“I’m sorry,” he says. His voice is thin. “I can’t do this.”
A moment ago Sidney had been kissing him. A moment ago Sidney’s hand had been on his jaw and Sidney’s body had been pressed against his and every signal, every sound, every involuntary motion had been saying yes. And now Sidney is shaking and can’t breathe and the shame on his face is swallowing everything else and Erath knows, he knows, because Sidney told him, because what he said has been sitting in the front of Erath’s mind since last night.
The understanding hits Erath with the force of something physical. He did this. Not intentionally, not maliciously, but he did it. He knew. Sidney had handed him the map last night,had said the words out loud in his living room, and Erath had heard them and filed them away and still, in the grip of wanting, had pressed Sidney against a counter and boxed him in and the fact that he hadn’t meant to doesn’t matter. He should have been more careful. He should have been paying attention to something other than the taste of Sidney’s mouth and the sounds he was making. He should have remembered.
He looks at Sidney’s hands. They’re trembling. Not the fine tremor of nerves or adrenaline but a deeper shaking, the kind that comes from somewhere structural, and Sidney’s jaw is clenched so hard the muscle is jumping and his breathing sounds like it’s being pulled through a straw and his eyes, which a minute ago had been warm and wanting, have the glassy, faraway quality of someone who is not entirely present.
“Alright,” Erath says. His voice is steady. He makes it steady, with effort, because the thing happening inside his own chest is not steady at all. “Of course.”
His coffee is on the counter, half finished, and he leaves it there. Going to the sink would mean crossing the kitchen, getting closer, occupying space that Sidney needs to be empty right now. Every instinct Erath has is telling him to go to Sidney, to touch him, to hold him, to do something, and he overrides every single one because every single one is wrong. The last thing Sidney needs is more hands on him. The last thing Sidney needs is another man who doesn’t leave when he’s told to.
Sidney is watching him. Braced. Waiting for the follow-up, the push, the are you sure, the negotiation that always comes after the first no. He is so visibly prepared for it, so rehearsed in the expectation of it, that the preparation itself is an indictment of every man who came before, and Erath feels a hatred so precise and so total that the temperature in the kitchen drops three degrees before he catches himself and pulls it back.
“Thank you for the coffee,” Erath says.
Sidney’s lips part. Something flickers across his face, confusion or disbelief or the beginning of a question he doesn’t know how to ask. Then it’s gone and his expression settles into something careful and controlled and held together through will.
He walks Erath to the door. His steps are measured. He opens it and stands in the frame with one hand on the wood.
“Goodnight, Sidney.”
“Goodnight.” His voice almost doesn’t waver.
Erath turns. He walks down the hallway and hears the door close behind him and walks down four flights of ugly carpet and out through the secured door and into the cold night.
He doesn’t look back at the fourth-floor window.
He makes it three blocks before he stops.
He stands on a corner. Very still. The city hums around him, distant and irrelevant, and the cold settles over his skin and he replays the last five minutes with the unforgiving precision of someone who does not have the luxury of forgetting. Sidney’s face. The shame. The fury. The I can’t, not I don’t want to, not this was a mistake, but I can’t. The word is specific. Want was not the problem. Sidney had wanted him. Erath had felt it in the kiss, in the urgency of it, in the sounds and the pulling and the heat. The want had been there, vivid and real, right up until the moment Erath had put his arms on either side of Sidney’s body and taken away the space to leave.
He knows what comes after the wanting. Sidney named it for him.
He thinks about Sidney kissing him anyway. Crossing the kitchen and reaching for him anyway. The specific, terrifying courage of wanting something your body has been trained to punish you for wanting. Sidney had told him the pattern and then walked directly into the part of the pattern where it goes wrong, and he’d done it with his eyes open, and when his body had overridden his mind he’d been ashamed. Not scared. Notangry at Erath. Ashamed of himself, for not being able to control a reflex that someone else had put there.
The hatred returns, colder now, more focused. Erath doesn’t know who they are. He doesn’t know their names or their faces. But he knows what they built inside Sidney’s body, the wiring of flinch and brace and shutdown, and he knows that they built it with their hands and their weight and their refusal to leave when they were asked. And he knows that tonight, for one unforgivable moment, he put himself in the exact same position they had been in and Sidney’s body could not tell the difference.
He puts his hands in his pockets. He stands on the corner for a long time. Then he walks back to the underworld, and the dark closes around him, and the staircase descends, and the cold follows him down.
Chapter 7
Sidney shuts the door and presses his back against it and stands there for a long time.
The apartment is quiet. The coffee maker is off. Two mugs on the counter, Sidney’s empty and Erath’s half full because he’d left it there when he went, had just picked up his jacket and said thank you for the coffee and left his mug where it sat. The kitchen light is still on. The living room is dark. Sidney stands in the doorway between them and listens to the silence of a room that had two people in it a minute ago and now has one.
He fucked it up.
He replays it. He doesn’t want to, but his brain doesn’t give him the option. The loop starts at the same place every time. The conversation. The coffee. The way Erath had said I’m interested in you with the unhurried certainty of someone stating a fact, something that existed whether Sidney acknowledged it or not, and the way Sidney’s hands had tightened on the counter behind him and the way the flush had crawled up his neck and the way he’d thought, very clearly, I am going to kiss this man or I amgoing to die, and both of those things had seemed equally likely and equally terrifying and he’d chosen the kiss.
That’s the part the loop snags on. Sidney had kissed him first. He’d let go of the counter and walked around the island and crossed three feet of kitchen and put his mouth on the god of death and the god of death had gone still. Had waited. Had kept his hands at his sides and let Sidney set the terms, all of them, and when Sidney hadn’t pulled away, when the question became an answer, Erath had responded.
His hand had come up to Sidney’s jaw, careful, light enough to leave, and Sidney hadn’t left. He’d leaned in. He’d opened his mouth against Erath’s and felt Erath open back and the kiss had become real, had become deep, had become something that had seemed impossible.
Sidney had felt it everywhere. His sternum. His stomach. The low, heavy pull of heat that’s been living in his chest since the first night Erath walked him home, that inexplicable gravity, except now it wasn’t pulling him toward Erath. It was pulling him into Erath, through him, like it wanted to dissolve the boundary between their bodies entirely, and Sidney hadn’t been afraid of it. For the first time in longer than he can remember, his body had been doing what he wanted it to do. Wanting what he wanted it to want. He’d pulled Erath closer by the front of his shirt and felt Erath hard against him through their clothes and wanted more, actually wanted more, and the want had been clean and simple and uncomplicated in a way that nothing about Sidney’s desire has been clean or simple or uncomplicated in three years.
And then Erath had pressed forward. Hands dropping to the counter on either side of Sidney’s hips. Arms bracing. Sidney’s back against the edge and Erath’s body against his front and the kitchen was very small and there was nowhere to go.
His body had decided for him. Not his mind. His mind had been right there, in the kitchen, wanting this, knowing who this was, screaming yes at a volume that should have been loud enough to override anything. But his body doesn’t negotiate. His body doesn’t parse context or intent or the identity of the person in front of him. His body has one response to being pinned against a surface with weight in front and arms on either side, and the response is absolute, and it put him somewhere else. Somewhere three years in the past. A studio apartment on the other side of Central. A deadbolt he didn’t have a key to. A bed he couldn’t get out of, and weight on top of him, and a voice above him saying he was being dramatic, saying he liked it, saying he wouldn’t be here if he didn’t want it.
