Erath sets his mug down. He looks at Sidney across three feet of counter and the distance feels both enormous and nonexistent.
“Maybe I’m making an exception,” he says.
Sidney’s fingers tighten on his mug. The motion is small, barely visible, but Erath sees it because he is watching Sidney’s hands the way he watches everything about Sidney, with an attention that has given up pretending to be casual. The tips of Sidney’s ears go pink. He looks down at his coffee and then back up and the looking-back-up is deliberate, a choice to meet Erath’s gaze when looking away would be easier.
“Has there been anyone?” Sidney asks. “Since Penny’s mom?”
“No.”
“No one?”
“It’s not exactly a position that invites romantic entanglement.”
“Sure, sure.” Sidney sets his mug down. He uncrosses his arms, then crosses them again, then uncrosses them and puts his hands on the counter behind him, gripping the edge. “I can see how that’s a tough sell. ‘Hi, I’m the literal lord of death, would you like to go to dinner.’”
“You don’t seem ly deterred.”
The words come out before Erath can stop them. Low and steady and aimed directly at the center of the thing they’ve been circling for two nights.
The kitchen goes quiet. The coffee maker clicks off. The refrigerator hums. Sidney’s hands tighten on the counter behind him and Erath watches the flush move from the tips of his ears to the sides of his neck.
“Yeah, well.” Sidney’s voice is rougher now, lower, and the humor in it is thinner, stretched over something raw. “We’ve established I have terrible taste.”
The sentence lands in the space between them and sits there. Sidney said it lightly, the same way he’d said it last night, the same polished delivery, but Erath hears the other thing inside of it now. The thing Sidney had let slip with the bandages and the linen and Erath’s hands on his skin. Sidney is standing in his own kitchen, gripping his own counter, and telling the god of death that wanting him is just the latest entry in a catalog of bad decisions, and the worst part is that Sidney believes it. He actually, genuinely believes that the problem is his taste and not the men who hurt him.
“I’m not interested in your taste,” Erath says. “I’m interested in you.”
Sidney stares at him.
The kitchen is very small. The counter between them is very narrow. The coffee is getting cold and neither of them is looking at it.
Something fragile and reckless wars behind Sidney’s eyes. Erath can see both sides of it, the wanting and the caution, the impulse and the restraint, and he watches the fight happen in real time and does not intervene. This is not his call. This has to be Sidney’s. Erath knows what Sidney told him, knows the shape of the pattern, and he knows that the last thing Sidney needs is another man who doesn’t wait to be invited.
Sidney lets go of the counter. He walks around the narrow island between them, mindful of his bandaged ribs, and crosses the three feet of kitchen and puts his mouth on Erath’s.
The kiss is tentative. Just the press of his lips, soft, testing, a question asked in contact instead of words. Erath goes still. He lets Sidney come to him. He keeps his hands at his sides, both of them, and lets Sidney set the pressure, the angle, the duration. And when Sidney doesn’t pull away, when the tentative press becomes something more deliberate and his lips part and Erath can feel the warmth of his breath, Erath responds.
One hand comes up to cup the side of Sidney’s jaw. His thumb against Sidney’s cheekbone. His fingers curling behind his ear where the hair is soft and warm. He keeps the touch light, open, a hand Sidney could step away from without effort. Sidney makes a sound against his mouth, small and involuntary, and the sound travels through Erath’s chest and settles somewhere behind his ribs. Sidney opens to him and Erath opens back and then they’re kissing, slow and deep and thorough, and Sidney tastes of coffee and something sweet he ate earlier and underneath both a warmth that is specifically, unmistakably his.
He’s a good kisser. Precise, deliberate, with a current of urgency beneath the surface that he’s trying to control and not quite managing. His fingers curl into the front of Erath’s shirt and pull, and Erath lets himself be pulled, lets himself be drawn across the last inch of distance between them until they’re chest to chest. Sidney’s back is against the island and his hand is fistedin Erath’s shirt and the pull of his fingers is insistent and small and saying more and the feeling of it is sending a current down Erath’s spine that is making it increasingly difficult to think.
They stay there. Erath loses track of the minutes, which is not something that happens to him, time being one of the few constants he has always been able to keep hold of. But Sidney’s mouth is on his and the warmth of Sidney’s body is pressed against him from chest to thigh and the minutes become irrelevant. He learns the shape of Sidney’s mouth. The way he tilts his head to the left. The way his breathing changes when Erath’s thumb strokes the skin behind his ear. The way he pulls at Erath’s shirt when he wants more, small, insistent tugs that go straight through Erath and land somewhere vital.
Erath slides his hand from Sidney’s jaw to the back of his neck. Sidney arches into it, presses closer, and the sound he makes against Erath’s mouth is lower this time, rougher, and it undoes something in Erath’s restraint that he’d been holding in place with considerable effort. Sidney’s hips shift against his and Erath feels the heat of him, the hardness of him, and the part of his mind that has been keeping careful, deliberate distance flickers and threatens to go out entirely.
He presses forward. His hands drop to the counter on either side of Sidney’s hips, arms bracing, and Sidney’s back is against the edge and Erath is against his front and they’re pressed together with nowhere for Sidney to go and Erath kisses him harder, deeper, and it’s good, it’s unbearably good, and he wants--
Sidney goes rigid.
Not slowly. Not in stages. It’s instantaneous, total, every muscle in his body locking at once. His hand, which had been cupping Erath’s jaw, drops to his chest and flattens and pushes. His breathing changes, shallow and rapid and wrong, thebreathing of someone who is not getting enough air even though nothing is blocking it.
Erath’s hands are off the counter before he’s finished processing what’s happening. He steps back. One step, then another, putting distance between them until there’s a full arm’s length of empty air where his body had been, and he watches Sidney’s hand, which is still extended, still pushing against the space where Erath’s chest was, shaking.
Sidney’s eyes are open but they’re not focused on Erath. They’re focused on something that isn’t in the room.
“Sidney.” Erath keeps his voice level. He keeps his hands visible, down at his sides, palms open. “I’m right here. You’re in your kitchen.”
Sidney blinks. His eyes refocus, slowly, and the kitchen reassembles around him. He looks at Erath, at the distance between them, at Erath’s hands held open at his sides, and the expression that crosses his face is something Erath was not prepared for and recognizes anyway. Shame, deep and immediate and all-consuming. Fury, directed inward, at himself, at his own body for betraying him. He presses his hand flat against his sternum and shakes his head.
