She grumbled at him, a low rattle of not-quite-a-growl in her throat.Cloister nudged her with his knee.
“Still doesn’t like me?”Kincaid said, raising an eyebrow.
“Does anyone?”Javi asked.
Kincaid’s eyes narrowed, and his smile tightened a notch.“The people that matter,” he said.“The ones that don’t…who cares what they think.”
Javi closed the car door.It wasn’t quite a slam, but it was forceful.He stood there until the car drove away, then took a deep breath.It hitched his shoulders the same way Bourneville’s sigh had swelled her ribs.As he let it out, he turned and walked over to Cloister.
“What’s wrong?”he asked as he offered a hand.“I didn’t know you were planning to come over tonight.”
Cloister eyed it for a moment as he weighed the pain he was going to feel against explaining that he’d hurt himself.He picked pain and the warmth of a familiar grip as Javi hauled him up off the ground.
“Neither did I,” he said.“I should have called first.”
“You don’t need to,” Javi said.
Except for the first time in a while, Cloister felt like he did.That could be his own issues, though.It wouldn’t be the first relationship he’d let his insecurity undermine.So he swallowed the need to pry and nodded after the car instead.“What was that about?Since when do you and Kincaid ride share?”
Javi started to answer, but hesitated.His mouth tightened for a second, like he tasted something sour, then softened into a wry smile.
“Like it or not, he’s my boss,” he said.“I have to play nice.”
“You just told him no one liked him,” Cloister pointed out.He reached up to brush his thumb over Javi’s cheekbone with easy affection.Javi snorted softly as he tilted his face briefly into Cloister’s palm.
“Sometimes ‘nice’ is hard,” Javi admitted.He stepped away as he got his key out to open the door.As he pushed it open, he glanced at Cloister.“Maybe I should get one of those biometric locks.Then all you’d need to get in is your thumb.”
Cloister snorted as he started up the stairs.He tripped and nearly slid off a step as Bon squeezed between his legs and raced up to the top in three long, loping strides.
“With my luck, someone would cut off my thumb,” he said.
Chapter Eighteen
Cloisterwashedthetwopainkillers down with a swig of water and then recapped the bottle.If Javi noticed that was Cloister’s first stop in the apartment, he didn’t mention it.
“You want the honey walnut shrimp?”Javi asked as he shrugged off his coat and grabbed a menu from the side to look over.“And broccoli?”
He did.
Cloister resisted the brief urge to be contrary and ask for something else.He was a cop with a dark past.If he wanted to be unpredictable, starting with his dinner order seemed a bit sad.
“Is that the place that we got the mango pudding from last time?”he asked as he put the water back in the fridge.
Javi flicked the menu over.“No,” he said.“They do fried bananas with manuka honey?”
It wasn’t the same.Cloister hovered on the edge of spiraling out because of that.He controlled himself.Just about.
“Sounds good,” he said.
They’d split it.Javi never ordered anything sweet, no matter how much he craved it.Cloister suspected that there was a page of family photos from around…nine, probably, after his grandmother died…where Javi had been stockier than his parents liked.It was good to remember that Cloister wasn’t special just for having hang-ups from his childhood.
He sprawled out on the couch, his arm thrown along the back of it.It looked good, and elevating his wrist helped while he waited for the painkillers to kick in.Bourneville jumped up, onto the blanket per the agreement she’d worked out with Cloister, and turned twice before she lay down.
Javi paused in the middle of his order to glance at them.His mouth quirked briefly in a soft smile, and then he flicked his attention back to the call as he corrected the restaurant that he wanted the Crab Rangoonandthe shrimp.He stripped off his jacket as he finished the order, hanging it neatly over the back of a chair and giving the shoulders a brief, fastidious dust.
Desert ruddy sand sprinkled over the wooden floors.The robot vacuum would get it tomorrow, after they left.
Javi put his phone down on the island and rolled his head from one side to the other.His shoulder blades poked sharply against the fabric of his shirt as he rolled them back until his spine cracked audibly.
