Chapter 5 #3
Erath tears off a strip of medical tape and secures the end of the linen. His hands stay on Sidney’s ribs for a beat. Two. Three. Then he pulls them away and leans back, and the loss of contact leaves Sidney’s skin cold in a way that is completely disproportionate to the temperature of the room.
“Done,” Erath says.
Sidney looks down at himself. The bandage is clean, even, professionally applied. He pulls his shirt back on, carefully, one arm at a time, and the motion is easier now. The compression helps. His ribs still ache but the support makes breathing feel less adversarial.
“Thank you,” he says. He means it. He means it more than the two words can carry, but they’re the only ones he has.
“Of course.”
Erath is sitting on the couch with his hands on his knees, watching him, and his expression is carefully neutral in the way that means it’s deliberately not showing whatever is underneath.
His eyes are doing something that his face won’t let them.
A lingering, a weight, a focus that tracks the way Sidney pulls his shirt down over the bandages and settles back into the couch.
Sidney should look away. He should stop cataloguing the details of this man’s face and the breadth of his shoulders and the way his hands look resting on his own knees, idle now, capable and warm and recently on Sidney’s skin.
He should. He doesn’t.
The pull is still there. It’s quieter now, a background hum instead of a roar, but it’s persistent and patient and it feels old, somehow, older than the three days they’ve known each other.
It feels settled, established, as though it was there before he knew it was there and has simply been waiting for him to notice.
“It’s getting late,” Sidney says, and this is the test. This is always the test. “You should probably go before Mrs. Watts down the hall starts getting funny ideas about strange men in my apartment in the middle of the night.”
He watches Erath’s face. He watches for the flicker.
The resistance. The moment where the easy composure cracks and something pushes through, the thing that always pushes through when Sidney tells a man it’s time to leave: the irritation, the entitlement, the but I thought we were that turns a polite suggestion into a negotiation and then into a problem.
He has his defenses ready. He always has his defenses ready.
He’s already mapped the distance to the door and the location of his phone and the number of steps it would take to get to the bathroom, which has a lock, which isn’t much but it’s something.
Erath stands.
He picks up his jacket from the arm of the couch and puts it on and the motion is unhurried, easy, a man leaving when it’s time to leave and nothing more.
He doesn’t ask if Sidney is sure. He doesn’t suggest one more cup of coffee or another few minutes or any of the small, reasonable-sounding extensions that always turn into something else.
“Thank you for the coffee,” he says. His eyes linger. His touch does not. He stands up and walks himself to the door, adjusting the cuffs of his jacket as he goes.
Sidney watches him go and feels what he almost thinks is disbelief. He climbs to his feet to see him out.
Erath opens the door and steps into the hallway and turns back, and there is nothing on his face but quiet warmth, and he says, “Goodnight, Sidney.”
“Goodnight.”
The door closes. Sidney stares at it.
He has never had a man leave his apartment without expecting something from him.
Not once. Not in ten years of letting people in and regretting it.
The pattern is so deeply established that Sidney has internalized it as a law of physics: you let them in, they take, they don’t leave when you ask them to.
That’s how it works. That’s how it has always worked.
It worked that way with Caleb, who’d stayed for three hours past being asked to leave and had left a bruise on Sidney’s jaw when he’d finally insisted.
It worked that way with Ivan, who’d gotten angry, who’d punched a hole in the wall behind Sidney’s head, who’d said later that he was sorry and he’d never do it again and then he’d done it again.
It worked that way every single time, without exception, and Sidney has built his entire understanding of intimacy around that pattern, around the knowledge that letting someone in is the easy part and getting them to leave is where it gets ugly.
Except Erath just left. No argument. No disappointment.
No guilt trip, no lingering, no finding a reason to stay five more minutes that turns into ten that turns into the night.
Sidney told him to go and he went and he did it with the same composure he’d had when he arrived, and the ease of it, the absolute lack of friction, is unraveling something in Sidney’s chest that he has spent a very long time keeping tightly wound.
Maybe Erath isn’t interested. Maybe despite the warm hands and the lingering eyes and the way he’d leaned in when Sidney talked, he’s just being decent. Maybe the god of death is just strange.
Or maybe, Sidney’s traitorous mind says, maybe he’s just a gentleman.
Right. All of his bad luck with terrible men, and Mr. Right would be the lord of the underworld. Fat chance.
The pull in his chest says otherwise. It says: you know exactly what this is. It says: you’ve been waiting for someone to pass that test and he passed it and you’re terrified.
He cleans up the coffee mugs. He puts the medical supplies back in the bathroom. He changes for bed, slowly, each movement careful, and slides under the covers and lies on his back in the dark. His hands rest on his stomach, over the bandages, in the exact place where Erath’s hands had been.
He doesn’t think about it. He lies there, in the quiet of his apartment, with the ghost of warmth still pressed into his skin, and he doesn’t think about any of it.