It was Quinn’s soul-piercing look into his eyes that undid Rafe, and he swallowed hard, forcing himself to look away before he fell into the despair he saw mirrored back at him. Folding his hands around Rafe’s, Quinn angled his head down until he was in Rafe’s field of vision.
“This is me, Andrade,” Quinn reminded him. “I know you. Don’t give me the crap you give everyone else. After all these years, don’t I deserve the truth?”
“Truth is, Q—” Rafe inhaled sharply, tasting the coffee, sugar, and the man next to him in the warm air swirling around them. “I don’t know. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing with myself, and if I don’t find something soon, I know I’m going to be crawling right back into the bad habits that got me kicked out of my own band.
“I haven’t done drugs in fucking forever, and I don’t miss them. That’s the sad part, right? I should miss them more. Instead I miss what I screwed up, because shit, I had everything, Q. Fucking everything. And I didn’t just let it go. I set it on fire and watched the whole thing burn. And for what? I still don’t know why.”
“Maybe you’re missing something inside of you? Maybe you walked too far away from the music?” The whiskey was back in Quinn’s voice, a thick Irish malt heady enough for Rafe to get drunk off of from a single sip. “Maybe if you can find that again. I remember how much you used to love playing. All the time your fingers were going, even when you didn’t have an instrument. Where did that go?”
“Maybe that guy Mark wasn’t the only thing that died that night.” Rafe tried to laugh off the welling thickness in his throat, but it soon became too difficult to breathe. His eyes were losing focus, drowning beneath a wash of stinging emotion he couldn’t control. “I don’t know, magpie. I just feel like I’m dead inside, and nothing—nothing—I do can bring me back. And I’m so fucking alone. So damned fucking dead and alone.”
“Hey.” Quinn’s breath was warm on Rafe’s cheek, his mouth a few butterfly wings away from brushing Rafe’s skin and frosting it with heat. “You’re not alone. Never alone. I’m here. Any time. You know that, right?”
“Maybe I just forgot.” Quinn was close, too close for Rafe’s comfort or perhaps not close enough for Rafe’s liking. Leaning forward would shatter Rafe’s world, confusing his already jumbled mess of a life, but in that moment when Quinn was so close Rafe could dab his tongue out and lick the curve of Quinn’s upper lip, finding out if his rainbow-chattering magpie tasted as sweet as he had before was all Rafe could think about.
“Last call!” The barista’s booming voice was a clumsy elephant dancing across their toes, and Quinn jerked back, startled by the echoing refrain bouncing about the coffee shop walls. “Closing in fifteen! Take something to go!”
“Well, shit, Q. Looks like we closed the place down.” Rafe leaned back, reluctantly letting Quinn’s fingers go. “Not as good as shutting a bar down, but hey, I take my kicks where I can get them. Look, Q, I’ve got to—”
“You’re going to say you’ve got to go when you and I both know you’re only saying that to avoid the emotions of this… between us. Our friendship. Our… brotherhood.”
“Trust me, Q. The last thing I think of when I look at you is being a brother.” The expression on Quinn’s face was priceless, and if it hadn’t been so late… if he didn’t hurt so deep inside, he’d have loved to kiss Quinn full on the mouth to watch it bloom. “Thanks for listening, kid—”
“Not a kid,” Quinn cut him off, shaking his head. “Stop trying to make me small, Andrade. That’s not going to work.”
It wouldn’t. Rafe knew that. He did it because it helped him deal with how Quinn looked, the want of Quinn’s taste on his mouth, and for all the missteps and fumbling emotions between them.
“No, not a kid,” he agreed softly, then winked. “But wait, the virgin thing. Real or no?”
“Sadly, real.” Quinn pulled a face and got up out of the chair. “Well, depending on how you define sex. I don’t… date well, and my last boyfriend… had some problems with body fluids. So we never really… got too far.”
“Oh, babe. See, that’s a crying shame,” Rafe whispered, leaning over to brush his lips against Quinn’s earlobe. “We’ll have to see what we can do about that. Because if done right, bodily fluids are sometimes the best damned part about the whole fucking business.”
Chapter 4
On the warehouse rooftop, looking out over the Bay.
Quinn: You ever wonder at what point someone thinks they can murder someone. I mean, where is that point? How do you get there? To that point?
Miki: That’s fucking easy. It’s ’cause some people are assholes, and instead of seeing a person… instead of seeing a soul, they look at a guy or chick and say: that over there, that’s just meat. That’s all that person is to the asshole. Just another piece of meat.
Damie: And this kind of shit is why no one will come up here and hang with the two of you.