Page 47 of Shades of Henry
Henry lifted his chin. “Oh,” he said, his lips quirking in the moonlight.
“Oh what?” God, he was so handsome. The stark lines of his face were perfect, even his flat-eyed gaze.
“Porn,” he said, a smile ghosting over his kiss-swollen mouth. “I get it now.”
Lance would have sat up right then, but their adventures had left the mattress a little… soggy. “Get what?”
“No shame. I kept wondering—why porn? Why not waiting tables or folding jeans or something. But… but all the people in your life, they tried to make you ashamed, all at the same time. And you….” Henry bit his lip and rubbed his knuckles along Lance’s cheek. “You don’t play that fucking game. You took this thing that people wanted you to be ashamed of and told the whole entire world that you were proud of it. You did it naked and you did it in style. You’re beautiful and you showed everybody that you were meant to be seen. That’s amazing. That’s… that’s what makes you so fucking brave.”
Lance’s eyes burned. “That’s really perceptive, soldier. I’m pretty impressed.”
“Not nearly as impressed as I am,” Henry said, and then he kissed Lance. It was a different kind of kiss, not exploratory, not building. Just… just a happy kiss, exulting in their bodies, still come-sticky, still soaring happily on sex-endorphin airways, but happy.
Lance returned it, until they were both a little sweatier, a little more breathless.
And then Henry broke off the kiss to yawn.
Lance laughed and rolled Henry off him and to the side. “Sleep,” he proclaimed. “We will do this some more.” The air mattress creaked. “In my bed.And we will do it in an empty house, and we will be alone, and I will think of all sorts of ways to make noise, do you understand?”
God, please let this not be the only time. Please.
“Yeah,” Henry said. “It’s ours. We’re not going to have sex with all the guys around, like soldiers whacking off in a barracks. I get it.”
Lance’s relief was palpable. “I’ve had easy sex,” he told Henry. “And I’ve had it for pay. In case you were wondering, this thing you and I just did, it’s a whole lot more important.”
“I wasn’t wondering,” Henry said gruffly. “I’m stupid. I mean, God. My first relationship was a clusterfuck of entrapment—you know that. But I’m not so stupid I don’t know this is special.” He wrestled a little to sit up and then fell back against the fucking mattress again. “Should we put on our underwear?”
“No.” Lance wasn’t arguing about this either. “This way all the guys will know what we’ve been doing, and they’ll all know it’s you and me.”
“Will they know it’s important?” Henry asked, eyes searching Lance’s in the darkness.
“They’d better.” Lance swallowed. “I’m not sharing you.”
“Me neither.” Henry grimaced. “But that may make life a little harder when you’re up on the schedule again.”
Shit. “One thing at a time,” Lance told him. “Once we know you’re not going to jail, I can figure out if I’m out of porn.”
Henry nodded, so sober Lance wanted to kiss him again, but that was just going to end up with them staying up way too late. “That’s a deal,” he whispered. “Anything. I surely would like to do this some more.”
“My bed’s not bad,” Lance told him practically. “Maybe we can make Randy sleep on the couch for once.”
Henry chuckled softly. “No. No no no no. There’s not enough Febreze in the world.”
They fell asleep giggling, naked under the sheets.
That thing they’d just done? It was for real.
Dark Promises
HENRY SATin the dark kitchen, drinking dark coffee at ten o’clock on an eighty-five degree dark night, and tried not to think about his day.
As a result, every moment of his day flashed in front of his eyes like a giant strobe light, from morning to night, until his brain jittered more from memory overload than caffeine.
FLASH!Jackson Rivers, looking exhausted but composed, sitting down for once in his partner’s office. Henry wasn’t sure exactly what had happened the night before—whether Jackson had gotten away with coming home wounded or if there’d been a helluva consequence for pulling that shit on Cramer, but Jackson was looking both better and worse. Better because there was a sort of peace on his movie-star rugged features that Henry hadn’t seen before, and worse because he was pale, like whatever illness had made him so thin in the first place was on its way back. Either way, their day of looking into Henry’s case had begun, and surprisingly, so had Jackson’s day of giving Henry some advice on how to get his PI’s license. As they both figured—dryly—if Henry didn’t get put in jail for murder, he was at least having fun tracking down who actually had done it.
FLASH!Skulking around the white-tiled corridors of UCD Med Center, looking for Martin Sampson’s father’s office. The scrubs they’d gotten that first day to view the autopsy had come in handy yet again as they’d sifted through Sampson Senior’s office, looking for proof of the drug distribution ring they’d come to believe was the motive for Martin’s murder. Henry had needed to get rid of some of his coffee right when Rivers had gotten trapped in the office’s small supply closet. While Henry had been killing time on the john, he’d gotten Rivers’s pithy texts:
Fucking Jesus, this guy’s banging this nurse like he’s ringing in the new goddamned year. Anal and no lube—what’d she do to him?
