Page 15 of Branding the Bat

"Not tonight." But the refusal was softer than Sero intended. "Maybe sometime."

"I'll wait." Trevor stood, stretched, his shirt riding up to show a strip of lean stomach, and gathered his jacket from the arm of the couch. At the door, he turned back. "Wednesday still good?"

"Wednesday's good." Sero was still on the couch, knees drawn up, watching Trevor stand in his doorway. The light from the hall was behind him, turning his edges gold. "Trevor?"

"Yeah?"

"Thank you for the grapes."

It was a stupid thing to say. It was grapes, not diamonds. But Trevor's composure cracked, just for a second, the careful mask falling away to show the face underneath. The look of someone who wasn't used to being thanked for small things.

"Anytime," Trevor said. Then he was gone.

Sero sat in the quiet apartment and listened to Trevor's footsteps fade down the hall. The TV murmured about coral. The grapes sat on the coffee table, red and shiny and ridiculous. On his neck, the claw marks had scabbed over, small, precise, already beginning to fade.

He touched them.

Then he turned off the TV, ate one more grape, and went to bed.

***

He dreamed about the session. Not the pain, not the orgasms, the sound. The sound Trevor had made when Sero came for the eighth time. That small cry, pulled out of Trevor like something torn loose. The sound of a man losing control.

In the dream, Sero was on his knees at the pole, arms above his head, and Trevor was standing over him with the flogger. But the flogger was made of light, each fall a strand of gold that left warmth instead of welts. And when Trevor struck him, the gold sank into Sero's skin and stayed there, glowing, until his whole body was luminous. A bat made of light. A creature of the deep brought to the surface.

Trevor dropped the flogger and knelt in front of him. In the dream, his eyes were amber instead of blue, cat eyes, the real ones, the ones that came with the shift. He put his hands on Sero's face and said something Sero couldn't hear.

He woke up reaching for someone who wasn't there.

The apartment was dark. The Strip's light leaked through the blinds in colored bars, red, gold, blue. Sero lay in bed and let his heart rate settle. His wrist, the one Trevor had tied on Halloween, tingled with phantom pressure.

Wednesday was two days away. He could wait two days.

He wasn't sure he wanted to.

Chapter Five

Wednesday came, and Sero was ready.

Not just physically. He'd shifted three times since the session to smooth the last of the welts, eaten his weight in fruit, and slept ten hours after each shift, which was excessive even for a bat. He was ready in the other way. The way that mattered. He'd spent three days thinking about the space Trevor had opened in him, and he'd decided he wanted to go back there.

He brought grapes for himself and cold cuts for Trevor, because last time that had worked and Sero wasn't the kind of person who fixed things that weren't broken. He also brought a bag of dried apricots, because they were his good-mood snack and he was in a good mood. A recklessly good mood. The kind that made him want to walk into a private room in a kink club and hand his body to a man who'd already proven he could take it apart and put it back together better than it was before.

Amani grinned at him from behind the bar. "Wednesday guy is back. He's already in the room."

"I'm not 'Wednesday guy.'"

"You are now. It's your slot. Every Wednesday, noon. He booked the room for the next four weeks." Amani raised an eyebrow. "I've never seen him do that. Usually he books one session at a time."

Sero's face went warm. Four weeks. Trevor had booked four weeks of Wednesdays. That wasn't a hookup. That was an intention.

"Don't read into it too much," Amani cautioned, though his smile undermined the warning. "He could just like routine. Cats are like that."

"So are bats." Sero took his provisions and headed for the room.

Trevor was already inside, crouched by the duffle bag, and the sight of him, barefoot, shirt off, that lean torso caught in the amber light, hit Sero with a force that had nothing to do with pain tolerance. Not just lust, though lust was there. The feeling of arriving somewhere familiar.

"You're on time." Trevor looked up with a grin.