Holding Out for a Fairy Tale (34 page)

“Well, are you?”

“Holding out for a fairy tale?” Elliot let out a bitter laugh. “No. I think I’m over that. I don’t think I deserve to be that lucky. I had a chance to make things right, and I blew it. Like you said, in real life, things don’t work out like they do in stories. In real life, bad guys win, people die, and relationships crumble. I think I finally get where you’re coming from with that. So why bother when I’d just be setting myself up to be miserable?” Elliot stood up and ran his fingers through his short hair.

“Elliot, that’s not fair. You—”

“I fucked up.” His tone dropped to a hush. “Believe me, I know. Whatever you feel like you need to do, if you need to report it, I won’t hold it against you.” He stole a glimpse at Ray for a moment, then turned away. He didn’t want to see the contempt he was sure would be in Ray’s eyes. “Whatever you need to do, do it.”

Elliot didn’t look back as he hurried back into the building.

E
LLIOT
MUDDLED
through work each day for the next week, throwing himself into case analysis. After work, he spent hours letting anyone who was willing to spar with him throw him around a judo mat. By the time he staggered home each night, he was too tired to think, much less remember the few days he’d spent caught up in the whirlwind that was Ray Delgado. He almost felt normal again by the following Monday.

But as soon as he began to feel like himself, things got weird.

Monday morning, he knew something was up when everyone stared at him the moment he got off the elevator. No one said anything as he walked through the office, and when he got to his desk, he found a strange tower of thin, gift-wrapped rectangles stacked on his desk. They were held together with a dark blue ribbon. Elliot untied the ribbon and carefully opened the folded wrapping paper. Inside was a cheap plastic case with the Pop-Tarts logo printed on the front in white. He unwrapped five more just like it. Inside the last one, he found a folded piece of notebook paper.

You said you burn 600 calories an hour fighting, so four hours of fighting means you need six packets of Pop-Tarts at any given time. Now you don’t have to put up with mushy ones.

There was no signature, but there was no doubt that the plastic cases were from Ray. No one else cared if he got enough to eat each day. No one else knew enough about his quirks to know how badly mushy Pop-Tarts annoyed him. He tucked the plastic cases into his messenger bag and tried to get to work.

Throughout the day, he wondered what Ray was thinking, leaving him a gift. And at the office, of all places, where anyone who saw him was likely to get the wrong impression.

When the week rolled on with no sign of Ray, Elliot assumed the gift was meant as a peace offering. He chalked it up to a message that there was no resentment between them, and he hoped that they might be able to act like friends if they ran into each other again. As he walked back toward his desk after lunch on Friday, though, his “no animosity” theory was blown straight to hell.

Sometime over his lunch break, his desk had been covered in boxes. There were no frilly baskets, no wrapping paper or ribbons, but there was a box of every flavor of Pop-Tarts Elliot had ever seen. There were even a few he’d never seen before.

“Who the hell did this?” Elliot stared at the stack of distinct blue boxes. They’d been lined up and stacked like children’s building blocks, built into the shape of a castle. There was no way Ray could have gotten all of those boxes of Pop-Tarts into the building, and built a castle out of them, in the forty minutes it had taken Elliot to grab lunch.

But Ray didn’t seem to be daunted by little things like
impossibility, or even by the armed security in the lobby.

“St. Claire said the FedEx guy did it. Said someone tipped him two hundred bucks to make you a fairy-tale castle.”

“A two-hundred-dollar tip? That didn’t seem a bit suspicious to you? Were these even x-rayed?”

“Of course they were,” St. Claire said from her office door.

“Accepting Pop-Tart sculptures from some random stalker is a good security practice, now?”

“Oh, come on, Belkamp, it’s only stalking if the attention is unwanted, and I doubt you could look me in the eye and tell me you don’t want his attention.”

“Granted,” Elliot admitted. “But it’s still freaky.”

“Are you kidding? I wish my husband knew me well enough to do something like this. Delgado is really serious about you.”

“How do you know it’s from him?”

“His name was on the delivery slip,” she said. “I’ve heard about a few of his exploits, and this seems like it’d be his style. Although, those stories were all about women, so maybe they were bullshit.”

Elliot shook his head quickly and sat down, staring at his Pop-Tart castle. “It’s been my experience that Delgado’s exploits are often toned down in the retelling. I’m sure everything you’ve heard is the edited, approved-for-all-audiences version of whatever he actually did.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Because I heard that when it comes to relationships, he’s the type who never looks back.”

Elliot looked up at his boss and saw the sparkle in her eyes. “He cleared this with you, didn’t he?”

She didn’t answer him. “Go take that mess down to your car, then you can take off for the day.”

Elliot knew he shouldn’t read too much into Ray’s over-the-top gift, but it was hard not to. He should be hoping Ray meant the gifts as a sign he wouldn’t hold Elliot accountable for letting Alejandro escape. But he couldn’t help hoping that maybe Ray meant the gifts as something more. He loaded the boxes into the trunk of his Honda with
a sad smile. “Even if he wanted to try, it’s not like it’d work out
anyway.”

He helped teach an introductory judo class that afternoon, but he didn’t stay to drive himself into an exhausted stupor this time. He couldn’t focus enough to handle a rough sparring match. His thoughts constantly wandered back to darkly tanned skin and the deep brown eyes he missed.

When he got home, he found that his garage door was blocked by a sleek black Nissan. There was no sign of its owner out front, and Elliot wasn’t sure what he’d be walking into if he strolled through his own front door. The alarm system had been repaired after the break-in, but he suspected Ray could make short work of the entrance alarm.

Elliot approached his house cautiously, slipping in through the backyard. He thought he’d get a decent view of his living room through the windows off the patio, but instead he saw Ray himself, reclining on Elliot’s patio chair, dozing in a rumpled brown suit.

Elliot stopped a few feet from the other man. “You can fall asleep anywhere but in a bed.”

Ray’s eyelids twitched, but he didn’t move. Elliot sat down on the chair and shook Ray by the shoulder. Ray snaked his arms around Elliot’s shoulders and pulled him down, enclosing him in a surprisingly gentle hug, before he opened his eyes. “I like waking up this way. Welcome home.”

“Should I ask what you’re doing here?”

“No.” Ray scoffed. “It’s obvious that I’m waiting for you, isn’t it?”

“Does this mean you’re not pissed at me?”

“Over Alejandro? No. If I had a dime for every time he’s manipulated me, I’d have….” Ray narrowed his eyes in concentration. “Two dollars and eighty cents. Three bucks even, if you count the mess with Sophie. Can’t really blame you for his behavior if I don’t blame myself for it.”

“But I could have stopped him,” said Elliot. “I should have stopped him.”

“Elliot, I think you’re being too hard on yourself. He is a manipulative bastard. Men like Alejandro are capable of changing in an instant. He wouldn’t hesitate to kill anyone, including his own flesh and blood. And if he hadn’t managed to manipulate you, he would have killed you.”

“I had a clear shot,” Elliot whispered.

“You’ve survived tours in two different war zones, and I know you killed people when you had to. After all that, and working in law enforcement too, you’re still reluctant to take a life. Even a life like Alejandro’s. But somehow, you’ve got yourself convinced that makes you
less
worthy of that fairy tale you wanted?”

“You think I give a damn about his life?” Elliot barked out a harsh laugh. “I did it because he threatened you! Because I was so hung up on you, the thought of you getting killed had me terrified. I was being selfish. I should have taken the damn shot. How many more people are going to die, because I didn’t?”

Ray shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. “Who knows? Maybe none. Maybe a few. But he’ll answer for them all eventually. His crimes don’t become yours just because he got away.”

“But he wouldn’t….” Elliot shut his eyes, although he couldn’t block out the guilt in his own head.

“Nope. I refuse to allow that argument. If I let you say you’re responsible for everything he does in the future, how much would that make me responsible for? Imagine how I could have changed the world if I had just stepped over that line and made the world a cleaner place when I was sixteen.”

“You’d have gone to prison.”

“Because it would have been murder. And then, someone else would get to live with a guilt trip for not stopping me. See? It’d never end. The only way to stop the cycle, and the guilt, is to do things the right way. For a police officer to arrest him, for a court to prosecute him, for the state to incarcerate him. It’s just a thin line between arresting someone and cutting out the courts altogether.”

“Our job is to enforce the law. To stop criminals.”

Ray nodded but argued. “Our job is
not
to cross that line. Because if we break down—if we take on the job of judge, jury, and executioner to stop a criminal—then that makes the police nothing but another gang. It would make us no better than him.”

“You sound like you actually believe that,” Elliot whispered. Ray cupped his cheek and forced Elliot to turn back to face him.

“It’s true. Whatever he said, whatever he did, you still tried to arrest him. And more than that, you took it upon yourself to do it. I don’t know what I’d have done if that had fallen to me. Something that would have made me no better than him, I suspect.” Ray’s smile turned into a sexy grin. “And you said you were totally hung up on me.”

Elliot groaned at the self-satisfied expression on Ray’s face.

Ray lowered his arms to Elliot’s waist and nudged Elliot into his lap. “Staying a decent human being in this job is pretty damn impressive.”

Elliot met Ray’s gaze, surprised by how relieved he was to hear the certainty and absolution in Ray’s voice. How anyone who’d lived Ray’s life could still believe in justice was a mystery to Elliot, but Ray did believe.

And somehow, Ray also believed in him.

Ray dropped his arm over the side of the chair and pulled up a plastic bag. “So I brought takeout. Join me for dinner?”

“Ray, I don’t think I’m up for much of anything tonight.”

“You’ve got to eat, Elliot. And we’ve got to talk. I’ve spent the last few weeks talking to people I’ve slept with, tracking down old flings and hookups. I wanted to make things right with everybody I….” Ray squirmed beneath him.

“Everybody you used as a blow-up doll?”

“To be fair, a lot of that was mutual.”

“I suppose some of it must have been.” Elliot shifted in Ray’s lap, trying to get more comfortable. “It was mutual with me.”

“I think I’ve apologized more these last two weeks than I have throughout my entire life.”

Elliot tried to ignore the way Ray was rubbing small circles against his hips. “Yeah? How’d that go?”

“It was a mixed bag. Some people took it okay, a few people told me to fuck off. But I’m glad I did it. If I hadn’t, you’d just think I was fucking with you, coming here like this.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Hmm.” Ray ran his hands up Elliot’s back beneath his T-shirt. Elliot rolled his hips forward, rocking against Ray’s body. He felt Ray, hard as steel, beneath him. “That’s tempting. But then we might not finish this conversation, and it’s important.”

“All right.” Elliot sat back, pried Ray’s hands off his hips, and set them on Ray’s own chest.

Ray pouted but continued. “That week at Hayes’s place was nice. It made me realize that having something like that all the time… well, it’d be….”

“Nice?”

“Yeah. Seeing the way my family looked at me at the funeral, like I was the one who shot her, it made me realize what I’ve really been looking for isn’t just a chance to get off and get a decent night’s sleep. I want that week back. I want somebody to have dinner with and to watch
Firefly
marathons with. A family.”

“So I’ve made you a fairy tale convert?”

“You made me feel like shit, that’s what you did. You convinced me that maybe there could be someone out there who would put up with me, who wouldn’t throw me away like my own family did. Someone who would trust me with power tools. You made me feel like a fairy tale might be worth trying for, and then you told me you don’t think you deserve one.” Ray shook his head and glared at him. “That’s bullshit, Elliot.”

Elliot tried to scoot back, but Ray held on to him again.

“El, you trusted me with rewiring your security system. You trusted me with fixing the backlight on your laptop screen. And with backing you up on the job.” Ray ran his finger down Elliot’s cheek and then down his chest, stopping over his breastbone. “Now I want you to trust me with something else.”

“Oh?”

“My next repair job. I’m going to make you believe in fairy tales again.”

“So the Pop-Tarts were what, exactly?”

“A big romantic gesture. Fairy tales are supposed to be all romantic, right? But flowers aren’t really masculine. Jewelry is kind of girly, too. Then I thought maybe cooking stuff, like a few bottles of nice olive oils, and I second-guessed that because I worried you might think I wanted you to change or that I was hoping you’d cook me dinner. Chocolate, coffee, and liquor are my go-to gift ideas for guys, but I didn’t want to give you a gift that would mean another migraine.”

“So you got me Pop-Tarts?”