Chapter Text
ACT I
The kitchen light was too bright.
Levi had noticed that before, months ago maybe, but he'd never changed the bulb. It was the kind of detail that sat in the back of his mind like a task on a list he'd never write down, something that existed only in the space between *I should* and *can't afford*. The fluorescent tube above the counter hummed at a frequency that was almost inaudible, almost nothing, almost easy to forget about until the apartment was quiet enough to hear it.
Tonight, the apartment was quiet enough, even with company there meant to fill the silence.
Zeke was sitting across from him at the kitchen table, legs stretched out beneath it so that his knee pressed against Levi's calf. He did that, took up space without asking, arranged himself in rooms the way some people arranged furniture, like everything was supposed to fit around him. The remains of dinner sat between them. Zeke had cooked. He always cooked when he came over, something elaborate and warm that filled the apartment with the smell of garlic and butter, and Levi had eaten it without comment, the food was good and saying *thank you* felt like accepting a debt.
"You're quiet tonight," Zeke said.
"I'm always quiet."
"Quieter than that."
Something in his voice made Levi look at him. Zeke's glasses sat pushed up on his forehead. He didn't need them, wore them like an accessory, a prop for a character he played during the day. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows. Blond hair curling against his neck where the length had gotten away from him. He rarely took the time to cut it. He rarely took the time for anything that didn't serve a purpose.
"Long day," Levi said.
Zeke nodded like that was enough. It wasn’t, but he took it anyway. Levi had never been someone who said much. Zeke said just enough to keep the rest hidden. It had worked for eleven months. Levi didn’t know why he was counting.
Without a word Zeke stood and slowly came around the table. His hand found the back of Levi's neck, thumb tracing along the line of muscle there, and Levi let his eyes close, the touch warm, his body responding to warmth even when the rest of him was somewhere else. Zeke leaned down, his warm breath ghosted against Levi's ear.
"Come to bed."
There was no bed, because Levi slept on the couch. Had slept on the couch for two years, since the other two rooms had gone dark and stayed that way. Zeke knew this and said *bed* anyway. He had a talent for talking about things as they should be rather than as they were. What he meant was the couch, the blankets folded with military precision, the space that was barely large enough for one person and certainly not for two.
Levi turned his head and Zeke kissed him before the motion was finished.
It was wet.
It was always wet and hungry, too much tongue and too much saliva. A desperate appetite in his mouth that never matched the patience everywhere else. Levi tasted garlic and wine and something underneath that was just Zeke, familiar in a way that had long since stopped meaning anything.
He kissed back, not out of want. The evening was long and the apartment was quiet and his body had learned the choreography of this months ago. Lean in, open your mouth, let his hand slide from your neck to your jaw, let him tilt your face.
Zeke pulled him up from the chair. His glasses slid from his forehead down onto his nose from the motion, and he didn't bother pushing them back up. They moved the few steps to the couch, and Zeke sat down first, pulling Levi onto his lap with both hands on his hips, and Levi straddled him. That's what came next. That was always what came next.
Zeke's hands traveled beneath his shirt, fingers spread wide across Levi's lower back. He pressed him closer until the friction was immediate and impossible to ignore. Zeke was already half-hard. Levi could feel it against his inner thigh, the heat radiating through two layers of fabric. Zeke shifted under him to get more of it, hips rolling upward in a motion that was slow and deliberate and entirely for himself.
Levi let him. He let his weight settle, let the pressure build between them, let his hips find the rhythm because his body knew the tempo by now. Zeke's hands moved to his ass and pulled him down harder, grinding up into him, and Levi's breath caught, not from want but from mechanics. His body was a system that responded to input. It always had been.
"Fuck, you feel good," Zeke murmured against his throat.
Levi said nothing. His hands were on Zeke's shoulders, gripping the fabric of his shirt. Levi focused on what was physical: Zeke's mouth on his collarbone, teeth scraping skin, the wet drag of his tongue moving lower. Zeke's thumbs hooking into the waistband of his pants, pulling them down over his hips with a practiced efficiency that said he'd done this exact motion a hundred times and would do it a hundred more. The cold air against his skin. The heat of Zeke's hand replacing it, wrapping around him without hesitation, and Levi's hips pushed into the grip before he could decide whether to let them.
He was hard and his body did exactly what it always had. That had never been the problem.
When Zeke shifted them, Levi ended up on his back, the couch narrow enough that his shoulder pressed into the backrest. Zeke above him, one hand braced beside Levi's head, the other working between them, fingers wrapping around both of them together, the slick friction of skin against skin. He stroked them slow at first, thumb dragging over the heads on the upstroke, and Levi felt the tension build low in his stomach, felt his body pull taut toward something it wanted even if the rest of him didn't. The sensation was sharp enough to pull a sound from Levi's throat that he didn't permit. Zeke took it as encouragement and picked up the pace, his grip tightening, his breathing ragged against Levi's neck, watching Levi's face with an expression that looked like tenderness from a distance. Up close, it looked like hunger.
"Look at me," Zeke said.
Behind those useless glasses that sat crooked on his face, Zeke's eyes were dark, his pupils blown, his lips parted and slick. There was nothing especially beautiful about his face. Levi had simply looked at it long enough that it had once started to feel that way. And there it was again, the thing he always felt in these moments, the thing he'd never named, naming it would have ended this months ago.
Nothing.
Not disgust.
Not discomfort. Just an absence. A room where something should have been and wasn't. Zeke moved faster, tightened his grip, made a low sound in his throat, and Levi arched into it, his body knew how, and closing his eyes made it easier.
He came first, quiet and controlled, his hand fisted in the couch cushion. Zeke followed seconds later, messier, louder, pressing his forehead against Levi's shoulder and breathing hard like he'd run somewhere and arrived.
The silence afterward was the part Levi hated most. Zeke was still breathing into his neck when Levi reached for the tissues on the coffee table and wiped his chest and stomach clean with quick, efficient strokes. The mess was gone before Zeke had even lifted his head.
Zeke placed a soft kiss against his jaw, the touch light but deliberate. The afterimage of the man he probably was with other people, in other rooms. Then Levi felt him reach down beside the couch, the particular shift of weight that meant he was looking for something without wanting to be seen looking. His phone. Somewhere in his jeans on the floor. The fabric rustled as the screen lit up, its cold white glow illuminating his face.
Levi observed him quietly as Zeke turned his attention to the screen. Something crossed his face that Levi had cataloged a hundred times. A micro-expression, gone before it fully formed, the particular rearrangement of features that Zeke's face performed when a lie was being assembled behind it. His jaw set. His eyes narrowed by a fraction so small it was almost nothing. Almost.
Levi knew that face better than his own.
"I have to go," Zeke said.
"Now."
"It's... something at work. They need me to come in." He rubbed the back of his head and looked away, and the gesture was so automatic that Levi wondered if Zeke even knew he did it anymore.
Levi didn't move while his pants were still around his thighs. Zeke was already tucking himself in, already standing, already putting distance between the couch and the door as if the transition from *inside Levi's space* to *gone* was a muscle he'd trained.
"At midnight," Levi said.
"I know. I'm sorry. It's..."
"What do you do, Zeke?"
The question landed in the room like something dropped from height. Zeke halted, his hand caught on his shirt as the simple gesture of straightening it stalled halfway.
"What?"
"Your job. What do you actually do."
"Levi, we've talked about..."
"We haven't. That's the point. I've asked and you've answered with something that isn't an answer and I've let it go, every single time, because I thought..." He stopped because he didn't know what he'd thought. That it would change, maybe, that one day Zeke would come in and sit down and say *here's what I do, here's where I go, here's why I disappear for days and come back smelling like smoke and adrenaline.* "Why do you have to leave in the middle of the night?"
"I can't tell you everything right now."
"You can't tell me anything ever. That's not *right now*. That's the whole time."
Zeke ran a hand through his hair and for a moment looked genuinely torn. That was worse than the lying because it meant he knew what this did. He knew, and he did it anyway.
"There are things I'm involved in that are... complicated. I'm protecting you by not..."
"Don't."
Levi sat up on the couch and pulled his pants back over his hips while Zeke was still mid-sentence. The gesture was small and domestic and it made the whole thing uglier than it needed to be.
Zeke's mouth opened but nothing useful came out. His phone lit up again in his hand, the screen bright for a second and tilted just enough that Levi caught the edge of it. Enough to make out numbers, a grid, something that looked like coordinates, a name he didn't recognize.
Levi looked away, his curiosity buried under too much anger to care about the details.
"I think you should go," Levi said.
"Levi..."
"I'm not asking."
Zeke opened his mouth. Closed it. There was something there. Something he wanted to say, something that pulled at the muscles around his eyes like grief or guilt or the kind of regret that comes too late to be useful. He took a step toward the door, then another.
"I'll call you," he said.
Levi didn't answer.
The door opened quietly before closing behind him. Not the way doors close in arguments, slammed, rattled, dramatic. This was the sound of something ending without a scene, without a final line, without the satisfaction of a clean break. Just the click of the latch and then the quiet,nothing left but the fluorescent light humming above the counter at the same frequency it always had, the only sound in the apartment that never left.
Levi sat on the couch that smelled like both of them and stared at the door and did not cry. He didn't do that, never had, and there was nothing to cry about. You can't mourn something that was never fully there.
He got up and worked through the apartment without thinking. He folded the blanket, washed the dishes and wiped the counter where Zeke's wine glass had left a ring.
The apartment was too big, but he was used to that by now. You get used to everything.
The sun was barely above the roofline when Levi's alarm went off. The same time it always did, the same flat tone he'd never bothered to change. He was already awake and had been for twenty minutes, lying on the couch with his eyes on the ceiling, counting the cracks he'd memorized months ago.
He got up, folded the blanket, wiped down the counter and put the kettle on. He made his tea the way he always did, black, no sugar, in the mug with the chipped handle, and drank it standing at the counter while the early light cut long shadows across the street.
The laundry basket sat by the bathroom door where he'd left it the night before. When he picked it up the left handle snapped off with a dry crack, the kind of break that had been coming for weeks. He shifted the basket against his hip, held it from underneath, and made a mental note to fix it later with glue.
The washing machine was in the basement, one of the two advantages of the apartment. The other being the price, which he'd talked down after his boss offered it in lieu of a bonus three years ago. *Direct access to the lower level*, the man had said, as though that were something to want. Levi had taken it because the numbers worked. That was all he'd required from a place to live for a long time.
The basement door stuck if you didn't lift the latch while you pulled. He flicked the light switch on and the bulb in the basement stuttered, went dark, stuttered again, then settled into a thin yellowish flicker that made the shadows pulse. Levi went down the stairs with the basket balanced against his side, his free hand on the railing out of habit. The air changed halfway down, colder, damper, that particular smell of old concrete and water that never quite dried. The windows had been boarded over after the third break-in, plywood nailed flush across every frame as a temporary fix, but somewhere along the way the plywood had stopped being temporary, and now no light came in regardless of the hour.
He crossed to the washing machine, set the basket down, crouched, pulled the door open, and started loading. Shirts first then pants, the order he'd settled into without deciding to. His hands worked through the familiar motions while the bulb flickered its unsteady light across the concrete floor. He reached for the next shirt as his hand stopped, held mid-air by something his eyes had caught before his mind had processed it.
In the glass of the front-loader door, warped and darkened by the curve of it, there was something on the floor behind him. A shape that didn't belong, long and horizontal, pressed against the base of the water pipes along the far wall. The reflection was poor, smudged with detergent residue he couldn't get off, but the shape was unmistakable.
Levi set the shirt down on top of the basket, straightened slowly, turned, and looked.
There was a man on the concrete floor, on his back, one leg bent at an angle and the other stretched out. His arms fallen open at his sides the way they fall when someone stops moving mid-step. He looked like he'd come through the gap at the far end of the basement, where one of the window boards had been pried away from the frame, and made it three feet before whatever was keeping him upright had given out. His clothes were dark and torn in places, his hair matted, his skin so pale it looked like the color had been drained from it. Where his sleeves had ridden up Levi could see the cuts, thin lines crossing the skin at different angles, some fresh and darkly scabbed, others older, faded to white.
In the unsteady light Levi couldn't tell if his chest was moving.
He looked at him the way he looked at columns of numbers that didn't add up, quietly, taking inventory of something that wasn't supposed to be here.
The man's head was tilted to the side, the back of it resting against the wall as though even gravity had been too much. His features were hard to read in the flickering light, but the bones were visible, cheekbones and jaw and collarbone where his shirt had pulled open. He'd been big once, Levi could tell from the frame, the width of shoulders that didn't match the hollowed-out rest of him. Whatever had brought him here had taken everything else.
Levi crouched, slow, keeping his weight balanced, and from this distance he could see the eyes moving behind the closed lids, rapid and restless, tracking something in a dream or a fever or whatever place this man was in that wasn't a stranger's basement.
He knew this picture from a long time ago. Kenny had kept company with men who looked like this, hollow-faced and shaking, and had called them junkies the way you call a stray cat a pest. Levi had been twelve, maybe thirteen, watching them come and go through the apartment, and this man on his basement floor looked the same, the pallor, the cuts and the body consuming itself from the inside out.
He didn't leave, and he didn't call anyone either. He went upstairs, filled a glass of water, came back down, and set it on the floor within arm's reach. Then he found the old blanket on top of one of the storage boxes, the one he used when the machine leaked, shook it out, folded it rough, and crouched beside the man again. He lifted his head just enough, the hair coarse and cold against his fingers, and slid the blanket underneath. The man's head settled back without any resistance at all.
Levi wiped his hands on his pants and looked at the basement around him, the drying rack, the tax files, the broken chair. There was nothing here worth stealing and nothing worth protecting, and the man's eyes were still moving behind his lids.
He went back up the stairs and locked the basement door. The washing machine was still open downstairs, half-loaded, the basket sitting next to it with one broken handle.
He put on his shoes and left for work.
At no point during the bus ride did he ask himself why he hadn't called anyone. The man on the floor had looked the way people look when calling someone is the last thing that would help them, and Levi had looked like that once, and Kenny hadn't called anyone either.
When he came home the apartment was the same. He changed his shoes, hung up his jacket, put the kettle on, and went to the basement door and listened. He heard nothing, so he unlocked it, opened it, and went down.
The man was still on the floor in the same position. Levi stood at the bottom of the stairs while the bulb flickered above in the same uncertain rhythm as the morning.
He went back upstairs, locked the door, and finished his tea.