Not that we were a couple.
The night wore on. Baxter began tossing and turning, making it impossible for me to drop off. I lay there as long as I could, pretending to be asleep in the hope that I could make it so by force of will, but in the end I gave up and pushed myself up on my elbows.
“Can you settle down, please?” I snapped.
“I’m trying. Believe me, I’m trying.” He sounded so exhausted but also so frustrated that my irritation died away.
“I know you have a lot on your mind—” I began, but he interrupted.
“It’s not that.” The sound of him censoring himself was heavy in the air.
“What is it, then?” I asked at last.
“If you must know,” he bit out, “usually I have a littlestress reliefbefore I sleep.”
It took everything in me not to laugh. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I began, but he turned over huffily towards me.
“No you’re not. You’re laughing at me. But it’s perfectly natural to masturbate.”
“I’m aware.”
“You’reaware?” he muttered. “Aware of but not a practitioner? You telling me you’ve been abstinent your whole life or something?”
I scoffed at that. “Definitely not.”
“But you’re ashamed of those urges?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Am I being ridiculous?”
In too many ways to count. I stayed quiet, hoping he would, too. But he didn’t.
“Angelo?” Bax’s voice was soft in the dark. He shifted slightly in the bed, leaning in towards me. “Was it difficult for you?”
“Was what difficult?”
“Being gay in the—in your line of work.”
“Back off, Dr. Freud,” I said, sharper than I meant to. Bax had a way of suddenly sliding into psychologist mode that I found unnerving. Half the time I forgot hewasn’tjust some frat-boy field agent.
“Captain Walsh calls me Sigmund. I don’t like it.”
I did not reply. This was classic cop bullshit. If a subject closed off on direct questions, try to re-establish a connection by sharing something personal. Something to make you seem vulnerable, so the subject will mirror.
“But that guy’s a moron,” Bax continued. “I only really care about what Villiers thinks.”
“Go to sleep.”
“Was it the same with you? Were you always looking for respect from Tino Morelli?”
The name landed like a bomb between us. I barely thought before I reacted, leaning up over him, pressing my forearm across his chest, shoving him back into the bed. He let out a grunt as I slung my leg over his to keep him underneath me as I loomed over him.
“Don’ttry to get into my head, kid,” I growled, and he shuddered. I’d quelled him, I thought with satisfaction. Got him back into line.
But I’d underestimated him. “I’m not a kid,” he said in a low, obstinate voice.
Was that, I wondered, how I had sounded to Tino when he’d first taken me under his wing? I found myself thinking of the things Tino had said to me all those years ago when I realized I wasn’t going home again. But I reallyhadbeen a kid, twelve years old, shivering and afraid in the middle of my own new, vast bedroom that was larger than my parents’ entire apartment.
