Levi was standing in Asher’s living room with his backpack over one shoulder and the cane Asher had replaced — a proper one, not the cheap aluminum — in his other hand, and he was looking at the room the way he looked at new rooms in the game, taking it in. His eyes moved from the couch to the kitchen to the bookshelves to the TV, and Asher watched him do it.
You’re here. You’re in my house. Your shoes are on my floor.
And the house —hishouse, the one he’d bought five years ago and slept in and cooked in and built prototypes in and never thought of as anything more than a place his body went when it wasn’t working — was a different place because Levi was standing in it.
The couch was going to smell like Levi. The sheets were going to smell like Levi. The shower was going to have Levi’s shampoo.Every surface Levi touched was going to carry him, and Asher was going to press his face into every one of those surfaces when Levi wasn’t looking.
“It’s nice,” Levi said, and he said it like he meant it.
The house wasn’t what people expected when they heard “CEO” and “wealthy family”. It was a three-bedroom ranch on four acres, set back from the road, with trees on three sides. The living room had a leather couch he’d picked himself, broken in over five years, a TV mounted on the wall — good, large, the kind he watched documentaries on or played music through—bookshelves with engineering manuals, neuroscience texts, and a few military histories arranged in no particular order. The floors were hardwood and clean; he cleaned them himself on a schedule, though it looked like whoever had been cleaning in his absence had used something that left streaks.
It was his. And now it was Levi’s.
“Come see the rest,” Asher said.
The kitchen and the living room, he moved through fast — Levi’s hand trailed along the counter; he sat briefly on the couch to test it, the leather creaking under him, and Asher caught the creak and thoughtthat sound is going to mean Levi from now on.Those rooms were just rooms. He wanted Levi to see the other ones.
The spare room was empty except for a desk with nothing on it. “This could be your streaming room. We’ll set up your equipment, and I can build you a proper desk.”
Levi looked at him. “Asher, I haven’t agreed to —”
“The light in here is good. Northern exposure. No glare on the monitors.”
He was already past the objection.
The bedroom. His bed was a king-size memory foam mattress, but he could replace it with a California king if Levi preferred. He ran his hand across the sheets. “Feel these.”
Levi looked at the sheets. He didn’t touch them.
He must be overwhelmed.
“They’re good,” Asher said. “Better than yours.” He watched Levi’s face. “I want to get your posters. The ones from your apartment. For the walls in here…I’ve never thought much about decorating. But I liked how you decorated your apartment. It looked like a place that suited you.”
“You want to put my posters in your bedroom?”
“Our bedroom,” Asher said without thinking, because it wasn’t something that required thinking. “The Civilization one. And the one with the knights. They’d look good over the bed.”
Asher kept moving before Levi could say something.
The bathroom was bigger than Levi’s. Tile floor, a vanity, and the shower — glass-walled, a bench built into the far side, two showerheads. Asher had installed the second head himself because one hadn’t felt like enough, and because he liked the project.
Levi stepped into the bathroom, keeping his hand on the doorknob; he glanced down at it. “Asher, there is no lock?”
“No,” Asher said. “I replaced all the interior door knobs when I moved in.”
Levi’s eyes widened. It wasn’t fear…actually, Asher wasn’t sure what his face was saying. “The bedroom doesn’t lock either,” Asher offered, in case that was what the look meant.
Levi’s mouth pressed flat, so maybe that wasn’t what the look meant.
I still have a lot to learn about you. That’s more exciting, I think.
As they moved back through the hallway, Levi stopped at a dark frame on the wall: the shadow box Marianne had made. She’d arranged every piece with the specific care she gave to evidence, and that was what it was to her: evidence. Asherwalked past it the way he walked past the thermostat. He hadn’t looked at it directly in years.
Levi was looking at it now, so Asher looked at it too.
“What is this?” Levi asked. His eyes were on the thing at the center — a badge, blue and silver, a musket inside a wreath.
“Marianne put it together. She liked having proof I could function.” Asher leaned on his arm brace a little, a twinge of pain shooting through his thigh where the bedsore still hadn’t healed. “Those are from the military.”