If he’d been trying to ingratiate himself, to somehow bargain bad food into an advantage, Simon would have shot him down. Instead he looked cocky, as though he were about to make a point. Smug looked good on him.
“Is it, or has it ever been, on fire?” Simon asked as he sat up. He pulled his knees up, and the cotton sagged in the middle as he rested his elbows on the shelf they made.
“Nope,” Jacob said.
“Would you be happy feeding it to a small child?”
Jacob narrowed his eyes in thought. “How small?” he asked. “I mean, it’s not breakfast’s fault that babies can’t digest chilies.”
“Tell me that you didn’t feed a baby chilies,” Simon said as he threw the sheets back and got out of bed. He grabbed a pair of jeans from the back of a chair, gave them a desert-habit shake, and pulled them up over his legs.
Jacob leaned against the door and watched with unabashed appreciation.
“Hey, I’m the one who knew not to feed babies chilies,” he said. “I bet you’d put tabasco in formula.”
“I have a niece.”
“So do I,” Jacob said, and pushed himself off the door. “Andmysister didn’t marry a millionaire, so I have to spend time with them.”
Simon buttoned his jeans and scowled. “I spend time with Callie.”
“Fun time,” Jacob said. “Not trying to force the little monsters to eat their breakfast instead of sticking it up their own butts.”
No, just helping a teenager cope with the death of her mom when she refused to admit she was anything but “old for her years” time. Although she had admittedly never tried to put her granola anywhere inappropriate that he knew about. Simon followed Jacob out of the bedroom. Breakfast smelled like eggs and vinegar.
Resigned to having to eat at least some of Jacob’s food, Simon hooked a stool out from under the breakfast bar and hopped up on it. “Do you get along with any of your family?”
Jacob snorted, his back to Simon as he did something at the oven. “No. They’re horrible, and I’m a liar and a thief.”
An apology tickled the back of Simon’s throat and wanted to protest that he hadn’t meant it. Except he had, and Jacob didn’t respond as though the words had any sting. It was just a fact.
“Do any of them know what you do?”
The long muscles in Jacob’s back stretched and played under lightly tanned skin as he reached up to get a plate from the cupboard.
“Hell no,” Jacob said. He turned around and slid a plate of scrambled eggs in front of Simon. It looked edible—crispier than normal—but edible. Jacob handed Simon a fork. “I mentioned I’m a liar, right?”
Simon poked gently at the eggs and turned them over to uncover wilted peppers and black, half-moon shards that, after an exploratory prod, he guessed were mushrooms. It could have been worse. He finally bit the bullet, lifted a forkful to his mouth, and chewed it cautiously. Crunchy and wet in the wrong proportions, but the flavors were… there. He swallowed and ran his tongue around the back of his teeth to feel the grittiness.
“Must be lonely.”
“No. Not really.” Jacob dished himself up a plate of eggs and scraped the bottom of the pan to season the dish with charred egg bits. He added salt and enough tabasco to drown the taste and held the plate as he ate. “I don’t need saving from myself, Si.”
Simon took another bite of eggs. It still tasted of… taste. “So, that leaves me saving you from street fights and kidnappings, just not from yourself?”
“Point taken,” Jacob said. He turned, opened the fridge, and grabbed a carton of milk. He left the door open as the cold leached out to goose pimple his skin. Then he splashed milk into a glass and, realizing he only had one out, a coffee cup from the night before. He put it back and closed the fridge precisely five seconds before Simon was going to have to say something. Simon got the glass and left Jacob to wash his hot sauce and burned eggs down with dingy beige coffee-flavored milk. Even Jacob made a face, although it didn’t stop him taking another drink.
He swallowed and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “How are you going to approach Lau?”
“I’ll see how he reacts to my turning up. Then decide,” Simon said. He pushed a lump of runny egg—how had he managed to have some runny and some burned black—around the plate. The wedge of self-doubt in his chest made him feel like a teenager again, scared to ask anything in case someone guessed what he really meant. “So, about last night?”
Jacob scraped the last of the eggs and pepper out of a puddle of sauce and licked them off his fork. He hunched a bare shoulder. “It was last night. I get it. I mean, really, I get it. Maybe I didn’t mean to lie to you—that much—but I did. If I were you, I’d have left me in jail or to the guns. So it’s fine. Bad decisions and Bali—neither are for you. I mean, fuck you a bit, but I understand.”
Simon grimaced, and the corners of his mouth twisted down. “I didn’t mean that.”
Jacob dumped his plate and fork in the sink, and the white stoneware seemed to sink under the greasy water. He wiped his hands on his hips. “Yeah, you did.”
Maybe a bit, Simon supposed. Not as much as Jacob thought.
