The male’s fly was open, and his cock was out … and Blay’s fist was wrapped around that thick length, the veins that ran down his muscled forearm swelling up as he stroked himself.

“You want this?” Hypothetical Blay asked in a deep voice.

Qhuinn hissed and bit his lower lip—and what do you know, as he rolled his hips, he could almost not feel the pain from the incision in his side. “Yeah, fuck yeah, I want that shit.”

Not Actually Blay shifted down lower in the seat so that he could spread his knees even wider. And as he did, the black jeans he had on stretched tight over his heavy thigh muscles and that fly got pulled open to its limit. And … oh, yeah, as the fighter worked himself, his pec on that side flexed and released along with his shoulder while he pumped, nice and slow.

With a rough swallow, Qhuinn’s pierced tongue itched for that head, that shaft. He wanted to make up for what had come out of his no-account mouth when he’d been raging, and sex wasn’t a bad Band-Aid, it truly wasn’t.

And Not Really There Blay was going to let him.

Floating in his little sea of delusion, Qhuinn felt the false relief that came with a forgiveness that didn’t exist in RL. Except goddamn it, considering the state of the rest of his life, he was going to go with this. In this little stretch of fantasy, he was going to hop on the Blay train and pray that he could somehow translate the reconnection to the actual male as soon as his drugs wore off.

“What do you want to do to me?” Almost Blay whispered. “Where are you going to go with your tongue?”

Yeah, enough with the talking.

With a sharp surge, Qhuinn went to sit up—because that was what you did when you had big plans: He had every intention of making it across the hospital room, dropping to his knees, and pulling an open-wide until Blay was drained dry. And that was just going to be a prelude to the makeup sex they were going to enjoy for the next twelve to fifteen hours.

So hell yeah, he jacked up to the vertical—but that was as far as he got. His stomach pulled the pin on a grenade he’d been unaware was in its possession and then his gut chucked that bitch right up into his lungs, the pain explosion throwing him into a lie-down-now tailspin that left him retching.

And damn him, the sharpshooter was a terrible clarifier, wiping Hypothetical Blay with his magnificently hard cock right out of the room—

As the sound of someone screaming registered, he put his hand to his mouth to check whether it was him or not. Nope. Lips were closed.

Qhuinn frowned and looked to the closed door.

What was … so who was yelling like that? It couldn’t be Xcor. If the Brotherhood had somehow managed to recapture him, they would never bring the bastard here.

Whatever. Not his problem.

Glancing to the left, Qhuinn measured the distance between him and the house phone that was on the bedside table. ’Bout two hundred yards. Maybe two fifty.

So if he were a golfer, he’d be out of the irons and into his driver.

With a groan, he initiated the process of heaving himself over and stretching his arm as far as he could. Pretty close to goal. Closer. Annnnd … almost.

After a couple of batting passes and some fondling with the tips of his fingers, he finally managed to grab the old-fashioned receiver from its cradle. Even managed to get it over onto his chest without dropping the damn thing.

Getting it up to his ear was a piece of cake, too.

But oh, fuck from the dialing.

He had to remove his IQ—er, IV. Messy, but necessary, the open port on the machine leaking clear shit onto the floor as his blood seeped out of where the tubing had been plugged into the crook of his elbow. Who cared. He’d mop it up … when he could stand without hurling.

For a moment, as he stared at the phone’s twelve buttons in their neat little square, he couldn’t remember the digits. But desperation made his memory far more acute than it had any right to be and he recalled the pattern more than the order of numbers.

One ring. Two ring. Three—

“Hello?” a female voice said.

The light from the sun was, like, ninety-seven percent gone from the sky when Blay opened the door and stepped out onto his parents’ new back porch. Cold, really cold, the air so dry his sinuses felt sandblasted.

Man, he hated December. Not just because it could get this frigid, but because it meant that there were, like, four more months to go before the weather eased and you didn’t feel like you needed to parka-up every time you went outside.

Putting the cigarette between his lips, he fired up his Van Cleef & Arpels gold lighter—the one from the forties that Saxton had given him when they’d been dating—and cupped his hand around the cheery orange lick of flame. The first inhale was—

Pretty fucking awful.

A coughing fit overcame what was supposed to have been a blissful reunion between two old friends: his lungs and nicotine. But he recovered quickly, and within three puffs, he was back in business, the familiar tingle in his head making him feel lighter on his feet than he actually was, the smoke down the back of his throat like a masseuse’s stroke over his esophagus, each exhale something close to chiropractic all the way down his spine.

He’d heard that smoking was a stimulant? And the little buzz in his frontal lobe put paid to that idea. But it was weird how everything about the bad habit calmed him out: The potential for relaxation had started to coalesce the instant he’d found the old, unopened pack of Dunhill Reds in a bedside drawer in his room upstairs, and had culminated in this, his first moment of semi-peace since he’d shown up here twelve hours ago, ostensibly to check on his mother’s bad ankle.

He tapped the cigarette over the crystal ashtray he’d balanced carefully on the porch rail, and then it was back between the lips, back with the inhale, back with the exhale.

Focusing on the snow-drifted meadow out behind the house, he felt sorry for his mom. She had had to leave their true family home when lessers had attacked the place—an episode that, although he could have lived without it, had proved even accountants like his dad and civilian females like his mom could be ass-kickers if they needed to. But, yeah, no staying there anymore following something like that—and after floating around and bunking in with relatives for a while, his parents had finally purchased this new colonial out where the farms and vacant stretches of land were.

His mother hated the house, even though the appliances were new, the windows opened and closed easily, and none of the floorboards creaked. Then again, maybe all of that was what made her dislike it, but what could you do—and this was not a bad spot. Ten acres with good trees, a great wraparound porch, and, for the first time, central air.

Which you didn’t need in upstate New York except for, like, the last week in July and the first week in August.

And during those fourteen or so hot nights, you were really glad you had it.

As he stared at the frozen pond with its whisker-sticks of cattails and s-curve snowdrifts, he let his mind wander to all sorts of non-controversial musings about real estate and HVAC systems and bad habits that weren’t actually that bad.

God knew it was a hell of a lot easier than what had kept him up all day.

When he’d arrived the night before, close to dawn, he hadn’t had the heart to tell his parents what had happened. The thing was, when Qhuinn had maintained that he, Blay, was not a father to those two kids, the guy had also erased any grandparental rights his mom and dad thought they had, too. So, yeah, no, he wasn’t going to explain why he’d—

The creak of the door behind him turned him around. “Hi, Mahmen,” he said, tucking the cigarette behind his back. Like he was a fucking pretrans doing something wrong.

Still, good boys liked to make their moms happy, and Blay had always been a good boy.

His mahmen smiled, but her eyes flicked to the ashtray, and come on, like she couldn’t catch the scent in the air? And it wasn’t that she’d ever tell him to stop, except she was like Qhuinn. She wasn’t a fan, even though there was no cancer risk to worry about.

“You have a phone call.” She nodded over her shoulder. “There’s an extension in your father’s study if you’d like a little privacy?”

“Who is it?”

He asked this to buy some time, even though it was pretty clear who was calling—but she didn’t seem to mind. “It’s Qhuinn. He sounds … a little off.”