Levi blinked. “I…what?”
“Pet names.” Asher settled more firmly against him, his arm still possessive around his waist. “Special names just for us.”
He was naked and bruised, lying in a dead man’s bunk, with a room that smelled like blood and sex, and Asher wanted to discuss pet names.Sure. Why not.This is my life now.
“I was thinking I could call you something like... sweetheart? Or maybe baby?” Asher’s thumb grazed Levi’s collarbone, slow, tracing the line of it like he was memorizing the shape. “You have such a young face. It would be perfect.”
Levi closed his eyes. The emotional whiplash of it — fromI like holding you when you aren’t scared of metosweetheart or baby?in under ten seconds. His hands tightened on the mattress edge because they needed to be holding something. But the fingers on his collarbone kept moving, impossibly gentle, and the heat of Asher behind him was steady and close, and Levi let himself have it. Just this. Just the quiet and the warmth and five consecutive minutes without something trying to kill them.
“Baby,” Asher decided, the word landing in his voice with the certainty of someone who’d just solved a particularly difficult equation. “I’ll call you baby. It’s perfect for you.” He pressed his nose into Levi’s hair and inhaled, slow, and made a small, satisfied hum, like this mattered more than any of the violence that had led them here.
Levi just lay there, staring out at the room, at the desk, at the door, his mind spinning as he opened his mouth and nothing came out because what was he supposed to say to that? He liked the weight of the word in Asher’s mouth. That was the thing he wasn’t going to look at directly — not the liking, which was just there, but what the likingmeant.
“What would you call me?” Asher asked, pulling on Levi’s shoulder until he was on his back. He sounded like a kid asking to be included in a game he didn’t quite understand but desperately wanted to play. His mismatched eyes searched Levi’s face, the only thing in them a desperate want that Levi wanted to meet. It was almost enough to forget that Levi had been dragged into this room and practically stripped at gunpoint.
“I...” Levi’s voice came out as a squeak. His mind scrambled for anything, landing on a concept, and the word it found was the wrong one, or the right one, or the one his guard wasn’t high enough to stop. “Dovey.”
He wanted to take it back immediately, but Asher’s whole face lit up before he could. It became younger and soft, lips parting, eyes wide, and he looked like someone who’d been given something he’d stopped believing he’d ever get.
“Dovey,” Asher repeated, testing it, then said again, softer: “Dovey.” The wonder in his voice was audible and terrible. “You — that’s from lovey-dovey. That’s alovename.”
Levi’s face burned. “It’s not—”
“You almost called me lovey.” Asher grinned, propping himself up on one elbow. “You were going to say the whole thing and you stopped yourself and you gave me the part withoutlovein it.”
“That’s not what—”
“Itis.“ Asher planted a kiss on Levi’s cheek with the uncoordinated enthusiasm of a dog who’d just earned a treat,then pulled back enough to look at Levi’s face. The smile on him was so bright, so genuine, so completely free of every sharp edge Levi had learned to watch for, that Levi felt himself start to smile back before he could stop it. “And a dove? That’s a peace bird. You think I’m peaceful?”
“I think you’re the opposite of peaceful.”
“But you called me it anyway.” He traced Levi’s jaw with his fingertips, barely touching, then let them drift — down the side of Levi’s neck, across the bite mark that still hadn’t faded, along the line of his collarbone to the hollow of his throat. Like Levi’s skin was something he’d been given permission to explore and he intended to map every inch of it. “Because when you’re with me, you feel—”
“Don’t finish that sentence,” Levi warned, but his voice came out thinner than he wanted because Asher’s fingers had dipped below his throat and his body was paying attention to that in ways his brain hadn’t authorized.
Asher smiled. Settled, certain, the smile of a man who didn’t need to hear the answer because the pet name already gave it to him. He lay back down and threw an arm over Levi’s chest, pulling him in until there was no space left between them — bare skin flush against bare skin, the length of Asher’s body warm and solid along his back, his face tucked into the curve of Levi’s neck. His lips brushed the spot just below Levi’s ear, not quite a kiss, and one leg hooked over Levi’s thigh with a casual possessiveness that made Levi very aware of exactly how much clothing neither of them was wearing.
“I’m so happy,” he murmured against Levi’s skin, his mouth still close enough that the words themselves were a sensation. “No one has ever given me a nickname before. No one has ever…” He stopped and swallowed hard. “No one has ever wanted to.”
Levi stared at the ceiling and felt something twist behind his sternum that he didn’t have a name for and didn’t want one.
“You have a pet name, I have a hostage situation.”
“You have a boyfriend who loves you and a pet name that proves you love him back even though you won’t say it yet.” He sighed against Levi’s neck. “No one else gets to call me that, right? Just you?”
“Just me,” Levi heard himself say, and he meant it.
Asher made a sound against his neck, like a low, pleased growl as his hips shifted closer, pressing his erection into the small of Levi’s back. Levi’s face heated. He could feel Asher’s heartbeat against his shoulder blade, fast and hard, and the slow drag of Asher’s mouth along the tendon of his neck, open and warm, tasting the skin there like he couldn’t help himself.
“You’re doing that on purpose,” Levi muttered.
“Doing what?” Asher whispered against his throat, and Levi could feel the shape of his grin.
They lay like that for a while. Asher’s thumb had found the dip between two of Levi’s ribs and kept returning to it, the same small circle, and Levi’s breathing had synced to it without his permission. The quiet was new. No alarm, no running, no one dying in the next room. Asher’s hand drifted from his ribs to his hip, his palm flat against the bone, fingers curling loosely over the jut of it, and every few seconds his fingers would sweep a slow arc across the skin below Levi’s navel — idle and absent, the way someone might pet a cat without thinking about it. Levi didn’t want to move. He didn’t want to think about the creatures or the plan forming in the back of his mind to get out of the game.
He just wanted to be with Asher when Asher was like this.
It’ll be different when we get out. He’ll remember how to be a person, not a weapon. We have to get out.
