the name, but many of Rafe’s alleged friends from those days were people he couldn’t be around anymore. In a lot of ways, Quinn hurt for his lover. Having to erase others from your life was always difficult, especially when your memories of them were hazy and numb so you’re left wondering if you’d been closer than you remembered.
Or at least that’s what Quinn thought.
“Brad used to be really good,” Rafe started, his gaze drifting off toward the horizon and the incoming storm. “I heard him play today, and all I could think was that could be me fumbling through chords and losing my place in the music. He showed up for the gig stoned out of his mind, and the kids who’d hired him… they deserved a hell of a lot better than what he brought to the table.
“When he saw me come into The Sound, first thing he said was: ‘Oh, take a look at Mister Rock Star over here! Slumming with the rest of us.’” Rafe bit at his lower lip, his nostrils flaring. “I was never like that. I never once rubbed someone’s nose into shit. Fuck, I went as high up as I could and fell down just as hard. I know how shitty it feels. I wouldn’t do that to a guy.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Quinn slid in, the silence needing a small pebble to create a ripple in the emotions Rafe swam in. It would anchor him, at least enough for him to feel there was solid ground beneath his feet. “So what happened?”
“I left it off like he was teasing, but you know how people sound when they’re trying to joke but they kinda really mean the shitty things they’re saying?” He glanced at Quinn, grinning as he said it. “Sorry, I know you have a problem with that. I think that’s what I love about you is I know you don’t play those kinds of games. The crappy plastic fake chatter pisses me off, but it’s a game we have to play a lot of the time. I mean, I stood there in front of those kids who knew who I was and were excited to see me, but at the same time I had to swallow all of the fucking shit Brad shoved into my mouth.”
Another stretch of silence and Quinn placed his hand over Rafe’s, joining him in Harley’s adulation.
“I went to give him a hug goodbye when it was time for me to go and….” Rafe took a long breath, hitching it into his chest. “There’s a smell on people’s skin when they do coke. I don’t know if you have to be a hard-core user, but it gives off this…. It’s kind of like how eating the white pith from a grapefruit would smell if taste was an odor. Do you know what I mean?”
“You’re talking to the person who spent five minutes describing how purple tasted to you.”
“Yeah, you understand,” Rafe murmured. He leaned over, resting his head on Quinn’s shoulder. “I could taste the high in the air around him, and I wanted to skin him open and crawl into his body because I wanted a hit so fucking bad. Not for long, but it’s kind of like this moment where it’s all I can think about.”
“So it’s kind of like an emotionally evocative phantom limb sensation?” Quinn mused. He leaned into the heat of Rafe’s body against his, the warmth building up between them in more ways than one. “There is a word that I can’t remember so it’s going to bother me until I do, but it’s an irrational, overwhelming emotion to passively die when a person is in a certain situation. Something like there’s a train coming and it would be pretty easy to fall down in front of it. The person doesn’t really want to commit suicide or even die, but the brain grabs at that dark thought and chases it down to where it lives.”
“Yeah, exactly like that.” Rafe chuckled. “So instead, I went to a meeting, then drove up to your parents’ house and weeded the fuck out of the vegetable garden in the back. Which reminds me, I owe your dad a few tomato plants, because they kinda look like weeds for a moment, and then they looked like pot, so I thought maybe someone planted them as a joke, because why wouldn’t you plant pot plants in a police captain’s garden? So I pulled them out.”
“We could just