Sid evaded and continued to unlace Dante’s boots. He slipped them from Dante’s feet, then his socks, fingers grazing the mangled scar. “How did you get this?”
“Someone shot me.” Dante spoke without thought.
“Why?”
“To make me stop.”
“Was it Luis?”
A laugh Dante didn’t recognise as his own escaped him. “No, but I wish it had been. He deserved the pleasure.”
“Why?”
“Because I made him hurt someone. Then I wouldn’t let him go, even in prison, and he got jumped so bad he got brain damage. He lost his hearing in one ear because of me, and I still wouldn’t fuckingstop.”
Dante slammed his fists into the door behind him.
Sid flinched, but relief seemed to colour his gaze. He stood, reached for Dante’s hands, and gently uncurled them. “But you did stop, didn’t you? And you’ll never hurt him like that again.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you’re not a man who does shit like that anymore.Youknow that, even if you don’t believe I can.”
Dante’s hair dripped second-hand raindrops down his face and into his eyes. He blinked them away, but theyburned.
Sid’s eyes watered too. He shook his head with a wry half-smile and reached for the hem of Dante’s soaked T-shirt...Sid’sT-shirt, actually, though the bloodstained sunflower looked like something from a horror film now.
“You need to get warm,” he said. “Let me help you?”
Dante nodded.
Sid pulled the ruined T-shirt over Dante’s head and unbuttoned his shorts, pushing them down Dante’s legs with his underwear. It wasn’t sexual, not even close, but a current thrummed between them that Dante couldn’t describe.
“You’re wet too,” he rasped out.
“I know.” Sid kicked Dante’s clothes aside and set to work on his own. “I was getting to that.”
He stripped and chased all their clothes into a damp pile by the bathroom door, then he disappeared through it. Dante felt his absence like a missing limb, and raw panic lurched inside him, igniting the nausea he’d carried since he’d woken up on the cold floor of the storage unit.
Hand over his mouth, he pushed off the door, stumbling forward.
Sid reappeared like an apparition and caught him in the bathroom doorway. “Oh shit.”
The world around Dante blurred, moving too fast for him to catch up.
He found himself hunched over the bathroom sink, heaving while Sid ran the tap and rubbed his back. He wanted to die. Perhaps he already had.
When it was over, Sid turned the tap off and guided him into the shower. Hot water beat down on them, and the relief was so sweet Dante sagged against the tiled wall, eyes half closing, but Sid’s intense gaze kept him awake. “What’s wrong?”
Sid skimmed his work-hardened palm over Dante’s torso, ghosting over his ribs. “What do you think is fucking wrong? You’re black and blue.”
Dante hung his head, staring at the mottled bruises blooming on his skin. While Sid’s hands were on him, nothing hurt, but distantly, everything did. It throbbed and ached in time with his pulse, and the impact of the Albanian’s boot reverberated in his ears. “It’s nothing.”
“Is it fuck. Can you breathe okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Promise me.”