The Next(38)

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.