“Your stepdad is scared of you.”
“Everyone is scared of me.” He kissed the top of Levi’s head. “Except you.”
I am scared of you. I’m just scared of you differently than I used to be.
The sheets were the good ones. The ones Asher wanted him to feel on his first day there.
Asher was doing his nightly sweep, using his arm brace again for balance after the infection. He checked behind the curtain, under the bed, the closet, the gap behind the dresser where nothing could fit, but Asher checked anyway. The knife stayed in his hand the whole time, low at his side, the way a person carried a flashlight in a power outage.
He’s checking under the bed for monsters with a knife,Levi thought.Because I sometimes think I hear things. This is fine. This is a healthy bedtime routine practiced by well-adjusted people across the country.
“You don’t have to do that every night,” Levi said.
Asher was crouched by the dresser, peering into the four-inch gap. He didn’t look up.
“I do.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“I built the thing that puts them there.” Asher straightened, knee popping, and dusted his hand on his sweatpants. “So yeah. I do.”
It landed flatter than it should have, the way the worst things Asher said usually did — stated and moved on from, because to Asher they were just facts, and facts didn’t require a performance. He turned and started on the closet.
He had built it. He had said so out loud. And he checked under the bed every night because of it.
Okay,Levi thought.Okay.
“Then take me to see it.”
Asher’s hand was on the closet door. “Take you to see what?”
“The building. Where you made it.”
The closet door stayed half-open. Asher’s face was angled into the shadow of it and Levi couldn’t see what was happening there, but he could see Asher’s shoulders stiffen. “Okay,” Asher said.
He closed the closet and crossed the room in three steps, abandoned his arm brace to the ground, and his hand was on the back of Levi’s neck before Levi had registered the second step. His mouth came down on Levi’s a second later and the question was gone, walked out of the room on Asher’s tongue.
Oh,Levi thought.That’s how we’re doing this.
He could have stopped it. He could have pulled back, kept the question alive, saidno, I want to talk about meeting the people who helped you make the game.But he didn’t want to talk right now anyway. Not about that.
He kissed Asher back.
He fisted both hands in Asher’s shirt and pulled him closer. Asher made a low sound into his mouth — the sound he made when Levi did something he hadn’t engineered — and his weight came down onto Levi on the bed.
Asher tasted like the wine Paul had brought and the garlic from the noodles and the mint from brushing his teeth, and Levi almost laughed at the inventory — Paul’s dinner still in his mouth, in a kiss that was no longer about dinner. The laugh moved against Asher’s lips and his fingers slid up from Levi’sneck into his hair and closed there, not hard, just enough to keep Levi’s head where Asher wanted it.
“Don’t laugh at me,” Asher murmured, smiling against his mouth.
“I’m not laughing at you.”
“You are.”
“I’m laughing at garlic noodles being in this kiss.”
Levi’s hands went under Asher’s shirt because his hands decided that’s where they wanted to be. He felt along the scars he first noticed in the game; most of them were from Asher’s time in the military, but some of them were earned by being a rebellious child who was bad at climbing fences. Asher said, with complete sincerity, that he was much better at climbing now.
Asher’s mouth moved to his jaw, his neck, down to the bite mark, and Levi bit his lip. His hand came up to the back of Asher’s head and held him there, because the press was warm and the warmth was reaching into something Levi hadn’t said out here.
