Page 72 of Sean's Sunshine
Particularly watching Sean and Jackson exhaust themselves over this case.
In the end, it had been the animals that saved them.
Jackson Rivers was domesticated by two three-legged cats, one approximately Siamese in lineage named Billy Bob and one adolescent black cat named Lucifer. The cats got along—Billy Bob seemed content to be Lucifer’s big brother—and together they stalked the house, being badasses of the feline variety. The small dog who had landed in Henry’s custody on the night Rivers was wounded, however, hadnotbeen part of their little club.
Poppy had spent his time in Cramer’s house being handed from lap to lap as they all concentrated on a variety of monitors at Cramer’s kitchen table. One unwary person had set him down, and all hell broke loose.
Jackson had taken the cats to the bedroom to calm them down, and Billy had put the dog in Sean’s lap and told him to go sit.
Finally—finally—after a day filled with activity and hard work, the two guys who weresupposed to be on leavehad taken time to rest.
Sean had fallen asleep with the dog curled up in his lap, and Billy assumed Jackson had done the same in the bedroom with the cats. While they were out of the way, everybody else had found the perpetrator and his entry point to where he’d taken his shot, and Cramer had enough evidence for whatever legal maneuvering he was going to do. It must have been enough, since Billy had been able to convince Sean they could leave then, although he was fairly sure he had not heard the last of whatever it was they’d been chasing on the monitors that day.
Rivers had offered to pay for every guy in the room to get the hell out of town for a day or two, because whoever had killed the dead guy in the apartment had an “unknown agenda.”
Billy figured he was probably only after other bad guys, so he andhisguys were okay, but he also guessed you didn’t get to be like Rivers and Sean, carrying the weight of the world even when you were broken, by thinking only about your own guys.
Hell, Billy had even opted out of being the leader of the flophouse because he just didn’t like being hurt.
But Rivers’s dedication to keeping them all safe had softened Billy’s frustration with both of them, Rivers and K-Ski (as Rivers insisted on calling Sean), as the two of them had pushed themselves to exhaustion.
Now, finally, they were returning home, and all Billy could think was that Sean needed to go to bed immediately—and Billy had a paper to turn in the next day.
Oh, and they should probably show the tiny dog where to crap, since it seemed they’d be caring for the little goombah until he got returned to his owner. Or the guy who was going to be his owner as soon as that guy got out of rehab.
So maybe he was a little bit brusque as he herded everybody in the door. He stood with Poppy the puppy out in the little duplex side yard for a moment while Sean got ready for bed, and then gathered one of Sean’s old blankets from the garage to put on the bedroom floor for the little dog to sleep. When he came back inside, figuring he’d set the dog up and kiss Sean’s temple and go out to do homework, he found Sean, in his pajamas, asleep full length on the couch with the dog cuddled to his chest.
“Aiie,papi,” he murmured, more and more of his family’s Spanish coming up in his language now that he was thinking about them more. “What’re you doing to me out here?”
“You gotta stay up late,” Sean mumbled. “I’ll keep you company, okay?”
Billy’s eyes burned, and for a moment he thought about herding them both into the bedroom where they belonged, to leave him out there alone in the kitchen, burning the midnight oil. It was what his mother had done when she’d been going through nursing school, he remembered. She’d put all the children to bed, make sure her husband was fed and had a beer, and then she’d sat at the kitchen table and done her homework.
But this wasn’t like that. This was Sean, asleep, maybe, but not forsaking Billy to work alone.
“Okay,” he whispered. “Not too late, I promise.”
“Good work, Guillermo,” Sean murmured.
“Thanks, cop.”
And even though his mind was racing with things—snipers in the city, thieves in the suburbs, heroes working when they should have been resting, tiny furry dogs who suddenly appeared in their lives—he was suddenly set to sit down and write a paper for his humanities class.
Weird how one really good thing in his life could do that for him. He wondered vaguely if it was magic before he settled into his work.
HE MANAGEDto finish the paper in two hours and get it printed out at Sean’s desk in the corner of the guest room. While waiting for the printer to work, he looked around the room, thinking he hadn’t really slept there in nearly a week, but it hadn’t mattered because he hadn’t brought anything to add there anyway. Mostly his clothes, right? And he’d brought almost all of them to Sean’s after it became apparent he wasn’t going back after the first week. He’d never been a clotheshorse—he took up about three-quarters of the dresser, with a few hangers in the closet for his best shirts and slacks.
And then it hit him.
He hadn’t really left anything back at the flophouse. Maybe a few posters that he and Cotton had put up in the last few months in a desperate bid to prove that they’d left their mark, but really, the odds that six other people had already had sex in his bed were pretty much an even bet.
He wasn’t “going” to move in here—hehadmoved in here. And he wasn’t using the spare bedroom either. The mattress was great, and Sean bought the good sheets, but Billy didn’t want to make a cave in here. Although some framed prints would be nice, this time ones that he’d picked, since Sean liked sports and Vincent Van Gogh and that was about it.
But Seanreallylikedhim. Billy hadn’t been trying to get laid when he’d shown up here. He hadn’t been aiming for a sugar daddy. He’d been trying to give back a little, like Jackson did, and Henry, and now that he knew it, Sean.
But the fact was, he wanted tobelonghere.
That morning, Billy and Sean had arrived at Rivers’s house with super-sweet coffee drinks in hand. Billy had been appalled, but apparently the two of them were determined to destroy their bodies with sugar, and dammit, they were grown-assed men, so he only got a limited say about what they put into their bodies. But Jackson hadn’t been ready to go yet, and Billy had gone into his bedroom to help him put on his shoes.
