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“Three minutes,” I said, more to remind myself than to remind him. I closed the door, turned on the water, and brushed my teeth with a toothbrush I had brought. I took off the briefs I had worn to sleep and stepped into the shower, the warm water falling over me but doing nothing to wash away the sins from last night.
I couldn’t think about it because I was already getting hard.
Three minutes. Three minutes.
Fox was waiting for me in the living room when I was finished and dressed, around the seven-minute mark. On regular days it barely took me any time to get ready, so when I was rushed, I could move even faster, especially since I didn’t have to take time choosing what to wear. I threw on what I had yesterday and with a small amount of gel to mess up my hair a bit, I was good to go.
“That was quick. You sure you don’t want to nurse that headache a little longer?”
“I’m completely fine.” A considerable portion of my brain throbbed like a chainsaw tore through it. “Fine. Just need some coffee if we could stop at a cafe real quick?”
“Sounds like a plan. Let’s go.” Fox looked fresh as a daisy. I had no idea how he did it. A glance in the mirror by Fox’s door showed me heavy bags under my eyes and a face as puffy as the Pillsbury Doughboy if he had gone binge drinking the night before a big baking competition.
“Here, I think you’ll need these to survive out there.” Fox grabbed a pair of sunglasses off the collar of his shirt and handed them to me.
“Thank you,” I said, once again finding myself eternally grateful for this man. The second he opened the door and the morning sunlight slashed inside, the sunglasses shielding my eyes became my absolute most favorite possession. “Are these your only pair?” I asked, concerned as we stepped out into the blinding sun like a pair of vampires forcing themselves out into the open. I half expected to hear a hiss from one of us.
“Yeah, don’t worry about it.” He was squinting against the sun as we walked.
“I’d fight you right now, Fox. I’d get into a fistfight with you and make you put on these sunglasses, because I know the only way of getting these back on your eyes is through a fight. But… I’m just going to say thank you. Again.”
He chuckled, the sound almost drowned out by the growing sound of Miami Beach. As we walked toward Stonewall Investigations, we got closer to the main streets where all the tourists and beachgoers would be hanging out.
“You’re already starting to figure me out, huh?”
“I don’t know about that. You’re a hard one to read.”
“It gets easier,” he said, his big lips curling into a smile. “You aren’t any simpler to read, Jonah.”
“No… I guess I’m not.” We walked side by side down the street, past a few brightly colored homes, and then past some towering hotels with grand fountains of dolphins and whales by their valet, past other hotels that held on to their art deco history with colorful exteriors.
“Besides I’ve got a black belt in karate and tae kwon do, so I wouldn’t recommend fighting me.” Fox had a cocky grin on his face. I tried not to think about how good those lips felt when they were pressed on mine.
“Well, man, I’m a black belt in jiujitsu. So maybe we’ll have to duke it out anyway and see who comes out on top?”
“Maybe we will,” Fox said, still wearing that same cocky smile.
As we walked, I tried not to think about the pounding construction work going on inside my head. It felt like there were multiple sledgehammers and drills doing severe damage in there. I could even feel the scar of my bullet wound as if it were a hot brand, like someone had burned it into my skin hours earlier.
Yeah, it wasn’t pleasant.
But there also was no way I would be missing this first day of work. I’d take the headache and the exhaustion and deal with it later, just like I’d deal with these confusing thoughts of mine. The ones that told me to push Fox into a bush right here and tongue-wrestle him until we were arrested for public indecency.
We reached the coffee shop without any incidents. Our walk had been pretty quiet, which had me wondering what the hell he was thinking. Was he thinking about what happened last night? Did he remember everything?
The smell of strong coffee and sugary creamer wafted out of the open doors to the coffee shop. There was a short line of similarly hungover beachgoers waiting to order their cold brews. It was a tiny spot, with washed-out pictures of Cuba up on the bright green walls and a couple of scratched-up tables pressed up against the walls for anyone who wanted to hang out. A couple of fans kept a cool breeze going as we waited, still neither of us saying much.
