“What do you do?”
“I wait. I sit beside you if I can. Or I stand where I can see you. And I wait.”
“For how long?”
“However long it takes.” Asher kissed his neck gently. “And then you gasp.”
Levi was quiet.
“Every time,” Asher said. “You always gasp when you come back to me.” His voice dropped, his tone softer than anything he’d said all night, “It’s my favorite sound.”
Levi’s eyes burned. Not from crying. From the thing that lived in the same place ashe loves meandhe hurts mein a way that had nothing to do with his body. Levi pressed his face into the pillow. The answers sat in him — the campsite, the murder, the suicides, the waiting, the gasp. The person wrapped around him who killed himself every time Levi died to get back to him faster and sat beside his empty shell and waited for a gasp.
Asher didn’t sayI love you,because he didn’t need to after that. The silence where it should have been filled the narrow bunk, and they lay in it together on a dead man’s mattress with the ship humming around them.
8
Random Name Generator
Leviopenedhiseyesto a room that hadn’t changed.
The ceiling. The dim ambient light...the smell underneath the air that his nose stopped noticing at some point. And behind him, the arm across his waist, the warmth, the steady breathing against the back of his neck. All still here, exactly where he left them.
Levi wore nothing and neither did Asher, and each point of skin-to-skin contact registered individually — chest to back, thighs against thighs, a somehow–already-stiff-again cock pressed against the small of his back, all the trapped body heat in a space too small for two people.
He shifted, just slightly, and his cheek burned where it pressed against the pillow. He tried to flex his fingers, but his knuckles were still stiff, protesting like they’d forgotten how to straighten. His body had other complaints too, deeper ones, in places he was choosing not to acknowledge.
Asher’s arm tightened around him. “Stay.”
“What time is it?”
Asher’s chin moved against his shoulder, looking around the room. “The clock on the desk says 0322.”
Levi lay very still, trying to make sense of the information.
He actually…slept?
How many days had it been? He’d lived entire days running and scared and died without a single moment of sustained rest, his brain never offline, never dreaming. And his body was just out there somewhere with a VR headset strapped to his face while his brain ran at full capacity inside a simulation designed to terrify him?
What is that doing to me?
“You didn’t dream,” Asher said.
Levi turned his head. “What?”
“You didn’t dream. I was watching. No eye movement, no sounds. Just...” His arm pulled Levi slightly closer. “Still. You were completely still.”
“You watched me sleep?”
“I watched you be peaceful.” Asher spoke the words almost like he was afraid of them, pressing a kiss to Levi’s shoulder. “You’re never peaceful when you’re awake. I wanted to see what it looked like.”
Levi’s chest ached and his skin crawled; both happened at the same time and neither cancelled the other out. “What did it look like?” he asked, not sure he wanted the answer.
“Quiet.” Asher’s lips pressed to the back of his neck. “Your face does this thing when you sleep. All the managing goes away. The thinking. The calculating. And what’s left is just...” He trailed off. His thumb continued its circuit on Levi’s ribs. “I like holding you when you aren’t scared of me.”
The sentence sat in the room like something with weight, and Levi let it sit. There was nothing in it that wasn’t true — Asher’s arm around him felt like the only solid thing aroundhim, and the chest against his back and the mouth near his hair had become what his body recognized assafe. Not safe like an absence of danger, because Asher being around meant there was always going to be danger, but safe in a way that always knew Asher would be there.
“You know what?” Asher began, and his tone shifted — brighter, almost childlike. “We should have pet names for each other. That’s what couples do, right?”
