“We absolutely will,” Riley said. “But first, I need you to get your hand off my face because of where it just was. That’s how you get pink eye.”
“Ope!” Josh said, laughing, and they resumed cleaning each other, again.
“Hey, does this mean we’re both bottoms?” Josh asked.
Riley adored this man. It figured his awakening would only leave him excited to learn more about himself, rather than be nervous about the future they had yet to face.
“I think it means we have lots of experimenting to do. Maybe we’re both vers.”
“We can’t be vers. We’re people, and people, places and things are nouns, not vers. Right?”
“You’re thinking of verbs. Vers is short for versatile, like you enjoy it both ways.”
“Ohhhh, okay, let’s be that, then.”
Josh may not have been bright, but he was the brightest part of Riley’s life. And he wasn’t ever going to let that change.
————————
After one more round of frotting and fingering in the shower, because they couldn’t help themselves, they decided to spend the rest of the night relaxing and baskingin their new normal.
When Josh announced he was going to make Riley dinner for their first date ever, kicking Riley out of the kitchen, Riley decided it was a good time to hop on his laptop to look into Josh’s parents’ accident.
It was usually easy to find police records, since they were public, but Riley was surprised when he couldn’t find the record of the accident in the database.
He tried to break the law as little as possible when it came to his hacking, usually trying to help people. Hacking the Cherrywood Police Department’s system was something he tried to avoid.
The problem was, it was so easy to hack that it didn’t even feel illegal. The last time he broke into their system, he even wrote some code to leave it more secure. Against other people, at least, but not him.
It took another few minutes to scan the system for anything about the accident. He found a copy of a police report buried in the police chief’s computer. It was heavily redacted, and the document had been labeled with the date of the accident.
He could see Josh’s and his parents’ names, as well as the fact it was a head-on collision, but that was it. He kept scrolling through the document until the police report began all over again, except this one wasn’t covered in black redactions. It was a clean copy. Why did they have both?
In the spot where the officer on the scene had to note which airbags deployed during the accident, the officer wrotenonewith a question mark.
Equally concerning was the section on the driver of the vehicle that hit the Wus.
The car information was listed, their airbags deploying as expected, but there was no driver information.
Josh had said he remembered someone running from the scene to get help, but he didn’t remember the guy ever returning.
And the car itself? It had allegedly been stolen days before, another report attached to the document said.
As Riley scrolled through the report, he reached one more document, a witness statement.
The accident had happened in an intersection of a suburban community and it looked like one of the homeowners had seen what happened. The name was redacted, blacked out so Riley couldn’t even guess at what it said, only mentioning it was someone who lived on the corner. Luckily, the statement wasn’t redacted.
The car was waiting to turn left because another car was coming from the opposite direction, but instead of driving through, it sped up, and the guy hit the standing car head-on. The sound was horrible. A man jumped out of the car wearing a black motorcycle helmet and dressed in all black and ran away down Brookline Drive.
Riley’s instincts were right. There was no way that was an accident.
The good news? It was definitely not Josh’s fault.
The bad news was there was something fishy going on. Riley was thankful he had a professional detective for a friend. He had originally asked Garrett to look into their stalking client, but hopefully he wouldn’t mind giving his opinion on this one too.
Of course, then he’d have to tell Garrett how he got his hands on the report.
That could be awkward.
