and looked away from the tablet in his lap, casting Hunter a surreptitious look across the aisle of the plane. Hunter—his dark hair pulled back in a half tail, gray eyes hidden behind sunglasses—was reclined in his seat, hands folded on his abdomen, the picture of refined repose.
“Not unless he’s doing it from his pores,” Josh muttered, yawning. He’d been really tired lately; Grace wasn’t sure why. Maybe he should eat more. Josh was always trying to slim down to get theater parts, but he was almost too thin for theater now.
Grace glared at him. “I thought you were my friend.”
“He is your friend,” Stirling said from Grace’s other side, eyes and fingers never leaving his laptop. “Anybody else would have smothered you in your sleep.”
“If he was my friend, he’d admit Hunter doesn’t like me,” Grace grumbled, put out. Couldn’t they see? Yes, the ex-military man was taciturn and stoic mostly, but he smiled at Josh, was kind to Stirling, even flirted with Molly on occasion, which was easy to do because Molly was irrepressible, but still. He only ever looked at Grace when they were speaking about the op, and he stayed as far across the room as possible.
Twice this past week, during dinner at the Salingers’, Grace had set the table, coming to sit down last with the express purpose of sitting next to Hunter. Both times Hunter managed to come up with an excuse to sit next to someone else. Grace had fidgeted unhappily during both meals. He’d wanted to sit next to Hunter. The man’s presence grounded him somehow. The eternal flitting, fluttering sensation that had driven Grace from lover to lover, from new and shiny to new and shiny, abruptly stilled, calmed next to Hunter’s muscular, immovable presence. And since that moment on the stairs, when Hunter had glared at him, half-mad, half-hungry, he hadn’t so much as looked in Grace’s direction without prompting.
How was the man supposed to watch Grace’s ass during an op when he couldn’t even meet Grace’s eyes at the dinner table?
Dammit!
Josh turned and gave Grace a level look. “I am your friend, and I’m a good enough friend not to call you an oblivious dumbass for not figuring out what’s going on.”
Grace narrowed his eyes. “I’m not dumb,” he sulked.
“I know. You’ve got an IQ of a hundred buzzenteen. Whatever. You’re an idiot, and if you don’t stop pulling Hunter’s chain, I’m going to disown you. Hunter’s trying to be a good guy. Can’t you see that?”
“See what? I’m just trying to get to know him!” Grace complained. “He’s your secret friend. You didn’t even introduce him to the rest of us until Felix needed help!”
If he was honest with himself, Grace would admit that he was a little hurt. He and Josh had been best friends since the second grade. He’d confided everything to Josh: first blowjob, first time he’d gotten high (which had happened simultaneously, because junior high kids shouldn’t flirt with high school kids, that’s why), and every theft from when he’d stolen candy from the local convenience store to the time he’d shoplifted from the guy who discriminated against Stirling because he was Black.
Josh had never berated him or shamed him—and, in the case of the shitty clothing-store guy, Josh had gone back and jimmy-rigged the guy’s security system and set up all his mannequins in obscene and hilarious positions in the storefront window, because Josh was solid that way.
Josh was not as bent as Grace—for one, his sex partners had been few and far between and fraught with terrible things like “feelings” and “monogamy.” He also tended to consider the victims of his crimes, making sure that the person he stole from or messed with was an actual out-and-out bastard, instead of someone who happened to be in his way. But that moral compass in Josh more than made up for Grace’s decided lack of one. If Josh hadn’t been there, telling Grace, “No, that’s a bad idea. Please, for me, don’t,” Grace would have been dead, in prison, or addicted to something by now, if not all three.
So when Josh had rounded up his friends to bail Felix out of a jam, Grace had been surprised, to say the least, to find that Josh had other friends besides him, Molly, Stirling, and (inexplicably) Chuck. Chuck was odd enough—who was this big, muscly guy with the Texas drawl who liked to take all the strangest humanity classes at U of C?
But at least Chuck