Page 84 of Ghost’s Awakening

Trenza laughed with her whole body, one loud bark, and slapped the table. "About time!"

"Don't push it." Mateo pointed the fork at Trenza, then at me, and the corner of his mouth was climbing. "That's a one-day thing. Bring the potato one tomorrow and we'll see."

I went back to the line with my ears hot and something warm sitting low in me, and I stood at the griddle with my back to the room until it settled.

Ghost fell in beside me at the counter with a plate of his own once the trays stopped moving. He ate the first half standing up, fast, and then he stopped, and I felt him looking at the side of my face.

"They all like you." Low, under the room. "You know that, right? I don't mean the food. I mean you. Mateo just paid you the biggest compliment that kid has ever paid anybody, and Irish handed you his kitchen, and Irish doesn't hand people anything⁠—"

"Eat your food." I didn't look at him.

"—and the thing is, I like that the most." His fork had stopped moving. His eyes hadn't. "Out of everything. That they all like you."

My face went hot up from the collar of his hoodie. I put a piece of bacon on his plate that he hadn't asked for. "Eat."

He ate. Four bites, and the speed came back into him. "How's the job? Is your chef still crying at you?"

"He stopped crying." A month ago, the day after the raid, I'd sent him a second photo, the one with the throat still purple, and told him I'd been jumped again. He'd called inside a minute and sobbed through five minutes of Italian, most of it saints, and I'd taken four more days and gone back. "He's got me on dinners. Five to close. I asked for it."

"So you can be here in the daytime." His voice had come down.

"So I can be here in the daytime." I wiped a counter that didn't need it. "The apartment's still there. I go by once a week for the mail and I stand in the door for a while and then I leave. It's not home without him in it. It was where we lived."

His hand found the back of my neck under the hood and squeezed once.

Then he looked past me at Irish, who was telling Declan around a full fork that mutiny had never tasted this good in the history of mutinies. Ghost watched him for a second. Then his eyes came back to me, fast, and something was going on behind them. This one had a tell I'd never seen on him before. His weight had shifted onto his toes.

"So, uh." He put the fork down. Picked it up. "After. When you're done here, with the trays and the, the whatever. Come to the room?" His voice had gone up half a step. "My room. Our room. There's a thing. It's not a bad thing⁠—"

"Okay." I kept my eyes on the rag in my hand.

"Okay." He stood up with his plate, and on his way past me he winked, one eye, quick and completely unlike him, and then he was gone through the crowd.

I stood at the pass with the rag in my fist and no idea what that man had in store for me.

I knocked.

A month in that room and I'd never once knocked on the door, but he'd winked at me, and Ghost didn't wink. The hallway was quiet at that hour, and I stood there with the smell of bacon still in the hoodie and my heart going harder than a knock deserved.

"Come in! Yeah! Come in." Through the door, too fast.

The window had a stripe of late-morning sun across it, and the air was warm and wet from the shower. Then the bathroom door opened and he came out with a white towel around his hips and nothing else, his short hair wet and dripping onto his shoulders, steam rolling out behind him and the smell of soap with it.

"Uff. I barely finished. I mean, uhm." He stopped in the middle of the floor with one hand on the knot of the towel. "I finished. Showering. I'm clean. That's not what I—okay."

I'd seen that body every night for a month. It got me anyway. The shoulders, wider than the face over them had any right to. The pale knot of the scar high on the left of him, and under it a stomach cut in ridges, water running down the line between them into the towel. Above all that, two ice-blue eyes doing their best to look at me and failing every second time. The face belonged on a kid. The rest of him belonged to a man who'd spent years getting hit, and it worked so hard I felt it in the backs of my knees.

"So." He wet his lips. "I kind of want to try something. With you."

"Okay." I shut the door behind me.

"You know how we've been doing the, the sucking stuff. Which is so good, oh my God, that is not a complaint—" One hand came off the towel and did a circle in the air. "But I've been thinking. I'm ready for more. I want more. And I might have asked Irish for some tips on how a guy gets ready for⁠—"

"You asked Irish for sex tips?!" It came out of me half a laugh, and the rest of the laugh followed it. My hand went over my mouth, and his ears had gone the color they'd gone when he handed me that phone.

"Well, I can't ask Blade!" Both hands were up now, and the towel held on without them. "Or Tank! Or Reaper! I'd rather die. And Irish talks about the three of them constantly, not details, but he says enough that if anybody in this building knows how a man gets ready for that, it's him, so I⁠—"

Ready.