"Airtight."
The bathroom is quiet. The steam moves.
"I don't need a ring," Sidney says. His voice is low, careful, the voice he uses when he's saying something that matters and doesn't want to get it wrong. "I don't need any of that. I just need this."
Erath looks at him. This man in his bathtub, in his house, in his life, who walked into the underworld and stayed, who makes pancakes and plays cards and gives bubble baths and readsstories and fights for a little girl who isn't his and loves a man who doesn't know what he did to deserve it.
"You have this," Erath says.
Sidney holds his gaze. The water is still. The steam curls between them and dissolves.
"Then that's enough," Sidney says. "That's more than enough."
Erath nods. The word enough sits in the air between them, and for once it doesn't mean settling or making do or accepting less than. It means full. It means complete. It means he has been empty for a very long time and Sidney filled every part of him and he doesn't need anything else.
"Come to bed when you're done," Erath says.
"Give me five minutes."
Erath pushes off the doorframe. He walks down the hallway and checks Penny's door, still ajar, nightlight still glowing, and goes into the bedroom. He sits on the edge of the bed and waits.
Five minutes later, Sidney appears in the doorway in sweatpants and a t-shirt, toweling off his hair. He tosses the towel toward the chair in the corner, misses, doesn't bother to pick it up, and crosses to the bed and crawls in beside Erath and pulls the covers up and fits himself against Erath's side.
Erath's arm goes around him. Sidney's head goes to his chest. Their breathing aligns, Sidney's slowing, Erath's deepening, and the dark of the underworld hums around them, steady and constant and unchanged.
"Erath?" Sidney says, after a while. His voice is drowsy, fading, the words coming from the edge of sleep.
"Yes."
"I love you."
The words land in the dark between them. They land softly, not thrown, not forced, not dragged out under duress. They land and they stay and they are, simply, true.
Erath's arm tightens around him. His hand spreads across Sidney's back, wide and warm, and he presses his mouth to the top of Sidney's head and holds it there. Sidney's fingers curl into his shirt. His breathing deepens. He's almost asleep, or already there, balanced on the edge, letting the words exist in the air without taking them back, without qualifying them, without bracing for impact.
"I love you," Erath says, into his hair, into the dark, into the space between the living and the dead where they have built something that belongs to neither world and both. "I have loved you since before I knew what to call it."
Sidney's hand tightens in his shirt. A small movement. The last conscious act before sleep claims him.
Erath holds him. The underworld hums. Penny sleeps down the hall with her bear in her arms and a pink starfish in her dreams.
And the dark, for once, feels like exactly where they're supposed to be.
Chapter 27
Two weeks after the warehouse, Willow’s reopens for business with Sidney behind the bar and Xela at his side, and the normalcy of it makes Sidney want to cry, which is embarrassing, so he doesn’t.
Instead he makes drinks and wipes down counters and deals with a leaking keg that has been a problem since long before his life went sideways, and it feels good. It feels right. He’s wearing his own clothes, in his own bar, doing his own job, and the bruises are healed and the burns are healed and everything that happened feels distant enough to breathe around. Not gone. Not forgotten. Just far enough away that he can look at it without it looking back, and that distance is enough for now.
The bar smells the way it always smells, of old wood and spilled beer and the lemon cleaner Xela uses on the countertops that she insists is professional grade and that Sidney is fairly certain is just dish soap with aspirations. The jukebox is playing something he doesn’t recognize, something one of the regulars put on before Sidney had a chance to curate, and the lighting iswarm and amber and the stools are full and the noise is the good kind, the kind that means people are where they want to be.
Xela is watching him the way she does when she’s worried but would rather be set on fire than admit it. She’s behind the bar doing something aggressive to a garnish tray and her eyes keep moving to Sidney and then away again, and the pattern is so consistent that Sidney catches her on the third pass and raises an eyebrow. She looks away and busies herself with something else. He smiles into the glass he’s drying.
They never had the conversation Xela promised Erath. Or rather, they had it, but it didn’t go the way Erath probably expected. Xela had pulled Sidney aside the day after the warehouse, while Erath was in the underworld dealing with Angelica’s spirit, and she’d looked at him with her pale sharp eyes and she’d said, “Did he hurt you?” Notwhat happened.Notare you okay.Did he hurt you. Direct. Binary. Requiring only a yes or a no and prepared to act on either.
Sidney had said, “Not on purpose. We’re working on it.”
Xela had stared at him for a long time. Then she’d said, “If he does it again, on purpose or not, I’ll kill him.”
