Chapter 9: The Rusty Nail Revisited
The van smelled like old coffee and gun oil, same as it always did. Drake sat in the passenger seat with his boots on the dash, arguing with the destination before they'd even crossed the river.
"You're taking me to the Rusty Nail. On purpose. Like a Normal Person Activity."
"You said you wanted to go out. Clause five. College drives with iced coffee." Ghost turned the wipers on. The drizzle was the kind that didn't fall so much as hang there. "There's coffee in the cupholder."
"This is not a college drive. This is a crime scene."
"It's a bar."
"It's the bar where you interrupted my evening and dragged me out over your shoulder like luggage."
"Fireman's carry."
"I will bite you." Drake picked up the iced coffee anyway, drinking through the straw with his eyes fixed on Ghost, waiting for a reaction he didn't get. "Why are we going there. Seriously. Be serious for one second of your life."
Ghost pulled off the main road into the Rusty Nail's lot. The gravel crackled under the tires and the neon sign buzzed overhead, the R in RUSTY dead, so the gold letters read US TY NAIL, glowing pink through the drizzle. He put the van in park and looked at the door with its peeling paint and the smell of old hops leaking out through the gaps.
"Because you sat in a booth in there with a stranger's hands on you," he said. "And I didn't like it."
Drake went very quiet. Ghost could feel it happening, the flush starting somewhere around the snake bites and working down.
"So we're going to sit in the booth," Ghost said, "and I'm going to buy you a drink, and you're going to sit there where I can see you, and then we're going to leave. That's the whole plan. It's not clever. It's just mine."
"That is the most unhinged romantic gesture I have ever heard." Drake's voice had gone up half an octave. "You're staking a claim. On a booth. In a dive bar. Like a tomcat."
"Something like that."
"If anyone I know sees me here I'm dead. Nadia will put it on a plaque."
"Then don't tell Nadia."
They went in.
The Nail was worse in the early evening than it was at midnight, or maybe it was the same and the light had just changed. Dim bulbs behind the bar, scarred mahogany, wallpaper peeling in long curls near the ceiling. A jukebox in the corner playing something country and regrettable. There were maybe a dozen people in the place, truckers and regulars and two women playing pool with the intensity of surgeons.
Drake hovered at the door with his hood up, scanning the room like he expected to find his entire social network waiting for him with cameras.
"No Jesse," Ghost said. "No Nadia. I checked your story. You only ever came here alone."
"You checked my story."
"Clause two. Honesty about whereabouts." Ghost put his hand on the back of the boy's neck, bare skin where the collar of the hoodie had slipped, and felt him go still under it. "It goes both ways. I know you came here Thursdays, alone, and sat in the third booth from the back."
"Why do you know which booth."
"Because I read the tracker. And because it's where we're sitting now."
The third booth from the back had a table top scarred with initials and a groove burned into the wood where somebody had set a cigarette down and forgotten it. Ghost steered him into it with the hand on his neck, light and total, and Drake folded into the seat without a single word of protest, which was itself a confession.
Ghost sat down opposite. The bench was shallow and he filled it, knees spread, taking up more of the booth than any one man had a right to, and Drake had to pull his feet in to fit.
"This is insane," Drake said, but he was grinning. The grin was doing something to his face that made the bar's bad light seem less bad. "You drove me forty minutes to sit in a booth and glare at it. What does the booth do to deserve this."
"Nothing. That's the point. It's an innocent booth."
"I can't believe I signed a contract with you." Drake tipped his head back against the wall. "I have a signed contract with a man who takes me on field trips to his feelings."
"Drink?"
"Whiskey. The cheap one. The one that tastes like a fire hazard."
Ghost went to the bar and ordered two, and while he was waiting he watched the room the way he watched every room, exits first, then faces. Pool players. Two regulars arguing about a football match. A big man in a neon work vest drinking alone at the end of the bar, going through his fourth with the speed of a man who wasn't stopping at four.
The drinks came back and Drake wrapped both hands around his glass and said, "Okay, toast. To the booth." He clinked his glass against Ghost's. "And to the fact that you are so, so gone for me that this is how you process emotions. Through furniture."
"Drink your fire hazard."
Drake drank. Ghost drank. For a while it was fine, the jukebox grinding through its songs, Drake telling him about the lecture he'd skipped, the reading he'd pretended to do, the international trade law professor with the voice of a man reading a parking ticket. Ghost listened and catalogued the room and let his knee rest against the boy's under the table, and Drake left it there, and pressed back, and pretended he hadn't.
It was the fourth beer that made the man in the neon vest brave.
Ghost clocked him standing up. Clocks the approach, the trajectory, the way his eyes had already been on their booth twice. He'd been on him for ten minutes, half a beer ago, and Ghost had marked him as background noise, a drunk, a type, the kind of man who mistakes a boy in a hoodie alone in a bar for an invitation.
The man changed that math by walking over.
"Hey." He planted a hand on the table and leaned into the booth. Breath of beer and cigarettes. "You're the kid from last week. Third booth. You were here Thursday, right? You remember me?"
Ghost remembered him now. Not from the tracker. From the door camera on the night of the Rusty Nail, a shape in the background, the man who'd whistled when Ghost carried Drake out over his shoulder.
"I don't," Drake said, and his voice was doing something careful, flat, the brattiness retracted like a claw.
"Sure you do. I bought you a shot. You didn't finish it." The man grinned. His eyes moved over Drake the way a hand moves over a counter checking for loose change. "Come have one now. I'm off at eleven."
"Hard pass," Drake said. "I'm here with someone."
"Your friend here?" The man looked at Ghost for the first time. Took in the size of him and visibly decided the whiskey had outranked his judgment. "He can watch."
The jukebox changed songs. The room got small.
Ghost didn't stand up. That was the trick, and it took everything he had. He stayed seated, turned his glass slowly on the table, and looked up at the man with the patience of a man who has done worse things in worse places and signed a contract promising not to do them here.
"She's occupied," he said. "The booth's occupied. The evening's occupied. Walk away."
"Or what, big man?"
"Or nothing. You just walk away. That's the good version."
The man looked at Ghost's hands on the table. Looked at Drake. Something in his whiskey arithmetic finally balanced and he straightened up, muttering something about fags and stuck-up little whores, and Ghost's hand moved off his glass before he could stop it, and Drake's foot came down on his shin under the table, hard, a full-weight boot heel.
"Don't," Drake said. Quiet. "Clause two. No blood. It's not in there but I'm adding it right now."
The man had gone back to the bar. Ghost let out a slow breath through his nose and unclenched his jaw one millimeter at a time.
"That," he said, "was restraint."
"That was terrifying. I could feel you vibrating." Drake's boot was still on his shin, but the pressure had changed, sliding up to his knee, settling there. "You okay?"
"No."
"Honesty clause."
"He put his hand on my table."
"Your table." Drake's mouth curved. "There it is. There's the thing." He leaned forward on his elbows, glass abandoned, and his voice dropped into a register Ghost hadn't heard from him before, low and deliberate and older than twenty-three. "You drove me here to sit in a booth where some guy bought me a shot, and now you're upset because another guy put his hand on the wood. Ghosty. You didn't come here for the booth."
"Drink your drink."
"I'm not drunk. I've had half a fire hazard." Drake's boot slid higher. "Say it. Say what you actually came here for. Out loud. In the bar where it happened. I want to hear it."
Ghost looked at him across the scarred mahogany, at the snake bites and the dark eyes and the flush climbing out of the collar of the hoodie, and every clause in the notebook in his vest pocket went very quiet.
"I came here to sit where he sat," Ghost said. "And to make sure nobody ever sits where I'm sitting again."
Drake's breath left him in one long, unsteady exhale. His knee hit the underside of the table.
"That is," he said, "so much worse than the booth thing," and he was already sliding out of his side of the bench. "Come here. Now. Before I do something embarrassing in public."
The back hallway off the men's toilet was a service corridor, half of it, a dead end with a mop sink and a fire door propped open with a crate, and it smelled like bleach and old beer, and neither of them cared. Drake pulled him through it by the sleeve of his jacket and got him against the wall under the single bare bulb and went up on his toes with his hands fisted in the front of Ghost's vest.
"Tell me you planned this," Drake said against his mouth. "Tell me you brought me here knowing."
"I brought you here wanting. Knowing came after."
"God." Drake kissed him, open-mouthed, and the tongue piercing dragged cold and slick against Ghost's lip, metal and heat. "You're a menace. You're worse than me. You're a whole different class of menace."
"You're the one who dragged me into a bleach corridor."
"Emergency measure." Drake's hands were already working at his belt, fingers clumsy with want, the FUCK across his knuckles flashing under the bulb. "Off. This comes off or I climb you and I'm not responsible for the injuries."
Ghost let him. Let him shove the jacket off his shoulders, drag the black shirt up his stomach, and Drake made a sound low in his throat at the reveal, the ridged scar tissue over the ribs, the ink, all of it, and flattened both palms against Ghost's bare chest like he was claiming it.
"Mine," Drake said. Quietly. Testing the word in his mouth the way Ghost had tested the booth.
"Yours," Ghost said, and Drake shuddered the length of his body.
Then Ghost stopped being patient.
He turned them, took the boy by both hips and lifted him onto the mop sink's edge, one hand spanning his whole waist, and Drake went with it, gasping, legs wrapping around him instantly, heels hooking into the backs of Ghost's thighs. The porcelain was cold through his jeans and he yelped and Ghost swallowed the sound with his mouth.
"Shh."
"Don't you dare shush me, I have rights, I have a contract," Drake was pulling at his own hoodie, getting it tangled, swearing into the kiss, and Ghost helped him, peeled it off him and threw it on the crate by the fire door. Underneath he was in the band tee with the hole in the collar, and Ghost got his hands under it and pushed it up to his armpits and bent and closed his mouth over one pierced nipple.
Drake's whole back arched off the sink. The sound he made wasn't quiet at all, a raw, cracked moan that echoed off the tiles, and Ghost felt it in his chest and did it again, tongue working around the cold bar of the piercing, teeth grazing just enough, and Drake's hands flew to his head, scrabbling over his shaved scalp, holding on.
"Ghost. Ghost, oh my god, okay, yes, I'm being so quiet, aren't I, I'm a church mouse," he was babbling, hips rocking up, the hard line of him grinding against Ghost's stomach through denim. "More, do that again, I'll pay you, I'll amend the contract, I'll add a clause, clause six, mandatory, you have to..."
Ghost moved to the other side and paid the same attention there, and Drake's litany collapsed into broken little whines, high and helpless, head thumping back against the tile wall. His flushed chest was heaving. Ghost dragged his mouth down the boy's sternum, tracing the tattoos along his ribs with his tongue, tasting skin and salt and the faint tang of the sharpie ink he'd been sleeping with, and Drake was shaking by the time he reached his waistband.
"Please," Drake said. The word came out wrecked and he hadn't even noticed saying it. "Please, I've been thinking about this for three days, since the library, I..."
"I know." Ghost unbuttoned his jeans with unhurried hands, took his time, watched the boy's face do everything it did, the defiance and the surrender fighting for space. "You said the stranger was a placeholder."
"He was nothing. He was a coat rack with opinions." Drake's hips lifted helplessly as Ghost peeled the jeans and boxers down over his thighs. Cool air on flushed skin, and his cock lay hard against his stomach, leaking, the head dark and wet. "You. You're the. Oh fuck."
Ghost dropped to his knees on the filthy tile floor of a dive bar's back hallway, thirty-five years old, former special forces, skull mask folded in the jacket on the crate, and took Drake into his mouth.
The noise Drake made should have been illegal. It punched out of him, a choked, strangled sound, and his hand slapped over his own mouth and then moved away because Ghost looked up and that was worse, that was so much worse, the boy staring down at the sight of it with his pupils blown to black. Ghost worked him slow at first, tongue flat, then sliding around the head, tracing every ridge, one hand wrapped around the base, the other pinning Drake's hip to the sink edge so he couldn't buck. The piercing caught the light. Ghost dragged his tongue over it deliberately and Drake's knee clipped his ear.
"Sorry, sorry, oh god, keep doing that, the, with your tongue, on the," Drake's sentences had stopped being sentences. His heel dug into Ghost's back. "I can't, if you keep, I'm going to, too fast, wait, wait..."
Ghost didn't wait. He took him deeper, until his throat opened around him, and Drake shouted something that might have been his name and might have been a obscenity and might have been a prayer, both hands fisted in Ghost's vest where he'd dragged it back on, holding on for his life. His thighs were trembling against Ghost's shoulders. The muscles in his stomach jumped with every pass of Ghost's tongue.
Ghost pulled off, slow, wet, and stood up over him, and Drake blinked at him with glazed eyes and swollen lips and said, "Why did you stop, why would you, what is wrong with you," and Ghost took him by the jaw and tilted his head back and kissed him so he could taste himself, and Drake melted so completely he nearly slid off the sink.
"Turn around," Ghost said. "Brace on the wall. Hands on the pipe."
Drake scrambled off the porcelain, turned, put both hands on the rusted pipe running up the wall, and looked back over his shoulder with his hood-mussed hair in his eyes and his jeans around his thighs. The tattoos down his spine disappeared into the waistband Ghost had just dragged back down, and above the FUCK knuckles his fingers were white-knuckled on the pipe.
"You're staring."
"I am."
"You've seen it before."
"I'm staring anyway." Ghost ran his hands up the boy's spine, both thumbs tracing the ink, and felt him shiver from skull to heel. "Three fingers. You'll tell me if it's too much."
"RED means stop, yes, I know, I wrote it down." Drake's voice cracked on the last word. "Ghost. Please."
Ghost worked him open against the wall, slow and thorough, first one finger and then two, each one dragging a helpless noise out of the boy that echoed off the tiles and would have embarrassed him sober and just made him louder drunk. Drake pushed back onto his hand, shameless, cursing in a low stream, the swearing dissolving into whines the deeper Ghost went.
"More. I can take it, I'm not. I'm not fragile."
"No," Ghost agreed, and gave him a third, and watched the boy's arms nearly buckle. "You're perfect."
The word hit Drake like a live wire. He made a sound that was mostly a gasp and pressed his forehead against the pipe, and when Ghost finally pressed into him, slow, one relentless inch at a time, hand braced on his hip, Drake's mouth fell open and stayed open and nothing came out of it at all for the first time in eight days of knowing him.
"There it is," Ghost murmured against the back of his neck. "The quiet version. Knew it existed."
"You're, oh my god, you're smug even now, you're," Drake's voice was wrecked, thinned to nothing, and then Ghost rolled his hips and buried himself the rest of the way and the sentence died on the vine.
Ghost set a rhythm that was nothing like patient. He'd been patient for a week. He fucked him up against the wall with one hand gripping his hip hard enough to bruise and the other fisted in his hair, tilting his head back so he could put his mouth against the boy's throat above the collar of tattoos, and Drake took it, heels skidding on the tile, moaning on every thrust, the sounds coming faster and higher and less controlled. The pipe rattled in its brackets. Somewhere on the other side of the wall the jukebox ground into another song and nobody in the bar seemed to notice the dead-end corridor had come alive.
"Harder," Drake gasped, "come on, come on, I can, I want," and Ghost gave him what he wanted, both hands on his hips now, driving into him until the boy's elbows gave and he hung from the pipe by his hands with his cheek pressed to the rust and his whole body shaking, and Ghost leaned over his back and said, close to his ear, low, "Who's the placeholder now?"
"Nobody," Drake sobbed, "nobody, it's you, it's only ever been you, you absolute, you're so, oh," and he came apart with a broken cry that he strangled against his own forearm, spilling over the wall's shadow and his own stomach, shaking through it while Ghost fucked him through the aftershocks, chasing his own end with three more deep, brutal strokes before his hips stuttered and he buried himself to the hilt and groaned into the boy's hair as he finished inside him.
For a long moment the corridor was just breathing and the drip of the mop sink and the muffled jukebox.
Ghost eased out of him carefully, steadied him when his legs tried to leave without him, and Drake sagged back against his chest with his eyes closed and his jeans around his ankles and said, "You can't take it back."
"Can't take what back?"
"Any of it. Clause seven. Retroactive. It's all binding." His voice was a wreck and he was grinning with his eyes still shut. "Also I need my hoodie. Also I'm not walking past the bar. Also I think I've come harder than I've ever."
Ghost grabbed a handful of paper towels from the roll by the sink and cleaned him up with the same unhurried thoroughness he applied to everything, and Drake watched him do it with an expression that was too soft to survive in the Rusty Nail.
"You know what the worst part is," Drake said.
"Tell me."
"I'm going to tell Nadia. Everything. She's going to make me a t-shirt." He pulled his jeans up, wincing, and reached for the hoodie on the crate. "Actually, no. I'm telling nobody. This is mine. This whole night is mine." He pulled the hood up and turned around, and under the single bare bulb, in a dive bar back hallway that smelled like bleach, Drake Simmons looked up at Ghost Riley with something fierce and settled in his face.
"The booth worked," he said. "Insane plan. It worked."
"Good." Ghost handed him his jacket. "Because we're doing it again next Thursday."
Drake stopped with one arm in his sleeve.
"Wait. We have a standing appointment. At the Rusty Nail. Weekly."
"I'm staking a claim," Ghost said. "It needs maintenance."
Drake walked into the fire door on his way out, shoulder first, hard enough to rattle the hinges, and Ghost caught him by the hood before he fell and had the rare pleasure of hearing him swear with feeling, twice, in two languages neither of them spoke natively.
"Shut up," Drake said, from inside the hood.
"I didn't say anything."
"You said it with your jaw. I could feel it through the mask." He straightened up, flushed and rumpled and grinning, and pushed out into the bar's dim light with his hand latched in the back of Ghost's belt like it had always been there, walking past the third booth from the back without so much as a glance at it.
The bar barely looked up as they crossed it. One of the pool players glanced, then went back to her shot. The man in the neon vest was on his fifth beer, head down over the wood, and Ghost watched him the whole way to the door without breaking stride. Drake's fist stayed hooked in his belt like a child trailing a parent through a supermarket, and Ghost let him.
Outside the drizzle had thickened into something with intent. The neon buzzed overhead, US TY NAIL pink against the wet dark, and Drake stopped on the gravel and looked up at it.
"I hate that I like this," he said. "The whole night. I hate how much I like it."
"You don't hate it at all."
"No. I really don't." He tipped his head back, rain catching in his eyebrows, hood half fallen. "It's the most romantic thing anyone's ever done to me and it happened in a bar that smells like regret."
"Get in the van."
"So bossy." But he got in, boots on the dash within thirty seconds, and Ghost pulled out onto the wet road with the wipers going and the heater ticking and the boy humming something tuneless beside him.
Ten minutes of silence. Then Drake turned in his seat.
"Question. And I want a real answer, not a jaw thing." He had his knees pulled up, glassy-eyed and loose from the whiskey and everything after, watching Ghost drive. "Back in the booth. When he put his hand on the table. What would have happened if I hadn't stepped on your leg?"
Ghost kept his eyes on the road. The wipers dragged across the glass.
"You don't want that answer."
"That's not a no."
"It's not a no." A truck passed, throwing water across the windshield. "He'd have spent a minute on the floor deciding whether to get up."
"Firmly."
"Firmly."
"Huh." Drake seemed to turn this over, and instead of being bothered he settled deeper into the seat, pleased as a cat. "Okay. Follow-up. Would you have enjoyed it?"
"No."
"Liar."
"I'd have been relieved." Ghost took the corner toward the river. "Stopping myself costs more than doing it. That's the honest answer. It's clause one compliant and I hate it."
Drake went quiet in a way Ghost was learning to read. Not the sulking quiet, not the scheming quiet. Something under both of those.
"You're actually a dangerous man," Drake said finally. "Like, actually. Not the aesthetic. I keep forgetting because you fold to my contract and enforce the cuddling clause."
"Remember it anyway."
"Hot," Drake said, and put his boots back on the dash.
The estate was lit up like a liner when they came through the gates, every window burning because Viktor was home, which Ghost knew and had planned around. He took the service side, parked under the camo of the old plane tree, and they went in through the mudroom like thieves in their own house.
"You realize my father is in that wing," Drake whispered, tiptoeing theatrically down the corridor in his wet boots. "If he sees you walking me to my room at ten p.m. smelling like a dive bar, I will be disowned and you will be shot. In that order."
"Then I'll walk you to the library."
"The library. The neutral zone. Switzerland." Drake grabbed his sleeve. "Wait. Clause one. Forty-five minutes."
"It's 2200. You have time."
"I know I have time. I'm invoking it now. In advance. Pre-emptive cuddling." He was already pulling Ghost down the hall by the belt loop again, walking backwards, grinning in the dark. "My room. I've decided. I never get to pick the location. It's always your room or a public corridor like animals."
"Your room has cameras."
"My room has cameras pointed at the door and windows, not the bed, I checked the angles months ago when I was plotting escapes." He said it with the casual confidence of a man who had no idea what he was admitting to. Ghost filed it under things to review tomorrow. "Also I have an actual bed. Yours is a cot with a tactical blanket. It's sad. It's the saddest bed I've ever seen."
"It's not a cot."
"It's a cot, Ghosty."
His room turned out to be exactly what Ghost expected and nothing like it at once. Band posters taped over the wallpaper, a desk buried under readings, a soft mess of laundry in the corner, and the bed large and unmade with a constellation of pillows and a black quilt that had seen better decades. The room smelled like him, soap and cigarette ghost and the sharpie ink he slept with on his skin. Ghost stood in the doorway a beat longer than he meant to.
"What," Drake said, catching it. "Why are you doing the stare."
"Mapping exits."
"You're doing the other stare."
"Both," Ghost said, and came in, and shut the door, and turned the lock, which made Drake's breath do something audible.
Shoes first. Drake sat on the edge of the bed to wrestle his boots off and Ghost crouched and did it for him, pulled the laces, worked the heel free, and the boy sat perfectly still above him watching with his ears going red.
"I'm capable of removing my own footwear."
"I know."
"Then why."
"Because." Ghost set the boots by the wall. He looked up from his knees, and the angle was not a neutral one and they both knew it, and Drake's throat moved. "You're still wet. Take the hoodie off before you catch cold."
"You're not a doctor."
"I'm worse." He peeled the damp hoodie up off him, careful of the snake bites, careful of everything, and Drake lifted his arms and let him, which was still new, still costing the boy something visible every time he surrendered a thing without a fight.
The band tee came off after, slower, and then it was just him on the edge of the bed in his boxers, ink and pale skin and the cold gleam of the nipple bars, and Ghost stood over him and felt the whole evening's restraint, all that careful folding-away in the booth, change shape in his chest into something less patient.
"Clause one," Drake said, but his voice had dropped out of the joke register. "The cuddling clause."
"We're getting there."
"Are we. Because you're doing the voice."
"Am I."
"You're doing the voice and I'm going to," Drake swallowed, "I'm going to need you to stop or start, one of the two, this limbo is torture."
"Which do you want?"
Drake looked up at him. Under the bravado, under everything, he wanted it so plainly that it was almost hard to look at.
"Start," he said. "Start, obviously, what's wrong with you."
Ghost pushed him back onto the bed with a hand flat on his sternum and followed him down.
The second time was nothing like the corridor. The corridor had been hunger, fast and filthy and over the wall. This was Ghost taking his time on purpose, because he could, because the door was locked and the bed was wide and Drake had a whole night ahead of him and no curfew to beat. He kissed him until the boy's mouth was swollen, until the tongue piercing went warm, until Drake was making small continuous sounds against his lips and his hips were doing slow helpless circles under him.
"Off," Drake managed, pulling at Ghost's shirt. "This, off, again, I liked it before I like it now."
Ghost stripped. He let him look this time, let him put his hands wherever he wanted, and Drake mapped him with both palms like a man reading a map he'd been refused for weeks, the scar over the ribs, the ink, the old damage, murmuring things under his breath that were half worship and half filth.
"You're built like a wall that learned to move," Drake said. "It's obscene. It should be illegal. I'm reporting you."
"To who?"
"HR."
"Dead man at HR."
"Then nobody's coming to save me." Drake dragged him down by the neck and kissed him with the piercing dragging cold over Ghost's lip, and wriggled out of his boxers underneath him with a fluid shameless grace that Ghost was never going to recover from.
He went down the boy's body at a pace designed to break him. Mouth on the pierced nipple again, drawing the bar against his teeth, and Drake arched clean off the mattress with a sound that the corridor's tiles had only been a rehearsal for. Ghost worked him with his hands and his mouth until he was leaking against his own stomach, trembling, saying please in between the curse words like the curses were the padding and the please was the actual sentence.
"Tell me what you want," Ghost said, against his throat.
"You. In me. Slowly, I think, this time, I want it slow, I want to feel all of it." Drake's face was a ruin of flush and honesty. "I want to remember it tomorrow. Both of them."
Ghost reached for the lube he had moved into the boy's nightstand drawer that afternoon without telling him, and Drake saw it and barked a laugh that cracked in the middle.
"You planted supplies. In my room. Like a contractor."
"I plan ahead."
"You're unhinged. You're the most unhinged man alive." Drake hooked his legs around him. "Don't stop being unhinged."
He opened him slowly, deliberately, on his back with his ankles on Ghost's shoulders, watching every flicker cross the boy's face. One finger, then two, working him with a patience that made Drake whine and curse and shove down onto his hand, chasing it, his cock hard and dark and dripping against his belly.
"Please, Ghost, I'm ready, I've been ready since the bar, I've been ready since the kitchen, since the cheese, probably since the roof."
"The roof."
"Don't unpack that right now, I'm begging you."
Ghost pressed in. Slow, like the boy had asked for, one endless inch at a time, and Drake's head tipped back onto the pillow and his mouth opened and stayed open and this time he was not quiet at all, didn't try to be, moaning long and low as Ghost sank into him to the hilt and held there, both of them breathing hard, not moving.
"Okay?" Ghost said.
"Yes. Yes. Move, move, please."
He moved like he'd promised himself he would in the van. Slow and deep, dragging out almost all the way and easing back in, one hand under Drake's hip to change the angle until he found the spot that made the boy's whole body jump and his voice break off the scale. Then he stayed there, working that same angle with maddening rhythm, and Drake came apart under him in slow motion, every thrust pushing another broken sound out of him, his hands scrabbling at the sheets, at Ghost's forearms, at nothing.
"Harder, just, a little, there, there, don't you dare change the angle, I swear to god if you change the angle I'll," and Ghost didn't change the angle, and Drake's tirade dissolved into a keening continuous noise, high and helpless and honest.
"Look at me," Ghost said.
Drake's eyes came open, unfocused, and found his. Held. And that, the eye contact, the no-hiding, did more to him than the angle had, his whole face going slack and red, and he came like that with Ghost looking down at him, spilling over his own stomach in long white stripes, shaking, gripping Ghost's arm hard enough to leave marks.
Ghost fucked him through it, slow still, gentle, and then his own pace finally frayed and he drove in deeper, three, four strokes, and came with his forehead pressed to the boy's shoulder, a low rough sound that he didn't manage to keep down.
After. The clock on the nightstand said 2314. Drake lay boneless and blinky with his cheek on Ghost's chest, one finger tracing the edge of a scar, and the rain had picked up against the window.
"That was clause one," Ghost said. "Technically overdelivered."
"That was clause one, clause three, and clause nine, if I had a clause nine." Drake's voice was a sanded thing. He rolled over, dragged the quilt up over both of them, and did not move away, tucked himself under Ghost's arm with the decisive weight of a cat claiming a radiator. "Forty-five minutes starts now. I'm timing you."
"Set your timer."
"I set it. In my head. It's very accurate."
Ghost lay in the boy's narrow bright loud room with the threat file three rooms away in his go-bag and did not think about it. He thought about the weight on his chest and the rain and the way Drake's breathing had already started going long.
He was nearly asleep himself when Drake spoke, drowsy, into the dark.
"Ghost."
"Mm."
"The letters. When you said someone watches. Did they watch tonight?" A pause. "At the bar. Did you check?"
"I checked everything. Faces, cars, the lot. Twice."
"Okay." Drake's finger stopped tracing. Started again. "Because I keep thinking about it. What you said in the car. That one day one of my friends will say my name too loud in the wrong room."
"That was a general warning."
"It didn't feel general." The boy lifted his head. In the dark his eyes were just a shine. "I'm asking you as a man who has to be honest. Is there something you're not telling me about the file?"
Ghost looked at the ceiling. Rain, and the weight of a sleeping house, and the notebook in his vest over the chair with both their signatures in it.
"There's a fifth letter," he said. "It came two days ago. Viktor's security didn't log it. I found it in the daily pull."
Drake sat up. The quilt slid.
"What did it say."
"It wasn't a letter. It was a photo." Ghost said it flat, the way he said everything that needed saying. "Of the Green Room. You in the window booth. Taken from a car across the street. Date stamped yesterday."
The room got very small and very quiet. Drake's face in the dark had gone still in the way it went still before brattiness retracted entirely, in the booth, at the word occupied.
"On the back," Ghost went on, "one line. He's written: third booth from the back, Thursday, alone."
Drake's breath came out once, shaky.
"Ghost," he said. "Tonight's Thursday."