Page 58 of Gunpowder

You awake?

He didn’t know if it was relief or dread he felt, watching the three dots appear to indicate that Wren was typing.

Sunshine

Yeah. Are you okay?

Blair stared at the screen. He didn’t think Wren had ever asked him anything of the sort. Was it so strange to ask if he was awake? Or did Wren just have some kind of freaky sixth sense for when Blair was upset?

I’m okay but thanks. You busy tomorrow?

Sunshine

Class.

After?

Sunshine

All yours.

The words definitely didn’t give Blair butterflies. Nope, not a chance.

The morning was spent making a run with Spencer to make a delivery before they set to the much tamer and more tiring task of repolishing the floors in the bar. He was glad to find Spencer quiet, gears turning almost audibly in his head as he tried to think of a plan. Blair left him to his thinking. He didn’t want to breach the subject, anyway, until he knew if his own idea was going to work. There was no point in mentioning it to anyone else when Wren might just refuse.

The smell of polyurethane was still lingering in Blair’s nose when he got to Gantry Plaza State Park, where they’d decided to meet. Blair parked next to the Audi and started walking after a glance through the tinted windows revealed it to be empty.

Wren stood with his elbows on the railing, staring across the water at Manhattan, at the building that made up part of his college campus.

Blair leaned back against the railing next to him and he didn’t really know who leaned over to who, only that Wren kissed him, and for a moment there was a sky’s worth of sunlight in his chest.

“Practical classes today, huh?” Blair said once they parted, nodding to Wren’s black scrubs.

Wren returned his arms to the railing. “The medical center attached to the campus gave us a cadaver.”

“That was… nice of them.” He took a deep breath that tasted of salt. “Do you remember the first time we were here, when they called me about Adam and you came to help?”

“I went to practice, but yes, I recall.” Wren’s eyes still lingered distantly on the school, so visibly cerulean and sullen when the breeze lifted his bangs from his face.

Blair took another breath, but it hitched around the anxiety in his throat, strangled out before it could reach his lungs. “I need your help again,” he said, sounding a lot more calm than he felt.

Wren raised an eyebrow. “Someone else get hit by a car?”

“No, but they will. Or worse. There’s no telling what Phantom will do next, or if the next person they target will be lucky enough to survive.” Jinx’s doll-like visage flashed in his mind. He took Wren’s hand and gently pulled him so they faced each other, with a city on either side that both felt small compared to the guilt eating through his chest. “I need you to get us into that warehouse. You built computers and wrote software, I know you can do it.”

“Us,” Wren repeated, his eyes going dark.

Blair gripped his hand tighter in what he hoped was reassurance. “Yeah, even I’m not crazy enough to go in there alone.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t go in there at all. You told them how to find the place, that should earn you the right to sit this one out,” Wren said, fingers twitching restlessly under Blair’s.

“But I don’t want to.”

“What if I do?” Wren asked, his voice shaped by something that sounded dangerously close to emotion. “What if I don’t want you to come back with another bullet in you?”

Blair smiled. “Hey, don’t worry Sunshine. This is what I do.”

Wren’s jaw clenched. He turned away, and usually Blair would have let him, but something made him reach out. Blair caught Wren around the waist and made him turn back around, keeping a hand on Wren’s hip as Wren glared down at him. Blair couldn’t keep the grin off his face. That look might have been scathing to anyone else, if they hadn’t been on the receiving end of Felix Bane’s glares for a couple years.

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