“What are you supposed to be, cops?”
“Something like that,” Taylor said. “What are you supposed to be, gangbangers?”
“Something like that.”
Taylor laughed. The kid opened his mouth, then read something in Taylor’s face that shut him up, already backing down, looking for a way out.
“Out of the car,” Will instructed the kid in the backseat.
The kid climbed awkwardly, one-handed, joining his glaring, resentful cohort. “Come on, Jorge,” he called to the third gangbanger.
Jorge, the kid who had been hassling the girl — who had remained wide-eyed and silent, clutching her carryout bags throughout this intervention — was a different animal.
“You’re no cop!” Face twisted in a sneer, he advanced on Taylor. That put him in Will’s path. Will planted his hand in the kid’s chest, shoving him back a step.
Furious, Jorge looked from him to Taylor. “What is this? What are you? Two jotos, eh? Yeah, I bet you are.”
“Want to find out the hard way?” Taylor inquired.
“No, you don’t,” Will answered as Jorge opened his mouth. “Believe me, you don’t.”
After a trembling pause, Jorge flung away, hands raised in the air in a grand “don’t touch me!” gesture. He started walking, furious, head down, and his minions raced down the street after him, shouting back obscenities at Taylor and Will.
Game over. But what if they’d been carrying? What if Larry, Moe, and Curly had whipped an arsenal out of their falling-down pants and opened fire at Taylor? It gave Will chills to think about it.
The girl launched into tearful thanks and explanation, and it was a few more minutes before they were finally in the restaurant, apologizing for being late for their reservation.
“You really pushed that, you know,” Will said from behind his menu once they were seated and the waiter had departed with their drink order.
Silence on the other side of the table. Finally Taylor lowered his menu. “You think we should have stood by and watched them carjack her?”
“Of course not.” Will couldn’t help adding, “They weren’t going to carjack her.”
“You don’t know that.”
True. Will’s instinct was that they were just having fun hassling her, but it could have turned ugly fast — it nearly had. Jorge had turned out to be harder and more reckless than Will had initially reckoned. If Jorge had been packing, he probably would have pulled his weapon.
Into Will’s silence, Taylor said carefully, “You think I mishandled the situation?”
“Of course not. I don’t have a problem with what you did. I have a problem with the way you did it.”
Taylor’s brows were drawn together in a narrow black line. His eyes glinted like old jade in the soft lighting. “How’s that?”
“You didn’t talk to me. You didn’t wait to see if I was with you. You didn’t —”
“Since when do we need to discuss our every move?”
It was Will’s turn to be nonplussed. There was truth to what Taylor was saying. They usually knew exactly what the other was going to do without discussing it — half the time with no more than a glance between them. They had been reading each other’s thoughts for years. That was part of what made them such an effective team.
Taylor had always been a little quick off the mark, a little hot tempered. Will had taken a tolerant view of it and watched for Taylor’s cues so he could back his play.
Watching Will, apparently reading his surprised recognition, Taylor said quietly, “You know what? I haven’t changed, Will. You have.”
* * * * *
The mai tais came in small red urns carved with dragon heads. Taylor rarely drank hard liquor, and then he stuck to Rusty Nails, but Will seemed to think the evening called for the Red Dragon mai tais, and who was Taylor to argue? The mai tais were sweet and citrusy and very cold. Under their influence, Will finally relaxed and forgot about the incident in the restaurant parking lot.
Something was going on with Will. Something more than the usual thing going on with Will — which was confusing enough. Taylor watched for the visual cues of Will’s eyes, his hands, his mouth. Will was the stoic type, so every little gesture, every microexpression, meant something.
From the point that they had moved from being partners to lovers, Will had had problems. Initially Taylor had put it down to the old thing about Will feeling guilty for Taylor getting shot. He’d been convinced that Taylor had stopped a bullet because he didn’t love him — not the same way Taylor did Will.
Taylor had been shot because he was careless. End of story.
They’d worked through that, for the most part, during the now-famous camping trip from hell. A week in the High Sierras — in freeze-your-ass-off April, of all times — where they’d managed to fall afoul of murderous hijackers looking for the ruins of a crashed plane — and two million dollars.
They’d survived that, come out of it stronger than ever, come out of it lovers as well as friends. Will had stopped feeling guilty, and he trusted Taylor to be able to handle himself again — and yet something had changed.
“How’s the tea-smoked duck?” Will inquired.
Taylor picked up a bite with his chopsticks. “Great. Excellent.”
And it was. The best Japanese food in town. Will had taken the trouble to call ahead so that Taylor could have his favorite tea-smoked duck, which had to be prepared the night before. Taylor was particular about his Japanese food, having lived in Tokyo for two years.
He preferred not to think about Tokyo, though.
“You want another drink?”
Taylor hesitated, and Will said, “Go ahead. I’ll drive home.”
Home. That sounded good. Taylor wished… Whatever. This was good too.
He nodded yes to another drink. Refocused on Will. Yeah. Whatever was going on with Will tonight wasn’t just the dustup in the parking lot. “Did you get a call about testifying in the Black Wolf hijacking case?”
“Yep.” Will met his eyes, smiled faintly.
“Don’t ask me to go
