani said.
"I feel better. Mostly."
"Mostly is an improvement over where you were." Amani set the drink down and leaned on the bar. He was in his usual uniform, the tiny shorts, the bare chest. "He's been in, by the way."
Sero's jaw tightened. "Trevor?"
"He came by last week. Not to play, he's still banned.
He came to talk to me. Asked about you. I told him you were alive and that was all I was authorized to share.
" Amani straightened up. "He looked like shit, for the record.
Like a man who hasn't slept in a month and deserves exactly that amount of insomnia. "
"What did he want?"
"He wanted to know if you were okay. And he wanted to tell me something." Amani reached under the counter and produced a folded piece of paper. "He left this for you. Said to give it to you when you came in, if you came in. I've been carrying it around for a week."
Sero took the paper. It was a single sheet, folded in thirds, Trevor's handwriting, precise, angular, the penmanship of someone who cared about how things looked even when the content was ugly.
He unfolded it.
Sero,
I've been cooperating with enforcement. Agent Vasquez says the case against the Grizzly is strong, he won't be operating again. The sharks are in custody. The Playground is closed permanently.
I've also been working with the task force to notify the other men I used the machine on.
Twenty-three so far, out of an estimated forty or more.
Some of them were angry. Some didn't care.
Two of them thanked me for telling them, which was worse than the anger.
One of them cried. I sat with him while he cried and I thought about you.
I destroyed everything in my workshop. The burner, the magic circles, the refining equipment.
I kept the alchemy. I can't destroy a gift I was born with, but I'll never use it to take from someone again.
I'm looking into legitimate applications.
There are healing practices in the shifter community that use alchemical principles.
Salves for shift injuries. Remedies for transformation pain.
Things that help people instead of exploiting them.
I don't know if I'm good enough to do that work, but I'm going to try.
I got a job. It's not impressive, I'm stocking shelves at a hardware store off Boulder Highway. Twelve dollars an hour. The apartment is going to be a problem soon, but the bathtub is worth eating ramen for.
I'm not writing this to ask for anything. I'm writing because you said "don't contact me" and I'm respecting that, but I also don't want you to think I disappeared. I'm here. I'm not hiding. When you're ready, if you're ready, I'll be wherever you want me to be.
What you found in those sessions belongs to you. It always did.
Trevor
Sero read the letter twice. Three times. The handwriting blurred on the third reading because his eyes were wet, and he folded the paper and put it in his pocket and drank his Shirley Temple and said nothing for a long time.
Amani didn't ask. Amani polished glasses and served other customers and let the silence be what it was, not empty but full, the way silence was full when it held something that was growing.
"I miss him," Sero said eventually.
Amani set a glass down. "I know."
"Do you think that's stupid?"
"I think missing someone who hurt you is the most normal thing in the world. The question isn't whether you miss him." Amani leaned on the bar, his voice losing the teasing edge it carried with everyone else. "Do you want to trust him again?"
"I don't trust him."
"That's not what I asked."
Sero ate the cherry from his Shirley Temple. Then he fished out the second cherry that Amani had dropped in without being asked.
"Yeah," Sero said. "I want to."
"Then that's your starting point. Whether you can forgive him, that's a decision, and you'll make it or you won't. But the wanting to try is where it starts. Everything after that is just showing up and seeing what happens."
Sero looked at him. "You keep being right about things and it's starting to get annoying."
"It's a gift. I don't question it." Amani picked up the glass and shelved it. "Also, I've been watching people try to figure out trust and desire at this bar since I was sixteen. You pick things up."
"I want to see him," Sero said.
"When?"
"Not tonight. But soon. Can you set something up? Here, at the club. During the day, when it's quiet."
"I can do that." Amani set a glass down and looked at him. "Sero. What are you hoping for?"
It was a real question. Not a challenge, not a warning, a genuine inquiry from someone who cared about the answer.
"I'm hoping that the man who wrote this letter is the real one," Sero said. "And that the man who built the machine is the one who's gone."
"What if they're the same man?"
"Then I'll deal with that. But I want to find out."
Amani nodded. "I'll text him. Wednesday work?"
Wednesday. Their day. The day Trevor had booked four weeks of, back when the world was simpler and the worst thing Sero knew about him was that he was arrogant and carried a mysterious bag.
"Wednesday works."
***
Sero went home and hung in his closet and thought about letters.
No one had ever written him a letter. Not a real one, not pen on paper, folded in thirds, carried in a bartender's pocket for a week.
Texts, yes. Emails, occasionally. Wade had once left a Post-it on the fridge that said OUT OF MILK and that was the closest thing to written communication their relationship had produced.
Trevor's letter was in Sero's back pocket, pressed against his body by the closet rod.
He could feel the edges of the paper through the fabric.
The words were already memorized. He'd read them enough times on the walk home that they'd burned into his brain the way card counts burned in, permanent and precise.
I sat with him while he cried and I thought about you.
The bathtub is worth eating ramen for.
What you found in those sessions belongs to you. It always did.
Sero hung in the dark and thought about forgiveness.
Not as a grand gesture, not as a scene in a movie where the music swelled and someone ran through the rain, but as a practice.
A daily, unglamorous choice to believe that a person who had done a terrible thing was also a person who could become something better.
Forgiveness wasn't about the past. It was about the future.
It was about looking at someone and deciding that what they might become was worth more than what they'd been.
He didn't know if he was there yet. He didn't know if he'd ever be there.
But he wanted to try, and wanting was the starting point, and everything after that was just showing up and seeing what happened.
Sero shifted back to human, climbed into bed, and set the letter on his nightstand. The Strip painted the ceiling in shifting colors. The apartment was quiet except for the building's creaks and the distant hum of the city.
He thought about Wednesday.
He fell asleep without dreaming, which was, after the month he'd had, the kindest thing his brain had done for him in a long time.