“I think I should leave.”
Javier’s heart squeezed at the misery in Bowie’s voice. “If that’s what you want. I can drive you home.”
“I’ll just take an Uber or something.”
Javier let his leg fall just enough to bump Bowie’s. “Don’t be like that. You don’t have to leave. I told you, I didn’t bring you here for some quick and dirty hookup.”
Bowie snorted, voice strained. “Good, ‘cause clearly that’s not happening.”
“That what you wanted? To blow me up against a window and then leave me high and dry?”
“Were you expecting flowers and candy?”
“I wasn’t expecting anything at all. Were you? Did you come here to prove something to yourself? It’s alright if you did. I get it. But I think you’re pushing yourself a bit too hard. It’s only been a few weeks.”
“I don’t want to have a nervous breakdown every time I want to hook up with a guy.”
Javier tried not to think too hard about Bowie hooking up with other guys. “Yesterday, you flinched every time someone touched you. Today, you kissed me and let me touch you. That’s progress. Fast progress.”
“Yeah, and then you tugged on my hair and I suddenly had a panic attack. I could literally taste him in my mouth.” He shuddered.
“I think you need to talk to somebody.”
Bowie’s face contorted. “Like a shrink?”
“Yeah, like a shrink.”
Bowie wiped a tear from his cheek, even though it was quickly followed by another. “I feel like I could get past this if he would just go away. Just disappear and never come back. But he’s always there. Lingering, lurking. I don’t know what he wants from me.”
“Guys like him… It’s about power. They get off on bending people to their will, terrorizing them. I saw a million guys like that back in Mexico.”
Bowie’s gaze shot upwards, locking eyes with him. “You’re from Mexico?”
“I was born in Texas but raised most of my life in Mexico, yeah.”
Bowie frowned. “You have no accent. None.”
“I do when it suits me. I don’t when it doesn’t.”
Bowie nodded as if that made perfect sense. Javier supposed it did. “So, these guys in Mexico…did they ever stop terrorizing people?”
“Yeah, angel.”
Bowie’s green eyes went wide. “How? When?”
When somebody put a bullet between their eyes.“When they finally went after the wrong person.”
Bowie’s face dropped, his voice growing dull. “So, I just have to wait for him to rape and beat up somebody more important than me and hope he gets what’s coming to him?”
Javier hated the hopelessness on Bowie’s face. It felt like he had fishhooks in his heart. Bowie didn’t have anybody to fight for him. His family wasn’t there for him. If he had friends, Javier hadn’t seen them.
Javier might not be a good guy, but he had plenty of them in his corner. Lawson was a junkyard dog, smart, loyal…and mean, but he’d give Javier the shirt off his back, literally, if he asked. Cy and Preacher, they were both the strong silent type, but they’d taken Javier in without question when he said he wanted out of the business. They might have been ex-cons, but they were good men. Men who wanted to right the wrongs of their past, especially now that they’d both married and settled down.
Javier scooted closer to Bowie. “Do you trust me, angel?”
Bowie wiped at his eyes with his fingertips. “Yeah,” he said, nose stuffy from crying.
Javier tipped Bowie’s chin up until they were eye to eye. “Enough to do whatever I say without asking a lot of questions?”
