Triangulation, page 28
part #2 of Borealis Investigations Series
Shushing Shaw, Jadon whispered, “I’ve wanted to do that for a while, touch you there, like that.” He rested his head against the side of Shaw’s face; Shaw was panting, struggling to breathe, every swallow painful and forced now under the pressure of Jadon’s grip.
“Please,” Shaw wailed. “I don’t . . .” He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. He didn’t want to be touched there. He did, yes. God, yes. But by North. His mouth had dried up, and when he tried to swallow, Jadon’s hand was still there, tightening. He touched the back of the hand at his throat and thought of North’s hand there, controlling him, bracing him, making it easy for Shaw to surrender. He whispered, “Tighter. A lot tighter.”
“You like that?” Jadon’s fingers flexed, and then he bore down, clamping tight around Shaw’s throat. Jadon’s free hand slid down Shaw’s belly, applying pressure, the force of his touch—hard now, demanding—like someone jamming a button that turned Shaw’s brain to fire. Shaw was vaguely aware of the back of his knees hitting the bed, of Jadon lowering him onto the mattress, his hand twisting under the waistband of the knit shorts, sliding once along Shaw’s dick. Grinning, Jadon said, “You’re getting sloppy, baby.”
He pumped Shaw again, and Shaw gave another broken cry, turning into the mattress, then rolling his head the other way, trying to find escape or release or something. Jadon’s hand around his neck pinned him in place. Releasing Shaw’s dick, Jadon grabbed the knit shorts and dragged them off Shaw. Then he climbed up onto the bed, kneeling next to Shaw. The hand around Shaw’s throat tightened. Shaw grunted a protest, grabbing Jadon’s wrist, but Jadon just glanced at him with one of those staggering smiles and said, “Be good, baby.”
Cold air washed over Shaw’s bare legs and ass and dick. When he had fallen onto the bed, the jersey had rucked up under his arms, exposing his abdomen and chest to the cool air conditioning. Jadon’s touch felt hot now, tracing a line down the center of Shaw’s stomach. His mouth followed. Kisses first, then nibbles, then bites. He was working his way to the scar, Shaw realized, and the thought made him pulse so hard that he dug his nails into Jadon’s wrist, whimpering. The black specks whirled faster at the edge of his vision. He could imagine the rough, wet heat of Jadon’s tongue tracing the sensitive skin at the edge of the scar. Only it was North’s tongue. And North’s teeth. And the rasp and burn of North’s blond stubble. And even in Shaw’s imagination, it was almost enough to push him over the edge.
But something else was happening too. While one part of Shaw’s mind drifted into the fantasy of North’s mouth on his belly, North’s teeth raking tender flesh, North’s tongue tracing a slick line toward the cleft of his legs, another part of Shaw’s mind was drifting into the blackness. The black snow spinning at the edge of his vision had changed. Jadon’s grasp had tightened as he became more aroused, and now the darkness fell on Shaw like combers.
Shaw remembered this. He had been here before: the painful tightness in his throat, the trapped blood pounding in his head, the slick, wet heat trailing down his abdomen and into his crotch. More details filtered through the haze. A glint of a gold tooth as a man smiled. Terror prickled along Shaw’s spine. The Slasher. He thrashed, no longer aware of Jadon, no longer fantasizing about North. He was with the Slasher, seven years ago, in an alley in the Central West End. Hands tightened around Shaw’s throat, cutting off air and blood, Shaw’s head ballooning until it felt like it might explode. Bricks stamped his back through his shirt. Carl—
No, he couldn’t think about Carl. He was being choked. The Slasher wore a mask; Shaw couldn’t make out any feature or expression, only the gold tooth, like a dead man’s coin floating in the darkness. But even as fear shrieked inside Shaw’s head, he could sense the other man’s pleasure. The Slasher was enjoying this. Taking care of Carl had been a matter of expediency; two on one was bad odds. But now, alone with Shaw, he could take his time. He had cut deep into Shaw’s abdomen and thigh and between his legs. The pain there was so intense that it came at Shaw like a wall of white fire, and it seemed to Shaw a better choice to disappear into those flames, let them consume him.
Instead, though, Shaw entered a moment of clarity, and he remembered dorm room bullshit sessions with North and Tucker and Percy, and North talking about basic self-defense. Macho bullshit, Shaw had thought at the time, although he had put it to himself more politely at the time because, of course, it was North.
Now, inside that sliver of clarity, Shaw remembered: the eyes, the ears, the mouth, the throat. He sagged, shifting his weight so that it dragged the Slasher forward a step. Shaw reached up, grabbing both sides of the Slasher’s head. Acrylic fibers unraveled beneath his fingers, and the mask slid across the Slasher’s head, bunching under Shaw’s hands. Shaw tightened his grip and dug his thumbs into the Slasher’s eyes. No warning, no testing, no hesitation. He pushed his thumbs into the soft corners like he was trying to pop a ball out of a tight spot.
The reaction was immediate. The Slasher reared back, instinct overriding everything else, and screamed. His hands fell from Shaw’s neck. The Slasher staggered back another pace. He slipped on something—metal skittered across cement, and Shaw’s brain registered: the knife—and then the Slasher screamed again, still pressing hands to his face. He spun toward the alley and stumbled away from Shaw. And Shaw went after him, the white wall of pain sweeping toward him, bearing him up, while he screamed and tried to catch up with the man who had tried to kill him.
“What the fuck, what the fuck, ok, ok, ok. You’re ok.”
The words dragged Shaw out of the memory. His hands ached. Throbbed, actually. And he was aware of the flecks of darkness clearing from his vision, settling like plastic inside a shaken snow globe. Shaw realized he was sobbing, biting his arm to muffle the noise. He could taste blood.
“Jesus, Shaw. Baby, come on.” Jadon’s face appeared above Shaw; his voice was rougher than usual, and a red mark on his cheek made Shaw wonder what had happened. But Jadon just said, “You’re scaring the hell out of me. Talk to me. What’s going on?”
Shaw’s jaw hurt as he worked his mouth open, pulled his arm free. A neat row of teeth marks showed in his flesh where he had bit down on the impromptu gag, and blood ran freely from several of them.
“Fuck,” Jadon whispered. “Ok, just stay here for a second. I’m going to get the first aid kit.”
Shaw sat up. Sobs still rolled through him, but he managed to take a breath and say, “No.”
“Shaw,” Jadon said, staring at his face, his arm, and then a glance at the hall bathroom. “Baby, what the fuck just happened?”
“Get out.” Shaw stood up, the rucked-up jersey falling from under his arms, polyester ghosting across his skin and making him shiver. “You need to go. Right now.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“Get the fuck out.”
“I’m not leaving, baby. You’re hurt, and something is seriously wrong, and—”
“Yeah, something is wrong.” Shaw worked his jaw—it was stiff, and it popped once—and added, “You choked the shit out of me, that’s what’s wrong.”
“I didn’t . . . why didn’t you tell me?”
“I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t even fucking breathe. Get the fuck out. What don’t you understand about that?”
“I am so sorry—”
“If I wanted a fucking apology, I’d ask for one. Can you just go?”
“Shaw, I would never, ever hurt you. And I would never do something you didn’t want me to do. You’re the one who put my hand on your throat. You’re the one who said, ‘Tighter.’ I wasn’t trying to—”
“Get out,” Shaw screamed. It left his throat hurting ten times worse, and he wobbled and grabbed the wall to keep from falling.
Jadon grabbed his coat and shoes—he was still dressed, thank God—and walked to the door. He kept throwing backward glances. “Baby, I’ll call someone for you. I’ll call North, ok? I know you don’t want me here, but this is—this is something really bad, ok, and you can’t be alone.”
“If you call North, I will kill you.”
Something in Shaw’s tone must have convinced Jadon because the detective paled. He shook his head once, and the gesture was so pained and helpless that Shaw felt bad for him. It wasn’t Jadon’s fault, really, but terror and helplessness and anger flooded Shaw. He knew, in a distant way, that he was lashing out at Jadon because it was easier to be angry than to be scared.
“I’ll stick around for a while, ok. Just outside. If you need anything, if you . . . if you think about doing anything stupid or something like that, I’ll just be right outside. Shaw, I am so sorry, I honestly thought that’s what you wanted—”
Shaw shut the door on Jadon. He locked it. He set the deadbolt. And then all the strength rushed out of him, and it was all Shaw could do to slide to the ground, fold his head against his knees, and weep.
Chapter 29
AS NORTH DROVE BACK to his dad’s place, a series of images played out in his head. He could almost see them in the faint mirror of the windshield: Jadon shaking out his jacket, Jadon settling the jacket around Shaw’s shoulders, Jadon sitting on the rock shelf so that his leg and Shaw’s pressed together. North punched the gas every time he got to this last image, and then he’d catch himself going twenty, twenty-five over the limit, the south side of the city streaming past him in a river of fluorescent and halogen and sodium lights.
When North turned onto Winona, he gave himself a hard limit: once he parked the Beamer, he wasn’t allowed to think about Jadon unfurling his jacket, Jadon laying his jacket over Shaw’s shoulders, Jadon grinding his leg up against Shaw’s like they were in some sort of fucking club. But as he drove down the street, his grip tightened around the steering wheel, and he passed the house and went to the cross street and came around the block again.
The next time he came around the block, he parked. The streetlights gave off pale yellow spheres like ancient mothballs in the darkness. He walked along the side of the blondie brick house, the Midwestern humidity sticking his clothes to him, the temperature stubbornly stuck in the 80s because there was nowhere for the heat to go. The late summer had burned the grass to a halt, but the weeds kept growing; in the backyard, some of them came up to North’s knees, fuzzy and prickly. He needed to do something about that before the city sent someone to cut them down; Christ knew David McKinney wasn’t going to tend the yard. He couldn’t.
When North opened the door, Jasper and Jones shot out with twin yowls, disappearing into the thick black heat of the night. Cigar smoke drifted out after them, and when North stepped into the sunroom at the back of the house, the little fan was chugging on the floor, trying to spin a solid wall of smoke out into the night. North jiggered the windows, forcing two of them open and shouting, “It’s just me, Dad.”
No answer. With any luck David McKinney was dead drunk.
North shivered at the sound of his own thought. Fanning the air with one hand, he walked through the kitchen, collected a pair of Bud Lites from the fridge—there was a new addition, a tube of Braunschweiger, the plastic wrapper peeled back to release the sausage’s pungent odor—and continued into the living room. He stopped in the doorway and considered running away.
North’s father sat in his recliner. In the chair North had pulled up next to him, the chair meant for North, sat Tucker. The TV was on, the sound muted, showing highlights from the day’s Cardinals game, and David McKinney glanced up only briefly to notice North before returning his attention to another play.
Tucker looked more like Tucker today. The scrapes and bruises on his face looked both better and worse: the scrapes better because the scabs no longer looked so raw; the bruises worse because they had darkened to blue and purple. But he was just so damn handsome, even with all the bruises, even with the scrapes, even with North knowing who was behind the mask, what this man had done to him: the thick blond hair neatly cut and parted; the strong, symmetrically waspy features; the unalloyed confidence.
Three things had drawn North to Tucker when everyone else had been confused by their relationship. It was easier for North to see them now, from a distance. Tucker was, in a way, the essence of everything North had wanted but never had: a stable home, a traditional upbringing, parents who loved and supported him, money, class, status, breeding. That had been part of it. And part of it, too, had been Tucker’s confidence—a kind of charisma that made him charming even when you knew he was an asshole. But the poison in the cocktail, what had been North’s undoing, had been the mistake of believing the tears, the recriminations, the helplessness. North had taken the hook, and it had felt wonderful because it had been confirmation that North was special. To the rest of the world, Tucker was an unmitigated shit, but North got to see the broken, raw, vulnerable man under all the pretense. And that made North unique. It made him powerful. It made him a stupid motherfucker, and he had gotten exactly what he deserved for being so stupid.
North smiled and cracked one of the Bud Lites; it sounded like a gunshot in a small room. “Go home, Tuck. While you still have a home. Before my lawyer gets started.”
Tucker drew a deep breath. He had his hands flat on his knees, his feet planted on the floor, his jaw raised so he could meet North’s eyes. “I promise I won’t make this a big deal. I just want a few minutes to talk.”
North sipped at the beer. Then he turned back to the kitchen.
“I’ll sign whatever you want,” Tucker said. “I mean it. No lawyers. Just—whatever you want. I’ll sign it. You can have everything, if you’ll just talk to me for a minute.”
With a grunt, North’s dad heaved himself out of the recliner. Grabbing the smoldering butt of his cigar, he propped himself on his walker and began his slow shamble toward the kitchen. North slid aside for him automatically, still not turning to the living room, still not ready to face Tucker.
“Ronnie’s been calling,” David McKinney said as he shuffled down the hallway. “He’s pissed.”
That information fell on North like a snowdrift; he’d been avoiding Ronnie on purpose, and it was going to come back to bite him in the ass. For the moment, though, he had bigger problems to deal with. Shoulders falling, North sipped at the Bud again and forced himself back into the living room. He bypassed the recliner, took another folding chair from the three-legged card table in the corner, and spun it so he could straddle it and face Tuck and have the back of the chair between them: a flimsy metal barrier, but better than nothing. He sipped the beer again.
Tuck smiled—shy, nervous, almost the boy North had fallen in love with during college. “Hey, Mickey.”
This time, North couldn’t stand just a sip. He downed the beer and tossed the empty into the kitchen, where it skittered across the floor with a metallic clatter that sounded too loud in the still house. He cracked the next beer. Another gunshot.
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
North wiped condensation from the can. He traced an S in the sweat and then scrubbed it out with his thumb.
“I love you so much. I love you more than anything in the world. What I did to you, I’m going to burn in hell for that, but I want you to know that I’m never going to do it again. I’m getting help. I’m going to ask for a change at work, something less stressful. Less money too,” he flashed one of those charmingly assholish smiles, “but that’s not really the point, is it? I don’t want to bring that stuff home with me anymore. Hell, for that matter, I just want to be home. With you. No more drinks after work. No more late dinners. No more golf on the weekends. The only thing that really matters in the whole world, Mickey, is you. The only thing that I care about, the only thing I want to fight for, is you.”
At the other end of the house, a window air conditioner chugged to life, and moments later an eddy drifted through the curtain of smoke. North pounded back the rest of the beer and wiped his mouth. “Is that it?”
“I’m seeing a therapist, and she and I really believe that if I make these changes at work—”
“You said all that. Is that all of it?”
“I love you, Mickey. North. I love you.”
“You said that too. Are you done? Because if you’re done, you need to go.”
“I know you can’t forgive me right now. I don’t deserve that. But will you at least—will you just tell me you’ll think about it? Dr. Farr thinks we should attend at least one couple’s session together, and I would really appreciate it if you’d, well, consider it.”
North barked a laugh; it was so harsh it hurt his throat. “Dr. Farr thinks we should go to couple’s counseling? And you’d ‘appreciate’ it if I considered it?”
Color stained Tucker’s cheeks. “I just meant—”
“The thing is, Tuck, we’re not a couple anymore. We’re done. I left. And for the full fucking record, I don’t give a single fuck what you appreciate anymore. That ended right after you almost took out my eye with that fucking strap you liked to use on me. Do you remember that? That was our anniversary, Tuck.”
North waited for the explosive anger, the violence, Tucker’s familiar rage. Instead, Tuck dropped his chin to his chest and covered his face with one hand.
“Don’t do that. Don’t fucking cry, you fucking pussy.”
“I’m so sorry. Dr. Farr thinks I’ve got an alcohol abuse problem, and I swear I’m going to stop drinking.”
