Page 18 of Branding the Bat

They stayed on the floor until Sero's body stopped trembling. Trevor helped him dress, slowly, carefully, handling the over-sensitized skin with the gentleness of someone who knew exactly where he'd left marks and exactly how much they still stung. He fastened Sero's belt. He tied his shoes. Each gesture small and precise and devastatingly tender.

At the door, Sero paused. "Wednesday. Same time?"

"I've got us booked for four weeks."

"I heard." He leaned against the doorframe. "Amani was impressed."

"Amani is never impressed."

"He was a little impressed."

Trevor came to the doorway and stood in front of him. Close, the way he'd been during the eye contact. "Come over to my apartment this weekend. Not for a scene. Just, come over. I'll cook."

"You cook?"

"I make an excellent quiche. And I have a bathtub the size of a small swimming pool."

"You had me at quiche."

"Really? Not the bathtub?"

"Trevor, I'm a bat. We're not naturally drawn to large bodies of water."

"But you are naturally drawn to egg-based dishes?"

Sero kissed him. It was the first time he'd initiated a kiss between them, and he felt Trevor's surprise, a small intake ofbreath, a fraction of a second where the confident Dom was simply a man being kissed by someone he liked. Then Trevor's hands were on his waist, and the kiss deepened, and for a moment they were just two people standing in a doorway doing the oldest, simplest thing in the world.

"Saturday," Sero said when they pulled apart.

"Saturday."

He left. Amani waved from behind the bar. The elevator carried him up to the lobby, where Bethany looked at him over her crossword with an expression that said ‘I know exactly what you've been doing and I'm choosing not to comment’, which was the most Bethany thing imaginable.

He walked home. The afternoon was warm and gold, and the warehouse district was quiet, and Sero's body ached in ways that mapped precisely to Trevor's attention.

He was falling. He knew he was falling. The question was no longer whether Trevor was worth the risk. The answer to that was yes, obviously, absurdly, in the way that jumping off a cliff was worth the risk if you believed you could fly.

The question was what Trevor was hiding.

Because Trevor was hiding something. Sero was sure of it, not suspicious, not guessing, but sure, in the bone-deep way a card counter was sure of the deck. The duffle bag that never left Trevor's side. The workshop he mentioned but never described. The "freelance" work that made him tense when questioned. The tubes he'd almost explained and then didn't.

Something was in that bag besides the machine. Something Trevor did with the results of their sessions. Something that wasn't about sex or pain or the space between them.

Sero was going to find out what it was.

Not by asking. He'd asked, and Trevor had deflected. Not by confronting. Confrontation would give Trevor time to prepare ananswer. Sero was going to find out the way he found everything out: by watching, by counting, by reading the tells.

He was a bat who worked for a casino. He saw in the dark.

***

Back at home, in his lab, Trevor sat on the floor with his back against the wall and the duffle bag open between his legs.

Two vials. Both golden. Sero's yield from the second session was, if anything, richer than the first, a deeper gold, almost amber, the light passing through it like sun through honey. Trevor held it up and watched the color shift as he turned it.

Two golden vials and a Grizzly who'd been waiting a week.

The shark had called again that morning. Twice. The second call hadn't been polite.Two days, Trevor. Two days and then we come find you.The threat wasn't subtle. The sharks didn't do subtle. They did teeth and blunt force and the cold cruelty of creatures who processed the world through a predator's arithmetic: people were useful or they were food.