Chapter 16: The Reading
The blue light from the phone was an icy puddle in the warm, brownie-scented dark. It didn’t flash. It just sat there, a solid rectangle of demand. Reminder: Ambassador Hotel - Tomorrow, 2 PM.
Travis didn’t move. The words hung in his vision, seared there even when he blinked. The lazy perfection of the day curdled in his stomach. The sun, the book, the chocolate—it all felt like the elaborate last meal of a condemned man.
On his belly, Mavis went very still. He’d felt the entire human body beneath him lock up, the muscles of Travis’s abdomen turning to stone. The shift from soft contentment to rigid alarm was instantaneous.
“Ah,” Mavis said, his voice deliberately light. “The summons.”
Travis said nothing. He just stared at the ceiling, the neon stars now looking like distant, mocking constellations.
Mavis scooted down, his small body shifting until he was curled around the lower curve of Travis’s navel, facing upwards. He could see the tight line of Travis’s jaw, the pulse hammering in his throat. He placed both of his hands flat on the skin there, just on the rim. He began tracing tiny, concentric circles, his touch feather-light but insistently present.
“Option one,” Mavis murmured, not stopping his circles. “We throw the phone out the window. I’ve always wanted to see it shatter on the sidewalk. Very cathartic, I’m told.”
Travis let out a breath that was more shudder than sigh. “It’s a rental building. They’d charge me for the window too.”
“Option two,” Mavis continued, his fingers now tracing the faint trail of hair leading downward. “We pretend it’s a year from now. That this is all a funny memory. That you tell the story about the time a creepy hotel guy tried to buy your soul, and we laugh about how you told him to get stuffed.”
“Did I tell him to get stuffed?” Travis’s voice was hollow. “I think I said I’d consider his generous offer.”
“Semantics. The spirit was there. A spirit of profound non-compliance.”
The phone screen faded to black, plunging them back into proper darkness. But the reminder was inside Travis’s head now, ticking.
“He’s going to be there,” Travis said. “In that same chair. With that same smile. And he’s going to want an answer.”
“And you’ll give him one.” Mavis’s touch became more deliberate, shifting from circles to slow, reassuring strokes along the tense ridges of Travis’s hip bones.
“Which is?”
“The only one you can live with.” Mavis said it simply, as if it were obvious. “The one that doesn’t make you feel like you need to take a shower in battery acid afterward.”
Travis finally moved. He brought a hand down and covered Mavis completely, not to grab or control, just to feel the solid, living warmth in his palm. He held him there against his stomach. “It’s not that simple. The money… the silence. He’s not offering a job, Mavis. He’s offering a coffin that looks like a corner office. Everything stays quiet. Everything stays… contained.”
Mavis wriggled until his head was free, peeking out from under Travis’s index finger. “And the alternative?”
“The alternative is he makes a few calls. To the zoning board. To the landlord’s corporate office. This building is old. It has ‘violations’ written all over it. He could have it condemned for renovations in a heartbeat. He wouldn’t be evicting me. He’d be evicting the building.”
The room felt colder. The scent of lavender body spray and old wood was suddenly tinged with the ghost of hotel-lobby perfume.
Mavis was silent for a long time. His small body was tense under Travis’s hand. This wasn’t about teasing or tickles. This was the architecture of their world, and someone had just pointed out the fault lines.
“So,” Mavis said, his voice uncharacteristically small. “My wall is a liability.”
“No.” The word came out sharp, absolute. Travis lifted his hand away. “You are not a liability. This is my thing. My weird… proclivity. He found out about it, and he’s using it as a lever. This is on me.”
“Don’t be a martyred idiot,” Mavis snapped, scrambling to sit up. The fear in his voice had sharpened into anger. “It’s our wall. It’s our… whatever this is. You think his threats stop at your lease? You think someone who buys secrets for a living doesn’t have a collection jar for tiny, impossible things?”
The image was visceral and chilling. A jar. A specimen label. A life measured in ounces and curiosity.
Travis pushed himself up on his elbows. The sheet pooled around his waist. In the gloom, he and Mavis were just two shapes facing each other on the vast plain of the bed.
“Then what’s the move?” Travis asked, the question laid bare.
Mavis looked toward the wall, to the tiny, dark hole that was his front door, his escape route, his world. He looked back at Travis. “You fight.”
“How?”
“You show up tomorrow. And you look him in his perfectly capped teeth, and you tell him no.”
“And when he starts making calls?”
“You make your own.” Mavis crawled forward, placing his hands on Travis’s knee. “You said it yourself yesterday. You’re not the only one. There are others. The forums. The weird, quiet corners of the internet. You find them. You talk. A leverage of his own. If he exposes you, he exposes the whole… ecosystem he wants to monetize. You make it messy. You make it noisy. People like him hate noise.”
Travis stared at him. It was a wild, desperate, dangerous plan. It meant stepping out of the shadows completely. It meant trusting strangers. It meant turning his private solace into a public battleground.
“That could burn everything down,” Travis whispered.
Mavis’s grin was fierce, a flash of white in the dark. “Then we get a better bucket of water than he does.”
The absurdity of it, the sheer scale of the risk, crashed over Travis. But beneath the fear, a spark ignited. A stubborn, defiant heat. The passive dread of the last 24 hours began to transmute into something sharper, more volatile. It was terrifying. It was alive.
He lay back down, but the energy was different now. Not defeat, but a coiled readiness. Mavis sensed the change. The mischievous glint returned to his eyes. The emotional triage was over; now, he was dealing with a man who needed a different kind of distraction.
“You’re thinking too loud,” Mavis announced. He walked up Travis’s thigh, his steps proprietorial. “The strategic planning session is adjourned. The board has moved to… executive relief.”
Travis snorted, but he didn’t stop him. The path was clear, the fear acknowledged. Now, his body screamed for sensation to blot out the noise in his head. He needed the grammar of touch that only Mavis knew.
Mavis understood. This wasn’t about tender healing. This was about reaffirmation. A reclaiming.
He started at the inside of Travis’s knee, employing not soft circles but a precise, relentless scribbling with all ten fingertips. It was a shocking, electric sensation that made Travis’s leg jerk. It was a statement: You are here, in this body, right now.
From there, Mavis moved with purpose. He used his nails, his teeth, the blunt pressure of his whole body. He mapped Travis not with kisses, but with bites that walked the line between pleasure and pain. He scaled his hip, digging in with tiny toes for purchase. He was a climber on a cliff of flesh, leaving a trail of fire in his wake.
Travis gasped, his hands fisting in the sheets. The anxiety was still there, a cold knot in his gut, but Mavis was building a counter-friction, a heat so intense it threatened to melt everything else.
When Mavis reached his destination, he didn’t tease. He enveloped him with a shocking, confident totality. The world narrowed to that single, overwhelming point of contact. The outside pressure, the looming meeting, the threat of loss—it all receded, muted beneath a wave of pure physical truth.
This was theirs. Un-buyable. Un-leverageable. A fact written in nerve endings and breath.
Travis arched, a sound torn from him that was part sob, part triumph. His vision blurred at the edges, the neon stars smearing into green streaks. He was present, utterly and completely, a creature of response, not thought.
After, he lay spent, buzzing, hollowed out and yet more solid than he’d felt in days. The fear was still in the room, but it was sitting in the corner now. It didn’t own him.
Mavis curled against his side, a spent comma of satisfaction. They listened to each other’s breathing even out.
The phone on the nightstand lit up again. This time, it was a text. The preview glowed in the dark.
Unknown Number: Travis. Don here. Confirming our 2 PM. I’ll have the papers. Let’s build a future.
Travis read it. He didn’t flinch. He reached out, not for the phone, but for the empty brownie ramekin on his nightstand. He picked it up, brought it to his nose, and inhaled the last traces of chocolate and safe, domestic effort.
He put the ramekin down. He looked at the text. Then he looked at the small, drowsy form beside him.
“You’re right,” Travis said, his voice quiet but clear. “We make it noisy.”
He picked up the phone. His thumbs hovered over the screen. He didn’t type a reply to Don. Instead, he opened a different app, one he hadn’t opened in months. A forum icon, a stylized lock. He entered a password he’d almost forgotten.
The screen loaded. Dozens of usernames. Hundreds of posts. A hidden world.
He began to type. Subject: Need to Talk. Urgent. Who else has been approached by Parallax Holdings?
He hit send.
The message vanished into the digital ether. There was no going back now. He put the phone face down on his chest. The screen cooled against his skin.
Mavis, half-asleep, patted his rib cage. “That’s my human,” he mumbled.
Outside, a siren wailed, fading into the city’s endless noise. Travis closed his eyes. He didn’t dream of lobbies or contracts. He dreamed of a low, gathering hum, the sound of many quiet voices deciding, all at once, to speak.
He dreamed of a low, gathering hum, the sound of many quiet voices deciding, all at once, to speak.
Morning brought a very clingy, playful Mavis. Travis woke to the sensation of small, insistent hands patting his cheek, followed by the tickling scatter of feet across his collarbone. He didn’t mind the attention from his favourite person, not one bit; he blinked into the grey dawn light, a smile already forming as he saw Mavis poised on his sternum, looking determined.
“You were grinding your teeth,” Mavis announced. “A dreadful sound. Like rocks in a blender. I’m here to administer a distraction.”
“Is that what this is?” Travis’s voice was gravelly with sleep. He stretched, muscles protesting from yesterday’s long tension.
“It’s a humanitarian intervention.” Mavis then launched his campaign. He dove into the thicket of Travis’s wild black hair, burrowing and making exaggerated sniffing sounds. “Needs washing. Noted.” He scrambled out and immediately marched down Travis’s arm, his tiny feet a piercing, perfect pressure on the sensitive inner skin.
Travis laughed, a short, surprised puff of air. The grim resolve of the night before was still there, a cold stone in his gut, but Mavis was a lit fuse skipping around it.
“Stop squirming,” Mavis ordered, though Travis hadn’t moved. He’d reached Travis’s hand and was now meticulously tracing each lifeline with a single pointed finger. The focus was absurd, intense. It was also incredibly soothing.
Sunlight strengthened, turning the room from grey to gold. The digital clock read 7:48. The meeting was a far-off country, separated by hours of ordinary time. Here, now, the geography was freckles and sleep-warm skin.
Mavis abandoned the hand and scampered back up to his perch on Travis’s chest. He flopped onto his back, spreading his arms and legs wide as if making a snow angel. “I’m claiming this territory. For the morning. All negotiations for its use must go through me.”
“Oh yeah?” Travis raised an eyebrow, looking down his nose at the tiny conqueror. “And what’s the toll?”
“Scratches. Behind the ears. Now.”
Travis obliged, bringing a massive finger up to carefully rub the spot Mavis indicated. Mavis wriggled, a low, buzzing purr vibrating through Travis’s sternum. The sound was contentment itself.
They stayed like that for a long while, in a bubble of quiet. Travis’s mind tried to drift towards the forum post, towards Don, towards the terrifying idea of making noise. Each time, Mavis would shift, or increase his purring, or dig a heel gently into his skin, anchoring him back in the room.
Finally, the practical world intruded. Travis’s stomach growled, a cavernous sound.
“Revolting,” Mavis said, sitting up. “Your internal caverns are demanding tribute. I suppose we must feed the beast.”
“We?” Travis pushed himself up, letting Mavis slide into his waiting palm.
“Supervisory role. I’ll ensure you don’t pour the orange juice on your cereal again. Your pre-meeting brain is notoriously unreliable.”
The normalcy of it was a shield. Travis shuffled to the kitchen, Mavis riding on his shoulder, fingers tangled in the collar of his t-shirt. He made coffee, the ritual grounding. He scrambled eggs. Mavis supervised from the edge of the frying pan, leaning back dramatically from the heat.
“You know,” Travis said, forking eggs onto toast, “if this all goes sideways today… if the noise just makes it worse…” He didn’t finish the thought. He took a bite, the eggs tasting like ash.
Mavis hopped onto the table, standing beside the massive plate. “Then we’ll be noisy somewhere else. I hear cockroaches can survive nuclear fallout. I’m at least as durable as a cockroach.”
“You’re not a cockroach.”
“I’m better. I have standards. And I’m cuter.” He paused, his bravado softening. “He’s just a man in a chair, Travis. You’re the one who built a world inside a wall. Who do you think is actually stronger?”
Travis looked at him, this five-inch declaration of independence, and felt the cold stone in his gut warm, just a little. He finished his breakfast. He showered, Mavis shouting critiques about his shower-song choices from the sink. He dressed, choosing clothes not for a meeting, but for a confrontation: dark jeans, sturdy boots, a worn shirt that felt like his own skin.
At 1 PM, the shield began to crack. The apartment felt too quiet. Travis picked up his phone. The forum icon had a small, red notification. One reply. His thumb hovered over it.
“Don’t,” Mavis said from the headboard. “Not yet. Walk in there knowing what you’re going to do. Don’t let a stranger’s comment talk you out of it.”
“What if it’s the only ‘yes’ I get?”
“Then it’s a start.”
Travis put the phone down. He checked his wallet, his keys. A pointless ritual. Mavis skittered down the wall and approached the hole. He didn’t go in. He turned around, leaning against its frame as if it were a doorway.
“Kick his teeth in,” Mavis said, not lightly at all.
Travis knelt, bringing his face level with the wall. “Metaphorically.”
“Obviously. We save the literal for special occasions.” Mavis reached out and pressed his hand against Travis’s lips for a second. A tiny, firm pressure. A seal. A promise. “Now go. Be so loud you drown out his smile.”
Travis stood. He walked to the door. He didn’t look back. As he pulled it shut, he heard the faint, familiar scratch of Mavis slipping into the walls, going to ground. He was alone in the hallway, but he didn’t feel empty. He felt full of a strange, singing static, the echo of a gathering hum.
He descended the stairs, each step solid. The city air outside was a slap of exhaust and rain-washed concrete. He turned towards the sleek, gleaming spike of the Ambassador Hotel, six blocks away. He didn’t hurry. He let the momentum of the morning, of the scratches behind tiny ears, of the claim staked on his chest, carry him forward into the noise.