Indirection, p.37
Indirection, page 37
part #1 of Borealis: Without a Compass Series
“Maybe you should stay at my place for a few days,” North said as eased Shaw down onto the bed. “Save yourself all those trips up and down.”
“Yeah,” Shaw said. He tugged the comforter up and played with one corner. “Um, if that would be ok.”
“I just suggested it, didn’t I?”
“I know, but—”
North dropped onto the bed next to him. His hand ran over the comforter, found Shaw’s thigh, and stroked his leg. “We were roommates in college. It’s not like we haven’t lived together before.”
“I know, I know, but now we’re, you know.”
“Dating?”
“Well, yeah.”
North made an amused noise and bent to kiss him. Then he pulled back, and his hand stopped on Shaw’s leg. “She kind of killed the mood, huh?”
“Sorry.”
“Christ, don’t be sorry. Want some of that cheesecake? Some tea? Do you want me to bring you some books?”
Shaw flopped back in bed, wincing at the throb in his shoulder, and pulled a pillow over his face. Voice muffled, he said, “Please don’t start—”
Then North’s hand was there, pressing down on the pillow until Shaw slapped his arm. North laughed and pulled back, and Shaw tossed the pillow to the side.
“Jerk!”
“Damn, was I smothering you again? I just can’t help myself.”
“You are a real jerk, North McKinney.”
North was still laughing as he clomped down the stairs in those godawful Redwings.
While the sound of dishes and glassware clattered below, Shaw propped himself up against a mound of pillows. He grabbed his phone and started a new book by Clarence—he’d downloaded all of them that morning, in a flurry of purchases that he didn’t completely understand. Castling the Rookie was a best-friends, secret-lovers, nerd-jock romance about a US college soccer team that traveled to Scotland, spent three weeks at a training camp operating out of a real castle, and mostly centered on the relationship between the team’s student manager and a red-shirt freshman. Two pages in, Shaw was hooked, and when he emerged from the story in odd moments—when he took the Tylenol and drank some of the kukicha tea that North had put on a tray next to him, or when he devoured the wedge of cheesecake in three huge bites—he felt a pang for Clarence, who had written beautiful, happy things.
Stretched out next to him, Shaw was vaguely aware that North was reading too, flipping through papers and interrupting himself with a series of increasingly frustrated noises. At first, Shaw tried to dive deeper into the book. Then, dropping the phone onto the bed, he looked over.
“What?”
North made a questioning noise without looking up. Then, with another of those disgusted sounds, he flipped the page onto the growing stack next to him.
“North Prophylacticus McKinney—”
“Not my middle name.”
“—what is going on? You sound like a water buffalo. A grumpy one. And I’m trying to read.”
For a moment, it looked like North wouldn’t answer. Then he raised his head, waving the remaining pages at Shaw with one hand and gesturing to the pile next to him with the other. “This is bullshit!”
“I thought you said we were taking the rest of the day off. Whatever Truck and Pari messed up in the paperwork, it can wait—”
“She made me Norton!”
Shaw cocked his head. “Am I having a stroke? Or are you?”
“She made me fucking Norton. Yasmin.” North shoved a sheaf of pages at Shaw. “Norton and Shaun. Those are the names of her characters. Norton is the big, drooling dumbfuck who’s always getting everything wrong, and Shaun basically leads him around by the dick. And Shaun is this brilliant, athletic, charming billionaire who solves crimes for his own fucking amusement. This is the biggest crock of shit I’ve ever seen.”
“Well, there’s always an element of—” Shaw stopped at the look on North’s face. “You’re right. It’s a travesty.”
“It’s not just that. There’s no make-up sex. There’s no sex at all.”
“Some romance novels don’t have sex. Or if they do, it’s fade-to-black. They have all these different heat levels, and—”
“Yeah, it’s that fade-to-black shit. Norton fucks up a major piece of evidence, and Shaun comforts the big fuck by revealing that the brilliant Shaun knew that Norton was going to fuck it up all along, so he planned for it, and then they start kissing, and right when it’s about to get good, nothing.”
“Some people prefer—”
“And they don’t fight. And they don’t threaten to break up. And they don’t bang it out for fourteen pages in epic make-up sex. What kind of romance novel does she think she’s writing?”
“I thought you didn’t read—”
The look North turned on Shaw was so intense that Shaw forgot the rest of the sentence. It took Shaw a moment to recognize the emotion in that look, and then his body responded. He pushed the comforter down; his erection was visible through the thin gray sweats.
“I think we should break up,” Shaw said.
North shoved the tea tray out of the way, the cup rattling on its saucer. He crawled across the bed to Shaw and caught Shaw’s jaw, gentle but firm. “What the fuck did you just say to me?”
“I’m starting a fight. A big one.”
“Yeah, you are. You have no—” He cut off, stifling a noise as Shaw pressed a hand against his crotch. After a moment of internal struggle that mapped itself across his face, North thrust into Shaw’s hand. Shaw undid the button and zipper, drawing North’s dick out, stroking him. North tried to suppress a whimper. “You have no idea—oh fuck. You have no idea what kind of…” He trailed off into heavy breaths.
“But maybe,” Shaw said, pausing as he leaned forward to lick the head of North’s cock, smiling as North failed to stop a moan, “since I’m injured, we can skip the rest of the fight and go straight to the fourteen-page make-up sex?”
“Fuck yeah,” North said, shimmying out of the jeans. “That sounds like the perfect ending.”
MISDIRECTION
Keep reading for a sneak preview of Misdirection, book two of Borealis: Without a Compass.
Chapter 1
KINGSLEY SHAW WILDER ALDRICH was trying to finish his story, but he had to compete with the bass line of a Weezer song.
“—and that’s when I knew I could do it because the power to achieve my dreams had been inside me all along.”
North McKinney, his boyfriend, sighed, spun his beer, and said, “The power to buy pre-shelled pistachios had been inside you all along?”
“Don’t say it like that. It was a very enabling revelation. Societal pressures have been holding me back for years. Understanding that the power had been—”
“Please don’t keep saying ‘inside me.’”
“—inside me all along was life-changing. I’m going to write a book. I’m going to free people from their chains.” Shaw leaned back and stole a cheesy fry from North’s plate. “And you didn’t have any complaints about me using the phrase ‘inside me’ last night.”
A pair of very young, gym-bunny gays was passing the table right then, and they shared a look and burst out laughing.
North’s cheeks reddened, but his only answer was to drag his plate closer and curl an arm around it protectively, glaring at Shaw.
“Also, that cheese is mostly preservatives,” Shaw said, “and it’s hardening inside your small intestine, and you’ll probably get a blockage and die.”
North’s eyes narrowed.
“A slightly smaller portion—”
“No.”
“Or if you shared—”
“There it is. No. No. No. No fucking way, Shaw. Nibble on your lettuce.”
“If you’d be nice to me, maybe I’d nibble on your lettuce.”
North covered his face with one hand, but he didn’t relax the protective curl of his arm around the cheesy fries.
The Unicorn Trough wasn’t officially a gay bar, but with a name like that, it had a hard time being anything else. At least half the couples were men; of the remaining half, some were women, some were straights, and a few were clearly enby. A banner over the bar limply announced 90’S NIGHT, but that only seemed to refer to the choice of music—nobody else had gotten into the spirit of it. Colored lights spun and swiveled, illuminating patches of the haze that floated over the dance floor; a handful of couples were dancing, all of them young and clearly looking for an excuse to grind on each other.
“My parents would have killed me if they’d found out I came to a place like this,” North said as he dragged a fry through the cheese sauce and glanced around. “Not that that ever stopped me.”
“My parents would have cried with joy if I’d asked to go to The Unicorn Trough,” Shaw said. “They made me do the whole gay-straight alliance thing in school after I came out. They were literally waiting for me to tell them; my mom had made t-shirts ahead of time.”
“They made you join the GSA? That seems like a bit much.”
Shaw shook his head. “They made me start it.”
North rolled his eyes. “Parents have some fucked up ideas about knowing what’s best. Exhibit A.”
He didn’t have to glance across the room for Shaw to know what he meant; Exhibit A was Nicci Lesperance, the woman they were following that night. Nicci had a chop of purple-gray hair and was probably too full figured to be wearing nothing but a leather vest (on the back, the name of her yet-to-be-discovered band, Bathtub Punchout) and leather leggings. She was a middle manager at Aldrich Acquisitions, which was the company owned by Shaw’s father and which supplied most of the work for North and Shaw’s private investigation agency.
Nicci’s father, Ralph Lesperance, was an executive at the same company, and he had asked that North and Shaw look into a younger woman with whom Nicci was having an affair. Kelly Cann—fifteen years younger, with blond ringlets and cherry-red lipstick—was, from all North and Shaw had been able to discover, about what you’d expect from the lead-singer-slash-genius behind a band called Bathtub Punchout: no steady job, no education, heavy use of recreational drugs. The subtext when Ralph had given them the job had been to get rid of Kelly, and Shaw couldn’t exactly blame the man—but that didn’t make him blind to North’s point either.
Fanning aside the sweat, artificial smoke, and skunky weed that cobwebbed the air, Shaw grimaced and said, “I’m going to have asthma from breathing all this glycol or glycerin or whatever it is. I’m going to need lemongrass and sage and—”
North took a long pull from his Schlafly—their pale ale, tonight. It was his turn to watch the women, and he was frowning.
“—ginger root and gingko biloba and—”
North lifted a finger from the Schlafly’s brown glass, and Shaw went silent. Then, with a tiny shake of his head, North said, “Never mind. They’re just getting more comfortable in the booth.” He took another, quicker pull on the beer. “And you’re not getting asthma.”
“I might be getting asthma. I definitely feel like I’m getting asthma. My throat’s all scratchy—”
“Because you’ve eaten four bowls of bar mix, and it’s mostly pretzels.”
“—and my tongue feels like corroded battery terminals—”
“Because you’ve had six Cokes.”
“Four, North! I had four. You cut me off, remember?”
“I remember very fucking well, thank you. I also remember that you flirted with the piece of meat behind the bar and got two more while you thought I was in the bathroom.”
“You can’t—I didn’t—” Shaw struggled to sit up straight. “First of all, trust is very important in a healthy relationship, and—”
North made a face as he retrieved his phone.
“Thank you, Vishnu,” Shaw whispered.
When North saw the caller, his expression disassembled into a deadly blankness that Shaw had come to recognize over the last few months. He stared at the phone, unmoving. In Shaw’s ears, the music became a background of pounding white noise—surf washing everything away.
Fighting the urge to close his eyes, Shaw said, “You can take it.”
“No.” But North kept looking at the phone. “No, he knows we’re only supposed to communicate through our lawyers now.”
“So don’t take the call.”
North sat there, staring at the illuminated screen that flashed with Tucker’s name. “He’s drunk. And he wants to scream at me. Or he wants me to think he’s drunk and he wants to scream at me. Or he doesn’t think he’s as drunk as he really is, but he wants me to think he—”
“I’m going to get some water,” Shaw said, sliding down from the stool.
Behind him, North’s voice was low and hard as he said, “What the fuck do you want, Tucker? What the fuck don’t you understand about ‘no contact’? Are you too fucking stupid to understand—” North broke off and resumed more fiercely, “I’ll talk to you however I fucking want, you fucking imbecile. We’re not—”
And then The Smashing Pumpkins were singing about tonight. Shaw kept his gaze on the bar, refusing to look back. He wormed his way through the press of bodies, flagged down the bartender, and ran a hand through his auburn hair—long enough now that he could hold it back with a scrunchie, which was a nice change from the crazy cloud of curls that North had described as Bob Ross-bred-with-a-poodle (the little yippy kind, he had clarified).
“Hey, beautiful,” the bartender said, leaning on his elbows, a white towel crisp against his black shirt. He couldn’t have been older than twenty, sandy haired, and he still managed to look boyish even though he must have spent a couple of hours at the gym every day. He had an inner bicep tattoo of a distorted clock and writing in what Shaw thought was Sanskrit. “You’re making my night better and better. I’m glad you came back.”
“Thanks,” Shaw said, checking over his shoulder; North was bending over their two-top, one hand cupped around the phone, probably so he could eviscerate Tucker more thoroughly. “You’re beautiful too. I bet you’re a Pisces.”
“Can I get some service?” a salt-and-pepper bro at the end of the bar shouted.
“What’s Pisces?” the bartender said, smiling as he pulled the towel from his shoulder and flapped it at the bro. “What dates, I mean?”
“February 19th to March 20th.”
“No way. March 1st.”
“I knew it. It’s because you’re so pretty. And I bet you have a really beautiful soul. Have you ever had your chakras read?”
The bartender blinked. Then his smile got bigger. “No, but I’ll try anything once. Do you want to—”
“Hey, buddy.” Daddy-bro was shouting again. “Trawl dick on your own time.”
The bartender shot him an angry look and turned back to Shaw. “I’ve got to, you know. Can I get you anything? Another Coke?”
For a moment, something nasty snapped its teeth inside Shaw, and he almost said yes. “Just a water. And another Schlafly, the pale ale.”
When the bartender set the drinks next to Shaw, he took Shaw’s wrist in one hand. His touch was warm and soft. His thumb traced the vein visible under Shaw’s pale skin. “I’d really like to keep talking to you.”
“I’d really like to keep talking to you,” Shaw said with a smile. “And you know what? I’m really glad you said that I’m making your night better because now you’re making my night better. North, that’s my boyfriend, is being such a jerk. It’s not like he tries to be a jerk. Well, sometimes he does. Like one time, he came home when I was using one of those as-seen-on-TV back shavers, and he told me if I really wanted to manscape, I could start, well, down there, because, quote, ‘it’s like getting lost in the pubic Amazon,’ which was really rude, and I said—”
The bartender released Shaw’s wrist and straightened. “You’ve got a boyfriend.”
“Oh, yeah, he’s the one over there who’s trying really hard to look butch with the henley and—”
The bartender shot toward the other end of the bar, saying something like wasting my fucking time under his breath.
“I didn’t give you the name of my psychic,” Shaw called after the young man. “If you want your chakras read. It’s Master Hermes!”
“Dude,” one of the guys next to Shaw said, covering his ear.
At a more normal volume, Shaw repeated, “It’s Master Hermes.”
“Yeah, whatever, quit yelling in my fucking ear.”
Shaw was carrying the drinks back to the table when Nicci got up and headed toward the bathroom. Kelly played with her glass, gaze fixed on the appletini in front of her, until Nicci had disappeared down a narrow hall. Then she grabbed Nicci’s purse, slid out of the booth, and shot toward the door.
North was still whispering furiously into the phone.
“Something’s happening,” Shaw said, touching North’s elbow.
With an inarticulate cry, North ripped the phone from his ear and hammered it against the table. When he pulled it back, he said, “No, you listen to me, you abusive piece of shit—”
“She’s running,” Shaw said.
“You want to talk about unfair? You want to talk about what’s unfair, Tucker? What’s unfair is every fucking minute I had to spend standing behind you, smiling and looking supportive—”
Shaw grimaced, set the drinks on the table, and went after Kelly. She was moving at a fast walk, sliding through the crowd without glancing back. Shaw copied her. She hit the door and disappeared into the night, fingers of artificial smoke curling after her. Shaw was five yards behind her. The April evening was cool, the air shockingly clean and sweet with spring after the weed-and-glycol haze in the Trough. A couple of guys were making out hard, pressed up against the Trough’s brick façade. A woman in a matted fur coat smoked at the curb, the security light washing out her face so she looked like a picture from an old book.
Kelly was already halfway down the block, disappearing between the aprons of light from the streetlamps, and Shaw took off after her. She was wearing biker boots to go with the leather leggings and the leather vest, and they made her steps solid, heavy, the only sound in the universe. At the next alley, she jinked right, swallowed up by the yellow, fluttering light from deep between the brick buildings.
