Sid shook his head. “No, no,no. Shit, I’m such an idiot.”
Dante didn’t agree but kept quiet as Sid waged whatever internal war he was having with himself. He brought the joint to Sid’s mouth and held it to his lips.
Sid took a drag and sucked it down hard, closing his eyes again. “I’m a mess.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“It’s hard to tell with you. You hide it better.”
“Do I?”
“Fuck, I don’t know.” Sid opened his eyes and claimed another lungful of smoke, then stepped back and sank onto the couch again.
Dante finished the joint and stubbed it out on a rock, hiding the butt beneath to retrieve later.
He shut the door and considered the coffee table.
Sid reached up and grabbed his hand. “Sit with me?”
Nowhere else I’d rather be. The sentiment sent shockwaves through Dante, sharper even than the hum of attraction their brief touch of lips had sparked in his blood. He sat, keeping hold of Sid’s hand, tracing the lines on Sid’s palm with his thumb. “I’ve never done this before,” he said quietly.
“Done what?”
“This.” Dante held up their joined hands. “With anyone, not just men.”
Confusion coloured Sid’s already complex expression. “I thought you said you’d been with men?”
“I’ve done stuff with men, a long time ago. It wasn’t, uh, what’s the word? Intimate? Affectionate? Or nice, I guess. And it wasn’t much. I can barely remember it.”
Sid squeezed Dante’s fingers. “Was it dangerous to be bi—if that’s what you are—where you were?”
“On the street?” Dante snorted. “Yeah, but it was dangerous to be alive, so it didn’t really matter. But if you’re asking about the crew I ran with, then... no. I wasn’t the only one who liked cock, but most of them preferred my brother, so it wasn’t really a thing.”
Sid said nothing for a long moment, then he took a breath and released it before fixing Dante with a shrewd stare. “Do you think it maybe wasn’t a thing because you’d created a safe place for your friends to be who they were? You ran that crew, didn’t you?”
Dante laughed. “If you can find a human being on this earth who says I created a safe space for them, I’ll do anything you want every day until the end of time. And none of those fuckers were my friends. The street doesn’t work like that. At least, it never did for me, which should answer your question.”
“What happened to your foot?”
A shot rang out in Dante’s subconscious, the acrid smell of a gunshot filling his senses, thick and heavy, clouding his mind. He flinched again, but this time it was all inside, jarring his heart and soul with pain he fuckingknewhe deserved. Pain he couldn’t walk away from, no matter how many times he’d tried.
Come back.
No.
Not me.
“Fuck, I’m sorry.” Sid leaned close enough to let Dante know he’d done something weird. “That’s got nothing to do with what we were talking about. I didn’t mean to catch you like that.”
“Catch me what?” Dante said absently.
“Off guard. Whatever. I didn’t think before I spoke. I do that a lot.”
Dante blew out a breath, counting the thudding beat of his heart as it slowed to a normal rate as abruptly as it had accelerated. “You know, when this first started happening to me, I thought I was going to die every single time. It was fucked up.”
Sid stared hard, cataloguing whatever he saw in Dante and putting the pieces together. “Anxiety?”
“Flashbacks. Something happened to me a long time ago... something I deserved. Karma, maybe, but it stayed with me the whole time I was in prison, and I relived it a thousand times until I started working in the gardens. It, dunno, distracted me, I guess.”