“I’m not wearing any underwear,” Rory said.
“Did you pick that up from BoyfriendTV?”
In answer, he slid the shorts below the curve of his ass and let them drop.
He had a nice dick, nice balls, strong thighs.He was shaved.He was already half hard, and he touched himself with one hand.With the other, he rucked the shirt up to expose his flat stomach.He was still looking at me.
“Do you have lube?”I asked.“Or do you all share Tip’s bottle?”
He smiled at the dig, kicked loose of the shorts, and pulled off his tee as he padded toward his bedroom.He came back a moment later with a little bottle of silicone lube.Not my favorite, but it would work.
“Condom?”I said.
He grinned and shook his head.
I put him over the arm of the couch.The prep was minimal.He was tight, and he grunted when I pushed in, but after a few seconds, he made a different kind of sound, deeper in his chest, and pressed back against me.I started to move then.
It was a hard, fast fuck.Once I set the pace, Rory whimpered from beginning to end.He got one hand between his legs, and that arm moved like crazy as I drove into him over and over again.I grabbed his nape and pressed his face into the sofa cushions.The muscles in my back were tight.My hips and legs burned.I hadn’t bothered taking off my clothes, and my belt jangled with every movement.When he came, he gasped, and he tightened around me.It took me another ten or fifteen seconds, my hand squeezing his neck as I increased my pace.He squirmed, and he whimpered, but he took it.
When I came, my vision darkened, my body clenched, and the wave of release that followed was so intense that I had to get one knee up against the sofa to keep from losing my balance.
I slipped out of him and put a hand between his shoulder blades, steadying both of us.His skin was slick with sweat.He made that deep-in-his-chest sound again and stretched like a cat.When he got up, I offered a hand, but he was twenty years old, and he moved like he had slinkies for bones.
“That was hot,” he said.“We should do that again.”
I straightened my shirt, buttoned my waistband, did up my zipper.My belt was still jangling every time I moved.
“I should probably get your number,” Rory said.He was flushed, and sweat glistened at his hairline.“In case I think of something important to tell you.”
“Call the station,” I said and left.
I drove to the Kum & Go and parked at one of the pumps.A disconnected part of me thought there was a joke there.I ran the AC on high and undid the buttons on the polo, parted the placket, ran one hand through my hair.Sweat made me feel like I was sticking to the seat, and I could smell myself.
My phone buzzed.
If it’s that fucking kid, I thought.
But it wasn’t.It was Saint fucking Somerset.
I let the call go to voicemail.A few seconds later, the phone buzzed again to show me that Saint Somerset had left a message.And then, a few seconds after that, Wahredua’s Golden Boy sent me a message.
Hey, just checking in.I heard about the kid you found.I wanted to make sure you’re okay.Let me know if you need anything.
I deleted the text and drove home.
7
After that, no matter how I tried to move the investigation forward, nothing seemed to go anywhere.
I did what I could; it didn’t seem like much.I still had to do my actual job, which meant running down a group of teenagers who had taken their neighbor’s car for a joyride, trying to track down a witness for a case against a drug dealer, and that stupid collaboration with Wroxall’s campus security.What little time I had left during the day, I tried to figure out who might have wanted to hurt Tip.
I interviewed Tip again—after he’d been released, and without Jordan hovering over him—but I only got the same bullshit story.I asked for names, anyone he remembered from the party, and I got nothing.I did my own fucking legwork, asking guys I knew in the area—hookups, friends, anyone who might have their finger on the pulse of gay life.Some of them knew Tip orhad seen him around.That didn’t surprise me too much.Others knew about the party at Sunny’s lake house, and a few even gave me some names.I ran down the ones I could, but none of them knew anything helpful.
At night, alone in bed, I tried to remember something from the party.Anything.But I’d pre-gamed hard, and what memories I had of the party were disjointed—more flashes of sensation, like the weight of a body on my back, or the rasp of a day’s stubble on my neck, than anything helpful.Only the end of it was really clear: the girls and the boy I’d bummed a toke from.And I didn’t have any idea who they were or how to track them down.
The rational part of me knew that what Red Alvin had said was true: if cases like this didn’t get solved immediately, they almost never did.If someone had seen Tip get hurt, and if they wanted to help, they would have come forward by now.Since no one had, it meant that nobody was going to.And without a witness—or a confession—the case was dead in the water.
I even tried calling Brother Gary and Red Alvin.The first time, they were professional enough about it—it didn’t take a psych degree to understand why I had an above-average interest in the case, and even though they were a pair of tools, they told me what they could.The second time, when they didn’t have anything new to share, things got frosty.The third time, it was worse.And the fourth.And the fifth.Eventually, the admin who answered the phone stopped transferring my calls, and Peterson pulled me aside in the bullpen to ask me if I needed to talk about anything, and if I didn’t, to let the sheriff’s detectives do their jobs.
