So, he did.
20
MERCER
In between the pain and the nausea, Mercer could not stop imagining one step further.
Before Rahil’s arrival, he’d simply been missing Kat’s constant migraine-attention—the way she’d curl up next to him the same as she did when they slept at night—but Rahil’s massaging made him feel in ways that no pet possibly could. With every drag of Rahil’s hands, Mercer dreamed of one lower glide, fingers slipping beyond the systematic up and down motion on his neck and sliding into the front of his shirt. Just an inch. Just a taste.
He could want for more, he told himself—but later, when he didn’t have the subtle pounding in his head as a distraction, his layers of fatigue and strain slowly unraveling beneath Rahil’s touch to become a limp, malleable thing willing to do whatever was asked it of for one more moment of relief. One stronger moment, one wider moment, one moment that would put the rest to shame. Though he knew then, alone in the darkness with his right mind awake and alert, his embarrassment was just as likely to get to him as the want.
So, Mercer just idled there, trading his knots of agony for the soothing pressure of Rahil’s touch and imagined one extra inch of contact, over and over and over. A subtle wrapping of fingers over his throat. A little tangling into his hair. A breath on his cheek. A brush of a mouth on his neck—maybe even the fangs. Maybe…
God, he had to stop this.
He was pretty sure that God had stepped out for the moment, though, and left a sock on the knob to Mercer’s brain as they went. At least, he hoped. No divine deity deserved to experience the sheer conflict of nausea, joy, lust, and shame going on in his mind.
As Rahil moved his hands up from Mercer’s neck and into his hair, rubbing such gentle circles against the back of Mercer’s skull that it was all he could do not to moan, he tried desperately to turn his thoughts onto anything else. Anything but Rahil or the pain. Unfortunately, the only other thing that would stick was Lydia.
“Are you dating Ray?”
She’d seemed so utterly neutral about it, like replacing her mother with a strange vampire was normal in her eyes. Expected, even. Mercer still didn’t know how to feel about that—and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know, in case his own feelings affirmed the way his suffering body was relaxing under Rahil’s touch, the length of skin between his jawline and his collarbones growing a bizarre ache like it knew something he didn’t. Besides, regardless of what his daughter thought of Rahil, she was the one who needed Mercer’s attention right now.
“Is Lydia still…?” It came out as a mumble, half-intoxicated by the groan he’d been trying so hard to suppress.
“Let me check,” Rahil whispered.
He kept one hand in Mercer’s hair, though, as he fiddled with his phone in the other. His fingers drew back and forth, a gentle tracing that was certainly no massage, but despite the space it opened for the pain to return, there was a tenderness and a care to it that Mercer craved all the more. He wanted, stupidly, to melt backwards, let Rahil wrap around him. To give in to temptation.
Was it truly the first time in nearly a decade that he’d been taken care of like this, or did it merely feel that way? The space within his ribcage tightened, bright and bittersweet above his unhappy stomach, and he wanted, nearly, to cry, before Rahil broke the moment with a pat to his shoulder.
“She’s still good, yeah,” he said.
Mercer had to pull himself back into form like he was dragging his numb body up the last ten feet of Mount Everest. “Thank you.”
“Of course.” As he spoke, he began massaging Mercer’s scalp once more. If he wasn’t fooling himself, Rahil sounded like he was climbing the exact same peak, and possibly failing. “Anything for you—and Lydia. She’s a good kid.”
“She is,” Mercer managed, trying not to focus too much on the glorious sensation of Rahil’s hands, while still allowing himself to appreciate the relief it was bringing. The headache was only one part of his migraines—paired with nausea, fatigue, vertigo, light sensitivity, a full-body physical discomfort, and occasionally a spotty aura of flickering lights that took up half his vision—but having something cared for was far better than nothing at all, and far better still because it was Rahil’s fingers doing the work. “You’re good with her, too. I can tell by the way she talks about you. Your own kids must have adored you.” Well, he supposed accidentally bringing up dead kids was one way to cut the mood.
Rahil stiffened, fingernails digging in slightly before he seemed to realize what he was doing and loosened again. “Yeah, I, um, I think they hated me, actually.”
Mercer was glad Rahil was behind him because he couldn’t keep the confusion and anger off his face. “Why would you think that?”
He wanted to say, too, that he was sure Rahil was wrong. But he didn’t know enough about Rahil—aboutthatRahil, anyway, the one from ten or twenty years ago. He could have been the kind of man who was willing to create metals that killed the oppressed, good reasons or not. People made terrible choices, then grew from them.
Mercer was proof of that.
Rahil gave a noncommittal noise. “That story is… a lot. And you have enough pain in your life.” He tapped gently against Mercer’s temple as he said it.
Mercer twisted to catch his gaze, ignoring the vertigo the sudden movement caused. “Weight isn’t a burden if it’s shared between enough people. Please, tell me. I’d like to know.” He lifted the very edge of his lips. “Only if you continue rubbing my head, though.”
“Ha,” Rahil said flatly, but he gave a weak smile, and when Mercer turned back around, Rahil’s hands resumed their original motion. He didn’t speak again for what felt like minutes, but Mercer gave him the space, letting the quiet linger. Finally, Rahil cleared his throat. “Jonah was such a bright and caring kid. He loved everyone—was always the first to offer help, to make someone laugh, to end a fight or find a compromise. But somewhere between Lydia’s age and high school, something changed…”
“Ah,” was all Mercer felt confident saying, but it seemed enough support to prompt Rahil to continue.
“He probably had chronic depression. We—Shefali and I—we didn’t really know what was wrong, though, or what to do about it. Shefali pretended that things were fine so aggressively that it seemed she convinced even Jonah for a while, but I think he was just learning to hide it.” Rahil drew in a sharp breath, and one of his hands left Mercer’s hair for a moment before returning. “He wasn’t really home much, and spent a lot of time by himself when he was. We had an older micro-cemetery a block from our house then, and I’d find him there sometimes with his headphones in, drawing spirals on his skin with markers. They were always so beautiful.”
The twist at the end of the word sank Mercer’s stomach like a pit. As though he could feel all the beauty Rahil had seen in his son turn to ashes—he wanted to hold on to that micro-cemetery moment, to stop the story there. But Mercer was afraid he already knew what the finale had wrought.
