Promises

CHAPTER 21

WHEN I got home, he was in the kitchen putting water on the stove to cook spaghetti in.

“Here.” He tossed me a yellow bell pepper. “Cut that up for the salad, will you? I got an avocado for you too.” He hated avocados.

“What are you gonna do?”

He winked at me. “Supervise, of course.” He leaned against the counter next to me, and I started chopping. “I’ve been meaning to ask how the tutoring is going.”

I told him about Ringo and about the visit from Alice Rochester. I don’t cook, so it took me a ridiculously long time to cut up the pepper and avocado. I noticed he was moving closer as I talked, but I kept my eyes on the cutting board in front of me.

Then I felt that gentle tug on the back of my head, and it felt like my heart stopped beating. Such a tiny, innocent thing as he pulled gently on my curls, but it hit me all at once that he really had come back to me. I realized I had stopped talking, stopped moving; maybe I had even stopped breathing. I almost wanted to cry but fought it. I made myself take a breath and found that I was shaking.

“What’s wrong?” he whispered, almost in my ear.

“I missed this,” I said quietly.

“I missed you.” He stepped closer. “Jared, I want to try something. Like an experiment. Is that okay?”

“Last time you asked a question like that, it ended with you not speaking to me for almost two months.” I tried to say it lightly, but I didn’t quite pull it off.

He lightly wrapped his arms around me and put his face in my hair. “I know. I’m sorry.”

I thought about it for a minute. I had an idea what he had in mind. “I don’t want to be alone anymore. Whatever you want this to be between us, I can handle it. Just don’t leave me again.”

“Never. I promise. I learned my lesson.”

I took a deep breath, tried to slow my speeding heart, and turned to face him. “Okay.”

He pulled me close, then took my face in his hands, and looked into my eyes. I started to put my arms around him, but he tensed up and said, “No. Don’t do that.”

“I’m not allowed to touch you?”

“Not yet.”

“What do you want me to do then?”

“Stop talking.” He was so serious I might have laughed if my heart wasn’t pounding so hard. I closed my eyes and tried to relax.

He was combing his fingers through my hair, and I remembered my birthday—his hands in my hair and his weight against me, his lips against my neck, and then him walking out the door.

“Relax, Jared,” he whispered, and I pulled my mind away from that night. It would not end like that. Whatever happened, he had promised not to leave again. I felt him lean in. Felt his breath against my lips and then the faintest brush of his lips over my mouth—soft, warm lips against mine. It was all I could do to keep my hands at my side. Then he actually kissed me, firm but gentle, his lips just barely parted.

He never said I couldn’t kiss back.

I opened my mouth, leaned into him, and brushed the tip of my tongue against his lips.

Whatever wall he had been trying to keep between us crumbled away at that slight touch. He moaned, and suddenly he was really kissing me, his arms tight around me, his tongue touching mine, his body pressing hard against me. This time, he didn’t object when I put my arms around him.

An eternity later, he pulled back a little. One hand was in my hair, his other arm around my waist, and his forehead was against mine.

“Was that the result you were expecting?” I asked breathlessly.

He closed his eyes but didn’t pull away. He took a deep breath and just barely shook his head. “No.”

“You didn’t think you would like it.”

This time, a slight nod. “At the very least, I thought it would be like some of the women I’ve kissed: pleasant but uninspiring.”

That made me smile. “And instead…?”

“Oh God.” His breath was shaky. He looked into my eyes and smiled back. “Very inspiring.”

I pulled him to me and kissed him again, and his response was fierce and urgent. It felt almost like an attack that I couldn’t quite fend off. His tongue was pushing into my mouth. He had a handful of my hair, gripped so tight that I couldn’t move my head without hurting myself. The counter behind me was digging painfully into my back side. I put my hands under his shirt, started to feel the hard muscles on his chest. He stopped kissing me just long enough to pull his shirt off, and to my surprise, he pulled mine off as well. Then his arms were back around me, one hand back in my hair, his mouth warm and insistent against mine. His skin was smooth and seemed feverishly hot. He felt amazing. His body was so strong and solid and perfect under my hands. I couldn’t remember the last time a kiss had felt so passionate and arousing.

His hands were fumbling at the buttons on my jeans. He tore them open and shoved one hand down the front of my pants. His grip was hard and rough, not quite painful, and I wanted more of it. I was gasping, arching against him, hoping I wouldn’t embarrass myself by coming before we even got our clothes off.

“Jesus, Jared.” His voice in my ear sounded a little frantic. “I don’t really know what to do.”

I laughed a little at that. I should have realized I would need to take the lead.

I unbuttoned his pants and slid them down just far enough to free his erection. He followed my lead and did the same to me. He was taller than me, so I wrapped one arm around his neck, pulled myself up a little while pulling him down, until our cocks were even, then wrapped my hand around both of them and started to stroke us off together.

The look on his face might have made me laugh, any other time. He looked so surprised as he looked down at my hand pumping away on both of us. He looked up into my eyes and said breathlessly, “I wouldn’t have thought of that.”

I really did laugh then.

But then his hand stopped mine. “I want to do it.”

Not like I was going to argue. I wrapped my other arm around his neck, which allowed me to hold myself up at his height a little easier, propped against the counter. I kissed him again and felt his big, strong hand start to work. I really wished we had our pants off, that we were somewhere other than in the kitchen with the counter digging into me from behind, but there was no way I was going to stop him now. He was moaning into my mouth, and his fist was moving faster, and—

His phone rang.

The whole world stopped.

“Shit!” he whispered, without pulling his mouth from mine.

“Matt.” His hand was still in the same place, although it had stopped moving. “Please tell me you’re not going to answer that.”

It rang again. He had left it on the coffee table in the living room. Technically, it was the property of the Coda Police Department. I had only seen him use it a couple of times.

“I have to.” His head was on my shoulder, and he was breathing hard. We both were. “You’re the only person besides the department who has that number. And since it’s obviously not you calling….” Another ring. “Shit!” He took a deep, shuddering breath and pushed his face into my hair for just a second, and then he seemed to tear himself away from me.

He was in the living room, on the phone. I wasn’t listening. I was mostly trying to get my breathing back under control, pulling my pants back up but hoping they weren’t going to stay there for long. But when he came back a minute later, I knew something was wrong. He was deathly white, and his hands were shaking a little as he put his shirt back on and started searching for his keys.

“Matt, what’s wrong?”

“Cherie’s dead.” There was no emotion in his voice when he said it. He sounded like it was just business, but I could tell by the tension in his shoulders and around his eyes that he was upset.

“What?”

“She was murdered. Somebody shot her last night. I have to go.”

I was stunned. People aren’t murdered in Coda. People die, of course. We had our share of teenagers killed in drunk-driving accidents or middle-aged men killed in hunting mishaps. But murder? That didn’t happen.

“But… how?”

“Jared, I don’t know. I don’t know much. I have to go in for questioning.”

“What?”

I couldn’t believe how calm he was. “As far as any of them know, I’m her boyfriend. Remember? Even if they knew I had broken it off, which they don’t, I would still be a suspect.”

“Holy shit!”

“Jared, listen to me. I told them I was here last night with you. One of them will be by to talk to you to confirm my story.” He stopped now, looked right at me, and I knew what was coming. “Don’t tell them everything. I had a hard enough time convincing them that we weren’t lovers last summer, and now they’ll all know I spent the night here too. Just tell them I came here after we broke up, and I had one too many, and that I didn’t want to drive home, and so I crashed on your couch.” He looked so scared, and part of me understood, but part of me resented him for it. “Please?”

But then I realized: Cherie is dead. Cherie, who obviously wasn’t my best friend or anything, but still, I had known her for most of my life. And suddenly it felt awfully petty to begrudge him a little privacy from his coworkers.

“I promise.”

IT TURNED out to be the Chief of Police who came to question me.

“So that’s it? Officer Richards arrived at your house at around nine o’clock, had a few beers, didn’t want to drive home, and slept on your couch the rest of the night?”

It was funny that he was saying, “That’s it?” He had been questioning me for more than two hours. “That sums it up, yes.”

“So he was sleeping on the couch?”

I hated the stupid smirk on his face when he asked that question. What I really wanted to say was, What does it matter? If he was here, what does it matter if he was on my couch or in my bed? But I had made a promise.

“Yes.”

He looked a little disappointed by the flatness of my response. “Okay, well, I guess that’s everything, then. Thank you for your time, Mr. Thomas.”

“Chief White, you don’t really think that Matt had anything to do with Cherie’s death, do you?”

He took a minute to think, debating how much to tell me, but then he sighed and said, “No, not really. One of the neighbors heard a shot, and when she looked out, she saw somebody running away. She thinks it was Dan Snyder, Cherie’s ex-husband. It was dark, and she couldn’t tell for sure. But certainly the description she gave matches Dan more than it does Officer Richards.”

I thought of Dan, who was shorter than me and had a beer gut, and I thought of Matt’s tall, muscular body. It would be hard to mistake one for the other.

“That, along with Dan’s history of violence toward his ex-wife, makes him a much more likely suspect.”

“Then why go to all this trouble?”

“The fact that Matt and Cherie had been dating does mean that we have to question him. If we didn’t, it just wouldn’t be due diligence. And the fact that he’s also a police officer means that we have to be extra careful so as not to show favoritism. We don’t want anybody saying that he got away with murder just because he’s an officer of the law.”

“What about Dan? I assume you’re questioning him too?”

“We will, as soon as we find the worthless SOB.”

He got up to leave but then stopped at the door, with his hand on the knob. “Son, I know it’s none of my business.” Oh shit. Nothing good ever came after an opening like that. “I don’t know what’s going on with you and Matt. I don’t know, and I don’t really care. But let me tell you, not everybody sees it that way. I was on the force in Denver for fifteen years before I came here. I’ve seen other gay cops. And it’s never easy for them.”

He turned and looked at me now. “I don’t think you realize how much that boy has gone through for you. He had a hard enough time before this, everybody calling him a queer just because he’d been seen around town with you. But now it’s going to get worse. A lot worse.”

I had no idea what to say. I could try to deny that anything was going on, yet I knew that wasn’t really the point. They were going to think it, whether it was true or not. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I just thought you should know. A time might be coming when Matt has to make a choice. If you care about him—and I think maybe you do— you won’t do anything to make that choice harder on him than it already is.”