Chapter 19
Mates and Littermates
“YOU UP for this?” Joey asked for the fifty-dozenth time.
“You?” Gideon asked gently.
Joey looked away. “I’m just so glad you’re home,” he said.
Gideon’s extended recovery had been too long for the hospital, and too intense for a place with four flights of stairs.
After a month, Gideon had gone to his father’s place in New Jersey for six weeks, until he could walk up the stairs without a pounding headache and going to the john didn’t send him to bed with spots in front of his eyes.
Joey had visited every weekend, exhausted and sad. His first night at Gerald and Trish’s New Jersey suburban palace had been painful—Joey had forgotten how to sleep. He woke up every five minutes, calling Gideon’s name, his movement hurting Gideon’s battered body.
Gideon had finally woken up after five solid hours to find Joey curled on the floor with a pillow and a blanket from the hallway, and he’d had it.
“Kid, get up here,” he’d ordered.
Joey had crawled up on the bed, miserable, in his briefs, looking like a bear on his last fucking berry.
“Okay,” Gideon said. “I need you to touch the places I’m talking about, okay?
Gently, but touch them. Start with my ribs.
” Joey’s hands, callused and firm, visited Gideon’s ribs, and Gideon covered them with his good hand.
“They were broken, and, yes, they punctured my lungs. They’re not crunchy anymore, but they’re sore.
My lungs need to heal. Can you feel that? ” He breathed evenly, up and down.
Joey nodded.
“How’d that feel?”
“Rough,” Joey whispered.
“Yeah. But still way better than in the hospital. Okay, next. Touch my face.”
Joey whimpered. The tears from Stevie’s rings had scabbed over, but the bruises and broken cheekbones still left swelling.
“Gentle, but touch it.”
And Joey had, while Gideon took him through the injuries, one by one.
When he was done, Joey slithered into bed next to him, his head pillowed gingerly next to Gideon’s.
“Why’d we do that?” he asked.
“So you could see I’m not dead,” Gideon said softly. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry I got hurt, but I’m not dead yet. You gotta see I’m not dead yet, or you’ll never trust me to be here again.”
The tears came then, quiet and cleansing. Gideon had heard about Joey crying in the hospital and hadn’t believed it, but now he believed.
Joey slept quietly after that—but he looked even worse the next weekend, leading Gideon to believe he never slept at home.
He could take short walks by then, and after wandering around his father’s property for a while, holding Joey’s hand and appreciating the sunshine in the morning, he ordered Joey to eat dinner with Trish and Gerald and retired upstairs, claiming he needed a nap.
He called Harding instead.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Harding mumbled, and Gideon wondered if he’d been down for his nap too. “We take turns sleeping on your couch, but it doesn’t seem to stop the nightmares.”
Gideon grunted. “Does he say what the nightmares are about?” he asked.
“No,” Harding replied, and now he sounded… cagey. “But you gotta know, Gid, that day had plenty of nightmare fuel. You may need to ask Joey about it. He may need to… talk.”
Gideon frowned, because that sounded loaded, but you didn’t ask Harding questions when he got like this.
“Have them sleep in bed with him,” Gideon told him. “Nobody’s virtue is at risk—think wolves in a pack when one of them’s injured.”
Harding grunted. “Gotcha. Good thinking.”
“Has he moved out of the old apartment yet?”
“Yeah—he sublet it to Swan and Pearson, who claim to be using the guest room.”
Gideon let out a fractured laugh. “Of course they are. Is this healthy? Us with the partners who are partners?”
“No,” Harding said bluntly. “But I don’t want to break up teams that are working.
When they stop working, they stop being partners.
I think you’ve got the right of it, though.
We’re a wolf pack—hell, even the spouses who aren’t working with us are our pack.
Even Pearson’s or Crosby’s ex-roommates are in our pack. We don’t let pack go it alone.”
“Nope,” Gideon said, and then he really was ready for a nap.
“Call me later,” Harding told him. “And not just to worry about your significant other. I miss your pointy brain.”
Gideon smiled. Joey’s word for it. “I’m bored,” he admitted. And then, in the interest of honesty, “My stamina’s still for shit, but when I’m awake, I’m bored.”
“Maybe in a few weeks we can have you back to run a desk. Or overwatch.” Harding paused. “Definitely overwatch.”
Gideon smiled. “Joey still not great at it?”
Harding grunted. “He’s not bad, really. The audible he called when we went to get you―”
“Which audible?” Gideon asked.
“He didn’t tell you?”
Gideon had to breathe, because his lungs were still weak and he’d taxed them. “Nobody’s told me anything. It’s like….”
“Like if you know what happened that day, we’ll see you in the fucking basement again,” Harding said softly.
“Yeah.”
Harding took his own breath. “Make Joey tell you some of this. Particularly about how the house burned down. But maybe you need to hear this too. I’m not sure if you know this, Gid, but you were a pretty awesome force of fucking nature.”
Gideon grunted. “Yay me,” he said, stretching out on the bed and getting ready for story time. “Now hurry up, it’s almost time for my nap.”
JOEY PAUSED before he entered Gideon’s room.
He couldn’t help it. He’d never dealt with parents, or people in their parents’ homes.
It didn’t matter that Gideon was, in his words, almost forty, which made Joey close to thirty.
Or that Gerald and Trish seemed like genuinely nice people, who only wanted Gideon to be happy and well.
A lifetime of distrusting parental figures and of not expecting kindness from strangers had made him leery of imposing on their trust.
But Gerald himself had brought Joey’s bag up the stairs to put in Gideon’s room, and Gideon….
If Joey had ever wondered what love meant, he was starting to think it was the wave of well-being that washed over Gideon’s battered features when he saw Joey at the door.
And the feeling that, even though this ordinary (posh!) house in the New Jersey suburbs was alien to him, being this close to Gideon was home.
So it still took him a minute, a breath, before he opened the door, expecting to find Gideon asleep. He’d been planning to sit on the bed and read—his comfort book since he’d been a kid was Call of the Wild, and he had a disintegrating paperback in his duffel.
What he found instead was Gideon sitting up, propped by pillows, reading on his phone.
“Whacha doin’?” he asked, trying to be playful. The fact was, his heart clenched, because with the lowering summer shadows, Gideon appeared almost normal.
He yearned for normal.
“Reading the action report from that day near Boston,” he said. Nobody talked about “raiding Stevie Carlyle’s compound”—that was too close to the truth.
Joey swallowed. “Ya see anything surprising?”
Gideon rolled his eyes. “Well yeah. Did you know I killed Stevie Carlyle?”
Joey stared at him. “You did not. I killed Stevie.”
Gideon shook his head. “No, you didn’t. According to this, I had actually skewered him in the liver—he was bleeding out from a mortal wound when you cut his throat.” He gave Joey a bloodthirsty smile. “Not bad for an old man, you think?”
Joey felt a semihysterical laugh bubble out of his throat. “I’m not sure whether to be relieved or insulted,” he said. He shook his head and slid onto the mattress next to Gideon. “I’ll settle for impressed. You learn anything else?”
“Yeah. Never to ask Crosby to clear a kitchen.”
Joey couldn’t help it. He snickered again. “Yeah, that was pretty epic. Clint was like, ‘I don’t mind that you kept this asshole there from shooting me, but seriously, what the fuck?’ and Crosby was like, ‘Joey told me to clear a path, and I did!’”
Gideon laughed and then sobered. “Calix took one for the team.”
Joey sighed. “Yeah. He didn’t mean to get hurt, but he told us this made it look real—I mean he said that as they were loading him into an ambulance.”
“How’s he doing?”
“His arm got infected—it’s getting better. We’ve been stretched fuckin’ thin. They keep sending me and Pearson out so Swan can ride with Doba and Crosby with Henderson. It’s like trying to balance the new with the crazy, you know?”
“Yeah. Sucks when you can’t have your normal partner. But I’m glad that Doba and Henderson are working out. We wouldn’t even have a unit without them.”
Joey sighed, pleased with the normalcy of talking work.
And then afraid all over again.
“Gid, what’ll happen if… if we don’t have this. If we don’t have… you know. Work?”
He didn’t have the heart to explain more than that, but Gideon understood.
“You mean if one of us gets hurt too bad to go back?” he asked gently.
“Yeah.”
“I’m not the only one with a pointy brain, Joey,” he said. “When we say we have ‘skills,’ it’s not all throwing knives or goring fuckers in the liver. Remember Chester Schumer?”
How could anybody forget Chester Schumer?
Joey snorted. “’Course.”
“Think you’d see him on paper now?”
Joey nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Yeah.”
“Think you could talk to a victim now? And know that somewhere inside you, you knew how that person felt?”
Joey closed his eyes, remembering almost losing Gideon, of being so afraid of his father, thinking he was invincible. “Yeah,” he said. “It sucks. Being a victim.”
“We got skills, Joey. If one day we can’t go back in the field, we’ve got things we can do. You don’t fight this hard, learn this much, for nothing. I mean, not a lot of money in it, but that’s not what we’re here for, right?”
Joey nodded slowly and took what felt like his first deep breath in two months.
“Still,” he said, “I can’t wait until you’re back at work. Even if you’re not out there with me, I know you’re with me, you know?”