Chapter 53: The Introduction, The Confession, And Seo’s Grand Plan!

Seo walked straight to Ruaan.

He reached up and ruffled his hair with both hands, messing it in every direction, and Ruaan grabbed his wrists and pulled them away and made a sound of genuine offence.

"What are you doing?" Ruaan said, raising a brow. "I’m not a child."

"Who knows?" Seo said innocently. He straightened his broken glasses. "Isn’t that how spoiled kids are treated?"

"I’m not spoilt."

Seo tilted his head. Then he turned and looked at Oren standing by the treadmill with his arms folded. "What do you think? Is he spoilt?"

Oren looked at Seo.

He looked for exactly one second and then looked away. At the equipment. At the wall. At a point somewhere between Ruaan and Seo that committed to neither of them.

"I have no opinion on that," Oren said. "I have no relationship with the prisoner."

Seo opened his mouth.

Ruaan had a thought.

It arrived fully formed and felt immediately like a good idea, which in his experience was the exact feeling that preceded both his best decisions and his worst ones. He looked at Seo. He looked at Oren. He thought about the conversation in this gym before Seo arrived and about Seo’s very obvious interest and about the fact that they were all standing here together at midnight with nowhere else to be.

He cleared his throat.

Both of them looked at him.

"Sir Oren," Ruaan said pleasantly. "Do you know my friend here?"

Oren looked at Seo. Then back at Ruaan. "I’m afraid not."

Ruaan smiled. He walked to Seo and put a hand on his shoulder. "This is my friend. The one I’ve been telling you about." He looked between them with the satisfied energy of someone doing something helpful. "I’m sure he has a lot of interest in you."

Seo went very still.

"What are you doing?" Seo said, quietly, through a smile that had become fixed.

Ruaan leaned toward him and lowered his voice. "Shh. Can’t you see I’m helping you? This is your chance. Get to know him."

"But I don’t need you to—"

Ruaan was already moving.

He walked to Oren’s other side and reached up to put his hand on his shoulder in what was meant to be a casual friendly gesture of introduction.

His hand landed on Oren’s chest instead.

Ruaan was several centimetres shorter than Oren and the shoulder was simply not reachable from this angle. His palm pressed flat against the left side of Oren’s chest, right over the uniform, and Oren went rigid.

He closed his eyes.

For one specific second, he thought about a shower block and a light from a corridor gap and things he had seen that he had not been able to fully file away since.

His face went red.

He was very glad the gym lighting was what it was.

Ruaan, completely unaware of any of this, kept talking. "And this is Officer Oren George. He’s new here but he’s very dedicated to the rules." He looked up at Oren’s face. "You two should talk. You have a lot in common probably." 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

Oren looked at the ceiling.

Seo, from across the gym, watched Oren’s face go through three things in four seconds. He watched the red. He watched the jaw. He watched the way Oren’s eyes went up instead of forward because looking forward meant looking at the hand on his chest and he was not doing that.

Seo picked up the towel from the bench beside him and wiped his hands.

He said nothing.

Ruaan leaned toward Seo one more time. "I’ll go now," he whispered. "This is your moment. Do something with it." He paused. "You know. Before you try to fu—"

"Go," Seo said.

Ruaan winked.

He waved at Oren. Oren did not wave back because he was still looking at the ceiling. Ruaan took this as a reasonable response and walked out of the gym with the satisfied energy of a man who had done something good tonight.

The door closed and the gym was suddenly quiet.

Oren lowered his eyes from the ceiling.

Seo was looking at him.

Oren uncrossed his arms and crossed them again and said, "I’m going to leave."

He took one step.

"Are you leaving because Ruaan is gone?" Seo said.

Oren stopped.

"I came here to do a check," Oren said. "The check is done."

"The check," Seo said, "took you twenty minutes and you spent all of it talking to a prisoner on a treadmill."

Oren turned around. "What I do with my time during a routine check is not your concern."

"I watched you," Seo said simply. "When his hand was on your chest. Your face went red."

"The gym is warm."

"It’s midnight and the AC has been running for hours."

Oren looked at him.

Seo looked back through the broken glasses with the same pleasant, open expression he always wore. The one that was warm on top and something completely different underneath.

"You get hard when you hear his voice," Seo said. "I’ve seen it. On the field and even right now."

"That’s—"

"Just say it," Seo said. "I already know. I’ve known since the shower block. Just say it."

Oren stood in the middle of the gym at midnight with the equipment around them and the one row of lights and the door that Ruaan had just walked through and said, with the defeated energy of a man handing something over that he had been carrying too long:

"Fine. I like him. So what."

Seo nodded.

"I can’t have him," Oren continued. "He has no interest in me. And it’s against the rules. And even if neither of those things were true, he’s already—" he stopped. "It doesn’t matter. The point is I can’t have him."

He said it all in one breath and then stood there looking at the wall with the expression of a man who had just put something down and wasn’t sure whether he felt lighter or worse for it.

Seo was quiet for a moment.

Then he said, "You’ve been here just a few days and you’re already staring at him. I’ve been here for months."

Oren looked at him.

"What?"

"I’ve been here much longer than you," Seo said. "And you walked in and immediately—" he gestured generally at Oren’s face and the direction of the door "—that. Without even trying."

"I wasn’t trying anything."

"Exactly," Seo said. "You weren’t trying and it still happened." He folded his hands in front of him. "Do you understand how irritating that is?"

Oren stared at him.

Something in Seo’s expression had shifted. Not fully. Just enough that the pleasant surface was thinner and what was underneath it was more visible.

"He was supposed to be my partner," Seo said. "Not in a romantic way. A different kind of partner. A toy partner. We were going to practice together." He pushed his glasses up. "He came once and then decided he didn’t need to anymore. And then he got closer to Harolin and now the two of them are completely tangled up with each other and I’m still here with my LEGO box, waiting for him."

Oren opened his mouth.

"And now," Seo continued, "the one person in this facility that I have actual feelings for has spent days making eyes at the same person that Harolin is obsessed with." He looked at Oren directly. "So yes. I wanted your attention. Yes, I used the file. Yes, I thought if you saw Ruaan as a problem you would focus somewhere else." He paused. "Somewhere like me."

The gym was very quiet.

Oren looked at him. At the broken glasses and the grey uniform and the towel in his hands and the expression that was for once not performing anything.

"That’s a lot," Oren said.

"I know."

"You grabbed my hair in a corridor."

"I know."

"You threatened me with a silent finger."

"I know."

Oren exhaled slowly. "What exactly do you want from this situation? From all of it."

Seo looked at him for a moment.

Then he leaned forward.

"I want Ruaan," he said. "And I want you." He said it the same way he said most things, easy and unbothered and like it was a completely reasonable sentence to say out loud. "And I want Harolin. Not separately. Not one at a time." He tilted his head. "Do you understand what I’m saying?"

Oren looked at him.

The expression on his face moved through several things.

"All of you," Seo said. "I want all of you together. In whatever arrangement works. I want to be fucked by you and by Harolin and I want to fuck Ruaan and I want all four of us in the same situation." He smiled, with everything underneath it visible now. "That’s what I want."

He spread his hands, slowly tilting his head to the side.

"Do you understand now?" he said. "I want both Ruaan and you."

’This psycho!’

Oren thought as he stepped back.