Chapter 9
Benny didn’t want to wake up.
He was warm. He was heavy in every limb, sunk deep in dark, and he had no intention of leaving it. So he didn’t open his eyes. He pushed his face deeper into the pillow and made a small, thoroughly undignified noise of contentment.
Five more minutes before he got up for work. He could sneak in just five more?—
Something snagged in his sleepy brain.
The pillow was too soft, and it smelled like someone else’s soap. And the sheets—Benny didn’t own sheets like these. Benny didn’t know anybody who owned sheets like these.
His eyes opened.
This was not his bed.
Then the night came back—all of it, at once, like it had been waiting politely for him to wake up before screaming at him.
Okay. So. There’d been the club, and then the alley. Then a man had come through a door, and there had been a gun—several guns, in the end; a generous allotment of guns. He’d driven a car away from a crime, very fast.
He’d stitched a knife wound shut on the floor of Pete’s club. And—oh, here was a highlight—he’d picked up a bottle of the good whiskey and brained a grown man with it.
Benny’s stomach got there half a second before the rest of him did. It was a good thing it was empty.
And then his brain arrived at a better part to revisit. The lap part. The part where he’d ended up flat on his back on the floor of his own workplace, bunny ears still on, a contract killer’s mouth at his throat…
He put a hand over his face and stared at a wall that wasn’t his.
Fine. Great. All of it had happened, and that part had been good, but it left precisely one piece of pressing business: the current location of said contract killer.
Slowly, without moving his head, Benny looked around the rest of the room.
Shaw was in a chair about four feet away. Dressed, wide awake. He looked like he’d been up for hours, and had spent a fair portion of them watching Benny drool into a borrowed pillow.
Benny pulled the sheet up another inch. On principle.
“Morning,” Shaw said.
“How long have you been sitting there?”
“A while.”
“You know that’s a serial killer thing. Watching people sleep.”
“Yeah.” Shaw didn’t move.
He didn’t fill the silence, either. Shaw, Benny was already learning, would let a silence run until it died of old age. Benny used it to take inventory.
Himself, first. He peeked underneath the blanket. The bunny suit was nowhere in sight—in a dumpster where it belonged, with any luck.
Somewhere between the bar floor and this bed he’d been put into a soft gray t-shirt that wasn’t his, big enough in the shoulders that it could only be Shaw’s.
The room, next. There wasn’t much to it. One chair, angled to face the door with its back to the wall. Blackout blinds taped flat at the edges. More locks on the door than a law-abiding person had any use for. A series of duffel bags.
Benny knew broke. This wasn’t broke. This was a man who’d decided a home was a liability: no photos, nothing in the place that couldn’t be in a bag and gone in ninety seconds flat.
Shaw leaned down, unzipped the nearest duffel, and held out a thick manila envelope without standing. Benny reached over to take it.
The ten grand Shaw had promised him for driving.
Benny had never held this much money at once. That was his outstanding tuition and every bit of rent he was behind on, and it fit in one hand.
Paid in full. Nothing owed either direction. Which left him barefoot in this man’s apartment, in this man’s shirt, with no excuse to be in either.
“Well!” Bright and frictionless, the airhead voice coming out on autopilot—he could do this part in his sleep. “Pleasure doing business. Five stars, would get taken hostage again.”
He got up and looked around for his shoes—no, he’d kicked those off in Pete’s parking lot, and he was never going back to Pete’s parking lot. Right. Barefoot, then. He didn’t know what neighborhood this was, or how far it was to anything. He’d pick a direction.
Except, pants. There’d been nothing under the bunny suit, and he was not walking out of this building in Shaw’s shirt and bare legs, not at this hour, not without getting arrested for something new and interesting. “I’ve got a clinical,” he lied. “I should really?—”
“You always do that.”
It cut clean through the pants problem. “Do what?”
“Talk more when you mean it less.” Shaw hadn’t moved out of the chair. “You did it in the alley with Rick. You’re doing it now.”
That was rude. It was also completely accurate. He’d have preferred rude. “Easier than the alternative.”
“Which is?”
Benny studied a duffel bag instead of saying staying. “I should go.”
“No.”
Fuck. “Okay,” Benny said.
He turned around and dropped the envelope on the arm of the chair. He didn’t want to be holding it for this part.
Then he crossed the room. “Shirt. Off.”
Shaw looked at him.
“Off,” Benny said.
Shaw pulled the shirt over his head. Obedient. Benny liked that in a man.
The dressing over Shaw’s stitches was new. Six fresh sutures sat where Benny’s own had torn. Neat and even, tied off clean. Shaw had clearly spent many years taking care of himself.
“Problem?”
“No, actually.” Benny went down on one knee to get level with it and put a hand on Shaw’s side to hold him still. “I mean—your spacing’s wide.”
“It holds.”
“It holds now.” He ran his thumb along the closure. It didn’t give anywhere. The honest answer was that it was better than most of what Benny had watched get done in good light by people with degrees. Benny wasn’t going to say that out loud.
“It’s adequate,” he said. “I’d have done it tighter.”
“Sure.”
“I would have.”
Shaw stood, close enough that holding eye contact would have meant tipping his chin up.
Benny didn’t. He looked at Shaw’s mouth instead, the one that had been on his throat a few hours ago and was currently about eight inches from his own. His whole body remembered the floor behind Pete’s bar at once, in detail, without being asked.
Shaw didn’t close the distance. Left the last inch sitting there for Benny to do something about.
“There’s a diner near my place,” Benny blurted out. “Coffee that won’t kill you. Eggs that might.”
“How far?”
“No idea. I don’t know where we are.”
“Let me show you.” Shaw turned to the nearest duffel and threw a pair of sweatpants at Benny’s chest.
They were enormous. Benny rolled the waist twice and cuffed the ankles. Oversized was very in right now. “Come on.” He got the door open. “You’re buying.”
“I just gave you ten grand and I’m buying breakfast?”
“Now you’re getting it.”
They shut the door behind them. Shaw's hand settled warm against the small of Benny's back and didn't leave the whole way down.