“She had the same look in her eyes—like he did, Rafe.” Everything hurt. His heart lost control of itself and threatened to beat its way free of its prison, and no amount of breathing seemed to calm it down. “I held him, and he looked at me that way. And I didn’t want to let him go. Because he was all I had left of you. That’s how LeAnne looked. It’s crazy because she’s… a person, and he was… but she looked so confused. Like he did. He was so confused and—”
“Baby, I need you to focus on me.” Rafe turned, settling Quinn against the headboard. Straddling Quinn’s lap, he rested his weight on his knees and took Quinn’s face into his hands, forcing Quinn to stare straight ahead. “Listen to me, okay?”
“Okay.” He knew he was crying. It was childish and stupid, a nova of emotions he couldn’t quite seem to tamp down, and Rafe’s voice promised so much.
“LeAnne… was a dream. You didn’t have anything to do with her dying. Someone else did that. Some sick fucking asshole took her from her family, and that person fucked up her life. Not you.” Rafe leaned in, his hair curtaining around their faces. “Can you see that? Tell me you see that.”
It sounded so simple, so logical, but the stain of LeAnne’s death ran deep. “I led him to her. She wouldn’t have died if—that tuilí—he shouldn’t have seen her. He wouldn’t have even known she was alive if I’d—”
“We don’t even know for certain you’re the one this guy is after.”
Rafe stroked his thumb over Quinn’s chin. It was a silly caress, almost as if Quinn smeared ice cream on his face, but something in Quinn’s belly turned over and begged for more with each pass of Rafe’s finger.
“And if he is, I’m not going to let him get even five miles near you. I’ve got you now. Here. Okay? It’ll be okay.”
“Tommy was my fault,” Quinn confessed. “I just didn’t want to… I argued with Mum about letting him go. Because he was so sick. I kept hoping he’d get better. I kept hoping, you know? And when I knew I couldn’t let him suffer anymore, I still couldn’t… I kept thinking I wasn’t doing enough for him.”
“For the record, Tommy was fucking ancient. And I’m not sure how one has to do with the other, but in that too-smart, Moebius-strip brain of yours, they do. And I’m going to tell you flat out, he was kind of old and beat up before he ever went to live with you guys. He was horny, mean, and somehow got your mom’s cat knocked up in the one hour he was in the house before he headed to the vet to get snipped.”
Rafe brushed his lips over the tip of Quinn’s nose, and Quinn shivered under the contact.
“That cat loved you. No two ways about it. Fighting, fucking, and Quinn. That’s what that cat lived for. And you’ve got to know, Q, you didn’t lose any of me when Tommy went on. You’ve always got me, okay?”
Despite Rafe’s soothing hands, the dark lingered around the edges of the room, shoved back only slightly by a slender twisted-metal lamp on the nightstand. Quinn tugged at his waist, finding he was still wearing the jeans and T-shirt he’d changed into so the medical examiner could take his work clothes off to the lab. The denim was sticky and heavy, dragging along his thighs where the fabric twisted around as he’d slept. It had to be late, much later than he’d imagined, because Rafe was half-naked in a pair of long shorts and bare chested, his dirty-blond hair rumpled from sleep. Quinn halfway remembered wanting to lie down for an hour before he ate something. He’d been so tired, and the last thing he’d heard from Rafe was something about a pizza.
“Talk to me, Q.” Rafe patted his cheeks, a devilish smirk lurking on the pout of his mouth. “Do you need a pill? One of those magic ones?”
“Is that a joke?” He cut Rafe a look, but the smile tugged him higher out of the black. “Fucker. You know I hate that.”
“I know.” He could feel Rafe’s laugh echo through his hands. “It’s why I said it.”
“Dick.” Quinn sighed, feeling the butterfly sharp of his panic settling down, its serrated flutter slowing as his breathing got easier. There was more than the panic in him, something softer and sweeter—something whiskey-hot and golden—Rafe. He could actually feel Rafe’s affection touching the coldest and dampest parts of his soul, a spray of bokeh to fill the emptiness he had inside of him. “Oh God, I can feel you.”
“I’m almost sitting on top of you.” Rafe chuckled. “I hope you can feel me.”
“No,” he whispered, shaking his head as much as he could, clasped in Rafe’s palms. “I mean… inside of me. Do you know how hard it is to feel anything? I can feel you. I mean, I usually have to guess… hope… that what I feel for other people is how they feel about me. I hear Mum say she loves me but—”