Page 16 of Glass

"Oh. You're crying."

He doesn't answer.

Doesn't move.

Hands in my biceps tight. Eyes behind the mask locked on mine. For maybe a full second he's not breathing.

I lift one hand slowly, because the last thing I did was break a restraint system and bite a man, and I know what my hands can do right now, and this isn't that. I brush my thumb along the bottom edge of his mask, where the tear track is. My thumb comes away wet.

I look at the wet on my thumb.

I look at him.

He's looking at me like he's waiting for something. The way you wait when you've been seen and you don't know what happens next.

I don't say anything else.

I lower my head slowly. I put my forehead against the hollow of his throat, above the bite I left on his chest, where the skin is warm and bare and I can feel his pulse. I close my eyes. I breathe him in, the real scent of him, now that the rut is lifting. Salt, cedar, the sweet underneath. Copper from the bite. Sweat. Tears.

Vaughn

I'm awake.

The private room is quiet. Low amber wall sconces, black linen sheets, thick insulation that turns the main-floor bass into a distant, uneven thump. My watch is on the nightstand. I don't remember taking it off or lying down. I remember the knot releasing against the concrete floor. A beta tapping my shoulder with professional kindness. A blanket wrapped around me. A short walk down a corridor I've never been down before, since I've never been in any of the rooms at the end. I remember the shower in the small attached bathroom here, the water hot, me using it quickly, not looking at myself in the mirror. I remember pulling off the ruined shirt and leaving it in the sink. I don't remember getting into this bed.

I pick up the watch.

Four-forty-three.

I've been in this room for hours. I try to do my usual math, but it doesn't come. My cab is gone. My cab is always gone; I book it for a specific hour, but I wasn't in it when it arrived. I didn't reschedule or message the driver. I've been doing this for eight years, and tonight I didn't message the driver.

I put the watch back down.

I don't get up.

The blanket on the bed is good. Weighted but not heavy, probably a spare from the club linen closet, tucked up to my bare chest. My legs are warm under it. My cock is soft against my thigh for the first time in six hours. My body aches in specific places: my hip where I hit the concrete, my shoulder where the shirt dragged, my jaw from holding a certain kind of composure for so long, my chest above my nipple where.

I turn my head.

He's asleep.

He's on his stomach, half-curled, one arm folded under his pillow and the other open on the sheet a foot from my hand. His mask is still on; the club's rules stay in effect in private rooms, and the beta who moved us probably checked. His bare shoulder is above the blanket. I can see the paddle bruise I put on his thigh, a dark flat color now, blooming purple under his skin. I can see the nail marks his own fingers left on his arm when he was tearing at the restraints, four crescents that he won't know are there until they scab. I can see the ones I put on his back, one wrapping around his side in this position, which I don't remember putting on him. The rut had his head. I had mine. I did. I had mine.

He looks very young asleep.

His scent has changed. The dark, burnt-sugar musk of the rut is gone, faded to something lighter and steadier. Warm dough. Clean skin. The sun-warm smell from the floor, the one that hit me across the club before I knew anything else about him. He smells like a kitchen in the morning. He smells like the kind of person who makes toast and eats it standing at the counter. I didn't know that's what the scent was underneath everything. I didn't know I'd want to keep smelling it.

I look at him for a long time. I try to do what I do. The first step of what I do is catalog. I reach for it, and it's not there. I reach again. The analytical frame I put on every person I meet, the fast confident sorting of traits into columns, the thing that lets me walk into a room and know what someone wants before they do. I reach for it and my hand closes on nothing. I'm not cataloging. I'm looking.

Looking is what other people do.

I've been looking at him for what might be ten minutes. The amber light hasn't changed. His breathing hasn't changed. Nothing has happened. I'm just looking at a sleeping person and the machinery I've run over every surface of my life for eight years is not running, and I don't know how to make it run, and I don't want to.

The alpha is exceptional.

The phrase arrives from somewhere. I used it at the end of last night, pressed to his chest with my hand on his bruise, and it worked then. It was a category. It slotted into place. Now I hear it in my own head and it sits wrong. The words are the same. The kid they're pointing at is a sleeping, sweet, enormous twenty-one-year-old with a paddle bruise on his pec that's already bloomed from red to purple. The bruise my hand made. His teeth made the bite on my pec. He marked me and I marked him, and the asymmetry of it — his teeth, my hand — is something I'll think about later, when I'm not lying in this bed looking at him.

I try to remember the man I had at the club two weeks ago.