by Wendy Qualls
“Might as well let the engine warm up,” he declared. “Start her up and I’ll be done in a sec. You want some coffee? Rick’s got a plug-in pot in the van. It’s not café quality but it’s hot. No creamer or sugar left, unfortunately. Go ahead and sit here while the car warms up—I’ll grab you one.”
Lito started the engine, which immediately started blasting cold air out of the vents, then slumped into the passenger seat and made a good faith effort to clomp the dirt off his hiking boots before closing his door. Tired and jittery at the same time. Wonderful. Coffee was probably a terrible idea, but the idea of a warm beverage—any warm beverage—was just too good to pass up. Hell, even the two-month-old protein bar was sounding less awful.
“Here.” Dave climbed in from the other side and set the coffee in the cupholder between them. “You good?”
“Yeah.”
“Excellent.” He settled into his own seat and let out a long, peaceful sigh which ended with a bit of a giggle. “That was incredible. Kid was freezing and miserable, but not a scratch on him. Hell of a first call-out for you.” He leaned his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes. “Holy shit. I’m exhausted but so keyed up right now. You hungry?”
Lito glanced over toward Rick’s van, where the other team members were milling around and helping load gear into the open side doors. “Don’t we have to…I don’t know, debrief or something?”
“We will, but not here.” Dave jabbed a thumb toward the house, where presumably Grayson and his mother were talking with the county sheriff. “In the case of a successful sector clear or a probable deceased individual, we all meet back and finish up at incident command. For a live find, though, we’re just in the way. Our part is done.”
“That’s a little anticlimactic.”
Dave grinned. “I’m too hyped up to care. Give me five minutes to tell everyone we’re clear and then we can head out.”
Lito sipped his coffee and let the warmth permeate his fingers while Dave checked in with the rest of the team. One by one, everyone packed up and left, until only the squad cars were left.
“Damn,” Dave said, climbing back in and buckling his seatbelt. “Still can’t believe it went that well. What are you hungry for?”
Chapter 6
Dave’s stomach was growling too loudly to worry about being picky and Lito insisted he didn’t care, so he took them home via the city of Cullman itself. It added about twenty minutes to their trip, but that was twenty more minutes of flipping radio stations and hearing Lito sing. Dave didn’t want to examine too closely why that felt so appealing. Once they got cell reception again, Lito pulled up a list of the handful of restaurants that were still open at eight o’clock on a Sunday night in Cullman, Alabama.
“Chain steakhouse, barbecue, another steakhouse, burgers…isn’t there anywhere to get vegetables around here?” Lito scowled at his phone. “Chinese buffet is a possibility, I guess.”
“You’re a vegetarian?” Dave was caught off-guard at that, although he probably shouldn’t have been. Avoiding animal products in the Bible Belt was possible in theory but had to be exhausting in practice.
“Not as such, no.” Lito rubbed the back of his neck in a gesture that was seriously endearing. And decidedly sexy, in Dave’s hyped-up state. “Nothing that would indicate a great moral stance or anything, anyway—I just avoid red meat. My dad couldn’t eat it for health reasons so we never had it growing up. I never developed the taste for it, I guess.”
“Let me guess: there were about a thousand more restaurant choices in Atlanta than there are in Black Lake.”
“Got it in one. Ditto when I lived near Orlando. I’ve got no problem with chicken or seafood, though… Yeah, the deli is closed too. Guess we might as well try the Chinese.”
The restaurant was well past the main part of Cullman, right at that distance where it could only loosely be called “in town,” but it did smell good and there were a smattering of cars in the parking lot. Probably church-goers who preferred the evening services. The buffet turned out to be on the smallish side, but it was otherwise was no different from any of a zillion other Americanized Chinese restaurants. They did offer cornbread and fried okra mixed in among the other options, Dave noted. That part might not have been as universal. Lito’s plate was crammed with variations on “healthy-looking things in sauce,” but Dave’s own food choices were squarely centered on “beige and fried.” After that search, he’d damn well earned the right to eat whatever he wanted.
“So the search,” Lito prompted once they were both back at the table. “Scooter made it sound like actually finding Grayson was unusual.”
“Let me put it this way: we do probably forty or fifty searches a year. Rick and I have been running this team for ten years. Out of all those hundreds of searches, I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve actually found—unhurt—the kids we were looking for.”
“Seriously?” Lito made a face. “Not like in movies, then.”
“Worth it when they do happen, though.” Dave had never sat down to do a full mental inventory, but live finds were what fueled the team’s “remember when?” stories for years to come. “It’s partly because we’re usually searching for adults, of course, and also because a lot of those searches are for people we’re pretty sure are deceased. But mostly it’s that kids don’t tend to get lost in the wilderness anywhere near as often as you’d expect. The woods have spider webs and poison ivy and no place to charge an iPad—not what most kids nowadays are looking for.”
“Where do they turn up, then, when they do get reported missing? Are they usually runaways?”
“That, custody issues, or they’re just sneaking around behind their parents’ backs like our Waldo today was.” The reasons did vary, but not by much. Hell, Dave vividly remembered sitting out on the bleachers with his friends after football practice most nights, horsing around and feeling invincible. Wandering along the cut-through to the cul-de-sac two blocks from Lito’s house in hopes of finding something fun to do. Funny how much two tours in the Army changed your outlook on life.
“Huh.” Lito mulled that over for a few bites. “Is it okay to talk about here?” he eventually asked. “I mean, Scooter explained the whole ‘Waldo’ thing…”
Despite the handful of cars in the lot, the nearest diners to their table were a good ten feet away. “It’s not like there’s confidential information we have to hide,” Dave explained, “but it’s not something to go blabbing to the news about either. I’m just in the habit of calling all our search targets ‘Waldo’ so I won’t slip up.” It said something good about Lito that the guy remembered to check, though.
“What happened today, then?”
A damn good find, is what. Dave closed his eyes and felt a delicious shiver run down his spine as he remembered the moment of Nikita’s jubilant alert all over again. “Grayson was tired and cold, as you’d expect, but unhurt. Nikita hit on his scent cone a ways out and followed it up a gulley to what basically looked like the kid’s secret hideout. A good quarter mile from the road, tucked in under a rock overhang. Hard to see unless you already knew where it was. I got the impression he hung out there a lot—tarp, blankets, folding chair, big Tupperware bin full of Penthouse and Playboys. The usual. He did have a hell of a hangover, though, which is probably making all the aftermath a little less fun.”
“Grayson was drinking?” Lito looked honestly surprised at that. “He’s only in seventh grade!”
Clearly middle school in Miami was way different than in Alabama. Seventh grade was supposed to be for fishing, getting random wood at the stupidest of times, and drinking your first shitty beer with your friends while hiding out somewhere your parents wouldn’t see. Dave had never particularly thought of his own experience as odd before.
“He definitely was this time,” Dave said, “but I don’t think it was a usual thing for him to drink alone.” There
hadn’t been any accumulated beer bottles, despite a plethora of soda cans and snack debris strewn about. “Short of it was, you remember the thing his mom told you about him having a crush on a girl?”
Lito nodded. “Beth, she said.”
“That’s the one. He lied to his mom so he could sneak out and walk over to her house. She lives about two miles down the road—not far at all, when you’re a determined thirteen-year-old. I didn’t push for details, but it sounds like he asked her out and she rejected him. He decided to break into his mom’s liquor cabinet and go get totally smashed in his secret clubhouse. Typical teenager drama; you know how it is.”
“I didn’t date until I was eighteen, so not really, but I’ve seen plenty of movies.” Lito made a what-can-you-do face. “Mine was far more typical than it should have been, unfortunately.”
Dave had a sneaking suspicion that this “drama” was code for “homophobia,” but Lito had never actually said he was gay. There was the earring and the tight shirts and the amazing fashion sense and the bubble butt and maybe Dave was hoping, but the dude had a right to come out—or not—at his own pace. “Parents disapproved of who you brought home?” he asked instead. “Or—let me guess. Were you full-on goth? Refused to do your homework? I’m trying to picture you as a teenager now.” He’d probably been a good-looking kid, Dave decided, skinny and smiling most of the time. And with those brown eyes…
Lito opened his mouth, then closed it again. He finally seemed to make a decision. “Didn’t so much bring someone home as get caught using my cousin’s fake ID to sneak into a gay club,” he said in a low voice. “My family didn’t take it the best.”
“Well shit.” That answers that. It made Dave feel a bit less rude for perving over the mental images of Lito that kept popping into his head as of late. Not that Lito liking men was a huge surprise, but confirmation was still good. And, he realized, something he himself had probably been remiss in not voicing earlier. Lito’s skittishness suddenly made much more sense. “I’m sorry you went through that,” he said aloud. “I held off on all-the-way coming out for a few years because the Army was still in the middle of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, but it was an open secret for a long time. My family knew, and my non-Army friends, but I couldn’t talk about it to anyone in training or when I was deployed.”
That earned him a long, thoughtful look. “You know,” Lito said slowly, “my gaydar has been giving me mixed signals ever since I met you and it’s been driving me crazy. You didn’t have that embarrassed, wary look straight guys sometimes get when they first meet me, but you didn’t come off as overtly queer either.”
“You’re not the first to say that.”
Lito snorted. “It’s nice to know I’m not the only non-straight dude in Black Lake, though. Are you out to the team?”
“Oh, sure.” He’d mentioned guys in passing, if not in full detail. Most of those guys had been one-night stands when he and his friend Gus met up in Tennessee to prowl their favorite nightclub together. “I’m not gonna lie to you—Black Lake isn’t Atlanta. You’d probably get some strange looks if you walked through downtown holding hands with another man. Nobody on the team has a problem with me being gay, though, and it’s not like any of the other squads we work with are in a position to say anything. I don’t advertise my orientation, but I don’t hide it either.”
Dave made a point of not looking at Lito’s earring. It was a tasteful little gold stud today. Absolutely nothing about Lito suggested hide—he probably set off gaydars for miles. Not as a hundred-percent-certain thing, more in a “damn, that guy’s gotta hate correcting people all the time if he’s straight” way. There was something admirable in being that comfortable with yourself. And there was definitely something good about finally having the mutually queer thing out in the open between them.
“That’s…good to know,” Lito said, and pushed a bit of broccoli around on his plate. “I’m assuming there isn’t a ‘scene’ in town?”
His tone was nonchalant, like it was an idle question, but Dave had to laugh at how Lito was practically holding his breath for the answer. “Do karaoke Fridays at the VFW count?” he asked. Lito glared, which sobered him a bit. “Sorry. I know what you meant. And any ‘scene’ in Black Lake barely lives up to the name, especially if you’re comparing it to what you’re probably used to. On the rare occasions I’m looking to cut loose, I go to Nashville.”
“Yeah, okay. I didn’t think there would be, but I was hoping.”
Dave didn’t have to imagine very hard to picture Lito being totally at home in a gay club, Nashville or otherwise. He’d almost certainly wear something like that pink t-shirt he’d had on at the pet store when they first met, and he’d meticulously gel his hair so it stayed frozen in a maximally attractive swoop across his forehead. He probably owned some tighter-than-tight jeans too, and he’d have his eyes closed out on the dance floor as he ground against some other, similarly decked-out dude. Oh, and he’d totally be singing along with whatever pop diva was blasting at the time.
No, that wasn’t right. In Dave’s mind, the generic dance floor resolved into his regular haunt in Nashville and the “other dude” morphed a bit to look suspiciously like himself. Someone who was tall enough to get right up behind Lito and surround him as he danced, palms skimming over his chest and broader shoulders dwarfing his smaller form. Lito would lean his head back in pleasure and Dave would be able to nip at his neck and yell-whisper over the music exactly what he intended to do to him when he got him alone…
And that was going to get awkward pretty damn quick. “So.” Dave looked down at his almost-empty plate. “Normally I’d be all for a dessert round of off-brand Jell-O and soap-flavored cookies, but I think I took more food on that first trip than I intended. I’m going to skip the encore tonight.”
“Same.” Lito set his fork down and nudged his plate toward the center of the table. “You want to get going? I’m not in any particular hurry—Spot is probably enjoying the chance to shed over my whole bed instead of just her usual half—but I guess it’s still a ways back to Black Lake.”
“Might as well.” Lumpy and Woozy were almost certainly already asleep on the sofa, curled into each other and making adorable snuffling noises, but they’d be up and waiting the moment they heard the garage door. They knew the drill. “Probably an hour or so from here.”
They split the bill and headed back out to the parking lot. The air had gotten noticeably colder as the evening turned into night, but there was a tiny sliver of a moon and the afternoon’s clouds had blown away. Dave gave himself a moment to stare at the sky and take it all in.
“You into astronomy?” Lito asked, pausing beside him and following his gaze.
“Not the science part.” Not the way his dad knew all the physics details, anyway. “It just reminds me of camping trips when I was a kid, lying in the tent with the tarp unzipped so we could watch the stars. My mom and my older brother Jack never wanted to go, so it was usually just me and Dad and my little brother Kitt. Dad knows all the constellations and all the other little random facts like which stars are how far away, which planets have which moons… Stuff like that. Kitt ate it all up, numbers and all, but I just liked the myths. He’s a meteorology tech for NASA in Huntsville now.”
“Huh. There was too much light pollution to see much of the night sky in Miami,” Lito said, “but it’s pretty. And big. I can see why y’all like it.”
Dave looked down and caught a hint of something on Lito’s face that completely knocked him for a loop. It wasn’t “wonder,” necessarily, but it was joyous and open and honest and Dave abruptly realized he’d do just about anything to see that same look in a different situation. One that involved both of them wearing far less clothing. Someone had to make the first move, and it might as well be him. “You know,” he said slowly and with as much innuendo as he could muster, “anytime you want me to help you see stars, all you gotta do is a
sk.”
Lito blinked at him. “You’re…am I reading too much into that, or was that a come-on?”
“Depends. Which interpretation involves you having a better night? Because if you want me to take you home and pretend I never said anything, I will. If you feel like us finding somewhere with fewer lights so we can appreciate the stars from the comfort of my Jeep, though…then yeah, it was a come-on.”
Lito cocked his head to one side. “Is making out in the backseat another one of those typical teenager things I somehow missed out on?”
He hadn’t said yes, yet, but there was a definite interested note in Lito’s voice. It was more than a little promising, and plenty to get Dave’s heart pounding. “I guess I’ll give you a pass”—Dave mock-sighed—“seeing as Miami probably lacks both clear skies and big SUVs. Stargazing was a staple of adolescence around here, though.”
“You lose your v-card in the back seat of a boyfriend’s pickup?”
Oh yeah. Definitely interested. “In an EconoLodge just after Basic, actually,” Dave admitted, “but…I’ll just say I spent a lot of time in high school dreaming about it.” He stepped away and dared a long, thorough once-over of Lito’s body. Even in the yellow-orange glow of the parking lot streetlight, the dude looked good enough to eat. “Like I said—no pressure, but you’d be fulfilling a major fantasy of mine. If you want.”
Lito paused, for so long Dave was afraid he’d majorly fucked things up. Then… “I suppose I could say it’s contributing to my cultural education.”
* * * *
Holy fucking shit. Lito rode silently in the passenger seat and focused on trying not to hyperventilate. Dave Schmidt really is gay, and he wants to get horizontal with me. It felt too good to be true. And okay, the offer may have only been made because dudes who do dudes were slim pickings in Black Lake and backseat sex was apparently on Dave’s bucket list, but damn. Lito wasn’t too proud to take him up on his offer no matter the circumstances.