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Blu's house is small, and Rhett has known this for longer than he should admit to knowing it. He's known it from the dented clasp on the lunchbox; from portions that got smaller week by week in a way Blu never mentioned and Rhett couldn't stop tracking; from the salt and lemon packed in their own containers because the cafeteria options that were safe for him were also shit. He pieced together the shape of this house from its edges, its artifacts, the way Blu folded the foil back around leftover rice with the care of someone who didn't get a second serving.
The front door sticks. Blu shoulders it open and Rhett is on the step behind him, blood crusting on his face, hands stuffed into his jacket because he doesn't trust them not to shake.
"Shoes off," Blu says.
Rhett kicks his shoes off. There's a second pair of Blu's by the door, older, the soles worn so smooth they've gone shiny. Narrow hallway. Coat hook with one coat. A table pushed against the wall bearing a key bowl, a folded newspaper, and a framed photo Rhett won't look at because Blu is already ahead of him, moving with that tight-shouldered walk, and Rhett follows the way he follows; without deciding to.
In the kitchen — also small, also clean, — there are two plates in the dish rack. Two cups. Two bowls. A kettle on the stove, its bottom blackened from years of use. And on the counter by the sink, the lunchbox, open, empty, washed, with the dented clasp Rhett recognizes the way he'd recognize Blu's handwriting. Beside it: the salt. The lemon. Sitting there like they've been sitting there for years, tiny soldiers of a kitchen that makes do.
Rhett's throat locks up. The cut on his face stings with the tightness, the dried blood cracking where his skin pulls.
"Sit down," Blu says. He's up on his toes reaching for a plastic bin above the stove, and his vest rides up, and there's a strip of blue skin at his waistband, and Rhett stares hard at a grout line between the kitchen tiles. The cut hasn't stopped stinging since the cafeteria. It throbs in time with his heartbeat, low and persistent, a metronome he can't shut off.
"Where."
"My room. Light's better there."
Blu's room is at the end of the hall, and the door is open, and inside it the bed is made so tight the sheets could bounce a quarter. Textbooks on the desk, stacked by size like someone who respects the spines. Prayer mat rolled neatly at the foot of the bed. One window, cracked barely an inch, thin curtains doing nothing to stop the late afternoon from throwing a gold stripe across the floorboards.
What the room smells like is Blu. That clean soap his aunt must buy in bulk — something faintly sweet, drugstore floral — and underneath it, the warmer thing, the thing that's not soap but skin, sleep, hours spent breathing in a room this size. Rhett breathes it and the inhale stretches the cut and the cut stings and his face tightens against it.
"Sit." Blu nods at the bed; the only surface not occupied by folded clothes or books.
Rhett sits on the edge and the mattress dips deep under him and the frame underneath is metal and thin and creaks, and the sheets are cool against his palms where he braces himself, fingers spread wide, pressing down like the bed might move if he doesn't hold it still. His hands ache. The crescent marks from his own nails during the fight are still raw in his palms, and the ache layers under the sting of the cut, one pain stacked on another, and he can't separate them, can't figure out which one is making his breath come uneven.
Blu cracks open the first aid kit on the desk. Cotton pads; brown bottle; tape. He tears a pad from its packaging with his teeth because one of his hands is already unscrewing the bottle cap, and that efficiency shouldn't make Rhett's chest hurt, but it does, or maybe that's the cut. The antiseptic smell hits the room all at once, sharp and chemical, muscling out the soap and the skin-warmth and replacing them with something medical, something that belongs in a nurse's office and not in a bedroom with a prayer mat and thin curtains.
Blu turns. Walks to the bed. Stands between Rhett's knees.
Rhett's wrists lock flat against the mattress.
He's sitting and Blu is standing and from here Blu is taller than him, which doesn't happen, which has never happened; Rhett is always the big one, the tall one, the body that fills doorframes — and now he's looking up. His chin lifts and the cut pulls at the edge and he can feel the scab crack, a thin wet line sliding toward his jaw, and he doesn't wipe it.
"This'll sting," Blu says, which is funny, because it hasn't stopped.
The antiseptic pad touches the wound and Rhett's whole skull lights up — a bright, clean, vicious flare that bolts from the bridge of his nose to his temple, and his head snaps back and his teeth slam together and a noise comes out of him, guttural, bitten off, embarrassing. Blu's free hand catches the side of his face; palm flat, fingers hooking behind his ear, gripping firm, holding his head in place the way you'd hold a cracked thing you were gluing back together.
"Don't move," Blu says. Quiet. Not a request.
Rhett can't. Blu's hand on his face and the antiseptic burning along the cut in a line that's wet and cold and hot at once — he can't sort them. The chemical burn and the warmth of Blu's palm are arriving through the same skin and his body is treating them as one signal; one long, throbbing, continuous sensation that's part pain and part something else, something that has absolutely no business being in the same nerve as pain. Blu dabs along the wound, methodical, his bottom lip caught in his teeth, brow pinched, eyes tracking the cotton with that focus he gives everything — and his thumb rests at the hinge of Rhett's jaw and presses slightly every time he adjusts and the press doesn't separate from the burn. It's all one thing. It's all one hot, throbbing, continuous thing, and Rhett's breath is shaking and that makes it worse because the air moves his face under Blu's hand and the cut stings and Blu's palm is warm and his body can't tell which one is making his lungs stutter.
Blu's knuckles are against his cheek. The split ones, the raw ones. Rhett can feel the torn edges of skin, rough and raised, pressed against the smooth of his jaw. Blu's damage and his own, made in the same fight, born in the same lunge; pressed together now, wound against wound.
"It's clean," Blu says, and pulls the cotton pad away. It's rust-colored; he drops it on the desk without looking. His hand stays on Rhett's face.
His hand stays on Rhett's face, and the sting lingers, fading from sharp chemical burn into something deeper, something seated in the flesh of the wound that pulses with his heartbeat. Blu's thumb is still on his jaw. The pad of it shifts; not much, a fractional adjustment, pressing tighter, and Rhett realizes — with a sick, lurching certainty in his gut — that Blu can feel his pulse in the wound. That Blu's fingertip is sitting against the beating of him, the rhythm of him, the animal machinery of his blood pushing against the cut from the inside while Blu holds the outside. Blu doesn't pull away. Blu's thumb presses tighter. Finding it. Sitting with it.
"I need to put the bandage on," Blu says.
"Okay," Rhett says.
Neither of them move.
Blu's eyes leave the cut. They go to Rhett's eyes, and they stay, and this isn't the bathroom — in the bathroom his gaze dropped and bounced back like touching a hot burner, a flinch, a thing that could be denied. This is Blu looking at Rhett with his whole weight behind it. The way he reads. That total, consuming focus that makes you feel less like a person and more like a text he's determined to parse to the last syllable.
Rhett's hands are fisting the sheets so hard the weave is cutting into his crescent-marked palms, and his wrists are locked and his shoulders have climbed halfway to his ears and Blu is looking at him and the cut stings and Blu's hand is warm and he can't breathe through it; can't think past the layered burn of wound and warmth and those flat, unreadable eyes that are, for the first time since Rhett has known him, readable.
Blu's weight shifts. Forward, toward him, and his knee presses against the edge of the mattress between Rhett's thighs, and the bed dips, and Blu's hand slides — slowly — from Rhett's jaw to the back of his neck, fingers carding against the slickness at his nape. The touch moves through Rhett's whole body the way a shiver does; neck to spine to gut to the palms of his ruined hands, and his fingers release the sheets and drop to his sides and hang there, useless, empty, aching to close around something they're not allowed to close around.
Blu's thumb catches on the skin at the back of his neck. It drags; a slow line from the knob of his spine to behind his ear, and Blu doesn't correct it. Doesn't repeat it. Doesn't pull away. His thumb lands where it lands and stays and the line it drew is burning the way the cut is burning, a shallow trail that pulses, and Rhett's mouth opens and nothing comes out, not a word, not a sound, just air, just the shaking exhale of someone who's lost the argument with his own body and knows it.
Blu leans in. Forehead to forehead; bone against bone through skin, light at first and then heavier, Blu's weight settling against him like he's too tired to hold himself up, like this is the first time all day he's stopped running on precision and is just — leaning. Blu's breath hits Rhett's mouth. Warm. Damp. Hitting the cut too, each exhale a small flare of heat against the wound, and the sting is sweet now, confused, muddled with the closeness, the soap-smell, the breath; and Rhett's chin tilts into it the way you press a bruise to feel it deeper, pushing his face toward the warmth the way something stupid and wounded pushes toward a hand.
Blu's breathing isn't even. Short, unsteady puffs that land on Rhett's bottom lip, and each one is a small heat, a small sting, a small thing that Rhett's body is cataloguing with an intensity that borders on insane. The cut stings. Blu's breath soothes it. Blu's breath stings it. Both, somehow; simultaneously; the same air doing two opposite things to the same wound.
Blu's hand tightens on his neck. Fingers clutching angles, gathering, gripping by fractions, and Rhett can feel Blu's pulse hammering in the palm pressed against his nape — fast, way too fast, faster than that flat voice has any right to be, and it matches the pulse in the cut and they're running together now, synced, two heartbeats in the same rhythm in a room that's too small and smells like them and the light through the curtains is going amber and the afternoon is ending.
Rhett's lips part. The scab at the edge of the cut nearest his mouth splits with the movement and the sound that comes out of him isn't a word or a groan; it's from the back of his throat, strangled and reedy and ugly, the kind of sound that would humiliate him if he had any room left for humiliation, which he doesn't, because Blu's forehead is against his and Blu's hand is in his hair and Blu makes a sound too — quiet, barely there, a catch of breath, a hitch that Rhett feels against his lips more than he hears.
The distance between their mouths is heat. Shared, damp, re-breathed. Rhett can feel where Blu's lips are the way you feel a candle flame with your eyes closed; not by contact but by the warmth, the proximity, the promise of two surfaces close enough to exchange air. Something touches his bottom lip. Soft. Could be Blu's mouth. Could be Blu's breath. Could be nothing but the air itself, grown thick enough between them to have weight. The cut stings. Blu's hand is in his hair. Rhett's nails are through his own denim and into his thigh, and the bright pain there is the only thing keeping him in one piece.
Blu's fingers tighten.
Rhett's breath cracks open.
A key in the front door; a distant, small sound, metal turning metal, and it splits the room like a fracture line through glass. Blu rips his hand from Rhett's neck and his knee from the bed and the cold that floods the space between them hits Rhett's face, his mouth, the cut, the back of his neck — every place Blu touched, all at once, sudden and awful, a map of absence drawn in cold air.
Blu is at the desk. Back to Rhett. Hands on the bandage, tearing the wrapper.
"Auntie," he calls, and his voice is level.
His shoulders are shaking.
"Blu? Are you home?"
"I have a friend over. We're—" A catch. A quarter-second where the word won't come. "—studying."
Cabinets opening. Water running. "Okay, habibti."
Blu turns back with the bandage in hand. There is color at the base of his throat, spreading upward; his eyes are too bright; his jaw is clenched hard enough to hollow his cheeks. His hands are trembling. The fine, quick shake visible in his fingertips as he peels the adhesive backing, and the wrapper rattles against itself in the silence of the room.
"Hold still," Blu says.
He presses the bandage over the cut. Firm, steady pressure, his fingertips smoothing the adhesive edges flat against Rhett's skin with that same methodical precision, that same focus — except his hands are shaking. The bandage goes on straight, because Blu's hands do what he tells them to do even when they're betraying him, and Rhett is watching the tremor, watching each fingertip press and smooth and shake and press and smooth and shake, and neither of them mentions it.
Blu's finger catches the edge of the wound beneath the bandage. Bright, hot sting. Rhett hisses; Blu's hand flinches back, then returns, softer, pressing the adhesive down again, and the pad of his finger rests against the bandage over the cut for a beat longer than it needs to. Two beats. Three.
"You should go," Blu says. "It's getting late."
Rhett doesn't move.
His hands are on his thighs; nail marks in the denim, his palms raw with crescents. The cut throbs under the bandage in a dull, warm pulse. The back of his neck is still burning where Blu's thumb traced its slow, annihilating line. His mouth—
He's sitting on Blu's bed. In Blu's room, in Blu's small house, with the two plates and the two cups and the lunchbox washed clean and the prayer mat rolled at the foot of the bed and the sheets pulled tight and the thin curtains and the light through them gone amber, gone dim, almost gone.
"Rhett," Blu says. Quiet. He's standing against the desk with his arms crossed, his jaw tight, the color still at his throat, his eyes too bright, his hands tucked into the crooks of his elbows where the shaking can be pressed into stillness against his own body.
Rhett is on his bed.
The room smells like antiseptic and soap and both of them.
He should go.
The cut stings.