FOREST HEARD the wrong in the air. He liked leaving the windows open a bit, even after Frank chastised him about burglars and lung damp from whatever came in off the bay’s waters. The sounds felt wrong—abnormal for the area. The neighborhood had a certain rhythm in it, one Forest knew as much as he did the sound of his own breathing.
Mostly asleep, he labored in the depth of his slumber, his mind sorting through the sounds around him. Voices were deeper, not like the chatter of club-goers cutting through the parking lot to get to the BART, and certainly not the Asian food workers starting their day in the curve of an early morning to prep for a long, busy day feeding tourists and locals alike. These voices were serious, hammering at his quiet. Then a boom shook the air.
And Forest smelled the taint of fire licking at the edges of his world.
It smelled close—too close for his liking—and he fought the long threads of sleep wrapping over him. The coffee shop was a possibility, but none of the alarms had gone off, and the studio’s wiring was new, revamped in the last renovation bug Frank had up his ass.
Then the screaming panic of sirens shot through his open window, and Forest finally opened his eyes to see hell had come to visit.
He stumbled over his drum kit, barking his toes on the set of Rotodrums he’d been tuning earlier. Trying to pull on a pair of jeans as he made it to the back wall of his studio apartment, Forest banged his elbow on a counter and nearly slammed into one of the barstools he used to sit at the kitchen counter and eat. Frustrated and smarting, he yanked away the curtain from the slender back wall window and stared down into the parking lot where Frank Marshall first found him.
Frank’s RV was on fire, and from what he could see, the cops standing around it were doing jack shit to help the man inside. It definitely was a slice of hell served up on a knife, because his heart imploded under a thrust of pain cutting through it.
“No no no.” Fear did silly things to a person, Forest knew that. He’d thought fear was something he’d left behind in that Dumpster years ago, but it lingered there, waiting to reach out with its cold, slithery fingers to yank at his teeth until their roots ran cold in his gums.
He couldn’t lose Frank. He never even imagined that being a possibility in his life. In Forest’s mind, the scruffy old hippie would always lurk nearby, marinated in pot and glory days when San Francisco was about love not pixels, and always with a word or two about how he played Perdie’s Filmore rendition of Memphis Soul Stew.
“Fucking cops. Goddamn it!” Forest couldn’t see the second-story landing when he pulled open his front door. His eyes burned from a mingle of smoke and tears, but he went down the back stairs without even thinking about putting on shoes. He didn’t even feel the small pebbles under his bare feet or how cold the night turned since he’d fallen asleep after drumming a session for a has-been rock band.
Because the world was trying to yank away the only family he’d ever found to love him, and suddenly the past decade slipped away, and Forest was once more that scared, skinny twelve-year-old kid Frank found trying to get out of a Dumpster.
Forest hit a wall before he could reach the engulfed motor home. Some part of him realized the wall was a man. His cock certainly knew it was, and his mind registered an enormous amount of muscle, large encompassing hands, and flashing bright blue eyes. Dressed in body-hugging black and wearing a thick vest with SWAT written across his chest, the wall smelled of embers and cop.
Even as his heart lay in the ashes fluttering about on the parking lot under his torn-up bare feet.
“You’ve got to let me go!” he yelled at the cop. The man held him, immovable and steady. Forest tried shoving at the man’s chest, but all he got for his trouble was a jarring rattle in his teeth and spine. He stared into the man’s hard, handsome face and pleaded. “Dude, please. That’s my dad in there. My dad’s in there. Please. If it were your dad—”
“I’d want in there so verra bad,” the cop replied softly, and some small part of Forest’s brain registered other things about him—the small block letters on his chest spelling out his name as Morgan, the Irish strung through his rumbling, deep voice, and how good the man’s hands felt rubbing at Forest’s shoulders and back to soothe him. “But he’s already gone. I pulled him out before the whole thing went up. He’s gone.”