Page 11

Indy

He didn’t look like himself, and it jarred me.

He’d been in rough shape the night he hooked our trailer up to his truck, dirty with ratted hair and a wild look in his eyes.

This was worse than that.

Usually, Loren defined clean cut.

He shaved daily and dressed in business casual for fun.

He even ironed his pants.

It was startling to see him ragged, heavily stubbled, and rendered physically speechless.

He was still himself, though.

Still gorgeous, and I told him so as we crowded into Sully’s shower.

It wasn’t much bigger than the one in our trailer, but I didn’t mind the proximity.

Loren let me rinse and soap his hair, making fleeting eye contact while I lathered the shampoo all the way through to the ends.

I started off focused and determined not to cry, but when the water ran gray with blood, and I saw the new scars on his lean, muscular body, I lost it.

My eyes pulsed dry and hot while the shower’s spray provided the moisture I could not.

I wanted to be strong for him, but even Sully said I needed him , not the other way around.

And I had needed him.

I did. More so since my memories came back.

I wasn’t strong.

I threw myself at him the same way I had when he first stepped through the wall.

He hugged me close, and we stayed like that until his knees began to quake.

With the blood and grime washed away, we moved to the bathtub.

Loren sat in front, nestled between my legs and arms as he lay back against me, blinking drowsily and breathing deep, slow.

I wasn’t strong, but I could hold him like this.

Skin on skin in the soapy water, I kissed his cheeks, his shoulders, and the curve of his neck.

I put my lips on every part of him I could reach and reveled in the way he arched into my touch.

I wanted to never let him go.

Even a momentary break of contact felt like it might be the end of this fantasy.

This dream. If my sleep-deprived mind had managed to hallucinate Loren’s return in such detail, I would find a way to stay awake forever.

But it felt real. Real enough that I finally worked my way around to breaking the pervasive quiet, “Sully fixed me.” My fingers brushed along Loren’s jaw, tickled by the scruff that was just long enough to be soft.

“I think we fixed everything,” I murmured.

My memory was restored, and Loren’s eternal servitude had ended.

We could be together in a way we’d never been: wholly, completely.

When I grazed the side of his throat to where the thick steel chain used to be, a smile tugged at my mouth.

“You’re free, baby. Can you believe it?”

He reached back and cupped his palm to my face, and I tipped my head into his hand.

My mind swam with recollections of this closeness, this intimacy.

The scope of it was vast, and my brain stretched trying to contain it all.

We’d shared hundreds of tender moments and more than our share of firsts—words, kisses, hugs—, but one first occurred to me more vividly than the rest.

Manhattan, New York

February 1 st , 1923

Snow blanketed the ground and piled up to our ankles where Loren and I stood at the foot of the lonely grave.

He usually came here alone, and I felt like an intruder watching him bend to lay a bundle of flowers at the base of the headstone.

The flashy red blooms were stark against the field of white, and I thought it a shame that something so beautiful was wasted on the dead.

I wasn’t sure why he invited me.

Rather, why he hadn’t refused when I asked if I could join him.

I was grateful enough to be included that I bit back the questions I’d had since we walked through the cemetery gates.

His family had passed years ago, leaving him as alone in the world as I was, and I expected to be checking up on their final resting place.

But there were no Morettis here.

Instead, one Jonathan Abernathy.

The dates beneath his name showed him to have died a year ago, shortly before I met Loren.

Birds lit in the nearby trees, flapping their wings like rustling leaves.

They chirped and chittered, as restless as I was shifting side to side and fussing with the flat cap that kept my curls in check.

Loren straightened and smoothed the wrinkles out of his trousers.

For ten months, he’d been my flat mate.

He was away from home more often than not, working long days at the automobile factory and venturing out most nights.

My inquiries about his comings and goings were met with succinct replies and excuses I didn’t quite believe, but I enjoyed his infrequent company.

He had a calming presence, and he listened while I prattled for hours about Max Ernst making the move from dadaism to surrealism, and how I thought I might like to learn to paint.

The cold nipped at my fingers, and I tucked my hands into my coat pockets.

Loren didn’t so much as shiver, even when the wind whipped his long dark hair around his cheeks.

He simply stood, motionless as if he were another statue in the graveyard keeping vigil.

I read the epitaph again.

Jonathan H. Abernathy.

Beloved husband and father.

Passed from this world at fifty-six.

Too old to be a paramour, too American to be a relative.

“Who was he to you?” I asked.

“A friend,” Loren replied.

I tucked my chin into the folds of the wool scarf wound round my neck.

If I’d learned anything in the past ten months, it was that Loren was content with quiet, and I was eager to fill it.

But I was more determined to wait this out.

To prove that I could be calming, too, and that I could listen, even if all there was to hear was silence.

Another few minutes dragged by.

I glanced at Loren’s stony profile and tried not to think about how handsome he was.

Whether in vests and slacks or grease-smeared coveralls fresh from the factory, he managed to be enticing yet wholly unaware of his looks or the inordinate amount of attention I paid to them.

He paid attention to me, too, though.

He knew my favorite meals, brought home the latest issues of The Art News , and even took me to the Brooklyn Museum once or twice.

He didn’t seem to care much about the exhibits, but he tailed after me as I darted from one canvas to the next, studying the brush strokes and reading the plaques aloud for him and any passerby to hear.

I studied the art like I studied him now, tracing the slope of his nose and the fullness of his lips while wondering what it would be like to kiss him.

My hands fisted in my pockets while Loren’s hung at his sides, apparently unbothered by the chill.

Would he be unbothered if I touched them?

Caught them up in mine?

I should have been somber, surrounded by corpses and miserable winter, but my insides were aflutter.

It was like I’d completely forgotten the reason we were here—not that I’d truly known it in the first place.

We were already standing close, but I ventured nearer, pulling my hand out of my pocket and sliding my fingers between Loren’s long, lithe ones.

Our palms barely touched before Loren jerked back as if he’d been burned.

He faced me. The grave was forgotten, and all signs of sorrow had fled him, leaving his expression hard and unforgiving.

“W-we’re in mourning.” I gestured to the grave.

“I’m… I’m comforting you. Because you were sad.”

He looked the farthest thing from comforted.

In fact, he appeared profoundly unsettled as he glanced around the cemetery, checking for onlookers or eavesdroppers to our private moment.

I couldn’t take it back, and I wouldn’t apologize.

Not for being kind to him.

Not for trying soothe his sadness…

Or appease the yearning that kept me up at nights, thinking of him in his bed and wishing he was in mine.

I truly did want to comfort him, comfort us both, so I extended my arms.

“Perhaps I should embrace you instead?”

“No!” Loren staggered backward, creating a gap I hurried to close.

“I’d like to embrace you, Loren. I…” My throat tightened, and I swallowed past it.

“I’d like to do a lot of things?—”

“Enough.” He shook his head roughly, then scanned the cemetery again.

My gaze dropped to the snow heaped around my feet.

“I know it’s improper, but I’m quite taken with you.” I shifted, feeling light and breathless and too out of sorts to stop the words from escaping.

“I think of you romantically, and I have to ask, I have to know , if you’ve ever…”

I dragged my eyes upward to find Loren’s expression stricken and his tan skin ghostly pale.

It took all the courage I’d been mustering for months to say, “Perhaps you think of me that way, as well?”

His brow furrowed, and he glanced aside, skimming over the grave and the ground around it.

He worked his jaw for five seconds, I counted them, then he shook his head.

“It hardly matters,” he muttered.

“As you said, it’s improper. Criminal. You could be arrested for even suggesting?—”

Would they arrest me for this?

I meant to ask it, and I would have, but my mouth was suddenly pressed to his, warmed by his breath while my pulse roared in my ears.

With how he towered over me, I shouldn’t have been able to reach.

I was on my toes, but he had leaned in, too, pulled by the arms I’d looped around his neck.

He bent into me and stayed there, his lean, muscular body curved toward mine, growing closer with the subtle shift of his feet.

I might have imagined that, but I couldn’t fabricate the feeling of his hand on my back, a gentle press against my spine, holding onto me the same way I held onto him.

Another cold gust whipped past, and his fingers splayed across my spine, bracing as though he feared I might be the one to retreat.

I withdrew only far enough to breathe and catch his gaze as he made another wary sweep of the cemetery.

Once he was assured that we were alone amongst the ghosts, his attention returned to me.

He blinked, then ran his tongue across his lips like he was chasing the flavor of our kiss.

My heart was still thundering, and I was far warmer than a man standing in the snow should have been as my eyes locked on Loren’s deep brown ones.

Did he think of me romantically?

Improperly? Illegally?

I thought I knew the answer.

Or maybe I felt it in his hand still splayed in the small of my back, keeping me close.

So, I said something else.

“Are you lonely, Loren?”

He glanced aside before replying, “I’m rarely alone.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

It wasn’t what I meant, either.

There was a deeper question to be posed, but I counted on him to infer it.

The war for his expression came to an end, and something akin to peace took its place as he said, “Not anymore.”

After the bath, I dressed while Loren bundled in a towel to wait for me to bring him some clean clothes.

Unlike me, he couldn’t borrow from Sully’s closet, and I was fairly certain he wouldn’t want to.

As I passed through the apartment, I found Sully and Whitney waiting.

I was surprised to see the other hound lingering, but Sully put a stop to any line of questioning by declaring, “Whitney is going to stay with us for a while.”

Considering he’d saved Loren, and I owed him for it, I was in no position to protest. So, I hurried downstairs to the gallery’s storage closet and picked an outfit from one of the plastic totes salvaged from Loren’s truck before returning to the steamy bathroom.

Inside again with the door shut behind me, I watched as Loren shaved his face and neck clean.

Once he’d finished, he cut a glance at me in the mirror’s reflection that nearly made my knees knock.

I stepped up and brushed my fingers over the curve of his hipbone where it peeked above the rolled top of the towel.

My hand skated across his bare skin as he rinsed the razor and set it on the counter, then turned to face me.

Weeks ago, when all this had started, I’d planned what I would say when he came back.

Most of it had been superseded by the awareness of our shared century of history.

But, while some things faded, others became painfully clear.

“I know you protected me,” I said.

“I’m sorry I made that a hard job sometimes.”

His lips parted with the beginnings of a protest, but I kept on.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you. I’m sorry I led you into danger in the first place. I’m sorry…”

I can’t stay clean.

I didn’t remember until now.

Most of all, I was so damn sorry for making him hurt because he loved me.

I couldn’t say anything else, and neither could Loren, so we stood in the bathroom, him half-dressed and me trying not to count the scars that marred his skin and made me feel so horribly, hideously guilty.

I hadn’t wounded him—not physically—but I knew his heart was battered.

I hoped he would trust me with it one more time, and that I could do right by him, by us, once and for all.