Chapter 117: Truce

"What are you doing here?" Kai asked, and Baylor still could not answer properly because he was too busy looking, openly and without shame, at the body in front of him. Kai was not oblivious to it. He saw the way Baylor’s gaze dragged from his chest to his waist and lower, and he did not particularly mind, because this was the kind of quiet mind torture he could live with. Baylor could look as much as he wanted, and still not touch.

There was an Elias everywhere if a person looked hard enough, and Baylor was giving major Elias vibes in the doorway, all heat and careless confidence with his shirt open and that bottle hanging from his fingers like an excuse.

"I love your clothes," Baylor finally said, shameless, with a smirk that was clearly meant to come off as sexy.

Kai was not particularly feeling it.

"I am not wearing any," he said blandly, and Baylor, instead of taking the hint of non-indulgence, predictably took it as a challenge.

"Is this your way of seducing me, white bunny?"

"Uhm..." Kai did not know what to answer first, whether he was more surprised that Baylor had clocked the tension that fast or more gagged that the man had walked himself straight into arrogance again.

"What? Cat got your tongue?"

"No. Actually, I am thinking how I would even be trying to seduce you when I literally did not know you were coming," Kai defended at once. "Besides, you have no self-control. A little show of skin and you are already like this? How pathetic. Guess I overestimated you."

Baylor grunted, swallowed, opened the wine, drank from it, and grunted again as if the bottle could answer for him.

"What are you doing here?" Kai asked a second time, genuinely curious now.

"To celebrate."

"Celebrate what?"

"Your promotion, silly."

Kai was confused and equally amused, and the sound that left him was a stifled chuckle more than a laugh. He looked from one empty side of the corridor to the other as if the answer might be standing somewhere behind Baylor.

"Why would you want to celebrate my promotion?"

Baylor chuckled, lower this time.

"Come on. Let us stop the constant bickering and call a truce for one night. This will be our last interaction, remember?"

He was right. Baylor had not passed the stage test, and failing a stage test in the Academy meant becoming a runt in the litter, forced into repeat work while everyone else advanced. The whole structure was built that way, hard and unsentimental, and for the first time since they had spent months tearing at each other through drills, rankings, and Tests. Kai felt an unwanted hit of pity cut under his irritation. Against all his better habits, he decided to let the night stand on different terms.

He rolled his eyes.

"I guess. But do not get it twisted. This does not change anything between us."

Baylor raised both hands in mock surrender.

"I am good with that."

"Yeah."

"Can I come in?"

Kai opened the door wider, and Baylor stepped through. The latch clicked shut behind them, and with the sudden certainty of privacy the hunger in Baylor’s eyes came fully into the light. They held eye contact for several long seconds in the quiet of the room, long enough for the air to thicken and for Kai to feel the old rivalry rearrange itself into something hotter and less honest.

Kai broke the tension with a chuckle and stretched his hand toward the wine.

"You gonna let me have a drink, or...?"

Baylor flushed under zero real pressure and handed the bottle over too quickly.

"Sorry," he said between grunts, then crossed the room and sat on the only sofa, leaving a deliberate distance between himself and the bed as if that one piece of furniture could keep the night from sliding somewhere neither of them had admitted out loud.

Kai took a deep pull from the bottle. The wine was hot in the throat and sharp enough to make his eyes sting, and he grunted when it burned going down.

"Damn, Baste. Are you trying to get me drunk?"

He held the bottle back out, and Baylor took it with another rough little laugh.

"It’s pretty strong, right?"

"Very."

Kai sat on the edge of the bed and grunted again as the heat spread through his chest, and Baylor kept chuckling from the sofa like the whole scene had been arranged for his private entertainment.

Kai frowned.

"Why are you laughing?"

"Because it’s funny."

"It literally is not."

"Humor is subjective."

"So peak humor to you is me suffering? Why do you hate me so much?" Kai said it as a jab, half jest and half old habit from months of mutual provocation, but the jest landed wrong. Baylor’s laughter cut off at once, and the change was so sudden that the room seemed to lose air with it.

Kai was taken aback by the gloom that settled over him.

"I don’t hate you," Baylor said.

Kai stared at him.

"You don’t?"

"No. Why did you think I did?"

"Oh, I can name a few—"

"I know I said some pretty mean things in the past," Baylor cut in, "but it was not from a place of hate."

"Huh? What was it then?"

Baylor’s fingers tightened around the bottle, and for the first time since he had walked into the doorway with that open shirt and cheap confidence, he looked like a man forced to stand inside his own reason.

"I think I kind of was conflicted."

"Of what?"

The silence stretched, thick and unstable, and when Baylor finally answered he did not look away.

"Falling in love with you"

Kai smiled, slow and sharp, because the whole night had just become much more interesting than a pity truce and a bottle of bad wine. Months of fouled spells, ranking insults, blocked lanes, and public hostility rearranged themselves in his head with ugly clarity, and the worst part was how well it fit. All that aggression, all that constant attention, all those times Baylor had leaned too close while talking down at him had never belonged to simple dislike. They had belonged to a man at war with his own wanting.

Kai leaned back on his palms and watched him over the space between bed and sofa, still half-naked, still warm from wine, and fully aware of the way Baylor’s gaze kept failing to stay innocent.

"So that is what all of this has been," Kai said, not unkindly and not soft either. "Every match. Every insult. Every time you could not stay away from my lane."

Baylor did not deny it. He only drank again, throat working hard, and when he lowered the bottle his voice came rougher.

"yeah"

Kai felt the words land low in his stomach, heat and anger and reluctant understanding tangled so tightly he could not separate them cleanly. He should have thrown him out. He should have laughed in his face and called the truce a mistake. Instead he remained on the edge of the bed in his underwear, necklace resting against bare skin, and let Baylor’s confession sit between them like an open hand neither of them had agreed to take.

"Come here," Kai said at last.

Baylor’s head lifted at once.

"What?"

"I said come here. If you are going to confess something that stupid after months of acting insane, you can at least do it without hiding on my sofa like the furniture is going to protect you."

For a second Baylor only stared, then he rose and crossed the room with a tension that made every step look heavier than the last. He stopped in front of Kai, tall enough that Kai had to tip his face up again, and the same shape from the tunnel returned with twice the privacy and none of the audience. Wine, heat, bare skin, and months of unfinished violence sat so close now that Kai could smell him.

Baylor’s voice dropped.

"You told me not to get it twisted."

"I did."

"And if I touch you anyway?"

Kai held his gaze and felt his own pulse betray him with an honesty he did not appreciate.

"Then you stop the moment I say so. That is the only rule."

Baylor’s hand rose slowly, giving him every chance to knock it away, and settled at the side of Kai’s neck. The contact was careful at first, then firmer when Kai did not move, and the thumb that brushed the edge of his jaw carried all the hunger Baylor had been swallowing since the doorway. Kai’s breath left him in a short controlled line, and Baylor leaned in until their mouths were close enough that the almost of it became its own form of contact.

They did not fall into softness. Softness would have been a lie after the year they had spent trying to ruin each other in public. What they fell into was pressure, heat, and the ugly relief of finally putting a body to months of denied attention. Baylor kissed him like a man losing an argument with himself, and Kai answered because the alternative was continuing to pretend that rivalry had been the only thing alive between them.

The bottle ended up on the floor. Baylor’s open shirt brushed Kai’s bare chest as he pressed him farther back onto the mattress, and the kiss deepened until it turned messy and breath-starved. Hands slid, stopped, slid again. Kai felt the hard line of Baylor’s want against him and the answering heat in his own body, and for a stretch of minutes there was no promotion, no failed stage test, no Academy ranking ladder, only the two of them grinding out a truce that looked less and less like peace with every second.

Baylor’s mouth left his lips and trailed lower, over the hinge of his jaw and down the side of his throat, and Kai’s fingers tightened in green-streaked memory and present heat alike as a rough sound left him. It stayed pseudo in the narrowest sense, clothes half in the way, lines not fully crossed, both of them caught in the dangerous middle where wanting had become obvious and completion still waited on one more bad decision.

Baylor rested his forehead against Kai’s temple, breathing hard.

"If this is still just a truce," he muttered, "you should stop me now."

Kai stared at the ceiling over his shoulder, mouth swollen, pulse stupid, and realized with no small amount of fury that he did not want to.