Page 20 of Branding the Bat

"I never kid about bathtubs."

The bedroom was next: a king-sized bed with white sheets pulled so taut he could bounce a coin off them, a single nightstand with a lamp and a book, blinds drawn against the evening light. It was spare and deliberate and it smelled like Trevor, cedar and black tea, the scent Sero had come to associate with safety, which was either beautiful or alarming depending on how much self-awareness he was willing to apply.

At the end of the hallway was a second door. Closed.

"What's in there?" Sero asked.

"Workshop." Trevor's voice didn't change, but his posture stiffened, the same subtle shift Sero had seen when Trevor talked about his freelance work. A door closing behind his eyes to match the one in the hallway.

"Can I see it?"

"It's a mess. Not fit for company." Trevor was already turning back toward the kitchen. "Quiche should be ready."

Sero looked at the closed door. It was just a door, plain wood, brushed nickel handle, no lock visible from the outside. But Trevor had walked past every other room in the apartment with the casual ease of a man showing off his space. It was the only door he'd kept shut. The only room he hadn't offered.

Sero filed it. Added it to the count: the duffle bag, the tubes, the freelance deflection. And now a workshop he couldn't see.

He followed Trevor back to the kitchen.

They ate at the island, Trevor with his quiche, Sero with his fruit plate, and it was disarmingly normal. Sero sat on a stool and ate persimmon slices and watched Trevor eat quiche with a fork and knife, which was another housecat thing, the kind of unnecessary precision that should have been annoying but was actually endearing.

"I have a question," Trevor said, midway through his second slice.

"You always have a question."

"True. What's the deal with the pain tolerance? Is it all bats or just you?"

Sero considered this while chewing a strawberry. "All fruit bats have a higher baseline than most shifters. We hang upside down for hours, that's a lot of blood pressure in the head that would give anyone else a screaming headache. We squeeze through spaces that would injure bigger animals. And our echolocation in bat form is basically a constant low-level sensoryassault that we've evolved to tune out. So pain tolerance is baked in."

"But yours is exceptional, even for a bat."

"How would you know? You said you've never been with another bat."

"I haven't. But I've read about bat physiology." Trevor set his fork down and leaned forward. "The average fruit bat's pain threshold is maybe two to three times a human's. Yours is significantly higher than that. The amount of impact you took in our sessions, a normal fruit bat would have safe-worded at thirty lashes. You took fifty-three and asked for more."

Sero blinked. "You researched bat physiology?"

"I told you. I research everything."

"You researched bat physiology because of me."

"I researched bat physiology because you're extraordinary and I wanted to understand why." Trevor said with the same matter-of-fact directness he used to describe the mechanics of his machine. No flattery. No performance. Just a man stating what he believed to be true. "You're an outlier. I want to know what makes you different."

Sero covered the flush creeping up his neck by eating a grape. "I don't know why I'm different. I've always been like this. When I was a kid I fell out of a tree and broke my arm and didn't cry. My mother thought something was wrong with me. Took me to three different doctors before one of them, a shifter doctor, explained that some bats just process pain differently. The signal reaches the brain, but the brain categorizes it as information instead of emergency."

"Information instead of emergency," Trevor repeated. His eyes were bright with interest. "That's exactly what I saw. Your body responds to pain stimuli, your pupils dilate, your heart rate increases, you perspire, but your subjective experience of it isn't distress. It's data."

"Until you push it far enough. And then it becomes something else."

"The space."

"Yeah." Sero looked at him. "The space."

They were quiet for a moment. The kitchen hummed with the small sounds of an apartment at rest: the refrigerator cycling, a clock ticking somewhere in the living room, the faint ambient noise of the building around them.

"I want to ask you something else," Trevor said. "And you can tell me to fuck off if it's too personal."

"You've had your hand inside me. I think we're past too personal."