I felt Marzoli's hands on my shoulders, sliding behind my back as he pulled me toward him. His chest pressed into mine. How coherently had I told my story? I had no idea. But to elicit an embrace that solid and encompassing, it must have been effective.
He spoke, and I felt the vibrations of his voice penetrate right into my chest. "I don't understand, after all that, why you don't want your brother's ashes?"
I pulled back from the embrace.
Marzoli looked me in the eye, searching. "What came between you and Paul?"
"I don't know."
"Where did you live after the fire?"
"The state forced us to live at our grandfather's."
I'd felt oddly calm until he started asking questions. Grief, anxiety, and anger had arrived and departed with the narrative as the moments changed. I'd felt cleansed and still, but as he continued his inquisition, my core constricted.
"What happened at your grandfather's place?"
"We … um … we ate hotdogs."
"That's it?"
"And beans."
"Was it there that something divided you and Paul?"
I'd relived whole passages of my past in that miserable trailer park when I'd least expected to, but when I was asked to recall the most crucial event … zipadeedoodah. Palmer's conversation had narrowed down something crucial related to Graves' death, but it had also narrowed down my fucking inability to recall it.
My temples began to throb. Surges of blood hit my forehead like a pileup on I-5 in a dense fog. I started hitting my forehead with my palms.
What the fuck was my problem!
"It's okay," he said.
"It's not fucking okay!" I erupted. "What's okay about fucking dead ends? What do I get out of it? What do you get out of it?"
Marzoli grabbed my hands and held them against his chest. I felt his heartbeat through my palms. Somehow, revealing my past was valuable. I couldn't nail down any relevance to the present by the actual narrative, but by the firmness of Marzoli's hands on mine and the nearness of his heart, I could tell I'd developed some profound equity in our relationship-equity which would be paid off tenfold before I knew it.
"If you had all your shit together," Marzoli whispered, "chances are you wouldn't let me be here with you right now."
Was that an admonishment of him or of me?
"You're golden, you asshole," I said. "Anything you want you get."
He remained silent. His eyes saddened. His reaction was not of false modesty. Something about wanting and getting twisted inside of him painfully. He obviously thought he did not get what he wanted, which means he obviously wanted more than he was letting on. This man was everything any man or woman could dream for. What possible impediment could exist that would cause someone to say no to him if he just asked? And was this impediment the reason he turned away from me only minutes ago?
"Marzoli," I said, "I've been in a fuck-muck for a year. I don't have any confidence in my intuition. I need you tell me in words, clear as day. Why are you here at all?"
As he took in a breath to fuel his response, I saw movement over his shoulder. Marzoli turned to see what I was seeing.
Layworth had risen from his bed.
We ducked behind the curtain, our heartbeats accelerating.
Alright, mofo. Game on.
Chapter Twenty
I pulled the cord.
For the first time in a long time, the curtains parted all the way.
The stage was lit with the bouncing afternoon sun. My apartment dazzled, sparkling from our hard labor. The white of the counter and the scrubbed windowsills glowed as my pupils acclimated to a flood of natural light. The star of the show stepped in the spotlight and peeled off his polo shirt.
My … holy crap … God.
His abs were each divided by valleys so deep they cast shadows on each other. His chest resembled two overhanging boulders cantilevered outward beyond his ribs. Dark chest hair spread smoothly down from his clavicles, below his pink nipples, and then disappeared for an inch in shadow below the rounded ledges. The hair picked up at his sternum like the head of the Amazon, broadening and thickening as it rushed past his navel, then funneled outward and plunged toward the river's mouth below the beltline.
His neck was dark and muscular, and the muscles slid in a smooth landslide over the mounds of his scapula, his shoulders, his rounded biceps, and his striated triceps. His nipples were pink and juicy bull's-eyes.
He opened his thick lips. "Speak."
"You're disgusting."
"Thank you," he replied, ridiculously and adorably embarrassed.
What the hell had this bastard to be embarrassed about?
He unbuckled his belt and pulled it swiftly and sharply out of the loops. The leather holster housing his gun clunked to the floor. Marzoli discreetly kicked it my direction and tossed his belt on top of it.
He picked up the broom and pretended to sweep the immaculate floor, gripping it with flexed muscles. For all intents and purposes, it appeared that I had moved out, and a new hotter neighbor had moved in. I'd positioned the webcam so it discreetly faced the courtyard as I sat beneath the windowsill, viewing Layworth's apartment on my laptop. Layworth had walked to the kitchen, grabbed a beer, and headed back to the bedroom. He'd not yet looked in this direction.
"Think this'll work?" Marzoli whispered.
This was the first indication that his self-confidence was dropping.
"Trust me, it's working," I replied with a wink.
He glanced at me curiously. It occurred to me that gratuitous sexual innuendo between men and about men might be foreign in the law enforcement culture. It also occurred to me that, to whatever extent he and I had flirted and made contact, we'd never addressed the impulses with a single overt sentence. I had, in a subtle way, committed the first audible crossing of the line.
After several seconds of consideration, he smiled.
Dimples.
My mouth dried, and my pole jolted in my underwear.
"What time is it?" he asked, sweeping some specks into a corner.
"Two thirty-five."
"The kids'll be coming home. We're too late. "
This was the second indication of dropping self-confidence.
"We have another hour at least," I assured him. "We just have to get him to bite today. We'll reel him in tomorrow."
He looked like a god, only sexier. What was Marzoli afraid of?
I plugged in the speaker on my computer and selected a song I'd written for Usher that never made it onto an album. Rebecca had her client Max Angel sing a demo of "Slow Slide Down From Me." The smooth groove oozed through the apartment. A sonar sliding of sweaty bodies together in front of the firelight. An aural blowjob with a sly wink. But instead of smiling, Marzoli's dark eyes were emotional and childlike. His lips were tight and serious. I motioned for him to move his hips. He did not. He remained absolutely still, looking injured.
This was his fucking idea. What was wrong?
I looked at the clock. If he was going through with this plan, the first contact had to happen now.
"Move," I ordered.
He closed his eyes.
"Are you sure you're ready for this?" Max asked. "Really think you're prepared?"
He listened to the music and soon began to sway. He slowly undulated to the rhythm. He raised his arms with loose bent elbows and sensually rolled his torso. He opened his eyes. His masculine control and bravura had given way to boyish obedience and a pained acquiescence. He looked at me helplessly.
I was confused.
What the fuck did I know about dancing? Or seduction for that matter? Nothing. Why was he looking at me for guidance?
Then I realized.
If he'd had a past like Nathan's, he'd have been abandoned in Chelsea when he was young and had to find some immediate means of income. Nathan turned to DJing and peddling E, most likely because all Nathan had to offer the world when he was just a twerp was a fast twitching mouth and an ability to spin.
Marzoli, on the other hand, had a body.
It made sense that he'd danced for a buck stuck in his socks or supporter. He'd worked his ass before finding a direction to apply and utilize his Herculean brain. He was a piece of meat that any john could tenderize until the day he enrolled in the police academy and gave that world a big fat fucking finger. Now, as Max's lusty voice crooned, Marzoli was reverting back to his teenage hell. He couldn't move to the music and let himself be treated like a hustler without sublimating all subsequent higher development. This was his schism. This was a fresh revelation I could not ignore. It made no difference how much I idolized him, I knew from the desperately lost look in his eyes he'd thrust me into the authority role. He was a kid who needed my permission to … to misbehave.
I turned up the volume.
"You're about to hit the top, babe, and it's a slow slide down from me."
"There you go. Give me more," I ordered.
He gave more. He could move, and he could move well. It was coming back to him gyration by gyration, roll by roll. So goddamn sexy, but I was getting stimulated by an entirely different factor. His obedience to me was no game. As pathetic as I'd been feeling for a year, at this particular moment, I felt a surge of empowerment pump through my body. It was a supremely titillating and twisted rush, as if the puppet and the puppeteer had spontaneously reversed.