by Sidney Bell
“I can be proud of you no matter what you do,” his papa said. “It is about the kind of man you are, not the job you do. And I have never wondered about the goodness in your heart, Tobias. Lost you might have been, but never bad.”
“This is good,” Manman said, and pulled him back in. “We will do better, all of us.”
He pressed his face against her shoulder and breathed, catching the scent of her rose cream and closing his eyes.
When they heard the stirrings upstairs of Tobias’s siblings getting up for school, Manman glanced at the clock and climbed to her feet. “With that solved, it’s time to get on with things, I suppose. You’ll stay for breakfast, Sullivan.” Talking to herself about what to prepare, she vanished into the kitchen. On school mornings they rarely got fancy, but Tobias strongly doubted his mother would allow a guest to eat Cheerios.
“And you’ll eat every single bite she gives you, even if you don’t like it,” Tobias added under his breath, because you did not disrespect a Haitian woman’s table and live to tell the tale.
“Why wouldn’t I like it?” Sullivan whispered back, looking alarmed, and Tobias couldn’t help teasing him by giving him an apologetic look, like they might be about to feed him insects or something, when Manman was probably making oatmeal.
Papa said, a bit tentatively, “So, have you given any thought to what you’d like to study?”
“A bit,” Tobias hedged. Then, with studied casualness, he added, “Sullivan already made me look through the school’s course catalog to see what I might be interested in. He doesn’t waste time.”
And that did exactly what he’d thought it would—his papa looked at Sullivan with new respect.
Parents could be so predictable.
* * *
Sullivan’s house was quiet when they got back; only Raina remained, and she was reading an issue of W that she must’ve brought with her, because Tobias didn’t remember seeing it before. She lowered the magazine and fixed Sullivan with a baleful stare.
“Not going to die?”
“Would it keep you from yelling at me if I was?” Sullivan asked hopefully.
“No.”
He deflated and threw himself on the couch.
Tobias patted his uninjured shoulder sympathetically and asked Raina, “Ghost’s gone then?”
“Left with your lawyer friend’s retired old man, who now has the USB and says we’re all to forget we saw it. There’s a note for you.”
“Oh, thank you.” On the table, Tobias found an old utility bill still in its envelope. On the back of the envelope was a sketch of a stick figure stabbing another stick figure—this one with a mohawk drawn in jagged black lines—while a third figure with a backpack stood nearby, a speech bubble over its head that proclaimed I AM A FILTHY HARLOT!
Tobias grinned, the last of his tension dissipating. He left the bill on the table and took the envelope upstairs, the irritated drone of Raina’s voice—going on about professional decorum and cost and profit or something—becoming wordless as he went. As far as good-bye notes went, Ghost’s was hardly loquacious, but Tobias got the gist.
Shovel talk, indeed.
In Sullivan’s room, Tobias took out his biochemistry textbook. The cover picture of a double helix against a blue background seemed both alien and innocuous to him now that he would never have to force himself to read another word within it. He reached behind it and pulled out the letter from his birth mother.
He stared at the two pieces of paper for a long time—two messages to him from difficult, potentially toxic people who nonetheless seemed intent on reaching out. Eventually he shrugged. The answer was the same it had always been; some things about him had changed, but others had not. The textbook went into the milk crate on Sullivan’s side of the bed in case he’d been serious about wanting to read it. Ghost’s sketch went into Tobias’s bag. The letter from his birth mother went into the trash can in the bathroom.
It had never been her that he wanted. Only the right to choose for himself.
He got out his phone and sent a thorough update to Church, letting him know that Ghost was off with the ex-cop and safe and sound for the time being. They texted for a while, catching up, and then Sullivan came in and sprawled on the bed.
“Ghost left a note?” Sullivan asked.
“Mmm-hmm. He says hi.”
“I bet.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Tired. My arm hurts. That stuff your dad gave me is wearing off, I think. Or maybe it was never enough in the first place. Either way, this sucks. Your friend is mean.”
Tobias kicked his shoes off, wondering if he could coax Sullivan into taking a nap. “I’ll pass the message along. Speaking of mean friends, Raina’s gone?”
“Yes.”
“She left you in one piece, at least. What’s the verdict?”
“I’m back on subpoenas for lying and sleeping with a client, but I’m not fired because I solved an unsolvable case.”
Tobias squinted, thinking it over. “Sounds fair. Could be worse.”
“Really could be.”
Tobias’s phone buzzed, and he opened the text message from Church: I gotta go too, customers. But you’re okay?
Tobias glanced at Sullivan, whose eyes were closed, the muscles in his brow and jaw already beginning to slacken into sleep. Tobias smiled, feeling stupidly fond, and sent back: Yeah. I’m good.
Epilogue
Fourteen months later
Tobias let himself in through the back door with his key and went through what he privately thought of as his home again process. He took off his shoes and undressed, opening the small cabinet so he could put his dirty clothes in the laundry basket and pull out a pair of black sweats that he kept on a shelf. Lastly, he buckled the black leather collar around his neck.
As he did, that small spot in his head that was always worrying, always wondering, always working, settled.
Oh, he’d thought, the first time he’d put it on. No words existed for that feeling, no description could suffice. It was just...oh.
He made his way toward the kitchen, careful about any debris that might stab him in his bare foot, but it seemed like the first floor could officially be termed done. It wouldn’t be much longer, he knew, before Sullivan started to get that antsy look that meant he was chafing at the enclosed walls. A matter of weeks probably, before they started bugging Sullivan’s sister Therese about a new place to live.
Church had asked him about it last time, suggesting that maybe Tobias should put his foot down if he was bothered by all the moving—three times in the past year—but it truly didn’t bother him. Yes, they were forced to keep their belongings sparse so that moves wouldn’t be stressful, but Tobias’s anxiety about keeping his things neat tended to do better when he kept the clutter to a minimum anyway. Plus, when Therese had fully renovated the house Tobias had first stayed in with Sullivan—and which he still thought of as the Firetrap—he’d been surprisingly affected.
The house that had been in such ruins had been rebuilt, beauty and strength had been restored, and a family was set to be installed. It didn’t feel like chaos so much as growing pains.
There was hope in that. He liked being a part of it.
“Hello,” he called.
“Back here!”
Tobias wound through the family room and down the hall to the cramped kitchen and dining room, where Sullivan was sitting at the scarred table, laptop open in front of him. He lifted his head when Tobias walked in, eyes going, as always, to the collar first.
“I’m wondering,” Sullivan said thoughtfully, “how you feel about romance in big moments.”
Tobias’s stomach rumbled and he turned toward the fridge. “Am I reiterating or is there a new development? Because if it’s the first, the magic words are Valentine’s Day. That should be enough reason to ne
ver do anything romantic for a big moment again.”
That was an understatement. Tobias gave Sullivan a lot of points for trying, but the grease fire-catfish incident had ended in a two-hour wait at a nearby restaurant while they got increasingly snippy with each other because they were hangry. When they’d finally gotten some food in their bellies, they’d decided that pizza and a movie was a valid romantic strategy. They’d employed it countless times since then, and they never had to make a reservation.
Win-win.
“Valentine’s Day is not a big moment.” Sullivan sounded mystified by Tobias’s example. “Valentine’s Day is an illusion of grandiosity. I mean real moments.”
“What moments?” Tobias shuffled some things in the fridge. He’d been planning to try out this new white wine sauce he’d seen in a magazine—
“The sort that come in boxes.”
“Huh?” Tobias opened the crisper and pulled out mushrooms, only to turn and bump into Sullivan, who took the mushrooms out of his hands and put them back in the fridge. “What are you doing?”
“Pizza. It’s already ordered. And I picked a movie. The one with the talking tree-thing you keep saying I should see. It’s all set up.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, this is an outrage,” Sullivan said conversationally, mouth quirked with humor. “I’ve been very well-behaved. Not even a misdemeanor. Can’t a young, innocent soul do something nice for his boyfriend?”
“Show me a young, innocent soul and I’ll ask him.” Tobias eyed Sullivan suspiciously. “Did you break something?”
“No.”
“Oh! Did your loan come through?”
“Not yet, but the finance guy says it will, so I’ve started to think about some of the other important details in the meantime.”
“Like?”
“Like I think I’m gonna call it Sullivan’s Super-Legit Detective Agency.’”
Tobias snorted even as Sullivan grabbed him by his bare shoulders and turned him back toward the dining room. He stopped Tobias just inside the room, and dropped a kiss on the curve where his throat became his shoulder. “But this isn’t about work. I wanted to talk to you about a thought I had.”
Tobias’s stomach abruptly filled with butterflies. It didn’t get better when Sullivan nudged his jaw, directing his attention to a brown box on the table. It was a bit bigger than a men’s watch box, and yeah, Tobias’s whole body was vibrating with the whole nervous tension thing.
“A few weeks ago, you said something about hating leaving in the mornings, remember?” Sullivan asked, sounding a little like he was struggling with some nervous tension too. “You said it was about your collar.”
The memory snapped into place. The comment had been the outcome of a truly horrendous series of events the day before. It’d been his first class session after being out with the flu and he’d been exhausted. He’d showed up for class to find that while he finished his half of a group project from his sickbed, his perfectly healthy partner hadn’t.
Tobias was studying Human Services now, concentrating in nonprofit studies, planning to eventually use his skills to help smaller nonprofits that didn’t have a lot of money figure out how to make their noble intentions self-sustaining. There was a lot of grant writing in his future. And he loved it, loved the classes and his work-study and his internship, but he’d spent the rest of that day not only catching up but helping his ass of a partner so they could get a passing grade.
Coughing, frustrated, and woozy, he’d come out of the library that night to find a voicemail from Sullivan that started with “Don’t panic, because I’m fine,” and ended with, “So the car is completely fucked but I’m really fine.”
He’d held on long enough to rush home, where he found Sullivan bruised but cracking jokes about teenage drivers, and promptly lost his shit. There’d been kisses and cuddling and ice cream and The Great British Baking Show—Tobias was convinced that nothing bad could happen in the world while someone, somewhere, was watching that show—and sweet, easy sex that was mindful of Sullivan’s incredibly minor injuries, and by the time he woke up in the morning, he’d been much more together.
Until it was time to leave the house and he needed to take his collar off.
His fingers had trembled and his stomach had been sick, and he’d almost been in tears at the idea of it, and Sullivan had had to unbuckle it for him. As soon as Sullivan had set it back on its shelf, all the fragilities from the day before had seemed to reawaken and he’d found himself turning to bury his face in Sullivan’s shoulder.
“I’m okay,” Sullivan had whispered over and over. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Anyone was bound to be shaky when the person they loved most in the whole world had a near-miss like that, but Tobias knew it was counterproductive to his sanity to dwell, so he’d forced himself to put aside the close call. After a while, he forgot about it entirely.
Except for the ten seconds every morning when he removed his collar and hid it in a box.
“I remember,” Tobias said now, and every muscle in his body went taut.
“I’ve been thinking,” Sullivan said. As he spoke, his nimble fingers were working at the clasp at the back of Tobias’s neck.
He was undoing Tobias’s collar. It never came off when he was at home, never, not even in the shower—they had a special oil they put on it to keep the leather supple for that very reason, so it would never come off and now Sullivan was removing it, and Tobias clamped his hands down on the buckle, probably crushing Sullivan’s fingers, and blurted, “Red.”
Sullivan instantly stepped back, his hands pulling loose and falling away, eyes closing for a second in sudden understanding. “Shit, sorry, that’s—this one’s on me. Oh, fuck, I did this all wrong.” Sullivan winced. “Can I touch you?”
Tobias nodded and Sullivan tugged him close. “I’m sorry,” Sullivan murmured. “I’m not leaving, you’re not leaving, we’re good.”
Tobias began to feel downright stupid around that point, because he knew that Sullivan wasn’t leaving, he knew it in his bones, but his collar was just, it was sacred, okay—Sullivan said, “Let me show you what I got for you. Then you can tell me I’m an idiot and we can forget this happened and have pizza and guardians of the tree-things.”
Sullivan held the box out to him, his eyes were questioning and hopeful, his teeth digging into his bottom lip.
“Open it.”
Tobias took a breath and did, not sure what to expect. The box was too big for a ring, and Sullivan wasn’t a ring person anyway, and while it might be the size of a man’s watch, Tobias couldn’t understand why a watch would mean he would need to take off his collar, so—
It was neither a ring nor a watch.
It was a wrist cuff.
The same expensive, plain black leather that his collar was made of, roughly three inches wide, with two small silver buckles that would hold it closed. There was nothing else to it—no skulls or rivets or elaborate engravings. It wasn’t jewelry or decoration. It was a symbol of ownership. He couldn’t breathe. It was perfect.
“This way you can take us with you wherever you go.” Sullivan shifted his weight, his gaze flying back and forth between the cuff and Tobias’s face, gauging his reaction. “Lots of guys wear these, so no one will think anything of it. You can wear it to school and work and you won’t have to take it off when you leave the house. So I thought, instead of your collar—”
Tobias threw himself into Sullivan’s arms, and Sullivan laughed against his cheek. Sullivan buckled it on, and they both studied it for a second, dark against the pale skin of Tobias’s wrist. The constriction felt strange, bulky and obvious, but his collar had been like that at first too, and now it was as natural to him as a limb. This would be too, eventually, and in the meantime, the strange, palpable weight was glorious.
Sullivan bent his head an
d kissed the meaty pad of muscle at the base of his thumb. “It looks gorgeous on you.”
“Thank you,” Tobias said. “I love it.”
“That’s the idea.” Sullivan lifted his eyebrows. “Is that...are we green?”
“Can I still wear my collar when we play?”
“You can wear it whenever you want. It doesn’t have to be one or the other, I guess. I just wanted you to have something you could take with you.”
“Then we’re green,” Tobias agreed, and pressed up on both toes to kiss him.
A second later, the doorbell rang.
“Shit, hold that thought,” Sullivan said. “Gotta get that before the pizza boy thinks he’s being Punk’d.”
Tobias looked down at the cuff, so innocuous in design. His family wouldn’t second-guess it; neither would Sullivan’s. Church and Ghost would suspect what it meant, but Tobias didn’t mind that. Church didn’t care about whatever Tobias got up to as long as he was happy, and these days Ghost was more likely to raise his eyebrow judgmentally than stab Sullivan. While Tobias couldn’t guess whether that aversion to violence was the result of everything Ghost had been through in the past year or a slow-growing tolerance of Sullivan, either way, he wouldn’t complain.
When Sullivan came back, it was with a large pie and a 2-liter of soda, and they settled on the couch to eat and watch the movie. Twenty minutes later, with the pizza cold and the movie completely forgotten, they’d moved to the bedroom, Sullivan was slicking his cock with lube, and Tobias was half-wrecked beneath him from trying not to come.
“You’re in rough shape,” Sullivan noted, amused, and Tobias didn’t have the wherewithal to argue. Some days it was harder to hold on than others.
