Chapter Text
Los Angeles, the city that never truly sleeps.
The heat sat on the back of the neck like a hand that would not lift. Even at night the asphalt held the day, and the bar Ilay had chosen—low light, bad music, a clientele that knew how to mind its own throat—smelled of citrus cleaner and old bourbon.
He had finished the T&R business an hour ago. A handshake. A signature. A man who would not sleep well for a month. Ordinary work.
Kyle had already messaged twice about the Berlin flight:
"Be on it. Do not make me send someone."
Ilay ordered whiskey, neat, and took a corner stool where the mirror gave him the door and the room without requiring him to turn his head.
He was leaving in the morning.
He had no intention of remembering this city any longer than it took the plane to clear the coast.
The seat two down stayed empty long enough that he stopped tracking it.
Then it wasn’t.
The man who took it was young, tall—over 180 cm, Asian, dark hair a little too long for the neat crowd along the bar, shoulders loose under a plain black hoodie.
Not Ilay’s type. Ilay’s type ran smaller, prettier, the sort that bruised if you looked at them correctly and thanked you for the attention.
This one had long hands and a mouth that already looked like it knew a private joke.
Ilay filed him as scenery and went back to his glass.
The man ordered in easy English with a faint, unplaceable drag under the vowels. Beer. Whatever was on tap.
When it arrived he took a swallow, and his whole face performed a small, involuntary tragedy—brows up, mouth pulled, a blink as if the glass had insulted him personally.
Ilay chuckled.
The sound startled him more than it startled the stranger. He did not laugh in bars.
He did not laugh at strangers. The whiskey must have been better than he thought.
The man glanced over, caught, and the disaster on his face rearranged itself into something brighter and entirely unapologetic.
“That bad?” Ilay said.
“I think they fermented regret.” The man’s eyes were brown, lively.
“I should have asked what the locals punish themselves with before I pointed at the tap.”
“You pointed at the tap.”
“I was optimistic. A personal failing.”
It should have been noise.
It wasn’t.
The man talked the way some people walked on ice—light, balanced, never quite where you expected the next step.
Ilay found he did not want him to shut up.
That, too, was unusual.
Most human conversation registered to him as a draft under a door: irritating, irrelevant, easy to ignore. This one was… tolerable. Worse. Easy.
“You don’t sound local,” Ilay said.
“Neither do you.” A quick look, assessing without greed. “German?”
“Among other things.”
“Mysterious. I respect a man who rations his biography.”
The stranger tipped the awful beer in a mock toast and took another brave, doomed sip.
His nose wrinkled.
Ilay’s mouth did something traitorous again.
“You’re going to finish that out of spite.”
“I paid for it. I’m not a coward.”
A beat.
Then, milder: “Also I genuinely like beer. This is a theological crisis.”
Ilay signaled the bartender without looking away. “Something that isn’t an insult. For him.”
When the fresh bottle landed—darker, cleaner, a label the man actually seemed to recognize—Ilay watched him taste it.
The change was indecently sincere.
Pleasure, plain and unguarded, opened across the stranger’s face, and with it a left dimple Ilay had not noticed until it arrived.
“Oh,” the man said, reverent. “Okay. I take it back. Los Angeles can live.”
“High standard.”
“I’m very particular about commissions I accept. Beer included.” He said it lightly, as if the sentence had wandered in from another life, then let it go.
“Thank you. Truly. I was about to write a complaint to God.”
They talked.
Not about names.
Not about work.
About nothing that would survive a subpoena and everything that somehow held: the bar’s criminal playlist, the way LA heat made bad decisions feel logistical, a story about a hotel elevator that had trapped the man with a mannequin for twenty minutes (“It had better posture than me. I took it personally”).
Ilay heard himself answering.
Dry. Spare. But answering.
The whiskey lowered half an inch. The man’s beer lowered faster.
Every so often that dimple came back, and Ilay’s attention snagged on it like cloth on a nail—then on the mouth beside it, the lower lip a little fuller, still faintly wet from the bottle.
He was staring.
He knew he was staring, and he did not correct it.
The man noticed.
Of course he noticed.
His gaze dropped, not to Ilay’s face, but to Ilay’s hand where it rested on the bar—long fingers, nicked knuckles, the clean brutal economy of someone who had learned what hands were for.
“You have pretty hands,” the man said.
Ilay’s eyebrow climbed. “Are you flirting?”
The smile he got was pure mischief, warm at the edges. “Is it working?”
Something low in Ilay’s stomach pulled taut.
“When I die,” Ilay said, mild as a blade laid on cloth, “I’ll cut one off and have it sent to you.”
The man did not flinch.
He tipped his head, considered, and the dimple returned like a secret.
“It would only suit a handsome face,” he said. “Like yours. Waste of a good hand otherwise.”
Ilay did not wait, he never did. He captured the man's lips with his own.
There was no further negotiation.
He reached, caught the man by the front of that black hoodie, and dragged the distance shut.
The mouth under his opened on a small sound of surprise that turned, almost at once, into an answer.
Sweet.
That was the wrong word and the only word—sweet under the beer, clean, absurdly drinkable.
Ilay chased it.
The man made a soft, helpless noise against his teeth and kissed back like he had been waiting for the excuse, hand fisting lightly in Ilay’s collar, not pulling away, not performing.
Fifteen minutes dissolved.
The bar narrowed to heat and breath and the idiotic thunder of blood in Ilay's body.
He had taken bodies apart and put desire through them like a utility; he had not, in a long time, felt *thirsty*.
This was thirst.
He kept returning to that mouth the way a man returned to a faucet in a blackout, irritated by his own need and unwilling to stop.
The stranger’s knee had found the inside of Ilay’s thigh.
Ilay’s thumb had found the hinge of the stranger’s jaw.
When they broke for air, both of them were breathing like the room had less oxygen than it had started with.
The man’s eyes had gone heavy, dark, wanting.
Ilay felt his own face answer it.
His phone rang.
Kyle.
Ilay dragged back an inch, forehead nearly against the stranger’s. “Don’t move.”
He stepped off the stool, put the phone to his ear, and let the annoyance into his voice without decoration.
“What.”
“I've booked the morning flight,” Kyle said, in the particular register of an older brother who had already moved three companies before breakfast but still had headaches because of a single crazy younger brother. “Please be on time. James has the car at Tegel. If you ignore me call again I will start deducting from your discretionary accounts for spite.”
“I’m busy.”
“You are in a bar in Los Angeles. This matter is related to —”
Ilay hung up on him mid-sentence.
It was a small, unsatisfying violence. He turned back to the stools.
Empty.
The second seat. The beer bottle, still sweating, half full. No black hoodie. No dimple.
The space where the man had been held nothing but the ghost of body heat and a bar napkin with no writing on it.
Ilay stood very still.
People did not leave him.
People waited, or people ran in ways he could track, or people died.
They did not evaporate between one breath and a brother’s phone call.
He looked at the door. He looked at the corridor to the restrooms. He checked the mirror.
He asked the bartender, who only shrugged—asain guy, black hoodie, paid cash for the first beer, never saw him leave.
Gone.
Something ugly and bright unfolded under Ilay’s ribs.
Not hurt. He did not do hurt.
Anger, clean and insulted, with a strange scraped rawness underneath it he refused to name.
He had been *thirsty*, and the glass had been taken away.
A petite man with a pretty face materialized at his elbow as if summoned by the vacancy—soft mouth, careful hair, the exact silhouette Ilay usually took upstairs and forgot by morning.
The pretty man smiled up at him, said something about buying a drink, laid two fingers on Ilay’s sleeve.
Ilay looked at him and felt nothing that could be mistaken for want.
The contrast was nauseating.
Soft where the other had been quick.
Arranged where the other had been alive.
He let the pretty man talk for ten more seconds out of pure mechanical patience, then took him by the throat—not hard enough to end anything, hard enough to end the conversation—and walked him back into the bar’s dark until the smile collapsed into fear.
“Don’t,” Ilay said, very quietly, and let go.
He left the pretty man coughing against the wall and went out into the heat alone.
.
.
.
.
.
By morning he was on the plane to Berlin with a whiskey from first class he did not taste and Kyle’s unread messages stacked like a plea.
Los Angeles fell away under the wing.
He did not look for an asain man in a black hoodie in the terminal. He did not have the hours.
Kyle wanted him home; the company wanted his signature; the world, as usual, assumed Rick the Madman would arrive when told and break what needed breaking.
In the narrow quiet of ascent, uninvited, he saw a left dimple and a mouth that had tasted sweet.
He closed his eyes and filed the whole night under unfinished.
He had never liked unfinished things.
Somewhere over the Atlantic, a man who did not exist on any payroll closed a laptop, stretched until his shoulders cracked, and smiled to himself in a dark hotel room, still tasting good beer and a stranger’s dangerous patience.
Jaeui would kill him if he knew he again tried to hook up with another unknown attraction.
Taeui—who was not Taeui on any network that mattered—touched two fingers to his own lower lip and laughed under his breath, warm and a little wicked, and put the night away for later.
He had always been particular about the commissions he took.
This one, he suspected, seemed a little more dangerous.