6. Six #3
Then the front buttons, from the top down, slow.
The first one opened the collar on his throat.
The pulse there was running just as hard as the one in his wrist. The second showed me the dip below it, the third the top of the dark hair across his chest. By the fifth, I was on my knees again without remembering kneeling.
By the seventh the shirt was hanging open, and his chest was bare, and his breath had gone shallow and audible.
I'd known he had a body under the suit. I'd had my hands on it through wool yesterday and I'd known the shape of him then.
I knew it better now. He was more solid than the suit had let on.
A long pale scar ran across his ribs on the left side, old and healed white, a knife by the look of it.
A smaller one marked the meat of his right shoulder, a bullet, in and out the back.
The hair across his chest was thick and dark and it ran in a line down his stomach into his waistband.
I let myself look. I had earned that, I thought, after the night he'd given me.
He was watching me look. His lips had parted again, and the color was high on his cheekbones, and he was unmistakably hard in his trousers from where I was kneeling.
I slid my hands up his sides under the open shirt and pushed it off his shoulders.
His skin was warm and slightly damp where the cotton had sat against him, and he made a low sound when my palms went over his ribs.
I folded the shirt and laid it across the chair on top of the coat, and I kept my hands to myself for the next part because I'd already told him what tonight was and was not.
The belt was the test. I undid the buckle, slid the leather out of the loops, and pulled it through.
He was half-hard under the wool and we both knew it and neither of us said a word about it.
The button. The zip. My knuckles brushed him through the cotton of his boxer briefs and his breath caught audibly above me, and I closed my eyes for a second, because I had given him my word.
"Hips," I said, quieter than I meant to.
He lifted them. I pulled the trousers down his thighs, off his ankles, folded them, and added them to the chair. He was in his boxer briefs now. The cotton did very little to disguise where his blood had gone.
I pulled the duvet back.
"In ye go."
He lay back. Slowly. His head hit the pillow. He closed his eyes for a second and opened them again.
I pulled the duvet up over his chest.
I went to the bathroom, filled a glass of water from the tap, and brought it back to set on the nightstand. Then I went back for the paracetamol I'd seen in the medicine cabinet earlier, the basic foil-pack kind, and pushed two out next to the water. I straightened up and turned to leave.
"Fin."
I stopped at the doorframe with my back to him.
"Don't go."
"I'm going to my room," I said.
"Fin. Don'..."
I stood with my hand on the doorframe and conducted a quick survey of the case.
There was a lad I'd grown up next to in Edinburgh who'd died in his own bed at twenty-six after a wedding, on his back, and his ma had found him in the morning when she came round with a roll he'd asked for the night before.
There was another in Newcastle on a job.
There was a third on a stag in Dublin. You knew by the time you were twenty that men died like that.
Quietly, in their own beds, surrounded by people who'd assumed they were sleeping.
I was not about to be the reason somebody's housekeeper found something nasty in the morning.
I crossed the room, put one hand on his shoulder and the other on his hip, rolled him onto his side, away from me, facing the far wall. He grunted. I worked a pillow in behind his back so he couldn't roll flat.
I went back to the bathroom, got the metal wastebasket from beside the sink, and set it on the floor next to the bed within his reach.
Then I stood and looked at him for a second.
The line of his jaw in profile was less hard than it had been at the door.
His mouth was open a little. He looked his age. Older than I usually let myself notice.
I crossed to the chair, lifted his clothes off the back of it, carried them to the dresser and laid them flat. Then I sat down in the chair.
The shirt was hanging off me in two halves. I pulled it closed across my chest with one hand. With the other, I reached over and switched off the lamp on the dresser.
I told myself this was strategy. Six months I’d stayed alive by being the most useful man in the room, by reading what a man wanted before he knew he wanted it, and a boss who went soft when I touched him was the best insurance I had. That was the story. It was even half true.
The other half was that I’d wanted to put him to bed.
Wanted to take his shoes off and pour the water and sit in the dark and listen to him breathe.
That wasn’t a captive keeping his captor sweet.
I’d known the difference between staying alive and wanting to, a long time ago, and I’d just felt the second one for the first time since they put me in that van. It had come on far too fast to trust.
But I'd kept worse company in worse rooms. This was not the worst chair I'd slept in either.