Page 3 of Devil and the Deep Blue Fish

“You’re going to see yourself in them,” Jackson said softly. “I was one good friend and his mom away from being one. Don’t think I don’t see that too.”

Henry shook his head. “See,that’swhy you don’t sleep,” he said, blowing out a breath. “Because you know these things—you’ve already thought about them, and you see them going on in the world, and they scare you shitless. Some of us get surprised every single time.”

Jackson chuckled weakly. “Yeah, but you also get to sleep.” As he spoke, his back pocket buzzed, and he answered it as he stood and stretched.

Galen and John will be by in an hour or so. Maybe prep them some food.

“And you were right, sensei,” he said, bowing in Henry’s direction. “Go. Do good things. I’ll stay here and make your bosses soup.”

Henry grinned. “The wonton soup you fed me wasoutstanding!” he said before heading for the door. He paused, his hand on the knob, and turned. “Jackson?”

“Yeah?”

“Whatever it is you think you failed at, whatever it is you think you didn’t do, you gotta find a way to let it go, man. You’re a good friend—a good man. Get some fuckin’ sleep.”

And with that he was gone, and Jackson was fishing the ingredients for homemade wontons out of the fridge again.

JOHN ANDGalen arrived in less than an hour, making Jackson glad he’d gotten a move on with the soup. The two of them blew in with a fierce March wind that drifted a few leaves in on their coattails, and Jackson could tell Galen, who used a cane to help him walk, was moving more stiffly than usual tonight, probably thanks to the surprising cold.

“If this is blowing in like a lion,” he said acidly, accepting John’s help to shed his coat, “I am against it. In fact I think we should boycott lions of every sort.”

“We can’t,” John said practically, hanging both their coats up on the pegs by the door. “Lions are cheerfully homosexual in the wild and possess the world’s most amazingly proportioned balls. I think we owe it to our people to give lions a chance.”

Galen stared at him. “I don’t owe my people the right to freeze my own generously proportioned balls off!” he argued, and John snorted.

“I’m just saying, maybe we shouldn’t blame the lions. They didn’t make the expression.”

“I’ll blame whomever I damned well—oh Lord, thank you, Jackson,” Galen said, sinking down at the dining room table and accepting the steaming mug of the cocoa Jackson had put on when he was throwing the soup together. Under Galen’s planned scruff and the curly hair he grew long to mask the scars from the same accident that injured his leg, Jackson could see white lines around his mouth.

“Would you like to eat?” Jackson asked. “Wonton soup and warm french bread.” He grimaced. “Probably an affront to both Asian and European culture, but—”

“Whocares.” John laughed. He had bright ginger hair and tanned freckled skin, and his green eyes almost disappeared into the lines at the corners when he smiled, which was often. “It smells awesome! Here, you grab your laptop, and I’ll dish everything up.”

“I already ate—” Jackson began, but Galen overrode him.

“I have strict instructions from Henry to take that for the excrement it is,” he said in his acid Southern drawl. “You will eat twice, and you will eat a lot. I for one amtiredof listening to Ellery worry about you. You will eat to accommodatemeand for no other reason.”

Jackson smiled slightly. Ellery had not been looking for friends when Galen had insisted he be hired at the firm, but he’d found a good one. Galen’s dry sense of humor and carefullyunderstated kindness was a good match for Ellery’s constant insistence on reason.

As in it was onlyreasonablethat they all make sure Jackson was doing well, since Ellery refused to even contemplate a future without him.

“Understood,” he said wryly. “He’s the boss.”

Galen snorted, but Jackson had already busied himself fetching his laptop from the bedroom and trying not to trip on Lucifer, who had a tendency to sprawl any-old-where just to make Jackson’s life more interesting.

After swearing at the cat, Jackson returned and set it up at his place at the table, workstation at the ready.

“Okay, guys,” he said, trusting John in the kitchen the way you trusted a good friend who’d been over a lot, “tell me what’s up.”

Galen let out a breath. “Tellme,” he said, making eye contact with John even as John was fetching bowls from the cupboard, “what you know about the Moms for Clean Living.”

Jackson sucked in a breath. “You mean the Stepford Dragons?”

John snorted, and Galen arched a sardonic brow. “Of course. I had no idea they’d rebranded.”

“You’re talking about those super right-wing scary women who go from town to town ripping books off shelves and screaming, ‘Keep those horrible queers away from my babies!’ right?” Jackson asked, and while he was going off with his own brand of honesty, his fingers were also walking the talk by pulling up what he knew about the group on his computer.

“We are indeed,” John said, and the grin he gave was truly manic. “I’m a soulless ginger porno-making queer—I’m, like, their devil!” He held a hand to his heart. “My nana would be proud.”

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