She planted her backside in the sand, hard enough to jar, and her eyes didn’t leave him.
Cloister held his hand until he was sure she wasn’t going to move until he said okay. Then he dropped his hand in a brisk gesture. “Good, Bon! Bring!”
She took off at a dead run, a black dart that arrowed down the beach with a wake of sprayed sand behind her. The surf had picked up the stick and washed it out. Cloister watched as Bon splashed out after it, all aggrieved sneezes when the water got in her nose. She finally fished it out and dragged it back with the wet, rooted end trailing in the sand.
This time Cloister didn’t make her work for it. He chucked it down the beach as far as it would go. She hared off after it, and Cloister watched her play until his phone abruptly rattled to life. It nearly vibrated itself off the side of the log. Cloister grabbed it and answered the call on the way to his ear.
“Where are you?”
The voice was Javi’s, the number—Cloister double-checked to be sure—wasn’t.
“Crossed your mind I’m dodging your calls?” he asked.
“No, I just broke my phone. Should it have?”
Cloister felt the brief urge to claim he had been, but that would be the conversational equivalent of stiff-armed shove.
“No,” he admitted instead as he brushed sand off the knees of his faded jeans. “I just missed a couple of calls, Agent Merlo.”
Javi sighed an exasperated hiss into Cloister’s ear.
“I said sorry about that,” he said. “Things had me on edge, but I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”
Bon loped up to him and dropped the well-chewed stalk of seaweed at his feet. She backed up three steps and looked at him expectantly. Her tongue hung out of a toothy grin as she panted.
“Yeah,” Cloister said. “And I said I didn’t need anyone to take care of me.”
He dug his booted toe into the sand under the stalk and gave it a kick. It didn’t go far, but Bon shot off after it. She pinned it down with her paws and growled at it.
“You have a broken arm—”
“Wrist,” Cloister corrected him. “And I’ve had worse.”
“I just thought it would make sense if you stayed at my apartment for a couple of days,” Javi said. Despite it being the third time he’d made the offer, the words sounded as though they had to run a gauntlet to make it out. His voice was stiff and resentful. “You’re barely a functional adult with two hands, Cloister, and you’re down to one. What’ll you do if you have to open a can of dog food? Use your teeth?”
Cloister snorted. He’d be offended if he hadn’t opened a beer that way the night after he lost the fight with the bottle opener.
“First time I slept with you, you made me sleep on the couch,” he said. “Now you want me, my dog, and a change of clothes all cluttering up your place? You were really going to be okay with that?”
“No,” Javi said, his voice dry as salt. “It sounds horrible, but I have dealt with worse. I don’t want you to get hurt again, Cloister.”
There was something raw in Javi’s voice when he said that—an aftertaste of blood. It hung between them for a second—one of them incapable of offering more, the other incapable of accepting what was on offer—and then Javi roughly cleared his throat.
“But you’re a free agent,” he said. “If you want to get gangrene and lose a finger, it’s down to you. That wasn’t why I called. Stokes finally got back to me, and he’s back in town. If you want to sit in on the interview, meet me at The Quail off Main in two hours.”
The Quail. Of course that was where Sean Stokes would want to meet. He was a man with expensive tastes that he could afford to indulge since his divorce. The Quail was an “authentic” old Plenty dive that someone had turned into a theme pub and built a hotel around. It was all original scored wood floors and counters framed by copper-clad tables and walls of IPAs.
“Classy,” he said. His voice was so carefully neutral it felt pointed.
“Yeah, you should probably wear the uniform if you want them to let you in.”
“Sure that’s not just for you?”
There was a pause. It was stupid, but Cloister could swear he heard the curve of Javi’s slow, dark smile down the line. A sharp prickle of awareness crawled down Cloister’s spine and clenched around his balls. “I prefer you in nothing, but as long as it’s not from the recycle bin, I’m happy.”
He hung up.
Cloister breathed out slowly and glanced at Bon, who carried the chewed-off stump of her makeshift toy back to drop at his feet.
