Chapter 16
In his house, with the door shut and Deacon making breakfast, Rafe could almost forget that tomorrow he was going back to work. They’d made love last night, slow and gentle, and afterward they’d laid for the longest time, just talking. Deacon told him all about being a cop, Rafe explained how much he loved teaching.
They were like a normal, everyday kind of couple.
“How do you want your eggs?” Deacon asked, pulling him from his memories of the previous night.
“Scrambled. Thanks.”
The conversation was that simple, and when they sat next to each other on the sofa, plates piled high with eggs and bacon, Rafe wished he could capture this moment forever. Soon Deacon would have to leave to go back to real life. Didn’t matter how much Rafe wanted him to stay and make something of what they were, he would have to go. Rafe was going to miss him. Or at least miss the sex. That was what it was—just the sex.
Who was he kidding? Deacon leaving wouldn’t be good.
“Why did you stop being a cop?” He asked the question that had been bugging him for a while. When they’d first met, Deacon had been undercover. Now he wasn’t anything, and in his words it had been a few months since he’d resigned.
“I already told you.”
“Yeah, you said about the shooting, but you were doing your job, right? A career you were good at. Why would you leave? Couldn’t you get support, help to keep on working?”
Deacon swallowed the mouthful of bacon and scooped up some eggs, chewing and swallowing them as well. He did everything deliberately and slowly, and Rafe wondered if he was ever getting a real answer.
“Honestly, I was already on the edge after being undercover. I’d lost part of my identity doing that.” He stopped, ate some more, and Rafe didn’t interject with any more questions. He knew Deacon wasn’t done yet.
Deacon looked at Rafe. “When we took Arlo in, and his sons, I’d done my job, you know?”
“Yeah,” Rafe murmured.
“But shooting you, and watching you afterward, when you struggled at first with what had happened—”
“Wait, you watched me?”
“No, that sounds like…no, I wasn’t watching you, but I knew where you were, and Evie kept me in the loop as to how you were doing. The town was a good match when you got here, but before you settled here, I know you were left with a lot of questions.”
Rafe put his plate on the small table, turning to face Deacon. “Like how was it the man I saw with compassion in his eyes had to kill me? That was my biggest question back then. The answer you gave me, about the others that died, and how you wanted to protect me? I get that. I understand that.”
Deacon put his plate on the table and sat back on the sofa, cupping his coffee. His hazel eyes darkened, and he half closed his eyes in thought. “Some of the things I saw…” he began slowly. “You’d put yourself right in the middle of it all, and I was growing to care about you. I wasn’t just guarding you, I was falling for you, and I saw vulnerability and a good heart, not blackness and poison. I didn’t want to shoot you, and right after we arrested Arlo and his sons, I wanted to wake you up in the hospital and tell you everything. But I couldn’t.”
Rafe scooted forward a bit, just needing to touch some part of Deacon. He had just as much that he needed to get off his chest.
Deacon leaned into him, and Rafe pressed back, and like that they slipped into an easy silence. He was going back to work in the morning, and after a while lost to sitting on the sofa, he pulled himself together and sat at the small kitchen table. He lost himself in coloring in and laminating all kinds of things to do with the letters B and C for his five-year-olds tomorrow.
Deacon came to sit with him, and without prompting he sat there and cut out letters, placing them in a neat pile. He didn’t complain even though there were fifteen of each letter, not to mention fifteen bears and fifteen cats.
“What made you want to teach the little kids?” Deacon asked, frowning when he couldn’t get a proper hold of the tiny scissors they were using.
“I didn’t have a lot of choice. It was the only vacancy, and I’d done early years as an elective at college. Two weeks of intense training, and I joined the school as Mr. Jenkins, teacher to a class of five-year-olds.”
“Do you enjoy it?”
Rafe nodded. “It’s important to me.”
Silence for a while, but when Rafe finished cutting out the last B, he sighed and realized he had one hell of a lot of questions.
“I’m not in normal WitSec, am I? Not as when the government knows where I am. I mean, there was no need for me still to be in Cambridge Falls. Arlo was dead, Chumo as well, and Felix in a psychiatric hospital. My part was done. Right? Any typical person would have been back to their normal life.”
Deacon put down his laminated teddy bear and unhooked the scissors, flexing his fingers. “You had to stay dead until I thought it was safe. If Felix had ever realized…”
“Which he did.”
“He was ranting about you being the murderer, about how without you everything was okay. He blamed you. But you were okay; you were dead and out of his way. I didn’t have to worry.”
“Okay.” Rafe went back to cutting, but Deacon clearly had something else he wanted to say, because he didn’t pick up the scissors.
“But yeah, the WitSec you were in wasn’t sanctioned. With all three of the Martinez family away, I couldn’t swing getting you protection, not officially anyway. So I pulled some strings and we got you here. Can I ask you something, though?”
“Sure.”
“Are you happy here? Is this the life you’d want if you could choose it?”
That was an easy question to answer. “I love this town, the apple Danish and coffee in the morning, the hellos you get from everyone, the love of the kids, the school and my work colleagues. I have friends. I would never have looked at teaching as a career, but I love it. I just wish I hadn’t made such a fuss about the LGTB group, otherwise I wouldn’t have been in the paper and Felix may never have seen it.”
“Rafe—”
“But then I would always have been thinking, why did Deacon hurt me, and where was Felix, and were more people dying because of that family?”
Deacon looked down at the pile of teddies and shuffled them with his hands. They looked so tiny against his fingers, and Rafe could only imagine what was going through Deacon’s head at that moment.
“I wouldn’t have let him hurt you in that hit-and-run if I could have got to you first,” he said finally. He sounded so serious, so focused and determined, that for the first time in the last few weeks, Rafe felt completely safe.
“Thank you,” he said, and went back to crafts, and for the longest time they sat quietly, the only sound the scissors in the card.
“My teacher in first grade was this really old woman who smelled of peppermint,” Deacon cut into the silence with a brand-new subject that wasn’t about death and fear. “Probably in hindsight she was thirty, but she seemed old to me when I was five.”
“One of the kids in my class wanted to know if I’d met any dinosaurs, so I know they all think I’m old.”
Rafe picked up the letters and the bears, placing them in a folder along with some worksheets he’d printed out, and then he was done.
They made dinner together, watched crappy TV, and halfway through a rerun of some godawful soap, Rafe switched off the TV altogether.
“You could go now if you want. No sense in dragging this out if you want to get back to your own life,” he blurted into the otherwise silent room. There, he had it off his chest.
He had a hundred reasons in his head for why he’d said what he had, but they were lost when Deacon hauled him in for a hard, desperate kiss.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
They stumbled back at the force of the coming-together, but Deacon didn’t let him fall. Instead, with heated kisses, he encouraged Rafe backward to the bedroom, assisting him even as they kissed so he didn’t fall over his damn cast.
Gently, Deacon laid him on the bed, but there was still fire in his eyes, and the kisses went back to being determined and focused.
“I’m not leaving,” he repeated between kisses, and carefully eased Rafe up the bed, not touching the tender area in his side or his leg. He was impossibly gentle, but wouldn’t let Rafe move.
How is he even doing that?
“You and me,” he whispered, “we’ve got a long time to figure us out.”
“Deacon—”
“Things are not ending tomorrow, or the day after. I want more than this.”
They kissed again, and something about the desperation and tenderness made Rafe melt. He forgot his leg ached and his side hurt, and he was finally at peace.