A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth—not his usual smirk, but something genuine that reaches his eyes. His hand finds mine beneath the sheets, fingers interlacing.
This is new. This quiet intimacy. No performance, no power struggle, no desperate need to consume one another. Just breathing together in the morning light, his heartbeat steady against my palm.
I’ve never wanted this before. I’m not entirely sure what to do with it now.
Victor stretches beside me, his muscles rippling beneath tanned skin. “Your bed is too fucking soft. It’s like sleeping on a cloud.”
“You didn’t seem to mind last night,” I say, tracing a finger along one of the scratches I left on his chest. “In fact, I think your exact words werefuck yesanddon’t stop, baby.”
His eyes flash with heat, but there’s something different in them now—a warmth that wasn’t there before. “You always this mouthy in the morning?”
“Depends on what my mouth is occupied with.” I flash him a wicked smile.
Victor’s hand slides up to grip my jaw, thumb pressing against my lower lip. “I’ve got some ideas about that.”
“I bet you do.” I nip at his thumb. “But first, coffee. Even sex gods need caffeine.”
“Sex gods?” He raises an eyebrow, but I catch the pleased look before he masks it. “That’s what you call all your conquests?”
“Only the ones who make me scream loud enough to concern the neighbors.” I sit up, deliberately letting the sheet fall to my waist. “But don’t let it go to your head. Your ego’s already taking up most of the bed.”
Victor snorts, then pulls me back down against him. “Five more minutes.”
“What happened to the man who couldn’t get away fast enough?” I ask, curious rather than accusatory.
His fingers trail along my hip, gentle and deliberate. “He’s still figuring this shit out.” The vulnerability in his admission catches me off guard—this raw honesty that he’s only just learning to offer without armor.
The bed is warm in the way it only is when neither of us has anywhere to be, when the world outside can wait another hour. Victor’s tracing absent shapes on my hip with his thumb, the repetitive motion soothing in its steadiness.
I shift to look at him properly, studying the planes of his face in the morning light filtering through the curtains. “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Specific.”
“Do you have siblings?”
Something passes across his face—surprise, maybe, that after everything we’ve shared, I’ve never asked this fundamental question. “A sister. Older. Lives in Sacramento with her husbandand their kid.” His voice takes on that careful neutrality he uses when discussing things that don’t quite fit comfortably. “We talk on her birthday. Mine. Christmas. That’s about it.”
“You’re not close.”
“We’re fine. Just different lives.” His thumb keeps moving, the rhythm unchanging. “She didn’t get it when I quit fighting and opened the gym. Didn’t get me before that, either. We were never the kind of siblings who told each other things.” He pauses, and I watch his throat work as he swallows. “Parents are gone. Mom died when I was nineteen. Dad moved to Arizona the year after, and we stopped knowing each other somewhere around when I turned twenty-five. He’s still alive. We just don’t talk.”
The way he says it—matter-of-fact, like he's reciting a grocery list—tells me there’s more pain there than he’s letting on. Thirteen years of silence. I wonder if he's holding out hope for a phone call that might never come.
"Only child," I offer, giving him something of mine in return. The words come slower than usual. "You already know most of it. The placements, the laptop, the records. The before is the part I don't talk about much."
Victor's thumb stills on my hip. He doesn’t push. He waits.
“My mom came over from Beirut in ’82. She was nineteen, alone, the war had taken everything from her in a way I’m not sure she ever explained, even to herself. She met my dad at a wedding in Connecticut six years later. They married, had me a year after that." I trace a pattern on his chest, feeling his heartbeat steady beneath my palm. “He died when I was seven. Heart attack at the kitchen table, on a Tuesday morning, eggs still on his plate. She didn’t have anyone here. No family. No money to speak of. She tried for two years, and then the state took me, and she didn’t have what it took to fight it. They tried to put me back with her twice. It didn’t take either time.”
“Christ, Theo.”
“Yeah.” I shrug, because what else is there to do with it after twenty years? “She wasn’t a bad mother. She was a twenty-something widow in a country that wasn’t hers, with a kid she couldn’t afford to feed. The system was always going to win that one.” I exhale slowly. “I aged out at eighteen with a duffel bag and the records he’d given me. Kept them hidden through every placement. Some kids hide drugs under their mattresses. I hid Massive Attack.”
Victor lets out a sound that’s almost a laugh, almost not. “Records.”
“Records.” I press my palm flat against his chest. “It’s why music matters so much, I think. They were the only thing I kept from before. Dad used to play them Saturday mornings—Mom would be making something on the stove, he’d put on Blue Lines, and the kitchen would smell like cumin and sound like the only kind of safe I knew how to recognize back then. That record went missing somewhere in the placements. The others I kept hidden, but Blue Lines I lost early and never replaced. I built a whole life out of remembering that, though. Didn’t realize I was doing it until I was about twenty-five and Eclipse was making money.”
Victor’s eyes search my face, seeing me the way he always does—completely, without flinching from the messy parts. “Records,” he says softly, understanding without me having to explain further.
