Harolin set the notebook down and checked the time.
12:04 AM.
He sat with that for a moment. The facility had gone quiet hours ago. Lights out at ten. By eleven, even the ones who fought it were gone.
He always waited until midnight.
It was a practical decision. He had made it on day one and he was keeping it. Seventy per cent of Blackmere's population was gay, by his rough estimate, and climbing. He was not interested in becoming anyone's conversation topic in the shower block. He was a private man. He had always been a private man. Eleven years of military service had taught him that the body was a tool and privacy was a discipline and neither required explanation.
He picked up his towel and his soap and walked out.
---
The shower block for officers was separate from the prisoner block. Larger. Thirty stalls, tile dividers floor to ceiling on three sides, open at the front. Industrial lighting that buzzed faintly. Adequate. He had slept in worse conditions and bathed in none at all, so Blackmere's facilities registered somewhere between acceptable and irrelevant.
He pushed the door open and heard water running.
He paused.
Someone was in the third stall from the right — he could hear it, the pressure of cold water hitting tile. He looked at the row of stalls. Thirty available. Whoever it was had taken one and left twenty-nine untouched.
He picked the third from the left.
Two stalls of distance. Reasonable. He wasn't going to leave because someone else had the same idea about midnight showers. He was an officer. He had a job tomorrow. He needed to sleep and before that, he needed to shower and that was the full extent of his investment in this situation.
He hung his towel. Turned the water on. Stepped under it and reached for his soap and began the routine with focus.
He was doing well.
Then the voice started.
"—'that Harolin bastard—'"
He stilled.
"—can't even show my face in public anymore because of his humiliation. I swear, I'll punch a hole in his face the next time I see him. One time. Just once. Right between those stupid grey eyes—"
He knew that voice.
Of course, he knew that voice. He had spent two years building a file on the person it belonged to.
He should ignore it.
It wasn't the first time someone had cursed him in this facility. It wouldn't be the last. He was cursed regularly and professionally and had long since stopped registering it as anything worth attention.
He turned off his water.
A smirk was already happening. He didn't particularly try to stop it.
From the stall on the right, the voice continued, dropping into something more aggrieved and personal.
"How the fuck am I supposed to bathe without soap? I feel disgusting. I need my body wash from Dubai. And some scented candles. God, if I get to the top rank, maybe I can import them and—"
Harolin stepped out of his stall and walked the two stalls over.
Ruaan had his back to the entrance, standing directly under the cold water with his head tipped slightly back, talking to himself with the full commitment of a man who had decided he was having a private moment. He was—
Harolin's gaze moved once and landed on the wall.
"You'll never reach top rank," he said. "That means you'll never bathe with your body wash from Dubai."
The sound Ruaan made was not dignified.
He lurched forward, hands slamming against the tile wall, then spun around — and immediately got a full face of cold water, which redirected his spin, and then he was facing Harolin with the shower pressure hitting the back of his head and water streaming down his face and into his eyes and running in rivulets down his neck, his chest, his—
He was entirely naked.
Which Harolin was aware of. He was keeping his eyes at a reasonable level. He was being professional.
Ruaan threw one arm up over his face and used the other to slap blindly at the wall behind him, searching for the pressure control, fingers scrambling across wet tile. Harolin reached past him — past the arm, close enough that the shower water caught his wrist — and found the control first.
He turned the pressure up.
Ruaan made a noise of pure outrage from behind his arm as the water intensified, soaking his hair flat against his face, streaming down his jaw. He pressed his palm down the length of his face to clear his eyes, blinking rapidly, and looked up at Harolin through water-spiked lashes.
"'Why,'" he said, with enormous restraint, "'are you here?'"
"Officers bathe," Harolin said. "In case that's new information for you. Withsoap."
"'This is the officer block?'"
"It is."
Ruaan looked at the ceiling. Then back. The water kept falling, running over the lines of his collarbone, down his chest, tracking the flat plane of his stomach. He was lean — not what Harolin had expected from the file, from the private gym memberships and the imported food. He looked away.
"I didn't know," Ruaan said.
"Now you do."
Ruaan's eyes moved to the sides — checking, identifying exits and other presences. His jaw was tight. He was uncomfortable.
"Is anyone—"
"We're alone, Ru."
The discomfort sharpened immediately into irritation, which was more familiar. "Don't call me that."
"I'll do what I want."
"You—" Ruaan stopped. He pressed his palm down his face again and took what appeared to be a deliberate breath. He was visibly recalibrating, which Harolin watched with mild interest. Then Ruaan's eyes dropped.
They stopped.
"Whoa." His voice came out different. Stripped of the irritation, replaced by something that wasn't quite anything else he could name. The cold water kept running over him but his face had turned red. The colour moved up the back of his neck, catching the line of his jaw, visible even under the shower's chill. He looked back up at Harolin with wide eyes and said, very carefully, "You're not going to — you're not planning to 'do anything' with that. Are you?"
Harolin frowned. "With what?"
Ruaan pointed. Downward. Specifically at him.
Harolin looked down.
The towel at his waist had — the fabric had—
He was hard.
Not half-hard. It was completely, visibly hard and solid. The towel did nothing useful about it as the shape of him pressed against the fabric left no room for interpretation.
He stared at it as the shower ran. He stared at it for what was probably too long.
Eleven years. Military secondary school, military college, the battlefield, the deployment, the years of shared quarters and communal showers and female colleagues who were objectively attractive and male colleagues who were objectively there — and his body had done nothing. Not once. Not a flicker of interest, not a response. He had assumed, at some point quietly that he simply wasn't built that way. That the training had overwritten it. That he was a man whose body was a tool and tools didn't have preferences.
He looked at Ruaan Calder.
Ruaan stood naked under cold water. Flushed despite the cold. Hair plastered to his face. Staring at Harolin with those sharp, wary eyes and that ridiculous mouth.
The man who had taken his sister's kidney donation and traded it for a cannolo from Palermo.
The man he had come here specifically to destroy.
'That' man.
'This' was what his body had decided to respond to. After eleven years of nothing, in a shower block at midnight in a correctional facility, in front of a prisoner in cell 109.
Something in the back of his mind said:
'No! This is a mistake. This needs to be confirmed as a mistake. And then corrected.'
He looked back up.
Ruaan was still staring at him, still flushed.
'Yes. A bloody mistake,' he thought again. 'And I'll have to prove it's a mistake.'