by Nicky James
I chuckled and leaned on the opposite side of the counter, taking some weight off my leg. The action reminded me of my sore shoulder, and I inadvertently sucked air between teeth before adjusting my position.
Beck eyed me over the monitor, scanned my body, and frowned. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
A pause followed my answer, and I thought he was going to press. He didn’t. “You heading out?”
“Yeah, I have a meeting with Doug. Gonna see if he’ll consider taking me back part time for now. I’ll have a lot of restrictions, so I’m not gonna get my hopes up.”
Abandoning his search, Beck shifted on his stool to face me. “What does your doctor say?”
“Haven’t asked him yet. I need something to do that isn’t sitting around all day, so I figured if I could convince Doug, I’d work on my doctor next.”
And there was that look again. The one that worked hard to penetrate my shield and see what I wasn’t saying. Before he could poke at that wound, I kept talking.
“I thought after I talked to Doug, I’d look into what it would cost to get my truck altered.”
“Altered how?”
“For left foot controls. I can’t drive with my right leg. Aurora mentioned it was something I should think about. Apparently an easy enough adaption to vehicles. Pricy I’m betting.”
“Aurora? That’s your cute OT?”
“Same one.”
I think my nose wrinkled in abjection because Beck smacked my shoulder and laughed. “Relax.”
The contact made me wince and shift away from his hand. Beck’s smile faded. Before I could brush it off, he was around the counter and peeling my shirt back revealing the purpling bruise.
“Jesus Christ, what the fuck happened? That wasn’t there last night.”
I yanked my shirt back in place and shoved him away when he tried to move it again. “It’s nothing. I fell.”
“How did you fall? With your prosthesis on? Using crutches?”
“I just fell. Didn’t catch myself in time and I hit the wardrobe in your room. It happens. Stop fretting.”
“I’m fretting because I think you’re bullshitting me. I’ve seen you using crutches and walking.” He motioned to my leg. “You’re stable. What doesn’t seem stable is this.” He flicked my forehead, and I batted his hand away.
“What the fuck?”
“Gray, something is going on with you. You’ve been acting weird, and every time I try to talk about it, you shut down. I think whatever it is, it’s messing with your head and making you panic. When you panic, you aren’t as careful. So, talk to me.”
He’d closed me into a corner. All my efforts to keep my slipping sanity hidden were for naught. Beck wasn’t an idiot. He wasn’t someone whose attention I could divert easily. He knew all my tricks better than anyone.
By the grace of whatever being worked upstairs, my phone rang, saving me a confession.
Beck’s lips firmed as I reached into my pocket. Checking the screen, I realized I’d traded one uncomfortable situation for another.
It was my mother.
“For fuck’s sake,” I grumbled, hedging, deciding who I wanted to deal with and who I didn’t.
I closed my eyes briefly and prayed for strength. “I have to take this.” I waved the phone in Beck’s face, earning myself a look that clearly stated, “This isn’t over.”
He returned to the computer and his auctions while I tapped to accept the call.
“Hey, Mom.”
“Grayson, tell me you haven’t eaten salad in the past forty-eight hours.”
I leaned heavily on the counter and pinched the bridge of my nose.
“I haven’t eaten salad in the past forty-eight hours. Why?”
“Oh, thank God. Haven’t you seen the news? Romaine lettuce has been recalled across Ontario. Massive outbreak of salmonella poisoning. People are sick all over because of lettuce. Can you believe it? Lettuce!”
“Not that shocking, Mom. If it’s not lettuce, it’s contaminated cucumbers or tomatoes or packaged something or other. The food safety board is recalling shit all the time.”
“Language!” she snapped. “Have you checked your fridge?”
“For what?”
“Romaine lettuce! Maybe you bought some and it’s sitting in the crisper just waiting to make you sick.”
“There is no lettuce in the crisper.” I should know, I had been the last one to grab groceries since Beck had been absent for a handful of days.
“Good. You can never be too careful. You should let Beckett know.”
My gaze rose and met Beck’s hazel stare as he watched me converse with my mother. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
“Asshole,” I mouthed.
“I’ll let him know, Mom.”
“How are things going?
Kill me now. Every. Damn. Day.
“Same as yesterday. Nothing to report.”
“How’s Beck doing?”
I grinned at my best friend and raised my voice, injecting an edge of cocksureness into my tone. “Oh, Beck’s doing great. Did you want to talk to him? He’s right here.”
His eyes grew, and he waved his hands frantically mouthing, “No, no, no!”
I chuckled and cut my mother off before she could say yes. “Actually, he’s busy with a tour right now.”
“Ah, you’re down in his shop, are you?”
“Yeah, just heading out. Got my meeting with Doug at noon. I can’t really talk long. I have to call a cab.”
“A cab? I thought Beck was going to take care of your needs.”
Oh, the double entendre she was completely oblivious to.
“Don’t worry, Mom. Beck is taking good care of all my needs.” I winked at him and added, “He just can’t chauffeur me around constantly. He has to work.”
Beck grew still as he watched from the corner of his eye, pretending to be focused on the computer. I chatted a minute more before insisting I had to get off the phone. When I disconnected, he caught my eye and canted his head.
“Are you going to tell your mother?”
“Is it a secret?”
Worry marred his brow, but he turned from his computer and gave me his full attention, speaking with a sincerity that surprised me.
“No. I would never ask that of you. I just… it’d be nice to get used to the idea first before telling your folks. It will wind up on the national news by tonight if I know them.”
I chuckled. He wasn’t far off. I had a feeling my mother would be over the moon hearing that Beck and I were making something more of our friendship. She’d always loved him.
“I’ll wait. But if this is really going somewhere—”
“I’m not asking you to live in a closet for me, Gray. And I’m not using you as an experiment. I see it going somewhere.”
A release of tension in my chest made it easier to breathe. I didn’t realize how much worry and doubt I’d been holding onto since last night until Beck spoke. No one was in the store, so I hooked a hand around his neck and pulled him across the counter, meeting him in the middle for a soft, and all too brief kiss. One that held promises of more.
He didn’t resist. Before we separated, he even flicked his tongue against mine in a searching, seeking, tentative sort of way. I sighed against him, and he gave another nervous laugh which I was finding kinda cute—although I’d never tell him that in a million years. Cute might be an insult to his masculinity, and I had to suspect Beck was on shaky ground about that already.
“You make everything good again,” I told him, breathing in his scent and closing my eyes.
Eventually, I pulled back, leaving him with a questioning look on his face. Before he could address my anxiety issue, I knocked on the counter and thumbed over my shoulder.
“I gotta run. I’ll see you tonight.”
Chapter Eighteen
Beckett
I watched Gray leave, cursing him under my breath. Every. Fucking. Time. This
evasive thing had to stop. Somewhere in a muddle of blowjob euphoria last night and nearly being late to open shop this morning, I’d forgotten, yet again, about the odd behavior Gray was presenting.
That bruise on his shoulder brought it back to the forefront.
Once his cab disappeared down the road with him inside, I zipped around the counter and ran to the front door of the shop. Securing the bolt, I then darted into the back room and took the stairs two at a time. There was something I’d meant to do this morning, but it had slipped my mind. With Gray out of the apartment, I felt compelled to check.
In the kitchen, I aimed for the garbage can under the sink. Ignoring the disgusting collection of discarded food on the top, I dug deeper until I found the stack of papers Gray had been quick to dispose of last night when I’d come home. They were food stained and sticky from the chicken bones still dripping traces of honey. A smear of pizza sauce covered another.
It didn’t matter. I smoothed them onto the table and frowned as I scanned what he’d written. Pages and pages, front and back, filled with numbers. Just numbers.
I flipped them over, scanned, flipped them back. Picked through them one at a time. But they didn’t make sense. There were five pages altogether. I laid them out and examined them like a puzzle, trying to see into Gray’s mind and figure out what he’d been so frantically doing.
On one page, his pencil strokes were almost neat and orderly. The numbers were in straight columns. Five columns across. On the back of that particular page, the writing was slightly less neat, the lines less symmetrical. Another page; the writing was almost illegible. There were no longer perfectly ordered rows. It was a chaotic mess of scribbles that made no sense. But they were still definitely numbers.
I frowned, pulled a chair out, and sat down. What the hell had he been doing?
As I picked over them, I discovered a pattern. They weren’t random numbers. What he’d written were timestamps. 5:23, 5:24, 5:25, 5:26…
I turned back to the most orderly of the pages and noted it started at 2:12, 2:13, 2:14, 2:15. And on and on, all the way up to the last one I could make out on the page of scribbles which was 6:07.
If I had to wager a guess, that was the exact same time I’d arrived home last night. Piecing together a theory, my stomach dropped. Had Gray been sitting here writing down each passing minute as they happened for nearly four hours?
How was that possible? That was insane.
And yet… knowing what I’d been witnessing lately—what Gray had been making every attempt to hide—it almost made a weird sort of sense. My clock almost flying across the living room. His new watch. The digital bedroom clock. The obsessive attention he paid to the time.
And that was only what I’d seen. What was going on when I wasn’t around?
What about the nightmares? His issue with the dark? The bruise?
I gathered the papers into a pile and folded them before shoving them—grunge and all—into my pocket. I washed my hands and headed back downstairs before customers wondered why the doors were locked.
All afternoon, I considered how to approach this new discovery. I knew Gray, and I knew he hated showing weakness. If something was wrong, it made sense he was hiding. But he had to know it wasn’t healthy. I wasn’t just a random person, either. I thought we talked about everything. For fuck’s sake, I let him suck my dick last night, that had to count for something.
We weren’t just best friends anymore, but lovers too—although we hadn’t labeled it anything yet, had we?
It had a weird ring to it that I wasn’t used to hearing.
Broody and unsettled, I closed shop early since it was a quiet day and went upstairs to wait for Gray to come home. He’d been out for hours. Apart from his meeting with his boss, I didn’t know where else he’d planned to go.
At a quarter to five, I decided to start dinner. While defrosting some ground beef in the microwave, I was contemplating the limp vegetables we’d accumulated in the crisper when my phone rang.
I scooped it off the table and answered right away when Gray’s name flashed across the screen.
“Hey. What happened to you? I thought you’d be home by now.”
All I got in response was breathing. In the background was a muffled chatter of voices followed by random beeping and what sounded like an intercom page.
“Gray?”
“Can you come pick me up?” His voice was clipped. Irritated.
The microwave beeped on my end, but I ignored it. “Where are you?”
More breathing. “The hospital.”
“What? Are you okay? What happened?”
“Just… ask for me at the emergency department. Please hurry up.”
Before I could say more, the line went dead. I stared at my phone. Jesus! The emergency room?
I was out the door and in the car before my heart took its next racing beat. Dewhurst Country General was a good ten-minute drive across town at this time of the day. Rush hour traffic was unforgivable on the main roads, and I cursed every red light, glaring at the odometer when I couldn’t manage to hit even half the speed limit.
Finally pulling into the emergency parking lot across the street from the hospital, I hightailed it through the giant sliding glass doors. The assault of noise was instant. Crackling radios, machines, paramedics calling vital statistics to nurses as they wheeled a stretcher with an unconscious patient from the ambulatory entrance.
The waiting room was standing room only, and the putrid smell of sickness mixed with the burning tang of antiseptic that hung in the air. Over the intercom, someone called a code blue in room one seventeen.
I let the paramedics zip past me before weaving my way toward the administration desk, skipping triage since Gray was already a patient somewhere and I just needed to find him.
The older African American woman behind the plexiglass window was multitasking; printing and stacking sheets of paper with one hand while typing on the computer with the other. Amazingly, she was also dictating instructions to a nurse behind her desk who was writing something on a clipboard.
I caught her eyes briefly before they set their focus back on the screen in front of her.
“Can I help you?”
“Looking for a patient. Grayson Brooks.”
She paused everything she was doing long enough to give me a look I’d seen on many teachers’ faces growing up. We were double trouble, Gray and me, and endlessly warming a bench in the principal’s office, much to Gray’s mom’s dismay. It was the that boy is a nuisance look. How, among dozens of patients, Gray had managed to make an impression deserving of a look like that I had no idea.
“Mmhmm… He’s in curtain A12.”
I paused, wanting to ask her why the face, but submitted and let her return to her work while I went to find Gray.
I pushed through the doors leading to the emergency care rooms, then followed the numbers hanging from the ceiling that marked the sectioned off curtain spaces. Halfway down a row, I spotted two police officers standing outside a section at the far side of the room.
Before I glimpsed the number above the curtain they occupied, for whatever reason, my gut told me that was where I’d find Gray. Checking only confirmed my suspicion. I blew out a breath and hiked over to see what the fuck was going on.
Gray sat on the edge of a hospital bed, his right hand resting on a rolling table where a young nurse with platinum blonde hair was working to close a series of cuts along his knuckles with stitches. Gray’s hand was bashed and bleeding, bruised, swollen, and practically shredded. A wad of bloody gauze sat on the tray along with a bag of ice.
Gray’s eyes were pinched closed, and his lips twitched, but I didn’t think it was from the pain of getting stitched. Based on the weeks following his accident, I knew for a fact he had a high tolerance for such things, and stitches were nothing. We’d both been the recipient more times than I could count growing up.
Gray didn’t notice I’d arrived, but the officer closer to me lifte
d his face from his notepad and scanned me once before pulling himself to his daunting full height of well over six feet. He lifted his chin in the cocky, confident way cops had that was meant to be intimidating. It worked. He was nothing but a wall of bricks. The guy was either a steroid freak or lived in a gym on his off time. His hair was dark mahogany and military short, and his broad shoulders threatened the fabric of his uniform.
“Are you the friend?”
The friend like he’d been waiting for me to show up.
Gray’s head jerked up, and his eyes opened wide as he noticed me for the first time. Not giving him the satisfaction of sympathy until I knew what was up from down, I returned my gaze to the police officer.
“Yeah. I’m Beckett O’Keefe. What happened?”
“We had a bit of a disturbance this afternoon.” He eyed Gray with a look that could have been a normal cop face or disgust—my money was on the latter. “Grayson here decided to have a little destructive tantrum at Davidson’s Ford dealership.”
“I didn’t have a tantrum. I punched a fucking clock. The end. I said I’m sorry. I said I’d replace it. It was—”
“You punched a clock?” I asked, the inflection at the end of my statement coming out in a disbelieving squeak. “Seriously?!”
“According to Eric Davidson,” the cop continued, “you pulverized it. Punched it repeatedly for near on five minutes in a fit of rage until it was shattered on the floor. Scared customers and the guy’s wife working behind the service desk.”
Gray’s jaw ticked, and he turned his face back to watch the nurse working on his hand. I caught the sneer, but thankfully, I didn’t think Mr. Macho Cop did.
“He’s exaggerating,” Gray spat.
The other cop’s radio crackled to life, and he listened for a second as someone rambled codes I didn’t understand before he turned the volume down. Tapping his partner’s arm, he muttered something I wasn’t meant to hear.
The second cop was shorter and less intimidating than the first—but no less stern-faced or arrogant. He had slanting cat eyes, a darker complexion, and the barest hint of a goatee forming.
The two held a silent conversation before the second officer unclipped his phone from his belt and walked down the hall as he made a call.