Page 36 of Branding the Bat

"What if they're the same man?"

"Then I'll deal with that. But I want to find out."

Amani nodded. "I'll text him. Wednesday work?"

Wednesday. Their day. The day Trevor had booked four weeks of, back when the world was simpler and the worst thing Sero knew about him was that he was arrogant and carried a mysterious bag.

"Wednesday works."

***

Sero went home and hung in his closet and thought about letters.

No one had ever written him a letter. Not a real one, not pen on paper, folded in thirds, carried in a bartender's pocket for a week. Texts, yes. Emails, occasionally. Wade had once lefta Post-it on the fridge that said OUT OF MILK and that was the closest thing to written communication their relationship had produced.

Trevor's letter was in Sero's back pocket, pressed against his body by the closet rod. He could feel the edges of the paper through the fabric. The words were already memorized. He'd read them enough times on the walk home that they'd burned into his brain the way card counts burned in, permanent and precise.

I sat with him while he cried and I thought about you.

The bathtub is worth eating ramen for.

What you found in those sessions belongs to you. It always did.

Sero hung in the dark and thought about forgiveness. Not as a grand gesture, not as a scene in a movie where the music swelled and someone ran through the rain, but as a practice. A daily, unglamorous choice to believe that a person who had done a terrible thing was also a person who could become something better. Forgiveness wasn't about the past. It was about the future. It was about looking at someone and deciding that what they might become was worth more than what they'd been.

He didn't know if he was there yet. He didn't know if he'd ever be there.

But he wanted to try, and wanting was the starting point, and everything after that was just showing up and seeing what happened.

Sero shifted back to human, climbed into bed, and set the letter on his nightstand. The Strip painted the ceiling in shifting colors. The apartment was quiet except for the building's creaks and the distant hum of the city.

He thought about Wednesday.

He fell asleep without dreaming, which was, after the month he'd had, the kindest thing his brain had done for him in a long time.

Chapter Twelve

Trevor was already at the bar when Sero arrived.

He was sitting on a stool, not Sero's stool, not the stool three down where he'd sat during the reckoning. A middle stool. Neutral territory. He was wearing the gray shirt Sero had seen him in the night he'd brought grapes to the apartment, and his hair was shorter than the last time Sero had seen it, cut close on the sides in a way that made his face look sharper and more exposed. He had a glass of water in front of him. No cocktail, no bourbon. Water.

He looked up when the elevator opened, and Sero saw the moment his face reorganized itself, hope flaring, then immediately suppressed, pushed down beneath a careful neutrality that Sero recognized as fear. Trevor was afraid. Not of Sero. Of what Sero might say.

Good. Fear was honest. Sero could work with honest.

"Hi," Sero said.

"Hi." Trevor's voice was careful. Quiet. The voice of a man testing the weight of a surface before stepping onto it.

Sero sat on the stool next to him. Not three down. Not across the room. Next to him, close enough that their elbows could have touched if either of them moved. Trevor registered the proximity. Sero saw it in the small intake of breath, the slight change in his posture, the way his hands tightened on the water glass.

Amani materialized with a Shirley Temple. He set it in front of Sero, gave Trevor a look that communicated approximately seventeen things, none of them simple, and retreated to the far end of the bar. Not leaving. Just creating space. A good bartender knew when to be present and when to be furniture.

"I got your letter," Sero said.

"I know. Amani told me."

"It was a good letter."