Dirty Kiss by Rhys Ford Page A

looking back. He lost a lot of friends after that, and to this day, he says he has no regrets, other than he should have done it sooner.
     
    One afternoon as he sat next to my hospital bed, a grey-flecked, muscular older man whose face was creased from squinting against the sun and laughing, he asked me if I forgave him for not being open sooner.
     
    I told him there was nothing to forgive. We both knew there wasn’t a lot of room for a rainbow behind the blue line. He’d done what he felt he should do, and I’d made my choices. At that moment, I wasn’t so sure my decision had been the right one. Bobby said, after everything that happened, he could say the same thing about himself.
     
    “You are a sight for sore eyes, boy.” Bobby stretched his arms over his head, resting his boots on the edge of the low table between our seats. “About time you decided to spend some time relaxing.”
     
    “You saw me a couple of days ago. Shit, we’re not married or anything.” I sniffed at the nonalcoholic beer the server brought me. It wouldn’t have been my first choice, but I wanted my head clear when I drove down to Dorthi Ki Seu. “What’s up?”
     
    We’d fallen into a routine of sorts, boxing on some days and sharing a round of beers at a bar near my house on others. Sometimes we were joined by other mutual friends, but today it was just me and Bobby taking up residence in one of the corners.
     
    “I expected to at least see you this morning in the ring,” Bobby said, watching a much younger man asking the bartender to refill his drink. “Then I noticed you limping and figured you might have caught some tail last night and overdid it.”
     
    “Oh, I caught tail. I just had to throw it back,” I joked. I spent a few minutes telling Bobby the story of Mrs. Brinkerhoff and her shotgun, not skipping over the gory details of me running through the lawn with my tail tucked between my legs.
     
    His booming laugh echoed against the walls and made me smile. On the job, he’d been so tightly controlled, I often wondered if he even had a heartbeat. Breaking years of silence was good for Bobby, and I enjoyed being around to see him laugh as hard as he did. It was like he was making up for lost time.
     
    “God, stop talking, kid.” He rubbed at his face with a napkin, wiping his mouth and mustache. “You’re going to make me pee my pants.”
     
    “That’s what happens when you get old.” I nodded sagely. “Next we’ll be fitting you for a diaper and feeding you baby food.”
     
    “Keep it up and I’ll make sure you don’t have enough teeth left in your mouth that the boys will be lining up for blocks to date you.” I earned the stinging punch on my arm, and I was sure it was going to bruise beautifully come morning. Lifting his empty mug for the server to see, he ordered himself another beer. “So what are you working on now?”
     
    “Suicide case,” I said, setting my bottle down and following Bobby’s gaze. The young man turned, meeting Bobby’s eyes and smiling. “Don’t you have enough phone numbers by now?”
     
    “One can never have too many phone numbers,” he retorted. Bobby became all business, his face turning solemn. “Tell me about your case.”
     
    “Young Korean man killed himself at a sex club called Dorthi Ki Seu. Mike asked me to look into it for the family.” It felt good to talk about the Kims and what happened. I missed having a partner to bounce ideas off of, and Bobby was the closest thing to a partner I had these days. He bent forward, listening intently and letting me ramble until I eventually got to Jae-Min.
     
    “You should see him, damned pretty. Not feminine, just… I don’t know, sexy. There’s this thing about him. It’s like he’s just a bit feral.” Exhaling, I ran my finger along the rim of the bottle, listening to the sing of my wet skin on the glass. “And I swear to God, I could hear him purring underneath his words. Smelled good too. You know