Chapter 10: Friday's Short Count
The morning Niles came home two-hundred-and-forty dollars short, the living room smelled like the inside of an ashtray left out in the rain. He stood in the doorway with his hood up and his jaw set, and the door didn't even get a chance to creak before Gavin looked up from the couch and knew.
"Marcus?" Gavin said.
"Marcus."
"He burn you."
"Five hundred down, front product at street price, not wholesale. Like I didn't do his aunt's move-in off the books last spring." Niles peeled his hood back. His face had that flat, white look he got when the anger hadn't found its exit yet. "Two-forty in the hole. Two days before I can even cover."
Gavin whistled, low. He was folded into the corner of the couch with the pipe resting on his knee, bruised cheekbone still yellowing. "And you took it."
"I took it because he's the only one in the city still fronting."
"You took it because you don't listen." Gavin swung his legs off the cushion and sat up. "I told you Friday was a setup. I told you the week he got friendly out of nowhere."
"You told me a lot of shit from this couch."
The words landed. Gavin's mouth went thin. "Excuse me for having a cracked rib and a sewn-shut hand. You want me running corners for you, bleeding through my stitches?"
"I want you to have been right about something before it cost me two-forty, yeah." Niles dropped onto the couch's far end, and the old springs groaned under both of them. The pipe sat on the table between them, in reach, not in the way.
Gavin turned the pipe over once with his thumb, studying it like it had answers. "Okay. So Marcus fronted you garbage terms because he knows you're desperate, and desperate buyers pay double-interest without noticing. Fine. There's a way out."
"There's no way out. That's the point of the burn."
"There's one way." Gavin set the pipe down. "You put everything back on me. The pickup, the run, the front. My name's clean in this. His people don't know mine. I make the Friday pickup, I move it fast, we clear his interest inside a week."
"And if you get grabbed, I owe two-forty with no product and no you."
"Yeah," Gavin said. "That's the trade."
Niles stared at the ceiling. The clock in the kitchen ticked through the wall, patient and stupid. "No."
"No?"
"No. You're stitched together with medical advice against you existing. You'd sell your own blood to cover it and then I'd find you on the floor again." His voice cracked on the last word, just slightly. "I'm not doing that again."
"Then what, Niles? What's the play? Because the only currency we got left is each other, and you just told me to sit on the couch."
"I didn't say that."
"You said stay."
"I said don't bleed for it."
Gavin stood up. He moved like his ribs allowed it, careful on the left side, and that carefulness somehow made it worse. "You know what the problem with you is? You'd rather owe Marcus forever than let me work an honest angle. Because working it means trusting me with something."
"This is me trusting you. Trusting you means not putting you in front of it."
"Bullshit." Gavin's voice went sharp. "This is you needing to be the one who fixes it, same as the bridge, same as the hospital. You'd rather go down swinging than let me carry half."
"Say that again." Niles was on his feet now too, and the room had gone small around them.
"You'd rather go down swinging." Gavin stepped in close, chin up, black eye meeting blue. "Than let me carry half."
Niles swung.
It wasn't much of a punch, and Gavin caught most of it on the shoulder, twisting so his ribs didn't take it, and then Gavin had a fistful of Niles's collar and Niles had Gavin's arm pinned and they went over the coffee table together. Bottles rolled. The table leg cracked clean off. They hit the carpet, the bloodied spot from two nights ago, and Niles ended up on top with Gavin's wrist jammed against the floorboards and both of them breathing like bellows.
"Done?" Niles said.
"Get off me."
"Then say the angle's dead."
Gavin grinned up at him through the split lip, blood on his teeth. "Make me."
That was how it always went. Niles's grip on his wrist loosened without his permission, and Gavin used the space not to fight but to pull, dragging Niles down by the collar until their mouths met, ugly and open, tasting of blood and last night's cigarettes. The kiss was a fight too. Teeth. Tongue. Gavin's good hand came up and fisted into Niles's hair and held him there, and Niles groaned into it, low and pissed off about the groan.
"You're such an asshole," Niles said against his mouth.
"Two-forty in the hole and you're still hard," Gavin said, and he was right, he could feel it, Niles's weight pressing down through torn jeans, and Gavin rolled his hips up to prove his own point. "Fists first, then clothes. Every time."
"Shut up."
"Make me shut up."
Niles did, in the way that worked: he sat back on Gavin's thighs, dragged the hoodie up over Gavin's head, careful on the bad side even now, even furious, and threw it across the room. The tattoos caught the gray window light. The stitched hand lay at Gavin's side and Niles took it, cradled it, pinned it above his head with a gentleness that contradicted everything else his body was doing.
"Careful," Gavin started.
"I know where the stitches are."
"You always do," Gavin said, and his voice had gone low and honest, which was worse than the fighting. "That's the whole problem with you."
Niles got Gavin's jeans open one-handed, yanked the zipper down, shoved the denim off his hips. Gavin kicked them the rest of the way off, swearing when his heel caught the broken table leg. Niles spat into his palm, worked himself out of his jeans, spat again and slicked Gavin with two rough fingers, quick and efficient, no ceremony. Gavin's head tipped back against the carpet. His throat was still marked from two nights ago, a bruise shaped like teeth.
"Come on," Gavin said. "You're not made of glass and neither am I."
"Shut up and take it." Niles pushed in, slow at first because Gavin's ribs mattered even when nothing else did, then harder, finding the rhythm they always found, the one that felt like arguing. The couch springs creaked from the draft. Bottles rolled off the table onto the floor. Gavin's good hand raked down Niles's back hard enough to leave lines, and Niles fucked him through it, forehead dropped to Gavin's shoulder, breath sawing.
"Say the angle's dead," Niles gritted out.
"Fuck you."
"Say it."
"No," Gavin said, and then he couldn't say anything, because Niles shifted and found the spot that emptied his head the same way the pipe did, and Gavin arched off the floor with a sound that the neighbors had heard enough times to stop complaining about. His hand, the good one, grabbed Niles's ass and pulled him deeper. "Niles. Niles, don't stop."
"Wasn't gonna."
He didn't. He drove into him, relentless, sweat dripping off his chin onto Gavin's sternum, until Gavin came across his own stomach with a bitten-off shout and his stitched hand curling uselessly above his head, and Niles followed three strokes later, buried deep, whole body shuddering, face pressed into Gavin's neck like he was hiding from the room.
For a minute there was only their breathing and the clock.
Then Gavin said, from underneath him, entirely too pleased, "Friday pickup's mine."
Niles didn't lift his head. "We'll talk about it."
"No. You just lost the argument. That's how it works."
"That's not how it works."
"It's exactly how it works," Gavin said, and wrapped his good hand around the back of Niles's neck, and held on.