Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
B anging broke out in the duplex. Kai fluttered his eyes open in the dark. “What the fuck?” More banging snaked through the door. Was someone in the house? With a swift inhale, he sat upright in his bed and listened. More banging. He stepped off the bed and fumbled through his clothes on the carpeted floor for his cell phone, then held it up to his face. The time read 3:05 a.m. Maybe Bryce just woke up? He smirked. Banging and a slam sounded out. “Shit.”
He slid his jeans up his legs and fastened them, then snuck to the door and opened it, peeking out through the hallway and into the main room. It was empty. The banging came again from the direction of the kitchen.
“Kai.” Bryce whispered from his bedroom doorway.
He opened the door further and peered down the short hallway to Bryce’s room. If he was here, he wasn’t in the kitchen.
Bryce stared at him, wide-eyed. “What the fuck is that?”
“I thought it was you.”
A loud thud reverberated in the room.
Kai startled. “Holy shit. Someone must be in here.” He stepped out from the doorway, gulped hard and motioned to Bryce. “Come on, I’m not doing this alone. ”
“Fine.” He stepped out of his doorway, wearing his black boxer briefs.
“Bro, you going to put some clothes on?” Kai covered his mouth and released a muffled snicker.
Bryce looked down at himself. “Shit. I’ll be right back.”
He tried to focus on the direction of the kitchen through the dark, trying to see any shadows. A loud thud resounded in the room. He jumped and his hands trembled. What was in the kitchen? He widened his eyes. Maybe someone was after the bikes. “Fuck that.” He puffed out his bare chest and strode into the main room, then stopped at the kitchen entrance, scanning the area, his hands fisting, adrenaline racing through his body.
Bryce stopped behind him. “What is it?”
He raised his brows and blinked a few times. “I-I don’t know.” He searched over an empty kitchen. All the cabinet doors were open and a few of the drawers. “What the fuck?” Ashbrook Wash is haunted. Fuck, no. A shiver raced down his spine.
Bryce placed his hands on Kai’s upper arms, standing behind him. “Mice don’t fuck with your cabinets, do they?”
His skin prickled. “No... Rats?”
Bryce squeezed Kai’s arms. “Are there raccoons around here?”
He turned to Bryce, focusing on his rounded blue eyes. “Maybe. We are right on the wash.” He relaxed his shoulders. “Shit, maybe that’s what it is. The little fuckers have hands. Maybe they were putting our glasses on the floor.” He released a tense chuckle.
Bryce stepped out from behind him and looked the room over. “So, where did they go?”
“I don’t know. There’s got to be a hole or a door or something.” He flicked on the light, then swiped his long hair behind his shoulders and walked around the room, searching for gaps. “Look in the cabinets and under the sink. Maybe there’s a hole somewhere.” He opened cabinets, peeked inside, and went to the next one .
Bryce opened door after door, knelt down on hands and knees and searched the lower cabinets. “I got nothing, Kai.”
“I don’t see anything either.” He furrowed his brows. “Maybe it’s time to call an exterminator. Maybe there’s something we’re missing.” He placed his hands on his hips and turned in a circle, surveying the kitchen one last time.
Bryce stood up and scratched his head. “Fucking weird.”
“Yeah, I’m going to bed.” Kai sighed and walked to his bedroom. “We can call an exterminator tomorrow.”
Kai ran the trail in mid-morning sun, wearing black running shorts, bare-chested, his hair in a pony-tail flopping on his back. He took nimble steps over stones and dirt, breathing in a rhythm that matched his stride, his arms pumping. Alternative rock music played through the AirPods in his ears, his iPhone strapped to his right bicep. He surveyed the rocky trail, the spiky staghorn and chaotic cholla cacti lining the sides, the saguaros reaching high. Lizards and rabbits scattered every few feet under scrubby bushes. He ran up rolling hills, then came down and wound around a wide desert broom bush, its scruffy branches reaching out onto the trail.
Conner sat on a rock, rubbing his ankle, in black athletic shorts and a white t-shirt.
Kai’s breath caught. He widened his eyes and halted, taking heavy breaths, then removed his AirPods and stuffed them into his pockets. “Shit, Conner. What are you doing out here?”
He squinted up at Kai. “Well, I was trying to hike off a hang over, but I stepped wrong on a rock.” He smirked. “Maybe I was still too drunk to be out walking.” He let out a sharp chuckle.
Kai stepped to Conner and knelt down. He probably didn’t remember anything from last night. Good. “Let me take a look.” He touched Conner’s ankle and pressed a few spots around the bone. “Doesn’t look swollen or bruised. Where does it hurt?” He focused on his face, looking deeply into ice-blue eyes. He’s so close. He swallowed hard, then glanced at Conner’s mouth. Last night’s kiss flashed through his head. Desire quivered up his spine. He had to stop this.
Conner gazed at him, parting his lips, the edges of his mouth raised in a slight curl. “I tweaked it here.” He grabbed Kai’s hand and rubbed it around the outside bone of his ankle joint.
His heart thumped. His mouth went dry, and he licked his lips. His attention was drawn to Conner’s ankle and he caressed it, dropping his whole hand over the joint. God, even this part of Conner felt good to touch. Heat rushed his groin. He cleared his throat and drew his hand away from Conner’s ankle. He certainly didn’t need a hard-on in these shorts. “Um, doesn’t seem too bad. You should ice it, though. I have an instant ice pack in my blazer. Can you walk on it?”
Conner winced. “I think so.” He stood up, balancing on the other leg, and grasped Kai’s shoulder. “Maybe you could help me back?”
“Sure.” He stood up and hooked his arm around Conner’s back. Wasn’t he doing this same thing last night? He released a quick chuckle.
Conner threw an arm over Kai’s shoulders, standing on his good leg. “What’s so funny?” He grinned at him.
“I’ve been helping you walk a lot lately.” What a switch. The rich athlete needing help from the poor scrawny kid. He sniggered.
“Well, since I need so much help, it’s a good thing you’re around.” Conner tightened his hold on Kai’s shoulders. “How far is it?” He set the foot of his bad ankle on the trail.
“Not far. Maybe two hundred feet?” Kai took a few steps.
Conner limped next to him.
“You okay?” Kai kept his attention on the ground. He didn’t need to be looking at Conner’s face when he was this close.
“Yeah, it’s okay.” Conner hobbled along next to him.
Kai led him to the parking lot and his waiting blazer .
Conner leaned his back against the side of the SUV. “What year is this?”
He pursed his lips. Here we go with the wisecracks about his vehicle. “Nineteen-ninety-eight.” As he unwrapped the Velcro strap on his cell phone holder from his arm, he glanced at Conner.
Conner hung his head, snickering. “This thing is fucking ancient.”
Of course. “So?” Kai didn’t have a rich daddy and a college education. He couldn’t afford a fancy car. He glared at Conner and removed his key from the phone holder, then unlocked and opened the back gate. He rummaged inside the back, through blankets, t-shirts, and tools for his first-aid kit. He grabbed a blue graphic t-shirt and slid it over his head, then pulled it down his chest. “A-ha.” He found and opened a red, plastic box, prepared an instant cold pack and handed it to Conner. “Here.” He held it out. “You can use my phone holder to tie it on.”
He grinned at Kai. “Shouldn’t I sit down somewhere for this?”
Kai scanned around them. Wasn’t there a bench or something?
“How about we go to lunch? It’s about that time.” Conner limped toward the passenger door of his blazer. “I could put this on while we eat, and I can grab a beer. Hair of the dog.”
Lunch with Conner. He was supposed to be avoiding him. Oh well, it’s too late now . He lowered his brows and glanced at him. “Yeah, guess so. Where’s your car?” He searched the parking lot.
“It’s on the other side of the lot. Drive me to it and we can meet up somewhere in town.” Conner opened the door and climbed inside the blazer.
“Sure.” What on Earth would they talk about? He didn’t have much in common with him. He stepped to the driver’s side door and opened it. “Where do you want to go for lunch?”
“You like sushi? How about Katana?” Conner set the ice pack on his ankle.
“Yeah, that works.” Katana Sushi was one of his favorites. They had the best sushi in the area. they must both like it, so that was one thing they had in common. His stomach grumbled—apparently, it liked that idea, too. He climbed into his SUV.
Holding the ice pack in one hand while Conner walked, Kai helped him into a black low-back metal patio chair, propped Conner’s foot on an empty chair, and took a seat next to him at the four-top table. “Here’s the ice pack back.” He handed it to him, taking in his muscular legs. He must still work out pretty hard. He looked like he could still play football.
“Thanks.” Conner set it over his ankle and wound Kai’s cell phone holder around it.
What should they talk about? “Nice day.” He looked out over the grassy median in the center of town, the trees and sculptures surrounding a winding brick walking path, then at the tall glass windows of the restaurant that sat on the first-floor corner of Conner’s apartment complex.
“Sure is. Glad summer is over.” Conner chuckled and picked up the menu. “You going to join me in a beer?”
“I sure am. It’s my day off.” Time for someone else to serve him, for a change. He perused his menu, looking over the offerings of sushi rolls, bento boxes and salads.
“So, what days do you typically work?” Conner studied him.
“I work weeknights, Tuesday to Saturday, then have Sunday and Monday off. No use being there when it’s not all that busy and my hourly pay is less.” He smirked at Conner.
“Yeah, I hear you.” He set his menu on the table. “Do you want to share a few rolls?”
“Sure.” Kai watched a dark-haired waiter approach the table.
“What can I get you to drink?” The waiter looked them both over.
“I’ll take an IPA. How about you, Kai?” Conner smiled at him .
“I’ll have a wheat beer, whatever you have on tap.” He glanced at Conner.
“Are you ready to order as well? The waiter shifted his weight.
Conner tapped Kai’s arm. “You ready?”
“Sure. I like pretty much anything. Just pick your favorite rolls and I’m good.” He watched an older woman walking her terrier on the median.
“Okay. So, how about the Sunkist roll, the baked lobster roll and the baked salmon roll?” Conner handed the menu to the waiter.
Kai nodded. “Those sound really good.”
The waiter picked up Kai’s menu. “Be right back with your beers.”
“Thanks.” He liked being a pleasant customer, since he’d had to deal with so many jerks in his own restaurant. He smiled at the waiter, then peered down at Conner’s leg. “How’s your ankle?”
He leaned back in his chair. “Good, now that it’s elevated and iced.”
The waiter dropped off their beers.
“That’s what I need.” Conner picked up his beer and sipped it. “I got really fucked up last night.” His cheeks flushed.
“Yeah, you could say that.” Kai took a gulp of beer. Damn, it was good to finally be drinking a beer instead of serving them. “You remember anything?” Though, based on past experience with him, he doubted Conner would say it if he did remember.
“A little.” He gave Kai a shy smile. “I do remember you walking me home.” He touched Kai’s forearm. “Thanks for that.”
“You should probably thank Bryce and Janice. It was their idea.” He was sure Bryce thought he was being helpful somehow. He grinned and rested his elbows on the table.
“So, you like bartending?” Conner chewed his lower lip.
He released a soft exhale. “Yeah, I do. ”
“Why?” Conner cocked his head.
He glanced out at the median, then focused on him. “I don’t know. I guess I get to be someone else when I’m behind the bar. I’m in a place where people are generally happy, and I get to be a part of that.” He pursed his lips and stared at his beer, twisting it in a circle.
“So, normally you’re not in a happy place?” Conner came forward in his seat, narrowing his eyes.
Kai rimmed his beer with his index finger. How should he answer that? It felt like he was talking to a therapist. “Let’s say I’ve been in some very unhappy places in my life. Right now, everything’s better.” He peered at Conner.
Conner nodded and gulped his beer, then tensed his jaw. “I know you were bullied in high school, and I heard your situation at home wasn’t the best.” He gazed at Kai. “I probably didn’t help the situation.”
Holy shit, was Conner finally going to bring up the graduation party? He stared at him, his heart pounding. He opened his mouth, waiting.
Conner twitched a corner of his lips and focused on his beer. “It’s such a nice day, we should talk about other things.” He offered Kai a forced grin. “Like, how are things going over there on Ashbrook Wash?” He snickered.
He gave his head a shake and gulped his beer. Should he tell him what happened? Sure. It wasn’t anything anyway. “Fine. I think we have raccoons.”
“Raccoons?” Conner lifted his brows and shifted in his seat.
He’d opened this conversation up, might as well finish it. “Bryce and I woke up to our cabinets slamming in the middle of the night, and when I got to the kitchen, the bastards were gone.”
Conner blinked, then parted his lips. “So, anything else happen?” He set his forearms across the table.
Kai huffed. This was so stupid. “Glasses we left on the counter were knocked on the floor but weren’t broken. We have a tile floor.” He drew a deep inhale. “Raccoons could have done that, right? I mean, they can grab things.” He held up his hand and opened and closed his fingers against his thumb.
Conner sat back in his chair and rubbed his chin. “I suppose it could be raccoons. I’ve never heard about raccoons being a problem around here, though. Have you?”
He scoffed and drank his beer. Conner had a point, but he was not going to entertain the alternative. “No, guess not. We’re having an exterminator come out tomorrow to be sure.”
“So, if it turns out to not be raccoons, we should set up a camera in your kitchen and see what’s really going on.” Conner chuckled. “I have a camera we can use.”
We... Now suddenly he and Conner had become we. “Sure.” He frowned. It wouldn’t get to that. It had to be animals.
The waiter stopped off at their table and set down white rectangular plates of multi-colored sushi rolls, along with wrapped chopsticks and square soy sauce bowls. “Need anything else?”
“How about another round of beers?” Conner lifted his brows at Kai.
“Yeah.” The beer was going down too well. He drank down the rest of his beer and handed the empty glass to the waiter, while Conner did the same.
Kai poured soy sauce in the bowl and mixed wasabi into it. Maybe he’d humor Conner on this ghost thing. “So, what exactly do you know about the haunted wash?”
Conner ripped open his chopstick wrapper and slid them out, then pulled them apart. “So, my friends told me there’s an old story about a little girl that was murdered in Ashbrook Wash. It became a missing persons case because they never actually found the body.” He glanced at Kai and wrinkled his forehead. “You okay?”
He never should have asked. This was too creepy. The chindi was nothing to mess around with. A shiver raced up his spine. He stared at his sushi, frowning. “Yeah, I’m okay. It’s just... I’m not one for ghost stories. I don’t even like horror movies. I can’t watch them.”
Conner swallowed a bite of sushi and fixated on him. “Why? They scare you too much?”
“I can’t sleep if I watch them. I get nightmares.” He tightened his jaw. Conner was going to think he was a pussy. He was though, wasn’t he? Just another thing his mother was right about. He rocked once and gazed at him.
“Hey.” He placed his hand on Kai’s forearm. “Don’t worry. I’ll be right there with you if we find something scary.”
He peered at Conner’s face. Was he serious, or was he fucking with him? He seemed serious. Kai forced a grin. “Yeah, right. It’s probably just raccoons.” He ate a sushi roll.
“Kai.”
He flinched. God damn if Conner saying his name didn’t get his blood going every damn time. “What?” He turned to him.
“I mean it. I won’t let you down.” He tightened his hold on Kai’s arm.
He looked at Conner’s hand on his arm and nodded. This was getting weird. “Okay. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Like what?” He gave Kai a warm smile and moved his hand to the table.
Good question. “So, Bryce says you’re a pharmaceutical rep now?” He stuffed a sushi roll into his mouth.
“Yeah. My dad wanted me to be a doctor, but I didn’t want to be in school forever. So after I got my bachelor’s in biology, I got a job.” Conner swallowed a sushi roll down.
The waiter dropped off a new round of beers.
Kai sipped his beer. He didn’t even know there was such a thing as a pharmaceutical rep. “So, what’s that like? What do you do exactly?”
“I basically go around and talk to doctors and sell the benefits of my company’s drugs. I visit most the doctors here in Fountain Hills, then down by HonorHealth in Scottsdale, and I go up to Payson about once a week.” He dunked a sushi roll in soy sauce and popped it in his mouth.
“Sounds like fun.” And easy money. He smiled at Conner.
He thinned his lips. “Yeah, it’s really flexible, and I have the freedom to do my own thing. It’s not easy to get into, though. I got some help from my dad.”
“Yeah?” Figured. Rich kids always seemed to have an in. “How so?” He gazed at Conner.
“My dad’s an anesthesiologist, so he knows a lot of people in the drug industry.” He slowly shook his head. “He was unhappy when I didn’t want to go to med school.”
The memory of Conner asking to cheat off his test for the chemistry final flashed in Kai’s head. “I see. You were really going to be a doctor, even though you sucked at chemistry?” He released a quick laugh.
Conner snorted. “Yeah, maybe you should have gone to med school.”
Kai stared at a sushi roll sitting in his soy sauce mixture. College was never in the cards for someone like him. “I’d be in debt up to my fucking eyeballs if I’d gone to college.”
“No shit? I thought natives got to go for free?” Conner narrowed his eyes and drank his beer.
The question was so typical. “No, we do not. We’re just like everyone else and have to pay or get scholarships. We just happen to have scholarships available only to us.” He popped the sushi roll in his mouth and chewed.
“Oh.” Conner peered at him, holding a sushi roll up in his chopsticks. “How native are you? I mean, you look native.”
Here we go. How to quantify his identity as a person into the separate pieces of it? He’d go with the official American government answer. “I’m one-quarter Navajo, on my father’s side. He was half.”
“So, your mom’s white?” Conner cocked his head, looking him up and down, as if seeing him for the first time .
“Yeah. She’s a full-on colonizer.” He freed a belly laugh. Would Conner even know what he was talking about?
Conner frowned and gazed at his sushi plate. “So am I, I guess.”
“It was a joke.” He put his hand on Conner’s knee. Shit, what am I doing? He yanked his hand away and cleared his throat, his mouth twitching. “Bryce and I talk pretty candidly about race.”
“Well, whatever half, quarter, shit you are, it turned out well. I mean...” His face flushed. Under his breath, he said. “You ended up being pretty attractive.” He gulped hard, inhaled deeply, and looked at Kai.
Kai’s breath caught in his throat and his heart thumped in his ears. Had Conner just said he was attractive? “Uh, thanks.” He knit his brows and focused on Conner’s lips.
Conner’s gaze focused on Kai’s mouth. He took a heavy breath. “Yeah.”
Stop it, Kai. This was stupid. Conner is not attracted to you . Kai blinked and slapped his hand to the table. “Anyway, looks like we’ve eaten all the sushi.” He released a nervous laugh. “I should probably get home and shower. How’s the ankle doing?”
Conner straightened in his seat and dropped his hurt leg off the chair. “It feels pretty good now.” He unwound the phone holder from his ankle and handed it to him, then placed the ice pack on the table. “Thanks for helping me. Again.” He gave Kai a wide smile.
“Of course.” He did sort of owe him for getting rid of Brandon. He peered at Conner’s ankle. “Can you make it to your apartment?”
“Let’s see.” Conner stood up, putting weight on the bad ankle. “It actually seems fine now.”
“Good.” Time to go back to the creepy house. He lifted his hand to the waiter.
The waiter came to the table.
“Can we get our check?” Kai asked.
“Sure.” The waiter jogged off .
Conner sat in his chair. “Hey, listen. I got this.” He set his hand on Kai’s shoulder, then released it.
He might not have the money Conner had but he could pay for his own lunch. He shook his head once. “No, I can’t let you do that.”
“Yes, it’s my treat. You helped me last night and today. I owe you one. Or two.” Conner smirked at him.
He had him there. “All right.” Kai drank the rest of his beer.