“You’ll only do smart things until I get there, won’t you, Sullivan?” Lisbeth asked as the conversation wrapped up.
“The smartest,” he agreed.
Tobias poked him again. “What’s she saying?”
Sullivan batted at his hand and tried to muffle the phone’s speaker against his shoulder so he could hiss, “She’s giving me the recipe to life everlasting. And if you keep poking me—ow—I’m not going to share it with you.”
Tobias was grinning, and after a second, when he heard Lisbeth cough pointedly in his ear, Sullivan realized he was sitting there silently grinning back. They were just two half-asleep idiots grinning at each other in bed.
“That would be the college boy stealing your attention, I’m assuming?” Lisbeth asked dryly.
“It would.”
“Is this a nice development?”
Sullivan watched Tobias lift an eyebrow and kick the sheet down a few inches, the filthy tease, and all Sullivan could think was that it was so clean. So happy, so pure. Nothing perverted about him, about them, no matter how dirty they played together. “The nicest.”
“Good. I’ll tell Caty you’re bringing him over for dinner in a few days. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
“Hey, now—” Sullivan started, but she’d already hung up. He wasn’t grinning anymore, unfortunately, because he had a mental picture of Caty tugging Tobias away to teach him all about “the ways of the sub,” which Sullivan knew all too well was just a collection of tips and tricks meant to annoy the shit out of Doms. Though he had to admit, a bratty Tobias wasn’t an unattractive one.
“What was she saying?” Tobias asked.
“We have two hours before this ex-cop guy gets here and half an hour before Lisbeth does,” Sullivan said, and tugged at the sheet, thinking that teasing was a crime definitely worthy of punishment. Blow job punishment. Sounded fair. He slid down the bed and added, “Plenty of time.”
“Wait, what?” Tobias sat upright, yanking the sheet back up to his navel. “Two hours? I can’t convince Ghost to give the USB to a cop in two hours.”
“You don’t have to,” Sullivan said, rather reasonably in his opinion, considering that Tobias was now doing the opposite of having sex with him. “We have the USB. We can give it to the ex-cop without Ghost’s permission. Ghost can make up his own mind about whether he sticks around to testify or get deposed, but either way, you know we can’t trust him to give the USB up on his own.”
“You made a good argument yesterday,” Tobias pointed out. “He might agree. He might do the right thing of his own volition.”
“I don’t know.” Sullivan thought of Tobias running downstairs in Spratt’s house, and reminded himself of Tobias explaining last night that it’d been about trust, not love.
“I’ve had a lot of important choices that I didn’t fight to make for myself,” Tobias said, taking his hand. “I want to give him that option. He’s going to have to live with the consequences; he should at least get a say.”
“Do you really think he’ll do the right thing?”
Tobias dropped his gaze.
“More to the point,” Sullivan said gently, “Can you live with yourself if you’re wrong?”
“Let me talk to him.” Tobias spoke more to Sullivan’s belly than his face. “Don’t do anything until I do that much, okay? Maybe I can convince him to go along with this.”
Sullivan sighed and rolled to his back. “This isn’t you choosing him, right? This is you trusting me to do the right thing even if you’re not babysitting me, right?”
“Yes,” Tobias said fiercely, and threw himself on Sullivan to kiss him, hard, and Sullivan kissed him back, morning breath bedamned. They’d been together for years now anyway, apparently. They were well past worrying about that sort of thing. And the idea that Tobias trusted him was getting easier to believe with every passing second.
“All right.” Sullivan brushed a hand over Tobias’s shoulder. “You’ve got two hours, sweetheart. Do your worst.”
* * *
Ghost was already awake when Tobias went downstairs. He was watching the news with the volume turned low, his skin faintly lavender in the glow of the screen. The morning anchorwoman from Channel 7 was making her way through a story on a bus accident. Tobias hoped there’d been no children involved.
“Anything about us or Spratt?” he asked.
“Not so far.”
“Good sign.”
Ghost lifted an eyebrow a tiny bit as if to say take it how you like, but I know better, and Tobias remembered Sullivan saying you don’t speak the same language.
No, they didn’t, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t work out a translation.
He also remembered Sullivan saying he cares what you think.
Tobias slipped the remote off the arm of the sofa and turned the TV off, then sat on the steamer trunk, a position that forced Ghost to move his legs.
“Look at you,” Ghost mused. “It’s way too early for fight face, Tobias.”
“You’re up,” Tobias pointed out.
“Spratt keeps intolerable hours. I’ll adjust back to my natural rhythms soon enough.”
“Tell me how you got the USB.”
“It’s like your boyfriend said—I had a camera and a laptop and later I made a copy.”
“Why didn’t you send it to Mama right then?”
“Because two seconds after I saved it, Spratt was pounding on my door.”
“Why?”
“For the sex,” Ghost said, batting his eyes. “I’ve been told I’m irresistible to a certain type.”
“You weren’t sleeping together.”
Ghost paused, a bare hiccup of time that made Tobias want to smile. Ghost wasn’t used to having to be on his toes with him. “And you know that because Boyfriend is a professional busybody, I suppose.”
“I’m pretty good at peeking in windows myself these days, too.”
“You make a lovely couple,” Ghost said earnestly. “But back then we were fucking.
