The Golden Ratio

by Cole McCade

  His breaths were warm against Seong-Jae’s neck. So warm.

  Seong-Jae did not think Malcolm knew what that meant, for him—that Seong-Jae even allowed it.

  When he had trained himself to be so defensive, to allow no one near any single point of vulnerability…

  To allow Malcolm so close to his throat, inside his defenses, was no small thing.

  To allow him, and to still feel not the slightest bit threatened.

  Comforted, instead.

  Comforted, until he could not sleep without those breaths on his throat, without that warm arm draped over him and Malcolm’s heat melting him into quiescence.

  “Happier than I have ever been,” he answered after a moment; he felt as if he was testing each word to make sure it was the right one. “He makes me feel…safe.”

  “Safe with what?” Aanga asked—almost forlorn, and yet…

  Seong-Jae smiled.

  He could not help himself.

  “Being me,” he said, as he drew Malcolm even more firmly against his side.

  “Thought so.” Aanga drew closer, stepping side by side with Seong-Jae, tilting his head to look up at him with a strange, rather melancholy smile. “I’d never seen you smile before. Not even once…but it’s good. I’m glad.” He lightly tapped his knuckles against Seong-Jae’s arm. “See you in the morning.”

  Then he was gone, a soft whistled tune rising with bittersweet merriness as he tucked his hands into the pockets of his slacks and sauntered past, heading for the exit with his head held high.

  Leaving Seong-Jae alone with his unconscious boyfriend, staring after him and wondering just why, when he would see Aanga again tomorrow…

  That had felt like goodbye.

  C

  THE NICE LADY IN THE lime green Pinto let him off on the side of I-10, where the railing looked down over the coast and he could see the rocks so small down below, distance turning them into pebbles so tiny he could have picked them up and tossed them in his hands and scattered them in an ocean that, from the top of the palisade, looked like a puddle that would ripple and scatter everywhere if he stomp-stomp-stomped his feet in it.

  It was very asymmetrical, very unclean.

  But he liked it anyway.

  He’d liked the Pinto lady too; she’d had a pleasingly angular face, the ratio of her nose to her lips so deliciously in line and the elegance of her sloping brow hitting a degree that made him sigh. He’d tried not to be obvious about looking at her, on the drive. She’d picked him up just outside of Nevada, and told him her name was Brandi with an I, and she used to be an exotic dancer but a friend of hers had a bedroom open up in a shared apartment in Los Angeles, so she was going to try to get into the entertainment industry as a backup dancer.

  She’d been hoping to be discovered, she said, with this sigh that said she was so young. Young enough to be idealistic; young enough to believe in dreams.

  Young enough to pick up a strange man on the side of the road, wearing oversized clothes he’d taken from the guard lockers.

  His t-shirt didn’t fit.

  It was a muted shade of brown with a broad yellow smiley and it said Put On A Happy Face, but it didn’t fit and he didn’t like that.

  He’d fix that later.

  For now he waved goodbye to Brandi in her rear view mirror, and smiled.

  Such a nice girl.

  Such a pretty girl.

  She hadn’t needed rearranging at all, and he hoped one day to see her symmetrical, evenly bisected face and little hearts-bow lips on billboards and movie posters everywhere.

  For now, though, he folded his arms on the railing and looked out across the sea, the sky, the land below. The glittering lights of the city that awaited, stop number one on a tour de force that would end in taking him home.

  First, though, he had some loose ends to tie up.

  Though he thought he would indulge himself, for now.

  It had been so very long since he had seen the outside of a cell. Nearly two decades. He had never bothered with the recreation hours, going out only when they forced him. He hadn’t liked the baking heat, the dryness. He was made for better weather, for air that tasted of salt and dampness when he breathed in, and he let out a little shiver, a little sigh, as he soaked in sensations that weren’t concrete floors weathered waxy and smooth by many feet, filthy cement walls, the plastic-y cover of a thin and uncomfortable cot.

  Even the saltwater rust and grime on the railing, biting into his bare arms and catching on the hairs on his forearms, was better than that.

  And the pavement was still warm under his bare feet.

  He’d never liked wearing shoes.

  Maybe that’s why he’d seemed so safe to Brandi with an I.

  She’d seemed like a bit of a flower child. Quartz crystals hanging from cords on the rear view mirror. Hippies, they’d called them when he’d been her age.

  He hadn’t been her age for some time.

  He stared down at his own hand, at the thick veins, the gnarls, the knobbiness of his fingers. The hairs on his knuckles were gray, he realized. When had that happened? How many times had he sat in that tiny cell and counted the hairs, plucked them until the numbers were even, and never noticed that they had turned from dark to light over time?

  “Huh,” he said, then smiled—happy face, happy face. He supposed he was old now. Maybe he should try to be more careful, but…later.

  Careful was for later.

  He breathed in a deep, satisfying breath of the wind, sucking deep into his lungs until his chest inflated like a bellows, then blew out sharply, letting it all out and savoring the rush past his lips.

  “Ah,” he said, flinging his arms wide. “I did so miss the aroma of the ocean at night.”

  He stepped back—then stumbled, as his heel crossed the white line marking off the shoulder of the interstate and a horn blared at him. The wind of a passing truck whipped against him, the hurtling momentum of its own sheer force shoving him against the railing without ever touching him, pushing him back onto the right side of the line.

  Always on the right side of the line, he had to be.

  “Fucking freak!” the driver yelled back out his window, his voice already zooming away along with those churning, churning wheels, so very round and round and round again. “Stay off the road!”

  “Thank you, good sir!” he called back, and saluted with a grin.

  Sage advice.

  Sage advice, indeed.

  People were so friendly, really.

  So very helpful.

  So very nice.

  That was why he liked to help them, too.

  And fix the little mistakes that never should have been made.

  “Now,” he said, and clapped his hands together, squaring his shoulders, and beginning to march, savoring the grit of the roadside beneath his feet as he made a very, very straight line toward the off-ramp. The off-ramp, and the city below. “Shall we, shall we…shall we begin?”

  [X: I KNOW THAT YOU’RE EMPTY]

  SILA HAD NEVER BEEN ABLE to sleep at night.

  Never been able to sleep at all, if his mother was to be believed.

  I used to think you were a change-child, she would tell him, bending over his bed and tucking him in with her long, pale platinum hair pouring down around them in silken-sweet ribbons. You would lie so quiet in your crib, looking up at the ceiling with your eyes so sweet. I’d painted stars all over your ceiling, then, and I think it was the stars that bewitched you. She’d bumped her nose to his, laughing soft and warm. I used to think they were calling you home.

  Sila had had a picture book, then, because he wasn’t yet old enough to read words, though he could understand them and speak them—but his stories all came from other people, from the words other people gave him, unless he looked in his picture book and imagined new stories to go with the images there.

  The picture he loved the most, though, was a picture of a soft green day, in the middle of spring. Everything was hazy with
strange brush-strokes, forest growing everywhere, but in the middle of the forest was a still quiet pond whose waters were as blue as the sky and as green as the trees all around. Growing next to the pond, though, was one tree that his mother had told him was a weeping willow, with its long, soft green fronds that fell down into the water.

  Sila didn’t think it was crying, though.

  No, the weeping didn’t come until later.

  He thought the tree was, instead, leaning down to reach for someone with its long pretty hair trailing, just like his mother’s long pretty hair trailing down over him.

  He was the pond and she was the willow, and on the next page with the next painting and the pond and the tree all swallowed by night, everything turned dark and cool and blue…

  He was full of stars, reflecting back galaxies.

  I didn’t come from the stars, Mama, he’d tell her, just as he told her every night, as he reached up to coil handfuls of her hair around his fingers and pulled her down to kiss her forehead. I came from under the water. Because all the stars kept falling into the water, and I picked them all up so I could bring them back to you.

  She’d laughed, nuzzled his nose, then gathered him up in a hug, squeezing him tight, warm. She’d always been so warm, he remembered, and he felt like he hadn’t been warm in so very long.

  It was hard to be warm when you had shed all your stars and become the wind, always blowing in from a cold, cold sea.

  I want you to keep them for me, little starshine. She’d cradled him in her lap and he’d clung so close, so close. I want you to always hold them inside you. That way everyone can see how bright you’ll shine. That way everyone can see your glow.

  He snapped his eyes open, staring up at the ceiling and sucking in a sharp gasp.

  Unfamiliar ceiling.

  Jason Min Zhe Huang’s ceiling, and Sila must have dozed off on this infernal sofa that had somehow become his home.

  He stared up at the ceiling, white stucco turned gray by the darkness. No stars, here.

  No stars left anywhere, for him.

  He wondered what ceilings others were sleeping under, right now, and if they, too, were thinking about how the world always seemed just a little off-kilter when the ceiling wasn’t your own.

  That was why he’d always preferred to sleep outside—on rooftops, on park benches, in abandoned homes that had been gutted and their roofs rotted out into natural skylights.

  So his only ceiling was the stars, and nothing could hold him in.

  He pushed himself up slowly, careful not to rattle the chain of the handcuffs binding him to the sofa leg, tossing aside the blanket some sod had put over him because for all these ridiculous people played at cops and robbers, they were still so very soft underneath and thought he still needed such human things as warmth.

  If he had to lay odds, he would guess it was that little waspish monster Mx. Marcus.

  Especially considering Sila was not alone in the living room, and had not been for a single night since he’d been confined here.

  Sade Marcus slept curled up in the easy chair like a little chipmunk, their body tucked small and tight inside a messy tangle of multiple blankets that they had woven around themselves in a cocoon against the winter cold. Even in their sleep their expression was troubled, brows drawn together—but where, while awake, they often withdrew behind a defensive scowl, at the moment there was nothing but…

  Loneliness, Sila thought.

  Because it was so very obvious to everyone but those two absolute tits where Sade would rather be sleeping.

  Sila sighed, rubbing his temples and shifting to lean his back against the arm of the sofa, facing away from that annoying bundle of overly bright energy. Sade made him itch, all those morals bristling everywhere like a hedgehog’s spikes.

  He couldn’t stay here much longer.

  These people would start to rub off on him, and make him soft.

  At least, he thought, his exit plan should finally be in motion.

  He’d entertain himself for a bit, watching Huang spin and spin and spin while he tried to escape a noose of his own making, perhaps even do a little goody-two-shoes work helping the man destroy the person who’d left him to rot in his little cocaine empire. It was something to do while he waited; something to do while he tried not to die from sheer and absolute boredom, stuck inside these four walls with people and their petty little games.

  For now, though, he found the remote and flicked on the television, keeping it on mute because he was such a courteous houseguest.

  It didn’t take long to find what he wanted.

  Just a few channels, before he landed on a late-night CNN news rebroadcast, and a grave-looking reporter mouthing words that looked ever-so-important, ever-so-serious.

  While behind her several crime scene photographs, heavily redacted and yet still quite grisly, flashed through in a never-ending cycle, along with multiple mug shots, names. The chyron at the bottom of the screen read in bold, declarative letters:

  PRISON BREAK AT MINIMUM SECURITY FACILITY OUTSIDE PHOENIX LEAVES 33 DEAD IN GRISLY MURDERS, 7 ESCAPED, ONLY 2 RECAPTURED

  Sila smiled.

  “How bright you’ll shine,” he whispered. “How very bright.”

  Then he closed his eyes, dropping the remote and sinking down to imagine stars where there were none, falling over and over and over into his dark waters.

  “Well, goodbye, then…” he sighed, willing his body to go numb, to let him rest for just a little longer before, soon, he would never rest again.

  “…father.”

  [THE END]

  Read on for a preview of CRMINAL INTENTIONS Season Two, Episode Two, “In Sequence!”

  [DISCOVER YOUR CRIMINAL SIDE]

  GET MORE OF THE THRILLING M/M romantic suspense serial everyone’s talking about. Follow Baltimore homicide detectives Malcolm Khalaji and Seong-Jae Yoon as they trail a string of bizarre murders ever deeper down a rabbit hole—that, if they can’t learn to work together, may cost them both their lives. Full-length novels released once per month—COMPLETE FIRST SEASON OUT NOW, Season Two just launched!

  Browse on Amazon and Amazon KindleUnlimited

  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07D4MF9MH?ref=series_rw_dp_labf

  See the series on Goodreads

  https://www.goodreads.com/series/230782-criminal-intentions

  [PREVIEW: CI S2E2, ”IN SEQUENCE”]

  [0: THE DEVIL WITHIN]

  SINDY CARMICHAEL’S FRONT DOOR IS open.

  She stops, standing on the front doorstep of her little adobe bungalow, the one she picked because the exterior was painted a shade of salmon pink she’d never seen anywhere else, and the high white concrete fencing gave her the illusion of privacy even though houses like hers were packed six per block and cost far too much for their postage-stamp-sized squares of lawn, but…well…

  Santa Monica property values.

  Her hand is outstretched, reaching for the doorknob that is not where it should be; an entire eight or nine inches away, in fact, open on the muted coral-colored tile of the entryway, with its cool shadows cut into strips in places by the bars over the arched front windows.

  At first, she feels no alarm.

  She feels no alarm because she remembers unlocking the iron-barred gate set into the front wall, the key turning and unlatching before the gate locked again as she elbowed her way through with her reusable cloth sack of groceries tucked on her hip like a baby. She doesn’t know when she picked up the habit of carrying her groceries that way; maybe when little Todd stopped wanting to be carried anymore but she’d already had six years of experience learning that was the most efficient way to carry a thing that fit neatly in the crook of your arm.

  But if the gate was locked, then she must have just left the door open when she’d ducked out to the corner grocery to pick up a few things for dinner tonight. She’s thinking something warm, maybe a pumpkin squash ravioli soup, because while daytime in Santa Monica still feels like late
summer it’s the nights when winter comes nipping in, and she thinks it’ll be nice to go to bed with something heavy and warm in her belly.

  Warm foods make Todd sleep better, too, as ever since he’s started second grade he comes home pale from anxiety attacks that make it hard for him to breathe, and if she doesn’t find ways to help him sleep he’ll toss and turn all night—but he’s getting old enough to refuse warm milk, and she doesn’t want to give him pills at his age. He’s got a therapy appointment, she remembers; Tuesday. But today he’ll be home from school in just two hours, and if she wants to get her pumpkin squash ravioli soup simmering in time for dinner, she’d better get a start now so she can leave it and finish her book before it’s done.

  She steps over the threshold, reaching for the doorknob to push the door the rest of the way open, but then stops, looking at her own hand.

  It’s the light off the silver charm bracelet that catches her attention first. It’s a Pandora bracelet, one of those expensive ones with the unique charms you add to tell your own story in one dangling, shining piece after another. Teddy had gotten it for her for their wedding, and the first little hanging bit of silver is a marriage charm with two interlinked rings while the last one is the pair of scissors that cut Teddy’s balls off in the divorce settlement after she found out he’d been sleeping with six other women and had two other secret families.

  In between there’s little Todd with a baby bassinet, there’s the painter’s palette for the speed painting class she took up to get over Teddy and do something for herself, there’s the a jewel-encrusted representation of the designer shoes she lets herself buy now and then when she can fit it in the budget and Todd’s school supplies don’t come first. There’s the little owl, too; she likes that one better for the decision she made to go back to school for her nursing degree over the things like graduation caps and textbooks.

  A knowing little owl, cute with its wide eyes ringed in tiny sapphires.

  But there’s one she never really looks at.