Pt. 1
Jamie Riley 

After Tino got shot, things didn’t get better. Whatever control Jamie had been keeping over his habits evaporated the moment Tino was steady enough on his feet to move back into his own apartment. Without Jamie watching every pill and every line, he slid straight back into the deep end. The gaps between hits shrank until they were almost nonexistent. Some days he was out cold for hours, body limp on the couch, half-empty bottles and burnt foil on the table. Other days he was upright, moving, even talking, but his words came out slow and heavy, his tongue dragging like he was wading through molasses. There was rarely any middle ground. He was either gone or half-gone.

Jamie had given him the benefit of the doubt at first. A bullet tears more than flesh. It leaves a tremor and an echo in the body long after the bleeding stops. Jamie had seen the pain crest and break across Tino’s face, the sweat that came out of nowhere. But weeks later, the pain had become a story Tino told with his eyes half-closed. “Still hurts,” he’d mumble, and Jamie would look at the scar, angry but healing and not infected. Jamie had seen him walk out of worse, and he knew the difference between pain and permission. Pain is what makes you grit your teeth and keep moving. Permission is the card you flash so nobody asks questions while you sink.

It wasn’t that Tino wasn’t hurting. But the wound had turned into a key he kept in his pocket. Any time the itch started, he’d hold it up like a badge: still hurts. And maybe it did, a little. Maybe the muscle pinched when he twisted, maybe sleep came jagged. But the slur wasn’t for sleep. The glassy stare wasn’t for healing. The silence after three in the morning, when the city went thin and the old ghosts crawled in, that was what he was medicating.

Jamie hated himself for understanding it so well. Hated that part of him that wanted to drag Tino into the shower, coffee to his mouth, say get up, we’re going. Another part wanted to lie down next to him and let the day dissolve, because it was easier than being the bad guy again. He’d been the nurse, the guardrail, the clock. He’d kept count. And when he stopped keeping count, Tino didn’t even pretend to count for himself.

It was an old, familiar fear he never named because naming it felt like summoning it. Half-tamed by denial. He had known the pattern of Tino slipping too far, knew it in his body before his mind would admit it. And yet, for years, he had wrapped that knowledge in softer words, like pain management, or recovery, or exhaustion, stacking reasons between himself and the truth until the alarms sounded like ordinary noise. But the way Tino was using now stripped that comfort away. Jamie had seen overdoses before, seen Tino’s skin lose its color, seen the stillness that didn’t look like sleep, and the memory lived in his muscles, ready to replay at any second. Every time Tino’s voice slurred or his eyes slid shut for too long, that quiet dread tightened in Jamie’s chest. It wasn’t abstract anymore. It was here, sitting between them, breathing with them, a burden Jamie carried in silence.

A month after the shooting, Jamie and Tino were sent to Redham Vale to expand the shipping routes for Black Ice. On paper, Redham Vale was one of the city’s biggest districts, a sprawling mix of wide parks, busy cinemas, and glass-fronted apartment buildings where rent was more than most people made in a month. Though that wasn’t the Redham Vale they knew. For them, the name didn’t mean clean streets and weekend markets. It meant Halston and Allwick, the two neighborhoods tucked behind the shine, where the buses rattled, mold mapped the corners of ceilings, and nobody had much of anything except reasons to leave. It was where they’d grown up.

Despite Jamie’s plan to make the job quick, they ended up pulling into a motel when a few spare minutes opened up. It had been Tino’s idea, Jamie at the wheel and Tino leaning back with that careless slouch, his hand slipping under the steering wheel to touch him in a way that left no room for misunderstanding.

Jamie had hesitated. Not because the want wasn’t there, it always was, but because he hated breaking his rhythm once a job was in motion. And of all places on the planet, Redham was the last where he wanted to linger. There was another reason too, one he avoided to look straight at; the unease of not knowing how clear Tino’s head really was during moments like this. Jamie hated second-guessing whether they were meeting in the same place.

Still, he gave in. Because Tino didn’t push the way other people might have, he simply leaned and let his hand settle like he had all the time in the world. It wasn’t a demand. It was the opposite, an invitation. Jamie could resist a shove, a plea, even an argument. What he couldn’t resist was Tino acting like it didn’t matter, like he’d just pull his hand away and look out the window if Jamie didn’t respond. That false nonchalance hooked him deeper than any insistence.

The closest place had been the Union Park Motel.

Jamie had him pinned high, Tino’s back pressed flat to the tiles, one hand locked at his throat, the other braced hard at his waist to hold him up. Tino’s toes barely found the floor, one foot scraping, the other suspended, all of him hanging off Jamie’s hands. He didn’t touch Jamie, because he hadn’t been told to. His hands stayed where they were meant to, one splayed on the tile for balance, the other braced against the narrow shelf beside his head until the plastic bottles clicked together. From the waist down, Tino was bare. Jamie had only loosened his own, button slipped, zip undone, the belt hanging askew with a soft metal tap when he moved.

His thumb rode the hinge of Tino’s jaw, tilting it up, while the rest of his fingers pressed the pulse until the breath went thin and quiet. He liked the sounds Tino made, but he liked him like this just as much, lifted high and quiet, balance gone, mouth opening to nothing.

“This,” Jamie said, and when he spoke it dragged in his throat. “is what begging looks like.”

Tino tried to answer but couldn’t. The sound jammed where air should have been. Jamie eased the grip a fraction to allow him to speak. Tino’s smile didn’t quite form as he gasped for air. “Want me to beg?”

Jamie’s hand slid from his throat to his hair, not a yank but a grip with direction. He hauled him off the wall and steered him to the mirror by the sink, pace rough enough that Tino stumbled on his bare feet. At the sink, Jamie planted his palms where he wanted them, bent him until the reflection took it all, flushed skin, wet mouth, the tremor still leaking through his shoulders. Jamie came in behind, his chest pressed to Tino’s back, one hand on his chest and the other still in his hair, locking his gaze forward so his eyes stayed on himself through the reflection.

“Look at yourself.” Jamie didn’t give the command room to settle before he pushed back in, tearing a groan out of Tino. “You are begging.”

In the glass, the two of them were one shape. Tino’s gaze flickered, almost sliding off, throat pink where the handprint was rising. He did drift sometimes, but Jamie knew it wasn’t disinterest. It was the way his mind slipped when pressure stacked too high, the same way it happened on a binge, or after a fight, when his body stayed but his focus thinned to a blur. Jamie didn’t mind the edge of it, but he never let it tip too far. He wanted him present, not floating, wanting him to feel the same voltage Jamie felt. Jamie could read the signs, and he always pulled him back, harsh or soft depending on what worked.

“Do you see it?” Jamie waited through the slack beat, through the half-lost glaze that made Tino look far away. Then it came, the blink, slow at first, then cutting sharp, the mouth drawing tight around a breath, focus snapping back into his stare. In the mirror the distance broke, and there he was again, held between the sink and Jamie’s grip. Jamie felt the re-entry like a shiver along his own skin.

Jamie’s control sharpened most in bed because it finally had a clean use. Out there it kept people alive, in here it made chaos line up. He didn’t want worship or theatrics. He wanted alignment and focus, the two of them bound inside the same frame of rules and commands, a moment built to stay exactly where he put it. He liked the asymmetry to be visible, his own fly only tugged open and Tino left uncovered, because it told the truth about who was setting the terms and who was choosing to meet them. Power wasn’t in forcing, it was in getting a yes that kept arriving, in feeling another person organize around his voice.

What aroused him was that shared discipline. Tino met it like he’d been built for it. He chose which levers to give up and then waited to see how Jamie pulled them. He knew Tino had no real brakes with him. He could say anything, do anything, and Tino would take it with no protest. If nothing resisted Jamie was the break. There was something dark in the way it pulled at him, knowing Tino would never push back, that he could take him all the way down and Tino would follow. He understood why it played out this way, though he wasn’t convinced Tino did.

Tino was wired to square up at everything, so the only way to stop the fight was to take the fight out of his hands. With Tino, halfway measures snapped back and softness made him skittish. He needed the ground to drop, so he could land. Jamie didn't call it submission, he read it as the off switch. The more feral the day, the harder the cut had to be at night. He’d heard the theory somewhere: men who drove too hard outside needed counterweight inside. For Tino it wasn’t a balancing act, it was crucial. Give everything over, empty out, wake up able to move again.

Jamie liked the contrast. He liked that when the world raged at Tino all day, Tino came looking for him and Jamie could decide what touched him and how. When Tino needed a place to fall, Jamie made the floor.

But sometimes, he wondered if it went further back than that. He didn’t know the details, not all of them, but he’d seen enough to guess. People didn’t come out like Tino without something carving into them early. Whatever broke him young hadn’t just left scars, it had rewired him. Giving himself over now might not be all about want. What looked like choice might be closer to muscle memory; shut down, hand over the controls, let someone else steer until the storm passed.

In someone else’s hands, it would have been ugly. Jamie could wreck Tino by accident and there’d be no resistance to warn him he’d gone too far. He handled that by deciding he wouldn’t.

“Do you like it? Seeing yourself like this? Bent over and fucked out and mine?”

“Yes—” The word broke. “Keep me here.”

“Oh, I’ll keep you here. Where else would you go? Back to playing king outside and kneel the second I touch you? Run laps around the same mess in your head until you’re dizzy again?”

Jamie’s palm spread over Tino’s sternum, feeling the thud of his heart knock against bone. Sweat pooled at the hollow of Tino’s throat, when Jamie’s thumb skimmed there it came away damp. The porcelain gave a faint groan under Tino’s grip.

“I found the one place you don’t get to lie to yourself. Say ‘thank you’.”

Tino’s breath shredded on the way out. Jamie hauled his head higher, neck stretched to a sting that thinned his voice into a rasp. “Fuck— Thank you—”

“I want you to see exactly what I do to you. What you let me turn you into.”

Tino was beautiful. His mouth hung open on heavy breaths, the kind that fogged the mirror. The bruises and cuts along his face were in that yellow-and-brown stage of healing, and the skin beneath his eyes carried a constant dusk. He looked worn in the way of someone who never truly slept. None of it made him less. If anything, the fatigue told the whole story, where he’d been, what he’d carried. Tino was reckless, petty, cruel, hilarious, loyal to a fault, and Jamie saw all of it. He saw it and didn’t try to rearrange any of it into something cleaner. He didn’t need Tino to be better. This was the man he wanted; the damage, the brightness, the fight and the hunger.

The urge rose hard and sudden, to let go of Tino’s hair and take his chin, turn his face, and kiss him. To press his mouth over that wrecked, open breath and quiet the room, quiet the job, quiet the noise in Jamie’s own head. He could already feel it in the muscles of his forearm, the small rotation it would take, the warmth of Tino’s exhale on his lip, the taste of salt and motel air.

He didn’t. Because that would bend the frame. It would tip them into a different thing they hadn’t agreed to, hadn’t earned, a boundary they never said out loud but both kept like a superstition. Kissing belonged to a world with mornings and confessions. This was not that. He let the impulse pass through him like a wave hitting pier posts, hard enough to shake, not enough to move.