Over and Again

by Brooke Edwards

  Sam’s face is stubbornly set, and even Lydia looks like she wants to argue. “I can work from anywhere,” Sam repeats, for the fourth time. “Even if I couldn’t, you’re more important.”

  James reaches out, gently squeezing Sam’s forearm. “I know, kid, and it means the world that you’d do that—”

  “You’re our family,” Lydia cuts in. Her eyes are bright, and there are still faint, bruised-looking shadows beneath them.

  She’s been family to James for a long time, so the words are more comforting than a surprise, but something twists inside him at the look in her eyes and the tear clinging to her eyelashes. He’s met her parents a handful of times over the years, but they moved to California when she and Sam were still in college.

  “I know, sweetheart,” he says, and reaches out to take her hand with his free one. “And it’s not that I don’t want to spend the next three months cramping your style. Believe me, I’d take all sorts of pleasure in that.”

  “You’re an asshole,” Sam informs him sullenly.

  James grins. “I know, where do you think you learned?” He squeezes Sam’s forearm, and then Lydia’s fingers. “I can’t leave Derek,” he says softly. “Not after what we’ve been through—and that doesn’t mean that I want to be without either of you. Just that right now, the best thing for us is to stay up here with Clinton and Genevieve, who are family too. Their house is going to be easier for me to get around, and they don’t have to change their lifestyle a whole lot to accommodate us. One of the neighbors is a rehab physio, too. It’s all very convenient.”

  Lydia squeezes back and wipes at her eyes with her other hand. “Stop making sense,” she mutters. “I don’t like it.”

  The laughter that bursts out of him catches them all off guard, and the deep furrow between Sam’s brows starts to disappear. “I’m going to call you both every day,” he promises. “And we’re going to skype for family board game night. You just wait, Genevieve taught Derek everything he knows about Scrabble.”

  Sam groans, and Lydia perks up, the brightness in her eyes suddenly more interest than tears. “This is going to be terrible,” Sam says, but there’s a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

  Brock sets up in the conference room for the afternoon. He’s combing through arrest records for Sal, as well as other known members of the gang, trying to connect them to any of the activity under the same RICO scrutiny as Howard Masters. There’s a knock on the door a few hours after Daniel and Cohen had left to go about their own jobs for the day.

  “Come in,” Brock calls around the marker cap in the corner of his mouth.

  Cohen sticks his head around the door. “I went out to get something to eat and thought I’d bring you back something,” he says. “Grabbed an extra Reuben, I hope that’s okay?”

  “Would take a better man than me to turn down one of those,” Brock says, closing the files in front of him as Cohen enters, closing the door behind him. “Thanks for thinking of me, I forget about lunch all too often.”

  “Not me,” Cohen says, dropping a brown paper bag on the clear space in front of Brock and settling down on the other side of the table. “My day revolves around mealtimes.”

  “Good man.” Brock’s stomach rumbles as he rips open the bag. The salty meat hits his nose first, then the tang of the dressed sauerkraut, followed by the mellow notes of the cheese. He breathes in deeply. “I had no idea how much I needed this.”

  “Sometimes it just takes a good sandwich to turn your day around,” Cohen says, tearing open his own bag. “I know that I’ve had my day made by the right sandwich more than once.”

  “Good philosophy,” Brock agrees, picking up half of the sandwich with both hands. He takes a bite, sighing around the explosion of flavors and textures. Cohen leans back in his seat, legs splayed wide and shoulders loose as he brings his own sandwich to his mouth. It’s enough to draw Brock’s focus, pulling his eyes to the wide V of Cohen’s legs and the stretch of fabric across the muscles of his thighs.

  He’s not blind—he’s noticed how attractive the young detective is more than once. The problem is the young part. Brock is pretty sure Cohen’s a little younger than Daniel, and therefore Derek, and Brock is twenty years older than Derek. Evan’s at least crossed into his thirties and pushes the age difference down a little. He takes another bite of his sandwich and tears his eyes away, forcing them upward. They pause, his gaze dragging slowly over the rest of Cohen’s body on the way up to his face. It’s no better for Brock when his eyes focus on the younger man’s face, the pale smudge of dressing obvious against the tan skin around his mouth and the dark pink of his lips.

  Brock throws himself back into devouring the sandwich with a single-minded focus. He’s here to do a job, he reminds himself. Not to get lost down the rabbit hole of a striking face and well-fitting pants.

  Peter meets up with Tia for lunch, hoping adorable cat pictures and free food will soften her up. He hasn’t exactly been the best roommate or best friend, he’s willing to acknowledge. Admitting fault and food has always served him well when seeking her forgiveness. She’s suspiciously silent for most of the walk, and their bus ride. The man in tight shorts that might as well be briefs doesn’t even garner a reaction.

  “Are you sick?” Peter blurts, when the woman in a purple faux-fur cropped jacket gets off the bus and Tia doesn’t even look away from the window. “Or are you just seriously mad at me?”

  “I’m not mad at you for getting a boyfriend,” she says, but it sounds halfhearted.

  “Okay,” Peter says. “So what are you mad about?”

  Tia sighs, long and loud. “I’m not even mad,” she says.

  “Well, something’s wrong.” Peter turns in his seat to face her properly. “So are we going to talk about it or are you just going to ignore me all afternoon?”

  “It’s not you,” she says eventually, when Peter just keeps staring at her. “I just—I guess I got used to having you around, and now coming home to an empty apartment doesn’t feel as good as it used to.”

  Lonely. Peter can work with that. Well, he corrects himself. He can try to work with that. “You can spend some more time with us,” he says. “I know that once you actually spend some time together, you’re gonna like Daniel. Or, no, even better. I can take you to the shelter and we can pick out a pet.”

  “I’m not adopting a cat as a surrogate boyfriend.” There’s some fire in her voice at that. “It’s bad enough I’m sad because my human surrogate boyfriend got a real one.”

  “So a real boyfriend?” Peter grins at her, watching the color rise in her cheeks. “Maybe we can work with that.”

  “You are not setting me up like in some whack-ass romantic comedy.” Tia pokes him in the chest. “I have standards, and am completely capable of meeting someone on my own.”

  “Okay, okay.” Peter lifts his hands, placating. He’s already thinking of how to ask Daniel whether he has any single, straight friends who would make a good match for Tia.

  Cohen is tossing away the grease-stained paper bags, and empty cans of soda Brock had grabbed them from the vending machine, when Daniel appears around the corner at the end of the hall. “Bailey!” he calls, and Cohen’s head jerks up.

  “Yeah?” he calls back, nudging the small trash can back into the right spot with his foot.

  “Get down here, our guest has agreed to talk, but only to you.” Daniel’s voice is curt, and his arms are crossed over his chest. Cohen wonders how long he’s going to be paying penance for yesterday’s events, but jogs toward Daniel all the same.

  “He says he’ll talk now?” he asks as he comes to a stop in front of Daniel.

  The sound Daniel makes is more a scoff than agreement, but he nods. “Nicholas has changed his tune all of a sudden,” he says. “C’mon, we need to roll with it while he’s willing to talk.”

  Cohen follows him a couple of doors further down the hall, and sees Martine, Roger, and Guy in the observation room. Daniel motions toward the
door into the interrogation room. “Go on,” he says. “Get whatever you can out of him.”

  Cohen takes a deep, bracing breath as he pushes down on the handle to the interrogation room, where Nicholas Duncan is sitting, staring at the one-way mirror panel.

  “Nicholas,” he says in greeting as he closes the door behind him, and the other man’s gaze lands on him. “You wanted to speak to me?”

  “That wasn’t how yesterday was supposed to go down,” Nicholas says, still staring at Cohen intently. “Do you believe me?”

  Cohen sits down across from him, resting his hands on the table. “Let’s say I do.” He leans back in the seat, not breaking eye contact. “How was it supposed to go?”

  7

  Daniel breathes out against his hands, a noisy whistle through his teeth, while Cohen tries to stop the muscle in his jaw from twitching.

  “I think this calls for a drink, boys,” Roger says from the doorway. His eyes are narrowed. “Let’s pick up Hart and head out for a beer.”

  Daniel’s head jerks up, eyes wide with disbelief, and Cohen opens his mouth to protest, but Roger’s hand shoots up, cutting across his throat sharply. He points to his ears and then nods toward the door.

  “Come on, first round is on me.”

  Cohen waits for Daniel to get up, still reeling, before following. He closes the door after them, and trails behind when they make their way down the corridor toward the conference room. He can just see over Roger’s shoulder when they stop, and watches as Brock looks up. Cohen is still seeing everything through a strange, slow-moving fog, so he isn’t sure whether something is written on Roger and Daniel’s faces, but Brock stands up quickly, closing his laptop with a click that seems too loud. He shoves it into a satchel and bundles up the files spread over the table, setting them in a pile before picking them up.

  “We’re grabbing a beer,” Roger says, as Brock crosses the room toward them. “You can drop those at Bailey’s desk on the way.”

  Somehow, when they all turn away from the doorway, Brock ends up in step with Cohen. “You can lock them in my drawer,” Cohen says, glad to have a simple task. Something that will take minimal effort while the rest of the world spins away out of his control.

  “That’s a good idea,” Brock agrees, and his arm brushes against Cohen’s side as they navigate another corner before entering the bullpen.

  Cohen leads the way to his desk, weaving between the other desks and officers and trusting that Brock is following. He unlocks the bottom drawer of his desk with the key from his pocket, and steps away to let Brock drop the stack of files down into it. He crouches to push it shut and lock it again, and Brock’s hand passes across the back of his neck, making him shiver.

  “Come on,” Brock says quietly, settling his palm between Cohen’s shoulders for a second, and then sliding it until he can grip below Cohen’s elbow, guiding him up to his feet. “It looks like you need something a bit stronger than a beer, hey?”

  It isn’t a conscious decision to lean into the touch, but Cohen notices the warmth where Brock’s fingers are curled, even through his shirt. He’s pretty sure that the cold creeping across his skin everywhere Brock isn’t touching is some kind of shock, and will wear off once they get out of the precinct to somewhere they can talk about the earth-shattering information Nicholas Duncan had given up in the interrogation room.

  Brock keeps his hand under Cohen’s elbow even when he’s on his feet, the contact hidden between their bodies as they follow Daniel and Roger toward the elevators. The heat is enough of a counterpoint to slowly start to pull him out of the fog, and by the time the elevator doors close behind them, his throat is loosening up.

  Roger shakes his head, just once, when Brock opens his mouth. The elevator doors open at the next floor down, and a vaguely familiar woman steps in, tapping at her cell phone. She smiles in greeting and Daniel smiles back, before standing with her back to them. She gets out first, and the four of them follow.

  “There’s a bar a few blocks south of here,” Roger says when they step out onto the sidewalk, passersby milling around them. “Bailey, we’ve gone there a couple of times before. McMillan’s. Do you remember it?”

  “Yes, sir,” Cohen says, standing straighter. Brock’s hand falls away from his elbow.

  Roger nods. “Good. We’re going to split up and get in separate cabs and meet there. Callahan is coming with me, and Hart, you’re with Bailey. Not a word until we get there and I’ve got three fingers of whiskey in my hand, you understand?”

  “Understood,” Brock says, and then Roger and Daniel are moving off toward the side of the road. Cohen blinks after them, and then Brock’s hand is settling on his shoulder and steering him south. “Let’s walk a bit this way before we hail a cab, all right? Bit of fresh air, clear your head for a minute.”

  Cohen falls into step, syncing their footfalls after the first couple.

  Brock leaves his hand on Cohen’s shoulder as they walk a hundred yards in silence, and then angles their path toward the street, too. He sticks out a hand, holding it steady instead of waving, and a cab pulls to a stop before Cohen has even had time to think about how long it could take. Brock opens the door, and then steps aside, urging Cohen inside.

  “McMillan’s, please,” he says when he climbs in after Cohen.

  The driver grunts an agreement before pulling into traffic as Cohen clicks his seat belt into place. The middle seat between them is empty, and Cohen already misses the heat of Brock’s hand.

  Traitor, traitor, traitor, he chants to himself, tipping his head back against the headrest and closing his eyes. The breath he sucks in is quieter than he had any right to hope for, and he holds it for a few seconds, until some of the sounds from outside the cab start to sink in. The rumble of other engines, faint squeals of rubber on asphalt, the beeping of horns, and a distant, wailing siren. He catalogues each of them until he feels a pressure above his knee. He looks down, the quick movement enough to send his vision blurry for a second. Brock’s hand is splayed out just over his knee, and when he looks sideways, he can see the concern in the tightness of his mouth and the crinkle between his brows.

  “You okay?” he asks quietly.

  Cohen nods. “Fine,” he says just as quietly. He knows that it is just concern driving the physical contact, but he doesn’t want it to stop, not while he’s still rattling with the aftershocks of his hour in the interrogation room with Nicholas. Brock’s touch is grounding and comforting, and those are more important than the background attraction he’s been successfully managing to ignore since they’d met.

  They fall back into silence for the few moments it takes to reach McMillan’s. The driver stops at the curb, and Brock pulls out his wallet, handing him a folded note. “Keep the change,” he says, and gets out of the cab. He holds the door open, hovering behind it, as Cohen unbuckles his seat belt and slides across the back seat instead of chancing opening the door into traffic.

  “Come on,” he says when they’re both standing on the sidewalk. “I’m dying to find out what happened.”

  “You won’t be saying that when we’re done,” Cohen mutters, glancing behind them. No other cabs are pulled up along the block, so he thinks that Roger and Daniel must already be inside. “I definitely need something stronger than beer.”

  “I’m partial to a good scotch myself,” Brock says as they head toward the door. “Top shelf, usually. If I’m going to drink, I want to make it enjoyable.”

  “Nobody who has to pay rent in New York on a detective’s salary can afford to think that way.” Cohen reaches the door first and swings it open, stepping back to motion Brock through. Turnabout is fair play after all, and he feels steadier on his feet this far from the precinct and all the possible listening ears.

  James hates the crutches with the fire of pretty much every celestial body in the universe, and probably some extra. He likes to think that he’s a relatively low-key patient, considering the cop stereotype, but the crutches are sorely testing
his patience.

  Genevieve has eagle eyes and is deceptively forceful. James started to rethink their plan about three hours after their discharge from the hospital when she’d had Clinton deposit him in the big armchair in the living room, his bad leg elevated on the ottoman, and told him to stay. Derek had been given similar orders, only he was to stay on the sofa.

  The painkillers keep most of the pain at bay, but there’s still some discomfort. Mostly a tightness in the muscles around his hip and thigh, which feels more wrong than actually painful. James is pretty sure he’s on a serious dosage, because he doesn’t think the doctors were exactly thrilled to discharge him. He has to shift every few minutes to keep the muscles from locking into position, and at the same time be careful not to move too much or he feels the pain the meds are otherwise dulling. There is a thick line of stitches down the outside of his thigh where some debris had torn into the muscle, but aside from the itching as it heals, he barely notices that injury. He can still wiggle his toes and feel all the way down, so he’s willing to endure the indignity because he knows how easily it could have been worse.

  Derek falls asleep barely half an hour into the midafternoon feature of Back to the Future they settle on, and when Genevieve comes back into the living room from the kitchen with a tray of sandwiches, James looks up just in time to see the tangled rush of emotion flit across her face. He can pick out relief and worry, and a brief flare of anger, before it settles on something softer. James can understand all of them. Thinking about his own son enduring even half of what Derek has been through in the time James has known him is enough to start fury burning low in his stomach. It’s different to how he feels about what’s happened to them both as a result of Coy Fairhall, but the force behind it is the same.