Risk Assessment

by Parker St John

  He’d never gotten around to making those new friends, and he certainly hadn’t bothered fixing up the place. He’d purchased a couple pieces of furniture from IKEA and called it good. There weren’t even any pictures on the walls. Rather than spend the effort crafting the life he’d imagined for himself, he’d thrown himself into his new job. The CLC was short-staffed and under-funded, so there was always plenty of work to keep him distracted.

  Now, here he was a year later, with no grill, no landscaping, and no friends. If he had a deck, he’d have a chair to sit on and he wouldn’t be getting a sore ass from the hard step. If he had a deck, he would have bothered to buy a barbeque, and he could be grilling himself a steak right about now.

  The thought of steak reminded him of Lucas and the way he’d acted like it was worth his effort just to charm Elliot. It was rare for someone so handsome to give someone like Elliot the time of day. He’d been flattered by the way Lucas had flirted so openly, so unselfconsciously. His smile was gorgeous, and his eyes had made promises that Elliot was sure he could keep. He hadn’t imagined the glorious, devilish invitation there, and for the first time in months he’d had something to look forward to.

  Then the door had slammed right in his face. He didn’t know what to make of that. The sudden coldness in Lucas’s expression had flummoxed him, but he knew he wasn’t imagining the way he’d gone from playful to pure ice in the space of a breath.

  Elliot took a long pull from his beer bottle and considered.

  It was possible the guy was just a flake. There were plenty of men cruising the scene who enjoyed playing cat and mouse, and this was the second time in as many days that Lucas had displayed overt interest only to leave Elliot hanging. But Elliot didn’t really believe that. He wasn’t a bad judge of character — his relationship with Greg notwithstanding — and Lucas Kelly had struck him as a man with both feet planted firm and hard on the ground. So Elliot must have done or said something to turn him off.

  He thought back over their conversation.

  Lucas wouldn’t be the first person to hate lawyers. Lawyer jokes were a cliché for a reason. But to flash from hot to cold so rapidly, without even a derisive comment or a joke about Satan’s minions? That was some powerful hatred. Maybe a lawyer had run over his puppy? Maybe he’d been previously married and his wife’s attorney took him to the cleaners? Who knew?

  He climbed to his feet, wincing at the crack in his knees. His weekly racquetball matches could only do so much to keep aging joints lubricated. He felt old and defeated.

  Stashing his empty bottle in a broken planter, he headed inside, aiming for his laptop nestled on the kitchen counter. The glow of the screen lit up the dark kitchen as he stood chewing on a slice of cold pizza.

  A quick search of the name Lucas Kelly didn’t turn up much besides the typical pay per click public records and a minor league baseball player from Cincinnati. He double checked that the ball player looked nothing like his Lucas before moving on. He clicked on the public records results and noted that Lucas was twenty-seven years old, had five address changes and three criminal records.

  He rubbed a hand across his jaw. The stubble there bothered him. He’d always had a thick five o’clock shadow, but these days it was coming in with more than a dash of gray, and he thought it made him look old. Lucas hadn’t seemed to mind his age. He’d looked like he wanted to eat him for breakfast.

  He debated with himself for a moment. With his credentials, it would be the work of a minute to pull up any priors. It was unethical as hell. But was it really any worse than vetting a potential date by asking friends and spying on his Facebook profile?

  Elliot preferred to vet the men he ended up in bed with one way or another, though he’d learned the hard way that just because his racquetball partner swore up and down his buddy was a great guy, it didn’t guarantee a successful liaison.

  He pulled up the database he needed, entered his credentials, and began to read.

  Fifteen minutes later he stood in his dark kitchen, his pizza forgotten, staring at the mugshot on his screen.

  Eight years ago, Lucas Kelly had been a different man. Not even a man. He’d been a boy, and an angry boy at that. His face was thin and hawkish, and he’d clearly been in an altercation, judging by the purple swelling on his cheek and jaw. He was younger and sharper than the buff, grinning man that had flirted so outrageously with Elliot.

  But those weren’t the most notable differences. Twenty-year-old Lucas Kelly had the same old, dead eyes of every hardened criminal Elliot had ever encountered. He was still just an overgrown kid, but it was painfully clear that he’d given up on life a long time before his arrest.

  Beneath the mug shot was a notification of a sealed juvenile record. Below that was a list of three adult convictions: evading, assault, and felony theft. The standard trifecta of almost every inner city defendant who crossed Elliot’s desk. Usually there was some drug use mixed in, but that was noticeably absent with Lucas’s report. Elliot breathed a sigh of relief. He wouldn’t wish the addiction battle on his worst enemy, and he was thankful that the beautiful man he couldn’t get off his mind didn’t have that particular monkey on his back.

  Those eyes, though. So blue, so hurt, and so angry.

  They stuck with him as he brushed his teeth.

  They stared back at him from his mind’s eye as he stepped into the shower.

  Elliot had seen the same haunted expression in countless other faces, but it had never struck him so forcefully. Perhaps it was the contrast between then and now. Elliot knew what Lucas looked like when he was warm, confident, and engaging. He remembered the mischievous sparkle in his smile. It disturbed him on a visceral level to know that Lucas had ever been so beaten down by life that he’d looked like a walking shadow.

  Maybe it was because of the attraction. Elliot had never been attracted to a client, so naturally he had felt no personal connection to their plight beyond the basic empathy required of his profession. That had to be it.

  There was no good reason to be as infatuated as he was, not even the fact that he hadn’t been laid in more than a year. Physical attraction didn’t matter nearly as much as compatibility, and there was no chance he had anything in common with Lucas Kelly. The men Elliot had dated in the past had all been white collar like him, exactly the type to take home for Thanksgiving… on paper, anyway. In practice, that hadn’t turned out so well.

  No matter how perfect they looked on paper, those relationships had always felt thin and awkward. It was almost as if Elliot and his partners had been playing at passion, pretending there was a romance when in reality they felt nothing for each other beyond mild satisfaction.

  Lucas was different. On paper he was a mess. It would be like dating a client. Elliot knew the statistics and recidivism rates.

  But he’d never felt anything like what he felt when that man stood within five feet of him, not even when he’d been a fifteen-year-old with a permanent hard-on, making cow eyes at the basketball team.

  Lucas was tall and strong, with a stomach so flat that Elliot knew he’d be able to see the ridges of his abdomen if he pulled his shirt off. That wasn’t all, though. If it were, he’d be just another gorgeous hotshot Elliot didn’t have a chance with. It was his sass and humor that were like a dog whistle making Elliot sit up and beg.

  How was it possible to feel such a pull so quickly? It made Elliot understand, for the first time, that human beings were truly animals at their core.

  He remembered the way rain had trickled down the back of Lucas’s neck. Elliot had wanted to lick the droplets away.

  His cock hardened at the memory.

  A man like Lucas, who had no qualms about taking a stranger by the arm and maneuvering him exactly where he wanted, would be just as demanding in bed. Just as aggressive. Just as dominant. Elliot shivered at the thought.

  He’d never admitted to any of his prior boyfriends how much he desired to be held down and taken, and any subtle hints had either mis
sed their mark or been politely ignored. Greg had preferred to be on the receiving end himself, so Elliot had acted as a top more often than not. Sex was sex, after all, and he liked it that way too. But it had never satisfied that secret inner craving.

  He groaned and twisted around to collapse back against the shower wall. Water pounded down on top of him, but the tiles were cold against his heated skin.

  He scrubbed his hands over his face, trying to ignore the desire coursing through him and making him shake. But he couldn’t. He knew what he wanted. For the first time in a very long time he knew exactly what he wanted.

  He wanted to be held down and fucked hard, and he wanted it to be Lucas Kelly who did it. He wanted it desperately.

  If only he had any clue how to make it happen.

  Elliot felt like hell the next morning.

  He was tired and cranky and he couldn’t even blame it on lack of sleep. He’d slept like the dead after jerking off — twice — to the thought of a gorgeous, blue-eyed man pinning him down. He wondered if horniness hangover was a thing. It should be.

  Despite a fresh bagel and massive amounts of coffee, it was nearly impossible to cling to his last frayed nerve when he checked in with Julio and discovered the kid had only applied for two positions.

  “You want to keep living with your gran forever, is that it?” he asked, rubbing his forehead tiredly.

  “Grams needs me, man.”

  “No,” Elliot pinched the bridge of his nose. “She needs you to be a grown man for her. She doesn’t need some kid sitting on her couch, eating chips and hanging with the same old homies who got his ass thrown in prison in the first place.”

  “They don’t come around no more, except Juan, but he’s cool. He wasn’t ever into the car stuff. He sells pills and shit.”

  “An entrepreneur,” Elliot said wryly. “Good for him. Hopefully, he’ll come around even less when you’re working full time.”

  There was a long silence. Canned laughter and the distant clatter of pots and pans filtered through the line.

  Elliot had only been to Julio’s home once, but he could picture it perfectly: the cheap but clean furniture, the boxy old tube television, the threadbare carpet his arthritic grandmother insisted on running an old metal carpet sweeper across every day. It had been dark and airless, but it smelled of Mexican spices and floral perfume.

  Julio was a step above a lot of kids. He had someone who loved him, and Elliot suspected appealing to his desire to do right by his grandmother was the way to motivate him.

  Eventually, Julio gave a fragile sounding little sigh. “Look, man, I know me, okay? I want to help my grams, but I’m gonna want to shoot my brains out just slaving away at some burger joint. I get into crazy shit when I’m bored, you feel me? So if I want to stay out of trouble, I need to find something I’m good at. I’ve just got to be patient. I’ll get a call back, eventually. There’s a few more garages close to the hood I can try.”

  The leather of Elliot’s chair creaked as he reclined back. He stared up at the popcorn ceiling and marveled at the repeating themes of his life lately. He wondered if the universe was trying to tell him something. “You’re good with cars?”

  “How else do you think we boosted a 2018 BMW?” Julio had too much respect to add the giant moron to the end of his sentence, but it was heavily implied.

  “What skills do you have that a garage might want?”

  “Anything.” His voice warmed, and he began speaking with more enthusiasm than Elliot had ever heard from him. “I can do anything. Take ’em apart, put ’em together, wiring shit, you name it. I can rebuild a carburetor from scratch. I ain’t as good with the computer bullshit, but only because I ain’t never had one to play around with.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You got a plan, Mr. S?”

  He wouldn’t go so far as to call it a plan. In fact, he was certain it was a dumb fucking idea that was about to put him in the position of being a sad, middle-aged man who couldn’t take no for an answer. It was pathetic, pursuing some sexy young man who was way out of his league. He’d become a walking midlife crisis.

  He hadn’t even gotten a taste of Lucas Kelly yet, but he was hooked. He needed an excuse to see him or else risk looking like a total fool. Desperation wasn’t attractive on anyone. Elliot wasn’t above using his client as a means to an end. Besides, Lucas had clearly needed an extra hand at the garage.

  “What I have,” he answered harshly, “is a boot ready to go up your ass if you don’t get out there and apply to five places before tomorrow. No more of this ‘holding out for a management position’ bullshit. You take what you get, and then you bring proof of it to me so I can show the court that you have something going for you besides a hothead and a lot of talk.”

  “Do you know how hard it is to—”

  “I don’t care,” Elliot cut him off. “Listen up, Julio. If you act like every other ex-con, you’re going to be treated like one. It’s your job to convince the appeals court they made a horrible mistake when they tried you as an adult. No one can do that for you. Not even me. Got it?”

  “Yeah,” came the sullen reply.

  “Good. Get to it, dammit.” Elliot hung up and buried his head in the cradle of his folded arms.

  Someone chuckled. Elliot lifted his head and saw Maksim Kovalenko leaning against his open door frame. He reminded Elliot of Humphrey Bogart, with a Louis Vuitton briefcase in one hand and a designer raincoat draped over his arm. His cologne was subtle and expensive and his silver hair was tidy, not a strand out of place. Elliot had always thought he looked like he belonged on Wall Street rather than in a courtroom.

  “You never cease to amaze me,” Maksim said.

  “I’m sure I’ll regret asking, but how about clarifying that?”

  “You’re just so mild-mannered in everything you do. You’re like oatmeal, my friend, so inoffensive and yet so bland that it's actually offensive. I would have suspected some New England WASP upbringing if I didn’t know for a fact your family were a bunch of corn farmers.”

  “Teachers,” Elliot said through his teeth.

  “Whatever.” Maksim waved his comment aside. He grinned, and it gave Elliot a moment to admire the man’s impeccable dentistry. “What matters is that the only time you ever show a set of balls is when you’re talking to a client. You’re like a different person.”

  “I wish I could say the same about you and a heart,” Elliot drawled.

  Maksim threw back his head and laughed. “There’s no shame in being paid well for my hard work, is there? Or must we all embrace noble poverty as you have?”

  Elliot gnashed his teeth. He barely put up with Maksim’s pomposity on the best day, and today was not that day. He stood and began methodically placing files into his bag, hoping his colleague might take the hint. “Look, Kovalenko, you’re a fucking amazing attorney. You’re a shark. Everyone knows that. We’re lucky to have you whenever you decide to go slumming or need a tax write-off. But you’re right. There’s something that separates you from the regulars in this office, and it isn’t money.”

  “Enlighten me,” he said with a queer little half smile.

  “We believe in something other than ourselves.”

  Maksim made a campy hiss, his smile unchanged. “Way to go for the throat. With attitude like that, I could get you on with my firm.”

  Elliot rolled his eyes and slung his bag across his shoulder. “Goodbye, Maksim.”

  Maksim stepped aside and graciously waved him through his own door. Elliot ignored him, but beneath the man’s Cheshire cat grin, he sensed that he’d managed to annoy him. It was never a good idea to cross Maksim Kovalenko, but Elliot couldn’t bring himself to care just then. All his concern was reserved for what he’d say when he saw Lucas again.

  6

  Elliot

  “I know you aren’t here because of the car,” drawled a gravely voice.

  Elliot turned from examining a wall freckled with business licenses and yellowed news
paper clippings.

  It was after business hours, and a gruff looking man with a braided goatee had let Elliot through the front door before yelling to his boss to lock up after their last customer. It seemed a bit cavalier on the customer service side of things, but what would Elliot know? Except for a paper route when he was fifteen, he’d never been anything other than an attorney. Maybe that was how things were done at a place like this.

  His personal fantasy stood just beyond the registration desk, in the doorway of what could imaginatively be called an office, judging by the metal file cabinets and cluttered desk just past his shoulder. Instead of a typical mechanic jumpsuit, Lucas wore stained blue jeans and a white t-shirt that was liberally streaked with grime. His sleeves stretched tight over massive biceps when he folded his arms across his chest.

  In a club, that posture would have been purposeful, as it was the best way of displaying his sculpted shoulders and chest in the hope of luring someone exactly as thirsty as Elliot was turning out to be. But considering everything he’d recently learned about the man, he suspected the gesture was defensive. God knew why, but he made Lucas uneasy.

  “So sure of your work, are you?” he asked with a grin. He was aiming for charming, but he was pretty certain he’d come across as screwball instead, judging by the lack of response in Lucas’s expression.

  “Yup.”

  Apparently the time for flirting was long past. Lucas had probably realized that Elliot was the antithesis of everything a man like him deserved. Maybe he was embarrassed he’d ever made a pass to begin with, and he’d hoped Elliot had gone away for good. That could be the reason for the wariness in his eyes. It wouldn’t be the first time it had happened.