“ROTC?” Simon asked while Jacob tried to get a good grip on the man’s legs.
“What?”
“You were ROTC?”
“Junior ROTC.” Jacob paused and leaned back against the anchor of his grip on the guy’s old Doc Martens. It was a good lie, vague enough to be hard to disprove and specific enough to invite belief. Except it was a job lie, and it felt wro… weird… to hand it to Simon. He supposed whatever bit of him had thought taking Simon to Bali was a good idea didn’t want to admit that they didn’t have a personal relationship anymore. “And no, not really. I—”
Simon stuck out his hand. “Give me the gun.”
It was a relief to hand the thing over. While he held it, there was always the chance that someone would expect him to do something useful with it. Jacob still felt the need to defend himself against… something.
“I have shot a gun before,” he muttered as he dragged the man away from the stairs.
“Did you hit anything?” Simon sat down on the stair. He leaned his bad shoulder against the bannister.
“Yes,” Jacob said indignantly.
That wasn’t a lie either. Hehadhit something. Technically it wasn’t what he’d meant to be aiming for, but he’d still hit it. That was… sophistry, and sophistry fell into the normal amount of lying that people do to each other. He heaved and felt the tug in his shoulders as the unconscious man shifted an inch. Then another. Once he was moving, however grudgingly, it was easier.
He dragged the man over to Pinch-face—or Nigel, he supposed, since his face had been spread by punches—and dropped his feet to the ground. The heavy rubber heels of the guy’s boots bounced off the floor. When Jacob straightened up, he grabbed the tail of his shirt and pulled it up to swab his face. On the ground, Nigel groaned and pushed clots of blood from between his lips, and rolled his head to the side.
Jacob loped into the hall and wedged the door shut behind him. “I don’t think they’re going to be out much longer,” he said. “We should go. Can you drive with your arm?”
“It’ll be fine,” Simon said. He sat with his dislocated arm between his thighs and his hands clasped under his knee. “Trigger the alarm on the way out. They’ll probably make themselves scarce before the cops get here, but they won’t have time to set the fire.”
He braced his feet against the step, exhaled through his teeth, and then shoved up against his own arm. The damaged slope of his shoulder rolled under the skin. There was an audible click-pop that made Jacob cringe back into himself, and Simon exhale a hard, relieved sigh through clenched teeth.
“There. Done.”
Jacob shuddered and hunched his own shoulders as though he needed confirmation they were still in place. “What the fuck are you doing?” He stepped forward but stalled when Simon growled at him. “Jesus, Si, there are doctors for that.”
“By the time I get to the doctor, it’ll be too swollen to jam back in,” Simon said. He sounded freakishly calm for a man who shoved his fucked-up arm back into his fucked-up shoulder.
“That was not right,” Jacob said.
Simon snorted, held out his good arm, and let Jacob haul him up off the stairs. The movement made him clench his jaw again and exhale hard through the pain. He got into this because of Jacob. If it had been the other way around, Jacob would have brought that up about ninety-two times by then.
He tightened his grip on Simon’s hand, pulled him closer, and stretched up the inch it took to kiss him. It was quick and messy, tart with copper and wet with smeared blood between their lips. Breathing in the heat of Simon’s mouth, Jacob realized he was the only one really doing the kissing. The hard lines of Simon’s body hadn’t relaxed into him at all.
It was the Bali question all over again. Crap. That was why one-night stands should be the rule. Simple, clear—everyone knew where they stood.
He stepped back and scrubbed the blood off his mouth on the back of his wrist. There was half an apology on the tip of his tongue, but the thought of it made him cringe.The hell with it. Pretend nothing happened and just get on with things.Avoidance was a proud family tradition, after all.
“Well, we didn’t find anything else,” he said. “So hopefully that memory card is what they were looking to destroy.”
He paused, just in case, but after an unreadable second, Simon just nodded. “Clayton had to have hidden it for a reason,” he said.
They went out through the backyard, just in case one of the neighbors were watching. Simon kicked the back gate open, and the lock ripped out of the wall in a tangle of broken screws and plaster dust. There was no noise, but Jacob knew that the nearest station was shoving cops into a car to make sure the rich people weren’t going to be on the news.
Ignoring the twitching urge to run, they walked briskly back toward the car, looking as unsuspicious as two beat-up men carrying guns could look. When they got there, the dog was sitting up in the back, and his nose prints and slobber smeared the window. He went insane when he saw them, barked at the glass with teeth bared back to the gumline, and wagged his tail the minute they opened the doors.
“Well done,” Simon ground out as he slid stiffly into the driver’s seat. “You managed to find a dog that’ll warn off thieves, but makes its peace if they actually get into the car.”
“We like to call it pragmatic,” Jacob said. He slammed the door and slouched down with his head tilted back against the headrest as he breathed out. His heart raced behind his ribs, and his balls had cringed their way back inside after the kiss, but the wisecracks made him feel a bit more like normal. Fozzy scrambled up onto his lap so he could look out the window, and his hard little paws dug into Jacob’s thighs like pitons. Jacob petted him absently. The rough fur and dog heat were kind of soothing. “So he said they weren’t supposed to kill Clayton. I thought they’d just… done it… before they got the information they needed, but they weren’t meant to kill him at all.”
Simon glanced at him. “So?”
“He wasn’t the one they were worried about getting the information,” Jacob said. He could already hear sirens in the distance, although maybe it wasn’t for their break-in. “It was whoever he’d have taken the information to next.”
