Chapter Eleven
“Have you ever had a woman you’re dating lay down an ultimatum?” Elias asked.
Suspicious, Colby looked up over the top of his computer screen at his partner. How the fuck would he know about Mal’s ultimatum earlier? But Elias didn’t even look at him, instead pretending intent interest in the file folder spread out in front of him. The main room of the precinct was mostly empty, though two cops were in the break room shooting the breeze while waiting on the coffee pot to quit bubbling.
“I mean, I get it,” Elias continued, still not looking at him. “I get where she’s coming from. What she’s asking isn’t unreasonable. But for some reason my lizard brain just can’t deal with it, and that pisses me off.”
Yeah, Colby got that exactly. When Mal had told him he shouldn’t be a cop if he couldn’t accept the dangers and risks to both him and his partner, he’d understood her point, and even agreed. But that didn’t mean he liked it, and his knee-jerk reaction was to do the opposite just because someone, a woman, specifically, had told him the truth of it. “I thought you were more Neanderthal than lizard brain.”
Elias blew out a snort. “’Me man. You woman. You no tell me what to do.’ Then Vic clubs me over the head and drags me into the cave.”
“Sounds about right.” They laughed a few moments, and then Colby asked. “So what’s she wanting you to do?”
“Oh, it’s the kid, Jesse.”
Colby had met Jesse a few times, but he didn’t entirely understand the living arrangements Elias and Vicki had worked out when she took a homeless man into her home. In fact, Elias had been meaner than usual for months before and hadn’t even been seeing her. Then all the sudden, it was the three of them back in the picture, and then shortly after, engagement. “That can’t be… easy.”
“Not easy, no,” Elias replied quietly. “But she loves him, and I love her, and while she loves me too, sometimes I just want to beat the shit out of him and kick him out of her house for good.”
“And other times…?”
Elias didn’t answer right away. Colby glanced back up at him and paused, shocked. In over a year of working with him, Colby had never seen his partner rattled. Let alone…
He was pretty sure the red splotches on Elias’s cheek bones were embarrassment.
“I don’t even know.” Elias muttered, followed by a foul string of curse words and a slammed drawer. “It’s her fault anyway. She put me in this position. She made this… possible. And damn it all to hell, I can’t seem to care, which pisses me off even more.”
Colby couldn’t help but imagine about a thousand scenarios, each more outlandish for the harsh, pit bull cop he knew. It wasn’t his business, but he couldn’t help but wonder how they managed the lovemaking. Did Elias watch her with Jesse, and vice versa? Or did she take them both at the same time? And how the hell did that work? Elias wasn’t a touchy-feely guy. Not by a long shot. Colby couldn’t even remember the last time the man had hugged him, even a friendly pounding or slap on the back. So how would he take touching another man in his woman’s bed? Did he touch Jesse?
Did he want to touch Jesse?
Now Colby found himself blushing too and unable to meet his partner’s gaze. Tough, brass-for-balls cops weren’t supposed to think about touching other men. At least in Texas. No wonder Elias was having an identity crisis. If two men loved the same woman, wouldn’t that be a natural progression? Now that he’d thought about it, it wouldn’t surprise him at all. Though maybe it was surprising Elias. Something he’d never counted on.
Elias wasn’t looking for advice, not really. He’d do what he was going to do one way or the other. He wouldn’t even care if people started gossiping, just like he’d blown off the bondage jokes after he’d filmed that commercial. It was his own response to the situation, his anger, that was frustrating him.
So maybe hearing a different side of a similar situation would help. “Mal gave me an ultimatum this morning.”
“Yeah? About what?”
“Getting my shit together, if I want to keep seeing her. After she dragged out an emotional story from my childhood that I haven’t told anybody else.”
Elias grunted. “She’s digging her claws into you good.”
And her teeth. The thought made Colby’s dick stir. “No shit. I felt like I’d taken a fall off my horse straight into a patch of barrel cacti when she was done with me, and she never laid a finger on me. But she made sense. I mean, I want to get my shit together, obviously. But I’m still fighting myself to shut up the automatic hell no.”
“So we’re both chauvinistic pigs.”
“And we both picked strong women who aren’t afraid to tell us so.”
“Sometimes on a daily basis,” Elias grumbled, though he nodded. “Guess I need to hear it that often. I just wish I knew what the hell I was doing.”
“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing either,” Colby admitted. “I just… like her. I can’t stop thinking about her. I know there are things that she’s going to expect from me, and I don’t know that I’ll be able to do it. That I’ll even want to consider it. But… I can’t make myself care.”
“You’ll know. When it comes down to it, you’ll know what to do.”
“Will I?” Colby asked as he met his partner’s gaze. “Will you?”
Admiration flickered in Elias’s gaze, followed quickly by gratitude. He saw what Colby had done, though it wasn’t in his nature to bring it out and examine it with words. “You’re a stupid motherfucker.”
“So are you.”
Elias grinned. “Let’s get this shit done so we can get back to being told what to do at home.”