Chapter 19: The Mug and the Ambush
Liam woke to the sound of the fire being poked, which meant Kaelen had been up long enough to get cold in the front room and had decided to fix it rather than put a blanket on. He lay in the mending tin a moment longer, listening to the scrape of iron on stone and the creak of the couch springs taking his brother's weight back down.
Then he sat up, stretched until his tail cracked, and got dressed in the only thing a person his size could swim in.
The swim trunks were a scrap of blue cloth Kaelen had cut down for him two summers back, on one of the weeks they had both decided to pretend the burn was a river. They still fit. He checked the tie at his hip, walked across the table to the shelf edge, and slid down the grain of the shelf leg to the floor, which was two feet of nothing if you missed it.
Kaelen was on the couch with his back to the hearth and a mug in his good hand resting on the armrest. He had not drunk from it. Liam could tell from here, because the tea had stopped steaming long enough ago that the surface had the flat look of cooling liquid, and Kaelen had not noticed.
He crossed the floor, scaled the couch leg, and came up over the armrest onto the cushion. His brother did not look down. His violet eyes were fixed on the fire, and his jaw was set in the way it went when he was running a hypothetical through his head and being stubborn about it.
Liam walked up the slope of his thigh and stopped beside the mug.
"Are you going to drink that," he said, "or just hold it all morning?"
Kaelen's eyes came down. They took in the swim trunks, then the rest of him, and something in his face shifted a degree off the weather it had been in.
"Chores," Kaelen said. "I was thinking."
"You were staring at the grate."
"Thinking at the grate."
Liam said nothing to that. He climbed the loose fold of Kaelen's shirt at the waist, up onto the flat of his stomach, where the fabric was warm from the fire and the fire was warm from behind. Kaelen's hand came up automatically to cup the small of his own back, a habit, and then dropped again when he saw Liam had his footing.
Liam kept climbing. Rib by rib, hand over hand, up the long ladder of his brother's side. He knew the route. Past the old knife scar at the bottom rib, past the place where the tail used to lie when Kaelen slept on his front, up over the breastbone drag to the sternum. From here the chest was a hill of warm cotton with a slow tide under it.
He stood at the top of the hill, at the hollow under Kaelen's collarbone where the fireshine was brightest, and looked down at the mug on the armrest below him. Cold tea. A surface he could see himself in.
"Coming in?" he said.
"What?"
Liam spread his arms and went off the edge.
He hit the tea in a blue flash and it went everywhere, up and out in a fistful of drops that caught the fire and threw little orange sparks across the leather. The mug rocked. Liam came up slick and laughing, hair flat to his skull, treading the tea with both hands, and Kaelen's whole body jerked still under him in the half-second before he understood.
Then Kaelen roared.
Not anger. The room shook with it anyway. He tipped his head back and the sound came up out of his chest, full and rolling, and Liam, four inches tall in a mug of cold oolong, took it as a victory and splashed harder.
"You," Kaelen said, when he got any air back. "You absolute menace."
Liam floated on his back. The tea was cool and the fire was warm and his brother's face above the rim of the mug had gone entirely human for the first time in days, all the firelight and none of the arithmetic. He held his breath and sank, came up, blew a jet of tea out of his mouth in a thin arc that missed Kaelen's chin and hit the collar of his shirt instead.
Kaelen looked down at the wet spot. Then he looked at Liam. Then, slow, he brought the mug up to his mouth and drank.
Liam had one second to flatten himself against the inside wall before the tea tilted, and then the mug was at Kaelen's lips and the level dropped under him and both of them were laughing so hard the mug nearly went over the side. Kaelen swallowed, which was a sound and a pressure all at once, and set the mug back down with a hand that was not quite steady.
"You're drinking my bathwater," Liam said.
"You're the one who climbed in it."
He settled in the last inch of tea, which was now mostly lukewarm and slightly salty, and lay with his arms behind his head and watched Kaelen watch him. Kaelen took another sip. Very deliberately. Kept his eyes on Liam the whole time.
"That's the one nice thing I own," Liam said. "You just drank it."
"You've been in the milk twice."
"The milk was an accident."
"You were five and you were trying to steal it."
Liam ducked his head under, which was as close as he could get to not admitting anything, and came up again with his hair in his eyes. Above him the fire had settled down to the low red bed of itself. The room had stopped being a room that held three days in it. It was just this, the couch, the mug, the slow hand that came down and hovered over the rim until Liam reached up and pushed one finger aside.
"How's the wing feel after yesterday?" Liam said.
"Loose." Kaelen considered it. "Warmer."
"Good."
"Don't start."
"I didn't say anything."
The quiet that followed was an easy one. Liam finished what was left of the tea and climbed the inside wall of the mug and out onto the armrest, dripping, and Kaelen went for the towel off the pegs by the door without being asked, and Liam stood on the armrest and let himself be dried by a square of flannel handled like a scalpel.
That was the morning gone.
The afternoon found Kaelen on the couch again, this time with the fuel ledger open on his knee and a pencil he was not using, and Liam on the table with the parts of his keyboard laid out in a grid he was cleaning with a dry brush. He worked through the row of keys twice and got a speck of dust out from under the spacebar. Then he looked over at the couch. Kaelen was reading. Reading the ledger, from the look of his eyes, but not turning pages.
Liam set the brush down. He climbed the table leg and crossed the floorboards and came up the back of the couch, which was an older, softer leather than the seat, and easier under his hands. He lay flat along the top rail and looked down at the back of his brother's neck.
Kaelen's hair was in six braids today, a shorter set than yesterday's, and the nape was bare between them. There was skin there. Warm, unguarded skin, with the kettle-soft smell of the fire still in it.
Liam measured the distance. Three feet, more or less, from the couch back down onto the neck. Kaelen would hear a jump. He would not feel a drop that began the second he turned a page.
He waited. Kaelen lifted the ledger, and turned, and in the second before his shoulders came back down Liam went off the rail.
He landed on the nape with both hands.
Kaelen came up off the couch like a hooked fish. The ledger went one way and the pencil went the other and Liam, riding the lurch, got his fingers into the hard ridge at the top of his brother's shoulder and dug in, working the muscle where the wing met the spine, and got one good deep press before Kaelen's hand came around over his shoulder and found him.
"Did you think I was done with you?" Liam said, breathless, and got himself flat against the neck before the fingers closed.
The hand chased him around the shoulder. Liam went down the front of Kaelen's chest. Kaelen twisted and got the other hand up and Liam had to leap the gap between the hands, which he had not done since he was sixteen, and landed badly on the forearm and rolled and came up laughing. Kaelen was laughing too, deep and helpless, trying to catch a target that had been catching him by surprise for twenty years, and missing, because he was doubled over and shaking.
They went off the couch together. Kaelen came down on the rug on his side, wings half-spread and one arm flung out, and Liam came down in the crook of his elbow and stayed there, both of them gasping at the low ceiling beams.
The fire cracked. The pencil had rolled under the couch. Somewhere on the table the keyboard sat in pieces.
"Tickling a man with bat reflexes," Kaelen said, when he could. "That was the plan."
"Worked."
"You're under my arm."
"I know."
Kaelen's hand closed in around him, light, the gauze rough against the side of Liam's face. Neither of them got up. Under the ceiling the last of the day went grey in the windows, and Liam lay there listening to his brother's pulse come down, and thought that whatever happened in three days, he had this to hold later.
Then Kaelen's free hand came back over and started tidying the braids he had wrecked, one at a time.
The hand moved slowly, working the braids in order from the top of his skull down. Liam lay in the crook of the elbow with one cheek against the gauze and let it happen. Kaelen did not rush the work. Each braid came apart between two fingers, got shaken loose, and got laid back along the nape.
The fire had gone down to its own coals, red at the heart and grey at the edges. Liam counted what he could hear. The tick of the stove iron cooling. The wind nosing at the north window. His brother's breathing overhead, long and unhurried, no hitch in it anywhere.
He waited for Kaelen to get up.
Kaelen did not get up.
Liam turned his head and looked along the arm he was lying in, out past the wrist, to the floorboards, which were old and dark and had a knot in them the size of a coin. He put his palm flat on the underside of his brother's wrist and pressed there, which was a habit, and a question.
The pulse came back under his hand, slow. Slower than the fire, slower than the wind. Liam held still and felt the whole arm let go in stages, the long muscle from elbow to shoulder unclenching an inch at a time, until the wrist under his palm had no tension in it at all.
Then the purr started.
It came from underneath, low in the ribs, and travelled up through the body and into the forearm and into the floor. Liam felt it arrive through the boards before he felt it through the arm.
"Are you going to sleep down here?" he said.
"Maybe."
"You'll hate your back in the morning."
"It's earned it."
The hand went on with the braids. There were two left. Liam lay still and let the last of the day go grey in the windowpanes, and above him the beams darkened and the room got smaller in the way rooms do when the fire is going out of them.
He sat up after a while, careful not to break the hand's rhythm, and crossed the palm to the heel of it and looked out. From the floor the couch was a cliff and the hearth was a wall of stone, and Kaelen filled all the space between them like a fallen tree.
"Should I get the blanket off the couch?" Liam said.
"No."
"You'll be cold."
"I'm not."
Liam looked at him. His brother's eyes were closed, or nearly, and there was ash dust on the wing membrane where it lay out flat on the rug, and the hand went on unbraiding his hair as if it had been given a standing order. It had not occurred to Liam until now that Kaelen might not be able to stop doing it, that the hands went on working while the man behind them let go.
Liam sat down in the middle of the palm and hooked his tail around the base of his brother's thumb, which kept him steady, and stayed.
"Do you have the answer yet?" he said.
The hand paused. It was one braid from finished, and the fingers stayed where they were, holding the plait, and Liam watched the face above him and could not read it in this light, which was the only reason he had asked now.
"Cable ran," Kaelen said. "Log came loose off the slope. I was standing where I'd been sent to stand, doing the job I was sent to do. Drew's account has me under it and nothing about his own feet, which is the one thing he'd need to explain and doesn't." A breath out, slow. "That's the answer. I've had it since Pete left the house."
"You said we'd write it first."
"I said that because you wanted something to do." Kaelen's hand started moving again, working the last braid apart, patient as anything. "I don't need it on paper. I need to say it in the room and have it come out in that order, which is a different thing."
Liam considered that. It was true, or close enough to true that arguing would only be a way of filling the quiet. His brother lied about very little and never about this kind of thing. He had come off that slope with a torn wing and had not once, in all the weeks since, told it as anything but the plain sequence.
"So tomorrow you'll run it past me," Liam said. "Out loud. Twice."
"Three times."
"Twice is enough."
"Three."
Liam leaned back against the base of the thumb and looked up at the underside of his brother's jaw, at the soft place under the chin where the pouch opened, all of it slack now, all of it at rest. Then he said the other thing, because the room had gone quiet enough to hold it.
"And after the room?"
The hand stopped for good this time. Liam felt it stop, the last of the braid loose in the fingers, black hair spread out over the rug in long wet-looking strokes. Kaelen's chest came up and went down and did not hurry about either.
"After the room, I'm done with the company," he said.
He said it flat. There was no heat in it, no bitterness, nothing to hold onto. He said it from the floor with his arm around his brother and the purr still going under both of them, and it sounded less like a declaration than something he had simply stopped carrying.
Liam did not cheer, or say anything at all for a moment. He got up off the palm and walked the length of the forearm to the elbow, where the gauze ended and the bare skin began, and lay down there with his ear on the inside of the wrist.
The purr rolled up through it, steady, unhurried, the sound of a man not going anywhere for a while.
"Two days," Kaelen said.
"Two days," Liam said, and closed his eyes, and kept them closed, and listened.
The purr went on under the floor for a while after that.
Liam lay with one ear against the inside of his brother's wrist and let it come up through the bone. The coals in the hearth sank lower. Grey lids formed over the red parts, then the red parts went under, and the room cooled by degrees until the leather under him stopped holding the fire.
Kaelen sat up first. His back cracked twice getting there, loud in the hush, and he made a low sound about it. Liam had told him what the floor would do. He lay where he was and let the man find out on his own.
"Don't," Kaelen said, reading his face.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
"I was going to say it later."
"Worse."
He got up and banked the fire. Liam rode the slope of his shirt for a while, then climbed down onto the couch cushion when Kaelen sat. His brother settled with the empty mug balanced on the armrest and an elbow on the other, the shape of a man done for the day.
Liam wasn't.
He didn't know what it was at first. He walked the cushion from one arm to the other and back, and it didn't help. He counted the braids gone soft in his brother's hair, all six of them, and that didn't help either. There was something under his own ribs like a second pulse, and the quieter the room got, the louder it ran.
Kaelen watched him do the length of the cushion a fourth time.
"All right," he said. "What?"
"Nothing."
"You've walked that same seam four times."
Liam stopped walking. That was true enough to sting a little. He looked down at the worn line in the leather under his feet and then up at his brother, and nothing he could say would have passed anyway.
So he did the other thing.
He crossed the cushion at an angle and climbed the fold of Kaelen's shirt at the waist. Up over the fence of the ribs, hand over hand, to the shelf of the collarbone. He put both palms flat on the warm skin at the base of his brother's throat and pushed his face into the hollow above the bone.
Kaelen went still.
"What are you doing?"
Liam didn't answer. The skin there was thinner than the rest and warmer, and there was a smell in it, smoke and wood oil and something under both of those that belonged to nobody else. He breathed it in and put his nose against it and rubbed his cheek along the hollow, slow, from one side of the neck to the other.
"Liam."
"Mm."
Kaelen's pulse knocked once under his hands and then settled. His head tilted back a fraction without meaning to, giving the throat room, and that was all the permission Liam needed.
He worked along the base of the neck to the soft place above the collar, then turned and pressed his face into the underside of the jaw, just forward of the ear. That skin was softer still. He nuzzled there with his whole face, cheek and brow and the bridge of his nose, until his hair stood up with it.
"Where did this come from?" Kaelen said. His voice had gone low in the chest.
"Nowhere."
"You've been pacing and now you're wearing me."
"I'm not wearing you."
"You're in my throat."
Liam hooked both hands into the loose skin under his jaw and burrowed in further, which was an answer of a kind. Kaelen's ear twitched near his head, a small animal tell, and the purr that had been sleeping since the fire came up again, slower this time.
Liam crawled up behind the ear and pressed his face flat to the warm hollow there, where the bone curved and the skin was paper thin over it. He stayed a long moment. The purr rolled through the skull under him and came out the other ear.
"You smell like the fire," he said, muffled.
"I've been sitting in front of it all day."
"You smell like that under it. That's not the fire."
Kaelen had no answer for that one. His hand came up off the armrest and hovered near Liam's back, and then settled, one finger laid along his spine.
Liam let it rest there a second. Then he got up, walked back down the jaw and the throat, and stood on the shelf of the collarbone with his arms crossed.
"Roll onto your front," he said.
"What?"
"On your front. Go on."
"You just got comfortable."
"I got comfortable enough. Turn over."
Kaelen looked down at him for a beat, the firelight moving on his violet eyes. Then he set the mug on the floor and shifted, swinging his legs along the couch, and rolled onto his stomach with his cheek on his folded arm.
The cushion creaked. The leather gave under his weight and Liam went with it, riding the dip, and then it steadied and the whole long slope of his brother lay in front of him, shirt rucked up at the shoulders, black braids loose down the back.
Liam stood at the base of the spine and looked at it. He had walked this ground a hundred times and never once got tired of it.
He started up the middle, palm over palm, testing each vertebra as he went. The lower back was fine. The middle was fine. Between the shoulder blades he found the knot that always lived there, and pressed the heel of his hand into it until Kaelen grunted into his arm.
"Found it."
"I know you found it."
"You could stretch."
"I could do a lot of things."
Liam got the knot to give, bit by bit, leaning his whole weight in. Kaelen's breathing went long and even under him, and the purr thrummed up through the cushion into Liam's knees.
Then he moved out onto the wings.
The left one he knew by heart. He worked the joint first, where the wing came off the back, and it was loose under his hands, looser than it had been in weeks. He walked the leading edge out to the thin forearm and back along the trailing edge, feeling for the raised seam of the scar.
The right wing he had not touched in days. And when he pressed the heel of his hand against the shoulder of it, Kaelen unfolded both of them.
They came open slowly, a fraction at a time, and spread out over the edges of the couch on either side. The right one reached the floorboards and pushed past them, membrane tented up the way it did when he flew. More room than Liam had ever had from him this close to the injury.
He stood there a second with his hands not moving.
"Problem?" Kaelen said into his arm.
"No," Liam said. "No problem."
He walked out onto the right wing and started at the shoulder, and behind him his brother's tail curled up off the floor and wound itself loose around the base of the couch leg, alive and unbothered, and neither of them said anything about any of it.
The right wing had been doing the work of both for weeks. He could feel it before he found it. The joint where the wing met his brother's back sat a little swollen under the skin, warm to the back of his hand, and when he set both thumbs into the hollow behind it Kaelen made a low sound into his folded arm.
"Tight?" Liam said.
"Not like before."
That was not a no. Liam worked the hollow in small circles, one thumb and then the other, until the tissue under the skin loosened by a degree he could measure through his palms. Out past him the membrane stretched across the room, tented up off the boards, thin enough that he could watch the firelight come up through it.
He walked the leading edge out toward the forearm. Every few steps he stopped and pressed down, hunting the knots that gathered where the long bones met the joint. Halfway out he found one, small and hard as a bead.
He crouched over it and brought his whole weight down slow.
Kaelen's wing flexed under him. The surface tilted and lifted him a hand's width off the couch before he had time to think about it, and Liam grabbed the leading edge with both hands and held.
"You could warn me," he said.
"You were standing on it."
The wing settled, then rose again on purpose, a long deliberate stroke that carried him up and down with it. From up there the hearth was a low red mouth and the couch was the shore of something grey and wide. His brother's body went out on either side of him in two stretches of dark leather, and the tail had drawn itself up off the floor and lay curled around the couch leg.
"You're testing it," Liam said.
"I'm testing it."
"Does the joint hold?"
"It holds."
He lowered the wing and the membrane came down onto the floorboards with a sound like cloth dropped on cloth. Liam stepped off onto the cushion and stood a second, letting his heart come back down.
Then he climbed the rise of his brother's back and sat at the nape.
The braids had gone to loose black ropes over both shoulders. Kaelen turned his head and found him with one eye, then pushed himself up and sat back against the armrest, knees drawn up, wings folded behind him like a coat laid over a chair.
He put his palm out flat on the cushion.
Liam stepped onto it without being asked. Kaelen lifted him to his face and held him level with his chin. The fire was behind his head and the room went dark at the edges of him. He tipped his chin down.
The pouch sat open at the base of the jaw, a soft dark hollow under the tongue.
Liam had spent half his childhood in there, and most of the last month as well. It was not a thing he had ever needed permission for. He rested one hand on his brother's thumb.
"In?" he said.
Kaelen did not lower him. He kept the hand where it was, and his breath went through Liam's hair in one slow pass.
"Will you come with me?" he said.
"To the room."
"To the room."
Liam sat back on the palm. The fingers curled a little underneath him, not closing, just curling, and the gauze on the thumb was rough where it pressed his knee. He had been going to come. He had been going to come since Pete stood in the kitchen and said the word board. It had not occurred to him that there was a version of it where his brother asked.
"I was going to anyway," he said.
Kaelen's jaw worked once. "I'm asking."
"I know."
"Then say it."
Liam looked up at him. The fire had put his eyes close to black, and the mouth under them was flat and tired, and two days sat between them and that room like a wall he was not going to get over on his own.
"Yes," he said.
Kaelen shut his eyes for a second. Then he tipped his head and lowered his brother down into the pouch.
It was warm in there and it smelled of smoke and of him. Liam settled against the back wall where the tissue was soft and found the nerve port without meaning to, and the link came open the way a held breath lets go. His brother's heartbeat came in through his skin. So did the shape of the room, the coals, the wind nosing at the north window, the ache sitting high between his brother's shoulder blades.
Kaelen got off the couch. The wings came half open for balance and then folded, and he crossed to the hearth and set the screen across it with one foot.
Through the link, the floorboards were cold under Liam's feet, which were not his feet. The kettle ticked on the ring. Kaelen's thumb came up and pressed once, gently, against the outside of his own throat, which meant he was thinking about the thing inside it.
Liam pressed his palm to the wall of the pouch in answer.
The hand dropped. Kaelen went down the short hall and into the bedroom, and the last thing Liam felt before the dark got soft was the pouch closing around him, warm, the whole of it holding him like a hand cupped around a match that had just caught.
Then Kaelen lay down on his side and the link went quiet and slow.
The link went quiet and slow, the way a room goes quiet after the last person in it sits down. Liam lay against the back wall of the pouch and let it run. His brother's breath came through in long passes, and the whole pouch moved with it, a slow rise and fall that carried him a half inch up and back with every cycle.
He did not count the time. He knew it by the rate instead. The walk from the hearth to the bedroom had been quick, a man crossing a floor he could cross in the dark. This was slower. This was the lying-down rate, the one his brother's pulse dropped to only when the day had actually let go of him.
Liam waited for it to settle all the way. He knew the last tell, a small twitch at the base of the jaw, no more than a nerve letting go, and when it came he stayed another minute to be sure.
Then he reached back and found the port with his palm, and let it close.
It did not snap shut. It let go the way a hand does, fingertip by fingertip. First the hearing went, the wind nosing at the north window, the tick of the kettle on the ring. Then the floorboards under feet that were not his. Then the ache high between the shoulder blades, which he had been carrying for his brother without meaning to, that one leaving a kind of relief behind it like a tooth going quiet.
Liam came back into himself in the dark. Four inches, cold hands, a pulse of his own that suddenly seemed loud.
He sat a moment. The pouch was warm and close and smelled of smoke and of his brother, and there was nowhere in it he had not been a hundred times. He had crawled out of this pouch on the morning their parents died. He had slept in it for a week solid in the winter after. He knew every fold of it like the back of his own hand, and it had never once been the back of his own hand.
He turned around.
The inner wall was in front of him, the lining of it, soft and near enough to touch. He crawled forward on his knees until his hands met it, and pushed.
It gave. That was the thing about it, always had been. It gave exactly as far as you leaned and no further, and then it took the weight and held it. Warm all the way through. There was a film over the tissue, thin and slick, and it came away on his palms with the smell of salt and woodsmoke both.
He pressed harder. Worked the heels of his hands in, one and then the other, in small circles, the way he worked his brother's back. The wall took it without complaint.
Then he stopped circling and put his whole face into it.
Cheek first, then brow, then the bridge of his nose, grinding in slow. The tissue folded around his features and held them, and the pulse came up through it into the bone of his skull. He could hear it down there, the thud of it, slower than his own, twice his size.
He dragged his face sideways across the wall, then back. His hair caught against the slickness and plastered flat. He did it again, longer, from one side of his jaw to the other, and then turned and did it with the other cheek until both were wet.
Outside, something changed. A catch in the breathing, one beat late.
Then the pouch drew in around him.
Not much. Not enough to trap him, just the lining tightening by a degree, a soft involuntary grip, and Liam felt it take his shoulders and his back and his hips and press him in closer to the wall he was already against. He flattened his hands into it and let it happen.
"What are you doing in there?" Kaelen said. The voice came from above and all around at once, muffled through muscle and skin, so low in his register that Liam felt it as pressure more than sound.
Liam did not answer. He got his fingers into a fold of the lining, both hands, and pulled himself up the wall a few inches, and set his mouth to it, and breathed.
The pouch clenched. Harder this time, a real squeeze, and then let go, and then held. Liam spread his arms flat and pressed his chest in and stayed.
A hand came up on the outside and laid itself over the pouch. He felt it arrive twice, once through the wall of it and once as a shadow over his own skin, four fingers and a thumb, gauze rough on the thumb. The pressure pushed him in another fraction. Now he was wedged, front and back, between the lining and his brother's palm, and the two of them were the same push.
He turned his ear to the tissue. Under it the heart, under that the lungs, over both of them the purr, which had started up again without either of them noticing.
"Does that hurt?" he said. It came out small against the wall.
"No."
"Tell me if it does."
"I'll tell you."
Liam believed him. He had been told that a lot over twenty years and it had been true maybe half the time, but it was true now. The hand outside stayed where it was, and the pouch stayed closed around him, and neither of them was going to be the first one to move.
He got his face back against the wall and worked into it again, slower now. Cheek and brow and nose, kneading with his hands at the same time, not looking for anything, not loosening a knot, not fixing a thing. Just the pressing. Just the being pressed back.
His palms found the place where the lining went thinnest over the big artery, and he laid both hands flat there and felt it come up through his arms, and for a while that was the whole of the world. A dark warm room the size of a fist, a heartbeat under his hands, a hand on the outside holding the door shut in a way that was not a shutting at all.
The purr rolled up through the wall and into his ribs. Liam stopped moving and let it roll.
He would go with him on Thursday. He had said yes, and it was a real yes, and that was settled. But this was the part he had not said, because there was no way to say it out loud and keep a straight face. He was going to spend the next two nights in here with his face pushed into his brother's lining, and it was not for comfort exactly, and it was not for him exactly, and it was more than either of those things.
He pressed his mouth to the wall once, hard, and felt the pouch take it.
Outside, Kaelen's thumb moved against his own throat, one slow stroke, back and forth, and did not stop.
Liam turned over in the dark and put his back to the wall instead, so that it held him all the way down, and settled in with his arms crossed and his tail curled up against his chest. Around him his brother's breathing found its long rhythm again and stayed there. He did not reach for the port. He lay awake a while longer in the warm dark, listening to the two sounds a body makes at rest, and let himself be held.