Chapter Eleven #2
Sean glanced away from the viewscreen for a moment as he considered that question. “I didn’t get that vibe,” he finally said. “He wasn’t looking for an out, but he probably did in his last relationship.”
“Bit of a leap.”
“Ah, people like to get their money’s worth from a PI. They talk. Limehouse said that something was bothering her, but in his frame of reference, that meant cheating. This time he wasn’t, so that left her.”
“Except she wasn’t.”
“Yeah,” Sean agreed. “That stumped him.”
It did Javi as well. He was a little annoyed to find himself in that company.
On the second floor of the motel, the delivery guy rapped on a door. A scrawny guy with a beard and legs like straws opened it and held out cash to trade for his sweaty plastic bag. Javi left Sean to get his evidence and headed back to his car.
The call went to voicemail for the second time.
Busy woman or blocked?
It was a hard call to make. Javi might have saved her son, but he’d briefly suspected her older son of murdering his little brother. That was the sort of dissonance that was hard to navigate. He didn’t leave a message this time, just hung up and flicked through his phone to his messages.
He’d not missed any.
The last text he’d sent to Cloister sat at the bottom of the chain. Read, but unanswered.
It had been nearly two hours. Javi had put a “hold” on losing his fucking mind about this, but it was starting to fray.
The distraction of work, always a gold standard solution before, only worked for short bursts before the knot of “what the fuck was going on” yanked a little tighter at the back of his mind.
The fact that Lara wouldn’t answer his calls was probably just bad timing, but between that and the silent rebuke of being left on read… Javi didn’t need any reminders about how bad he was with relationships, but they kept on coming.
He tossed the phone onto the passenger seat and scrubbed his hand roughly over his face.
The worst part was that he knew what had him twisting in the wind wasn’t the possibility that Cloister, despite his earlier confidence, might have realized the smart call was to call it a day on this.
It was that right now none of it was in Javi’s control.
Not that he wanted to break up—for more reasons than just the still-sharp memory of broad freckled shoulders and Cloister’s warm, wet mouth…but that was up there—but at least he could take an active role in it.
Javi snorted to himself as he slid his hands back until he could lace them together over the nape of his neck. And to think people called him a control freak.
He closed his eyes, took a breath, and then let it out.
Right now, there was nothing more he could do to help Cloister, so he needed to focus on Joel. That meant, until he could get hold of Lara, pulling the dangling thread of that unretired UC line, he needed to—
Before he could line up a concrete plan of action, his phone buzzed. Javi’s eyes snapped open, and he grabbed it off the seat and swiped to answer.
He expected to hear Cloister’s voice; instead, he got Tancredi’s light contralto. “Agent Merlo?” The dull weight of disappointment made his voice more sour than he’d meant.
“What do you want?” he asked.
There was a pause. He could feel her squirm at the other end, caught between feeling bad she’d fucked over Cloister and justified because she had done her job. Or, Javi thought with an internal snort, maybe he was the one projecting.
He grimaced. “Sorry—”
At the same time, Tancredi blurted out, “I didn’t want to—”
There was a pause as they unraveled who was where in the hierarchy of the apology. Javi got in first.
“It wasn’t your fault, it’s just—”
“It’s OK,” Tancredi said quickly. “I should have—”
“Better you than someone stupider,” Javi interrupted. His patience with other people’s feelings was already gone, and before he made it worse, he nudged her back on track. “What was it?”
There was a long pause. Long enough that Javi rubbed the bridge of his nose. It felt like a “Cloister’s done something” pause.
“Did he hit Kincaid?”
“No,” Tancredi said quickly. Then a little slower, “I mean, not quite. But he’s maybe done something worse?”
Javi knew that wasn’t a good thing, but the idea of needing to manage whatever the fallout was going to be did take the edge off his nerves.
He hit the button to start the car and glanced in the rearview. As the hands-free picked up the call, he tossed his phone back onto the passenger seat.
“Tell me on the way,” he said. “Where is he?”
“You were right,” Cloister said as he looked up at Javi, one hand raised to shade his eyes against the sun. He was sat on the curb outside a neat heather-gray ranch house, worn denim stretched over his bent knees. “He got under my skin.”
Javi stopped on the sidewalk. He took his sunglasses off and hooked them into the neckline of his shirt.
Bon was curled up on the sidewalk behind Cloister, feet and nose tucked up into a deceptively small ball of black fur.
She acknowledged Javi with a glance from one amber eye and a flick of an ear.
“I spent the whole drive over looking forward to that ‘I told you so,’” Javi said.
Cloister squinted one eye shut. The web of creases that fanned out from the corner made Javi feel oddly possessive. He knew the odds were against him making this relationship last—at this point, even hitting an anniversary felt like wishful thinking—but the idea of it had its appeal.
“You can still say it if you want,” Cloister offered.
“No,” Javi said. “You’ve taken the joy out of it.”
His deadpan delivery made Cloister snort with a surprised blurt of humor. Javi glanced away from him to the gray house. He watched the man inside—tall and lean, with hair graying so elegantly Javi could see a stylist’s hand at work—walk back and forth.
He was going to ask, but it could wait a minute. Javi scuffed his foot over the paver next to Cloister and sat down next to him. Their shoulders nudged comfortably against each other.
“I would have put money on you punching him,” Javi said.
“Me too,” Cloister admitted. “Only thing that stopped me was the fact JJ was there, and he’d definitely use that to get our case thrown out.”
“He was your lawyer this time.”
“Yeah,” Cloister agreed. He rubbed the back of his neck. “I forgot that for a minute. Probably for the best.”
Javi wanted to touch him. His fingers ached to grab the back of his neck and pull him into a kiss, to lean his forehead against Cloister’s and just feel their breath mix.
He also wanted Cloister to go first, just to establish that they were still on.
So he laced his fingers together between his knees, thumbs casually steepled against each other as if he just didn’t have anything else to do with them.
“How bad is it?” he asked.
“JJ said it could be worse.”
“That means it could be better.”
“I got that.” Cloister bumped his knee against Javi’s. “It’s fine. We’re fine.”
Javi didn’t move his knee away, but he didn’t unlace his hands either. He could have just taken the assurance as a given and moved on as if Cloister was the only one with an emotional stake here. It was the safest course of action, the one that kept his emotional integrity intact.
It was what Kincaid would do.
“You didn’t call,” Javi said. “I thought maybe you’d realized you should put your own oxygen mask on first.”
Cloister snorted. “Doesn’t sound like me.”
That was true.
“You didn’t call,” Javi repeated. He wanted to ask, it would have been easier to ask, but the words stuck in his throat.
“Yeah, I…” Cloister ducked his head and rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m not used to checking in.”
Part of Javi really wanted to take that the wrong way.
Apparently, now that he knew Cloister wasn’t going to blow this up, his instinct was to get in first and claim credit for fucking it up.
Javi fought that off and reached out to cup his hand over the back of Cloister’s neck.
He rubbed his thumb along Cloister’s hairline and felt the man lean into the touch like a cat.
The reaction sent warmth seeping under Javi’s skin. Before he could decide what to say next, Bourneville shoved herself under his arm and squeezed between them. She put a possessive paw on Cloister’s leg as she leaned pointedly against him.
Javi pulled away before she got dog hair all over him. “I thought the dog and me were cool,” he said.
Cloister shrugged as he let his arm drop to sling over Bourneville’s shoulders, fingers working down into her fur.
“You are,” he said. “At home. At work, she gets first dibs.”
Bourneville gave Javi a “what he said” look and then flopped down with her head on Cloister’s knee.
Her tail thumped the ground a couple of times, stirring up the dirt.
Javi brushed his hands together. He knew better than to ascribe human emotions to a dog with a much more basic cognitive range, but this dog was smug.
“That actually brings me to my next point,” Javi said. “Aren’t you suspended?”
Cloister glanced sideways at him. “Aren’t you meant to be at work?” he deflected.
“Technically, this is lunch,” Javi said. He checked his watch. “For another fifteen minutes. If Kincaid’s already gunning for you, breaking the rules isn’t smart.”
That got him a grin. The reminder that Cloister, in a different life, with a different nose, could have been almost ridiculously pretty was almost enough to distract Javi. Not quite.
“No one’s ever claimed I was,” Cloister said.
Before Javi could call that deflection out, the door to the house behind them opened, and Cloister scrambled to his feet to head that way.
“They should have,” Javi muttered as he braced his hand on the ground to push himself up.