Chapter 20 #3
“Be careful,” I blurted, and the tiger shifter stopped, his hand partway into the safe.
“Something I should know?” he asked sharply.
I swallowed. “That’s really important to him,” I replied. “I don’t know what it does, because he didn’t think about that, just that this was really important, and he didn’t want to keep it upstairs.”
“This asshole has used charmed objects before,” Hart said. “Maybe let me?”
“And you touching this is any better than me, why?” Raj asked him.
“I come with magical defenses,” Hart replied. “Elf shit. If that fucking thing is magicked or cursed or whatever, I’ll know before I touch it. You won’t.”
Raj grunted, but he must have seen Hart’s point, because he stepped back from the safe, letting Hart take his place. The elf blew out a breath, then reached in hesitantly.
“It’s got something,” Hart reported. “It’s all tingly and shit, but I think that’s because what’s in the box is magic, not the box itself.”
“Are you going to hurt yourself if you touch it?” Raj asked him.
“I don’t… think so,” came the response. “Here goes fucking nothing.” Raj’s shoulders tensed, and I felt my own stomach flip a little as Hart’s arm muscles bunched, but nothing terrible happened, and Hart withdrew a wooden box about half the size of a shoe box.
Raj held out an evidence bag, then worked it over the box without tipping it so that they could carefully set it inside the filing box.
“That it here?” Raj asked, and Hart grimaced.
“I guess. We really should do a more thorough sweep—”
“We’re out, then,” Raj replied. “Before we find something that does take off somebody’s hand.”
I felt completely and utterly foolish. I was sitting in the passenger seat of Raj’s Subaru, trying not to let either my breathing or my heart rate reveal just how nervous I was to be sitting there, waiting for Raj to finish talking to a few other agents and then take me home.
I was conflicted about that, too.
I wanted Raj to be the one to take me home because I wanted to spend time with him—but I also didn’t want to experience the awkwardness of him still being annoyed with me, especially because it was justified.
After we’d left Jennings’s house, the team had reassembled in one of the work rooms in the basement of the FBI building, laying out evidence, documenting, analyzing, discussing, trying to connect Jennings to the Gates-Adams case.
I’d tried to essentially disappear into a corner, huddled in an uncomfortable folding chair, waiting for the moments when someone would remember I was there because they wanted me to touch something. It had only happened a few times, but when I’d asked Hart if I should leave, he’d shaken his head.
So I’d stayed.
It was late. After-dinner late, not that any of us had eaten.
And when Hart had turned to me to ask if I was ready to go, Raj had intervened, saying that he could take me home. Hart—probably wanting to see Taavi—had nodded and told me to get some rest.
Raj turned away from the others, then came close enough that it would be clear he was talking to me.
“Let’s go,” he said.
I stood and followed him out to the parking lot, not saying a word.
I didn’t know what to say. Whether it would be appropriate to comment on everything that had happened that day, whether I should ask about the cameras Jennings had set up, what he thought would come of all of it…
or to apologize again for having invaded his dreams.
I wasn’t sure how to do the first and too mortified to do last, so I kept my mouth shut and hoped I wouldn’t make things worse.
I couldn’t tell if it was better or worse that he didn’t say anything, either. At least not until he’d pulled up in front of my building.
“Rayn,” he said, as I reached for the door handle.
I paused, then turned my head to look at him.
“You have to know this can’t work,” he said, his voice strained.
“What?” I asked. Me working on cases for the FBI? Or on this case, specifically?
“This,” he repeated, then gestured between us.
I stared at him. “I don’t understand,” I admitted, feeling my face heat.
He let out a sigh. “You and me,” he said, his voice sounding a little like he was having trouble saying the words. “Whatever… Whatever happened in…” He let out another sigh. “Just whatever.”
I frowned. “I—”
“I’m more than a decade older than you are,” he blurted.
I blinked, even more confused than before.
“I was almost twelve when you were born. Twelve. Practically a teenager. I could have babysat you as a kid.”
I had no idea what was going on, so I just stared at him.
Raj ran a hand through his thick hair. “To say nothing of the fact that we’re working together. The FBI really hates that.”
“We can’t work together because you’re twelve years older than me?” I asked, when it became clear that he wasn’t going to provide any further explanation.
“What? No.” He looked startled. “We can work together. We can’t… I can’t…” He swallowed.
I waited.
He let out another sigh, this one almost harsh. “We can’t date,” he said finally.
I blinked. “I—”
“That’s why you were in my dreams, wasn’t it?” he asked, suddenly, and in gloom of twilight, the whites around his gold-brown irises were wide.
I felt my cheeks heat. I hadn’t actually thought about dating him. I’d thought about kissing him. About him touching me. About me touching him. Doing more than just touching. But I hadn’t explicitly thought about dating.
Because I didn’t think it was even remotely possible that he’d ever consider such a thing.
Which, clearly, he wouldn’t.
But I had no idea what to say that wouldn’t be either offensive or dismissive. Or an outright lie. So I didn’t say anything.
“It’s a bad idea,” he said, almost as though he were trying to convince himself rather than me. “No, a terrible idea.”
I waited. Because now that he’d mentioned the possibility—or impossibility—of dating, my treacherous brain wanted to think about it. Imagine it. Want it.
Which was completely counterproductive, since the whole point of this conversation was precisely the opposite of that.
“We can’t,” he said, then, and there was something in his voice that I couldn’t identify. Anger, maybe? Worry? I wasn’t sure.
And then he stared at me long enough that I felt like I had to say something.
“Okay,” I whispered.
“And please, stay out of my dreams.”
I nodded, then fled.
I stood in my tiny kitchen, staring into the stark light of my refrigerator, trying to convince myself that I needed to eat something because I hadn’t really had lunch, despite the fact that I’d done a lot of psychic work.
But now my stomach was a messy roil of anxiety, nausea, guilt, and, weirdly, pleasure at the fact that apparently Raj had thought about dating me at all.
He’d dismissed the idea, but not for any of the reasons I would have thought.
Not because I was weird or stupid or horribly awkward or unattractive or because he didn’t like me.
Because he was twelve years older than me and because we worked together.
While the conclusion—that he wasn’t going to consider dating me—was the same, somehow those two facts made me feel… flattered? pleased? stupidly hopeful?
It was completely ridiculous for me to feel any of those things, of course. He’d told me that we—we, as in us, as in a relationship—were a bad idea. A terrible idea, in fact. That we couldn’t date. That we shouldn’t.
And yet.
I often had a hard time with the fact that people often said one thing while meaning something else entirely different. That polite conventions and turns of phrase often indicated that certain things were or were not true, no matter what words were being said.
But even I understood that you didn’t make an argument for why you shouldn’t date someone unless you actually wanted to date them. Because if you didn’t want to date them, you wouldn’t be thinking about reasons why you should or shouldn’t at all.
I didn’t think about why I shouldn’t date Beck or Ward or Hart, for instance, because I had no interest in dating any of them.
I hadn’t thought about why I shouldn’t date Raj because I’d assumed that he would have no interest in me.
But not because he was older or because we worked together.
I’d assumed he just plain wouldn’t have any interest in even thinking about me and dating at the same time at all. Ever.
But, clearly, he had.
He’d only come up with two reasons why we shouldn’t.
And one of those reasons was temporary. It would disappear when we finished this case.
The other one wasn’t. He was always going to be older than me, and always by the same number of years.
But was that really as insurmountable as he seemed to think?
I knew Hart was several years older than Taavi.
Maybe not twelve, but more than two or three.
And did it really matter that much as you got older?
I knew there were plenty of celebrity couples—not that either one of us was a celebrity, or that celebrities were necessarily the best example of healthy relationship dynamics—who had much bigger age gaps.
Not that I was ever going to make an argument like that to Raj.
I couldn’t imagine ever saying anything to him about us dating.
I’d made my move—horribly inappropriate, invasive, and awful as it had been—and now I had to accept his answer.
It just… wasn’t quite as negative as I’d thought it would be.
Maybe in a decade he’d think about it again.
And maybe, to borrow a phrase from Hart, pigs would fucking fly.