Holding Out for a Fairy Tale (26 page)

Ray stumbled as Elliot half carried him back to the apartment’s one bedroom. Elliot lowered him onto the bed and tried to slip away, but Ray snaked his arms around Elliot’s neck, wanting to hold on to him.

“Delgado.” Elliot laughed and tried to escape. “I need a shower. I need sleep. And you’re about to pass out.”

“Please wait.” Ray took a deep breath and forced himself to look up and meet Elliot’s gaze. “Can I ask you something?”

Ray felt the world spin as Elliot nodded.

“Since we’re stuck together anyway, do you think maybe we could just sort of pretend?”

“Pretend?”

“Yeah. Just pretend that you’re not holding out for a fairy tale? And pretend that I can be….”

“Pretend you’re not an asshole?” Elliot suggested, grinning.

Ray shrugged and smiled. “Pretend I’m worth a damn? That I can be what you want? Just until this shit is over?” he asked.

“I still need a shower.” He shifted out of Ray’s grasp, then bent over him again. Elliot brushed his lips against Ray’s gently. “But I think I’m up for that.”

E
LLIOT
FULLY
expected Ray to be hungover. Ray had been so wasted the night before, he should have been battling a throbbing headache and nausea. Elliot expected to wake up to Ray rolling around on the bed groaning. He’d even set a bottle of water and one of his own pain pills out on the nightstand in case Ray needed them.

The last thing he expected was to wake up to the smell of breakfast and the brush of lips and stubble along his neck. Elliot tried not to laugh as Ray kissed the ticklish spot beneath his ear. Ray’s hands and lips roamed across his shoulders and down his back. Ray’s cold, slick fingers eased inside him, coaxing him to wake up and respond. Ray leaned over his shoulder, and Elliot met him halfway, crushing their lips together. He felt Ray’s fingers brush against his prostate and shoved back. Ray broke their kiss and lined himself up behind Elliot quickly. Since Elliot was still loose from the last time, Ray’s silicon-encased erection rocked into him smoothly.

This time, Ray didn’t seem concerned about dragging things out. He shifted in and out of Elliot’s body, moving fast and hard. Elliot shoved his hips up, meeting Ray’s urgent pace eagerly. Ray grabbed his hip and shoulder, using his body to get more leverage. Elliot arched into the motion, amazed at how fast his orgasm was building. When he felt Ray shudder against him, Elliot didn’t hold back, letting the tension inside him break as Ray rode out the aftershocks buried inside him. Elliot came against the sheets, then dropped back down onto the bed. Ray slipped out of him as he moved, then rolled to the side, panting. Ray smiled at him and pressed a surprisingly tender kiss to his temple. “Good morning.”

When his nerves finally stopped firing, Elliot shifted into Ray’s outstretched arms. He could too easily get used to waking up like this. “Definitely a good morning.”

“There’s bacon and eggs.”

“How long have you been awake?”

“About an hour. I’m lucky I managed to stay asleep as long as I did. Alcohol always messes with my blood sugar, makes me too hyper to sleep.”

“Hangovers make you hyper? And you can stomach the thought of food?”

Ray’s humongous grin was unnerving. “I know. I’m a lucky bastard. I’m sure it’ll catch up to me eventually, but for now I’m not complaining. Do you want to shower before breakfast?”

Six hours after breakfast, Elliot was nestled in Ray’s arms on the couch, feeling warm and comfortable, despite how awkward he was sure this would be. Whatever hang-ups Ray had had on Tuesday morning seemed to have vanished, along with the endless machismo and snide comments that seemed to make up Ray’s entire personality. Beneath the asshole facade of Detective Delgado, Elliot found that Ray was an affectionate guy. He was downright cuddly, even. Ray was constantly reaching out to touch him, to kiss him, or just to drape a long arm across his shoulders. As the morning faded into afternoon, Elliot relaxed and let himself enjoy it. He knew better than to expect it to last, but it still felt nice.

Being cut from the case and effectively grounded, they didn’t have anything to do except hang out and explore each other. And watch television. Hayes’s apartment didn’t have cable, but Ray kept old episodes of a lot of different science-fiction shows on his phone, and he soon had it plugged into the flat-screen TV. Elliot wasn’t really a fan of science fiction, but Ray made such a fuss about how amazing
Firefly
was that he’d paid attention anyway. It turned out Ray was right, and the show was growing on him more with each episode. As the familiar theme song came to a close, Ray unwrapped himself from Elliot and got up to pause the show.

“Were you just shitting me when you said they canceled this show without finishing it?”

“I wish I was joking about that.” Ray stretched with his arms above his head. “It’s one of the greatest tragedies in television entertainment, canceling
Firefly
.”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far. What’s up?”

“Popcorn. Or real food. It’s a couple hours past lunchtime.”

Elliot shot up from the couch and followed Ray into the kitchen. “Hey, you made dinner and breakfast, let me handle lunch.”

“I didn’t buy Pop-Tarts.”

“You bought garlic, and there’s olive oil and pasta in the pantry. It’ll do.”

“Ah, will it? For what?”

“Aglio et Olio,” Elliot said in a singsong voice. “My mom always said it was too plain for anybody but poor bachelors, but I remember serving it as a weekly special at least once a month growing up.”

“Huh? You totally lost me.”

“Trust me,” Elliot grinned. “I grew up in an Italian restaurant, and this dish was always on the menu. Even when it wasn’t on the menu, people still ordered it.”

“What? You grew up in an Italian restaurant, and you live on Pop-Tarts? That’s wrong on so many levels.”

“I do actually know how to cook. I just don’t usually have time. Real Italian food takes all day.” He pulled down a skillet and a large pot, then pulled everything he’d need out of the pantry.

“You really grew up in an Italian restaurant?” Ray asked dubiously. He hopped up onto the counter, well out of the way of the stove, and watched Elliot move around the kitchen. “And since when is Belkamp an Italian name?”

“My dad’s family is Dutch. But I did grow up in an Italian restaurant. It’s in a little part of San Francisco called North Beach. The neighborhood was mostly Italian, once upon a time. My grandparents opened up the restaurant in the fifties, and it’s done okay through the years. My mom and her brothers own it now. My dad worked there as a waiter while he put himself through school. Now he owns an accounting firm, but he takes care of the business side of the restaurant and lets them run the place. My uncle Gianni cooks. My mom….” Elliot smiled as he thought about the way his mom always seemed to be everywhere at once, chatting with everyone, and keeping everything alive and vivid. He set a pot of salted water on the stove and turned on the heat, then cracked the garlic with the flat side of a steak knife and peeled it quickly. “Honestly, my mom just chats with customers and bustles around the kitchen smacking cute waiters on the ass.”

“Your dad’s okay with that?”

Elliot grinned. “That’s how they met. They were both hippies in the 1960s, and they’re pretty open-minded.”

“Really? You know, you’ve just totally fucked with my assumptions about you.”

“Have I?”

“Ah, yeah. Decorated Army veteran, hard-ass FBI agent, psychotic martial artist, and stoic bastard,” Ray ticked off items on his fingers. “Budding Italian chef and son of open-minded San Francisco hippies doesn’t fit.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“How did you end up…?” Ray swept his hand up and down, indicating Elliot’s entire body. “How did you end up as
you
?”

“Well, growing up in San Francisco is probably why I don’t have a lot of guilt or shame over being gay. Not anymore, at least. My family’s Roman Catholic, so it took a while before they came around, but since they were from San Francisco, it wasn’t so bad.” Elliot poured a lot of olive oil into the hot skillet. He swirled it for a moment, then tossed in the garlic he’d minced, then added some pepper and dried parsley from the pantry. “As for the veteran bit, my dad wasn’t happy about that. He was never that active in the peace marches and stuff in the sixties, but he still holds to the same values. He’s not happy about my job, either. He’s okay with me being gay, but not with the rest of my life. We’re just different people. Very different people.” When the water came to a boil, Elliot emptied an entire box of spaghetti into the pot.

“How did you get past it?” Ray’s tone was quiet and serious. “How do you reconcile being gay with everything else?”

Elliot had been prepared for this. He’d been trying to think of what he could say that might help Ray come to terms with being attracted to men as well as women, trying to sort out what it was in his own life that had shifted being gay from something shameful to something he could accept. His family had been a huge part of his own self-acceptance, but there had been more to it than that.

“I guess I realized that who I’m attracted to doesn’t change who I am. It’s a part of who I am, but honestly, not that big of one. I’m still a man, I’m still a soldier, and I’m still a federal agent. My accomplishments, my hobbies, my life isn’t going to change because I’m gay. Being gay doesn’t make me less of a man. It didn’t make me less of a soldier, and it doesn’t make me less of an investigator now.” Elliot shook the skillet to keep the garlic from burning. “It’ll make having a family tricky, but even that’s not impossible these days.”

“You’re lucky,” Ray whispered, his gaze locked on the floor.

“You know, you’re too smart for your own good.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You overthink everything.” Elliot used a fork to strain the pasta, keeping just enough of the water to thin out the oil and thicken it into a creamy sauce. He dumped the noodles into the oil and shook the pan. “I don’t want to feed your ego, so I’m not going to point out that you’re probably the smartest person working in homicide. You remember every line from
Firefly
and details about potential nerve damage that can happen if you fail to double-lock a subject’s handcuffs. And I’d actually be willing to bet that you make a point of remembering to double-lock them, every single time.”

“Sanchez ratted me out!” Ray looked insulted, and then he smiled.

“And it took you less than a second to come to that conclusion,” Elliot pointed out. “You might not like her. You might not hang out with her. But you know enough about her allergies to know flowers and balloons wouldn’t cut it when she had a baby, and you put a lot of time and effort into a gift that wouldn’t cause problems. How were paper cranes special to her?”

“Her husband is half-Japanese. Origami seemed appropriate.”

“You analyze everything else in the world, too, including yourself. It might do you some good to stop overthinking your life and just live it for a while.”

Ray slumped forward. “It’s not that simple.”

“No, I imagine it’s not. Grab some plates?”

After devouring the spaghetti, Ray sat back with a satisfied smile. “All right, I’ve been proven wrong. The Pop-Tart addict can cook. That was really good, and creamy. How’d you manage that with garlic and olive oil?”

“Some of the cooking water from the pasta. It’s got enough starch in it to thicken everything and make the oil creamy.”

“It was really good. So now I’ve got to know, if you can manage this with a box of pasta and a few cloves of garlic, why the Pop-Tarts?”

“It takes about ten seconds to rip open a packet of Pop-Tarts,” Elliot explained. “This takes fifteen minutes. When I get really hungry, fifteen minutes is just too damn long.”

Ray rolled his eyes. “Even fast food is better for you than Pop-Tarts”

“I like them. They’re easy, calorie-dense, and they never go bad. I can toss them in my duffel bag and leave them in class until I need them. And they come in every flavor from strawberry to cake batter,” said Elliot, feeling defensive. “Just about the only bad thing about them is the way they squish when they end up at the bottom of my bag. Then I’m not crazy about them, but I eat them anyway.”

“Ice cream comes in every flavor imaginable too. That doesn’t mean it’s healthy.” Ray stared at him for a minute, cocking his head to the side. “Hell, I love Italian food. Can I bribe you into making dinner, too?”

“Hmm. I don’t know. Dinner’s a big deal. You know an Italian dinner is usually a five-course meal, right? If you count dessert. That would have to be one hell of a bribe.”

Ray looked up at Elliot with a predatory smirk. “I’m sure I can think of something that would make it worthwhile.”

“I guess you’ve got all afternoon to try, but I’m still doubtful. However, I reserve the right to order takeout if I’m inexplicably worn out.”

“El, you can spend four hours straight sparring with men fifty pounds heavier than you. I’m flattered you think I could wear you out, but realistically,” Ray’s smile didn’t falter for an instant, “I’d have to build up to that.”