Dim Sum Asylum(51)
It was a cookie-cutter apartment, the kind of slap-dash series of boxes and cheap drywall cobbled together during one of the city’s rushes to provide affordable housing to the massive amount of people washing up onto San Francisco’s piers. I knew without looking there was a galley kitchen and dining area next to a front door that either led to a sidewalk or a landing with stairs. There’d be a hall and either one or two bedrooms beyond it, or possibly just a bedroom with a tiny bathroom with a tub-shower combo barely large enough to wash a medium-size dog in.
The place was beige. From the slightly tramped-down carpet to the nicotine-tinted walls and the less than comfortable knobby sofa I’d ended up on, I was left to drift in a sea of slightly burned oatmeal. Even the damned coffee table was a cheap low faux oak construct, held together by a few screws, a prayer, and a bit of duct tape.
Beige except for all of the books.
Bookshelves lined the empty wall opposite the couch and ran along the length of the apartment, then formed an L in the dining room. There was no rhyme or reason to the selection, or at least none I could see. There seemed to be a bit of everything, from mythology to historical romances and some nonfictions scattered here and there with memoirs and science textbooks. Most of the shelves were stacked two or three deep with thin books shoved into every imaginable empty space. It was a dizzying array of letters and colors shoehorned into wherever anything fit and gave every impression of a tremendous avalanche being held back by a single critical, trembling novella.
The pressing jumble returned the throb to my temples, and it quickly slid down to other parts of my body, reminding me I’d spent the last few days being tumbled around like a lost sock in a dryer. Rubbing at my chest helped a little bit. So did spotting my badge, gun, and wallet on the coffee table. My jacket was on a stubby coat tree by the door alongside a leather trench coat and a navy blue blazer.
“Shit, how fucking drunk did I get?” I never tied one on while wearing my weapon, and I never got pass-out drunk. Not since I’d stolen a fifth of whiskey from my mom’s stash under the sink and shared it with a bunch of friends. I’d been fourteen and spent the rest of the week alternating between throwing up and scrubbing all the grout in Central’s bathrooms with a cup of bleach and a manky toothbrush. “And how the Hell did I get here?”
It came back to me in dribbles, filtering in through the shuttered parts of my brain. The conversation with my grandfather. Jie’s death. Then the icy-eyed blond man who’d pulled me out of Sailor Jim’s and poured me onto his couch.
“You feeling better?” Trent’s silky rumble startled me, setting off the drums in my head again. Dust motes danced in the sunlight slicing across the living room, a golden ocean filled with plankton made of debris and dirt. “You had a rough time of it last night.”
Gods, he looked damned hot. Whichever muse the geneticist used to guard Trent’s spliced-in DNA, it’d been breathtaking. I couldn’t tell what was done. As gorgeous as Trent was, he looked human—a beautiful, perfectly sculpted man—and if he hadn’t been hiding his sapphire-and-quartz tumbled eyes, I wouldn’t have guessed anything swam in his soup but Homo sapiens.
He made other parts of me hurt, throbbing bits I hadn’t paid attention to since forever and a day ago. I didn’t like what booze and death did to me. I was aching, needing something to fill the emptiness inside me, anything to wash away the bitter sour of fear clinging to the roof of my mouth and down the length of my throat.
I didn’t need to feel again. I didn’t want to feel again. I’d locked myself down and lived on the razor’s edge forged and honed for me by a family I didn’t even like, much less want to be a part of. I didn’t want to notice Trent’s ass or wonder how he tasted in the morning after he brushed his teeth, and the last thing I wanted in my brain was to find out how his skin would feel on my tongue.
The girls’ graves, my grandfather’s unapologetic bloodthirst, and Jie’s murder brought out everything I’d thought I’d hidden. I was sipping at my own mortality, and the primal spark in my psyche wanted to quench all of its needs, starting with a long, healthy bout of sex with a man I shouldn’t have feelings for, followed by a piece of rare steak charred on the edges and possibly accompanied by a mind-numbing amount of whiskey.
“Roku!” Trent snapped his fingers in front of my face. “You in there? Do I have to take you in to the doc’s?”
“How’d you find me?” I winced when he strolled across the length of the carpet and pulled the blinds halfway up, flooding the room with light. “Why’d you find me?”
From the view, I knew we were above Chinatown proper, about two blocks up from the police station and an easy walk to work if Trent’d wanted to jog down a steep hill. Checking out his powerful thighs and tight ass, it wasn’t beyond belief that’s exactly how he got to work. He looked good, too damned good for my tender state, and more importantly, for my delicate heart. The damned thing—my heart, not Trent—was refusing to die back down, and suddenly the drinking myself into a stupor made sense.
“Gaines told me where you’d be, remember? I told you that last night. He thought maybe I’d have better luck getting you home. Said he didn’t have a lot of faith in you seeing reason and going quietly. He was right. It was easier to toss you into the car and bring you here than try to get you anywhere else.” His attention caught on something outside of the windows, but I couldn’t force myself to stare at the brightness beyond the glass. From the screeching, it sounded like a flock of pygmy vulture pigeons, but I’d been wrong before. Something larger screamed back, a throaty growling challenge, and then the city’s noises rose again to fill the resulting silence. Trent smiled down at me, tucked his hands into his jeans pockets, and said, “How about I make us some coffee and we have a little talk?”