Acrobat (25 page)

Her lips curved as she turned to look at me before nudging me with her elbow. “You’ve been holding out on me.”

“No, this is new.”

She waggled her eyebrows. “Me likey.”

I groaned, and she laughed, and Ben sighed deeply as we all turned to him.

“What?” she asked her husband, the sound muffled because she was talking with her mouth full.

“You’re exhausting.”

“So what?”

Only then did it dawn on me that she’d eaten half my sandwich and I was starving.

I could tell that Dreo and Michael were both absolutely enchanted with Melissa Ortiz. But I understood: she was an easy woman to love.

“Why did you shave?”

I turned to look at her as she straightened up, picked up my beer glass, and took a long swig. “I dunno.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I think you thought, he’s so young, and I’m old, but if I look younger, if I shave off the beard, people won’t think I’m robbing the cradle.”

“He’s not old,” Dreo told her.

“Oh, honey, you’re preaching to the choir.” She shrugged before returning her eyes to mine. “And while it is nice to see the hot dimples again, you can let the beard grow back and people will still think you and pretty boy here belong together.”

There was throat clearing.

We all turned to Dreo.

“I’m not,” he assured her, “pretty.”

One of her perfectly shaped golden brows rose. “Maybe you need to go look in the mirror, Mr. Fiore.”

“I’m considered kind of scary, you know.”

“By who? My husband’s scarier than you are.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Ben asked her.

She just shrugged.

Ben and Michael took up residence on my couch to watch
SportsCenter
on ESPN, catching up on the all the college football that had been played that day, the scores and highlights captivating them both. Later, poor Dreo was grilled by the woman he found so charming, answering question after question she fired at him as they sat together at the kitchen table drinking oolong tea, which apparently they both liked. The buzzer that connected to the outside security door went off a couple of hours later, and when I asked who it was, a familiar growl answered me back.

“I need to talk to you,” Duncan said.

“I’ll be right down,” I told him and cut him off before he could argue.

I went out in jeans and a T-shirt, socks, and a fleece hoodie, all of which I had changed into when I got home. Opening the security door, I found him safe out of the rain in the small foyer where the mailboxes were.

“Come in.” I smiled, holding the door so he could slip by me. When I turned, I was surprised how close he was to me, and took a step back. “You’re working on the weekend.”

He looked me up and down but said nothing.

“How may I help you, Detective?”

“Can we go up?” he asked, taking a step closer to me even as I took one back.

“No. I’ve got company, and you’ve got news about something, right?”

He nodded, walking around me to take a seat on the couch that was in the lobby. “Come here.”

I joined him, taking a seat in the chair across from him, not beside him, and waited.

“What the fuck, Nate?”

I blinked. “What?”

“You can’t even stand to sit close to me?”

“Duncan, why are you here?”

He took a breath. “I’ve never seen you without the beard. You look great.”

“Thank you.” I forced a smile. “Did you guys find out something about my hit man?”

“No.” He took a breath. “The organized crime guys aren’t buying that the shooter was there for Fiore. It makes no sense.”

“But it makes no sense that he wanted to kill me, either.”

“Unless he wasn’t there for you or Fiore.”

But who else was… Michael. My eyes met his. “You guys think that the hit man was there to hurt Dreo’s nephew?”

“We’re exploring all the possibilities, but the fact is that the kid spent a lot of time with you and—”

“How do you know that?”

“We interviewed people in the building.”

I nodded.

“So if someone was trying to get to Fiore—to hurt him—they might have gone through his nephew or….”

I knew what he was fishing for. “Sure,” I agreed, instead of telling him more than he needed to know. “So is Michael safe, or—”

“He’s safe as long as that was the only guy someone sends.”

“But why would they? I mean, Dreo’s out of that business now, so I wouldn’t expect to see anyone else.”

“Oh? How do you know that?”

I took a breath. “Because he and his nephew are moving in with me, so I kind of have to know what’s going on with him.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

I stood up, shoving my hands into the big pocket at the front of the hoodie. “Duncan, I don’t want to have a whole thing. We don’t need to, and we’re so past the time that it should matter to either one of us. You have your life, I have mine, we’re done.”

He stared at me, and after a minute, I started toward the elevator.

“Nate!”

I stopped and turned and waited while he caught up to me.

“How are you just so ready to let this be over?”

“Because it’s been over for a year and a half already.” I sighed deeply. “What happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean something changed to remind you of us, and that’s why you care all of a sudden.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Nate, I always cared.” He smiled suddenly, his dark-gray eyes glinting. “I didn’t want anything to change.”

“Duncan, you’re in the closet. I’m not. I need a partner in every sense of the word. You can’t be that guy, and I’m so sorry, but when we broke up, I worked through things and realized what I wanted.”

He frowned. “You could have made it work.”

And it was so true that for a moment, I was dumbstruck, because God, who knew that Melissa Ortiz was the damn Oracle at Delphi? Hadn’t she said almost the exact thing? Because if I put my heart and soul into something, I could make anything work. But it took concentrated effort, and instead of doing that, I had given up on Duncan Stiel.

“Nate?”

My head snapped back, and I looked at him.

“You didn’t want to put in the work to make us happen.”

It was true. I had been so captivated by Duncan, so enamored, so infatuated, that I let his life drown mine for two years. I went along, and when I got tired of it, tired of it just being easy and comfortable and convenient but not love, I ended it. And that was why I had the man in my lobby looking at me like there were still places for us to go. I had let him believe that he was my whole world, let him be everything, and then one day just stopped loving him and walked away. It was something I did, something I had always done—poured on the charm, made myself into the ideal partner, lover, friend, indispensable and irreplaceable, and then, when I got bored or tired or tapped out, instead of fighting, I just quit. It was wildly unfair, and the only people I didn’t do it with were my family. Even my friends complained that I was always around and then just gone. The only reason I was constant with Ben was because he was attached to Mel and she was, even though she was my ex-wife, still my family.

“Nate?”

“Jesus, Duncan, I’m sorry,” I told him, reaching out, putting a hand on his bicep. “I’m really so sorry. I don’t know why I… and with us, I mean—I saw things weren’t going to change, but I just gave you the ultimatum that I knew you couldn’t change, and then when you said that was it, I just let you walk out.”

He was staring at me, and I saw all the pain there and felt even worse.

“That was my scene, my ending, and I blamed you,” I told him as he put his hands on my face, tipping my head up as he stepped close to me. “God, I’m so sorry. I let you believe that what we had, what we were doing, was enough and then one day just pulled the rug out from under you and told you it wasn’t. Forgive me, please.”

He took a breath and bent toward me at the same time I eased free and stepped back.

“Nate?”

I shook my head. “The fact remains that we’re in two completely different places in our lives. And now, finally, I’m ready to take the leap, the big one, the real one, and not run and not turn myself inside out and make myself into something I’m not.” There were no tricks needed, no midair trapeze work, no acrobatics without a net to impress and keep Dreo Fiore. I could do it without theatrics, with just me and my heart. “You need to find a guy who can live with what you can give him, and that’s not me.”

“I want you back,” he said softly, reaching for me again.

I moved further away, too far for him to touch. “I need more than you can do, Duncan, and the time where we could have maybe worked at it is over. You know that.”

The muscles in his jaw were clenching.

“You went from having what resembled a home life with me to screwing guys in bathhouses again, so I totally get that you’re grieving for that piece that we had. You don’t wanna do the nameless, faceless fucking anymore,” I advised. “I understand it, but don’t confuse the little life we were sharing with the big romantic Hollywood blockbuster that you could have.”

He let out a quick breath, and suddenly he was smiling.

“Move, start a life, get out of Chicago. There’s nothing keeping you here. Go and find a place where you can be a cop and come home every night to the guy of your dreams. It’s not me, and you know that just as well as I do, but it was as close to good as it’s ever been for you when you were with me, so that’s where this is all getting screwed up in your head.”

Long, heavy sigh as he looked at me with his gorgeous charcoal eyes.

“If I had loved you more than I loved myself, I wouldn’t have been able to let you walk away. If you loved me more than yourself, you would have never left,” I clarified for him.

His eyes locked on mine for long moments before he turned away. He didn’t look back, didn’t turn around before he went out the door. Before, when he had gone, I had always thought that our paths would cross again. This time the parting felt permanent. We were two very different people, and it hurt and it was sad, but both of us made sense, which was why neither of us could give in. I couldn’t thrive in his world; he couldn’t be himself in mine.

When I got back upstairs, I slipped in and realized that no one had even noticed I was gone. Walking to my bedroom, I sat down on my bed and stared outside at the pouring rain.

“Hey.”

I turned toward the door, and there was Dreo, leaning on the doorframe.

“You were talking to that detective for a long time downstairs.”

“How did you know?”

He levered off the frame and crossed the floor toward me. “I went to check on you and saw you guys talking. Melissa filled me in on him when I got back. She recognized his SUV parked outside.”

“Oh.”

“So, what?”

I shook my head. “Nothing, just same old stuff.”

He nodded, reaching me and sitting down beside me. “So what did he want?”

“Just to talk about the hit man on the fire escape.”

“And?”

“Nothing else. They just still don’t think he was there for you.”

“That makes no sense.”

I shrugged.

“Then who?”

“Maybe Michael.”

“Michael?” he echoed.

“Yes. They think the hit man might have been after someone close to you.”

“As a warning?”

“Maybe.”

“A warning for what?”

“I don’t think they know, or Duncan would have told me.”

“So then it could have been you,” he suggested.

“But no one knew you thought I was pretty,” I teased.

His eyes were hot and wet. “Anyone who really knows me, knew.”

“Yeah?”

His eyes searched mine. “Yes.”

“I like that,” I murmured.

There was a quick shrug of his broad shoulders. “Except that obviously someone was paying better attention than I thought, and I don’t want you hurt.”

“But like I told Duncan, there’s no reason for any of it now.”

“Unless the point is to just hurt me by hurting you or Michael.”

“Who would do that? How is that logical now?”

“It’s not anymore.”

“So we have nothing to worry about,” I said before wondering, “I wonder if anyone went after anyone that Sal cares about?”

“I dunno. He never said anything, and when I told him that day after you left, told him and Tony, neither one of them remembered seeing anybody around.”

I thought about that for a moment. “That’s strange, right? Why you and not Tony? Why you and not Sal?”

“And why after Mr. Romelli was killed? It would make more sense before he died to threaten us or him.”

“None of this makes any sense.”

He smiled. “So what are you thinking?”

“I just wonder, maybe someone wanted to hurt just you?”

“Like who?”

I turned to look at him. “I don’t know. Maybe Mr. Romelli’s son?”

“Joey?”

“Why not? He hates you, he hates the fact that you told his father you were gay… it makes sense that it would be him.”

“Nate—”

“He was horrible today. The things he said to you were obscene.”

“Yeah, but you don’t think that’s a huge jump from hating that I’m gay to sending someone to kill you or Michael?”

“Putting out a hit on you, you mean?”

“Oh, look at you sounding all made man over here.”

I bumped him with my shoulder. “I’m worried. It doesn’t make sense, and I hate things that make no sense.”

He nodded. “So, your ex, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“And all he wanted you for was to talk about the hit man?”

I turned to look at him. “There was a little more.”

“How much more?”

“I promise it’s not important.”

His eyes searched mine.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” I requested.

“Okay, what are you doing with him?”

“I’m not doing anything with him,” I said, smiling at the man I was planning on being around. “I’m doing everything with you, Mr. Fiore, if that’s what you want.”

He took my hand in his, and as I stared down at our entwined fingers, I noticed, as I had on many occasions, how strong they were. The veins that ran from his fingers, corded wrists, and sinewy forearms—the man was powerful everywhere but able to be gentle at the same time.