"We're disgusting," Seth said when he could speak again. His voice was raw. His body felt like it had been disassembled and reassembled in a slightly different configuration. Better. Looser. More real.
"Completely."
"That wall is never going to be the same."
"The headboard has a dent."
"Jack is going to say something."
"Jack is absolutely going to say something."
Seth laughed. It was wet and shaky and surprised, and it was the first real thing he'd felt since the trigger pull. Not the numbness. Not the clinical distance. Something warm and messy and human, bubbling up from the place the sex had cracked open.
Zain pulled him in. Wrapped around him, chest to back, arms locked, face pressed into the curve of Seth's neck. Holding himtogether the way you hold something that's been shattered and is slowly, carefully, being glued back.
Seth's hand found Zain's. Laced their fingers together against his own chest, over his heartbeat.
"You brought me back," Seth said.
"You never left."
"I did. On that street. For a minute. I went somewhere cold."
"I know." Zain's lips against his spine. "But you came back."
"Because of you."
Silence. The rain. The distant hum of the refinery. Zain's heartbeat against his back, steady, steady, the metronome that Seth's body had learned to sync to without permission.
"Zain?"
"Hm."
"I killed someone tonight."
"Yes."
"And I don't feel guilty."
Zain was quiet for a moment. His arm tightened. "The guilt will come. It always does. But not feeling it now doesn't make you a monster. It makes you a person who did what was necessary and whose body is still catching up."
"And if the guilt doesn't come?"
"Then we'll deal with that too."
"We."
"We." Zain pressed his mouth to the back of Seth's neck. The spot where he'd bitten earlier. Tender now, over the bruise he'd made. "Everything from here on out is we."
Seth closed his eyes. The tears came then. Not the shaking sobs of breakdown. Quiet tears, sliding sideways into the pillow, running into the place where Zain's arm held him. The tears he hadn't shed in the warehouse. The tears he'd refused for thirty-one hours and for four months and for every year before thatwhen crying meant weakness and weakness meant someone took something from you.
Zain didn't tell him to stop. Didn't tell him it was okay. Just held him, and breathed, and let his own hand shake against Seth's chest where Seth couldn't see it.
The rain kept falling. Detroit kept breathing. And in a bed that smelled like sex and sweat and the fading ghost of violence, two men who had killed for each other lay tangled together and let the night hold what the morning would make them carry.
CHAPTER 22
Seth was in his bed.
