Page 67 of Salt Kiss
“I’ve done worse,” he says and gives a slow roll of his shoulder. I know he’s worried about keeping his range of motion there, although after seeing him fight in the hall, I hope his concerns are more kink-related than combat-related.
Because, uh, his range of combat motion wouldn’t be much to mourn.
Together, we go into his room, and I dress him for the day. I help him into his pants and undershirt, and then into the pale gray shirt he’s wearing today, easing it over his bad shoulder and then buttoning it for him. Then the cuff links, my fingers on his wrists, on his palms, brushing, grazing.
He watches me the entire time, his eyes hooded, his breathing steady, even as a muscle flickers in his jaw. I don’t need to look down to know that he’s hard.
I knot his tie as neatly as I can—and then have to untie it and start over when Mark tells me that it looks like it was tied by a cat batting a ball of yarn between chair legs—and then it’s my favorite part, kneeling to put on his socks and shoes. Normally, I dress him with a soldier’s efficiency and a submissive’s respect, only touching him when necessary and when allowed, no matter how tempting it would be to rub my palms up his back or trace the line where his pressed collar rests against his throat.
But his feet...I can’t resist the urge to stroke when he rests his bare foot against my thigh, and I don’t. I don’t resist. I run my fingertips over the intricate architecture of bone and tendon at the top; I press my thumbs to the sole and knead. I caress his ankle, feeling the crisp hair of his leg and the tight taper of muscle coming down from his calf, and I just stare, wondering how it can affect me so much. Wondering why it feels like a crime and a gift all at once to pull the fine wool sock over it and then the other, followed by his shoes, which I lace with tight, even loops.
“I think I’d like to wear my watch today,” Mark says once I’ve finished tying his shoe. He’s forgone the watch since the attack—watches aren’t much use if you can’t lift your wrist to look at them—but I also sense that he’s getting impatient with the pain in his shoulder and with himself for feeling it. And once Mark decides something, it’sdone. Leaving the CIA, fucking me, wearing a watch even though his shoulder vibrates with agony whenever he moves his arm—once he’s chosen, the choice is chiseled in stone.
I know this is another thing I can’t fight him on and hope to win, so I get to my feet with a sigh. “I’ll get it for you,” I offer, just as his phone rings.
He nods at me as he answers it with his left hand, walking out toward the kitchen. I go into his large walk-in closet and stare at a section of built-in drawers for a moment, and then start opening them at random. I haven’t seen the watch in here while getting socks or ties or cuff links, but it seems like the most logical place to start.
Coming up empty, I walk back out of the closet and go to one of the bedside tables which brackets Mark’s oversized bed. The table on the right I’m very familiar with, since it’s where lube, condoms, and a handful of Mark’s favorite toys are kept. The one on the left I’ve never opened.
I do now, gratified when I see the watch right away. It rests on a wooden tray inside the drawer...and it’s not the only thing there.
Two rings sit in a shallow depression in the wood. Both are a dark metal—tungsten, maybe—each in a different size. The smaller one is polished, with a ring of black stones wrapped around the middle. The larger one is matte and unadorned.
When I nudge them with my finger, I see that both have the same thing etched inside:1 Samuel 18:3.
Catholic Sunday School did a good enough job that I know 1 Samuel is in the Old Testament, but that’s about as far as I can get without a Google search, and I don’t want Mark to walk in and find me snooping. Because there can be no doubt that this is private. As private, maybe, as the dead rose in the drawer at Morois House.
I think they’re wedding rings.
I take the watch and close the drawer, thinking of the man in the picture next to Mark’s bed in Cornwall, thinking of Mark alone in the library, going there year after year to mourn.
Was he married to that man? And is it strange that I don’t know the answer to that already? For the last three months, I’ve been his shadow; for the last four weeks, I have given everything to him. It is odd not to know if someone’s been married after that kind of time together, right? Unusual? Especially when I feel so often like he knows everything there is to know about me, my foibles and nightmares and maybe even my stupid, hopeless obsession with him, and I can’t help feeling like it matters somehow, when it comes to him. Like if I can know this about him, then I can expose one of the intricate inner mechanisms that makes him tick.
Twenty-Three
I’ve spokenwith the police three times, and the FBI four times, and yet I still spend my afternoon in a glass meeting room with two FBI agents, this time going over the security footage from the attack with them, corroborating the video with any details I can recall. Which is nothing that I haven’t already said, written, and signed several times over, but I guess the army has given me a deep well of patience for redundancy because it feels very normal to be explaining something for the eighth time, with lots ofno, sirsandno, ma’amsindicating that no, I have not spontaneously recalled the attackers reciting their last-known addresses or aliases as they died.
Mark seems to take their lack of leads as a given whenever it comes up.FBI, he’ll say in a voice dripping with scorn.They can’t even investigate their way into a suit that fits.
And indeed, even though we all agree Drobny must be involved, no one can find him or even where he went after he was in DC this last week. He’s gone, and the best we can do is hope that Mark’s web of information and connections will eventually do what the FBI’s can’t and help us locate the bastard.
After I’m done with the interview, I’m meant to go up to Mark’s office, but I stop by Sedge’s office first, taking a moment by the door to shelve my pride.
There is a private humiliation in having to ask Sedge about Mark, about his life, and there is the not-so-private impression that it will surely make. Sedge will know I don’t know. He’ll know that I care.
But the curiosity is like needles under my skin, pricking at my palms and at the nape of my neck. An instinct, the same one that made me aim for a wristwatch glinting in a dark alley, the same one that led me into caves and seemingly empty houses in Carpathia. An instinct sayingthere’s something here, there’s something here.
Or maybe it’s just the old curse, my obsessive nature. I have to know this.
Sedge looks up at me as I enter, and something moves in his pale gaze, something that makes me wonder if he feels about me the same way I feel about him, but it’s gone in an instant, replaced by his usual soft wariness.
“How can I help you, Mr. Thomas?”
I am so, so aware of how awkward and unprofessional and exposing this is, but it’s too late for anything else. I can see the wedding bands so clearly in my mind’s eye now, the way one had been half resting on the other, the light catching the black stones of the smaller ring. I just...
I have to know.
“Has Mr. Trevena ever been married?” I ask, sitting down on the low, armless chair in front of Sedge’s desk. “Like before he founded Lyonesse, maybe?”
