Recoil

by Evelyn Drake

  Solving murders was Tobias trying to atone for his sins. Tobias was a product of their shared past as much as Kyle was.

  Kyle felt like a blind man who could suddenly see.

  “Can I come over tonight?” Kyle asked as he cupped Tobias’s face in his hands.

  “What about other people? People knowing about us?”

  Kyle shrugged his wide shoulders. “I think… I want to be with you more than I care about what other people know.”

  “Any idea how someone found out?”

  “No, I haven’t told anyone. Well, except Monica.”

  Tobias lifted an eyebrow.

  “You think I’d be able to keep it from her?”

  Tobias smiled. “No, I guess not. That woman’s nobody’s fool.”

  “How do you think they found out?”

  “Well,” Tobias said, his mouth smirking to the side, “I’m guessing having sex in the alley didn’t help.”

  Kyle shrugged again. “What would it matter? I’ve had sex there a hundred times.” He winced as he recognized what he was saying to his new lover, but then he pressed on. “I’ve never been caught.”

  “Um, about that—”

  “You want me to stop fucking girls while we’re together?” Kyle interjected. “That’s not hard.”

  Tobias’s brow lifted. “No. I want us both to only fuck each other while we’re together.”

  Kyle smiled, the tension draining from him. “Done.”

  Tobias shifted and gave a pained wince again, and Kyle’s hands were on him in an instant, lifting Tobias from his kneeling position and shifting him to sit next to Kyle on the fan’s encasement.

  Tobias laughed.

  “What?”

  “I forget how strong you are sometimes.”

  Kyle felt his cheeks heat, though why Tobias’s comment would make him blush he didn’t know. As a teen he’d been tall and gangly. But once he’d started growing into his body, he’d filled it out with hard workouts that had wrapped his lanky frame in muscle. While Tobias had chosen a shield and a badge, Kyle’s body had become his armor against the world.

  Kyle took a deep breath that ended in a small sigh. “I’m glad to be… exclusive,” he said, leaning in closer to Tobias. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

  Tobias’s expression still looked pained.

  “What is it? Do you need to go to the hospital? Are you okay?”

  Tobias put his hand over Kyle’s. “There’s something I haven’t told you. The alley… You were caught. Lots and lots of times.”

  Kyle’s face scrunched in confusion.

  “I had a thumb drive anonymously delivered to me at the precinct. It had a video of you with a bunch of different partners. Every time looked to be in that alley way.”

  Kyle leaned away. “How long have you had this?”

  The space between Tobias’s brows compressed as he thought. “You know, that’s a really good question. I got that video after you and I were together at my apartment. I got it before what happened in the alley. That means that if I got the video as a way to discourage any further romantic entanglement with you, the person who sent it would have had to have been following you… or me. That means their awareness of what’s happening with you extends beyond the confines of this club. They’re digging into your personal life.”

  “Is Monica in danger?” Every muscle in Kyle’s body tensed.

  “No,” Tobias said, “I don’t think so. Everything is linking back to your romantic connections.”

  “Then I need to stay away from you, too,” Kyle said with the sudden need to put as much distance between him and Tobias as possible, as fast as possible.

  “No way. I just found you again. I’m not letting some psycho keep us apart.”

  “This is all too much,” Kyle said, shaking his head as he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, his hands clasping by weaving his fingers together. “I’m quitting this job,” he said softly.

  “You are? When?” Tobias asked, leaning forward to match Kyle’s posture.

  “I don’t know, but soon,” Kyle said, turning his head to be able to look into Tobias’s face. “I don’t want to be the hulking troll who carries the constant threat of beating people up. I mean, I know that’s who I am—a part of me will always be that guy—but I’m tired of it being who I am to other people. I want a change. I want a different life.”

  Tobias leaned in and placed a sweet, chaste kiss on Kyle’s lips. His touch was warm, and Kyle melted a little when he breathed in his musk.

  I’m so fucking in love!

  “Text me when you’re on your way?” Tobias asked.

  Kyle smiled, his whole body warming. He was going to be in Tobias’s arms again in just the matter of a few hours.

  Sliding his hand behind Tobias’s head, Kyle deepened their kiss until his body’s want of the man he’d loved all of his life was like an out of control fire in his belly.

  “Get as much sleep as you can before I get there,” Kyle said in both a warning and a gentle chastisement, “because once I get there, I’m going to make love to you until dawn.”

  Tobias trembled, and Kyle smiled, kissing him deeply again.

  19

  Tobias

  Tobias’s ears filled with a terrible scream, one that froze his breath and stole his body’s ability to move. His heart beat so fast that he thought a heart attack was imminent. His eyes shifted in their sockets, searching out the source of the scream… and there she was.

  Ten feet from the bed. Blackness oozed from the gunshot wound in her forehead and the knife wound in her shoulder, and all he could smell was death. It permeated every one of Tobias’s senses.

  Behind him, a warm body shifted. Kyle’s warm body. And Kyle’s heavy arm rested limp over his waist.

  Tobias blinked and found that his eyes were actually still closed. He fought with all of his might and managed to flutter them open. Darkness welcomed him, but it was an empty darkness. A peaceful darkness.

  Tobias’s body relaxed and his speeding heart slowed. The room was empty except for him and Kyle. It was blissfully empty.

  Kyle had come over and they had made love. Tobias still ached with pleasure. Taking a deep breath, Tobias closed his eyes and beckoned for sleep to take him once more as he willed his body to melt into Kyle’s warm strength. Their bodies fit seamlessly with Kyle’s long form spooning him, the entire length of their bodies flesh to flesh. It was an intimacy Tobias had had only a handful of times in his almost thirty years of life, and it was bliss.

  But he soon found his eyes open once more, staring into the darkness of his room. The darkness was still empty, but Tobias’s brain had woken up along with his body, and as fatigued as he was, sleep was not going to come again so soon.

  With a roll and a slide, Tobias slid out from beneath Kyle’s arm. Holding his breath, he watched pensively to see if Kyle would wake, but Kyle only adjusted his position and captured Tobias’s pillow to pull it in tighter against his body. Then he settled, sinking once more into deeper sleep.

  Tobias dared to breathe, and then winced in pain as he got to his feet. If anything, the blow to his hip felt more swollen than it had last night. He should have gone to the hospital, he knew. But they would have wanted to do x-rays and given him orders to rest, and his chief would have required him to follow them to avoid opening the precinct up to a possible lawsuit. So, while he’d reported the incident, he didn’t seek any medical attention and allowed there to be an assumption by his chief that he had gone and had gotten the all clear.

  It was stupid, he knew, but he didn’t want to lose the man-hours on the case. He was in it now. It had sucked him in and had claimed him as a part of what was unfolding. He just had to get ahead of it so that no one else died.

  On his way out of the bedroom, Tobias grabbed a pair of shorts tossed over a nearby chair and picked a discarded t-shirt up from the floor. His gun was where he’d left it—on the floor, tucked under the edge of the bed. He closed t
he bedroom door behind him, doing his best to minimize the handle’s click that resulted.

  He sank onto the couch, clothing doing nothing to keep the chill from settling into his bones.

  There were two deaths already—that they knew about. Kyle was the only factor connecting them, but the connection was shaky as hell, and Tobias really believed him when he said he didn’t do it.

  So what else was left? The attack on him? Who the hell could have figured out they were—whatever they were—before they were even seen in the alley? Where were the CCTV cameras that had captured the tapes he was sent?

  “Why isn’t this guy behind bars?” Tobias exclaimed, and then threw a quick glance in the direction of the bedroom door as he held his breath. Silence followed and soon Tobias dared to breathe again.

  Tobias swiped at his forehead. He felt like he were burning up with fever. At this rate, he didn’t think he would make it through another ten years of life.

  They haunted him. Every victim. But especially the serial killers—the victims he could have prevented, had he cottoned on sooner to what was going on. It wasn’t enough to tell people he saw them in his sleep. They’d say that was normal, bad dreams, with the kind of job he had.

  Maybe his dabbling with the paranormal, as much as he didn’t believe in it, was connected. Maybe he was trying to keep it close, in case it was a threat.

  Even the thought sounded crazy. Fuck. Who was he becoming? He ought to be back there, in bed with Kyle, happily cuddling the night away.

  Instead, he was on the verge of being sick here on the couch, finding his hands shaking—no, his whole body—as he slid to sit on the floor, pressing his face into the couch cushions.

  His voice was strangled as he tried to keep it quiet. “It’s me. It’s my fault.”

  And Kyle—he’d gotten into this job because of him.

  “I can’t tell him. He’d never forgive me.” Kyle cared about him more than himself. Knowing his supposed death had broken him, pushed him into a career where he could punish himself over and over… “It has to stop.”

  Tobias put his head into his arms, and for the first time in a long time, cried. His body was shaking on its own, his mind sliding further away from conscious reason or logic.

  20

  Kyle

  Kyle pulled his ear away from the door and paced the length of the bedroom as his heart pounded with painful intensity against his chest.

  He did it? He can’t tell me? It can’t possibly be him.

  Kyle felt bewildered. It was too much to take in. Too much to comprehend.

  He can’t be saying… I gotta get out of here.

  Kyle grabbed his pants off the floor and started putting them on. Once he was dressed, he headed for the door, but panic flashed inside of him when he heard the fall of Tobias’s feet approaching the bedroom door. He resisted the urge to barricade it.

  He’s not going to kill me, Kyle reassured himself. It was more of a pep talk than actual belief that he was safe.

  Does he have his gun? Where’s his gun?

  Kyle frantically scanned the bedroom. The gun was nowhere to be seen.

  The handle on the door turned and Kyle’s body went rigid as his knees bent and his eyes went wide, posing himself to leap full-bodied at Tobias as soon as he walked into the room.

  Tobias entered, and Kyle scrambled to process everything that he was seeing in the half-second that he had to work with.

  No gun. No nothing. Shorts. T-shirt. Barefoot.

  Tobias’s startled look when he noticed Kyle crouched and ready to spring within the confines of the darkened room completed Kyle’s decision. Tobias wasn’t planning to attack him.

  He headed for the door, senses on high alert.

  When Tobias’s hand wrapped itself around his bicep in an effort to stop him, Kyle pulled free without missing a step, focused on getting out of the apartment and away from Tobias as soon as possible.

  “Wait!” Tobias shouted. “Talk to me!”

  “About what?” Kyle’s voice was calm and nearly lacked any inflection.

  “About what’s going on! Please!”

  Kyle turned on Tobias. “You really going to do this? You really going to play dumb with me?”

  The color drained from Tobias’s face.

  “Talk to me when you’re ready to tell me, then.”

  Tobias slowly shook his head. “It’s not like that.”

  “Am I going to be able to leave here?” Kyle asked. “Am I going to get gunned down on the way to my car?”

  “No. Of course not! Of course not,” Tobias repeated, the spark of fight leaving him.

  Kyle yanked the front door open, and he was gone.

  Getting into his car, he started the engine and was driving before he even had his seat belt on. He just needed to escape. He needed to put distance between himself and someone every bit as bad as his parents had warned him about.

  “Why didn’t I see it before? What’s wrong with me?”

  It can’t possibly be him killing my lovers, can it? Jealousy? A cop being protected by his colleagues? This is all crazy.

  It was so late at night it was early, and he knew he wasn’t thinking rationally, but it scared the shit out of him that he’d never thought of the possibility before.

  A cold chill ran through him, and his knuckles turned white next to the wheel.

  “What have I done? What have I gotten myself into?” Kyle’s mind raced with all of the possibilities as he navigated his way home through the nearly empty streets. It wasn’t until he pulled up into the driveway of his own house that his heart stopped pounding. Closing his eyes, he rest his forehead on his steering wheel.

  The worst part was that if it was all a giant mistake, if Tobias hadn’t been admitting to himself that he was the killer… this was all his paranoia kicking in again, layer after layer of it designed to keep him away from Tobias.

  If I can’t be with him, what’s left for me? Everything about his future seemed to dead-end like a cliff in midair. I don’t even know what I am now. His brain buzzed with incomprehension.

  How could a man who’d slept with dozens of women—and one man—not know who he was sexually? How could he not know what he wanted as a future? Maybe his life was to be that of celibate bachelor with close friends. “But I don’t have any friends,” he lamented. His life was work, stalking Tobias, fucking women, and being there for Monica. Out of those things, Monica was the only one left.

  Leaning back in his car seat and resting his head against the headrest, Kyle took a deep breath as he stared at his quiet home in the soft light of the street lamps. “I’ll talk Monica into leaving with me, and we’ll go. We’ll start fresh.”

  Climbing out of the car, Kyle walked with his shoes in hand to the front door and let himself in with the slide and turn of his key in the lock. Pushing down on the door’s levered handle, he opened it was a soft click, hoping that he wouldn’t disturb Monica’s sleep.

  The house was dark and quiet, and, feeling exhausted, Kyle made his way through the unlit foyer toward the stairs leading to the upstairs bedrooms.

  His foot hit something thick but soft and in the next moment the floor was rushing up at him. Kyle his with a whoosh of air as the hit knocked the air out of his lungs.

  “What the…” Kyle said, leveraging himself up on his arms in order to roll over and into a sitting position with the stairs at his back.

  Hoping that it wasn’t broken, Kyle fished his phone out of his jeans’ pocket. Fiddling with its face, he triggered its cameras flash to shine like a flashlight and held it out in front of him. What he saw next stopped his heart. In the dim light of his phone’s camera light was a bloated and slightly discolored body. The man’s tongue protruded through his swollen lips. His eyes were bugged open, saucer wide, and looked as if they were ready to pop from their sockets.

  Yet the most disturbing thing of all was how the man’s hands were tied in front of his body as he lay on his back. They were done up in a bea
utiful ribbon and bow.

  “Monica…” Kyle breathed out, terror filling him. Twisting, he scrambled up the stairs on all fours as fast as he could move until by halfway up he managed to lift to a standing position without losing any momentum. He took the remaining stairs three at a time. His body bounced off the far wall once he reached the top and then he rushed in a perpetually falling state toward Monica’s closed door.

  There, he stopped. His entire body was shaking and a cold sweat had broken out on his brow. His breath was coming fast, yet he didn’t feel like he was getting any air.

  He draped his arms over the top of the door frame and willed himself to steel himself to the worst of his fears laying beyond that closed door. He knew that as long as the door was closed, there was hope that Monica was okay. But as soon as it opened, reality would swamp and overcome his world in ways he wouldn’t be able to stop.

  With tears in his eyes, Kyle turned the handle of Monica’s bedroom door with slow, delicate care so that the only sound it made was a soft click. Pushing the door open, Kyle didn’t dare to breathe.

  That was when he saw it—when he saw her—and his body crumpled to the floor, shaking uncontrollably as he levered his back against the door frame. Less than ten feet away, Monica slept unharmed, and as he watched, she moved, snuggling deeper into her pillow as she slept.

  “Oh thank God,” he intoned, his voice trembling as he leaned his forehead against the heel of his hands. His heart was beating erratically, his head felt light, and his body was covered with a clammy, cold sweat.

  Rolling over onto his side, Kyle lay on the floor and closed his eyes as he listened to his heart, willing it to calm. Finally, the desire not to have Monica wake to discover him laying in the doorway of her bedroom overwhelming, Kyle got to his feet and closed her door as silently as he had opened it.