Chapter 6 #2
They go up. Four flights. The carpet hasn’t improved.
Sidney’s pace is steady tonight, no faltering on the stairs, and he unlocks his apartment door on the first try, which Erath notes is the first lock that’s cooperated with him all evening.
The apartment is warm and smells of lavender.
Sidney drops his keys on the counter and fills the coffee maker and clicks it on and the machine starts its low, industrial grumbling.
He pulls two mugs from the cabinet, the one with a dog on it and the plain one and sets them on the counter and leans back against the opposite side and crosses his arms.
The kitchen is narrow. The counter puts about three feet between them.
Erath is on one side, leaned against the edge.
Sidney is on the other, hip against the counter, arms crossed, watching the coffee maker with the focus of someone who needs something to look at that isn’t the other person in the room.
The coffee maker drips. The apartment is quiet. Erath watches a strand of Sidney’s hair fall across his forehead and wants, with a fierceness that startles him, to push it back.
“So how does the dad thing work?” Sidney asks, eyes still on the coffee maker.
“You’re going to have to be more specific.”
“I mean, you’re the lord of the underworld. You oversee all the dead. You manage the entire afterlife.” He glances at Erath. “How does that work with being someone’s dad? How do you balance the whole dominion-over-death thing with, you know, parenting?”
“The dead don’t require constant supervision. Most of them are content to move through the process. The ones who aren’t take time, but the underworld has its own rhythms. I’ve had eons to learn them.”
“So you clock out and go home and be a dad.”
“Something to that effect.”
“Does she know? About what you do?”
“She knows in the way children know things. She understands that people come to the underworld when they’re done living, and that I take care of them.” Erath pauses. “She thinks it’s boring.”
Sidney’s mouth curves. “She thinks managing the entirety of death is boring?”
“She thinks most things are boring unless they involve coloring, snacks, or painting someone’s nails.”
“Fair. She’s got her priorities straight.
” The coffee maker sputters and finishes.
Sidney turns and pours, and the motion puts his back to Erath for a moment, the line of his shoulders visible through the too-big jacket, and Erath’s gaze traces the shape of him without permission.
Sidney turns back and hands him the plain mug and their fingers brush in the exchange, brief, incidental, and Sidney doesn’t pull away from it. “What’s her favorite book?”
“She has a book about a caterpillar that eats an extraordinary amount of food for its size. She’s read it to me four hundred times. I could recite it in my sleep, if I slept.”
“You don’t sleep?”
“No.”
“Ever?”
“Not in the way you mean.”
Sidney takes a sip of his coffee. He holds the mug in both hands, elbows on the counter, and looks at Erath over the rim.
The kitchen light is warm and it catches the gold in his hair and the faint lines at the corners of his eyes, lines that deepen when he smiles and are visible now even though he’s not smiling, not quite, just existing in the proximity of one.
“What do you do at night, then? When she’s asleep?”
“Think. Walk. Check on the river. Make sure nothing’s gotten in that shouldn’t be there.”
“That sounds lonely.”
It is. Erath doesn’t say that. Saying it would give it a shape and a weight and a name and he’s been carefully avoiding all three for a very long time. He lifts his mug and says, “It’s quiet. I prefer quiet.”
“Liar,” Sidney says.
The word is precise and unhesitating and it lands with the force of something that’s true. Erath’s mug pauses halfway to his mouth.
“You’ve showed up at my bar two nights in a row,” Sidney says. “You walked me home. You’re sitting in my kitchen drinking coffee at midnight. None of that screams I prefer quiet.”
Erath sets his mug down. He looks at Sidney across three feet of counter and the distance feels both enormous and nonexistent.
“Maybe I’m making an exception,” he says.
Sidney’s fingers tighten on his mug. The motion is small, barely visible, but Erath sees it because he is watching Sidney’s hands the way he watches everything about Sidney, with an attention that has given up pretending to be casual.
The tips of Sidney’s ears go pink. He looks down at his coffee and then back up and the looking-back-up is deliberate, a choice to meet Erath’s gaze when looking away would be easier.
“Has there been anyone?” Sidney asks. “Since Penny’s mom?”
“No.”
“No one?”
“It’s not exactly a position that invites romantic entanglement.”
“Sure, sure.” Sidney sets his mug down. He uncrosses his arms, then crosses them again, then uncrosses them and puts his hands on the counter behind him, gripping the edge. “I can see how that’s a tough sell. ‘Hi, I’m the literal lord of death, would you like to go to dinner.’”
“You don’t seem ly deterred.”
The words come out before Erath can stop them. Low and steady and aimed directly at the center of the thing they’ve been circling for two nights.
The kitchen goes quiet. The coffee maker clicks off. The refrigerator hums. Sidney’s hands tighten on the counter behind him and Erath watches the flush move from the tips of his ears to the sides of his neck.
“Yeah, well.” Sidney’s voice is rougher now, lower, and the humor in it is thinner, stretched over something raw. “We’ve established I have terrible taste.”
The sentence lands in the space between them and sits there.
Sidney said it lightly, the same way he’d said it last night, the same polished delivery, but Erath hears the other thing inside of it now.
The thing Sidney had let slip with the bandages and the linen and Erath’s hands on his skin.
Sidney is standing in his own kitchen, gripping his own counter, and telling the god of death that wanting him is just the latest entry in a catalog of bad decisions, and the worst part is that Sidney believes it.
He actually, genuinely believes that the problem is his taste and not the men who hurt him.
“I’m not interested in your taste,” Erath says. “I’m interested in you.”
Sidney stares at him.
The kitchen is very small. The counter between them is very narrow. The coffee is getting cold and neither of them is looking at it.
Something fragile and reckless wars behind Sidney’s eyes.
Erath can see both sides of it, the wanting and the caution, the impulse and the restraint, and he watches the fight happen in real time and does not intervene.
This is not his call. This has to be Sidney’s.
Erath knows what Sidney told him, knows the shape of the pattern, and he knows that the last thing Sidney needs is another man who doesn’t wait to be invited.
Sidney lets go of the counter. He walks around the narrow island between them, mindful of his bandaged ribs, and crosses the three feet of kitchen and puts his mouth on Erath’s.
The kiss is tentative. Just the press of his lips, soft, testing, a question asked in contact instead of words.
Erath goes still. He lets Sidney come to him.
He keeps his hands at his sides, both of them, and lets Sidney set the pressure, the angle, the duration.
And when Sidney doesn’t pull away, when the tentative press becomes something more deliberate and his lips part and Erath can feel the warmth of his breath, Erath responds.
One hand comes up to cup the side of Sidney’s jaw.
His thumb against Sidney’s cheekbone. His fingers curling behind his ear where the hair is soft and warm.
He keeps the touch light, open, a hand Sidney could step away from without effort.
Sidney makes a sound against his mouth, small and involuntary, and the sound travels through Erath’s chest and settles somewhere behind his ribs.
Sidney opens to him and Erath opens back and then they’re kissing, slow and deep and thorough, and Sidney tastes of coffee and something sweet he ate earlier and underneath both a warmth that is specifically, unmistakably his.
He’s a good kisser. Precise, deliberate, with a current of urgency beneath the surface that he’s trying to control and not quite managing.
His fingers curl into the front of Erath’s shirt and pull, and Erath lets himself be pulled, lets himself be drawn across the last inch of distance between them until they’re chest to chest. Sidney’s back is against the island and his hand is fisted in Erath’s shirt and the pull of his fingers is insistent and small and saying more and the feeling of it is sending a current down Erath’s spine that is making it increasingly difficult to think.
They stay there. Erath loses track of the minutes, which is not something that happens to him, time being one of the few constants he has always been able to keep hold of.
But Sidney’s mouth is on his and the warmth of Sidney’s body is pressed against him from chest to thigh and the minutes become irrelevant.
He learns the shape of Sidney’s mouth. The way he tilts his head to the left.
The way his breathing changes when Erath’s thumb strokes the skin behind his ear.
The way he pulls at Erath’s shirt when he wants more, small, insistent tugs that go straight through Erath and land somewhere vital.
Erath slides his hand from Sidney’s jaw to the back of his neck.
Sidney arches into it, presses closer, and the sound he makes against Erath’s mouth is lower this time, rougher, and it undoes something in Erath’s restraint that he’d been holding in place with considerable effort.
Sidney’s hips shift against his and Erath feels the heat of him, the hardness of him, and the part of his mind that has been keeping careful, deliberate distance flickers and threatens to go out entirely.