Chapter 10
CHAPTER
TEN
Ghost
Ordinarily, the faint itch in the back of my throat was impossible to ignore.
But as I lay there, the big spoon wrapped around the little one, I found that itch to be nothing more than a nuisance.
An addiction trying to lure me away from something threatening it, something powerful enough to replace it.
It seemed blasphemous that one roll in the sheets with Pip was enough to replace a long-standing habit of nearly ten years. Yet here I was, forgoing the call of a cigarette so I wouldn’t have to peel myself away from him.
“You sure you never cuddled before?” I wondered, rubbing my chin in the unruly blond strands atop his head.
“Am I doing it wrong?” He worried, face coming around to peer at me over his shoulder.
The rumpled, well-fucked look drenching his expression and muddying his eyes shot me with a hit of dopamine that nicotine could never match.
“Wrong?” I scoffed. “This is some expert-level stuff. I feel like you hustled me.”
His head nestled back into the pillow at the same time his ass wiggled tighter against my groin. “Think that’s the first time anyone has ever said I’m good at something.”
“Lies.”
He didn’t deny it. But he also didn’t agree. I wasn’t sure which was worse.
A muffled shout broke through the quiet room, followed by pounding footsteps. Pip tensed, his entire frame going into survival mode, ready to run.
“Easy,” I murmured, pulling him back against me. “Just people being dumb outside.” I assured him and pointed to the shadows that rushed by the mostly covered window. Another shout was buffered by the glass, then followed by fading laughter.
Pip exhaled shakily, body melting into mine.
“You’re protected here,” I promised against his ear.
“I don’t even know where here is,” he murmured.
“It’s the same motel as last time.”
“Do you live here?” he asked.
“No.”
A beat of silence. “Are you homeless too?”
A man with my expertise saw a lot of really felonious and unhinged shit. I’d participated in it as well. So tell me why being asked this by a little Pip who fit seamlessly in my arms made the horrors I’d endured seem nontoxic?
My expertise?
Let’s just call me a sanctioned operative—a fancy term for a ghost. Someone the government pretends doesn’t exist as long as I do their bidding.
“I have my own place,” I replied, not willing to give up more than that. It was bad enough I was here with him. Taking him to my apartment would have been borderline lunacy. Only dead men took strangers home, and while I was a ghost, I was definitely not dead.
“I’m glad.”
The response wasn’t what I was expecting. I mean, I’d basically just told him to his face that I didn’t trust him.
“You’re glad?” How dare he not be upset that I didn’t trust him?
He looked around at me. “Of course. Being homeless is hard.”
I stared down at him, trying to find his angle. Did he want me to feel sorry for him? Break down my walls by appealing to my empathy?
Too bad for him, my empathy tank was hollow.
“If it’s so hard, why do it?” I challenged.
A faraway look passed over his features before he returned to the pillow. “Because sometimes being homeless is safer than being at home.”
The clean cruelty of those words slid between my ribs like a well-sharpened blade, puncturing a hole in a hollow space inside me. The loss of pressure caused a collapse, turning that empathy tank into something gnarled, deformed, and angry.
Grasping his chin, I forced his face up, studying him through a slitted gaze. “You’re homeless because someone hurt you at home?”
His eyes bounced between mine as I waited impatiently for his answer.
“I bet most everyone thinks your eyes are black, but up close, they’re actually deep brown. Two secrets right there on your face.”
If I found his observation of my eyes disconcerting, I refused to show it. “I asked you a question.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“How long?” I pressed. I wasn’t above torture to get answers.
“A couple years.” He turned away.
I couldn’t even be happy he’d answered directly because, What the fuck? I yanked his face back, drilling my stare into his. “You’ve been living on the streets for two years?”
He shrugged.
Shrugged as if his flirting with death for two years was no big deal.
Jesus, how had he kept himself alive all this time? I mean, in the last week alone, I’d chased half of Buffalo’s problem children away from him. “You got a death wish?” I demanded.
I should have been here.
You can’t stay.
Listen, the words that came out of my mouth were often funny. The shit that floated around in my head? I kept it to myself for a reason.
“If I had a death wish, I would have stayed home!”
His words were basically cornstarch, thickening the plot. And not in a good way.
Pressing him down, I straddled his waist. If I was momentarily distracted by his bare torso and pink nipples, well, who could blame me?
“I want an address. And names.”
“What for?” he asked innocently.
For tea and crumpets. What did he mean what for? Wasn’t it obvious? “They just made an appointment in hell.”
The chill in my words snapped his lips shut and made saucers out of his eyes, all while his Adam’s apple bobbed like it was suddenly lost at sea. I quirked a brow, waiting for the list.
The tip of his tongue shot out to swipe his lower lip. My groin tightened like I hadn’t just been inside him.
“A-are you joking?”
I leaned in, hoping he saw just how not joking I was. “Your safety will never be a joke to me.”
The guarded look pinching his features softened. Seems like that should have had the opposite effect, but okay. “Is your name really Hero?” he asked.
“No,” I said intently, watching his reactions, suspicious all over again.
A crease formed between his brows. “But you asked me how I knew your name.”
“Did I?”
His gray stare narrowed. I could practically see him questioning himself. Did I ask him that, or was it his fevered imagination?
Again, I wondered about his angle and which way he would play this.
After a short internal debate, his eyes lifted to mine. “Yes. You did, and you accused me of lying. Then, instead of telling me why, you gave me meds that knocked me out.”
Ah, the sassy mouse angle.
“First of all…” I lifted a finger, waggling it above him. “Those meds were to help your fever, not knock you out. Second of all, people lie all the time.”
“Like just now when you said your name isn’t Hero.”
I glowered. “Don’t turn this around on me.”
He didn’t even look intimidated. Kinda rude.
“You accused me of knowing your name. The only thing I’ve called you since we met is Hero.” He held up his hands, palms up as if to say isn’t it obvious.
“I’m the one asking the questions here.”
“You told me not to follow you, and then you followed me.”
“What are you, a professional scorekeeper?” I wondered. Geez. “Got the memory of an elephant.”
“What did you expect?” he asked, eyes rolling over me like fog swallowing a shoreline, skewing visibility until there was only him. “You said yourself that you’re a ghost. You haunt me.”
Suddenly, I felt like a pinball machine, and his words were the ball, zinging through me, bouncing off bones, and rattling everything. Bracing my hands on either side of his head, I loomed closer, “Aren’t you afraid?”
“No.”
“You should be.”
“You said I was protected here. Was that a lie too?” He blinked, those innocent gray eyes making a mockery of me.
This pocket-sized pip had a way of taking my words and aiming them back at me, sort of like holding up a mirror and forcing me to look at my own reflection. I should have doubled down, made it clear I wasn’t susceptible to his charms and that I was here to gain information, not give it.
But just like before, my vision was skewed. All I could see was him. All I could feel was the weight of his attention, his yielding body beneath mine. In my world, trust was a commodity with too high a price tag, but paying it now felt like pennies.
“You’re safe with me, Pip,” I whispered, eyes caressing his face. “And I’ve never lied to you.”
“But you said—”
I pressed two fingers against his lips, stopping the words, though powerless to the instantaneous pull he wielded over me.
“My name isn’t Hero,” I said, leaning down to hover mere inches above where my fingers pillowed on his lips. It’s Hiro.”
Realization lit his eyes. His lips moved, but I pressed my finger down to keep him from talking and explained. “It’s Japanese. But in English, it sounds almost the same as hero.”
He made a sound, and I stopped him again, continuing the explanation.
“I should have realized, but it caught me off guard.” My eyes strayed down, locking onto that lush mouth. My voice dropped an octave, but I swear the temperature in the room rose. “Hearing my name from those lips turned out to be the ultimate distraction.”
No one ever called me by my given name. Not since I’d left home to join the military over ten years ago. After that, I had no first name. No last. I simply stopped existing and became a ghost, a mere shadow of a man.
Hearing it from him as he lay limp in my arms set off an instant visceral reaction beneath my skin. I likened it to suspicion and mistrust instantly because that was the way I’d been conditioned. Of course, I thought he was up to no good and sent as some sort of trap.
Or maybe you knew all along, but you needed an excuse.
An excuse to stay and take care of him. To make it okay not to dump him and go.
Because the facts were out to play, and I knew almost upon first sight that this pocket-sized pip was too innocent for deception.
My bestie Kieran might be convinced there was exactly zero goodness left in this world—and I would admit it was definitely rare—but I knew it wasn’t completely eradicated.
After all, why else would I do what I do?
This gem of innocence was even more rare because it was packaged up to look like my Achille’s heel. My exact type. Soft. Slight. Defiant in the face of cruelty.
Notice I did not say weak.