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Even with his back to the door, Geno knows Sid’s coming.
His footsteps are easy to pick out, he leads with the left and steps heavy, confident and sure of himself and completely control of both his body and everything around him.
Always the same. Always so predictable.
But besides that, he just know. He can feel it. It’s like the air shifts to make room for him. The atmosphere changes but no one else can feel it but him.
He feels Sid’s presence bone deep. He has from the moment they met.
Geno counted the number of steps it took him to get from the front door to the tiny table in the back of the cafe when he walked in- fifteen, and then adjusts that for the length of Sid’s legs and his own unique gait.
He turns his head just slightly to the right as he gets to eighteen and Sid is there, slipping into the chair opposite him and placing an out of date Blackberry on the table.
“I’m surprised you didn’t take this seat,” Sid says and Geno shakes his head as he slides the phone off the table and into his jacket pocket.
“Know you like having your back to wall.”
“It’s safest,” Sid says and Geno knows he’s making a sweep of the room. He also knows when Sid’s eyes fall back to him. “You taught me that.”
“Feel pretty safe.” Geno reaches for his bottle of beer and looks up, meeting Sid’s eyes for the first time in too long. Sid’s looking back. Predictable. “You the only one who knows how to kill me.”
“Pretty lucky I like you then, huh?”
Geno shrugs and Sid kicks his shin at his faux indifference. “Yes, yes,” Geno finally agrees as he slides his bottle across the table for Sid to take. “Most lucky.”
Sid smiles and it lights up his far-too-serious face. It doesn’t happen nearly as much as it should but when it does, it’s like Geno can’t believe how far they’ve come.
It was over a decade ago when the high ups yanked a seventeen year old Sid from the system and gave him a choice; jail, or a job.
Sid picked the illusion of freedom that came with the job only to find himself locked away in a training facility for months, learning how to kill.
By the time Geno had gotten to him he was untrusting and stubborn and well on his way to being shaped into a contracted killer even though his baby face still remained.
“No one will ever believe he’s an assassin,” Geno had said to Sergei as he sipped his tea behind the two way mirror. Sid sat in the holding room with his arms crossed over his chest in a picture perfect display of teenage angst.
“That’s why he’s perfect,” Sergei had said.
Beyond the mirror Sid kicked at the chair across from him in frustration and even though Geno was only a year older, he could never remember being that young.
It took time to gain his trust, to make Sid understand that he wasn’t there to beat the rules into him or starve him when he made a mistake or bring up his past as a way to shame.
Others had already done that. Geno wasn’t going to be like that.
He was going to be his handler. His partner.
“Don’t care about your past,” Geno had said as he handed Sid the rifle for target practice, loaded for the first time. “We all have past. I’m here too.”
Sid took the rifle and looked it over and thought maybe this was it. There was nothing stopping Sid from turning it on him.
But Sid hefted it over his shoulder, lined up the target at the other end of the room, and pulled the trigger.
“I was expecting someone different when they said I’d have a handler,” Sid admitted after a long day of target practice, sparring, and lock picking. They were sitting together by the compounds pool. Sid had done lap after lap earlier in the day to build up his stamina. Geno had watched. Sid had his sweatpants pulled up to mid-calf as he lazily cut his foot through the water. “I thought it would be someone older.”
It usually was. Usually it was a father figure but Geno had fought for Sid. He saw something in him; a challenge, potential, a friend.
“Sometime it’s better when we’re both young. Like, still kids. We grow up here.” Geno had shrugged and lied. “Like brothers.”
Sid folded his arms over his knees and rested his chin on his arm. “I have a sister,” he said quietly. Geno had to strain to hear him over the water gently lapping against the side of the pool. “I haven’t seen her since she was really little. I don’t even know where she is.”
Geno did.
He still does.
As Sid sits across from him in the cafe and smiles at the toddler that’s being bounced in her mother’s arms as they make their way to the restroom, he knows that Taylor was adopted by a family in Minnesota. They had a yellow lab while she was growing up. She played the flute but not very well. She’s a goalie on her college hockey team and when she graduates in the fall she has a public relations job lined up with the Pittsburgh Penguins.
She has a lovely life, one that Sid would be proud of if he knew about it.
He should have told Sid. He should have told him that night they were sitting around the pool or during that first seventeen hour plane ride from Singapore to Los Angeles. Before his hands stopped shaking after a kill and he still looked a haunted at taking a life or before they kissed that first time in that small town outside of Rio or the second time in a hotel room in Cologne.
It’s been years- countries and continents and bodies after bodies laid to waste by Sid’s hands on Geno’s orders- and he still carries the secret with him.
But letting go of that would open the door to others. Like how he looks at Sid sometimes (as he’s pulling on gloves so he won’t leave prints or tapping away at his phone or sleeping in the pre-dawn light) and think about running away. They have the knowledge and the ability to slip away and live off the grid. They can falsify passports, change their names and finally be free. They can settle down in the snow covered mountains of Switzerland or on the beach next to the bright blue waters of Santorini. Wherever they decided they could be together. They could hold hands as they walk down the street and sleep in on the weekends. They could have lunch in cafes just like this one without a dead man’s cell phone in one pocket and instructions for the next hit in the other. They could be happy. They could get married.
“Hey,” Sid says, his hands steady around the bottle of beer as he breaks Geno from his thoughts. “Have you heard anything I’ve said?” He leans in with his elbows on the table. “Where did you go?”
Somewhere better, he thinks, somewhere happier. “Long flight,” he says with a shrug and tries to hide his smile when Sid rolls his eyes. “I order for you. Eat first then we talk about next mission.”
Sid frowns and pushes the bottle back towards him. His shoulders slump and he stares down at his hands as he says “do you ever…” and then trails off.
“What? I ever what?”
Sid gets a far away look in his eyes, like he’s thinking of something better, something happier and then he shakes his head and his eyes clear. “Nothing. Thank you for ordering for me.”
“Of course. Know what you like.”
“Yeah,” Sid says softly as he hooks his foot around Geno’s ankle. “You do.”