Page 14 of Branding the Bat

They ended up on the couch. Not touching, a foot of space between them, the grapes on the coffee table beside the strawberry stems. The jellyfish pulsed blue and green on the screen. Sero ate grapes. Trevor ate grapes too, despite being a cat, and made a face at the sweetness.

"So," Trevor said after a few minutes of comfortable silence. "Are you always this quiet?"

"Yes. Are you always this talkative?"

"Also yes. Cats like to hear themselves." He angled to face Sero. "Can I ask you something?"

"You're going to anyway."

"True. What's your actual life? Outside of KK and the grapes. What do you do?"

Sero pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around them. It was a defensive posture, he knew: closing off, making himself smaller. Bat instinct. When a bat was uncertain, it folded its wings. "I'm a blackjack dealer at one of the casinos on the Strip. Night shift, mostly. I've been doing it for about two years."

"Do you like it?"

"It's fine." He considered elaborating, then decided Trevor had asked a direct question and deserved a direct answer. "I'm good at it. I can count cards, which I obviously don't do for the house, but it means I can track the deck in my head without trying. Management likes me because I'm fast and I don't makemistakes. The hours work for me. I'm nocturnal by nature, so working nights feels right. And the pay covers rent and grapes."

"And the magnificent persimmon."

Sero kicked him lightly. "It's a good persimmon."

Trevor grinned and caught his foot, holding it for a moment before letting go. The touch was brief and warm, and Sero felt it travel all the way up his leg like a current finding ground.

"What about you?" Sero asked. "What do you do?"

Trevor's expression tightened, a slight narrowing around his eyes, a fractional change in the set of his mouth. If Sero hadn't been watching closely, he would have missed it. But he was a bat, and bats noticed small movements in the dark.

"I'm... freelance," Trevor said.

"Freelance what?"

"I make things. Custom work. It's hard to explain." He picked up a grape and studied it. "I've got a workshop at my apartment. I build devices, like the one I used on you yesterday. That's my own design. I sell them sometimes, or variations of them. There's a market for quality equipment in the kink community."

It was a plausible answer. It was also, Sero sensed, not the whole answer. But he didn't push. They'd known each other for three days. Whatever Trevor wasn't telling him, he either would eventually or he wouldn't, and pressing would only make him defensive.

"The machine is impressive," Sero said instead. "Did you really build the whole thing?"

The tension in Trevor's face dissolved, replaced by genuine enthusiasm. "Every component. Took me about eight months. The hardest part was the synchronization, getting the vibration patterns of both attachments to coordinate so they amplify each other instead of canceling out. I went through about thirty prototypes of the controller alone." He was animated, his handsmoving as he talked, sketching shapes in the air. "The materials matter too. The sleeve is custom-molded silicone with a specific durometer, soft enough to feel good but firm enough for the suction to work. The dildo has a flexible core so it can be angled for prostate stimulation without being rigid enough to cause injury. And the tubes—"

He stopped abruptly.

"The tubes?" Sero prompted.

"Connect the attachments to the base unit." Trevor’s voice had gone flat. "For power. That's all."

There it was again. The door closing behind Trevor's eyes. Sero filed it away the same way he filed card counts at the casino, quietly, automatically, without letting it show on his face.

"It's a hell of a thing," Sero said mildly. "You should patent it."

Trevor laughed, and the tension broke. "I'd have to explain what it does on the patent application. I'm not sure the patent office is ready for that."

They talked for another hour. The documentary shifted to octopuses, their intelligence, their ability to change color and texture, the way they solved puzzles with a distributed nervous system that was more alien than anything in science fiction. Trevor compared himself to an octopus, adaptable, clever, good with his arms, and Sero told him he was more like a sea cucumber, cylindrical, defensive, expelled his internal organs when stressed. Trevor threw a grape at him.

It was easy. Stupidly, dangerously easy. Sero had spent years building careful walls between himself and the men he dated, walls made of caution and precedent and the accumulated evidence that nobody stayed. But Trevor kept finding gaps in the mortar. Not by pushing through, by fitting through. He was funny without trying too hard. He asked questions and listened to the answers. He was physically present withoutbeing physically demanding, respecting the boundary Sero had set about not wanting anything physical tonight without ever referencing it or making Sero feel like he needed to justify it.

And he'd brought grapes.

"I should go," Trevor said eventually, though he didn't move. The TV was showing a time-lapse of coral growing, years compressed into seconds, a reef building itself one tiny polyp at a time. "Unless you want company while you sleep."