“Like if you know what happened that day, we’ll see you in the fucking basement again,” Harding said softly.
“Yeah.”
Harding took his own breath.“Make Joey tell you some of this.Particularly about how the house burned down.But maybe you need to hear this too.I’m not sure if you know this, Gid, but you were a pretty awesome force of fucking nature.”
Gideon grunted.“Yay me,” he said, stretching out on the bed and getting ready for story time.“Now hurry up, it’s almost time for my nap.”
JOEY PAUSEDbefore he entered Gideon’s room.He couldn’t help it.He’d never dealt with parents, or people in their parents’ homes.It didn’t matter that Gideon was, in his words, almost forty, which made Joey close to thirty.Or that Gerald and Trish seemed likegenuinelynice people, who only wanted Gideon to be happy and well.
A lifetime of distrusting parental figures and of not expecting kindness from strangers had made him leery of imposing on their trust.
But Gerald himself had brought Joey’s bag up the stairs to put in Gideon’s room, and Gideon….
If Joey had ever wondered what love meant, he was starting to think it was the wave of well-being that washed over Gideon’s battered features when he saw Joey at the door.
And the feeling that, even though this ordinary (posh!) house in the New Jersey suburbs was alien to him, being this close to Gideon was home.
So it still took him a minute, a breath, before he opened the door, expecting to find Gideon asleep.He’d been planning to sit on the bed and read—his comfort book since he’d been a kid wasCall of the Wild, and he had a disintegrating paperback in his duffel.
What he found instead was Gideon sitting up, propped by pillows, reading on his phone.
“Whacha doin’?”he asked, trying to be playful.The fact was, his heart clenched, because with the lowering summer shadows, Gideon appeared almost normal.
He yearned for normal.
“Reading the action report from that day near Boston,” he said.Nobody talked about “raiding Stevie Carlyle’s compound”—that was too close to the truth.
Joey swallowed.“Ya see anything surprising?”
Gideon rolled his eyes.“Wellyeah.Did you knowIkilled Stevie Carlyle?”
Joey stared at him.“You did not.Ikilled Stevie.”
Gideon shook his head.“No, you didn’t.According to this, I had actually skewered him in the liver—he was bleeding out from a mortal wound when you cut his throat.”He gave Joey a bloodthirsty smile.“Not bad for an old man, you think?”
Joey felt a semihysterical laugh bubble out of his throat.“I’m not sure whether to be relieved or insulted,” he said.He shook his head and slid onto the mattress next to Gideon.“I’ll settle for impressed.You learn anything else?”
“Yeah.Never to ask Crosby to clear a kitchen.”
Joey couldn’t help it.He snickered again.“Yeah, that was pretty epic.Clint was like, ‘I don’t mind that you kept this asshole there from shooting me, but seriously, what the fuck?’and Crosby was like, ‘Joey told me to clear a path, and Idid!’”
Gideon laughed and then sobered.“Calix took one for the team.”
Joey sighed.“Yeah.He didn’t mean to get hurt, but he told us this made it look real—I mean he said that as they were loading him into an ambulance.”
“How’s he doing?”
“His arm got infected—it’s getting better.We’ve been stretched fuckin’ thin.They keep sending me and Pearson out so Swan can ride with Doba and Crosby with Henderson.It’s like trying to balance the new with the crazy, you know?”
“Yeah.Sucks when you can’t have your normal partner.But I’m glad that Doba and Henderson are working out.We wouldn’t even have a unit without them.”
Joey sighed, pleased with the normalcy of talking work.
And then afraid all over again.
“Gid, what’ll happen if… if we don’t have this.If we don’t have… you know.Work?”
He didn’t have the heart to explain more than that, but Gideon understood.
