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“He can stay,” the man says, glancing away from the painting as Jackson slinks out the background on bare feet. His hands are clasped respectfully behind his back, like he’s in church or something. He looks unassuming, could be an accountant or somebody’s dad. Not like he let thousands of people get sick on his supplements. But that’s the thing about people who don’t get their hands dirty, Jackson thinks. They never look the part.
So Jackson beams, jumping the back of the long architectural nightmare of a leather sofa and slinging one leg over Seunghyun’s. He winks at their guest and swipes Seunghyun’s scotch as well, though he hates the taste.
“Thought you’d never ask,” he says, and doesn’t startle when Seunghyun’s hand settles over the back of his neck in a claim. His skin burns. “Daddy says you’re our new neighbor?” he drawls, and the grip tightens in warning. Funny Seunghyun should choose now of all times to be bothered, when Jackson has said far worse to rile him.
It’s not a terrible painting, he supposes, but not the sort he’d have a religious experience over. Three hulking pieces of wood for canvas, edged in gold, and the colors are vivid but there’s no form to it. Just noise and confusion. But their mark is standing just a foot away from the brushstrokes and he can’t tell it’s not the genuine article, much less that Seunghyun finished it last week.
“You sure you want to do this?” Mark asks, pitched a little too casual as he rifles under the bed and comes up with a bag of apple chips Jackson was saving for later.
He holds up another shirt for inspection. How many undersized black tanks has he packed, they’re all starting to run together. “Why wouldn’t I be? Sitting on my ass for once babysitting Top? Sounds like a snooze compared to busting up ex special ops. My shoulder’s still crunchy from last time I bailed you guys out.”
“You’re gonna pretend to be his boyfriend and you won’t even say Seunghyun’s name,” Mark crunches a chip in contemplation. “These are stale. And you’re being thick.”
“That’s not his name.” Jackson chucks a pair of running shoes into his bag. “I don’t know his real name. And neither do you.”
“Stop trying so hard,” Seunghyun says when they’re alone. Jackson glares at him and bites off half a banana with undue force.
“Who says I’m trying?” he shoots back with his mouth full, but Seunghyun doesn’t even give him a grimace. He’s not the sort of man who loses control, Jackson thinks sourly. He always chooses what slips through. Nothing is an accident.
They just have to make it to the housewarming party, he tells himself. One week until they invite all the best snobs from their building and Jiyong can have at the mark’s place downstairs. Now that Seunghyun’s buttered him up with the excuse of his art collection, one of the mark’s favorite painters conveniently displayed, they have a hook to tug him back. More of his pieces safely delivered from storage in time for the party, he’d claimed, right about the time his free hand had curled warm over Jackson’s thigh.
“You’re overacting,” Seunghyun continues. He’s standing in that patch of sunlight near the west windows that affords the best and most casual view of the traffic coming and going from the building’s entrance. His instincts aren’t bad, for a civilian. “Like an amateur.”
Something hot and tight coils between Jackson’s lungs. “Sorry, daddy,” he croons. “We can’t all be pros like you.”
Thing is, Jackson likes being part of a crew. Those years he was alone, calling himself a retrieval specialist because common thieves couldn’t hold their own in a knife fight like he could, they can’t measure up. Yeah, he thought it was nuts when Jaebum rounded them up, some ex insurance investigator hack on the wrong end of a crisis. Telling them they could help people. That they might even like it.
But he was right about them all. Jackson knows how to hit. Mark knows how to hack. Jinyoung and Jaebum don’t make bad plans, they’ve got the vision, they think a dozen moves ahead where Jackson would smash and run. Jiyong can steal anything (and he’s fucking crazy, dropping down elevator shafts and off the sides of buildings, but Jackson can admire the brass tacks he has on him).
And Top. He’s a grifter. He lies like Jackson never knew people could lie. Doesn’t just put on a new name and a fresh set of clothes, he can change his voice, carry himself like a stranger, and when he wears a cover he knows it like a lover.
Some of them had history, when they fell in together. Jaebum had chased them all, one time or another. Jiyong and Seunghyun partnered sometimes, and still have nicknames for each other that no one else uses. Jinyoung and Mark had a three year online chess rivalry, one they’re still dragging out.
But they only seemed to worry about Jackson, and Top. How they’d crossed paths more than once angling to steal the same diamonds or Tang dynasty daggers. How Jackson had nearly killed him, supposedly. It was a two story drop, he doesn’t bother saying. There was an awning, grow a pair.
So when Top — Seunghyun, that’s what he calls himself now — saunters into a debriefing late with his coffee, Jackson won’t be the one who glares over unfinished business. He won’t give up his spot on this crew just because Seunghyun comes with it.
“Hey baby,” he blows a kiss from across the conference table. Solid mahogany, what the fuck is Jinyoung’s budget for this place. “You spend too long thinking about me in the shower again?”
Of course Seunghyun bats his eyes without missing a beat. “When am I not thinking about your sweet ass?”
Mark retches, and Bam makes suitably intrigued noises on speakerphone, Jaebum nudges them back to their new job, and this is how it always goes. It’s fine.
They break down the empty cardboard boxes weighted with newspaper, the ones meant to make them look like they were still unpacking. Three days and Seunghyun has no trouble passing the time between updates from Jaebum. He naps on the long sofa, smokes on the balcony, reads paperback novels printed in Russian.
Jackson itches out of his skin. Runs from one bridge down the length of the bay to the next, until his legs are so unsteady he has to walk back inland, mumbling distracted apologies to pedestrians he bumps along the way. Seunghyun’s emergency signal would cut through his earpiece, but still Jackson made him bring out the .38 before he left, stood there until Seunghyun scoffed and checked the magazine and the safety. Their mark should only be a civilian himself, but all that blood money buys paranoia and nasty security.
“Maybe I should stay,” Jackson squinted. “It’s like leaving a baby.”
Seunghyun snapped the slide back into place, metal louder than a slap. “Are you worried about me now?” he asked warmly, pitched all dark with a rasp that always rubs against Jackson’s skin. Maybe Seunghyun knows it. Probably. “Here I thought you might take the opportunity to drop me out a higher window and finish the job.”
He doesn’t know if Seunghyun and Jiyong fuck. He knows they drink together, and Seunghyun smiles at him in a fond, annoyed way he doesn’t use on anybody else. Jackson doesn’t know much of anything about Seunghyun, after all this time. Not even how he managed to fence that Francis Bacon after Jackson got saddled with a copy instead and an angry buyer on his hands. Two years and he’s never caught a whisper of that creepy thing being sold, and Jackson’s asked.
Privately, he can admire the forgery. Seemed a shame to toss it, even before he knew Seunghyun was the pretentious savant behind the brush. So it sits in a storage locker, wrapped in a quilt. Seunghyun never asked him what he did with it, and Jackson’s never asked why Seunghyun would put his face out there, paint a target on himself, when he could make all his money behind the scenes.
Jackson gets used to it. Not having the answers.
After the botched wedding job the crew got him and his concussion back to the loft, and Jaebum never said that Jackson failed them by going down like a bag of rocks when they needed him fighting. Jackson knew it was probably safe to sleep. Probably. That he wouldn’t lose time again. But Mark sat up with him in the hall anyway, and kept him talking. And without announcing himself, without sparing a glance their way, Seunghyun brought them sweet black tea and fresh sliced mango. To keep Jackson’s blood sugar up, presumably, but he didn’t say so, just left the tray and retired to his armchair with a book.
He sat there all night, and never said a word, but some time around dawn Jackson blinked his gritty eyes and he was gone.
What happened in Macau, the others think they know. Seunghyun gets plenty of mileage out of telling the story, how he hit the rose bushes and landed just shy of a pretty lawyer and her whippet out for a stroll, and somehow in minutes had her escorted on his arm and a warm bed for the night.
Jackson never contradicts his version. It was a short fall, he always says. Builds character, you’re welcome.
They don’t talk about the hush. It was a summer night, the windows flung open, quiet thick as tar over the whole historic district. The house was still, not a whisper of alarm. When Jackson and Seunghyun, who called himself Daegil then, regarded each other at opposite ends of the hall, they did so without a word.
Jackson advanced, and Seunghyun stepped back. Again, and he was holding the porcelain jar out the open window. A small thing to be five hundred years old, and worth so much to so many people. When Jackson stepped forward again, the grifter had hissed softly in warning, but even in the dark Jackson thought he might be smiling. Just a bit. It made Jackson think of blood in his teeth, the satisfaction of the first punch thrown. It hadn’t been so long since the last time they met, in Vienna, where Seunghyun had picked his pocket and left him to steal a forged Francis Bacon.
Maybe it was the quiet. Nothing to say, nothing to threaten. Just a stolen moment and a sleeping house. But he liked the way Seunghyun sucked in a single unsteady breath when he stepped bodily into him. How his lashes had flickered in the dark when Jackson smoothed his hands down his ribs and found no weapons.
For a man who could be anyone, Seunghyun didn’t kiss like he knew the trick of it. His mouth was too hard, like he only knew how to press back with his entire body, always the threat of his teeth. He might have muttered a curse, too soft for Jackson to catch, in the space between breaths. Heat was creeping up past the collar of his shirt, through the layers of his suit, and Jackson could feel him.
At most, he thinks, it took thirty seconds. For Seunghyun to ease into the kiss at last, his tongue sweeping into Jackson’s mouth. He wasn’t holding the jar out of reach at all, they were fitted together so tight no glimmer of light could pass through. And Jackson thought about a narrow bed waiting for him, how Seunghyun would look against the sheets. If his skin might be gold all over like his throat, his careful hands.
There would always be more old shit to steal, he might have let himself think, before Seunghyun’s free hand brushed across the knife in his pocket.
No matter how hard he’s tried, Jackson can’t remember the expression on Seunghyun’s face before he swiped the urn and flipped him out the open window all in one breath.
But they don’t talk about it.
“You know what I don’t understand?” Jackson leans over the back of the sofa and lets his wet hair drip onto Seunghyun’s newspaper. Who the fuck still reads the newspaper, anyway.
“The difference between Kandinsky and de Kooning? Personal space? Basic math?”
One night until the party, just one, and the late afternoon sun fills up the apartment like a halogen bulb, every edge a bright filament. The hours are coming so slow Jackson has to grit his teeth and count the minutes instead. He hasn’t been sleeping well, down the hall from Seunghyun. It’s so fucking quiet.
He shifts beneath his robe, damp heat still trapped against his skin from the shower. “I don’t understand why you kept the Bacon. You must’ve had a buyer lined up.”
“You don’t understand,” Seunghyun repeats. A baffled crease is etched between his brows and he tugs off his fake glasses to regard Jackson properly. “You’re serious.”
“Am I dressed like a clown? Nobody’s here, give me a straight answer for once.”
Body language. That’s why Seunghyun is angled away from him, pouring himself a drink at the bar cart. No ice, and he always takes ice. This is what he does with marks, to demonstrate his nonchalance.
“I kept it because it’s beautiful, and I’ve loved it for years,” Seunghyun addresses his glass. His edges are softer, his usual suit traded for a sweater that zips up his throat. If he’s boiling under there, he hides it well. Like he hides everything else. “I’m sentimental. I wanted it, so I took it.”
Jackson watches the line of his jaw, sharp as a paper crease. “I don’t believe you.”
“Because you don’t understand art,” Seunghyun nods, pitying, and finally spares him a glance over one shoulder. But his gaze slips to the window, the eastern skyline.
“Fuck art,” Jackson laughs and the feeling knifes through his ribs. “I don’t believe you because you’re a liar.”
The glass meets metal sharply. Oh, he has his full attention now. No accent, no affectation. Seunghyun closes the distance and strokes his thumb into the damp hollow of Jackson’s throat, fingertips grazing his pulse. Jackson can withstand interrogation but just now he can’t tamp down the bloodbeat in his ears.
Seunghyun tilts his head down and murmurs against Jackson’s hairline, “we’re being watched. The roof, behind you. Give it a minute and we’ll step back to the bedroom.” And then his nose is nudging beneath the hinge of Jackson’s jaw, roughened breath fanning over his throat.
“This is so easy for you,” Jackson hears himself say, shoulders tensing. “Bet you pick knives off all the guys like this.”
The hands kneading Jackson’s hips through the fabric of his robe go still. “So is that what I did, make you kiss me? Now that’s impressive. I should take this show on the road.” Quiet as the words are, something brittle shakes his voice.
“If I were a better liar,” Seunghyun says against his mouth, “I would have had you already. You’d be sore from a round this morning, or maybe over the table at lunch, and you’d still wrap your legs around me and beg me to give it to you again on the floor. I’d make it easy for you, and tell you it didn’t mean anything, and you could use me any time you need to forget.”
When Seunghyun steps away, his eyes are darker than Jackson has ever seen. Not even the reflected shards of gold sunlight can reach them.
“I have never— lied to you,” he says. “Live with it.”