"Company," Sero said. "The floor needs someone who's been on it before so the floor doesn't feel like a question you need to answer."
Amani's face crumpled. Not all the way, not a sob, not a break. But the control loosened and for a moment he was just a twenty-year-old kid on a floor, and the person next to him was just another person who knew what floors were for.
They sat there. Sero didn't talk. Amani didn't talk. The bass from the club's sound system pulsed through the wall, the heartbeat of a building that kept going even when the people in it couldn't. At some point Amani's head tipped sideways and came to rest against Sero's shoulder and Sero didn't move, didn't flinch, didn't make it into anything. He just let it happen. Two people on a floor, leaning.
Eventually Amani said, very quietly: "He called me little cub."
Sero was still.
"That was his name for me. Little cub. Like I was his. Like I'd always been his and just didn't know it yet."
"Kendrick didn't know," Sero said. Not defending. Just stating.
"I know he didn't know. That's what makes it—" Amani's voice broke. "It's everywhere. It's in everything. It's in words that were fine before and aren't fine anymore and I can't explain to every person in this building why a word that used to be normal is now a—"
"A weapon," Sero said.
"Yeah."
"Yeah." And that was all that needed to be said, because the person sitting next to Amani on the floor of a storage room at Kinky Kritters was someone who understood that the things that hurt you worst were not the things that looked like weapons. They were the things that used to look like love.
***
Nero's couch. Four in the morning.
Amani had driven himself. He'd gone home after the shift, Bethany had finished the night behind the bar while Amani sat in the back-office staring at a spreadsheet without seeing it. He'd locked the three locks and sat on his own couch and tried to sleep and the couch was wrong, every couch was wrong because couches were where Grainger held him. He'd gotten up and driven to Nero's house and rung the bell instead of knocking like normal. There he was.
The quiche was in the oven. Nero was on his end of the couch. Amani was on the other end with the pillow in his lap, his hands working the corner of it the way he always did when he was building toward saying something.
"Someone called me little cub tonight," he said.
Nero waited.
"Kendrick. The bear. He's been calling me that since I was seventeen. It was always a nice thing. A family thing. But tonight he put his arm around me and said it and I was back there. On the couch." His hands stilled on the pillow. "I dropped a tray. In front of everyone. Broke glasses. Scared Kendrick. Just stood there in the middle of the floor while everyone watched."
Nero said nothing. He sat on his end of the couch and he waited because waiting was what he did and this silence was not his to fill.
"Sero found me," Amani said. "In the storage room. He sat with me. He told me about the first time Trevor touched his neck after they got back together." A pause. "He threw up."
"I know," Nero said. "He told me. During the investigation."
Amani looked at him. Surprise crossed his face, maybe, that Sero had shared that with a stranger. Or recognition that Sero had shared it with the same person Amani was sharing things with. The sharing was part of how Sero had gotten from the floor to somewhere else.
His hands found the pillow again.
"The worst part wasn't the cage," he said. "It wasn't the escape or my feet or being locked in. The worst part was the couch. Him holding me and stroking my hair and telling me about his dead mate and talking about our future like we had one. Like I'd chosen to be there. Like what he was doing was love."
The word sat in the room like something with weight.
"He was gentle," Amani said. "He was so gentle. And the gentle is the part I can't get out. If he'd been cruel, I'd know what to feel. I'd be angry. I could put it somewhere. But he was gentle. My body liked being held because bodies like being held. I hated it. Every second. My body didn't hate it enough. I don't know what that makes me."
His voice broke on the last word. The surface tension that had held through the floor and the storage room and the drive home and the drive to Nero finally gave way and it was not dramatic. It was just tears. Quiet ones, running down his face while he stared at the pillow in his lap and his hands gripped the corners. His jaw worked against the sound that wanted to come out.
Nero let the tears happen. He didn't reach for Amani. He didn't move closer. He let the couch hold the space between them because Amani had been held against his will for five days and the last thing he needed was someone closing the distance without permission.
When Amani's breathing steadied, not calm but steady enough for words, Nero said: "It makes you human."
Amani looked up. His face was wet and the amber was bright with tears.
