Royally Busted #2
“God,” Bailey muttered, turning to the spray at last. “You really can’t take a hint.”
“No,” Dean said, reaching around him and making sure their bodies slicked together as he did so. “I’m very mildly on the autism spectrum, so taking a hint is not my strong suit.”
Bailey gaped. “You… you never mentioned that before.” Then he shook his head, scattering droplets of water everywhere . “Not that it should surprise me. You haven’t mentioned anything before!”
He was charging up his mad again, Dean thought, once again at a loss.
“What were you hinting?” he asked, partly to derail Bailey’s mad, and partly to try to get a footing on why this thing, this unnamed, amazing thing that he and Bailey had been doing for the last three months might be going to suddenly disappear.
He didn’t want it to disappear.
In fact he was realizing with a bit of panic that he absolutely needed that thing right here .
“That I wanted you to meet my father!” Bailey burst out.
“That might be hard,” Dean said. “I’m expecting to get called into the office later today. I will still have time to do your laundry, though.”
“ See ?” Bailey cried, making no sense at all. “I didn’t know that, and it would be nice to know that. It would be nice to have some warning when you’re going to show up—”
“Oh!” Dean said happily. “That’s easy. Whenever my case takes me here or I have a weekend off.”
Bailey scrubbed at his face with his hands, and Dean helpfully put a washcloth and his soap bag in his hands so he could do that more efficiently.
Bailey stared at the objects and then started to use them absent-mindedly, shaking his head and muttering to himself. It was hard to hear above the spray, but it sounded like he was saying, “ Such useful information,” and “It would have been great to know that from the start!”
“The autism?” Dean asked, to make sure. “It wasn’t assessed until college, when we were studying metacognition and ways people absorb information.
I replied to a test question that I had to very carefully organize information or I couldn’t connect motivation to result—for example, unless I explained to myself why it was important to pass English, I would simply not do the homework because it seemed frivolous.
Once I could explain to myself that English was about communication, which is obviously my weak point, I actually enjoyed my classes.
I learn with very specific guidelines and communicate very literally. Why would it be a problem?”
“It wouldn’t,” Bailey said shortly, “unless your lack of communication was hurting my feelings , and I assumed you were doing it because you didn’t care .”
That pulled Dean back. “But I do care if I’m hurting your feelings,” he said, dismayed. “I’m sorry. What would you like to communicate about to help me fix that?”
Bailey let out a groan. “Dean, I can’t do this in the shower. I can’t do it on the way to work. And if you’re not going to be here when I get back, I don’t know why I should bother at all. I care about you, but I am obviously the last thing on your priority list—”
“That’s not true!” Dean protested, his dismay morphing into panic.
“I had to bring my plants to the office in Sacramento because they would die because I spent so much time in Austin. I miss my plants. My brother Reg was going to help me pick out a kitten, and I had to put that off, and his feelings were hurt, but I am spending all my time in Austin, and it wouldn’t be fair to the kitten. You are on my priority list!”
He stood there, naked and dripping—he hadn’t soaped up at all—and Bailey finished soaping his pits and then handed the bag to him, along with the washcloth.
“I didn’t know that,” he said softly.
“I didn’t know you needed to,” Dean said, hoping this could be the end of it.
“I did,” Bailey said with a sigh.
Dean couldn’t be sure, but he thought maybe—just maybe—he could make a move now.
He got close enough to wrap his arms around Bailey’s shoulders and pull him back against Dean’s chest. “Are there other things you need to know?” he asked, thinking that a list might be nice.
He and Marcus lived off lists when they worked together.
“So many things,” Bailey said with a little laugh. “But right now… for once, I don’t want to talk. This is nice.”
Dean let out a sigh, enjoying Bailey’s body again, some of his morning reforming around him with the peace he desperately needed.
“I’m glad,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about the kitten. It makes me sad.” He hated to admit it, but he missed his family. Every last interfering one of them had a solid, immutable piece of his heart.
“How many brothers do you have?” Bailey asked. “Just the two?”
It occurred to Dean that this might be the kind of information Bailey had been talking about when he insisted they communicate.
“Five,” he said shortly. “And one sister.”
Bailey stiffened in his arms. “ Five ?”
“Why is that freaking you out?” Dean asked, truly at a loss.
Bailey snorted and went back to letting Dean soap him up. “That’s a big family, Dean. You didn’t mention them.”
“Did you think all the time I spend on my phone is for work? Marcus has his own family to bother.”
“Marcus isn’t your brother?”
Dean blinked, and it occurred to him that if Bailey didn’t know this at least, he may perhaps have kept his life too much to himself.
“Marcus is my partner ,” he said. “With the Bureau. His last name is Cabrillo. We work cases together.”
Bailey was quiet for a long moment. “I can’t figure out if that’s better or worse,” he muttered. “How is it I didn’t know that?” Then he straightened up and glared at Dean. “Oh yeah. Because you didn’t tell me that!”
With that he stepped carefully out of the shower and out of Dean’s arms and began to towel off while Dean soaped his hair.
“It’s not my fault you didn’t ask,” he said, mostly to himself.
The ripping back of the shower curtain came as a surprise. “I’m sorry?”
“You didn’t ask,” Dean told him crossly, closing his eyes so he could rinse his hair. He finished, shook his head, and stepped out, then reached around Bailey’s angry body to grab the last dry towel.
“I didn’t… I didn’t….”
“I asked,” Dean said. “You were very forthcoming. You told me about your father, how your mother passed when you were in high school, how hard medical school was, how much debt you still have.” He smiled a little, wistfully.
“How much you love your cat, and how you leave the television on sometimes or have the neighbor boy come in and make sure he’s okay and feed him when you’re working doubles.
How your dad calls and talks to him, and you know that because your recorder tapes him singing.
I told Val about your dad singing Gordon Lightfoot to the cat—he said that was encouraging. ”
“You told your brother about me?” There was something desperately hopeful then about Bailey’s voice.
“Yes,” Dean said.
“Anybody else?”
And he hated to shut that eagerness down, but he didn’t lie, prevaricate, or exaggerate.
“Only Val. Val doesn’t get nosy. He takes what I tell him in stride.” In the name of honestly, Dean felt like he should add, “Mostly he just grunts.”
“Great, there’s two of you,” Bailey muttered and then shook himself and, to Dean’s immense relief, smiled a little.
“Okay. It’s not exactly an invitation home to meet the parents, but I’ll take it.
It’s progress. Dry off and I’ll make you breakfast.” His face fell again.
“Do you really have to leave today?” he asked wistfully.
And—perhaps for the first time—Dean felt apologetic about answering the demands of his job. “We have to catch a flight to the Chihuahuan Desert today. We have a very exciting development in our case.”
Bailey just stared at him. “The Chihuahuan Desert. That’s romantic.”
Dean knew he was being sarcastic, but he didn’t play sarcasm games.
“In fact it’s not. There are some lovely places in Mexico and South America, but unless you’re an ecologist or botanist interested in three quarters of the world’s species of cacti, there’s not much to recommend it.
” He wrinkled his nose. “It’s really hot in July, for one thing. ”
Bailey raised his eyebrows, and that soft smile appeared, the one that Dean was starting to treasure. “Poor baby,” he said, moving close enough to kiss Dean’s cheek. “I’ll have to make you something really good for breakfast.”
Dean smiled back, savoring the feeling of their skin, warm and clean, in the steamy heat of the bathroom. “Maybe we could stop for breakfast on the way to the hospital.”
Bailey’s eyebrows went up. “You’re taking me to the hospital now?”
“Yeah,” Dean said softly, going in to kiss him again.
Bailey let out a soft sigh of surrender, and Dean fell into his sweetness all over again. Oh, this was good. Yes, it was probably addicting, but Dean? He was already an addict, and he had zero regrets.
Dean felt Bailey open, as he always did, and captured his breaths in his heart, like he had from the very beginning.
He devoured, stroked, lubed, and thrust with the same certainty he’d always used, but as he buried himself in his lover’s body, for the first time in an active, healthy sex life, a little voice in his head was saying this—the lovemaking, the sex—was not enough, and a little voice in his heart was begging him to open for more.