Page 27

“Like what?”

“Like I’m a problem you’re calculating.”

“I’m not calculating anything,” he says. “I hate math. What I am doing is watching you try to make coffee while you’re still drunk and haven’t slept more than a few hours and your body is running on what looks like spite and adrenaline, and at some point in the next little while the Sons are going to come looking for both of us, and you’re going to be absolutely useless if you don’t sleep.”

“Mind your own fucking business,” I say.

He looks at me. Long, flat, steady.

Then something shifts in his face. A decision settling in.

“Fine,” he says. “I fucking will.”

I knew it.

Same spiteful Wraith. He gets a little pushback and he’s going to come at me and try to assert control all over again. My muscles tense in readiness, and my eyes go to the whip.

But instead of being a spiteful asshole, he stands up from the table, picks up the handcuffs from where I’d left them on the counter and he crosses to the radiator.

I watch him do it.

My mouth might open a little.

He sits down on the floor next to the radiator, threads the cuffs through the pipe, and clicks one cuff around his left ankle. He does his right ankle next, and then he picks up the second set of handcuffs, and cuffs his left hand to the radiator, and then looks up at me.

“You going to help me with the other one or am I going to have to do this shit myself?” he says.

I stare at him.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Minding my own damn business,” he says, “so you can quit bitching and take a fucking nap. You think you’re being an adult, but you’re really acting like a toddler. So handcuff me so you can feel fucking safe and go down for a nap.” He holds up his free left hand. The chain connects his right wrist to the pipe, his ankles to the floor, and his left hand is just hanging there, empty, waiting. “Now. Will you cuff my other hand and then go the fuck to sleep?”

I stare at him for a long, long moment. The coffee maker makes its coffee sounds behind me. Somewhere outside, a car passes on the street, carrying someone off to their normal, un-egged, un-sex-shopped morning.

“You better not be trying anything, because I will whip you,” I say.

Something flickers across his face. “My cock’s had enough from you… for now.”

And there it is — that thing in his voice, that very slight, careful thing, the ghost of something that isn’t threat and isn’t contempt and is something else entirely, something that lands low in my chest and makes a small warm spot that I immediately try to smother because I absolutely cannot afford to let that spot exist.

I almost say something back. Something with a smile behind it. Something that would mean more than I can afford to let it mean right now.

I don’t.

Instead, I cross the room, grab the cuff, and click it around his other wrist. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t fight it. Just watches me, and his eyes, this close, are tired and gray and carrying things that look a lot like what I’ve been carrying, which is a thought I shut down immediately.

I reach into The Love Hole bag one more time and pull out the blindfold. The cock-embroidered one.

“Really?” he says.

“It‘ll feel weird to have you watch me sleep,” I say.

“Fair. Just don’t gag me, okay?”

I put it on him. He sits back against the radiator, cuffed and shackled and blindfolded, and he says nothing more, which is perhaps the strangest thing he’s done yet — just stays quiet, lets me walk away, doesn’t reach for any last word or leverage or angle.

I get into bed.