Zane closed his eyes. “Only you,” was the best answer, the answer he wanted to give. But it wasn’t the correct answer, and he had no right to lie.
“Nothing hard core,” he finally admitted. It had been a self-destructive couple of months, when he first got to Miami. He wondered if Ty would care.
Ty straightened and turned to stare at Zane. “You back on the bottle?”
he asked neutrally.
Nothing other than a flat-out negative while steadily meeting Ty’s eyes would convince him otherwise, and Zane couldn’t do it. He shrugged a little. “Yeah.”
Ty looked away and shook his head, walking to the steps wordlessly and heading to the second floor. Zane sighed as he sat in the kitchen before slowly getting up to follow. Ty retrieved the pair of sweatpants he had been wearing before he was called in to Burns’ office, tossed his robe aside, and he was stepping into them when Zane topped the stairs.
“Well, then,” he said as soon as he heard Zane enter the room. “You won’t mind if I have a drink,” he said curtly as he brushed past Zane and headed downstairs for the kitchen again.
Zane sighed. That answered that question. “By all means,” he said, going to the bathroom to put his briefs and dirty jeans back on and taking another look at the rip in his arm. He sniffed at it and ventured back down the narrow stairs to face Ty, who had retrieved a bottle from the refrigerator and was standing at the kitchen counter, drinking it as he played the bottle top over his fingers like it was a poker chip.
Zane sat on the stool across from him, sliding a hand through his wet hair. “Now what?” he asked. It was a question that had many meanings.
“Want a drink?” Ty offered sarcastically.
Narrowing his eyes, Zane shook his head sharply. “Only when I’m in for the night,” he muttered.
“Well, that makes it better,” Ty responded in the same sarcastic tone.
“We all know the chicos in Miami sleep like babies.”
Zane’s face went hard. “Why are you giving me shit over this if you don’t care?”
“Do I sound like a man who doesn’t care?” Ty asked, trying to keep the hostility out of his voice.
That brought Zane up short, and his sharp reply died in his throat. Ty sounded … upset? He certainly looked angry. After four months apart, he was angry because Zane had started drinking and popping again. He didn’t know what to say without going back into that dangerous emotional territory. “So you want me to leave off it again?” he asked, voice even.
Ty closed his eyes and snorted in exasperation as he lowered his head.
Rubbing his eyes and wincing, he shook his head and said, “That is sort of the idea of the whole being on the wagon thing.”
“And I obviously have so much respect for the whole being on the wagon thing,” Zane retorted, sliding off the stool and heading back upstairs to get his shirt. This wasn’t going to go well, and he saw no reason to stick around for more abuse. He’d made his decision at the time, and at the time it had made sense. The sound of Ty’s beer bottle crashing against the nearest wall followed his exit.
Zane stopped midway up the stairs and turned to look down at Ty as the man stood in the middle of the kitchen. “What the f**k is your problem?”
“You don’t even care, do you?” Ty asked heatedly as the wall dripped and fizzed with Hard Lemonade. “You didn’t give a damn if you were killed down there.”
Zane leaned his shoulder against the wall, tipping his head back to glare at the ceiling. What did you say to a question like that? The truth? “Why should I give a damn? I got the job done, and no one I worked with was hurt.”
Ty glared at him for a moment before lowering his head once more and placing his hands flat on the countertop to calm himself. “All right, then,”
he finally said in a soft voice.
Anger flared again in Zane, and he wasn’t of any mind to repress it.
“So now you’re going to sit in judgment over four months of my life with no explanation? Fuck you, Grady.” He stalked up the steps and into the bathroom. For a long moment there he’d almost been convinced Ty did care.
“You told me,” Ty called after him angrily, coming up the steps behind him, “how long it had been since someone gave a damn about you!
You make it f**king impossible to do it!” he shouted as he rounded on the bathroom door.
Zane froze, hands on the sink as he looked at the hurt that surfaced in his eyes and crossed his face despite his effort to swallow it down. After a tense silence he felt Ty standing nearby, and he said hoarsely, “Add four more months to the tally.”
“You going for a record?” Ty asked heatedly. “Because I don’t give a flying f**k about the people you were working with in f**king Florida.”
“What are you saying, Ty? ’Cause I’ve changed my mind about four times about what I think you’re saying,” Zane snapped back before turning on him. “I didn’t give a shit about anybody for five years, and then when I did, I didn’t do a damn thing about it slipping away.”
“I’m saying,” Ty answered in a slow, stubborn tone, “that I would be hurt if something happened to you.”
Zane’s anger wilted, and he just looked at Ty while he stood there and ached inside. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
Ty had nothing to say to that. He sighed heavily and shook his head.
“Is this going to interfere with what we have to do?” he asked resignedly after a long moment of tense silence.
“I’ll stop with the drinking,” Zane finally promised after a long pause, turning to pick his shirt up off the floor.
“And your other … addictions?” Ty asked slowly.
Zane tilted his head, trying to stretch some of the tension out of his neck before looking back to Ty. “I’ll get it under control,” he murmured, settling his dark eyes on Ty’s body appraisingly.
Ty shivered slightly in the cool air of his bedroom, and he looked away toward the window and the small balcony. “You staying here tonight?”
he finally asked in a beaten voice.
Looking up at himself in the mirror, Zane knew what his reply had to be, as much as he didn’t want it to be. “No. I’ll go on ahead and find somewhere for us to work,” he said quietly. It would not be a good idea for him to stay so close to Ty. It was far, far too tempting, and he knew he’d never be able to resist.