Page 38 of Branding the Bat

"No scenes," Trevor agreed.

"And when I'm ready for a scene, if I'm ready, it happens on my terms. I choose the room. I choose the tools. I negotiate every detail, and you explain every component of whatever you bring into that room. If I find out later that something happened during a scene that I didn't explicitly agree to, we’re done. Permanently and completely."

"Understood."

"Good." Sero picked the cherry out of his empty glass and ate it. "Now buy me lunch. There's a steakhouse on Tropicana that does a decent fruit plate and a cheese board that might be acceptable even to a housecat with expensive taste and a hardware-store salary."

Trevor laughed. It was sudden, startled, the kind of laugh that escaped before the laugher could catch it. It sounded like relief. It sounded like a man who'd been holding his breath for three weeks and had just been told he could exhale.

"I can afford a cheese board," Trevor said. "Probably. If we skip the wine."

"I don't drink anymore. Not after what bourbon did to me the first night we met."

"Fair enough." Trevor stood. He looked at Sero, a long, careful look, as if memorizing the way he sat on the stool, the way the amber light caught his face, the way the empty Shirley Temple glass sat in front of him with the cherry gone and the grenadine staining the melting ice pink. "Thank you, Sero."

"Don't thank me yet. The cheese board is the easy part."

They left the club together. In the elevator, their hands brushed, accidentally, then deliberately. Trevor's fingers closed around Sero's. The grip was tentative. Sero tightened it.

In the lobby, Bethany glanced at their joined hands. She looked at Sero. She looked at Trevor. Then she went back to her crossword with an expression that might have been approval or might have been indifference or might have been the particular emotion that crossword enthusiasts felt when they realized seven across was "forgiveness" and it fit perfectly.

They walked out into the afternoon.

Chapter Thirteen

They dated like normal people for three weeks.

It was strange. Not bad-strange. The kind of strange that came from discovering that a person you'd known primarily through extremity was also a person who had opinions about pizza toppings and a preferred brand of toothpaste and a habit of narrating the thoughts of passing animals under his breath.

"That pigeon is furious," Trevor said, walking down Fremont Street on their second date. "Look at him. He's absolutely seething. Someone stole his breadcrumb."

"You can't know that."

"I'm a cat. I know exactly what birds are thinking. Rage. Constant, unrelenting rage."

"Is that why you want to eat them?"

"I don't want to eat them. I want to catch them. Eating is incidental."

They went to the steakhouse on Tropicana twice. Trevor ordered the cheapest thing on the menu both times, a side salad and bread, which he ate with the dignified restraint of a man who was absolutely starving but would rather die than admit that twelve dollars an hour didn't cover steakhouse dinners. Sero ordered the fruit plate and the cheese board and pushed the cheese toward Trevor without comment. Trevor ate it without comment. The mutual pretense that the cheese board was communal rather than charity was one of the more elegant negotiations of their relationship.

They watched documentaries at Sero's apartment. Octopuses, then wolves ...Trevor's choice, delivered with the disclaimer "know your enemy", then a three-part series about bioluminescence that they both found genuinely moving. Theysat on Sero's couch with a bowl of grapes between them and a careful six inches of space that narrowed, over the course of three episodes, to two inches, then to contact. Trevor's shoulder against Sero's, warm and solid and deliberate.

They talked. Not about the machine, not about the gold, not about the Playground or the sharks or Agent Vasquez's ongoing investigation. About everything else. Trevor's childhood, the shelters, the foster homes, the housecat in a world of bigger predators, learning early that cleverness was the only advantage a small body had. Sero's childhood: Tucson, his mother who called every weekend, the broken arm from the tree that didn't make him cry, the shifter doctor who'd said "some bats just process pain differently" and given him the first framework for understanding his own body.

They talked about the casino. Sero described the blackjack table, the green felt, the plastic-coated cards, the specific rhythm of deal-flip-count that had become as natural as breathing. He described the fruit he kept in the break room, the way the pit boss tracked his shifts, the way the casino floor at three AM felt like the inside of a machine designed to convince people that time didn't exist.

Trevor described the hardware store. The lumber aisle, which smelled like pine and sawdust and made his cat brain want to sharpen his claws. Doug, the owner, who'd promoted him to assistant inventory manager after two weeks because Trevor's organizational instincts were, in Doug's words, "freakishly good." The raccoon healer, whose name was Miriam, who was teaching him the basics of legitimate alchemy: plant compounds, mineral distillation, the slow, patient work of making things that helped bodies instead of exploiting them.

The Christmas season had nearly broken him. Doug had put him in charge of the holiday display; lights, artificial trees, inflatable yard decorations, extension cords rated for outdooruse that customers invariably tried to use indoors. Trevor had restocked the same box of icicle lights fourteen times in one week. A woman had asked him to explain the difference between warm white and soft white and he'd had to excuse himself to the stockroom before his cat instincts kicked in and he swatted the entire display off the shelf.

"I never want to see another string light," he told Sero. "If you ever try to put up Christmas decorations, Iwillleave you."

"Miriam said I have talent," Trevor said one evening, sitting on the floor of Sero's apartment with his back against the couch and a mango slice in his hand. "Real talent. The kind that could make a difference in the shifter medical community, if I put in the time."

"How much time?"

"Years. It's basically an apprenticeship. She said the best healers study for a decade before they're trusted to work independently." He ate the mango. He'd been eating more fruit lately, Sero's influence, absorbed through proximity the way cats absorbed warmth. "I don't know if I can do ten years of anything. Cats aren't known for patience."