by Rhys Ford
Angel Daniels.
“The motel… that’s just business. I didn’t mean for it to get as ugly as it has.”
“I live in that business. Not once did you come to me to talk. You knew I was there, but you let that asshole Washington turn the screws,” Angel accused.
“Look, we can talk about all of that. I just never… crap. I just want… for us to be okay,” West whispered. He was flayed open, his mind reeling with the impact of Angel standing in front of him. He missed the man. As stupid as it sounded, as it was, he’d missed the soul he once shared everything with. “I don’t know how else to say it.”
“You don’t get to decide we’re okay, Harris. You don’t have that right,” Angel muttered into West’s ear. He leaned in close, close enough for West to smell his skin, an odd mélange of sugar, spices, and a hint of masculine sweat. “Give me one fucking good reason I shouldn’t make you eat your own teeth.”
“Because my parents paid a hell of a lot of money for these teeth,” he replied hoarsely. “And if I remember correctly, you were always so very practical. Even as you were getting into that van and waving good-bye, you made damned sure you knew how to get hold of me. Or at least that’s what it seemed like at the time.”
“That what you think? I was going to use you?” Angel rubbed his jaw against West’s cheek, his faint stubble leaving behind a raking burn. “Like I used you all summer? Like all of the times I asked you for what? Oh, wait, I didn’t ask you for jack shit, Harris. Not then. Not now.”
West refused to step back, knowing he needed something from the man he’d left behind. He just didn’t know what.
No, he reminded himself. He knew exactly what he wanted from Angel Daniels, what he’d wanted from Angel all along, and with the numbness creeping through his mind and the pills rattling around in his empty stomach, West discovered he no longer cared what the hell happened that night so long as he got a taste of Angel.
One single taste and he’d be able to walk away.
Like he’d done before.
But this time it wouldn’t hurt, West promised himself. This time it wouldn’t be his heart left in a smear of ashes across his soul. This time it would take away the anger he had raging inside of him and maybe soothe the sharp, hard prickle of hurt Angel seemed to carry in his heart.
“I wasn’t expecting you, Angel. And I sure as hell wasn’t expecting you to… hit me as hard as you do,” West rumbled back. He wanted Angel. There was no mistaking the hardness of his cock or the ache in his heart. The years were melting away, leaving behind the rocks they’d probably flung at one another in the time they’d spent apart, but damn him if Angel didn’t still make West want more than a quick fuck and a good-bye. “You always told me to grab what I wanted and hold on. Right now, this is what I want.”
His mouth found Angel’s, and there was a brief hiccup of time when West was afraid. Scared he’d gone too far or maybe not far enough when he should have. Either way, his fear ran slick, bitter spit over his teeth, and his throat closed up, leaving him speechless. His world hung on a fraying thread, a risk West knew better than to take but a cliff he was going to jump off anyway.
And damn the rocks below.
“Fucking hell,” Angel muttered. “Jesus Christ, you make me nuts.”
A touch of Angel’s tongue on his lips and West knew he was destined for a painful crash, but he’d be damned if he didn’t enjoy the fall. Because God, the man tasted like someone’d poured Heaven and all the stars into West’s mouth, and he couldn’t drink it all in fast enough.
Angel’s hands were rough, long fingers harsh with calluses and scrapes, and his touch burned serpentine trails of desire along West’s skin. His mouth was hard, taking from West more than he was giving, and West’s lungs ached, trapped between wanting more of the man pushing him back into the house and inhaling a sweet sip of the evening air so he could dive back down into Angel’s mouth again. Their tongues fought, teeth striking once, then twice before they found an angle both of them liked. West dove in again, catching a brief suck of wind. Then he was tasting the masculine sweetness of the man he’d never wanted to toss aside.
He’d had no choice, some part of his brain reminded him. Their lives were too different, and West’s father—his goddamned, controlling father—promised to break Angel in every way possible if he didn’t walk away from the wild, gray-eyed almost-lover he’d fallen for in those brief summer months.
Angel came up for air first, gasping as if West took everything from him, leaving him parched and sucked dry. His hands were still clenched around West, his fingers shoved down past West’s belt, digging into his tender flesh.
West’s cock hurt. Not in the way his spine ached or his ribs throbbed from being thrown about the car but in a delicious, hot, needy tightening of skin and nerves he’d not felt in forever. West couldn’t get his hands on enough of Angel’s skin. He’d tangled his fingers into the man’s T-shirt—some banged-up, faded black piece with a grinning kirin on it and a name of a band he’d never heard of—but it wasn’t enough to drag Angel in tight. He needed more of… everything… kisses, tongue, and sweat. There was something raw growing between them, a desperate hunger brought up by the slightest touch of Angel’s lips to his.
“We can’t do this. I can’t. This is stupid. Too fast. Too stupid,” Angel growled into West’s mouth. “God, I fucking hate you right now for making me want you.”
“Yeah, I’d hate me too,” West confessed around Angel’s tongue. “But I wasn’t the one who dropped the pizza.”
“I’m tired, and you’re… crazy,” he muttered.
“Stoned really. Pain pills.” West smiled faintly. “We’re both emotionally and physically compromised.”
“I should walk away.”
“I should let you go.”
Angel sighed. “I don’t see either of that happening. Do you?”
“No, I don’t,” West agreed. “But damn, it’s good to see you, Angel.”
“It’s been years—”
“Feels like yesterday, love.”
The world… shifted. That was the only word West could come up with for the odd change in dynamics he felt when Angel pushed him into the foyer wall. His shoulder blades hit the hard plaster, rattling some faux-metal thing with tentacles the designer hung next to the door and called it art. West used it to hang his jacket on, but oddly enough, it wasn’t attached firmly enough to hold any significant weight.
West found that out when he grabbed at it—grabbing at anything, really—so he could anchor himself as Angel tore him apart with his mouth and fingers.
God, those fingers. That tongue. Those lips. Angel was everywhere on him and still not where West needed him to be. With his scalp aching from Angel clenching his hair, West fought back a mewling gasp when Angel’s teeth raked a welting score down his throat.
The tentacles shattered on the foyer’s tiled floor, dragged off its perch by West’s weight. He couldn’t breathe, and his skin tightened over his muscles, reminding him in a brief slap of pain of what he’d lived through yesterday. But the bitter sweetness of Angel’s mouth was too damned… good to push away.
Even if he was the one being held against the wall and kissed senseless.
A moment later, the simmer turned to ice, and West was free of the hot, hard length of Angel’s body. He hung there, unbalanced and adrift for a moment as he realized the man’d let him go—fucking let him go—in the middle of everything they’d been doing to one another. Angel’s shirt was torn open, an uneven rent through the collar and down the front, exposing a tanned stretch of skin and hard muscles.
The air was cold on West’s belly, the buttons from his shirt popped off and scattered over the floor. He’d somehow worked the tang from Angel’s belt loose and undid the top button of the man’s jeans, pulling them open enough to stroke at the soft, silken dark hair below Angel’s belly button.
Angel’s hands were in his own mink-and-gold mottled mane, his fingers pulling the strands
away from his sharp, sculpted features. The mouth West’d savaged moments ago was swollen, a blush of pink flesh marbled with teeth marks and wet from West’s tongue.
Then it all fell apart.
The pills West’d taken weren’t strong enough to withstand the rush of blood pounding through his veins, or perhaps Angel’s heady taste drowned out any narcotics, because West took one step toward the muscular, rough man pacing off his foyer and his knees buckled under him, pitching him onto the floor.
Angel caught him—a cradle of firm flesh, regrets, and an anguished need so sharp it cut West open from the inside out.
He hurt. He hurt inside his soul, places he thought he’d deadened so long ago they might as well have belonged to someone else, but the flare of pain in his heart, in his chest, down to his very soul blazed bright enough West knew he’d only been blind to the misery he’d buried inside of him.
“Angel, I—” West grabbed at the man’s shoulders, needing to lever his hips up before his sprained joints splintered apart. The pain in his limbs hit West hard, stretching out until his gums were tight on his teeth. “Shit, my ankle—”
“I’ve got you,” Angel muttered in his rough burned-caramel voice. “Just hold—”
West never found out what he was supposed to hold onto. As Angel hooked his arm around West’s back, a gunshot broke through the heated silence they’d built up. The bullet hit the light fixture hanging down from the foyer’s tall ceiling, shattering it into a million pieces and raining shards of glass down upon them. The light’s heavy black frame plummeted, and West tried to throw his arm up to protect them, but he was too late. It glanced off his temple, leaving behind a spark of pain.
Already rattled, his skull creaked, blossoming into red swirls and staccato jabs. His eyes were working furiously, blinking to clear away the swelling clouds. Then the world tilted and Angel’s face shifted, jagging to the right, then the left.
West swallowed hard, tasting blood again, a too familiar flavor on his tongue considering the past couple of days. Then he mumbled at the man holding him up in the remains of his foyer, “This is not how I wanted us to meet again.”
Then all West heard was Angel’s fading shouts for him to hang on while he succumbed to a thick, rising darkness.
“SO YOU didn’t see anyone outside? No idea of who shot at the house?” Montague eyed Angel with equal parts suspicion and incredulous doubt. “Nothing? Gender? Height?”
“It was dark outside,” he confessed. Running his hands through his hair, Angel was quickly made aware of his torn shirt by the gust of cold wind hitting his bared nipple. Bringing his arms down, he then crossed them over his chest. “Look, I wasn’t… outside isn’t where I was looking.”
The house was overwhelming, rising up around him, and Angel felt more than a chill when the cops arrived with an ambulance in tow. West remained passed out right up until the moment the blond medical technician put her hands on him. Then he woke up swinging. It was definitely not a good sign for Angel, who’d been trying to convince the cops he and West weren’t arguing when the gunshot rang out, and Montague didn’t seem to be buying what Angel was selling him.
“You’ve got to admit, it seems odd. From what I see, it looks like you’ve been tangling with each other, and then there’s bullets flying around, but you see no one?” The detective’s eyebrows seemed permanently raised onto his forehead, where they’d gone nearly as soon as he’d heard Angel’s take on what happened. “And didn’t you just tell me you and Harris hadn’t seen one other in years, but I’m supposed to believe you found enough common ground to suddenly tear your clothes off in the middle of his foyer?”
“Would I have dropped a pizza from Joey’s place on the floor for anything other than a hot piece of ass?” Angel growled back. “Look, I didn’t say it made sense. It doesn’t make any fucking sense. We sure as hell didn’t leave things on a good note between us, and tonight… fuck, tonight just kind of happened. Maybe because I’m as tired as shit and my brain just said why the hell not? He’s on pain pills, so he’s not thinking straight either. It was stupid and… just… stupid, but I didn’t plan on it. And I sure as hell wasn’t paying attention to anyone outside who got it into his fool head to shoot out the light.”
“Are you on something, Mr. Daniels? Is there something you’re not telling me?” Montague looked up from his notepad, his dark eyes deadly serious as they fixed on Angel’s face. “Did you come here to hurt Mr. Harris? Maybe in retaliation for what happened at the bakery the other night?”
“I’m not on something.” It was never a good thing when the cops suddenly called you mister. That step back from friendly was a long one, distancing the police officer from their quarry. “Look, if I shot the light out, where’s the gun?”
“You’re a strong guy, Mr. Daniels, and that’s a whole hell of a lot of brush out there,” the detective replied. “You’d have had more than enough time to chuck it up the hillside or hell, even over the cliff. Might have even been able to hit the ocean if your aim was good enough. Then there’s that matter of that gun we found. The one registered in your name.”
“I don’t own a gun,” Angel ground out between his teeth. “I’ve got my kid brother living with me. I’m not having a gun anywhere he can get his hands on it. And your guys just scraped some of my skin off at the bakery and here. That’ll tell you I didn’t shoot anyone. Hell, West is right fricking there. Ask him.”
From the irritated grumbles coming from the living area, West wasn’t very keen on the emergency medical staff poking at him. Angel chanced a look over his shoulder, and their eyes met, a flash of tangled somethings wrapping around Angel’s gut at the blood splatter on West’s cheek. The EMT took West’s distraction for acquiescence, and she daubed something wet across his wounds, drawing a long hiss out of West’s slightly bruised lips. Turning back to the detective, Angel tugged at his shirt and said, “Look, if you’re going to keep me much longer, I’ve got to call home. I’ve got a friend sitting up with my brother. I don’t want them to worry.”
“Sure, go ahead. Give me a few minutes with Harris. Then I want to touch base with you again before I release you.” Montague tucked his pen into his jacket pocket. “Don’t go anywhere, Daniels. You’re not cleared to leave.”
“Yeah, okay, like I’ve never heard that before.”
Angel dug his phone out, then wandered off to find someplace quiet to talk. The cop’s eyes were hard, glittering and sharp when he passed the small clusters of uniforms in the front of the house. Finding the kitchen empty, Angel ducked into the cool, shadowy room and dialed his brother’s phone.
“Where are you?” Roman’s voice was tight with worry. “You said you’d be home by now.”
Angel intimately knew the particular panic drowning Roman at that point. He’d swallowed more than enough of that metallic-edged fear in his life, so much so he’d grown up thinking everything in the world tasted slightly of rancid blood and oily threads. They’d both been tossed away too many times before. Their father conveniently forgetting he had a son whenever the mood struck or when money got too tight to stretch to cover two mouths. He couldn’t count how many streets he’d roamed, looking for someplace warm to sleep or at least dry. Dry went a hell of a long way, and food was something he could easily live without. It’d been a blessing to finally stop moving. To have a bed in a room with solid walls.
He still wasn’t quite used to waking up in the same place after nearly eight years, so he didn’t have much faith Roman was settled either. And in the middle of the night, in the dark while his younger brother battled nightmares with little whimpers and tangled thrashings under his covers, Angel was beginning to wonder if either one of them ever would truly believe they were home.
“I’m here, Rome. Some shit went down at this guy’s place, so now I have to wait the cops out.” Angel spoke calmly, slowly, more for his brother’s sake than anything else. Cops was a dirty word for them, but honesty went a long way with Roman. Knowing the police
were keeping Angel from coming home would shift his focus for a second, long enough for him to shake off any paralyzing fears. “They said I can leave soon. I had to talk to them about some idiot shooting a gun off by the house, but I’m okay. Everyone’s fine. Well, except the guy’s pizza.”
“Justin was about to call you, but I wanted to do it. Then you called instead,” Roman muttered.
Then Angel heard words he never ever thought he would hear come out of Rome’s mouth.
“I was scared you weren’t coming home. I thought you were going to be like Dad and… just leave me.”
It was stupid to cry, even stupider to cry while standing in an expensive house owned by a guy who’d broken his heart, but Angel felt his tears burn across his eyes, then fall, hitting his cheeks and the counter he’d leaned against.
“I will never leave you, kid,” Angel swore, pushing as much of his love for his brother into his voice as he could, anything to make Roman believe him. “No matter where you are, that’s my home, okay? No one’s taking you from me. No matter what. I will always come home to you. Understand me?”
The line was silent, too silent and too long, but finally Angel heard Rome sniff. “Okay.”
“Good. I’m going to see if the cops will let me go, and you tell Justin I said you can hook up a game.” He snorted as Roman began to scream for Justin as if he hadn’t just been sniffling into the phone. “I’ll be there to put you to bed, dude. Don’t give Justin a hard time. Got it?”
He suffered a few more seconds of Rome’s shouting, then took a few minutes with Justin, assuring the redhead he was okay and would be back to the motel in a bit. After hanging up the phone, Angel hitched himself and leaned back against the upper cabinets, taking in the cool quiet.