by Jenn Burke
“I’ve gotta go.”
I trailed after her as she made her way to the door. “You don’t have to. We can brainstorm—I’m sure we can come up with another way to find out what’s going on with Marissa.”
“Not tonight.” When she turned to face me, her expression held nothing but disappointment. It made me cringe. “I understand not wanting to get more involved. I do. But you’re already involved, simply by being there.”
“And how is sharing my absolutely useless information the right thing?”
Or potentially ripping off the barely healed scab on my broken heart? By anyone’s measurement of time, thirty-three years should have been long enough to get over Hudson and his damned smile, but now that I was thinking about him, I could feel my soul bleeding. A trickle, just enough to know that things weren’t as healed as I thought they were.
“It’s something. Better than doing nothing.”
“But I didn’t do nothing. I called—”
Lexi sighed and headed for the stairs, raising a hand in farewell. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
I closed the door and leaned my forehead on it for a second before stumbling back to the living room. The blanket tangled around my legs and I kicked it off with more prejudice than it warranted. Collapsing on the couch, I grabbed the remote control and started stabbing my way through channels. That was a mistake. It didn’t take long for me to come across a local channel with the breaking news about Meredith’s death. Her image stared at me accusingly—until I blinked and realized she was actually smiling in the picture.
Call him, Lexi had said. As if it was easy to break more than three decades of silence. I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to hear his voice. I didn’t want to imagine how time had treated him—but now that my brain had gone there, it was all I could think about. Would he be bald? Going gray? Would he have a beer gut? Kids?
He was as gay as me, but it had been the mideighties when we’d broken up and Hudson had made it clear that openly being with me was something he could never do. Despite all but living together for five years, despite me worrying constantly that this undercover assignment was going to be the one where he got hurt and no one knew to tell me, he’d refused to put me down as his emergency contact.
They would know what it means, he said.
Logically, I grasped why he was afraid. He was in a macho job, one where he had to trust his colleagues to have his back, and he couldn’t give them any reason not to trust him. Back then—hell, even today—cops got killed for being gay. Not directly, maybe, but from a slow backup response or lack of support when requested. The closet was the only truly safe answer—though that could be argued too. I knew all that. But emotionally...
Denial had already killed me once.
Was Lexi right? Should I do more? I couldn’t see how my information would be useful, but I wasn’t a cop. Maybe it would help. Maybe something I saw would be the key to everything.
Goddamn it.
I spun my phone on the coffee table. “Phone the switchboard, or whatever the hell they call it now,” I muttered. “Leave him a message.” Because it was almost 8:00 p.m.—he’d be done for the night. Now was the perfect time to call, actually. I wouldn’t have to talk to him.
I pulled up Google, found the generic number for the Toronto Police headquarters, called it and pressed a button to speak to a person. When someone answered, I asked for Officer Hudson Rojas.
“Do you know what division he’s in?”
“Ah—no. I don’t.” When we met, he’d been in traffic, but the undercover assignments he’d taken on in the last part of our relationship meant he’d gotten transferred. I had no idea to which division. He’d stopped talking to me about his work at some point—probably by the third undercover stint in as many months.
“One moment please.”
The line went to hold music. Then, much sooner than I expected, it started to ring. One ring, two...it’d go to voice mail soon and then I could—
“Rojas.”
The familiar, sexy roll of his surname made me want to whimper. Oh my god, it was him. Not voice mail, not a recording. Him.
“Hello?” he prompted.
His voice was deeper and rougher than I remembered. Kind of like gravel scraping against my nerve endings—nerve endings that were never that sensitive with anyone else.
“I can hear you breathing and I’ve got your number on my screen, so you might as well say something,” Hudson rumbled. “It’ll save me the time of reverse lookup and tracking you down for pissing me—”
“Hi, Hud. It’s me—Wes Cooper.”
There was a satisfyingly long pause before Hudson said, “Wes?”
“Yeah.” I let out a small chuckle. “You remember me.”
“Of course I remember you, I—Holy shit. Wes.” Was it my imagination, or was that a smile in his voice? Could he actually be happy to hear from me? “I never thought—How the hell have you been?”
“Good.” How else did you sum up thirty-three years to a former lover? “You?”
“Good. Yeah. Wow.”
And now the awkward descended, along with a laden silence. I hadn’t forgotten my reason for the call, but how the hell did I segue into that? Great to hear your voice, Hudson, and by the way, when I was a ghost in Meredith Montague’s house this afternoon, I witnessed her murder.
“Um...so still a cop, huh?” Brilliant addition to the conversation, Wes. Jesus.
“Detective now.”
“Congrats.”
“Thanks.” I heard shifting on the line, and I imagined Hudson leaning back in his chair. “So why’d you call?”
“I guess it’s a little hard to believe I’d reach out after all this time to say hi.”
“A little, yeah.”
“Right. So, um...you know Meredith Montague?”
“The actor who was murdered this afternoon?” Hudson’s voice lost its happy glow and grew sharp edges. “What about her?”
Damn, this was harder than I thought—and I’d known it was going to be tough. I wished I could whip out a snappy quip, but I wasn’t that much of an asshole that I’d make fun of a woman’s death. Especially not one I’d witnessed. “I saw it.”
“Saw what?”
I wasn’t gonna have to spell it out, was I? I pressed my lips together, hard enough that they went numb, then spit out, “Her murder. Okay? I saw her get killed.”
A sound came across the line—a sound I shouldn’t have recognized after all this time. A sharp inhale with a soft grunt edging into a sigh. The sound of Hudson wanting desperately to react but holding back until he could control himself. It brought back memories of how often he’d looked at me, caught between frustration and resignation at my career. He’d never approved of how I made my living, and unlike Lexi, never hesitated to tell me I should do something else.
“Christ,” he finally said. “Let me guess—you’re the one who called it in anonymously.”
“Yeah.”
Another cut-off sound. “I’m coming over.”
Okay, that I hadn’t anticipated. “No. You don’t have to—”
“I damn well do, because I’m not taking your fucking statement over the goddamned phone. You’re at the same address?”
“Yeah.”
“Be there in twenty.” The line went dead.
I stared at my phone for a moment. Then I carefully put it down on the coffee table, scrambled to my feet and darted into the bedroom to raid my closet. If I was gonna see my ex-boyfriend, it was not happening in sweats and a ratty Edmonton Oilers T-shirt I’d owned since before we broke up.
I was going to be shiny and sparkly, damn it. An ornament of look what the fuck you missed.
Chapter Two
We met on a crappy gray, rainy day in November 1980. It was one of those days when you wanted to curl up
and read, maybe listen to a new record on the stereo. Or, if you were a celebrity, you could hang out at an equally rich friend’s house and pretend you were in the Caribbean somewhere while you lounged around his indoor pool—as was the case at the party I’d infiltrated. Turn up the heat to a stupid level and add enough drugs, and you could pretty much create any fantasy you liked.
By the time I left the party—with the heirloom charm bracelet my client had hired me to retrieve from her “no-good nephew” in my inner pocket—I’d forgotten it was cold and rainy, but I hadn’t forgotten my pantry was empty of pretty much everything. So I darted into a grocery store, grabbed a basket, and promptly bumped into a cop.
Let’s be honest—I nearly shit myself. But he was smiling and chuckling as he apologized for the collision, and I realized this was nothing but a chance meeting.
His eyes were the first thing I noticed after taking in the uniform. They were a deep, rich brown. Later, I’d try to find the perfect description for them. Russet, maybe, or chestnut, with the barest hint of smile crinkles at the corners. They were so damned warm and welcoming, as though he’d seen me—really seen me, and not only the external trappings of slightly out-of-date bell bottoms, dark blond hair I’d let grow wild into a big halo of waves, and a tight orange polyester shirt with a few buttons opened to display my one chunky gold necklace.
He’d followed me around the store—not in a creepy stalker way, but in a laughing sort of “our baskets have matching ingredients” kind of way. It was utterly charming and clear he wasn’t disappointed to keep bumping into me. Behind his bushy eyebrows and mustache, he was so happy and friendly and nice, and I felt bubbly and excited in a way I’d nearly forgotten. Eventually I asked what he was making—spaghetti—and he asked me—chili—and somehow we decided that my chili sounded better than his spaghetti, and he joined me for dinner. Afterward, we kissed, and I remembered exactly what those bubbles in my gut meant—anticipation, attraction, desire. For the first time in nearly fifty years, I found myself wanting to have sex, and that need to connect with this man who’d enticed me so thoroughly with his warmth and joy of life only intensified the next few times we saw each other. After a month of spending Hudson’s days off together, we finally gave in to the mad attraction and made love on my couch, listening to Meat Loaf, of all things.
Me getting physical even that quickly was rare—as in, it had only happened once before. So the connection I’d felt with Hudson was special. Incredible. Startling. I thought I’d found forever.
Not so much.
Hudson was fifty-eight now. I finally figured it out as I was searching through my closet. Fifty-eight. Old enough to be the dad of grown kids. Old enough to be a grandpa. Old enough to look at me and my unaging face and resent it. Hate it. Hate me.
I didn’t know if I’d be able to stand it if he hated me.
Fuck it. That didn’t matter. It had been his choice to walk away, his choice to put his job ahead of us and allow his frustration with my job to fester. I would never age and I would never die, and you know what? I wasn’t willing to change that even if I could. My life—not-life—was exactly what I wanted it to be. I was challenged by my work and I made damned good money doing what I did. I had an amazing witchy Amazon as a best friend—a description I’d have to share with Lexi later, because she’d appreciate being compared to Wonder Woman. I wasn’t the richest person in the city, but I was more financially secure and stable than I’d ever dreamed to be as a young man during the Great Depression.
My not-life was awesome.
One knock on the door made me doubt everything.
For an instant, I was tempted to step onto the otherplane and run. It wouldn’t be out of character for me to flee. But that would only delay this meeting. Because now that I’d roused the proverbial bear, he’d want...uh, his honey. Wow, that metaphor went places I wasn’t prepared to go.
Another knock, louder this time, and I pulled open the door.
My imagination had not primed me for the reality of Hudson Rojas in his fifties.
Holy shit.
No beer gut here. No extra weight at all on his broad shoulders and thick chest. His well-tailored suit hung perfectly on a body that looked as fit as he’d been when we’d dated—which was really, really fit, and a shock to see, considering he was closing in on sixty. His hair was longer than I remembered, long enough to hint at the waves and curls it contained, but still well above his collar. It used to be dark brown, but now it was more silver with dark threads. The laugh lines that had been starting to form at twenty-five were now fully realized crow’s-feet and gave the impression that whatever else had happened in the years since we’d split, he’d still smiled a lot.
I wasn’t sure if that made me feel better or worse.
He’d gotten rid of the ’stache and groomed his eyebrows, and now his eyes drew all my attention. His beautiful, changed eyes. The shift in hue was subtle, and it was probably something no one else would have noticed—they were still brown, but not as rich and warm as I remembered. More golden. Nice, but a good reminder that while my evolution was done, Hudson’s wasn’t. Despite his fit appearance, he was older and would continue to get older, while I...wouldn’t.
“Hi.” His voice was rough, gravelly, more so than it had been on the phone. An indication that maybe he was as affected by this reunion as I was. “Can I come in?”
I stepped back, and nudged the door open wider. “Yeah. Of course. I was just—”
His smile was crooked, as it always had been—as though he couldn’t quite convince himself to let the expression completely free. The big smile, the wide one that etched lines into his face, only came out for the best reasons.
“Same.” He moved into my apartment with only a brief pause. I caught a whiff of his scent as he passed, the smoky cedar aroma exactly the same as it had always been, and jolted as it pinged memories—so many memories. “You—you look exactly like you did.”
I prepared myself for a hug that never came—which was fine. Any embrace would be nothing more than awkward. Pressing the door closed behind him, I offered a wan smile. “But you knew that.”
The moment I’d revealed my not-ghostness to Hudson was something I wouldn’t forget—and I had no doubt the memory was as strong for him. We’d been together for a couple of months when he’d confronted me with suspicions that there was something “off” about me. He wasn’t sure what it was, if I was doing drugs, or sick—AIDS was a horrible, terrifying and unknown thing at the time—but he never was one to leave puzzle pieces out of place. My choices were to tell my secret or let him walk, so I told my secret. He still walked. For about a week. The longest week of my life up till then.
His gaze traveled around the room, probably noting how little my apartment had changed. Well, the layout. I’d replaced the seventies-era furniture years ago with IKEA stuff—and I should probably upgrade again soon. I’d painted earthy tones over the teal I’d thought was so cool in the nineties, but Hudson wouldn’t know I’d gone through that phase. When he’d last been here, everything had been a boring beige and I’d had an orange shag rug in the living room.
“How do you keep your neighbors from noticing?”
“About me, you mean?” I shrugged. “I own the building and rent to a series of college kids.” I purposely kept the other apartment on this floor empty, as a precaution against people getting too close. The rent from the lower three units of the manor-turned-apartment building was more than enough to keep it maintained.
His attention snapped back to me. “You own it? Since when?”
“Since...” I frowned, thinking. “Early nineties? Whenever the real estate crashed around then. I bought it through my company—April’s granddaughter, Rosanna, helped me figure it all out.” I thought of her more as Lexi’s mom these days, but that was a reference Hudson wouldn’t get—he was out of the picture before Lexi was even born. But he knew who Ap
ril was. The witch who’d cast the spell that brought me back to life. I cleared my throat. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? Beer?”
Hudson extracted a notebook from the inner pocket of his jacket. “No thanks. I’d like to go over what you saw.”
Down to business with hardly even a hello. I scowled, and of course Hudson didn’t miss that.
“What?” He settled onto one of the chairs next to the couch, filling it up entirely. No, whatever time had done to Hudson, it had certainly not diminished him in any way.
“That’s all the small talk I get?”
“Yep.” Hudson popped the P on the word and relaxed into the chair like he owned it. “You never would have called me but for this.”
“You didn’t call me, either.”
He tilted his head to the side, acknowledging the point, and looked me up and down. Again. Did I imagine the flare of heat as he took in my appearance? “Is that what you wear to hang out at home?”
I looked down at my fitted purple-and-black striped shirt and snug black jeans. I’d considered sliding into my leather pants, but that would have been a touch too far. “Sure. Why not?”
“That’s club wear.”
“I like clothes that highlight my assets.”
Hudson snorted. “Need to impress the mirror?”
I squinted at him. “What’s your point?”
“You look like a twink.”
Well yeah. With my height—five-seven on a good day—my lean build, and my dark blond hair, I’d never pretended to be anything but. “I epitomize twink, thank you very much.”
“Your apartment looks like a college kid’s first place off campus.”
My squint turned into a glare. “Hey, now. This is a good place.”
“I bet if I stuck my head in your bedroom, I’d see clothes everywhere, right? Like all the nights you took forever to get ready for the clubs.”
“The clubs you hated,” I reminded him. “What’s your point, Rojas?”
“My point, Cooper, is that I’ve grown up and you never will. There’s no point in small talk or any talk other than you telling me what the hell you saw this afternoon.” Casually, he flipped open his notebook, rested one ankle over the opposite knee, and waited for my statement.
