Royally Busted
DEAN WRAPPED his arms a little tighter around Bailey’s long, lean body and sighed.
God, he was delicious.
Three months ago when Dean had first met him, in the ER tending to Val, Dean had thought he was cute. Then he watched him be competent and compassionate and kind to Dean’s brother, and Dean had thought he was more than that. He was worthy.
And then—and this was the true miracle—Dean had seen him be funny .
Dean himself was not funny. He knew this. He took everything too seriously, too literally to be funny. Humor relied on different levels of meaning, and Dean’s specialty, the thing he was really good at, was drawing a straight line between ideas.
This was harder when you were working with two levels of meaning, so Dean often didn’t bother.
But he did appreciate it when somebody was naturally funny. Sal, his older brother, was naturally funny. Laure, his sister, was also pretty quick on the draw. Their mother was a riot , and Dean would make no apologies for thinking she was the greatest woman of all time.
But Dean was not funny, and when Bailey had made him laugh, he had been… charmed.
And then Dean had analyzed Bailey’s long frame, his narrow face, his square jaw and graceful brow, and he’d been… well, more than charmed.
Smitten.
He’d expected their brief interlude in the bunkroom at the hospital to be all he needed, but, well, he’d needed more, so he’d taken Bailey’s card, and since then any excuse to fly to Austin—including two days off in a row—had gotten him on a plane.
It didn’t hurt that he and his partner at the Bureau had been working a case involving the Russian mafia and a nearby cartel south of Austin that threatened to become a bloodbath—he and Marcus practically had their own suite at a nearby Holiday Inn Express.
After his injury wrestling cattle (and hearing an earful from Marcus via text about how they were never hiding in a cattle truck again; he didn’t care if there was a sign from God saying “Bad guys hid their stuff here !”), Dean had spent a week in Bailey’s apartment, bringing takeout, petting the cat, watching TV with Bailey, falling asleep in his arms. No, it wasn’t ideal—Bailey hadn’t known he was coming and hadn’t known how long he’d been there, but for a week they’d lived almost like a normal couple, and Dean had found it… .
Comforting.
Amazing.
He and Marcus had gone into the field at the end of the week, as soon as his injury had healed, and the first night they’d been stuck in a shitty hotel room in Tijuana, doing surveillance on the Russian mobsters trying to sell tech to an absolutely monstrous cartel, Dean had thought of Bailey coming home to a note that read, Don’t forget me . Back soon .
And he’d felt the absurd urge to cry.
He hadn’t cried since the sixth grade, when Val had kicked his ass for telling Chance that Santa Claus wasn’t real.
Chance had cried, and Reg—who didn’t get mad at anybody —had yelled at Dean for being cruel, and Dean had tried to explain that it was ultimately much kinder to realize the lie and misinformation now than it would be to get to the second grade and have all the kids laugh at him.
Chance had cried harder, and Dean had actually welcomed Val paddling him with a shoe.
It hadn’t hurt—or it had, but Dean bore pain stoically, even in the sixth grade—but Val’s words had all but ripped him open.
“You may think you’re above us, Dean Royal, because you’re smarter than us, but you remember that those two kids have as much right to believe in goodness and kindness and magic as anybody.
Of course they would have figured it out sooner or later, but Chance just spent a week petitioning Santa to get you your own tablet because he knows you’re trying to move into high school next year, and now you broke his heart. ”
And that, of all things, broke Dean’s.
He’d started crying, and then Val had hugged him tight, and then Chance and Reg had run into the room and begged Val not to hurt him, and Dean had cried harder, and, well, his proudest, most masculine moment it had not been.
And in this cramped stucco hotel room, with an ambient temperature of about 90 degrees making Marcus’s foot odor even stenchier and a burrito grabbed from a local taqueria about to make its presence known in a bad way, Dean had felt that same absurd sense of letdown.
On paper, cutting out of Bailey’s apartment as soon as he got Marcus’s text and leaving a note had seemed like the right thing to do.
In practice, it might have been much crueler than Dean had intended.
Of course, that night the Russian mobsters had taken out an office of the cartel as Dean and Marcus watched in horror, and the resulting flight through Tijuana and across the border near San Diego and then debrief to their section chief had taken two weeks.
They’d been left with a single lead about the movements of the Russian mob and a confidential informant who had come out of the woodwork somewhere up north and asked only to be moved to Austin so he could work as a doctor in a nearby hospital.
And Dean had arrived at Bailey’s apartment to a predictably frosty reception.
Bailey had said something like “Dean, we have to talk,” and Dean had been so afraid that meant “Dean, you can’t come here anymore,” he’d promptly seduced Bailey until his eyes rolled back in his head and he forgot his own name.
Dean was good at that. He was well aware it was all he brought to the table.
There had been no more “we have to talk” noises, but Dean had noticed that when he’d showed up on the doorstep since then, the look in Bailey’s eyes was a sort of hurt joy.
Yes, he was happy to see Dean, but he knew that maybe not tomorrow, and maybe not the day after, but pretty soon Dean would be going again.
Dean didn’t know what to do with that.
His one play was to fuck away the pain, and he wasn’t sure how long that would last.
But right now, Bailey was warm and pliant in his arms, and the harsh sunlight of an Austin, Texas, summer was trying to penetrate the heavy white drapes across the bedroom windows, and all Dean wanted to do was keep smelling the sweat and sunshine at the nape of Bailey’s neck.
“You always smell so good here,” he mumbled, nuzzling that spot right there. “Why?”
“Baby shampoo,” Bailey mumbled back. “Makes my hair shiny.”
Dean laughed then, wide-awake and very surprised. “God, you’re funny,” he said, his voice full of admiration, and to his horror the look Bailey turned back over his shoulder wasn’t happy or pleased—it was injured.
It was practically bleeding.
“What?” Dean asked, legitimately surprised. “What was that look?”
Bailey just shook his head. “I’ve got a shift in two hours,” he said instead. “I need to shower and do some laundry or I won’t have anything when I get back.”
“I should be able to do that for you,” Dean said promptly. He honestly didn’t mind being at the apartment when Bailey had to work. It may not have been his home, but it was somebody’s home, and Dean’s nerves, used to being stretched taut, appreciated the difference between that and a hotel bed.
To his dismay Bailey shook his head. “No,” he said, sounding miserable. “You can’t promise that, and I’m visiting my dad in Fort Stockton tomorrow, so I need the clothes. Let me out of bed.”
Dean did, surprised at the defeated tone of his voice, at the sadness in his eyes—at the whole way this once-wonderful morning had gone.
“Bailey, what’s wrong?”
“I told you,” Bailey said, keeping his face averted. “I’m visiting my dad tomorrow. He’s cooking dinner. I do this once a month. You can’t be surprised.”
“I’m not,” Dean said, baffled. “But why… why do you make it sound like dinner with your father is the end of the world?”
“Because you haven’t asked once to meet him,” Bailey returned, anger burning in his voice along with the unhappiness.
“And I get it. I’m just… just a drive-by piece of ass to you, but…
but I keep hoping that someday I can at least introduce you to my father as a friend, and it just hit me, in bed a minute ago, that that’s not going to happen.
You are never going to want to be introduced to my father, and I…
I mean, don’t get me wrong, the sex is great , but that’s all it’s ever going to be to you and…
.” His voice dropped, the anger draining out.
“I thought I could do that, but it turns out I can’t. ”
Dean blinked at him, scrambling. “You want me to come meet your father?” he landed on, and Bailey rolled his eyes in disgust and stalked into the bathroom.
Dean tumbled out of the sheets, pausing to make the bed because he hated an unmade bed, made sure the phones were in the charger and Bailey’s picture of his old boyfriend who had passed away was straight, as was only respectful, and then followed him in.
“It’s not only sex!” he cried over the pounding of the water.
Bailey ripped the shower curtain back and stared at him. “It took you five minutes, and that’s all you could come up with?”
Dean scowled at him, stripping off his clothes.
“You are not coming in here!” Bailey protested.
“Of course I am. I need a shower, and we’re having a discussion, and this only makes sense.
” And Bailey’s skin seemed to feed something in Dean that he usually needed a week at his parents’ house to get.
That humming sense of well-being that his family could give him—if he relaxed enough to let it—seemed to fill Dean up with only a few touches from Bailey.
Even the random ones, like to his hair as they sat at the TV, or across his back as Dean was making dinner. But he didn’t have words for that.
Still, Bailey was staring at him (or squinting at him through the spray) in outrage as Dean entered the giant glass cubicle, which as far as Dean could tell was the only reason Bailey was paying such outrageous rent for this apartment.
Yes, Dean had looked up the cost of rent here when he’d looked up the address the first time. Was he not supposed to?