Taming Cross (Love Inc 2)

I nod, because my head has started hurting and I'm feeling kind of off.

“The back door is right here.” She points to what looks like regular dirt, then lifts a tiny, dirt-colored plastic flap and punches in a code. Some dirt falls away, revealing a plastic-ish, dirt-orange door. She opens it somehow—I can't see from where I'm standing—and I turn to get the body.

I try not to look at him as I grab one of his legs, using all my strength to drag him through the square doorway. I’m hoping Merri’s gone further inside, but she’s right there as soon as I stumble through the door. She presses something on the wall, the way you might with a garage door, and I can hear the door sliding shut as we maneuver the dead guy into the first room on the right.

It’s a surprisingly normal looking laundry room with a stacked washer/dryer combo, a little brown rug, a shelf of laundry supplies, and a framed photo of two men embracing, holding martini glasses.

Merri and I settle the dead guy face-down on the rug, and my gaze returns to the framed photo. The bald guy at our feet is smiling in the arms of a well-worked-out Hispanic man with shoulder-length hair and a Hollywood-worthy smile.

“That’s him,” I mutter. The infamous Jesus Cientos.

Merri nods.

I glance down at the floor, where blood is pooling. “This shit is weird.”

She nods and grabs a towel off a shelf.

“Let’s go out into the hall now.” She leads the way, lightly touching my back as I step by her. Then she stuffs the towel underneath the door.

17

Merri

THE INSIDE OF this place looks just how I remember, which is not really a surprise. Jesus and I picked out most of the décor online. From Pottery Barn, of all places. It was shipped to an empty building in Camargo, the next town over, and Jesus and David loaded it into a truck and brought it here and set the place up themselves, one weekend when Jesus pretended to be away with me. I stayed in the basement suite all weekend, cross-stitching some pillows Jesus wanted for the guest room and feeling buried alive. The basement of an underground bungalow feels really, really underground.

When I snap out of my memories and look at Evan, I find him holding out one of Jesus’s freshly laundered wife beaters. He's holding onto it with a dryer sheet because his hands are painted red. I wonder when he picked it up.

I slip the shirt on while he casts his eyes back at the door, and then I lead him into the half-bath behind the next door down. We wash our hands with pear-scented soap from Bath and Body Works.

Evan seems to be breathing hard. He looks kind of wide-eyed and is moving slowly. I wonder what the odds are that he was wrong earlier, and he really is in shock, but then I brush the thought away. This is his job.

Still, when we walk back into the hallway, I look him up and down and ask, “Are you okay?”

This makes him laugh. I laugh a little too. “Stupid question I guess.”

“Thanks for asking,” he says.

I'm leading him down the hallway, past the wine cellar and into the mouth of the kitchen, where I'm slightly amused to see surprise transform his face.

His blue eyes are wide. “Am I hallucinating?”

“Nope.” I pull out a chair at the weathered, white-washed breakfast table and move one of the blue and white breakfast mats so he doesn't get it dirty; old habits die hard. “Have a seat, I'll get the first aid stuff.”

Jesus's love nest is half underground, and it’s got central air. It feels good in here—probably seventy-three degrees, Jesus's preferred temperature—and the refrigerator is appropriately cold, so the antibiotic shots are still in good condition.

I find the first aid kit in one of the cabinets near the stainless steel refrigerator. There's an additional briefcase full of surgical supplies in the pantry. When I get back to the breakfast area, Evan has his right elbow on the table and his face propped in his hand.

Despite the shell I've tried to build around myself, I feel a bubble of concern form in my throat. Maybe it's the way he put himself between David’s bullets and me. I was running so hard I almost didn't notice, but I glanced behind me and there he was, with both arms out. I don't care who you are or what your job is, that's pretty heroic.

He doesn't move as I approach the table, so I get the perfect chance to really look at him. His shoulders are so wide, it's almost a little ridiculous, like he might be wearing football pads—except of course he's not. Beneath his sweaty, blood-splattered black t-shirt, I can see every ripple of muscle, from the exaggerated roundness of his shoulders to that delicious indention that runs down his spine between smooth slabs of muscle. I'm checking out the bicep of his left arm, wondering how he keeps it so in shape if that hand can't move, when I notice a wicked-looking scar along his collar-line.