Chapter 7
The ceiling was wrong.
That was the first thing. Not bad wrong, just not my ceiling. My ceiling had a water stain in the upper left corner that I'd been meaning to report to the building manager for four months and had not reported because that would require me to find out who the building manager was.
This ceiling was perfect. Flat, clean, no water stains, no opinions.
My head had opinions. Several of them. A persistent low throb behind my left eye that I categorized immediately and then tried to put somewhere I wasn't looking.
My mouth tasted like the end of recorded history.
Something was purring.
I looked down. There was a cat on my chest.
Orange, fluffy, resting between my sternum and my collarbone. It looked up at me when I moved. Brown eyes, amber-warm, catching the light.
I stared at it.
It purred.
"Who are you?" I asked, as if it would answer.
The cat blinked, slow and unbothered.
I was in a bed that wasn't my bed. The bar. The alley. The car. Cross's apartment. The floor, the trash can, Cross's shoes, the shirt being removed, the—
Oh no.
The vomiting.
I put my arm over my face, which disturbed the cat, who repositioned without leaving. I lay there with my arm over my face and thought about the vomiting, specifically, with the full force of a sober brain that had slept and was now processing last night's receipts with terrible clarity.
Cross's face. The shoes. I'm sorry. I know. The floor, the towels, the deadpan efficiency of a man cleaning up after me while I sat there and contributed nothing.
The guy with the good shoulders' text.
The fractional pause.
I moved my arm. The cat looked at me. I looked back at it.
"When did you get here?"
The cat sat on me and purred, which was not an answer.
I remembered Cross waking me. Twice, maybe three times, light and questions, same drill each time, same level voice in the dark pulling me back up to the surface.
I sat up. The cat relocated to my lap.
My body filed a complaint about the sitting up. My head filed a supporting brief. I noted both and got up anyway, mostly because lying in Cross's bed feeling sorry for myself was not a viable long-term strategy, and the cat jumped down and looked at me like I'd made a questionable decision.
I was shirtless.
Right. The shirt had been a casualty.
I needed water and my phone and probably my entire dignity back, none of which were immediately visible.
I followed the sound.
It was coming from somewhere down the hall, past the bathroom I hadn't made it to last night, past the room I had not investigated, and through a door that was open about eight inches.
Rhythmic. Heavy. The clean metal shift of weights being moved by someone who knew what they were doing. I pushed the door open.
The room was small and spare and fit for the purpose: rubber flooring, a rack of weights that were organized by size because of course they were, a bench, a pull-up bar mounted in the corner. Mirrors on one wall. Utilitarian light. Everything a person needed and nothing extra.
Cross had his back to me.
No shirt.
I had approximately one second before my brain caught up with what I was seeing and another second before my body caught up with my brain. Both of those seconds were extremely inconvenient and not something I had budgeted for this morning.
Cross was at least ten years older than me, but the guy was built. He was built the way people get when exercise is a practice rather than a performance—functional and serious and genuinely unfair—and he was sweating, which I had never once considered as a possibility.
Cross existed at a controlled temperature of his own manufacturing, yet there was sweat tracking down his spine. His shoulder muscles were doing something through the rep that I watched happen and then looked immediately at the wall.
This was a mistake. I knew it was a mistake while I was doing it. His back was—the word I kept landing on was architectural, which was the least incriminating word I had available, and I was going to stay with architectural and not examine what was happening south of my waist, which was—that was —
That was a problem.
Getting hard was an inconvenient problem that had arrived without my permission, and I needed it to not be happening.
It was happening anyway, because apparently my body had opinions about shirtless, weight lifting, sweating Nathan Cross that it had been keeping to itself and had chosen this moment to table for discussion.
Not now, I told my body.
My body did not care.
Cross set the weights down. Didn't startle. Just put them in their place and looked at me in the mirror, and I had approximately zero seconds to solve the problem before he turned around.
The cat appeared from nowhere.
I grabbed him.
The orange cat expressed his feelings about this immediately and comprehensively. Both front paws, claws deployed, latching onto my forearm with the grip of a cat who had decided this was a personal attack and was responding in kind.
I made a noise. The cat made a noise. I did not let go, because the cat was currently the only thing standing between me and a situation I was not going to be able to explain professionally. I held him in front of me at my waist like a small furious orange shield.
"You're awake," Cross said, from the mirror.
"Good morning," I said. My voice was admirably normal. The cat was trying to remove my hand from my wrist. "You have a cat."
"I'm aware."
"He was on my chest this morning." I adjusted my grip. The cat adjusted his. We were locked in a mutual hostage situation. "Very forward. No respect for personal space."
Cross looked at me in the mirror. Then at the cat. Then back at me with the expression of a man doing a rapid assessment and arriving at questions he hadn't expected to have this early.
"His name is Leo," he said.
"Great name," I said. "Love that name. Normal name."
Leo got his back legs involved.
I held on.
Cross picked up his towel and turned around, and I kept Leo positioned with the practiced casualness of someone who was absolutely not hiding anything. Leo expressed his continued objections into my forearm.
"You can put him down," Cross said.
"I'm good," I said.
"He's drawing blood."
I looked at my forearm. Leo had, in fact, drawn blood. Several small crescents, red and immediate, which Leo was now licking with the satisfaction of a job well done.
"We're bonding," I said.
Cross looked at me for a long moment.
I started to put him down, but then I remembered the pants situation and took a brief personal inventory and confirmed that the problem had, somewhere in the chaos of the Leo hostage crisis, resolved itself, which was the first piece of good news I'd had since waking up.
I put Leo down.
Leo sat on my foot and began cleaning his face, completely unbothered, mission accomplished.
"He came with the name?" I said.
"No," Cross said with no further explanation.
He turned back to his mirror, and I stood in the doorway of Nathan Cross's home gym at seven in the morning with scratch marks on my forearm and yesterday's pants and no shirt, and thought that this was genuinely one of the stranger mornings of my life.
Which was saying something.
He turned around when I got close. The mirror version and the real version of Cross were different, the real version was Cross in three dimensions, close enough that I could see the rise and fall of his chest from the workout, the faint flush across his collarbone, a small scar below his left shoulder I'd never had occasion to notice before.
His eyes were very blue.
My body was having thoughts that I was not endorsing, that I was actively vetoing in real time, that were happening anyway with the particular democratic indifference of a nervous system that had never once cared about my opinions.
I got hard looking at Nathan Cross doing bicep curls.
What was wrong with me?
What was wrong with me?
"You’re responsive," Cross said.
I made a noise.
Not a word. A noise.
“Sorry,” I said. “What?”
“Neurologically. Your responses. They’re better than last night.”
“Great,” I said. “That’s. Yeah. Great.” My voice was normal. Everything was normal. I was normal.
He walked past me, and I followed him to the kitchen because the alternative was standing in the hallway alone with my revelation and that seemed worse.
The kitchen was the same as the rest of the apartment: clean surfaces, morning light, everything in its place.
A tea setup on the counter, small containers in a row, organized by something I couldn't identify.
No coffee maker. I looked for one. There wasn't one.
There was a kettle and a collection of teas that had their own dedicated shelf and that was it, that was the situation.
I sat at the kitchen island as Cross moved through the kitchen the way he moved everywhere, precise, no wasted motion. I watched him, which I kept doing, which I kept noticing I kept doing.
Underneath the watching was the thing I was not looking at directly, the thing that had arrived in the gym doorway and was now sitting in my chest like a stone that had changed shape overnight.
I was attracted to Nathan Cross.
Not—okay. I knew I'd noticed him. I'd been noticing him for months in the way you noticed things you were pretending not to notice, the jaw, the hands, his attention, the soap. I'd been filing all of it under proximity and medical context and it's fine, it doesn't mean anything.
Turns out, it meant something.
I looked at Leo, who had appeared on the stool beside me and was watching me with his warm brown eyes.
You’re on your own, his expression said.
"Not a word," I said.
Leo purred.
Cross set a mug in front of me. His fingers and mine were on the mug at the same time for half a second — the warmth of it, the edge of his thumb against mine — and then he let go and turned back to the counter and I sat there and thought about nothing, very deliberately, with great focus and discipline.
"How did I get to the bed last night?" I asked. Casual. Purely informational.
"You walked," he said. "With assistance."
"Right." I looked at the mug. "Oh, sorry, I don't drink tea.”
"I don't have coffee."
"You don't have—" I looked at the counter. The kettle. The dedicated tea shelf. The complete and total absence of anything that had ever considered becoming coffee. "At all?"
"At all," Cross said, without apology.
I looked down at the tea.
At the counter, Cross cracked an egg. Considered it. Cracked another one. The stove made a sound I wasn't sure it was supposed to make.
"You cook?" I said.
"I'm cooking," he said, which was technically a different answer.
Something in the pan did something alarming.
Cross addressed it with the same precise attention he gave everything, which was either going to fix it or make it significantly worse.
I watched him and thought about the gym and the bicep curls and what is wrong with me and the warm brown eyes of the cat beside me and the complete absence of coffee in this apartment.
I picked up the tea.
It smelled fine. It was hot.
"It’s been fun," I said. “Or at least it’s been interesting, but I should go ahead and head home. Lots to do today, you know how it is. I’ll call a taxi and—"
"No,“ said Cross, and turned the heat down on whatever was happening in the pan. “No, you won’t.”