It didn't matter. They had time.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Three months to the day after the ranch, Amani asked Nero a question.
They were on Amani's couch in the loft. It was a Saturday afternoon. Amani had the next two nights off, Lady Leo had enforced it despite his protests, and Nero had come over with takeout and a bag of groceries for breakfast. The sun was going down over the warehouse district and the light through the big windows was the warm slanting gold that Amani had always loved about his apartment.
Amani was lying across the couch with his head in Nero's lap. Nero's hand was in his hair. They had been watching some movie neither of them was really paying attention to, and the movie was paused, and Nero was reading a book one-handed because the other hand was occupied with Amani's hair, which was a new development Nero had embraced with the calm thoroughness he embraced everything.
"Would you still have wanted me," Amani said, "if none of it had happened."
Nero's hand stopped.
The question had come out without planning. Amani hadn't meant to ask it. It had been sitting in him for weeks, or maybe months, the quiet worry that his relationship was built on the scaffolding of trauma, that Nero loved the wreckage more than the man, that if Amani had never been taken, if Nero had never been the one to bring him back, they would have passed each other in the club and never noticed.
Nero set the book down. He looked at Amani, and his hand resumed, slowly, fingers threading through hair. "What brought that on?"
"I don't know. I was thinking about how we met."
"You were thinking about how we met."
"I was thinking about what version of us would exist if I had just been a bartender and you had just been a cop who came into a club once and ordered a screwdriver."
Nero thought about it. He was not a man who rushed answers. The silence stretched, not uncomfortable, the specific quality of quiet that Amani had come to associate with Nero thinking carefully about something that mattered.
"The honest answer," Nero said, "is I don't know. I can't run a simulation on a life that didn't happen. I can tell you that if I had walked into KK and seen you behind the bar, I would have noticed you. Anyone with eyes would have noticed you. I can tell you that I have a very specific type and you are it. I don't mean the obvious thing, I mean the combination of sharp and soft and loud and quiet that is specifically you. I would have been interested."
"Interested isn't the same as this."
"No. It isn't." Nero's hand moved through his hair in long, slow strokes. "What we have now was built on top of something specific. The rescue, the couch, the quiche. If those things hadn't happened, we would have been a different couple, or we wouldn't have been a couple at all. I can't promise you that the version of us that didn't go through a kidnapping would have found each other. I don't know. Nobody knows."
"But?"
"But I can tell you that what I feel for you now is not about the rescue. It stopped being about the rescue a long time ago. If you decided tomorrow that you were done with all of this, done with the club, done with Vegas, done with me, and you wanted to move to a cabin in Oregon and learn to make pottery, I would follow you. Not because I saved your life. Because you're theperson I want to be with, and who you are is who you are now, and I don't have a version of you that I want more than this one."
Amani closed his eyes.
"I would not make pottery," he said. "Just for the record."
"No?"
"I have terrible hand-eye coordination. I dropped a tray six weeks ago."
"Noted. No pottery."
"Glass art, maybe. I could blow glass. That seems dramatic enough for me."
Nero laughed. "Whatever you want, Amani. Glass, pottery, running the club, opening a second location in Reno, moving to Oregon, staying exactly here. Whatever you want. I'm not attached to any particular version of this. I'm attached to you."
Amani opened his eyes. Looked up at him. The late afternoon light was catching the side of Nero's face and the angles of him looked softer from this vantage, the permanent cop watchfulness relaxed for once, the book forgotten beside him, his attention entirely on Amani.
"Okay," Amani said.
"Okay?"
"Okay. I believe you."
"Good."
