“Four years. Five in January.” Sidney adjusts his posture, trying to find an angle that doesn’t make the wrapping pull. “Started as a barback. Xela promoted me after two weeks because the previous bartender got into an altercation with a vampire and she decided I was less likely to start fights.”
“Was she right?”
“I don’t intentionally start fights.”
Erath wraps another layer. His fingers brush the edge of the bruising and his hand compensates, adjusting the angle of the linen so it presses more gently where the skin is tender, and Sidney watches his hands because watching his face is too much. Erath has long fingers. His nails are clean and trimmed short and his knuckles are prominent in a way that speaks to the size of his hands, which are large, which Sidney is trying very hard not to think about in the context they keep inserting themselves into. The pull in his chest isn’t helping. It’s doing something insistent and warm and low, a slow drag toward Erath’s bodythat feels gravitational, and Sidney can’t figure out if it’s coming from him or from something else entirely.
“And Xela,” Erath says. “She’s a banshee.”
“Full-blooded. Born and raised somewhere she refuses to name because she says it doesn’t exist anymore. She’s older than she looks. She’s also meaner than she looks, and she looks pretty mean.”
“She was protective,” Erath says, and there’s something careful in the way he says it, something that tells Sidney he’s circling the alley without stepping into it directly. “When she came for you.”
Sidney doesn’t ask how Erath knows about Xela coming for him. They’ve already danced around the alley question and the answer is sitting between them, unspoken, with its hands folded and its mouth shut. “Yeah. She’s protective. She has the emotional range of a cactus and the nurturing instincts of a cactus and also the general personality of a cactus, but if anyone touches me she will remove their skeleton and wear it as a conversation piece.”
“She sounds formidable.”
“She’d love to hear you say that. She’d hate you for saying it, but she’d love it.”
Erath’s mouth does the thing again. The curve. The barely-there lift that Sidney has to be watching to catch, and he’s watching, and he catches it, and the warmth in his chest spreads.
He keeps talking because if he stops talking the silence will fill with the sound of Erath’s hands on his skin and the pull that won’t ease up and the heat crawling through his torso that he’s running out of ways to pretend is related to the injury. He tells Erath about the bar, about the regulars, about the time a troll tried to arm-wrestle a fae prince and they’d had to replace the entire bar top. He tells him about the IPA keg that won’t stop leaking and Xela’s increasingly creative profanity directed at it,and about Gerald who’s been parked on the same stool at the end of the bar since before Sidney was born and who orders the same whiskey neat every single night and has never once said thank you.
“What about you?” Erath asks.
“What about me?”
“You talk about the bar and the people in it. What do you do when you’re not there?”
Sidney considers this. “I go home. I eat something terrible. I fall asleep on my couch.”
“That’s it?”
“What do you want me to say? I lead a thrilling double life as an international spy?”
“I want you to say what’s true.”
Something about the way Erath says it makes Sidney go still. It’s not a demand. It’s not even a push. It’s just an openness, a door left ajar, and the way Erath’s hands have paused on the linen, one at Sidney’s side and one at his back, both warm, both still, both waiting. He’s looking at Sidney with those dark eyes and there’s nothing predatory in them, nothing calculating. There’s just attention. Full, undivided, unhurried attention, the kind that most people offer with half their focus while the other half is somewhere else entirely, except Erath isn’t most people and he’s giving Sidney all of it.
Sidney swallows. “I don’t do much,” he says, and his voice is quieter now. “I work. I come home. I watch bad TV. Sometimes Xela drags me out, but I’m not great at…” He gestures vaguely, the motion small because large ones hurt. “People. Social situations. I’m fine at work because there’s a bar between me and everyone else. Outside of that I’m kind of a mess.”
“You don’t seem like a mess.”
“You’ve known me for three days.”
“I’ve known a lot of people for a lot longer,” Erath says, and his hands resume, smoothing the linen, pressing it flat, and the motion is slower now, or maybe Sidney is imagining it. “You don’t seem like a mess.”
The pull. There it is, that insistent warmth in his chest, tugging at him, and it would be so easy to lean into it. To let his shoulder tip into Erath’s chest and find out what happens. To stop resisting whatever this gravity is and just let it take him. He’s tired. He’s sore and exhausted and the adrenaline from the past few days has drained out of him and left something raw and exposed in its place, and the man sitting beside him is warm and steady and has hands that know exactly how much pressure his body can take and it would be so, so easy to just give in.
He doesn’t. He doesn’t because he knows himself, and he knows what easy gets him, and the bruise on his face is still fresh enough to remind him.
“I had a run of bad luck,” he says, and he doesn’t know why he’s saying it. He didn’t plan to. But Erath asked what was true and apparently Sidney’s mouth has decided to comply without consulting the rest of him. “With people. Men. I pick wrong. I’ve always picked wrong.”
Erath’s hands don’t stop. They don’t falter, don’t tighten, don’t change their rhythm. He wraps another layer and says, “Wrong how?”
Sidney huffs out a breath. “The usual way. Interested, then possessive, then mean. It’s a whole cycle. It’s very predictable in retrospect.” He’s saying it casually, the way he always says it, light and dry and wrapped in enough humor to keep the edges from showing. “I’m at the point where Xela has a vetting process. If I bring someone to the bar she conducts a full interrogation before she’ll even serve them. It’s killed my dating life entirely, which is probably the point.”
Erath is quiet for a moment. His thumb smooths a crease in the linen. Then he says, “Xela sounds like she cares about you a great deal.”
