Page 25 of Burden of Proof

We finished the dishes without exchanging another word, sighing in equal measure when we realized Marshall and Silas were still in the shower and probably would be for a while.

“Can we talk about last night?” I asked, scratching the back of my neck. I was scared to move, scared to say the wrong thing. Lincoln was skittish and scared, and I didn’t want to out him to his best friend, but he needed to talk tosomeone.

“I can’t afford that,” he bit out.

“You probably won’t believe this, but you are my last client, so...”

He scrunched his nose, glancing up at me from the corner of his eye. He was so small, so delicate, but also so strong.

“You’re right. I don’t believe it,” he said.

“Doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not asking in that capacity.”

Lincoln turned and rested his ass against the counter, those borrowed pajama pants still indecently low on his hips. He crossed his arms in front of his chest and stared at the stove.

“What do you want to talk about?” he asked.

“I want to make sure you’re doing okay. I think…I mean I don’t know a lot about this, but I don’t think I should have let you leave.”

“I couldn’t afford to stay,” he snapped.

Frustrated, I stepped in front of him, grabbed his arms, and gave him a little shake. He was still frowning but glared up at me with an exhausted kind of venom filling his eyes.

“Would you stop with the money shit?”

Lincoln’s nostrils flared, and he sucked in a sharp breath. “I don’t know what any of it means anymore,” he finally said.

I licked my lips, rubbing them together and trying to think of the right thing to say. I wasn’t good with words like Finn, and I wasn’t good at understanding the things people needed like Marshall.

“I’ve never known what any of it means,” I admitted to him softly. Down the hall, the water turned off, and I flexed my fingers around his arms, not ready to let him go. “But if it’s a secret you’re keeping and I’m the only one who knows, maybe we can figure it out together.”

Lincoln studied me thoughtfully, a knot appearing between his eyebrows.

“It’s more complicated than that,” he said.

Marshall’s and Silas’ voices grew louder from down the hall, and reluctantly I let go of Lincoln and took a step back.

“I donated it to Angeles Fish and Wildlife Rescue,” I said quickly.

His eyes went wide, his lips shaped into an O that had me thinking all sorts of things that had no place anywhere near that moment. “What?”

“The fifty-three dollars.”

“What’s fifty-three dollars?” Silas asked, bounding into the kitchen like an overgrown puppy. He threw an arm overLincoln’s shoulder and kissed him on the cheek, achingly close to his mouth which had settled back into its usual unhappy line.

“Nothing.” Lincoln hiked up the oversized pajama pants, turning to face Silas and kissing him messily against the slope of his neck. It was clearly a distraction from the conversation Silas had walked in on, but seeing Lincoln’s mouth move against Silas’s neck in the exact ways I wanted his mouth to move against me…

It was horribly intimate, but Marshall seemed absolutely unbothered, smiling fondly at the two of them instead of looking like he wanted to put Lincoln through a wall.

“Are you okay with this?” I mouthed, gesturing at the two younger men in the kitchen.

Marshall squinted, rolled his eyes, nodded, and mouthed back, “Harmless. Platonic.”

If Marshall didn’t have an issue with the over-affectionate nature of his boyfriend’s relationship with Lincoln, what could Lincoln have meant when he said it was more complicated than that?

What else was he hiding?

But more importantly, why did I care?