by A. J. Thomas
“Come on.”
“You know the crap in your kitchen doesn’t count as food. And as for your clothes….”
“My clothes aren’t good enough for you?”
“Your clothes aren’t good enough for you. They’d be fine for me. You should get your shit tailored.” Ray’s gaze travelled up and down Elliot’s body suggestively. “Or just go naked.”
“Maybe if you ask politely,” said Elliot.
Ray turned a wide-eyed smile at him, then hurried ahead of him toward the elevator.
On the way home, Ray was silent, and out of the corner of his eye, Elliot saw his head droop. The other man’s gurgling stomach reminded him that they both needed food, along with showers and clean clothes, before this night could finally end. But Ray was all but dead to the world in the car, and Elliot was surprised when he made it into the house under his own power.
He left Ray sitting on the couch while he rinsed off and changed out of his workout clothes, and when he was finished, he steered Ray into the bathroom and hoped for the best.
He leaned close to the bathroom door. “I’m going to order some food!”
The only answer was the shower starting again.
Elliot had a routine. He usually got home way too late, opened up his empty fridge and stared at the shelves for a few minutes, then ordered pizza. This time, though, he found that the top shelf of his fridge was full. He had vegetables, turkey, and even cheese. “Ray went shopping,” he reminded himself.
He threw together a couple of quick sandwiches and then tried to remember which of the boxes he hadn’t unpacked yet had extra blankets and linens. After three tries, Elliot found a clean set of sheets and a blanket. He pulled an extra pillow from his own bed and set the whole bundle on the couch. He loved his couch almost as much as his bed. They were the only pieces of furniture he’d left in storage when he was assigned to what he expected was the middle of nowhere in northwestern Montana two years ago. Since he’d lived in a tiny apartment before that, and a tiny apartment during that assignment, he didn’t have enough stuff to fill up the twelve-hundred-square-foot, two-bedroom home he’d bought this time around. He didn’t dare buy anything new yet, though. His mother’s weekly e-mails each ended—after a dozen detailed paragraphs about his uncles, their children, and how the family restaurant was doing—with a promise to fly down and help him get settled in. The only other time his mother had helped him get settled into a new place, she and his uncle had arrived with a moving truck filled with all of the extra furniture his parents, uncles, neighbors, and random customers had on hand to donate. The last thing he needed was to try to fit enough mismatched furniture for a five-bedroom house into his living room, again.
If he was going to be stuck with Ray until this case was over, he was going to have to pick up curtains, and maybe an air mattress, too. He would also have to find a way to ease some of the tension mounting inside him and start keeping his migraine medication on him, because he could feel another headache creeping up on him. Exhaustion and stress tended to magnify the effect of things that normally triggered his migraines.
Dehydration and low blood sugar were two of his worst triggers, and if the only way he could keep from jumping Ray was to work out until his muscles trembled and threatened to fail, he was in for more headaches. He casually grabbed an Imitrex needle from his medicine drawer and slipped it and his pills into his suit jacket. He took another injectable cartridge out and shot it into his arm, then dropped the empty cartridge into the trash. Since he wasn’t in the middle of a migraine yet, the medication would stop the headache in its tracks.
Elliot stretched his arms over his head and then bent down to ease the kinks out of his lower back. He hung there, bent at the waist, and folded his arms over the top of his head. He let his forehead rest against his shins and stayed there as some of the tension drained from his muscles. He rolled up slowly, then twisted to either side to try to stave off the muscle aches that were already settling into his shoulders. After, he slumped to the counter where half of his turkey sandwich sat on a plate, next to the one he’d made for Ray. He took another bite and drained his beer when the thrum of the shower in the master bathroom stopped.
He heard the soft tread of bare feet enter the kitchen and turned to tell Ray to eat, but froze as he realized what he’d forgotten—clean clothes. Ray stood there with nothing but a thin towel wrapped around his waist. There was nothing else blocking his body from Elliot’s hungry gaze. His tanned skin glistened, and his dark hair, finally free of gel and dried sweat, dripped in a tousled mess. Ray padded over to him with a devious smirk, swaying his hips with each step.
“Is that one for me?” He nodded at the sandwich and open bottle of beer.
“Yeah.” Elliot turned away quickly. “I’ll grab you some clothes.”
He practically ran to his bedroom, hoping Ray didn’t notice he had a hard-on.
He took a few deep breaths and forced himself to calm down as he dug out a pair of boxers and a T-shirt, but he just ended up picturing Ray’s bare chest, then pictured him wearing the plain black boxers. Elliot sighed and shook his head. If he was so hard up that his own boxers were turning him on, he really needed to get laid. He set the clothes on the end of the bed, tried not to let his fucked-up imagination make him think about what Ray would look like waking up in his bed, and hurried back out to find the most erotic domestic scene he’d ever seen in his kitchen.
Ray was bent over and leaning into the fridge. The short towel was doing its best to keep his bare ass covered, but it was loose and drooping over his hips, revealing nearly an inch of Ray’s crack and the abrupt curve of his ass. Elliot licked his lips. He wanted to rip that towel away so bad his fingers twitched. Elliot caught himself as his legs, drawn by his cock, unconsciously moved him toward Ray. He swallowed hard and turned toward the counter. He was not going to fuck Ray Delgado. Not while the man was leaning into his fridge, anyway.
Ray emerged a moment later with his arms wrapped around turkey, cheese, mayo, and a tomato. He was trying to hold the loosening towel up with his elbow.
The sandwich Elliot had left on the plate for him was already gone.
“I’m so hungry even those nasty Pop-Tarts sound good,” said Ray, dumping everything on the counter. “Workouts like that are why you’re so skinny.”
“So?” Elliot stared down at the edge of Ray’s towel. It had slipped over his hipbone. One quick tug, and Ray would be completely naked. “There’s a T-shirt and shorts for you on the bed. I’ll make you another sandwich. Go get dressed.”
“You should have another one yourself. Do you realize how many calories you’ve got to burn, doing that judo shit?”
“About six hundred calories an hour.”
Ray cocked a single eyebrow at him. “My guess was higher. Still, that means you burned twenty-four hundred extra calories tonight, just in your workout. You’re tall, so you probably need at least two thousand more calories a day just to live, and so far, I think you’ve eaten fifteen hundred. You can’t train like a fighter and eat like a supermodel. It doesn’t work.”
“Well, I normally manage dinner before two in the morning. I eat.”
“Another sandwich wouldn’t hurt.” Ray hiked up his towel and reached for the bread.
“Go get dressed.” Elliot elbowed him out of the kitchen, then started putting together two more sandwiches, using up the rest of the turkey.
He also tried to clear his head. If he had to take another cold shower to be able to sleep, it really would be sunrise before he got to bed.
“I was thinking I’d go to a hotel after I got some sleep!” Ray’s voice came from the bedroom. He came out a moment later, wearing the boxers Elliot had left for him but no T-shirt.
“You don’t need to go to a hotel. Didn’t I put out a shirt for you?”
“I don’t like to wear them to sleep.” Ray stared at him for a long moment. “I prefer not to wear anything.” He glanced pointedly down at Elliot’s bare chest.
“Fair’s fair, though. Anyway, I was thinking that losing those laptops was too much of a coincidence. Someone thinks Sophie stole that money, and they must think the way to get it back is somewhere on her laptop. The only time I’ve been anywhere near it was this morning, which means someone had to be following us. I wasn’t seeing things.”
“Again, my car, my house. I’ve only been assigned here a few weeks.”
“If Alejandro has been following me since Friday, he could have been watching us this morning. It’d be a safe bet that he followed us here, too.”
“If he was following us, wouldn’t he know that you didn’t go back to your place with the laptop?”
“I don’t know.” Ray shrugged. “But going to a hotel would be safer than staying here with you, for both of us. Your alarm system’s not even hooked up, and I don’t want you getting hurt because of this mess.”
“It’s not monitored, and I don’t turn it on, but the alarm system works just fine.”
“Even if it works, the only thing it can do is make noise. Noise isn’t going to scare someone like Alejandro. It’s not going to stop him, either.”
“I’m not arguing that. But it would give us an extra thirty seconds to get oriented and line up a shot.” Elliot began slicing tomato to add to their sandwiches. “I’d rather not shoot holes in my woodwork. And a hotel would have the disadvantage of having a single point of entry. Easy to get trapped.”
Ray stole a slice of tomato from under Elliot’s hands and ate it plain.
“I just don’t think it’s worth panicking about yet,” Elliot continued.
“You don’t think it’s worth panicking about? Do you have any idea what type of man my cousin is?”
“If I didn’t have a decent idea of what type of man he is from his dossier, I think the ‘Soup Maker’ thing summed it up. Definitely the kind of guy where you need to shoot first.”
“And ask questions later?” Ray rolled his eyes.
Elliot smirked. “If he’s still capable of answering questions, you’re a lousy shot. So it’s a good thing I can aim. I don’t think it’s worth panicking about yet because we don’t know if he was the one who broke into your place. You’re forgetting that someone else knows you took Sophie’s laptop—Luca Garcia. You can’t tell me he was happy with you taking it.”
“He doesn’t know where I live,” said Ray.
“He doesn’t know where I live, either. All I’m saying is, it could have been totally random. An ex-lover could have broken in and trashed your place just to fuck with you.”
Ray let out a defeated huff. “Can we turn on the alarm, at least?”
Elliot set two extra slices of tomato on Ray’s sandwich and dropped the top slices of bread on. He shoved Ray’s sandwich toward him. Ray’s eyes focused on the sandwich, all thoughts of cartel stalkers forgotten.
“I don’t even know how to turn on the alarm system,” Elliot admitted. He hesitated for a moment, then traced his fingertips up Ray’s side and over his bare chest. “I guess we’ll just have to keep an eye on each other. And we can’t do that if I’m here and you’re in a hotel.”
Ray swallowed hard. “Okay, no hotel.”
Ray woke up less than an hour after he got to sleep. The light cascading through the gigantic windows overlooking the Rueda Canyon filled Elliot’s living room with a golden glow. If Ray was a morning person, he might have appreciated it more. It made the entire room agonizingly bright, and even burying his head in the black hole that was Elliot’s couch didn’t block out enough light for him to stay asleep. Since he was going on four days with very little sleep, he was so exhausted he considered digging through Elliot’s medicine drawer to find something that might knock him out. But if he was going to risk getting his ass kicked for a bit of rest, he’d rather it be for something more worthwhile than a mixed narcotics hangover.
Groggy and stumbling, he wandered into Elliot’s bedroom where heavy curtains masked the glaring sunlight outside. Elliot stirred as Ray slipped into bed beside him.
“What the hell?” Despite the grumble, Elliot rolled over to give Ray space.
“You don’t have curtains in your living room,” Ray said. “I’m tired, Belkamp. I’m so tired I think it would take a lethal dose of Viagra and a blowjob for me to get it up right now. Your ass is safe from me.”
He scooted under the blankets and moved close enough to feel the warmth of Elliot’s body. The cocoon of body heat and the deep, even rhythm of Elliot’s breathing lulled Ray into the first deep sleep he’d had in days. At some point, he felt Elliot try to shift away from him, and Ray automatically dragged him back across the bed. He was well aware of what he was doing, but he kept his eyes shut and hoped Elliot would assume he was moving in his sleep. Once Elliot’s warmth and steady breathing settled in his grasp, he drifted off again.
When he awoke next, it was still dark, but he could still hear Elliot breathing. He rolled toward the weight of the other body in bed and found he was trapped by the blankets. “Come back,” he muttered, trying to grab Elliot through the blankets. “Still tired.”
“It’s almost six. I was tired enough to sleep most of the day, too, but food has to happen at some point. You should wake up.”
“Don’t want to,” Ray pouted.
He looked up and saw Elliot, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt that actually fit him, reading something on a new, thin laptop. Ray tried to squirm closer, but with Elliot on top of the blankets and him underneath them, it wasn’t working.
Elliot glanced down at Ray and rolled his eyes. “You’re ridiculous.”
“You’re comfy.”
“I ordered pizza, it’s on the counter if you want some,” said Elliot.
“Coffee?”
“Gives me headaches.”
“Caffeine?” Ray tilted his head up in panic. He could technically survive without coffee, but the withdrawal headaches would be a bitch. He wondered how they compared to Elliot’s migraines.
“There’s a gallon of sweet tea in the fridge. It has caffeine.”
“Thank God….” Ray dropped his head onto Elliot’s hips, nuzzling closer to use the other man as a pillow and to catch a glimpse of what was on his laptop screen. “Thank you for letting me sleep too.”
“Letting you?” Elliot huffed. “The only time you’ve shown any signs of life was when I left the room. So long as I’m nearby, I think you could sleep through anything.”
“Thank you for staying so I could sleep. I feel so much better.”
“Sure.” Elliot clicked something on his laptop.
“Got anything on Sophie’s laptop yet?” Ray asked
“It’s Sunday night; of course I don’t. Our boys in Technical are calling in encryption specialists from the National Security Agency to get into the hard drive.”
Ray sat up. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. If it turns out she went to all this trouble to secure her diary or some shit like that, neither of us is ever going to live this down.”
“It’d be funny though, right?”
“No.”
Ray sighed. It would be hilarious, in a career-ending, mortifying kind of way. “You really think she would go to all that trouble to hide something that wasn’t important?”
“I wouldn’t have bothered handing it over to the guys in Technical if I didn’t think it was important.”
“Ouch. Usually I’m the one getting annoyed when someone restates the obvious.”
Elliot shrugged and went back to scrolling through the file.
“I’m starting to think you’re right about her stealing that money,” said Ray.
“Since we’ve interviewed everyone possible, St. Claire has decided to elevate this to a full-blown missing-person investigation. She’s preparing an official press release, and she’s got agents and volunteers combing the campus grounds today. Better today when there aren’t as many people. Tomorrow I’m going to go help interview Munoz’s classmates and talk to that last professor again.”
�
��Call him now. Garcia suggested they were involved. We’ve got to follow up on that.”
“I’ve tried twice today and once yesterday when I was submitting the report for the laptop. Both numbers he gave me are forwarding calls to his office. It’s Sunday night, so no one’s there. You’re welcome to come with me tomorrow, if you think you can keep your temper under control this time.”
Ray rubbed his eyes and shimmied under the blankets again, dropping his head back into Elliot’s lap. “I didn’t lose my temper. And the more I think about it, the more likely it seems that they were involved.”
“How so?”
“Sophie’s smart. She might have thought that little shit Garcia was cute, but she resented having to act like an idiot just so she wouldn’t offend him. It’s in the tone of her Facebook messages to him. It’s the same way she talked to Carmen every time Carmen made her clean her room. I think he was totally oblivious while they were together. Garcia might have thought she was exchanging sexual favors for a boost to her GPA, but I think that was because he didn’t know her well enough to know she didn’t need to. The professor is more her type, and he obviously knows her better.”
“So why did he bring up Garcia?” Elliot asked. “And would you sit the hell up? Or at least stop trying to burrow into my crotch?”
Ray rolled up on his elbow and closed the screen on Elliot’s laptop. “I was comfortable.” He set his fingers on Elliot’s zipper, hesitating for a moment to give Elliot time to stop him if he wanted to. Elliot’s mouth hung open slightly, but he didn’t move to stop Ray. As Ray pulled Elliot’s zipper down, his knuckles grazed the thin cotton of Elliot’s boxers and the swelling cock hidden beneath the fabric.
Elliot grabbed his wrist and squeezed, stopping him instantly. Ray met Elliot’s dark green eyes for a moment, seeing the lust he was feeling mirrored in Elliot’s gaze. Ray ignored the pain in his wrist and tried to grin. “We need to sort this out. I want you. I’m pretty sure you want me. I’ve had a constant hard-on for the last three days because I can’t look at you without getting turned on.”