“I don’t want to,” Asher began, then cocked his head, tracking the tears down Levi’s face.Be honest. “Not that much.”
Levi closed his eyes. His hands were still shaking. The tube shifted on his face when he swallowed. Asher waited. He had been good at waiting once, in the game, on patient nights. He was getting good at it again.
“What do you want from me?” Levi whispered.
Asher could have said a lot of things. He had a list growing in his mind that had no organization to it, because it seemed like every few minutes he thought about a new thing he wanted to experience with Levi out here. But he knew how Levi liked things to be answered, what sort of things he needed to be told to feel okay while his mind adjusted to what was inevitable. Asher hadn’t been able to answer him properly on so many important things in the game because he had been so lost in there.
He was going to do better.
“Do you remember what I said in the sanitarium?” he asked. “I told you that meeting you made everything hurt a little bit all the time. Do you remember?”
Levi’s eyes welled up again as he nodded.
“I said it was okay, because we have each other now, forever, and we can make each other feel better,” Asher reminded him. “I meant that. It was a promise, and I’m here to keep that promise.” Levi closed his eyes and more tears slid down his once-full cheeks. Whatever was happening inside him was big. Asher couldn’t see it and Asher didn’t need to see it. The promise had been delivered. The promise had been received. The promise was going to keep being true for the rest of their lives, and Levicould close his eyes if he needed to, but Asher would always make him open them again.
Asher reached across the table and wiped a tear off Levi’s cheek with his thumb, smiling to himself that Levi hadn’t flinched. When he pulled his hand back, his thumb was still wet from Levi’s mouth and now the tears, and he only looked at it for a fraction of a second before deciding to lick it clean while he waited for Levi to open his eyes again.
He could wait.
He had practiced.
36
Bathroom Meter
Asherwasawake.
Levi knew before he opened his eyes. The breathing behind him was wrong for sleep — too uneven, too controlled, the deliberate breathing of a person who was conscious and choosing not to move. An arm was across his ribs, there was warmth at his back, and Asher’s breath ghosted across his neck with every exhale.
He didn’t know how long Asher had been like that. Watching. Waiting. Breathing against him in the morning light of a studio apartment that had one room and no doors except the bathroom.
He opened his eyes and let his mind do what it did.
He’d been wrong. He’d told himself when he was put back in the game that the real Asher would be different on the outside, that every terrible thing Asher did and every simple thing he didn’t understand was because he had been playing too long. It made sense, at the time.
But he was wrong.
This was always him. That was what Levi realized as Asher cut him free from the chair when Levi said he was tired. He had been, he didn’t lie about that, but he needed more time to think as well. Everything was still foggy everyday. His thoughts moved slower than they did inside the game, but the one thing he kept coming back to was simple:
There are no resets.
The thought was a pulse with his heartbeat.No resets. No resets. No resets.
“You’re awake,” Asher whispered, tugging Levi back against his chest and nuzzling into his hair.
“How long have you been up?” Levi made no effort to turn over or look at Asher. He stared at the poorly painted wall near his face. When he laid down on the bed, facing the wall, he thought Asher would clean up and give him a moment to think, but Asher only blew out the candles, kicked off his boots, and crawled in behind him and just…stayed there. Asher’s arm banded over his chest like the duct tape on the chair, pulled him close, and Levi found himself trapped between Asher and the wall.
“A while.” Asher kissed his shoulder. “Your breathing changed about twenty minutes ago. Did you know you cry a lot in your sleep? I liked holding you for that.”
Levi didn’t want to tell him the sequence of dreams he had that probably caused the crying.
“I need to use the bathroom,” he said instead.
“Okay.”
Asher’s arm lifted and Levi felt him moving on the bed, allowing him to get up. Levi stood slowly, his legs wobbling beneath him. His cane was still by the front door where he collapsed, but he wasn’t going to ask Asher to grab it for him. It felt like the wrong move.
His weight shifted wrong on the second step. Just a slight wobble, so small the cane would have caught it. Asher was beside him before the wobble finished, his arm shoved haphazardly in his own arm brace to support his weight.
