by Rhys Ford
We picked through the kimchee slowly, ignoring the conversation we were meant to have. About three pieces in, the fire finally hit my throat, and I once again regretted marrying somebody who had a cast-iron mouth and made his own kimchee. Just as I was wondering if I was going to have to say something, Ichi cleared his throat.
“When I was growing up, everything I learned about America was through television and movies.” He furrowed his brow, lost in the contemplation of his kimchee bowl. “When she was dying, our mother used to talk about the two of you once in a while. She would wonder how you looked. How you turned out. I promised myself I would at least meet you and Mikio one day. It wasn’t until my father married that I realized I was no longer welcome in his family, so I came looking for the two of you.”
“And you definitely found us,” I said, cracking my iced tea open. “I know I was kind of an asshole to you in the beginning. Lot of anger I had to work through.”
“It was understandable. Your father told you she died, and for us—as a traditional Japanese family—she didn’t have a right to you anymore. I know that’s hard to understand from an American perspective. It was hard for me to understand how you felt until my father began his second family and my name was no longer important to him.” Ichi set his chopsticks down, resting their pepper-sauce-stained ends against the rim of the bowl. “I hated growing up as a Tokugawa. Everything in my life was laid out for me. My clothes. My schools. My behavior. Even my friends. There were expectations—no, requirements—to being Tokugawa Masahiro’s son. And I hated every minute of it because it felt like I was dying before I even had a chance to live.”
Swallowing the sip of tea I’d taken, I nodded, then said, “My father was the same way. And we all know how well that turned out.”
Despite his somber expression, Ichi barked a short laugh. “You and I aren’t so different there. Mike likes being traditional, and in a lot of ways, so do I, but I also want to live on my own terms. I love being an artist. I love tattooing. I love telling stories with ink, and nothing makes me happier than the look of joy on someone’s face when I wipe their skin clean and reveal the piece of themselves I’ve pulled up from inside of them.
“Or at least nothing made me happier until I found you and Mike,” he murmured. “Then I fell in love with Bobby. And suddenly I was the richest man in the world, with everything I’ve ever dreamed of. So, I am asking you as your younger brother and the name beneath yours in this family registry, to please understand how scared I am about maybe losing any of you.”
I didn’t need to see the tears in Ichi’s eyes or hear the thickening of emotion in his voice to know my brother was overwhelmed. He trembled when I pulled him into a hug, his fists knotting into my T-shirt as he refused to cry. I swallowed, trying to choke down the pain in my own throat, tiny razor blades left over from words I’d held back in arguments with my own father. If anyone understood Ichi’s fear, it was me. I’d reached a point of my own life where I was happy, and I knew the depths of loss more than anyone.
“Fucking Bobby doesn’t take this seriously,” he growled against my shoulder. “He was stabbed. Both of you were shot at. And I’m more scared than angry, then more angry than scared because he shrugs it off. That time when you and I were being shot at—do you remember that?”
“I haven’t been in so many gunfights that they become a blur,” I replied softly. “Yeah. You were mad at me for running in.”
“I tell myself I’m used to you being like that, running towards danger to help people,” Ichi said, pulling away slightly, but his hands were still in my shirt. Shaking me lightly, he laughed. “I somehow reconciled myself to having a very American action-hero-type brother who had more heart than sense. But it didn’t occur to me Bobby was the same way.”
Ichi really was a combination of me and Mike—Mike’s features combined with my lankier body type. Our hands were the same, and all three of us were as stubborn as fuck, but Ichi was born a dreamer, an artist who could see beyond the hard lines of our world and into some mystical cosmos he and Jae could talk about. I took a good hard look at my younger brother, trying to save as much of this moment in my memory as I could. We’d only had a few years together as a family, but I loved him as much as I did Mike, and I couldn’t imagine my life without him. And as much as I groused about him and Bobby, I was delighted they’d found each other. They were some of the best people I knew and deserved every bit of happiness they could get.
I just couldn’t say that, because that was the code of being a brother… or at least it had been.
“In a lot of ways, Bobby Dawson is a much better man than I am. He was a cop—a good, upstanding cop—in a time when the LAPD was as crooked as shit and about as corrupt as you could get.” I pushed the shock of blue-streaked black hair out of my brother’s eyes. “He left the force because he needed to live his life out in the open. Kind of like you did. Yeah, he’s always going to try to do the right thing, because he’s that kind of guy. I learned that from him. There have been too many times when people looked away when I needed someone to step in, especially when I was a kid and Dad got too free with his fists. No one spoke up for me. Even Mike had problems with me being gay, and that made things hard. We worked through them, but it took a long time. Bobby stepped up for me when I was alone. So I kind of promised to always step up for other people, even if it meant things might go to shit for me.”
“He says you’re the one who made him realize he needed to be out,” Ichi confessed in a whisper. “That he’d been living a lie until he got word your partner almost killed you. He’d heard you were gay and out on the force but thought you were an idiot. It wasn’t until another cop tried to murder you and then he had to watch the force cover it up that he needed to step away from his badge.”
“I think he was just tired of filling out reports,” I said with a smile. “It’s the main reason why he won’t be my partner in this investigation business I’ve got. He doesn’t want to do any of the paperwork. Bobby’s a good guy. And he loves you. He doesn’t take unnecessary risks, which is more than I can say about myself, because there’s been more than a few times when I’m in the middle of the shitstorm wondering how I got there. He’s always going to run towards the firefight. That’s just who he is. That’s who I’ve become. But I can promise you that I’m going to do my best to make sure he always comes home to you. I said that before, and I still mean it.”
“I know you do. Just… make sure you come home too, older brother,” Ichi said, lightly pushing at my chest. “Be careful. And whatever you do, remember to duck when someone is shooting at you. You don’t need another hole in that head of yours.”
Nineteen
ONE OF the things I loved about Jae was he woke up very Korean.
It sounded weird, but it was true.
There was a span of a few minutes right after he opened his gorgeous, long-lashed eyes, blinking at the sun fighting its way into our room, when he still lay in his dreams, immersed in all of the colors and fantastical ideas simmering in his brain. His murmurs were in his native tongue—a waterfall of sounds I couldn’t understand, but I felt them pour over me, golden and hot with a spark of electricity to them, even though he wasn’t quite conscious. His black hair lay in a feathery cascade down his cheeks, obscuring his jaw. But his lush mouth was usually bare, plump, and slightly parted, ready for a morning kiss.
English wouldn’t settle back into his thoughts for at least five minutes after those initial blinks. It took him a while to finally seize upon the fourth language he learned. I could barely say my own name in Japanese, so I was envious of the lingual rings he could dance around me.
Okay, I was envious and usually aroused by the literal rings he could dance around me, but I was man enough to admit it.
We were aging together, moving into a rhythm spiced by happiness and the adventurous leanings Jae discovered inside of himself. He blossomed, I settled down, and we found a pace we both enjoyed. It went without saying that he was
the love of my heart and soul, but I said it anyway, mangling the Korean I did know. But he’d understand me.
Jae always understood me, even when I didn’t understand myself.
“Saranghae-yo,” I whispered against his parted lips. It was a more formal pronouncement of love, but it’d been the one I learned first. Those were also the words he’d murmured to me a long time before I’d told him how I felt about him. I just hadn’t understood when he’d said them first. “Morning, honey.”
“Honey is the dog, Cole-ah,” he mumbled, his native tongue wrapped around his English with a liquid blur. “Come closer.”
“I get any closer and we’re going to have to kick the dog out. She’s too young to watch her dads do those kinds of things.” His fingers were slightly cold, and I shivered when they found me under the blankets. Stroking at my length, Jae chuckled against my neck when I responded to his touch. “Okay, see, this is why I’m always late in the morning.”
“Claudia should be used to that by now.” Jae’s fingers moved, lightly skimming over intimate places on my body.
“How about if we don’t bring up Claudia right now?” I turned him over, covering Jae’s body with my weight. “I’d rather it was just you and me in this bed.”
In the years between our first kiss and now, Jae and I had fought our way through cultural differences and internalized fears. It was good between us, had been good for a long time. Still, each kiss I’d given him since the first one was like a new gift. Every. Single. Time. I loved taking my time exploring his body, tasting the different textures and flavors of his skin on my tongue. I knew where each mark was on his body and the places I could make him shiver beneath me when I lightly bit there.
I could make love to him a million and one times and still want to come back for more, just for the sounds he made in his throat when my mouth closed over him and I drew him down as deep as I could. It was definitely time for him to cut his fingernails, because they made sharp aching starbursts on my shoulders and back. The sting lasted for only a few seconds, and I found I didn’t mind. Making love to Jae was a visceral, primal connection we forged time and time again. I never grew tired of his touch or his kisses, and when he finally tugged on my hair, driven to the edge of his control by my mouth and fingers, I chuckled at his insistent demands.
Jae made love like he lived life. We’d once started out desperate and needy, a violent explosion of want. Then we pushed away, separated by a brittle wall of control. We’d taken that wall down brick by brick, shattering them on the solid foundation of our relationship as we built it up. Jae’s passions were unfettered, sometimes even wild, and I was happy to be along for the ride. He stretched my imagination so many ways, pushing me to reach for the stars and to hold on to him as tight as I could.
I did exactly that as I slid into his tight warmth.
We rode each other slowly, stroking at ribs and shoulders, kissing what we could reach. And since Jae was a lot more flexible than I was, he could reach a hell of a lot. The stress of the past week sloughed off of me. I needed to leave all of it behind—my conflicts with my family about how I live my life, my worry I would reach for a gun to solve my problems, and most of all my paralyzing fear someone would take Jae from me.
I’d already been visited by Death way too often. I didn’t need him knocking on my front door anymore. Spending a lazy warm morning with Jae in our bed was the best panacea for my troubled soul.
“Stay with me, Cole-ah,” Jae murmured, raking his fingers through my hair. “Only us now.”
Being a good husband, I did what I was told and fell back into the starry heat he’d laid out around me.
The friction we built up between our bodies eventually spilled over, and his tightness became too much to bear on my sensitive flesh. He left his marks on me, his fingers bruising my shoulders while his legs trapped my hips, holding me firm. We found a pace, setting to a roiling pound, and I crested first, taking Jae with me.
He dug in harder, holding me in, keeping me lodged against his body until our contact grew to that bright brittleness where my skin couldn’t stand the burn anymore and I had to close my eyes, drifting away on the curls of pleasure and too-satisfied pain that sex always left behind. I kept my arms wrapped around him, fingers skimming his sweat-dappled shoulders and arms. Then Jae arched up against me, releasing the final bit of coiled tension from his body. We were sticky, damp, and probably musky as hell, but I didn’t care. I nuzzled my face into the curve of his neck and sighed, echoing the tiny husky breath he let go.
“I can’t move.” My mumbling was lost in Jae’s hair, but he understood me enough to grunt. “You’ve broken me. Next time, I’m on the bottom.”
“That would be nice,” he grunted again, this time with more force, and he shifted violently beneath me. “Because you weigh too much. Aish, you’re heavy. Why is muscle so heavy? Ouch, that’s my—”
“Sorry. Sorry.” Moving was apparently dangerous, and I’d come too close to unmanning Jae for life with my knee. Half rolling, half sliding off of Jae, I landed awkwardly on the bed, somehow tangling my elbow in the sheets. “Shit, I’m stuck.”
It took us nearly three minutes to get me free, but then again, I wasn’t really trying very hard. After Jae caught me wrapping him back up in the linens, he did something bendy with his body and left me where I lay, a sage-cotton burrito filled with smug satisfaction and more than a little bit of arousal from Jae rubbing up against me to get me loose.
“I’m taking a shower.” My beloved husband hit me with a pillow on his way to the bathroom, scoring a direct smack against my head because I was too entangled to defend myself. “If you join me, hyung, we’re not having any more of this. I’m late already.”
“I wasn’t the one who started it,” I called out, and he actually flipped me off. Not a very Jae thing to do, but sometimes he did the unexpected.
Even as tangled up as I was, I appreciated the view of him walking away. His ass was firm and taut, much like the rest of his toned, golden body, and there were a few pink bite marks on his shoulder. Not on the shoulder where he bore a slick scar from being shot—another thing he could lay at my feet—because no matter how often we got rough in bed, I couldn’t—wouldn’t—do anything more than kiss that spot. That spot wasn’t for playing, at least not in my mind. That scar was my fault. Even though I hadn’t been the one to pull the trigger, it was still mine.
“Shit, I forgot to tell you about the guns.” I hadn’t moved from the bed, but I didn’t need to. Rolled over onto my stomach, with my head at the far end of the mattress, I could see straight into the bathroom. Jae was brushing his teeth with a distracted fury that made me worry for his enamel. His mind was probably on the things he had to do today rather than what I said, because he glanced over at me, his eyebrows creased down toward the bridge of his nose. “Ivan—the guy that broke into the office—was shot to death yesterday in his hospital room. O’Byrne came by and asked me to turn over my weapons. She took them with her for ballistics tests.”
That got Jae’s attention. He turned to face me—a beautiful, freckle-dusted, porcelain-skinned man wearing my bite marks and a tattoo of my Asian birth year on his body. He no longer hid anything from me. We’d started our relationship off behind a web of lies and half-truths, but while those days were definitely gone, sometimes Jae was hard to read. I usually waited for him to tell me exactly what was on his mind, but this time I didn’t need any Post-it notes or carefully worded and lovingly meant remarks. The gold in his honey-brown eyes was molten, and he spat out a mouthful of toothpaste into the sink so quickly I thought he missed the bowl.
“She comes in here and accuses you of shooting the man, so you feed her?” Jae gestured wildly with his foamy toothbrush, splattering the mirror above the sinks. I had a vague hope of him not getting any of it on the art-nouveau-styled dresser I’d refurbished and repurposed as our bathroom vanity. It was a brief wish, one secured away by Jae’s anger. “The two of you acted like nothing was wron
g between you. I invited her to the barbecue this weekend.”
I slid off of the bed and approached my husband carefully. After plucking the toothbrush from his clenched fingers, I gathered him up in my arms, then tossed the brush into the sink from behind his back. I told my cock not to get excited about being pressed up against Jae’s naked body, but it had its own mind, and I could only hope Jae ignored me. I pulled him in closer, until there wasn’t any space between us, and I kissed his gorgeous full mouth, tasting his ire and the mint on his tongue.
“There is nothing wrong between us. She had to ask for them. I’m a likely suspect, but I pretty much have an alibi for the time he was killed. She still needs to exclude me from the possibilities, and the only way to really do that is to check the bullet against all of my guns. She might even tap Bobby for his. It’s a part of the job, Jae. Just a necessary evil,” I reassured him, locking my fingers at the small of his back. “She doesn’t think I killed him. She came here as a cop and did her job. If she hadn’t and they bring in the real killer, the defense could poke holes in the case by asking if she excluded everyone she believed could have done it.”
“She’s supposed to be your friend.” He wasn’t willing to let go of his irritation yet. Jae prized loyalty and friendship above practically everything else. His entire life was filled with family he’d chosen, and he would do anything for someone he loved. Especially me.
“She still is my friend. This doesn’t change anything between us. It’s the job, babe.” I shrugged as best I could with my arms full of a simmering man I’d given my heart to. “Look what I did to Ivan. If I was in her shoes, I would come knocking on my door too. We worked it out. It’s okay. I just wanted you to know what happened and how things stand.”