Reporting for Duty Read online

  “Reporting for Duty”

  M/M Straight to Gay First Time Romance

  Jerry Cole

  © 2016

  Jerry Cole

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This book is intended for Adults (ages 18+) only. The contents may be offensive to some readers. It may contain graphic language, explicit sexual content, and adult situations. May contain scenes of unprotected sex. Please do not read this book if you are offended by content as mentioned above or if you are under the age of 18.

  Please educate yourself on safe sex practices before making potentially life-changing decisions about sex in real life. If you’re not sure where to start, see here: http://www.jerrycoleauthor.com/safe-sex-resources/.

  This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner & are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Products or brand names mentioned are trademarks of their respective holders or companies. The cover uses licensed images & are shown for illustrative purposes only. Any person(s) that may be depicted on the cover are simply models.

  Edition v1.01 (2017.08.30)

  http://www.jerrycoleauthor.com

  Dedicated to my friend Danielle.

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  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Authors Note

  Books by Jerry Cole

  Chapter One

  The police station at the corner of Southwest 5th and Main had been built recently, but it looked more like a mid-century modern building than a pretty office building. At least as far as Elijah Epstein could see. The feeling that the building gave off wasn’t one of community and welcoming. Rather, it felt as old and tired as the police force in the small city did. Despite the repeated modernization attempts, the public wasn’t any closer to trusting the police.

  Elijah had only recently moved back after he finished college, finding a position as an online reporter in one of the only surviving newspapers in town. He tried to chalk it up to luck, but his mother being the district attorney for more than thirty years likely helped matters.

  Elijah tugged at the press pass hanging around his neck. The material of the cord irritated his skin when it rubbed against the back of his neck, but that was enough to ground him. As he stood there, staring up at the new police station and making inaccurate architectural judgments, he tried to tell himself he was less afraid than he felt.

  After a couple of deep breaths, he finally pushed in. A woman, not in uniform, was sitting at the reception desk and writing something down, barely paying attention to him. Elijah walked up to her and tried his best to flash a genuine smile. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Elijah Epstein. I’m with the—”

  The woman’s head darted upward, so quickly Elijah worried she might hurt herself. “I know who you are,” she said. “They are expecting you.”

  He waited for her to say something else, point at where he should go, anything. But he was left in a staring contest that he hadn’t consented to, all while the receptionist did nothing to speed up the process. She tapped her long fingers over the mahogany desk before Elijah cleared his throat. He didn’t want to prompt her, but he saw no other solution. If her attitude was any indication of what this entire venture would be like, he didn’t have a very good few weeks to look forward to.

  “Take the elevator to the second floor,” she finally said. “Our community liaison is waiting for you there.”

  “Your community liaison? I thought I would be dealing with the captain.”

  “The captain is doing police work,” the receptionist replied. Elijah had to bite his tongue. He knew that he would have to work with these people for a while, and his sarcasm had gotten him in trouble with people he was just interviewing before. He didn’t want to test it when he had to do an investigative piece. She smiled at him, eyes full of poison. “Good luck.”

  He swallowed and smiled back at her, unsteadily.

  When he got to the second floor, there was no one there to greet him. Elijah looked around, fingering the plastic-wrapped ID hanging from his line and wondering where to go.

  You’re an investigative reporter, he reprimanded himself. And you’re standing in the middle of an empty floor like an idiot instead of doing your job.

  He walked toward the one room he could hear voices coming from. From the outside, it didn’t look like much. He could see a sofa and a person leaning back on it, his head tilted up and staring at the ceiling.

  He cleared his throat before he knocked on the door. “Hello? I was told to come in here and meet the community liaison.”

  The laughter stopped suddenly. Everyone knew who Elijah was and no one wanted him to be there. A man, shorter than him, rose from the sofa and extended his hand. Elijah hadn’t realized that there was a way for people to offer their hand as a greeting aggressively. The longer he was in this police station, the wider his understanding of body language got.

  “I’m Mr. Mahajan,” the man said as he crushed Elijah’s long, delicate fingers.

  “I’m Elijah Epstein,” he replied, trying not to let his discomfort show. “I’m here from the Evening—”

  “We know why you’re here,” Mahajan replied. “The reason has been made perfectly clear to us.”

  Elijah wanted to ask him what he meant, but he bit down his lower lip and said nothing instead. If he was going to be spending the next few months around these people, he needed to learn to play nice. Especially if he was going to write something decent about them.

  “Yes,” Elijah said, clearing his throat. “Well, it’s nice to be here finally.”

  Mahajan raised
his bushy black eyebrows and said nothing to that, choosing to get right to business instead. “As has been requested, you’ve been assigned to one of the cops in the department.”

  Elijah felt his heart sinking. “The request was for a detective.”

  “Well, our detectives constantly risk their lives. I’m afraid that we couldn’t allow for another liability like that to take place. We have found you a most suitable replacement.”

  He emphasized the word replacement, sounding out every syllable, mocking him.

  “Who?”

  “This tall drink of water,” Mahajan replied. He gestured back at the one person that was still sitting on the sofa. If this hadn’t been a professional engagement, Elijah may have actually gasped. The man had looked like a mannequin from where he was sitting, but now, as he stood up, Elijah realized that he didn’t actually look like a mannequin at all. He looked like a model.

  The blue uniform clung to his body in a way that made it look fashionable, but Elijah could only look at his body for a second before his gaze shot up to his eyes. Huge and round, he couldn’t tell what color they were from where he was standing. What he could tell was that they were intense. The rest of his face was just as striking as his eyes, though the more he looked at him, the harder it got to describe him as attractive.

  His eyes were far too large, too far apart, his nose far too strong, his jaw not strong enough. Elijah’s voice was caught in his throat as he tried to articulate some sort of greeting, but nothing came out of his mouth.

  The uniformed man extended his hand. “Kilkenny,” he said.

  Elijah raised his eyebrows.

  “Robert Kilkenny,” the cop said. Elijah shook it, noticing how long and calloused his fingers were around his comparatively soft skin. Then Kilkenny smiled. “I’m your babysitter.”

  Elijah knew that it was a slight. He knew that he shouldn’t laugh, but he still felt the corner of his mouth twitch.

  Chapter Two

  Robert Kilkenny was more interested in the logistics of how he would show the reporter around than in the reporter himself. He had been at the precinct for a few weeks and he was still on a bike. He didn’t mind the bike so much, it kept him fit, and he liked the slower pace after his job with narcotics, but if there were real police work to be done, he knew that it needed to happen in a car.

  No one had volunteered to take the reporter, though the captain had told them that integrating someone to do press was an integral part of their community outreach process. He hadn’t wanted to ostracize his new coworkers, so he had approached his boss quietly and then negotiated a trade.

  He would babysit the reporter for two months if he got to keep the car after the assignment was over. The deal worked for him. It also made him look less like a betraying screw-up to the rest of his workmates, who still regarded him with no small amount of suspicion.

  There was something to it, of course. Kilkenny used to be a rising star, working with narcoterrorist unit, and then things had fizzled out. One of the most ambitious, one of the brightest, one of the most well-known police officers in the state, turned into a simple beat cop. With no better explanation than ‘I like it a lot’, Robert understood why his colleagues could find such an explanation difficult to digest.

  Months ago, he wouldn’t have believed it himself.

  “Thank you,” Elijah Epstein said, bringing him out of his self-reflective trance. “I know that I’m not the most popular—”

  Robert held his hand up, waving him off. “It’s okay,” he said. “I assume you thought you were going to get a detective, didn’t you?”

  Elijah looked away and nodded. He was a tall, slim man with bright brown eyes and dark rimmed glasses. It was almost hard to believe that he had already graduated from college. “I don’t really know what I expected,” he said, clicking and unclicking the button on his pen. “I guess I just thought I could write this interesting investigative piece about why there is such a rift between the police and the community, you know?”

  “Yeah,” Robert replied, taking a left on Third and slowing down as he scanned the area for anything that may seem unfamiliar. “Wish I knew what to tell you, kid. I’m not from here either.”

  “The police are scary,” Elijah said. “I grew up here. I’m a white Jewish kid, and my mom is in the system. Even I’ve always found the police scary. I know we have a really big problem with violence here, disproportionately from other towns, but I think it’s an authority problem.”

  “You do?”

  “When I was growing up,” Elijah said, his voice only a little louder than a whisper. “We were all so afraid to call the police. We all heard stories, we all saw it, you know? Tommy Diogeneia beat up my friend Matty so bad that he still can’t see out of his left eye.”

  Robert finished scanning the street and turned another corner all while he listened to Elijah talk. “Is Diogeneia still on the force?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he replied. “He transferred to a different town. Everything is great where he is. They make quota off traffic tickets.”

  Kilkenny laughed, shaking his head. “You really don’t like the police, huh? You would think they would send someone a little less biased to do this report.”

  Elijah looked at him, straight at him, for the first time. His brown eyes sparkled behind his glasses. “It’s not a report,” he said. “And I only don’t like the police in this town.”

  “The police are the same everywhere,” Robert said, looking back at him. “Look, take my advice. Keep your head down, do your work and then get the fuck out of here.”

  “You’re telling me that once I write my report, as you call it, I need to get out? Are you threatening me?”

  “No. I’m telling you that you’re going to want to, for your own protection,” Robert said. “Look, Epstein, is it?”

  “Elijah is fine.”

  “Look, Elijah, this town is small and there are only a few jobs going. As a member of the media, unless you do what the captain wants, you’re probably not going to bag many more exclusive news stories with the police. And since we only have the one newspaper for the entire county, then you’re not going to be able to do much with your degree here. Move out west. They have jobs for people like you there.”

  “People like me? What does that mean?” Elijah’s eyes widened as he stared at Robert’s face.

  Robert was surprised by his tone, which wavered something between horrified and hurt.

  “You know,” Robert said. “Reporters.”

  Elijah sat back down and smiled. “That’s not what I thought you meant.”

  “That is what I meant. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, young. The world is your oyster,” Robert said. “Why are you in this shithole town?”

  “I could ask you the same thing,” Elijah said.

  Robert sighed. He hadn’t meant to talk to this kid so much, but there was something about him. He seemed nice enough. There was also the fact that he felt like he couldn’t talk to anyone at the station. He still didn’t have any friends in town. And he wasn’t quite sure what he was doing there. But he wasn’t going to tell this stranger that he didn’t know, someone that he was sure could write about him.

  “You could.”

  They were quiet for a few moments before Elijah spoke. “Thank you,” he said. “Seriously.”

  “I haven’t done anything but my job,” Robert said.

  “But you are nice to me. You don’t have to be, but you’re actually talking to me. I was so worried that...”

  Robert didn’t say anything, parking next to the playground and turning off his lights. “I have no reason not to be nice to you, Elijah.”

  “What about the fact that you’re babysitting me?”

  “It kind of sucks, but it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever done for the sake of my career,” Robert replied, laughing.

  “And what is?”

  Robert winked at him and Elijah laughed. The way he laughed was interesting. It was deep, much deeper than his voice
and it was also slightly musical. Robert didn’t mind it at all.

  Maybe this wouldn’t be as bad as he thought.

  Chapter Three

  Elijah arrived at his newly empty apartment at eleven o’clock at night, after typing up all his notes at the one cafe in town. It was still locally owned, even after all these years, and he knew the owners.

  There was that, and then there was the fact that he didn’t want to go back to his apartment. He wanted to stay in the coffee shop for as long as possible. Going home to an empty apartment was not his idea of fun. Moving hadn’t only been a career move. Andy was largely responsible for it. He could have stayed in the city looking for a job but it would have probably never materialized. Everything had changed when they had both graduated, probably because Andy had a future and he didn’t. After their break-up, they thought they could try again. And then graduation happened and there was nothing there. There was so much that Elijah wanted to do, but he had wondered how much of it was just to impress Andy. He had always been the ambitious one in the relationship. He was the one who was sensible enough to get a degree in something that people actually needed, that wasn't dying, despite how much he hated math and how difficult he found the rest of the course.

  When Andy had walked out, after they had gotten back together and after Elijah had apologized, Elijah was sure that he deserved it. Even that knowledge didn’t make being in his apartment any easier. It was too bare and he had never been one for decorating.

  It had always been Andy. Everything had been Andy. His off-white walls reminded him of just how lacking his taste was, how lacking everything about his life was.

  At least he had his job.

  And Robert Kilkenny hadn’t been too bad. He had been polite at least. That was more than Elijah had expected. Then again, Robert Kilkenny was a beat cop, and he looked just as lost as Elijah felt, although it seemed like at least he liked it. Maybe he wasn’t as lost as Elijah felt, after all. Maybe he knew exactly what he was doing and Elijah was just projecting his own issues onto him.