Infected: Lesser Evils Read Online Free PDF

be.”
    “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
    “Yep.”
    “He married?”
    “Divorced. That way he can say he’s dedicated his life to his job ’cause he never got over his wife leaving him. Although she left because he stopped having sex with her, but hey, why spoil a good story with details?”
    “You are aware how risky this is, don’t you? If they catch you taking pictures—”
    “They haven’t and they won’t. Give me some credit, I’m not an idiot.”
    “I know, but you’ve been hurt enough.”
    “Well, if I didn’t wanna get hurt, I shoulda never become a hooker,” he said in an offhand, derisory manner. There was almost always truth in the awful, but it seemed cruel to say that about himself. But Holden seemed to be in a very black mood right now, so Roan didn’t say it out loud.
    Once they got back to Holden’s place, Roan went to see if he had any ice packs in his freezer while Holden went off to his bathroom. Maybe to retrieve painkillers, maybe to punch a hole in the wall, he didn’t know and decided not to ask, giving him that much respect and privacy.
    He found an ice pack in an otherwise almost empty freezer (he had a couple of frozen dinners, that was it), and had found a bottle of aspirin in the cupboard when Holden came back out, stripped to his black boxer briefs. Somehow he looked slightly more intimidating half naked than dressed, although Roan had no idea how that worked. Holden had a reddish mark on his knee that might ripen to a bruise—he’d either taken a kick to the shins or kneed the judge in a place where he hit bone pretty hard. Holden sat on the couch, as always unashamed, and asked, “Know any retired hookers?”
    Roan brought him the ice pack, which he took with a slight nod of thanks, but he declined the aspirin with a wave of his hand. Roan put it back on the counter. “Can’t say I do.”
    “That’s because we don’t retire. We get dead or we drift away, but little good ever comes of us.”
    “So be the first.”
    That seemed to surprise him. “What?”
    “You’ve been many firsts, Holden. This will be just one more for you.”
    Holden remained one of the strangest men Roan had ever met, mainly because he could never quite get a bead on him. Other people he could figure out, know what their reaction would be in certain situations, but Holden? By nature an unpredictable creature, and he probably liked it that way. All Roan really knew about him was, if things went tits up, you wanted him on your side. If there was a zombie apocalypse, you definitely wanted Holden on your mall-occupying crew. If there was a way to survive, he would find it.
    Roan slumped in a chair parallel to Holden’s sofa as Holden held the ice pack to his bruised eye and asked, “Why do you make it sound so easy? I’m a dropout, I’ve done porn, all my skills seem to be illegal in nature. It’s not like I can hand over a CV with S&M Boys on it and be taken seriously by anyone.”
    “S&M Boys?”
    “I’m not Fiona, but I’ll do light dom. It’s on my web page.”
    “Fiona’s harder than you?”
    “Much. I’m really very vanilla at heart. I’ll only get a little weird before it starts getting too silly for me to take seriously. Fiona has a better poker face than I do.” He paused a moment. “There’s probably a better way to put that.”
    “Probably.” It actually took Roan a moment to find the slightest entendre about that.
    “Maybe I should take Paul up on his offer.”
    “Paul?”
    “A guy who’s a semiregular. He’s told me he’s willing to pay me to be an exclusive.”
    “What’s that mean?”
    “I’d be his houseboy. He’d pay me to live with him and be his boy toy. He’s rich too, has a nice place on Orcas Island. There’s little downside to it.”
    He stared at him in disbelief. “Except you’d be property.”
    “What am I now? Little better. Besides, isn’t that what relationships are? You’re someone’s property. It’s just that in this case the