Chapter 12
When Snow Coats the Ground
JOEY UNDERSTOOD that in many families, people keep time by the events in the family. September was when everybody had a birthday, or April was when somebody was expecting, and the entire year hinged around those moments.
September was when Garcia arrived and Crosby got shot, and Joey had to accept another person into their family—and worry about the brother he already had.
September was when he’d first slunk his way into Gideon Chadwick’s bed, and Gideon had mastered him there, not just fucked him—and damned well—but mated with him.
Possessed him. Kept him. Had given Joey haven, safety, home.
Joey hadn’t had a home—a real home—since he was eight years old.
He wasn’t sure what to do with it. He wasn’t expected to spend every night there, was he? Their partnership was well established, but this other thing was in its infancy. Surely Gideon would need some nights to himself.
Every second or third night, Joey would say he needed space and spend the night in his apartment.
He never slept those nights, simply lay awake in the bed that had come with the apartment, under the bedding that Gideon and Harding had bought him, and waited for something, anything, to break through his door.
For a year and a half, as he’d learned more about electronics, he’d set up his own surveillance in that apartment, had cameras, had alarms, and nothing had disturbed his sleep then.
Two nights with Gideon and it no longer felt like his den.
And right when he was starting to get a handle on why he was so jumpy, the thing happened that shattered all his peace.
They’d just hit a big case. Joey had made the kill this time, with a crossbow in a cemetery while Crosby had distracted the killer, a man about to annihilate his entire family with a 9mm in his daughters’ brains after he’d already done the same for their mother.
Joey had spent the night in his apartment—he’d been closer to the scene when Crosby caught it, and Gideon had taken overwatch from the office since he’d only just arrived.
Joey had wanted him there so bad. Something about the silence of the crossbow bolt, the awfulness of what had almost happened, and even the cemetery plot—labeled the Island of Hope, a place for unidentified murdered children, of all things—had depressed Joey in ways he didn’t think he could be depressed.
Not after his childhood. Not after his adulthood, for fuck’s sake.
Not after all his internal bullshit about predators and prey.
It was beginning to dawn on Joey Carlyle that sometimes you were neither the wolf nor the deer. Sometimes you were just a human fucking being depressed by what other human fucking beings could do to each other.
So he was in the back of the SUV as they returned to the office—via the nearest food venue, since Garcia professed to be hungry and Joey knew Gideon often went without food in the morning—when his phone buzzed.
He glanced at it numbly, for once looking forward to the time off after a weapons discharge or a kill, and thinking it might be Gideon with his order.
Come to the compound for Christmas.
Joey gaped. No return number, but there didn’t need to be one.
Fuck off and lose this number.
Shit. He was going to have to requisition another fucking phone.
You think you’re invisible? Your little unit is making waves. It’s time to come home.
He sucked air in through his teeth. They hadn’t made any explicit plans, but Gideon had said something about forgoing his trip to Pennsylvania this year to his stepmother’s place so they could spend Christmas day…
whatwuzit? Joey touched the face of his phone and remembered Gideon’s nonchalant invitation.
We can eat good food, watch stupid Christmas movies. You know—give each other dumb presents. Pretend like we’re normal. You think?
I dunno, Gid. What’s a dumb present? I need specifics.
You ever play with Legos?
Joey remembered now, how he’d snorted and rolled his eyes, and Gideon had nodded like giving a grown man a Lego set was totally reasonable.
And for some reason, Joey had looked forward to that.
They’d had Thanksgiving at Natalia’s house, and Joey and Crosby had spent the day playing with her two children to give Tal and her wife a break. They’d pretended to be choo-choo trains and bears while everybody else sat at the table and drank wine and adulted.
Joey had loved that. Loved the safety of the cubs rolling around on the carpet, loved the kindness of the adults, even loved the smell of wine on Gideon’s breath when they’d gotten back to Gideon’s apartment and fallen into bed.
But the idea of a holiday where he got to be the child, watching cartoons, opening “stupid presents,” that had filled him with this sense of contentment he hadn’t known he was capable of.
You don’t know where my home is, he sent to his father now.
There was no response, and for a whole forty-five minutes, Joey believed he was safe.
Then, as he was exiting the elevator into the office, the rest of the unit in front of him, all of them bearing takeout bags, his phone buzzed again.
He managed to pass the bag absentmindedly to Gideon before he wandered to his desk, sank down, and checked his phone.
And swallowed.
There was a picture of his apartment building on his phone.
Granted, the picture was from a block away, and it was grainy, so it had been taken from probably farther away than that, but he knew what the picture intimated.
It said, “I do too know where your home is, and you’re no longer safe there,” in a way that left no mistaking the threat. And no proving it either.
Joey wiped a suddenly shaking hand across his face, and instead of seeing his father, he saw the crossbow bolt as it entered into their perpetrator’s back that morning.
I’m a killer too.
He might have sat there forever, but a nonrecyclable food carton hit his desk with a thud, and Gideon stood there, staring at him with concern.
“What gives?” he asked quietly.
Joey swallowed and privately bid adieu to that promise of sleeping in with Gideon, watching movies, eating Gideon’s food—which was always top notch—and opening a box of something stupid and wonderful and remembering what surprises were like. The good kind.
“I think,” he said, smelling the food and feeling sick, “I need to visit my father over Christmas.”
Gideon’s eyes popped open. “Do you want to visit your father over Christmas?” he asked carefully.
Joey shook his head and showed him the picture on his phone. “Not particularly,” he said.
Joey realized he’d never seen this expression on Gideon’s face before. But after an entire day of Gideon waging a subtle campaign of “Let’s ask Clint what he thinks,” and “Maybe the unit would prefer you stay at my place for Christmas,” he thought he might understand what it was.
This was Gideon Chadwick when he was afraid.
But the good news was that Gideon Chadwick, afraid, was just as smart as Gideon Chadwick, cool, calm, and analytical.
Joey had tried to detach himself at first. “I’ll stay at my place from now on,” he’d murmured that night as they’d headed for the garage. “You can drop me—”
“No,” Gideon replied. “No.”
Okay, then. “Gid, it’s only a matter of time before he figures out where I’m spending my nights—”
“You change your habits now, he’ll come looking for me,” Gideon said shortly. “And I’m not letting you go there alone, not tonight.”
Joey sighed. “I can’t move into your apartment—not now.”
Gideon had turned to him in the elevator, the fury on his face unmistakable. “Tonight, Joey. That’s all I’m asking for. Tonight.” He took a breath, and some of the fury relaxed. “I said I knew what I was getting into, Joey.”
“But now you want out,” Joey said with resignation, sagging against the back of the car.
Gideon’s mouth on his, brutally, was not the answer he anticipated. But he responded, the hurt, the fear, the anger roiling in his gut unable to leave any room for hiding.
Everything—everything—was in that kiss, and Joey, heart, soul, being invaded with Gideon’s surprising heat, clung to him in panic as he’d been afraid to cling to him with emotional need.
The kiss was over as quickly as it had begun, leaving Joey to pull his brains back inside his head as the elevator doors opened and they made their way through the lobby to hail a cab to the apartment.
Except Gideon didn’t hail a cab. Apparently still pissed, he took off along the crowded sidewalk, Joey striding beside him.
Joey wanted to protest, say something like “All forty blocks?” but he didn’t. They were both fit—Gideon was a runner, as unlikely as he looked, loping along in a ground-eating pace with those long slender legs. Forty blocks was not a hardship.
Joey kept pace, and after the first twenty blocks, Gideon’s stride slowed a notch, became less fierce, less angry, and more accepting. His chest opened up enough that—had either of them been demonstrative at all—Joey could have seized his hand.
For the first time in his life since he was a child going shopping with his grandfather in the city, Joey wanted to hold somebody’s hand.
The thought startled him, and he almost stumbled, but it burrowed in, making him yearn for something he’d never known he missed, almost consuming him as he followed Gideon up the stairs to the apartment, the corridor echoing with the voices of the other building residents as people prepared dinner or hurried out to eat.
By the time Gideon opened the door, his movements were calm, measured, thoughtful, and Joey realized that he’d needed the activity to work things out in his own head.
The thought soothed Joey—he used physical activity to think too, and he often forgot how similar he and Gideon were about some things.
It meant Gideon wasn’t angry at him.