Page 4 of Playing with Fire

“Yeah,” I said, though I obviously didn’t.

“I’ll be back on tomorrow. Don’t stay up too late, Sunshine.”

“Don’t burn down the whole countryside,” I countered.

“Just the parts that deserve it.” His voice softened. “Night, Leo.”

“Night, X. Be careful.”

The words felt inadequate, pathetically small against the enormous feelings swelling behind them. Be careful carried the weight of everything I couldn’t say: Don’t die. Come back to me. I need you in ways that terrify me. I’ve never been touched, but I want you to be the first. I want you to corrupt everything my family tried to make holy in me. I don’t know who I am without you anymore.

The intensity of my own thoughts shocked me sometimes. When had my need for his companionship become as essential as breathing? No, it was something more. It was desperate, all-consuming… Very much like a drug. I’d let Xavier carve out pieces of me to make more room for him.

If my abuela could hear those thoughts, she’d drag me straight to confession. Not just for wanting a man, but for idolizing one. For becoming someone who would rather be in pain with Xavier than whole without him.

I made a mental note to check the dark web forums tomorrow for any chatter about mysterious fires. These days, I handled most of Xavier's digital cleanup, anyway. It was easier for everyone if the forums blamed electrical faults rather than vigilante justice. The thought that he trusted me with this, with covering his tracks, with being his silent partner in righteous criminality, sent a shameful thrill through me.What would Father Mateo say now, seeing his altar boy enabling a vigilante?

Xavier trusted me with everything except his body. That part of him would always remain beyond my reach, a boundary I couldn't cross no matter how desperately I wanted to. And I did want to. With every fiber of my being. The need to be touched by him, to feel his hands on my skin, had become a physical ache I carried constantly.

I stretched, my back cracking after hours of gaming. The sound echoed in the silence of my room, making me suddenly aware of how alone I was now that Xavier had logged off. The absence of his voice left a vacuum, an emptiness that expanded with each passing second. My room was a comfortable chaos of technology and memories, but without X's voice filling the digital space, everything felt slightly wrong, like a puzzle with one crucial piece missing.

My walls were covered in indie game posters and shelves that held various models of my favorite anime characters. The carefully framed photo of my old army unit sat next to half-built Evangelion models. A small shrine of Sailor Moon collectibles claimed one corner, dominated by my prized Sailor Mercury figure. She'd always been my favorite—the smart one, using technology and intelligence to solve problems over violence.

Sometimes I wondered if that's why I was so drawn to Xavier. He was like Mercury in so many ways—brilliant, analytical, capable of freezing enemies with a calculated precision that was beautiful to watch. But unlike my innocent love for an anime character, my feelings for Xavier were complicated by flesh and blood reality. By the knowledge that I wanted something he couldn't give.

The Fullmetal Alchemist wall scroll above my bed had been a gift from Xavier on my birthday last year. He'd remembered me mentioning it was my comfort anime, the one I returned to when the world felt too harsh. My father had called anime a waste of money, a childish obsession. My mother had worried about the "feminine influence." Neither of them had understood that what I admired was the minds, the capability, the complex characters who weren't afraid to show emotion while still being strong.

The trailer might be small, but this space was mine. My sanctuary of circuits and code, where I could build the simulations that kept local law enforcement and private security teams sharp. It wasn't the career I'd imagined when I was writing combat training programs for the Army, but it let me help people in my own way. Plus, living on the Junkyard Dogs compound meant I had a front-row seat to how those simulations actually helped in the field.

I pulled up the police scanner program I'd modified, setting it to alert me to any reports of fires or explosions within a thirty-mile radius. Then I opened my monitoring software, the one that kept tabs on Xavier's digital signature across various networks. He didn't know I'd built this particular safeguard—a program that tracked his movements through digital space. It was invasive, probably crossing boundaries that friends weren't supposed to cross. But the thought of not knowing, of him disappearing without me having any way to help, was unbearable.

This was the dark reflection of our friendship. I had this obsessive need to track him, to protect him, to be the one person who always knew where he was. The one person he could count on when everything went to hell. It wasn't healthy, but it was ours. And after two years, I couldn't imagine functioning any other way.

Another crash came from the kitchen, followed by muffled swearing. I sighed and got up, carefully sliding my feet into my shoes, just in case Wattson dropped something on the floor.

I found Wattson surrounded by mixing bowls, his curly red-blond hair dusted with flour. The kitchen counter had disappeared under bags of chocolate chips and measuring cups. Three sheets of cookies were already cooling by the sink, their sweet smell mingling with the sharp tang of anxiety sweat. The contrast was jarring. Something meant to comfort, born from something painful.

“Want to talk about it?” I asked, leaning against the doorframe. My shoulder blades pressed against the cheap wood paneling, grounding me in the moment, in the reality of being needed here instead of running after Xavier into whatever danger he was facing.

He looked up, and for a moment I saw past the calm exterior to the weight he carried. Connor McCoy—though nobody called him that except his medical license—had been patching up soldiers and mercenaries for longer than I'd been alive. But some cases hit harder than others.

He shot me his signature scowl, the one that scared new recruits but had stopped working on me months ago. "No, I want to stand here at three in the morning measuring vanilla because I enjoy wasting my time."

He grabbed another mixing bowl with more force than necessary, then winced at the movement. His Central Pain Syndrome was flaring up again. My eyes caught the slight hitch in his movements, the careful way he compensated with his other arm.

I pretended not to notice. We had an unspoken agreement about his bad days. About pretending we were both more whole than we actually were. "Need your meds?"

"Already took them." His voice was gruff but had lost some of its edge. He focused on measuring vanilla, the same careful control he projected to convince everyone he was clean now.

I nodded, not calling him on the lie. The empty pill bottles I occasionally found hidden in the bathroom trash told a different story than the sobriety chips he proudly displayed. His "recovery" was as carefully constructed as my heterosexuality had been back home. It was a performance we both maintained because the truth was too painful to acknowledge. The difference was, I knew he was still using. He just thought he was better at hiding it than he actually was. But who was I to judge another person's necessary fictions? We all did what we had to do to survive.

"Kid was nineteen. Just started college. If we'd had a trauma center closer, if the ambulance had gotten there faster..." He shook his head. "Rural healthcare is a fucking joke."

"So you're making cookies." I kept my voice neutral, free of judgment.

"Better than the alternative." He gestured at the cooling rack with his mixing spoon. "Make yourself useful and pack these up. The night shift at the clinic could use them. And for Christ's sake, wash your hands first. I've seen your keyboard."

I grabbed some containers from the cabinet—which he had indeed reorganized, fan-fucking-tastic—and started packing cookies. This was our normal. Him saving lives and stress-baking when he couldn't, me writing code and playing games and trying to make the world a little safer through better training. Two broken people who'd found a weird kind of family in this tin can we called home. Not the family I'd been born into, with its rigid expectations and conditional love, but something pieced together from salvaged parts. Something that worked despite its imperfections.

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