Finch #2
I stare at his hand. The same hand that was inside me an hour ago, the same fingers that held my jaw in the entryway, that stroked my hair while I cried, that gripped my hips hard enough to bruise. He’s offering me his hand like we’re meeting at a coffee shop.
I take it.
“Finch,” I say.
He squeezes my hand and his almost-smile turns into a real one. The dimple shows up, and his eyes crinkle a little bit.
“Finch,” he repeats. “That’s a good name. Finch.” He says it like he’s tasting it, fitting it into the space where the anonymous omega was, and I can see the moment it clicks into place. “Tell me something about you, Finch.”
“I teach music,” I say, because he already knows that; I told him during the lull, and it feels safe to start with something he already has.
“You told me. Kids?”
“Fourth and fifth grade, mostly. Piano, voice, general music. I’ve got a choir.” I’m sitting here naked in a sex club talking about my choir, and it’s so weird I almost laugh. “They’ve got a spring concert next month. We’re working on a three-part harmony, but the altos keep coming in early.”
He grins. The dimple deepens. “Tell me more about the altos.”
So I do. I sit there in bed, still sticky with his come and his bite mark on my shoulder, and I tell him about Maisie Chen, who can’t count rests, and Devon, who sings everything at full blast no matter what the music says.
There’s a kid in the back row who never sings out loud but mouths every word perfectly—I think he just needs a smaller audience.
I tell him about the piano in my classroom that’s missing the B-flat below middle C, so I’ve had to work around it.
And I tell him how it sounds when the choir finally nails a chord, all those voices hitting the same note at once. It’s the best thing I know.
He listens. He listens the way he does everything — fully, attentively, his eyes on me, his hand still holding mine.
He asks questions. Real ones, not polite ones.
He asks what instrument I play (guitar, mostly, a little piano) and whether the kid in the back row might do better in a solo audition setting (yes, I think so, I’ve been working up to suggesting it) and whether the B-flat is fixable or if I need a new piano (fixable, but the school won’t pay for it, so I’ve been putting money aside).
“I had a German Shepherd last week,” he says, when I’ve run out of choir stories.
“Hit by a car. The owner was a mess, screaming in the waiting room. The dog was calmer than she was. Broken leg, internal bruising, but he just lay there on the table looking at me with these big brown eyes like I trust you to fix this. He let me splint the leg without flinching. Didn’t bite, didn’t panic. Just breathed.”
“Did you fix it?”
“Yeah. He went home two days later. She sent me a photo of him in a cone of shame looking very unimpressed.” He runs his thumb over my knuckles. “That’s what I do. Fix scared things. Wait for them to trust me. Try not to break the trust once they do.”
I look down at our hands, fingers laced together, and think about who we are outside this place. I’m a music teacher who can’t play B-flat, he’s a vet who fixes German shepherds, and somehow we’re also the two guys who did all that last night in a warehouse that smells like sex and bleach.
“I don’t know how those two things fit together,” I say. “The person I am out there and the person I was in here tonight.”
“They fit together because they’re both you.” He says it simply. “I’m gentle with dogs, and I tracked your heat cycle. Both of those are me. You teach kids about harmony, and you beg me to breed you. Both of those are you.”
My throat tightens. I want to argue, to say normal people don’t get off on being called pretty or beg to be degraded or come four times in one night and cry through half of it.
But he’s looking at me with those warm brown eyes, the dimple, the crooked nose, holding my hand, and he said that’s allowed. I can’t even get the words out.
“Take off the mask, Finch,” he says. Soft.
I reach up. The elastic catches on my hair the way it did when I put it on, back when I was standing at the entrance telling myself I could handle this. I pull it off.
His eyes move over my face the way they moved over my body, but slower, gentler.
“There you are,” he says. He said the same words on the floor when I walked in. But his voice is different now.
“Here I am,” I say.
He leans in. Our first kiss without masks. His mouth is warm and unhurried, and his hand comes up and cups my face, his thumb on my cheekbone. I kiss him back, and it’s nothing like the club floor, nothing like heat-driven desperation. It’s slow and deliberate, and it tastes like a beginning.
He pulls back. Presses his forehead against mine. We breathe.
“Come home with me,” he says.
The words just hang there. Not ‘call me’ or ‘let me know’ or any of the usual stuff people say when they want an out. Just ‘come home with me.’ Right now.
“I don’t have pants,” I say.
He laughs. Real, full, loud enough that it echoes off the walls of the small room.
“I’ll get you pants,” he says. “I’ll get you pants and coffee, and I’ll drive you home.
Or you can come to mine and meet my cat.
His name is Morty. He's fat and orange and he sleeps on my head. I’ll make you eggs.
We can sit on my couch, and you can tell me more about the altos. I promise I’ll listen to every word.”
My eyes are wet. I blink, and a tear runs down my cheek, the first one that isn’t attached to an orgasm, the first one that’s just emotion, just Finch. Nico catches it with his thumb and doesn’t say anything, and the silence is the kindest thing anyone has ever given me.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay. Take me home.”
***