Page 40 of That Defining Moment

He should wipe it on his jeans. If he made one pass of his palm down his thigh, it would be gone, absorbed into denim and sweat and the ordinary smell of him. Instead, Cassian put his hand in his pocket. His fingers curled closed around the scent of Uriel, and he kept walking home.

Chapter Nineteen

Cassian propped his chin on Lysander’s shoulder and watched the lamb wobble across a farmyard on unsteady legs.

“Show me again, Sander.”

Lysander’s thumb tapped the screen, and the video rewound to the beginning. The cat appeared first, small and marmalade-coloured, sitting in the straw beside a white bundle that didn’t look like anything yet. Then the bundle grew legs, and then the legs grew a lamb, and then the lamb grew until it was twice the size of the cat and still pressing its enormous woolly head on the cat’s flank as though it hadn’t noticed that it was now several times bigger than its friend.

“Again,” Cassian said.

“Cass, we’ve watched it six times.”

“Seven would be better.” He reached across Lysander’s arm and prodded the screen himself, which he’d only learned to do last week, and felt a private thrill of competence as the video started over. The lamb’s legs buckled on the second frame and the cat licked its ear.

“I’m going to show this to Uriel,” he said, straightening up on his stool. “I’ve been teaching him YouTube. He didn’t know what it was, obviously, because the compound didn’t have Wi-Fi, and the first time I showed him a video on my mobile he held it away from his face like it might bite him.” He drummed his fingers on the countertop, his knee bouncing underneath the island. “I’m going to make him a Google account and a YouTube account so I can send him all the videos I watch. He needs to see the one of the dog who carries his own lead on walks, and the one where the baby otter learns to swim.”

“Yeah?” Lysander smiled at him. “What else have you been teaching him?”

Cassian brightened. “All sorts of stuff. I’ve got him to stop calling everything outside the compound ‘the territories of the unilluminated,’ which is what they say when they mean the regular world where people have Wi-Fi.” He ticked items off on his fingers. “I took him to a library and showed him how I scan the books I borrow myself, with the machine, and he was very impressed by the machine. He watched me do it three times and then he tried it himself.” His second finger went up. “And yesterday we sat on the bench outside Brown Sugar and he ate a jam doughnut with me, and he got icing sugar all down his jumper and I had to brush it off for him.”

“Sounds great, Cassian.” Lysander’s voice was warm and easy, the way it got when Cassian told him the things he wanted to hear. “Like he’s settling into proper Melbourne life.”

Cassian nodded. His fingers found the edge of his mobile on the countertop, and he traced the crack in the screen from corner to corner.

“Uriel is doing well,” he said.

Lysander’s gaze held his, and Cassian met it without flinching, because the doctrine had taught him how to hold a surface still while everything underneath it moved.

Uriel still talked about going back.

It didn’t matter what Cassian showed him. They’d sat side by side on the bench outside Brown Sugar while Cassian held his mobile between them and played the video of the baby otter learning to swim, and when it ended he’d said, “Charles has been asking after you.”

They’d walked through Carlton Gardens on a Thursday afternoon, the elm canopy throwing shards of light across the path, and Cassian had pointed out the possums sleeping in a tree hollow the way Lysander had pointed them out to him, and Uriel had looked up and said, “The Lumineer wants to know when you’ll be ready.”

They’d kissed on the bench at Edinburgh Gardens while an old man threw bread to the pigeons three metres away, and when they broke apart Uriel stayed leaning close to him and murmured, “He misses you, Cassian. Charles misses you.”

The kisses didn’t stop it. Cassian could press his mouth to Uriel’s and feel the Universe rearranging itself inside his chest, the alpha’s scent making him weak, and still Uriel would surface from the kiss with Charles’s name sitting right there in his mouth.

Yesterday, Uriel had escorted him home from Brown Sugar.

They’d taken the long way, cutting through the back streets where the terrace houses clustered close together and the afternoon light came in at a low slant through the gaps between rooflines. Cassian had been telling Uriel about the book Elisa was helping him read — a novel about a woman who sailed around the world on her own, which Cassian found both thrilling and doctrinally problematic — when Uriel’s hand had closed around his wrist and steered him sideways, off the footpath and into the narrow alley that ran along the back of Hamish’s row of cottages.

The alley was shaded and quiet, hemmed in by garage doors and the high wooden fences of back gardens. Uriel walked him past it and pressed him against the garage door at the far end, where the jasmine from Hamish’s fence had crept over the top and hung down in a curtain of white flowers that brushed Cassian’s shoulder.

Uriel kissed him there, in the dim stripe of shade between two fences, with one hand flat on the garage door beside Cassian’s head. The jasmine’s scent tangled with Uriel’s until Cassian couldn’t separate them.

It went on long enough that Cassian’s knees softened and his fingers curled into the front of Uriel’s jumper and twisted into the fabric, pulling him closer. Long enough that Cassian’s underwear was wet with his slick by the time Uriel drew back and pressed his thumb to Cassian’s lower lip, dragging it across the tender skin before letting go.

Cassian had walked through the back gate on legs that didn’t feel entirely his, across the garden and in through the kitchen door where Lysander was standing at the counter chopping garlic, a knife in one hand.

Lysander’s head had turned as Cassian came through the door, and his nostrils flared, and the knife stopped. Lysander’s gaze tracked from Cassian’s face to his neck, to the collar of his shirt, where the jasmine petals had caught in the fabric. He hadn’t said anything, though.

Cassian had gone past him down the corridor to his bedroom, closed the door, and stood with his back against it while his pulse hammered in his throat.

Uriel’s scent clung to every part of him that the alpha had touched, and Cassian wanted more of it.

All of their outings ended up in the alley now. It didn’t matter where they started. That narrow strip of shade between the garage doors was their default destination now. They’d walk home along the back streets, and Uriel’s hand would find the small of his back as he steered him down the alley.