Dirty Kiss

by Rhys Ford

  “Depends on how generous he was feeling at the time.” I laughed, mostly to blot out the sorrow choking my throat, but also because, while I loved him, Rick wasn’t the easiest person in the world to get along with. But he purred like a kitten when stroked the right way, just like Jae had when I’d held him against the couch and sucked on his mouth.

  “Did you ever talk to someone? I mean, since the shooting?” Bobby pried carefully, edging closer.

  “Like a shrink?” My laugh this time was much more bitter. “Yeah, the department sent one as soon as I woke up. He wanted to make sure I didn’t go on some revenge rampage against other cops.”

  “No, about Rick.” The verbal jab was as sharp as his finger, poking at healed-over scars. “Your brother, maybe?”

  “Dude, Mike wants to hear about my sex life as much as you want to hear about his,” I responded. There was a burning along the edges of my eyes, and I pressed my lips together, biting at the inside of my cheek. We were getting too close to things I avoided, and despite my brotherly affection for Bobby, I didn’t want to tumble into some crying jag. “I don’t want to talk about Rick. He’s gone and buried someplace his family guards like it’s the Hope diamond. I can’t even fucking visit him there. They even took the goddamn dog.”

  “Okay,” he agreed. “Then how about Ben?”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Bobby!” I was across the room before I knew it. The table lay on its side, and the paper stacks we’d pulled apart were on the floor, flat victims of my anger. I wasn’t prepared for Bobby’s feint, but then I never am. Stuttering, I struggled to regain my mind and failed. “Why the hell would I want to talk about Ben?”

  “You talk about missing Rick, but you never talk about Ben,” Bobby said, grabbing at my shirt as I stalked past him. I resisted, but he wrapped the shirt around his fist and pulled, dragging me down onto the couch. Staring down at me sprawled out next to him, Bobby patted my chest, unerringly finding the knots of tissue under my clothes. “You lost two people you cared about that night. Maybe you don’t need to talk about Rick as much as you should talk about Ben.”

  “I can’t.” It was hard to admit pain, even to someone like Bobby. While I was busy fighting for my life, Ben’s life was bleeding out in the front seat of the car we often bantered in. His body was being interred, and Rick’s brains were already being washed off by the infrequent Los Angeles rains before I woke up from my coma. “Bobby, I don’t have anything to say. What the hell can I say?”

  “It’s okay to miss him, you know.”

  “Rick?” I was confused. Upside down and staring at the ceiling, I felt like I did when I woke up in the hospital room amid beeping machines and a squishy tube looped down the nasal passage Mike hadn’t broken when we were kids.

  “Not Rick. Ben.” Bobby’s hand on my stomach moved in small circles. “It’s okay to miss him. You were with him longer than you were with Rick. Hell, you spent more time with Ben.”

  “It’s not okay,” I replied. Broken bits of guilt were surfacing, flotsam I’d shoved into a river of grief to avoid looking at them. “How the hell is it okay to miss him after what he did to me? After what he did to Rick? How the hell do I even give him that much of myself? Huh?”

  My face hurt, the skin over my cheeks drawn tight as I lay on Bobby. In my mind, I could see Ben’s face, laughing at something stupid I’d said as we wandered the streets, looking for something or other. My memories with Rick were too entangled with images of Ben, his face popping up in pictures of backyard barbeques or at a football game, all of us drunk off our asses and grinning like the idiots that we were.

  “He never told me why,” I choked out. “Fucking son of a bitch never even left a note.”

  Bobby prodded again, fearless as he walked on the fractured ice of my heart. “What would you want it to say?”

  “Something.” Frustrated, I sat up, scrubbing at the drying tears on my face. “Fuck, anything, Bobby. You know, something that would make some sense of all this shit.”

  I didn’t hear what Bobby said under the ring of my cell phone. Since I’d already spoken to Mike, I let it go, waiting for it to go into voice mail, when he grabbed it, holding the damned thing for me to answer.

  “Might be your Korean boy.” He waggled his eyebrows again. “Here, answer it. Might make you feel better.”

  There was going to be a point in the near future when a bottle of hair remover was going to end up in his shampoo bottle, and I was going to laugh myself to death when those eyebrows floated down the drain of the gym shower.

  “Hello?” I didn’t recognize the number, but the 714 area code wasn’t one I could ignore. It could be anyone from one of the Kims to another of Dorthi Ki Seu’s dancers calling to tell me they were pregnant with Hyun-Shik’s lovechild. Implausible, but still not outside the realm of bizarre that seemed to follow me around.

  A spate of Filipino crackled across the speaker and into my ear. I didn’t need to know what the person on the other end was saying to understand that I was being sworn at, and probably more thoroughly that I’d ever been in my life. Spits of words were beginning to make some sense, tidbits of English smattered through the high-pitched screaming. I only knew one person that spoke Filipino, and the street-guttural tone of it was a far cry from the polished silk of her normal voice.

  “Scarlet?”

  “You come fix this! Come down, buglit, and fix this. You’re the reason he is like this, hurt!” There was more swearing, and then suddenly a deeply accented voice replaced Scarlet’s, a soothing, authoritative older man who sounded as if he wasn’t used to being argued with.

  “Is this Cole McGinnis, please?” I grunted a yes and rubbed at my abused ear, trying to work the ringing out of my eardrum. He spoke briefly to someone else in Korean. I was guessing Scarlet by the conciliatory tone of his voice.

  “What’s wrong?” The water in my stomach came up in a rush of bitter over my tongue. I was already raw from talking about Rick, or avoiding talking about Rick. The mention of a hospital and Scarlet’s anger were a kick to the belly. “What happened? Jae?”

  “Scarlet’s musang was hurt. The apartment he lived in had a gas leak, the police officers tell me.” The man went on, but I didn’t hear him, not with the pounding of my blood in my face. “Perhaps his oven light was not on and something created a spark.”

  “Fuck, is he okay?” I cut him off. For all I knew, he’d told me Jae was out dancing, but from the echoes of Scarlet’s curse words in my ear, I doubted it.

  “He is hurt, but the doctor hopes he will be okay. Sarang, yes, I am asking him to come here.” He returned to our conversation. “He is at the Garden Grove hospital. If you are coming down, please understand that Scarlet is upset. She is very fond of dongsaeng.”

  “I’ll be right over.” I clipped the phone closed and searched through the mess on the floor for my keys, growling when I came up empty. “Where the fuck did I put my car keys?”

  “We’ll take my truck.” Bobby grabbed my arm, yanking me toward the front door. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “Jae….” If Scarlet’s keeper could be believed, Jae would be fine. Either that or he was lying through his teeth and was only trying to draw me down there so Scarlet could peel my testicles from my body with a melon baller. Either way, I needed to get over to the hospital.

  I filled him in as Bobby shut the door behind us, half-running to his truck. My mind raced to catch up with my fear, which had left the ruins of my thoughts with a maniacal glee. I pulled myself into the cab and waited for Bobby to turn the engine over, going through what I’d been told.

  “Fuck me, someone’s after Jae.” I exhaled hard, my fear finally finding someplace in my belly to set up its rave.

  “Didn’t that guy tell you it was an accident?” Bobby maneuvered around my battle-weary Rover, tsking at the damage left by the white van. “Gas leaks happen, Princess.”

  “Yeah, but I was in his kitchen. His stove was electric, and so was his wall heater.”<
br />
  Bobby exhaled under his breath. “So whoever it is isn’t stopping with that Jin-Sang kid.”

  “Doesn’t look like it.” One good thing about being half Irish: while my temper usually got me into trouble, it sometimes saved me when I needed a good kick in the ass. My anger showed my dancing fear to the door and took up residence, firmly staking a claim on what I was going to do next. “Fuck this. We find this asshole before Jae gets killed.”

  “Best thing I’ve heard you say in a long time.” The look Bobby gave me was long and probably was lewd as well, but I couldn’t see his eyebrows do their jig in the dark of the cab. “Come on, Cole. It’s good to see you into someone. Admit it, you like this guy.”

  “Yeah, I do.” I fell into watching the lights pass over the glass, the blobs pushing along the freeway in a measured urgency. Jae’s ripe mouth and unreadable brown eyes loomed in my mind, fueling my rage. “He’s going to probably get me killed, but yeah, God fucking help me, I like him. Worse, I want him.”

  Chapter 11

  “HEY,” I murmured into Jae’s ear, stroking the pitch-black hair poking out of the bandages around his head. His eyelids fluttered open. Those enticing cinnamon eyes were foggy for a moment as he tried to focus on my face. Awareness sunk in quickly as he recognized me, a slow smile cracking his dry lips.

  His face was dirty, and a smear of something viscous clung to his cheek, but he looked better than I’d hoped. The smile he gave me went a long way in dispersing the knot in my stomach.

  “Hey, Cole.” Watery would be how I would have described his voice, but at that moment, I didn’t care. I might not even care later as long as he was talking.

  I’d been expecting the worst when I’d seen Scarlet’s anguished face, her makeup run off by tears. The Filipino and Korean she shouted at me dissolved as quickly as her foundation must have when she’d grabbed at my shirt and I pulled her small body into a hug. Scarlet was frail under the armor of her personality. Mumbling something about Jae, she cracked wide open and sobbed hard into my chest.

  Terror tastes a lot like blood. It lingers on the tongue until all I can smell and taste is metal. Sometimes there’s a coldness that crawls over the face, but for the most part, fear resides happily in the senses, shaking loose any stability in the world. My mouth was full of metal shavings, and the shaking in my hands wasn’t because I was cold. I’d been scared for Jae all during the drive over to the hospital, and seeing him lying against the too-white sheets that he came close to matching, my dread began a creeping meander along my spine.

  “You came,” he whispered. “Did Scarlet call you?”

  “She called me and mostly yelled at me. Then someone with sense got on and told me where you were. I came right down.”

  Blood speckled his face, a small cut on his cheek held together with a butterfly bandage. The lines were already dried to black and peeling off when he moved. I wanted to kiss some moisture into the mouth. The crackle across his lips looked like it hurt. I gave in to the joy of seeing him and took a taste, reveling in the subtle orange zest in his mouth and the play of his tongue on mine. Breathing into his kiss, I fell hard into Jae, submerging myself until I felt the wet of tears on my face.

  “Hyung, don’t cry.” Jae’s fingers were cold on my neck, then a tiptoe of ice along my face where he wiped under my eyes. “I’m fine. Just a bump on the head.”

  “To go with the one you already had?” I didn’t want to let him go, a warmth spreading down into my toes when I felt his mouth move to kiss the corner of mine. “Most people don’t go through life banging their head against things. It leaves dents.”

  He grumbled at me, “Your hair must cover huge craters on your skull.”

  The mutter turned into a cough, working up from his lungs and shaking his whole body. The machines beeping around him didn’t skip a beat. Tiny lights and sounds continued to measure his breathing and heart rate, ignorant of his distress. When I adjusted the oxygen feed looped around his neck, he grumbled more, low, deep noises that went straight to my dick.

  Funny how I could think about sex during the dumbest of times.

  “You look bad, Cole,” Jae said, blinking. His eyes went unfocused for a moment, and I grabbed at the nurse’s call button just in case. Waving his hand, he dismissed my worry with a click of his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Stop. Just tired.”

  “You don’t look too good yourself, baby.” His breathing had improved, but there was still a layer of soot around the edges of his face, and the smaller of the cuts on his chest and arms weren’t bandaged. Someone in the ER had tried to remove the black dust from his face, but they’d done a half-assed job, probably more concerned with keeping Jae’s lungs going than with how he looked.

  I got a wet washcloth from the bathroom and pulled the rolling stool close to his bed, wiping carefully at his face and neck. It took several trips back to the sink to rinse the cloth out and a few wrinkled-nose protests from Jae, but the sticky tar dust came off, leaving a blush on his pale skin where I scrubbed a bit too hard.

  “Neko!” My arm ached where he grabbed it. For someone recently on the brink of death, his motor skills appeared to be great. “You have to go find her for me.”

  “Jae, don’t worry about the cat right now, okay? You need to get some rest.”

  “She’s all I have, Cole.”

  He broke me. Right in half. The plaintive hitch in his smoke-ravaged voice and the pout to his mouth broke me. God didn’t play fair when he dealt out manipulation tools. I could barely get Claudia to give me an extra piece of pie by giving her puppy-dog eyes, and Jae seemingly could take down my defenses with a sheer bat of his eyelashes.

  “Please.”

  That was just uncalled for. Like the final nail in my coffin. Nodding, I agreed, wondering how I was going to come back to him with his cat’s corpse. Judging by what Scarlet half described, the place sounded like it was leveled. Of course it also sounded like Scarlet wasn’t the most objective person where Jae was concerned, but I could understand that.

  “What happened? Do you remember anything?” It might have been too soon to press him, but in the coming hours, Jae would remember less and less. I wanted to get some answers while it was fresh in his mind. “They said it was a gas leak.”

  “No gas in the place. It’s all electric.” His frown moved the bandages down over his eyebrows, smashing his hair against his temple. “And I don’t know what happened. I was cropping pictures, and then I woke up in the ER. I couldn’t breathe.”

  “Did you hear anything? A car outside? Something?”

  “It’s a brick building, Cole. I heard brick.” Another cough shook Jae, and I held up a cup of ice chips. He nodded as he coughed again, spitting up into a tissue. The phlegm was runny and mottled with black swirls. “My chest hurts. Throat too.”

  “Here, open,” I said, holding out a chunk of shaved ice for him. “Get some liquid into you. The nurse outside said you could suck on these.”

  Next to his mouth, his tongue seemed to be the next deadliest weapon he had in his arsenal. I really didn’t need to have it sliding around my fingers and suckling the icy water from my hand. It wasn’t that I didn’t want it there. I could think of lots of places that tongue could also be, but with Jae lying on a hospital bed, my body wasn’t listening to the scolding my brain was giving it.

  “Tired.” Leaning his head against my arm, Jae closed his eyes, murmuring softly in Korean.

  “English, baby,” I reminded him.

  “Who is that? Is that… your boyfriend? I don’t want you to have a boyfriend.” His eyes were open again, staring through the open door at Bobby.

  Scarlet was in good hands. Bobby was a master at consoling people. My best friend never used that finely honed skill with me because he thought tough love would work better. If that didn’t work, he resorted to the tactics of my older brother and pounded the shit out of me until I gave in.

  “Oh, um… no,” I said. It seemed like as good a time as any t
o set the record straight. “That’s my friend, Bobby. There’s no one but… you, okay?”

  “Were you scared?” Jae slurred the words together. Exhaustion was spreading through him, leaving bags under his eyes. “I’m sorry I scared you.”

  “Yeah, I was scared. Hospitals aren’t the best place for me, sometimes.” I was losing Jae to sleep, and I slid him off my arm and onto the pillow. “Why don’t you get some rest? I’ll be right here.”

  “Neko, remember?”

  “Yeah, shit. Okay, I’ll head down there and see what I can find,” I mumbled, rubbing at my face. Bobby had driven us, and I wasn’t sure he was up to taking me to a disintegrated building to look for a dead cat in the middle of the night. On the other hand, he owed me one, and it was as good a time as any to cash it in. “I’ll be back.”

  “No, I need to get out of here.” Jae strained to reach the call button. “Need to find someplace to go. Can’t go with nuna, she’s living with… well, I can’t go there. Maybe Uncle Kim can put me up.”

  “Jae, no.” I looped the wire out of his reach. “You’re stuck here until they tell you it’s okay to leave.”

  “Can’t afford it.” He was fully slurring now, barely able to keep awake.

  “Don’t worry about that. I’ll take care of it.” His pulse beat strong under my thumb as I ran my hand up his neck, cupping his jaw. He set his mouth into a tight line, and I was momentarily thankful that he was too battered to give me much of a fight. I might have outweighed Jae by forty pounds, but I was willing to bet he could give Bobby a run for his money if he was pissed off enough. “I’ll be back. Promise.”

  “Call Scarlet when you find Neko. She’ll let me know.” Jae nodded off, resting his hands under his face as he turned, struggling briefly for air. “Take care of her. Please, Cole.”

  I didn’t want to leave him. Hell, I didn’t want to let him out of my sight. There was going to be the unpleasant task of telling him that he was going to stay with me until we could figure out what the hell was going on, but that was going to be an argument I intended to win, even if I had to drag Claudia in as a proxy. Pound for pound, she could take Jae on, and with luck, Scarlet would side with me.