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“Really?”
“The way you're touching me right now tells me a lot of things.” Luca rolled over on his back and caught Nox’s hand. “Everywhere you touch me tells me something.” Luca put Nox’s hand to his cheek, then moved it to his throat.
Nox’s expression softened.
He extended Nox’s thumb and brushed it over his lips.
Nox’s eyes warmed.
Then Luca used Nox's fingers to trace his jaw, down his chest, to his navel.
Nox licked his lips.
Luca stopped right before he reached his dick.
And Nox made a face that belonged on a kid who’d opened a box promising a game console, only to discover a brick wrapped in a sweater from Grandma.
Luca laughed. “See.” He kissed Nox’s fingers. “You said everything I need to know with your expression.”
“That’s an expression.” Nox rolled on his side, leaving Luca’s head propped on his bicep. “Even if I thought it could make expressions, it wouldn’t be the same.”
Luca huffed. “Do you like being difficult?”
“What?”
“You’re thinking literal. I’m trying to...” He tossed a hand, and it somehow landed in Nox’s, and he cradled it in his palm.
“Trying to what?”
“It communicates. It’s too intelligent not to. It doesn’t make a face, it doesn’t physically touch you, but you even said you could feel it like a weight. And you told Dr. Dante that a memory you had felt older. Like it wasn’t yours.”
Nox closed his eyes for a moment and swallowed several times. The gentle wash of affection flowing through Luca’s mind stilled as if frozen.
“You’re afraid of it.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“I mean, you’re afraid of it communicating. You’re afraid of understanding it.Reallyunderstanding it.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
The wind tossed leaves against the window, and another gust of wind pelted it with a fresh sheet of rain before going quiet. Soft footsteps traveled from upstairs. Then the wind kicked up again, blowing hard enough to make the house creak.
Nox pushed back Luca’s bangs one lock at a time. “What if there’s less difference between us than I think?” He stopped and rested his hand between them. “What if the Anubis is just a substance they found in the desert? That it has no motive or agenda. And all the anger and rage is mine. What if who I think I am, who I want to be, is just a box they put it in?” Nox sighed. “What if I’m the monster and I use the ichor as the excuse to be what I really want to be?”
* * *
Nox had almost a decade's worth of years on Luca, but he wasn’t foolish enough to believe he was older.
Because the man who watched Nox wasn’t barely in his twenties. He was ancient. He’d seen death. He’d touched it. He’d tasted it. He’d faced it until he understood it.
And a month ago in Canada, Luca embraced his end with no anger, no fear, no regret.
Nox lived with the embodiment of that darkness inside him, and he couldn’t claim to be as stoic.
Now Luca had asked Nox a question he’d never considered. Instead of fighting the death he feared, listen to it. All the things Luca had done for most of his life lying in a hospital bed, waiting for his life to stop.
