Slow Burn (MM) (22 page)

“Okay. It
really
sucks. But I’m not the bad guy here. I’m trying, even if failing, to help.” Zack ran a hand through his hair as Brody took up his pacing again.

He felt like he was outside a thick piece of glass, looking in. Watching Brody, seeing him run headlong into disaster but unable to get through or make him stop and see. He
hated
that feeling, and he hated being helpless as Brody reverted back into someone he hardly knew. “So what are you going to do?”

“What do you think I’m going to do? Keep working on it.” Brody walked over to the chair next to the couch and grabbed a file like he was going to do exactly that. Right now. “Griggs thinks he’s all over this. Kid is an idiot and a royal prick to boot. I’ll have this figured out while he just sits with his thumb up his ass. I’ve got a few ideas. He’s got jack.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” he tried to ask again as delicately as possible. Brody wanted nothing to do with discussing the matter, but Zack loved the guy. There was no denying that anymore. And there was no way he’d sit here and let Brody shoot himself in the foot.

Brody looked up at him, his expression hard. Zack didn’t like that look on him at all. He hadn’t seen it in weeks, and now he remembered how much he hated it.

“
I
get to make that call. And yes, I absolutely think this is a good idea. Furthermore, I think that if I don’t work this case, there’ll be another dead girl in a few weeks and still no leads and that’ll be on me. You think you could handle that with a smile?” He turned back to the folders on the table, hands balled into fists, knuckles white against the sea of manila and brown folders.

Zack couldn’t stand it anymore. He got up and walked over to Brody. His broad shoulders didn’t relax an inch. “I know it’s important,” Zack told him. “The most important, and it’s also your job.” He placed a hand gently on Brody’s shoulder. The muscles were tense, like a coiled spring. “So what happens at the third warning? Your job is everything to you, but I don’t think you should push it, and I definitely don’t want you getting hurt. You really want to risk that?”

Brody turned to look up at him. The action shrugged Zack’s hand away. “
I
get to make that call. Not you.”

Zack opened his mouth to say something but was cut off with a point of Brody’s finger. “You’re not my mother. You’re not my wife. You don’t have a say in this.”

The floor fell from beneath Zack, and the dropping sensation was way too familiar. Way too real. He was launched back to college and every year since he’d accepted his sexuality. Too many parties, too few real relationships. The heart-crushing awareness of being the closeted guy’s dirty little secret. He was tossed back into childhood, being in the way, a burden rather than beloved. He knew this feeling too well. Being a hindrance, a problem…of being worth nothing.

He blinked at Brody, no idea if he was waiting for a smirk, a break in the concrete facade, a quick apology or plea to let him take it back. He was waiting for something. Something to dispel the pain of what Brody had just said.

It never came.

Brody remained expressionless except for the anger pulling at the corners of his eyes. The silence drew out as he turned back to his files like he was dismissing Zack. For life, for all he knew. Regardless, it was a clear dismissal.

Zack took a deep breath and counted to ten. He knew a snake about to strike when he saw one. Hell, he’d already been struck. The venomous words spread through Zack’s veins whether Brody knew it or not.

He should leave. Let Brody cool off. He was being an unreasonable jackass and only getting angrier. And his communication skills really sucked. Zack should go. Come back tomorrow when Brody wasn’t looking to attack whoever came into sight.

Brody’s gaze jerked back up to Zack’s. “What?” he snapped. “What do you want? I have work to do.”

In the end, that was what finally made Zack snap back. He’d be damned if he was going to stand there and be dismissed so openly—again.

“No. You have a job to
lose
and relationship to sabotage, and you’re doing a damn fine job of both.”

“What?” Brody pushed himself out of the chair to stand again.

“You think I don’t know destructive behavior when I see it? You think you can stand there and say whatever you want just because I’m a nice guy? Grow the fuck up, Brody. You see what you want to see and believe what you want to, not the truth. The truth is I care about you, and you can’t deal with it because you can’t accept that a
man
cares about you. Not a mother, not a wife.
Me
. But all you see is interference when really, it’s me giving a shit about you. What if they suspend you for messing in the case again? You said it could happen. Maybe you have good reason to risk it, but I wouldn’t know, because you won’t tell me. You’re deliberately being a jackass to run me off because life just got real. I’ve had it done to me before, so I know how it feels. Got the therapy bills to prove it too.”

Brody bowed up, the same body language Zack hadn’t seen since they were first in PT. Brody had a way about him that surely intimidated a lot of people, but Zack knew it for what it was. A defense mechanism. Brody didn’t scare him.

“Excuse me?”

“Quit acting like you can’t hear me when I’m standing right here speaking English.”

Brody stiffened further, like he was ready for a back-alley brawl. Last time Zack was here, he’d gotten that very same treatment. Right before Brody kissed him and then made him come.

Zack knew tonight that wasn’t happening. “You don’t want to talk about your feelings?” he asked. “Fine. Be a walled-up asshole. You were that way when I met you. You don’t want me asking questions and caring? Don’t want to talk about your job or any real-life issues that matter? Too bad. I can’t just pretend like we’re fuck buddies and tell myself every day that my concern and valid opinions don’t mean shit to you. You are not going to talk down to me or screw your career and possibly life and expect me not to say anything or have any opinion at all because I’m your gay lover.
Fuck. That
.”

Brody’s eyes widened slightly before going right back into target mode. It was meant as a warning, but Zack was already on a roll with no stop in sight.

“You’ve already been demoted, and now you’re talking suspension? Getting fired? And I’m supposed to stand here and not care because I’m what? Just the flavor of the month? Maybe everyone else cowers to all this fury you dish out. Maybe they won’t say shit to you, but I’m not everyone else, and you know it. You say that kind of crap to me because you think you can. Try to run me off like I don’t matter. Well, fuck you.
I matter
.”

“You should.” Brody’s eyes narrowed, the gray almost as dark as charcoal. Unforgiving. “But I didn’t ask you here, Zack. I didn’t want you inserted in the middle of this part of my life, and I didn’t ask you to fix my problems.”

“Yeah, I got that message loud and clear.” He was being dismissed. Brody didn’t want a boyfriend. A partner. He wanted a boy toy to play with, then put back in the closet so he wouldn’t have to mix real life with a relationship and all the complicated details that went along with both. Zack knew this going in too. He knew this would blow up on him, and he’d gone and fell for Brody anyway.

But he was not going to be Brody’s convenient secret. All good for the sex and good times but hidden away during real life or really bad times, missing for stuff that mattered. He’d been there and sworn he wouldn’t do that to himself again. He already hated himself for getting involved with Brody when he knew he wasn’t out. Now he hated himself for loving the idiot.

“You know what, Brody? You can stay in here in the dark with your whiskey and slept-in hair, and you can beat and fuck up your life all by yourself. You’re so stuck in the habit of denying the truth and hating yourself for it, you miss what’s right in front of you anyway, so why should I bother? You obviously don’t need someone who cares about you, because they’d only cramp your self-destructive bullshit. So you know what? Keep the phone off, because I sure as hell will.”

Brody’s eyes had lost some of their fury, but he hadn’t softened and he wasn’t backing down. Zack had to get away. His chest constricted with the dismissal, and his heart was pounding with the reminder of exactly how easy he was to throw away.

It was too late to get out of this with his heart intact, but it was time to back up. He refused to be a shameful secret or a burden for caring. He sure as hell wasn’t going to be the toss-away fling, not when he already filled the role of toss-away son.

The walls started to close in as he turned for the door. He couldn’t feel his feet move as he reached it, jerked it open. All he felt was the deafening pain that Brody didn’t get it. He felt himself breaking inside, because, despite everything, Zack really, really
did.

No amount of running would relieve the ripping pain that was tearing him apart inside as he somehow made it down the stairs. But he would. He’d go home, tie on his running shoes, and run until he couldn’t breathe. Then he’d truly fall apart.

Chapter Seventeen

Brody blinked against the hard, dry pillow, rolling his face into it for comfort. It wasn’t a pillow at all.

“Shit.” Brody pushed himself to sit up straight at his kitchen table, plucking a sticky note off his cheek. He’d finally managed to doze off after the night from hell. Too bad he hadn’t managed to make it to his bed. He unfolded himself to stand; every bone seemed to crack as he stretched. He shook out his knee, still conscious of working out the pins and needles before putting weight on it. But damn, it was in good shape, considering. Good shape because of…

He grumbled, shuffling to the shower. He was not going to think about Zack or last night or what he’d said or what Zack had said or any of it.

“Fuck it,” he said to his haggard reflection. It was never going to go anywhere anyway. Not with someone like him. Truth was, Zack deserved better, and they both knew it. It would’ve gone this way eventually. He’d only saved them both further pain and time.

Right now he had to focus on this case. This case that would always be his, no matter what the captain said or who Griggs had to blow to steal it from under him. This killer was Brody’s to catch.

He turned his face into the hot spray, cringing at the pain but needing it to wake up. He had work to do. Ten-minute shower and two cups of coffee later, he was back at his table, files out before him.

The answer was here. But he had to see it. He hadn’t yet, so maybe it was time to look at it differently.

He picked up the faces of the five girls and placed them out in front of him. Next with the crime-scene locations. All girls aged twenty to twenty-three, all killed on campus, sometime between two and four in the morning. All had a relatively low blood-alcohol level, all strangled with leather like any common belt and lots of power behind it, little to no defensive wounds. Made sense with a big, male attacker that they all knew. Yet there were no common friends, family, or coworkers who fit that profile.

He closed his eyes and pinched his nose, taking slow, deep breaths as he resisted the urge to throw something. He’d been staring at those bright faces for his entire career. And he had nothing to say to them. Nothing to reassure them of justice or peace. Nothing. The murderer breezed in, took their lives, and then breezed out.

A jolt of pain sprang from his shoulder and up to his neck. He groaned as he reached back and started rubbing at it. He lacked finesse. Zack laughed at him when he’d offered a massage, said that he tried to growl the pain away. Zack always had strong, sure hands that took the ache away as easily as he smiled.

Zack.

“Hell.” Brody let his hand drop to the table with a thump. Of course Zack was absolutely right. Brody
was
a walled-up asshole whose confinement was his own creation. He couldn’t see what was there because it didn’t fit into his preconceived notions of how he should be. But he’d never denied that. They’d both known that going into…what they went into. A…relationship.

He’d never denied being scared of the truth about himself, so he did everything he could not to see it.

“You only see what you want to see instead of the truth,”
Zack had told him.

Brody shoved his chair back. He was not about to sit there and fixate on what Zack had said. When he moved to push himself up, he also pushed a third of the files onto the floor.

“Dammit.”

Papers fluttered down, some sweeping wide and escaping into the den, the majority landing under the table.

“You’re so stuck in the habit of denying the truth and hating yourself for it, you miss what’s right in front of you anyway.”

Brody stared at the fallen files, cussing them once more before moving toward the kitchen. His foot crunched on something, and he winced. He might be a mess, but he really was a perfectionist when it came to his paperwork.

What if Zack was right? In more than just his personal life, Brody tended toward tunnel vision when shit got real. He could at least admit that much now.

So what was he not seeing? In all of his controlled environment, all the rules and regs, what had he missed? What was the one thing he’d assumed as truth from the start of this case? That it was a big guy the victim knew but not the boyfriend. What if it was a guy she didn’t know?

But then why wouldn’t she fight? It didn’t make sense, because any woman would defend herself to whatever level she could. She wasn’t knocked out. No concussions. Some big-ass, strange man approached one of the vics at night, she’s a woman alone, she’d go on guard automatically. It’s nighttime, maybe she’s a little drunk, if a guy gets too close or she felt cornered, she’d move toward light and people.

These killings weren’t far from the heart of the campus, which was right downtown. He had the brass ones to leave the body at the actual crime scene too. The guy was either stupid or very confident.

Wait…

The guy.

What if it wasn’t a guy? The victims might not think to be on the defensive. Let their guard down.