It was like meth. Tobias had read up on it after the whole thing with Church and the Krayevs eight months ago, and he knew that for some people trying meth just once fundamentally changed their brain chemistry, creating profound addiction that would rock the rest of their lives. He thought that might be what he’d experienced. He already craved more.
Tobias supposed they’d had casual sex.
He wasn’t innocent, but he’d always preferred to know a partner well before embarking on something physical, both because he liked the intimacy of it and because it helped him feel less anxious about pleasing his partners. He’d never slept with someone outside of a relationship; he was admittedly out of his depth.
Still, he’d expected casual sex to feel sort of...casual, and this had been anything but.
To him, anyway.
At that thought, his stomach rolled over, and the last of his lovely buzz vanished.
Who knew what Sullivan was thinking? Tobias hadn’t asked for what’d happened, not with words anyway, but neither had Sullivan, now that he thought about it. Neither of them had said yes or no or if or how. They’d followed some unspoken form of communication and it’d been perfect—on his side, at least. He hoped it was true for Sullivan as well.
He’d had sex with a man he’d known for all of five days, a man who should hate him. A man who had tattoos and a mohawk and worked as a private detective and was impossibly cool, not to mention decent enough to take care of Tobias when he’d been vulnerable despite all the reasons he had to be a jerk. Sullivan was a good man, a slightly weird, moderately hyper, hot-as-sin, occasionally annoying good man.
A man who liked to live by the seat of his pants, no doubt. He probably didn’t do relationships. He’d probably be uncomfortable if Tobias suggested otherwise. In fact, this would probably last only until the case was over.
Fine. That was fine, actually. Tobias could be casual. He was doing all sorts of things lately that he’d never thought to do. And people had casual sex all the time. Why shouldn’t he be one of them? The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. Tobias Benton could be the kind of person who followed his urges and didn’t think about the consequences and had casual sex with tattooed private detectives. In fact, that sounded downright excellent. He’d milk this dark, strange power between them until he’d gotten what he wanted, and once he’d found Ghost, he’d say good-bye to Sullivan with a little wave and a thank you kindly and move on.
Before going downstairs, he paused to take a slow look at Sullivan’s room. There wasn’t much here: a box spring and a mattress without a bedframe, the sheets and pillowcases mismatched, one of those Rubbermaid four-drawer storage containers full of clothes, an old milk crate of odds and ends, including a bottle of vitamins, a Kindle, some wires and cords.
Everything Sullivan owned was designed to be transitory. He’d said it himself earlier—he didn’t like to stay in one place. Sullivan was a guy with wanderlust. It wouldn’t be long before he wandered away from Tobias, too.
His phone buzzed in his pocket, making him jump. He found a text from Mirlande: where are you? Ruby’s performance starts in forty-five minutes. Are you riding with me and Guy? If you are, you better be on your way.
“Oh, shit.” Tobias hurried downstairs, typing out a reply that he would meet everyone at Boettcher, freaking out about how he was going to manage to get back to the motel, shower, and still make it on time—he was not going to his little sister’s concert reeking of sex—and...he didn’t have his car. It was at the motel. Sullivan had been driving all day.
He blundered into the living room at full speed. “Can you take me to the motel?”
“What?”
“I have to go. I’m sorry. I’m—my sister, she’s—I have to go.”
Sullivan climbed to his feet. “Is she all right?”
Tobias had no idea where his car keys were. Where the hell had he put his keys? “Yeah, no, it’s nothing like that, it’s... I promised I would be there for her performance—she’s a violinist—and I forgot. I’m so late, and I can’t beg off; she’s got abandonment issues. Well, we all have abandonment issues, I suppose. Adopted kids. It’s pretty standard. And I’m her favorite, though God knows why, since I can’t seem to—”
“Here.” Sullivan held out Tobias’s keys. “They fell out of your pocket while you were lying on the couch.”
“Oh, thank you, you’re...” Tobias stuttered to a halt, struck by the tension in Sullivan’s mouth, in the way his brow pinched. He realized suddenly how this looked. “Hey, so about, uh, the sex.”
As he spoke, he lifted a hand to try to straighten his hair, because he no doubt had sex hair, and Sullivan... Sullivan flinched.
Tobias dropped his hand. It took a full five seconds for his brain to come up with “It was really good,” but he said it with far too much vehemence, because he was suddenly furious at that stupid flinch. He tried to soften it by adding, “I’m good if you are.” He cleared his throat. “I didn’t realize I needed that.”
Perhaps not the most graceful postcoital compliments possible, but at least Sullivan didn’t look like he was anticipating a punch anymore. He mostly looked sort of startled, and Tobias’s mouth was still running on without his permission. “Thanks for being decent. I mean, you don’t have any reason to like me, and I know casual things don’t come with a lot of expectations, so it could’ve been...but you were good to me, and thanks.”
Something flickered in Sullivan’s expression, something that Tobias began to interpret as annoyance, but then it shifted, lightning-quick and impossible to parse, and finally Sullivan’s features settled into a mask of distance. Tobias wasn’t sure
