Chapter 17 Something to Keep
Luke
I woke into the pain first.
That’s the order with a body that’s been worked over.
The hurt gets up before you do. Left side a slab of it where the ribs were, the deep ache that means a bruise still coming into its full self under the skin.
The forearm stiff to the elbow. A bright sting at my eyebrow when I moved my face against the pillow.
My hands sore in a way I felt before I remembered why.
The whole left of me filed a complaint at once, the way it had every morning of my life that followed a bad night, and I lay there and took the inventory the way I always take it, flat, no drama, just counting what still worked.
Then the weight on my chest shifted and made a small sound, and everything else went quiet inside me.
Ryan. Asleep against me. Sometime in the night we’d turned, and the man I’d held into sleep was now the one who held me, his head tucked under my jaw, one leg thrown across mine, his breath going slow and even into my throat.
That’s when I opened my eyes. His hair was a wreck. There was a crease from the pillow pressed up one cheek. His mouth had come open a little in an adorable and seductive way.
My body was still a ruin, I just stopped caring about it. I lay still so I wouldn’t wake him, enjoying his warmth.
He’d said it first. That was the part that made me grin. He was the one who’d cracked. In the bathroom, shouting. I worry about you because I love you. And then again, quiet, the third time, handed over like a fact he was done arguing with. There. It’s yours.
I could not believe my luck. Some part of me I’d kept boxed up so long I’d forgotten it could make noise wanted to shake him awake just to hear him say it again.
Wanted to do something stupid with the day.
I felt like a teenager. He loved me. He’d said so, out loud, more than once, and somehow I got to keep it.
For a few minutes I let myself just have that.
Big and stupid and grinning at the ceiling like a kid who’d gotten away with something big.
I ran my knuckles down the line of his spine, slow, enjoying the contact.
He made a small sound and pressed closer without waking.
I held still and let him, and for one minute I thought about nothing but the warmth of him and the fact that he was mine to hold in the daylight now, and not only in the dark.
He woke slow, the change in his breath, the way his hand flexed against my side and then went still as he remembered where it was. He didn’t move for a moment. Taking his own inventory, maybe.
“Don’t,” he said, muffled, into my chest. “Whatever time it is, don’t tell me.”
“I don’t know, you’re blocking my view to my bedside clock.”
“That’s your problem.” But he tipped his head up, his eyes soft in a way they never were when he was upright, and he looked at me, the whole of my face, the eyebrow and the lip and the rest of it, and something went tender and pained across him at once. “Morning.”
“Morning.”
I tilted my head and kissed him, slow, careful of the split in my lip.
He went still, then leaned into it, and we stayed there a while, unhurried, a kiss with nowhere to be and nothing to prove.
Morning breath and all. Neither of us minded.
It was a different thing from the night before.
That had been the loud part, the lock finally going, the whole of it coming down at once.
This was the quiet on the other side of it.
The morning after, the part I’d spent my whole life finding reasons to skip.
He drew back an inch and looked at me like he was making sure he hadn’t dreamed it.
Then I watched him decide he hadn’t. Real. Still here.
He pushed up onto an elbow, which made him wince, a small involuntary catch he tried to cover and couldn’t, and a flush went up his neck the second he realized I’d seen it.
“Don’t,” he said again, but different now, embarrassed, looking anywhere but at me.
“You’re sore.”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s my line. You’re not allowed it.” I reached up and pushed a piece of sleep-mussed hair off his forehead, careful, like he might bolt. “Ryan. Look at me. You’re allowed to be sore. It’s the most normal thing in the world.”
“It’s not the soreness.” He went redder, which I would not have thought possible, and dragged a hand down his face.
“It’s that I don’t know how to do the morning.
The after. I know how to do a hundred mornings after a hundred nights and not one of them was.
This. With.” He gestured at me, at the bed, at all of it, and gave up on the sentence.
“I’m out of my depth and I hate being out of my depth and I’m aware that’s exactly the kind of thing I’d normally make a joke about, and I can’t find the joke, which is how you know it’s real. ”
It was the most naked thing he’d said to me without a shout behind it.
“Come here,” I said.
“I am here.”
“Come here properly.”
He came back down, slow, careful of himself and gentle with me, and fit himself against my good side, his head on my shoulder, and I felt some of the tension go out of him by degrees, the way it goes out of a man who’s been braced and decides, against his training, to stop.
“There’s no right way to do it,” I said into his hair. “You wake up. You’re here. I’m here. That’s the entire technique. I’m not going to grade you.”
“You’d give me a low mark anyway. Out of spite.”
“I’d give you full marks and make you think you’d earned it. It’s the only kind thing I know how to do.” I felt him huff a laugh against my chest.
He went quiet and warm and heavy, and the gray light came up a little at the window, and for a while neither of us did anything but lie there and breathe and be two men in a bed on a morning that didn’t want to start yet.
It was the calmest I’d been in a long time. Him dozing again against my shoulder. The city coming awake three floors down. My own wrecked body not mattering at all. I knew what it was even while I had it. I just didn’t know how little of it was left.
We got up because his stomach made a noise loud enough to wake itself, and he announced he was going to feed me whether I liked it or not, and I let him walk me to the kitchen with a hand on my back like I might tip over, which, getting out of that bed, I half might have.
For a while it was only the small machinery of a morning.
He filled the kettle and got the mugs down without looking for them, easy in a kitchen we’d shared as roommates for so long it had stopped being anything at all.
I leaned on the counter and watched him and couldn’t get my head around it.
Same kitchen. Same man, barefoot, hair every which way, moving around it the way he had on a hundred ordinary mornings.
Except he was mine now, and that turned the whole picture over.
I let my eyes go down him the way I’d never let myself before, the long line of his back, the notch of his spine disappearing into the waistband of the sweatpants he’d taken off me, the easy shift of his shoulders as he worked.
So long spent pretending not to look at this man.
Now there was nothing stopping me, and I didn’t look away.
“You’re staring,” he said, not turning round.
“I’m allowed. New rule.”
“I like the new rules.” He looked back over his shoulder, and the smile he gave me was one I’d never been on the end of, private, unperformed, pitched at exactly one man in the world.
He gave the rest of the world a brighter one.
It wasn’t worth a tenth of this. “Careful, Hawley. You don’t get to make me blush forever. It’s a limited-time offer.”
“Noted. For the record, I plan to abuse it.”
He went soft at that, the banter dropping off him for a second. “Yeah,” he said. “Do.”
So I did. I crossed the kitchen and wrapped him up from behind, slow, but wanting it more than I minded the pull of them, and put my mouth to the back of his neck, to the warm skin under his hairline.
He smelled of sleep and, under that, faintly of me.
He went still, then tipped his head and gave me the side of his throat, and for a second I felt him forget he was meant to be doing anything else.
Then he laughed, low, and reached back and swatted my hip.
“No. Off.” He was grinning, I could hear it.
“I’m feeding you first. You don’t get to derail the whole morning by being.
That.” He flapped a hand back at me, vague, taking in all of me at once.
“Go and sit down before you fall down. You can maul me after you’ve eaten something that isn’t painkillers. ”
Daylight is honest in a way lamplight isn’t. He turned round from the counter then, in the flat gray morning coming through the one window, and actually looked at me, shirtless, in the cold light, and went still.
“Luke.”
“It looks worse than it is.”
“It looks worse than last night. That’s the thing.
It’s gotten worse overnight.” He crossed to me, and his hands came up and hovered, not touching, mapping it from an inch away.
The rib bruise had spread and gone the colors they go, black at the center bleeding out to a sick green at the edges, bigger than it had been.
The road rash on my shoulder had crusted dark.
There were marks I hadn’t catalogued in the mirror, a boot-shaped one over the kidney, fingerprints on the bad forearm where someone had gripped to swing me. “This is. Luke, this is a lot.”
“Bruises come up over a couple of days. It’s the body doing its job.
It looks the worst right before it looks better.
” I caught one of his hovering hands and put it flat on my chest, on the good side, where there was nothing but me under it.
“I’m not made of glass. You can touch me. I’d rather you touched me.”