“Well, guess I better head home.” The sheriff took a half stroke toward the shore but then let himself drift. They were close enough that Eli didn’t have to raise his voice to be heard.
“It’s pretty late.” He’d already yawned hard enough to crack marble once, but was reluctant to break the spell of the moment.
“Yup.” Baxter treaded water for a moment while screwing up his face.
Eli could see him wrestle not to say the words and then lose.
“I’m sure you swim here all the time. But it would help me rest easy tonight if I knew I wasn’t leaving you in the dark with no one around.”
Argh. That annoyingly polite concern. Again.
He tried to work up some of his earlier irritation, but it wouldn’t come. Kicking harder, Eli crossed his arms and rubbed his hands against his goose-pimpled skin. His fingers were wrinkled and rough. “Guess it’s time for me to get out anyway. I’ve gotta be up in about six hours.”
He kept his eyes to himself as they got out of the water, because staring at the man who kept being so polite felt rude now that they were all quiet and sleepy instead of flirty. But when Baxter called out to him after Eli had tugged his clothes on over his wet limbs, his skin still prickled with a deep physical awareness of Baxter’s body.
“C’mere.”
Baxter sat on the end of the picnic table, thighs spread wide, the white of his undershirt glowing in the moonlight. His uniform shirt and weapons belt sat in a neat pile at his hip.
Eli eyed him, not really wary anymore after Baxter had been so damn mannerly about everything during their skinny-dipping session. Even his high school adventures had involved more attempted glimpses of naked body parts than this midnight swim had.
Baxter beckoned to him. “Closer. You’ve got something in your . . .” He pointed in the general vicinity of Eli’s hair.
Eli’s stomach dipped pleasantly as he approached. With Baxter sitting, they were almost matched in height. The warmth of Baxter’s breath washed against Eli as he stepped between his open thighs. Eli kept his gaze high, pretty sure his nipples, still tight from the cool night air on his wet skin, were pebbling visibly against the thin cotton of his old football T-shirt.
Baxter was so much darker than he was. The hair on his arms and curling over his ears was black against olive skin. Eli’s arms looked ghostly pale as he crossed them, feeling awkward and unsure of himself as Baxter reached out and plucked something from his hair.
“There.”
The stringy length of dead grass he showed Eli made him jerk to the side reflexively. Gross. That was the downside of skinny-dipping in the lake.
Nature. Yuck.
A hand on his hip kept Eli from bumping into Baxter’s leg. Those fingers tightened, and Eli inhaled sharply. The whole thing was pure reflex, Eli was almost entirely sure, because Baxter dropped his hand immediately after the brief squeeze.
“Thanks, Sheriff.” The title was a desperate attempt, at this point, to keep some kind of metaphorical distance between them, even as a rising tension set the night air between them on fire.
Eli shivered as Baxter brushed his fingertips against the drying waves at Eli’s temple, then dropped that hand and oh-so-slowly hooked one finger through the belt loop next to Eli’s zipper. His tug was so faint Eli could have pretended he hadn’t felt it, even as the weight of Baxter’s finger dragged the waist of his cutoffs down an inch.
Eli stepped into him.
“Joe.” The sheriff’s voice was a low growl, still rumbling in Eli’s bones, his mouth a breath away from Eli’s own.
“Joe,” he repeated and gave in. He leaned into the kiss, sliding his fingers up the back of the Baxter’s neck and deep into wet hair as their mouths found each other in the dark. Stubble scratched his face and the taste of lake water on warm skin filled his mouth. God, he missed kissing. And Sheriff Baxter was so very good at it.
Eli shivered, and Joe pulled him closer, wrapping big, warm arms around him as he dove into Eli’s mouth and tightened his fingers on Eli’s ass until Eli knew there would be bruises later. The idea just made him hard, and he groaned as his dick ached. He chased Joe’s tongue with his own and scraped his fingernails down Joe’s back until he was breathing hard too.
He tastes good, like chicory coffee and chocolate and something wild.
He wanted to eat Joe Baxter alive.
When he realized he was about three seconds from starting to hump Joe’s leg on a picnic bench, Eli wrenched himself away and took two steps backward. God, this sucked. It was amazing—so amazing, holy shit—but it sucked nonetheless.
His dick was so hard it hurt, and his lips frigging tingled with sensation. He dug his fingers into his thighs and tried to focus.
“Eli,” Joe started, dark eyes intense and full of heat.
He cut the words off before Joe could even say them. He wasn’t strong enough to hear whatever it was Joe had been about to say. “Listen, you are, uh, disturbingly attractive.”
Joe snorted, and Eli’s mouth kept running. “I mean, I can barely think straight around you because I keep picturing you naked. Which I can do without having to use my imagination now, thank you very much.”
Baxter’s low chuckle vibrated between them, making the bones in Eli’s chest hum. “You’re welcome.”
He hung on to his remaining shreds of sanity. “But this”—he flopped his hand back and forth between them—“can’t happen. Definitely not right now.”
Shit. He hadn’t meant to offer a qualifier. His brain was such an asshole.
“It can’t?” Joe’s eyebrow quirked up.
“No.” He tried to keep his voice firm. “I’m in a difficult place with the library board at the moment, which means I’m in a difficult place with the town council and Clear Lake in general, and I can’t have a . . . thing going on with the county sheriff. I’m already being accused of pushing my ‘agenda,’ and running around town with a hot guy is only going to cause me more trouble.”
Also, you noticed what no one is supposed to notice about Millie, and so you can’t be around us. Ever. But he didn’t say that part out loud, because those words were dangerous, and Eli already had more spine-stiffening danger on his plate at the moment than he could possibly manage.
He wasn’t sure his words were making any kind of a dent in his target, however.
“First, I rarely ‘run around town,’” Joe drawled. “I’m more of an easy stroll kind of guy.”
“Ha ha.”
Joe ignored his mockery. “Second, I think you’re pretty hot too. Just wanted to make sure that was clear.”
Eli ignored the thrill that lit him up like a rocket. “Is there a third?”
Shooting him a look that said he wasn’t pleased to drop the hotness conversation, Joe continued, “Third, one of the reasons I agreed to take over the rest of Buddy’s term before the election was because he told me how things had changed out here. He even made sure to let me know Clear Lake had a lesbian police officer on the force, not that I spend a lot of time interacting with the locals.”
The county sheriff and his deputies mostly patrolled the unincorporated areas and managed jail transfers and such, Eli knew, but he was pretty sure Joe was underplaying how much time he spent with Clear Lake’s PD.
Eli cocked his head. “Buddy Baxter said the words ‘lesbian police officer?’”
Joe’s look said what do you think? He didn’t need to elaborate. Buddy, God bless him, was not exactly the poster boy for LGBTQ allies.
“Close enough. Are you telling me the town has enough of a problem with your being gay that you can’t be out? That you would lose your job if you were publicly dating someone?”
Whoa. Dating someone? How did we get there already?
“Not exactly. I mean, there aren’t a ton of out gay people in Clear Lake.” He paused, reconsidering. “Hardly any, really. There’s the guy who runs the Christmas shop, but he’s a hermit. We only see him between Thanksgiving and Christmas, ever since
his boyfriend decided to stay in the city instead of coming back to Clear Lake. And I heard a rumor some kids want to start a gay-straight alliance at the high school. But . . . yeah. Christine is pretty much it right now.”
He liked the take-no-nonsense cop and her wife Jane, who was a nurse at the local hospital in the next town over, but he didn’t do much more than exchange friendly chats with them. He could tell he pinged their gaydar, so there was always an undercurrent of you’re one of us in their conversations with him, but it wasn’t anything Eli had ever talked about with them.
Hell, with anyone other than Kalea and Grandma Gee really. At least, not since he’d left college and returned to Clear Lake to start training under the old librarian six years ago. His hookups were few and far between, and only ever just that: hookups. Conversation about the challenges of being young and gay in a fairly conservative small town was never part of the deal.
“It isn’t about that though,” Eli said, struggling to find the words to sum up a lifetime of navigating the subtle currents and strong pressures of a small community where everybody knew everyone else’s business, and residents whose families had lived in Clear Lake for a hundred years didn’t hesitate to throw their weight around when things started changing. “All things being equal, someone else—you, for example—could probably be gay and out and dating someone without it causing too much trouble. There’d be gossip and some negative stuff, sure, but most people would be fine. Or at least quiet.”
Joe waited for him to continue, settling into his seat on the end of the picnic table like he could wait there all night to hear what Eli had to say.
“But they’re used to thinking of me being a certain way. Maybe they all knew I was gay, sort of.” He thought people probably had known, some of them at least. “But it was never something anyone in Clear Lake had to deal with. After my parents died, I kind of shut down. That’s an understatement, actually.”
Those had been hard years. Or rather, numb ones. He’d kept his grief at a distance for so long, because it was the only way he could live without drowning in it. And shutting down his emotions had shut down so many other things, like his body and what it wanted. He’d lived like a monk through high school, and even though he’d had relationships in college, he’d fallen back into those habits as soon as he’d returned to Clear Lake after graduation. He’d been “quiet Eli, that nice librarian boy” for so long, he’d forgotten that wasn’t who he actually was.
“But recently . . .” Eli smiled. “Recently I’ve started to wake up. Ever since this last election, I’ve been angry. Like, a lot. And I needed something to do with all that anger. Something productive, that would help me feel like I was making the world a better place, even when it seemed like everything was going to shit.”
“I heard about some of your library programs,” Joe said, interrupting him with a grin. “I think they sound pretty great.”
“They are,” Eli said confidently. When it came to his job, he was never uncertain, unlike when it came to his personal life. “And they’re exactly what this town needs to keep growing and changing with the times. But I’m also getting under people’s skin. A lot. And there’s been talk, I know, at the monthly board meetings about whether I’m the right person for the job. So . . .”
“So, you’re not looking to rock the boat with your personal life, when you’re already doing it in your professional life,” Joe finished for him.
Warmth bloomed in his chest. Exactly. “Yes.”
Joe got off the picnic table, stretching his legs and shaking out his hands like he’d been tensing them for too long. He shook his head, and Eli tried to read the expression on his face. Tried and failed.
“I’m sorry. I mean, really, really sorry,” was all he could think of to say.
“I get it. And I’ll try to stop thinking about kissing you, though I can’t promise I’ll succeed. But I gotta wonder . . .” Joe paused next to Eli on his way to his cruiser, and the night radiated heat that threatened to spark between them as they listened to each other breathe. The outside edge of Joe’s hand brushed against Eli’s. “Are you really the type to take that kind of thing quietly? I can’t picture Miss Gee’s grandson letting some narrow-minded people’s opinions stop him.”
Eli felt that brush of Joe’s hand like it had been burned into his skin the whole walk home.
3
Eli shoved his face in his hands and groaned like his dog had just died. He never should have said word one to Kalea but controlling his mouth around his BFF wasn’t one of his strong suits.
“Holy crap,” she hissed at him before turning back to her customer. “Four seventy-five, please. You got buck naked with the sheriff in the lake and then you kissed him?”
“Say it louder, Kalea. I don’t think Mr. Pederson heard you.” Eli glared at his best friend, who was perched on a rolling chair in the tiny ticket booth of the town movie theater, handing over change to the elderly man who clutched his lemon-yellow ticket stub in one hand.
“Good evening, Kalea. Eli.” The library board member, and Eli’s regular patron, nodded at them.
“Hi, Mr. Pederson,” Eli said, desperately cheerful and praying the man hadn’t heard Kalea. “I’ve got that Ben Franklin bio on hold for you, you know.”
“I’ll be in on Tuesday. Right after my trim and polish. Can’t miss my appointment.” The elderly bachelor was as regular as clockwork, hitting the library right after his biweekly haircut and shoe shine at the barbershop. “Especially now that the scenery is so pretty.”
A few years back, Clear Lake’s one barbershop had had to admit its demographic was rapidly aging itself out of existence. The two brothers who owned the shop had argued about it, as they did about every subject in existence from sunrise to sunset—this habit being the reason they were both still single at sixty-plus years old, town gossips were known to speculate—and come up with a solution that still provoked the occasional debate in the post office.
They’d rented out the third chair in the shop to a young woman, who not only cut hair in styles that hadn’t been seen walking out the door of the barbershop in, well, ever. She also sometimes, it was whispered around town, even colored or bleached the hair of the young men who now came into the shop by droves. All while wearing what were reported to be scandalously short skirts and sleeveless tops, many of which showed off her tattoos.
Eli was dying to book an appointment with the new stylist but couldn’t justify blowing the cash on a cut when Kalea took clippers and scissors to his head every month. After fifteen years of practice, she had the short-in-back, long-fringe-of-bangs-in-front look he preferred down cold, thank God. The early days of their home salon experiment were still referred to as the Everything-Can-Be-Fixed-with-a-Buzz-Cut years. For reasons. “Things still pretty hot up in the barbershop?”
“Oh, you should’ve heard Bill and Arnie when she sent the Thompson boy out of there with his hair blue like a peacock.” Mr. Pederson shook his head, but his grin shone bright. “And standing up like one too.”
“I can imagine.”
“But that girl, Sammie—boy’s name, ha!—she gives it right back to them. She’s a little spitfire.”
“Maybe she’ll come by the library some time.” He definitely wanted to meet the woman who could go toe to toe every day with the Simpson brothers without losing her cool and storming out of town. He couldn’t imagine why someone like that would end up coming to a small town like Clear Lake from anywhere else, but she could probably use some friends under eighty, especially since she was new in town.
New in town brought up thoughts of Joe, which Eli ruthlessly squashed in order to listen to Mr. Pederson.
“I’ll tell her you’ve got the eye, Eli. Best I’ve ever known for picking out the right book.”
He grinned and threw the dapper old man a salute, a genuine warmth glowing in his belly from the compliment. Eli was proud of that: his ability to learn his patrons’ secret fondnesses and icks—things they didn’t even kno
w themselves—until he could eventually suggest books to someone like Mr. Pederson that ranged far from his comfort zones, but still hit his every reader-pleasure button and turned him on to a new treasured author.
“You’ve always been my favorite.” And it was almost entirely true. He got a salute of his own in return, and a click of the heels.
“Bet you say that to all the Civil War buffs.”
“I’m telling you. Wait until you get a load of Ben Franklin. You’re going to love him.” Eli knew it would be a good match. Mr. Pederson loved best the superior strategists of the Civil War, Sherman and Jackson, and Benjamin Franklin’s skilled manipulation of the European powers to help the fledgling nation he represented as an ambassador was going to win him over in a heartbeat. Stacy Schiff’s A Great Improvisation was sitting on Eli’s hold shelf with a sheet of paper marked Pederson rubber banded around it.
“Tuesday, for sure. And thank you.” Mr. Pederson nodded. “That’s the kind of book people want to find at the library. Better than another display like that one you had with the agenda about the Indians.”
Eli gritted his teeth, a whole bunch of his fondness and good will evaporating in an instant. “We say Native Americans now, Mr. Pederson.”
“I just don’t see what was wrong with things the way Mrs. Williams did them,” Mr. Pederson groused, calling back to the “good old days”—as Eli’s regulars often did—before Eli’s promotion to Head Librarian. “Always loved her Lewis and Clark display, with the little canoe on the river.”
Eli reminded himself that the goal was always to educate, not antagonize, but he couldn’t bite his tongue entirely.
“Mr. Pederson, do you know how many times the library has had a Lewis and Clark display in the past forty years?” Before Mr. Pederson had a chance to open his mouth, Eli bowled right over him. His predecessor had kept meticulous notes. “Thirty-seven times. Do you know how times the library has done educational programming about the Kaskaskia, Peoria, and Cahokia tribes from our region?”
Mr. Pederson pressed his lips together.
Rogue Hearts Page 23
