“Wha—Jess! Wait! I—”

Logan’s shouts were abruptly cut short by a larger variety of dry coughs. Aden took steps he considered neither too slow, nor too fast, though the latter was of a biased opinion. Either way, he ended up standing awkwardly at Logan’s bedside as the coughing eased up.

“Maybe the lawyer was right and you should take it easy on the talking,” Aden offered, his voice timid.

“Not interested.”

And just like that, Aden’s fear was justified. His heart clenched, and his stomach dropped. Between the two, a tendon being strained and ready to snap him in two any second. But Jessica’s words fueled him with enough confidence to continue forward, as hard as it would be. This time, he chose a more appealing viewpoint.

“Listen, I don’t need to know anything about what’s going on, okay?” Aden started, fidgeting with the lid of his coffee cup. “I don’t need any explanation—”

“Then don’t ask.”

“—or anything like that, but the fact of the matter is—”

“No.”

“—you have nowhere to go but a perfectly warm and safe option—”

“I said no.”

“—in living at my apartment.”

Logan stared hard at Aden, a short cough likely the only thing keeping him from being a stubborn brat. “What part of ‘no’ do you not understand?” he asked with a whisper, the softer tone less likely to cause any more coughing.

Aden felt his expression harden. Relax, he told himself. “Look, you don’t have anywhere to go so stop acting like you have a variety of options at your disposal.”

Logan’s brows shot up in relative surprise.

“My friend’s a cop, so I know a bit about what’s been going on.”

“Lovely,” Logan scoffed, though he surprisingly didn’t continue.

“Look,” Aden began to crack, “I’m just trying to offer you—”

“And I don’t want whatever you have to—”

“I’m sorry!” Aden snapped, his blood roaring through his ears. “Fuck, I’m sorry. I am. And look, I don’t fucking need you to forgive me. I get it, okay? But that doesn’t change the facts.”

Aden knew his anger was getting the best of him but that was fine. As long as Logan would agree to being safe at the apartment, Aden could find peace in Logan’s fury.

“You don’t have a place to stay, but I do. You need to be able to get to and from the courthouse consistently for the next few months. I can provide transport. You need an address—your lawyer said so herself. An address that you can share with someone you can trust.”

“Oh. I can trust you now?”

Aden looked down into Logan’s cold eyes. Fuck that shit hurt. “Apparently not,” he conceded, taking a heavy seat in the chair behind him. He felt like he was fighting a brick wall. Physically and mentally. Aden let out a heart-heavy sigh, his soul compressing beneath Logan’s vindictive glare. “You still need somewhere to stay. It’s fine if you don’t trust me, it’s fine if you…aren’t very fond of me. I’ll do my best to stay out of your way, and then…”

Aden thought of Henry’s work-in-progress, a house full of roof leaks and rotted floorboards, smoker stains splotching once-white walls. The leaks had technically been sealed, though a rainstorm had yet to prove they’d been properly fixed and Aden promised to help Henry with the floors over winter break. Presumably, it’d be livable by the turn of the new year.

“A friend of mine. He’s a good man, Henry. You can stay with him when his house is fixed up. Shouldn’t be more than a few months.”

Aden had expected some snarky remark along the lines of “why should I trust the opinion of someone I don’t trust” or something akin to it but it never came.

“How do you know he would let me stay with him?” Logan asked instead.

A genuine smile finally pulled at Aden’s lips as he thought of the exact way Henry would have answered that question. Eyes and smile bright with nothing but kind welcomings and strange Irish phrases that Aden sometimes wondered the authenticity of.

“Because Henry would let almost anyone stay with him so he could tell all his favorite stories again from scratch,” Aden replied fondly. “He thinks all the jokes land every time he tells them but they don’t so he needs new ears to listen.”

“…You aren’t very convincing,” Logan muttered quietly, though it is the first time anything other than poison seemed to touch his tone. “But I might know who your talking about. He’s Irish?”

Aden blinked in surprise. “What? You know him?”

“I mean, I think so,” Logan shrugged before a short, wracking cough shook his frail frame. “He, uh…helped me outta sticky situation,” he continued with a sharp wince. “I remember the—cough, cough—BFFD Academy emblem on your shirt.” Another fit of coughs.

“You shouldn’t talk anymore. Let your lungs and throat rest,” Aden said, outwardly encouraging Logan to quiet himself. Inwardly, though, Aden was barely holding on to the slew of questions crowding his headspace.

“You know Henry?”

“When did you two meet?”

“Why had Henry never told me about it?”

“Did he really not know it was Logan when he helped?”

And the dread was there, too, a louder, booming question that drowned out the others with a swift crack akin to a lightning strike.

“What kind of situation did Logan need to be rescued from?”

Logan cast a glare Aden’s direction but must have realized the ragged state he was in as he held his tongue. Aden knew he held only arguments, but he also knew that Logan was more rational than his explosive personality led many to believe.

“Great, so you know Henry. Then you know he’s a good person. Think all you want of my ill-intentions, I’m assuming you know that Henry doesn’t have them. Stay with me until his house is finished—maybe we can find time to hurry along the process. Get you moved out sooner.”

Logan’s expression attempted to remain controlled and neutral, but cracked at Aden’s last statement with a surprised jump of his brow. Aden chose not to acknowledge it.

“You don’t trust me, I get it. I won’t force you to stay with me if it clearly makes you uncomfortable. But I also don’t want you going back out there with no plan, nowhere to go, and—after talking with Jess-I mean, your lawyer—few people to turn to.”

Logan frowned at the mention of Jessica; a frown that said quietly “I can’t believe she said that” but he held on to Aden’s insistence that he remain quiet. Either his throat was incredibly sore or some reminiscent trace of trustful intuition convinced Logan that Aden’s advice was sound enough to follow.

“You’re low on options and you want to turn down the only one you’ve currently been offered. That isn’t a logical decision, and I know you know it. It’s been…a long time. But I don’t think for a second that you’ve lost your wit.”

Logan’s eyes narrowed at the truth of Aden’s remark, enough of an admission as any other.

“So?” Aden asked, laying his honesty bare. “What do you say? You wanna move in with me?”

Tranform Indefinitely