Chapter 5
FIVE
Morrison
“Oh, my god,” Morrison groaned while Chris took his time unlocking the front door. “Hurry the fuck up, I have to pee.”
“Serves you right,” Chris said heartlessly, turning the key and pushing the door open. “Mom’s drinks are always dangerous. It’s best to pace yourself. How many did you have anyway?”
Morrison had no clue and couldn’t calculate anything due to the aforementioned need to urinate. “You weren’t here to warn me, so how was I supposed to know? And anyway, I was pacing myself. But then I lost count.”
Chris stepped aside so Morrison could go ahead of him.
“Losing count is inevitable when Susie Hatch is making the drinks, and extremely dangerous.”
“Where’s the damn bathroom?” Ivan couldn’t see well in the dim interior. Why didn’t the owner at least have a couple of handy night-lights?
“Down the hall to the right. Watch the coffee table there.”
Turning toward the hallway Chris had indicated, Morrison immediately knocked into the coffee table. Pain radiated from his shin, almost but not quite overwhelming his need to use the bathroom.
“Fucking motherfucker, that hurt.”
The coffee table hadn’t budged from its spot in the middle of the carpet. It was a beast, with what appeared to be several sets of encyclopedias piled onto a shelf underneath while the upper surface was covered with magazines set in stacks, like the place was a hair salon or doctor’s office.
Morrison heard Chris’s distinct snort as he pulled the front door shut.
“Was that a laugh?” he asked. His eyes had adjusted to the gloom, and he began to move across the room more carefully. Who knew what else the owner had stashed in plain sight?
“Maybe it was.”
Morrison made it into the bathroom without further injury and quickly took care of business. When he returned to the living room, a knock-off Tiffany-style lamp had been turned on and Chris was relaxed on a truly heinous couch Morrison had somehow missed on his first pass-through. Personally, he thought the couch was better served by the dark.
The thing should’ve been in a horror museum. The frame was made of wicker, maybe bamboo, and spray-painted black by an amateur who’d missed huge swatches of the thing. Some of the ugliest floral upholstery and matching pillows Morrison had ever seen hid the worst of the paint job, but not all of it. The piece of furniture took up most of the real estate against one wall, across from a picture window looking onto the street.
“Will that hold both of us?” he asked doubtfully.
Chris raised an eyebrow at him. “I guess there’s only one way to find out.”
“I could sit in the matching chair, I suppose.” He took another good look at the couch and the equally weirdly spray- painted chair. “Who puts this kind of shit inside their house? Isn’t this outdoor furniture?”
“We’re in Arizona, Ivan. Life works differently here.”
Ivan . Gah.
Morrison’s heart stuttered. He loved hearing his first name roll off Chris’s tongue the way it was meant to be spoken. How many times could he get Chris to say his given name while they were pretending to be boyfriends?
Admittedly, Ivan hadn’t been kidding about the boyfriend thing. This forced vacation was a gift from the federal gods, his best chance to get Hatch to see him as someone other than the guy he needed to constantly monitor. As the man who loved Chris Hatch regardless of his Little Black Cloud tendencies. And anyway, most of the shit he got up to was just to get Chris’s attention.
What could he say? That laser stare of Chris’s turned him on.
With care, Ivan lowered his weight down onto one side of the couch. No way was he sitting in the chair. He wanted to be as close to Chris Hatch as possible. When Ivan Morrison made a plan, he stuck to it.
And if that sounded a bit creepy in his head, he didn’t mean it that way. He was just glad he hadn’t said anything out loud. Fingers crossed. Quickly, he glanced at Chris; nope, his ex-boss wasn’t staring at him like he’d said something inappropriate.
Counting that as a win.
Shifting around, he made the couch creak under the additional weight, but it held. Exchanging a goofy grin with Chris, he settled back against the cushions and directed his gaze out the window, where he could see that the neighborhood was getting ready for the night. Lights were clicking on inside the homes, the blue flicker of TV sets was gleaming through front windows, and he heard something that sounded an awful lot like a car engine trying to start.
“What’s that sound?” he asked.
Chris listened for a moment. “Cactus wren.”
“That’s a bird? No way.”
“Yes, way.”
Hatch was, possibly, as relaxed as Morrison had ever seen him. His arms were slung across the back of the couch and one ankle rested on the opposite knee. This was one of the first times he had seen Chris not wearing anything that wasn’t a suit, suit-related, or suit-adjacent. Not the very first time, but no more than the fifth time for sure.
The first instance had been a year ago, when Special Agent in Charge Hatch had answered Ivan’s knock on his front door wearing a pair of disheveled pajama bottoms and a hoodie with an unidentifiable stain on it. Human after all.
“You look good in shorts,” Morrison blurted. “And the t-shirt is nice too.” He refrained from commenting on the fact that they were all black.
Chris looked down at himself as if he’d forgotten what he was wearing.
Oh, damn. There went his mouth.
Glancing back up at him, Chris said, “So, I guess there are some things we need to talk about, Boyfriend .”
Morrison grimaced and groaned, knowing what was coming next. His big mouth went and got him in trouble. Again. He wished he could blame the alcohol, but he wasn’t drunk, just tipsy.
“No need to talk. Nope, nope, nope,” he said, dragging his thumb and index finger across his lips as if zipping them together. “Zip it, lock it, put it in my pocket.”
For a second Chris stared at him, eyebrows drawn together in what appeared to be utter confusion. Then, without warning, a bubble of laughter burst from him. This was followed by more, louder, hoots of laughter. And he kept laughing. Bemused, Morrison watched as Chris flung himself forward and wrapped his arms around his middle while he lost it, his shoulders shaking as he huffed and guffawed.
Chris Hatch . Mister Fucking Serious. Howling with laughter until tears were streaming down his face, and it was beautiful, joyous. Ivan wanted to make it happen over and over.
Doubt he’d been pushing aside reared its head and hammered into him.
This whole shenanigan was ridiculous. Of all the shenanigans he’d ever shenaniganned, this one... He paused his train of thought to ponder for a moment: Just how big was a shenanigan?
Anyway, moving right along.
It was beyond outrageous that he’d driven all the way to Arizona to barge in on Chris’s vacation. There was no way anyone would ever believe Chris would be interested in him, much less want the label of Ivan Morrison’s boyfriend. But laughter was the most infectious disease of them all, and regardless of his self-doubt, Morrison found himself laughing along with him.
Eventually, they laughed themselves out. The room turned quiet and Chris was watching him closely—probably wondering if Ivan had finally lost his last marble. Ivan quieted down, feeling twitchy under the piercing scrutiny.
“So, we’re boyfriends, right?” Chris asked, wiping his eyes. “Just clarifying, getting the story straight, so to speak. And we’re moving in together as soon as your lease is up?”
So, not wondering about Ivan’s grasp on reality then. That was a relief.
“You know what happens, Chris.” No way was he uttering the word boss at this moment. “A thought gets into my head and suddenly boom . Your mom surprised me, and it just popped out.” And anyway, Chris wasn’t his boss anymore, or almost wasn’t, even if he didn’t know it yet. He really needed to tell Chris he’d put in for a permanent transfer to Radisson’s team.
“It just popped out,” Chris repeated, snorting again. “Look, Ivan, I know you, not only as part of my team but also from reading your file. You’ve withstood interrogations by hardened motorcycle gang members. You’ve infiltrated gangs running drugs, weapons, and humans from Canada to Mexico. My mom is not that scary.”
“Her lemonade is damn strong.”
“I may be a little drunk right now,” Chris continued. “Okay, a lot drunk. But I’m pretty damn sure that Mom’s lemonade didn’t make you say those things. Or sit there and flip through all seventeen of the photo albums she and Dad put together.”
“Eighteen,” Ivan corrected. “Susie said she just finished the last one this past winter. And, oh my god, that picture of you and your folks at your college graduation. I think that’s my favorite.”
“See?” Chris pointed a wobbly index finger in his direction. “That’s what I’m talking about.” His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “You want to think there’s something interesting in me—always dropping by the office, hanging out, sharing your five-alarm take-out, trying to connect or something. Which is”—he shrugged and flailed his hands—“ridiculous. I am the world’s most boring person. Add to that the fact that I pined— pined —after someone for fucking years when I knew he wasn’t interested in me? Boring and an idiot. Go figure.”
Wait. Ivan stopped breathing for a moment.
Chris thought he was boring? Was Morrison having an auditory hallucination?
“You’re not boring,” Ivan said seriously. “You’re reliable. Although you have to admit, the phad Thai from that food truck is amazing.”
“Hmph.” Skepticism oozed from the single word. “I’m reliable. So reliable that I racked up enough vacation to have myself literally forced by the higher-ups to take time off. And there was nowhere for me to go except my parents’ fifty-and-up retirement community in Arizona. I have nothing better to do than work. ‘Get a hobby,’ they say. What the fuck should I do? Start needlework? Does a person just randomly wake up and decide, ‘Today is the day I am going to start collecting rocks’?”
Morrison leaned over and kissed his boss.
On the lips.