Take the Edge Off

by TA Moore

  “Don’t worry about it,” Cal said. The taste of Joe was long gone from his lips, but he licked them anyway. “What else do I have to do?”

  There was a pause, and then El said, “Do you have any friends who aren’t criminals?”

  “You?”

  “I’m your brother. I have no choice.”

  “I miss the cars, not the assholes,” Cal said. The acrid edge to his voice tasted like bile. He swallowed it. Last time he’d seen his best mate, the shithead sold him out on the stand. It had been a year, and it could easily have been worse, but it had been Cal’s fucking year. Mick was lucky Cal had worked out that revenge wasn’t worth another year. “Don’t worry about me. He’s put me up at the Renaissance for the duration. Guy’s too rich for common sense.”

  “Do not.”

  “I don’t plan to,” Cal promised.

  It wasn’t a lie. He’d already done it, and despite the temptation, he didn’t plan to revisit Joe’s bed. That sort of thing got complicated fast, and Cal was already on Edward’s bad side… assuming there was another side.

  It might have worked on anyone else, but El had known Cal since he told his first lie, so he snorted.

  “At least wait until the contract’s up,” El said. “And if you see Jane, tell her I need to talk—”

  “No.”

  Cal hung up and tucked the phone into his pocket. There was no sign of Joe on his way back to the car. Who did an American have buried in a London graveyard, Cal wondered as he patted his pockets for a smoke. It was only when he came up with a strip of gum instead of a packet of Benson and Hedges that he remembered he’d given that habit up.

  It had been a sort of sacrifice to his new, clean act. He’d quit the two vices most likely to kill him—smoking and stealing cars—so could anyone really hold it against him if he fell off the dangerous-men bandwagon every now and again?

  The collar of Cal’s borrowed shirt—retrieved from the garment bag in the boot earlier—rubbed at his neck. He scratched under it and wondered when El’s last visit to Grandad had been. The abrupt blare of a horn cut through his distraction, and he turned around to see the yellow-clad power walker slap his bare hands angrily against the bonnet of a low-slung sports car.

  “Watch where you’re going,” the man yelled as he threw his hands up in the air. He gave the bumper of the car a dent with his trainer. “Idiot!”

  The driver gave him the finger out the window and veered around him. Cal started to turn back to the graves but stopped as a dull navy car, so nondescript it was memorable, caught his attention. It was stopped in the back corner of the car park, in front of two other cars.

  It probably wasn’t the same one. There were lots of navy cars, after all.

  The passenger-side door popped open, and a lanky figure in baggy jeans and a baggier hoodie, skull and Slipknot logo half-peeled off the well-washed cotton, scrambled out. Despite the sun that beat down on the manicured, vibrantly green grass and pruned trees, he had his hood tugged up over his head and down nearly to the bridge of his nose. The scruffy figure loped between the parked cars and cut across, instead of around the sunken dips of the graves. Meanwhile the navy car gunned the engine and pulled away from its spot.

  Cal gave in to the sharp-nailed prod of suspicion and tried to get the license plate, but between the distance and the dirt, it was impossible. It turned out the gate and disappeared from view, and when Cal looked back at the graveyard, the hoodie had disappeared from view too.

  A kid, Cal tried to convince himself, dropped off to pay his respects. That was all. Even if it wasn’t, Cal was a driver, not a bodyguard. No one had ever been exactly clear where he could toe up to that line, but this would be clearly over it.

  “Shit,” he muttered aloud as he pushed himself off the car.

  Cal walked briskly up the narrow path between the carved, occasionally florid gravestones until he reached the turn Joe had taken. He looked around as he walked briskly along the road, eyes peeled for either Joe or the scruffy kid in the torn hoodie.

  “This is what comes of not listening to El,” he muttered to himself as he sidestepped some mourning old ladies. “I bet this doesn’t happen if you date a doctor.”

  Gravel crunched under Cal’s feet as he walked along the path. He scanned the green slopes at either side of the road as he looked for an expensive suit and stupid hair or Slipknot hoodie as he nicked a bunch of flowers from a grave.

  He rubbed his ear as he took a left at a swooning angel, the crack her nose had taken at some point probably why she’d had to sit down, and followed the narrow, uneven lane trod between the graves.

  At the top of the slope, shadowed by a thick spur of hedges, Cal finally saw Joe in front of a large, gray gravestone. His hand rested carefully, almost uncertainly on top of it, and his head was bowed. He didn’t look like he wanted to be interrupted.

  Cal paused next to Mr. and Mrs. Eddie Tanner and wondered if he could get away without being seen. Before he could make up his mind, the hoodie belted through the gravestones and grabbed Joe.

  Fuck.

  Cal sprinted up the hill as the hoodie tried to muscle Joe away from the grave. It didn’t go as easily as the lanky man had expected, as Joe dug his heels in and jabbed an elbow back.

  Chapter Four

  JOE WAS a rich man. He’d been a rich kid. There had always been a chance someone would try to snatch him. For as long as he could remember, Edward had run him through drills about what to do if it happened—a checklist updated each time Joe shot up an inch or hit another useful milestone, like knowing his address or how to text with his phone in his pocket.

  In practice, that all turned out to be nearly useless.

  Instead of a carjacker with a gun and a clear plan, it was rough hands and the stink of fresh sweat layered over old body odor under a sweat-damp hoodie. He jabbed his elbow to the side and tried to hook his foot around the attacker’s bandy, jean-clad legs.

  “Get off me,” he panted as he tried to pry gloved fingers off his arm. “Let go and I won’t call the police.”

  The attacker snarled a muffled “Shut up!” and jabbed a short, vicious punch into Joe’s back. The pain spiked into Joe’s kidneys and then radiated out across his back. He staggered, and the attacker grunted in satisfaction as he muscled him between the graves.

  Joe grabbed an old headstone. The granite was rough under his fingers, and he tore a nail as the attacker yanked him away. The small, sharp pain finally reminded him of something Edward had told him to do, so he let his legs go from under him and his attacker cursed as he tripped over his long, bony legs. The hard grip on Joe’s arm loosened, and Joe managed to wrench himself free.

  He fell onto his ass and kicked his heels into the grass as he scrambled backward. The attacker picked himself up and ran at him again. A skull leered out from under the hood—bare bones and tombstone teeth under the glitter of feverish blue eyes and rough skin. He swung a booted foot in a wild arc, and Joe caught it against his arm with a dull impact that his brain decided didn’t hurt yet. The assailant lurched forward and stamped on him with heavy, frantic boots. The thick rubber soles connected with Joe’s thighs and crushed one hand into the grass.

  “Get away from him!” Cal’s rough voice cut through Joe’s confusion-fed panic. “Son of a bitch!”

  At least, Joe thought with relief as he curled up to protect his head, if he got kidnapped, there would be a witness.

  The attacker staggered to a stop and leaned down to grab a handful of Joe’s shirt. A ragged, glass-gargled voice spat out, “Fuck off home, rich boy, and stop asking questions. Next time—” He grunted as he dragged him over the grass, and Joe groped behind him as he tried to find something to hang onto. He dug his fingers into the dirt and grass and then met cold, empty air. “I’ll finish the job first.”

  Joe glanced around and saw a grave gaping open behind him—sharp edges of wet dirt and a long drop down to an old, dirt-scabbed coffin.

  The panic washed back, outs
ized and incapacitating. Joe grabbed at the attacker with frantic hands, hooked his fingers in the musty hoodie, and clawed into the mask. It twisted under his fingers and slid down the man’s face. He got a glimpse of a clumsy nose—broken so often it smeared out from the crooked bridge—and the man pulled his arm back.

  Cal hooked his arm around the man’s throat and wrenched him backward. The man’s fingers clenched on Joe’s shirt and then deliberately let go. Joe clenched his teeth on a scream as he dropped into the grave. He hit the coffin with a thud, and clods of dirt, dislodged from the dark, damp sides of the hole, fell in on top of him.

  His chest squeezed painfully as though the throttled-back scream took up all the room.

  Trapped. He couldn’t move. His lungs hurt. Pressure on his shoulders and across his chest….

  Joe took a ragged breath—he could taste the wet soil on the air—and shoved through the acrid wall of panic. It wasn’t a box. He wasn’t trapped. It was only a hole.

  A grave, his brain corrected with icy precision. It was a grave, and the cracked, wet wood under his fingers was a coffin. Joe lurched awkwardly to his feet, dug his fingers into the soft dirt walls, and tried to scramble out. He managed to boost himself up to grab the edge of the hole, but it crumbled away under his fingers, and Joe dropped back onto the coffin with a thud.

  “Cal!” He could hear the sound of a struggle overhead—the hard thump of knuckles on skin and the scuff of feet over grass. Joe clenched his hand into a fist and thumped it against the dirt wall. “Get me out of here!”

  There was another thud, someone grunted, and a sharp voice screeched disapproval across the graveyard. “Show some respect for fuck’s sake! I’m calling the police!”

  Fuck. That was all he needed.

  A second later Cal leaned over the grave. “Need a hand?”

  Joe bared his teeth. “Get. Me. Out.”

  “That does it for me in the sack,” Cal said as he reached down to grab Joe’s wrist and hauled. “When you aren’t fucking me, learn to say ‘please.’”

  For a second, Joe’s brain glitched out as he tried to process the dregs of claustrophobia and the stark, flat fear that someone had heard Cal say that. All the old stars of the show jostled into his head—the lurid headlines, the tell-alls from his hookups, and his dad’s closed-off, disapproving face—and screeched that everyone would think he was gay.

  It shouldn’t matter, for fuck’s sake. His dad was his boss, but Joe was a grown man and he had his own money. He’d broken up with the only person who actually had a reason to object to who he slept with. But tell that to the paranoia that chewed on the back of his brain.

  Joe scrambled up over the trampled edge of the grave, into the sunshine and the thick, green smell of cut grass, and fell into Cal’s arms. Or at least, hung off Cal’s broad shoulder for a second as he caught his breath. The sharp lemongrass and honey smell of the hotel soap caught on his tongue and spawned a dark, smug wash of possessiveness.

  Stupid, he thought sourly as he pushed himself off Cal, took a step back, and then stumbled gracelessly sideways as he nearly tripped himself back into the hole. It wasn’t his soap, and even if it were, last night had hardly been the start of anything.

  “C’mon,” Cal said as he grabbed Joe’s elbow. “We should call the cops. Get you to a doctor.”

  Joe pulled his arm free and stepped back again. “I’m fine,” he said coldly as he straightened his jacket and brushed fastidiously at the grass stain on the sleeve. “There’s no need to make a fuss, Mr. Tate.”

  The bite in his voice made Cal’s eyebrow twitch slightly in response, and he pulled his hand back to rub the bruise on his jaw instead. Joe bit the side of his tongue. He knew he was being an asshole, but with the last of the panic still hot in his ears, he couldn’t stomach any… constraint.

  He looked around. An old woman with a small black dog tucked under her arm and a phone up to her ear stood at the bottom of the road and frowned up at them. A few rows over, a couple murmured to each other as they curiously craned their heads.

  “Did they see anything?” he asked.

  “Not much,” Cal said. “It happened pretty quickly. Look, if you don’t want to call the police, we should at least call Edward. He’s your—”

  “No,” Joe snapped. He swallowed and tasted the metallic salt of spent panic and anger. “Let’s be clear, Mr. Tate. The other night changed nothing about our relationship. I’m the boss, and if I don’t want to say ‘please,’ then I won’t. You’ll still do what you’re told. If you can’t do that, then I’ll do what Edward wants and get your brother to send a replacement.”

  The minute Joe said it, he wished he could take it back. In his head it had sounded more of an unsentimental reinstatement of boundaries and less like a privileged asshole with control issues. He couldn’t even blame it on the claustrophobia.

  Reserve shuttered Cal’s pale eyes, and he shrugged.

  “You’re the boss.”

  The apology was on the tip of Joe’s tongue, but he couldn’t bring himself to spit it out, probably because he was a bastard with control issues. Instead he pushed past Cal and stalked back down the hill.

  “Spit or swallow?” Cal asked behind him.

  The low, growled question reached down under Joe’s good sense, palmed his libido in one callused hand, and flicked his temper with the other. Joe felt heat prickle up the back of his neck as he turned around, but he couldn’t swear whether he wanted to punch Cal or kiss him.

  Split the difference, a wicked little idea suggested, put him on his knees and make him show you what he does. The mental image was easy—paint his memory of the hotel bedroom with sunlight and Cal’s mouth around Joe as he came—but that didn’t mean it helped.

  “What did you say?” he asked.

  Cal held out a handkerchief. “Spit or swallow,” he said as he gestured at his own lower lip. “You’re bleeding.”

  Joe touched his mouth, and his fingers came away wet and red. He hadn’t noticed before, but now he felt the sting of a split lip under the hot static of panic that had filled him.

  “Thank you,” he said after a second. “I didn’t hear you right.”

  He took the handkerchief, wiped his fingers clean, and then dabbed it carefully against his lip. It hurt now that he knew it was there.

  Cal smirked at him with a slow, cocky slant of his mouth that said he knew exactly what he’d said. “Did ya?” he asked. “That’s a shame, but you should mind that lip.”

  He headed on down the hill. Joe pressed the folded cotton against his mouth and watched him go. There were grass stains on the white cotton shirt pulled tightly over his shoulders and mud on the trousers that weren’t quite tight enough to show his ass off to full effect. The wicked little thought nudged back into his brain to note, “He’s not that cocky when he’s under you. If you….”

  Joe shoved it back into its box for later, when he was alone between fresh hotel sheets, and limped after Cal.

  “I need a drink,” he said instead and then glanced down at himself with a grimace. He’d dripped blood all down his shirt, and there was grave dirt worked into his trousers. “And some new clothes. I don’t want to explain this to Edward.”

  “HERE,” CAL said as he set a glass of whiskey in front of Joe. He sat down on the other side of the table with a bottle of soda and straddled the low chair with his long legs. “Try that.”

  Joe picked it up and took a drink. The liquor stung the cuts inside his mouth and burned on the way down. He ran his tongue along the inside of his lip and tasted the dull-penny taste of fresh blood.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “You paid for it, Mr. Bailey.” Cal shrugged as he lifted the soda. “I did as I was told.”

  There was, probably, nothing particularly lewd about the pucker of Cal’s lips when he drank, but Joe had to shift uncomfortably in the booth and look down into his whiskey. He rubbed his thumb over the sharply cut corner of the square glass.

  “What
I said,” he said stiffly. “It might not have been called for. I’m not used to my personal and professional lives being quite so… connected.”

  Cal swallowed and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Don’t usually sleep with the help?”

  “You make it sound sleazy.”

  The first smile since the graveyard curved Cal’s mouth. It didn’t slide into goofy, but it touched his eyes. He slouched back in the chair and idly rubbed his thumb around the lip of his bottle.

  “I kinda like it sleazy,” he said. “But I get it. You don’t want anyone to know you banged me.”

  “That doesn’t make it sound any better.”

  Joe glanced over Cal’s shoulder to see if any of the people at the bar could hear them. The bartender was slouched at the far end, his attention on the TV. A couple of businessmen were two beers past insufferable as they boasted about money and leered at the woman at the table by the window, red curls scooped atop her head and her attention pinned to a laptop.

  The slow wash of relief annoyed him. The only people who could justify commentary on his sex life were either dead or, finally, cut loose to actually be happy. He didn’t know why he was still… scared. Unless it was the habit of it.

  Cal shrugged and leaned forward, his soda held out for a toast. Condensation dripped down the side of the bottle as he tilted it. “I’ll mind what I say,” he promised. “You say please.”

  He waited as Joe picked up the whiskey glass and held it loosely between his fingers. “And if I don’t?” he asked.

  “I’ll do what I’m told,” Cal said. His smile sharpened. It was a small change in expression—a tightness at the corner of his mouth, a hint of sharp, white tooth—but it stripped the easy humor out of Cal’s face. “But you’ll know that I think you’re a dick.”

  “You’d have plenty of company,” Joe said. He touched his thumb to his lower lip and winced at the ache of it. “Our friend at the graveyard among them.”