14. Seeing Red #3
"Fine. Whatever." He shook himself out and put his hands up. "On guard, kitchen usurper!"
The gym had quit being a gym by ten. Every mat in the compound had been dragged in here and laid edge to edge, the weights shoved to the walls, and the sound of bodies landing was the only talk. Blade walked slow circles through it, drilling takedowns and their counters.
The man in the flannel leaned on the wall by the door, and I'd learned his name in the first ten minutes, because Blade had called it across the room without looking and the man had come.
Logan.
The name found its place. Ghost's medical-bay stories.
A ranch in Montana that Blade had torn open, and a man named Logan who'd gone through it beside him.
Blade's partner, down from Montana for this.
Every so often he came off the wall to move somebody by the hip or the wrist, and Anima's guard came up two inches after he touched her elbow.
Peace wasn't the only language the man spoke, and in a room this full of the other kind, I was glad of somebody who spoke more than one.
Ghost was across the floor with Mateo.
The kid was taking a beating. A patient one.
Ghost walked him through the same entry over and over and ended it a different way each time, and I knew what I was watching because Blade had told me an hour ago.
He's green. When the wall comes down Thursday, he needs to already know what it feels like to lose a hold and not panic.
Thrown, and get up. Thrown, and get up. My gut didn't like it. Nineteen years old, maybe twenty, walking into that building on Thursday with a beer for a cover story, and I still wasn't sure he liked me. He was risking a lot for a man he hadn't decided on.
Then his eyes crossed the room and found mine, and he winked.
One eye, there and gone, and a smile came up out of me before I'd agreed to it.
That was when Ghost dropped.
He went under Mateo's reach so fast I only saw the finish, low, his shoulder into the kid's thighs, and then Mateo was in the air. All of him. Ghost stood up through the lift and turned, and Mateo went over his shoulder and came down flat on his back with a slap I felt through my own feet.
"Ufff." Everybody in the room made the sound at once, the noise a room full of fighters made when a body landed.
Mateo lay there. His eyes found the ceiling, then me, and I mouthed it at him across the room. Sorry.
He lifted one hand off the mat, middle finger up, and let it fall.
I turned back to Irish, who'd been waiting with his hands up and the grin back on, and set my feet.
Ghost talked the whole way back to his room.
"—and Mateo's good, he's going to be good, but he's green, he telegraphs the level change with his shoulders, that's why I threw him, he's got five days to stop doing it—" His hand did something in the air that was probably a shoulder.
"—and you. Irish. He outweighs you, Caleb, and you put him down like a spare tire.
Twice. Trenza said something in Spanish I'm not going to translate?—"
I let him run. My legs were loose and heavy the good way, the blood up and the head quieter, and I didn't need to talk.
My head hadn't left the hospital. It had only stopped shouting about it.
Church at two had taken five minutes. The whole club sweating straight off the mats, and the plan with one new piece in it.
I'd give the signal. The Phoenixes would come through the walls.
And now there'd be men and women posted outside the north face too, at the door only Ghost had seen, waiting in the dark for anybody who tried to leave through it.
Especially the one who'd built it. A full raid, with a trap on the only back door.
I'd sat there wanting the door. I wanted to be the thing waiting in that alley when the big man came through it at a walk. But my place was the ring, under the hanging mic, and the word I was going to put into that mic while he listened would have to be enough. I'd been saving it a long time.
"—and the level change thing, I could fix that in a day if he'd just?—"
I pulled my shirt off over my head.
He stopped mid-word. I dropped the shirt on his chair and turned around, and he was standing in the middle of his own room with his mouth still open and his eyes on my chest, doing nothing to hide it.
He had a bathroom off the room, his own, which the guest rooms didn't get. I'd walked into it at two that morning half asleep.
"Join me for a shower?" I tipped my head at the door.
One eyebrow went up.
"Not for that." I didn't smile. I couldn't, quite, yet. "My head's somewhere else. You know where. But I'd like to have you—" I looked for the word and there was only the one. "Close."
He didn't say anything. He reached back over his shoulder and pulled his shirt off in one drag, and the sweat had glued it to him, so it came off slow, peeling up over the ridges of his stomach and the flat of his chest, the pale knot of the bullet scar coming out from under the cotton last with his arms still tangled in it.
Then it was on the floor and he was only standing there.
A man's body, hammered into shape by years I hadn't been there for, and above it a face that still forgot to shave, and two eyes so pale they'd looked straight through a crowd once and found me.
We got out of our shorts. Neither of us made a show of it.
He went in first and turned the water on, and I shut the door behind us on a room that was tile and a shower with a glass panel that two men our size were going to have to share.
The water came down cold. He'd stepped under it before it warmed, the way he did everything, and it hit me a second after it hit him, hard across the shoulders, and I hissed.
Then the heat came up under it in a rush and the small space filled with steam.
The floor was barely big enough for our four feet.
His back was against my chest. My arm was against the glass.
There was nowhere to be that wasn't touching him.
"You're thinking about him." To the tile, not to me. It wasn't a question.
"Yes." The water ran into my mouth. "I want to see him. I want to sit in that chair and put my hand on his and count his fingers." My voice went somewhere I didn't send it. "And I know the way I protect him is five days from now, in a ring, not in that chair. I know it. I can't make it feel right."
He turned around under the water. We were close enough that turning took work.
"Tell me the truth." I made myself hold his eyes, pale and steady, water running off his lashes. "Is he really safe? Gravedigger's short five men this morning, and he knows it. He knows exactly who he sent and exactly where he sent them. What does a man like that do when they don't come back?"
Ghost didn't answer with words.
He stepped into me. Both arms came around my back and pulled, and my chest met his, wet skin on wet skin, the whole front of him against the whole front of me.
Stomach to stomach. His thighs against mine, solid from the morning's work.
And lower, our cocks, thick and heavy against each other, not hard, neither of us, but nowhere near soft either.
Just there. Just warm. There was no part of the front of me that wasn't touching some part of him, and none of it was asking for anything.
I'd been held before, and never like that. Never by a man who took his whole body and made a wall out of it and put me on the inside.
"Tank will put a shotgun round into anybody who says the word transfer anywhere near that building before they finish saying it.
" His mouth was against my ear, low, and there was no speed in him at all.
"He's got three of ours with him. If anything moves, they call, and we're fifteen minutes from that door at full throttle, and I'll do it in twelve.
" His arms tightened. "For now, we finish this. That's how we keep him. We finish it."
I put my face down into the curve of his neck and let the water hit the back of my head.
"You let me sleep." Into his skin. "This morning. You knew."
"I knew at half past four." He didn't move.
"I stood in that door with the whole thing in my mouth, and you were asleep.
Really asleep, Caleb, not the way you were in the medical bay, and I couldn't put my hand on you and take that away.
" A breath. "I'm not sorry. I'm sorry you heard it in front of thirty people. I'm not sorry you slept."
I thought about that. Both fists on the oak. A room I'd asked to trust me, watching me come apart.
"Next time you wake me."
"Next time I wake you."
"Even if I'm really asleep."
"Especially then." His hand came up and spread flat between my shoulder blades, and pressed. "I'll hate it. I'll do it."
We stood like that. The water beat on us and ran off, and the steam closed the room down to the size of two people, and every place we touched had gone warm past the water's warmth. His pulse, and mine, slowing toward the same count. His chin, rough, settled against my collarbone.
I breathed him in. Soap, and under it just him.
"We finish this." Against his neck, so low the water almost had it. "And him."
His arms answered before he did.
"And him."
Nobody moved for a long time. The water ran.
Outside that door, five days sat on a calendar waiting, and a warehouse full of a man's people.
In here there were two bodies with nothing between them, and a promise I could feel in his hands and hear in the count of his breathing, which had found mine, and stayed there.