Chapter 19 Gedeon
GEDEON
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
I lifted my head off the pillow, grogginess clouding my senses—
A steady pitter-patter of flowing water trickled from the bathroom. Dimness spilled from the cracked-open door, but the shower sounds pacified my unease.
Zion and Kali must have returned from Vice.
Burying my face in the pillow, I listened to someone—most probably Zion—wash up. Realization I wasn’t alone anymore dissipated my bleariness.
Last night hadn’t solved our problems. The three of us had too many things left unresolved.
With a grunt, I threw the thick, heat-trapping duvet off me—
A crouching shape snatched something off the floor. A tall body uncurled as Kali straightened, clutching the treasure to her chest, the fabric bundled into a ball.
Before I could say anything, she darted into the hallway, her wild hair swaying, the door banging shut behind her.
I pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes. A difficult conversation awaited us. I had not planned to return so soon, but once Zola had shared her suspicions, there was not a chance I would have left Kali and Zion to deal with a potential-turned-real ambush by themselves.
With Zola’s and Carys’s assistance, infiltrating the crew of soldiers had been surprisingly easy.
Soldiers unfamiliar with each other had assembled their group.
So one slit throat in an alleyway, a reprogrammed chip in my hand, a uniform concealing every inch of me, and nobody could recognize me as the leader of the opposition. I had become one of their own.
Climbing off the bed, I aimed for the bathroom. Late night doused the space, obscuring the interior. The swipes of water struck the large bathtub in sharp, repetitive taps as I undressed, discarding my underwear on what I knew to be a black-and-white marble floor.
Facing the showerhead, lathering up his hair, Zion paid no attention to me as I joined him in the bathtub large enough to fit at least three people.
After spending so many years in shabby apartments in Ilasall, I had predicted Kali would enjoy it and had been proven right.
Her first night at our compound, she had soaked in a steaming bath despite the summer’s heat having been blistering enough to solder your clothes to you.
Not that it was a surprise.
In Ilasall, the rights to hot water and enough of it to luxuriate in baths were bestowed upon green-banded citizens exclusively.
And it wasn’t like Ilasall or the other two cities lacked the safe and drinkable resource.
They simply switched off the heat toggle for the black-banded’s residential buildings.
Warmth soaked my front as I embraced Zion from behind.
His contented hum rumbled under my palms. Drawn by the slickness dripping down his body, I licked the wetness off his neck.
“Just feeling you like this…” I rested my chin on his shoulder.
“Tell me this is not a dream.” Now I knew what Zion had meant before.
“That if I open my eyes, you will still be here.”
He chuckled. “I’m that dreamlike?”
Yes.
Like the water trickling through my fingers. Impossible to hold on to. To contain.
My low grunt elicited a short bout of laughter from him.
I could not pinpoint when it had happened, when childhood friendship had morphed into attraction, when lust had transformed into a desire for more.
What I could tell was that Kali had awakened me.
She had kicked my footing from underneath me, and that was when everything I had kept at bay, harbored behind a stone wall, erupted.
Struck by lightning, that wall had fractured.
And the following thunder had eviscerated the bricks until the need to have Zion grew overwhelming, all-consuming, its maw greedy because of the time we had spent apart.
I lowered my lips to his pulse point, searching for his heartbeat: thud, half-a-second pause, thud, half-a-second pause, thud.
“I’m here.” His voice took on a more serious note, a terrifying one.
This thing, it felt like a sandcastle built on a seashore—brittle, unsteady, about to succumb to the foaming waves threatening to ravage it.
“I’m not going anywhere.” He leaned into my chest. “I’d never seen you this speechless before. ”
“Can we”—I splayed my hands on his abdomen—“just stay like this for a bit?”
“And asking? That’s unheard of.” As he rested his forearms atop my own, the water fused our skin. “But yes, you can touch me.”
An errant strand of my hair fell on my forehead, its tip ticklish and irritating, yet I remained plastered to Zion, absorbing the connection as if the next sunrise depended on it.
Perhaps it did. Its plea for fuel compelled me to kiss the two-soon-to-emerge bruises on his neck. The space between them. Behind his ear.
“I won’t be able to stand for long if you keep doing that,” he drawled. “But other parts of me will surely stand.”
“I thought you would be satiated for—”
“Never.” He snickered, drawing a smile out of me. “You’re the best shower snack there is. A dripping wet ice pop.” Twisting around, he flattened his tongue at the base of my throat, searing a trail up to my jaw.
My eyelids fluttered closed as my head tilted back.
Never had I suspected being called a summer treat would make me want to turn Zion around, shove him into the bathroom wall and show him precisely what it meant to provoke a man who had been frozen for eternity.
But not yet. Not so soon. Merely knowing he had never been fucked stirred the satisfaction hibernating in my gut. I was going to take my time making him guess when I would take him.
Anticipation could be a potent weapon.
Pushing the stray thoughts deep down, to my toes and then into the silver drain sucking the water into its depths, I asked what had been weighing on me, “How is she?”
I have a shift at Vice, but once I return, I hope you will be gone, Kali had said.
Reaching for the faucet, Zion flicked off the shower spray. “Stubborn.” As he tousled his hair, the drops smacked me like a wet cloth imbued with what words couldn’t describe. “You have no idea how hard it was. Hiding everything from her…”
He hopped out of the white bathtub, the ceramic immaculate besides a few cracks.
“Her stabbing you was an accident, but she still blames herself for it.” Grabbing two towels, he passed me one while wrapping another around his hips.
“It killed me to keep my lips sealed shut around her, Gedeon. I…” He cleared his throat.
“Please don’t ask me to do anything like that again. ”
Finished drying my hair, I returned the towel to its hook near the sink.
“I loathe having had to do this, but there were few solutions to unite our people. Too many had expressed refusal to work together.” I strode to him, the tiles chilly under my soles.
“So I chose the most effective option. The one that maximized our chances. Your chances.” Yanking the damp fabric, I loosened Zion’s towel. “We all had a part to play.”
“I trust you in strategy. I’ve always followed you and always will. Your ass is too nice not to have it around,” he said, but then his smile dropped. “But not knowing the outcome… You might have been truly dead. That possibility nagged at the back of my mind incessantly.”
As I hung his towel next to mine, surprise colored my tone. “I figured the doc told you.”
“I convinced him to keep it to himself. I couldn’t know.
If I did and found out you were alive and alone, without anyone to watch your back…
” Zion looked out the fogged-up window. The condensation veiled the world full of human lives, rows of them cut short and only the select few gifted the grace of old age.
“It would’ve ripped me apart—having to choose between looking after Kali and searching for you. ”
Cupping his face, I glued my forehead to his. From how he had acted with Kali and the short time I had him before Ilasall’s attack, physical contact had seemed to soothe him. Like a balm of sorts.
Heat emanated from his rapidly cooling body, and I relished how he reinforced his hold on my waist, his nails prodding my back and undoubtedly creating crescent indentations.
But hearing he’d consciously prohibited the doc from informing him of my survival… It made coming back a hundred times worse. My knees wobbled, as if the veins in the marble tiles had slithered up my feet, twined around my ankles and burrowed into my cardiovascular system to siphon my blood.
“When she threw her letter into your funeral fire and I had to scramble for a lie about why I couldn’t do the same…
I’d almost spilled it out. She looked so broken, Gedeon.
She’d stared at the sheet of paper with your name on it for hours, too scared to burn it.
” He lifted his head, his face inches from mine, so close and yet so far.
“I had to convince her to set it aflame, pretending that it was right.”
The story he painted called out my demons.
We all lived with them. Some were real, some were not.
Some roamed our dreams, some stalked us in reality.
And some possessed us, steering us awry.
Persuaded us to make foolish decisions, like pushing someone away and then loading the burden of lies onto their shoulders.
“There is no point in saying I’m sorry; I know that.
It won’t change the past, but…I will always put you first, Zion.
You and her.” Taking his hand, I backed toward the doorway, and our limbs stretched out between us.
“This, you, us, is my priority. I just might show it in questionable ways.” I tugged him toward me. “Come to bed with me.”
I didn’t want to let him go.
Based on how he stepped toward me, he didn’t want that either.
Shoving the too-thick duvet aside, I collapsed onto the mattress on my back. My limbs liquefied from how he snuggled in close. His bent leg resting on my thigh and his arm thrown on my sternum singed their imprints into my flesh.