Fish Out of Water (23 page)

“’Bout what?” And it wasn’t Ellery’s imagination—he was
trying
to sound like a pouty schoolboy.

“I don’t know. What’s your favorite movie?”

“Easy.
Full Metal Jacket.
What’s yours?”

“
The King’s Speech
.” Ellery sighed. “That is
not
promising.”

Jackson rolled to his stomach. “Favorite kids’ cartoon?” he said cautiously.

“
Darkwing Duck
!” Ellery said excitedly.

“Let’s get dangerous?” He wrinkled his nose.

“Well, I was a neurotic kid from the suburbs. A comic duck was as dangerous as I was going to get!” Ellery defended, laughing. “Your turn.”

“
Transformers
,”
Jackson gave up reluctantly.

“More than meets the eye!” Ellery did his best robot impersonation and surprised a laugh from Jackson. “You know, like you.”

“You are making me really uncomfortable in my masculinity,” Jackson said, drawing his dignity about him like a cloak. “I have had about enough pillow talk, thank you.” He stood up and rummaged through his dresser to come up with a tank top. “Okay, I don’t know about you, but I want something cold and sweet, and I’ve got nothing in my freezer. And I’ve got a… a…
Honda
in my driveway that is
not
feeling any more real with me sitting in here. Grab your notes and let’s go for a drive.”

Ellery grinned at him. “I might want to grab my pants first.”

“You’re just excited someone took them off you,” Jackson muttered, but Ellery could see two red crescents appearing at his cheekbones.

“Absolutely,” Ellery agreed. “And I hope you plan to take them off again.”

Jackson scrupulously avoided eye contact and started looking on the floor for Ellery’s clothes. “Yeah, whatever,” he mumbled.

But Ellery’s enthusiasm was undimmed. Ellery Cramer
was
dangerous, and Jackson Rivers
was
more than met the eye, and his optimism knew no bounds.

THE PIERCING
light of justice knifed through Jackson’s eyeballs like an ice pick, and someone was hammering Armageddon down on his head with every thud at the door.

“
Jackson, open up, you asshole! I need some fucking money
!”

“Oh God,” Jackson muttered, burying his head under the pillow. “No. Fuck no. Not today.”

Ellery shoved at his arm. “Jackson, who is that and why is she doing this to us?”

Oh hell. Ellery was there. Ellery was
still
there, and they were naked, and his sheets smelled like sex, because they’d had it
twice
more last night. The first time was right after they’d gotten back from their drive to the park for ice cream and cold soda, and that time Ellery had let Jackson top. Not like he was humoring him—no. Just like he
enjoyed
that position and didn’t mind getting his ass plowed.

They’d gotten up and done some more work after that. Ellery had drawn up briefs, and Jackson had made lists of contacts and researched all the key players in the game until he was done.

Then Ellery had stood up and stretched and gone in to brush his teeth. Jackson had turned out the lights and locked the door and gone to do the same—

And found Ellery in his bed when he stepped out.

He’d been wearing his boxers and smiling sleepily at the door, and Jackson couldn’t decide which was stronger: the urge to bolt, or the urge to climb in with him and maybe plunder his mouth some more, or glide his palms over the smooth skin of his ribcage.

Ellery had seen him hesitate and had just… lain there, eyebrows up, the knowledge that he wasn’t getting out of the bed unless Jackson asked him to lying heavy between them.

He had made his position loud and clear. Jackson had to tell him, or he wouldn’t change his course.

Which meant that if Jackson turned around and went to sleep on the couch, Ellery would know him for the coward he really was.

Mortifying but true—and still almost not enough to get Jackson in that bed, where a man who knew his secrets and didn’t care waited. A man who was willing to fight for his family and who seemed willing to take Jackson, baggage and all.

Because God, if Ellery was willing to deal with all of
that
shit, what would happen to Jackson when he
couldn’t
deal anymore and Jackson was left alone? He’d fought so hard to not
need
anybody.

What would happen if he let himself need?

Ellery seemed to see inside him, though. “Don’t worry, Jackson. I’ll still be here in the morning.”

“Everyone’s here in the morning,” Jackson muttered. “They just don’t come back the next night.”

“Because you don’t let them.” Ellery’s dark eyes bored into Jackson’s skull like he was daring Jackson to deny it. “But I think we’ve already established that you don’t ‘let’ me do anything. I can decide for myself.”

And that was the crux of the matter, wasn’t it? Ellery
was
strong enough to decide for himself. He
did
know what he was getting into.

And Jackson didn’t know what to do with that.

So he turned off the light, let the cat in for the final time, and crawled into bed.

And was surprised by Ellery’s mouth on his own in the dark and how sweet their fingers felt on each other’s skin. They used their hands, stroking each other off to a sleepy climax, and for once Jackson was too tired—and too sated—to make the person in his bed get up so he could change the sheets.

The dream tried to creep up on him in the wee hours, but Ellery rolled over and spooned him, rubbing his shoulders, pulling him back against Ellery’s front, and the dream went away.

The next day was Saturday, and Jackson had been pretty sure they’d get to sleep in before he started making his investigative rounds, and that had given him some peace too.

Until now.

“Oh God,” he groaned again and then rolled out of bed and put his jeans on, not even wanting to
look
at Ellery, who was as naked as he’d been and probably rumpled and sexy and dear. “Hell. Fuck. Shit. Cock. Bugger.
Ass
.” He stumbled to the doorway and then turned to Ellery in naked supplication. “Look, if you respect me even a little at
all
, you will just hang out in here and pretend you never heard the following conversation, okay?”

Ellery raised his eyebrows and was probably just about to say “Fuck no!” when Jackson whirled on one heel and took off for the front door.

Shit. Mike had worked late at the station the night before, and the
last
time she’d visited, he’d threatened to shoot her in the head. Jackson really did not want to have to look for another tenant while he visited his friend in prison.

“All right!” he called. “I’m coming, I’m coming—Jesus
fuck
, bitch, can we fucking
not
wake up the entire fucking neighborhood?”

He tore the door open and glared at the woman on the other side.

She was exactly forty-five this year, but it was a hard-lived forty-five. The lines in her thin face were etched deep, and her upper arms and shoulders, exposed by the tight white tank top she wore, were crepey and sun weathered. Her hair was bleached blonde, her face was freckled with too much sun, and her denim miniskirt clung tightly to an ass that had been slender when she’d been a new mother at fifteen but was now emaciated and bony.

Her blue eyes were hooded, obscured by lines in the corners, none of them laugh lines, and her fingers as they rose up to knock at the door were yellow, stained so badly by nicotine that it crusted under her nails.

There was a cigarette smoldering in her other hand, held carelessly between her first two fingers, and the smoke rose up in a choking cloud.

“Is that what you greet me with, you high-and-mighty bastard? Did you just call me a fucking bitch?”

“Yes. And I’m going to slam the door in your face if you don’t put the cigarette out—
not
on my lawn, bitch. I’ve told you before, Celia, you can’t smoke in my house.”

She sniffed disdainfully and shook her bony ass down the lawn to the sidewalk, where she flicked the butt and ground it out under her thin-soled sandal, and then sauntered back. Jackson crossed his arms and leaned against the doorframe, praying to God that Ellery had stayed in the bedroom like he’d asked.

Oh Jesus. Of all the reasons Jackson didn’t want people to see how he lived, this one right here was right at the top of the list.

“You’re
still
not going to let me in?” she whined when she got back up to the door. “I just—”

“What do you want, Celia?”

“A new tattoo,” she said promptly, and he grimaced. She’d gotten a few over the years. The ink was still visible on her breastbone and her back, especially since the spaghetti tank she wore covered not much of her flat chest. With the amount of time she spent in the sun—and the number of times she’d chosen drugs or liquor over food—that ink had all turned purple and bled, leaving behind only faint, discolored memories of the images she’d originally wanted.

He was pretty sure the one on her neck was a butterfly, but it had looked like a Rorschach test since he was ten.

“I’m not going to fund your next tattoo,” he muttered. “Try again.”

“Rehab?” she said, what should have been an impish grin creasing her features. It made her look like an evil gnome.

“If I believed
that
,
I would have sent you years ago,” he said, bored. “One more try and I can legally
kick you
off my porch. And if you won’t go without holy water, I’ll see if Mike’s home and he can wave his .45 around and see if
that
scares you.”

“Jackson!” she whined. “I’m hungry! Can’t you even give your own mother some food?”

A memory swamped him, a childhood he’d tried hard to forget. Jackson, five or six, hungry—hunger beyond hunger, the kind of gnawing in your belly that won’t let you think. Watching Celia—younger, prettier, up-for-anything Celia—snorting coke she’d paid for with food stamps. Jackson had come in asking for some food, and her dealer had thrown him a granola bar just to make him go away.

He took a deep breath, a controlled one, to keep the violence at bay.

Remembered when he was twelve and Kaden’s mom had divided a lasagna that was supposed to last them two days—and eked out a portion for Jackson, who hadn’t eaten in that long either.

“You’re not my mother,” he said coldly. And saw, clear as day, Kaden’s mom in a wheelchair when he graduated from the academy, skin an ash-colored parody of the comforting dark brown he remembered from his school days, her body wasted with cancer she couldn’t afford to fight. He owed Toni and J and K better.

“Wait,” he said before she could retort. “I’ll give you food—and money for whatever—if you stay right there and answer a question or two.”

He took a step back, closed the door, and started down the hallway for his phone, which was in the charger by the bed.

Ellery was in the kitchen by the sink, where he could have seen the whole exchange on the landing. Jackson glared at him and headed right past him and down the hall.

“Wait, where are you going?” Ellery called.

“I need the picture of Luanne Chisholm,” he muttered, grabbing his phone. He hustled back, bare feet making hollow slaps on the hardwood. He swung open the door again, and Celia was still there, glaring resentfully at the doorway.

“Here,” he said imperiously, pulling up the picture. “Her. You seen her?”

“I don’t know every chickie in the old neighborhood,” she retorted.

Jackson grabbed her shoulder and made her actually look. “Have. You. Seen. Her?” he growled.

Celia didn’t do what he expected. “I thought you were out of that, Jacky.” Her voice lowered, and the look she sent him was almost tender. “I mean… I know you were… you were hurt last time. I thought you’d be staying away from this sort of thing after that?”

Jackson’s stomach gave a triumphant
kazing!
while his heart… tried really hard not to engage. “This is for a case, Celia. Her name is Luanne Chisholm and—”

“I didn’t have anything to do with it, Jacky,” Celia said, backing away from him. “I swear. I—I wasn’t there. I just heard from Jimmy—you know Jimmy? Guy used to feed you when you were a kid. Well, he’s lookin’ for more girls, yanno, and he said the cops… well, this one ain’t workin’ no more.”

Hell. Mentally, Jackson put
check morgue
on the top of his list.

In real time, he pulled a twenty out of the wallet in his pocket and held it out to her. From mother to confidential informant. Well, she’d never been great at motherhood.

“Here,” he said, shoving the money into her greedy hand.

“Aw, Jacky, that won’t buy me—”

He added another twenty. “Wait right here. I’ll get you some food.”

Ellery was still in the kitchen, wearing his boxer shorts and making coffee, and Jackson felt the strangest sense of longing. He’d had a fantasy—a stupid normal fantasy—of the two of them drinking coffee in his kitchen that morning.

He thought of the woman outside who’d spawned him, and how she’d contaminated his day with her nicotine-stained fingers, and he wanted to flee. Without looking at Ellery, he grabbed a plastic bag from the drawer and shoved most of a loaf of bread in it, as well as half a jar of peanut butter and an unopened bag of store-brand Cheerios. He sprinted back to the door and hauled it open just in time to see Celia hit the sidewalk and turn right, the money probably already shoved in her purse. She lit a cigarette as she went.

He stopped, chest heaving, and spent a fruitless breath hating himself fiercely. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid—he knew it when he was six. You’d think he’d learn.

He turned back around and threw the bag on top of the refrigerator, where the plastic jar of peanut butter thumped loudly. Shower. Next on the agenda. Turning away and heading for the shower was his best bet for not having to look at Ellery, not having to see the pity or the acknowledgment there or even answer any questions.