Chapter 13

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Lennox

The hallway extends, whispering into darkness.

And, still, I keep seeing it. Over and over.

Reed's hand on Indy's hip, fingers flexing as he pulled her in, his lips turning into a smile, his nose dragging along the side of her neck, her hair feathering across his jaw.

I feel sick. Detached. Bewildered, muddled, perplexed.

It was a scene. An act.

I know that.

Logic tells me that. Logic tells me all sorts of things—about Indy's boyfriend, about a man who looks like Archer, about the knife-edge of want .

But the rest of me isn't listening to logic. It's caught in that room, replaying that moment over and over.

He's just a person . One I hardly know. And one who is dating one of my best fucking friends.

I don't know why I'm reacting so strongly. It feels out of proportion.

Voices pick up behind me, and I know Jamie will be looking for me, but I just can't do it right now.

I need five minutes. Ten.

He'll understand.

Would he, though? Understand me about needing time, yes. Understand me having all these reactions to Indy's boyfriend? No, probably not.

I step away from the door, treading quietly on the carpet, the need to be somewhere else sitting like a rock in my chest. I dig my phone out as I head toward reception, pass the stack of books, walking by the dark doorways, ever present with secrets.

Shadows close behind me, voices fading until it's just me, solitary in the hallway. Whether it's a good idea or not to be alone, I don't think I care.

Besides, we've been all over this hallway now, making noise, drawing attention to ourselves, and creating an inhospitable habitat for Boston wombats.

I'm not really all that scared of it. I think with my years of Muay Thai, I can take on one small furry critter. Or, at minimum, run and scream at the top of my lungs, enough to scare it away.

But then a floorboard, exposed through threadbare carpet, creaks under my foot, and my stomach contracts, my bravado waning, the echo of the sound reverberating into the silence, eerie and hanging. My light darts around jerkily, taking in every detail as I reach the marble flooring of the lobby. It's dark except for the swelling light from my phone and an even fainter illumination through the stained glass.

This building has a feeling. A presence. An aliveness . It's not just the legends about it, the history… the murder hotel. It's something else. A feeling under the feeling. Something gut deep and raw and dark.

There are three main paths off the lobby: the hallway to the library, a wide staircase, and an elevator bank. I presume this elevator bank is the one with the painting that Indy mentioned.

I take in a breath of dust filled air and head toward the frames hanging on the wall between the two elevator doors. One is closed, a dull silver reflecting in my light. The other gapes open, no car inside.

I settle my flashlight on the first painting, which is a pile of raspberries.

I shake my head at why Indy would point this out to me, but as I get closer, my breath catches in my throat. I squint at the raspberries. Each of the little drupelets—the bumpy parts that make up the fruit—are actually tiny human hearts. It's as creepy as fuck.

It only gets worse as I move to the next one, sliced open watermelons with fingernails instead of seeds, twisting hands seeming to rise up through the flesh. Then a broccoli with eyes hidden between the florets, and don't even get me started on the artichoke. I like weird shit, but I'm not sure that will ever get out of my head.

Who picked these? They're so inherently odd for an old classy hotel, something I struggle to juxtapose as I turn to eye the open elevator door with the missing car. Brackets and rails run along the far wall.

I step toward it, vaguely aware of a chill that flits through the holes in my jeans, like the smallest breeze is coming from somewhere. The marble dead-ends at the threshold of the elevator door, and I stop at the edge, the toe of my shoe two inches from the drop.

I peer down. The bottom of the shaft must be in the basement, although it looks lower than that, like there's two floors below, even though I'm on the ground floor. The car isn't below, just the dirty cement walls with rails attached to the sides. And…

I squint, my heart doing something in my throat.

The shaft is filled with graffiti.

Mostly at the bottom. It's covered in work that isn't just some kid scrawling on the wall with a can of spray paint. It's artwork. It's detailed. It's confident. I'm only halfway able to see it, so I can't fully tell what it's of, some sort of human-like form. I squint to make out the steady lines, the overall composition of colors—mostly black, studded with bright yellows and hot pinks and vibrant lime green.

I lean forward, gripping onto the doorframe, sweeping my flashlight to get a better look. To know what it is . Fuck, it's beau?—

"Lennox." Reed's soft voice is right behind me, the sudden shock of his presence like a push of air.

Oh, holy fuck .

My foot slips, a garbled sound raking out my throat as my hand grips onto the frame.

I scramble, a wash of cold fear darting up my spine, and the scent of him is everywhere. His arm sweeps around my chest, inked forearm and wrist. He hauls me back, a foot from the drop, his breath puffing against my temple, his arm clasped so tightly that I can feel the flex of his bicep across my chest.

And I… fuck… I almost went over .

"Holy shit," I mumble. "Are you trying to kill me?"

He doesn't move, his arm still flexed around me hard, breathing coming hard, his height behind me feeling massive.

"Why the fuck did you do that?" he snaps, all the softness gone.

My phone is still clutched in my hand, the light from my flashlight on the far wall. "Do what ? You fucking came up behind me and scared the shit out of me. I was just fine until?—"

" You were leaning over the edge," he bites at me, his voice hard, but his fucking body is even harder, feeling like a board behind me. I don't understand how someone could be that hard. How his arms can be so tight around me. How I can feel every breath, and then the pause between them, feel when he swallows, when the way he's standing seems to change. Then he softens, somehow, but his breath is still rasping in my ear.

There's a pause. A hesitation.

He's clasped around me, my heart still pounding from nearly sending me over the edge. I'm still offset from earlier, that reaction to him kissing Indy. I'm detached, needing to keep my distance.

But, I want to stay, too.

I want to feel him breathe, feel his blood move, and hear his heart beat, even his stomach digesting.

I want to be aware of all the things that keep him alive.

There's no way he feels that, too.

No way he's standing there thinking about my stomach digesting. Honestly, I don't really want him to be. That's kinda weird.

He releases his arm. "We're supposed to be in pairs, Lennox. I turned around and you were gone. Just fucking gone. And you're my pair."

"I needed to step out for a minute." My light is a ring on his chest, illuminating his tight jaw and drawn lips, up to a slash of eyebrows just under the brim of his hat.

"For a minute of wandering off alone into the dark recesses of a dangerous abandoned building?"

"I was fine," I point out. "Until you nearly knocked me down an open elevator shaft."

His eyes narrow, his jaw rippling. "I saved you. And what were you even looking at?"

"There's graffiti at the bottom." I let my light fall down to my side. "I needed to get a closer look."

His fingers flick against his thigh. "You nearly fell off the edge of an open elevator to look at artwork?"

"Well, yeah . Obviously, I have priorities." I swing my flashlight in that way. "It's surreal." I lick my lips. "I don't know how else to describe it. There is something about it."

He glances over that way, his brows pulling together under his hat, which he reaches up and flips, still staring toward the elevator, the sharp line of his jaw moving as he swallows. He takes a step in the direction of the elevator.

My light follows him as he walks to the open doorway. He stops half a foot away and braces his hand on the door before swinging his flashlight down into the depths.

He's there for nearly half a minute, his light moving methodically over what's below.

I wait, wanting to see it again. Although not from here. I want to go down there.

He leans over the open edge, his joggers tight against his ass, his t-shirt stretching over the back of his shoulders. He's got that mesomorphic body shape that some men are just lucky to have, with broad shoulders narrowing down into slender hips, an inverted triangle.

I swipe my hair back again. My pulse is still thicker than normal and in my throat, and it floods down other places, low along my abdomen, filling my t-dick, and into the tips of my fingers. His chest against my back.

Fuck, my skin prickles. I finish sweeping my hair back and rest my palm on the nape of my neck.

"I've seen this before." He points his light in the direction of the library. "There was something like this in one of the corners of the library."

My lips part in disbelief. "You're serious?"

He nods. "I saw it the first day we were here."

"Holy shit, why didn't you say anything?"

He shrugs. "We were focused on other things. Then Indy and Jonas got hurt, and I forgot about it."

I take that in. What's interesting is that the paint still looked vibrant. And the styling of the graffiti doesn't take me back thirty years. Graffiti started in the sixties, so it's possible someone did the work while the hotel was still open. Although, why wouldn't they have cleaned it up?

It makes sense that someone might break in and leave something like that behind. I don't know why I'm questioning it. But something niggles in the back of my head.

My hand falls from the back of my neck. "Show me."

We pass by Jamie and the others focused on filming a part where Indy is alone, and so we don't stop, moving past silently, both of us seeming to hold our breaths down the hallway to the library. The path is familiar now, although it feels wildly different on every trip. Maybe because I always notice something new like two of the sconces that don't match or a part of the carpeting that looks like it's been slashed with an exacto blade. All of these tiny details that feel like they could be mysteries of their own if thought about for too long.

Reed brings me to a corner in the library, where the bookshelves narrow on either side down to a two-foot-wide shelf that marks the tip of the star.

My light moves over mostly empty shelves, taking in the subtle differences. There are notebooks stacked here and there on the shelves, just as dust covered as everything else, but something that seems odd compared to the other shelves filled with hardcover books.

I move steadily, focused ahead, but pause when the first piece of graffiti comes into view.

Angels.

The graffiti is of angels. Not traditional. The lines are sharp, and the shapes are half connected, the sense of the angels only apparent when stepping back to take in the whole image.

Maybe that's why I wasn't able to get a full handle on it when looking down the elevator shaft.

The artwork is drawn over the shelves, sometimes using empty parts to create the illusion of depth, wings seeming to recede into the shelves. And for the remaining books still here, the artist painted right over the spines. If a book was removed, it would take part of the artwork with it. And that makes my mind explode with possibilities.

The colors are more serene here. Mostly white on dark wooden shelves, also stretching across the floor, and I'm careful to step over the artwork as we make our way to the far end of the point where there's a larger angel, the only one with the halo, painted in fading gold, chipping and cracking, worn from so many years.

We stop before the final angel.

"It's more than I remember." Reed tips his head back to look at where the halo stretches over book spines. "I didn't come all the way down here. I was looking for a window. And somewhat freaked out too, I guess."

"It's different from what's in the elevator. It's more somber." I can't stop looking at it. Even as I twist to look back at Reed, standing behind me, the edge to his jaw strong, the way that he seems to set all of my vitals off. "It feels big . Like it's here for a reason."

I turn, trying to take it all in, wishing I could see it in the full light. When the sun swells through the skylight, I wonder if it highlights this. "Do you know much about the history of this building?"

His gaze is steady on me, those cool brown eyes fixed. "I didn't even know it existed until I came here with you."

"Jamie and I researched a lot." I swipe my fingers across the dusty edge of a shelf, careful to only touch negative space. "It was a lot of time at the library." I don't know after so many years how fragile the paint might be. "Which isn't a problem for me, considering that I work there."

Reed straightens. "You're a librarian?"

"Well, I mostly work in the digital archives. Or do other things that involve technology. I'm not technically a librarian."

"That's pretty cool, though."

I squint at him, wondering what he finds that cool. "Anyway, the hotel has a long history. As an orphanage, then a gentleman's club, and then finally as the Belmont Hotel. It closed thirty years ago, after the owner's son murdered two people here."

I look down at my feet, my Vans flat on the floor. A chill runs across the back of my shoulders.

"Wait… do you think this is someone's memorial?" Reed's voice shifts into a rough husk. "You think someone was murdered here?" He pulls in a breath. " Right here."

"I don't know." Obviously, anything that was here before would've been cleaned. "The son said he was framed."

I'm not sure why I share that specific detail. Something about it had struck me when I read the newspaper articles from thirty years ago. A gut-level feeling.

"By who?" Reed steps closer to me, that musk and cotton scent of him twining over the dust and leather. The sharp edge of chlorine is there too–from my imagination or not, it tickles my nose.

"I'm not sure." I let my flashlight rest on his chest, the stretch of the wings above us fading into the shadows. "He escaped before he stood trial. And he was never found."

The dark wood folds in on either side of us, the meaning of the paint above feeling significant. Like it means something beyond just resin and color pigments. As my eyes adjust to the light, the white brightens.

Reed brushes his fingers along the lip of the shelf next to us. "It doesn't feel like a memorial, though."

"No, it doesn't." I turn off my flashlight, leaving only Reed's. "The white almost glows in the dark."

I feel a kind of reverence.

For whatever reason it was created here, it has history and depth and meaning. It has what I've struggled to find. The emotion that lies underneath. Tucked into the lines and the color and the composition. The thing that can't be replicated, can't be forced.

It seems to sway around us, the wings lifting and falling on the vacant bookshelves, the gold halo chipping.

"It has consequence," I whisper.

Reed's light clicks off.

We stand in the dark. I can hear him breathing, hear the patter of rain on the skylight, and a knocking somewhere in the building, probably caused by the shifting wind.

I relax my eyes, letting them adjust even more. The outlines of the objects around us become faintly visible. The structures appear, but not the details.

The floor creaks next to me. "It feels like your room."

"No." It doesn't. My work doesn't have this . "My work is just big-dicked, winged people."

"You're wrong." He shifts next to me, close enough that I know I could reach out and touch him. That I could feel his pulse if I set my hand on his skin. His breath, his movement. All those things that keep him alive.

"I don't have this," I say. There's a chasm between what I am and what I can be, and those two things never seem to fully meet.

"You're very wrong." He comes into view, just enough so that I can see the shape of his face, the angle of his jaw. Whether it's from my eyes adjusting, or the clouds shifting and the moon welling through the skylight, or a drift of illumination from somewhere else, I see him. Or maybe it's the way that my mind sees him. Maybe it's like the chlorine, my mind filling in the dots, making up images, making up meaning.

He stops breathing. And I feel that lack of breath, raising hairs along the back of my neck, down to my forearms.

"Your work…" he whispers. "It takes me somewhere else. It takes me somewhere okay. Somewhere I want to go."

"Reed?" My voice is soft. I don't understand what he's telling me. What he's?—

"I want to be in that place." His eyes move over my face. I don't know if I can really see them, but I'm giving up trying to decide what's real and what's not here. "I want to feel the way your artwork makes me feel."

"What is that?" My voice cracks.

He licks his lips. "I feel like me."

"You?"

"Yeah."

"And who is that?"

"I'm…" He moves. I don't know if he takes a step forward or he just shifts somehow, but he's close.

Alarms sound in the back of my head. We're not supposed to be standing here like this. But, fuck me, I don't want him to step away. I don't want him to?—

I push up to my toes.

My heart pounds. I'm doing something I shouldn't be doing. But I do it anyway.

And I'm not the only one.

He meets me. Our lips graze. Just a skim, a touch, a rustle of a kiss. And then his palm warms my neck, his chest pressing against mine. His height seems like it should be bearing down, but I'm right there, pushed up on my toes, and then we really kiss.

It's a release. Not the kind that rocks into a sudden blast, but the kind that bubbles once, under the surface, and then boils up, coursing out as his tongue parts my lips, his hand gripping my neck, our bodies pulling together, heat and friction like a broiling vent. He murmurs against my lips in between kisses, the slickness of our tongues drawing a beat low in my gut. I shift my hips forward. The weight of my packer presses against me. There's this mix of euphoria and fear, deep in the back of my head. I don't think he knows .

But then his fingers dig into my neck, and he kisses me.

My breath is stuck in my lungs. There's no release, no inhale, and we kiss until an ache spreads across my lungs. Until it becomes a choice between breath and kiss.

And even then, I don't know what I want to choose.

Until I finally have to break away. I suppose it's not surprising that he can hold his breath for longer than me.

We stare at each other.

And then reality hits.

"Fuck, I'm sorry." His hand falls, torn off my neck. "Shit, I'm so fucking sorry. Lennox, I…"

"It wasn't just you."

It wasn't just him at all. And for my part, fuck . There is so much. Indy. If he knows I'm trans. The way that he wraps around Archer in my mind. This film and Jamie. And murder beneath our feet. And holy fuck .

"Jesus. That was…" He stumbles back.

I'm reeling. My skin is prickling. My body feels strange. My awareness of being trans is sharper than usual. Sharper than it's been with other guys before, feeling that disconnect, that haze from years ago, before starting T. But some kind of exhilaration too. My thoughts are too fragmented to grasp.

"That can't happen," I say.

He stares at me, something passing over his features that I can't even begin to sort out. Or maybe it's just the play of the darkness, a spike in my imagination.

We fucking kissed . And if he's doing that, then I should tell Indy. I should be a good friend to her.

Except he kissed me .

And I wanted him to. I still want him to. If he stepped forward again, if he bent to kiss me again, I don't know what I would do. My eyes sink to his lips, and I fucking want it.

I've never had attraction to someone the way I do with him. That directness. The way that he looks straight at me, like he's seeing every detail. I mean, I still don't fully know him. There's too much I don't know, but every bit of me has this feeling.

He's the person I'm supposed to kiss.

Fuck, I'm the worst friend ever.

Far off, I hear my name. Jamie's voice. And then Indy's.

If guilt didn't slap me before, it pummels me now.

"Lennox?" Reed whispers, his voice low and urgent.

I scrub a hand over my face. "We need to film. It's not…" I shake my head, my shoulders tightening as Jamie calls my name again.

I go to step around him, and he's quiet. Half of me wants him to stop me, wants him to grab me and shove me up against the bookshelves. I want to feel the wood digging into my back as he kisses me again, as he fits his mouth against mine. I want to feel his fingers gouging into my neck, and I would respond with my tongue.

I want that.

I ache for it.

My fingers rattle with what they can't have, and my thoughts tumble with words like friendship and respect and honesty and integrity.

And all those words mean something to me, so I step around him, and I walk away.