Gideon frowned.“But if you don’t hear the music around you, you could miss out on a lot of joy,” he said, concerned.“C’mon, Carlyle—it’s not neuroscience.What makes youhappy?”
Gah!Joey racked his brains.During deployment, he’d wandered environs, watching the small victories and tragedies of flora and fauna around his seemingly oblivious unit.
“Snakes and birds?”he said.“Monkeys.”He paused.“Did you know the Spider Monkey is endangered because of habitat loss?”He sighed.“And it doesn’t get laid enough.But it has a prehensile tail.Not a lot of the New World Monkeys do.”
Chadwick appeared bemused.“I did not know that,” he said, as though assimilating that very fact.“That is sad—but very cool.Tell you what.”He fiddled with the radio for a minute.“I’m going to play some Imagine Dragons, because they’re old school, but you might have heard them, and you tell me about New World Monkeys, because I am seriously fascinated.”
At first Joey thought that would be too much noise, but Chadwick seemed to have a knack for picking just the right amount of noise for the occasion.The music was loud enough so, when Joey ran out of things to say about monkeys, a song called “Radioactive” that Joey remembered from grade school was playing, and he could hear enough for it to be familiar.
“Oh,” he said in surprise.
“What?”Chadwick asked.
“I know this song.”He hummed a few bars.“I like it.”
And then, for the first time, he saw atrulyjoyous smile break out on Chadwick’s face.“Awesome,” he said.“Next stop, Broadway!”
Joey frowned.“Broadway?Like… I don’t know.Plays?”
“Broadway likemusical theater!”Gideon almost crowed.“I’ve got tickets to seeWickedtonight.I’m stoked.I know it’s not your thing, but give it some time in the car, you and me, and itwillbe.”
Joey had snorted, but now, as they neared the suddenly foreboding and very expensive house, he heard Chadwick humming something under his breath.
I wonder if that’s from his musical?
Joey got it then.Hethought about creatures to calm himself down.Stalking mountain lions, protective wolves, swift and muscular deer.The poor doomed Spider Monkey with its rare-for-South America prehensile tail.
Chadwick heard music.
He was interested in mine.He wants me to be interested in his.
Oh.Was this part of the new job?Being interested in the people around him?
Joey got being interested in protecting people, or serving people, or avoiding people, or sometimes killing people, all in the name of making the ecosystem work.He understood ecosystems.His grandfather had taught him well about the predators not overhunting, about the prey needing to be culled.
But while he’d been glad to let pregnant does or young, untried stags pass unhunted in the name of keeping the ecosystem sound, he hadn’t wanted to share musical tastes with them.
The same went for bedmates—his personal ecosystem enjoyed the physical contact, but he was content to make the kill, as it were, and then fade from their existence, a one-off in the night.
Joey realized that if he was partnered with this man, he needed to not fade from his existence.They needed to berealto each other.
Joey was starting to see he had a lot of weaknesses, and it didn’t please him at all.
Chadwick was talking to himself, which brought Joey back to the here and now.
“So what do we have here, Mr.Boring White Guy,” Chadwick murmured as they neared the house.“Could be a stockbroker, could be a monster.Until we open the door, it’s both.Schrödinger’s monster.”He chuckled to himself then as they neared the door, and Joey found his lips twitching.
Out of nowhere, helongedfor Chadwick to turn to him, that self-deprecating smirk on his lips, and invite Joey in on the joke.Joey actuallygotthe Schrödinger’s cat jokes.Hegotthe dry, subtle digs at his own age.Joey had never reallygottenanother human being before, and except for the thing with American musical theater, Joey was starting to think he couldgetChadwick.He couldn’tfuckChadwick—for one thing, Chadwick apparently had game that nobody had suspected.Joey knew for sure that Kathy Novocek woman who had sent him the files on Chester Schumer had been angling for an invitation to Gideon Chadwick’s bed for the last two days.Joey could practicallysmellher pheromones through the phone, not that Chadwick responded to any of that noise.
But Joey had to leave the man alone that way.This thing they were doing—tracking prey together—they couldn’t contaminate that with any other smells.
Still, they were what?At the den of a fluffy bunny today?Joey had seen the boards, had even bought into the reasoning, but he couldn’t get over that mild, deer-in-the-headlights expression of the puffy-faced man with the white-blond hair and big wet blue eyes.
“Remember,” Chadwick said as they neared the door, “you have to go to the bathroom.”
Joey grunted, clearly recalling the distraction method they’d talked about on the ride over—in between discussions ofWickedand whether or not jaguars should be classified as endangered because their population was dropping.
Chadwick would establish rapport, and then Joey would ask politely to use the bathroom.Doing so while Chadwick engaged would give Joey a chance to scope out the place.Joey figured that finding traces of things that shouldn’t be there was something he could absolutely do.
