“For now or forever?”
“For a while.”
Bayani juts out his lower lip and John worries the boy might cry, so he reaches out to him for a hug. Bayani climbs into his lap eagerly and nestles down like a chick to its mother with one soft cheek pressed against John’s chest. John pets his head, and it’s nice.Reallyfucking nice. Bayani fits with him in a way no one else ever has. John’s father was a womanizing gambler who spent whatever money he made frivolously. His mother was a victim of his father’s bad temper and paranoia, trying to hold their family and the business together by ragged threads. His parents’ fighting was only a little better than the twitchy silence, which usually meant something worse was coming.
John left home at 18 years old thinking he’d escaped his family’s dysfunction only to enter another kind of hostile environment, and that was among his own service members. Once he’d returned stateside, John resolved to go it alone. He’d get a job doing security and buy a little fixer-upper with a garden out back, adopt some animals to keep him company. Maybe even try his hand at dating. Then his dad had a massive heart attack and his mother’s cancer came back.
And the Hand paid him a visit.
Now he has Bayani, who softens John’s sharp edges and allows him to express himself fully, to be the sort of man who can look at himself in a mirror without recoiling in shame. John is more than just the Butcher to Bayani. Without knowing or even meaning to, the boy has given John a reason to live and a reason to fight. But John knows what it’s like to be trapped in a hopeless situation, and he’d never do that to this sweet, tender-hearted boy, not if he can help it.
After a few minutes of this quiet comfort, Bayani reaches for his tablet again. “Cuddling is okay?”
“Cuddling is fine,” John answers with some hesitation. He knows how quickly cuddling can lead to more, but he’ll hold the line.
“Will you sleep in the bed with me?”
John chuckles at his persistence. “No, that’s a danger zone.”
“How about kissing?”Bayani puckers his lips.
John smiles and shakes his head.
“Not fair,”Bayani says with a scowl.
John pecks his forehead and says, “Until I can get us out of this situation, cuddles will have to do. The most important thing to me is that you’re safe and happy.”
“You keep me safe, and you make me happy.”
John can hear the boy’s stubbornness come through in the tablet’s translation as he lays his head on John’s shoulder again. His soft puffs of breath warm John’s neck, and John buries his nose in the boy’s hair to breathe him in deeply.
“I hope one day we can be together in that way,” John says. Admitting it out loud feels dangerous. Everyone he’s ever loved has been stolen away from him.
Bayani’s shiny black head bobs in response and the boy grips him tighter.
John will figure a way out of this, somehow.
* * *
The cast comesoff Bayani’s arm a week later. Around the same time, his knee is healed enough that he can move around with only the aid of his leg brace. It will still need surgery, but that would require an MRI and an orthopedic surgeon. Eventually they’ll get the knee fixed properly. In the meantime, John compensates Thomas with a chest freezer filled with meat, which he installs in Thomas’s garage one hot and humid afternoon. Thomas offers him a beer afterward and John accepts to be polite. One beer and he’ll head home. He doesn’t want to leave Bayani alone in the apartment for too long.
“So, he’s going to stay with you?” Thomas asks.
“For now,” John says. The thought of sending Bayani away distresses him more than he’d care to admit. But even more worrisome is the thought of Bayani not being safe with him.
“He seems happy. You two get along?”
“Well enough,” John replies. He keeps his cards close to the vest, always has. And his feelings for the boy have evolved over the course of the past couple months. He desires Bayani as a lover and a companion, harbors intense feelings toward him, but he stands by the boundary he drew. Sex would only complicate an already delicate situation. And besides, what they do or don’t do in the bedroom is nobody’s business but their own.
“And you,” Thomas says, “seems like the company has done you good. Fewer cloudy days and more sunny ones?”
This is Thomas’s gentle way of asking if John still wants to kill himself.
“I guess you don’t realize how lonely you are until you aren’t anymore,” John says. Beyond easing his loneliness, his life has meaning now. He’s Bayani’s friend and protector. His mission is to get Bayani to safety, far away from Emile and the machinations of the Hand. John would rather die than fail him.
“Well, it’s good to see you smile once in a while.” Thomas clinks his glass bottle against John’s. They finish their beers and say goodbye. Thomas tells him not to be a stranger. John promises that he won’t, though it’d be better for Thomas—safer—if they never saw each other again.
* * *
