“You do not, you big baby! It was years ago. Do you think he even remembers you now?”
“Probably not,” Grace said, scowling. “But what if he does?” Grace paused in the act of going through his drawers. He started pulling small boxes out and setting them meticulously on the dresser.
“What if he does?” Josh snarled. “Do you think me or my dads or my mom will let him get within a mile of you? Dude! You don’t need to run away from him!”
“I’m not running away from him!” Grace cried, touching the boxes disconsolately. “I’m running away from him!” And with that, Grace pointed at Hunter, who was looming behind Josh, wondering what in the fucking hell.
Hunter recoiled, stung. “What did I do?”
“You’re fine,” Grace muttered. He looked up at Josh. “You can’t open these,” he said. “You can’t open them when I’m gone. They’re your parents’, and it’s not stealing if they don’t leave the house or if nobody knows.”
“They know!” Josh shouted. “They know. We all know. And we know they never left the house, Grace, because it’s your house too. And it’s your family. And you can’t leave us now because you’re scared!”
The face Dylan turned toward Josh and Hunter wasn’t composed or catlike. He wasn’t smiling or musing or blithe. His face was wet and streaked with tears, and his cheeks were flushed and blotchy, and his beautiful amber-colored eyes were red-rimmed and miserable.
“He….” Grace faltered in midsentence and risked a look at Hunter. “You thought I was something,” he whispered. “For a little while, you thought I was something good.”
And then he dropped the backpack and turned around, slipped through his bathroom door, which opened into Chuck’s room, and a heartbeat later, they could hear the sound of his lightly shod feet hitting the carpeted stairs.
“Fuck!” Josh snapped, and Hunter caught him around the waist as he hurled himself toward the stairs.
“Stop!” he ordered, but Josh Salinger wasn’t weak. He struggled—hard. And Hunter was hard-pressed to block a furious series of vicious blows to his face, then his chest, then his throat.
The one to the throat came damned close to cutting off his wind forever. He grunted, decided Josh wasn’t fucking around, and swept Josh’s legs out from under him so he went sprawling on his back. Before he could recover, Hunter dropped to his knees and threw Josh over by the shoulder, then twisted his arm back and pushed his face into the carpet.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said as calmly as he could, but he was winded. He couldn’t deny that.
“He’s getting away!” Josh all but wailed, and here—here was the youth that Hunter kept expecting when he spoke to Josh. Here was the boy who was worried for his friend.
“You have to let him,” Hunter said, and to his horror, his voice was choked. “Look, I don’t know what this is about, but unless he comes back of his own volition, you’re not going to be able to keep him safe, okay?” He thought about Ronald Pinter, who’d been in way the hell over his head and had told nobody about it until someone blew up his house. Hunter would have told him—hell, Paulie would have told him—not to swim with sharks. But he was too scared, too coked out, to listen to the people near him.
Grace was smarter than that, right?
The man Hunter had been sleeping with—hell, the man Hunter had seen in action on the job—may not have worked in the usual ways, but he was smart. Damned smart.
“But what if he doesn’t?” Josh rasped. “You don’t understand. You… you’ve never…. Fuck.”
To his relief, Josh’s body went limp under his, and Hunter moved off. They hadn’t heard the sound of a door closing, but then they wouldn’t have, would they? Not with Grace.
With a grunt, Hunter leaned back against the wall. “Wow,” he muttered, voice tinged with admiration. “The actual hell, Josh. Where’d you learn to move like that?”
“Karate, tae kwon do, aikido, jazz, tap, ballet….”
Hunter laughed a little with the last three, but he was well aware that Grace’s fluidity as a dancer made him such a superlative thief, and Josh was apparently a true jack of all trades.
“You’re really good,” he said, feeling old in his bones. “You don’t need me.”
Josh shook his head, blinking rapidly. “Don’t give me that shit. We need an expert. And we need you.” He closed his eyes tight and sat up to rest his forehead on his knees. “God, we really need him to come back.”
“And not because you need him,” Hunter acknowledged.
“There weren’t many people I could trust with my family,” Josh said, and Hunter saw Josh—self-possessed, supremely adult Josh—suddenly as a little kid.
“You and Grace must have been holy terrors,” Hunter said, laughing a little.
“We were an Offspring song,” Josh acknowledged. “Every teacher we had would try to separate us, and then, after Grace literally swung from the light fixtures, figured that having us sit together made more sense.”
Hunter nodded. “What’s he so afraid of? What’s this about?”
Josh blew out a breath. “I can’t tell you all of it. It’s Grace’s story. I thought he would have mentioned it at least. But his one actual boyfriend was Gabriel Hu. And Gabriel Hu was bad fucking news. I mean, there’s criminals and then there’s bullies, and guess which one he was.”
“Grace dated him?” Hunter asked, surprised.
“Junior year in high school. You had to know him then. If you ask, he’ll say he was bored and lonely, but it was more than that.” He looked over his shoulder and gave someone a little salute, probably to indicate he and Hunter were okay. A moment later, Julia came into view, her blond updo visible first, followed by her unlined forehead and then her sweet Grace Kelly smile.
“What in the fuck was that?” she asked, eyeing the two of them, disheveled and sweaty on the ground.
“He made me let Grace go!” Josh accused, his voice still shaky.
“Well, puddin’, if you’re an adult and can run your own crime syndicate, I think your contemporary has the right to go out and get some air.”
Josh glared at her. “That’s not the point, and you know it.”
And Julia’s arch expression faded. Without pretense or hesitation, she plopped down next to her son and leaned into his sweaty shoulder. “I know. I think Hunter has it right, though. Did he take any of his things?”
Josh shook his head. “He didn’t even take any of your guys’ things.”
She gave a little burble of laughter. “He’ll come back, then. He wants those emerald earrings badly. He’s stolen them three times in the last five years.”
Josh leaned his head against hers. “You bought them on that trip to the cabin off the lake. Before Uncle Danny left? Grace had never been on a family vacation before, and remember? He couldn’t think of a souvenir for himself. I think he just liked that you and Felix and Danny would play games with us and talk.”
“I remember,” she said softly. “Grace means a lot to all of us, honey. But—” She looked at Hunter, who nodded. “—if he’s grown up enough to have a real relationship, he’s grown up enough to deal with this moment from his past.”