Kit stepped into the Nowhere, but he wasn’t fast enough to dodge the monster. The big one slammed into him and they popped right back into the world. Or Kit did, anyway. The monster didn’t follow him out. Kit pushed himself upright and rubbed the back of his head. The white walls and floors looked the same as the rest of Facility 17, so he assumed he hadn’t gone far. The room was a wreck. There were overturned tables and broken computers on the floor. One wall must have had a series of rectangular windows looking out into the hallway, but the glass had all been smashed, and now there was just brown paper taped over the empty spaces. There were signs on the metal door with warning symbols. Keep closed at all times. Across from Kit, the back half of the room was open, with no tables or chairs or debris. There were two large metal instruments, curved like parentheses, the opening one on the left and the closing one on the right of the room.
All the wrongness he’d sensed elsewhere in Facility 17 was concentrated there. The currents he could normally feel in the Nowhere slowed to a crawl and became irregular. He reached out with a hand—here, he could feel them, but six inches to the left, they were gone.
Or he thought it was six inches. His hand and his eyes disagreed. He saw his hand move six inches, but he felt it move way farther than that. The space inside the room was distributed all wrong, stretched in some places and squeezed in others.
This was Dr. Lange’s lab.
It was as though the explosion that had rocked this room had fragmented the Nowhere. Now invisible shards of it hung all around him. Kit shuddered to think of what it might feel like on the other side of the large room, in between those menacing instruments. Luckily, the other side of the room might as well have been ten miles away.
Had the thing brought him here? Did it have intentions? Or was it just some glitch in the Nowhere resulting from whatever had gone wrong in this room? Kit didn’t know and he didn’t care to find out. He’d promised to get Aidan and Laila out of Facility 17, and the stomach-knotting wrongness of this room wasn’t helping him toward that goal. This wasn’t his problem.
He took a breath to settle himself, closed his eyes, and reopened them in the Nowhere—only to get tangled with the thing and forced back into the world, somewhere bright and loud and full of people. A terminal? A mall? Kit blinked, disoriented. Just as in the lab, he had a moment of wondering if the thing had been trying to follow him out. He had a strange sense-memory of… as if it had tried to grab him and hold on. But it had no hands. Or did it? Its shifting, ghostly form did seem to have appendages sometimes, and it felt solid enough when it attacked him.
No matter. It was nowhere to be seen. Kit left before anyone could ask if he needed help getting up from the floor.
The thing had to be waiting for him. It was on him in an instant. Kit kicked and shoved, trying to get away and free himself, but only ended up twisting himself around and getting forced, face-first, back into the world somewhere. He flailed, grappling with a monster that was no longer there. There was sunlight and blue sky and air—and Kit would have been grateful that there was air, since getting popped out of the Nowhere and into the void of space seemed more and more likely, but there was only air.
No ground, no trees, no buildings, no nothing. He was falling. The wind ripped at his clothes. He risked a glance down and saw a city in miniature below, its tiny grid of roads and structures a blip in the surrounding green farmland.
Shit.
There was only one choice: back into the Nowhere. The strain of it dragged at every muscle and his brain groaned in protest, but it saved him from splattering on the ground.
It didn’t save him from the thing, which attacked again. Kit wanted to scream, but he’d jumped into the Nowhere five times in a day. He didn’t have the energy to run from the thing, let alone scream at it. They spent what felt like days hurtling through the void—sideways, forward, backward, up, down, Kit couldn’t tell—until they plunged into a different kind of darkness, the icy water of some unknown ocean. Kit struggled, thinking the thing might have come with him into whatever world this was, but there was only the water and the darkness and the pressure, pushing into his lungs. He couldn’t see anything, but reaching out with all his limbs only got him tangled in some ropy, slimy plant. It didn’t get him any closer to air. Which way was the surface? Was there a surface? He needed air too much to think. He’d die if he didn’t open his mouth, but there was only water.
When he blinked back into the Nowhere, he was alone. The sudden lack of pressure let his lungs expand, but he still couldn’t seem to breathe or focus. Soaked, shivering, none of his senses or his limbs working, his brain a quivering mass of useless jelly, he let himself drop through the void.
Kit materialized in mid-air in Emil’s room and thudded to floor with a squelch. Emil dropped his book and jumped out of bed, crouching over Kit, who was freezing to the touch and wrapped in some kind of kelp. Seawater puddled beneath him.
“Kit!”
Kit coughed up water. Emil began chest compressions, firm and steady, clearing his brain of anything except the count. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. He tilted Kit’s head back, pinched his nose, covered his mouth and blew into it. Another round of compressions. Another breath. Then Kit’s arms shot up and pushed at him, and he rolled to the side and coughed up more water on Emil’s floor. He gasped for breath, his purple hair dripping into his face and his whole body trembling.
No time to consider it. Emil pulled off his waterlogged boots, peeled him out of his clothes, toweled his hair and the rest of him as best he could, and deposited him in bed. He stripped and crawled under the blanket, pressing himself against Kit, reassuring himself with the sound of his heartbeat and his breath. Where on Earth—or maybe that was the wrong expression. Where had he been? It had been a whole day since they’d last seen each other in the kitchen. Why had Kit jumped back here? What had brought him so close to drowning?
The thing. He must have run into it again. Emil lifted his head slightly and looked over Kit’s shoulder to his room beyond. In the wet pile of Kit’s things left on the floor, there was a long rope of some kind of dark green-brown seaweed. He’d have to examine it once he could be sure Kit wasn’t hypothermic. Kit felt so small curled against him, freezing. He wasn’t quivering anymore and instead was perfectly still. Emil wanted to rub his hands into Kit’s cold skin, but he’d been trained not to. Kit had to warm himself up slowly. So Emil resisted his impulses and tried to feel secure in the knowledge that Kit was alive.
“You scared me,” he murmured, unsure if Kit could hear him. Kit was certainly drowsy and out of it, if not fully asleep. “But I’m so glad you came back.”
Kit had come here in a panic, fearing for his life. When they’d returned from the desert together, he’d brought them both to his own room, but tonight he’d come here. With no chance to plan or time to focus, his first thought of safety had been Emil. Even with Kit’s chilled body pressed into him and leaching out his body heat, the thought made Emil warm. Kit had sidestepped Lenny’s question about whether it was possible to jump to a person, but his arrival tonight was answer enough.
“I missed you,” he told Kit. “I know you were only gone a day and we barely know each other, but… I missed you. Please be okay.”
He could never have said that while looking Kit in the eye and worrying about how he’d respond. But lying in bed, under the soft light of his reading lamp, with Kit facing away from him, it was easy to speak the truth. In this suspended, anonymous moment, it was even possible to lean over and impulsively drop a kiss on Kit’s temple.
When he settled back into bed behind Kit, his heart was hammering. He shouldn’t have done that. Why had he done that?
Emil stayed quiet, listening to Kit’s body in the silence of his room. Resuscitating Kit had terrified him and Emil was too worried and wired to fall asleep, but he could stay here with an arm slung over the dip of his waist and a hand against his heart. Kit was asleep now, not about to vanish again, and Emil let his thoughts drift.
I haven’t seen you look at anybody like that since… Chávez had said. It was funny to hear it, since Emil didn’t feel like he’d looked at his previous partners any particular way. And Kit had nothing in common with either of them. He was so much younger, first of all, and instead of having a professional career, he made his living in a shadowy, cash-only criminal underworld. Rose and Lucas had both been Emil’s age. Rose had been a graphic designer and Lucas had been a doctor. His parents had been delighted with both of them—proof that Emil was on the right track at last.
Rose and Lucas weren’t the only people he’d ever had relationships with. There’d been two people in the five years since Lucas dumped him, but Chávez didn’t know about Ella and Marco. They’d both been casual, no-strings arrangements in the year after the break-up, and Emil’s nightmares had featured broken condoms and broken hearts during and after those liaisons. He wasn’t cut out for casual.
He hadn’t really been cut out for relationships, either, according to Lucas and Rose—no matter how good it had all looked on paper. He’d dated Rose for two years in his early twenties. She’d even moved to Franklin Station so she wouldn’t have to take the elevator up whenever she wanted to see him. But he’d been working long hours, and she’d found someone else to occupy her time. She’d cried when she’d confessed, as if she were the victim. I can’t believe I did that to you, she’d told Emil. You’re so perfect.
Emil didn’t like to remember that moment. Not because he’d been gutted, although it had hurt plenty. But even then, he’d known that if he’d spent more time with her, things might have gone differently. He’d made his choices and his career had won out. In a way, he’d left her a long time before she’d left him. A perfect person wouldn’t have done that. He’d failed. He wasn’t perfect. Still, he hated how Rose had made perfect sound like an accusation. Like it was a reason to sleep with somebody else.
He’d taken up with Lucas for another two-year relationship—that was Emil’s romantic expiration date, two years—soon after. There hadn’t been any cheating in that one, but Lucas had essentially said you’re so perfect and exited stage left.
“You checked off all these goals from your list—your education, your career—and now you want to check off ‘relationship,’” Lucas had said. “And you’re doing everything right! Almost. It’s like somebody gave you a lecture on being a good boyfriend and you made yourself a to-do list. Kiss Lucas when he comes home from work. Check. Make him dinner. Check. Have sex. Check.”
Emil hadn’t understood what was wrong with his behavior then, and he still didn’t.
“I have a terrible feeling that if I let you, you’d just stay with me forever out of some sense of duty. You do everything you’re supposed to, and God, an awful little part of me wants to keep letting you do it, but I can’t. Are you in love with me, Emil?”
“Of course.” Lucas was good-looking and good in bed and they had a comfortable life together and Emil had no idea why he was making such a fuss.
Lucas had narrowed his eyes. “Are you saying that because it’s what you’re supposed to say?”
“I don’t know what you mean!”
“Are you happy, Emil? Really think about it.”
Emil hadn’t been able to say anything. He didn’t feel unhappy, exactly. But he supposed he didn’t really feel happy, either. He’d never thought about it—no, that wasn’t true. He specifically tried not to think about it. Because when the time came, he couldn’t say yes.
“Right,” Lucas had sighed, when the silence had grown overwhelming. “That’s not really fair to either of us, then, is it?”
Emil hadn’t argued. He’d been sad when both Rose and Lucas had left him. Looking back on it through the prism of what they’d said, he wondered now if it hadn’t been a checklist kind of sadness—the expected follow-up to the loss of his dull, empty, checklist happiness. He hadn’t cried. He hadn’t thought of them longingly after the fact. He’d just numbly gone on with his life. Maybe that made him a soulless robot or an empty husk of a person, but he’d come to terms with that. Feelings were chaotic and terrifying and inconvenient. Advancing his career came more easily to him, and luckily, being single and childless had made him an excellent candidate for Quint Services’ mission. Who wanted feelings when there were trips to undiscovered realities to be had?
Kit stirred against him.
Yeah. You’d be the most chaotic, terrifying, and inconvenient of all. Kit was all wrong for him. He couldn’t bring a criminal home to meet Zora and his parents. And yet Emil had never felt anything like what he’d felt when Kit grabbed him and kissed him. His brain replayed that moment on a loop any time Kit was near him, as if thinking hard enough about it would make it happen again.
Kit felt warm against him. How long had they been lying here? Emil had lost track of time.
When Kit had vanished last night, all Emil could think about was how nothing like that kiss would ever happen again. It was a foolish thing to want—they were both caught in the middle of something incomprehensible and neither of them could afford distractions—and yet he wanted it anyway. That was the nature of want. It was the nature of all feelings to run wild, free from the constraints of logic and reason. Emil knew better than to want Kit. But not only could he not stop wanting, he also kept finding himself in situations that stretched the limits of his self-control. Situations where they had to touch each other. Sometimes without their clothes on. In bed.
And yet again, just like in the desert, Kit was vulnerable and not in control of all his faculties. Emil had to be the responsible one. It was his job to control himself. To behave morally.
Even if Kit stirred again and snuggled closer, even if he rubbed up against—
Emil couldn’t finish that thought. He jerked his hips backward, putting space between them. Kit moved again, compressing the space between them to nothing. Emil bit his lip and closed his eyes and tried very hard not to be aware of his body, which was behaving decidedly against his wishes.
Kit murmured something. Was he sleep-talking?
“Pardon?” Emil said.
“I said, that’s not where I wanted you to kiss me,” Kit said.
Emil hadn’t kissed—oh no. He had. He’d given in to a ridiculous impulse to kiss Kit’s temple because he’d thought he was unconscious. But Kit was awake now and he’d been awake then and now Emil was caught.
“And don’t tell me you didn’t want to,” Kit said, undeterred by Emil’s long silence. He sounded entirely too pleased with himself. Emil had to work faster to compile a convincing list of reasons that they shouldn’t, couldn’t move forward with any of this. Kit continued, “I have a state-of-the-art lie detector.”
And then he rubbed his ass against Emil’s hard-on.
Emil experienced a second of perfect, thoughtless bliss—the softness of skin, the warmth, the pressure, the friction—before coming back to himself. “Kit, this isn’t a good idea.”
He tried to put on his most serious tone of voice, but it wavered a little. Kit had a fucking nice ass. And they were both so, so naked.
“That feels like a lie.” Kit slid his body against Emil’s, up and down and torturously slow. “A big lie.”
“Please,” Emil said, and he wasn’t sure what he was asking for. He couldn’t bring himself to say please stop, not when Kit was still writhing against him and telling him how big his dick was. God, but he was ridiculous.
Kit lost the wickedness in his tone, stilled, and said, “Emil, I almost died at least twice today, and my prospects for tomorrow aren’t great. There is nothing you can say that will make me not want this. The only question now is whether you’ll let yourself have it.”
“Wait, what do you mean, your prospects for tomorrow aren’t great?”
Kit sighed, impatient. “Almost every time I entered the Nowhere, that thing found me. It feels a lot like it’s trying to kill me. Now, back to the topic at hand. You can take that as literally as you want, by the way.”
Emil’s hand was still positioned over Kit’s heart. Kit laid his hand over Emil’s and moved their hands suggestively downward.
“You must have been in and out of the Nowhere for hours, fighting with that thing. Aren’t you tired?” It was a desperate, last-ditch evasive maneuver, and Kit wasn’t fooled.
“Yes, I’m tired. And hungry. But as previously mentioned, I’m also not dead.”
“Kit, we—”
“Do you not like me?” Kit demanded. “Because that’s not what it feels like right now.”
Emil was prepared to evade, but not to lie outright. Still, his voice didn’t make it much above a mumble when he said, “I like you.” The confession was so inadequate, it was absurd.
“You stopped us before and you’re trying to stop us now. What are you so afraid of?”
This. Everything. You. “You were high the first time! And you were barely conscious when you showed up tonight! I can’t take advantage of you, Kit.”
“I’m awake and alert and I’ll recite the alphabet backward if you want,” Kit said. “Trust me, you’re not taking advantage. I don’t know how much more clearly I can express myself.”
In the quiet that followed, Emil sifted through all of his panicked objections and settled on saying, “I don’t usually do this.”
“Yeah, well, me neither. I also don’t usually get chased into the depths of the ocean and almost-drowned by a physics ghost,” Kit said. “It’s not a usual kind of day. The question is—do you want to?”
It was like the moment when Lucas had finally asked him if he was happy. A heart-pounding silence and then the truth. But it was nothing like that moment, because this time, Emil said, “Yes.”
By some miracle, he managed not to say what does this mean for us or promise you won’t vanish afterward or any of two dozen other inappropriate things. By a second, wildly undeserved miracle, Kit twisted around to face him, threaded his fingers into Emil’s hair, and kissed him, quieting the racket in his brain. This, Emil could do. His partners had always been clear on that point. Pleasing people in bed was just one more skill that could be learned through practice and patience, and Emil was a good student.
The concrete immediacy of it was familiar and reassuring. They fit their lips together and Emil let his tongue slip against Kit’s. As they kissed, he drew his hands down Kit’s lithe body, around the dip of his waist and the curve of his ass. Even exhausted, Kit was adorably reactive, clenching his hands in Emil’s hair and moaning into his mouth when Emil trailed one hand down his hipbone and into the crease of his thigh. He hadn’t touched Kit’s cock yet, but one glance down proved it was already straining and eager, wet at the tip.
The sight inspired Emil to break their kiss, although he couldn’t resist kissing his way along the sharp edge of Kit’s jawbone, or sucking a kiss into the tender skin just below his ear. Kit gasped at the graze of Emil’s teeth, and he liked the sound of it. He bit the side of Kit’s neck and was rewarded again. Tracking kisses over his collarbone and down his bare chest and belly made him squirm, and brushing his lips over the tip of Kit’s cock elicited a throaty “Fuck.”
Emil couldn’t even think about how hard he was. If Kit touched him—maybe even if Kit didn’t touch him—this could all be over embarrassingly fast.
When Emil finally wrapped his hand around the base, Kit bucked his hips. Emil lowered his mouth over Kit’s cock, sliding down until his lips met his hand. He moved his hand and his head in concert, slicking Kit down, then sliding up until he could run his tongue over the slit at the head. Kit’s hands fisted tightly in his hair, not pushing or pulling but just hanging on for the ride.
Emil loved giving head. He loved tasting Kit, feeling the weight of his cock on his tongue, listening to him breathe and whimper. And he loved making himself wait, growing harder and harder with every tiny twitch of Kit’s body.
With his free hand, he cupped Kit’s balls. He reached under with his middle finger, rubbing the sensitive skin there, pressing against it. Kit thrust hard into his mouth when he did that, his hips snapping forward of their own accord, so Emil moved his finger down ever so slightly, until he was circling the rim of Kit’s hole. Kit gripped his hair almost painfully hard at that touch. A little pressure and Kit was groaning and spilling into his mouth, hot and salty.
“Fuck, fuck,” Kit said. “You are so fucking good at that.”
Emil swallowed and kissed Kit’s cock, flush with triumph. He laid his head on Kit’s belly. All the blood in his body and all the thoughts in his head flowed down to his own erection, which was pointing straight up toward his navel, dripping and aching. One or two strokes and he’d go off. Even the thought of Kit’s fingers brushing the length was almost too much.
Kit tugged at his shoulders, urging him to move back up the bed, and Emil went. When he arrived, Kit kissed him deeply, not caring about the taste in his mouth. He stopped for a moment, his hands in Emil’s hair and his dark gaze fixed on Emil. “Wow, you’re just… wow,” he said, breathless and dazzled. “I don’t even think you know how beautiful you are. I want to make you come.”
He reached down between them and wrapped his slender, clever fingers around Emil’s cock. He slicked it down in one stroke. Emil took a shuddering breath. “Slow,” he pleaded. “I’m not going to last.”
Kit slowed his hand. He slid up Emil’s length at a glacial pace. “Yeah?” he asked. “You loved sucking me off that much?”
“Yes,” Emil said, his eyes closed. Kit’s hand felt so fucking good. It had been a damn long time since anyone else had touched him. Kit was slow and delicate and Emil was already wrecked, quivering in anticipation. He wanted the end but he never wanted this to end. He could hear his own breath catch.
“Beautiful,” Kit murmured, tracing Emil’s bottom lip with his thumb. He’d done the same thing when they’d been in the desert, and the memory came over Emil in a hot rush: how ready Kit had been, how pushy, how much he’d wanted Emil. Sober, Kit wasn’t much different. He still stroked Emil’s cock like it was his favorite thing he’d ever touched. “Will you come for me?” he asked, slipping his thumb into Emil’s mouth so there was only one way to answer.
Emil’s orgasm ran through him right then, a burst of pleasure that left him shaking and spurting into Kit’s hand.
“Fuck,” Kit said appreciatively. He leaned over to drop a kiss on Emil’s temple.
Then instead of settling back into bed, he let go of Emil and bolted upright. “Fuck,” he said, in a completely different tone. It shook Emil out of his languor. “Something is really wrong.”