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Jasper
Imade it two blocks down the road before caving to the need to talk to someone. Dunks beckoned, so I pulled into the parking lot, put down all four of my sedan’s windows, and shut off my car. Dinnertime drew near, but I figured it was still early enough I wouldn’t bother my co-worker Zeke and his husband Levi by calling.
“What’s up, Jasper?” Zeke answered, a smile in his voice.
“Hey. Got a few minutes?”
“Yeah. Hold on.” Rustling sounded in my ear, a quiet murmur explaining he’d be back in a bit.
“How’s your husband?” I asked, expecting Ihadinterrupted something.
“Sunburned. We spent the day on the beach.”
“You need to rub some aloe on him.”
Zeke chuckled. “Already done.”
“Sorry for intruding.”
“We finished, otherwise I wouldn’t have answered.”
My face heated. Levi tended to plaster to Zeke’s side whenever he came into Humanity House. He was definitely needy but not nearly to the extent Mason was. To see their love, experience their devotion to one another from the outside would make any single gay man jealous.
I was green with envy.
“What’s going on?” Zeke asked.
“Well, there’s this guy.”
“You hit it off with that dating app dude?”
“Shit—no. Sorry. He, uh…didn’t show, but I met someone else while leaving the bar.” I’d actually forgotten about the blond I’d been excited to meet that night.
“Tell me all about it,” Zeke commanded, sounding settled as though he’d gotten comfortable for a long story.
So, I told him about the assault, Mason not correcting the EMT’s assumption that we were partners. How calling him mine had felt right on so many levels. Caring for him. Sleeping beside him. Being blown away by the kiss of my lifetime.
“Someone has it bad.”
“Yeah,” I agreed while turning my car and air conditioner back on because the interior grew too hot thanks to the summer heatwave. I moved on to the whole police station scene, telling Zeke how Mason visibly escaped reality behind a thick veil of seeming indifferent.
“I used some of your redirection tools to help him refocus after the detective threw his emotions for a loop, but he pretty much shut down on me again. Not as badly as he’d done when admitting to recognizing the knife, but I knew I wouldn’t get any more information out of him no matter how much I wanted it.”
“How were things left between the two of you?”
I considered the lack of physical touch beyond our hand holding, the fact he’d acted reserved and didn’t seem like he’d wanted me to kiss him goodbye. “Not cold exactly, but a far cry from what we’d shared earlier this morning.”
“He has a lot to process and a serious choice to make. I can’t believe it would be easy considering who his attacker was. They’re sure it’s Delaney?”
“Fingerprints on the knife confirmed it.”
“Prints aren’t evidence enough these days. Who’s to say they weren’t planted on the stolen knife and dropped on purpose?”
It was a possibility, but Mason had been convinced the man who had assaulted him was the same one who’d carved aJin his skin. That last bit of information I’d kept to myself, unsure Mason would appreciate me sharing that part of his story with someone he didn’t know.
Perhapsthatwas where his shame came from. That he’d allowed himself to be incapacitated and taken advantage of. How far had shit gone? Mason didn’t seem the type who could be forcefully aroused…had Joseph drugged him? Raped him?
Heat flared through me. I wanted to kill the son of a bitch.
