10. Face-First #3
I sat down on the edge of the bed because my legs offered me a choice between sitting and something less dignified. The papers shook slightly, and I watched them shake, and understood distantly that the shaking was coming from my hands.
Five days. Since that morning in the hospital parking lot, five days I had carried a dead man everywhere I went.
Through a hospital, through a vote, through a kiss.
I'd built a version of myself around his weight, the man who killed somebody in a dark hallway, I'd rehearsed how I'd say it to Liam someday and never found words that survived the rehearsal.
And now the weight came off all at once, so fast it hurt, like a rope going slack after five days of pulling.
What poured into the empty space wasn't entirely clean.
Because the truth the chart told was an inch wide.
A wall instead of a floor. The back of a skull instead of the front.
The same kick, the same spin, the same night, and the only reason my man would wake up in Summerlin and Ghost's man never would was luck and an inch of angle, nothing I'd chosen, nothing I could take credit for.
I'd walked up to the one line I'd sworn I'd never cross and stopped a single inch short, and the inch hadn't been mine.
But he was going to wake up. Somewhere north of the city a man was going to open his eyes again, and I got to put the body down.
And then the other thing arrived, riding right behind the relief.
"You've known since this morning." I looked up at him. "Before Church. You sat next to me at that table for an hour. You trained with me for two more. You watched me look at Tyler's folder and go white, and you asked me if I was good."
"Yes." He didn't move, didn't soften it, took it standing the way I'd told him to.
"I had it in my pocket the whole day, and every time I got near it, I—the planning session wasn't the place, thirty people, and then the mat, and on the mat you kept touching me and I kept thinking, if he touches me one more time I'm going to either tell him or kiss him, and both of those needed a door that closed, and I—" His hands came out of his pockets and did a helpless thing in the air.
"I pulled back because I couldn't stand being that close to you while I was holding it.
It felt like lying with my whole body. And you read it as regret, I watched you read it as regret and leave, and I stood in that gym for an hour calling myself things Irish would be proud of. "
"You should have told me on the mat." The anger was real and I let him see it. "You should have told me at seven a.m. with all thirty of them watching, I don't care, Ghost. I have been carrying a body for five days?—"
"I know."
"—I looked at my own hands differently. I had a speech half-built for my brother. Five days, and you had the answer in your pocket since breakfast?—"
"Since 6:40." His voice dropped near a whisper. "Tyler caught me by the coffee. I know the exact minute, because it's the minute the body moved."
That stopped me.
"Moved." The word came out of me flat.
"From your shoulders to mine." He came a step closer, into the bars of light from the window, and I saw his face fully for the first time since he'd walked in, and it was older than it had been yesterday.
"Caleb, I've put men down my whole patched life.
Floors, walls, hoods of cars. I'm good at it, it's half my job, and every one of them got up eventually or got carried somewhere where they'd wake up.
Nobody ever stayed down forever." His voice thinned.
"He's the first one that was mine. I killed a man.
I did it in about one second, for you, because he was between you and the door, and I'd do it again tonight without blinking, and that's the part I've been walking around with since 6:40, that I would do it again, that some switch flipped in that hallway and it flipped for you, and I don't—" The speed tried to come back into his words and failed.
"I wasn't protecting you from the truth today.
I was hiding from it standing next to you.
Those aren't the same thing and I'm sorry. "
The room was quiet. Down the hall somebody's music played through a wall, bass with no song attached.
The papers had stopped shaking, because I'd set them on the chair, and my hands were empty, and I looked at them, the hands I'd spent five days thinking belonged to a killer, and then I looked at his.
Steady hands. That had held a rail-thin steadiness all day over a thing that was eating him alive.
He'd carried my body for twelve hours and his own since the hallway, because he'd known what his hands had done even before the paperwork told him what it added up to, and he'd let me hate myself with company rather than alone.
I stood up.
"Come here."
He came. Wary, reading me for weather. I took his right hand and turned it palm-up between us, and I put my thumb in the center of it, on the calluses, the hand that had ripped a man's feet out from under him and dragged me through a door and landed on my shoulder in a kitchen and pressed flat against a cold wall beside my head last night.
"I spent five days deciding these were the worst thing about me," I told his palm, and then his eyes. "Wrong hands. Wrong verdict. Now run your own math again with the right numbers."
His breath went out of him unevenly. "Caleb?—"
"You killed a man who was going to help beat me to death or drag me to Gravedigger, whichever came first. I threw the same kick at the man next to him and the only reason mine gets to wake up is dumb luck.
Neither of us gets to be clean, and neither of us carries it alone.
That's the whole deal, take it or leave it.
" My voice cracked in the middle, quiet and total, five days of freight finally shifting. "Take it."
He kissed me.
It wasn't like the gym. The gym had been a dam breaking. This started slow and shaking, his mouth landing careful like I might still be made of the last hour, his hand turning in mine to grip it, and I gripped back and pulled him in by it, and the care burned off in about four seconds.
We hit the bed sideways. It was a bed built for one considerate man, and we were two large inconsiderate ones, and the frame banged the wall and neither of us cared.
His weight came down on me and my hands went up the back of his shirt, spreading over hot skin, the muscle moving under my palms as he settled between my legs, and he made a sound into my mouth, low, wrecked, and I swallowed it and pulled the shirt up.
We broke apart long enough to fight our shirts off, his caught on his ear and I laughed, actually laughed, and he grinned down at me with his hair destroyed and muttered "not a word," and then his bare skin came down on mine and the laughing stopped.
Heat everywhere. His mouth went to my neck, down, unhurried and completely without a plan, mapping, and I lay there with my fingers in his hair and let myself be mapped.
When his tongue crossed my nipple I arched, and he noticed, filed it, did it again, and I heard myself make a sound I'd never made in this room.
"Off." I got a hand in his waistband. "Everything."
We fumbled it. There was no version of two grown men getting out of jeans on a single bed that had any dignity in it, elbows and denim and one shin cracked on the footboard, him swearing, me laughing again, and then it was done and there was nothing between us, and we went still for a second, both of us, looking.
He was hard against my hip, and the sight of him knocked the breath sideways in me, because I'd built this exact picture in my head only yesterday morning, alone in this bed with my fist moving, and I'd assumed I was flattering him.
I hadn't been. Thick, long, curved up hard toward his stomach exactly the way I'd imagined it, flushed dark at the head, and the bullet scar a pale knot high on his chest rising and falling fast above it.
His eyes were doing a slow pass down me with the same open want.
"I've never—" he started.
"Me neither."
"Okay." He breathed out. "Then we learn."
He slid off the bed and stood, and took my hand, and pulled. I came up off the mattress and onto my feet in the bars of yellow light, both of us bare in the small warm room, and he held my eyes for one second, and then he went down my body and onto his knees on the thin carpet.
The sight alone nearly finished the argument. Ghost, kneeling, my cock hard and heavy in front of his face, his hands sliding up the backs of my thighs, and those pale eyes tipped up at me exactly the way they had in the dream, except the dream had been a cheap copy and hadn't known it.
His mouth closed over my cock and my head went back.
Wet heat, tight lips, careful for about four strokes, one graze of teeth and a hissed "easy—" from me and a hummed apology from him that did things of its own, and then the carefulness burned off the same way it had in the kiss.
Because he had a cock of his own and twenty-six years of knowing what felt good on it, and he started spending that knowledge on me.
His head moved faster. He took me deeper, hollowing his cheeks, finding a rhythm and then breaking it on purpose just to hear what it did to me, and what it did to me was pull sounds up out of my chest I had no say in.
"Fuck. Ghost." My hand found his hair. "Look at me."