19. Awakening #2
Fifty-odd bodies came through those doors inside an hour, and the potato frittata went up onto the pass faster than I could fill the trays.
Bacon spat on the griddle. The room was loud and warm now, forks on plates and thirty conversations at once, the windows fogged along the bottom, and the heat off the line kept the front of my head busy and I let it.
Ghost worked the pass, two plates a hand, sliding through the crowd sideways so that people felt him go by and never saw it. Every third trip his eyes came over the trays and found me, and every third trip I lost my count on the trays. I took two plates off the pass myself and carried them out.
Trenza had the end of the second table. The cut along her cheekbone had healed to a thin pale line, and the eye above it, the one I'd watched swell shut on a mat, was open and on me before I'd cleared the counter.
"You're late, cook." She took the plate out of my hand before I could set it down. "Ese chico te tiene mal."
"That boy has you bad."
"He has me fine." I set the second plate down in front of Mateo, and Mateo looked at it and then at me.
His left arm hung in a sling, the cast under it gone gray with a month of the compound. The cut over his eyebrow had closed into a mark he'd have for the rest of his life. He looked at me for a while with his fork in his good hand, and I stood there and let him.
"I decided." He told it to the frittata.
"Decided what?" I kept my hand on the back of Trenza's chair.
"Whether I like you." He cut a piece off the corner and ate it. He chewed for a long time. "You're all right."
Trenza laughed with her whole body, one loud bark, and slapped the table. "About time!"
"Don't push it." Mateo pointed the fork at Trenza, then at me, and the corner of his mouth was climbing. "That's a one-day thing. Bring the potato one tomorrow and we'll see."
I went back to the line with my ears hot and something warm sitting low in me, and I stood at the griddle with my back to the room until it settled.
Ghost fell in beside me at the counter with a plate of his own once the trays stopped moving. He ate the first half standing up, fast, and then he stopped, and I felt him looking at the side of my face.
"They all like you." Low, under the room. "You know that, right? I don't mean the food. I mean you. Mateo just paid you the biggest compliment that kid has ever paid anybody, and Irish handed you his kitchen, and Irish doesn't hand people anything?—"
"Eat your food." I didn't look at him.
"—and the thing is, I like that the most." His fork had stopped moving. His eyes hadn't. "Out of everything. That they all like you."
My face went hot up from the collar of his hoodie. I put a piece of bacon on his plate that he hadn't asked for. "Eat."
He ate. Four bites, and the speed came back into him. "How's the job? Is your chef still crying at you?"
"He stopped crying." A month ago, the day after the raid, I'd sent him a second photo, the one with the throat still purple, and told him I'd been jumped again.
He'd called inside a minute and sobbed through five minutes of Italian, most of it saints, and I'd taken four more days and gone back.
"He's got me on dinners. Five to close. I asked for it. "
"So you can be here in the daytime." His voice had come down.
"So I can be here in the daytime." I wiped a counter that didn't need it. "The apartment's still there. I go by once a week for the mail and I stand in the door for a while and then I leave. It's not home without him in it. It was where we lived."
His hand found the back of my neck under the hood and squeezed once.
Then he looked past me at Irish, who was telling Declan around a full fork that mutiny had never tasted this good in the history of mutinies.
Ghost watched him for a second. Then his eyes came back to me, fast, and something was going on behind them.
This one had a tell I'd never seen on him before. His weight had shifted onto his toes.
"So, uh." He put the fork down. Picked it up. "After. When you're done here, with the trays and the, the whatever. Come to the room?" His voice had gone up half a step. "My room. Our room. There's a thing. It's not a bad thing?—"
"Okay." I kept my eyes on the rag in my hand.
"Okay." He stood up with his plate, and on his way past me he winked, one eye, quick and completely unlike him, and then he was gone through the crowd.
I stood at the pass with the rag in my fist and no idea what that man had in store for me.
I knocked.
A month in that room and I'd never once knocked on the door, but he'd winked at me, and Ghost didn't wink. The hallway was quiet at that hour, and I stood there with the smell of bacon still in the hoodie and my heart going harder than a knock deserved.
"Come in! Yeah! Come in." Through the door, too fast.
The window had a stripe of late-morning sun across it, and the air was warm and wet from the shower.
Then the bathroom door opened and he came out with a white towel around his hips and nothing else, his short hair wet and dripping onto his shoulders, steam rolling out behind him and the smell of soap with it.
"Uff. I barely finished. I mean, uhm." He stopped in the middle of the floor with one hand on the knot of the towel. "I finished. Showering. I'm clean. That's not what I—okay."
I'd seen that body every night for a month.
It got me anyway. The shoulders, wider than the face over them had any right to.
The pale knot of the scar high on the left of him, and under it a stomach cut in ridges, water running down the line between them into the towel.
Above all that, two ice-blue eyes doing their best to look at me and failing every second time.
The face belonged on a kid. The rest of him belonged to a man who'd spent years getting hit, and it worked so hard I felt it in the backs of my knees.
"So." He wet his lips. "I kind of want to try something. With you."
"Okay." I shut the door behind me.
"You know how we've been doing the, the sucking stuff. Which is so good, oh my God, that is not a complaint—" One hand came off the towel and did a circle in the air. "But I've been thinking. I'm ready for more. I want more. And I might have asked Irish for some tips on how a guy gets ready for?—"
"You asked Irish for sex tips?!" It came out of me half a laugh, and the rest of the laugh followed it. My hand went over my mouth, and his ears had gone the color they'd gone when he handed me that phone.
"Well, I can't ask Blade!" Both hands were up now, and the towel held on without them. "Or Tank! Or Reaper! I'd rather die. And Irish talks about the three of them constantly, not details, but he says enough that if anybody in this building knows how a man gets ready for that, it's him, so I?—"
Ready.
He was standing in front of me in a towel telling me he'd gotten ready. My cock jumped in my jeans. I crossed the room.
"—he told me four things, one of them was about breathing—" I kissed him.
Soft, first. My hand on the side of his face, his skin still hot from the water, my mouth on his with no push behind it, and he stopped talking into it, all at once.
He tasted of mint toothpaste. His lips parted, and I went in slow, tongue against tongue, his breath breaking against my cheek, and through the towel and the denim his cock pressed hard against mine, already hard, and mine answered it.
I knew how far down that throat I could go, which was all the way, and I stood there kissing him and wondered if the rest of him took a cock the same way.
"I'll be careful." Against his mouth. "Fuck, Jake, I've thought about fucking you, I didn't know if we were?—"
"I'm not sure I want you to be careful." His voice had gone rough off the kiss. Low. The double speed was gone out of him, and it went through me from the neck down and landed in my cock.
"Fuck, Jake." I found the knot of the towel and pulled it loose, and it dropped off him onto the floor without a sound.
He stood there naked with his hair wet, and I stood there in his hoodie and my boots, and it was filthy to look at. I wanted to take him right there on the floor with my boots on.
I went to my knees instead.
His cock stood in front of my face, thick and long and curved up, the head dark and already wet. I looked up the whole length of him and found his eyes, and I held them while I opened my mouth and took him in.
"Fuck." It came out of him on a breath. "Caleb. That feels so fucking good. Like always. Fuck?—"
I sucked him hard. Fast, from the start, my head moving on him and my hand around the base and spit already running down over my knuckles.
Salt and skin, and under it the taste I'd know anywhere now.
His stomach jumped against my forehead every time I went down.
His hand landed on the back of my head and didn't push, just held, and I felt the shake in it.
I pulled off with a wet sound, and he made a noise about it, high.
"So." I kept my fist moving on him, slow, and looked up. He was shivering. He was looking down at me with his mouth open and his abs jumping with every stroke. "You don't want careful?"
"Don't be careful." It came out of him firm, and under the firm a piece of begging I'd never heard out of him.
I took him by the hips, both hands, and turned him.
He put his forearms flat against the wall beside the bathroom door and looked back at me over his shoulder, and I stayed on my knees and looked at what I'd turned around.
His ass. Right in front of my face, round and hard and pale where the sun never got. I put both hands on him and gripped, and worked the muscle under my palms, and he sighed against the wall.
Then I pulled my right hand back and slapped him.