Thank you for reading!

Wylan woke suddenly, startled, and looked around him in a panic, not recognizing the room or the bed … or the person sleeping next to him.

Then he remembered. Jesper. The beautiful man he'd run into in the street. Literally.

His first reaction was to smile, to lean over in the grey light preceding dawn and wake Jesper with kisses, to restoke the fire that had raged between them so successfully the night before. But something stopped him.

Looking around the room, Wylan considered the situation. The gunbelt that hung over a chair, the gunbelt Jesper had worn like it was part of him, the well-worn handles of the guns. The ease with which Jesper had approached the desk clerk to engage the room. The rings on his fingers. This was a man at home in the Barrel. This was not a man who was going to want more than what had already happened between them.

For that matter, Wylan remembered, he had been the one to initiate the exchange of names. Jesper had been more than happy to go on without that piece of information. And while Wylan had gasped out Jesper's name more than once in the ensuing hours, Jesper hadn't used his at all.

Into the middle of a lonely life, the Saints, or whoever was in charge of fate, had dropped this warm, beautiful, funny, generous person into Wylan's path, and he wanted to take advantage of it, to try to make this accidental meeting, this one night of passion, into something that might last, something he could keep. But he knew that was foolish. Whatever Jesper's life was outside this room, he didn't need an illiterate and penniless runaway who was too shy to speak half the time hanging onto him. And almost certainly wouldn't want that, or anything else. He had been too comfortable falling into bed together to be someone who was looking for more.

He could stay, Wylan supposed, until Jesper woke up … but that would be awkward, and uncomfortable, and embarrassing, and it would ruin the memory of the night before, which had been anything other than those things. No, the best bet would be to get up now, before Jesper awoke, and leave quietly.

It took Wylan a few minutes to go from deciding to leave to actually moving out from under the blankets and away from the warm body of the beautiful man he'd spent the night with, but eventually he managed to slide out and go on the hunt for the clothes that had been stripped off him and tossed wherever they might land last night. In the end, he found everything except for one sock, and decided that was an acceptable loss. It had had a hole in it anyway.

Dressing in the growing light, he kept glancing at Jesper, half-afraid and half-hopeful that he would wake up, but he slept on. And, really, no one should look that pretty when they slept, Wylan thought.

He briefly debated leaving a note, but if he was going to do that, then he might as well stay. So he let himself quietly out of the hotel room, stood outside the door for a few moments wishing things could be different, and then hurried off, trying to resurrect last night's enthusiasm for phosphorus and chemistry.

Jesper woke when the sun was fully up and streaming in through the window into his face. He yawned and stretched, feeling completely comfortable, other than the faint headache that told him he'd gone one or two over his limit last night.

Only gradually did he realize he wasn't in his own bed or his own familiar room. He sniffed cautiously, trying to determine what the unfamiliar odor was that hung in the air.

The tannery? What was he doing down here?

Then it came to him. Kaz dragging him down here, him wandering off to find a card game, imbibing a bit while he played, and then …. there had been a man. A beautiful man, if Jesper remembered correctly. And they had come back here, to this surprisingly comfortable inn, and then … Well, he might not remember the name or the face, but he remembered the way the man had kissed, and the way he had—everything else.

Sitting up, Jesper put his hands over his face, trying to call to mind anything about his partner of the previous night other than how he had felt, and tasted, and smelled, and sounded. All of those Jesper could call to mind with ease—it had been one of the best encounters he'd ever had—but the man's face, and name if he had ever known it, had gone completely out of his mind.

Dark eyes, he thought, squinting in the sunlight to think back. Long lashes? But that didn't help. He cursed the impulse that had led him to take that final drink last night. It had been one too many, clouding his mind and shrouding his memories in shadow.

Jesper groaned and fell back into the blankets. If only the man had stayed … but, really, what would have been the point? With Kaz bent on this plan to go to Ravka, it wasn't as if Jesper could have started anything—and did he really want to, anyway? He liked his life the way it was, his only ties to Kaz and Inej, and those fairly tenuous unless there was work to be done. If he'd awakened next to the man from last night, he probably would have made some awkward excuses and run, so maybe he'd done them both a favor by leaving. But as he grasped the blankets underneath him, letting the memory of last night flow through him, Jesper was less sure than he told himself he was.

He lay there for a few moments, letting the sunshine warm him like a cat, before the thing that had been teasing at the back of his mind came to the front. Kaz. Kaz, who had brought him down here in the first place last night, whom he had abandoned to play cards, and who almost certainly would glare at him when Jesper finally made his way back to the Crow Club. Was there something they were supposed to do today? Probably there was, and he just couldn't remember.

Jesper got to his feet and started getting dressed, hoping to find some clue to the other man's identity left behind as he recovered his own clothing, but all he found was a single sock, with a hole in it. This shocked Jesper to the core of his sartorially perfect soul, but told him absolutely nothing at all.

He left the room with a final lingering glance. By the time he'd reached the street, looking around him at the bustle of his beloved Barrel, he'd forgotten last night.

From a passing vendor, he bought a stroopwafel.