Chapter Thirteen
They dated like normal people for three weeks.
It was strange. Not bad-strange. The kind of strange that came from discovering that a person you'd known primarily through extremity was also a person who had opinions about pizza toppings and a preferred brand of toothpaste and a habit of narrating the thoughts of passing animals under his breath.
"That pigeon is furious," Trevor said, walking down Fremont Street on their second date. "Look at him. He's absolutely seething. Someone stole his breadcrumb."
"You can't know that."
"I'm a cat. I know exactly what birds are thinking. Rage. Constant, unrelenting rage."
"Is that why you want to eat them?"
"I don't want to eat them. I want to catch them. Eating is incidental."
They went to the steakhouse on Tropicana twice.
Trevor ordered the cheapest thing on the menu both times, a side salad and bread, which he ate with the dignified restraint of a man who was absolutely starving but would rather die than admit that twelve dollars an hour didn't cover steakhouse dinners.
Sero ordered the fruit plate and the cheese board and pushed the cheese toward Trevor without comment.
Trevor ate it without comment. The mutual pretense that the cheese board was communal rather than charity was one of the more elegant negotiations of their relationship.
They watched documentaries at Sero's apartment.
Octopuses, then wolves ...Trevor's choice, delivered with the disclaimer "know your enemy", then a three-part series about bioluminescence that they both found genuinely moving.
They sat on Sero's couch with a bowl of grapes between them and a careful six inches of space that narrowed, over the course of three episodes, to two inches, then to contact.
Trevor's shoulder against Sero's, warm and solid and deliberate.
They talked. Not about the machine, not about the gold, not about the Playground or the sharks or Agent Vasquez's ongoing investigation.
About everything else. Trevor's childhood, the shelters, the foster homes, the housecat in a world of bigger predators, learning early that cleverness was the only advantage a small body had.
Sero's childhood: Tucson, his mother who called every weekend, the broken arm from the tree that didn't make him cry, the shifter doctor who'd said "some bats just process pain differently" and given him the first framework for understanding his own body.
They talked about the casino. Sero described the blackjack table, the green felt, the plastic-coated cards, the specific rhythm of deal-flip-count that had become as natural as breathing.
He described the fruit he kept in the break room, the way the pit boss tracked his shifts, the way the casino floor at three AM felt like the inside of a machine designed to convince people that time didn't exist.
Trevor described the hardware store. The lumber aisle, which smelled like pine and sawdust and made his cat brain want to sharpen his claws.
Doug, the owner, who'd promoted him to assistant inventory manager after two weeks because Trevor's organizational instincts were, in Doug's words, "freakishly good.
" The raccoon healer, whose name was Miriam, who was teaching him the basics of legitimate alchemy: plant compounds, mineral distillation, the slow, patient work of making things that helped bodies instead of exploiting them.
The Christmas season had nearly broken him.
Doug had put him in charge of the holiday display; lights, artificial trees, inflatable yard decorations, extension cords rated for outdoor use that customers invariably tried to use indoors.
Trevor had restocked the same box of icicle lights fourteen times in one week.
A woman had asked him to explain the difference between warm white and soft white and he'd had to excuse himself to the stockroom before his cat instincts kicked in and he swatted the entire display off the shelf.
"I never want to see another string light," he told Sero. "If you ever try to put up Christmas decorations, I will leave you."
"Miriam said I have talent," Trevor said one evening, sitting on the floor of Sero's apartment with his back against the couch and a mango slice in his hand. "Real talent. The kind that could make a difference in the shifter medical community, if I put in the time."
"How much time?"
"Years. It's basically an apprenticeship.
She said the best healers study for a decade before they're trusted to work independently.
" He ate the mango. He'd been eating more fruit lately, Sero's influence, absorbed through proximity the way cats absorbed warmth.
"I don't know if I can do ten years of anything. Cats aren't known for patience."
"You built a machine over eight months. That's patience."
"That was obsession. Different thing."
"Is it?"
Head cocked, Trevor looked at him. The amber light from the lamp caught his face, sharper now, thinner.
The hardware store and the ramen diet were sculpting him into a leaner version of himself, the expensive-restaurant softness giving way to something harder and more defined.
He looked like a man who was being rebuilt from the inside.
"Maybe not," Trevor said.
They didn't have sex. They didn't have scenes. They held hands at the steakhouse and sat close on the couch.
They spent New Year's Eve at Sero's apartment.
Neither of them suggested going out. The Strip on New Year's was a crush of humans and noise that would overwhelm any shifter's senses within minutes.
Instead, they sat on the couch with a bowl of grapes and a bottle of sparkling cider.
Sero didn't drink and Trevor had stopped, quietly, without announcing it, and watched the fireworks through the warehouse windows.
The explosions painted the ceiling in bursts of gold and white, and at midnight Trevor said "Happy New Year" and Sero said "Happy New Year" and neither of them kissed because they hadn't gotten there yet, but their shoulders were touching and the space between them was warm and deliberate and enough.
It was the first New Year's in four years that Sero hadn't spent alone.
He didn't say that out loud. He didn't need to.
Trevor's hand found his in the dark, and the fireworks kept going, and the new year started the way the old one was ending — carefully, together, with a long way still to go.
And once, on the third week, Trevor kissed him in the doorway of his apartment, a slow, careful kiss that asked permission with every millimeter of pressure.
Sero kissed him back. The kiss tasted like mango and uncertainty and the sweetness of a second chance that neither of them was sure they deserved.
At the door, after the kiss, Trevor rested his forehead against Sero's.
"I want to do terrible things to you," Trevor whispered.
Sero laughed. "That's the most romantic thing you've ever said."
"I mean it. Not—" Trevor pulled back, his expression caught between desire and caution. "Not the machine. Never the machine. Just me. The flogger, the whip, my hands. I want to take you to the space again. I want to watch you go there. I want to be the one who holds the door open."
Sero's body responded before his mind could weigh in, a flush of heat, a tightening low in his stomach, the familiar pull of something deep in him that recognized Trevor's voice the way a lock recognized a key.
The space. The vast, warm, floating place that had been quiet for weeks.
Not gone. Waiting. Dormant, like a bat in winter, preserving its energy for the moment when the dark turned warm again.
"Not the space," Sero said. "Not yet." But his voice was rough, and his hands were already moving, finding Trevor's hips in the doorway, pulling him inside. "But I want to give you something."
Trevor's eyes went dark. "Sero, you don't—"
"Stop." Sero pressed two fingers to Trevor's mouth. "Every time we've been together, you've done things to me. The flogger, the machine, the handcuffs, the whip. You've been the one with your hands on me. I've never had mine on you. Not like this."
Trevor was very still against the doorframe. His pulse pounded through the thin fabric of his shirt, fast and hard, the heartbeat of a cat caught between wanting to run and wanting to stay.
Sero dropped to his knees.
The sound Trevor made was small and wrecked and immediate.
Sero looked up at him from the floor of his own apartment, his hands on Trevor's belt, and watched the Dom dissolve.
Trevor's mouth was open. His hands were flat against the wall behind him.
He looked like a man who'd been handed something he hadn't known he was allowed to want.
"Can I?" Sero’s fingers were on the buckle, not moving, waiting.
"Yes." Trevor's voice was barely there. "God, yes."
Sero undid the belt. Pulled down the zipper.
Trevor was already hard, straining against his underwear, and when Sero freed him and wrapped his hand around the base, Trevor's head dropped back against the wall and his hips jerked forward.
Sero took a moment to look at him. He'd never seen Trevor like this, not from this angle, not with Trevor's cock in his hand and Trevor's composure coming apart above him.
The man who held the flogger, who counted orgasms, who controlled every element of every scene, had his hands pressed flat to the wall and his thighs trembling and was making no attempt to take charge.
Sero licked the tip. A slow, deliberate pass of his tongue over the head, tasting salt and skin and the faint musk of arousal that was purely Trevor. Trevor hissed through his teeth. His hips jerked again, and Sero felt the restrained power in it, the effort it took Trevor not to thrust forward.
"You can move," Sero said. "I'll set the pace. But you can move."
He took Trevor into his mouth.