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Peter Strahm wasn’t sure when he’d started regarding Mark Hoffman as handsome. Easy on the eyes, pleasant to look at; it must have been that two parallel universes had collided and merged, and in doing so brought about a nearly imperceptible shift that left the world feeling unsettlingly askew. Things that never should’ve come to pass all of a sudden had, and what had once seemed impossible and ludicrous was now the reality.
It was as though he’d woken up one day, a day unremarkable as any other, and the Detective Lieutenant, the resident Neanderthal of NYPD, the mass-murdering maniac and Jigsaw’s best boy, had shed the guise of a vaguely unappealing, lumpy creature and revealed no small amount of beauty underneath. Beauty. Peter shuddered.
He was being unkind. Dredging up past resentments without any apparent cause, driven by a relentless, destructive urge to taste old anger, to feel it congeal like sludge at the back of his throat.
Why? To prove that he could? To prove that he has not changed, that he had not let Mark change him? That he was still the old, unpleasant, unapproachable, angry Peter—the one that clung fiercely to every last little ugly thing that made him that half-feral, snarling creature everyone knew and barely tolerated? The one that could—if he so chose—put an end to this charade, this parody of a white-picket marital life, this insult to all that was good and moral?
(Whether he ever would was a point of debate, though Peter desperately wanted to believe he could. Even, or especially, if it was not so.)
Perhaps, also, to justify this. To justify this life they had fashioned for themselves, this life that neither of them—such as they were—rightly deserved. Better people were dealt shittier hands, and no small amount of those dealings could be attributed precisely to the man warming Peter’s bed. All the same, let he who is without sin cast the first stone—Peter’s record wasn’t exactly spotless.
There was no justice in this: in them, safe and sound and stretched out like a pair of lazy cats on a wonderful Sunday morning, holed away in a small house at the fringes of a quiet fishing town.
No. None at all.
Therein lay the issue, maybe; Peter wished, beyond anything else, that he could scrounge up a morsel of guilt—a morsel of guilt that might prove that he wasn’t beyond redemption; that the bad apple of his eye hadn’t spread its rot to him, too.
As if guilt might absolve him. As if guilt might make this slice of heaven easier to stomach.
Sadly, guilt never came. Never would come.
Not now, at any rate; not now that sun dappled the broad expanse of Mark’s back as it filtered through the shutters, and Peter’s hands with it, there where they rested above his shoulder blades. Encircling him. Keeping him close, chest against chest, heart against heart; he could feel the thumping of Mark’s, a steady rhythm.
Mark.
His edges had softened with each passing day, as though the sea had taken to him like a pebble, one of thousands upon its shores; every wave, every splash sanding down all those pointy, jagged bits. Shaped him into something gentle, something easy to hold.
Peter ran the backs of his fingers, feather-light, down Mark’s cheek; smooth near the cheekbone and slightly rougher where a two-day-old stubble clung to it like seaweed to stone. To lean forward and plant a small kiss was as easy as breathing. He did dole out those quite generously of late, didn’t he?
Much like a good, hearty meal, Peter couldn’t stop now that he’d gotten a taste of it; he pressed his nose against Mark’s temple, inhaled, let his dry lips touch the warm skin. Near enough to his eye that he could feel with ease the faint texture of crow’s feet. There was something charming about that; about the thought Mark might’ve smiled and laughed enough that the crinkling of his eyes had left a permanent mark.
It was a horrible, treacherous thought to have; too sappy, too saccharine for his own liking.
It couldn’t be helped.
Perhaps he’d finally really started losing the plot, all rational thought squeezed out of him by Mark’s bulk bearing down on him in a way that Peter really, really liked. There was something to be said about it, about being touched seemingly everywhere all at once, about feeling every bump and divot of another body. Namely if you loved that body. Namely if you loved the person within it.
Which was all there was to it, wasn’t it? Love. The mastermind of this operation, the catalyst behind every unforgivable decision Peter had made ever since that first night—that first night that now seemed lifetimes ago—when he’d gone snooping for Aspirin in Mark’s apartment and found blueprints instead, blueprints and little notebooks full of incriminating notes and sketches that he could’ve taken to Erickson right that instant, stop Jigsaw once and for all, hail himself a hero. Instead, Peter—stupid, whipped Peter—had shoved them back into the drawer of Mark’s desk, never to be touched again.
(And when Mark would come home reeking of blood and motor oil, it had been disturbingly easy to feign sleep and pretend he never saw the blood encrusted beneath his fingernails.)
“Pete?”
Mark must’ve stirred at a point, which had entirely escaped his notice. Though no more than a handful of seconds might’ve passed since, that voice still thick and rumbly and slurred with sleep. His lips had barely parted to let Peter’s name flutter past.
“Go back to sleep,” Peter murmured, letting a hand slide up to cup the back of Mark’s neck, guide his head gently back to his own breast. The other yielded easily, nosing into the fabric of Peter’s shirt, bringing to attention the small puddle of spit.
Sighing softly, Peter pressed a kiss between Mark’s brows. Ah, well.