Chapter Nineteen
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Name: Vivian Marist (filed on behalf of)
Title: President
Location: Vancouver
Description: Business dinner
Other attendees: Holt Traynor (Empath Initiative); Victor Nichols (Polaris Empathic Research Facility)
—STONE SOLUTIONS CANADA EXPENSE REPORT
Reece became aware he was in a moving vehicle before he even opened his eyes. “Where are we?”
Grayson’s voice reached his ears. “Almost to the border.”
Reece opened his eyes. He was in the passenger seat of Grayson’s truck—seat belt fastened, thank goodness, it wouldn’t do to risk him flying around the truck and distracting Grayson from the road—reclined and covered with Grayson’s big coat. “Did you say border ?”
“We decided we were running away to Canada. Or maybe you don’t remember that part, because thirty seconds later you’d knocked yourself out colder than this weather.”
Reece winced as events came rushing back to him. “Oops?”
“ Oops , he says.” Grayson gestured to the glove box. “Your gloves are in there. You don’t have to wear them around me, but you do need to remember you took them off before you go touching me.”
Why had he taken them off in the truck bed? Reece reached for the memory, but it slipped away.
The memory of Grayson’s skin, though. That was seared into his brain. “You have really nice hands. Like, they’re all big, and warm,” Reece said, and then his brain caught up with his mouth. He cringed. “Jesus, sorry, my brain’s still fuzzy, ignore me slobbering over your hands. Please. ”
Grayson’s eyes darted to him, then back to the road. “I didn’t hear any slobbering. I heard you trying to flatter me into forgetting you’re not supposed to take your gloves off in public. And I didn’t forget, but you were also supposed to stay put, so I guess I’m just gonna add more lines to that long list of things you’re already in trouble for.”
Reece’s shoulders relaxed. Grayson wasn’t going to make fun of him for being so desperately untouched. “So what’s an empath got to do to get out of trouble?” He made a face. “That sounds like the start of a bad porn.”
“Or a real good one,” Grayson muttered.
Reece snorted. “Don’t tell me you’ve got a thing for bad empaths. That would make your job very difficult, wouldn’t it?”
“Sure would,” Grayson said, eyes fixed forward.
Reece sat up, bringing the seat upright with him as he held the cozy coat blanket in place. Night had fallen while he’d been unconscious, the highway a dark sea with red taillights. At some point the rain had become big fluffy white flakes of snow that caught in the truck’s headlights and landed on the windshield. The seat warmer was on and Grayson had cranked the heat up, making the truck cab feel like a glimpse of summer in the heart of winter. Reece could almost imagine driving through a warm night in Texas, windows down and sunroof open. Parking somewhere they could lie in the bed and stargaze together.
He shook his head quickly, to clear it of those kinds of thoughts. Lusting after Grayson he might be able to deal with; feelings were absolutely off-limits. “Any chance you’ve got something to drink stashed around here?”
Grayson gestured at the cup holders, where a pair of paper cups with lids and straws were sitting. “I hit up a drive-through in Bellingham. Told the cashier you were a deep sleeper.”
“Now that’s a bald-faced lie.” Reece picked up the cup and took a sip. Vanilla cream soda. He smiled around the straw.
Grayson twisted, one hand on the steering wheel and eyes on the road while he started to reach into the backseat. “Got you some kind of veggie—”
“Hands on the steering wheel,” Reece snapped. “I’ll get it.”
“Sugar, you can’t reach the backseat. Not without unbuckling your seat belt, and I know you’re not gonna do that.”
“Excuse you, honey ,” said Reece, and he’d been aiming for sarcasm to match Grayson’s patronizing, but damn. That had rolled off the tongue a little too easy. “I can too reach.” Lie. He pinched his lips together, ignoring the rumbling in his stomach. “I’ll just wait until the border.”
“Empaths.” Grayson put on his blinker.
“What are you doing?”
“Feeding you.” He pulled onto the shoulder and popped on his hazard lights. He stretched one long arm into the seat behind Reece and came back with a paper bag in hand. “Here. And take it carefully , unless you want to spend a few more hours unconscious.”
Reece chanced a glance at him. In the dark of the truck’s cab, he couldn’t see the missing emotions. Just his partially lit face, the high cheekbones, the line of his jaw. The lips Reece could lose himself in until nothing existed but Grayson.
“Thanks,” he muttered, painstakingly avoiding Grayson’s hand as he took the bag. He dug in and found a veggie burger, Tater Tots, and three fruit-filled pastries. Reece might have been the endlessly awkward mayor of Weirdo Town, but Grayson understood him, neuroses, quirks, and all.
He popped four Tater Tots in his mouth as he pulled out his phone. “Did you already tell Jamey—aw, fuck.” His cheeks flushed. “You took a picture ?”
“Thought you’d want to see it.”
“I thought pictures of you were classified!”
“They are.”
Reece narrowed his eyes. “So now there’s a top secret picture of me ass-up over your shoulder?”
“There sure is,” Grayson said. “You would’ve been face down on the pavement if I hadn’t caught you. And remember you only got yourself in that position because you went and knocked yourself out.”
Ugh, that was an annoyingly fair point. “And you needed to carry me like this why ?”
“So my hands were free to open the truck,” Grayson said, like that had been a stupid question with an obvious answer, which in fairness it probably was.
Reece’s gaze stayed on the picture, how unbothered Grayson looked by his weight, the way his arm wrapped around his thighs to hold him in place.
It was infuriatingly hot . Reece could extrapolate a whole damn night from this one image, bickering but laughing as Grayson carried him across the studio to toss him down on the bed, Reece’s mouth on his until they were both kiss-drunk, his hands on Grayson until he’d mapped every inch. They could have so much fun together.
If they weren’t who they were.
Reece took a breath through his nose. “Tell me you let Jamey know where we are but without the picture.”
“Being the Dead Man doesn’t mean I have a death wish,” said Grayson. “I know better than to send your sister photographic proof of me manhandling you.”
How about you come over here and manhandle me some more —Reece shook his head to try and clear away that wildly unhelpful thought. “What’s our plan for the border?” he asked, like a subject change could somehow make him stop wanting Grayson. “I don’t have a passport.”
Grayson cleared his throat. “You don’t actually have anything but your phone, your wallet, and the clothes you got on.”
Reece groaned. “I didn’t even think of that. What was your big plan there?”
“We’re going to Canada, not the moon. Last I checked, they have stores.” Grayson gestured at the glove box. “And the border plan is in the first aid kit.”
Reece furrowed his brow but got the kit out of the glove box from under his gloves. Opening the hinge lid revealed a shallow tray of supplies, and under the tray was—
“How many passports do you have?”
“Enough to do my job.” The road was more brightly lit now, a line of cars up ahead waiting at the single open booth at the border. “I change the truck license plates every few months. It’ll come back as a rental if they run them.”
Reece picked up the top passport, the darkest green in the dim light with México Pasaporte on the front. “Won’t these all have your picture? Not only can I not remotely pass for you, don’t you think the border agent is going to notice if the pictures match?”
“The pictures aren’t identical, but if they do notice, then I have actual government credentials I can pull out. But I want to keep us under the radar, and EI doesn’t know about these identities.”
Keep us under the radar. Meaning EI still didn’t know the two of them had run off to Canada. Reece side-eyed Grayson. “Does EI have any idea you keep all these secrets from them?”
“Wouldn’t be secrets if they knew.”
“But you’re the Dead Man . Aren’t you, like, an EI agent, in a way? Doesn’t Stone Solutions have you on their payroll?” Reece gestured at the border. “You can’t tell me any of them would be happy with you, if they knew about this.”
“I’m not exactly in the business of making folks happy.”
“But what is EI going to do when it learns you’re cutting them out of the loop?” Reece pressed. “What is Stone Solutions going to do if they find out? Are you going to get in trouble?”
“You know I can look out for myself.” And before Reece could argue, Grayson nodded at the stack. “We’re almost at the border. Give me the US one for León Collins—I have a beard in that picture. You take the Canadian one.”
Reece pulled out the blue passports from the stack and opened one up to find a version of Grayson with dark brown hair and glasses. “Thirty-one-year-old Teodoro James, born in Victoria,” he said, reading from the page. “Nice disguise, but I will never pass for half this hot and you know it.”
“I don’t know anything of the sort.” And before Reece could process that compliment, Grayson was adding, “Pull the coat to your chin and face the window. Pretend to be asleep.”
Reece groaned, but it wasn’t like he had a better option. “If we’re going to be around another person, let me put my gloves back on—”
“You can’t,” Grayson said.
“But I have to—”
“We’re here because you almost got empath-napped,” Grayson said, cutting him off. “And there is a Canadian empath out there who’s still missing. So far the only thing we’ve learned that you and Ms. Pelletier from Montreal have in common, besides being empaths, is that y’all both have sisters who picked careers saving people. That’s not much to go on, and until we know what’s going on, we can’t risk anyone learning you’re an empath. All right?”
Reece sighed, but nodded. He passed the two passports over, then stuck the others back in the glove box. He reclined the seat a bit, pulled the coat up high, and rolled on his side, just as Grayson pulled past the Peace Arch and into the line.
This late on a freezing Monday night, the border line was short, and before too long, Reece could sense the light on the outside of his eyelids. He peeked through his lashes over the dashboard. They were next in line, and he could just make out the border agent in the booth, the lines in her forehead, the tenseness in her shoulders. In a near-silent whisper that only Jamey or Grayson would still be able to hear, he said, “Can you ham up the Southern thing? Lay it on really, really thick?”
“Maybe. Why?”
“The border agent looks like an introvert who’s had a long day and is very tired of people,” Reece said, in the same whisper. “Last thing she’s going to want to deal with in her line is a chatty Southerner who won’t shut up. Annoy her enough and she might be itching to push us through and be rid of you.”
The car in front pulled away, and Reece closed his eyes fully. He felt the truck move forward, then heard the window lower.
The woman’s voice came. “Passports?”
“Yes, ma’am, here you go.” Grayson’s voice had suddenly become less deep and a lot more friendly than Reece had ever heard it. “How’s your night going? They got heat in that little booth there to keep y’all warm in all this snow? We don’t get much snow in Texas, but we do get ice storms, and then we don’t have the salt or plows ready to go like y’all do, though I reckon one of those storms would shut things down even up here. Hail too, and graupel—bet y’all haven’t even heard of that.”
The agent grunted, and Reece could almost taste her grumpiness. “Business travel or personal?”
“Personal as it gets. The long-distance thing gets real old, real fast.” Grayson had dialed the accent up to thick as molasses. “My boyfriend—that’s Theo there, asleep in the seat, you’ve got his passport—he came down to see me, like a—we call them Winter Texans, but do y’all call them snowbirds here, like Yankees do, or maybe y’all call them snow geese in Canada, because of the Canadian geese?—anyway, we met online and then Theo came to Austin for American Thanksgiving—you can see I used to have a beard in the picture, had to shave it for the relatives, I’m thinking of growing it back but that’s a whole other conversation—and now it’s my turn to visit Vancouver Island; I didn’t even know there were islands in Canada before I met him. Do I need to wake him? Baby, we’re at the border. Can you tell the agent why you were down in Texas with me and how we’re going to your place in Oak Bay? Oh, and tell her that whole long story about how I didn’t know you could drive cars onto the ferry ’cause I thought you rode dog sleds in Canada.”
“It’s fine, I can see him,” the agent said hastily. “Welcome to Canada.”
Reece bit his lip hard, trying not to smile and ruin Grayson’s unexpectedly good performance.
A few minutes later, the truck was moving again. Reece opened his eyes. “You took my advice,” he said happily, as he brought the seat back up.
“When it comes to people, I put my money on the empath’s opinion every time.” Grayson’s voice had dropped back into its usual gravelly register, and his accent seemed downright subtle now, in comparison.
Reece settled into the seat as they drove down the dark highway, the more sparsely populated marshy area just before the explosion of Vancouver. “The boyfriend thing was an inspired touch.”
That sounded casual, didn’t it? And not like he was still a bit giddy over it?
“To be honest, I wasn’t sure I was gonna pull it off,” Grayson said. “Been a while since I’ve been anyone’s boyfriend.”
You looking to be one again, by any chance? Ready for someone to take you off the market? Reece cleared his throat. “I thought you were really convincing,” he said. “I mean, you’re calling Theo baby, waking him up all sweet—I bet León’s got him smitten.”
“I bet León wouldn’t know Celsius from centimeters, but he drove all the way up here from Texas in December,” Grayson said. “Theo’s definitely his baby.”
“See?” Reece said. “Very convincing boyfriend. Bad driving boyfriend, on both sides of the border, but convincing.”
Grayson glanced at him. “What bad driving ?”
“That speed limit sign you just blew past was for eighty kilometers an hour. Not miles.”
There was a pause.
“We’re in Canada for five whole minutes and you already forgot which part of your speedometer to watch?” Reece said. “Or does Evan not know Celsius from centimeters either?”
“Hush,” Grayson muttered, as the truck slowed.