Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Javi liked suits.
His were pricy, precise, and tailored to fit.
It wasn’t just because he looked good in them, though. He did, and he knew it, but that was just a bonus.
A good suit—an expensive one, worn like you didn’t care—conveyed authority and distance. It made it easy to identify him as the lead voice at the scene.
Unfortunately, now that he wasn’t in charge….
Things had changed, and so had his wardrobe.
Javi scratched at the collar of his gray FBI-branded polo shirt, untucked to hide the gun clipped to his belt, and held out a leaflet to the one girl in the group of giggling teens who seemed genuinely interested in the display.
“Thinking about a future in law enforcement?” he asked, his face stiff with the effort to be approachable.
The short brunette looked a little surprised to be singled out. She juggled her armload of fair goods about until she freed up one hand to take the tri-fold pamphlet.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. I don’t know about the FBI, though. I was thinking more like a cop or something.”
One of the other girls, blond and tanned and stereotypically Californian, rolled her eyes.
“Oh my god, Maddy,” she huffed. “You don’t decide your future career because a hot cop caught your stalker. Hear the man out. You could be the next Agent Scully.”
“Who?” Maddy asked.
“The redhead in that old cop show that my dad likes,” the girl said. She poked Maddy in the shoulder with a sharp-nailed finger. “Talk to the Fed. I bet they get paid more than a deputy sheriff.”
Maddy slapped at her friend’s hand with the leaflet. “Then what’s he doing at a County Fair in Plenty?” she asked. There was a beat as her brain caught up with her mouth, and she gave him an apologetic, wrinkle-nosed smile. “Sorry.”
“It’s a fair question,” Javi said. “But Plenty’s actually got more going for it than you might think. At least, it does when it comes to crime.”
Maddy sniggered and used her thumb to unfold the leaflet. She glanced down the inside as Javi pointedly handed notebooks to the rest of the group.
A brief pitch later, and Maddy tucked Javi’s business card into her wallet. She hooked arms with her friend as they walked away, heads together as they pored over the leaflets.
Javi straightened a stack of thumbed-through magazines. That had…actually gone fairly well.
So he’d got first go at recruitment down and only…Javi checked his watch and felt his shoulders sag…six hours left to go.
He pinched the bridge of his nose for a second and wondered if this was it.
It had taken a month, but SSA Joel might just have broken him.
He had thought if he just held his tongue about being shut out of investigations he’d done the groundwork for and did all the scut work she dug up—to the point he smelled like burned paper most days—she’d eventually have to accept he was a good agent.
Because he was. The evidence for that was in every file Joel opened and every informant she tapped.
Six hours of being nice to people, though? That might be the straw that broke his resolve.
“You know what, I bet my dog could beat up any dog in the FBI,” a familiar voice made the combative statement.
Javi opened his eyes and gave Cloister an unamused look.
“That’s juvenile,” he said.
Cloister smirked as he shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans. The worn-white denim slid down over his lean hips with the gesture, a slice of tanned, flat stomach just visible under his worn T-shirt.
“Notice you didn’t say it wasn’t true.”
Javi ignored that as he took in his boyfriend, all six foot three of sleep-deprived cowboy in thrift store clothes that were a choice and not the result of a deputy sheriff's wage. One day, he thought spikily, he was going to have to introduce this man to his parents.
The thought should have horrified him—that was why he’d thought it—but instead all it did was fill him with warm, cow-eyed joy. Every time Javi thought he’d come to terms with loving Cloister Witte, he just managed to find new depths of it to sink to.
It made him want to be cruel. Just to prove that it didn’t matter.
“The FBI K-9 partnerships are the crème of the working dog training community,” Javi said, the familiar ground of a pre-relationship giving the comment bite. “If we taught Bourneville to drive, she could handle all the calls about raccoons in the crawl spaces without you. It’s not the same level.”
The snark felt good. Javi didn’t much like that about himself, but it was true.
He knew there were people who didn’t understand what he saw in Cloister—a man who’d never knowingly flout a redneck stereotype—but only the ones who didn’t know them.
Everyone else thought that Cloister had settled.
Luckily for Javi, though, Cloister would never believe that.
His insecurities were too deep-rooted for that.
“Really?” Cloister said as he snapped his fingers over the table. Bourneville responded to the command by getting up on her back legs, paws braced on the FBI runner, and gave him a polite “woof.” Cloister rested his hand against her shoulders. “Say that to her face.”
Bourneville cocked her head to the side expectantly, her ears pricked forward and her eyes intent on him.
After a month of Cloister crashing in his apartment—it was like living together, but technically the couch was always made up—Javi had gotten used to the drifts of shed hair, the watchfulness, and the tick-tack of toenails on his wooden floors.
He still thought the dog looked suspiciously smart sometimes.
If anyone knew that Javi didn’t deserve Cloister, it was probably her.
“One day you’ll be replaced by an advanced drone with an olfactory sampling system,” he told her firmly. “So will the FBI’s K-9s, but you first.”
Cloister snorted. “You’d miss us.”
A minute ago, Javi had been determined to carve out some emotional distance for himself, and yet now a passing joke about the possibility made him tense.
“You going somewhere?” he asked, his voice brittle to his own ears despite his best efforts to keep it steady. To cover, he fell back on the usual pretense that none of this mattered. “Because I’ll need my spare key back.”
Cloister, as always, only reacted to the surface level of what Javi said. It was hard to tell if that was deliberate or if things really were just that straightforward for him.
“Oh, don’t worry. I left them in the kitchen when I left for my shift last night,” he said, jerking his thumb over one shoulder in the vague direction of the apartment. “I just need to grab the rest of my stuff and I’ll be out of your hair.”
Or maybe, Javi thought sourly as he felt the unexpected weight-free pitch of his stomach dropping to his boots, Cloister was secretly a devious sadist who’d mastered the art of keeping the upper hand.
“You don’t have to take everything,” he conceded, doing his best to make it sound like he was the one making a concession. “Leave the shampoo, at least. I don’t need you using mine on the dog again.”
Cloister pulled a face.
“Trust me, I wouldn’t make that mistake again,” he said. “She smelled like mango for days. I couldn’t stop her licking herself.”
“It’s blackcurrant.”
Cloister grinned, a crooked flash of humor that faded too quickly.
“You know your fruits,” Cloister said. “You can tell your mom that law school was worth it.”
Javi snorted and reached over the table to grab a handful of Cloister’s T-shirt, some forgotten band’s logo creased between his fingers as he pulled the tall deputy into a kiss.
It was meant to be…not exactly discreet, but quick.
Instead, the moment dragged out between them, warm and sweet as Cloister’s donut-flavored lips.
Javi loosened his grip on the thrifted shirt and slid his hand up over Cloister’s chest and around the back of his neck.
His fingers spread over warm skin and the knobbly outline of vertebrae.
He could feel the prickle of freshly cropped hair against his fingertips.
A not-entirely-unfriendly voice jeered, “Get a room,” over the background noise of the fair. Someone else yelled back at whoever it was to mind their own business. The back and forth made Bon bark, and Cloister, without looking, grabbed her collar on autopilot.
Reminded that he was still on the clock, Javi reluctantly broke the kiss. Getting caught up in a brawl at the county fair while wrapped around his deputy sheriff boyfriend wouldn’t exactly impress on Joel that he had learned his lesson about fraternization.
Although for a second, as he looked into Cloister’s pale blue eyes, framed by thick gold-dusted lashes, he almost didn’t care.
Almost.
Javi leaned to the side and murmured into Cloister’s ear. “It’s the lube that’s mango-scented.”
He felt the heat against his palm as a flush spread up Cloister’s throat and into his face. Point made, Javi pressed a kiss against one pink cheek before he stepped back. He let his fingers trail along the harsh line of Cloister’s jaw as he pulled them away.
“How did your first shift back go?” he asked, his voice determinedly conversational.
Cloister looked blank for a moment. He gawped at Javi and had to clear his throat, a gruff rasp, before he could catch up with the tonal shift.
“The shift…yeah, it went OK,” he said, then frowned and scrubbed his hand through his short dark blond hair. “But I heard some interesting gossip.”
Javi raised an eyebrow. “About me?”
“No,” Cloister said, then narrowed his eyes as he thought better of the answer. “Or…maybe. Either way, I thought I should run it by you.”
“And I thought you just missed me.”
This time, Cloister’s smile was softer, and the warmth of it lingered around the corners of his mouth a little longer.
“That too,” he said as he reached over the table to brush his fingers lightly over Javi’s knuckles. “But…mostly the other. Do you have a minute?”
Javi checked his watch again. Still the bulk of six hours to go, but….
“I’m owed a lunch break,” he said. “Do you know anywhere good to eat around here?”