I was startled. I admit it. We’d not worked directly together since the knife attack. I saw a shiver of shock in his eyes that must have mirrored my own expression. “Good,” I said, amazed how steady my voice sounded. I took a step toward him. I think I moistened my lips.
“Early night, you said.” His voice was very brusque. “Must have been a hard weekend for you.” His gaze never wavered, though I couldn’t mistake the shadow of arousal under his loose shorts. “I’ve set the alarm for four a.m.” Then he walked past me as calmly as if I were nothing but part of the furniture. When my hand reached out to him, he bent away from me, so slightly that I might have thought I imagined it. But I didn’t. He had never refused me before, never turned so deliberately away from what we both wanted. Never denied it.
When he came out of the shower fifteen minutes later, he walked straight into the bedroom and turned out the light. I was still standing in the hallway, shocked. He never said another word to me.
FUCK IT. Memories—glances backwards, whatever—almost always suck.
The surveillance job that following morning was a minor task, but we were both there on time. It had been a long night, and I’d been damned uncomfortable on the couch. We grunted at each other over coffee, and sat as far apart in the hired transport as possible. No one else was on the job—the other guys were on duty elsewhere on the site—but neither of us needed our hand held.
We’d always worked well together in the past. Hell, we’d enjoyed it. A job like this might have been a bit of fun, too. No real danger any longer, therefore no prospect of distraction for a few hours. I often wondered later on whether things would’ve been different if we’d chosen to spend some of the time making out instead of messing up. In the early days of our relationship, we wouldn’t even have needed to think about making a choice.
I think we initially tried to be civil, but the long hours of boredom took their toll. The agents we relieved were yawning after their night shift, and after a while on our own, we weren’t much better. The whole exercise was a final check by the Team, helping out the Department, and just in case some of the external contractors turned out to be less discreet than we hoped. We had bugs in all the relevant places, including their own warehouses and offices, picking up their conversations. That morning, though, it seemed that most of the heavy work had already been done, and any activity at the warehouse was nothing more than the shouts and crude jokes of workmen. Occasionally we heard the creaking of temporary office furniture being dismantled. We sat in a seedy upstairs room in an abandoned unit across the industrial estate with nothing to entertain us but a portable radio link, and we nursed our resentment. Well, that’s what I did.
The tension wasn’t going to die down any time soon. It’d been a miserable night, and now we sat for hours in the early morning, waiting for something or nothing to happen. The place was cold and damp, and the filth around us implied that it had been empty for months. We were both tired, and I soon got a cramp in my left calf. The flask of coffee was drunk far too soon—Niall took the last cup—and there was no food left for a guy like me who’d skipped breakfast. The final straw was when my numbed fingers dropped the radio for the third time. After that, the reception was so bad it sounded like Brad was talking through crispy corn flakes.
Up until then, Niall’s only conversation had been to do with the damp and the dust around us, but now he suddenly seemed to snap. “You need to keep your mind on the job in hand.”
“Not professional enough for you?” I fired back. “See me as some kind of an amateur compared to you?”
He stared at me angrily. “What the hell do you care what I see?”
In all honesty, I think the aggression between us was mainly due to the miserable situation we were in but to me, at that precise moment, he was dredging up the horror of the attack all over again—and my less than glorious part in it all.
“That’s crap. I’m not getting drawn into this, just so you can go another round against me, you and all the Team and their fucking dog!”
“Feeling a touch of paranoia, Tanner? No one’s picking on you. That’s nonsense, and you know it.”
“Nonsense?” I bristled. “Sums me up, eh? Careless. Unreliable.” Worthless.
He shook his head, impatient. “Yes, I think you let yourself down sometimes, but you won’t listen to what I think. It’s easier for you to go for the cheap shot. You’re always speaking for me, as if you reckon you know what I really think.”
“Got to do that,” I ground out. We were both half out of our uncomfortable seats by now, the surveillance and the radio all but forgotten. “Because you eke out so fucking little for me to go on.”
“I’m not like you, Tanner. I don’t feel the need to validate everything with endless words. And anyway, why the hell should I need to? I tell you what needs to be told.”
“So now you’re speaking for me, eh?” I was perilously close to a yell by this time. “Keep MacKay on a need-to-know basis, right? He’s only another colleague, and not one you think you can rely on.”
“Yeah?” He’d raised his voice as well. “Nowadays, you’re not around long enough for me to know one way or the other. Look at how you just slid back in last night, not a word for days, no sign of you at all. If you don’t see any need to keep me in the loop, that’s fine. Life seems to be one long party to you.”
“Now who’s the paranoid one?” I protested. “I’m not around because I don’t enjoy seeing the look on your face when I am.”
“You’re not around long enough to see anything!” He was really incensed, but I couldn’t see past my own fury and distress and had no intention of backing down. “Don’t accuse me of the very thing you’re doing yourself! You pride yourself on your honesty and openness, but it’s pretty damned convenient that excludes your own behavior.”
We glared at each other for one poised, poignant second as if we’d suddenly reached the exact same level of anger and hurt and confusion. And then—even as I watched it happen, with horror and some amazement that I could lose control quite so spectacularly—I laid right into him.
I wasn’t thinking straight by then. I had a huge pile of umbrage smoldering in my heaving breast, and it was itching to get out and be heard. I’d always thought I could rein myself in, if need be. Perhaps I didn’t see the necessity anymore, or perhaps I’d just had enough. Perhaps I was—just for that brief moment—completely insane. I told him it was wearing me down, his lack of empathy and tolerance, and his inability to communicate in ways that were familiar to the rest of the human race—hell, I think I suggested he’d been some kind of alien changeling since birth. I said it was a pity he’d had to lose a chunk of skin before he realized it, but it was obvious I was nothing but a raw edge in his smooth life, and if he couldn’t get over that and accept me as I was, there was no fucking point in going on together. Basically, I said, we had nothing more to say to each other, no reason to keep pretending, no duty of care anymore.
I halted my rush of words, drawing a sudden, painful breath.
“This is the one time I welcome you speaking for me,” he growled. “That’s exactly how I feel too.”
It still hit me hard, to hear it aloud. From him.
“Okay, fine,” I replied quickly, fiercely, if only to keep the words flowing over the lump in my throat. “But if you want other company, at least be honest about it, if honesty’s so fucking important to you.”
He stared at me then, eyes wide and accusing, and—though I didn’t want to see it right then—hurt.
And then I really lost it and accused him of fucking Joe on the side.
Tuesday 09:45
THE ARGUMENT began with words; it escalated swiftly to fists. Shit, the guy could land a punch! Niall’s first crack to my jaw sent me sprawling. Every tooth rattled in my head, and my eyes couldn’t focus. But I was so fucking angry that he’d hit me, I got straight back up and pitched in my defending blow. I caught him kind of unawares, too, and I was ridiculously pleased to
see his head snap back from my own fist connecting.
We wrestled each other, eyes blazing, breath rasping in our chest as we struggled to speak, most words coming out as incoherent grunts. And I kept bouncing back, kept plowing in with my own efforts, despite the increasingly fierce knocks and the pain in my jaw. I was not going to go down again, of that I was sure—and I think I was yelling it, too, most of the time.
Like anyone was going to let the situation continue like that.
It all ended with Joe hammering hard on the door, then kicking it open and racing in to break us up. He’d been called over from the conference center itself, and someone told me later he ran all the way, outstripping the other personnel who followed him. In the background we had Brad screaming at us through the radio to break contact because every word was being broadcast—albeit through crackly cereal—both to the Department and to the warehouse we were meant to be watching. But still we fought. It took a couple of Joe’s ninja-type minions to hold me back while he personally pinned Niall to the opposite wall, shouting into Niall’s face to pull himself together. Someone smashed the malfunctioning radio, and all the voices in the room were silenced. Then all we could do was pant painfully and glare and spit at each other like a couple of frustrated alley cats.
I don’t remember much else of that time. Other agents appeared in and out of the room. Pale, shocked, and inquisitive faces stared through the doorway at us. I heard sharp, muffled words from another radio. Eventually Judith appeared like the Wrath of God herself, bearing the twin divine gifts of her anger and disgust—and immediate suspension of us both from the Project Team.
IT FELT like I left the Team as much a stranger to Niall Sutherland as I’d been his companion. Damned odd, how things go. Close together like Siamese twins—then as distant as prince and pauper. But I was still mad and still hurting. And after the fight, I had a whole pile of bureaucratic shit to plough through as well.
The last thing I wanted was to face more shit from—or because of—him.
We both went through the disciplinary procedure; we were treated just the same. Partners in crime, you might have thought. But instead it acted as the final dissolution of our partnership. We never spoke to each other during the proceedings. We were never left alone together, saw nothing of each other at formal interviews except at a glaring distance. Outside of work, we were under the guard of a Department agent, but we each stayed in our own apartment, anyway. And so we never spoke again at all.
Even when I left the city.
Facing that disciplinary procedure had been one of the grimmest times of my life—dammit, my work was one of the few things in my life that I’d been truly proud of—because they made me feel like a troublesome school kid who’d disappointed his parents and put his friends in the direst danger. Took several days, too, to grind salt into that wound. Fuck ’em! I’d thought. Do I really need this? Of course, I never answered myself. Nor did I wonder if Niall had been subjected to the same trial. Nor care.
When the internal investigation was over, all I did was peel back to the apartment and pick up the minimum that I needed to exist. We’d been given several months’ suspension, and I decided to run for cover. It was what I’d done in the past, though not since I’d joined the Team. Sure, Niall had a key to my place, but I didn’t care about that. He was welcome to it. I had other places I could go, I always did. Places that no one else knew. Not even Niall.
It was my second Departmental investigation in six months, of course. Odds were looking bad for me all round. I expected the call from Judith at any time, firing me completely. I reckoned it was the best thing I could do, to make an escape while I still could.
It still took me a long, lonely hour to pluck up the courage to leave.
I stood there in my cold hallway for a long time, staring at a jacket Niall had left at my apartment weeks ago, hanging on the back of the front door. But I couldn’t feel anything else of him there; no ambience, no vibrations at all. Despite a smattering of his stuff in every one of my rooms, it was as if that final fight had erased the whole of our relationship. I was too tired and too dispirited to remember anything other than misery and anger between us. I spent the last half hour heaping as many of his belongings as I could find into a couple of bags, and I left them in the hallway for collection. Or not. To be honest, I didn’t care what he did with it all, or if he threw the equivalent of my belongings at his apartment right out of the window. Perhaps he was already planning to move on—had duplicated his toothbrush and flannel elsewhere, at some other guy’s place. Some kind of masochist I was.
There were several messages blinking on my phone, probably from the other guys. Whether they wanted to help or to scold, I didn’t care at that time. I decided that I’d contact them when I was good and ready—and at my choice.
So I escaped to my anonymous trailer—courtesy of an old family friend who’d passed on and left his property to another mutual friend I’d once known well. Who was now overseas. Not that anyone needed to know my convoluted social history, of course, except to explain why no one would directly connect the place with me—and why it was available for my use at such short notice. And I stayed there. Comforted only by my own self-pity and the false warmth of my arrogance. In hiding. Licking wounds. Grieving. Whatever. It fucking hurt, whatever it was.
Thinking back on the fight, I realized that it was destined to happen at some time or another. It’d been brewing since the attack on Niall, and maybe from a way before that. It was difficult to remember when we hadn’t been at each other’s throats. And whose fault had it all been?
I hated to admit it but I had to, deep in my dreams, late at night in my solitude. Whatever Niall might or might not have done, however much he’d betrayed me, or dismissed me, or hurt me—hey, despite all that, I’d royally fucked up.
And lost the whole damned lot. Everything ruined. Everything finished.
He never denied it, you know? Never told me to go to hell, that of course he hadn’t fucked Lam, I was talking out of my ass. He never said anything like that. But he could have done, couldn’t he? It’s what I would have said. So what was a guy to think?
Fuck it.
SOMETHING WAS calling my thoughts back to the present. Something insistent.
Niall’s fist on my jaw. Niall’s angry voice in my head.
Niall Sutherland in my bed. Curled against my body. The rhythm of his breathing in my head.
Niall’s dick inside me, his hands holding me to him, his hips rocking against me, his voice in my ear, urging me on.
Niall, on the steps of my trailer, muttering something under his breath, something that sounded angry yet awed. His hand on my shoulder, my hand covering his, and my head leaning slowly in toward him….
I felt sweat spring up on my forehead, and I wrenched myself away from him. He was startled, and his body swayed as he regained his step. He also pulled back. I thanked God my senses had returned quickly to the present time before he’d seen the look in my eyes, or guessed the thoughts in my head.
“Get back inside.” My anger was way too fierce for the situation, but I wasn’t going to be justifying that to him. “Get back!”
He paused in the doorway, his head tilted just slightly to the side, his eyes temporarily distracted from glaring at me. He looked flushed again. “There was a movement, Tanner. Behind the black trailer.”
“I know,” I said curtly. Junk’s trailer was a big beast of a thing with exotic graffiti scrawled across the sides and bars across the smoked windows. A huge thing that looked like it’d never travel even if he’d wanted it to; a home usually filled with various relatives of all ages, from babes in arms to impossibly grizzled old ladies, and all protected by Dylan. There were other dogs on the site, of course, but Dylan was the biggest and the meanest. Or looked it, to intruders who didn’t know how well Junk had trained him. Dylan—who seemed to have gone astray this morning.
I’d seen the shimmer of movement behind the trailer too. I’d also heard
the faintest echo in the morning air of a human footstep.
“I know Junk. That’s his trailer. Leave it to me, for God’s sake.” This time, I was thinking. This time, trust me to do it properly.
Niall moved back into the trailer, obviously still reluctant to be left out of the action scenes, and the door closed softly behind him. I recalled the metal that was warped at the bottom of the sill and the hinges that groaned in the wet weather—but Niall managed to close it both efficiently and softly.
Right. I sighed to myself.
I slowly turned back around, mentally shaking myself back to full attention. The impact of that stupid, stupid touch had been so vivid that I still felt the trail of memory like goose bumps on my goose bumps. But now he was out of sight, if not out of mind. Now I could concentrate on the matter in hand.
Couldn’t I?
One of Zac’s parakeets called mournfully from a tree on the outskirts of the trailer park. A discarded page from a newspaper rustled around the wheels of one of the silent homes. I stepped carefully across the trailer park ground, my boots brushing up the grit and dried oil. There were people moving in the distance, where the perimeter of the park ran into the surrounding neighborhood and where more regular folks drove their cars to work and bussed their kids to school. But everywhere around my own trailer was deserted. No shouts from the kitchens, no shrieking of children’s battles. No cigarette smoke, no revving of bikes’ engines.
The black trailer loomed large in front of me, and I stopped a few feet away so that I could see the track around both sides. There was no further movement, but awareness still thrummed on the fringes of my mind. My gun felt strangely sticky in my palm. I knew that something was wrong, of course I did. This was the first time I’d called on my training in months. But you didn’t forget that sort of thing.
I just wished I could get the memories of “old” Niall out of my mind. It was all too damned distracting. We’d parted in the most final of ways, and there wasn’t much that could be salvaged from that. I thought I was still angry with him. I knew it still hurt to have him around. But he was only here for a day or so, surely. Would soon be on his way again; would soon take his scowling face out of my home and leave me to get on with my exile in peace.
Dreamspinner Press Year Four Greatest Hits Page 83