Chapter Thirteen
THE BIKERExpress apparently only ran in the early hours. Tag had to catch the bus back from the hospital. When he got on, half the bus were faces he recognized from the hospital. By the time he got to his stop, it was just him and two of the orderlies. They had forgotten he spoke Spanish and thought he’d missed his stop.
He hunched his shoulders against the drizzle as he got off the bus. The street was dark, the only light splashed over the pavement by the cars on their way past, and Tag made a mental note to complain to the town council again. It didn’t seem to do any good—the streetlights worked or didn’t on some schedule he hadn’t figured out yet—but he felt better for the effort.
Maybe one day they’d actually fix them, and Tag could tell himself that was his doing.
He nodded politely to the two orderlies as they parted ways at the corner. The two men ambled off as they argued over whether they should offer to walk him to the right bus stop or introduce him to the dealer who delivered.
Tag snorted and shoved his hands into his pockets. He supposed he should look for somewhere new. Not that he cared that he shared a neighborhood with the porters, but it obviously wasn’t where anyone lived if they had options. Tag had options.
His credit was probably still shit—he’d always been bad with money—but Kieran was the one who wanted to buy. He was a Midwest boy, where you farmed your own land… or something like that. Plus he made the big money. Tag came from proud renter stock. He liked the security that came from the plumbing being someone else’s problem.
It wouldn’t hurt to see what he could get in his price range. It wasn’t like he wanted to stage a return to the suburbs. It had never been a good fit for him, not really. Between his shifts and the commutes up to San Diego, he never got to know anyone that well. And he still didn’t get the point of a garden when you didn’t have kids, dogs, or a desire to spy on your neighbors through their fences.
The headlights from a passing car glittered on a broken bottle left discarded on the path, green smeared with red. Tag swept the bloody pieces into the gutter with the side of his shoe. He didn’t look around to see if the bleeder was still nearby.
Somewhere that didn’t have a homeowner’s association or people who got glassed on the streets on the weekends, then. That would be a dream. He could even stay in the Heights. There were places here that met his criteria and would be closer to the hospital.
… and near Bass?
Tag grimaced at the skeptical thought as it settled like silt in his head. He could feel the slippery knot of self-doubt that Kieran had fed him earlier. It was still wedged behind his ribs despite his best attempts to ignore it out of existence.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t had his own doubts before, but they were easier to work around before Kieran pinned them down with words and history. He’d always had a knack for that. It made him a good psychiatrist and a pain in the ass when someone just wanted to enjoy blissful ignorance.
Although, to be fair, most psychiatrists were like that. People just didn’t appreciate someone who pointed out their mental tripwires as much as they did the oncologist who confirmed that was just a weird mole.
Still, just because it wasn’t something Tag wanted to think didn’t mean Kieran was wrong. But this time Tag knew that going in. Unlike the thirteen-year-old gang members who died from gunshot wounds in surgery or the seventeen-year-old car thieves he patched up well enough that they could be taken to jail, with Mallick he’d seen a kid he thought he could help, and he ignored all the red flags that he couldn’t.
Bass was just no-strings fun, and unlike a knife in a dark alley, Tag wouldn’t be surprised when it ended badly. He might be a soft touch or a lovestruck idiot, but he wasn’t a blind one.
If he signed a lease, it would be because he actually wanted somewhere to live, not just somewhere to stay until… something changed. And if it meant he got to sleep in with Bass or someone in the future, that would be a bonus. That’s all.
When he got back to the building, his parking space, marked in cracked yellow paint with his apartment number and a greasy oil stain from the Mustang’s undercarriage, was still empty. There was no sign of it anywhere else in the parking lot or slotted in between old vans and the cars with magazines pasted into the windows that families used to sleep in. Even in the dark, the long nose and cherry-red paint job made it hard to miss.
No sign of Bass either. It was—Tag checked his watch and grimaced—later than he’d promised. His shift had run over, and then he’d been drafted to cover the first half of another doctor’s shift after Jameson got stuck in Seattle.
Maybe he’d been stood up.
OrBass had decided to just man up and prove Kieran right. Tag pushed both hands through his hair and then locked them together behind his head. He really hoped that wasn’t it, not after Tag had just done all this work to convince himself that the crash and burn would be painless.
He pressed his thumbs against the back of his neck and stared up at the bright, blind windows of other people’s lives. Muffled music and TV shows turned up too loud created a discordant white-noise background track to the night.
Other people’s lives.
Tag knew they weren’t any better than his, but right then, they could easily be simpler. Not that anything would change while he stood out here… unless he got mugged. Tag dropped his arms from his head and dug into his pocket after his keys as he headed inside.
He trudged up the stairs, through the cloud of hash smoke on the third-floor landing, to his floor. The long day had started to hit, and the slice of pizza he grabbed for lunch suddenly looked even less sufficient. Tag doubted there was anywhere open to deliver, but he’d have a look while he charged his phone. It had died mid-Words with Friendson the bus.
He started to unlock the door and then paused when it swung open under his hand.
Fuck.
A chill ran down Tag’s back. It wasn’t fear exactly—he could have left the door open; he had before—but it was sharper than concern. The thought of Shepherd and his calculating eyes made the skin on the back of Tag’s neck prickle.
He weighed his options. The stairs behind him loomed large in his thoughts as he considered flight. But his phone was dead, so he’d have to get the bus back to the hospital and then call the cops and come back here. If he was going to go to all that bother, he wanted to be sure there was someone here to run away from.
Tag exhaled slowly and gave the door a cautious nudge with one hand. It swung open with a slow creak, and Bass, legs propped on the coffee table and arm slung over the back of the couch, looked up from his phone.
