What the fuck are you doing, Miller? One good blow job, that’s all it’s going to take to ruin your career?
Miller brought his free hand up to cover his face, turning his head away from Danny. He tried to concentrate on the pleasure he’d felt, both giving and receiving, but his internal voice had disengaged its mute button and would not be silenced.
You keep this up, the life you know, it’s going to be over. For what? For something you don’t even know if you want? For something that can never last? He’s going to go back to his life. And you’ll go back to yours… what’s left of it, anyway, after this disaster.
The sofa cushions dipped underneath his back as Danny shifted his weight. “What’s wrong?” he asked, his lips pressing soft kisses against Miller’s arm.
“Danny, I can’t….” Miller hated how weak his voice sounded, how reedy and close to tears. He pushed himself upright, yanking up his jeans with one hand. He looked over his shoulder at Danny, who was watching him with no judgment in his eyes, his dark hair tousled like a little boy’s.
Miller leaned forward, elbows on knees, and rested his head in his hands. He wanted his old life back, the one where he was sure about who he was and where he was headed. The one where he could keep a lid on the doubts and fears that had been trailing him around every corner of his life for as long as he could remember. The life where he was going to marry Rachel and have three kids and that house in the suburbs. The one where he knew the difference between right and wrong and was sure about who was good and who was evil. The one where he’d never met a man with black hair and green eyes and a jeweled snake painted across his back, a man who pushed into all Miller’s private spaces and made himself at home.
Danny put one hand on Miller’s back, his thumb stroking a slow half circle. “What do you want, Miller? What do you want to happen here?”
Miller could smell Danny on his fingers. He dropped his hands from his face with a weary sigh. “I want to be the man I was before I met you.”
Danny swung his legs over the edge of the couch, hiking up his own jeans as he moved. He sat next to Miller without speaking, their bare shoulders touching. Miller risked a glance at Danny’s face, prepared for anger and steeling himself for scorn, but Danny was looking at him with compassionate eyes, telling him without words that it was all right. And for the very first time in his life, Miller felt understood—felt that someone was seeing him all the way through and not turning away.
Danny cupped Miller’s jaw in his hand, that simple touch making his stomach cartwheel to the floor. “It’s too late for that. It’s too late to go back,” Danny said, gentle but firm. “Now you have to decide the man you want to be from here on out.”
MILLER HATED college. He felt disloyal even thinking the thought; it was no secret what his family had sacrificed to get him there. But he didn’t fit in, and after two and a half years, he knew he never would. Kansas State University was hardly upper-crust, privileged, Ivy League ground, but it might as well have been to Miller, who’d grown up on a desolate farm where the nearest town boasted a whopping 400 residents.
Driving into Manhattan the first day of freshman orientation, his father at the wheel of his rusted-out pickup and Miller in the middle where the broken spring cut into his back, it felt as if they’d landed on Mars. The noise in the small city made him want to cover his ears like a little boy, the sheer volume of people and the speed at which they moved hurting his eyes. His father had given him a slap on the back when they’d dropped him in front of the dormitory, telling him, “Good luck, boy,” before hopping back in the truck. Junie had been slightly more emotional, hugging him close and saying she’d see him at Thanksgiving. Then they’d driven away, leaving him standing on the sidewalk with his thrift-store backpack and a threadbare suitcase that had been his mother’s.
From the very first, college had seemed dangerous, like he was navigating a series of land mines. He felt pried into; his personal space felt invaded, the way everyone wanted to talk all the time. Miller’s fellow students were full of rabid curiosity, always asking questions about his past and what he planned to do when he graduated. Professors wanted to know his opinions on books, current events, and philosophy. He soon learned that grunting and ducking his head was not an option unless he wanted to end up back in Fowler with his tail between his legs, facing a furious father who had somehow tied Miller’s success in college to the memory of his lost wife. Over time, he got better about talking, could answer a question in class without feeling the prickly heat of embarrassment staining his cheeks, and could make small talk in the library without hiding behind a textbook. But he was always careful about what he said, forever thinking out his answer before he spoke.
He made a few friends, but more on the order of drinking buddies, guys to catch a basketball game with, no one destined to weather a lifelong friendship. He learned from the other boys, though, how to pretend he liked the overcrowded bars packed with too many people drinking too much, how to walk around campus with his head up, waving to students he recognized, how to smoke a joint without choking and make crude jokes about girls he’d slept with once or twice. Girls he met out at the local bars and then followed back to their rooms or apartments for fumbling, drunken sex. The sex always felt good enough during, though never “mind-blowing,” as Scott had once described it. But afterwards, walking back to his own place, he was always lonelier and more confused than he’d been the night before. He learned to live with constantly feeling like a stranger in his own life, inside his own body, and the little voice in his head stayed mercifully quiet.
He never asked himself what exactly he was hiding from, what he was so terrified might be revealed. That was an answer he had no interest in hearing.
MILLER LOVED the FBI Academy. From the first day he arrived at Quantico, he felt safe. No one cared about his inner thoughts, about discovering who Miller was. They cared about making him a good agent, teaching him tricks and techniques for success, molding him into a man who believed he was acting on the side of the good and righteous, and it turned out to be a perfect fit.
He was expected to remain neutral in the interrogation room, to coax a suspect into talking using a variety of methods, gain their trust if possible—more information was revealed that way. But if not, he could be a hard-ass with the best of them, dish out a little dose of fear. Outside the interrogation room, Miller was to remember he was one of the good guys. The bad guys were the enemy, and he was a barrier between them and the rest of society. He wasn’t to let empathy sway him—these people were getting what they deserved.
Being a good agent required compartmentalization, and Miller was gifted at locking away parts of himself. Things he didn’t want to examine were shuffled to the back of his mind and never thought of again. His mental filing system had been serving him his entire life and never more so than in his early days as an agent.
He was damn good at his job. He felt confident, even living in a city with all its bright lights and overcrowded sidewalks, shielded somehow by his new “us versus them” mentality. He was able to walk into an interrogation room and remain professional and objective with the men sitting across the table. He was able to get them to open up, tell their darkest secrets, believe Miller was there to listen and might help them cut a deal, and then he could walk away at the end of the day, go have a few beers and laugh about what scum-sucking pieces of shit they all were. And he slept just fine at night.
He received commendations from his bosses for his ability to uncover the truth, to instinctively recognize when a suspect was withholding or outright lying. But about five years in, a funny thing started happening to him—the better he got at ferreting out the truth, the more often that little voice in his head started clamoring to be heard. It wanted to ask questions Miller had spent thirty years avoiding. He’d get up in the morning and look in the mirror, and he’d hear his own internal voice, the interrogation room one, smooth and slick, turning its intuitive powers on him. He managed to dro
wn it out, choke it down, most of the time, but the effort wore on him, leaving him exhausted and disillusioned too.
He started feeling sick when he lied to a suspect, making them believe things were going to work out all right in the end, when in truth, they were going down hard and the ride would be ugly as hell. He began wanting to lunge across the table and smack the ones who smarted off to him, daring to challenge his authority. He was slipping, and he knew it. He thought maybe he could get it back if he could just silence that voice, that fucking voice… the voice that had gained its strength from how good Miller was at his job, how skilled he was at uncovering lies. His ability to take cover inside his FBI skin unraveled in direct proportion to his talent as an agent. It was a Catch-22 of which his dreaded English professor would have been proud.
The job Miller had chosen because it felt safe and insulated—free from self-reflection, its parameters and goals clearly defined with no room for errors or individuality—ended up feeding the doubts Miller had been trying to starve into silence.
He was hanging on, though—some days with two strong hands, other days by his bitten-to-the-quick fingernails. And then he’d gotten the call, the nod from above he’d been waiting for: the go-ahead to begin surveillance on Danny Butler.
DANNY WAS slamming around in the kitchen. Miller smiled into his pillow as he listened to the sounds of Danny starting his day, a sideways glance at the bedside clock showing 9:03 in the morning. The man couldn’t make a pot of coffee or pour a bowl of cereal without it turning into a production. In spite of the noise, Miller liked knowing Danny was out there performing his morning rituals.
Then why don’t you get your lazy ass out of bed and go see him?
They’d parted company in the living room last night, Danny leaving Miller where he sat, closing his bedroom door softly behind him. When Miller had finally leveraged himself up with a defeated sigh, he’d noticed Danny’s gun was missing from the table. He hadn’t wanted to argue about it anymore, his anger burned out of him, leaving only exhaustion behind. He’d brushed his teeth and fallen into bed, welcoming sleep so he wouldn’t have to chase his thoughts around inside his head.
And now he was scared to face Danny. Scared of where they would go from here. Danny was right; there was no going back. But Miller didn’t see a clear way forward, either. He should call Colin, tell him he wanted off the Butler babysitting duty, and have another agent sent over to take his place. But what if they assigned some rookie, a newbie who’d make a stupid mistake and get Danny killed? Or Miller could stay. But he knew what staying meant. There was no way he and Danny could be in this apartment together and not touch, not kiss, not continue what they’d started. Miller had willpower, but he wasn’t an idiot.
First thing you’ve got to do is get out of this room. Go talk to him. You’ve had his dick in your hand and your tongue in his mouth, and you can’t sit down and eat a bowl of cereal with him?
Miller pulled on some jeans and a clean T-shirt and ran a hand through his hair. Danny was still in the kitchen, shirtless, his back to Miller as he crammed a filter into the ancient coffee maker on the counter. One glance at him and Miller felt the pins and needles of anticipation. The desire to touch, the need to taste Danny’s skin was obviously not sated, because Miller’s tongue was longing to make that journey again.
“Hey,” Miller said, his voice a tangle of sleep and lust.
“Shit!” Danny exclaimed. As he pivoted, the spoon he was holding turned to pepper the floor with coffee crystals. “You scared me. Is that the first thing they teach you at the FBI Academy, how to lurk in doorways?”
Miller smiled. “I think it was the third lesson.” He pulled out a chair and sat down. Danny leaned back against the counter, watching him with careful eyes.
“How’d you sleep?” Danny asked.
“Good. You?”
“Pretty good.” Danny dipped into the coffee again, dumping the new spoonful into the machine. The comforting gurgle of promised caffeine filled the kitchen.
“Miller—” Danny began.
“We need to start thinking about what you’re going to do after this,” Miller said swiftly. “They’re going to be starting the ball rolling for the Witness Protection Program, and it helps if you have some ideas about the kind of work you might like to do.” Miller looked down at the table, away from the disappointment he saw in Danny’s eyes.
“Okay,” Danny said. “I guess drug runner is out as a future career option.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Miller asked, eyes snapping to Danny’s.
Danny shrugged, taking two mugs from the cabinet above the sink. “It’s about all I’m qualified to do. And I’m good at it.”
“You don’t seriously want to go back to that life, do you?”
Danny didn’t answer right away. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But there were parts of it I liked. I’d be lying if I said there weren’t.”
“Like what?” Miller asked. He didn’t even try to keep the disbelief from his voice.
“The money. And this sounds weird, considering how Hinestroza runs my life, but the independence. No clock to punch, no one telling me to be at work at a certain time. My time was my own, for the most part.” Danny stopped to fill the mugs with coffee, the steam rising up into his face. “And I liked being good at something, being someone Hinestroza relied on. Working on some blue-collar assembly line isn’t going to afford me the same benefits.”
“No, but there is the ‘no one trying to kill you or arrest you’ part that might be a nice change,” Miller pointed out, taking his coffee from Danny’s outstretched hand.
“I guess,” Danny said. He didn’t sound convinced.
“I don’t understand you,” Miller said, exasperation making his voice harsh. “I thought you’d be glad to be leaving that life behind. To be moving on to something better.”
“Better is relative, though, isn’t it? I mean, sure I get a ‘new’ life. One where I don’t know a fucking soul in the world, where I’ve got to work some menial labor job because that’s all I’m qualified for. A life where I never get to see Amanda again, or Griff, or… anybody I care about, and I’m watching my back until the day I die. Honestly, it doesn’t sound like a real treat.”
“But you’ll be alive, Danny,” Miller said.
“Yeah,” Danny sighed, his tongue running along his lower lip. “I’ll be alive.”
The silence in the room felt heavy, that thick-with-implications quiet that Miller felt so often when he and Danny were together. He watched as Danny set down his coffee mug, took a purposeful step in his direction. “Miller,” he said, trying again.
The cell phone in Miller’s pocket sprang to life, the jangling ring startling him, making his hand jump against the table. He checked the caller ID. Colin. “I have to take this call.”
“Fine,” Danny nodded, looking away. “Fine.”
Miller walked into the living room before flipping open the phone. “Hello?”
“Hey, Miller. How’s it going?”
“The usual.” Miller slipped on his coat and shoved his feet into tennis shoes. “What’s up?” He pulled open the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the balcony, shutting the door behind him. It was frigid outside, the day gray and bleak. The icy rain of the night before had ended, but snowflakes were floating down, not sticking to the pavement yet, but catching on tree branches and grass, snagging on Miller’s hair as they tumbled to earth.
“We’ve checked all the unsolved murders in this area. Don’t think we’ve got any matches on an Ortiz. There are some John Does out there, but none of Hispanic descent. We’ve got one unidentified Hispanic woman, but that’s it.”
“Huh,” Miller grunted, pinching the phone between his ear and shoulder so he could light a cigarette. “I don’t think it’s a woman.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t know, really. Just a hunch.”
“You want me to have them keep looking?”
Miller rais
ed his eyes to the sky, let snowflakes gather on his lashes, blurring his vision. “Yeah,” he said. “Tell them to try Texas. Near Dallas. That’s where he was up until about ten years ago.”
“You got it.” Colin paused. “You still holding up okay there?”
“Yeah. I’m fine,” Miller said, exhaling a plume of cigarette smoke into the frosty morning air. He didn’t know if it was true, but he couldn’t afford to have that conversation with Colin. “When are we getting him down to the Marshal’s office for the Witness Protection interview?”
“I have a call in to the U.S. Attorney’s office. I’ll let you know when I hear back. Call if you need anything,” Colin instructed.
Miller hung up the phone, tucking it back into his pocket. His hands were stiff with cold, the snow falling harder now, a thin layer coating the cement floor of the balcony. He started to open the door and head back inside but pulled up short when he saw Danny standing on the far side of the sofa, watching him.
Miller looked through the glass, looked into those green eyes. He knew what he wanted. He just didn’t know how to go about getting it without losing everything he already had. His job would be gone if anyone found out, his idea of himself in pieces on the floor, and his relationship with Rachel compromised in every possible way.
You still think you’re ever going to marry Rachel? Or any woman? After what you feel when another man touches you? Stop kidding yourself, Miller.
He tossed his cigarette down in the dusting of snow and stubbed it out with his foot. He knew if he did this, if he followed where his body wanted to lead, he wasn’t going to be able to hide anymore. He was going to have to start answering those questions he’d been ducking all his life.
Maybe it’s about time. Maybe it’s about time you started answering some fucking questions of your own.
Dreamspinner Press Year Three Greatest Hits Page 55
