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The motel room, Kyle thought, was no different from every other motel room he'd bedded down in nearly every night of his life since leaving Manhattan -- with one notable exception. All those other rooms, no matter how nice, no matter where in the country, no matter how many nights he'd been there, had lacked Brian Bradley sitting on the far corner of the bed, hands clasped, forearms resting on his knees, clothes tattered, but Bradley all the same.
You look like hell, Kyle had said first off when he'd seen him again, because it was true. He'd lost weight in the time they'd been apart, so much so that he kind of hung on his own bones, and his clothes hung off him in turn. More than that, he looked nervous, which was not a look Kyle was accustomed to seeing on the face of a man who'd once had enough bluster to take on the whole Lower East Side before his first cup of coffee. It made him feel worse than uneasy, all the way through to downright sick. "How'd you keep all that from me?"
A car backfired outside, and Kyle saw every muscle in Bradley's body tense, an alley cat poised to run at the first sight of trouble. The years on the run had drawn him taut like a guitar string, ready to snap at the first pluck. With a deep sigh, he straightened his back and ran a finger through his hair. "Some secrets you just learn to keep." He gave an apologetic little grin. "I always figured you might understand that, at least, being queer and all--"
Almost before he'd registered Bradley's words, Kyle's fist was out, connecting hard with Bradley's jaw and sending him with a sharp crack backward. Thrown off-balance too easily (too light, the back of Kyle's head lamented), Bradley teetered and fell to the floor, where he landed sprawled on the carpet.
Kyle flexed his fist, feeling the ache of contact against his knuckles. "...Sorry. Watch your mouth."
Bradley brought up a hand to rub at his bleeding jaw and took a deep breath, shutting his eyes. He looked so chagrined, Kyle almost cut through the shock and hurt to help him to his feet. Almost. "I'm sorry. That was awful of me." He took his fingers away and examined their wet, red shine in the motel room's dim light. "Mind if I wash up?"
"Of course." Torn between helping and just watching, Kyle finally stepped back out of the way and let Bradley pull himself to his feet, which he did with no small lack of grace, grabbing at the end of the bed to steady himself. No matter which way you looked at him, he already looked too thin with his shirt on; as he unbuttoned his bloodied shirt and set it to hang on the towel rack in the bathroom, Kyle tried hard not to stare at the way he could see Bradley's bones move under his skin. It'd been a hell of a stretch for both of them. "Did I break anything?"
"Did I?" The son of a bitch managed to grin at him before stopping up the sink and turning on both taps, swishing the water in the basin to a more comfortable temperature.
"Oh, fuck you." The epithet nearly caught in his throat as Bradley bent forward to the sink, and his undershirt pulled just enough to reveal a mark on the back of his right shoulder, a circular depression the exact size and shape of a shot fired by a standard-issue police weapon. It looked only as big as the ball of Kyle's thumb, and he stuck both hands in his pocket to fight the urge to reach out and see if it was, in fact, a fit. "So, yeah, I know how to keep some secrets."
The blood-stained water in the basin matched the deep pink of the years-old wound, halfway between the bright red of injury and the pure white of old scar tissue. "Never doubted it for a minute." Bradley took handfuls of water to his mouth and spat them through his teeth until they ran clear.
It wasn't a bad cut, Kyle could see now. It was clean, just a tooth-split lip from a punch nobody saw coming. "...You're the only one who knows a goddamn thing about that."
"Of course I know, you idiot." Bradley raked his damp fingers through his hair, pushing it back from his face. In the thin, buzzing fluorescent light of the bathroom, he looked like the ghost he nearly was. "I'm your goddamn partner."