Colin #2
“Can do,” Carter said hastily. Then I heard and felt the faint whoosh of air pressure shifting through the building as he opened the doors to go outside. It was only then that Xander came into the room, his shoulders rolled into a slight hunch as he got a cup of coffee before turning to see me.
“Afternoon,” I said lightly as I looked him over.
He’d ditched the formal wear, which was a shame; he’d filled those pants and his shirt out nicely.
They were replaced with a pair of jeans that still hugged his thighs, not a surprise considering the damn things were as thick as my waist, I’d swear.
And a shirt that hung a little loose on him, but even if I was robbed of that show, I could still appreciate the vein that ran down the inside of his right bicep and into his forearm.
“Doing fuck all, I see,” he said dryly.
I clicked my tongue. “Seems someone forgot to put me on a duty roster, and since I don’t have any pressing need to be in the clinic, and everyone else is busy with their own shit and not immediately needing my help, I decided to have a cup of coffee. I was up later than I expected last night.”
His eyes narrowed, and he spoke loudly. “Cait!”
“What?” she shot back in an equally annoyed tone.
God, I loved the way the two of them interacted.
There was about as much romantic and sexual chemistry between them as there was between two desert rocks, but the rest of their chemistry?
Flawless. Like two siblings who couldn’t decide if they hated or loved each other.
“One-on-one meeting,” he growled.
“Fine!” she snapped, and I smirked when I heard music through her door.
“Cat siblings,” I muttered, thinking of the two cats I’d had as a kid who had come from the same litter. One minute they were smacking the living shit out of each other, and the next they were curled up in the same sunbeam.
“What?” he asked, frowning.
I waved him off, not trying to piss him off early in the apparent one-on-one meeting we were having. “Sorry, thinking aloud.”
“Just what we need,” he said, coming closer to the table, but I noticed he didn’t sit down, choosing to stand behind the chair across from mine.
Drama queen.
“So,” I said, looking around. “This is where you have your one-on-one meetings, eh? I thought your cabin was your office.”
“I’m not bringing everyone into my goddamn cabin, idiot,” he growled.
I smirked. “Oh? Then I guess I should feel honored that I was given the chance to come into such a sacred area with your blessing.”
He stared at me for a few seconds, his jaw ticking. “You want to piss me off, don’t you?”
“Honestly, at this point? I think you want a reason to be angry,” I said, shrugging when his eyes narrowed. “But for what it’s worth, I still wonder why you dragged me there rather than talking to me here, like you are now.”
“I…don’t know,” he said in annoyance, and I wondered if it pained him to admit that aloud.
I took a moment to consider our situation, knowing Cait had turned up her music to block out any noise and that if someone were to come in, we would sense it so long as we weren’t distracted. “Could it be because some part of you wanted me there alone with you?”
His shoulders went taut as he hunched forward slightly and glanced over his shoulder. “Don’t.”
“Or we could pretend like it didn’t happen,” I said with a roll of my eyes.
“Maybe,” he grunted.
“Right, we’ll see how long that lasts,” I said with a shake of my head. “So, if you wanted to send Carter off, and have Cait not listen in, but you didn’t want to talk about what happened last night, what was it you wanted to talk about?”
He fidgeted, his face taking on the appearance of someone who had just jammed something unexpectedly bitter into their mouth before it eased into his normal frown. “I…heard part of your conversation with Carter.”
“What, just now?”
“Yeah, and she didn’t tell me everything because she seems to think she needs to protect all of you from me, but Cait told me some of what happened yesterday too.”
“How…thorough of you.”
“Huh?”
“I already told you what happened last night.”
“So?”
“So, you’re not even trying to trust me,” I said with a roll of my eyes and easing back into my seat with a shake of my head. “Whatever, it’s only been a week. I suppose that will take time. A little baseline trust would be nice, but—”
“Shut up,” he grunted, and I did. Not because I wanted to listen to him, but because he didn’t sound pissed, just…strained. “If I didn’t trust you, I wouldn’t have sent you out without me around to keep an eye on you. If I thought you couldn’t be trusted, I wouldn’t have chosen you to come here.”
Okay, that was new. “Wait, you chose me? I thought I was chosen for you.”
He wrinkled his nose. “Those suit-wearing, desk-riding dickheads might have a say in my budget, but they’re sure as shit not going to have a say in who is or isn’t working at my fucking outpost. The one time I let them do the picking, the fuckhead they sent got someone killed…one of our own.”
That was the first time I’d seen proof that he genuinely cared about the guys here, not just a few hints to support the theory. Not that I thought for a single minute he cared so little that he would be flippant about lives, but I could see the pain under his anger.
“When…was this?” I wondered.
His nostrils flared. “It would be…seven years, this September.”
Seven years and the memory still made him look like he wanted to put his fist through a wall. Yeah, yeah, okay, he was a bit of a sentimental bastard.
“And,” he continued, fingers flexing, “if I didn’t think you were trustworthy, I wouldn’t have let it go when you lied to my face last night.
And don’t say you didn’t. I’m accepting your version of events, but I’m not going to pretend you weren’t leaving parts out and lying about others.
If I didn’t trust you, I would have got the whole story and put your and Carter’s asses on probation. ”
Okay, he was trying to be reasonable, so I bit back the comment that itched to drop from my lips. “Okay.”
His expression didn’t tell me if he was waiting with bated breath for me to make some comment or come up with the words to say whatever he’d come to say. Whatever the case, it took him a moment before he grunted. “Right. And I spoke to Reno.”
“I’m not even going to say what we both know I’m thinking at the moment,” I told him with a smirk.
“Good,” he said with a scowl. “And…I was right to trust you, I think. It was a little messy, how you handled shit, but I can’t think of one time any of us handled shit around here smoothly.
Especially me. Leading people is a pain in the ass and you’re never going to get it completely right, but you… you handled that shit.”
Of all the things I thought he was going to say, a genuine compliment, awkward and a little off course but still a compliment, was not what I was expecting. “I…wasn’t trying to lead anyone. That’s uh, your title.”
“Yeah well, someone around here needs to step up and take charge of shit when I’m not around to make the calls, and Cait shouldn’t have to do it even though she’s got more experience than all of you,” he said with a shrug.
“The guys work well together, they figure shit out most of the time, and that’s how I want it.
I don’t want to hold everyone’s hands when they need to tie their shoes.
It’s why I wanted you to go without me the first time, to see if you could mesh with it.
And from what Jake told me, you did just fine.
And now your second call out, where I should have been there but—”
“Couldn’t,” I supplied, because there was no way in hell I was going to touch his divorce right then. If there was anything that seemed to strike all the nerves, it was my smart mouth in second place, and his divorce at an astronomically high first place.
“Right,” he said, and I smiled at the relief in his voice. “And you saw the situation needed to be taken in hand. No committee work, no group vote; something needed to be done. And for the record, you made the right call. That second girl, she was—”
“Gone,” I said with a familiar heaviness in my chest. “How much hell are we going to catch for the damage her body took?”
At that, he smirked. “You let the suit-wearers worry about that.”
“Uh-huh, till they come to your doorstep asking why it happened the way it did.”
For the first time, I felt uneasy at the malice in his face, especially because it was accompanied by a twisted little smile.
“Do you know how much fun I have watching those little fuckers come to me, chests puffed out, pretending like they know their heads from their asses? And being able to shove their heads back up their asses where it's normally lodged because they don’t know the first fucking thing about being in a position like you were last night?”
“You know, I wondered about your leadership,” I said slowly, chuckling.
“You’re so…distant, kind of cold, definitely a dick but…
now I have a better picture. You keep everyone contained, but you’re not trying to nail them down, letting us do our thing the best way we can.
And if the shit hits the fan, you’re right there with a racket to smack it back at the flingers. ”
“You fuck up? I won’t keep your ass out of the fryer, but you can bet that ass of yours that if the right thing was done, I’m not throwing any of my own under the bus.”
“I dunno,” I said slowly, because I couldn’t help myself. “Not a bet I’d take easily. It’s a big one.”
“What?” he asked, eyes narrowing suspiciously.
“You said to bet my ass, but that’s a lot to bet,” I said, smirking.
He stared at me for a moment before sighing. “I guess it is.”
Xander looked as surprised as I felt, and I realized it had slipped out without him realizing he’d been thinking it. “Oh, really now?”
“Do not,” he said, jabbing a finger at me.
“Hey, I’m not going to tell you what you should or shouldn’t be thinking about,” I said. “Even if it is my ass.”