Sloe Ride (8 page)

Rafe was subsequently amazed at how many favors he seemed to owe Finnegan’s and how they never seemed to go down in number.

Sweeping the outside café area for opening was an easy job. He’d been conned into doing that by a pouty Leigh. Still, sweeping was a far better job than the one Sionn had inside, which seemed to be mostly picking shells out of the eggs he’d been assigned to crack open for scrambles. Half-energized and a bit sore from their morning run, Rafe enjoyed the brisk wind coming off of the Bay and the hot Irish spitting out from the open pub doors.

Seagulls outnumbered the tourists. It was too early but for the most stalwart of vacationers, but the local crowd was already shuffling from their homes and onto BART or the ferries. It was quiet enough to hear the sea lions barking from their docks, sleek-bodied squatters ready for a long day’s bake once the sun broke through the morning fog.

It was a normal, simple day. Much like every other normal day Rafe and Sionn did their run from Finnegan’s and up past to Ghirardelli’s. With one exception.

Most mornings didn’t have a long-legged, angelic-faced, green-eyed Irish man showing up in a pair of worn jeans and an easy smile, but if Rafe had a choice, he’d opt for a Quinn Morgan appearance any day.

“Let me guess. You came down here for the greasy ham and flapjack special? Although from what I hear going on in there, you might want to stick with cold cereal.” Rafe looked back behind him. Leigh joined Sionn’s battle with some piece of equipment, cajoling him to move it a bit to the right, and it would slide right in. He’d have made a dirty joke if he didn’t think either or both of them would stomp outside and shove the broomstick up his ass. “Then again, you’d be safer with the coffee. At least it’s decent.”

“I called Sionn to ask him something about brewing so we could talk about me investing in his mad schemes, but it sounds like he’s busy.” Quinn shoved his hands into his pockets, his forearms powerful with lean muscle. “He told me you were down here. Mind if I hang out with you for a bit? But if you’re busy….”

“I’m never too busy for you, Q. It’s not like they can fire me. I’m a volunteer. Actually, an indentured servant paying off a lifetime of bar tabs and imagined slights. Hang on a second. I’ll sneak in and get us a couple of coffees.” Rafe handed Quinn the broom, then slithered his way into the pub. It took him a few minutes, most of them spent picking up sugar packets he’d spilled onto the floor, but he made it back outside with no one noticing.

Quinn was still there, sitting in one of the café chairs, legs stretched out and keen, sharp eyes drinking in the crowd scurrying by.

They sat silent for a few minutes. An occasional murmur of curiosity came from Quinn when someone dressed in too much of a contrast for his sensibilities strolled by. Rafe had to agree with him on most judgments, but he argued vehemently for the woman in the giraffe-print T-shirt and red pants, pointing out the spikes on her shiny black leather heels.

“You have to give points for a woman with style, Q. She’s rocking that.” Rafe nodded in her wake. “Shoulders back, head high. Chick’s got balls.”

“Her shirt has tassels on the hem. It would be okay without the tassels. Small little tassels.” Quinn wiggled his fingers at Rafe. “Why? Why would you put tassels on a shirt like that?”

“Rocking the tassels, Q. No hating the fringe.”

“Makes her look like a lamp. A cheap lamp. In a hotel where merrow come up out of the toilets.” Quinn wrinkled his nose as Rafe’s laughter carried across the courtyard in front of Finnegan’s. “It does.”

“Maybe her shirt’s reincarnated. Its past life was a whorehouse pillow.” His cheeks were beginning to hurt, especially when a bit of coffee went down wrong, and Quinn began pounding on his back to help him stop coughing. Waving Quinn off, Rafe caught his breath. “Sorry, bad image of you handing out red cards for fashion violations.”

“I don’t know shite about fashion,” he shot back. “It’s the colors. Look at the colors she’s wearing. It’s like they can’t see the difference between khaki and olive green. Why would you go out wearing an indigo shirt and olive-green pants? What kind of monster does that to the world?”

They talked more after that. Stupid things they’d done and probably would do again. Quinn mourned the loss of his Audi, wishing he’d had the chance to take Rafe out in it at least once before he’d nearly rolled it. After extracting a promise of a ride after the car was repaired, Rafe leaned back and sighed contentedly.

“This is really nice, Q. No worries. No fuss.”

“What is nice? What fuss?”

“This. You and me. Why didn’t we do you and me more often? I really could have used this. Still can use more of this in my life.”

“Because you were off being a rock god, and I was still some clueless nerd with my face pressed to a computer screen?”

“Stupid of me. You know that, right?” Rafe glanced over at Quinn, who studiously avoided making eye contact. “I’m serious, Q. You’re one of the best fucking things—people—I’ve got in my life, and I didn’t make time for you. Time I should have. You’re like a touchstone for me. And I feel like I buried you in my pocket when I should have held you in my hand.”

Quinn frowned, his eyebrows knitted over his strong nose. “I’m a flat piece of slate you use to test metals on?”

“Wait. What?” He sat up a little bit, leaning an elbow on the table. Quinn was off again, veering into the stratosphere while the rest of the world looked up, earthbound and confused. Or at least Rafe was confused. Patient and waiting but still a bit confused. “Explain it to me.”

“A touchstone. People used to smear golds—types of golds—on a certain type of stone, like slate, then compare it to known samples. It’s how they tested for purity.” Quinn sipped at his cup. “Or do you mean metaphorically? Like a point of reference.”

“Um, no. Not the rock one. The other one. The metaphorical one. The one where you bring balance. And sanity. God knows I need some fucking sanity.” Rafe slouched back down in his chair, chuckling to himself. “Nicely done, by the way. Good ducking a compliment there, magpie.”

They watched a flock of like-shirted Asian tourists waddle after a woman holding a red flag above her head, a stream of quicksilver Japanese and Cantonese. Rafe coughed again, mostly to clear his throat, but Quinn glanced over, worry on his face.

“Are you okay?” He leaned over, nudging Rafe’s sneaker with his foot.

“Better now you’re here.” It wasn’t hard to admit that to Quinn. Something inside of him lightened when Quinn was near. He’d never noticed it before. Not until his life’d hung too heavy on him, and Rafe felt like he was one step away from flinging himself of the Bay Bridge with a necklace of albatrosses slung around his throat. “Missed you, Q. Never knew how fucking much until right now. But I did. I do.”

“Missed you too, Rafe.”

Quinn’s fingers brushed over his, and Rafe grabbed them, holding them tightly.

“I’d be stupid to let you go again.” He squeezed lightly, caught in Quinn’s deep emerald gaze.

“You won’t.” Quinn smiled. “Let go, I mean.’Cause I love you and everything, but sometimes, Andrade, you do stupid
really
well.”

Q
UINN
COULD
have done without the flat tire.

After sitting through a two-hour play about cubist painters falling in love during their exploration of the color red, a flat tire wasn’t how he wanted to finish up the afternoon. But the universe had other plans, and they apparently included Quinn digging out the spare from the loaner’s trunk and swapping out a tire nearly as terminally depressing as the avant-garde performance he’d just endured.

The art-house theater still retained a lingering aroma of its time as a meatpacking warehouse and, from what Quinn could tell, was just as cold. Nearly two hundred people packed into a corner of the squat brick building barely dented the frigidity of the theater’s interior, and he’d been thankful for the black peacoat he brought in with him.

The five-minute intermission brought a quickly dashed hope of scoring a cup of hot coffee. Instead the director’d insisted on carrying on his vision of frigidity in love by serving frozen unsweetened strawberry Kool-Aid, made even more bitter by the reality of having to watch the second half of the play only because he’d promised a former colleague he’d attend.

Since Graham’d made that exact same promise to the director, Quinn suspected the rest of the audience were riveted to their seats out of guilt and frostbite more than a vested interest in Isabelle’s expansion into chartreuse and her growing love-hate for banana-adoring Beauregard.

“We can wait inside until the car service comes,” Graham suggested. The thin man shivered beside Quinn, pressing in close to keep warm. “That tire is as flat as the play’s dialogue. God, what rubbish that all was. I am so sorry I dragged you to it. I’m sorry I dragged
me
to it.”

Quinn tried not to mind the touch of Graham’s arm on his side, but it was difficult. As familiar as he was with the other professor, Quinn’s skin ruffled under his shirt at the brush of Graham’s body on his. A far different reaction from his casual stroking of Rafe’s fingers a few nights before.

“It’s a pity your friend couldn’t make it.”

“Don’t think the director would have thought so. He’d have stayed because I wouldn’t leave and made comments the whole time. He was smart enough to weasel out of it.” He paused in his contemplation of the tire. “We’ve got to learn to weasel better.”

Calling a tow truck to change the tire would mean standing around for an hour, and Quinn was tired. He’d put in a long day of counseling students on their papers, with a sidetrack of one male student nearly crying in his lap about a dead goldfish. The papers he dealt with easily, working through the topics until he was certain the students knew what they were doing. The goldfish-mourning basketball player was subsequently passed along to a grief counselor at the student center with a hearty wish he’d feel better.

It took Quinn about five minutes before he realized he’d probably sounded as if he wished the goldfish would somehow get better instead of the student. Thoughts of a yellow-and-white zombie fish lurking in the halls of a coed dorm kept him amused during Beauregard’s long discourse on the perils of a rotten pear in his still life.

“Here, put this on and stay warm. I’ll change the tire.” Quinn shrugged his peacoat off, handing it over to Graham once he got his arms loose.

The brisk afternoon air cut through his T-shirt, although his jeans seemed sturdy enough to hold the chill back. Once the doors had opened, signaling the audience’s release, the theater vomited out people as if it’d eaten too much cake. No one appeared willing to linger, and the theater’s small parking lot was practically empty, save for Quinn’s borrowed sedan and a VW van he suspected the director lived in, based on the piles of fast-food wrappers on the front seat.

Graham’s spine went rigid, and he clasped Quinn’s coat to his chest. “I can’t… I mean, we can call someone. No need for you to catch a cold. Well, to catch a—”

“It’s just a tire, Graham.” Quinn patted his shoulder, then headed to the trunk. “Easy enough to do. I’d tell you to go inside and wait, but you’ll freeze to death in there, even with the coat. Trust me. Five minutes into changing a tire, and I’ll be plenty warm enough.”

Thankfully, the loaner’s spare tire was a standard size and not a rubber donut he’d have to exchange at the dealership. Graham made noises about helping, but Quinn waved him off, hefting the jack out of its hole beneath the trunk hatch.

“How about if you see if you can find us some hot coffee?” Quinn peered down the street. “Actually, if there’s someplace open, stay there and get out of the wind. I can call you when I’m done.”

“Are you sure?” Graham swaddled himself in Quinn’s coat, pulling its soft wool lapels up to his sharp chin. “It seems rude to… desert you. Suppose someone comes by and—”

“Attacks me?” Quinn held up the jack’s tire iron. “I’m armed and dangerous. Besides, it’s in the middle of the afternoon. If anyone starts anything, I’ll just start quoting the second act until their head goes full watermelon. It’ll be fine. Promise.”

The five minutes stretched into ten as the car refused to give up its hard-won flat. Deep breathing helped, as did swearing. He’d gone through all of the Latin he knew when the final lug nut gave in, and Quinn spun the tire off to the side, resisting the urge to fling it against the far wall to teach it a lesson. With the spare in place, he’d just put the flat in the trunk and was about to lower the car to the ground when a siren jolted him out of his focus.

“What the hell?” A black SUV with darkened windows pulled up beside him, and Quinn groaned, wondering what he’d done to bring down the wrath of gods on his head that afternoon. “Of course. Why not.”

The SUV’s lights flashed twice; then the car engine cut off. A few seconds later, the driver’s door opened, and a broad-shouldered, hard-jawed cop got out, the afternoon sun glinting on the metal star fixed to his dark uniform jacket. From the look on the man’s face, Quinn was in for a reckoning—but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out exactly what he’d done wrong.

Until he caught the captain eyeing the sedan perched on its jack, trunk open and disabled tire displayed for all to see.

“
Quinn.
” The man’s rolling Irish and deep golden voice seemed as cold as the air Quinn sucked into his lungs. “Imagine. I’d thought I’d seen ye but then said to meself, no, that’s not m’boy’s speedster. It couldn’t be me son, but then I remembered something—a conversation I’d just had with Mullens up at Southern. Something about a truck and a tin can about wide enough only to hold a sardine.”

“Hello, Da.” Sidestepping Donal Morgan’s ire wasn’t something easily done. It was best to accept the inevitable and show remorse, but Donal’s eyes narrowed, and he drew up closer, his long legs shortening the distance between them. Donal was nearly against Quinn’s chest when he stopped short, studying his son intently.