"You already do that too."
"And I'm going to…" Seth's voice faltered. Just for a moment. A crack in the armor, the real person looking out. "I'm going to let you see me. All of it. The bad parts and the broken parts and the parts that still wake up swinging."
Zain kissed his forehead. "I've already seen them."
"And?"
"And they're mine. All of it. If you'll let me."
Seth pulled back. Looked at him. The kitchen light caught his eyes and turned them luminous, and the smile that broke across his face was the second real, unguarded smile Zain had ever seen from him, not the first, bright and fierce, but this one, quieter, deeper. The smile of a man who had been ruined and rebuilt and was choosing, for the first time, to believe that what he'd built could last.
"Yours," Seth said. "Your brat. Your problem. Your… "
"My person," Zain finished.
The word was simple. It wasn'tI love you.It was better. It was the word of a man who'd learned that the grandest declarations were often the emptiest, and that the truest things were said in kitchens while someone cooked lamb tagine in the background and the people you'd die for pretended not to listen.
Seth kissed him. Soft, then deeper, then soft again. The kind of kiss that wasn't going anywhere. The kind of kiss that was already home.
"Get a room," Jack said from the stove.
"We have one," Zain said without breaking the kiss.
"Use it, then. You're scaring the risotto."
Seth laughed against Zain's mouth. And Zain, who didn't laugh, who barely smiled, who had spent six years compressing every feeling into a space too small to hold it, laughed too.
The sound surprised him. Surprised everyone. Ghost looked up from his closed laptop. Nate lowered his book. Even Elijah opened one eye.
And Marcus, standing in his office doorway with the phone still in his hand, watched the kitchen full of his broken, brilliant, impossible crew, and allowed himself, just for a moment, the smallest smile.
They made it to the bedroom this time. Barely.
Seth had his hand down Zain's pants before the door was fully closed, and Zain had Seth's shirt over his head before the lock clicked, and somewhere in between they knocked a lamp off the nightstand and neither of them stopped to pick it up.
"Bed," Zain said.
"Floor."
"Bed, Seth."
"Make me."
Zain picked him up. Actually lifted him off the ground, hands under his thighs, and Seth wrapped around him with the instinctive ease of a man whose body had memorized this geometry, legs locked at the small of Zain's back, arms around his neck, mouth already on his jaw.
"Show-off," Seth muttered against his skin.
"You weigh nothing."
"I weigh a hundred and sixty pounds of attitude and you love it."
Zain dropped him on the bed. Seth bounced. Grinned up at him with that feral, green-eyed grin that had been making Zain stupid since the first night in the safehouse.
"Clothes off," Seth said. "All of them. I want to look at you."
"You've seen me naked."
"And I want to see you naked again. Repeatedly. For the foreseeable future. Take your pants off."
