The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(62)
“I’m . . .” He trails a hand down my arm, fingers lingering at the upper edge of the bandage. “Better for now,” he says finally. “Ian and I spent a couple hours going through my photos. We found some from Stanzi’s birthday party just a couple of weeks before. It was open to the whole neighborhood. We can see if any faces appear in other case files. I won’t go in as an agent, but as . . . as someone who can answer questions.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah?”
I snuggle against his chest, his shirt slightly damp from his shower. “I know it could help the investigation, but if it also helps you, I’m good with it.”
“I do have a question of my own, though.”
“Yeah?”
“If that’s just the top, how bad was the rest of the dress?”
I laugh and slide my knee across his thighs so I can sit up without hurting him. “It was bad,” I admit. “It was so very, very bad.”
“I was always curious. I don’t think I envisioned this.” His fingers play at my hips and the two inches of skirt that remain.
“You never looked?”
He shakes his head, wet hair curling against his forehead. “It wasn’t my place,” he says simply.
“It’s gone now.”
“Mostly.”
“Well, as to that . . .” I tug his hand behind me, to the thick, sturdy ribbon in a bow at the swell of my ass. “It laces up the back.”
Ian leaned against the door to the school clinic, watching the boy on the cot clean up the abrasions on and around his knuckles. The bruising didn’t look like it was going to be too bad, he thought, assessing Brandon with a professional eye, but he’d be wearing a bandage around that hand for a few days. Given the way his tongue kept prodding against the inside of his cheek, he might have had a tooth knocked loose as well.
He’d kept an eye on Brandon over the last three months, regular chats with the school’s resource officer that made him cringe with every update. There was some pride there, too, but damn, kid. Less than two weeks back from his most recent suspension and he’d been involved in yet another brawl. Ian had barely gotten off the phone with Officer Gutierrez when he got the call from Xiomara. From her voice, she was barely holding back tears as she asked for his help.
Help me save my boy from himself, she’d asked.
Ian wasn’t sure it was that easy.
But here he was, uncomfortably aware that he was wearing his gun in a school full of kids, watching a boy who’d gotten far too good at patching up his own war wounds.
He cleared his throat. “Brandon.”
The kid jerked his head up, wide eyed and a little afraid, until recognition dawned. Then the caution was replaced with the glare that had become achingly familiar over the past months. “Detective,” Brandon growled.
“Your mother called me. Your principal says you’re in danger of getting expelled.”
Brandon looked past him through the glass half wall to the attendance office, where another kid sat whining to the not particularly sympathetic counselor sitting with him until his parents got there. Ian had the full story from Gutierrez, knew that this fight was only the latest in a campaign against dickish boys who grew to dickish men.
“Come on,” Ian said. “We’ve got somewhere to be.”
“Sir?”
“Vamos, chico.”
“You speak Spanish like a gringo.”
“I am a gringo, so I guess that makes sense. Come on.”
Shrugging, Brandon taped the last length of gauze over his knuckles and left the unused materials on the counter for the school nurse, who’d been helping him until she got called to a classroom for an epileptic kid having a seizure. Brandon and the nurse had reportedly become great friends.
Ian led the boy out to the parking lot to his unmarked dark sedan that somehow managed to be unmistakably a police car.
Brandon hesitated, looking between the front and back of the car.
Ian swallowed back a grin. “Bag in the backseat, ass in the front,” he instructed gruffly. “You’re not under arrest.”
The kid stayed silent as they drove, not even glancing at him as they turned onto Dale Mabry. That was fine. Ian didn’t need Brandon to talk to him today; he needed him to listen. He turned into the parking lot for the Big Sombrero. There were a few cars parked there, but the lots were quiet. The season was over, and everyone was taking a deep breath before throwing themselves into preparations and training for the next season.
Inside the stadium, Ian handed the kid the gym bag the school’s track coach had obligingly retrieved from Brandon’s practice locker. He pointed to a bathroom. “Change.”
Amazingly, Brandon didn’t argue. His coach had nothing but good to say about him, excepting his frustration that the punishments for fighting interfered with his practices. Said the kid had the right headspace for cross-country, that he could start running and not realize for miles how far he’d gone. Ian could see that just the gear was starting to settle him; Brandon stretched as they walked through to the bottom rank of seating and didn’t seem to know he was doing it.
Ian gave him time to fully stretch. He didn’t want him to get hurt, after all. Once Brandon straightened up and shook himself out, Ian pointed up the steep banks of stairs. “Run.”