He expected Sands to be awake, waiting, and he was.
He was sitting by the table with his back to the door, cigarettes and ashtray arranged in front of him, no reaction to El's return.
The ashtray had filled up a lot. Sands smoked so heavily anyway that it didn't mean anything.
He set the guitar gently in the corner and walked round the table to lean against the cupboards opposite, where he could watch. Wood creaked beneath his weight, a force pressing against his spine.
Sands just sat, long after he settled.
"They will be back," he said.
Sands took a cigarette and lit it, slid the pack across the table towards him. "Who?"
"The cartel."
"Even if we got every last one, which we didn't, there'll be someone else just like them," Sands agreed mildly.
"So we should go and get them."
Sands' lips curled up at the edges, stretching outwards and widening ever so slowly into the bright and satisfied smile that El knew far too well. "Well, that took you long enough, El," he said, each word strung out and lazy, as if he was tasting the shape of them on his tongue. "I was actually starting to wonder if I might have misjudged you."
It was disconcerting, watching the real Sands, the killer, uncurl and stretch from inside the man who'd been existing in his house since Culiacán.
It would have been less so if he didn't recognise that feeling from the inside.
He had known he was right. He just hadn't known it would be so blatant, the life taking shape in the slow-spreading glow, and he wondered if people saw it like this in him before he took hold of his guns. If Carolina had looked at him and seen this.
Sands wasn't ever going to live quietly, here or anywhere. If he'd found his Brazilian beach and a bottle of tequila, he would have been probing out suitable targets for his malice within weeks. He had nothing unless his brain was twisting, analysing, and the only thing that truly interested him was manipulation, playing for the highest of stakes and dealing out death.
He wondered if his head had actually been clearer before he started to think of Sands as human, when he was just an annoyance in his passenger seat, something to be used.
Sands was Sands now, and would remain that to him, whatever he did.
There was never a path back.
He reached for the pack of cigarettes that lay on the table between them. "If that's what you wanted, why didn't you ever suggest it?"
"Because you would have said no." Sands spoke with easy confidence.
"You could have persuaded me." Sands knew how to work him, he always had, and he would have been an easy sell. In many ways, it was easier to be that man than not to.
"I could have." No doubt on it from Sands either. "And you would have killed some people with me, and then afterwards you would have come trotting dutifully back here and rotted through all your months of mournful penance again. This deal really only works if you choose it for yourself."
He rolled the cigarette between his fingers, finally put it to his lips and lit it. "So you just sat back and waited."
Sands smiled, leaning back more heavily into his chair. "Well, more or less. It kind of depends on how you look at it."
Sands wouldn't make the mistake of trying to lie to him, not now.
He wondered when it had become so important to him that he didn't.
The smoke drifted heavy and slow over his tongue, in, out. "You don't think by telling me this now, I will become annoyed and change my mind?"
"No." Sands was still smiling faintly, no effort to disguise it. "You've already decided what you're going to do, and if you back out now, because of what I say, then you're letting me control your future, and somehow, I don't think you want to do that."
Part of him could have laughed at the obvious flaw. Sands was controlling his future either way; had been ever since the day he'd knocked on a door in Culiacán.
No. If he was honest, it had been before that. A week before, when he'd left this place to find him; from that point, every decision he made had already revolved around him.
It was too easy to look at where he stood now and tell himself it was because of Sands. It wouldn't have happened if he hadn't allowed it, his own obsessive, driven nature resurfacing and focussing after so many years.
It felt too good to have something to chase.
El thought again about Ramírez, and wished they hadn't had to lose such a useful man. A thoughtful man, and most likely a good one. "You have other people who can get us information?"
"Oh, I always have other people, El." Sands' lips twitched and there was a quick flash of eyebrows above the sunglasses. "Sometimes they just don't know it yet."
It wasn't just Ramírez - Sands had also spoken of the man who'd told him where to find El. "Do you have anyone you can manage to leave alive for a while?" he asked.
"That depends entirely on them." Sands flicked his cigarette into the ashtray. "We're going to become remarkably popular, and you'd be surprised who turns up willing to sell you out."
"I had to kill my own brother," El reminded him.
Sands smiled, wide and cheerful. "And that's precisely why I hold out some hope for you, El."
So much of Sands right there, a smile and a sentence, the judging of someone's worth by how ruthless they were willing to be.
He was tying himself to a man who had no other purpose to his existence beyond the hunt, the control over who would live and who would die, who needed it to hold what was left of himself together. And that man was tying himself to El because El would help bring it to him.
But he himself wasn't so different now. He had found after the coup that he couldn't settle into the life here any more; it wouldn't fit, wouldn't hold, and he had left to chase the violence. Their reasons were different, but both of them were trapped in the cycle.
As long as Sands was with him, Sands would kill with purpose. That vicious clarity within his mind that set him apart from madness, it could be focussed and unleashed on those who deserved it.
And he was already bound to Sands in enough ways that one more didn't change things.
'He won't be here for long.' His own words, the lies he told himself.
"Did you mean it?" he asked slowly. "What you said about doing it to each other?" The heavy emphasis through his words would leave no doubt what he meant.
Sands smiled slow and wide and not entirely welcoming. "Well, of course I did, El. I never make an offer I'm not prepared to follow through on. I have to say, though, I'm a little surprised - I didn't honestly expect a good Catholic like you would consider taking me up on it."
"I haven't been a Catholic for many years." He still believed, still prayed sometimes, but the trappings of it meant nothing to him any more.
"Oh, that's right, I forgot. You only go to church to kill people now, don't you?"
That wasn't entirely fair, but it wasn't so untrue either. He'd used his share of churches to meet friends, contacts, to discuss murder, going back a decade.
He was choosing that life again now, and his death with it. But he'd chosen the other way in the past, and lost it all. Had lost the innocents he had dragged down with him.
Sands at least had chosen this path himself, as El had.
He stepped forward, letting his hands trail over the cloth around his arms as a warning.
He wanted to touch him.
For everything he knew of Sands, the man forced his attention in a way no-one else now came close to, like the golden desert scorpions whose images he wore. Dangerous, deadly, yes, but his awareness was held when the risk was past, fascination in the pure economy of purpose, the same oddly compelling beauty that lay in his guns.
His own nature had always been essentially tactile, the touch of something beneath his hand letting him feel it on a level that purely conscious understanding could not. And he wondered how Sands would feel to him.
He slid his grip loose down onto Sands' hand, his wrist, the exposed skin there. Fine hairs beneath his fingertips, muscles tensing against him; even when Sands allowed his touch, there would always be reaction there, instinctive, intrinsic to who and what he was.
His fingers wandered around his wrist, the steady-beating life and drive of him right there against tendons now strung as tight as his own.
Sands snapped his fist up and punched him below the cheekbone, hard enough to force him back a step, and he was up on his feet fast behind it.
"Let's get one thing straight here, El. I am not your little wife. This is about getting off."
The ache through his teeth was nothing. "Oh, I know you are not my wife." He didn't even want to hide the bitterness. "My wife was generous and kind and loving. She was beautiful."
"Yes, well, I think we'd both say we're lowering our standards just a bit here." Sands' words sliced as obliquely as his own. "Though, I guess I'll have to admit most people would say yours have dropped further, since I'd have to pay mental trauma compensation to a hooker now." He dipped his head unerringly into the light spreading outwards from over the table, reaching up to tilt the sunglasses down his nose.
El had never seen him without them, but he'd seen enough to know. So many months sharing space, watching, always watching, and a thousand glimpses from all the tiny motions Sands would barely be aware of - sweeping his hair behind his ear to light a cigarette, dropping his head forward in ingrained habit as his fork searched out the last of his food, the glasses following his fingers a centimetre or two when he rubbed along his nose before he pushed them back. He knew what was there and what wasn't, the staring emptiness and the scarring, the angled ridges of unevenly healed tissue with a slick-smooth surface that glistened almost wet with the flare of the light.
If Sands was expecting to shock him, it failed; but the constant, deliberate spiking was just as sharp.
Two steps forward and a push Sands couldn't brace for, and he had him backed against the wall, Sands' fingers still gripping tight around the glasses, pressing them back into place before they could be lost to scatter across the floor. "You are so obsessed with 'pretty'?" Spitting back the word Sands had painted over him earlier with such derision. "Here, look for yourself." He tugged the tail of his shirt up over his body, and grabbed Sands by the wrist. Sands snatched back hard, instinctive, but he had nowhere to go, no leverage, and El kept his grip and dragged his hand towards his chest. "You feel that?" He drew Sands' fingers across the scars scattered rough across his chest. "Those are the bullets from Marquez' gun when he killed my family. And this," he pulled Sands' touch, no longer resisting, down the length of his ribs, "this is where they cut me open to take those bullets out." He let Sands' hand drop away from his body, but his grip around his bones tightened. "I have more if you want to see." Using the word deliberately, and waiting for the backlash.
Sands only laughed, high and ringing past wickedly carved lips, pushing forwards and twisting his body into him. "Yeah, that's more like it, El. Now you're getting the idea."
He grabbed for Sands' other wrist, holding them tight by his sides, and stopped that acid mouth with his own, hard and vicious with the ragged anger.
Teeth nipped at El's lips, sharp and painful, and he bit back, unthinking. Sands didn't move to strike him this time, fighting his grip only enough to put his hands to his hips and drag him closer. This, this, the feel of someone moving against him, the pressure of lips warm on his, a slick and practiced tongue pushing at him, all of it shooting through him like a flare, and he wanted more, all, wanted -
"Your room," he said.
This was different, but he wouldn't have Sands in Carolina's bed.
"Why, how considerate of you, El. I'd only fall over things in yours." Sands knew exactly why, the derision strung taut and neon all through his words, and it was easier to hold his lips with teeth and tongue than to listen to him. And Sands didn't fight him this time either, pushing, yes, but only making it better.
His chin was obsessively smooth, flawless within the grip of his hand - even here, in this village, he often shaved more than once. And it was one thing to know Sands' habits, and another to experience them against him, unmarred skin rubbing over his own as their lips and bodies angled and drove.
He stripped the leather binding from his hand, seeking with every nerve and sensation that still ran through his palm and his fingers. He curled them tight into Sands' clothes, fibres harsh contrast to the slide of his cheeks and his mouth, pulled at him, tugging towards the doorway.
Sands jerked away, two staggered off-balance steps, shoving with previously keen hands. "What the - " And then he got it and moved with it, pressing back in as they found his room, hard edge of plastic scraping over El's cheekbone while they clashed noses and teeth. He had his hands inside Sands' jacket, pushing at it, tugging at his T-shirt beneath it, wanting to touch, wanting to know -
Sands looped his forearms up and outwards, shoving his hands away, and took two steps back. "You can quit that right now, El. I'm not playing hide and seek with my fucking clothes half the night for a quick jerk-off." His voice hung swaying between bored and irritated, but his tongue dragged over his lips, and he shivered faintly in air that was not so cold.
Sands couldn't lie to him now, not so long as he watched.
Sands stood by the bed and undressed himself, no tease, no play, just ridding himself of clothes. El decided it was easiest to follow his example, and did the same.
"You leave any mariachi crap where I'll trip over it later and I'll shoot you in the balls," Sands said.
Sands carefully folded everything and laid them across the chair by the bed, his gunbelts on top. El looked around, and in the absence of anywhere better near him, he folded his own clothes into a pile and pushed them beneath the edge of the bed.
He stood there naked, with another naked man. It wasn't the first time he'd done that, of course, but it had never been... like this. Never a man with an erection as obvious as his own, and with intent...
It occurred to him, looking at Sands stripped bare and with that empty plastic stare aimed right at him, that he really had no idea what he was going to do. Oh, he knew principles and basic ideas, but that was never the same as actually doing and he -
"I hope you're not turning frigid on me over there, El," Sands remarked, "because it's not considered polite to leave a guy hanging, and I really don't want to have to do all the work myself."
"Shut up," he said, and he walked forward and gripped his hair and kissed him hard, so he would have no choice.
A little odd to be kissing someone his own height, surprising with someone who came to him with teeth as much as with tongue, someone who matched his force and summoned more of it with sharp nails in his shoulders. Startling, arousing, Sands wholly with him in this, and his fingers untangled from his hair to run over his neck and along his spine.
The simplicity of skin. Touch. Oh, God.
He hadn't realised.
With Sands, he'd avoided even the most casual of contacts, and spending so much time with him had restricted his interactions with the townspeople still more than his essentially solitary ways after Carolina's death had already done.
He hadn't understood how much he'd cut himself off from something so vital, until now when it shocked all through his body in flashes and ripples.
It was muscle and angles against him instead of muscle that shifted into curves, but it was the touch that mattered, the skin beneath his hands, the fingers raking tight over his own.
He'd wondered what he would find when he touched Sands, and the answer was simply... more.
Sands gripped him and pressed up against him with lips and hips, demanding, pushing, inevitable. He was taut, bunched muscle beneath his hands, never relaxed, even when he gave that impression, always coiled and edged. He shivered and reacted, moving his hands over El's body as El explored his own skin, never still, not for moment, and that was true of all of him, his mind ever-restless and seeking even while he held his body motionless.
There was nothing new here - he already knew this man. Not his past, not the details, but as much as he needed.
The touch here was of someone known and trusted, and to his body that meant more than he'd guessed it would. Familiarity made it easy, took this practical easing of loneliness and made it different from sex with a stranger.
And he was so familiar.
His hair had grown, straggling even with his own, and it fell forwards across both their cheeks as Sands nipped along his jaw. He wondered vaguely how long it would become, if Sands would ever let a stranger near his neck with a pair of scissors. But his hair brought with it the smell of his own shampoo beneath the clinging tobacco, and his skin was clean with the hints of El's soap, and he realised how much was common to both of them now. They ate the same food, smoked the same cigarettes, though El smoked them occasionally and Sands all the damn time.
He debated pointing that out to Sands, that there was not so much difference between them any more - the reaction would be amusing, but it might also get him kicked out of this room to finish himself alone, so he stayed quiet and used his lips and teeth on Sands' ear instead, the fingers that gripped at his body tightening in response.
Now that he knew this, Sands against him, beneath his fingers, open to his lips, he wanted it, would continue to want it, and he wouldn't stop. This was his now.
If the touch did this to him, he wondered how it was for Sands, who couldn't see.
But he knew something of it, knew it from the compulsive movement of hands over his own body, from the pattern of the breath that flared warm and jagged across his shoulder.
He grabbed hold of Sands' arms and hooked a leg around his ankle, flipping them so they both fell sideways onto the bed. The fingers on his arm and thigh tightened reflexively, curling into painful hooks as they landed, the bed quivering and creaking beneath them.
He bought good, strong furniture; it would take it.
"Christ, El, how about some warning next time?"
"Maybe," he smiled. He liked Sands a little off-balance, a little surprised. It made him easier to deal with. He shifted a hand to his hip, tugging them together and holding him there, the press of another erection against his own hot and real, and not something he'd ever thought to want, but now it made him shudder and crumble and need.
"Fuck." It was more of a slow breath than a word, Sands' frequently mocking, lazy voice much more appealing this way.
Yes, fuck. That sounded... interesting too, maybe, but...
He tightened the muscles in his stomach and thighs, and rolled himself against Sands, the movement rubbing along him, slow and perfect and urgent, dragging through him, irresistible, so that he did it again. Watched Sands suck on his own fingers and lick along his palm with the smoke and poison tongue that he had welcomed into himself.
Sands' breath was a warmth on his neck, short and irregular, and his hand pressed between them, damp fingers wrapping around him, holding them both together so that he shivered with it even before the fingers began to move. Sands worked them fast almost from the start, the cool curl of his fingers sharp against the heat of his body and beautiful with friction, and that was so much of a good thing that more could only be better, adding his own hand, twining his fingers over and around Sands', into the hint of wetness, catching the rhythm instantly.
His head fell forwards to Sands' shoulder, his lips and teeth moving over his skin, fast, keen, eager, wanting, demanding, and Sands, Sands angled his head and extended his throat and let him take, fingers hooking into his hip, gripping him tighter, and that, that drove him further, made him want it more, and his hand kept the rhythm, fingers sure around them both, but his body was losing it, trembling, Sands suddenly jerking, shuddering hard and breathing hard alongside him, all sweat and damp hair against his nose, salt beneath his bite, violence contained in his hands; and orgasm was a release from all of it, any fragments of doubt or conflict leached away with the tension from his body, with the warm, clinging come on his fingers and stomach from both of them.
He was sweaty and sticky and he was... good. His fingers resting on skin, his body passive with release, a tempting-deep lethargy safe from thought he obtained no other way.
Sands rolled over onto his back, breaking the touch. "Well, that was a little more than I recall suggesting."
His voice was breathy and cracked beneath the dry tones, and El smiled. He knew what Sands had envisaged, though, a single hand on one another, forced and distant. "Isn't it a bit late now to object?"
"There's really no such thing, El. 'Too late' is just what most people use as an easy excuse for doing nothing." Sands appeared to consider briefly, then twisted away onto his side, tugging the wrinkled sheet out from under him. "I'll give you my take on it later, when I wake up."
"I'll remember to duck." He wiped his hand on the edge of the sheet. It was messy enough already, it didn't matter.
The night wasn't warm, but it was enough, indoors, breezeless. The fingers of air drifted over the sweat on his skin, cooling; not unpleasant, though it might become so in the few hours of darkness still left to it.
Light angled in from the open doorway, the rest of the house still bright as they had left it.
It could stay that way.
He lay, ignoring the lingering, distant stickiness of his body, almost scared of any movement that might break the acceptance. He lay, the ceiling hanging closer before his eyes, his limbs shattered and idle, listening to the soft, whistling hiss of breath.
Sands was asleep beside him.
It still felt like insanity to trust him, but at least his insanity was shared.
It only seemed fair, since he was about to share in Sands'.
He didn't think he would sleep, but it was nice just to lie, unfettered by guilt.