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I couldn’t hear anything on the other side, and I didn’t know what to do with that. Was he sleeping? Not home? Dead?
“Hart?” The question came from behind me, down the hallway. It took a few seconds for his voice—his rich, warm voice—to filter through the panic in my brain. He was alive, and I could start breathing again.
Then I turned around, saw him, and damn near shit myself.
“Taavi, what happened?” I pushed away from the door and took a step towards him.
His lip was split, his cheek scraped, his clothes muddy and torn, blood spotting his jeans and his grey t-shirt. He was holding one arm tightly against his side.
He didn’t say anything, just limped past me and unlocked his door before going into the dark apartment, almost reflexively reaching out and flicking on the light. He didn’t close the door, so I followed him inside and shut it behind me. As it clicked, he turned around.
His brown eye searched my face. “Why are you here?” he asked, his beautiful voice rough.
My chest felt hollow, like my sternum was trying to push its way into my spine. “I—” I swallowed. “Raj found an unidentified canid body,” I whispered.
“And you thought it was me?”
“The description fit,” I managed. “And then you didn’t answer your phone.”
He kept staring at me. “I lost it,” he said, his voice barely audible. “When they hit me.”
“They who?” I asked, my chest cracking open as tears filled his mismatched eyes.
He swallowed, blinking rapidly, then licked his split lip and winced. “I don’t know who they were,” he whispered. “But I—I think they wanted to kill me.”
“Taavi…” I reached out one hand, not knowing why or what I expected or wanted to happen.
He didn’t take it.
He moved right past it and buried his face in my chest, one hand gripping my button-down. I wrapped my arms around him and held on.
“Who hit you?” I asked him, scenarios of a gang of MFM supporters with bats or crowbars or some shit roving the streets and attacking people. I knew how strong he was, and the idea that even a handful of assholes could cause this much damage was almost unbelievable. “What did they hit youwith?”
He spoke into the fabric of my shirt. “Their fucking old boy pickup,pendejos jodidos.”
I had no idea what that meant, but it didn’t matter. My arms tightened around him, although I tried to be careful.
I probably should have suggested we go to the police.
I didn’t.
Because I knew they wouldn’t care.
Taavi was a shifter. He was Latino. He was queer. And I would have bet anything that whoever had tried to run him over with a fucking truck were either homophobic pieces of shit, raging anti-immigrant racists, MFM dickbags, or some combination of all three. In this city, that made the odds that at least one of them was also a cop higher than I’d have liked.
So I didn’t say anything. I just stood there with my arms around him, feeling the heaving of his breath, the warmth of his over-heated body, and the trembling of muscles infused with adrenaline from both panic and pain.
I stood there and was fucking grateful he was alive.
And I really wished I hadn’t been such a fucking dick.
Because it had takenthis, this fucking nightmare in which Taavi had been chased down and hit by a goddamn truck for me to realize that I really was the world’s biggest fucking dumbass. I’d been pushing him away for months because I was afraid that if I let him get too close to me, I’d fall in love with him.
But I already had.
Probably a long time ago.
Probably, if I was going to be completely honest, the moment he’d called me six months after he’d kissed me, which is when I’d undoubtedly started the process.
