Signs of Life Read online

  Jeremy’s shoulders were broad, but his body was whipcord lean from all the running, not an ounce of fat on him. His hands were slender but masculine, with long tapered fingers. He wore no rings, just a large expensive watch on his left wrist.

  Right then Liliana started her spiel, campaigning for community service for the boys instead of monetary restitution. Kai tuned her out, watching Jeremy closely, seeing skepticism and doubt creep onto his face.

  “These boys destroyed part of my home, and you want me to let them back in?”

  “Mr. Speer, they will be constantly supervised. At no time will they be left alone in your home or around any of your possessions.”

  “Why is Mr. Daniels here?” Jeremy’s question was abrupt, and Kai sat up straight as Liliana waved her hand toward him.

  “A couple of them are his students.”

  “Students?”

  “I’m a high school teacher,” Kai explained.

  “And what does that have to do with—”

  Kai interrupted him. “I work with students in what’s called a second-chance school, also known as an alternative high school. These are the kids who are failing in mainstream school for a variety of reasons. Most of them are in the legal system, and it’s a requirement of their probation that they attend school. As part of my job, I work closely with their probation officers, sometimes do home visits or job site visits when a kid needs a little extra encouragement to get his or her butt to class.”

  “These boys have indicated they feel a rapport of sorts with Kai,” interjected Liliana. “I think he’ll be a good influence on them. What a lot of these kids are lacking are adult role models they can look up to.”

  “So these—these—thugs ransack part of my home and cause thousands of dollars’ worth of damage, and I’m supposed to just set that aside so they can come play with paint and power tools a few hours per week while you play Big Brother?” Jeremy’s voice was dripping with scorn, and his knuckles were white as he gripped his fingers together.

  “Mr. Speer, I understand you want these boys punished—” Liliana began, subsiding when Jeremy made a sharp motion with one hand.

  “Yes, I do,” he said fiercely, “and I will not apologize for that.” He picked up a file in front of him and extracted some photos from it, tossing them into the middle of the table in Liliana’s direction.

  Liliana looked at them but made no move to pick them up, so Kai reached out and slowly pulled them to him, shuffling through the full-color photos of the damage done to what appeared to be a home gym, shock coursing through him. The place was like a war zone, with piles of shattered debris, the red paint splashed on the walls and floor looking grotesquely like blood spatter. Coming upon this scene unexpectedly, and while alone, must have been horrifying.

  “What you don’t see in these pictures is the way they urinated on everything,” Jeremy forced out. “The way feces was smeared on parts of my—of my home.”

  “The boys deserve to be punished for this,” Kai said quietly. “And from what I understand, Terrell Watkins, the main instigator, has been referred to adult court and is currently in jail?” When Liliana nodded, he continued, “The other boys don’t have any criminal records. This was a crime of opportunity, not premeditated, and from what I know of them, they were basically caught up in a situation they couldn’t control, and that got out of hand.”

  Jeremy opened his mouth, but Kai continued, raising his voice just slightly, “They need to be punished, and believe me, having to give up their free time to do what basically amounts to unpaid labor will punish them. Having to spend time with authority figures who are making them do what they don’t want to do will punish them. No phones, no friends, no sleeping in.”

  Andrew Maglio spoke for the first time. “Jeremy, we’ll be asking for something like twelve hundred hours of community service, not something they can complete in a weekend or two. This will take months. Also we’ll make it a condition of their probation that they attend school regularly and complete homework assignments in addition to their community service. And it’ll be clear to them that their asses will be arrested if they don’t comply with each one of these conditions.”

  Jeremy still looked unconvinced, and Kai made a decision.

  “I know you think being in detention will punish them, and it will, but it will also be sending them to hell.” He rolled up his sleeve to display heavy scarring on his left forearm. “I spent two years in juvie, from age fourteen to sixteen. This is from a knife wound, when some guys jumped me in the kitchen.”

  Jeremy and Liliana’s eyes flew to him in shock. Kai held his hands out, splaying his fingers and showing the scarring on his knuckles.

  “I got this from trying to fight them off nearly every single day. I was scrawny, and scared, and ‘too pretty’ for my own good. Sometimes I was able to fight them off, and sometimes I wasn’t,” he said simply. He watched comprehension set in, their faces holding horror and pity.

  “Terrell Watkins is a hardened criminal, and he’s in jail and will likely remain in jail. These boys”—Kai waved his hand toward the mug shots—“are just stupid kids who didn’t have the balls to tell someone ‘no.’ Let’s punish them, but let’s not ruin their lives in the process.”

  “If you’re a second-chance school, why were they in your class, then?” Jeremy’s voice was still challenging but lacked some of the heat of earlier.

  “Chronic truancy and basically failing out of mainstream school. They are marginal students at best,” Kai admitted. “They are easily influenced, easily led. When I was incarcerated, I saw kids like this get talked into committing crimes inside and turning a six-month sentence into years. One kid was in for petty theft and shoplifting, would have been out in a year, tops. He was talked into assaulting a guard, and was transferred to adult court and adult prison. Basically his life as he knew it was over.”

  Jeremy scrubbed his hands over his face, looking at the mug shots again. Kai noticed his fingertip lingering on the edge of Craig’s picture, and he was curious. Who did the boy remind him of?

  Abruptly Jeremy shoved his chair back and stood. “Can I have a day to think about it? I’ll call Mr. Maglio tomorrow with my decision.” With that he strode from the room.

  Liliana blew out a breath, her bangs flying up and down with the exhalation. “That went well.”

  “We made him think, at least,” Kai said, picking up the crime scene photos and handing them to Andrew. “That’s some awful shit right there.”

  “Kai, thank you for what you said about—you know. Jesus,” Liliana said with difficulty.

  “It was a long time ago,” Kai murmured. “I was a different person back then. And I made it out. I know I was lucky.”

  “That’s a story that I’d love to hear someday, Kai,” Liliana said fervently. Kai quirked his lips up in a half smile.

  “Maybe someday.”

  JEREMY’S FEET slapped the pavement, his breath coming in sobbing gasps instead of the measured breaths of a long-distance runner. He was only eight miles in but he felt like he was on mile forty-eight. The calm he usually derived from running eluded him; his mind was racing and his skin too tight across his bones. He felt brittle… like he could shatter at any moment into a thousand glittering shards.

  Seeing Kai in that meeting room had shaken him to his core. Never in all Jeremy’s wildest dreams did he think he would ever lay eyes on him again, and seeing him walk into a setting where Jeremy was the fucking victim knocked Jeremy flat on his ass. What Kai’s game was in pretending not to know him, Jeremy could only guess; his calm and self-possession when coming face-to-face with the bastard who’d used him and walked away without a word was impressive. He must have known who Jeremy was beforehand. Had Kai been in the courtroom during the various hearings, and Jeremy, so self-absorbed, never even noticed?

  Kai had looked so gorgeous, dressed in a long-sleeved denim shirt open over a tight white T-shirt tucked into neatly pressed and belted khaki pants. He was long and
lean, his warm-brown skin luminous, his black hair carelessly styled. He looked professional yet casually hip, no trace of the sexy clubgoer, no piercings, no eyeliner, yet Jeremy felt an immediate surge of lust so strong it made his hands shake, his mind flashing back to Kai arched against that alley wall in ecstasy, his rock-hard cock throbbing in Jeremy’s hand as he came, his husky moans ringing off dirty brick.

  In that meeting room, Kai’s golden tiger eyes were sharp and intelligent instead of slumberous and glowing with sexual heat, yet Jeremy still felt like he could drown in them. He was shaken by Kai’s admission that he’d been in jail as a kid, that he’d been…. Jeremy didn’t want to think about that, and his face grew flushed and burning hot, not with the exertion of running but with shame at how he’d pinned Kai roughly against that wall, how he held him and told Kai to “fight me” as Jeremy rutted against him and then left him without a word, covered in jizz with his pants around his knees. Jeremy had never treated a lover like that, never, and the fact Kai was a club hookup was no excuse.

  Layered on top of the guilt and lust and shame was… oh God, that boy. That blond boy, Craig, who didn’t bear any physical resemblance to Brent except for tousled blond hair in almost the exact same shade. But it was the eyes, awash in tears, the lost and heartbroken look that stabbed Jeremy right in the gut. Jeremy heard how the boy’s father spoke of him in that courtroom, “fucking wimp, fucking pansy,” and it made him remember Brent’s stories of his own father, how the bastard once took his sensitive, artistic son hunting, forcing Brent to watch as he shot a deer, then cut its throat while it thrashed and bleated in pain and fear.

  He made Brent help skin it after it was dead, field-dressing it right there and throwing the entrails at his son while Brent sobbed helplessly. All to try to “make a man out of you if it fuckin’ kills me, boy! Don’t want no limp-wristed fairy for a son, no, sir!” As Brent related that story, his eyes held the same lost look Jeremy saw on Craig’s face in the mug shot, that same bewilderment at not being accepted for who he was by the very people who should have loved him unconditionally. And that left Craig open to the manipulation of assholes like Terrell Watkins.

  Jeremy had no idea if Craig was gay or not, and it didn’t matter. The kid obviously had to endure an insensitive bully of a father, and how could Jeremy possibly live with himself if he sent that boy to jail to further endure Christ only knew what? The boys deserved to be punished, but like Kai said, they didn’t deserve to have their lives ruined in the process. They weren’t hardened criminals; they were kids who’d made a mistake. Jeremy knew what he had to do: approve of the community service, let those boys… and Kai… into his home, his sanctuary.

  Jeremy felt raw and exposed from all the unaccustomed emotion, the dam he’d carefully built around the charred remains of his heart threatening to crack open and spill grief and bitter anguish out, and so he did what he taught himself to do. He pushed his body to the point of exhaustion, to where nothing could possibly exist except the need for another breath, the need to get above physical pain into quiet. The illusion of peace.

  So Jeremy just ran.

  Chapter 7

  “SHAUNA, PLEASE stay after class for a moment.”

  “Mr. D, I gotta get going. My mama got Dante and—”

  “It’ll just take a few minutes.” Kai’s voice was gentle but implacable, and Shauna bowed her head but remained in her seat until the other students had filed out. Kai knelt down next to her desk, and she partially turned away from him, whispering, “Did I make a mistake on somethin’? I know I didn’t get all the copying done, but I—”

  “Shauna, move your hair away from your face, please.” Kai was careful to keep his distance from the girl and not touch her, but he wasn’t going to let her leave the room until he confirmed what he suspected the moment she walked into class.

  Shauna’s hands were shaking, and Kai’s heart broke as she tucked her hair behind her ear to reveal a large puffy bruise that extended along one smooth cheek, the injury reddish purple and angry. It must be throbbing painfully, and Kai couldn’t stop the breath that hissed out through his teeth. She flinched, and he made a concerted effort to keep his voice soft.

  “Who did this to you, Shauna? Your mom?”

  “No! She would never—”

  “Who, then? Your boyfriend?”

  “My boyfriend hauled ass when I found out I was expectin’ Dante,” Shauna said, her voice bitter. “He ain’t never even seen him.” Kai waited until she sighed and said, “It was my mama’s boyfriend. He mad because Dante was cryin’ and woke him up. He works all night,” she added hastily. “I shoulda kept the baby more quiet.”

  “Shauna, there’s no excuse for a grown man to lay his hands on you this way in anger. I think you should report it. If you were under eighteen, I would have to do it under the law.”

  “No!” Her normally quiet voice was almost a shout, panic threading through it. “I can’t! He might—”

  “Has he ever hit you before?”

  Her silence spoke volumes. Kai tried to tamp down the rage surging through him, and he asked a question he was dreading knowing the answer to. “Has he ever abused you in ways other than hitting you?”

  Shauna flinched again. “You mean—”

  When Kai nodded, she said, “No way. He helps my mama pay the bills, and I shoulda kept the baby quiet so he can sleep. That’s all.”

  Something in the way she carefully wouldn’t meet his eyes told Kai she wasn’t telling the whole truth, that if sexual abuse hadn’t happened yet, it eventually would. He stood up and walked back toward his desk, leaning against it and crossing his arms, watching as Shauna arranged her hair to cover her bruised cheek.

  “I’m starting a self-defense class one afternoon a week after school, and I’d like you to come, Shauna. Every woman needs to know basic ways to defend herself.”

  “I can’t beat up my mama’s boyfriend,” she said doubtfully, and Kai interrupted her.

  “You can if he’s trying to force his way into your bedroom,” he said bluntly. “And I don’t care if the baby is screaming loud enough to wake the whole neighborhood, he doesn’t get to hit you. I want you to be able to defend yourself.”

  She stood up and gathered her things, not able to hide a wince as she slung her book bag over one shoulder, making Kai think there were other bruises she could more easily hide than the one on her face.

  His jaw clenched and he took a deep breath to try to keep the rage from his voice as he said, “And it’ll be something you can teach your mama too.”

  His suspicions were confirmed as tears filled her eyes, and she whispered, “Yeah, okay, then. That would be good. I need to go, Mr. D.”

  She walked out, and Kai clenched his fists in helpless anger. God, he’d love to have that woman-beating asshole in front of him right now, make the guy pick on someone his own size, someone who’d learned how to fight back.

  He spent the next hour on classroom prep for the following day and then made his way out the door, still seething and worried sick. He’d talk to the people he needed to talk to and get that self-defense class started ASAP. It wasn’t much—he wanted to do more—but it was something.

  As Kai headed toward the school parking lot, he saw a flash of color out of the corner of his eye and he swung around to see Jeremy, dressed in black running tights and a neon green Gore-Tex windbreaker, using the back of a bench in the student pickup area to stretch out his hamstrings. Then he stood up straight and raised his arms over his head, twisting from side to side, doing what were obviously cooldown stretches after a run.

  Kai walked over to him. “What are you doing here?” He heard the belligerence in his own tone but didn’t back down. He’d had a shitty day and this was all he fucking needed, to be reminded of his own foolishness, and he really hadn’t anticipated seeing Jeremy anywhere except at the community service.

  “I wanted to talk to you,” Jeremy said, dropping his arms to his sides and bouncing loosely on the balls
of his feet, keeping himself warmed up.

  Kai was absolutely not interested in anything this man had to say, and he let his expression speak volumes, holding Jeremy’s gray gaze with his own.

  Finally Jeremy broke the stare-down and glanced away. “I made a decision on the community service.” Kai said nothing and Jeremy went on, “I don’t want those boys in my home around my personal things, but they’ll be allowed to work outside on my property, cutting down encroaching vegetation, raking leaves, whatever.”

  “What about the home gym? They could clean—”

  “I already had the debris hauled away and the structure torn down,” Jeremy said quietly. “I know that the weather is getting cold and wet, and it won’t be feasible to work outside for much longer. I just purchased an old Victorian in town that I’ll be turning into my law offices, and it needs lots of work inside, stripping wallpaper, sanding floors, painting. I’m willing to have them work there when the outside work at the cabin is finished. I hope that will be sufficient.”

  “This isn’t anything you needed to tell me in person,” Kai said flatly. “Liliana or Andrew would have called me once you informed them of your decision. What do you really want, man? I don’t got time for this.” Jeremy didn’t say anything, and Kai blew out a disgusted breath, muttering, “Whatever,” as he turned to walk away.

  “Why did you pretend you didn’t know me at that meeting?”

  Kai threw him a withering look over his shoulder and kept walking.

  “I came here because I wanted to talk to you about that night.”

  Kai froze midstride, then stopped, keeping his back to Jeremy.

  “I ain’t interested in hearin’ anything you got to say about that night,” he growled, deliberately letting his accent thicken and the street cant he’d worked so hard to banish from his speech creep back in, hoping to intimidate.