“She’s broken herbutt!”he cackled.
Tag rolled his eyes and left him to it. He figured by the time Mel was back on her feet, Jeff was going to be sorry or single.
A teenager with a bug up her nose and hiking boots on—“Never. Going. Camping again!”—and two men who’d finally sobered up enough after the night before to realize they’d hurt themselves—broken fist in the first case, half a glass still jammed into his ass in the other—were next in line. It wasn’t until Tag finished with them that he finally got a chance to check his phone.
It felt too good to see Bass’s name hover in his notifications. He’d told himself he didn’t regret the swipe that blocked Bass’s number, that he’d been glad not to see any more videos ready to play in his inbox, but that was a lie. He swiped open the message.
One message, just text with no pictures.
I can still taste you.
Tag couldn’t breathe for a second as lust hit him in the chest. He cleared his throat awkwardly and rubbed at the back of his neck. If he’d hoped that last night and this morning had gotten Bass out of his system, he was clearly wrong.
Just the thought of Bass’s rough hands on him, a gruff voice against his ear, sent a quiver of awareness down Tag’s spine. Any headway he’d made on not being a complete pushover had been rolled back again.
“Fuck sake,” he muttered under his breath as he rubbed his eyes. “How hard is it to not screw my life up?”
Too hard for him, apparently.
“Doctor Hayes,” Ennis called with the note of saccharine sweetness in her voice that meant she’d gotten out of something and didn’t even have to feel guilty. “There’s a patient in here who’d rather see a male doctor.”
Tag sighed. That pretty much invariably meant that the guy had stuck something in his ass or in his penis. Which was fine—people had been doing that since the start of time—but it always involved a lot of lies and a lot of time convincing the patient you needed to stick the needle where you needed to stick the needle.
“On my way, Doctor Ennis,” he said.
He typed out a quick response as he turned to head toward the curtained-off cubicle, Ennis’s head stuck out halfway up like a bad magician’s act.
Bass would just have to wait.
THE BABYcarrier hit the barbeque and went up in flames.
Tag flinched in sympathy with Mel Byron’s panicked screech. He knew it was a bad idea, but he flicked to the next video, where Mel thought she’d fed Jeff drain cleaner.
“Jesus,” Tag muttered as he chewed on a slice of cold pizza. Part of him thought that, on some level, Mel had to know what was going on before her pained chuckle to the camera at the end when it was revealed her dad hadn’t been arrested, her cat hadn’t fallen out a window, but her husband was still a dick. After the first five, surely every time anything went wrong, she’d be suspicious of Jeff’s camera somewhere.
But probably not to the degree where she expected to break a small but important part of her back.
Someone sat down opposite, white cuffs in the periphery of Tag’s vision, and he looked up absently to nod his acknowledgment. He flicked his eyes over the pressed collar and the tie he’d gotten him… what, anniversary present? Birthday? … and braced himself for whatever he’d feel by the time he got to Kieran’s face.
“Hey,” Kieran said. His eyebrows creased together in a familiar “We’ve got something to talk about” frown.
Tag swallowed and reached for a napkin. He wiped his mouth and then his hands. “Hey.” He balled up the greasy paper and rejected a dozen sarcastic comments like “Did Freddie finally fall off your ass?” before he settled on something neutral. “Long time no see.”
Neutral-ish.
Kieran nodded. “It’s been strange,” he said mildly. “I used to see you every day for nearly five years, and now you dodge me in the hall.”
Tag snorted. “Don’t try and pull that Psychology 101 shit on me,” he said. “You cheated on me.”
“But you’re the one who left,” Kieran countered.
It was the sort of thing he said like he really believed it, even though he couldn’t possibly think it was reasonable. Like it somehow canceled out his screwup if Tag did something Kieran didn’t like. The spot at the back of Tag’s head, where his spine slotted neatly into his skull, started to ache. He could, without much effort, plot out the next ten minutes of back-and-forth, and it didn’t sound like fun. So he cut across it to the point.
“What do you want, Kieran?”
Kieran leaned forward and braced his arms on the table. “I’m worried about you, Tag,” he said. The hint of his old accent, North Dakota born and bred, caught Tag the same way it always did, like it meant something that Kieran still let that slip around him. Maybe it did, but not enough. Kieran narrowed his eyes at whatever expression he saw on Tag’s face. “And before you say anything, I get to worry about you if I want to. I don’t need your permission.”
It should have felt like… something. Hope? An opportunity? Tag just felt the ache of residual irritation in the back of his skull.
