Page 47 of Branding the Bat

Sero woke in the enormous bathtub, which was not where he'd fallen asleep. He'd fallen asleep on the couch, watching a documentary about migration patterns, birds that flew thousands of miles on instinct alone, navigating by stars they'd never been taught to read, and at some point Trevor had carried him to the bathroom and put him in warm water. He knew this because he was naked, submerged to his chest, and the water smelled like lavender and the salts were the expensive kind, which meant Trevor had splurged on something for the first time in weeks.

Trevor was sitting on the tile floor beside the tub, fully dressed, reading a book. His legs were crossed. His back was against the wall. He looked comfortable in the way cats looked comfortable in places that shouldn't have been comfortable, like the world had been designed wrong and they'd simply adapted.

"You put me in the bath," Sero said.

"You were snoring. The couch was making your back worse." Trevor turned a page. "Also, I wanted to use the lavender salts and it seemed rude to bathe alone when there's a perfectly good bat available."

"I'm not a bath toy."

"You're the size of one."

Sero splashed him. Trevor moved the book out of range with reflexes that were, annoyingly, faster than the water.

"What are you reading?" Sero asked.

Trevor held up the cover. It was a textbook, thick, dense, the kind of book that had been written by someone who caredmore about accuracy than readability. The title was Alchemical Applications in Shifter Medicine: A Practitioner's Guide.

"Miriam gave it to me," Trevor said. "It's about two hundred years old and approximately ten percent of it is still relevant, but the foundational theory is sound. The author was a fox shifter who figured out how to use alchemy to treat silver poisoning in wolves. Revolutionary stuff, at the time."

"And you're reading it while I'm in the bath."

"I'm reading it while you're in the bath because you're in the bath and I like being near you and sometimes being near someone means sitting on a tile floor reading about fox alchemy while they prune." He turned another page. "I'm multitasking."

Sero sank deeper into the water. The lavender was warm and the steam was soft and Trevor was on the floor beside him reading a two-hundred-year-old textbook about healing, and the moment was so far from where they'd been three months ago that Sero felt a brief, vertiginous disorientation, the sense of looking down from a great height and realizing you'd climbed it without noticing.

"Trevor."

"Hmm."

"What are we doing?"

Trevor looked up from the book. "Right now? You're bathing. I'm reading. We're coexisting in a bathroom."

"I mean what are we doing? This. Us. The Wednesdays, the dates, the bathtub. Where is this going?"

Trevor closed the book and set it on the floor. He turned to face Sero fully, his back against the wall, his expression shifting from casual to serious with the ease of someone who'd been waiting for this conversation and had decided not to be the one to start it.

"Where do you want it to go?" Trevor asked.

"I asked you first."

"You did." Trevor pulled his knees up and rested his arms across them. "Okay. Here's where I'm at. I'm working at a hardware store for twelve dollars an hour. I'm learning alchemy from a raccoon who thinks I have potential but also thinks I'm an idiot, which is fair. My apartment is going to become a problem in about two months because the rent is three times what I can afford on a hardware-store salary, and at some point I'm going to have to decide between the apartment and the bathtub and food."

"The bathtub is non-negotiable." Over the months, Sero has come to enjoy it as much as Trevor did.

"Agreed. So, the apartment stays and I eat ramen." He paused. "The point is: I don't have anything to offer you. Not money, not stability, not the life I was living when we met. That life was built on something I took from people, and now it's gone, and what's left is a guy with a flogger and a textbook and a very nice bathtub."

"And a job at a hardware store."

"And a job at a hardware store. Where I'm assistant inventory manager, which sounds impressive until you realize it means I'm the person Doug yells at when the lumber is out of order." He smiled, but it was small and uncertain. "I'm not who I was when we met, Sero. I'm less. Less money, less status, less of everything that made me feel like I deserved to be arrogant. And I don't know if less is enough for you."

Sero sat up in the bath. Water ran down his chest, over the claw marks, healed now to pale pink lines, five parallel scars that would stay. Permanent, by choice.

"You're not less," Sero said. "You're different. Less would mean you'd lost something valuable. What you lost was a business built on stealing from people. That's not valuable. That's weight." He reached over the edge of the tub and took Trevor's hand. The tile was wet. Their fingers slipped and thenheld. "What you are now, the hardware store, the alchemy training, the man who sits on a bathroom floor reading a fox textbook because he wants to be near me, that's more. Not less."

Trevor's hand tightened. "I can't take care of you. Financially. I can barely take care of myself."

"I don't need you to take care of me. I'm a blackjack dealer who lives on fruit. My overhead is mango and rent." Sero squeezed his hand. "I need you to be honest. That's it. That's the whole list. Be honest with me, and I'll figure out the rest."