Page 62 of Ghost’s Awakening

He had a bathroom off the room, his own, which the guest rooms didn't get. I'd walked into it at two that morning half asleep.

"Join me for a shower?" I tipped my head at the door.

One eyebrow went up.

"Not for that." I didn't smile. I couldn't, quite, yet. "My head's somewhere else. You know where. But I'd like to have you—" I looked for the word and there was only the one. "Close."

He didn't say anything. He reached back over his shoulder and pulled his shirt off in one drag, and the sweat had glued it to him, so it came off slow, peeling up over the ridges of his stomach and the flat of his chest, the pale knot of the bullet scar coming out from under the cotton last with his arms still tangled in it. Then it was on the floor and he was only standing there. A man's body, hammered into shape by years I hadn't been there for, and above it a face that still forgot to shave, and two eyes so pale they'd looked straight through a crowd once and found me.

We got out of our shorts. Neither of us made a show of it.

He went in first and turned the water on, and I shut the door behind us on a room that was tile and a shower with a glass panel that two men our size were going to have to share.

The water came down cold. He'd stepped under it before it warmed, the way he did everything, and it hit me a second after it hit him, hard across the shoulders, and I hissed. Then the heat came up under it in a rush and the small space filled with steam. The floor was barely big enough for our four feet. His back was against my chest. My arm was against the glass. There was nowhere to be that wasn't touching him.

"You're thinking about him." To the tile, not to me. It wasn't a question.

"Yes." The water ran into my mouth. "I want to see him. I want to sit in that chair and put my hand on his and count his fingers." My voice went somewhere I didn't send it. "And I know the way I protect him is five days from now, in a ring, not in that chair. I know it. I can't make it feel right."

He turned around under the water. We were close enough that turning took work.

"Tell me the truth." I made myself hold his eyes, pale and steady, water running off his lashes. "Is he really safe? Gravedigger's short five men this morning, and he knows it. He knows exactly who he sent and exactly where he sent them. What does a man like that do when they don't come back?"

Ghost didn't answer with words.

He stepped into me. Both arms came around my back and pulled, and my chest met his, wet skin on wet skin, the whole front of him against the whole front of me. Stomach to stomach. His thighs against mine, solid from the morning's work. And lower, our cocks, thick and heavy against each other, not hard, neither of us, but nowhere near soft either. Just there. Just warm. There was no part of the front of me that wasn't touching some part of him, and none of it was asking for anything.

I'd been held before, and never like that. Never by a man who took his whole body and made a wall out of it and put me on the inside.

"Tank will put a shotgun round into anybody who says the word transfer anywhere near that building before they finish saying it." His mouth was against my ear, low, and there was no speed in him at all. "He's got three of ours with him. If anything moves, they call, and we're fifteen minutes from that door at full throttle, and I'll do it in twelve." His arms tightened. "For now, we finish this. That's how we keep him. We finish it."

I put my face down into the curve of his neck and let the water hit the back of my head.

"You let me sleep." Into his skin. "This morning. You knew."

"I knew at half past four." He didn't move. "I stood in that door with the whole thing in my mouth, and you were asleep. Really asleep, Caleb, not the way you were in the medical bay, and I couldn't put my hand on you and take that away." A breath. "I'm not sorry. I'm sorry you heard it in front of thirty people. I'm not sorry you slept."

I thought about that. Both fists on the oak. A room I'd asked to trust me, watching me come apart.

"Next time you wake me."

"Next time I wake you."

"Even if I'm really asleep."

"Especially then." His hand came up and spread flat between my shoulder blades, and pressed. "I'll hate it. I'll do it."

We stood like that. The water beat on us and ran off, and the steam closed the room down to the size of two people, and every place we touched had gone warm past the water's warmth. His pulse, and mine, slowing toward the same count. His chin, rough, settled against my collarbone.

I breathed him in. Soap, and under it just him.

"We finish this." Against his neck, so low the water almost had it. "And him."

His arms answered before he did.

"And him."

Nobody moved for a long time. The water ran. Outside that door, five days sat on a calendar waiting, and a warehouse full of a man's people. In here there were two bodies with nothing between them, and a promise I could feel in his hands and hear in the count of his breathing, which had found mine, and stayed there.