Chapter 18
Chapter eighteen
Crowe
A few days later, I’d spent the morning with Kat and Diego going over what they’d learned about Valen when I headed upstairs to see if Noah wanted to go to lunch.
When I entered the apartment, I didn’t see him anywhere, but I heard talking before I reached the bedroom door.
He didn’t sound distressed, but he did sound very frustrated.
I also heard what sounded like a door opening and closing more times than any door needed to.
I assumed it was either Julius or Mika in there with him, so I knocked softly on the door.
“It’s open.”
He was standing in the middle of the bedroom in jeans and a t-shirt with the closet door hanging wide open behind him and an expression on his face that I hadn’t seen before.
He looked genuinely stressed, but obviously it was about something that wasn’t life-threatening, which I found I was entirely unprepared for.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He gestured at the closet. “I have nothing to wear. Julius brought me some things, but none of it works.”
I looked at the closet. It had clothes in it. Shirts, jeans, and a couple of jackets. The things Julius and Mika had loaned him, supplemented by what he’d brought with him from Houston. It looked like a normal closet to me, which probably meant I was missing something.
“To the Gala,” he clarified, reading my face. “I’m giving a speech, Jackson. In front of people. At a formal event.” He motioned towards the closet. “I don’t have anything.”
“You have all kinds of stuff in there.”
He looked at me with an expression that suggested I’d said something deeply naive.
“Julius’s stuff is more suited to going out on the town, and Mika’s is for everyday wear.
” He pulled out a fairly plain jacket that I was guessing came from Mika.
“I can’t give a speech about human trafficking in a denim jacket. ”
He wasn’t wrong about that. “Okay,” I said.
“I’ve been putting it off because—” He stopped. Let out a breath. “I don’t know. It felt like the least important thing, and now the Gala is in less than a week, and I’m standing here looking at a denim jacket.”
I understood this more than I expected to.
The Gala had been a logistical problem for all of us the last few days.
Entry points and exit routes, Chance Kelly’s agents, and The Hargrove’s floor plan.
I’d been thinking about it in those terms, and Noah had been thinking about it in terms of what he was going to stand up and say and what he was going to be wearing when he said it. Both of those things mattered.
“So we’ll go get you something,” I said.
He looked at me. “You’d do that?”
“Go shopping?”
“Go shopping. With me.” He tilted his head slightly. “You don’t exactly seem like a shopping trip kind of person.”
“I’m not,” I said. “But I’m a keeping-you-safe kind of person, and if you need to go out, I’m going with you.” I paused. “Also, I’ve been told I have decent taste.”
He looked at my ratty old t-shirt and jeans and then smirked. “By who?”
“Wyatt. Once. Under duress.”
That got me a smile, which was what I wanted. “Okay,” he said. “Let me get my shoes.”
I knew just the place because all the bodyguards at Three Bears were required to have suits available for situations like this, and Caden had sent us all here.
It was a men’s clothing store on the east end of old downtown called Fielding & Co.
that had been there for decades and had recently been taken over by the previous owner’s daughter, who’d kept the good bones of the place and updated everything else.
Caden had described it as the kind of store where they actually know what they’re doing, which, coming from Caden, was the highest possible endorsement.
The storefront was the kind of place that didn’t have too much in the window because its reputation spoke for itself.
A bell over the door announced us, and a woman in her forties looked up from behind the counter, assessing us both in about two seconds with the professional eye of someone who’d been doing this a long time.
“Help you find something?”
“He needs something for a formal event,” I said. “A gala. He’s speaking.”
She looked at Noah. “What’s your timeline?”
“Less than a week,” Noah said, wincing.
“So something off the rack then. No problem, we can do that.” She came around the counter. “I’m Diane. What are we thinking? Classic suit, something with more personality, somewhere in between?”
Noah looked at me briefly, then back at her. “Somewhere in between, I think. I don’t want to look like I’m trying too hard, but I want to look like I belong in the room.”
Diane nodded like that was exactly the right answer. “I’ve got a few things in mind. Come on back.”
I followed them to the back of the store where the fitting rooms were.
Then I took up a position on the low bench outside the curtain while Diane pulled things from the racks with the focused efficiency of someone who knew her inventory and trusted her eye.
She handed Noah a charcoal suit in a fabric that caught the light, a deep navy jacket with clean lines that she paired with a different pair of trousers, and a third option I couldn’t quite see from where I was sitting because she’d draped it over her arm.
“Start with the charcoal,” she said, and disappeared back into the store to give him room.
I sat on the bench and listened to the sounds of the fitting room. After a few minutes, the curtain moved.
He stepped out in the charcoal suit, and I understood immediately why Diane had pulled it first. The fit was close without being severe, the color doing something specific to his complexion, the whole effect landing somewhere between put-together and at ease. He looked like himself but more so.
He looked at himself in the three-way mirror and tilted his head.
“Well?” he said.
“That’s the one,” I said.
He turned to look at me. “You haven’t seen the others.”
“I know. I don’t need to.”
“Jackson.”
“It fits right. It looks right. You look like someone who belongs in the room, which is what you said you wanted.” I leaned back on the bench. “But try the others if you want.”
He turned back to the mirror and looked at himself for another moment. I watched him do it—watched him see himself in it, the careful way he assessed things. Then something settled in his expression.
“Okay,” he said. “Yeah. This is it.” He looked at me in the mirror. “You’re surprisingly good at this.”
“Don’t tell anyone.”
He laughed, quiet and genuine, and turned back toward the fitting room. Then he stopped with his hand on the curtain and glanced back at me over his shoulder with an expression that was doing something deliberate.
“You could come in,” he said. “Help me with the buttons.”
I looked at him.
He looked back. Entirely composed. Waiting.
I got up off the bench.
The fitting room wasn’t large. It was a proper fitting room—good light, a full mirror on one wall, a hook for discarded clothes, but it was designed for one person and there were two of us, which meant when I stepped inside and pulled the curtain closed behind me, we were close enough that I could see the slight uptick of his pulse at his throat and the careful effort he was making to look as though he hadn’t completely intended this.
He had completely intended this.
I reached for the buttons at his collar and worked them slowly, my fingers brushing his throat. He was very still in the way he held himself when he was paying close attention to something.
“Diane could come back,” I said quietly.
“She’s very professional,” he said. “She’ll knock.”
“Noah.”
“Jackson.”
I got the last button, smoothed the lapel flat with both hands, and looked at him in the mirror over his shoulder. He looked back at me in it. The suit, the light, the two of us in a space built for one.
He turned around.
We were close enough that it wasn’t a question of leaning in so much as simply being where we already were, and when I kissed him, it was slow and deliberate. I brought my hand up to his jaw with a careful grip that said I was holding something worth being careful with.
I wished we could just stay here in our own world, but we couldn’t because the reality was we were less than a week out from a gala where the man who’d tried to buy him would have the first opportunity to make a move since we’d left Houston.
I pulled back just enough.
He looked at me. His composure was slightly less immaculate than it had been thirty seconds ago, which I considered a reasonable outcome.
“We should probably—” he started.
“Yeah,” I said.
He exhaled a small laugh, dropped his hands, and stepped back, straightening the jacket with the focused attention of a man reassembling his dignity. I smoothed my own expression and turned back toward the curtain.
“Jackson,” he said.
I looked back.
“Thank you.”
“You needed something to wear,” I said.
He smiled, and it was the slow one, the real one. “That’s not entirely why I’m thanking you.”
I held his gaze for a moment. Then I pulled the curtain open and stepped out into the store and went back to the bench and tried to appear like a man who’d simply been waiting, not a man who’d snuck into the dressing room to steal a kiss.
Diane came back around the corner just as Noah stepped out of the dressing room back in his street clothes. She looked between us with the serene expression of a woman who’d seen everything in forty years of running fitting rooms and had made peace with all of it.
“We’ll take the charcoal,” I said.
“Excellent choice,” she said simply and walked away.
“I’ll pay for the suit,” I said.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I’ll just write it off as an expense for the mission. Don’t worry, Wolfe can afford it.”
I knew he wanted to argue with me, but I also knew that right now, he wasn’t working and there was no way I was letting him dip into any savings he had to pay for this suit when I was standing right here beside him.
He thought about it for a minute, but then he finally nodded and let me pay.
We walked back toward the parking garage in the afternoon light, Noah with the garment bag over one arm and his shoulder close to mine.
Old downtown was quiet for a Wednesday with just a few people on the sidewalk, a delivery truck pulling out of an alley, and someone’s music drifting from an open window above us.
“I need one more thing,” he said.
“Anything.”
“I didn’t even tell you what, Jackson.”
What this boy didn’t seem to realize was that it didn’t matter what it was. If he wanted or needed it, I would make sure he had it.
“Okay, what is it that you need?” I asked, humoring him.
“Shoes.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go buy some shoes.”
He gave me an amused little smile, and we kept walking, his shoulder warm against mine in the afternoon sun, and I thought that if this was what ordinary felt like, I’d been missing it for a very long time.