Page 67 of Shades of Henry
“Don’t try to make me heroic,” Henry told him firmly. “Don’t try to make me brave. If I was a fuckin’ hero, I would have told him no the first time.”
“Oh, Henry, you’re a hero because you told him no at all.”
Henry grunted. “Whatever.” He yawned. “God. There was so much I wanted to do today. It all got completely derailed. We on for tomorrow?”
“Yeah, sure.” Lance seemed put out that Henry wasn’t going to whine anymore about Malachi, but Henry just couldn’t. Who deserved to be subjected to that crap, right? “What are we doing tomorrow?”
Finally, something to smile about. “Well, you’re going to get me into your work, and we’re going to break some laws. You ready?”
Lance buried his face in his pillow. “Henry, you’re killing me.”
“Hey, maybe when we get back, the place will be empty. You ever think of that?”
“No.”
“It could happen.”
Lance glanced at him sideways. “Who says I want to?” he asked, clearly wanting to.
Henry actually chuckled and ran a gentle knuckle along the side of Lance’s neck. “I do.”
“God, you’re cocky.”
He wasn’t, not really. “I just really, really, want it to be true.”
Lance’s shy smile peeped out from the pillow. “It is,” he whispered.
Henry chuckled gently and lay back on the mattress. “I am so damned glad.”
Not My Job
“SO HERE’Sthe thing,” Henry explained as they were leaving the apartment. “You can’t do anything that would put your job in danger.”
Lance paused and looked at him in the much-laundered white scrubs he’d gotten that first day of the investigation. “You know, when we’re done with this case, you can probably wear those as sweats or something. You seem to like them an awful lot.” Truth was, he looked good in white, and Lance liked to imagine him in his tighties underneath the loose bottoms. Hereallyliked to imagine Henrynakedunder the fabric, but it seemed best to curtail all sexual fantasies until they actually had some time alone.
“I’m serious, Lance. You need to watch yourself and your license to practice. Don’t let me go over any lines, okay?”
“Like what?” Lance asked.
Henry rolled his eyes. “Look, you’re the one who worked your ass off to be a medical professional. So, stop me before we do anything that would violate a rule or something, something you cannot do. I really want to wrap up this loose end, okay? Jackson’s going into surgery in the next couple of weeks—”
“Hold up.” They had gotten this phone callthat morning.“Aren’t we going to, like, some sort of party next weekend? Athis house?”
Henry grinned. “Look, I’m just saying if the guy’s gonna die, he’s gonna do it in style. Besides, between you and me, I think that’s Cramer. He seems to want to… I dunno, spoil Jackson. Like Jackson has a bank account and his own money and shit, but Cramer won’t let him pay for anything. And they’re always arguing about clothes—”
“Good!” The thing Jackson had been wearing when Lance had sewn him up had predated Lance’s high school graduation.
“Yeah,” Henry agreed, looking thoughtful. “It is.”
“What do you mean?”
Henry shrugged. “He’s let some stuff slip, not really complaining, though. I was like, ‘My father’s an asshole,’ and he’s like, ‘My mother was a junkie—we’ve all got damage.’ I get the feeling Cramer spoils him because he’s going to need a lot of spoiling before he believes he deserves it.”
“I know a guy like that,” Lance told him, cursing for the thousandth time their living situation and the fact that he couldn’t greet Henry with flowers and candlelight and a bottle of wine. Lance hadn’t dated since Teddy, and Henry hadn’t datedever.What would it be like to have an entire evening alone with this man, and let him know he was cared for?
Lance would have to continue to wonder, because right now, they were busy fighting crime—and Henry was luminous with it.
“So I don’t put my job in danger,” Lance said, trying to focus. “That’s easy, since I don’t know what we’re doing yet!” Henry had been sort of cagey about that, but then, they were supposed to have done this yesterday, only, well, seaweed exfoliant depilatories and a despondent Randy, who was probably going to spend the next week in either an oatmeal bath or the gym pool until his hair grew out, had kept them busy.
