"Somehow, I expected your mother to hold her liquor a little better than this."
"I said she was a hippie, Jim, not a Merchant Marine."
Jim passed his hand a couple of times just above Naomi's face, and she didn't even twitch in her
sleep. Blair pushed his arm aside and took over the job of fussing, tucking the afghan around her
shoulders and flicking back the loose hair from her lightly sweaty face. He had the urge to sing
"Piece of My Heart," like Naomi used to years ago while she tucked him into bed, which probably
proved that he was a bit drunk himself.
"I feel like I should be reporting all three of us to Family Services," Jim mused, swirling a little
wine around in the bottom of his glass. Could that really be the last of the third bottle? And here
Blair had always suspected that Jim kept that wine rack around just for decoration.
"What do you mean?"
"This really is the first time I've had a woman and her son in my bed at the same time, I promise."
"Okay, *thank you,* Jim, for making this *completely* weird in my mind." As opposed to just
mostly weird, like it had been when Blair was thinking of it as being in bed with Jim with his
mother chaperoning. Even just "Naomi" and "chaperone" in the same sentence rated as *fairly*
weird.
But Jim was obviously amused as hell by the whole thing, as Jim so often was whenever Blair had
reason to hope he *wouldn't* see the humor in a situation. No, Jim couldn't have a sense of
humor about pick-up games of wastepaper-basketball erupting during poker night and the
unfortunate proximity of an antique menorah and that damn digital answering machine whose
whole memory could be erased if just one thing fell over on top of the wrong button. He had to
have a sense of humor about getting cruised by Blair's mom instead.
The better to ignore Jim's fucking sense of humor, Blair rolled over on his stomach and peered
down between the bars into the darkness of the loft. Couch definitely in the wrong place; he'd
totally lied, he didn't like it there at all, and now that Jim and Naomi were such great friends, Blair
wouldn't mind admitting it. His work here was obviously done when it came to forging alliances
-- quite possibly overdone. "Can you see everything from up here?" he asked, and his voice
sounded a little dreamy, a little cloudy. Definitely drunk. "Even in the dark -- the whole loft?"
"Yeah," Jim said, without looking.
"Hell of a view. You're like -- master of all you survey from up here."
Jim snorted. "Oh, yeah. It's great. No way does that kitchen get out of line without me knowing
about it."
"You really liked the tongue?"
"It was...really okay."
"Would you, like, admit to that in public?"
"I'd shout it from the rooftop: Sandburgs give great tongue."
Blair muffled a mixed sound of amusement and outrage in Jim's pillow, and then turned his head
to give Jim a baleful, one-eyed glare. "You are seriously *perverted* when you're drunk, anyone
ever tell you that?"
"I can see you."
After a minute's thought, Blair decided that, yes, that was definitely a non sequitor. "Run that by
me again?"
"You." Drunken Jim's voice sounded a lot like drunken Blair's, like fog rolling in off the harbor
would sound if it could talk. "I can count your eyelashes from here. I can see which hairs in your
eyebrows grow the opposite way from the rest of them. I can see the pores in your skin, the
texture of your front teeth. Did you know that no one's eyes are really just one color? There are
little dark rays, lighter flecks. I could zone...on the patterns in your hair...the crisscross and the
flyaways...."
He rolled his face away again, frustrated by the thought that even this couldn't hide him from Jim.
Jim could see the gooseflesh rising on the back of his forearm, hear the way he swallowed through
his persistently dry throat. Christ on a crutch. And his mother snoring softly in between them --
when the *fuck* did his life become...weird? Always before, all through Blair's peripatetic
childhood, the revolving door of Naomi's projects and missions and obsessions, the cast of
frigging *thousands* that peopled his memory, Blair had adjusted to everything, slipped himself in
through the cracks and inhabited every new mental and physical place like it was perfectly normal.
Somehow, only Jim, nice, stand-up, *normal* Jim Ellison with his car payments and his receding
hairline and his take-out menus stuck to the side of the refrigerator with freebie magnets from his
insurance company, had ever had the power to make Blair feel cast adrift, his mental furniture all
rearranged every time he walked through the door.
But he forced his voice to sound as noncommittal as possible as he said, "I bet *nobody* really
looks good to you anymore, huh? I mean, close up like that. Must be a little creepy."
"Actually, I think everybody looks better this way. At least...it's like there's more to look at.
More to see. You get more...involved. I dunno. This shit is hard to explain."
"Yeah." Nobody knew that better than Blair. When they'd first started this Sentinel thing, Blair
had all but drilled a hole in Jim's skull, stuck in a straw, and tried to suck the knowledge out.
Being so tantalizingly close to the full experience of being a Sentinel, and yet so utterly unable to
get at what it must be like had been its own special brand of hell. He knew in the first month that
it would always be this way, always him looking in on Jim and wishing it was his trip to live
instead of to observe, Jim looking out and wishing he weren't alone in this. It had taken a little
longer for him to quit beating the dead horse, but by now Blair was reasonably adept at sitting
back and letting Jim do his thing except when circumstances genuinely warranted an intervention.
He didn't spend his life just trying to crawl under Jim's skin for the hell of it anymore; bottling up
the Essence of Sentinel wasn't Blair's -- what would Naomi call it? -- life-path.
There had to be more. To life. To Blair. Finding a real, live Sentinel, which at first had seemed
like the culmination of all his years of fascination with all things Sentinel, had actually turned out
to be pretty much the beginning of the end, or at least proof positive that what you studied could
never really be who you were. You couldn't go native, even if you wanted to. You would
always and only be a guest. And there had to be more than that. To life. To Blair.
"But you can't see me," he said, his voice crushed low under thinly disguised desperation. "You
and Naomi. You're the only real friends I ever had, and put me in front of either of you, turn
your eyes on me, and I become what I am to *you.* I followed her around all my life. I'll follow
you around until I die. Is that all there is to see?"
"I think we're all just...the sum of what we've done. How we've affected the people around us.
There's nothing else. I grew up thinking that I -- *was* something. I was an *Ellison.* That
fucking mattered to me. Wanted to bend my whole life around being that thing, protecting it and
letting it protect me. It's not true, Chief. It's not real. You know what's real? Your pig-hating
mother going undercover to protect you, risking her life and her karma or whatever for you.
Don't say *is that all* like it's nothing much. It's everything."
"You're more. You're a Sentinel. That's within you, it's all yours, it never changes, and it has
nothing to do with anyone else. That's you. You're more. You're so much more than I am...."
Jim sat up abruptly, and the bed rocked like it was at sea. He put a hand on the railing to steady
himself as he glared across at Blair like he was making an arrest. "Don't you ever say that to me
again. Don't you ever. This thing I can do -- I hate that it makes me something that other people
aren't. It's like it pushes against me. Pushes me away from everything else. You're the only
thing it ever pulled *in,* and be damned if I'm gonna let you talk to me like it puts you and me in
two different places."
"I *observe you* like you're part of the scenery. I *test you* like you're something I can move
over here and over there, and I spend my life trying to get you in the exact right spot, some --
someplace where I can live with it and you can live with it, the exactly right place. Two different
*places*? Jim, you and me, we're all *over* the place."
Somewhere along the line, Blair had rolled over onto his back, and he could see the whole scene
laterally, a distorted vision out from the corner of his eyes. Naomi, unconscious and fragile, the
bright center of his childhood universe. Jim, looming massive in the distance, the weighty object
whose gravity field held Blair in orbit. His whole life in this bed -- mind and memory and stimulus
and spirit flowing through him and around him while the hot glow of too much cabernet buzzed
gently across his scalp.
"Maybe..." Jim was saying, a little too quiet and a little too dangerous. "Maybe I'm sick of you
fucking moving me around. Maybe I want to be in *one* spot, just end this thing and live with
the place where we wind up."
"Man, I'm too hammered for this haiku thing. What are we talking about now?"
"We're talking about sex, Sandburg."
Wildly, without any actual purpose, Blair waved his arms up above his body. "No -- no way,
man. I *know* we're not, because *I'm* not. I'm totally *not* talking about sex with you right
now."
"Well, for Christ's sake, Sandburg, when? In another year? The next millennium? On your
fucking deathbed?"
"Yeah, that sounds good. I'll take the deathbed."
"You can't ignore this forever."
"Wanna bet I can't?"
"I can't. I won't. I'm sick of it being just one more thing you juggle day after day -- get up, take
a shower, grade papers, lust after your Sentinel, call for backup, run to the store. This is fucking
*crazy,* Sandburg."
Blair rolled over, propping himself up on his elbows, and impatiently shaking back the hair that
gravity helpfully pulled down to block Jim from his line of sight. "How? How is it crazy? It
*works,* Jim. We've got our little nest all feathered. We've got our shit arranged like we like
it."
"You do not like it."
"Where we can *live* with it, then. Where it works for us. Why are you fucking with me like
this, man?"
"*Fucking* with you? Jesus Christ, Blair, I'm offering to go to bed with you. It's what you
*want.* How does that constitute fucking with you?"
"It's what *I* want? What is it, my fucking *birthday*? Or is this just some utterly misguided
attempt to distract me from the fact that I'm nothing without you by making me even more
dependent on you than I already am?"
"Do not make this into a Sentinel thing, Sandburg. I'll kill you if you try to make this into a
Sentinel thing, I swear to God."
"You still don't get it, do you? It's all a Sentinel thing, Jim! You think you're the only one
who's stuck with it? All my life, I got moved around, I was like carry-on baggage, I was interior
fucking decoration, just adapting to being put in the places my mother could live with. And I did,
Jim -- I adapted. I was cool with it. I did just fine. But then I took off on my own, I came
*here,* and what falls into my lap? The Sentinel thing. It was mine, Jim, it was the only thing
that was all mine! No one else even *wanted* it because it was so damn weird! And then you
come along and you *are* the Sentinel thing, and what the hell -- where the hell -- I mean, I had
to follow along where it led, Jim. I had to let it put me where it wanted me. Where you wanted
me. You wanted me to be the other half of your home, so here I am. Like I had any other
options that made any fucking sense at all?"
Jim swung away from him until all Blair could see was his back, like a geological feature on the
grey-black-grey topographical map that the loft became in the darkness, navigable only by feel
when you weren't a Sentinel. "I guess with your fucked-up childhood," he said, twice as dark as
the darkness, "that's what you consider love."
Yes, Blair thought about saying. Actually, it is. Sorry, is that...weird? Instead, he whispered,
"Where does this come from, Jim? What makes you want...all of a sudden...?"
"It just...I don't know. It seems to make sense. I like living with you. I like the way we belch
and throw our underwear on the floor. I...I look into the future, and I can't picture wanting
anything else. I can't picture factoring anyone else into whatever it is we've got going here, so I
guess...I guess I figure...if this is where we're gonna be for the rest of our lives, then...."
"Then we might just as well have sex? Jim, do you even *get* how insane that is?" Jim
shrugged, a tiny earthquake on the map. "Jim...Jesus Christ. This is so not something you do
because it seems more convenient than dating, you know? Man, I am lying on a bed next to my
mother and discussing my sex life, and I *still* think that this whole thing you're proposing is
totally incestuous."
"All right, already. You said no; I get the point."
"I don't think you do," Blair murmured, but Jim had that tone in his voice like he was done
listening, so it was a waste of energy to keep at it.
He stood up, and Jim had that adorable way of making a *statement* when he stood up; the
statement was *now that we're done here, let's get back to business.* "I think Naomi is down for
the count. I'll move her downstairs."
When he leaned down toward her, Blair was suddenly seized, freshly and with more of a physical
kick, by the hugeness of this. Naomi. Jim. Naomi. Jim. His life, his whole fucking life. The
two forces that, between them, had moved him from one end of the world to the other, the yin
and yang of his existence. Naomi's. Jim's. He was nothing more or less than the sum of them,
and here they were. Naomi. Jim. Both. Here. Blair reached up and put his hand to Jim's face,
feeling the bluntness of angular bone and the needle prick of his faint stubble.
"I think," Jim said, and his voice was just soft enough to sneak inside Blair's body under the
radar, wind itself around his spine and tickle at his skin from the inside, "that you're out of
excuses. I think twice is as many times as you can turn me down. I think if I asked you
again...right now...you'd say yes...."
Yes. Yes. Yes. Jesus *Christ,* hell *yes,* he'd say yes. "I think you're right, Jim," he said,
surprised at how calm he sounded. "In fact, I'll go you one better: I will guarantee you, beyond a
shadow of a doubt, that the next time you come on to me, I'll say yes. If you answer one thing
for me right now."
"What's that?"
Blair took a deep, shuddering breath, his fingertips curling lightly against Jim's skin. *Pull it
together, Sandburg. Come on.* "Do you really think you're ready for this? If what this is really
about is making sure that nothing changes between us, then do you really, truly, 100% believe
that you're ready to look at me every single day and see the guy you have sex with? Are you
ready to shuffle the deck like that? Come on, Jim. You have a stroke when someone moves the
*couch.* Tell me whether you're ready to redefine *home.*"
Against all odds, it seemed to work. Blair could almost see the wheels turn behind Jim's
shadowed eyes, almost see the message relayed from one part of Jim's brain to another, all the
way down to central command. Jim's hand covered his and squeezed it once, then gently moved
it back to rest on Blair's own chest. "The answer is no. I feel like a fucking idiot, but...I'm not.
Ready. You're right. I *want* to be."
"You think you should be."
Jim grimaced at that. "I think I should be. It seems to make sense."
"It's not supposed to make sense. Screw *should* be, Jim. I'm serious. There are no rules for
this, so don't just go making them up because you like rules."
"I love how bad you want me," Jim blurted out, and then looked a little stunned at himself.
"Fucking tease," Blair accused, and all at once, like some exotic, night-blooming flower, need and
desire opened up in him, curling outwards, expanding through his chest to become something that
could only be love. He loved Jim's car payments and his furniture and Jim's twisted sense of
humor and his superior genetics and he loved those powerful and beautiful blue eyes that could
make Jim both observer and observed.
He stood up with Naomi in his arms, and to hell with nothing more to Blair's life -- to Blair it
seemed like there was nothing more in the whole world. Naomi, endlessly changeable, moving in
and out of lives like they were last year's clothes, her head full of white light and soothing
visualizations. Jim, unshakeable, implacable, putting Blair's life to the torch with that searing
sexual magnetism, full of covert ops and black cats and fierce, solid *knowledge* of who and
what he was. He loved them both. They moved him where they wanted him, and he went
willingly, gladly.
There might be more. To life. To Blair. Or maybe not. Maybe Jim was right, and this was more
than *all* there was. Maybe it was *everything.*
Blair rolled over and watched through the bars as Jim carried his mother down the stairs and
tucked her under a blanket on the couch. He knew he really ought to sit up; it was just plain
tempting fate to be still lying here on Jim's bed when Jim came back.
And yet somehow, there he was when Jim climbed back up the stairs. Lying in Jim's bed in the
darkness, surrounded by rumpled blankets and the smell of patchouli and empty wine bottles. Jim
stood by the bed a moment, his face inscrutable, as Blair looked up at him, wondering if it really
*would* be like this on his deathbed, Blair looking up, Jim looking down, both of thinking, *Are
we ready for this?*
Jim reached down with one hand, and they took each other by their forearms so Blair could pull
himself up to his feet. "Hey, Jim?" When he opened his mouth and breathed in to speak, the
scent of Jim hit him with such dizzying strength that he wondered not so much what it was like to
be a Sentinel but how anyone *survived* it.
"Yeah, Chief?"
"You were completely right. I can't do this three times. So, um, next time? Be ready."
"Next time I will be," Jim promised, his eyes glinting oddly catlike in the dark, and let go of
Blair's arm.