HIS VOICE (MM Popstar Romance/Suspense)

This man was crying. And trying to hide it.

A small thread of mutual distress escaped past Sevan’s façade of stoicism. He lowered his eyes off his crying companion and fixed a stare on the drink gathering condensation in front of him. No one else would see Rick Cutts cry. It wasn’t obvious. Not in the loud, dark atmosphere full of drunken partiers. The breakdown was long due, anyway. If in a gay club in the heart of Miami of all places, so be it.

Biting his lip, Sevan looked down at his phone. There was a single text message at the top, one he had read but hadn’t responded to.

PO: Reminder, you’re due back within county lines tomorrow before 8PM.

An itch crawled up Sevan’s spine. Time wasted. The plan, the permission, this entire trip. Silently praying he wouldn’t accidentally escalate the situation beside him, Sevan cautiously reached out and put his hand on Rick’s forearm.

Rick turned immediately at the touch. His quick, forced smile met Sevan, and Rick wiped a finger under his undoubtedly bloodshot left eye. “Sorry for bringing you out here, Sevs.” His voice was barely audible, but he had to be yelling to be heard over the pulsing music.

“No, it’s fine!” Sevan responded loudly. “It was worth a try. Out of our control if this idiot was going to show.”

Rick nodded, eyes lowering to the empty glass on the bar beside him. Sevan saw him heave a sigh. “She’s gone, isn’t she, Sevs.” Those words, Sevan read off his lips.

He had heard Rick say them enough times.

Sevan pressed a thumb and forefinger to the Jack and Coke in front of him and lightly tipped the glass, watching the liquid inside shine under the passing glow of a purple strobe light.

Dancers. People dancing, rather. Varying degrees of commitment to the beat. Varying degrees of intoxication.

A sleeveless dark shirt with neon writing slashed across the front of it lit up under a traveling beam of light, and Sevan tracked it through the jumble of movement on the dance floor. Long hair, tied up in a ponytail—dark down to the shoulders then strikingly platinum past that. A full tattoo sleeve covering the right arm. The nameless stranger stood out because he could dance. There was something both riveting and ridiculous about how he was obviously drunk and yet perfectly in tune to the music. He disowned every movement of his body, but fell perfectly in sync with the beat nonetheless.

Rick let out a sigh that Sevan felt more than heard.

And in a moment of paralyzing coincidence, the stranger across the way lifted his face and met Sevan’s eyes for a fraction of a second.

Liquid scattered across the bar surface suddenly, and Sevan flinched, attention abruptly returning to the drink he had just absently tipped too far.

Rick immediately provided a wad of napkins. He scrubbed up the spilled Jack and Coke in one swipe, then dropped the soaked pile into the empty glass Sevan quickly righted. “If you want to stay longer, I can get an Uber back to the motel.”

“No, I’ll head back with you,” Sevan responded.

“Are you sure?” Rick met his eyes through the poor light. “I’d actually feel a lot better about this whole thing if you at least had a little fun.”

An awkward, half-frozen laugh escaped Sevan’s throat. “This is—not my scene, Rick.”

They were both fish out of water in this place, even though only one of them was straight.

Rick nodded slowly. “Okay, then.”

Leaving the club felt like a breath of fresh air—out into the humid night as it was.

“Damn, look at my goosebumps, man,” Rick laughed as they started down the sidewalk. “I didn’t realize how cold it was in there.”

The rest of the walk was silent.

Deathly silent as they reached the top level of an eight-floor public parking garage, and Sevan unlocked his beat-up sedan.

Rick hit the passenger seat with a heavy breath. And Sevan was seconds from cranking the ignition when Rick spoke: “Dude, I’m so fucking sorry.”

Sevan’s fingers retracted from the ignition, and he glanced at the man in his passenger seat. It might’ve passed him in those quiet few seconds, that forbidden thought. That Rick had more guilt in this than he admitted. “Don’t be. It was out of your control whether this guy showed up or not. Out of anyone’s control.”

“Not that,” Rick sighed. There was a long silence. “I should’ve come down here myself. By myself. You said it’s not your scene. You had to get permission from your probation officer. You went through all this hassle. Guess I really just wanted someone to come hold my hand. And I should’ve seen the signs from her. I should’ve seen this coming. I should’ve stopped her.”

Sevan’s eyes drifted up at the windshield. There was a group of people walking along the edge of the parking garage, looking out at the city view. And Sevan recognized him by his hair: that dancer he had seen in the club, walking with the group. “I have just as much business being here as you,” Sevan told Rick softly.

“I told you I would take care of her. I promised. I vowed, goddamn it.”

That stranger was beautiful, too. Asian, maybe Latino, mixed. A magazine-worthy skin tone lit up in the parking lot lights, his lips moving in response to what someone else was saying to him. He wasn’t tall, but athletic, fit, slender, beautifully built. A magnetic figure among the people accompanying him. He smiled radiantly and waved as the others in the group began to walk away, and he was left lingering by the wall at the edge of the lot.

And then Sevan’s phone vibrated loudly in the silence. He took out the device and glanced at the incoming call on the screen. He swiped the decline button.

Rick abruptly sat upright in his seat. “Was that who I think it was?” Protectiveness seized his voice, like he could switch between his problems and Sevan’s as easily as switching outlets.

“No. No.” Sevan’s heartrate climbed several notches at Rick’s insinuation. He blinked at the windshield. “No, it’s just my aunt. I’ll call her back.” Then, like a promise, “I blocked him. He’s blocked.”

“Hane,” Rick pronounced with the boldness of saying a curse in Kindergarten. He sank slowly back into his seat.

A long silence passed.

“The fellow on Instagram was just calling me gay, right?” Rick sighed, switching back to the reality at hand. “That’s the joke? Respond to a guy’s Instagram post about his missing wife, and tell him you got information, and that you’ll meet him at a gay club in Miami? He never had any information. He probably doesn’t even live in Miami. He just wanted to call me gay. I was fucking stupid.”

There are more fish in the sea, someone besides Sevan might have been able to say in that moment. But Sevan knew that to Rick, there was only one Lacey Cutts. And to Sevan, there was only one twin sister.

“What made me think someone in Miami would’ve seen her when she was last known to be heading to Los Angeles?” A faint scoff escaped Rick’s throat, and then he was chuckling, blinking back tears in the darkness of the vehicle.

The stranger with the black and platinum hair was gone. Nothing moved among the silent cars in front of Sevan’s windshield.

“So fucking stupid,” Rick whispered.

No, he wasn’t. He was there—in the shadow left by a break in the lot lights—standing on top of the wall meant to barricade the top level of the parking garage from the eight-floor drop on the other side.

Sevan’s heartbeat involuntarily quickened. People can be so stupid…

“I just wish she would give me a chance, you know?” Rick sighed. “If she would just let me talk to her, just…just fuckin’ see her, you know? I know she’s unstable, I know she’s unreasonable…but, God, if she would just…”

Crazy. She was a diagnosed borderline with ASPD and delusions, so clinically speaking, she was crazy. But she was legally independent. Legally allowed to go missing if she wanted to.

And suddenly, Sevan remembered that the stranger standing on the wall by the far end of the parking garage had been drunk in a club minutes ago. That he was absolutely and undoubtedly—still drunk.

“Shit, people are so stupid,” Sevan breathed. His seatbelt clicked off, and he pushed open the driver’s side door.

Rick called something after him—something Sevan slammed the door on with more than a little irritation bristling his nerves. Sometimes, survival of the fittest didn’t seem like such a bad concept.

“Hey!” Sevan snapped his hands together loudly, the same way he did to get the attention of half-deaf residents at the Adaline. “Hey, get down from there! You’re drunk, get down from there!”

The stranger on the wall didn’t even turn. His hair was loose, now, lifting in the warm breeze.

And as Sevan strode quickly closer, he saw a small, flashing blue light through the thick locks—a set of Bluetooth earphones.

How absolutely fucking stupid can you be— It was the last fragment of a thought Sevan had before he gripped the stranger’s forearm from behind. And in the same instant, the stranger, who had never even noticed Sevan was there, stepped forward off the wall.

A reflex Sevan didn’t even know he had kicked in, and his grip tightened like a noose. His hip slammed the wall with shattering pain. Rough concrete ground savagely into his elbow and forearm as he struggled to brace himself. And only a second after it happened did he realize he was still gripping the stranger’s forearm, holding him suspended over eight floors of empty air.

Panic froze every nerve in Sevan’s body. His mind processed nothing as his non-slip shoes anchored against the base of the wall, and his elbow lifted off the concrete—arm shooting forward to grip the stranger with both hands. Tight, fragile, a grip he was too adrenalized to determine the longevity of.

And then that face lifted—slow, expressionless. Empty brown eyes met Sevan from a face so pretty, it almost didn’t look real. Two facial piercings, glittering silver jewelry hanging from his ears. A neck tattoo. One of the earbuds had been slammed out when he hit the side of the wall. He could hear, now.

“What the hell are you doing!?” Sevan screamed. And in a paralyzing moment of coherent thought, he realized he was gripping the stranger’s forearm in both his hands, but even the hand he was holding wasn’t holding him back.

He was drunk. He was high. He was anything.

But the look in those empty brown eyes was not one of someone who thought he could fly.

“Give me your other hand. Give me your other fucking hand.”

Nothing. No reaction in those soft brown eyes. They watched him like they were waiting for him to let go.

“This—This is not a decision you can rethink!” Sevan gasped. Pain welled up in his chest, and it burned into the strain in his muscles. “Do you understand that? You cannot sober up and change your mind tomorrow!”

He didn’t care. Not an ounce of care traced across the blank face staring back at Sevan.

I can’t help him. It shot through Sevan’s mind like a bullet. His entire body was screaming at him to let go. He wasn’t physically capable of dragging this person back over the wall, even if this stranger chose to grip Sevan back. He was too heavy, the angle was too awkward.

Sickening weight coiled in Sevan’s core. That lost, drowning sensation of complete helplessness.

“Someone’s going to be fucking heartbroken you made this decision,” Sevan breathed into the dark air. An image of someone else clouded his mind. Suffocating, swallowing. “Someone is never going to forgive you for making this decision. Someone is never going to fucking understand why you did what you did tonight, and they’re going to carry that with them for the rest of their life.”

It was the first spark of anything Sevan had seen in that empty face. Like everything else Sevan had said to him before had been in a language he didn’t understand.

Dark brows slowly arched over those soft brown eyes. Tension, bitterness—some kind of hurt Sevan couldn’t read. And then the limp fingers resting between Sevan’s forearms moved, opened. Gripped.

Wind picked up, streaking shorter strands of dark hair across the stranger’s face as his other hand lifted and gripped Sevan’s forearm—strong, firm. Painful. There were rings on his fingers that dug into Sevan’s skin like barbs. He lowered his face, kicked out into the open air in an attempt for purchase against the cement column his foot couldn’t reach.

It was hopeless. Sevan’s grip strength was rapidly waning. His sweat or the stranger’s—something was causing both of their grips to slip, millimeters at a time. Sevan’s body was beginning to shake with the exertion, pain digging into his bones in the places where his body was being crushed against the concrete. Even if he somehow managed to activate his Google Assistant and call 911, he wouldn’t be able to hold on long enough for help to arrive.

“What in the hell?” A voice came from so close to Sevan, it startled him. And then Rick was suddenly beside him. The brawny man Sevan had known since high school did not hesitate. He doubled over the concrete in an instant, seizing the stranger’s arms. “One, two, three,” he counted off.

And in a single, swift heave, Sevan and Rick hauled the stranger back over the wall.

He stood on his own for less than four seconds in frozen silence before he wavered. Sevan struck out a hand and caught his shoulder. And as automatically as if they knew each other, the stranger collapsed forward into Sevan’s arms.

It was a weird sensation, and one Sevan hadn’t felt in a while—another person pressed to his chest, holding onto him. Awkwardly, Sevan raised his arms around the smaller, lean form. He smelled like cologne. And alcohol. And Sevan could feel him breathing, his rapid heartbeat.

Sevan’s eyes lifted and met Rick’s.

“What the hell,” Rick silently mouthed out.

“Very drunk,” Sevan mouthed back.