The Golden Ratio by Cole McCade

Author:Cole McCade [McCade, Cole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-20T04:00:00+00:00

TRY AGAIN. :)

Sade leaned back in their chair, staring, brushing their hair back out of their face.

Then grinned.

“Challenge accepted,” they whispered.

Before cracking their knuckles, and diving in.

[8: NOW I’M NAKED]

MALCOLM LEANED AGAINST THE HEADBOARD of the overly plush, king-sized hotel room bed that he already knew would ruin his back by morning.

And cradled Seong-Jae’s head in his lap, holding his omr-an close and curling over him, silent as he traced his fingertips over the stark lines of his eyebrows, the ridges of his temples, the crests of his cheekbones, the slope of his jaw, the bridge of his nose, the angled slash of the scar between his eyes. Again and again, memorizing him by touch, reading him like reading tarot and stars in the texture of skin, stroking again and again with soft, light touches while Seong-Jae went looser and looser against him.

One stroke at a time, the knit of Seong-Jae’s brows relaxed; his lashes no longer squeezed tight against his cheeks, but lay in quiet soft curves. His shoulders slowly came down, rather than hunching around his neck, easing to leave Seong-Jae in a loose sprawl with his hand curled against Malcolm’s calf, his lips parted, his feet hanging off the foot of the bed despite its size.

Seong-Jae was too damned tall.

But Malcolm smiled slightly, to watch him let go of the rock-hard tension that had gripped him from the moment they’d stepped off the plane. This was soothing for Malcolm, too—letting him fully reduce his focus down to Seong-Jae and Seong-Jae alone, shutting out everything else. Every last nightmare image stamped on his mind, frozen in his brain in a moment of sensory impression that he knew would rise up later—in his sleep, in his dreams, to plunge him into the scent of congealing blood and bloating bodies and the texture of rubbery skin through vinyl gloves as he examined a neatly skinned hide.

No.

He shoved it away again.

Pushed it far down, down where he couldn’t reach with the darkest and most hurtful of his thoughts.

But he remembered his father.

Remembered his father reading from the Torah, and teaching him about the violation and the sin of nivvul ha-met.

He might not practice anymore…

But some parts of the faith still lived inside him.

Respect the dead.

Always, always respect the dead. Respect kevod ha-met.

It was something he could look past, with autopsy dissections. Those dissections served a purpose—to solve a case, to find a killer, to prevent further loss of life. Those could be permitted by the Torah, and turned the desecration of the body into the preservation of life.

But there was nothing redeeming about what that monster had done.

Nothing that made even the slightest sense.

Nothing human, and yet…

What made it worse was that the killer was only a man.

Just like any other.

If Malcolm dismissed him as a monster, then…

In his own way, he was disrespecting the dead himself.

By refusing to grapple with the darkness of the human soul, and reckon with his responsibility to bring that man to justice.

“Malcolm…?” Seong-Jae’s soft voice

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