Page 48 of Branding the Bat

"I can do honest. I'm aggressively honest now. Ask Doug. He says I'm the most forthcoming employee he's ever had. Last week I told him his lumber display was structurally unsound and he needed to reconfigure the weight distribution. He said 'just stack the boards, kid.' I wrote him a memo."

"You wrote your hardware-store boss a memo about lumber?"

"With diagrams."

Sero laughed. It came from the warm place in his chest, the place that had been cold for weeks after the confession and was now, slowly, filling with something that felt like the beginning of permanence. Not the permanence of a promise, which could be broken. The permanence of a direction, which could be walked.

"Here's what I want," Sero said. "I want Wednesdays. I want the bathtub. I want you to keep learning from Miriam and keep stacking lumber for Doug and keep reading textbooks on the bathroom floor. I want us to figure out the money thing together, because I have a salary and you have a salary and between us we can afford one apartment with a good bathtub, if we're smart about it."

Trevor stared at him. "You're asking me to move in with you."

"I'm asking you to move in with me. My apartment doesn't have a bathtub, so we'd need to keep yours. Which means I'd bemoving into your apartment, technically. Which means I'd need closet space."

"For your clothes?"

"For hanging." Sero gave him a look. "I need a closet I can shift in. It's a bat thing. Non-negotiable."

"The walk-in closet in the bedroom is yours."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that. I'll clear it out tonight." Trevor was smiling now, the real smile, the one that came from below the armor, below the arrogance, below every version of himself he'd ever projected. The smile of a man being given something he knew he didn't deserve and was going to try to be worthy of every single day. "Sero."

"Yeah."

"The claw marks. Over your heart."

Sero looked down. The five pale lines on his chest, just visible above the waterline. Permanent. Chosen.

"What about them?"

"I want one too."

Sero blinked. "You want me to claw you?"

"I want a mark. Your mark. Bat claws aren't as sharp as cat claws, but you could do it in shifted form. Bat teeth are precise enough. Over my heart. Matching." Trevor's expression was open, unguarded, stripped of every defense. "I don't want this to be one-directional. You carry my mark because you chose to. I want to carry yours because I'm choosing to."

Sero looked at him for a long time. The bathroom was warm. The steam rose in lazy curls. Trevor sat on the tile floor with a two-hundred-year-old textbook and a twelve-dollar-an-hour job and an apartment he couldn't afford and a bathtub he refused to give up, and he was asking Sero to mark him. To claim him. To make the possession mutual.

"After the bath," Sero said.

"After the bath."

"And Trevor. It's going to hurt."

Trevor grinned. The real grin. "I know."

***

They got out of the bath. They dried off. They stood in Trevor's bedroom, the white sheets, the taut blankets, the morning light coming through the blinds in long warm bars.

Sero shifted. The transformation was instantaneous, his human body collapsing inward, wings stretching, the world going echo-mapped and textured. In bat form, he was small enough to fit in Trevor's cupped hands. Trevor held him carefully, steady, warm, the hands of someone who was used to handling fragile things.

Sero landed on Trevor's bare chest. His tiny claws gripped skin. Trevor flinched, not from pain, from the strangeness of it, a bat perched on his sternum, small and warm and precise.

"Over the heart?" Trevor said. He was looking down at Sero with an expression of such tender absurdity, a grown man talking to a fruit bat on his chest, that the moment balanced perfectly between sacred and ridiculous, which was, Sero had come to believe, the only way the important moments ever balanced.

Sero bit.