“She’d deny it to her grave,” Sidney says. “But yeah.”
“Good.”
That’s it. That’s all Erath says. He doesn’t press. He doesn’t ask for names or details or the specifics of what “mean” means. He doesn’t offer sympathy, or pity, or the kind of anger that other people perform when you tell them something ugly about yourself, the anger that’s more about their reaction than your experience. He just says good, about the person who takes care of Sidney, and goes back to wrapping, and the absence of performance in that response does more to Sidney’s composure than any amount of sympathy could.
Sidney keeps talking. He calls the underworld a bad commute and asks if Erath gets weekends off. He asks if the souls ever get rowdy and Erath tells him about a ly persistent ghost who refused to cross over because he wanted to finish a crossword puzzle, and the image of the lord of the underworld standing over a ghost with a half-finished crossword is so absurd that Sidney laughs and the laugh hurts and Erath’s hand catches him again, firm against his side, steadying him, and Sidney’s hand comes up without thought and closes around Erath’s wrist.
They both go still.
Sidney’s fingers are wrapped around Erath’s wrist. He can feel his pulse under his fingertips, slow and even and unhurried, and the skin is warm and the bones beneath are solid and the nearness of Erath’s body is suddenly overwhelming in a way it hasn’t been until this exact moment. Erath doesn’t move. He doesn’t pull his hand away and he doesn’t lean in and he just holds still, patient, his hand warm against Sidney’s side and Sidney’s fingers circling his wrist, and the pull in Sidney’s chest is no longer pulling. It’s singing. It’s a low, insistent hum thatradiates from his sternum and he can feel it in his teeth and in his fingertips and in every point of contact between his skin and Erath’s, and he doesn’t know what this is but he knows it isn’t normal. People don’t feel this way about men they’ve known for three days. People don’t feel the gravitational field of another person pulling them in and think, yes, let me get closer to the thing that could destroy me, that sounds like an excellent plan.
Except Sidney does. He always does. And that’s the whole problem.
He lets go of Erath’s wrist. He clears his throat and shifts on the couch and says, “Sorry. Reflex.”
Erath looks at him. Something moves behind his eyes, something that is carefully and deliberately kept below the surface, and he says, “Nothing to apologize for.” And then his hand resumes, as though nothing happened, and he finishes wrapping, and the whole time Sidney is vibrating at a frequency he can’t control and cannot explain.
He doesn’t give Erath the tiniest amount of deference. He teases him about the espresso and suggests the god of death could probably use a vacation and asks if he’s ever considered a career change, and instead of being offended, Erath seems charmed. That’s the only word for it. The more Sidney refuses to treat him as anything other than a tall man sitting on his couch, the more interested Erath becomes. His mouth curves more often. His responses come quicker, drier, matching Sidney’s rhythm. He leans in when Sidney talks, and the lean is small but noticeable, a gravitational tilt toward Sidney’s voice, and Sidney notices because he is attuned to every shift in the air between them in a way that is going to be a serious problem if it continues.
Erath tears off a strip of medical tape and secures the end of the linen. His hands stay on Sidney’s ribs for a beat. Two. Three. Then he pulls them away and leans back, and the lossof contact leaves Sidney’s skin cold in a way that is completely disproportionate to the temperature of the room.
“Done,” Erath says.
Sidney looks down at himself. The bandage is clean, even, professionally applied. He pulls his shirt back on, carefully, one arm at a time, and the motion is easier now. The compression helps. His ribs still ache but the support makes breathing feel less adversarial.
“Thank you,” he says. He means it. He means it more than the two words can carry, but they’re the only ones he has.
“Of course.”
Erath is sitting on the couch with his hands on his knees, watching him, and his expression is carefully neutral in the way that means it’s deliberately not showing whatever is underneath. His eyes are doing something that his face won’t let them. A lingering, a weight, a focus that tracks the way Sidney pulls his shirt down over the bandages and settles back into the couch. Sidney should look away. He should stop cataloguing the details of this man’s face and the breadth of his shoulders and the way his hands look resting on his own knees, idle now, capable and warm and recently on Sidney’s skin.
He should. He doesn’t.
The pull is still there. It’s quieter now, a background hum instead of a roar, but it’s persistent and patient and it feels old, somehow, older than the three days they’ve known each other. It feels settled, established, as though it was there before he knew it was there and has simply been waiting for him to notice.
“It’s getting late,” Sidney says, and this is the test. This is always the test. “You should probably go before Mrs. Watts down the hall starts getting funny ideas about strange men in my apartment in the middle of the night.”
He watches Erath’s face. He watches for the flicker. The resistance. The moment where the easy composure cracksand something pushes through, the thing that always pushes through when Sidney tells a man it’s time to leave: the irritation, the entitlement, the but I thought we were that turns a polite suggestion into a negotiation and then into a problem. He has his defenses ready. He always has his defenses ready. He’s already mapped the distance to the door and the location of his phone and the number of steps it would take to get to the bathroom, which has a lock, which isn’t much but it’s something.
Erath stands.
He picks up his jacket from the arm of the couch and puts it on and the motion is unhurried, easy, a man leaving when it’s time to leave and nothing more. He doesn’t ask if Sidney is sure. He doesn’t suggest one more cup of coffee or another few minutes or any of the small, reasonable-sounding extensions that always turn into something else.
“Thank you for the coffee,” he says. His eyes linger. His touch does not. He stands up and walks himself to the door, adjusting the cuffs of his jacket as he goes.
Sidney watches him go and feels what he almost thinks is disbelief. He climbs to his feet to see him out.
Erath opens the door and steps into the hallway and turns back, and there is nothing on his face but quiet warmth, and he says, “Goodnight, Sidney.”
“Goodnight.”
The door closes. Sidney stares at it.
He has never had a man leave his apartment without expecting something from him. Not once. Not in ten years of letting people in and regretting it. The pattern is so deeply established that Sidney has internalized it as a law of physics: you let them in, they take, they don’t leave when you ask them to. That’s how it works. That’s how it has always worked. It worked that way with Caleb, who’d stayed for three hours past being asked to leave and had left a bruise on Sidney’s jaw when he’d finally insisted. Itworked that way with Ivan, who’d gotten angry, who’d punched a hole in the wall behind Sidney’s head, who’d said later that he was sorry and he’d never do it again and then he’d done it again. It worked that way every single time, without exception, and Sidney has built his entire understanding of intimacy around that pattern, around the knowledge that letting someone in is the easy part and getting them to leave is where it gets ugly.
Except Erath just left. No argument. No disappointment. No guilt trip, no lingering, no finding a reason to stay five more minutes that turns into ten that turns into the night. Sidney told him to go and he went and he did it with the same composure he’d had when he arrived, and the ease of it, the absolute lack of friction, is unraveling something in Sidney’s chest that he has spent a very long time keeping tightly wound.
Maybe Erath isn’t interested. Maybe despite the warm hands and the lingering eyes and the way he’d leaned in when Sidney talked, he’s just being decent. Maybe the god of death is just strange.
