Coffee and a bowl of no-brand cereal kept Cloister awake for fifteen minutes, his usual insomnia for another thirty. Eventually he let sleep win and crawled into his bed for a nap. Javi set the timer on his watch to twenty minutes and looked down at Cloister’s body, the ridiculously long, elegant sprawl of it over clean, rough sheets. He’d kicked his boots off but hadn’t bothered with anything else.
The dog’s bed probably cost more than Cloister’s.
“What?” Cloister asked as he opened one eye a crack to peer up at Javi.
“I’m trying to decide if you live like a college student or a divorced dad with a bad lawyer,” Javi said as he unbuttoned Cloister’s jeans and pulled them down his long legs.
“Or like a drifter.”
“Is this role-play?” Cloister asked with a crooked smirk. He helped kick the jeans off over his feet and sat up to drag his T-shirt off on his own. His cock lay limp between his thighs, and Javi irritably squashed the flash of misplaced lust that tugged at his gut. “Usually people pick something a bit more glamorous.”
He left the T-shirt tangled around his cast and flopped back into the pillow. Somehow the bruises and scrapes that stained his body looked worse in the dim light from the bathroom than they had under the bright hospital bulbs. At a distance from the immediate relief that Cloister wasn’t dead, Javi could imagine how easily he could have been.
“You don’t have to stay,” Cloister said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Just go to sleep,” Javi told him as he freed the T-shirt and tossed it into the laundry. “I’m not going anywhere. Not tonight.”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE ALARMwent off at five in the morning. Usually Cloister had been up for an hour—or hours—by then. Worst-case scenario, he was half-asleep as he tried to chase that “good night’s rest” people talked about, and the blare of the siren was a welcome excuse to give up.
He never realized what a godawful noise it was when you were actually asleep.
Cloister kicked sweat-tangled sheets down the bed and dragged himself out from under the clammy weight of exhaustion. It turned out that the only thing worse than insomnia was someone who poked you awake every twenty minutes to make sure you were still breathing. He should have just promised Javi not to die instead of being a smartass.
The alarm was still on as Cloister sat up and swung his legs off the end of the bed. His head swam sickly with the sudden movement, and he had to close his eyes for a second to let it settle. Lack of sleep, he wondered dryly, or being hit by a truck? Maybe it was both.
He roughly rubbed his eyes—even the blear behind his lids was bruise colored—and finally went to turn the alarm off. It took him a minute. The muscle memory that let him slap it off in passing was lost under sore bones and the damp cotton wool that packed his brain. None of the buttons he pushed or flipped seemed to do the job.
Outside the bedroom, Bourneville started to bark and paw at the door hard enough to rattle it in the frame.
“The hell with it,” Cloister muttered. He yanked the cord out of the socket, and the alarm whined itself down into silence. It went back on the nightstand, and Cloister raised his voice, or tried to. The first time he attempted to speak, the words got caught in the stickiness that clogged his throat. He coughed and tried again. “Bon. Quiet. Down.”
She made nearly the same reproachful whine into silence as the alarm clock had, and then he heard the thud as seventy pounds of well-muscled German Shepherd flopped down onto the floor of the trailer. It still wasn’t quiet. That was one of the benefits of the trailer park—there was always a dog barking at a seagull or a baby who didn’t care what time it was as it wailed for its diaper to be changed. Background noise. At least he knew he wasn’t the only one awake.
When Cloister was a kid, they lived way out on the outskirts of town, but there was always something going on. The clank and curse of his stepdad as he worked on his old project bike, the sharp, barked alerts from the dogs whenever the sheriff turned onto their drive, and the clink of beer bottles and laughter late into the night when his stepdad’s friends came around.
Back then Cloister never had trouble sleeping. He used to have to ward it off, to try to stay awake long enough to hear his uncle Drake’s story all the way through, until finally his stepdad would come and tell him to go to sleep or his eyes would dry up like raisins. It was only afterward, when the bunk over his was empty and everyone kept their voices down from pity, that he spent his nights awake. When there was no other sound in the house, the sound of his mom praying for God to bring his brother back and take him instead carried through the floor.
Cloister shied away from that memory as he pushed himself off the bed. It had been decades—and she hadn’t really meant it. He knew that, or at least she hadn’t meant him to hear, and he was a grown man, not a lost little boy. Sometimes—some days—that didn’t seem to matter. This time of year, it was always easy to pick at those old hurts and draw blood… easier than not.
His jeans lay in a knot on the floor where he’d stepped out of them the night before. The thought of bending over to grab them made his head hurt and his ribs throb. He grabbed the sheet off the bed instead and fumbled it one-handed around his waist as he headed over to open the door for Bon.
She scrambled to her feet, graced him with a curt morning bark, and padded pointedly to the door. Her tail slowly swept back and forth as she waited. She had a morning routine whether Cloister had been hit by a truck or not.
“I suppose I’d be a creature of habit too if I couldn’t open the bathroom door myself,” Cloister muttered as he limped over and pushed the door open for her. She shot down the stairs into the small garden, where the low fence was more to keep the local kids out than keep Bon in.
The rain had stopped during the night. In its wake the air had a damp, fresh taste, and a year’s worth of dust and salt had been washed off the trailers. It was the cleanest they’d been in years, even though the rain had exposed the dents and scrapes the dirt had hidden on some of the older ones.
A pale-orange cat slunk from under a trailer to take a drink from a puddle. It had belonged to some family from Nevada who thought it would be a good idea to bring the cat on a road trip. They called it Fluffy or Fluffers, at least until the dad dragged the sobbing four-year-old away by the arm and the family left for Disney.
Everyone assumed the coyotes would get the cat—or if not them, one of the hawks that sometimes floated down to the shore to pick territory fights with the gulls. The gulls usually drove them off, but people had lost little dogs or chickens before. And Fluffers was obviously an indoor cat with soft pink toe pads and gingery Siamese markings. That was a year ago. Fluffers had lost the dark-ginger tip of his tail and a chunk from one ear, and his coat had roughened and bleached in the salt air. He wasn’t tame anymore, but he was still alive and more lean rather than skinny.
Cloister hitched up the sheet securely over his hip and leaned against the doorframe. He watched as the pale cat twitched its mangled ear and looked up as it heard something. Water dripped from its long white whiskers as it waited to see how to react.
Some things thrived when introduced to a new environment. The cat had. Cloister had. He breathed in and felt his ribs cramp, the bruised tendons tight between the arch of “maybe cracked but not broken” bones.
Janet Morrow hadn’t been so lucky. Maybe she thought that a semirural California town was safer than the streets of New York. Or she just took a shortcut down the wrong street at the right time for some pervert.
