Take the Edge Off

by TA Moore

  “Gray?”

  “Navy,” Joe corrected from where he stood next to a wall of fabric bolts. “Three-piece. Maybe something in herringbone?”

  The woman tilted her head to the side thoughtfully, her eyes narrowed as she considered Cal, and then nodded in approval. “Good choice, Mr. Tate,” she said as she hopped to her feet. “Hold on a minute.”

  She ducked out of the shop, between the ranks of blank-faced, well-dressed mannequins. Cal scowled at Joe.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked.

  Joe pinched a paisley-patterned bolt of cloth between thumb and forefinger. “I didn’t say the fitting was for me.”

  “I don’t need you to buy me a suit.”

  Joe leaned back against the heavy wooden table, years of use scarred into the polished surface, and crossed his arms. He tilted his head to the side. “You didn’t need to take off your trousers,” he pointed out. “But you did. So you can’t mind that much.”

  It had been the “please,” soft and damp against his jaw, and Joe’s hand firm in the small of his back. By the time Cal remembered they weren’t doing this anymore, his trousers had been over a hanger and the woman’s tape measure had been looped around his chest. By the time he worked his way up to annoyance, she was already on her knees. Last woman who’d been down there had told him to cough.

  “You’re lucky I’m wearing briefs,” Cal muttered darkly to Joe.

  Joe grinned. “For now,” he said. “I wouldn’t get used to it.”

  Before Cal could ask if that was a come-on or something to do with his new suit, the woman was back with three suits draped over her arm and more shirts than Cal owned dangling from her other hand.

  “Here.” She thrust a dark blue cotton shirt at him. “Try this one first.”

  They stared at him expectantly and Cal gave in and pulled the shirt on. All those years and those people who tried to teach him how to behave, and all they’d needed to do was to make it uncomfortable to make a scene.

  “It’s a bit small,” he said. The fabric was tight over his shoulders, and the collar pinched across his Adam’s apple. “I feel like I’m wearing my brother’s shirt to go to court.”

  The woman snorted at him and brushed his hands away from the buttons. She did them up, top to bottom, with brisk efficiency. “It’s meant to be fitted,” she said. “Did you really do all that work on those muscles not to show them off?”

  She stepped back and looked at Joe with raised eyebrows. “What do you think?” she asked.

  “Maybe something with a grandad collar?” Joe suggested. “Show off his ink.”

  “Oh, yes,” the woman said. “Lean in. Good idea.”

  She disappeared again. Cal figured he didn’t want to know what she thought he was meant to lean in to. He hooked his finger into the collar of the shirt and gave in to the absurdity of the whole situation.

  “So what?” He winked saucily at Joe in the mirror. “You want to go the full Pretty Woman here? I could be into that, I guess.”

  “No.” Joe pushed himself off the table and walked over to stand behind Cal, one hand casually on his shoulder. “You were right. No more pretending to go out. It wasn’t fair. On either of us.”

  The collar of the shirt tightened around Cal’s throat as he swallowed. It usually felt better to be right. He let the disappointment settle.

  “So we’re clear,” he said as he twisted to look over his shoulder at Joe. “Sex is still very fair. You give. I take. We both get off.”

  Joe leaned in and kissed him. He tightened his arm around Cal’s shoulder, knuckles tucked up under Cal’s chin to hold him in place. Warmth spilled over Cal’s tongue and down his throat and then spread through his stomach and down into his thighs. It made the heavy muscles tense and tremble in anticipation.

  After a second, Joe leaned back. He was still close enough that Cal could feel his breath, the heavy rise of Joe’s cock pressed hard and insistent against Cal’s ass through the pointless barrier of thin cotton. There were people in the shop outside, sales staff and clientele, and the woman was going to be back any moment with the replacement shirt. The threat of discovery sparked off Cal’s nerve endings and prickled his skin with eager goose bumps.

  “I’m going to one of the fund-raisers my mother used to support,” Joe said. “There’s a chance they can point me in the right direction. I want you to come with me.”

  Cal frowned. He thought he might have missed something, but it was hard to focus with Joe’s cock nearly—not nearly enough—in his ass.

  “Well, how else would you get there?” he asked. “You don’t drive, and I can’t see your posh ass on the underground.”

  Joe rolled his eyes and kissed him again. A laugh trembled between their lips as their tongues tangled.

  “I want you to come with me as my date, you idiot,” Joe muttered into Cal’s mouth, between soft, nipped bites. He strayed down to Cal’s jaw and scraped his teeth over the freshly shaven skin. “Out where everyone can see. Where anyone can see.”

  “Even Edward?”

  Joe rested his head against Cal’s shoulder and sighed into the corner of his neck. “Edward doesn’t want to see,” he admitted. “He has to know, but he doesn’t have to admit. Well? Do you want to go out with me, Cal Tate?”

  It was the sort of answer that should have been easy. Cal wanted to. He wanted a nice life, stable, on the right side of the law. It was too good to be true. If you were too happy, there was no way it was real. It was the rug over the pit, ready to be yanked out from under your feet.

  “So the suit’s so I don’t show you up?” he said roughly.

  Joe pressed closer against his back. He slid his hands down to Cal’s hips, spread across the bare flat of his stomach under the loose shirt. “Wear shorts if you want.” He lifted his head and smiled wickedly at Cal in the mirror. “I want to see you in a nice suit and then take it off you. If it bothers you, you can pay me back for it.”

  “Fuck off,” Cal snorted. He felt as though he’d stepped back onto solid ground. The precarious happiness was still there, but being a dick made him feel better about it. “I’m not paying for some monkey suit so you can get off on it.”

  The curtain tugged back, and the woman, shirts dangling from both hands on hangers, stepped in.

  “Here we go…. Oh.” Her eyebrows shot up as she got an eyeful and she quickly stepped back out. The curtain rattled shut behind. “Sorry, but that’s not—”

  “I asked him out,” Joe said as he stepped back. He straightened his cuffs and collar. “He said yes.”

  “That’s nice,” the woman said. “But you’re going to wrinkle the shirt, and we only have ten minutes left before my next appointment arrives.”

  Cal glanced down at himself, his cock half-hard under black cotton and his balls aching. He didn’t want to have to zip that into a pair of slim-fit trousers.

  “Give me the shirts,” he said. “And give me a couple of minutes, okay.”

  She stuck her arm through the curtain, shirts hung from a hooked finger, and waited for him to take them.

  “Five minutes,” she said. There was a pause and then a prim little reminder, “Don’t make a mess.”

  Cal grimaced. He wasn’t about to jerk off on Saville Row, but he supposed some people would. Retail was hell. Instead he closed his eyes and thought about cold showers and the weak, wrung-out feeling when he got stabbed.

  It was effective enough to make his ribs itch with the memory of it but didn’t do much to discourage his cock.

  “Hope you’re happy,” he grumbled to Joe as he stripped the shirt. He put on one that the woman had handed in to him. It was still snug over the shoulders, but the collar fit better. When he looked at himself in the mirror, he caught Joe watching with a still, thoughtful expression. He paused, buttons down halfway up his chest. “What?”

  “I am,” Joe said. He gave Cal’s ass a quick grope on the way past. “I’ll be happier later, when I can make a mess.”

&nbs
p; Heat puddled in Cal’s stomach, a weight of it in his groin, at the low suggestion. His barely discouraged cock popped back up again to nudge against the waistband of his briefs. He swore and pressed it down with the heel of his hand, and the dull ache of it throbbed in his gut.

  “Try your suit on,” Joe told him. “I’ll send Ms. Kettler back so she can mark you up for adjustments.”

  He ducked out through the curtain and tugged it straight behind him. Cal snorted after him, finished up the buttons on the shirt, and then grabbed a pair of trousers at random. He didn’t know a dart from a seam. He just wanted to be dressed when the tailor came back. The legs were shorter than Cal usually wore his jeans, bunched around his ankles or frayed where he’d walked on them, and the fit felt odd.

  Still, Cal checked his reflection in the full-length mirror and rubbed his hand over his cropped head. He did look hot in a nice suit.

  Chapter Twelve

  UNDER NORMAL circumstances it wouldn’t be a great start to the day. The coffee was bad, the breakfast had been lukewarm, and Lem Jeter, whose investment in a dilapidated hospital in Cornwall looked more a losing proposition than ever, hated Joe’s guts. Today, though, none of that was sufficient to put a dent in Joe’s good mood. He’d woken up with Cal in his bed, a full-size hot-water bottle with an arm slung loosely over Joe’s hip and his face buried in Joe’s pillow.

  That was a first.

  Joe wasn’t sure if he wanted to let Cal know that, but he was sure he wanted to wake up like that again.

  “You know what?” Lem said as he shoved his meticulous proposal impatiently into his briefcase. He lurched to his feet and nearly spilled all the paper back out again. A quick scramble got the briefcase clutched awkwardly in his arms as he glared at Joe over it. “Go fuck yourself, Mr. Bailey. All I needed was another year to finish the refurb, and I’d have brought money in. Now I’m going to lose the property. Do you understand that? None of us are going to get anything back on this.”

  Joe pushed his coffee cup away from the edge of the table. “My company won’t lose any more money either,” he said bluntly. The Cornwall project had never been his idea of a good investment anyhow, but Harry had an occasional weakness for a whimsical project well done. The problem with Jeter was that he’d let well done consume him year after year as he finished one quarter of the project to perfection. “I appreciate your passion, Mr. Jeter—”

  Jeter spat on the table and stormed out of the cafe. The door slammed behind him, hard enough to make another customer look up from his laptop.

  “Penny for your thoughts?” Edward asked as he produced a folded paper napkin and wiped up the clot of sputum. He folded the napkin with a distasteful curl of his lip and dropped it into the dregs of his tea.

  For the first time in a while, Joe thought he might give an honest answer to that question. He studied Edward for a second over the coffee and wondered what his reaction would be once there was no more plausible deniability. Joe thought it would be okay, in the end. Or maybe that was more hope.

  “That after this tour, you’ll have to work double time to stay on top of the death threats,” Joe said dryly. “You might need an assistant.”

  Whatever reaction Edward would have to Joe dating a man could wait. He had enough balls to keep in the air—the search for his mother, his responsibilities to the business, his stalker—that he couldn’t afford to add Edward.

  Although, it occurred to Joe, the latter wouldn’t have the flesh and bone of Cal to offer up as evidence. Joe would be back in LA, and Cal would be back on the market for some doctor to pick up. The thought sank through Joe’s lingering good mood like a cold stone, despite his attempt to brush it away.

  It wasn’t a tragedy—you had to know someone at least a year for their absence to be a tragedy—but that didn’t mean Joe had to like it. He grimaced to himself as he lifted the bitter coffee to his mouth. There were too many feelings around lately. Joe was used to a more limited range.

  “Speaking of that,” Edward said. “When did the stalker first make contact again, the original emails that you didn’t think were serious enough to escalate to internal security?”

  “Earlier this year,” Joe said. “March.”

  “There was a… vlog?” Edward asked. He wasn’t computer illiterate. Cybersecurity came under his oversight at the company too, but you could still hear the air quotes he put around the word. “You said it was after that.”

  Joe took a drink of coffee. “It was one of Eric’s starlets,” he said, the mention of his least reliable friend enough to make Edward scowl. It wasn’t exactly the story that Joe had told Cal either, so he supposed he wasn’t so proud of the company he sometimes kept. “Antoni. She got stoned, Eric got pushy, so I got her out of there. Some man with a handheld camera jumped us outside, shouted the usual gibberish to try and piss us off. I ignored him, poured Antoni in the car, and drove her home.”

  Edward pulled his phone out of his pocket and pulled something off. When he turned it around so Joe could see the screen, it was the grubby street outside the bar with him and Antoni caught in an image-editing-program-enhanced spotlight. She had her face buried in his shoulder to avoid the camera, and Joe remembered he’d nearly choked on the floating, brown curls. But the blog had splashed an “actress caught in romantic clinch with property magnate heir” red ticker over the photo.

  “Could Kristen have thought there was any truth to the headline?” Edward asked.

  “Antoni wasn’t who she had to worry about,” Joe said dryly. It might not be the right time to shove Joe’s orientation under Edward’s nose, but he wasn’t going to indulge Edward anymore either.

  “Did she know that?” Edward asked. He turned around and raised his hand to catch a waiter’s eye. He mouthed “tea” and held up one finger.

  Joe frowned. “You think Kristen sent me those letters?” he asked dubiously.

  “She had reason,” Edward pointed out. “You didn’t treat her well, and… she’s had problems in the past. After her parents split up, she keyed the mistress’s car and sent her hate mail.”

  “She was thirteen,” Joe pointed out. Although he remembered when Kristen had told him about it, the real venom in her voice when she mentioned her stepmother’s name. Age hadn’t changed how she felt. The flicker of doubt made him feel guilty, and he struggled to think of something else to disprove the accusation. “And it wasn’t anonymous.”

  “So she learned her lesson and kept her name out of it this time,” Edward said. He paused as the waiter brought his refreshed tea and took away the empty cup. “It makes sense, especially how it escalated after you broke up with her. Not to mention that she arrived the same day the bear was sent in the post. I should have considered her originally, but I hadn’t realized you were having problems.”

  That would be ironic. He’d thought the stalker knew some sort of dark family secret, but it was Kristen getting pissed off after a couple of glasses of wine. Of course Edward didn’t know about the man who’d jumped Joe at the graveyard. Kristen had still been in California then, although Joe supposed that even two-bit English thugs had PayPal.

  “The bear, though,” he said slowly. Even the thought of the charred blue fur made the back of Joe’s throat taste like bile. He washed it away with the bitter coffee. “It… disturbed me.”

  Edward snorted as he tasted his tea, made a face, and added more sugar. “It was creepy, right enough.” He chuckled, scratched between his knuckles, and picked off a rough bit of old scar. “But maybe that got it out of her system? I’ll keep an eye on it, but I think maybe the closure will help cut it off.”

  Part of Joe wanted to argue that it was more than that. The bear had made him feel the same way a lift did, trapped and skin-stinging hot. It was hard to get the words out. He never talked about his claustrophobia, about the sour sweat under his arms every time he had to ride in a packed elevator. Harry, Joe knew, assumed he’d grown out of it like a kid who was afraid of the dark.

  So he cha
nged the subject instead. “I have a meeting with Bea, the lawyer, in ten minutes,” he said. “We’re going to discuss continuing the company’s support of some charities in the UK on an ongoing basis. Good publicity, in case we ever decide to expand back into the local market. Do you want to go and—”

  “Do anything else?” Edward asked. He sucked down half his tea in one quick, mouth-scalding gulp. He glanced at his watch. “Since I doubt the young lady is going to pose a threat, I’ll actually go and check in with Harry. He’s not enjoying being out of the loop. Anything you want me to tell him?”

  Joe smirked briefly as he entertained the idea of whether or not he could make Edward tell Harry that his son was gay. The notion had its appeal, but it supposed it was the sort of thing he had to do himself.

  “I hope he’s getting some rest,” Joe said.

  Edward nodded, placed a tip on the table, and left. Alone for a while, Joe collected his coffee and moved to a table in front of the window. He watched the tourists file over the road and queue for the British Museum. The selfie shuffle on the forecourt, as everyone tried to get a shot of the Museum with no one else in it, amused him until Bea arrived.

  She jingled through the door with her arm around the shy red-haired woman from the other day. A quick kiss and the woman laughed—a surprisingly big, sweet sound—and headed for the counter while Bea came over to him.

  “Perfectly professional,” she told him with a sly smile as she slid into the seat, long legs in flower-patterned tights tucked under her. “Rosie actually works for someone on the board of the charity. That’s how I scored your tickets.”

  Joe raised his eyebrows. “That’s a coincidence.”

  “Not really. Our firm has worked with this charity before. The board member who Rosie works for is a client, and a few of the trusts that we administer include donations made to various hospices and respite programs that the charity runs.” Bea set her laptop bag in her lap and pulled out a neatly bound set of documents. She pulled a rueful face at Joe over them. “Apparently that’s how we met the first time, but I guess she wasn’t as cute and flustered then. Anyhow, I had a look, like you asked, at all the legal filings and contracts that my firm has done for your… company. Which you currently represent and, therefore, have every right to access. The only thing that really stood out was this—for fifteen years, your father, through a blind trust, bought and maintained a small house in Reading and paid a monthly stipend to the owner.”