Fucking Sgt. Luke McClain.
Jai couldn’t believe he had thought the guy was momentarily human, that he had been concerned when the guy had walked into the gym with the stress of the day apparent in each step.
Jai stepped out the shower and wrapped himself in his towel, cursing his own stupidity. He wasn’t mad about coming out; he wasn’t going to live his life in a country closet. He was just mad that he had done so in a way that left him feeling so judged at the end. No homophobic slurs, just a guy almost tripping over his feet and the feelings of some sort of tentative friendship withdrawn.
Well he wasn’t going to stop his gym sessions, so the sergeant would have to get used to sharing the gym with a gay man. His sobriety was too hard won, and he needed to fill his evenings. Such a freaking pity too. Jai would have to not perv on the guy on principle. It been a while since he had come across a man that attractive. Six feet and a good few inches of pure muscle was even hotter in his civvies, where the strength of his arms and legs was exposed.
Jai didn’t even let himself appreciate the physical attributes of men who actively disliked who he was though. That way led to self-hatred, so he determinedly put his mind off Luke. Luckily, distraction came in the form of his phone ringing.
“Hey, Krissy boy,” he answered, a smile on his face for the first time since he left the gym.
“Babe, I already miss you. Are you super bored out there in the middle of nowhere without me?” His best friend’s voice was warm and reminded him of nights lying on their apartment’s soft couch talking into the night.
“Not bored. But I think I’ve landed in the middle of college housing with kids determined to drink their body weight before their six weeks here is up, and the cop they sent to pick me up looked like he wanted to arrest me for being gay tonight.”
“They sent a cop to pick you up. I thought you were working as a radiologist, not serving a sentence,” came Kris’s languid reply.
Jai let out a short laugh. “I think sending the cop out was country for nice. To be fair, they were trying to save me spending hours on a rural bus that apparently stops everywhere, and I think the cop is normal with most people. He just doesn’t seem to like exotic gay boys from the city.”
“Ouch,” Kris’s voice held real regret. There weren’t many gay men their age who didn’t know that feeling. “I guess fun with the uniform and handcuffs is out of the question then.”
“Looks like the only police uniform I’m going to get to take off a man is the stripper at Contact. It is a pity, too, because this guy is gorgeous, tall, muscles everywhere, and a perfect face with brown eyes.” Jai blushed as he said all this; he needed to stop talking about Luke. The guy was hot and rude, story done.
He forced himself to tune into what Kris was saying. “Before I visit you, I’m going to need a report of the state of Grindr out there.”
“You totally know that I deleted the app ages ago,” Jai replied. “Sober made anonymous hookups too awkward for my tastes.”
“No bars and no apps is why you haven’t had sex in more than a year.”
It couldn’t have been a year. Jai did the math in his head. Fuck it, it was more like eighteen months. Now he had moved to a country town with no apparent scene at all. “I’m accidently celibate as well as deliberately sober. No wonder no man is going to want me.”
“Uh-oh. Don’t tell me we have the return of emo Jai. Do I have to come to the country myself to wrestle the black hair dye and the dark eyeliner out of your hands?”
Jai knew he was lucky to have Kris. “I don’t think goth is the best look on a twenty-nine-year-old professional. Though, you know I’ve always rocked a bit of eyeliner.”
“Okay, the eyeliner is a winner as long it is only applied at night. Surely there are some burly country boys out there who are willing to be corrupted.” Kris would never give up what he considered his best friend duties to get Jai laid.
“I haven’t met any yet, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any here.” Jai injected a bit of optimism in his voice. “I’m coming home for Mardi Gras, so I’m sure that I’ll have some luck in the city.”
Okay, so he hadn’t had much luck there the last eighteen months, but maybe it was time to put a little effort into looking when he went home next.
“Babe, if you don’t get laid Mardi Gras weekend in Sydney with every gorgeous gay man in the country to choose from, you’ll have officially gone from picky to deserving a chastity ring. Let’s face it, you are beautiful enough yourself to get any of them.”
Luckily, Kris wasn’t around to see Jai couldn’t smile at that one. He had been referred to as beautiful a few too many times in his past life. It was part of why everything came easily to him, even the things that destroyed his life. It turned out that being a beautiful eighteen-year-old boy newly arrived on the scene meant that drugs and sex became a constant whirl around him. Even now, his beauty meant that excess was a little too easily available.
Jai looked around the sparse room. Well, no one could call this excess, or even really comfortable.
“Apart from scoping the world for my future boyfriend, what are you doing?” Jai asked Kris.
“Working, working, working.” Despite the lightness of the words, Jai could hear a raw undertone in Kris’s voice. He and Kris had connected in rehab and become best friends in the years that followed. Post sobriety, Kris had been the only person Jai could have considered living with, the person he had trusted to keep their home a sanctuary.
Leaving him and the safety of their friendship had been hard, almost impossible, but Jai had needed a place free from the reminders of his past. He needed a place where he could feel he was contributing to a community, where his value was professional, not ornamental.
“Babe,” Jai said. “Your company is killing it. Now I’m gone—and I totally expect a visit soon, by the way—you have no excuse for not following our meetings very well-meaning advice on how to meet a man.”
“Unlike some people, I can work an app.” Yeah, blond adorable Kris, didn’t have trouble meeting men, even with the restriction of trying to avoid alcohol and drugs.
“Meeting for a relationship, not a fuck, I mean,” Jai clarified. “I know you went to the same type of school I did, so the good news is like all the other Sydney private school boys you now have the choice between the gay rowing or gay water polo teams.”
Kris groaned. “The expense of our education can be for something other than knowing which Year 11 boy has the best dope. Okay, I’ll go on Instagram and check out who has the hottest team.”
Cheered at Kris’s capitulation, Jai requested for him to send him some pictures of the hotter teams. “That is one thing can I do from the country—decide which team has the greater shagging options.”
“Yeah, but you are going to miss Melanie’s face at the meeting when I tell her I’ve followed her advice on improving my love life through joining a club.”
Damn it, Jai really would miss that. He’d miss the humor, the gentle caring, even the awful overshares of their NA group. He’d miss sitting in the back row with Kris rolling his eyes when Frank overran his time with a narcissistic rant.
“You’ll have to keep me updated on the gossip.” Okay, so that was going to be a small breaking of “what happens in the meeting stays in the meeting” rule, but hey, he had listened to these people every week for the last five years. He had earned the end of their stories. Anyway, he needed some leverage to make sure Kris kept on going without him. And they had their own well-developed cone of silence.
“So how was your first day at work?” Kris asked.
“Pretty good. The staff here is friendly if not overly resourced. We had a child abuse case which was pretty ugly, and the cop I was telling you about pushed to get my opinion.”
“Aren’t you out there in the bush to be more than a photographer with a big camera?”
Yeah, Kris had listened to him complaining about the stupid rigidity of his profession’s protocols more than a few times.
“He was bossy about it, okay?” Jai defended his annoyance. “He got the arrest at the end of the day, but it was my first day there and he forced me onto the ledge by making me give my judgment in a case that delicate.”
“You are smart and you got amazing marks when you went back to university. Whatever opinion you gave would have been the right one.”
Kris’s fierce certainty about Jai’s professional abilities was yet another reason that Jai would miss him so much. Not everyone had believed that the boy who had once been unrealized potential could go back and achieve in a serious educational setting. Kris had encouraged him to go for his professional goals and had celebrated each triumph, from high distinctions to successful job interviews, with him.
As they said their goodbyes, Jai felt the bad mood of the day settle upon him again. Kris hadn’t even given him more ammunition to be mad at Luke. Hell, he might himself have been halfway to forgiving Luke about the hospital, especially when he heard of the arrest he’d made, but that didn’t mean Kris had permission to not be outraged on his behalf.
If Luke wasn’t so attractive, would Jai find his hostility this upsetting? Would he have been able to dismiss Luke’s disapproval more easily as an old-fashioned country guy who could disapprove as silently as he liked. Not everyone had been comfortable with Jai’s sexuality in the past, and though always slightly hurtful, usually Jai met it with a spirit of dismissive defiance.
• • •
Five hours later, another party shook the walls of Jai’s flat. Great, now he could go into his second day of work flat tired. If Luke hadn’t taken the news of his sexuality like a lead balloon, he might have been tempted to give him a call. The flats in his building were only supposed to have six residents, but it sounded like the whole pub had been invited back. Jai had partied till dawn in his wilder days—blow jobs in stairwells, dancing on rooftops (probably blow jobs and blow there too). However, now he just wanted the students next door to shut up, and he wanted the good night sleep.
• • •
Third night and third party. After two days of dragging his tired arse around the hospital, Jai decided he couldn’t spend another day as a health professional this tired and claim any sort of professionalism. The flat next door’s party game seemed to involve more than the usual amount of screaming. Jai thought if he went in there and had to deal with the loudest screamer, he might be tempted to go for the traditional method of helping those experiencing hysteria, with the old slap to the face. Even with his muddled middle-of-the-night thinking, he knew it was time to bring in the big guns. On the plus side, a 1 a.m. wake-up call on the home mobile had an enjoyable fission of revenge for some of Luke’s more snide comments.
Jai called the number he had been contemplating for the last hour.
“Did you really mean your promise about being the party police?” Jai asked, the already familiar voice at the other end.
“Are they still giving you hell?” came Luke’s measured reply. Any annoyance that he might have felt about the wake-up call wasn’t evident in his tone.
“If you came over now, you could count it in two categories: community policing and preventative crime.”
“Preventative crime?” Amid Luke’s question, Jai could hear the distinct rustle that was particular to clothes being put on.
There was a pause in the conversation as Jai’s tired brain contemplated what Luke slept in. Was he a conservative to his core in cotton pajamas, or did he go lazy boy option of boxer briefs? Surely he wouldn’t go for Jai’s person favorite of bare and enjoying the high-thread-count cotton sheets.
“Preventative crime?” the question came again, a little more amusement in it, as it was obvious that sleep-deprived Jai had lost his train of thought.
“Well, you’ve be coming as a protective detail for the squealing students, who I really think I would get great satisfaction out of either slapping or locking them out of their rooms.”
“Advantage of a small town is that I’m only four minutes away.” Luke’s voice then turned from tired to cop. “Wait till I get there to do anything. I’ll meet you at the apartment, and we’ll come up with a plan of action then.”
After hanging up the phone, Jai had a full thirty seconds of lying there before realizing he had someone (a cop someone) arriving at his apartment in three-and-a-half minutes. Covering his bare arse was priority number one and boxers and jeans and even a T-shirt went on in record time. At least the advantage of being sober meant there were no drugs to flush, and porn these days could quickly be deleted off the computer screen. The only objects probably not up to public scrutiny were a dildo and butt plug, but they have been carefully packed into the bottom of Jai’s cupboard so were unlikely to have any mortifying effect.
Almost exactly to predicted time, the knock came on the door. Now Jai was a bit more awake; he answered it with more than a little embarrassed regret.
“Sorry, kids partying too loud next door is probably pushing the friendship.” Jai winced at his words. They weren’t friends; he had brought Luke here as a punishment. And well, those kids were fucking loud.
“Hey, I’m amazed I haven’t had a call out here before.” Luke wedged his shoulder in the doorway. Middle-of-the-night calls seemed to have relaxed his perfect posture. Any time of the day, though, didn’t seem to have taken away how overwhelming his physical presence was, as his shoulders seemed large enough to block the doorway. He’d even managed to get in full uniform, as promised, for maximum intimidation purposes. Jai figured Luke must have slept with it next to his bed like Superman.
“I guess usually there are only other students here and they are in the party-hard pack.” At least the little bastards hadn’t decided at that moment to go to bed and were demonstrating their drinking game at full voice. Jai had feared they would suddenly quiet down when Luke was on the way over and he’d be left looking like a man who yelled at the lawn for growing too loudly.
“I’m the only old man living here,” Jai continued. “So I’m guessing that everyone is usually in on the party or too embarrassed to object.”
“Ancient dude you are,” Luke replied, looking more amused than Jai expected for 1:20 a.m. “Well, I better get my ‘so old I must be mummified’ body over there and do the scary cop act for the reward of silence.”
The after-midnight version of Luke was more relaxed. Or at least, that’s what Jai thought until he heard the triple tap on the door that they taught in the academy.
For the sake of discretion, and quite frankly to avoid a future tire slashing, Jai closed his front door so he didn’t look like the person who was responsible for the stern lecture he could hear muffled through the walls. He couldn’t make out the exact words, but from the tone, he heard the notes of warning he remembered in his DNA. Yeah, him having to call in an awkward cop favor in a noise complaint was definitely ironic. He had been at the end of that lecture more times than he could count.
Five minutes later, a discreet academy unsanctioned tap sounded at his door. This time Jai took a few steps back and let Luke over the apartment’s threshold.
“That should do it, at least for tonight,” Luke said, with a too appealing smile. “I don’t think any of them had any reason to have talked to a cop before, and they were mortified enough to promise to head straight to bed.”
Jai winced a little. “I feel stupid asking you to do that. They are obviously not hardened criminals; there is just stuff in my past which made me feel really uncomfortable confronting them myself.”
“Hey, community policing at its best,” Luke assured him. “Don’t look so worried, any night I get called out and it’s not to break up a domestic where someone ends up biting me is a good night.”
Standing there, so handsome in his uniform, Jai tried not to think of the ways he could imagine biting this man.
He tried not to let these thoughts show in a flush to his cheeks. “Well, I better get to the peaceful sleep you so generously provided and let you get back to yours.”
As Luke turned to leave, Jai said farewell with a, “Seriously, man, thanks.”
With a raised hand, Luke was gone.
Definitely easier not thinking about Luke’s hotness when he was just an asshole.