Chapter 2

TWO

F elix could count on one hand the number of times he'd stayed in an actual hotel. In fact he only needed one finger. Normally, he saved credits by continuing to bunk aboard whatever ship he was assigned to while enjoying shore leave. Occasionally, he sprang for a hostel—when he thought he might need some privacy and a bunk not predisposed toward falling off of its hinges. Not that all his encounters over the past couple of years had taken place in a bed. In fact, he could probably count…

He needed to stop counting, and stop thinking about sex—which was really hard when faced with the largest bed in the galaxy. It was the size of an Olympic swimming pool and covered in a soft, puffy looking quilt and pillows thick enough to plug a hull breach. About six hundred of them.

Felix looked at Zed instead and felt yet another blush sting its way down from his scalp and across his cheeks, where it met the one springing up from his neck. Damn his pale skin, and damn Zed for being so fucking hot. He was melting Felix's synapses. Conversation as they crossed the station to collect his hold-all from the hostel had been weird and stilted. Felix had expected it to take some time for them to reconnect. He hadn't expected the odd combination of strangeness and familiarity, though, as if someone had presented him with an imperfect copy of the Zed he'd grown up with. One more gorgeous, just as personable, well-versed in their personal history, but somehow different. Unknowable.

"There's only one bed," Felix said.

Zed's brows crooked together. Man, he looked good. Felix preferred Zed's dark brown hair longer, but the shorter cut made his steely blue eyes huge and…had his cheekbones always been so prominent? His mouth, Felix remembered. Wide, with full lips. The straight nose, those dark and mobile brows.

"It was going to be a bit of a wait for two and the beds at these hotels are always huge. Is it a problem?" Zed finally answered.

Felix's answering shrug was more reflex than planned. "It's the size of a basketball court, I think we'll be fine."

"You still like basketball?"

"Yeah. I don't get to watch it much. Mostly old replays we pick up through rip comms."

Felix glanced at the bed. They could sleep together there for a week and not bump into one another. It'd be fine. Unless Zed had planned for them to do some bumping. Was that why he'd decided not to wait for a bigger room?

Jesus. He really needed to stop staring at the bed.

Backing away, Felix swung his hold-all from his shoulder and dropped it onto the floor. Without looking at Zed, he angled toward the door on the far side, what he hoped would be the bathroom.

Zed caught his arm as he passed. "Hold up."

Felix stopped.

"I can get us a different room if the bed is a problem."

"Forget the bed."

Zed's brows dipped low. "Do you want your own room?"

"No. What I want is to take a leak."

"Oh." Zed let go.

Zed was still standing at the end of the bed when Felix finished inspecting every corner of the palatial bathroom and had washed his hands four times. Soap smelled good. Sorta like Zed. All woodsy with a hint of citrus.

"Do you want to get two rooms?" Felix asked.

"What I want is for this to not be so weird."

"Yeah, I know. But it's been four years." Felix scratched the side of his head, catching the scent of sandalwood and lemon as his hand passed his face. "It didn't occur to me until that last week at school that it'd be that long. Two years, four, whatever. Seemed unreal, you know? Like we'd probably bump into each other out there somewhere. After training if not before."

Zed's smile had a slightly distant quality.

Dropping his hand, Felix went to inspect the mini bar. Maybe they should fall back to Plan B. That'd been the one where he lined up shot glasses, right? Or got drunk? As he studied the line of bottles—no mini versions for VIP guests!—he realized he didn't want to waste any of the little time he had with Zed by getting drunk. He wanted to remember these five days. They might be all he had for the next who knew however long.

Zed still hadn't moved when Felix turned around again. Had he said something wrong? Felix pushed out a sigh. "Okay, here it is. I'm not expecting anything, all right? I'm not going to throw myself at your feet and tell you I love you and ask you to promise me the next four years. I'm over it. Took me a long time, I know, and I'm sorry for any ripmails I didn't answer, and for the fact I've let a few queue up lately. We were in the?—"

Registering the fact Zed now had a strange look on his face, Felix clamped his mouth shut, cutting his apology off at the knees. Fuck. He had said something wrong. But which part? And why was Zed so quiet?

Zed had dropped his bag on a proper stand thing in the corner of the bedroom. He walked over to it and thumbed the release. The bag softened and fell open, displaying two stacks of neatly folded clothing. "How about if we head out?" he said, lifting the top two layers away to get at something underneath. "Get something to eat, a drink. Find some music or a show." He glanced up. "Do something that isn't us staring at the big bed in the middle of the room, wondering if we're going to sleep on separate sides or in the middle."

Felix's thoughts wandered to the middle of the bed, to what they might do there in between banked clouds of pillows and linen. Was that what Zed wanted? Did he want to sleep—or not sleep—in the middle? The fact they only had a limited amount of time could be the pass Zed needed. Five days to fuck and then...no, Zed wouldn't forget. If not only because he knew Felix wouldn't, despite the brave speech he'd just given.

"Felix."

At the sound of his name, Felix returned to the conversation to find Zed standing right in front of him. This close, he caught a whiff of the familiar and strange that had so far dogged their afternoon. Zed's aftershave and the chemical tang of reprocessed air. This close, he could appreciate, again, how large his best friend was. Broad across the shoulders and half a head taller. Zed leaned in and brushed their lips together. A kiss that didn't feel like a kiss, but a touch that could be nothing else.

"Stop thinking so hard," he said, his breath tickling Felix's stunned lips. "That's my job. Now go put on a clean shirt." Stepping back, he cocked his head. Eyes twinkling now. "You did bring a change of clothes, didn't you?"

"Yeah."

"Forward march, soldier."

Why hadn't he just waited for a room with two beds? Flick was clearly embarrassed by Zed's assumptions—and now, so was Zed. Flick couldn't have made it clearer that he wasn't interested in pursuing anything of a romantic nature.

He really should have called down and asked for them to be moved to a new room. But fleeing the scene of the crime seemed like a better proposition at the time. And it had led them here, to a laser tag arena, so that couldn't be all bad, right? They were up against a trio of teenagers—spoiled rich kids, by the looks of them, and Zed would know. He and Flick had won the first round, and now a couple of unintelligible shouts drifted from the other team's camp. Trash talk.

Flick rolled his eyes. "You know," he yelled over the barricade, "if you're gonna be smart-asses, you should at least enunciate!"

"Bite! Me!" The words were very clear and perfectly pronounced.

"You told them to enunciate." Zed chuckled. "How's the charge on your rifle?"

"More than enough to take out these two dickwads."

"Remember, they're just kids."

"Not anymore, they're not." Flick's eyes glittered with a mix of amusement and ferocity. "Now they're the enemy."

The siren sounded to start the second round. Zed shared a grin with Flick, bumped fists, and headed off to flank the so-called enemy. If they won this round, too, they'd get new opponents—theoretically, they could keep going all day on the one admission fee, if they kept racking up the victories. Not that he was worried about the cost. It was more the principle of the thing. Bragging rights. It felt like he and Flick were back at the Academy, taking on all comers and kicking?—

Zed's stomach lurched as his feet left the floor. Instantly he snapped into officer mode, assessing the situation. Was the gravity loss throughout the station or?—

Just as quickly as it disappeared, gravity came back on and reinforced its hold. Harshly. Zed slammed to the plasmix floor and rolled, distributing the brunt of the fall. From a pained groan off the in the direction he'd left Flick, someone else hadn't been so agile.

Forgetting all about the game, he sprinted across the battleground. A laser shot stung his shoulder—a fleeting sensation designed to inform but not harm. He lifted a finger in the universal sign for fuck you, then skidded to a stop beside Flick, who was sitting against one of the strategically placed barricades, blood streaming down his face from his nose.

"'M okay, 'm okay," he muttered as Zed knelt beside him.

"Shit." Zed peeled off his shirt and folded it up to press against Flick's nose. "Can you breathe okay?" Eying the other side of the battleground, Zed shouted, "We forfeit!"

Cheers erupted. Assholes. Scowling, Zed pulled out his wallet and punched a couple of holographic buttons to officially end the match. Oh look, there was a button for medical assistance. Zed pressed it, then put his wallet away and turned back to Flick.

"Here, keep pressure on it." Zed cupped the back of Flick's head and pressed the blood-soaked cloth more firmly to his nose.

"Ow!"

Zed winced. "Sorry."

"You could've warned me that the laser tag had zero-g mode." The words came out of Flick's mouth sounding muffled and garbled, but Zed figured them out.

"I didn't know. I thought I'd picked a standard battleground."

He backed off as a couple of attendants appeared with a first aid kit. Shortly thereafter, an older man wearing a suit marched up their three former opponents. He looked about as impressed as Zed.

"Mr. Anatolius, I'm Greg Hoffelder, the director of Hemera Laser Fun. I'm sorry to meet you like this, but I wanted to share that we registered the momentary loss of gravity in your match and were able to trace it back to your opponents." Greg leveled a glare at the teenagers.

Zed's brows rose. "You hacked the match?"

The boy in the middle—and he was definitely a boy still, with zits and limbs too gangly for his body—crossed his arms and looked like he wanted to be anywhere else. "Yeah. But we were never gonna win against you guys and?—"

"Shut up, Mario!" one of the other boys growled.

"And now we're banned for a month. Jeez." The third boy glared at Zed. " Everyone knows that the grav is fair game for hacking."

"We didn't. Ow, fuck." Flick pushed at the attendant's fingers until she moved her hands away from his face. "I think it's stopped bleeding. What do you think, is it broken?"

Zed waited for the attendant to move away, then, gently palpitated the bloodstained flesh. "Nah, I think it's good. How's it feel?"

"Like shit." Flick made an experimental sniff and flinched. "Damn it, that hurts."

The game attendants produced an icepack—one of the ones Zed was familiar with from exercises, where you just had to break the material inside the plasmix to get the reverse thermal reaction to occur. The thing went super cold in seconds. Zed pressed it gently to Flick's face and Flick hissed.

"I'm sorry," he murmured.

Flick made a grunting noise that might have been acceptance of the apology or dismissal, Zed couldn't tell.

"This whole…none of this is going as I'd planned." Zed sighed.

Flick looked up at Zed for a few seconds, his gaze unreadable. "Maybe that's the problem."

"What?"

"The plan part of things." He shrugged and winced again as the icepack moved. "Maybe we need to toss the plan. Start new."

Zed frowned. "I don't want to pretend we don't know each other. Or that we didn't?—"

Flick held up a hand to stop Zed. "We're not the same guys we were at eighteen. I think expecting that we could just pick up where we left off…"

Goddamn it. Zed let go of the icepack. Flick was holding onto it with one hand anyway, and Zed couldn't be touching him when…when… "Do you want to cancel our?—"

"No!" Flick shouted, then cleared his throat. "No," he said more calmly. "But let's…just play it by ear. I mean, this was a good start."

"In theory," Zed said, his lips twisting into a grimace.

"In theory," Flick agreed.

Zed sucked on his teeth for a moment, debating with himself. "Do you want another room?" he finally asked.

It took Flick just as long to answer. "No," he said quietly.

"Okay." Zed tried to ignore the flutters of triumph in his stomach. "Let's go get room service and see if we can find a bad holo to watch."

"Or a basketball game?" Flick suggested hopefully.

"Sure." It didn't matter to Zed—as long as they were together.

Jumping hurt. He had to remember that. But the Titans needed this point to take the game from the Ancients. The plush carpet of the Anatolius suite was not thick enough to cushion Felix's landing, though. Pain shot from the base of his jaw, up through the bridge of his nose, where it poked directly into the back of his skull. "Jesus, Joseph and Mary."

"You okay?" Zed pulled Felix's hands from his face. "Don't touch your nose, you'll make it worse."

"Don't see how," Felix mumbled.

"Maybe let the Titans shoot the rest of their baskets themselves?"

"They need my help, man. They need this game for a chance at the quarter finals." Zed was laughing quietly. Felix pushed him backward by shoving a hand into his shoulder, but found he couldn't help laughing as well. "Hey, this is the first live game I've seen in two years. If I'm gonna help my team, now's the time."

"I'd forgotten how much you like basketball."

"And I'd forgotten how much you like to eat." Food crowded the low table in front of the sofa. One of everything from the room service menu.

Felix perched on the edge of the sofa and leaned forward to grab another strawberry by the stem. He tipped his head back and dangled it over his lips, teasing the pointed end with his tongue, absently, liking the texture, before taking a bite. Juice ran from the corner of his mouth and he swiped his tongue sideways to catch it. Having glanced in the same direction, he caught Zed staring at him—eyes heavy lidded, lips parted. Cheeks flushing, Felix looked back at his strawberry. The mischief maker within suggested he stick his tongue into the little hollow inside the fruit. Moan a little, then suck the strawberry into his mouth. Zed wouldn't be the only one turned on by the tease, though, and they hadn't actually decided if they were going to revisit old territory or not. But, really, could something like that be initiated by a conversation?

Fuck it.

Closing his eyes, he stuck his tongue into the strawberry. Zed's sharp intake of breath would have been audible back on Earth. The sound—the urgency of it, the want transmitted by that one quick inhale—shot straight to Felix's groin. The strawberry was sweet and warm. He sucked juice from the middle before wrapping his lips around the rest of the fruit and drawing it into his mouth. Cheering erupted from the large holo screen flickering in front of them. Someone had scored a point—maybe even his beloved Titans. The short, quiet panting next to him seemed louder. Definitely more significant. Felix finished chewing, swallowed, opened his eyes and turned to face Zed, who looked as though he'd come in his pants. Or was about to.

"Holy shit." Zed pulled at his pants, obviously needing to rearrange certain folds of fabric.

It was so hard not to look at his crotch.

"I don't know whether to feed you more strawberries, push you back into the couch or just yell at you for giving me a hard on."

Well, that was frank.

Chuckling, Felix reached for another strawberry.

"Wait." Zed's hand arrested his, callused fingertips grazing Felix's knuckles. "Hold up. Before you drive us both insane…maybe we could just talk a while? That's what we haven't done, you know."

Felix swallowed. "Talk about what?" Did Zed want to make a new plan, or outline some rules for whatever happened next?

"Just stuff. All we've done since we got here is stare at a bed, nearly get your nose broken and watch a basketball game." He moved his hand away from Felix's, holding it up in a placating gesture. "What I mean is… You were right. I had a plan and it didn't include you eating strawberries."

Grinning, Felix picked up another strawberry and twirled the stem, making the small red fruit spin.

Zed groaned. "Jesus, Flick."

Felix popped the strawberry into his mouth without a tease and flopped back into the couch. "Okay, you want to talk? Tell me what you've been up to on Central. Your last couple of ripcomms were really vague."

"Anything out of Central gets sniffed and snipped, you know that."

Especially anything transmitted from the AEF Headquarters. Felix had supposed a post at the seat of human government would suit Zed, but now he could tell it didn't.

"How long are you going to be stuck there?" he asked.

"I don't know. I've been…looking into other postings."

"Yeah? Like where?"

Zed short of shrugged, sort of frowned. "I don't want to talk about work."

Felix chuckled. "We're soldiers. Our work is our life. It's all we have to talk about."

"You get any time to tinker aboard the McCandless ?"

"Not really…" Felix thought over the numbing routine that was life aboard a battle cruiser. "I did devise a new locking mechanism for the aft evaporator storage."

"Because…"

"Not many private places aboard a battlecruiser."

"Oh." Zed's expression darkened. He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. "Need privacy a lot?"

"Not often." He had a casual something going with one of the guys on his crew. Very casual. So casual, it was more like coincidence. "How 'bout you?"

Zed's hand migrated to the back of his head. His new scar. "My head is still ringing." He gave a wry smile.

"So…with all the important work you're doing at Central…" Paper pushing. He'd be scanning holo reports and making reports of what he'd read for other benched soldiers to scan. "Have you kept up with your music?" That had always been Zed's main hobby. Weird instrumental compositions made using a couple of different wallet programs. Felix didn't understand Zed's music, but he liked it—mostly because it represented a part of his friend few people ever saw. What he was like beneath the handsome exterior wrapped in a layer of perfect soldier. It was Zed the dreamer, the gentle idealist. The man who would one day be a hero to more than just Felix Ingesson.

Zed had his hand on his pocket. "Well, I did do this thing…" Cheeks flushing, he moved his hand away. "It's not really?—"

"I want to hear it."

Zed fiddled with the fabric of his pocket. "It's not finished yet."

"I don't care. Besides, who else are you going to play it for?"

Felix held his breath as he waited for Zed to answer, suddenly and keenly aware that if there was someone else—outside of Zed's brothers—who got to hear his music, then Felix would no longer be…privileged? Special? The best friend.

Just as he thought to suggest Zed needn't answer, Zed pulled his wallet out and folded it open. He glanced up at Felix. "Besides you, Brennan and Maddox?" His smile was wistful. "No one. You know that."

Felix let out a breath. Unsure how capture the precious feeling imparted by Zed's statement, he ate another strawberry while Zed fiddled with a holo display.

The music caught him by surprise, as it always did. Haunting melodies strung together with beautiful phrases. If Felix were to try and make music, his compositions would be mathematical. Methodical. Zed's music wasn't chaotic, but veered as close as it could to the edge of sense, combining rhythms that shouldn't work together but did. The melody…traveled, rarely visiting the same place twice, but beneath, there was a constant. Felix couldn't figure out just what it was, couldn't pin it down, but there was a note, or a beat that tied it all together.

When the piece ended, Zed eyed him cautiously. "What did you think?"

Felix didn't know what to say until his memory suddenly snapped the pieces of what he'd just heard together. "It's…it's a story, isn't it?"

Zed immediately brightened. "Yeah."

"That's what all your music is, right?"

Rather than look offended by the fact Felix had only just got it, some ten years after he'd heard Zed's first mournful tune, he simply nodded. "Mostly. Sometimes it's just me playing with sound, but I always have a sort of picture in mind."

"Tell me about the picture for this one."

He'd thought Zed might hesitate and he seemed to, for the space of a breath. Then he launched into a tale—him among the stars, searching—and Felix fell into listening. He was interested in the story, but really, Zed could be describing the food laid out across the coffee table. Just to hear him talk, passionately and animatedly. This was what had been missing so far. Zed being Zed. Felix laid his head back on the couch and closed his eyes, prepared to listen until Zed ran out of words.