“You’re so bloody beautiful,” Cain said, and his words came hoarse like the low, awed breaths, “you know that?”

A jolt shot through Casper’s chest, a bloom of fuzzy warmth chasing out the cobwebbed chill. Had anyone ever called him beautiful before?

Jack liked hot. Jack liked sexy. Sometimes he even went pretty or cute. Both of them knew Casper wasn’t beautiful. Inside or out.

Shit. Casper rubbed his hand against his cheek and took a deep drag on his cigarette. His heart pattered like mice feet. Why couldn’t it stop doing that? “Not pulchritudinous?”

A groan, the last of the trance shaken off, and with his fingers sliding back through his hair, he took a drag as well. “Oh piss off. That’s the last time I use a word more than two syllables.”

“Syl-la-bles.”

Cain glared at him, ruined by the playful smile crooking the corner of his lips. “That’s the last time.”

Cute. Definitely too cute. Casper hunkered down, elbows on the knees of his crossed legs, and smirked up at Cain whose dark eyes traced the ember of Casper’s cigarette as he put it to his lips, the cherry flaring bright in the darkness.

“Who said this was a date anyway, rich boy?”

It might have been comical, the way his face fell, if it wasn’t so sweet. A slow fall to kicked-dog eyes and a pouting bottom lip until he shook his head and mastered the expression. “No one, I suppose...”

Casper pouted at him, chin resting on his knuckles. A drift of ash whipped away in the wind. “Better mind your tongue then.”

“Alright—” Cain twisted in his seat, arm over the back of the bench and his cheek resting on his loose fist. Shadows gathered beneath his cheekbones sharpened them to carved marble and his voice harkened to the old black-gold velvet. “Call this a turn of fate then, pretty boy, and I’ll ask the question. Let me take you on a date.”

Shit and it was hard to keep the grin off. Best he could do was limit it to widening the smirk. Casper wagged the cigarette back and forth before him, the glow caught like an ember buried in his eyes. “And how’re you going to make that worth my while?”

“Mm...” Cain tilted his head further to the side, heat simmering behind every precise turn of his features to pure sin and the crooked half-smile put him right back behind the bar, his blood racing as this stranger made him melt. “I’ll play then, Casper. What’s your time worth?”

The coy reply died unspoken, sinking and rotting to nothing more than a black pit of nausea in his stomach. And it hadn’t been going to be about money. Maybe he’d been going to ask for a kiss, but...

He really prodded that question out like an expert.

The breath of smoke scratched through his voice as he spoke down to his lap. “Don’t ask me that.”

A hiss, forced between Cain’s teeth, and his body closed off, turned away and shut down. Casper cut back in before he could speak. Shit, his chest was getting all tight now. It made his voice even worse. All stupid and cracking.

“I didn’t think I’d actually be talking to you like this when I made that a joke, I’m sorry. Just don’t, please. It’s—it doesn’t feel right.”

His response came soft, a single word. “Why?”

And for some god-fucking-forsaken reason, Casper told him. Call it the exhaustion and the dope-sickness creeping in.

“Because every time you ask, up here—” Casper tapped his head— “I’m checking my price list. Five hundred for a date, if you’re wondering. Don’t like them. Every time someone forks it out, I’ve gotta sit there remembering I’ve never been on a real one.”

“Oh.”

Oh. Summed it up, didn’t it? What would it be tomorrow? Hungover, he’d sprawl in bed staring at the ceiling until a call came in. Five men want you in my house later. Two holes, three dicks. Bring dope and drink the spiked drink they give you, so you won’t remember it in the morning.

Earlier this week, he’d gone to his fourth of the day, last one before he headed to an overnight, and the guy had beaten him up and stolen his money and kicked him out because he’d come too high to even struggle.

Someone else had punched him in the face, but they’d paid him to do that.

That tight feeling knotted through his throat and beneath his eyes, a deepening of the aching cold sinking into his bones. It was that feeling that felt like crying, but it had been so, so long since he’d been able to cry.

A survival mechanism he hadn’t been able to shed.

If only he could make himself look up to at least look out at the city. The expanse of the sky might loosen the rope tightening around his neck. Might at least jerk it closed and get it over with. Casper picked at the white lichen splattered across the rough wood of the bench with the edge of his thumbnail. Nice bench, really. Old and solid, like a relic of the times when people cared about things like benches in parks in the sky.

How could you care about benches when the world died only a little slower than your panicked scrabble to the bottom? How blessed would it be to find someone to slow that plummet just a little?

Now he’d gone and messed it all up.