Noam’s next breath hitched in his throat. Somehow he hadn’t anticipated that seeing Dara again would feel likethis. Without shock to cushion the blow, it was like being shot with a bullet he hadn’t sensed coming. He said Dara’s name, his voice coming out strangled and wrong.
Dara took a step back, and Noam moved forward to fill the emptied space. He slid a hand into Dara’s hair, kicked the door shut with his heel, and kissed him hard on the mouth.
He expected Dara to taste like whiskey and cigarettes the way he always used to, but this Dara tasted like nothing but himself. He felt the same, though. Same warm body, same firm chest pressed against Noam’s. Same slim fingers on Noam’s cheek. Same heartbeat pumping iron through his blood, tangible to Noam’s sense of all things ferromagnetic.
A part of him thought Dara would push him away—braced for it, even, his veins all live wire crackling with electricity. But Dara didn’t. And when Noam drove him back, Dara went, the pair of them stumbling across the narrow space of Dara’s one-room apartment until Dara grabbed Noam by the collar, turned him around, and shoved him back onto the bed. He climbed after him, kissing Noam’s throat, the corner of his mouth, teeth catching Noam’s lower lip. Noam’s hands on Dara’s waist slid down to curve over his ass.
God, how had Noam lived these past months without this—withouthim?
Dara’s weight was heavy against Noam’s lap, and Noam wanted more of that, more of Dara touching him like he couldn’t get enough.
“I can’t believe you’re alive,” Noam said, breathless and between kisses. “I can’t believe you’re here—”
Dara broke the kiss but he kept his head there, brow tipped against Noam’s and his breath hot and humid between them.
“I missed you so much,” Noam said and touched Dara’s cheek, Dara’s skin warm but not feverish, not anymore.
Dara’s fingers curved around Noam’s wrist, and after a beat, he pulled Noam’s hand away. When he leaned back and met Noam’s gaze, his eyes were too serious. His thumb still pressed in at Noam’s pulse point as he said, “You’re with Lehrer now.”
It wasn’t an accusation, not quite—but it struck like a thrown dart, a sharp and sudden pain lancing through Noam’s chest. He wondered if Dara could feel it against his thumb, the way Noam’s heart raced.
“It’s ... complicated,” Noam said. The words were lame and awkward on his tongue, even as he spoke them.
Dara sat back. The light cast strange shadows on his face, making his expression unreadable. “Why don’t you explain it to me?”
God. There was no way to put this that wouldn’t make Dara hate him.
“We ...”
Noam’s tongue felt wrong in his mouth, too dry.
Dara raised an expectant brow.
Noam swallowed and forced himself to go on. “We’re sleeping together, yeah. Or we were.”
“Were?”
“Not since I realized ... not since you came back.”
Dara said, very calmly, “Was it consensual?”
The sickness in Noam’s stomach swelled toward his throat. He wanted to reach for Dara with both hands and kiss him on the lips, pushing that question back into Dara’s mouth, silencing it.
“Yes.”
Dara slid off the edge of the bed, onto his feet. He had his face turned away from Noam. Noam couldn’t see his expression, couldn’t tell if Dara ... if Dara hated him now, truly this time, or if he ... if he ...
“Dara,” Noam said, shoving the rumpled sheets out of the way until he could sit on the edge of the bed and gaze up at the back of Dara’s head. “You have to understand—I thought you were dead; he was—he was theonlyperson who understood what that meant, who’d lost you like I had. He—”
Dara paced to the far end of the room, then back again. Both hands lifted to drag back through his hair, twisting dark curls in his fingers. When he rounded on Noam again, there was a hardness to his face that hadn’t been there before, like a thin layer of frost had crystallized beneath his skin. When he spoke, his voice trembled. “Lehrer raped me.”
Noam wanted to die. He wanted to strip off this body like dirty clothes, toss it aside, and disappear. He could barely stand living with himself. Living in this skin, which Lehrer had touched—
“I know.”
He was crying; he was ... he couldn’t help it, couldn’t hold it back. Noam scrubbed the heels of his palms against his damp cheeks, for what little good it did. Tears didn’t make it any better, not to Dara anyway—who had lived like this with Lehrer for years, and not because he chose to.
Dara looked at him for one long, horrible moment. Then he spun on his heel, lashing out with one arm to hurl the lamp off the bedside table. It crashed onto the floor in a mess of pewter and shattering glass that spun out across the hard wood toward the far corners of the room. Noam startled where he sat, but he didn’t dare launch to his feet. Dara was a storm cloud blackening fast, a terrible energy pulsing off him that Noam felt in his very blood.
