“I kinda like it sleazy,” he said. “But I get it. You don’t want anyone to know you banged me.”
“That doesn’t make it sound any better.”
Joe glanced over Cal’s shoulder to see if any of the people at the bar could hear them. The bartender was slouched at the far end, his attention on the TV. A couple of businessmen were two beers past insufferableas they boasted about money and leered at the woman at the table by the window, red curls scooped atop her head and her attention pinned to a laptop.
The slow wash of relief annoyed him. The only people who could justify commentary on his sex life were either dead or, finally, cut loose to actually be happy. He didn’t know why he was still… scared. Unless it was the habit of it.
Cal shruggedand leaned forward, his soda held out for a toast. Condensation dripped down the side of the bottle as he tilted it. “I’ll mind what I say,” he promised. “You say please.”
He waited as Joe picked up the whiskey glass and held it loosely between his fingers. “And if I don’t?” he asked.
“I’ll do what I’m told,” Cal said. His smile sharpened. It was a small change in expression—a tightness at thecorner of his mouth, a hint of sharp, white tooth—but it stripped the easy humor out of Cal’s face. “But you’ll know that I think you’re a dick.”
“You’d have plenty of company,” Joe said. He touched his thumb to his lower lip and winced at the ache of it. “Our friend at the graveyard among them.”
There was a zip file full of death threats on Edward’s computer to send to the police “in the eventof,” and those were only the ones that wanted Joe harmed. That didn’t include the people, the ones he’d grown up with, worked with, and dated, who didn’t like him that much. Why should the opinion of one pretty contract worker with a tight ass matter more than all of those?
The answer was probably in the question, Joe thought with a flutter of wry humor.
He reached forward and clinked the baseof his glass against the bottle.
“Deal,” he said. “I’ll say please… in public.”
Cal snorted at him, but a hint of interested color flushed his cheeks and the sharp bones of his temples. He sat back and lifted the bottle. This time Joe glanced away before he got distracted by Joe’s mouth, and his eyes caught on a blotchy, irregular stain on Cal’s torn sleeve instead.
“Is that blood?” he asked.
Cal looked blank and then glanced down at his arm as though he’d just remembered. “Oh. Yeah.” He put the soda down and rolled the sleeve back up his arm. The raw, red line scraped through a set of crooked initials inked onto Cal’s arm and then curved down and around to nick the top bar of the crucifix on the pale underside of his forearm. It was scabbed roughly at the corners and raw-looking alongthe rest on the length of it. Cal clenched his fingers and rolled his fist to move the muscles under the sliced skin. “Turns out your friend in the graveyard had a knife.”
A minute ago Joe would have said he’d spent too many chemicals on fear today to muster any more. He’d been wrong. It caught in his chest like cold, wet rags as he remembered the attacker’s desperate energy and the venom inhis voice as he threatened to finish the job next time. He’d come equipped to do it too.
“I didn’t know you were hurt,” Joe said. “I’m sorry. If you want to go to the police, I won’t stop you.”
Cal shrugged and rolled his sleeve back down. “It’s a scratch,” he said. “I’ve had worse.”
There was a pause as he took a drink. Then he grimaced and leaned his elbows on the table as he leveled a seriouslook across the table at Joe.
“Look, it’s not my business. You made that clear,” he said carefully. “But are you sure you don’t want to tell Edward? This is his job, and, to be honest, it’s not mine. I’m only a driver.”
“And get laid,” Joe said, in a halfhearted try at humor. The echo of the other night’s claim made Cal’s mouth twitch.
“That’s more of a hobby,” Cal said.
Joe finished the whiskey,but it didn’t do anything to squelch the guilt. He set the empty glass down on the table with a click and steepled his fingers against the rim.
“This was my call. I’ll take the consequences,” he said. “I don’t expect you to put yourself in harm’s way, not any more than you already have. What I do expect is for you to respect my wishes, and I donotwant Edward to know.”
Joe knew the drill. Theminute Edward found out the stalker had escalated from empty paper threats to physical action, he’d want to institute new security measures that would curtail Joe’s ability to move around freely. Under normal circumstances the ability to run to McDonald’s without an escort would be a small sacrifice to make in return for not being thrown into a grave.
Right now, it would ruin everything.
“Areyou close with your parents?” he asked. “Your mother?”
Cal looked askance for a bit, but after a second, he visibly decided to play along. “Not really. My dad’s a junkie. He’s really good at it but useless at anything else, like being a parent. Mum’s married to some lawyer, lives up in Newcastle. She likes to pretend me and El don’t exist.” The flat honesty caught Joe off guard. That must haveshown on his face, because Cal twisted his mouth into that sharp-edged, unamused smile and shrugged. “It’s their shit, not mine.”
That sounded like a good philosophy. Joe wished he could follow it, but his family’s “shit” was hard to scrape off.
“My mother died,” he said. It was habit to try and sound sad about that—half because people always seemed to think he should be, and half to see ifhe could wring the emotion out if he said it often enough, plaintively enough. A sort of emotional muscle memory. “It was tragic and sudden. She had a heart attack one day, and that was it. She died. People do.”
