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 fewsolutions 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 mindincessantly.”
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. Icouldn’tknow. 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 almostspilled it out. She looked sobroken, 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 wasright.”
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.
Him nestling against me had to be a form of a tranquilizer. The constant whirl of thoughts and the hunt for solutions ensuring the survival of our people ebbed, dissolved into wisps of air. I floated suspended between them, in an illusion of serenity.
Running my fingers through his damp hair, I scratched down his scalp. He thawed, his groan choked. Two minutes later, he became so limp and drowsy, I wondered if exhaustion had seduced him.
He never passed up an opportunity to snooze. Anywhere, including dozing off while waiting in line for his turn at the training rings. He had passed out next to me on too many occasions to count. Sometimes drunk off his ass, like when we were teenagers, and I had to haul him to my parents’ house. Not only had he blacked out while hogging two thirds of my bed, but his sweaty socks had stunk up my room.
But now I got to hold him in my arms.
I dragged my nails along the top of his nape. “Zion?”
His barely audible grumble was all the response I got.
“Did you put a dent in my car?” Someone had to be at fault for that crater in the bumper, and that same someone deserved a punishment.
“I made it easier on the eyes.” His cheek moved against my shoulder, giving way to his smile. “Now it hascurves,” he mumbled. “Like Kali.”
My core tensed as I attempted to suppress a chuckle. I would put a thousand dents into my car myself, pull it apart and set it on fire if it meant Zion wouldn’t have to suffer the same—the dents life put into you. The ones I had put into him myself.
Distance had given me time to think. Walking among the dead, and then rising from behind the veil, it had put things into a new perspective.
He had stood by me unrelentingly, year after year, and somewhere along the way, things had…evolved. Except, my stubbornness and fears had raised a wall I now knew was called denial.
But the mere sight of Kali and Zion together, how she had made him laugh, freely and sincerely, had disintegrated the first brick of that wall.
Tracing the burn scars distorting his forearm, my callouses snagging on the uneven skin, I concentrated on drinking in thefeel of him against me, on memorizing the slackening angles of his face, on deciphering his incomprehensible murmurs.
“You have our kitten’s claws,” he mumbled as I scratched the side of his head, along the shell of his ear. “So good.”
