Chapter Seventeen
Sero woke in the enormous bathtub, which was not where he'd fallen asleep.
He'd fallen asleep on the couch, watching a documentary about migration patterns, birds that flew thousands of miles on instinct alone, navigating by stars they'd never been taught to read, and at some point Trevor had carried him to the bathroom and put him in warm water.
He knew this because he was naked, submerged to his chest, and the water smelled like lavender and the salts were the expensive kind, which meant Trevor had splurged on something for the first time in weeks.
Trevor was sitting on the tile floor beside the tub, fully dressed, reading a book.
His legs were crossed. His back was against the wall.
He looked comfortable in the way cats looked comfortable in places that shouldn't have been comfortable, like the world had been designed wrong and they'd simply adapted.
"You put me in the bath," Sero said.
"You were snoring. The couch was making your back worse." Trevor turned a page. "Also, I wanted to use the lavender salts and it seemed rude to bathe alone when there's a perfectly good bat available."
"I'm not a bath toy."
"You're the size of one."
Sero splashed him. Trevor moved the book out of range with reflexes that were, annoyingly, faster than the water.
"What are you reading?" Sero asked.
Trevor held up the cover. It was a textbook, thick, dense, the kind of book that had been written by someone who cared more about accuracy than readability. The title was Alchemical Applications in Shifter Medicine: A Practitioner's Guide.
"Miriam gave it to me," Trevor said. "It's about two hundred years old and approximately ten percent of it is still relevant, but the foundational theory is sound. The author was a fox shifter who figured out how to use alchemy to treat silver poisoning in wolves. Revolutionary stuff, at the time."
"And you're reading it while I'm in the bath."
"I'm reading it while you're in the bath because you're in the bath and I like being near you and sometimes being near someone means sitting on a tile floor reading about fox alchemy while they prune." He turned another page. "I'm multitasking."
Sero sank deeper into the water. The lavender was warm and the steam was soft and Trevor was on the floor beside him reading a two-hundred-year-old textbook about healing, and the moment was so far from where they'd been three months ago that Sero felt a brief, vertiginous disorientation, the sense of looking down from a great height and realizing you'd climbed it without noticing.
"Trevor."
"Hmm."
"What are we doing?"
Trevor looked up from the book. "Right now? You're bathing. I'm reading. We're coexisting in a bathroom."
"I mean what are we doing? This. Us. The Wednesdays, the dates, the bathtub. Where is this going?"
Trevor closed the book and set it on the floor. He turned to face Sero fully, his back against the wall, his expression shifting from casual to serious with the ease of someone who'd been waiting for this conversation and had decided not to be the one to start it.
"Where do you want it to go?" Trevor asked.
"I asked you first."
"You did." Trevor pulled his knees up and rested his arms across them.
"Okay. Here's where I'm at. I'm working at a hardware store for twelve dollars an hour.
I'm learning alchemy from a raccoon who thinks I have potential but also thinks I'm an idiot, which is fair.
My apartment is going to become a problem in about two months because the rent is three times what I can afford on a hardware-store salary, and at some point I'm going to have to decide between the apartment and the bathtub and food. "
"The bathtub is non-negotiable." Over the months, Sero has come to enjoy it as much as Trevor did.
"Agreed. So, the apartment stays and I eat ramen.
" He paused. "The point is: I don't have anything to offer you.
Not money, not stability, not the life I was living when we met.
That life was built on something I took from people, and now it's gone, and what's left is a guy with a flogger and a textbook and a very nice bathtub. "
"And a job at a hardware store."
"And a job at a hardware store. Where I'm assistant inventory manager, which sounds impressive until you realize it means I'm the person Doug yells at when the lumber is out of order.
" He smiled, but it was small and uncertain.
"I'm not who I was when we met, Sero. I'm less.
Less money, less status, less of everything that made me feel like I deserved to be arrogant.
And I don't know if less is enough for you. "
Sero sat up in the bath. Water ran down his chest, over the claw marks, healed now to pale pink lines, five parallel scars that would stay. Permanent, by choice.
"You're not less," Sero said. "You're different.
Less would mean you'd lost something valuable.
What you lost was a business built on stealing from people.
That's not valuable. That's weight." He reached over the edge of the tub and took Trevor's hand.
The tile was wet. Their fingers slipped and then held.
"What you are now, the hardware store, the alchemy training, the man who sits on a bathroom floor reading a fox textbook because he wants to be near me, that's more. Not less."
Trevor's hand tightened. "I can't take care of you. Financially. I can barely take care of myself."
"I don't need you to take care of me. I'm a blackjack dealer who lives on fruit. My overhead is mango and rent." Sero squeezed his hand. "I need you to be honest. That's it. That's the whole list. Be honest with me, and I'll figure out the rest."
"I can do honest. I'm aggressively honest now. Ask Doug. He says I'm the most forthcoming employee he's ever had. Last week I told him his lumber display was structurally unsound and he needed to reconfigure the weight distribution. He said 'just stack the boards, kid.' I wrote him a memo."
"You wrote your hardware-store boss a memo about lumber?"
"With diagrams."
Sero laughed. It came from the warm place in his chest, the place that had been cold for weeks after the confession and was now, slowly, filling with something that felt like the beginning of permanence.
Not the permanence of a promise, which could be broken.
The permanence of a direction, which could be walked.
"Here's what I want," Sero said. "I want Wednesdays.
I want the bathtub. I want you to keep learning from Miriam and keep stacking lumber for Doug and keep reading textbooks on the bathroom floor.
I want us to figure out the money thing together, because I have a salary and you have a salary and between us we can afford one apartment with a good bathtub, if we're smart about it. "
Trevor stared at him. "You're asking me to move in with you."
"I'm asking you to move in with me. My apartment doesn't have a bathtub, so we'd need to keep yours. Which means I'd be moving into your apartment, technically. Which means I'd need closet space."
"For your clothes?"
"For hanging." Sero gave him a look. "I need a closet I can shift in. It's a bat thing. Non-negotiable."
"The walk-in closet in the bedroom is yours."
"Just like that?"
"Just like that. I'll clear it out tonight.
" Trevor was smiling now, the real smile, the one that came from below the armor, below the arrogance, below every version of himself he'd ever projected.
The smile of a man being given something he knew he didn't deserve and was going to try to be worthy of every single day. "Sero."
"Yeah."
"The claw marks. Over your heart."
Sero looked down. The five pale lines on his chest, just visible above the waterline. Permanent. Chosen.
"What about them?"
"I want one too."
Sero blinked. "You want me to claw you?"
"I want a mark. Your mark. Bat claws aren't as sharp as cat claws, but you could do it in shifted form.
Bat teeth are precise enough. Over my heart.
Matching." Trevor's expression was open, unguarded, stripped of every defense.
"I don't want this to be one-directional.
You carry my mark because you chose to. I want to carry yours because I'm choosing to. "
Sero looked at him for a long time. The bathroom was warm.
The steam rose in lazy curls. Trevor sat on the tile floor with a two-hundred-year-old textbook and a twelve-dollar-an-hour job and an apartment he couldn't afford and a bathtub he refused to give up, and he was asking Sero to mark him.
To claim him. To make the possession mutual.
"After the bath," Sero said.
"After the bath."
"And Trevor. It's going to hurt."
Trevor grinned. The real grin. "I know."
***
They got out of the bath. They dried off. They stood in Trevor's bedroom, the white sheets, the taut blankets, the morning light coming through the blinds in long warm bars.
Sero shifted. The transformation was instantaneous, his human body collapsing inward, wings stretching, the world going echo-mapped and textured.
In bat form, he was small enough to fit in Trevor's cupped hands.
Trevor held him carefully, steady, warm, the hands of someone who was used to handling fragile things.
Sero landed on Trevor's bare chest. His tiny claws gripped skin. Trevor flinched, not from pain, from the strangeness of it, a bat perched on his sternum, small and warm and precise.
"Over the heart?" Trevor said. He was looking down at Sero with an expression of such tender absurdity, a grown man talking to a fruit bat on his chest, that the moment balanced perfectly between sacred and ridiculous, which was, Sero had come to believe, the only way the important moments ever balanced.
Sero bit.
Bat teeth were small but sharp, designed for piercing fruit skin, for breaking through the tough exterior of figs and mangoes to reach the sweetness inside.
They left a mark: a small, precise crescent over Trevor's heart, a curve of tiny punctures that welled red against his pale skin.
Not deep. Not dangerous. But permanent, in the way that chosen things were permanent, not because they couldn't heal, but because the person who wore them wouldn't let them.
Trevor hissed. Then he laughed. Then he pressed his hand over the mark, Sero's mark, the bat's claim, and held it there.
Sero shifted back. Human again, naked, sitting on Trevor's bed with his knees drawn up. Trevor was standing in front of him with blood on his chest and his hand over his heart and tears in his eyes that he wasn't trying to hide.
"Ow," Trevor said.
"I warned you."
"You did." He took his hand away and looked at the mark. The crescent was small, smaller than his claw marks on Sero's chest, because bats were smaller than cats and their teeth left smaller signatures. But it was there. Visible. Real.
"We match," Trevor said.
He sat on the bed beside Sero. Their shoulders touched.
The morning light moved across the floor, slow and warm.
From somewhere in the building, the sound of a neighbor's television.
From outside, the distant hum of the city waking up.
Vegas, vast and indifferent and full of people who were, in that moment, doing extraordinary things in ordinary rooms that no one would ever know about.
"Wednesday?" Sero said.
"Wednesday."
"Bring the arnica salve. And grapes."
"Always." Trevor leaned his head against Sero's. "Always. Of course, if you’re living here by then, you can remember the salve."
“No. That’s your responsibility.” Sero chuckled.
They sat in the morning light, marked and matching, and the quiet between them held nothing hidden.
The End
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