Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,8

former glory would also fix me.

A couple of years later, the house was restored to its showcase prime, and I’d opened up my private investigation business after converting the formal dining room and front parlor into an office and conference room. Along the way I picked up Claudia, a sharp-tongued, Southern-born black woman who’d retired from driving a school bus and decided to not only manage my office but also my life. She’d become my mother of sorts and was the first person who realized I’d fallen in love.

Way before I did.

Kim Jae-Min was everything I wasn’t looking for in a man but really needed. A photographer by trade and a former dancer at a gay Korean gentlemen’s club called Dorthi Ki Seu, he’d been at the center of a murder case I stumbled into, then wormed his way into the center of my heart. We’d been through a lot—fights, broken hearts, hurt feelings, and cultural conflicts—but those were in our past, and now I wore his ring on my finger.

Or at least I thought it was on my finger. There were some days I was pretty sure it was actually threaded through my nose. On those days, I just kept my mouth shut and answered yes to anything I was asked.

Who said I didn’t know how to be married?

“You didn’t have to wait up,” I said, padding barefoot into our living room. Carefully I moved the six pounds of fury and black chinchilla fur we laughingly called our cat and sat down next to him, sighing contentedly when Jae leaned against me. “Not that I’m complaining, because you are exactly who I need to see at the end of this day.”

I didn’t need to see the bowl of orange-dusted fruit strips sitting on the table next to the couch to know he’d been eating li hing mui mango. Jae’s kiss tasted of it. Its sweet licorice-sugar stung my tongue, reminiscent of tamarind with a punch of Jae behind it. I was dead tired, scraped up to hell, but my body responded as it always did, flaring to life whenever he was near. My desire for him became incendiary whenever we touched, and there were moments when I was convinced I would one day be found as a pile of ash at the side of our bed. I would be the happiest pile of ash ever.

He was almost my height, skimming six feet, but we were built so very differently. For all of my being half Japanese, very little of it settled in my bones and musculature. My face wore ghosts of my mother’s Asian blood, but my personality and body were purely descended from the McGinnis side of the family—a long line of Irish brawlers with a nose for trouble and a thirst for adventure. I kept fit by boxing and running, usually accompanied by Bobby Dawson, my best friend and a former LAPD detective, and lately I’d tried to keep up with Jae doing yoga, hoping it would help ease the scar tissue knotting up my body.

Jae was a sleek, beautiful Korean man with a pretty face it almost hurt to look at and a flexibility that almost guaranteed my destiny as that pile of ash. His black hair framed his sculpted face, falling almost down to his shoulders and long enough to pull back into a ponytail, something he did when he went all mad scientist in the kitchen. As much as I loved his mouth, I loved his eyes even more. They were a smoky honey-rye silken brown mixed with burnt gold, and I loved seeing the world through them when he told me about his day. He was graceful in a way I could never compete with and seemed to possess a fondness for spicy things that even amazed other Koreans. He’d come to me guarded and hating his attraction to other men, but to be fair, I’d come to him broken and hating myself.

Along the way, we kept each other company as we patched up our wounds even as life injured us further. But we’d still found each other, still climbed over rigid walls to admit our love, to embrace our connection and eventually exchange rings.

I regretted nothing of the pain we’d gone through to reach this point in our lives, but I would have to say I wished I had brought more smiles to Jae’s full lips. Since we were both in our thirties, we had a lot more years ahead of us,