It was difficult to fight off the idea that Rei would not come back.
Fluke found her once. Even Baz would never manage the impossibility of tracking her down a second time. She would be miles away, digging her way into secret caverns of forgotten civilizations to avoid the responsibilities of real life.
"Are you brooding?" Diego asked from the island, where he read up on muscle groups. He didn't look up from the book, as if he could sense Baz's mood behind him.
"I am resting, as per Doctor Vega's orders," Baz replied, stretched out across the pulled-out couch, taking up as much of it as possible. The TV was on, but it wasn't doing anything that made Baz wish he had his own. It was just background noise.
"You can't multitask?" Diego graced Baz a glance.
Baz shot him a look, propping himself up on his elbows. "If I was brooding, you would know. I do not half-ass my brooding."
Like with nearly all things, it was half-joke, half-true. Diego ought to know that particular truth better than anyone. Baz was past the stage of brooding. He flew through that stage so quickly that he didn't have time to marinate in his own misfortune. Reality had already set in, weighing down but not crushing him. With or without Rei, Baz would leave.
"You know, you don't have to do what she says," Diego said.
Baz let himself drop back onto the bed, staring at the ceiling. The floor lamp cast shadows through the popcorn texture.
"If I had a better idea, I'd do something else," Baz said, "being that I don't..."
"Is that the only reason?" Diego asked.
No. Yes. Baz shut his eyes.
"Don't think it matters. She's—"
A sharp knock at the door interrupted him. Diego and Baz exchanged a look, fear striking before anything else. Diego rose, crossing cautiously to the door. He swung it open and Rei breezed right in, arms laden with plastic bags, hauling a carry-on sized suitcase behind her. She parked it, not addressing it at all. Diego made no comment about her moving in.
"Cheng's meeting with his lawyers tomorrow to discuss how next to approach a reward or ransom," she said.
Baz sat up, watching Rei whip off her sunglasses as she set her bags on the island. The smell of fried rice answered a question before it was asked.
Rei put on an impressive act of pretending not to notice their confusion. There was something...off. Rei was trying too hard to be casual and it read in ways Baz could perceive but not pinpoint. It was like she emitted a nervous energy, buzzing off her.
"What happened?" Baz asked.
"I picked up take away," Rei said which, while completely unenlightening, Baz appreciated. Her hands busied, pulling out styrofoam takeout containers. "I didn't know what you liked, so..."
She ducked her head, letting her hair fall around her face as she arranged dishes. Wonton soup. Chicken chow mein. Dumplings. Spring rolls. Beef with broccoli. More fried rice than Baz knew what to think of.
"I have been thinking..." Rei said, slowly, thoughtfully, as she snapped a set of chopsticks apart, "I may have my own business to tie up tomorrow. Would you be able to meet me at the museum after your visit to Cheng's?"
Baz watched her face for some sign, some tell he didn't know her well enough to read. Rei was a different language, one that he was only conversational in, not nearly fluent.
"What kind of business?" Diego asked, returning to his seat at the island, and Baz would've smacked him if he was close enough. He stood and slid onto the barstool next to Diego. There was no denying he wanted to know, he just wanted Rei to volunteer the details herself.
"I can meet you there," Baz agreed, avoiding Diego's obvious attempt to meet his gaze. It was either listen to Rei or listen to Diego. Either way, he was following someone else's lead. Did Diego's grand advice only apply if Baz followed Rei's lead? Was bending to Diego's suggestion not the same?
"Thank you," she said, "are you going to eat or not? I don't think I can work through this all by myself."
Baz took a set of chopsticks and started in on the dumplings. After a moment, Diego gave in, too. No distaste for an archaeologist could overcome a taste for Chinese take out. More to the point, it was a peace offering, a small one that could be easily passed off. Not too obvious, just some shred of evidence that she was doing more than just bulldozing people to her will.
Diego changed the channel, letting House Hunters take up conversational space. It was easier to speak by commenting on outrageous wishlists for miniscule budgets. There was good use for a TV.
It was also punctuated by small moments: Rei laughing as Baz unabashedly stole a wonton from Diego. The smile Baz flashed her in return earned him a raised eyebrow look from Diego.
Empty containers eventually stacked up, conversation quieting. Diego stood first, tossing out the styrofoam. He went about his nighttime routine while it steadily dawned on Baz that they hadn't discussed particular logistics. Really, he avoided thinking about it because there was no non-awkward way to bring it up.
Rei idly nibbled through a fortune cookie, relocated from leaning on the kitchen island to perching on the arm of the couch. "'People are naturally attracted to you,'" she read from the sleep of paper. "I think I got your cookie."
Baz couldn't even keep eye contact. He didn't look at anyone again until Diego cleared his throat from his bedroom threshold.
"I've got one pull-out. You're adults, figure it out," Diego said. "I'm locking my door 'til 6."
He closed the door. Not much else could punctuate that announcement. Baz turned to Rei, his hands up in some kind of half-apology, half-shrug, hoping that it communicated that Diego's opinions did not necessarily represent Baz's own.
"Is it me?" Rei stage whispered.
"No. No, that's just D," Baz replied, "you know, it's good when you need... motivation, I guess."
Diego was exactly the kind of personality Baz needed when they met, he could just be a bit... intense at first impression. The strangest part about it wasn't that Diego came on too strong, it was that Rei didn't really try to stand her ground. Baz watched her snap back at her brother's snide remarks. He'd watched her debate in class, her opinions louder and firmer than anyone else's.
"You can have the couch," Baz said. She was already on it anyway.
"Don't be ridiculous. Like he said, we're adults," Rei replied, "I'm not making you curl up in a chair."
Baz dropped onto the mattress. He reached up to his neck. It was certainly the more comfortable option, but it sure put temptation well within his reach.
"Are you going to play with your ring?" Rei teased.
"Now I'm not." Instead, he picked at the hem of the blanket.
Rei eased down from the arm, stretching her legs out across the bed.
"Can I ask you a question?" Rei looked earnest. Baz half-expected a sultry smile, a charade of a request, a hand on his thigh. Maybe an Italian bottle of wine and a hot tub, prying for information... but Rei wasn't in the business of selling something. She was in the business of unearthing truth.
Rei left space between them, her eyes dancing.
"Sure," Baz answered, "ask away."
He steeled himself to reveal ugly truths, waiting to admit to the details of his Sundial-funded crime spree or worse, the dark shadow of his life that followed state championships.
"Do you miss gymnastics?" Rei asked.
Not what he was expecting.
"Sometimes," Baz replied, without thinking about it. It was his lifeline once, when he was a kid living in Iowa. The dream of leaving town for bigger, better things pulled him through the hell that high school was for a boy who did gymnastics and loved art and spoke French, who was just a little too soft.
"I like parkour. It's a more functional sport. More creative. More relaxed. Far fewer conservative judges from the former USSR." Baz also learned his lesson and didn't saddle his entire self-worth into a single sport.
"Those USSR judges are deadly," Rei joked.
"Didn't have any at taekwondo meets?" Baz quipped back.
Rei smiled, but it faded from her eyes as she glanced down at her hands.
"I didn't need them. My mother is a perfectionist enough. I could be top ranked and my mother would still ask why I didn't finish a match faster," she replied.
It made sense now that he got under her skin just by outdoing her in a single class. The secret was written across both Rei and Cheng. Rei, the best at what she did, always searching for something, to be the first, to be the best, to hold the answers to the universe in her hand, unearthed from earth itself. The first with an answer.
Then there was Cheng, willing to undermine his competition by literally letting his vengeful lap dog hire a burglar.
"I have a very important question," Baz said, pausing for dramatic effect. Rei tilted her head, slightly uneasy. "Is your mother actually a disgraced Asian spy?"
Rei laughed, and the tension left in Baz's shoulders melted away.
"My mum's British-Born Chinese," Rei replied, familiar mischief returning to her eyes. "She's with MI6."
Baz blinked, wavering between believing her and not.
"I'm joking!" Her laugh was so easy. "She only consults."
Rei's smile hinted at a joke, but Baz couldn't help but wonder if she, like him, hid the truth in plain sight. She slipped a little closer.
"Can I see your scar," Rei asked, "from your surgery?"
She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and Baz's breath caught.
Rei was so tangible, it was terrifying, even as Baz slowly reconciled the Rei Collingwood she wanted everyone to see and the woman she actually was. That certainty he had in school of being so far beneath Rei no longer stood as an invisible barrier between them. It was something he built for himself, cemented by a foundation of believing she was flawless. Baz wasn't. So, that was that.
"Are you sure you don't have ulterior motives?" Baz asked, reaching for the hem of his shirt. He flashed her a smile.
"Well, maybe," Rei grinned.
Baz tugged his shirt over his head, dropping it to the floor. The light from the single floor lamp did not flatter the bruises or the scar tissue. Lines from Diego's kinesiology tape criss-crossed the nasty, still deep-purple bruise.
Rei slid ever closer, reaching out to run her fingertips around the shape of the scar. His skin prickled under her touch as if electricity pulsed from her. She watched for reaction and Baz met her gaze steadily. There were things about Rei that remained distinctly the same. Her clear skin, letting a faint blush show through. The way half her gestures were so flippant and careless, like the flick of her wrist when she brushed her hair away from her face, but others were so precise and intentional, like the way Baz could hardly feel her fingertips brushing over his skin.
Hers were hands that brushed dust off delicate history, carrying the patience it took to remove pottery from a rock gentle brushstroke by gentle brushstroke. She was excavating him, searching for truth under his skin.
"Find what you were looking for?" Baz asked.
"You're not wearing a shirt, so mission accomplished." Rei flashed a coy smile, showing her hand.
Rei let her hand slide from his shoulder down the contours of his arm. Baz caught her, pulling her closer. Close enough to hear the short gasp of surprise escape her lips. Rei was quick, recovering to twist them both down across the mattress.
Baz laughed, for the first time wary of being too loud in his best friend's house.
"In the interest of fairness..." Baz said, "I think you owe me a scar of your own."
Rei pretended to consider, drawing out the moment as she sat up, straddling him on the bed. Baz's whole body was alert and electrified.
"I suppose you have a point," she said, peeling off her own shirt. Her hair loosened out of its ponytail and Rei pulled it right out, her hair falling past her shoulders. Baz propped himself up on his elbows, telling himself he was searching for an imperfection in her skin, the marks of trouble from her work.
Rei twisted her arm at an odd angle. "There's the snakebite from Belize everyone loves to go on about."
She presented him the healed marks from two distinct teeth. Baz had imagined much worse from the article he read.
"So, is anyone right when they go on about it?" Baz asked.
Rei shook her head. "Almost none. It was really more embarrassing than anything. My guide killed the snake to take with us to the hospital, but the snake just wanted to give me a chomp to let me know she was there and not afraid of me. Dry bite, no venom. Poor thing's only crime was being too close to camp."
Baz smiled, dazzled by how casually she described the incident, more endearing in her regret over the snake than she ever had been in the exaggerated version.
"And the part about returning to the dig?" Baz urged her on.
"Of course I went back to dig! Do you know the shit they would've given me if I took the day off over a dry bite!" Rei said, "though, I dug up more llama bones than anything else."
She was too proud and too stubborn, faults Baz couldn't hold against her as long as he remembered his torn rotator cuff and the season he competed on it.
Rei rolled off him, sprawling across the mattress next to him, leaving both to stare up at the ceiling one long, thoughtful moment. Her shoulder brushed against his, skin soft and warm.
"This feels exactly like the freshman year I should've had," she said.
Rei wasn't wrong. There was unarguably something about lying shirtless on a pull-out couch in a friend's one-bedroom apartment that screamed first year of university, but it hadn't been Baz's freshman year either. It was someone else's. Someone who didn't spend early mornings in the gym or in training, who didn't pass on a Friday night beer to catch up on the reading he had plenty of time to study. He hadn't spent much time fumbling in the dark for bra clasps and hot skin.
How ridiculous and surreal it was to catch up on the experience in the middle of everything.
"My parents wouldn't let me stay in dorms. I wanted to. I went to boarding school, so it wasn't as if it would be that different," Rei said. "I wanted that proper American college experience. Sharing one tiny room with a bubbly American girl, becoming best friends. Going to frat parties..."
"You watched a lot of movies, didn't you?" Baz asked.
"So many. Grass is always greener situation, I'm sure." Rei shrugged. "What about you?"
"I got in on a scholarship and it was like being granted a miracle. No more Centerpoint, Iowa. No more small town. I think I was scared of having to go back to that. Too scared to risk having a good time," Baz said. He would still pick hard done by in Temperance than hard done by in Centerpoint.
He'd been wrong for so long about Rei. She had so many of the things he didn't, but that didn't separate them. At least, it didn't in the ways he might've imagined.
Baz's fingers found Rei's, tangling clumsily into them like he'd never held a girl's hand before in his life.
She squeezed, another sign that the bridge was enough.
"I know it's really terrible of me to say, and I hate what Cheng has roped you into," Rei began, "but I don't think I mind that you dropped in on me out of the sky."
It was really terrible of him to agree, but Baz did. He didn't want to trade everything he had for Rei, but her warm hand in his made starting over less daunting. He could do it. He'd built himself up from scratch once before and he had faith he could do so again.
"You know, Gwen stole my first boyfriend," Rei mused, "I was fourteen. His name was Elliot and, as I recall, two weeks later, Gwen stole his clothes and locked him in a broom closet for starting rumors that I was a prude."
Well, that was not hard to imagine at all. At least not the part about Gwen locking someone in a closet. Stealing away Rei's boyfriend just to defend her honor shortly thereafter was a bit more complex of an idea to comprehend.
"Is that a warning?" Baz asked.
"You tell me?" Rei replied. Whip-smart, she was. That was a trick his mother liked to play. Nothing got his father in trouble faster than trying to explain himself. Baz liked to think he'd done well to learn from that mistake.
"I was looking for a distraction. A very quick fix for a very complicated problem. A way out of the truth," Baz said. The quick fix was a very addict way of thinking, but Gwen had temporarily seemed safer than substance-based problem solving. Before the broom closet anecdote, at least.
"Oh, I see." Rei's feigned understanding sounded suspiciously like scoffing. "And what are you looking for now?"
Another loaded question.
"Hope, I suppose," Baz replied.
He slipped his arm underneath her, pulling her closer until she met his eyes. Every breath Rei took expanded against Baz's chest.
"Are you...?" Rei whispered, her eyes dancing in the lamp light, "or shall I?"
If Baz was waiting for an invitation, that was it.
He kissed her, soft and slow, leaning into her hands on his chest. Rei's fingers followed up the line of his collarbone, looping her arms around his neck to tug him closer. Her skin pressed warm and soft against his. Baz held her tight, needing the contact, needing to siphon her electricity, their touch a conduit.
Rei pulled back. Her breath came out next to his ear, soft little gasps punctuating the way his fingers ran over her lower back and she shivered into him. Her nails dragged up his back.
"Ow," Baz flinched, then laughed into Rei's shoulder as her fingers raked over his bruises before she pulled away. "That's a little tender."
"I'm sorry," she whispered, stifling her own giggling. Trying to be quiet. Probably failing. Too close to that university freshman year Rei wanted. Fumbling and tangled into each other, but with enough experience to do so with intention, searching for the sensitive spots, the nuances.
Rei's laugh settled into her easy grin and Baz caught her eyes.
"What was the truth?" she asked.
"What?"
"The truth you were looking for a way out of?" Rei asked, "with Gwen."
It should've been bad form to talk about other women he had slept with, but Rei asked. Maybe it was that neither Rei or Gwen really adhered to an easily navigable code. Maybe it was just because Baz was not the first man to have been caught between them.
"Gwen was pretty convinced that she was my second choice." The red wine he hadn't had in Diego's apartment gave Baz much better judgement than he possessed in Gwen's hot tub. Gwen couldn't be 100% right because the Rei Collingwood she accused Baz of being in love with was different from the Rei grinning at him. It was easy to become infatuated with a symbol of a life he didn't have, but Rei was someone more whole and imperfect and alive than that. He could fall in love with Rei Collingwood, once he knew her. Really.
Rei pursed her lips, considering that.
Baz didn't give her time to think too long, taking her distraction as an opportunity to press his lips to her neck. She melted into him, the little sounds she made fueling him and turning him to absolute stone. There was no way Rei could ignore how much he wanted her. His body betrayed him.
"Sébastien, wait," she whispered, running her fingers into his hair.