Chapter Text
It happens like this:
It’s Saturday night and Inej is burglarizing one of the nicest houses in Ketterdam, on a job with Kaz. (For him, he would say.) She’s been spending a concerning number of her Saturday nights this way since she lost her gymnastics scholarship and realized that her part time job in the library wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
She doesn’t always say yes when Kaz hits her up, but when she does, she tries not to inquire too deeply into the details of his schemes. The less she knows, the better. Inej keeps her head down, gets in, and gets out.
It’s the getting out part that’s proving troublesome on this particular Saturday night.
It’s not anyone’s fault, but if it was someone’s fault, it would be Jesper’s, because he was supposed to be keeping watch. He was supposed to be keeping watch, but he’d been distracted by saints-know-what and now instead of jumping out of the window as planned, Inej is jumping into a dumbwaiter that was probably last functional about a hundred years ago.
At least Kaz jumped first.
“Wait,” he hisses now, but it’s too late for that. Inej has already jumped and even she can’t stop in midair.
She understands the problem upon landing. This dumbwaiter wasn’t made for one person, much less two. Her chin catches on Kaz’s chest, rattling her teeth uncomfortably. She’s so close to him she can feel the fabric of his shirt against her lips. No, actually, it’s in her mouth. She spits the cloth out as unobtrusively as possible.
“Sorry,” she whispers into his chest.
He just huffs out a sigh that ghosts across the top of her head.
As her eyes adjust to the darkness, she tries to get her bearings. She extends her hand to the right and the left and almost immediately hits walls on either side. Kaz is in front of her, obviously, and she can only back up a few scant inches before her back hits the wall behind her.
Okay.
This is fine.
Inej has been in tighter spots before. Of course, she’s usually by herself, not trapped with a large inflexible man with a penchant for sarcasm.
This is fine.
She takes a few deep breaths to calm herself. Kaz stiffens when her chest brushes his, but he’s just going to have to get used to it, Inej decides. She can’t not breathe. Besides, it wouldn’t hurt him to take a few deep breaths every now and again. It might help with his whole – everything.
She’s palming around the walls again, hoping against hope that this thing opens from the inside, when Kaz holds his phone up. He’s got the brightness turned all the way down, but the blue light still illuminates the tension in his features.
This is maybe the first time she’s ever seen Kaz in a situation that he’s not masterminded himself. She’s accustomed to him being two or three moves ahead of everyone else on the chess board. Honestly, if it weren’t for the tightness of his jaw right now, she might assume that trapping himself in the dumbwaiter was an essential part of his plan, something he’d smugly reveal days later, if at all.
There is a text from Jesper on his phone.
Change of plan, it says. Sit tight until Nina lets you out.
Oh, Saints.
It doesn’t open from the inside.
“Sit tight is one way to put it,” Kaz mutters. She feels the shape of his words more than she hears them.
It almost sounds like a joke, but he’s grimacing, so it’s hard to tell.
“We’ll be fine,” Inej whispers back.
“I know.”
Okay, then.
“Did you – did you at least get it?” Kaz shifts his weight awkwardly as he speaks, so their thighs are pressed flush as well as their chests. This whole thing must be hell on his leg, Inej realizes. The jump would have been bad enough, but now he can’t even shake it out.
“Of course I did.” She fishes in her sports bra for the flash drive, holding it up triumphantly. The metal is warm from her body heat and when she catches Kaz’s eye – this close, she has to crane her neck – she flushes. He’s looking at her like she just pulled her whole top off.
An involuntary shiver goes through her, doubly embarrassing because she knows he can feel it, too. She curses her body for reacting to nothing. Kaz Brekker isn’t thinking about her bra or what’s underneath it. More likely he’s thinking about improper tech storage.
He takes the flash drive with surprising delicacy, warm leather barely brushing the pads of her fingers. Inej watches it disappear into the darkness, just another sleight of hand. She’ll probably never know what’s on that flash drive or why Kaz wanted it or even whose house this is.
That’s how it works between them. Inej never asks; Kaz never answers. Working with him (working for him) is what she needs to do to stay in college, get her degree, and make her parents proud. She can still make them proud, even without gymnastics.
But now, tonight, there’s nothing for her to do but wait. Kaz is quiet in front of her. She can’t see his face like this, so it’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking. Probably planning all the different ways he’s going to kill Jesper when they get out of here.
Inej can’t find it in herself to be particularly mad at Jesper, but then again, she never can. His particular brand of brash charm softens her every time.
Kaz shifts in place and Inej catches the scent of something wild and woodsy.
Aftershave? Cologne?
Inej smothers a laugh in her throat. Kaz Brekker does not wear cologne.
Whatever it is, it’s nice. She likes it. It’s not a surprise, exactly. It’s not like she expected him to smell bad. She’s just never thought about it before.
She’s starting to realize that there are a lot of things about Kaz she’s never thought about before.
Like, has he always been this tall? And – does she like that too?
Kaz stops her train of thought before it can go careening wildly off the tracks.
“Er – can I just?”
He doesn’t finish his sentence, just leans more heavily against the wall, and bends his good leg so he can stretch out the other. A shaky sigh escapes him, barely audible, even as close as they are. Inej swallows hard as she feels his leg slot neatly between her thighs.
Saints.
She’s obviously not going to make him stand there in pain just because this new position is slightly awkward. It’s not even that bad. Maybe if she just shifts a little –
Okay, no.
That just made it worse. Or better, a traitorous voice in her head whispers as heat flares low in her belly and between her legs.
She closes her eyes for a moment, trying to gather herself. There’s no escaping it. She’s stuck here, essentially straddling Kaz’s thigh, until further notice. When she opens her eyes again, he’s peering down at her. His gaze is curious – a distant relation to his scheming face, the look he gets when he’s puzzling something out – but also, she realizes, cautious.
Inej didn’t know he was capable of looking at her like that.
She nods, an answer to his silent question.
He relaxes incrementally further, letting the wall behind him take more of his weight. Their combined body heat in such a small space is making the air heavy and humid. Her thoughts are coming slow and syrupy, an echo of Kaz’s carefully controlled breaths.
It’s strange – this situation contains all the elements that usually send Inej spiraling: alone in the dark with a man without an easy escape hatch, a thick veil of tension descending between them.
Except she’s not alone in the dark with just any man.
It’s Kaz.
And that – somehow that makes a difference. It grounds her in the moment and keeps her from slipping away. She’s with Kaz; they’re on a job. She knows him, she knows how his mind works, and he looks nearly as tortured as she feels right now, trapped with his thoughts.
Kaz shifts his weight, passing a hand over his face. The muscles in his leg jump and flex beneath her and Inej swears that he’s setting every one of her nerve endings alight. Saints, but she wants to roll her hips. It feels almost instinctual, like her body is confused by his nearness and his scent and his body heat.
It’s just so hot in here. She’s never thought of Kaz as a particularly warm blooded creature, but he’s positively burning up where they are pressed together. Does he feel it, too? Or is this his natural state of being? Surely, he doesn’t just walk around burning all the time. How could anyone stand it?
He’s moving again, damn him, pressing himself further into her, and Inej grits her teeth against the sensation. A sigh hisses out despite her best intentions and slithers between them before coiling itself at their feet. Inej stops breathing. Maybe if she holds her breath long enough, she’ll just pass out and wake up much, much later, when she can safely deny that she ever made that sound.
He’s everywhere and she didn’t even know she wanted him, didn’t even know she could want anyone ever again, but suddenly she wants and wants and wants.
It’s a relief and a revelation all at once and it couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient time.
His leg is hard and hot and it’s making her think of other things that are hard and hot. It’s like the floodgates of desire have opened, right here in this rickety dumbwaiter, and Inej wants everything, now, all at once.
Saints, what’s wrong with her?
If only she could talk, make idle chit chat to distract herself. Then maybe she wouldn’t be so laser focused on the sensations in her body. But she mustn’t make noise – they can’t be caught. And even if talking were an option, it’s Kaz, who’s never met a polite conversation he couldn’t kill.
It’s Kaz.
That alone should be enough to snap her out of this inexplicable sexual fugue state. Sure, she knows him, but she doesn’t particularly like him.
He’s immoral, unpleasant, and a frequent pain in her ass.
And he smells really good.
She’s about to take a surreptitious whiff – it’s a very piney kind of smell that she can’t quite place – when the dumbwaiter door whips open, casting them in bright light. Nina is there on the other side, and she takes one look at the way they’re wrapped up together and laughs, loud and bright, effectively breaking the spell. Now that she can see Kaz’s face in the light, she realizes that despite the maelstrom in her mind, he doesn’t look curious or intrigued or even the slightest bit turned on, just very pale and annoyed.
“Oh, Saints,” Nina says, once she’s done laughing, offering a hand first to Inej, and then Kaz, who of course declines, “Jesper isn’t getting out of this one alive.”
Well, that was disturbing, Inej thinks later, when she’s lying in bed staring at the ceiling, trying to pretend that her heart isn’t beating just a little too fast.
But surely it was just a fluke, she reassures herself. She doesn’t want Kaz like that.
Right?
Wrong.
Very, very wrong.
She does want him like that and it’s probably going to actually kill her.
Now, every time she sees him, she can’t shut down the voice in her head whispering what if…
And when she follows that train of thought – Well, that’s even worse. Because then she’s imagining doing things with Kaz that she never thought she would want to do with another person again, not after everything that happened her freshman year. Of course, in her imagination, he wants to be doing those things with her, but in reality, she’s got absolutely no evidence to the affirmative.
That doesn’t stop her from looking for it, though. It doesn’t stop her from looking, period.
She eyes the elegant lines of his throat and wonders what it would be like to lick the spot between his ear and his jaw, where his pale skin is so delicate she can see the blue of his veins. His shoulder to waist ratio is positively unfair and she can’t stop thinking about how he felt pressed up against her, his body covering hers in a way that was all pleasure and no panic. In the one class they share (Moral Philosophy, because he thought it would be funny, she supposes) she becomes so transfixed on his graceful fingers tapping out notes on his laptop that she basically blacks out for an entire lecture and has to suffer through the indignity of actually asking him for said notes later that night.
(She never noticed before, but his notes are surprisingly detailed. Perhaps they should study together.)
After a few weeks of this, Inej can’t bear it any longer. She has a perverse desire to talk to someone about these new, awful feelings, just so she can poke and prod at them under a different light.
“Kaz isn’t – he’s not seeing anyone, is he?”
She’s in Nina’s room on Friday night, watching her get ready to go out. Inej herself hasn’t made up her mind; half the time Nina persuades her to come along to a club or house party, but sometimes she likes to take advantage of the way the gym is nearly always empty on Friday nights.
“Seeing anyone?” Nina says. “Saints, no. At least, I hope not. What a hideous thought.”
A simple yes or no would have sufficed, but Nina’s never been a less is more kind of girl. And Inej has been wanting to talk about him…
“So… you don’t think he’s sort of good looking? Objectively?” Inej hastens to add.
Nina screws her face up painfully. “In a kind of pale, Dickensian workhouse sort of way, maybe. He’s awfully skinny.” She stops, shudders. “Oh, God, he’s like my vaguely psychopathic brother, Inej, please don’t make me think about him like… that.”
Inej wishes she could make herself stop thinking about him like that.
Except, she doesn’t, not really.
That’s the whole fucking problem, isn’t it?
“What brought this on, anyway?” Nina asks, leaning in close to start lining her eyes. “Did you see him with a girl? Or a guy? This better not have anything to do with the way I caught you climbing him like a tree in that dumbwaiter.”
“I was not,” Inej protests hotly.
“Oh, relax,” Nina snorts, catching Inej’s eye in the mirror. “I’m kidding, obviously.” When Inej doesn’t say anything right away, Nina goes on, tightly: “I mean, obviously, right? Obviously, I was joking, because you would never, ever – Inej?”
“Er,” Inej says.
“Oh, no.”
Her face is burning with the fire of a thousand suns. Nina gapes at her in the mirror. And really, Inej thinks, is it so hard to believe? Kaz certainly hadn’t looked Dickensian in the dumbwaiter. He hadn’t felt skinny. He’d felt broad and warm and like she wanted every part of her body to touch every part of his.
“Look,” Nina says. Inej has startled her badly enough that she’s made a mess of her eyeliner – the wing on her right eye careens wildly to one side.
“I’m all for reclaiming your sexuality. Seriously. Two thumbs up from me. But, honestly, Inej, does it have to be with the most emotionally unavailable man you know?”
“Well, who would you suggest?”
Nina’s eyes bulge. “Oh, I don’t know, literally anyone with a pulse and a conscience?”
“Kaz has –
“We don’t know that,” Nina says sternly.
“I don’t know how it happened,” Inej moans, throwing herself backwards on Nina’s plush duvet. “He’s such a dick, isn’t he? He’s cold and arrogant and impossibly self-satisfied. And the suits. The suits, Nina! Who does he think he’s fooling, walking around campus like he’s better than the rest of us? Like he’s some – some middle aged mafioso masquerading as an investment banker.”
“Oh, God, you think it’s hot, don’t you?”
Inej pulls Nina’s pillow over her face and lets out the inhuman scream that’s been building up inside of her for the past three weeks.
When she’s recovered herself somewhat, Nina is peering down at her sympathetically.
“It’s not so bad,” she says, like phew, we caught it early, doc. “You’re just – infatuated. It happens to the best of us.”
“Infatuated?” Inej repeats weakly. “That sounds bad.”
“It’s attraction. You’re human, Inej, although I did always imagine you’d have better taste.”
“So, what do I do?”
Nina purses her lips like she’s considering a particularly difficult chemistry problem set. “Well,” she says slowly, “you know what they say: the best way to get over somebody is to get under somebody else.”
Inej wrinkles her nose.
“I mean, maybe not directly under,” Nina hastens to add. “But wouldn’t you like to date a little? I could set you up with one of Matthias’s friends. He’s got lots of them now that I’ve convinced him that he doesn’t always have to be the designated driver. Or we could get you on the apps! I could make an amazing profile for you. Maybe I could even swipe for you, just to pre-screen all the guys, threaten them a little – I have very high standards for you.”
“Stop, stop,” Inej says, half laughing. “I don’t want – any of that.” And she really doesn’t. The only reason she thinks she was able to let her guard down enough to feel…the way she felt in the dumbwaiter is because she knows Kaz. Knowing him means knowing he’s insufferable, sure, but she also knows he wouldn’t intentionally hurt her, barring the occasional verbal barb. Besides, that’s not personal, that’s just Kaz.
The idea of baring herself to some stranger with unknown intentions and unknown expectations is far scarier than her current predicament. Probably, she realizes, she’s been noticing Kaz because she knows it would never work. There’s absolutely no chance, which makes it perfectly safe for her mind to wander in… new directions.
“You just want Kaz,” Nina says flatly, like prognosis negative, doc.
Inej covers her eyes. “No. Yes. I don’t know. It’s not like I’m going to do anything about it.”
“So, you’re going to do… nothing?”
“Yes,” Inej says brightly. “Absolutely nothing.”
“Yes, good,” Nina says. “That’ll work.”
And if there’s something ominous in her tone, Inej decides not to hear it.
Inej goes on doing absolutely nothing (except for the looking and the thinking and the wondering) for several more weeks and it’s going perfectly well, thank you very much, until all of the sudden it stops going well and starts going very badly indeed.
It’s Friday night and she’s been cajoled into coming out with Nina and Matthias. The party is at Wylan’s house – Inej thinks it’s someone’s birthday or birthday month or perhaps just a half birthday – which is mostly why she agrees. Wylan lives with a bunch of other guys and girls in the music department and although they have a lot of parties, they don’t tend to get out of hand. Still, her favorite part of these evenings is always getting ready with Nina. She herself doesn’t tend to do much in the way of hair and makeup, but when Nina sits her down and does it for her, turning her straight hair into lustrous barrel curls or dusting glitter over her eyelids, it feels like love.
Sometimes, though, it also feels a little too look at me, which is something she generally tries to avoid. She doesn’t like the feeling of too many eyes on her at the same time. It makes her chest and shoulders tight when she catches people looking. Looking isn’t a crime, Inej knows that, and she also knows that Matthias would gladly punch the lights out of anyone who so much as blinked at her the wrong way, but sometimes it’s still all too much.
Inej doesn’t drink at parties anymore, but she’d done a few shots with Nina and Matthias before leaving, and the combination of the alcohol and the weight of eyes upon her – real or imagined – makes her feel hot and prickly. She just needs a minute to herself to catch her breath.
She ducks into Wylan’s bathroom, savoring the muffled quiet, and having nothing better to do, begins to examine herself in the mirror. Nina had used a heavy black pencil on her upper and lower lash lines, giving her a sort of punk rocker look. In Nina’s room, with the benefit of a few shots, she’d thought it made her look dangerous. Now, she wonders if it’s all a bit silly.
“You look fine, you know,” Kaz says from the bathtub.
Inej doesn’t scream. She doesn’t, because she’s better than that, but she can’t help the faint squeak that escapes her. She can’t believe that she didn’t see him there. There being, inexplicably, inside the bathtub that stretches the length of the wall furthest from the door. He’s sitting fully inside of it with both knees bent to accommodate the small space, a half drunk beer hanging loosely from his hand.
She can’t believe she didn’t see him. She always sees him.
(Not just him, of course. Everyone. It’s her whole thing.)
He’s not wearing a suit, for once, clad in a black hoodie and joggers, nearly passing for a normal college student. Much to her dismay, she realizes she thinks he looks just as good out of the suit as he does in it, maybe even better, which is just – great, really great. Now she’s got new fodder to fuel her borderline insanity.
Kaz looks a little amused – happy to have taken her by surprise, she guesses. It’s not much; effectively a ratio of about twenty five percent amusement, seventy five percent brooding, but that’s still about twenty percent more than usual.
“What are you doing in here?”
He takes a pull of beer, wipes his mouth, and that gesture alone is enough for her to tell that she’s not the only one who’s feeling their drink tonight.
“Hell is other people,” he quotes, gesturing to the door, behind which the party is going strong.
“Haven’t people been coming in here? It is the bathroom.”
“Most people,” he says, frowning pointedly as he watches her perch above him on the rim of the bathtub, “don’t stick around once they realize I’m in here, shocking as that may seem.”
“Well, too bad for you, you can’t scare me off,” she teases gently.
His frown only deepens, but he doesn’t immediately demand that she get the fuck out, something that he’d ordinarily have no qualms doing, so Inej figures that he can’t mind her too much.
“Do you actually have to pee?” he says, bracing himself to get up. “Because I guess I could –
“It’s fine.” She doesn’t want him to leave. She wants him to stay, so she can – what? Look at him and feel pathetic? Yes, that’s exactly what she wants, and why shouldn’t she have it, honestly? “I just needed a break from – all that. Too many people.”
“Nina and her guard dog ditched you, then?”
“What? No – Nina and Matthias did not ditch me. And I don’t need a guard dog.”
“I didn’t say you did,” Kaz says mildly. He’s tracing the lip of his beer bottle with an ungloved thumb, round and round and round, like he’s about to make it disappear. Inej imagines him leaning forward and pulling the whole thing out from behind her ear and then she’s thinking about how even his ears are quite nice looking – not too big and not too small and if she and Kaz were to have a child, would their earlobes be attached or detached, she’s sure she learned about that in high school biology – and wow, she needs to course correct.
“Why are you hiding?” she asks.
“I’m not hiding,” he sneers, just as she knew he would.
She raises an eyebrow.
“I told Jesper I’d come,” he says. “Not that I’d actually socialize.”
“God forbid,” she agrees.
Kaz shrugs. “When he finds me in here, he’ll see how miserable I am and feel all guilty for dragging me out in the first place. He’ll definitely buy me breakfast to make up for it. Maybe lunch – depends on how bad the hangover is tomorrow.”
Inej considers him – posed almost too casually in the tub, alone in a crowd, morose as ever. It’s a plausible excuse. It certainly follows the kind of put-yourself-first, long-game logic he seems to live by. But Inej doesn’t quite buy it. He wants to be here, or he wouldn’t have come. Well, Inej thinks, maybe he wanted to get out. Socialize, in his own way. Everyone needs a distraction from their thoughts sometimes. She knows this better than most.
“Won’t work if he finds you in here with me,” Kaz adds. He’d basically grumbled it into his beer and when Inej looks at him askance, his answering expression is reminiscent of a fox caught in a trap. And it’s so rare that Kaz ever lets anything slip beyond his carefully constructed mask – she knows next to nothing about his life before university, except for the rumors she hopes aren’t true – that she can’t help the surprised smile that tugs the corners of her mouth. She’s not exactly sure what he’s implying, but she thinks, maybe –
She feels sort of funny tonight, almost outside of herself, so it doesn’t feel strange to slide closer to him.
“Why not?” she asks, still smiling.
Kaz eyes her flatly, unamused. Maybe she’s just lost in the wishful vortex of her own desire, but his gaze seems to linger on her mouth just a second too long.
“Why won’t it work?” she presses, leaning closer still. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, but she’s going to keep doing it until she can’t anymore.
And, oh, his eyes aren’t flat, not at all. They’re dark and molten and alive – all pupil as they dip down to her lips again, and then even lower, to the tops of her breasts. A tiny shiver runs through her as she remembers the way he looked at her in the dumbwaiter when she pulled the flash drive out of her bra.
Not shock or embarrassment, like she’d thought, but arousal, same as her.
He drags his eyes back up to hers.
“Why?” she asks again.
“Because,” Kaz growls. He stops, swallows. “Because if Jesper finds you in here with me, he might assume that I’m enjoying myself.”
And everything’s gone slow and syrupy again, just like the last time she was alone with him like this, everything except her heart, which is thumping staccato in her chest, because this time she’s going to do something about it.
And she’s leaning in, and she’s thinking this is going to end badly, and she’s pressing her lips to his and –
And for about five seconds, it’s all perfectly splendid. She promptly swallows the soft sound of surprise bubbling up from the back of his throat, and his mouth is warm and pliant and a little uncertain under hers, and it’s so nice and not scary that she even starts to think that maybe it’s actually going to end very well indeed…
But then Kaz jerks back like he’s been electrified, and not in a sexy, I’m on fire for you kind of way, and his head smacks into the ceramic tile hard enough that she can practically see the cartoon birds circling his temples.
“Motherfucker,” he says, and then, horrifically: “Get off me,” as he scrambles to stand. And she’d never been on him to begin with, but she still slides as far away as she can get on the rim of the tub. He’s looking at her like he doesn’t recognize her, like she’s betrayed him, and he’s breathing hard, sharp and fast, and it feels like twisting a knife deep inside of her just watching him.
Kaz’s face is utterly white as he pushes past her towards the door. He’s hyperventilating, she realizes dumbly. She doesn’t know what to say or what to do, only that she mustn’t reach for him again, tempting as it is to try and physically pull him out of his panic.
“Kaz,” she says helplessly to his back. Her voice is a strangled, half-dead thing. He’s standing in front of the door, rigid save for the rapid rise and fall of his shoulders. She can see in the grim lines of his posture that he is contemplating the lesser of two evils: to push out the door and into the chaos of the party, where he’ll have to face inebriated strangers, or to stay in the quiet, where he will have to face her.
He reaches a shaky hand for the door knob and then drops it, folding himself in two and covering his eyes with both hands.
He’s staying.
But he’ll not face her.
Inej listens to the rattle of his breath and watches the way his whole body shakes, feeling absolutely paralyzed with uncertainty. Has she done this to him? It seems ludicrous that she could have reduced Kaz Brekker to a trembling mess.
But –
She kissed him.
She kissed Kaz.
It happened mere moments ago and it already feels like a sheer impossibility, a logical fallacy, a not-funny joke.
She kissed him and now this –
Is this her fault?
She lurches to her feet just to feel like she’s doing something.
“Kaz,” she says again, trying to make him look at her. And then he does look at her, wheeling around unsteadily, and she wishes he hadn’t because there’s nothing in his eyes that she recognizes, only the emptiness of true terror.
But he keeps looking at her, just looking and looking, and she tentatively allows herself to believe that her presence in the room is at least not actively hurting him. There’s a thin sheen of sweat at his temples and his chest is rising and falling jackrabbit fast, but the longer they stay like that, locked into a staring contest in the eye of a storm, the more he begins to come back to himself.
“Kaz,” she says. “I think you’re having a panic attack.”
“No. Shit,” he grits out. And okay, Inej thinks, he’ll be okay.
Outside, the sound of glass breaking followed by a chorus of groans makes them both flinch.
“Do you need – what do you normally do when this happens?” Kaz doesn’t answer right away. Instead, he braces himself against the wall and slides down the side of it slowly, trembling jerkily. It’s perhaps the least graceful thing she’s ever seen him do.
And then he glares up at her. “Normally,” he says, between breaths, “You don’t fucking kiss me.”
Oh, Saints. Guilt and embarrassment make Inej’s stomach churn.
This is her fault.
“What were you thinking?” Kaz says when he’s mostly got his breath back, like he simply can’t imagine she might have looked at him and his sharp eyes and cutting mouth and thought yes, I’ll have that one, please, when in fact that’s the whole sorry truth of the matter.
“What do you think I was thinking?” she sputters idiotically.
“I really haven’t the faintest, Inej.”
“I was thinking – that I wanted to, okay? I didn’t realize kissing me was going to be such a terrible ordeal for you,” she snaps, because he seems to have recovered his typical snark, and being irritated with him is preferable to being embarrassed right now. And then, instantly guilty – he’s just had a panic attack after all and it’s entirely her fault – she adds, awkwardly: “I’m sorry. I thought you wanted to, too, or I wouldn’t have done it.”
He is quiet long enough that Inej starts to plan her escape from the bathroom, because surely, he’s recovered himself by now, and she can excuse herself to go drown in her own humiliation.
“It’s not you,” he finally says. “And it wasn’t an ordeal –
Inej cuts her eyes at him, and he stops. “Okay, well, it wasn’t because of you. You’re very –
He stops again, this time of his own accord, and Inej slides down next to to him miserably, unsure whether whatever conciliatory compliment he hadn’t quite been able to force out of his mouth would have made her feel better or worse.
“It’s not you,” he says again. And then he gusts out a pained breath and covers his eyes with the palms of his hands. “I can’t – with anyone,” he says wretchedly.
“You mean – ?” Inej makes a gesture, and Kaz nods, even though he’s still covering his eyes and can’t possibly see her.
“You’ve never – ?” she says, and he shakes his head.
“What about – ?” she makes another gesture, and he finally he tips his head over to look at her, and blushes – blushes! – when he sees what she’s doing with her wrist.
“That’s – that’s not the problem,” he says stiffly.
Inej has to stifle a shocked giggle. He’s being so unexpectedly vulnerable, and it would be absolutely inappropriate and frankly cruel to laugh right now, but all the same, she can’t quite believe they’re sitting here, talking about jerking off. Maybe, she thinks wildly, the bathroom has detached itself from the rest of the house and they’re actually floating somewhere outside of space and time, where nothing really counts.
Furthermore, she’s starting to believe that he wasn’t uniquely repulsed by her, mostly because he’s got no motive to lie about any of this – certainly not protecting her feelings – and even if he were lying, she can’t imagine he’d choose anything that might make him look…weak. And now that the humiliation is fading away, it’s quickly replaced by the warm milk of human kindness, mixed with sheer relief, and the desire to help him, to wipe the misery and mortification off his face.
“Well, then,” she says, “if it’s not that, then what is it, do you think?”
She’s really pushing it, she knows, and she doesn’t really think an impromptu therapy session in the bathroom at a house party is going to solve his intimacy issues, but this whole night has already gone completely off the rails anyway and she fully expects him to tell her to get the fuck out any moment now, so she’s honestly shocked when he mutters, mostly to his knees, “Don’t like to be touched.”
“Not even, like, a hug?” Inej says, stupidly.
He looks at her sideways again and sort of snorts, like hugs are beneath him or something. And it’s Kaz, so he probably really does think that hugs are beneath him, Inej reminds herself.
“No, Inej,” he sneers. “Not even a hug. It’s better if I’m the one – if I know it’s coming. But it’s still not –
“Not what?” she prompts.
“Not right,” he says softly. He’s not looking at her when he says, “It’s supposed to feel good, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she says, blithe and bitter, before she can stop herself. Kaz stiffens next to her, and she has a feeling like she’s just triggered a landmine. He knows why she’s been working for him these past two years, he knows, in a vague sort of way, she thinks, why she’d lost her gymnastics scholarship – all those days she couldn’t get out of bed for crying and the blank emptiness that came later, when she couldn’t cry, and she couldn’t get out of bed – but they’ve never talked about it.
“I mean, yes,” she scrambles, “Saints, Kaz, yes, it’s supposed to be good.”
They lapse into silence awhile, both perfectly miserable, and yet she can’t help sneaking glances at him every few seconds. Impossibly, even after all this, she’s still – pathetically – infatuated, she realizes. Maybe she should find him less appealing now, but the flame inside her hasn’t dimmed in the slightest. Only, now, she’s thinking of him as more of a whole person, rather than an attractive asshole or a circumstantial crush.
Somehow, she thinks that might be worse.
There’s an idea – a very, very bad idea – burrowing inside her brain. Carefully, she says, “You know, that stuff is hard for me, too.”
“You made it look pretty easy just now,” Kaz says dryly.
“Well, but that was because I had been – thinking about it. Before.”
“You were?” There’s an undercurrent of something in his voice. Like he’s pleased.
Now she’s the one talking to her knees. “I knew I wanted to, with you,” she grits out. “So, it was – easier.”
It had still taken every scrap of courage she had and rather more alcohol than was probably preferable, but she isn’t about to tell him that.
“What if we – ” this time, she does turn her head to look at him, and finds him already watching her, deliberately, like he half knows what she’s going to say but fears it’s a trap all the same.
“What if we… helped each other out?” she says.
His eyes are shot wide. “You – and me?”
“If you want.”
“If I want,” Kaz lets his head thunk against the wall, eyes rolling to the ceiling. “As if I…” he trails off.
“It’s okay if you don’t,” she rushes to add. “We don’t ever have to talk about it again.”
He drags his gaze to the bathtub and back to her, pointedly. “You do know what you’re signing up for, right?”
“We’ll go slow. And we can always stop.” We’ll go slow, she thinks hysterically. What business does she have going slow with Kaz Brekker? What business does she have going anywhere with him, for that matter? Fortunately, he doesn’t seem to realize that she’s rapidly losing confidence in herself, because he considers for another moment, probably attempting to assess all the possible consequences of such a half-cocked plan, and then apparently gives up trying.
“Alright,” he says.
“I – really?”
“I said alright, didn’t I?” he says testily.
She hadn’t truly thought he’d agree, she realizes. She’d been fully prepared to walk out of this strange night and never speak of it again. But now that he has agreed, they’ve got to have some – rules or something. Nina’s horrorstruck expression appears unbidden in her mind’s eye. “I don’t think we should tell anyone,” she says.
“Obviously,” he says, and she tries not to feel stung. He is still Kaz, after all.
“And you can’t be shitty,” she adds, inspired. “While we’re doing this.”
Kaz swallows, but still manages to scoff at her. “A blanket ban on shittiness feels a bit aspirational,” he says.
She rolls her eyes. “Fifty percent less shitty, then.”
“I suppose that’s feasible.”
She hesitates, because things are almost starting to feel normal again, and she doesn’t want to ruin it, but this next one is too important to leave out.
“And you have to tell me when you don’t like something,” she says. “And – and when you do.”
She knows that she’s breaking one of their regular, unspoken rules – Inej never asks; Kaz never answers – and she almost thinks this will be the thing that breaks him, but after a while he says, pained but steady, “Fine. And vice versa.”
Inej suddenly feels very hot. “Right. I’ll – it’ll go both ways.”
They both stare at their knees for a few minutes.
“When should we start?” Kaz asks.