Page 35 of What We May Be

Chapter Ten

The backdoor of the station had barely closed behind Trevor when Sean cleared the bottom of the stairs and came barreling toward him.

“Trev, glad you’re back,” he said, not slowing one bit. Trevor held his hands up to block, only to have Sean slice his forearms between them and obliterate the defensive position, knocking Trevor’s arms aside. Hands to Trevor’s chest, Sean slammed him against the wall. “If you ever take off like that again without telling us, I’ll kick your fucking ass.”

What exactly did he think he was doing now? Sean certainly had the upper hand. Trevor was still struggling to catch his breath from the physical jolt to his body and from the emotional jolt of Sean’s words and actions. Anger and worry swirled in Sean’s eyes, and us rang in Trevor’s ears. “Where do I even start to unpack all that?”

“Better question,” Sean said, not giving an inch, “why the fuck didn’t you tell us where you were going? Or answer your goddamn phone all day?”

Us.

Ignoring how good, how familiar that sounded, even in Sean’s angry growl, even if the context was strictly professional, even if his twice-burned heart knew better, Trevor lowered a hand and dug his phone out of his pocket. He turned the darkened screen toward Sean. “It’s dead. I left in a hurry and forgot the charger.” Sean’s eyes—tired judging by the lines of red running through the whites and the bags beneath them—flicked to the phone. “And I didn’t tell you or Charlie I was going because you’d just tell me not to go.”

Sean’s gaze whipped back to him. “Damn right.”

“Proving my point.”

Sean stepped closer, his fingers curling in the front of Trevor’s shirt. Trevor’s breath stuttered, flashes of their recent night together careening through his mind. “Sean, what—”

“Sean, back off.” Charlie’s clipped command shattered the suddenly toasty bubble in the hallway. “That’s enough.”

Sean’s weary blues flashed with the same heat coursing through Trevor’s veins. Trevor immediately missed it when Sean heeded Charlie’s warning and retreated. But not without a final warning. “Don’t do it again.”

Trevor straightened and pocketed his phone. “Message received.” All of them. But with Charlie approaching, they’d have to get into unpacking all that later. And he meant to. “Thank you,” he said to Charlie.

“If you think I’m gonna go any easier on you…” She smirked, and despite the weariness he could see in his best friend too—her skin paler than usual, her hair hastily pulled into a bun, the divot between her brows and the same dark circles under her eyes as were under Sean’s—it was impossible to deny how attractive she was in her element, magnified standing next to Sean.

He waved off the fight, chuckling. “I know better.”

“Fess up,” she said.

“I followed a lead.”

She crossed her arms and leaned against the wall, knee hitched and foot propped. “I know you think you’re a cop, but you’re not. You’re a professor.”

“Exactly.” Which was why he’d gone to Apex as a fellow professor without a cop on his arm. “A cop wouldn’t have gotten what I did.”

“Which was what?” Sean asked.

If they were going to question him, he had a question for them first. Possibly related to the information he’d obtained. “First, tell me why the press is still out front?” He’d had to park around back because Main Street was completely blocked by press vans and reporters. “I figured that would have died off some by now, unless there’s been a development in Jeff’s case.”

Sean stepped closer. “You haven’t heard?”

Trevor ignored the tingle at the bottom of his spine and patted his pocket. “Dead phone, remember?”

The tingle raised goose bumps on his arms as Charlie also drew closer, her expression shifting. Gone was the smirk, vanished was the hard-ass detective and best friend who gave him shit. Instead, she wore the I’m about to deliver bad news face. Serious but compassionate. He knew that face. Had been on the receiving end of it a few times—the most recent the morning earlier this month after Sean had left again. There could be only one explanation for it now. “There’s been another murder,” he surmised.

She laid a hand on his forearm.

A full-body shiver joined the tingles and goose bumps. “Who?”

Sean closed in on his other side, and he remembered this move too, how the two of them had talked him down their senior year after the Pirates had been eliminated from the CWS. “Why don’t we go upstairs into the conference room?” Sean suggested.

Fuck that. If his pinging instincts were right, which they usually were with these two, the last thing he wanted was to be on the main floor when they delivered whatever news they were so skittish about. “Who, goddamn it?”

Charlie held his gaze and grasped his wrist. “Julian.”

There was a second where he didn’t believe what his ears told his brain, but the look on Charlie’s face, on Sean’s, punched the truth through the layer of disbelief. “Holy fuck.” Despite Charlie’s grip, he wrenched his arm free and stumbled around them to the nearest wall, slamming a fist against it. Warmth flanked him from either side—Sean’s “You okay, Trev?” close and quiet, Charlie’s hand on his back soothing, but he kept his eyes closed, trying to sort through the barrage of emotions and questions that were pummeling him, one hitting the hardest. He angled his face to Charlie. “Who found the body?”

---