Finally, Tristan said in a hoarse voice, "I keep thinking about her. How scared she is."
Hoping they were the right words, Cade replied, "I know it's awful, but we'll get her before the auction. Just hold on a little while longer, then this whole nightmare will be over."
Tristan's chin dipped in a jerky nod, but his lips remained pressed tightly together. He watched the rest of the baseball game without commenting, then announced he was going to bed. Cade was about to settle himself down for a long night on the sofa, but he heard the soft plea, "Come with me. Please."
The words reached his ears, filling him with an unfamiliar warmth that he was tired of questioning, and he followed the other man to the bed.
Cade woke before the sun, and from the quiet comfort of the bed, watched the light progress from the moonlit haze of dawn to the burning orange of sunrise to the full brightness of morning.
Tristan lay curled up beside him, his face relaxed in sleep, faint freckles dusting his cheeks like a distant galaxy. Cade briefly considered pulling him close and lounging in bed all morning, but he was restless and craving movement after too many lazy days.
Climbing out of bed, he threw on clothes and shoes, and once outside, stretched lightly before breaking into a steady run. As he skirted the tree line around the cabin, he tried to clear his head of worries about the case and the gorgeous, exasperating man in his bed.
His wandering thoughts drifted back to the first time he tried running as a skinny, awkward ten-year-old. When his foster father had invited him on a run, Cade had been nervous about keeping up, but Marshall had maintained a doable pace, and soon Cade relaxed into a groove, listening to only the slap of their shoes on the pavement and the early morning bird songs.
It was the first time he understood the idea of companionable silence.
He supposed he liked running after that, not only because of the company, but because, when you ran, you weren't expected to talk.
He'd never been much of a talker.
Before going to live with Marshall and Cindy Walker and their teenage son, he'd rarely spoken. He'd been a broken, traumatized child who thought that if he was quiet, he wouldn't make waves, couldn't provoke the yelling that made him shake with fear. His silence had protected him, let him fade into the background.
Made him invisible.
Maybe that was why no one ever adopted him.
After spending more than a year with the family, playing basketball with Seth, eating Cindy's French toast breakfasts, and bonding with Marshall over baseball and running, he started to feel more secure, and though no one would ever consider him talkative, he opened up to them. He started to feel safety, acceptance, and maybe even something bordering on happiness.
But when Marshall told him he and Cindy were divorcing, that he was moving to another state and couldn't take Cade with him, the words vanished again, strangled by the familiar ache of loneliness and the fresh pain of betrayal.
After that, the new placements meant no more running, no more baseball, just his belligerent silence fueled by rage. Before the Walkers, his muteness had been defensive, but now he wielded it like a weapon, preventing anyone from getting close, using it to anger and provoke, to even instigate the yelling he hated as a child.
It turned out to be an effective way to escape placements he didn't like, especially the one with that creepy pervert.
On the streets, he found his voice again, but he didn't start running once more until after he met Hamm. As a gangly, underfed seventeen-year-old, he ran to build his endurance and muscles, to get stronger and faster.
No longer weak and out of shape, running allowed him to maintain his equilibrium, to meditate, to calm his thoughts and anxiety. It usually cleared his head, let all his worries fall away like a trail of breadcrumbs in his wake.
But things were different here at the cabin, he realized, both today and a few days ago when his entire run had been consumed by mortification over his perimeter blunder and fear of fictitious, rabid rodents.
Here, in these isolated woods, a persistent buzz had filled his head, his thoughts of Tristan a near-constant companion, a brainworm that he couldn't shake. With worries over the caseweighing on him as well, his mind had been churning overtime, resistant to the mental relief he normally got from this exercise.
That sucked because, with everything going on, some clarity of mind would have been helpful.
As he finished his run, he managed to focus on calming his breathing and stretching his muscles, but when he entered the cabin and saw Tristan strewn over the bed sans covers, his thoughts immediately scrambled again. The redhead looked relaxed and alluring, with pale skin and lithe muscles on display, and images of him — some innocent, some decidedly not — flooded Cade's head.
Shaking off the ridiculous truth that his brain short-circuited simply from seeing his housemate in bed, he poured himself a glass of juice and sat at the table, picking up his phone to concentrate on anything except those invasive thoughts.
While he scrolled through his phone, it buzzed, and he answered, expecting Annabeth.
"King, it's Hamm."
Cade's heart dropped when he heard Hamm's voice.
"Is Annabeth okay?"
"She's fine, just sleeping. She's also a fucking genius. She found the other nine sites."
