Both were marked as dead ends on the map. The early tests had missed their connection, since neither shape had returned a tennis ball.
God, they could so easily have missed him while he was trapped.
Jake took a deep breath, matched Sol’s steady, droning hum, and returned his attention to the map and the room.
Sol had named B and G without looking at the map. It was like the crossword—he’d fit the whole of it into his head.
That shouldn’t have been the thing to make Jake catch his breath, not in this multidimensional hamster cage of a room, not when Sol was reshaping space with his thoughts, but it was. Maybe because that skill was almost within his reach, he could be impressed by it. Everything else was impossible to imagine.
Across the room, something emerged. It was a slow movement, totally different from the swaying pulse of the distortions. A quicksilver puddle pooled at the base of one half of the machine.
The alien was liquefying itself, like he’d suspected it could. The coral-like solid forms growing on the remains of the machine washed down in waves until the puddle was unmistakably far, far larger than the base of the machine. It stretched toward the right wall of the room and began to ooze across the floor.
Jake opened his mouth. “Um—you all see that, right?”
“Yes,” Miriam said, clipped but soft. She’d been the one most worried about the alien as a threat. She was standing with one hand braced against the table and the map she’d been annotating. Her other hand held a pencil like a weapon.
The alien flowed until it hit the wall, and then it stopped moving. It wasn’t any closer to them. It hadn’t gone far from the machine, either. What was the point?
It solidified, going rigid and then forming dozens of little tubes along the bottom of the wall. The process was quick, but not as quick as the disappearance of several distortions from the air.
“Strike distortions E, F, and I from the map,” Sol said.
The cluster of three that vanished was between Sol and the organism.
“Holy shit,” Jake said, and Miriam turned sharply to look at him. “Look at the map, and look at where the organism is. It moved over there on purpose, in response to what Sol is doing. It’s like… it’s like they need to pull on opposite ends of the distortion, or something. The alien moved to be in position.”
“You can see the distortions?” Miriam asked.
“Yeah. Since I got out.”
“Can you hear what Lange hears? You were humming,” Chávez said, and Jake shook his head.
The alien liquified itself again and slid back toward the center of the room.
“If you’re right, then you should be able to guess which one they’re working on, based on where the alien goes,” Miriam said. “Point to it.”
Jake glanced from the alien to the map in her hands, and put his finger to D and J, which were connected, according to her notes.
A second later, both closed.
“Strike distortions D and J from the map,” Sol said. Maybe Jake was imagining it, but he sounded a little smug.
“Well, damn,” Miriam said. “You were right.”
“They’re communicating,” Chávez said, like it was the best thing she’d ever seen in her life—and she couldn’t even see the best parts of it. “More than that, they’re working together.”
The alien glided across the floor according to some inaudible instruction from Sol, and together, they cleared the room of another distortion, and another. The air flashed and calmed as they worked.
Sol leaned on him more heavily as his energy flagged. His voice grew strained, so Jake took to announcing which distortions had closed.
And then, at last, Miriam had crossed out every shape on the map. The alien slid back to the machine and solidified. The room was almost restored.
Only the breach remained.
Jake could see it now if he cared to look. The gash that stretched between the two halves of the machine had none of the appealing shimmer of the smaller distortions. It was a warped, impossible, colorless shape—or sometimes black, from the corner of his eye. Staring right at it made bile rise in his throat, so he decided not to.
But if Sol and the alien could repair the distortions, they could seal the breach. He hoped.
Sol sagged against him. Jake grasped his hands and stood carefully so they could support each other. He felt much better than he had. The work had distracted him, and now that the distortions were gone, his fear had quieted. He no longer needed to check over his shoulder to see if the wall was where it had been, at least for right now. The tight band around his lungs had loosened. He hadn’t expected the reprieve so quickly.
Sol had given him that gift.
Jake kissed him. Laced with salt, the kiss tasted like relief and gratitude. They clung to each other, solid and real.
20
Faith
It was a novelty to sit down on Sol’s bed instead of crawling into the suspended sleeping bag. Jake was tired, but he didn’t lay back to make space for Sol. Instead, Jake caught him around the waist. Sol wasn’t weightless anymore, but he put up no resistance, letting Jake pull him into his lap. Sol settled there, straddling him, as heavy and real as Jake could ever have wished for. Jake wrapped his arms around him and squashed their bodies together. Sol’s skin was hot and smooth. His spine arched and the hard angles of his shoulder blades shifted under Jake’s arms, but he didn’t try to escape the embrace. They both smelled faintly of the rinseless shampoo and soap they’d used in the absence of a working shower. He could feel the pulse in Sol’s neck and the beat of his heart and lower, the hard length of his cock nestled between them.
Jake was hard, too, his dick stretching the fabric of the shorts he hadn’t had the foresight to strip off. He hadn’t known he was going to do that, reach out and grab Sol like that, until his arm had already been extended. They hadn’t talked about this. By rights, they should both be asleep.
Jake wasn’t sure sleep was in the cards for him tonight, and he really didn’t want to contemplate that, so he kissed Sol’s cheek and then gently bit his earlobe.
“We were both told to rest,” Sol said, amused.
“If you pick now to start doing what you’re told, I swear I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” Sol asked.
Jake exhaled a laugh, unable to bring himself to say anything, just in case Sol really did want to sleep. “Lie awake with this hard-on, I guess.”
“You wouldn’t even furtively jerk off? Disappointing.”
“I—what? Fuck.” Jake buried his face against Sol’s neck. He was thirty goddamn years old and had lived through a lot of shit, but Sol could make him flush with shame and arousal like flipping a switch. Probably because now if Sol did want to go to sleep, then Jake would lie in bed next to him contemplating how quietly he could stroke himself.
Sol tsked and shook his head gravely. Then, his eyes bright, he reached between them to cup Jake through his underwear. “I don’t intend to let this go to waste. Tell me what you want.”
“To not think about anything but this. You. Us.” Jake ran his hands over the muscled plane of Sol’s back and all the way down to the curve of his ass.
“How do you feel about fucking me?”
Sol had the answer throbbing in his hand. Jake said, slightly breathless even though he hadn’t moved, “Yeah—I mean, good, I feel good. I want to.”
The way he’d felt when Sol had fucked him, that fullness, that blackout rush of sensation—he’d never come so hard in his life. Just the thought that he could make Sol feel a fraction that good made his cock swell.
It would probably be a fraction, though.
“I… might not be as good at it as you are,” Jake said.
“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want you to,” Sol said, as though that swept aside all of Jake’s self-doubt.
And maybe it did. Sol knew this was his first time. He’d probably adjusted his expectations accordingly.
Sol unf
olded himself—God, his long legs, the muscles of his thighs, the slight upward curve to his cock, the way it bobbed as he moved—from Jake’s lap and crawled onto the bed. He lay on his back with his knees spread, and by the time Jake had peeled off his shorts, Sol had a bottle of lube in one hand and two fingers in his own ass.
Jake’s mouth went dry at the sight of Sol’s clever, slender fingers working in and out of his body. His own hands curled with envy. “Can I do that for you?”
Sol handed him the bottle. “Be generous with it.”
The lube was cool against his fingers, and he rubbed them together to warm it. He touched a fingertip to the tight little whorl and drew a careful and curious circle. Sol had done that to him, and he’d liked it.
“In,” Sol demanded.
Well, it didn’t get much more direct than that. Jake went slowly. It had been strange, feeling Sol push into him yesterday. Good-strange, but still. He didn’t want to fuck this up. His fingers suddenly felt ridiculously thick.
Jake glanced between the tip of his finger disappearing into Sol’s body and the much, much larger erection leaking between his thighs. The calculation gave him pause.
“Jake. You are not going to hurt me. I want this. Put your finger all the way in and find out how much.”
Jake slid his finger forward, past the tight ring of muscle. It was hot—literally warm, heat radiating from all sides, and Jake should have known that, of course people were hot inside, but knowing was different from feeling. The inside of Sol’s body welcomed him.
Jake’s mouth had fallen open and he wasn’t quite breathing, so he must look absurd, but Sol had his eyes closed and his head thrown back. He hummed with pleasure as Jake eased in and out. Sol had been using two fingers on himself, so Jake added a second.
“That’s so good,” Sol told him, “so good.”
Fuck. Jake had to reach down and squeeze himself. He kept his other hand working steadily. Could Sol come just from this, from his fingers? Sol’s untouched cock lay rigid against his stomach, a thin thread of precome dripping from the tip.
Sol wrapped a hand around Jake’s wrist, stopping him, as though he’d read Jake’s mind. “Fuck me.”
“Yeah,” Jake said, his mouth dry and all other thoughts evaporated. He slid his fingers out with care. “Okay. Yeah. Like this, with you on your back?”
Sol rolled to his side. “Lie behind me.”
“Spoon you, you mean?”
“Just do it.”
That was easy enough, and with only some minor adjustments and a few short, borderline curt instructions from Sol, they got themselves aligned. Jake entered him, smooth and slow, and had never felt anything so blissfully perfect in his whole damn life.
“Fuck,” he said, hoping that conveyed everything, and Sol sighed happily in response.
This wasn’t like when Sol had fucked him, and not just because they’d switched. That had been adventurous, experimental, more about force and depth and angles. It had been goddamn glorious, but they were doing something different now.
This time was about wrapping an arm around Sol and kissing the back of his neck. It was about closeness. Sol wanted to be held. No matter that he didn’t want to admit it or talk about it, or that he couldn’t give gentle, encouraging directions to make it happen, the fact that he wanted it—enough to ask for it—made Jake melt. He opted not to embarrass Sol by saying anything and instead pulled Sol back against his chest.
They settled into a rhythm, languorous and unhurried. Everything unspoken was there, in the slide of their intertwined bodies and the clutch of their intertwined hands. In every breath, Jake could smell the mingled, earthy scent of them and taste the salt on Sol’s skin. He could feel Sol everywhere. It was impossible to be anywhere but here.
When he reached down to stroke Sol’s cock, hard and slick with longing, he did that gently, too. There was so much pent up between them that even a light touch was enough to set Sol off. A tremor took him and he shuddered against Jake, his hips snapping erratically. His orgasm spurted into Jake’s hand and overflowed. His body clenched tight around Jake’s, squeezing again and again, and Jake couldn’t have stopped himself from coming even if he’d wanted to. Pleasure slammed into him and kept going, dragging a few last thrusts from him long after the sensation should have subsided. It left him motionless and happy. He kissed the back of Sol’s neck again.
They slid apart, cleaned up, and came back to bed. They lay face to face. It wasn’t until the lights were off in the room that Sol spoke.
“I didn’t want that to happen to you,” Sol said. His voice was rough.
“I know,” Jake said. He braced to say it’s not your fault. Given every other conversation with Sol, he’d need to.
Instead, Sol said, speaking barely above a whisper, “I didn’t want it to happen to me, either.”
Jake pulled him closer. How shitty that there was no equation you could write or machine you could build that would stop bad things from happening. No matter how smart you were, or how careful, or how kind, or how deserving of kindness, still life might make you suffer. The multiverse was vast and incomprehensible, but Jake knew that.
He knew one or two other things, too.
“I was scared,” Jake said. “But not as scared as I could have been. I knew you would look for me.”
“You could not have known that I would find you.”
“Yeah.” Jake didn’t like to think of other versions of events. He tightened his arms around Sol and dropped a kiss on his temple. “But if we limit ourselves to things a human being could know—”
“I don’t appreciate your tone—”
“I know you’re really fucking stubborn,” Jake said, interrupting him. “And I knew you would look. It made me feel better, and I’m sorry you didn’t have that when you were trapped. I wish I’d been looking for you then. You should know that if anything happens to you now, I will turn the whole damn multiverse upside-down and shake it.”
“That is—” Sol seemed to reconsider his words. “Thank you.”
Jake had been hoping for something else, something more, but he’d hedged his own bets, so “thank you” was the best he could expect.
Sol released a breath. “I need to tell you something.”
Good. Jake hadn’t expected Sol to go for it, but if they were going to confess shit flat out, that would be so much easier than dancing around it.
“I don’t know how to do it,” Sol said. “I don’t know how to make it work.”
Fuck.
“Your faith in me—it’s too much,” Sol continued. “I can’t repair the breach. I’ve thought through it so many times now and I’m not enough—”
“Oh,” Jake said, louder than he meant to. “Thank fuck. I thought you were kicking me out.”
“You’re relieved that I’m talking about the breach?”
It was too dark to see Sol’s expression, but Jake could picture the skepticism. He couldn’t contain his slightly panicked laugh. “Yeah, actually. Thought you were working your way up to ‘I don’t know how to be in a relationship’ or something. Worrying about the disintegrating fabric of reality is our everyday life at this point.”
“Jake,” Sol said, softly enough that it was cause for alarm. “I don’t know how to be in a relationship. But it doesn’t matter because I can’t fix the breach.”
“We can figure it out,” Jake said. “On both counts.”
“When you were gone, I wished I had told you,” Sol said. “The set of feelings I have for you—the joy and comfort I derive from your presence, but also the fear when you’re in danger—I think they might most succinctly be described as ’love.’ I want you to know that, even if this is all we get.”
“Wow.” Jake kissed him, because he wasn’t gonna say anything half that good, and it slid from sweet to fierce in seconds. When they broke apart, he said, “In case it’s not clear, I love you, too. And I’m not ready to give up on our chances of fixing the breach—but I think the first st
ep is for both of us to get some sleep.”
Sol rolled to his back. Probably he had his eyes wide open so he could brood in the dark. Jake touched his shoulder, nudged him until he was on his side, and then gathered him close. It was good to have someone to hold.
21
Eat the Moon
The copper tubing was heavier in Solomon’s hand than expected, but it had nothing to do with gravity. Solomon hadn’t had much cause to hold lengths of pipe—literal ones, anyway.
“Why did you give this to me?” he asked Jake.
“Because we’re fixing the leak so we can turn the water back on. Give it to Eliza, she’ll get it where it needs to go.”
Jake was tapping at an electronic blueprint of the facility on his tablet. Solomon bent to set the copper tubing in the clawlike grip at the end of one of Eliza’s arms. Two of her other hands latched around short, wide copper tubes, and the last had its grip altered to two flat pincers, but Solomon couldn’t say what for. Eliza rolled away from Jake’s feet and up the interior wall of the greenhouse, toward the water-damaged hole in the ceiling.
“You want a shower, don’t you?” Jake asked, his attention still alternating between Eliza and the tablet.
“It’s not the most pressing of my obligations.”
Solomon should be back in his lab, staring at the breach until an answer came, but instead Jake had asked him to come here. So he had. Even though reality was falling apart. As they’d walked together, Jake had handed him the pipe as though Solomon knew what to do with it, and Solomon had accepted it, because it came from Jake.
His priorities were as disordered as his mind.
Jake interrupted his thoughts by pressing the tablet into his hands. Solomon held the tablet horizontally, with one hand on either side, and his thumbs hovered over two columns of icons likely meant to control Eliza’s arms.
He could see nothing unusual, no reason for Jake to have given him the tablet. The center of the screen was video from the camera affixed to Eliza, and it was showing the wreckage left by the organism. Jake and Eliza had broken off the corroded portion of the water line days ago, and now there was a long empty space without pipe.
Nowhere Else Page 23