EEE = MC SCARED! AAH-FFIDAVIT!!!

For three years, eight months, and — Remus liked to be exact about this, in the one area of his life where he ever bothered — eleven days, Remus had believed he was dating the most boring man in the greater metropolitan area, and had loved him desperately for it.

Logan Reeves worked in "risk assessment and recovery services," which Remus had always pictured as something involving spreadsheets and a lanyard. He left the apartment most mornings in a pressed shirt, came home most evenings smelling like coffee and dry-erase markers, and had opinions about grammar so strong that Remus had once seen him correct a stranger's tattoo. He alphabetized the spice rack. He ironed his socks, which was insane, Remus had told him so on their second date, and Logan had said, precision is not insanity, Remus, it is a moral position, and Remus had fallen so hard and so fast that he'd nearly choked on his drink.

They made an objectively ridiculous couple. Remus wrote splatter-horror novels under three different pen names and kept a jar on his dresser he told people held shark's teeth. Logan color-coded his bookshelf by subject and then alphabetically within subject and had once spent forty minutes explaining the Dewey Decimal System to Remus's cat, who was not listening, and Logan had known the cat wasn't listening, and had done it anyway because he found the ritual satisfying. They should not have worked. They worked immaculately.

"You're the only interesting thing in my apartment," Remus told him once, early on, tangled together on a couch that smelled like whatever candle Remus had lit and forgotten about. "Everything else about you is so normal it's practically a disguise."

"Perhaps I contain multitudes," Logan had said, dry as ever, and Remus had laughed and kissed him and thought nothing more of it, because why would he. Logan was steady. Logan was safe. Logan made him lunch when he forgot to eat during a deadline and read his goriest drafts with genuine, focused interest, red pen in hand, correcting his anatomy — the femoral artery does not spray in that direction if the leg is bent at this angle, Remus, I have told you this three times — with the mild exasperation of an editor, nothing more.

In hindsight — and Remus would spend a great deal of time in hindsight, later, turning every memory over like a coin to check both faces — there had been things. Small things. The go-bag in the closet that Logan called "for emergencies" and never elaborated on. The nights, maybe eight or nine times a year, when Logan left after dinner saying he had "a work thing" and came back past midnight, showered already, hair still damp, moving through the dark apartment with a quiet, careful economy that Remus had always found soothing rather than strange. The fact that Logan flinched, just slightly, at the sound of sirens, in a way that read as concentration rather than fear. The fact that he knew, with total confidence and no apparent source, exactly how long it took a body to go from warm to cold in a given ambient temperature, and had once corrected a true crime podcast out loud, alone, with real irritation, over a detail Remus hadn't even noticed was wrong.

Remus noticed all of it, in the scattered, unbothered way he noticed most things, filed it under Logan is a weird little guy and I love him, and moved on, because that was who Remus was. He collected strangeness the way other people collected stamps. He had never once thought to ask what the strangeness added up to.

He should have. He was, after all, a writer. Add up enough strange details and you get a plot.

---

It was their anniversary — four years, Remus had counted them on a wall calendar in blood-red marker, which Logan had found either horrifying or endearing depending on his mood — and Remus had decided, with the singular focus he brought to exactly two things in his life (writing and Logan), that he was going to surprise him.

The surprise was a cake. Remus could not bake. This did not stop him. He'd spent the better part of the afternoon destroying the kitchen in pursuit of something that vaguely resembled a red velvet layer cake, had gotten flour in his hair and frosting somewhere he still hadn't located, and had texted Logan around six asking when he'd be home, only to get the usual: Work thing. Not sure. Don't wait up. — L

Remus didn't mind. Logan's work things were sacred and boring and Remus had never once begrudged him the mystery of quarterly compliance reviews or whatever it was risk assessment people did at eight p.m. on a Tuesday. He iced the cake badly, ate a third of the frosting straight from the bowl, and decided — because patience had never once been a virtue he possessed — that he would drive to Logan's building and surprise him there instead, cake and all, wobbling dangerously on the passenger seat in a container that did not remotely fit it.

This was, in retrospect, the whole of the plan's failure. Not the cake. The car.

He didn't even make it to Logan's office. He was three blocks out, cutting through the industrial stretch near the old rail yards because his GPS insisted it shaved four minutes off the drive, when he saw Logan's car — Logan's actual, specific, extremely recognizable car, the one with the dented rear bumper from the parking garage incident Remus was still not allowed to bring up — parked crooked and half-hidden behind a chain-link fence outside a shuttered auto body shop that had no business having anyone's car parked outside it at nine at night.

Remus pulled over out of pure nosiness, cake forgotten on the passenger seat, already composing the bit he'd do about catching Logan somewhere weird — risk assessment my ass, you're moonlighting as a mechanic, aren't you, is this the secret, four years and the big reveal is you fix cars on Tuesdays — already grinning at the thought of it, already halfway out of his own car before his brain had finished deciding to move.

The shop door was propped an inch open. Light bled out from somewhere deeper inside, thin and yellow. Remus, who had never in his life been able to leave a propped door unopened, pushed it wider and stepped in, cake speech dying in his throat before he could deliver a word of it.

---

The front room was empty — stripped shelving, a dead vending machine, the particular stillness of a place nobody had used for its stated purpose in a long time. But there was a door in the back standing open, and the light was coming from there, and there were sounds coming from there too — low, murmured, precise, a voice Remus knew as well as his own heartbeat, saying something about staying still, this will be considerably less painful if you cooperate — and Remus, helpless against every instinct that had ever kept him alive, followed it.

The back room had been an old paint bay once, tiled floor sloped toward a drain, harsh fluorescent light buzzing overhead. There was a man zip-tied to a support pillar, bleeding sluggishly from a cut along his forearm, his face gray with the specific exhaustion of someone who has been afraid for a very long time and has run out of the energy to keep being afraid. And there was Logan.

Logan, in shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, a fine dark spatter across his collar. Logan, crouched at a rolling case Remus had never seen before — organized, Remus noted, with the same obsessive order as the spice rack, instruments nested in cut foam, everything with a place — selecting something long and thin with the unhurried consideration of a man choosing a pen for a card. Logan, glancing up at the sound of the door, and going, for one full second, utterly, uncharacteristically still.

Nobody spoke. The zip-tied man made a small, wet sound. The fluorescent light buzzed. Remus stood in the doorway with frosting still under one fingernail and stared at his boyfriend of four years with an expression that was — even Logan, even in that frozen second, could not immediately parse it. Not horror exactly. Not yet. Something closer to a man watching the last page of a book finally resolve a mystery he hadn't consciously known he'd been reading.

"Huh," Remus said, finally, into the silence. "Okay. So that's not compliance work."

"Remus." Logan set the instrument down, slow, careful, both hands visible, the way you'd move around something unpredictable. His voice was even, but Remus — who had spent four years learning every register Logan owned — could hear the calculation running underneath it, fast and cold. "You should not be here."

"No kidding." Remus's eyes moved from Logan to the man on the pillar to the case of gleaming, ordered tools and back to Logan, and something in his chest was doing something complicated and fast that he didn't have a name for yet.

Logan studied him with the flat, assessing look he usually saved for malfunctioning equipment — the look he gave a jammed printer, or a student who'd turned in work with an unforgivable citation error. Calculating angles. Exits. Remus could see him doing it, could see the gears turning behind those speckled lenses, deciding whether this was a five-years-of-shared-groceries-and-a-cat problem or a body-disposal problem. And something about being weighed like that — being looked at like a variable instead of a boyfriend, like a contingency instead of a certainty — sent a hot ugly thrill straight down Remus's spine that he was not remotely equipped to be ashamed of. He never had been equipped to be ashamed of anything. It was possibly his best quality.

"You're not freaking out," Logan said slowly, like it was a data point he didn't have a column for.

"Should I be?" Remus took a step closer instead of back. His boots found a dry patch of concrete without him quite meaning to choose it — some animal part of him already accounting for the room, already cataloguing it the way Logan must have taught him to without either of them noticing. The man on the floor had stopped being relevant to him almost immediately, which probably said something, but Remus had stopped listening to what things said about him years ago, right around the time he'd started keeping a jar of teeth on his dresser that he told people were shark's teeth. They were not shark's teeth. Nobody had ever asked closely enough to find out otherwise, which was, in retrospect, the story of his entire life until this exact moment.

"You've had blood on your knuckles before," Remus went on, closing another foot of distance. "I thought it was, like, a bar fight thing. A 'Logan gets weirdly intense about parking spaces' thing. One time you came home with a split lip and told me you'd walked into a door, and I let you tell me that, because I respected the lie. I write villains for a living, Lo, I know a good cover story when I hear one. I did not know it was covering this."

"It is a professional discretion thing." Logan rose, unhurried, wiping his hands on a rag with the same neat, economical motions he used cleaning his glasses before bed each night — three wipes, always three, always the same corner of the cloth. "I am a licensed bounty hunter. Skip tracing, primarily. The termination clauses are — extralegal, but contractually implied by certain clients who prefer the paperwork end quietly. I did not tell you because you are, forgive the bluntness, incapable of secrecy, and this required several years of it. I did the math. The math said silence."

"Rude," Remus said, delighted, pressing a hand to his chest like he'd been wounded. "Accurate. But rude. You did the math on lying to me?"

"I run projections on everything. You know this about me. You have known this about me since our second date, when I made you fill out a compatibility spreadsheet."

"Best date of my life," Remus said, entirely sincere, and meant it. "I still have that spreadsheet. It's laminated. I show people."

"That's concerning."

"Everything about me is concerning, angel, that's why you keep me."

"I keep you," Logan said, and there — there was the smallest crack in the clinical composure, a flicker underneath the flat delivery, "because you are the only chaotic variable I have ever encountered that I do not wish to eliminate."

Remus's breath caught in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with the smell of the room anymore.

"Logan Reeves," he breathed, "did you just call me your one exception?"

"I called you an anomaly I have chosen not to correct for. Do not make it romantic."

"Too late. It's already the most romantic thing anyone's ever said to me, and I once had a guy propose with a ring he stole off a corpse at a wake."

"That is a deeply upsetting sentence and I would like context later," Logan said, "but not now."

"Why would I leave?" Remus was close enough now to see the flecks on Logan's jaw, close enough that the copper smell was just Logan-smell now, folded into cedar and old paper and the faint chemical tang of the cologne he wore — Remus understood now, with the particular clarity of a man having several epiphanies stacked on top of each other — specifically to mask the cleaning products underneath. Years of it. Years of Logan coming home smelling faintly of bleach and lavender and Remus never once asking why, because why would he, because Logan alphabetized the spice rack and ironed his socks and it had never once occurred to Remus that the compulsive tidiness wasn't a personality quirk. It was tradecraft. "You have been lying to me for years and the lie was this? You've been sneaking off to be hot and competent and murdery and just — not telling me? That's not a red flag, Logan, that's a whole parade. That's a marching band. I want a float."

Something shifted in Logan's face — not quite a smile, Logan didn't really do smiles, they made his jaw ache, he'd told Remus that once very seriously over breakfast — but a small tightening at the corner of his mouth that Remus had learned to read as its own private dialect years ago, back when it had only ever meant you've amused me against my will over a bad pun or a worse pickup line.

"You're deranged," Logan said, and it was not an insult. It had never once, in five years, been an insult, not from him.

"You knew that when you signed the lease with me. You knew that when you found my collection of knives that I told you were 'for aesthetic purposes only' and didn't push. Did you know, even then? Could you smell it on me? Two predators in one studio apartment, that's practically a nature documentary—"

"I did not know," Logan interrupted, with the particular precision of a man correcting an inaccurate premise before it could compound. "I suspected. Your interests were — suggestive. The knife collection. The manner in which you discuss your fiction. The fact that you once described, unprompted and at length, seventeen distinct methods of disposing of a body, three of which were viable and one of which I have since used."

Remus made a small, wounded, ecstatic noise. "Which one."

"Later."

"You're killing me with the pacing, Lo, I need to know—"

"Later, Remus."

"Fine. Fine. God, you're so hot when you're withholding information from me, has anyone ever told you that."

"You. Regularly. It has never once changed my behavior."

Remus reached up, unbothered by the drying red already transferring itself from Logan's sleeve to his own forearm where they'd brushed, and traced one finger along the fine spray across Logan's cheekbone, the way another man might have traced a birthmark, something intimate and known. Logan let him. Logan, who flinched from unexpected touch, who needed three seconds' warning before a hug or he'd go rigid as a board — Logan stood perfectly still and let Remus map the mess on his face like it was a love letter written in a language only the two of them spoke.

"You knew and you married me anyway," Remus murmured. "Common-law. Whatever we are. You knew there was something wrong with the wiring in my head and you picked me anyway, out of every boring normal accountant-brained person in this city, and I have spent five years thinking I was the freak in this relationship."

"You are still the freak in this relationship," Logan said. "I am simply a freak with better paperwork."

Remus laughed — really laughed, head tipping back, delighted and a little wild — and then he reached up and, watching Remus watch him do it, Logan did something Remus hadn't quite predicted even from him. He lifted his own thumb, unhurried, and pressed it — cool, drying, deliberate — to the corner of Remus's mouth. A streak left behind like a signature. Like a claim.

"There," Logan said, very quietly, very evenly, watching the color settle into Remus's skin with the same clinical attention he gave everything, except his pulse — Remus could see it, right at his throat, going faster than clinical attention ever accounted for. "Now you match the room."

Remus made a sound he would later describe, with enormous pride, as unhinged, and closed the last of the distance himself.

The kiss was not clean. It was never going to be clean, not in this room, not with the copper taste already on both their mouths, Logan's hand fisting in the front of Remus's shirt with more force than the moment strictly required — pulling him in like he was afraid of the four minutes of distance that had almost cost him, like the math had briefly failed him and he needed the recalculation done at close range. Remus laughed against his mouth in short broken breaths that weren't quite laughing and weren't quite something else, both hands coming up to frame Logan's jaw, thumbs smearing the mess further instead of wiping it away, because why would he wipe it away, this was the best thing that had ever happened to him, this was five years of half-answers finally resolving into a whole and terrible truth and he wanted to wear it.

"Say something clinical to me," Remus gasped against his mouth. "Say something disgustingly precise, I need it—"

"The carotid," Logan murmured, lips at his jaw now, unhurried even here, even now, "severs cleanly at a forty-degree angle if the blade is sharp enough. Most people use too much force. Force is inefficient. Precision is everything."

"Logan."

"You asked."

"I did, I did, keep going, tell me the — the whole binder, I want the whole—"

"Later," Logan said again, and this time it came out rough, frayed at the edges in a way Remus had heard maybe three times in five years — the night Logan had gotten his first faculty rejection letter and sworn, actually sworn, in a full sentence; the night their cat had gone missing for six hours; and now, here, blood-slicked and breathless in a dead man's warehouse, kissing him like the words were secondary to the need. "Later. Right now I would like you to stop talking."

"Make me," Remus said, grinning against his mouth, and Logan did.

Logan kissed like he did everything — with intent, with total unnerving focus, like Remus was the only variable in the room worth solving for anymore, like the body six feet away had already been filed and closed and forgotten in favor of the one problem Logan had never managed to fully account for in five years of trying. There was blood between them, smeared where Remus dragged his mouth along Logan's jaw and Logan let him, tipped his head back with something that might, on a more expressive man, have been called want, bared his throat the way he never did, not even in bed, not even half-asleep and soft with affection — because this was different, this was seen, fully and finally seen, and Logan Reeves, who ran projections on everything, who alphabetized his spice rack and ironed his socks and had spent five years being loved by a man he was terrified would run the moment he knew the truth, found himself instead being kissed like a discovery. Like a gift someone had been waiting their whole life to unwrap.

"You're not scared of me," Logan said, when they finally broke apart, forehead pressed to Remus's, both of them breathing hard, both of them marked now, matched, a matching set the way Remus had always secretly wanted them to be.

"Scared of you?" Remus's laugh was breathless and wondering. "Logan. My love. My little gremlin accountant of death. I have spent my entire life waiting to find someone who could look at the absolute rot in my head and go, ah yes, that tracks, let me show you mine. You didn't scare me. You completed me. This is the single most romantic thing that has ever happened to me and I include the ring-off-a-corpse guy in that ranking."

"I need you to never bring that man up again."

"No promises."

Logan exhaled something that was almost a laugh, rare as a solar eclipse, and pulled back just far enough to look at him properly — swollen mouth, red-streaked jaw, eyes bright and manic and utterly unbothered by the corpse cooling six feet away — and something in his chest, something he would never have the vocabulary to name even if you gave him a spreadsheet and three hours, settled into place like the last piece of a very long equation.

"You're going to help me move the body," he said.

"Obviously." Remus grinned, wide and red-stained and thrilled down to his marrow, already rolling up his own sleeves with the enthusiasm of a man who'd just been handed the best birthday present of his life eleven months early. "But first —" he kissed him again, filthy and fond and lingering, "—you're telling me everything. Every job. Every little secret little kill count. I want the whole binder, Lo. Color-coded. Tabbed. I want a presentation, with a laser pointer, and I want you to wear the blazer with the elbow patches while you give it."

"That is an oddly specific request."

"I contain multitudes."

Logan pulled a folded tarp from his duffel bag with the same hand still stained red, shaking it out with brisk, practiced efficiency, and passed one corner to Remus without looking up. "Fine," he said. "I will prepare a presentation. Color-coded. But you're carrying the ankles."

"Why is it always the ankles—"

"Because you drop them. Every hypothetical scenario, every film we have ever watched together, you insist you'd drop the ankles, and I have decided to test that hypothesis in controlled conditions."

Remus stared at him, tarp corner in hand, heart absolutely galloping, and thought — not for the first time, but with a clarity he'd never quite reached before tonight — that he had never loved anyone the way he loved this ridiculous, meticulous, quietly monstrous man.

"I love you so much I could throw up," he said.

"Please don't. It would compromise the scene."

"Later, then."

"Later," Logan agreed, and together, in the copper-sweet dark, they got to work.

---

They ate the cake at two in the morning, sitting on the kitchen floor because neither of them had the energy to reach the table, Logan showered and changed and smelling of the same lavender-bleach combination Remus would never again mistake for just good hygiene, Remus still faintly pink-knuckled from the cleanup, both of them exhausted in the specific, companionable way of people who had just done a very large project together and done it well.

"So," Remus said, through a mouthful of frosting, "binder. I want the whole binder. Every job. I want a presentation."

"That is an unreasonable request at two a.m."

"Everything about me is unreasonable, that's why you love me."

Logan considered this, forkful of cake halfway to his mouth, and something in his face — tired, soft, entirely unguarded in a way Remus had waited four years to see without knowing he'd been waiting — settled into something like peace.

"Saturday," he said. "I will prepare a presentation."

"Wear the blazer with the elbow patches."

"That is an oddly specific request."