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“Why am I such an asshole?”
“You’re not. The last couple weeks have been a lot.”
“I fucked the whole thing up.”
“You didn’t fuck anything up. We should have told John-Henry we were going to see Brey, but honestly, I kind of thought Auggie had told him. And—” Shaw had to plunge into the next words. “And we should have called Auggie, or answered his call. Whatever. You know what I mean. They don’t work for us, and it’s not fair to expect them to do what we tell them to do.”
North shifted slightly, exposing more of his face, and he rolled his eyes. “Christ on a cracker, how was I supposed to know he had something useful to tell us?”
Laughing again, Shaw scritched his fingers through North’s messy blond thatch. “That’s kind of the whole problem, you know.”
North grunted and pressed his face into Shaw’s side again.
“So,” Shaw said, “are you still, um, feeling amorous?”
“No. And don’t call it that.”
“Really? Because—”
“I’m sulking.”
“—if you were interested, I could be persuaded—”
“I’m not. I’m depressed.”
“You wouldn’t even have to do anything,” Shaw said. “I mean, not too much, anyway. If you put your hand right here—”
But North snatched his hand away and rolled off the bed. “John-Henry didn’t fire us.” He grabbed a fresh tee and pulled it on. “That means we’re still working this investigation. That means we’ve still got work to do.”
“Yes, but you realize we could be fast and have a physically and emotionally satisfying intimate moment and then work—”
“Move, Shaw.”
“I feel like I’m getting mixed messages because you’re at, uh, three-quarters mast.”
North threw a towel at him and ducked into the bathroom.
Shaw dressed—nothing too lovely, on account of it was nighttime and, therefore, sneakery was probably afoot. The leisure suit was a gray so dark it was almost black, and it was summer weight, so it was surprisingly comfortable. Especially because Shaw decided that a shirt under the jacket was optional.
He was just pulling on his jackboots when North emerged from the bathroom—three-quarters mast had deflated to about half-mast—and said, “No.”
“But they’re black!”
“Absolutely not.” He rooted around in one of Shaw’s suitcases and pitched first one black sneaker and then another.
“But these are my orthotics! For the nursing home!”
“That thing is going to make hamburger out of your nipples, you know.”
Sometimes, the only way to deal with North was to be haughty, so Shaw raised his chin and said, “My nipples will be fine.”
But later, in the bathroom, he did put on the little nipple chafing covers he’d started buying in bulk.
North, of course, was in jeans and the Red Wings again.
“Have you ever considered—”
“No.”
