It wasn’t exactly fair. Javi knew that. It wasn’t fair to get angry at Cloister for getting hurt either, but it was a lot easier than having to actually feel any of the other options, the ones that meant he’d have to pick at old, angry scars to let the poison out.
Anger felt a lot better than that, and it would get the same job done.
Javi closed the door behind him and stalked over to the bed.
Right up until the point he grabbed a handful of T-shirt and got into Cloister’s face, he’d intended to snap at him. The harsh, impatient words were all lined up on the back of his tongue, but once he dragged Cloister in that close, it seemed like a waste of time not to kiss him.
After all, an hour ago Javi’d thought he might never get to kiss Cloister again.
So he did. It was a rough, frustrated slash of his lips, prickled with temper and a day’s worth of stubble. Cloister’s mouth was stern under his for a second, and then it softened into the kiss. He tasted faintly of blood and orange juice, a sharp sweet-salt tang on his tongue.
It would have been easy enough to push him back onto the bed, onto the stiff mattress and flat pillows with his jeans shoved down over his lean hips and the old T-shirt shoved up so Javi could explore the bruises with his mouth. It was too late to have the “just be friends” talk anyhow, so why not.
Even the thought that Frome would walk in on them had a sort of perverse appeal that twisted possessive heat in Javi’s stomach. Public sex wasn’t his kink, but it had rubbed him the wrong way to have to appeal to Frome to get in to see Cloister. Frome might be the ranking officer in Plenty, but that didn’t mean Cloister needed his protection—not from Javi.
Luckily Javi’s common sense was stronger, and he quashed the urge before it could get away from him. After the mess in Philadelphia, the last thing his career needed was another scandal.
“Your life is your own business,” Javi growled as he broke the kiss. He reached around and shoved his hand down the back of Cloister’s jeans to cup the firm curve of his ass. He gave it a rough squeeze, hard enough to make Cloister’s breath hiss between his teeth. “But your ass is mine. So tell me why you threw it in front of a car.”
Cloister leaned back against the bed and studied Javi for a long, pensive second. Then he curled the corner of his mouth in a halfhearted stab at his usual wide, open smile. He scratched absently at the knot of stitchwork over his eye.
“It was actually a pickup truck.”
“Does that matter?”
Cloister shrugged crookedly, careful of his broken arm, and let the grin widen. “I wouldn’t want you to think I was taken out by a Prius.” He glanced past Javi’s shoulder at the door and pushed himself off the bed again. “Tell you what. You give me a lift home, and I’ll tell you what happened.”
His jeans slouched dangerously low as he moved, just about caught on the sharp flare of his hip bones. He grabbed them and absently hitched them up as he limped toward the door. Javi frowned at the breadth of his shoulders.
“You could have a concussion,” he pointed out.
“I’ve had a concussion before. All they do is monitor you.” Cloister shrugged. “I can do that for myself. It didn’t kill me when I was fifteen, and it won’t now.”
He had to let go of his jeans to reach for the door, and they sagged back down again. Despite himself, Javi watched the denim slide down. He was as dry mouthed as he had been the first time he saw the taut upper curve of Cloister’s ass. He dragged his attention away and tried to brush his scattered thoughts back into a straight line.
“You have a broken wrist and a head injury,” Javi argued. “You can’t just go back to your trailer.”
Cloister got the door open and yanked his jeans back up before they slipped low enough to constitute a crime. “Watch me,” he said as he looked back at Javi. “I don’t care how I get out of here—you can give me a lift, or I can get a taxi—but I’m not going to be here when Frome gets back. It’s up to you.”
He leaned back against the doorframe as he waited. Javi always appreciated the long lines of Cloister’s body, the elegant bones under a bruiser’s muscle, but right then it looked as though the door were holding him up. If that exhaustion didn’t convince Cloister to stay, Javi doubted he’d succeed.
And… it had been a long time since Javi thought about that night in the ER. He’d rubbed it down like old wood until the details blurred—all except the blood—and sunk it as deep as he could. Hospitals didn’t give him pause, but having someone he liked in the hospital—even if they were a stubborn idiot—obviously did.
“Fine,” he surrendered. “My car’s outside. Do you think you can make it that far?”
Cloister made a dismissive noise and pushed himself off the door. “It’s a broken wrist and a few bruises,” he said. “You should see the other guy.”
THE SIGNin the café window said No Dogs Allowed and, in additional Sharpie underneath, No Exceptions, but the bleary-eyed waitress at the counter took one look at them, at Cloister still branded with the Sheriff’s logo across his chest, and visibly decided not to bother. She just showed them to a booth with a Formica table worn in wide, rough circles where graffiti had been scoured off. It was aggressively kitsch. The café had opened only two weeks earlier, moved into the shell of a bookshop that had dried up and blown away.
But it was supposed to serve good coffee, and that was all the authenticity Javi cared about.
“Still raining out there, huh?” the waitress commented as Javi dried his hands on a napkin. “If this keeps up, I’ll be swimming home.”
Javi stifled the urge to make a withering comment in response to that banality. It was a canned comment that Mabel, from her name tag, had likely repeated to every table since the storm broke that evening. She probably wanted actual engagement even less than Javi did.
It wasn’t her fault that Cloister had nearly gotten himself killed. All she wanted to do was get them coffee and go back to reading her phone behind the till.
“Coffee,” Javi said as he stripped off his jacket. The cuffs of his sleeves were soaked from the dash through the rain, and he folded them back from his wrists to dry. “Black, no sugar.”
