“Fuck.” He buried himself deep and stayed there. “Fuuuck.”
Indeed. Ranger collapsed on top of me. I held him, dazed, but mindful of the fact that it had not been a day since he had struggled to walk to the bathroom without help. “You are okay?”
Ranger raised his head, eyes heavy, a sex haze I’d seen in him before thick in his gaze. “I’m dead.”
“Good dead?”
“The best.”
He fell slack again, breathing hard. I kissed every part of him I could reach until he came back to me.
Ranger pulled out and staggered to the bathroom to clean up.
He came back with a towel and a viscous headache written all over his face. “We need to wash this if we want to keep our balls.”
“I will do it in the morning. Come, Asher.”
Ranger lay down with me again. The TV was on and he stared at it for a long moment, gaze vacant, excavating his brain again.
I touched his face. “Are you still worried I will not stay with you?”
“Hmm?” He came back to earth with a slow blink. “Nah. I was wondering something else about you.”
“And what is that?”
“How old are you?”
Of all the things I thought he might ask, it was, perhaps, the most benign. “I am twenty-seven.”
“What?”
“Twenty-seven,” I repeated. “Did you think I was forty-five?”
Ranger opened his mouth.
Shut it again. “I don’t know what I thought. But it wasn’t that. How...?” He frowned as he thought too hard. “I don’t get it.”
“Which part?”
“You’ve done so much. How the fuck did you fit it all in?”
“I started early.” The sofa had blankets and pillows, as if someone had known that Ranger would tire of the bed the moment we were left without an audience. “When your name is not your name, the rules don’t apply.”
“Your name isn’t Viktor?”
“It is. The Petrenko part... not so much. My employer chose it to be unremarkable, like Jake, like Alexei’s name, though I believe his is as real as such things allow.”
Without the weight of a head injury slowing his thoughts, perhaps Ranger would’ve asked me more. But he lay down instead, wrapping his long, lean body around me, his cheek to my chest. “I feel like we have a future, and it scares me.”
“Why?”
“I never thought I’d have one.”
I kissed his temple, burying my face in his silky hair, letting my eyes grow damp, tears blurring my vision. “Neither did I.”
[ 34 ]
RANGER
