Cole McGinnis 05 - Down and Dirty (17 page)

He just didn’t know if he could handle it if Ichiro walked out on him after hearing it.

B
OBBY
WAS
nervous.

It didn’t take a psychic to divine he had a lot on his mind, and Ichiro wasn’t sure if Bobby was even willing to listen to him when he said it would be okay.

Because as far as Ichi was concerned, whatever Bobby did that pissed Mike off, the ex-cop was probably beating himself up for it, and Mike tossing in his two cents was about as good as pissing on a burning bush in the middle of a Southern Californian firestorm.

The coffee shop was a haven of bearded men and sloppily dressed woman smelling faintly of florals and incense. A few stalwart trousers-and-polo-shirt wearers shored up a long bar-style top against one wall, huddling over their recycled paper coffee cups and muttering about the unwashed masses around them.

Surprisingly, one of the shop’s niches boasted a beat-up red velour love seat, and Ichiro claimed it, dragging a low table over so they had something to set their drinks on. His lover arrived as Ichi plopped into a corner of the sofa, its springs squeaking loudly when he moved about to get comfortable.

“Here. Got you a misto with soy milk.” From the glum look on Bobby’s face, Ichi guessed he’d gotten Ichi a coffee while Bobby went for the arsenic and old lace special. “Check your cup for floaters. This place is worse than the Hairy Hippie across the street from Cole’s.”

“Scarlet’s going to text me if he gets out so we can head back over.” Ichi left his phone on the table, then took the coffee from Bobby. “You don’t owe me anything. Just because Mike—”

“Can you just let me get through it?” Bobby sat down on the edge of the sofa’s seat, rubbing at his eyes with his free hand. The coffee cup shook slightly in his grip as he set it down, and Ichiro patted the small of his back. “God, don’t be nice. Wait until you decide whether or not you want to walk out on this, okay?”

“What can you say that I don’t—” The beleaguered look on Bobby’s face put Ichiro’s shoulders back. “Shit, I don’t think you killed that guy.”

“Might as well have,” Bobby remarked harshly, wringing his fingers around his wristwatch. “Cole’s not… look, your brother’s got a good heart, and unlike Mike, he hardly ever crosses the line. So when he told you to steer clear of me, he was doing you a solid. I’m not good with… fidelity, Ichi. Fuck, I haven’t been faithful to anyone in my entire life—including myself.”

“Dawson—”

“Let me finish, then… let’s see, okay?”

“Okay.” Ichi turned sideways on the couch, facing Bobby as much as he could on the cramped seat. “Go ahead.”

“I was married… before.” He paused long enough to take a sip out of his coffee, wincing at its taste. “God that’s strong.”

“Less coffee, more talking.” Ichi waved his hand forward. “Complain about that later. You were married. Did you love her? Trying things out? What?”

“I got her pregnant,” he admitted softly. “It was stupid to sleep with her and even dumber to marry her, but that’s what guys did back then. You
married
when you knocked someone up. None of this baby daddy shit. People don’t realize how fucking much marriage ties you up, I mean legally. You don’t get married, and it’s a damned fight for every little thing if one of you dies, especially if there’s a kid. Insurance—hell, everything. I get why everyone wants the right to marry. You have to if you want your family taken care of.”

“No, I get that.” His coffee was getting cold, and it smeared a film over his tongue when Ichi sipped at it. “So you married her. And you’ve got a kid. How old? Do you have weekends with him?”

“Ichi, I’ve got a kid your age. Jamie’s—James—is twenty-seven. And fuck, he hasn’t wanted to see me in years.” Bobby’s hands were over his face again, scouring away either the tired or the shame he was holding in them. “Jesus, I married her—but I wasn’t faithful. Fuck, I didn’t even try. I screwed her—Marsha—because I was trying to prove I wasn’t gay. Hell, Ichi, I fucked any chick who looked my way back then, and when it got too damned much of a lie to choke on, I went back to fucking guys.”

“So that’s what you’re worried about? Fidelity?”

“Sunshine, if I’d been faithful, maybe Mark would be alive right now,” he ground out. “And you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

M
ARK
. S
HIT
,
he’d buried Mark years ago. Even before he’d found Mark slumped over a ratty couch with his brains splattered all over a wall in a cheap, knocked-together condo in WeHo, he’d buried Mark in his memory.

He’d buried Mark the day he’d come home to find Marsha choking on her tears and anger as she waved pictures they’d taken on a weekend trip down to Mexico. A few days filled with sex, tequila, and tight asses, documented all in living color.

Cum-splashed, suntanned living color.

The last time he’d seen those pictures, they’d been in Mark’s hot little hands. Hands he’d let grab his dick and work him off while they’d joined the mile-high club coming back from Cabo.

Right before Mark told him he’d never come out of the closet—never join in out in the open where they could have a real life instead of sneaking off behind closed doors.

He’d been so fucking willing to crack his life apart and bleed for Mark.

“Bobby, you don’t talk, I don’t understand,” Ichi prompted, nudging his knee with his knuckles. “So talk. Or wait. I’m okay with it.”

“Yeah, I’m… fuck.” He exhaled the heat building up in his lungs. “Where the hell to start?”

“How about anywhere I wasn’t there? Good place.”

“You can be an asshole, you know that, Sunshine?” He eyed Ichiro, who responded by flashing back a cheeky grin.

“I was aiming for dick, but asshole seems to be okay too.”

“Yeah, good job, then.” His coffee’d cooled too quickly for his liking, but he sipped at it anyway. “About fifteen—shit no, sixteen years ago—I’d hooked up with Mark at a club down in WeHo. I liked him—a lot. I’d been fucking around behind Marsha’s back since… hell, since we’d said I do.”

“You weren’t out, though, right?”

“Hell no.” He chuckled, trying to imagine the captain who’d been in charge of him dealing with an out cop. “Back then, that kind of shit could have gotten you shot in a back alley all accidentally like. You kept your mouth shut. Safer and easier that way.”

“They must not have been ready for Cole.” Ichi laughed under a smirk.

“Babe, I don’t think anyone’s ready for Cole, least of all LAPD,” he said, shaking his head.

“So Mark?”

“Yeah, Mark. He wasn’t out either. I’d seen him before. He was a resident down at one of the big hospitals. I’d seen him there. A lot. I can’t tell you how many times I’d had to drag a bum choking on his own vomit to the ER, and there was Dr. Tight Ass, giving me a hard time for not treating them like they were glass unicorns.” He pulled up his shirtsleeve to point out half-moon blemishes under his skin. “I’ve been bit so many fucking times by those assholes, I look like a giant squid got hold of me and tried to
hentai
me. Wait, did I use that word right?”

“Perfectly,” Ichi assured him. “Katsushika Hokusai’s
tako to ama.
”

“Some guy wrote about squid tacos?”

“I’ll explain… forget about the
tako
. So you and Mark didn’t get along?”

“Nah, he was always riding my ass about police brutality. Fucker didn’t even know me and accused me of beating up some guy I’d found down on the tracks.” He shook his head, recalling Mark getting up into his face and shouting him down. “We went at it and… got to be honest, Sunshine, he was hot. Fighting with him turned me the fuck on, so as soon as I got off my shift, I headed down to one of the places I went to get some, and there he was.”

“And you guys hit it off?”

“Hell no, we were both pissed off at each other, so I fucked him up against a wall in the back room.” Bobby snorted when Ichi shook his head. “He wanted it. I wanted it. It just sort of happened. Then… it kept happening until, well, shit… I was digging through downtown looking for assholes I could take in just to see him.”

“Did the two of you end badly?” Ichi took Bobby’s cup away from him and set it down on a table. His hands suddenly felt too empty, and Bobby rubbed his palms on his jeans. “How did you get from angry sex to…?”

“Him shooting himself a decade later?” He puffed out his cheeks, staring off into the evening as the traffic lights blinked red and green through the coffee shop’s tinted windows. “We were together for about a year. Maybe a little bit more, but you know, I… fuck. I was stupid. I thought… I thought he wanted the same things I wanted.

“See, Sunshine, I was sick of the fucking lies by that time. I was lying to everyone. Marsha, him… myself. I told my wife I was working late when I was fucking Mark, and I told Mark I had things to do with my kid when I was home trying to convince myself the whole gay thing wasn’t real.” Bobby closed his eyes briefly, then continued slowly. “Wife didn’t have any complaints, but shit, not like we… I wanted out. I wanted to… fucking breathe. You know?”

“So what happened? With all of it? Did Marsha find out?”

“Worse than found out. Mark and I went down to Mexico with a couple of friends to some gay resort. And it wasn’t like… we hadn’t fucked other people before, but he acted like it was an all you can eat for a dollar ninety-five buffet. I didn’t want that. Shit, I even told him beforehand, I’d just wanted to hang out and do… tourist things.”

“What did he say when you told him that?”

“Actually, I told him I wanted it to just be the two of us. From that point on. No more clubbing. No more… any of that shit. I brought it up, and he looked at me like I was crazy.”

“He didn’t understand you wanted just the two of you guys and no one else?” Ichi cocked his head. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Yeah, apparently it was worse because I told him I wanted to find a place and move in with him.” He could barely get the words out. It seemed like a lifetime ago, but the punch in his chest was just as hollow… just as hard. “I told him I wanted to split from Marsha. Just… fuck, end that whole life I’d being lying in and shake it off. You know what he told me?”

“I’m going to guess I’m not going to like it,” Ichiro murmured, sliding in closer.

“He said the only reason he was fucking me was because I was married. Because he
knew
I wasn’t going to want something more than what we had. Hell, Ichi, I hadn’t slept with Marsha for two months before that trip, and it took everything I fucking had to get that out of me.” He rubbed at his chest where the burn began to spread up from his stomach and into his heart. “He jacked me off on the plane ride back and then said it was over. Last time I saw him… before that night… was at the airport as he got into a cab. Then I went home and acted like nothing happened.

“Until Mark decided to drop on by the house a couple of days later and hand over photos people took of us in Mexico.” It was still a bitter pill to swallow. The foolishness he’d dreamed up of a happy-ever-after between two men stuck somewhere under his breastbone, refusing to be dislodged by common sense or self-loathing. “She lost her shit. And I can’t blame her for it. I’d have lost my shit if I were her. Man, we had a fight. I let her… shit, she threw everything she could lay her hands on at me. Fucking waffle iron cut open my head, but I never touched her. Not once. And when the cops showed up, I stood there and let them handcuff me while they talked it out with her.”

“Wait, you were bleeding, and they handcuffed you?”

“Yeah, you can go on about gender equality, but first thing cops are going to do is grab the guy and put him down.” The apologetic murmurs he’d gotten from the uniform stung his pride a bit, but he’d been cooperative. “Someone calls in a domestic, and they’re going to go for the guy first. Standard. And hell, a lot of cops do shit to their families. We’re not the best kind of partners for that. Shit, they did that to Cole, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember. Did she out you? To everyone there?” Ichi frowned, creasing his brows together. “What… hell, I don’t even know what to say.”

“Say she was right, and I fucked her over,” Bobby replied softly. “Because it’s the truth. She didn’t say shit to the cops about the pictures. Just that she’d caught me cheating and was mad, but she didn’t tell them it was with a guy. They asked me if I wanted to press charges, and I said no. Everyone shook hands, they left, and she told me to get the fuck out of my house. That’s when I found out Mark’d come over in person to throw our shit into her face, then didn’t even have the balls to stick around and face me. A week later, I got served, and part of the divorce settlement was me getting tested. Didn’t blame her for that either.”

“What about your son? Jamie?”

“Marsha’s a good mom. I don’t have any complaints about how she raised him. She always takes care of him first. She’d sent him to a friend’s house for a sleepover, but I think he knew. Fuck, how couldn’t he have known?” The tension building up along his shoulders was intense, and Bobby rolled them back, trying to work them loose. “She remarried a couple of years later. Shit, Jamie was… sixteen then? Barry—the guy she hooked up with—wanted to adopt him, but she told him no. Actually, she said hell no, because he’s my kid. We’ve done okay by Jamie.”

“So she’s all right with you… being gay now? What about your son? Is he?”

“Things between me and Jamie weren’t always good. I stayed in the closet until… well, you know when, but he…. Jamie doesn’t know. It’s better now, but he’s got a lot of shit on his plate that I dished up. I never told him about me being gay.” Bobby grimaced. “I’ve got an uncle… the one I told you about in assisted living. He’s… old-school cop. Hell, I haven’t told him either. I think he’d shoot me if he ever found out.”

“So how… why did he…? Mark….” Ichiro got hung up on his words, his eyes hooded in the shadows flung down from the hanging lamp above them. “So why did he do it? And how did he get your gun?”

“I didn’t know why he did it until he called me at the station that day. The gun was one I’d given to him as a gift.” He grinned at Ichiro’s wrinkled nose. “Don’t give me that look. Cops… hell, people give each other guns all the time. I’d taken him out to the range—”