Since I had to give my information to the county clerk, and was recorded as Cai’s place of residence, the police department called to confirm when I would be home in order to set up the home monitoring system. Without Peter and Angelica to rain down sheets of guilt, I began to process the fact that this boy was going to be in my home, ruining my career. I spoke tersely to the officer making the appointment and hung up, continuing my drive.
“Jesus Christ, what have I just done?”
I answered myself silently, You’re tethering Peter to you, using Cai as the chain.
Home Alone VI — Avoiding Mother and Son
Peter was waiting on my front stoop, resting his waist against the wrought iron railing next to Darryl, who sat on the top step. When they saw me, Darryl stood and Peter tilted to see beyond me.
“They’re bringing him in an hour and half,” I said.
“Rosa?” Darryl asked.
“When Angelica and she are done discussing things.” I slipped past them and unlocked the front door, holding it open so they could go inside.
“Did he look okay?” They asked in unison, though Darryl’s was a variation of the question. It was then I noticed the grocery and duffle bags they carried in.
“He looked tired,” I said tactfully. I couldn’t ask the questions I wanted to about Rosafa, not without giving away that she was a federal witness. I had a feeling both boys knew, however. And I really didn’t want to ask questions. I wanted to take Peter upstairs and finish that kiss we started earlier. “What’s in the bags?”
“Cai’s paints and clothes. Groceries. Rosa will want to cook, and Cai has sugar…issues.” Peter smiled fondly.
“Issues?” I showed them to the kitchen and watched them unpack. They unloaded Pixie Stix, Pop Rocks and Skittles by the bagsful onto my counter. “That’s not sugar issues. That’s a candy factory.”
Darryl grinned over his shoulder while stuffing my cabinets and fridge with various items. The only things I recognized without reading labels were eggplant and rice. Or maybe I saw lettuce or cabbage? “Cai will be having major sugar withdrawals,” Darryl said.
“He uses it sometimes to combat the sadness.” Peter shrugged.
“Cai’s got sugar and Peter’s got—”
“Darryl,” Peter warned.
Peter’s got what? Intravenous drug needs? A whip collection? He masturbates using those slippers? What?
I really needed to get over those slippers. I kept fixating on them because it was so out of place with his personality. But the more I learned about Peter, the less I was beginning to think he was as hard-edged as he liked people to believe. The way he kissed, the way he touched me, and his patience with me—those didn’t fit with who I perceived he was. It was time to stop basing everything I thought about Peter on the fact that he was a prostitute.
“Do you two want to stay here?” Both of them turned slowly to me. Peter’s mouth was parted, his eyes wide. Darryl tilted his head.
“As in move in?” Peter asked, clenching and releasing fists against his thighs.
“As in, stay here for a few nights a week until the preliminary hearing. Bond may be revoked then.” Move in? I remembered when even the thought of that sent me from the person I was dating into another woman’s bed. This, though? This made my heart skip beats in a whole new way.
“Sure, a few days I meant.” Peter exhaled loudly. “Thanks. I can sleep on the sofa.”
You can damn well sleep in my fucking bed. “It’s a pull out, you two can share.” Over my dead, rotted-to-dust corpse!
After Cai murdered me, of course.
“Be right back,” Peter said to Darryl and took my hand, pulling me upstairs two at a time.
“Remember to use protection,” Darryl sing-songed.
“I don’t have my gun,” I answered idiotically.
I followed Peter heedlessly, or more specifically, my penis followed blindly. How many blow jobs can we fit in before Rosa and/or Cai get here?
In the bedroom, Peter slammed the door with his foot and shoved me against the wall, pushing my blazer over my shoulders.
“We need to talk.” Oh, shut-the-fuck up, self! We didn’t need to talk. We needed to suck, or fuck, or do things that I had been waiting a week and half to do. Things I had been waiting my whole post-pubescent life to do! Things that had to do with stuff coming in my mouth, not words coming out of it.
“Say, ‘Suck my dick, Peter’. That counts as talking,” he said, devouring the thoughts from my head with every press of his tongue and lips against my neck.
We needed to talk. I had no idea what to expect from Rosafa, or how to take care of Cai. I wanted to know what Darryl had meant about Peter having something like a sugar obsession. I wanted to know about—Oh, fuck. Peter’s tongue teased between my now-opened shirt panels, leaving a hot trail down my chest and stomach.
My hands delved into his hair, releasing the herbal scent of his shampoo and cinnamon—a scent I was sure he sprinkled on. I inhaled it deeply, using the wall to push my hips to his mouth. “Suck my dick, Peter,” I echoed.
He scraped his teeth along my side. “Now say, ‘Please’, Austin.” His fingers pried at my belt.
“Please, Austin,” I grinned, pushing him further down, until he was on his knees.
My Ex-Girlfriend Was Right—Men Do Suck
His lips closed over my cock. My grin quickly disappeared under a gulping breath. I automatically closed fists around his hair, guiding his head, my gut twisting with the same heat of his mouth.
“Fuck,” I breathed, quickly sucking in another swig of air. In a state of rhapsody, I looked down, watching his fucking porn-star mouth work over my cock. My thumb grazed over his cheek where long copper lashes rested. He blinked them away, a sea of blue open to my gaze. My head fell back, eyes closing with that image while I exhaled in bursts.
I tried to remember anytime I had felt even the smallest fraction of this pleasure. Nothing came to mind. It wasn’t just the sex, it was Peter. It was the image of Peter with his perfect red lips gliding up and down my cock, and his deep blue eyes, gazing up at me with a fascination I could read clearly.
“Peter,” I moaned, stroking his hair, bleeding it through my fingers. He yanked my hips hard, burying my cock in his throat and twisted his head in such a way that my legs threatened to give way. My hands flew to the wall for support. He shoved my ass hard against the wall, licked around the head, drove me crazy with his tongue, and then swallowed me again. I saw stars.
Thrusting forward with every slide of his tongue, my breath stuttered, held, stuttered again before I was just panting every exhale. His tongue ring clipped over the ridge of my cock. “Fucking…fuck.” I jerked in his grasp. My knees trembled, and pleasure expanded from my groin like tipped bottle of heated oil. The intense wave of heat tore through my body. I tensed, grabbing Peter’s hands, crushing them as I shot into his throat. He didn’t stop sucking—making my body jerk with his tongue ring bumping up against my sensitive head. I laughed breathily, pushing him away and sliding down the wall to sit with my knees near my chest.
“Christ…I can’t…That was…”
The doorbell rang before I could finish. Or maybe I couldn’t have finished anyway. I was spent—in every way.
“Good?” Peter laughed, placing his hands on the floor at either side of my hips and leaning forward to my ear. “Hope you took notes. There will be an oral quiz later.”
“Notes? Fuck. I don’t think I could repeat that if I had a video and step-by-step instructions.”
Video…mm.
Chapter Fourteen
Understanding Everything—Unfortunately
I was smiling while quickly throwing on clean khakis and a shirt. I felt like I finally had a handle on decoding Peter’s actions. Little things were coming to me, each with a depth of understanding.
So far, I knew he shut off when he felt frightened, angry or confused. I imagined that had to do with his having been a hustler and lived in a househol
d run by a mafia enforcer; or a combination of those two. In each circumstance, having the ability to turn off sentiment was essential. All the moments of warmth he showed me were a little more momentous because I knew this tidbit about him.
Today I got another piece in the Peter puzzle. He used sex to express gratitude and elation—or his version of them. Maybe also to avoid painful or uncomfortable subjects?
When I had agreed to help him with Cai, he responded by initiating sex. No, not just sex, intimacy. Peter had been intimate with me. He’d shown me patience and warmth.
The same thing just happened downstairs when I asked him if he wanted to stay here. Immediately I was dragged up to my room and attacked.
Most people showed gratitude or happiness in a smile or a bouquet of flowers—Peter sucked cock.
Not a whole lot of debate on which of those choices was my favorite.
Not a big surprise, either, that as I jogged down the steps a few minutes after him, I considered all the ways to make Peter grateful—frequently. But at the resounding slap I heard, my feet skipped the last three steps in one bound, my smile crumbling simultaneously with my landing ‘thud’.
Peter stood in front of Cai’s mother, his cheek slowly reddening even as the rest of his skin paled. His jaw clenched, his nose gave a slight tick; and then his face became blank with a single blink of his eyes.
“You take my boy from me, Petya! Whore yourself? This is what you do with my child and your life?”
“Hey,” I intervened, standing between them, my back to Peter. “You hit him again, and I’ll arrest you.”
“Stay out of this, prettyboy,” Darryl said, somewhere behind me. I didn’t bother to check, but I knew he was next to Peter.
“You are not family!” Rosa glared at me.
“It doesn’t take family to understand that blaming a boy who was twelve years old, is on the wrong side of insane.” I wasn’t going to ask which kind of ‘family’ she meant.
“We did what we had to do,” Peter said, a repeat of his earlier assertion to me.
“You did what you had to do? You sell your body when your mothers cry our hearts onto your empty beds?”
Peter said nothing in defense of himself or Darryl.
“Mama Rosa,” Darryl began in a stern voice, “We couldn’t stay. Not after what happened. Would you rather Cai go to juvie?”
“Nikë is better now? Raped by drug dealer? Taking test for AIDS? Going to jail for murder? What have you two done?”
“That’s hardly his fault,” I said, but Peter seemed to disagree.
“It’s my fault, Rosa. I—”
“You. You are a stupid boy! I should slap the backend not the face.” She stepped around me and pulled both Darryl and Peter into a hug. She was taller than Darryl by an inch, and Peter was a few inches taller than she, but Rosa seemed to dwarf both of them. “Stupid boys.” Each “boy” had his chin in her hands as she looked them over. I summoned all my detective skills to handle the scene I was witnessing. Nothing. For all my experience, I threw up my hands in defeat. There was no understanding these people. “You go call your mother,” she told Peter.
“Does she know?” Peter asked, lip white under the force of his teeth.
“I tell her some. You tell her everything. She is flying here soon. Go now.” She turned to Darryl as Peter slipped off with his cell phone tucked against his stomach. “You, help me cook.”
I was left standing there as Darryl trailed after her into my small kitchen. “What the hell just happened?” I asked the empty room.
Darryl called from the kitchen, “You just met an Albanian mother.”
From my point in the living room, I watched Darryl and Rosa pull things from the cabinet and fridge, until Rosa looked up and raised her brows at me. “Vendosur tabela.” Rosafa flitted her hands in my direction. Having not had interaction with a mother—other than Dave’s, who was a soft spoken and soft-all-over woman—I didn’t know what Rosa expected. I checked behind me in case someone there was the something I was supposed to do. “You fix table,” she ordered.
“I don’t have table,” I replied, still reeling from the questions battering around in my head from these encounters.
“What kind of person has no table for eating?” She tsked.
“The kind that lives alone and eats drive-thru food?” I retorted.
“Maybe you live alone because you eat garbage. You think of that?” She appeared to be massaging someone on my counter. I leaned over the half-wall which served as a breakfast table to see her rolling dough, not noticing Peter until he leaned against me, sending a thrill of heat down my neck.
“I live alone because I’m an asshole. Since my fiancée just found out I like cock, I’ll continue to live alone” The word emphasized around a mild sentence sounded even more harsh. I didn’t care. I was hoping the shock of my words would shut her up.
“Elton John does not live alone. Doogie Howser does not live alone.”
She had me there. Peter and Darryl were hiding smiles, one burying his against my shoulder and the other grinning at the eggplant he was chopping.
I didn’t have to come up with a response, thankfully, as the doorbell rang, signaling the end of this round.
Cai was here.
How to Win Friends and Alienate Albanian Table-lovers
Shoulders drooped, his hands rubbing along the wrists, eyes downcast, Cai looked broken and defeated. That was my first thought. My second was that Kelly Fitzpatrick, the patrol officer who last week praised my self-described death-defying capture of Prisc Alvarado, could eviscerate me with his glare.
Officer Kelly “Mick” Fitzpatrick carried a satchel which he opened immediately upon entering, and from which he pulled a black box. “I’ll need a flat surface,” Mick said.
I flourished a hand at the living room, giving the officer free reign and ignoring the way he harshly bumped my shoulder as he walked past.
Peter wrapped a hand around the back of Cai’s head, enfolding the boy into his arms. Darryl ruffled Cai’s hair as they both murmured things that I couldn’t decipher. I was busy watching that scene instead of Mick, until he was finished setting up and cleared his throat.
He had completed installing the home-monitoring system and called everyone’s attention to the black box sitting on my mantle; then began a list of do’s and don’ts with regard to the judge’s orders.
“You cannot leave the house without prior authorization. You cannot drink alcohol, partake in illegal substances or associate with known criminals. Do you understand, Mr. Strakosha?”
Cai nodded, eyes wet and wide, pushing a soft, “Yessir,” from his lips.
Mick continued the explanation, tossing a not-unexpected sneer my way. If this is how a patrol officer treated me, my fellow detectives would be a nightmare to deal with. With that done, Mick took his leave. Not before throwing a last caustic glower at me. I, of course, smiled brightly and gave him two thumbs up, dropping the act as soon as the door shut behind him. I shifted my gaze to the small group of embracing houseguests, which now included Rosa.
My whole adult life had been about being a cop, and my entire future was wrapped around the FBI. I should've been angry at Angelica for lying about Cai’s innocence. And at both her and Peter for beguiling me into ruining my career with a misrepresentation of the facts. At the same time, I had difficulty imagining this boy killing anyone. One look at Cai’s face, his innocent eyes and his childlike smile, and I couldn’t find the will to be angry at any of them, or even to fault him for killing Alvarado.
Not that I agreed with vigilantism, but there was a small part of me that sided with Cai. When the kid lifted his eyes, the gratitude set in their grey depths whispered the shameful fact that I actually approved of what he did.
Besides, I agreed to all of this. My choice. I had to stop blaming everyone else.
“Your paints and sketchbook and some clothes are in the guest room,” Peter said, pointing to my hallway.
“Enough.
We will eat now. I cooked Bourek,” Rosa announced, pushing everyone towards the living room with waving hands. I looked at my watch and saw it was nearly ten in the evening. I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten.
“What’s Bourek?”
“Heaven in puff pastry,” Darryl answered me. And no exaggeration here—he pranced to the kitchen to retrieve a pan from the oven.
Once everything was laid out on my coffee table—Bourek, pita bread, feta cheese salad—we sat down to a morose meal. The only one who enthusiastically devoured his food was Cai. His attention was single-mindedly focused on the Bourek, which resembled egg rolls made of puff pastry and were stuffed with, I hoped, beef or lamb. But hey, I braved menudo, right?
Though the Bourek tasted, as described, like heaven, dinner was a subdued affair. Everyone focused on Cai, watching for signs of a breakdown. Between Rosa’s disapproving tsks every time someone had to lean over to put something from my coffee table onto their plate, and the continued silence, I grew uneasy half an hour into the meal. At the most recent ‘tsk’, I considered asking Rosa where she might find space for a dinner table, but the thought of her answer made my ass clench.
“You all decide your sleeping arrangements, I’m going to bed. Dinner was fantastic. Thank you.” I stood up at the same time Rosa and Darryl did. Peter grabbed the leftovers and carried them in the kitchen. I was not going down the possessive road of ‘get your ass upstairs’.
Waiting until he made a return trip to the living room, I told him, “You’re welcome to join,” in lieu of begging.
“I’m going to stay up with Cai for a while,” he replied.
There it was again. Cai above all else. Silly to expect more after the short period we knew each other. From now on, I’d keep reminding myself just how short that period was.
Darryl and Rosa were busy loading my dishwasher despite already knowing I had a maid who came in to do just that. I didn’t miss their not-so-casual glances our way.
I said my goodnights and avoided two-stepping the climb upstairs by the smallest of restraint.
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