Never Cry Wolf

809

Starsky’s back on the job after recovering from Gunther’s hit, but an case takes a wrong turn for Hutch when his subconscious takes over.

 

Originally published in Venice Place Chronicles V.

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Hutch didn’t need to be awake. Of that much he was certain. His alarm clock wasn’t blasting him with its strident demand that he quit the comfortable haven of his bed, so Hutch knew he was at liberty to linger. Only one layer above the deep unawareness of sleep, that was about all he knew, but it was enough.

For a minute or two. That was how long it took him to realize that his was not the only warmth beneath the light covers. Reluctantly, he floated up another layer, let his skin feed him the information that there was a body pressed against his back, that an arm was slung over his waist, and a hand, lax and undemanding, cupped the curve of his breast. No name, no face came to mind, but Hutch didn’t strain for it. It wasn’t the first morning after he had failed to recall such pertinent details from the night before. It disgusted him, and Hutch didn’t want to be disgusted with himself just yet. Later, when the alarm clock did insist he stumble out of bed, would be soon enough to try to meet his own eyes in the mirror.

He had almost succeeded in drifting back into total oblivion when the body behind him had the temerity to remind him of its presence. It moved. Cuddling closer against his back, knees pushing into the backs of his and the arm tightening. Resentment swelled. Whether for the disturbance of his escape into sleep, or for the possessiveness of the grip mattered not at all. The emotion itself robbed him of any hope of going back to sleep. He didn’t want to be awake yet.

The body moved again, rubbing an unexpected hardness into his ass that suddenly made remembering the details of the previous night his first priority. That was a cock. He had one himself and knew what that half-erectness felt like. Resentment became a minor concern, and Hutch shot through several layers of sleep into almost full wakening. His eyes flew open, but were unable to pierce the dense darkness that seemed to inhabit those final moments before dawn began to break the night’s hold upon the city, while his body tensed to fight for his freedom. Then, just as suddenly, he relaxed. Starsky. The man behind him, making inappropriate advances in his sleep, was Hutch’s longtime friend and partner. He wasn’t sure why he was so certain of his bedmate’s identity; he only knew there was no cause for alarm.

Cause for amusement, instead, Hutch thought lazily, smiling into the darkness as Starsky rubbed against him again, fingers that, up to now, had been lax, seeking out and finding his nipple. Starsky was going to be so embarrassed when the alien contours of the body in his arms woke him, and he discovered the amorous advances he had been making while dreaming of some woman.

Hutch wondered how long he should let it go on. Not too long, of course. It was a good joke if he let it continue only to a certain point. Beyond that, it would be deliberately cruel. Hutch had had a belly full of taking his ill humor out on Starsky this past year, and had promised himself it was going to end. Besides, his own body, not terribly discriminatory when the right buttons were pushed, was responding to Starsky’s touch, despite a feeling of unease, almost-fear, that slithered through his amusement.

“Starsk. Better wake up before you do something we’ll both be sorry for,” Hutch said into the darkness, pushing back a little with his shoulder to jostle the man behind him.

Starsky’s only response was to snuggle closer, and zero in more precisely on Hutch’s nipple with talented finger and thumb.

Damn. That felt good. Too good. Hutch arched his hips forward away from the persistent sleeper’s groin, and pushed back with his shoulder again, harder this time. He was no longer concerned with the joke, more worried about which one of them might be the more red-faced if Starsky didn’t waken soon. “Come on, Casanova. Wake up and remember whose bed you’re in,” he advised.

He got a “mmmmm” this time, vibrating from his partner’s lips right into his spine where Starsky nuzzled the nape of his neck, while the grip around him tightened and drew their bodies back together.

Hutch knew how Starsky woke up. Once you could get even that “mmmmm” out of him, Starsky’s sleep cycle was broken, and it wouldn’t be long before he wakened enough to take in his present circumstances. Once he did, Hutch assumed it would take about two seconds for Starsky to react. Anticipating the panic about to erupt behind his back, Hutch was unprepared for the warm, dry caress of lips to his nape, nor for the sleep-husky, sex-drenched greeting.

“Mmmmm. You ready again already?” Starsky rumbled while his fingers bestowed a stinging, arousing pinch to Hutch’s nipple.

So maybe he was a little out of practice at judging Starsky’s waking sequence. It was the strangest feeling—amusement at odds with forbidden arousal—that added an extra second or two before Hutch could bring yet another wake up call to his lips. In the meantime, one simple word banished any illusions he might’ve had that Starsky was not awake and fully aware of who he was with.

“Hutch.”

Arousal dropped off the meter, disappeared by shock as Hutch felt a second kiss pressed into his nape, this one no sleepy buss of affection or some similar, benign emotion. This one was the open-mouthed expression of passion, moist inner lip clinging to his skin, while a wet tongue tip skied the low peaks and shallow valleys at the top of his spine. C4, C5, C6. Shock let go, and Hutch jerked forward, freeing himself of the caress.

“Cut that out,” he demanded.

“Ticklish tonight, beautiful?” Starsky murmured, arm tightening, body drawing closer, warm breath warning of a renewed kiss about to be bestowed.

Maybe Starsky had been awake all along. They both had questionable senses of humor. Hutch could accept that and gracefully concede defeat. “Ha, ha, Starsk. Funny joke. But enough’s enough. Let me go.” He tried to laugh, but even he could hear the falseness of it. The strident edge that branded the attempt a fraud. Starsky had to let go now because this just wasn’t funny anymore. Perhaps Starsky was getting the message, too, because the body behind him lost its relaxed ease and the arm released him.

“What’s wrong, Hutch?” Starsky’s voice in the darkness seemed caught between amusement and concern, as if his brain was still processing the input.

Hutch twisted around beneath the covers, finding Starsky a barely discernable blur against the slightly lighter sheets. He flung out a hand, encountered warm, bare skin, and snatched his tingling fingers back to cower against his own chest.

“You’re naked!” he accused, his fingertips feeling the sudden, sweat-damp coolness of his own bare skin.

“Uh, huh,” Starsky agreed, and Hutch felt the distance between them crossed, even though he couldn’t see the journey, could only sense the approach. “So are you. Best way to—”

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Hutch demanded, scrambling back until he almost tumbled off the edge of the bed in his need to escape the darker shadow that encroached upon him.

He felt Starsky freeze, the familiar stillness that came upon his partner when he sensed danger but could not immediately identify its source.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Starsky echoed, voice low, street-dangerous and wary.

Abruptly, Hutch rolled, teetered on the edge of the mattress as his hand groped for the lamp on the nightstand, found it and fumbled it on. Blinded by the sudden glare, he didn’t wait for his eyes to adjust but turned back to stare at Starsky, expecting… He didn’t know what he expected. Anger, teasing, anything but the confusion and hurt that was struggling with the light-induced tightening of Starsky’s face.

“What’re you doing in bed with me?” Hutch demanded, feeling like some outraged virgin in a really, really bad romance novel. Barbara Cartland with morning stubble.

Anger began to darken Starsky’s equally unshaven face, then suddenly disappeared, replaced by the tender concern of Starsky in protective mode. The face Hutch had seen on the other side of an isolation window. The heart-in-the-eyes nakedness Starsky had given him while they waited for the paramedics to release him from beneath the prison of his wrecked car.

“Ah, sweetheart,” Starsky murmured, one hand reaching out for Hutch’s face. “Did you have one of your bad dreams?”

Instinctively, Hutch knocked the hand away, needing answers as panic tried to take possession of him. “What the hell is going—” Hutch interrupted himself as, belatedly, he remembered the night before.

Determinedly, Hutch kept his arm around Starsky’s shoulder as they left the bar. He felt Starsky’s arm start to slide away, the smooth brush of leather on leather halfway down his back, a hesitation even as his partner kept pace with him, then Starsky’s hand was settling on his shoulder again. Me and thee, in the face of a threat from without, even if behind that wall of unity their friendship lay in shambles.

“Don’t, Starsk,” Hutch asked, putting the demand into the grip of his hand rather than his voice. The united front they had presented to Kira just now had to be real again, somehow made more than an instinctive, face-saving sham. If Starsky had to beat him to a pulp, and if he had to return the favor, they were going to be real again before the night was over. Nevertheless, Hutch released his partner when Starsky pulled away a second time.

“What do you want from me, Hutch?” Starsky countered, no attempt made to disguise the demand in his voice or the wariness in his eyes.

“To let me apologize,” Hutch replied, and saw Starsky blink. So, not what he had been expecting. “All night long. All month long. Because I mean it. Because I owe it to you. To grovel if that’s what you need to see to forgive me.”

“Forgive,” Starsky echoed, rolling the word around in his mouth as if tasting this sample to see if he wanted more. Abruptly, he turned away, short, choppy strides taking him to his car. “All right,” he conceded as he popped open the driver’s door. “I’ll meet you at your place.”

“My place?” Hutch repeated, surprised by the choice of arena. Didn’t Starsky want the security of home ground for what might possibly be the last confrontation of their long friendship?

“Yeah. You’re too fucking big to throw out if I don’t wanna listen to you,” Starsky pointed out. He offered a grim, humorless smile, then slid in behind the wheel.

Hutch forced himself not to think as he followed the Torino’s red tail lights out to Venice. Made no attempt to rehearse what he might possibly say to his friend. Instead, he concentrated on feeling how much he wanted Starsky’s friendship. Determined to allow himself no retreat into icy disdain, sarcasm, or bravado. Not even within his own thoughts. Tonight, Starsky deserved nothing but total honesty, however painful it might be for both of them to endure.

By the time Hutch had pulled up behind the Torino and shut down the engine, Starsky was already waiting on the sidewalk. His friend was the image of defensive unease—shoulders hunched, head drawn in as deep as possible within that muscular shield, and his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jacket. Hutch could imagine those hands drawn tight into fists around keys and loose change. Defensive or not, however, Starsky was here, and there was no hesitation in his stride as he followed Hutch onto his home ground.

“Do you want a beer?” Hutch asked, shucking off his jacket, hoping Starsky would follow his lead, but not about to make an issue out of it.

There was hesitation now, while Starsky seemed to weigh the pros and cons of accepting the token of hospitality. Finally, he shrugged. “Soda,” he requested, but he did unzip his jacket and sit down in the chair. He didn’t sprawl. He looked stiff and uncomfortable, like a kid in the principal’s office. But Hutch was prepared to settle for presence, he didn’t have to have comfort.

Good host duties complete, Hutch sat on the couch, close enough to the chair to touch Starsky if they ever got to the point where touch would be acceptable again, but outside his partner’s personal space for the moment. He allowed himself only a brief reprieve to take one swallow of his beer—he required the Dutch courage, even if Starsky didn’t—then tried hard to give Starsky the words he needed to hear.

“I acted like a conscienceless bastard,” Hutch admitted, gaze on the beer bottle because there was only so much fortitude he could ask of himself at one time. The words first, dredged from the part of him that hated himself most at the moment. Once they had been spoken, offered in place of self-flagellation and a hair shirt, then maybe he could meet Starsky’s eyes and let him read the shame.

“Thought about nobody but myself. Or maybe I didn’t think at all. No excuses, Starsk. I don’t have any. There aren’t any. I was a bastard and a son of a bitch and… a sorry excuse for a friend.”

“Is this the part where I’m supposed to say: ‘Ah, Hutch, don’t be so hard on yourself?'” Starsky asked softly, his tone so mild and devoid of irony that Hutch had to give up his own agenda and look at him.

“No,” Hutch answered, letting everything he felt for this man, everything he knew he had endangered, live on his face. “This is where you ‘re supposed to agree with me.”

“Fuck. It.” It was a pronouncement, a sentencing of some sort, and Starsky said it with capitals and punctuation while he set aside his soda and climbed to his feet.

Despite his best intentions to accept whatever punishment Starsky chose to inflict, Hutch couldn’t prevent his hand from flashing out. He stopped just short of imposing a physical restraint on his friend, but was unable to stop himself from voicing it. “Don’t go.”

“Not going anywhere,” Starsky promised. And it was a promise, reinforced when he shrugged out of his jacket and tossed it onto the couch beside Hutch’s. “But we can’t do it like this. I’ll get the beer; you get the Monopoly.”

They had talked and played and drank their way through the worst crisis of their long friendship, finding accord at last in the wee small hours, their bonds re-established in apology and forgiveness. Starsky had had a few too many beers to drive and had crashed on the couch.

Was that it, Hutch wondered? Was Starsky still a little drunk and groggy?

One look disabused Hutch of that notion. Starsky was a happy drunk, not grim as a Baptist preacher on a Sunday morning, and the blue eyes that watched his every move were way too sharp. Hutch tore his gaze away, let it take in the room. Starsky’s bedroom, not his alcove, even though he could remember smacking his sore knee on the brass footboard on the way to bed. Tentatively, his fingers sought out the soreness beneath the covers, but found none.

“Hutch? Sweetheart?”

It was the endearment, not his name, that brought Hutch’s gaze back to his partner in time to see Starsky rise up on an elbow, the sheet falling away to bare the familiar, furry torso Starsky was so damned proud of.

“Oh, my God,” Hutch breathed, mesmerized, reaching out, despite the revulsion and horror that possessed him, toward the blackened pockmarks and red/purple slashes that cross-crossed Starsky’s chest. “Starsk. What the fuck happened to you?”

***

Starsky knew how to handle a crisis. Knew how to hold the shaking inside where it couldn’t be seen, and let practical matters take precedence over emotion. It was nothing but training, but Starsky had never been more grateful for the ability as he climbed out of the bed. That training almost deserted him when he turned and saw Hutch staring at his chest with the horrified fascination of a mongoose watching the snake slither ever closer. He snatched up Hutch’s robe from the end of the bed and threw it at him, grateful for the brief reprieve as those horrified blue eyes were blocked from view long enough for Starsky to fumble into his own robe.

“Get into that and come out to the kitchen,” he commanded on his way to the door. “I’ll make us some coffee.”

In the kitchen, Starsky let his hands work at the familiar task of brewing coffee. Dump the cold dregs and rinse the pot. Filter and grounds and a dash of salt into the basket. Mindless routine. He could make coffee half asleep or hung over. Mindless or not, it kept the gibbering panic at bay. Let him rerun every moment, every word, every nuance that had passed between them since Hutch had wakened him. He didn’t know what the hell he was dealing with, but every instinct demanded he find out fast. Somehow, despite the fear that made his heart pound and the panic that nibbled at the edges of his enforced calm, he had to let his training take over, function like a cop working the clues of a case. Eliminate the impossible until only the possible remained. But his mind refused to offer up a place to start.

 

 

Starsky glanced at Hutch as his partner appeared in the kitchen entrance, standing there, looking uncertain and hesitant as if he didn’t quite know what to do with himself now that he had come to the end of the orders Starsky had issued. Silently, Starsky pointed at the chair Hutch usually occupied at the table, then reached into the cupboard for mugs.

His hands were shaking, Starsky realized as he set the mugs on the counter with a clatter. Or maybe the whole world was shaking. Like the first time he had experienced an earthquake after he had moved to Bay City from New York. There was nothing like a little Mother Nature temper tantrum to remind a cocky teenager just how insignificant he was. Only once since then had Starsky’s world rocked like this—when, aching from his own bumps and bruises, he had looked into Hutch’s eyes and failed to find himself there. No recognition, just an icy blue assessment that had found him wanting.

Those eyes weren’t making any judgments now, but they were once again fixed on his chest as Starsky leaned across the table and set a mug of strong, black coffee in front of his shell-shocked partner. He felt shell-shocked himself and craved something stronger than coffee. Whatever was going on, however, Starsky knew he better be 100 percent sober to deal with it.

“Hutch?” Starsky prompted as he took the chair across the table, unnerved by the horrified revulsion on his friend’s face. Hutch had never looked at his disfigured body like that. It had been Starsky who had avoided mirrors and buttoned his shirts to the throat for months after the wounds had been inflicted. Impatiently, Starsky yanked together the gaping edges of his robe and repeated his partner’s name.

Hutch blinked and finally met his eyes. “What?” he asked, eyes little clearer than they had been since he had first noticed the scars.

Starsky didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to believe that Hutch could ever treat him so cruelly again. But Starsky remembered the pain. There was no reason for it that Starsky could fathom, but Hutch had cried wolf once. Surely, the lesson had been learned then, but, however remote or unlikely, it was still a possibility. Eliminate the impossible, Starsky reminded himself. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” he said, hoping the edge in his voice would slice away the façade Hutch wore, if it was a façade, and silently begging forgiveness with his eyes if it wasn’t.

“Starsk?” Hutch said, his expression, to all appearances, the genuine confusion of a man struggling a step behind those in the know.

“Well,” Starsky drawled, wincing himself for his own cruelty. “At least this time you remember my name,” he jabbed and saw the thrust hit home.

“Of course I know your name,” Hutch growled angrily, confusion swept away from his features. “You’re my goddamned…” The anger faded as abruptly as it had come, shame taking its place, the one expression that could, in Starsky’s eyes, mask Hutch’s true beauty. “Oh. Then.”

“Yeah. Then,” Starsky repeated warily.

“It’s not like that, Starsk,” Hutch insisted, the sincerity impossible to miss and, Starsky hoped, impossible to fake. “I remember you. I just…” A hesitant gesture of Hutch’s hand indicated the hidden scars. “…don’t remember that.”

“So you’re a little fuzzy on the details, huh?” Starsky asked, watching Hutch closer than he would watch a rabid dog. A rabid dog might try to tear his throat out, but only Hutch had the power to tear out his heart. “Remember that you’re a cop? Remember that I’m your partner?” He paused, already focused attention zeroing in tighter, attracted like a heat-seeking missile to the sudden guiltiness of Hutch’s demeanor. “You do remember that we’re partners, right? And friends. Don’t need me to start a stroll down memory lane,” he taunted, bracing himself, waiting for Hutch’s righteous indignation to lash out at him, ready to welcome it if it would strip away this uncertain stranger.

“Don’t, Starsk. Please,” Hutch begged instead. “I know you were mad at me. You had every right. I acted like a bastard. But I thought…” There was anguish in the blue eyes as they pleaded for forgiveness that had already been granted. “…we sorted it all out over beer and Monopoly—”

As he spoke, Hutch twisted in his chair to face the living room, the sweep of his arm toward the cluster of couch and chair and coffee table halted in mid-swing, and puzzlement taking the place of sincere regret. “Did you put the game away?” he asked uncertainly.

“What game?” Starsky asked, but he was more uneasy himself now, convinced by the real terror he had just seen in Hutch’s eyes that this was no game. Whatever was going on here, Hutch was not reprising his role of amnesiac wounded party.

Wrapping both hands around the warmth of his cup to prevent them from grabbing Hutch and trying to wring some sense out of him, Starsky focused every particle of his attention on Hutch’s face, searching every flicker of expression for some clue as to what was wrong with his lover.

“Tell me about last night,” he demanded softly, the voice he used in the interrogation room when he knew the suspect was ready to give them everything they wanted. All they had to do was gently coax it free.

“We, we left Huggy’s and came here,” Hutch began, his eyes narrowed to slits as he looked around as if he had never seen Starsky’s apartment before. “Except, I thought we went home,” he added hesitantly, then shook his head to dismiss the distraction he himself had introduced, and went on. “We talked it all out. I thought…” The blue eyes sought Starsky’s and then slid away, “…you forgave me for what I did. For sleeping with Kira when you—”

“Kira?” Starsky echoed, something very close to panic claiming him now. “We talked about Kira?”

“We settled it. It was over. You had too much beer to drive…ah, I guess, I had too much to drive…” Puzzlement again, the crease between the fair brows etched deep, while one big hand rubbed absently at Hutch’s bare knee. “But I remember hitting my sore knee on the… Starsk, why didn’t I sleep on the couch? Why was I in bed with you?” he asked, the edge of panic back in his voice, hysteria peeking out around soft vowels and hard consonants.

“Easy, sweetheart,” Starsky soothed, his hand covering Hutch’s hand where it rested on his knee, all thoughts of past tricks and cruelties banished. Hutch wasn’t a man prone to panic. He couldn’t do the job he did if every crisis sent him into a tailspin. But Hutch was in a panic now, and Starsky knew that he was only a step behind.

The events Hutch described had happened over a year ago. Surely, Hutch had to remember something of all that time. If not the shooting, then surely some part of the aftermath.

“Hutch, do you remember a man named Gunther?” Starsky asked gently, trying hard not to show how important the question was, not wanting to put any more pressure on Hutch than he was already under.

“Gunther?” Hutch echoed, the lack of recognition on his face giving his answer before he voiced it. “No,” he said slowly, shaking his head.

“You don’t remember flying up to San Francisco to arrest him?” Starsky pushed. He remembered those hours vividly. Lying helpless in his hospital bed while his partner walked into that dangerous old bastard’s parlor alone. “Do you remember the sprinklers?”

“N-n-no,” Hutch stuttered and tried to pull his hand away. “‘Frisco? Sprinklers? What sprinklers? Where? I d-don’t know what you’re t-talking about.”

Starsky resisted Hutch’s efforts to reclaim his hand, using his grip to pull Hutch up as he rose. He couldn’t do this anymore. Pretend a calm he didn’t feel, poke and prod at his obviously terrified partner. Hutch didn’t remember, and he wasn’t faking. Of that much, Starsky was certain. There was only one place Starsky could think of that might help them get to the bottom of this. He gave Hutch an encouraging shove toward the bedroom. “We’re going to the hospital.”

Hutch balked at the door of the bedroom. “Hospital?” he echoed.

“Yeah,” Starsky confirmed, prodding Hutch again toward where his discarded clothes lay on the opposite side of the bed, the side Hutch had been claiming almost every night for months now. He fought to control the panic trying to take possession of him as he fumbled into his own discarded clothes, trying to convince himself that wherever the memories of the past year had disappeared to in Hutch’s mind, they couldn’t be gone forever. Not that year, Starsky begged silently. The year during which Starsky had very nearly been robbed of his life by an assassin’s bullets, and had it given back to him by Hutch’s love.

“Hospital?” Hutch repeated, standing bare-chested but with yesterday’s wrinkled jeans buttoned and zipped.

Starsky bent and snatched up the t-shirt that, only a few hours ago, he had teasingly removed from Hutch’s body. He tossed it toward Hutch and pulled his own t-shirt over his head. “Yeah,” Starsky confirmed as his head popped through the neck opening and he thrust his arms through the sleeves, tugging the material into place. “Yesterday, you had a bump on the head. Maybe this time you really do have amnesia.”

***

Hutch let himself be hustled along as far as the door, before he dug in his heels, refusing to be rushed out when a million unanswered questions swam around in his brain. “Quit pushing me,” he demanded, and shrugged off the hand on his shoulder, sidestepping the door Starsky had already flung open.

“Goddamnit, don’t get stubborn on me now,” Starsky pleaded. “Please, Hutch, just let me get you to the hospital.”

“What the hell’s going on? What happened to you?” Hutch demanded. While the scars had been hidden beneath Starsky’s robe, Hutch had been distracted by the seeming inconsistencies between his memories and the cold hard facts. But, when Starsky had thrown the robe aside for the hurried scramble into scattered jeans and t-shirt, Hutch had seen the horrendous marks again, and saw that the ugly, blackened puckers of healed gunshot wounds also peppered his back. New, vivid, round scars of evil to match the faded one Starsky had acquired in an Italian restaurant four years ago.

Starsky took a breath, held it with eyes closed while he visibly sought to rein in his urgency. “All right. Okay,” he said on the outrush of the held breath. “I’ll answer any question you want, Hutch. But on the way to the hospital. Okay?”

Reluctantly, Hutch nodded, stepping across the threshold onto the landing, feeling strangely vulnerable to be leaving a place he couldn’t remember entering. Nevertheless, he followed Starsky down the staircase and let himself be ushered into the front seat of the Torino. With a squeal of tires that was certainly not going to endear him to his neighbors, Starsky got them on the road.

“Now tell me, Starsk. What happened?” Hutch demanded.

“I was shot,” Starsky said bluntly, taking a comer far too fast, sending a second jarring tire scream ripping through the early morning quiet.

Shot, Hutch thought, trying to remember how many scars he had seen. He couldn’t recall, his mind too shocked by their existence at all to have been able to record the details. But it hadn’t been once, or maybe even twice. Such details hardly seemed to matter when, try as he might, Hutch couldn’t bring the memory to mind. Nothing. Not even a glimpse or a glimmer.

“I guess you could tell from the scars,” Starsky continued, but he wasn’t looking at Hutch, his eyes tracking the sparse traffic as if he was trying to negotiate the worst possible gridlock. “Three slugs. In the chest. Out the back. The docs played connect the dots trying to patch me up.”

Hutch’s impatience had disappeared with the first hushed sentence Starsky had spoken. He leaned forward, straining for mind pictures while the familiar streets streaked past unnoticed. His heart pounded and his pulse raced, but he couldn’t tell if the emotions ripping through him the way he imagined the slugs had ripped into Starsky’s body, were true recall, or only evoked by the images Starsky’s spare description painted.

“Was I… was I there?” Hutch asked hesitantly, knowing he had to be, but unable to find a picture, a sound, a scent anywhere in his mind.

“Yeah,” Starsky said, only deepening the nightmarish disconnection. “You and half of Metro.”

“Where?” Hutch whispered, his eyes intent upon Starsky’s face, silently begging his own stubborn brain to give him the answer before Starsky did.

“Metro’s parking garage,” Starsky said with a laugh polluted by bitter irony. “Couple of out-of-towners in blues, driving a black and white. They were gunning for both of us. Something twigged you, and you tried to warn me, but I had to be the hero.” A second laugh that resembled the grate and rasp of rusty hinges. “Tried to pull my gun.”

“To protect me,” Hutch breathed, and then was thrown forward when Starsky hit the brakes and turned to stare at him.

“You remember?” Starsky asked urgently, his right hand leaving the wheel and finding a grip on Hutch’s arm that tried to sink into the bone.

Eyes locked with Starsky’s, Hutch scrabbled for a picture, a flicker, anything, but there was nothing. Slowly, he shook his head. “Not a memory,” he whispered. Not memory, but instinct. No matter what went down, Starsky would always try to protect him first, just as he would try to protect Starsky’s life above his own. How had he failed so horribly?

“Playin’ cowboy,” Starsky dismissed his own valor bitterly.

Hutch sank back against the seat as Starsky accelerated again. He closed his eyes, demanding that his brain give up the memory, release it back into his keeping, although he didn’t know how he could have ever lived with it at all.

“When?” he asked, almost against his will. When he received no answer, he turned his head to watch the hesitation form on, and then fade from, Starsky’s face.

“May 15th, 1979,” Starsky told him.

“May…” Hutch echoed, trailing off as it caught up with him. Today was May 9, 1979. Six days from now, Starsky would be shot? “But today’s…” he murmured as they pulled up to the emergency entrance at County Hospital and Starsky, completely ignoring the signs that forbade parking or stopping, shut down the engine.

“June 12th,” Starsky said, his blue eyes filled with more fear than Hutch had ever seen in them before. “1980.”

***

A year. A whole fucking year.

The two sentences kept repeating themselves in Hutch’s brain as he laid on a gurney, dressed in a peek-a-boo gown, each repetition louder and louder inside his head until it almost succeeded in drowning out Starsky’s perpetual tirade. His head was pounding, but it wasn’t from the bump Starsky said he had had on the head yesterday. There was hardly even a sore spot. The phantom pain in his knee, that his mind kept insisting ought to ache, was more real to him than the slight tenderness of his scalp.

“What the hell is wrong with you people?” Starsky demanded, tuning Hutch back into the almost one-sided conversation.

Hutch was surprised the nurses or the doctor, who was Starsky’s most current victim, hadn’t exiled his partner to the waiting room, if not the parking lot. Mama Grizzly protecting her lone, sickly cub had absolutely nothing on Starsky this morning. Oddly enough, despite the blush he felt in his face, Starsky’s fierce protectiveness was also comforting to Hutch. Or perhaps not so oddly. Hutch may have somehow lost a year, but there were still many more years’ worth of memories of Starsky’s friendship intact. Blushes or no, Hutch was grateful for his partner’s presence.

“I brought him in here yesterday and you said he was fine,” Starsky continued to rant. “‘Take more than a bump to rattle that thick skull.’ I am quoting you right, aren’t I? Then this morning I… he wakes up with a whole fucking year missing. I’d call that rattled, wouldn’t you, Doc? Shake, rattle and roll, if you ask me.”

If he wasn’t so scared, Hutch might have been tempted to see the humor. Starsky did have a way with the English language at times. Dr. Walker, however, seemed undisturbed, or at least able to retain his professional calm, despite the ongoing tirade. Walker, it seemed, was a long-time veteran of ER medicine and had probably dealt with thousands of excitable relatives and friends of patients over the years.

“Yesterday,” Walker slid into the pause Starsky had finally been forced to leave to take a breath. “Sergeant Hutchinson was fine. He was checked out by every criteria we have for a possible head injury. And, as I recall, you were somewhat… vocal about how long that took.”

Again, it was only the seriousness of the situation that robbed Hutch of the amusement he would normally feel when someone managed to handle Starsky so deftly. Laughing, however, was the furthest thing from his mind. A year. A whole year vanished from his memory just as if it had passed between one tick of the clock and the next. Less, because even the ticking of a clock left some impression on the mind, if only fleetingly.

“Today, physically, I have to make the same diagnosis. To all appearances, there is absolutely nothing wrong with you,” Walker said to Hutch, while holding up a hand to halt Starsky’s protest. “But since appearances are obviously deceiving in this case, I’m going to admit you and run some tests to make absolutely certain this is not an organic problem.”

Hesitantly, Hutch nodded, frightened enough to accept the doctor’s dictates more meekly than he normally would. Usually, he hated to be poked and prodded, often feeling that, in their zeal, the medical profession went overboard. He was frightened enough this time not to care what they put him through. They could turn him inside out and prod at his brain itself if it meant they would give him back a year of his life. A year that, it seemed, had almost taken Starsky away from him.

Starsky appeared mollified by the doctor’s announcement and even had the grace to offer a chagrined, if grudging, apology. “Sorry about the drama, Doc, but—”

Walker brought a halt to the apology by putting a hand on Starsky’s shoulder as he moved toward the curtain. “It’s all right, Dave. I had enough of it out of him when it was you in that bed.” The doctor shook his head. “What is it about cops and their partners, anyway?” he asked rhetorically before he left the cubicle, pulling the curtain back into place behind him.

“You wanna sit up?” Starsky asked as soon as they were alone. He left his station keeping at the foot of the gurney and moved up closer. Hutch saw him reach out toward him and welcomed the coming physical reassurance, but the gesture was never completed. Starsky’s hand hovered in the air above him for a moment as if he just couldn’t decide where to touch, then curled into a fist and was stuffed into his jacket pocket.

Slowly, Hutch sat up, hardly aware as Starsky adjusted the bed and tucked the thin pillow behind his back. A memory, a very recent memory that had been driven into the back of his mind by the double blow of seeing Starsky’s scars, and the knowledge of just how much time he had lost, was presenting itself front and center. He and Starsky had awakened together this morning, naked, and Starsky’s hands and mouth and body had laid claim to him with possessive familiarity.

He ought to feel shocked, the way he had when he had first wakened, by the implications, and he was. A certain queasy fear kicking up its heels in his belly, and yet, the single most profound emotion that claimed him now was relief. In the yesterday Hutch remembered, he had feared that, though forgiven, what he had done with Kira had damaged something, scarred it so deeply, it could never again be quite as fine and strong. And yet it was. Somehow, in a year he couldn’t remember, what he and Starsky had shared hadn’t only been mended, but had grown far deeper than Hutch had ever thought possible. He wanted to reach out for Starsky, confirm in the touch of their skin that everything implied by their wakening was true, but couldn’t quite make himself do it.

Once he was upright, however, it was as if some self-imposed taboo had been lifted and Starsky reached out to him then, patting his hand reassuringly where it rested in his lap, and even brushing gentle fingers through his hair. They were the touches of a lover, imbued with emotion, and they came to Starsky as naturally as the way he held a phone or his cocky strut. As naturally as, a part of Hutch quietly insisted, he should be able to accept and return them. But, as much as, only a moment ago, he had craved contact with Starsky, now it only seemed to increase the near panic inside him. A fight or flight instinctive reaction that all memory, all logic, told him shouldn’t be attached to Starsky’s touch. But it was. As unobtrusively as possible, Hutch slid his hand out from beneath the one that rested reassuringly over it.

“I gotta go into the station. You gonna be okay?” Starsky asked anxiously, a flicker of distress revealing that he had noticed the rejection, but no verbal objection offered. “I don’t wanna leave you, but Dobey is never gonna buy this over the phone.” He hesitated as if loath to continue, then seemed to decide further justification for his desertion was needed. “Not after the last time.”

Again, Hutch wanted to reach out for the security of contact, hold on to Starsky’s hands as if they were a safety line and Hutch dangled precariously at the very end of that rope. There was a cavern of uncertainty gaping below him that looked to be a long, long way down. It wasn’t the being alone in this environment that was, unfortunately, all too familiar. It wasn’t even the yawning gap in his memory. It was the need to know, deep down at the very base from where his courage sprang, that Starsky believed him.

“You believe me, don’t you, Starsk? You don’t still think I’m faking, do you?” Hutch asked, fearful of the response even though he could read in Starsky’s eyes that the question need not have been asked.

Starsky began to lean down toward him, the fluidity of the movement halted suddenly, and then he jerked upright. Starsky, Hutch realized as his hand was reclaimed and squeezed reassuringly, had been about to kiss him. It startled him, despite the evidence of the morning that sometime in the year he had lost, he and Starsky had added yet another, even more intimate, layer to their relationship. What shocked him more was the feeling that, despite the loss of conscious memory of such moments, he had been ready to be kissed. His lips had anticipated the caress of Starsky’s, and his own mouth knew exactly how that kiss would taste.

“‘Course I do, swe… Hutch,” Starsky said, stumbling over the endearment, the name awkwardly offered in its place. “I’ll be back fast as I can.”

Hutch groped for a smile, cobbled together something he hoped looked more genuine than it felt when he forced it to his lips. “Not going anywhere without you,” he quipped, meaning that Starsky was driving.

The joke was, admittedly, weak, and it was apparent that Starsky was in no mood to see the humor in a pratfall. “Damned right you aren’t,” he said fiercely.

***

“Starsky, you can’t be sitting there and seriously expecting me to buy this. I remember, even if you don’t, how that partner of yours hornswoggled the bunch of us, including the doctor,” Dobey protested.

Starsky didn’t blame Dobey one bit for his skepticism. Ashamed as he was to admit it, even to himself, he had harbored doubts of his own. Right up to the moment Hutch had mentioned Kira. If there was one taboo subject between them, one period of time in the long course of their relationship that was never discussed after the night Hutch had recalled this morning, it was the debacle over Kira.

That Hutch’s behavior had been a symptom of the changes happening, unacknowledged, between them had become apparent only after Starsky was shot by Gunther’s hired guns, but still they never spoke of it. Starsky had made peace with that time, but he knew Hutch never had completely forgiven himself, so he also let it live in its corner of the past.

“He isn’t faking.” Starsky said it quietly, with all the conviction he was capable of, and he held Dobey’s dark eyes while they probed at him, sought to break through and read the truth for themselves.

There wasn’t too much Starsky was sure of, but that Hutch didn’t remember they were lovers had been all too apparent in the hospital. He had seen Hutch’s shock when he had, without considering all the implications of Hutch’s loss of memory, leaned down to kiss him. He had been shocked in his turn, but refused to panic. Of course Hutch had been surprised. With no memory of how their relationship had grown, the last thing he would be expecting would be for his partner and friend to try to kiss him.

“You can have my badge and the keys to the Torino if I’m wrong,” Starsky added, almost as an afterthought.

Dobey grunted, dropped his gaze to the never-diminishing stack of files on his desk. He even fiddled with one or two of the folders before he sighed and leaned back in his protesting chair. “What would I do with that tomato of yours,” he grumbled. “What did the doctor have to say?” he asked after another moment, a certain wariness to his manner that told Starsky his superior still wasn’t completely convinced.

“Not much. He doesn’t think it has anything to do with the bump on the head Hutch got yesterday, but, well, he said he was going to run some tests,” Starsky reported.

“Do you think it might be something else from the warehouse you arrested Jackman in yesterday? A drug or some kind of fumes Hutch inhaled?” Dobey suggested.

Starsky shrugged. It was a theory he had already considered and discarded, although Dr. Walker a said he would do blood tests just in case. “I’ve been wracking my brain, but that warehouse was pretty wide open and I didn’t smell anything. And there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with my memory. We separated to flush Jackman, and I did spend some time behind a stack of crates when the bullets were flying fast and thick, but….”

“I read that in your preliminary report last night, and I intended to talk to you about it this morning,” Dobey interrupted. “Were you… were you able to handle the situation yesterday? You’ve only been back on the job three weeks, and that’s the first time you’ve been under fire.”

Starsky knew better than to try to offer Dobey glib reassurances. In any case, he had none to give. Before returning to the job, before even being allowed to take the physical re-qualification tests, he had been required to spend many hours with the department-employed trauma counselor. At one time in his life, Starsky might have resented the prerequisite, seen it as an insult to his machismo or some other stupid nonsense. But, after an initial period of awkwardness, he had been able to talk through the shooting with Richards. He had thought he had put it into perspective, and was ready to get on with his life, but had to admit that being shot at had shaken him more than he had expected, and certainly more than he had let on to anyone, even Hutch.

“I’m never going to take being shot at quite as lightly as I did before Gunther,” Starsky finally admitted. “There isn’t a day goes by that an ache or a twinge doesn’t remind me that I’m not Superman and those bullets aren’t going to bounce off me. But I did the job,” he insisted, still uncertain if he was lying to both himself and Dobey.

Dobey nodded, a grunt that was often his response when he heard what he expected to hear rumbling in his throat. “I suppose you’re planning on taking the day off, too. Heading back to the hospital,” he complained gruffly.

Starsky managed the first real smile of the day. There was no way Dobey could complain about that, not after the stories Hutch and Huggy had told him of the days Dobey had spent camped outside the ICU where Starsky had lain fighting for his life.

“You’re just going to end up sitting around waiting and drinking bad coffee,” Dobey reminded him.

“That’s okay, Cap,” Starsky said as he pushed out of his chair, fingers automatically gathering up the edges of his jacket and zipping them together. He patted the brown leather, the new stiffness of it reminding him that this was not the familiar jacket he had worn for so many years. Blood-stained, and bullet-ridden, that one had been beyond salvaging. Just as so many people had believed that Starsky’s former life could never be salvaged. But not Hutch. Hutch had bought this jacket the day Starsky had declared his intention to fight his way all the way back to Hutch’s side. “He did it long enough for me, didn’t he?” he reminded Dobey, thinking of the endless days and nights that Hutch had been there—in the hospital, at home, wherever Starsky had needed him to be.

Dobey shook his head and waved a dismissal toward the door. “Go. But be damned sure you keep me informed.”

***

“Gin.”

Hutch threw the worn cards that Starsky had borrowed from a nurse, onto the over-the-bed table and pushed it toward his partner. “Forget it. I can’t concentrate, and I’m in no mood to lose my shirt to you.”

Starsky gathered up the cards, then pushed the table aside. Head down, he manipulated the rectangles between his fingers, shuffling, then fanning them with the edge of his hand, then shuffling again. “Not keeping score,” he mumbled softly.

“Sorry,” Hutch apologized. Starsky had to be as bored as he was after the endless hours of waiting. He, at least, had had the brief diversion of the tests the doctor had ordered, but those were long over. So long, in fact, that Hutch had to assume that Dr. Walker must have finished his shift and left the hospital. He would have to wait until morning, and he did not want to wait. Nor did he want to stay in the hospital. At least, having been admitted, he had a proper room with a proper door instead of a curtained-off cubby hole. Not that he and Starsky had said anything that required privacy. He didn’t think they had exchanged a dozen words beyond “gin” since he had finished describing his last test.

“Doesn’t matter,” Starsky excused the ill humor. He finally put the cards aside and looked at Hutch, one hand moving to rub absently at his chest.

That gesture was repeated frequently, Hutch had noticed, but it didn’t seem as if Starsky was in pain exactly, or even discomfort. It seemed more that the damage that had been done to his body, though, Hutch assumed, healed, was never far from Starsky’s mind. Assumption was all he had to go on because Hutch didn’t know. It was that, more than the waiting that was making him snappish. His best friend and partner, and it appeared, perhaps his lover, had been grievously wounded, and Hutch couldn’t remember.

“Why didn’t you die?” he asked softly, the startled expression Starsky gave him reminding him that Starsky couldn’t really read his mind.

“Because you wouldn’t let me,” Starsky replied in a voice equally hushed, as if the two of them were whispering forbidden secrets in church.

“Is that why I woke up in your bed this morning? Were you grateful?” Hutch asked, assuming, although he couldn’t have said why, that he had been the one to initiate this expanding of their relationship into sexual expression.

The tenderness that had possessed Starsky’s face hardened into something that could have been anger but wasn’t quite so clear cut. “If I thought for one minute that was true, you wouldn’t have been there,” he growled.

“Gentlemen,” Dr. Walker announced his presence as the door behind Starsky opened.

Starsky, Hutch noticed, started harder than he did, shocked enough, in fact, to actually leave his chair and back a step or two away from the bed before he forced his body to halt its retreat and return to Hutch’s side.

“So, what’s the verdict, Doc?” Starsky asked, his tone so natural that he might be inquiring about the weather, and certainly far too nonchalant for the charged conversation that had preceded the doctor’s appearance.

“As I expected,” Walker began, moving to the opposite side of the bed, a chart in his hand, the pages of which he flipped and referred to as he spoke. He directed his comments to Hutch, but included Starsky with a glance. “There is nothing physically wrong with you. No sign of a brain injury of any sort on the x-rays. No indication of any drugs in any of the blood tests beyond an infinitesimal trace of alcohol. I assume you might have had a beer or two after you left here last night?”

Hutch shrugged, a nod of his head indicating Starsky. “Ask him. I seem to have misplaced that particular memory, along with a whole year of my life,” he snapped bitterly, and felt Starsky’s fingers circle his arm, squeezing reassuringly through the material of the gown he wore.

“Easy, partner,” Starsky crooned. “Then, if it isn’t physical, what is it?” he asked the doctor.

“Hysterical amnesia, I would guess,” Walker said.

“Guess?” Hutch echoed.

“Guesses are about all I can offer when every diagnostic tool we have fails to show us what is wrong,” Walker pointed out.

“Educated guesses?” Starsky asked.

“Not educated enough,” Walker admitted ruefully. “The brain is the one organ that remains almost a complete mystery to us, and this isn’t my field of expertise. What I’d like to do, since there is really nothing we can do for you right now, and the stress of being here is likely only compounding the problem, is release you and make arrangements for you to see a specialist as soon as possible.”

“A brain doctor?” Starsky sought clarification.

“A neurologist,” Hutch corrected automatically, but he was anticipating Walker’s shake of the head.

“No. A psychiatrist. There’s nothing physically wrong with your brain, Sergeant Hutchinson. That leaves…” Walker shrugged eloquently.

“Hutch losing his grip on reality,” Hutch said bitterly. “Apparently, one year at a time. Maybe every morning for the next month or so, I’ll lose another year until I’m almost back at the beginning and I can—

“Hutch,” Starsky cautioned softly, fingers digging deep into the taut muscles of Hutch s arm.

Hutch didn’t need the warning. He had heard the hysteria creeping into his own voice and locked his back teeth before any more of it could escape.

“But his memory will come back, right? Since there’s nothing wrong with his brain,” Starsky asked hopefully.

Walker shook his head again. “I’m sorry, I don’t know. There have been cases where the lost time was never recovered. Almost as if it had been erased like a piece of tape or film. On the other hand, there have been cases where the memories are blocked, still retained, but, for whatever reason, usually something traumatic, the person is unable to access them. Once that trauma has been discovered and dealt with, then the patient’s memory returns.”

“Flip a coin,” Starsky suggested, then, “So what should we do until this specialist can see Hutch? I mean…” He hesitated, looking at Hutch with an embarrassed expression. “…I’ve heard that sometimes reminding the person….”

“In my opinion, it can’t hurt. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I want to send you home, Sergeant,” Walker told Hutch. “Familiar surroundings may help. Any sort of stimulation of the senses might help. Memory isn’t just a series of pictures recorded like a motion picture without sound, taste, or smell. Any one of the senses can gather the information that imprints the memory, and any one of the senses might be the key that unlocks the door to the memories your mind has blocked. Because we don’t know what has blocked your memories, we have no idea what might trigger their return.”

“If they’re just blocked,” Hutch reminded them, more appalled by the thought that it was his own mind that was denying him his past rather than some outside agent. It seemed to him no better than faking it, even if he didn’t have conscious control over the loss.

The doctor conceded the accuracy of Hutch’s correction with a nod. “But I’m not recommending you push it. More than anything, that will only cause frustration and anger. What I am recommending is that you try to relax, rest, live your life as normally as you can until I can get you an appointment with a specialist and he can see you.”

“Sounds like good advice for the time being,” Starsky agreed when Hutch might have objected.

Their eyes met, a minor battle of wills ensuing before Hutch shrugged and broke the lock, signaling his defeat. He desperately wanted answers, but if there were none to be had, he couldn’t exactly force them from the doctor at gun point.

“When can I take him home?” Starsky asked.

“Whenever you like,” Walker said, a small smile lightening his sober expression. “But if you really are his friend, I’d suggest you do it soon. They were just beginning to deliver the dinner trays when I arrived,” he quipped and began to move toward the door. He stopped with his hand on the knob. “Oh, by the way. How’s the knee?”

“Okay.”

“Still hurts a little.”

The doctor looked at both of them and then Hutch felt himself become the object of two sets of eyes.

“I hit my knee during the explosion at the Golden Lady Dance Hall,” Hutch explained hesitantly.

“No, Hutch,” Starsky corrected gently. “I hurt mine at the Dometar warehouse yesterday. Tore my best jeans.”

For just a second, there and gone so quickly that Hutch wasn’t completely sure whether it was real or not, was a memory of kissing hairy, wounded flesh. The memory might or might not be real, but the emotion that gripped him, the terror that froze the breath in his lungs and made his pulse thunder in his ears was real enough.

“Hutch? Babe? What happened? Where’d you go?”

Hutch blinked, then focused on Starsky’s face only inches from his own, his friend’s panic and expectation closing in on him like a suffocating blanket. Instinctively, Hutch put up both hands and pushed at Starsky’s chest. Not hard, just hard enough to force Starsky to step back and give him room to breathe.

“Did you remember something, Hutch?” Starsky demanded anxiously.

Hutch shook his head in denial, sensing that, whatever it was that had flashed so briefly in his mind, it was not for sharing with outsiders. And, for all his seeming compassion, Walker was an outsider. In any case, Hutch was almost certain the brief flash had been nothing but the power of suggestion. The terror, however, had been all too real. If that was how he had felt for the past year, maybe he was better off not knowing.

“Just get me the hell out of here, Starsk.”

***

Dr. Walker had said to take Hutch home. Starsky had about five blocks, long ones fortunately, to decide just what “home” meant. Did it mean his place, where they had spent 90 percent of their time since the shooting? At first, by necessity because Starsky couldn’t travel much, and so, each day, Hutch had come “home” to him. Then, Starsky had always suspected, because their sexual relationship had begun there, from habit and a sense of comfort that his bed was the place to indulge their need for each other.

Four blocks now, and no decision made. If he took Hutch to Venice Place, he would be following the doctor’s orders to the letter. But there, Hutch could also tell him to leave. A day ago, that thought wouldn’t have crossed Starsky’s mind. They had been practically joined at the hip and certainly at the heart for so long now. But the memory that seemed to be Hutch’s last one hadn’t been the high point of their relationship. The lowest, maybe, and it had been the culmination of a year when Starsky had slowly come to believe that Hutch hated him, and had found himself very close to reciprocating. He had seen the fear in Hutch’s eyes today. Fear of him and the touches and endearments that Starsky couldn’t seem to control after so long of being able to offer them freely. But that fear, Starsky was sure, was only because Hutch didn’t remember. The feelings were there, had been there long before they became lovers, and Starsky refused to believe they could just disappear like a puff of smoke.

Starsky had never considered himself a man who needed to be in control of every situation, but he desperately needed some kind of control now. Even if it was only the fact that he held the keys to the car and Hutch, if he wanted them separated, would have to ask for a ride. It made him feel petty, but the thought of Hutch firmly established in Starsky’s apartment while they dealt with this and sought the return of his memory, did give him a small and uncertain illusion of security.

But it was petty. Starsky cut a glance at his partner as they approached the entrance to the highway for Venice. What he saw in the exhausted, anxious features made his decision for him, and he eased the Torino over into the far-right lane. It was Hutch who needed all the security, however illusionary, he could get right now.

“At least the highway won’t be—Goddamnit!” Starsky swore and hit the brakes hard as, within six feet of the cut off, the green sedan that had been traveling just in front of and to the left of them, suddenly cut to the right, scraping by the Torino’s bumper with barely inches to spare. Brakes and tires squealed as the Torino obediently slowed and then stopped.

“I thought you were going to get those brakes fixed,” Hutch reminded him. “They’re still squealing.”

Starsky looked over at his partner, his heart still thundering from the near collision and notching up yet another gear as he processed what Hutch had said. He jumped as an off-key melody of horn blasts from behind reminded him that they were blocking traffic. His foot moved from brake to gas, and he guided the Torino’s long nose past the on ramp to the next intersection where he made a right that would lead them to his apartment.

Surreptitiously, he wiped one clammy palm and then the other in turn on the legs of his jeans. It couldn’t be coincidence, he told himself, as he drove, very nearly on automatic pilot, while Hutch’s casual reminder swirled around in his head, along with the memory of when it had been spoken the day before.

Within a block of the Dometar warehouse where, to the best of their information, Jackman was holed up, Starsky shut down the Torino’s growling engine and let the big car coast, in neutral, silently forward. The siren and mars light that had cleared a path through traffic for them had also been killed by Hutch as Starsky guided the car to the curb.

Jackman knew he was being stalked, that the partners had been closing in on him, tightening the net with every bit of information they had gleaned, every connection they had made. He had to know his options were running out, and would be doubly dangerous because of that knowledge. All they could hope for was that their silent approach would offer them the slight edge of surprise.

Starsky flexed cramped fingers around the steering wheel, trying to find that center of calm that had carried him through so many similar situations. That focused level of alert that made efficient use of the adrenaline pumping through his veins. He was too tense, but couldn’t seem to convince his body to just relax and prepare for the action to come. He was just out of practice, he reassured himself and concentrated on timing just how far to let the Torino roll before he stopped it, took command of the moment, and carried himself and Hutch that final step toward the unavoidable action and risk.

For one brief moment, he was tempted to just let the car keep rolling silently past the warehouse. Find some secure hidey-hole where they could call for back up, and wait in safety for the cars and men to arrive. To do their job.

Disgusted with himself, Starsky put his foot down hard, jolting both himself and Hutch forward as the car came to an abrupt halt and drawing a high-pitched squeal from the brakes. It sounded loud enough to Starsky to have announced their presence to every soul within five miles.

”Geez, Starsk, and you complain about the way I maintain my car,” Hutch groused, pulling Starsky back from the edge of panic and settling him into the security of their partnership. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.”

“Hey,” Starsky protested as they both exited the car, closing the doors soundlessly behind them on the off chance that the squeal of doom hadn’t already blown the element of surprise. “Were they squealing this morning? No. Were they squealing at lunch? No.”

They had reached the door of the warehouse now, each of them flattened to the wall on either side of it, shoulders pressed to the heated metal while they drew their guns.

“Sounds like maybe you’ve been riding those brakes too hard,” Hutch teased, a depth to his voice that, for Starsky’s ears alone, added an innuendo to the innocent accusation that no one else would hear.

Starsky let himself be distracted for a moment, offering Hutch a smoldering visual inspection across the width of door that should have peeled the paint right off the metal. “You just wait’ll we get Jackman behind bars where he belongs. Then I’ll show you riding,” he promised.

Hutch’s grin couldn’t hide his response to the flirting assessment or the promise as he returned it, his eyes tracking Starsky briefly from top to toe. “Just make sure you get those brakes checked sometime soon, buddy.”

It seemed impossible it had only been yesterday that memory had been made. Not last year or the year before, but yesterday. Twenty-four hours ago. Time had somehow found a way to elongate, twist and turn back in upon itself like a snake caught in its death throes. But it did prove that the memories were there. Hutch, for whatever reason, might not be able to find them, but they were there. And Starsky had too much at stake to let them remain lost in the labyrinth of Hutch’s mind forever. He wasn’t taking any chances that Hutch might want them separated. He was taking Hutch home, but not to Venice. He was taking his lover home to the place where they had loved.

***

Hutch didn’t object, but, as Starsky let them into his apartment, he did have to wonder why they were here. Dr. Walker had said “home” and, as familiar as Starsky’s apartment was to him, it wasn’t home. However, Starsky was every bit as rattled as he was. Likely his partner hadn’t even thought it through, but had just headed automatically for home. It was certainly closer than Hutch’s place out in Venice.

Standing in the doorway, watching Starsky shed his jacket as he headed for the kitchen, Hutch found the familiarity of it all jarring. It was worse, he suspected, than it would have been had the place been totally strange to him.

“Hutch?”

Lifting his head, realizing only then that he had been studying the nap of the carpet as if the key to his problem was written in there somewhere, Hutch met Starsky’s concerned eyes across the width of the apartment.

“Come on in and close the door,” Starsky invited with the ghost of a smile.

It peeved Hutch a little to be spoken to like a particularly backward two-year-old, but not enough to make an issue out of it. In a way, it was a relief to be given direction while his mind ran frantically in circles trying to find the one maze of memory that was missing. He stepped across the threshold and flipped the door closed behind him, wondering irreverently if, at any time in the past year, he had performed these same actions, and followed them up with a teasing “honey, I’m home.” It would be in keeping with his questionable sense of humor.

“I’m gonna make us something to eat. Why don’t you grab a shower. Maybe it’ll make you feel better,” Starsky suggested.

“Don’t tell me you learned to cook in the last year,” Hutch said. Questionable humor again, but it felt… right. Humor, teasing, always had been a part of their relationship. A way for them to connect, to reassure each other, when other ways and means were inadequate. Surely, that wouldn’t have disappeared just because they had started crawling into bed together. Hutch shuddered, trying to imagine the two of them together like that, a miasma of fear overtaking him and refusing to let such pictures form.

“Not so’s you’d notice,” Starsky admitted with a grin. “But even I can scramble eggs and toast bread.”

“No hot sauce,” Hutch cautioned him as he moved toward the bedroom, already shrugging out of his jacket, but his eyes were still on Starsky so he didn’t miss the grimace. “I mean it, Starsk. No hot sauce. My stomach isn’t up to dealing with jalapeno and chili scrambled eggs tonight.”

“No hot sauce,” Starsky agreed, but far from the expression of grudging acquiescence Hutch had expected, Starsky looked like a kid who had just been told the Tooth Fairy flushed little baby teeth down the toilet.

“What’s wrong?” Hutch asked, letting Starsky’s reaction distract him from his own troubles.

Starsky shrugged and turned to open the refrigerator door. “Nothing.”

It seemed Starsky hadn’t learned to lie to him any better in the last year. That knowledge was a definite comfort. Hutch veered away from the bedroom door and took a couple of steps closer to where Starsky was bent over and rummaging in the refrigerator. “What’s wrong?” he repeated more adamantly.

Starsky straightened, backing out of the refrigerator with his hands full of egg carton, and butter cube, and milk jug. He closed the door with his elbow and turned to face Hutch, looking at him as if his partner were an inquisitor from IA. “One of the bullets nicked my stomach. I can’t eat the way I used to anymore.” A forced grin stretched his lips, but didn’t touch the gloom in his eyes. “Jalapeno is no longer my culinary condiment of choice.”

It had the sound of a quote. The words all wrong for Starsky’s usual choice of vocabulary. Was he quoting Hutch? Hutch shook his head at the question when the answer refused to come.

“Go on and shower, Hutch,” Starsky said gently.

Obediently, Hutch continued his interrupted trek to the bedroom where he laid his jacket over the end of the unmade bed and went to the dresser. He pulled open the second drawer and selected a pair of underwear, closed the drawer and opened the next for clean white socks. It was only as he half-bent to open the bottom drawer, seeking a fresh t-shirt, that Hutch really noticed what he was doing or processed what he had seen as he had retrieved his clean clothes.

For years, he had kept at least one change of clothes at Starsky’s, and usually more. Just as a few items of Starsky’s wardrobe were always stashed in his drawers. They were always kept in one drawer, the bottom one. One drawer. Everything together. Not three drawers for three items. Slowly, Hutch pulled out the first drawer again and stood staring at its contents. A supply of the boxers and white briefs he alternated between, neatly folded and stacked, and beside them were the bikini briefs that Starsky favored.

That drawer slid smoothly back into place and the second was opened. Rows of paired off socks, the black and white he generally preferred beside the rainbow array of Starsky’s choices. Hutch didn’t re-open the third drawer, but moved to the closet. Hesitantly, he opened the door, fearing and anticipating, at the same time, that he would discover the same evidence that their lives were as blended as they seemed. Proof positive hung from the rod in jeans and cords and shirts and jackets that belonged to him. Numbly, Hutch selected a pair of jeans and closed the door.

With the clean clothes in hand, Hutch moved to the bedroom door, his eyes tracking over the rest of the apartment, seeking more proof or negation of the conclusion he was forming. Plants he hadn’t noticed when he had first come in—his plants—hung from the ceiling and sat on tables. He could have given those to Starsky, couldn’t he? He was always foisting cuttings and babies off on his partner when his greenhouse could hold no more. But it never took Starsky much more than a week to kill them.

And it wasn’t just the plants. Evidence of his habitation was everywhere in personal possessions—books, favored pictures. Hutch’s eyes fell on his guitar case and he stopped looking for more. Starsky had bought him that to replace the one Diana Harmon had destroyed. He had never taken it anywhere, certainly never left it anywhere.

“Hutch? Swe… babe. What’s wrong?”

Hutch blinked, found that Starsky had left his voluntary KP duty and stood halfway between him and the kitchen. A frown drew the heavy brows together and one hand was raised toward him.

“Don’t I have a home anymore?” Hutch asked, hearing the forlorn helplessness in his own voice.

“Of course you do, Hutch,” Starsky reassured him. He took a few more steps toward Hutch, then hesitated. “Do you wanna go to Venice Place?”

The information calmed Hutch a little, reassured him that, like a wounded animal, he still had a lair to bolt to, and, for a moment, Hutch wanted to escape to it very badly. It was the expression on Starsky’s face, however—bleak, hopeless—the same one that had taken up residence, Hutch realized now, when the doctor had said Hutch might never remember—that made him hesitate. He wasn’t alone in his loss. What he could no longer recall was as important to Starsky as it was to him. Together.

That felt right. As right as anything had since he had wakened this morning. Hutch shook his head and retreated to the bathroom.

In the bathroom, door left ajar because Starsky’s bathroom didn’t have an exhaust fan and the steam built up too quickly, Hutch stripped. He left his discarded clothes in a heap on the floor, started the shower and stepped into the hot, powerful spray. Determinedly, he tried not to think. He was trying too hard to remember, had been trying too hard all day. Dr. Walker said relax, and Hutch did his best to follow that advice now, turning beneath the spray and letting it pound muscles tensed hard as iron into something approaching human flesh.

Gradually, he felt the tension ease out of neck and shoulders and back, and dipped his head beneath the spray. Concentrating all of his attention on the feel of his fingers massaging the shampoo he had collected from the bottle on the edge of the tub into lather, it took a few moments for Hutch to recognize a familiar scent. It was his shampoo; the same one he had been using for years. His eyes opened and he sought out the bottle where it teetered precariously on the edge of the tub, then tracked to a second bottle where it sat in the more secure position in the corner. The more logical position. Starsky’s shampoo, he could only assume, although his friend didn’t have the same loyalty to any particular brand that he did.

His right eye stung, reminding Hutch that he had been standing, arms raised, fingertips still resting on his scalp, as he had been seeking out the visual confirmation of deeply ingrained habit he couldn’t remember acquiring. He closed his eyes and tipped his head back to let the spray wash the lather away, his hands stripping it from his hair to hurry the process. When he opened his eyes again, he looked for his soap but, now alerted, he couldn’t tell if he sought it out or already knew where it was. The same was true, a few moments later, when he left the shower and faced the choice of which of the two towels hanging on the rack was his. They were both blue, hung side by side. Was his the left or the right? Did it matter? Had it ever? Showering at Starsky’s wasn’t foreign to him. He had done it before. But would it be this familiar if he didn’t do it every day now? Would all his favorite products be here?

He didn’t know, and all his frantic questioning was gaining him nothing but a throbbing, pounding headache that set up housekeeping behind his eyes and seemed to encircle his entire skull. Cursing in frustration, Hutch gathered up his laundry and left the hauntingly familiar routine behind.

***

Scrambled eggs didn’t take long to put together. Certainly not as long as it seemed to be taking Hutch to shower. Starsky tried to concentrate on what he was doing, tried not to listen for any stray sound that Hutch might make above the thunder of the water. When the shower cut out, he tensed, then forced his body to relax, although he couldn’t prevent himself from tracking Hutch’s movements by the sounds he made. Curtain pulled back, towel off the rack, a longer period of no discernable noise, and then a rattle that could only be the towel being re-hung. He gave it a few more minutes for Hutch to dress and reappear, but when the eggs were done, instead of calling out a jaunty “come and get it” as he usually did when it was his turn to cook, Starsky turned the burner down to its lowest setting and went to the door of his bedroom.

He found Hutch, back to the door and assumedly unaware of Starsky’s presence, stuffing his dirty clothes in the laundry bag. Hope, all out of proportion to the simple act, bloomed, but Starsky forced himself not to read too much into it. As he watched, Hutch began to turn away from where the laundry bag sat in the corner of the room, but then paused, in profile to Starsky, his attention on the bedside table. One hand reached toward the half-depleted blue and white tube of lubricant that sat on the table, but didn’t quite touch it, arrested in mid-air. Whether the sight evoked memories for Hutch, Starsky couldn’t interpret, but it brought last night vividly to his mind.

“Got ya covered, partner,” Starsky promised, easing back, drawing Hutch with him until they sprawled on the bedspread together.

Starsky brought his knees up, making of them and the arms he wrapped tight around Hutch’s broad back, a cradle for his lover. Patiently, he rocked in counterpoint to the rhythm Hutch set, content to ride a tsunami of lust or a gentle ebb-tide of tenderness, whichever his lover needed tonight. Hutch’s weight pressed the breath from his lungs in husky pants, then gave it back to him in gasps with the slick slide of their cocks caught hard between their bellies.

There was need for more than this gentle loving in Hutch tonight. Starsky could feel it in the taut muscles beneath his fingers, the sudden dew of sweat that slicked every place they touched. He could incite it, he knew. The right word or two or three could rouse Hutch to a fever pitch, oust this tender lover and bring lust incarnate into his bed. But Starsky was content to wait tonight, to follow Hutch’s lead, whether into lust or love mattered not at all. Wherever Hutch led, Starsky had already committed his heart to follow.

“Need you,” Hutch murmured, mustache tickling and prickling, silken lips soothing where they nibbled just beneath Starsky’s ear.

Starsky shivered as the sensations chased each other along the pathway of his nerve endings directly to his brain. “Got me,” he promised. “Anyway you want me. Anything you need.”

Leaving a trail of kisses to jaw, cheek, and nose, Hutch slowly lifted up, the powerful muscles of his back bulging beneath Starsky’s hands. Flattening his palms, Starsky rode the retreat until his hands rested on Hutch’s shoulders, both thumbs stroking the highlighted curve of the clavicle to the tender hollow of Hutch’s throat.

“Kneel for me?” Hutch asked, blue eyes nearly glowing in a face flushed with arousal and hard-edged with need. “Wanna cover you, Starsk.”

Starsky answered with his smile and the desire in his own eyes, but nonetheless mourned the retreat as their bodies parted. Grief was a short-lived thing, however. Before he could even turn fully onto his belly, Hutch’s hands were on him, laying claim to his hips, drawing his ass up high while an insistent pair of knees found their way between his and forced them wide.

The long, thick heat of Hutch’s cock settled into the crevice between the cheeks of his ass. A formidable weapon that had carried Starsky to the very edge of annihilation so often in the past months, and had taught him the joy of allowing himself to fall into that oblivion. The hard rod stropped once, twice, pressing into the tender skin and then slipped lower, the broad, slick tip probing at his anus.

“You’d let me, wouldn’t you?” Hutch accused him, lips once again pressed hard to the nerve-rich junction beneath Starsky’s ear. “Let me fuck you dry.”

“You wouldn’t,” Starsky panted, although the threat of it was dangerously exciting in itself. It lifted his hips beneath his lover’s weight, drove that unsheathed tip ever so slightly into him before Hutch’s hips jerked back, separating them.

“Brat,” Hutch growled, teeth latching onto the lobe of Starsky’s ear and pressing just hard enough to make him squirm.

After a moment, the pressure of sharp teeth eased on Starsky’s ear and the mattress dipped as Hutch’s weight shifted to the side. Starsky turned his head to watch Hutch fumble open the drawer and scrabble through the accumulated junk for the well-used tube of KY jelly.

“Everybody else in the world has their junk drawer in the kitchen,” Hutch complained before the mattress rocked again as he once again settled behind Starsky.

“You wanna go all the way out to the kitchen for the lube every time you wanna fuck me?” Starsky asked, anticipating the playful smack Hutch would lay onto the cheek of his ass in retaliation.

But Hutch fooled him, laying an open-mouthed kiss on the expectant flesh instead, while fingers laden with cold gel found their way to Starsky’s anus. His body, even after months of this type of loving, tensed at the first touch, but the long fingers weren’t so easily discouraged, and in a moment, Starsky felt his body opening to the slick coaxing. He pushed back, anxious to feel Hutch inside him. To feel Hutch wrapped around him. The weight and length and breadth of his lover his shield against the world.

“Ready?” Hutch asked, solicitous, even as urgent as the strain in his voice revealed his need to be.

“Oh, God, babe, yeah. Cover me. Fuck me,” Starsky moaned.

Slowly, relentlessly, Hutch pressed for entrance, breaching the ring of defensive muscle as Starsky let the sweet sting of that first balls-deep stroke possess him, fill up his heart and his soul the way Hutch’s cock filled his ass. He groaned into the pillow when he felt the brush of soft pubic curls against his ass and knew that he had taken all Hutch had to give him. He wanted more, an endless Hutch cock to fill him up, probe at his heart and make him choke.

“Mine,” Hutch breathed. His full weight settled on Starsky’s back, driving a second groan from his lungs and any thoughts of wanting more than Hutch had to give out of his mind.

“Yours,” Starsky promised, full of Hutch’s love and Hutch’s cock, the hand that Hutch wrapped around his penis almost unneeded as the hard thrusts and withdrawals drove him closer and closer to the edge.

“Cover you,” Hutch panted, hips driving powerfully, jolting them so hard the bed rocked, frame squealing a protest at the power of his need.

Then climax had Starsky in its iron fist, squeezing out awareness of everything except that hard clench in his gut as it spasmed against the invader that filled him so perfectly. Within Hutch’s hand, his cock exploded, the pulses ripping a cry from his throat even as he felt their demanding beat echoed within him, heard the rhythmic grunts that matched his own as Hutch emptied himself deep inside.

It took only a moment for the passionate memory of their loving to play itself out in Starsky’s mind. But as it dissipated and he saw the expression on Hutch’s face, he wished he could return to it. Invoke some sort of magic incantation that would transport them back to that moment, and supplant the clear revulsion with his discovery on Hutch’s face now with the desire that had lit the handsome features less than a day ago. But there were no magic words Starsky could think of, and, after a moment, Hutch shuddered and the hand was withdrawn, curling into a fist where it came to rest at his side.

Starsky felt as if he had been sucker punched in the gut. The breath driven from his lungs by the blow, and leaving him unable to draw the next as wounded muscles tensed to guard against further assault. Instinctively, he wanted to grab Hutch and shake him until the wall in his mind tumbled down, and he was forced to remember what lived so cherished in Starsky’s mind. Demand that the lover who had possessed him so passionately less than a day ago come out of hiding, and if that lover was gone forever to face it, somehow learn to live with it.

But he didn’t have the courage. Couldn’t, for once in his life, confront his worst fears head on and take whatever consequences came his way. He chose instead to somehow contain the bellow of denial and cage it inside. To wait for his world to be shattered, rather than to bravely seek it out.

“Dinner’s ready,” he mumbled, saw Hutch spin away from the nightstand, surprised guilt in his stance and on his face, but ignored it, turning away from the possibility that Hutch might have remembered something for fear of what that something might be.

At the table, both of them putting away food that neither of them really wanted, Starsky tried not to stare at Hutch. It wasn’t easy. He had always liked to look at Hutch. Long before he had thought of Hutch in sexual terms, Starsky had enjoyed Hutch’s beauty. As the years passed, and Hutch altered his style again and again, Starsky had only ever approved of what time and gravity and the vagaries of fashion did to his friend. Mushed up eggs, speckled with pepper and toast crumbs just weren’t much competition, especially when he feared that the right to look at Hutch with love and desire was being snatched away.

It was Hutch who finally broke the silence. “Tell me about last night. Yesterday. The ones you remember,” he asked.

Starsky shook his head, poked at the food on his plate, the instinct to give Hutch whatever he needed warring with the need to protect himself. But he never had been any good at putting himself ahead of his partner even before Hutch had become the center of his universe.

“It was just a case, Hutch,” he said, hearing the depression in his own voice, but too dispirited to try to mask it. “We arrested a man in a warehouse. He resisted. Nothing we haven’t done a hundred times in the course of our duty. We watched each other’s backs and got the job done.”

“What about when we got… home?” Hutch asked, the hesitation and unease on his face making Starsky wince. “Did we…?”

Despite the blushing hesitancy with which Hutch asked the question and his obvious discomfort, Starsky couldn’t help but remember what had come before Hutch’s desperate possession of him the night before.

Starsky had food on his mind as he and Hutch climbed the stairs to his apartment. Breakfast was a long-ago digested memory, and lunch was balled up in a bag in the back of the Torino, abandoned when their radio had squawked Jackman’s suspected whereabouts. Just like the good old days. Somehow, Starsky had managed to forget this part of being the Dynamic Duo of Metro division. The missed meals, the eyestrain, and the lousy coffee. The hours of tedium interspersed with sudden, deadly action. When he had been working his ass off to re-qualify, it had been only the thought of once again hitting the streets with Hutch that had shone like a beacon in his brain. He had forgotten just how hard those streets could be when you landed on them. He dismissed the rest of it from his thoughts and focused on his empty belly.

“I’m so hungry,” he announced as he fitted key into lock and opened the door. “I could eat—”

The room whirled before his eyes, the sudden, possessive grip of Hutch’s hand on his arm spinning him in place, then backing him into the closing door. He had time to open his mouth to protest, but that only aided and abetted his partner when Hutch kissed him, leaving him without defense to the tongue that filled his mouth.

Who needs defense, he thought, greeting the invader like a beloved conqueror, then going for a little territory acquisition of his own with hands that gripped soft hair and a tongue that demanded the right of fair trade. Hutch, obviously, was thinking with an organ a little further south than the rumbling one that had been on Starsky’s mind.

”You,” Hutch panted when he released Starsky’s mouth, bestowing wet, bristling nibbles along his jaw to his ear.

“You?” Starsky echoed, shivering as that damned caterpillar he loved so well scraped and scribbled its way through his five o’clock shadow.

“I’m gonna eat you,” Hutch threatened, warm breath tickling directly into Starsky’s ear canal with the words. That canal that, Starsky was almost sure, had a direct conduit to his balls.

“No dinner?” Starsky pouted, trying desperately to play the role of reluctant tease for all of five seconds. Not a part destined for him when Hutch was playing commanding seducer, and his own hips were lifting, trying to pile-drive his growing erection into Hutch’s groin.

“Lots of dinner,” Hutch promised, stepping back without releasing his grip. “About 175 pounds of dinner.”

“Uh, huh, 173,” Starsky corrected, his hands settling on Hutch’s hips to guide their passage around furniture from front door to bed. The last thing, obviously, on Hutch’s mind was the obstacles in their path, and a prat-fall over the footstool could be a real mood killer. “No shower?” he added as they passed safely through the bedroom doorway.

“Do I look like a raccoon?” Hutch asked, busy fingers attacking buttons and zippers and snaps, making short work of Starsky’s jacket, holster, and shirt. He paused with his fingers tucked into the tight waistband of Starsky’s jeans, his thumb stroking the tail of his leather belt. “Gotta wash my food before I eat it?”

Realizing he was falling behind, and that if he didn’t catch up soon, Hutch would be doing him while fully clothed, depriving them both of at least half the pleasure, Starsky gave up the banter in favor of stripping away the same barriers Hutch had relieved him of.

“At least you gotta come to the table properly undressed,” Starsky insisted, ignoring the frown that appeared when his insistent efforts to strip his lover got in the way of Hutch’s single-minded intentions.

The frown turned into a growl behind the material of Hutch’s t-shirt when Starsky pulled it over his head. When Hutch refused to give up his own pursuits on Starsky’s jeans, Starsky pulled the t-shirt down further, effectively binding Hutch’s arms. He offered his sweetest grin in response to Hutch’s second growl.

“Time out?” Hutch suggested.

“Time out,” Starsky agreed. It was their signal that they should deal with the mundane business of stripping separately in the cause of efficiently getting them horizontal as quickly as possible. There were times when a slow strip tease heightened the pleasure, but there were other times, like tonight, when such a show did little more than frustrate them both.

“But leave your jeans,” Hutch commanded.

They separated long enough to discard shoes and socks. Obligingly, Starsky left his jeans in place as ordered, though his trapped penis throbbed a protest when Hutch stripped off his restricting denim and briefs and turned away briefly to toss the clothes onto the chair. He couldn’t seem to help himself, even though he knew Hutch wanted to be in the lead tonight, from reaching out and palming one smooth, white cheek. Hutch jumped, straightened abruptly, and turned back toward him.

“Uh, uh,” Hutch protested, catching Starsky’s hand and holding it away from his groin. He slid his hand all the way up to his shoulder, a teasing stroke that barely brushed the hairs on Starsky’s arm. Grip tightening, he reversed their positions, putting Starsky’s back to the bed.

“I’m not sitting down in these jeans,” Starsky protested, resisting the pressure that tried to fold him down onto the bed. “They’ll neuter me.”

“Wouldn’t want that,” Hutch agreed as he eased to his knees, his hands stroking down Starsky’s chest until they came to his waistband again.

Starsky moaned softly, his fingers sliding into Hutch’s hair as the blond head cuddled into his groin, cheek stropping against his trapped cock like a love-starved cat. Fingers fumbled for a moment at his waist, struggling with the intricacies of belt and snap and zipper before the cruel pressure was suddenly eased. A breath of cool, then the sudden heat of Hutch’s lips pressed hard to his flesh, separated only by the last thin barrier of his briefs.

Starsky wriggled a little in response to the nibbling, teasing pecks up and down the length of his still-shrouded penis and to aid the denim in its halting slide down his hips and thighs. Hutch’s hands and then his mouth followed in the denim’s wake, licking and sucking at the crease where groin met thigh, over the pulled-taut muscle of his thigh to his knee. Starsky felt the lust leave Hutch then, swept away by a tidal wave of tenderness as both big hands cradled his scraped knee while it was showered with kisses that should have healed the minor abrasion by the magic power of their love alone.

Slowly, without disturbing Hutch’s determined healing, Starsky sank to the bed, his fingers stroking his own tenderness into the scalp beneath the mussed blond strands, and the features that tightened and eased as Hutch ministered to the minor hurt. Just as he had ministered, time after time, with hands and lips and tongue, to the scarring that mapped Starsky’s torso. Night after night, with the dedication of an artist, Hutch had painted love and joy and acceptance of these visible badges of honor onto Starsky’s flesh and into his heart and soul.

It was many minutes before Hutch seemed to realize that somewhere along the line he had lost the thread of lusty intention, and sought to gather up the fallen skein. He shifted between Starsky’s thighs, hands blindly easing jeans all the way clear while his mouth skipped from knee to thigh and would have gone further had Starsky not interrupted the journey.

“Hey, I’m not just another pretty face here, you know,” Starsky reminded his long-time friend, using the grip he still had in Hutch’s hair to force eyes, struggling hard for uncomprehending innocence, up to meet his. “I was born at night, sweetheart, but it wasn’t last night.”

Lashes several shades darker than Hutch’s hair came down to veil sudden disquiet. Releasing his grip on platinum, Starsky sought out this darker gold, brushing his thumb lightly over the soft bristle until the lids slowly, reluctantly lifted. He cupped Hutch’s face in his hand, fully extending each finger to lay claim to temple and ear and jaw, offering the padding of his palm to the stubborn chin that trembled ever so slightly.

“You think I don’t know why you were suddenly hot to have Walker check out a bump on the head that didn’t even raise a goose-egg?” Starsky asked gently, feeling the sappy tenderness of his own smile, but not the least inclined to try to hide it. No reason, now, or ever again, to hide from Hutch. “You just wanted him to have a look at this knee,” he added, pressing the scraped joint against Hutch’s shoulder.

“Starsk, I…” Hutch began, but seemed unable to bring the words of excuse or explanation to his lips.

“Got ya covered, babe,” Starsky promised, easing back, drawing Hutch with him until they sprawled on the bedspread together.

“Got ya covered, babe,” Starsky whispered softly.

“What did you say?”

Starsky blinked once, then dropped his gaze to the cold eggs on his plate that suddenly seemed like the safest thing to look at. Certainly safer than the uncomfortable disbelief on Hutch’s face. How ironic, he thought, that only last night he had been reveling in the joy of never having to hide again. Unable to sit still, Starsky pushed up from the table, grabbed his plate and carried it to the garbage, trying hard to suppress his pain, hide it and the love he feared Hutch no longer wanted from him.

But Hutch wouldn’t let him retreat. “Starsk? Did we…?”

The questioning use of his name followed Starsky, demanding honesty. He put the plate in the sink and stared at it while he marshalled calm. Hutch needed him. This was no different than backing up his partner on the street. He had discovered yesterday that he could still put aside fear for his own safety to protect Hutch. Surely, here, he could put aside fear for the safety of his heart to do the same thing. He turned back to face his partner.

“Yeah, Hutch, we made love,” he reported as coolly as he could manage with the memory of the love and pleasure that had been theirs less than a day ago vivid in his mind. “You were…hot. Wouldn’t let me eat. Wouldn’t let me shower. You needed to fu…” Starsky bit his lip over the explicitness and back peddled to something safer, gentler. Maybe, he hoped, something that wouldn’t have Hutch looking quite so green around the gills.

“You… kissed my knee better. Hutch?” he questioned the suddenly alert expression, the same one, he now remembered, that had crossed Hutch’s face briefly in the hospital when he had mentioned his scraped knee. “Do you remember something?” he asked, trying not to sound too anxious, too pushy, too something that might drive Hutch further away from him. As much as he feared the return of Hutch’s memory and what it might cost him, he knew neither of them could live in this limbo forever. His first priority had to be the return of Hutch’s memory.

Hutch shook his head, frustration twisting his features as he threw a half-eaten slice of toast onto his almost untouched plate. Both big hands came up to cover his face, fingers pressing into his eyes, thumbs white with the force they inflicted on his temples.

“I don’t know,” Hutch growled. “There’s something, but… Dammit!”

Instinctively, Starsky stepped forward, but stopped the hand that automatically reached out to soothe. His touch didn’t seem to be what Hutch needed anymore. “Easy, Hutch. The doc said don’t try so hard. Just… just don’t even think about it anymore,” he advised, fearing he said it as much for his own sake as Hutch’s.

“How am I supposed to do that?” Hutch snapped, but he seemed only impatient, some of the desperation gone now that Starsky had taken the pressure off.

The trained detective that Starsky was latched on to the clue. Too much probing, too much expectation, and Hutch reacted predictably to the stress. If Starsky could continue to take the pressure off, or at least diminish it somewhat… He forced himself to grin as if this were a night like any other.

“TV. You always say that the best way to end up in a stupor is to watch TV.”

“But I always said that about you, didn’t I?” Hutch asked suspiciously.

Starsky shrugged his agreement. “You got a better idea?”

***

Hutch considered most television programming to be mindless distraction. Although tonight’s selection certainly fell into the mindless category, it wasn’t the least bit distracting. He felt restless and awkward sitting on the couch with Starsky, but couldn’t quite pin down where the feeling came from. It was familiar, the kind of feeling that plagued you when you tried to do something differently from the way you usually did it. Like parting your hair on the right instead of the left, flossing your teeth after you brushed them, or eating dessert first. Just not the natural order of things, and he suspected it had something to do with their positions on the couch.

When they had first moved here from the kitchen, Starsky had made as if to sit right beside him where Hutch had settled in one corner of the couch. He almost didn’t notice, Starsky had changed his movement so smoothly, straightening and taking a few steps further to the other corner. He couldn’t remember sitting cuddled together like lovers for an evening of television, and yet he felt unnaturally cold all along his right side as if his body was used to a heat source, close and consistent.

“Who do you think did it?” Starsky asked, waving toward the television where a station break was just beginning.

Hutch hadn’t been paying close enough attention to the detective show to have any idea of who the culprit might be. He shook his head tiredly. “Hell, Starsk, I couldn’t even tell you who the victim was.”

Starsky gave him a chuckle for that. It was a tense thing, more nerves than humor, but a brave attempt at normality that Hutch felt the need to reward.

“Please don’t tell me I’ve become addicted to the idiot box in the past year,” he said, pitching his tone to mock horror. “No wonder I want to forget it.”

“Shit, no,” Starsky reassured him. He looked at his watch and pushed up off the couch. “But I almost forgot, the one show you do like starts in a couple of minutes,” he explained while he flipped through the channels. “I forgot all about this,” he added as he returned to the couch.

“Maybe it’s contagious,” Hutch muttered and waited for this favorite program of his to start. He couldn’t remember having a favorite program, never mind one that he watched so consistently that Starsky would have noticed his preference.

As he feared, Hutch didn’t recognize the theme music when it began or any of the characters that flashed onto the screen one after the other. This “favorite” program was just one more reminder that he had a big, gaping hole where the last year was supposed to be.

“Damn!” he cursed softly, frustration taking possession of him again, making it impossible to sit still beneath Starsky’s expectant eyes. He thrust to his feet, wanting to escape but could think of no place he could retreat to where he would not find himself. He was the problem, and you couldn’t run away from yourself.

With no place to run, Hutch paced, thoughts whirling around in his head at such a dervish rate, he couldn’t even begin to grasp one and hold it in focus long enough for it to make any kind of sense to him. The more he paced, the angrier he became and the angrier he became the faster he paced. A maddening circle that demanded he break it. And break it he did, coming to an abrupt halt before the television and reaching out to sweep the plant that rested on it away. It hit the floor with a satisfying smash of shattering pottery, and Hutch looked around for another victim, finding it in a leafy cousin that hung from the ceiling a few feet away.

Starsky intercepted him, both hands clamping onto his arms, and the strength from the deceptively slim body that had always surprised him, pitted against his irrational anger. A flood of memories seized him, flashing between their locked gazes. Starsky had held him like this so many times over the years, too many times perhaps, when some idiot or injustice had angered him beyond judicious discretion. Held him back from making a fool of himself or worse. The familiarity bled calm into him as he hung in Starsky’s grip while the adrenaline slowly dissipated.

“Okay now?” Starsky asked softly, the kind of cautious tone you might use with a familiar, docile pet that had suddenly turned on you, claws unsheathed and fangs bared.

Hutch tried for a reassuring smile and knew he had succeeded to some extent when Starsky released one of his arms. The free hand reached for his face, and, while one part of him jabbered in fear, the same fear he had felt when he had noticed the lubricant in the bedroom, another part waited anxiously for the connection to be made.

Starsky’s fingers settled on his face and Hutch knew this touch. Not with any part of his brain that might be credited with the storage of memory. This felt as if his very skin, his nerve endings themselves, were brain cells upon which had been indelibly imprinted the reality of this touch. He knew this hand. Knew how the callused tips softened progressively from the thumb that rested beneath his cheekbone to the softness of the baby finger that brushed the skin just behind his ear. Knew how the fleshy pad beneath Starsky’s thumb cushioned the curve of his chin. In a moment, that thumb would venture further, brush the bristles of his mustache, seek out his lips beneath….

The sensory recall, so close to a memory that Hutch could taste the salt Starsky’s thumb would bring to his lips, came apart as the hand left his face. Hutch opened eyes he hadn’t even realized he had closed to find Starsky’s intent gaze upon him. He wanted to snatch at the hand Starsky cradled against his chest as if it had been burned, and press it hard against his face. Force his skin cells to give up the memories they horded, and use them to unlock the grim blank face in his brain behind which the last year cowered.

For the first time in his life, Hutch allowed unquestioning terror to consume him completely. Only fools were fearless, and, though Hutch was no one’s fool, he had learned to reach past the fear, tuck it away and get on with his job. But this wasn’t fear; it was terror. An unreasoning, instinctive terror evoked by the sensory memory of Starsky’s touch. Heeding it, Hutch stepped back, one slow, cautious step and then another while his body slowly calmed for the second time in so few minutes.

“Hutch?” Starsky said, but, as if he, too, was tuning into instincts that had nothing to do with intellect, made no attempt to close the distance between them. “We can watch something else,” he offered uncertainly.

Hutch shook his head mutely, what stupid television program they might watch the last thing he cared about at the moment.

“Why don’t you try to get some sleep? Those tests probably tired you out,” Starsky suggested. He was silent a moment, then seemed to feel that some reassurances as to his own intentions were required. “You can take the bed. I’m gonna watch TV for a while, so I’ll just camp out on the couch.”

Hutch was exhausted. Craved sleep worse than he had ever craved the heroin Forest had forced upon him. If he slept, there would be a new day to wake up to, maybe one that would fall back into the order his life had been taking, and this one would only be a bad dream after all. Or, as he had postulated, morbidly and he hoped not prophetically, he might wake up tomorrow to find yet another year had vanished.

“I just want to wake up tomorrow and find out this has all been a bad dream,” he admitted, hating the fear in his voice, the neediness.

That bleak expression that so stabbed him returned to Starsky’s face, tempered only slightly by the agreeing smile he attempted. “Me, too, swe… babe.”

“Sweetheart,” Hutch echoed softly, bringing the endearment out between them. “What if it never comes back, Starsk?” he asked, hating the pain he was inflicting, the pain he seemed to drive into Starsky with nearly every sentence he spoke. “What if I never remember we were…” he trailed off, feeling the blush stain his cheeks and the fear yammer at the door of the cage he had locked it in.

It had to be another blow, and yet, for a moment, Starsky’s face softened, tenderness there that Hutch could remember, but never before for him.

“I know you don’t remember. I see it… hit you every time I call you sweetheart,” Starsky said, the softness of his face hardening into the determination Hutch was far more familiar with. “But we’ve been through way too much to get to sweetheart, we’ve been too happy there, to go back without a fight.”

It was the strangest time to think of it, as Hutch, unable to find a reply, turned away silently in retreat, but he couldn’t help but wonder just when it was in the past year that Starsky had lost his aversion to soapy scenes.

***

He was afraid to open his eyes. Hutch knew he had, against all logic, slept. But not well, or long. Only long enough to dream. Images he could not remember, but that left him tense and shaking with fear in the aftermath. He moaned softly, relieved to hear that his voice was no longer trapped in his throat. Something had told him he could not move, that he could make no sound.

“One more fucking thing I can’t remember,” he grumbled and rolled onto his back, tried to force his eyes to see in the dark, his ears to hear some sound, any familiar sound that might calm the thundering of his blood in his veins. It was his nose that rescued him, easing calm into him on the waft of warmth from under the covers. His own scent, sleep-warmed and fear-soured, but incidental to the well-known scent of his partner. Long stakeouts in a steam bath of a car only deepened it, no cologne could mask it. Security. Safety. Love. The last thought brought fear with it, riding in on the coattails of emotions that had been calming him, trying, like some out of synch pacemaker, to rev his heart up again.

“Hutch? You okay?”

Inwardly focused, Hutch hadn’t heard Starsky’s approach, saw him now only as a dark outline in the bedroom doorway, backlit by the unreliable flickering of the TV screen. He strained his ears for the sound of it that he must somehow have missed before, but there was none. Starsky must have turned the volume down, but left the screen on for light. In the year Hutch could no longer remember, had Starsky learned to fear the dark?

“How did you know I wasn’t asleep?” Hutch asked gruffly.

The faceless shadow that possessed Starsky’s voice moved into the room, bringing with it the rustle of clothing and that smell again. Hutch let it wash over him, sink into the places inside that still trembled in fear of the dream. He accepted without protest when Starsky eased onto the side of the bed. He welcomed the warmth, even while he feared it, and was very grateful that Starsky didn’t turn on the light.

“I don’t know,” Starsky admitted, his voice as soft as if he feared discovery by some hostile force. “Just jumpy, I guess. Why aren’t you sleeping?”

Hutch bit his lip, loath to confess to yet more loss of memory. Real life first, and now his dreams. His brain must be starting to look like swiss cheese. The bed moved, and he felt the warmth move closer, saw the shadow loom over him for a moment and then abruptly retreat.

“Did you have one of your bad dreams?”

“Don’t know if it was bad or not. I can’t remember it,” Hutch confessed, and it wasn’t as hard to admit as he had feared. He had few secrets that Starsky did not share, perhaps none now. It was comforting to realize that. To assume, whether rightly or wrongly, that the memories were held in trust for him by his dearest friend.

“You never can,” Starsky told him.

Hutch shivered a little, pulling the thin blanket up around his shoulders, though he knew this cold came from within, that no amount of bedding would warm him tonight. He couldn’t remember frequent nightmares, recalled upon wakening or lost forever. “Do I dream all the time now?” he asked, the oddity of having to ask for the information disturbing what little peace he had managed to find.

“No. Couple of months ago they started, I guess. Maybe a bit longer. When we first….”

Starsky’s voice disappeared into the flickering darkness around them, but Hutch didn’t need him to finish the reference. When they had first become… lovers. The thought terrified him, put an ache in the pit of his belly he had only felt a few times before. Times when he feared Starsky lost to him forever. Shot. Poisoned. Kidnapped. He had felt it today when Starsky had described the attack that had left him disfigured, but it was strongest when he thought of Starsky as his lover.

“When we first became… lovers, after the hit,” Starsky began again. “You had dreams then, we both did. A few times we scared the shit out of each other,” he added, reminiscent amusement in his voice that, though Hutch could not recall the moments, nevertheless brought a small smile to his lips. “But we always remembered them. They went away after a while. Maybe we got used to being… waking up safe together and finding out they really were just dreams.”

“But they came back?” Hutch asked, wondering what peace he had found, wishing for it now, and fearing what might have stolen that peace from him.

“Just yours,” Starsky admitted. “Couple of months ago, like I said. They really got to us both. You even went and saw Richards, the department trauma counselor they sent me to. But… he said he couldn’t… get through to you.”

“Couldn’t?” Hutch echoed. He had always known his own weaknesses, and, more importantly, how to hide them. What was he hiding from now? What terrified him so that his psyche was hiding his memories from him?

“I figured that was my fault, even if you wouldn’t admit it,” Starsky confessed.

“Your fault? How could my nightmares be your fault?” Hutch asked, then remembered the fear that possessed him whenever he tried to think of them together as lovers. “Were we… having problems?”

“Hell, no.” Starsky laughed softly, the sound rich in contentment, the sound a man can only make when he has everything he wants in the world well within his grasp. But it didn’t last long. Hutch felt that movement again and knew Starsky was once again reaching out for him, but catching himself before the connection could be made.

“You said you didn’t want a department shrink digging around when I’d finally made up my mind for re­qualification. Gay and cop are pretty damned mutually exclusive as far as the department is concerned, is the way you put it. Said all you needed was… to hang onto me for a while and the dream went away. I didn’t have any objections to being held onto,” Starsky confessed with a kind of defiant pride. There was refusal to be ashamed of what they had in his voice, but offered with caution because he no longer knew if Hutch felt the same way. But his need for it was rich in his tone, and in the way he had to stop himself from reaching out to Hutch. They had always been physically affectionate with each other, but this was more. This was need, like air and food and water.

Had Hutch felt that need? Ever. For Starsky? For anyone? Certainly not for Vanessa or Gillian or any of the other women who had touched his life. There had always been a part of him that had remained aloof, protected, immune and self-contained. Had he only seen the need in Starsky for a more intimate relationship, responded to that need, but never felt it himself? Now that they were partners again, did he want to go back to the way it had been, was that why he had forgotten? He didn’t like to think himself capable of such cowardice.

And yet, his senses remembered. Earlier, the simple touch of Starsky’s hand on his face had released a maelstrom of sensory memory within him. It had terrified him, but seduced him all in the same breathless moment. Were his senses the key as Walker had suggested?

“I’m gonna let you get some sleep—”

“Starsk. Don’t go,” Hutch protested, unaware before the words left his mouth that he was going to say them, that the abandonment signaled by the gentle rocking of the mattress as Starsky stood would drive him to act upon a theory that scared him witless.

Starsky settled back onto the bed. “You should try to get some sleep. It can’t help—”

“Would you…” Hutch interrupted, then hesitated. Want and terror and so many other conflicting emotions skittered through him so insistently, he couldn’t choose between them. He didn’t know how to sort them into any kind of progression that would let his intellect rule.

“Would I what, Hutch?” Starsky asked. “All you have to do is ask. Even if you don’t remember the last year, you have to remember that much about us.”

What Hutch remembered was a slow, agonizing drawing apart, and he couldn’t fathom any way they could have gone from the last memory he had to this morning when they had wakened, naked and entwined. And yet they had, and, despite his fear, he wanted fiercely to know how that had happened, what they had shared, and why the idea of it terrified his mind, now, even while it seduced his senses.

“Would you touch me?” Hutch finally found the courage to ask, feeling almost as if he were asking Starsky to commit murder or some other such forbidden crime. Forbidden by him, because he had already seen the hurt he could be inflicting upon his friend if he once again rejected that touch.

And despite the longing Hutch had seen in him ail day, Starsky hesitated, too. “Christ, Hutch, I don’t know.”

“My face, Starsk,” Hutch hurried to elaborate. “Like you did tonight. It was… when you touched my face, I almost… not remembered. But it was like my skin remembered your touch. Like… like… if I could just tap into it, I’d unlock.”

Hutch’s voice trailed away as he saw there was no more need for explanation, no more need to coax Starsky. Starsky’s hand had lifted, what little light there was catching and reflecting off the rings that encircled his smallest finger. Hutch watched that hand approach, feeling it’s warmth—only remembered, or real?—before each separate finger was delicately laid along the side of his face. Once again, the touch ignited sparks of sensory memory, knowledge layers deep in the cells of his skin.

“Yes,” Hutch breathed softly. “I know this touch.” He closed his eyes to better focus on the flashes at the edges of his mental vision, hoping to entice even one to skip into his line of sight and allow itself to be truly seen.

Then Starsky took his hand away.

“No!” Hutch protested, eyes popping open, hand flashing out to catch at Starsky’s arm, to force him to stay, to give form and substance to ghostly specters.

“I’m not a Vulcan, Hutch. I can’t mind meld you and give you back your memories,” Starsky grated, every word dipped in the poisonous disillusionment of unbearable, unforeseen pain. “Memories you don’t want.”

Hutch tightened his grip, holding Starsky in place, stung and yet afraid that what Starsky said might be true. “You don’t know that I don’t want them. Can’t know that if I don’t.”

“Can’t I?” Starsky asked. He twisted his arm free, but didn’t try to leave the bed again. “Is that why you’re shaking hard enough to rattle your brains?” he grated. “You think I wanna sit here and touch you when I know, saw dammit, Hutch, how disgusted you were when you saw the lube.” A sweep of his arm indicated the bedside table and the tube that still lay there like some sort of mute accuser, reminding them both of what they had shared, and what only one of them now remembered. “You think I want to touch you when I can see my touch scares you spitless?”

“Scared, yes,” Hutch admitted. “Terror, if you want the truth. Like the difference between thinking a punk’s got a gun and watching the bastard pull the trigger. But…” Again Hutch hesitated, grabbing at the feelings inside, needing to give them to Starsky in words in the frantic hope that he could then understand them himself. “But excited, too. That adrenaline kick when the bust is going down just right. Or… when you’ve anticipated, a long, long time. Something. Anything. And now it’s there and happening.”

But Hutch could tell that, although Starsky’s quick temper was cooling, neither was his partner convinced. There was enough light for him to see that the dark head was shaking in negation even if Starsky was no longer trying to physically retreat. Hutch sat up, reaching out and laying his hands on Starsky’s shoulders. “You were my lover, Starsk?” he asked and felt a jolt rock through the body he held.

“Yes,” Starsky rasped, the single word bitten off and then choked on, the pain in his voice cutting into soft places in Hutch that he hadn’t even know existed.

“What kind of lover were you that you never made me tremble?” Hutch asked softly.

“Not in fear, Hutch. Disgust or terror, like you said,” Starsky protested plaintively.

“I’m aroused now,” Hutch confessed because it was true, his cock a throbbing demand that made even the constriction of his light briefs, the weight of the sheet, a torment.

“Fear hard,” Starsky dismissed the relevance.

“Maybe,” Hutch agreed, reaching for honesty, unable to offer it with any surety. “Maybe my body remembers what my mind no longer can.” He became aware suddenly that he wasn’t the only one trembling, that Starsky was shaking, too. Hutch forced himself to release his partner, take his hands away and fumble for a grip in the sheets to keep from falling off the edge and into the pit. Forever lost.

“Do you want me to make you some tea or something?” Starsky offered after a minute or two of strained, awkward silence

The offer nearly made Hutch laugh at the inanity of it. He asked for sex, and Starsky offered him tea? “You don’t have to wait on me,” he snapped, harsher than he intended, harsher, certainly, than was called for. He never had had much patience. Surely the past year couldn’t have changed him that much?

“You did it long enough for me,” Starsky reminded him, sounding like a man who had been offered a reprieve, and yet knew his sentence had only been stayed, not commuted. “Tea and sympathy you’d call it when it all got to be too much for me and I’d want to just quit.”

“I did?” Hutch asked, distracted by the offer of a spoken memory, wishing he could remember such selfless devotion as Starsky described, the sour taste of the last actions he did remember bitter upon his tongue. He felt Starsky’s hand curl around his arm, realized that there had been no attempt by Starsky to hold this gesture back and found himself relaxing into it. Friendship. Support. Love of a sort that he need not fear.

“I’m alive today because of you. I’m a cop again because of you. You wouldn’t let me quit, Hutch. And I’m not gonna let you quit either. We’re gonna find out what happened to your memory, and we’re gonna fix whatever it takes to get it back for you.”

It was a promise, almost a sacred oath, as if Starsky stood in court with his hand on a bible. But what if regaining his memory meant Starsky lost what he seemed to need so badly? The darkness was no longer Hutch’s friend. He needed to see Starsky’s truth as well as hear it. But what would he do with it then? Maybe it was better, kinder, to cower in the darkness when he had no promises to give to the light.

“I just want to sleep,” he said wearily. Escape for a while from the living nightmare, even if it meant plunging back into the dreaming one.

Starsky patted the arm where his hand still rested, then the bed rocked gently, the shadow retreating as far as the door. “See you in the morning,” he promised and then he was gone.

The darkness deepened a few moments later and Hutch realized that Starsky had turned off the TV. So, no fear of the dark after all. It seemed, at the moment, Hutch was the one with the market cornered on fear.

***

Starsky didn’t expect to sleep now any more than he had before Hutch woke. He was too used, by now, to sharing a bed, to never sleeping or waking alone. And he wasn’t charmed by the idea of going back in time. Nevertheless, he switched off the television and stretched out on the couch, crunched the pillow up into a semi­comfortable position and tried to let his body relax.

He had no hope of convincing his mind that forty winks might be a plan worth considering. It was too busy chasing itself around in ever tightening circles until the thoughts became nothing but a whirling blur of emotion-charged colors. He opened his eyes to erase them, grateful for the darkness broken only by the glow from the streetlight seeping through the panel on the door.

His chest ached, but the persistent pain had nothing to do with the scars that marred his body. This pain went far deeper than that, right into the core of him, his belief in himself and his ability to live again. That core had Hutch’s name stamped all over it, imprinted by Hutch’s love, Hutch’s faith, and Hutch’s touch. Now Hutch didn’t remember any of it, shuddered in apparent fear or disgust at the mere thought that they were more than friends. The memories of them lost, banished, or blocked. Whichever it was mattered not at all, because it came down to the same thing. Hutch didn’t want him. Hutch didn’t remember that he ever had. Hutch couldn’t even recall that it was he who started it.

Starsky was past that grateful-to-be-alive stage. Well past it, in fact, and sunk deeply into the pain and disability his life had become. The doctors were still playing with his pain meds. Trying to find a drug and a dosage that would diminish the pain of his bullet and scalpel ravaged body and yet not leave him either a permanent resident of cloud nine, or depressed enough to pray for deliverance in death.

“Come on, Starsk. This doesn’t look so bad. Have just a couple of bites, okay,” Hutch coaxed.

“Fuck off, Hutch,” Starsky growled. Whether he was high or depressed, he was miserable. The nurses bore the worst of it, of course, because it was their job and they were stuck with him. But poor Hutch came in for more than his fair share as well. And he didn’t have to. He could plead work or exhaustion—one look at the guy was enough evidence of either—but Starsky knew his partner was spending every spare minute with him. It made him wish he could put a rein on his temper and spare his devoted friend. It also made him wish Hutch would take his advice and fuck off. Usually, both at the same time.

“I’ll put that at the top of my priority list,” Hutch promised, while he swung the over-the-bed table into position over Starsky’s lap and lifted the cover off lunch. “As soon as you’re well and Gunther’s rotting in jail for good. I’ll make sure I get laid.”

Starsky laughed. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t know who Hutch had writing his comebacks for him—Huggy, maybe?—but he always seemed to have something waiting on the tip of his tongue. Usually something so outrageous that Starsky’s self-pitying black mood just couldn’t hold out against it. “Goddamnit, Hutch. Don t make me laugh. I’ll bust something loose,” he complained.

Hutch made a production out of shaking the paper napkin open and tucking it into Starsky’s pajama top. At least he was in pajamas now. The immodest gown consigned to hell, if there was any justice in the world, along with the catheter and a few of the tubes and wires. Progress, Starsky had to admit, but grudgingly.

“Not possible,” Hutch assured him. “Your doctor confessed he did his best knitting in there.” The Hutchinson finger hovered close to the right side of Starsky’s chest as if it could command, by the force of Hutch’s will alone, for bone and muscle and damaged organs to miraculously mend.

“Well, it feels to me as if he might have dropped a stitch or two,” Starsky grumbled, but Hutch had coaxed him out of his bad mood, for the moment at least. Until some poorly planned movement on his part reminded him how disabled he was now. Cautiously, he reached with his right hand to curl his fingers around Hutch’s extended finger. He winced as he squeezed and tried to jokingly push it away, the jab from torn flesh catching his breath in his throat.

“Want me to kiss it and make it all better, babe?” Hutch asked, humor in his voice, but something entirely different in his eyes. Something Starsky wasn’t sure how to interpret. Something that had lurked there even before the shooting, but that had gone unspoken, unacknowledged, by either of them.

“God, Hutch, I wish you would,” Starsky panted as the pain burned through him.

A heartbeat later, he forgot about the pain, forgot the hospital and the horror and that he would never be whole again. Forgot it, and knew he would never look back at it, that it would never have the same power over him, because in that heartbeat, Hutch bent toward him and, without hesitation, kissed him. Took possession of his lips with a pair that laid claim to Starsky’s with unmistakable love and passion and then begged the same in return.

That kiss and all the others that had followed it had been the turning point in Starsky’s recovery. Like a carrot dangling at the end of a stick, Hutch became the prize that pushed Starsky past pain and disability and depression. The reward of regaining his place as Hutch’s partner, and claiming this new reward of Hutch’s love, had been too great for halfway measures. Starsky had put his heart and soul into it. It hadn’t happened fast, although they had become lovers in the physical sense, as well as the emotional, as soon as he was capable, but months of hard work by both of them had, only a few weeks ago, given them back their partnership to complete the circle of contentment they found in each other.

The memory of that first kiss, of the overwhelming feeling of homecoming at the touch of Hutch’s lips on his, was one Starsky had revisited so often during his recovery he was surprised it hadn’t worn thin from the constant recall, stripped of its richness and deprived of its ability to inspire him to one more step, one more stroke. But it never had. Never before, however, had he recalled that moment with sadness.

Had it all been a pipe dream after all? Had Hutch somehow sensed a need in him that Starsky himself hadn’t recognized and responded to it out of loyalty and genuine affection? It was in Hutch’s nature to be so self-sacrificing, certainly. That thought soured Starsky’s stomach, gave birth to true nausea that flooded his bullet-scarred stomach with acid and his mouth with saliva. He swallowed hard, breathed deep, waiting, willing the nausea to pass. When it did, he forced himself to look at the other side of the silver coin of betrayal.

Had Hutch deceived himself? Had it only been the so near loss of his friend and partner that had led Hutch to feel desire that would never normally have possessed him? Now that the friend and partner had been restored, was the need for the lover gone, and Hutch, being Hutch, unable to deal Starsky the blow it would be to confess the loss? Had his subconscious chosen amnesia as a path to deliver him from an entanglement he could no longer bear?

Starsky sat up abruptly. It wasn’t illness that plagued him now, however, but a white-hot fury that made him want to abandon cool logic, charge back into his bedroom and drag Hutch from his restless, dream-ravaged sleep. Shake recall back into that stubborn brain, force his lover to remember with kisses and caresses and passion that only a day ago had been joyfully given and received between them. Quelling the illness that had swept him earlier was easy compared to the battle Starsky now fought. He had always had a quick temper that flared and then passed just as quickly. But he had always been possessive as well. Hutch was his. His body claimed, his heart earned, and Starsky knew he couldn’t find what it took to allow that to be taken from him without a struggle.

Staring at the lighter square in the door, focusing on it to drive his imagination back into hiding, Starsky wrestled the doubts in submission, shoving them into an unlighted comer of his mind and slamming a mental door upon them.

“No,” he muttered fiercely at the small square of dim light, the symbol of the outside world they both always determinedly ignored once they were alone together within the sanctuary of one of their homes.

Hutch was no coward. If his feelings had changed, he would tell Starsky. Gently, regretfully, but honestly. Starsky had to put his faith in that belief because the alternative was simply unthinkable. He had put his faith in Hutch a year ago, no, more than a decade ago, and he wasn’t about to withdraw it now or any time in the foreseeable future. Or the unremembered past.

Slowly, Starsky stretched back out on the couch, closed his eyes and let the silence wrap around him. But the silence wasn’t complete. Separated by only a few yards, Starsky could still hear the soft, almost-purr of Hutch’s snoring. A sound he was used to hearing at much closer quarters, sometimes directly in his ear. That memory brought a smile to his lips and renewed determination to his heart. He wasn’t about to give that up, or any part of Hutch, without a damned good reason. They would find out where Hutch’s memories had gone and why. It would be soon enough to mourn, then, if he had to.

***

“Do you want to go into the station this morning?” Starsky asked as he refilled their depleted coffee cups.

“That’s a brilliant suggestion, Starsky,” Hutch snapped, feeling out of sorts and out of place, or just plain out of it, and taking it out on Starsky. Because he knew he could? Hutch was trying too hard again, he realized, recognizing that he was seeking a difference in the feeling that venting his spleen at his partner was something he dare not do. That after the way he had betrayed Starsky, he needed to walk on delicate eggshells until the wound he had inflicted on their friendship was scarred over.

“I can’t remember the day before yesterday or a whole year before that,” he went on, but more gently, reminding himself as much as Starsky that he was, at this moment, mentally and dangerously crippled. “I might be kind of… useless filling out reports today. A little fatal—to either one of us—on the street.”

“I didn’t mean to work,” Starsky mumbled, blue eyes apparently fascinated by a lone, sugar-infected puff that floated in the leftover milk in his cereal bowl. “The doc said familiar surroundings.”

Hutch nodded acceptance of the explanation. The station would certainly be familiar. He spent enough of his life there. Or had he? “Starsk? What have I been doing while you were… laid up? A whole year? Dobey never lets anybody work alone for long. Do I have… did I have another partner?” he asked, remembering that Starsky had said they had made an arrest together the day before last.

Starsky’s demeanor changed completely with the question, his somber face animated from within by excitement and pride. “You wouldn’t take another partner,” he reported with the kind of smile usually reserved for a cat burping feathers. “Told Dobey you had a partner. I didn’t see it myself, but I sure heard about it later. Couple of hundred times, I think.”

“So, what did I do?” Hutch wondered, a vision of sitting behind a desk, dealing every day, day in and day out, with the boring minutia of paperwork and endless files no more appealing now than it had been when he had first donned the uniform. He had known all along he would never be content behind a desk. Even his growing dissatisfaction with the seeming imbalance of personal risk and true justice couldn’t possibly have convinced him to sit behind a desk. He gave up his useless speculations to tune into Starsky’s excited outpouring.

“Damn, Hutch. You were… you were the star of Metro division. Of the whole damned force. Dozen guys workin’ under you half the time, firing on all cylinders all the time. Christ, I think the mayor would have nominated you for sainthood or something if he could have,” Starsky revealed with an enthusiasm that stripped away the exhausted tension from his face.

“What did I do?” Hutch repeated impatiently, frustration making him want to reach out and wring the words right out of Starsky, the scenario Starsky presented so at odds with his feelings of discontent with the job that it only made his current feeling of dislocation worse.

“You brought down an empire,” Starsky said. His restless excitement had disappeared abruptly, awe and pride taking its place. “An evil, corrupt empire that had sunk its claws and spread its poison into just about everything there was to poison. Businesses and judges and government and… You put the most powerful man in the world into a cell, and you did it so thoroughly, all the lawyers in the world are never gonna be able to find the key to unlock those bars.”

Hutch shook his head, unable to grasp what Starsky said, unable to believe that he could have forgotten such acts when all he could recall was the growing feeling that the job wasn’t worth what it cost anymore. He felt Starsky’s hand on his arm, looked up to find that uncertainty had returned to that expressive face.

“You coulda written your own ticket, Hutch,” Starsky told him. “But when I passed the re-qualification, you told Dobey all you wanted was your partner and the streets you knew.” The bleakness that was becoming all too familiar reclaimed Starsky’s eyes. “Maybe that’s why… Maybe you’re sorry—”

“No!” Hutch cut in. He knew he couldn’t, never would, regret a decision that saw him securely partnered with Starsky. His last memory was of events, actions he had taken, that he had feared would sunder that partnership, and the memory of the desolation he had felt was vivid. As vivid as the memory of the relief he had felt when Starsky had forgiven him and the trust that bound them together had been mended.

“How long?” he asked softly, something niggling at him. The kind of thing that, if you tried to look straight at it, eluded you. You had to turn your focus elsewhere, let that nebulous something flirt around the periphery of your mind until it became incautious and you could spin around and catch it unaware. It made him feel as if his memories were a living entity, with rights and agendas of their own, that could choose to hide themselves from him no matter how hard he looked for them. Like scurrying rodents, hiding from the light, they demanded he allow them their own time and place to reveal themselves.

“How long have I been back?” Starsky asked, then went on when Hutch nodded. “Just about three weeks. We took it easy for a couple of weeks.” A reminiscent and teasing smile curved his lips. “Took that long for you to quit… hovering. Like you expected me to keel over or something, even though every—”

Every night, Hutch filled in silently when Starsky abruptly regained control of his runaway tongue. But fear wouldn’t let him say it aloud. A depleted tube of lubricant, and the smell of sex in the bed when they woke together. Every night they had sex? Every night they made love?

Starsky was watching him, and Hutch knew his partner could read what he was thinking, but he couldn’t push past the fear to say it, to bring it out in the open between them. Coward, he indicted himself bitterly.

“Last week we took over the Jackman case,” Starsky took up the conversation again, all trace of hurt cleansed from his voice, his expression as neutral as if he were dictating an occurrence report.

The dichotomy was so frustrating for Hutch. Last week they had been spending their nights paying for dances at the Golden Lady Ballroom, and their days snipping at the very fabric of the friendship that had held them together for ten years. “What kind of case was it?” Hutch asked, desperately hoping some clue, some fact would bring him forward in time, back into step with the date on the morning paper that lay on the table, pushed aside with his uneaten breakfast.

“Some of just about everything,” Starsky said with a shrug. “Narco first got into it because of drugs, then Vice figured out Jackman was tied up in prostitution, too. Mostly under age. Then one of Jackman’s known pushers turned up dead, and the case was bumped up to homicide.”

Hutch shook his head ruefully, recognition of the pattern, if not exactly the facts of the case, quelling the feeling of dislocation that possessed him, if only for a few moments. “Nice and complicated, you mean?”

Starsky grinned at him, those few moments expanding with familiarity, coming close to planting Hutch’s feet in the today that truly existed, not the one he remembered last.

“Like always.”

They said it together, and the sound of their voices, blending in harmony was almost enough to bring that flirting something into focus. Almost, almost. Before Hutch could grasp it, it flitted away, leaving behind an echoing sense of loss and a lingering belief that in one single day, or maybe an hour, or only a moment, of the 365 he could no longer recall, lay the secret.

“What went wrong?” Hutch asked, uncertain from where the feeling of foreboding, the certainty that something had, indeed, gone wrong, came from. Was it only the echo of the pain of Kira and his own Judas behavior?

“Nothing,” Starsky reported. “Jackman gave us a run for our money, but we got him with nothing worse to show for it than a bump on the head for you, and a scraped knee for me.”

“And you ripped your best jeans,” Hutch murmured softly, the quality of the silence that followed bringing him out of introspection to face the sudden animation of hope on Starsky’s face. He shook his head, hating to strip away that eager expectancy, dreading the pain that would come into the eyes that clung to his, but unable to lie. “You said that at the hospital yesterday,” he reminded Starsky gently.

Hope died just as Hutch feared it would, and pain took its place before Starsky pushed up from the table, picked up his cup and bowl and retreated to the sink. Hutch heard the dishes rattle into the sink and knew Starsky had started as hard as he had when the sudden, strident demand of the telephone’s ring invaded the aching silence.

They looked at each other as if neither one of them had ever heard the sound before, didn’t recognize this outside world’s intrusion into the private space their friendship had always created for them. Then Starsky muttered a soft ‘damn’ and moved to snatch the phone off the wall.

“Starsky,” he growled into the receiver, and Hutch shook his head, pitying the person on the other end of the line if he or she didn’t have a damned good reason for calling.

“But, Captain,” Starsky protested, revealing the caller’s identity to Hutch, the frown gathering between drawn-together, heavy eyebrows adding the clue that whatever Dobey was saying, Starsky didn’t like it.

“Okay. Yeah. I understand,” Starsky conceded grudgingly. He twisted his arm to check the face of the watch he wore. “I’ll be there in… What? Why? He doesn’t remember anything. What good…? All right. Yes, sir.”

Hutch winced at the layer of icy sarcasm that coated Starsky’s apparent submission to Dobey’s demand, but then saw reluctant acquiescence take some of the edge off Starsky’s anger.

“Sorry, Captain. I understand. Just… ah… does anyone else…? No. Okay. Give us an hour.”

“He wants us in?” Hutch interpreted when Starsky hung up the phone with a little more force than was likely good for the instrument.

“Yeah. We only did a pre-lim the other night. Usually enough to hold a slime like Jackman for a couple of days. But the DA’s been buzzing around the station, driving Dobey nuts. Looks like Jackman hired Zimmer, and the legal beagle’s been all over Kyle already, claiming unauthorized use of force during the arrest, failure to inform the suspect, blah, blah, blah.”

Hutch couldn’t help but smile. The tirade, sung with different words, but to the same tune, by one or the other of them was so familiar that it almost managed to abolish that feeling of dislocation again. Until he remembered that he didn’t know any of the words to this particular refrain. Didn’t know if the suspect’s accusations were true. That he couldn’t cover his partner’s back on this one, or even his own ass.

“Ah, Starsk, don’t you think this hole in my brain might prove to be just a slight inconvenience?” he asked hesitantly.

Starsky shrugged. “That’s what I tried to tell Dobey, but he insists we get our asses in there and give Kyle what he wants. Toot sweet.”

“He might be…” Hutch began, but trailed off when he saw the sudden smile on Starsky’s face. It was one of those smiles that took over when, out of the gloom, Starsky had discovered an unexpected silver lining. Usually something ridiculous. “What’s that look for?” he asked warily.

“Nothin’,” Starsky reassured with his words, but there was a certain anticipatory gleam to his eye that only accented the sudden tease his smile had become. “I was just thinking how, for once, partner, you’re going to have to shut up and let me do all the talking.”

***

“Gentlemen, thank you for coming in so quickly,” ADA Kyle greeted the partners as they came through the door of the interrogation room he had commandeered. Starsky and Hutch, it appeared, weren’t the only officers whose reports were less detailed than Kyle would like, and so, for a change, the mountain had had to come to Mohamed. If he resented the inconvenience, however, it wasn’t apparent, as he came out from behind the file-strewn table and offered his hand to each of them in turn.

Starsky accepted it reluctantly, and saw Hutch do the same. Who was Kyle trying to kid, he wondered? District attorneys and cops, despite being technically on the same side of the law, just weren’t this buddy-buddy. Then he remembered the motherlode of locked-tight, guaranteed victories Hutch had been handing over to the DA’s office for the past year. There was nothing like sweetening a guy’s win/loss ratio to make him treat you like his best friend.

“Please, sit down,” Kyle invited them, circling the table to reclaim his chair. His hand came to rest on one of the files that waited, but, surprisingly, he didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry to get on with it. “Captain Dobey informed me you sustained a head injury during Jackman’s arrest, Detective Hutchinson. Nothing too serious, I hope. Was it a concussion? I had one myself a couple of years ago. Skiing accident. I had terrible headaches for weeks after.”

Starsky didn’t wait for Hutch to answer, but jumped in quickly to take advantage of the groundwork Dobey had laid for them. “That’s right. My partner’s feeling a little under the weather,” he said with apparent sympathy. “So, if you don’t mind, I’ll give you the report today.” He offered a disarming smile to Kyle’s obvious reluctance. “Believe me, if I get any of the pertinent facts wrong, Hutch won’t hesitate to let us know,” he added, carefully arranging his face into the long-suffering acceptance of a man who had, over the years, grown accustomed to being corrected. Kyle didn’t need to know that it was a sham.

“Certainly, Detective Starsky. Now, I don’t think we need to go over any of the investigative work. It’s all here,” Kyle said, patting the file under his hand and offering Hutch an approving smile. “It’s the actual arrest I need you to recreate for me. Your preliminary report is… ah… a little sketchy.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Starsky said as contritely as he could manage. “I was a little anxious to get Hutch to the hospital.”

“Understandable, of course,” Kyle agreed quickly. “But if you could give it to me verbatim…” He leaned forward, his finger hovering over the record button on the tape machine that sat on the table. “You don’t mind if I record this, do you?”

Actually, Starsky minded a lot. He hated giving recorded evidence almost as much as he hated testifying in court. But the method was becoming more and more popular—he and Hutch even used it themselves. He nodded grudging agreement, then concentrated on marshalling his thoughts the way he did before making any report, seeing the scene again in his mind’s eye in order to provide all the details that sometimes seemed insignificant at the time, but upon which a case could succeed or fail.

Starsky carefully closed the metal warehouse door behind them and gave himself a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Then, his Beretta held between both hands, its business end pointed at the concrete floor, he moved up beside Hutch where his partner was surveying the situation from behind a stack of wooden crates.

“It’s a fucking maze,” Hutch reported disgustedly when Starsky was close enough for their shoulders to brush.

“And Jackman’s the sewer rat that knows all the ins and outs,” Starsky reminded them both. They had done this hundreds of times in the past, had it down to a synchronized ballet almost second nature to them after all the years they had danced it together. But it had been a year since he and Hutch had done this, together or apart, and it wouldn’t hurt to layer a little caution over the adrenalin pumping into their veins.

“And we’re the tough alley cats that are gonna flush him,” Hutch reminded in his turn, but it wasn’t bravado, more like the pep talk a coach gave at half-time. Or maybe when there was only a minute left on the clock.

“I’ll take the right,” Starsky agreed, giving Hutch a little bump to the back of his right shoulder with the front of his left. Silent communication not meant to replace words because there were none they needed to say that had not already been said between them. He started to slip off to the right, already intent upon sending his senses ghosting ahead of him, seeking out the quarry and leading him to the rat’s hiding place as surely as if the creep wore a homing beeper. He had barely cleared his partner’s big body when Hutch’s voice, hissing his name with sudden urgency, froze him in place.

“Starsk!”

Starsky swiveled, outward focus pulling in, narrowing onto Hutch, seeking clues to the sudden tight urgency.

He almost expected to find that Hutch had already somehow ferreted out their quarry’s lair, but it wasn’t knowledge that was living on Hutch’s face. Caution instead, and more than a little fear. Starsky watched silently as Hutch conquered that fear and a professional mask settled over the grim features.

“Be careful,” Hutch demanded, but it was clear that, like it or not, he knew he had to let Starsky do his job and get on with his own.

Silently, Starsky laid one hand on his partner’s shoulder and squeezed once. This was it, he suddenly realized, this was the moment when they found out whether they could really be partners again. Whether they could finally say “fuck you” to Gunther and truly reclaim the lives he had tried to steal from them. There were still no words Starsky could give, so he turned away and slipped from Hutch’s sight.

As warehouses went in their district, this one was well-organized and relatively clutter-free. Starsky noticed these details only for their usefulness. That it meant the neat, tall rows of crates gave him blind alleys to conceal himself in and that there was little or no litter to avoid disturbing that might give him away. Swiftly, silently, new Adidas soundless, he traversed the aisles, nerves drawn so taut that he was almost able to feel Hutch’s presence mirroring his own, sense the backed-into-a-corner fear of Jackman somewhere ahead of him.

He tuned into that awareness of evil, let it lead him relentlessly onward into the dimmer depths of the huge room. Jackman was there, just ahead, Starsky was sure of it. As certain as he was that Hutch was to his left, though neither prey nor partner had given themselves away with the slightest sound.

Perhaps it was time to break that silence, Starsky thought as he reached an open space between crates that gave him a view out onto the glass-fronted back office where, both logic and instinct told him, Jackman had gone to ground. He couldn’t get any closer, cross that no-man’s land of no cover, without exposing himself. And he didn’t doubt for one moment that Jackman was waiting for him or Hutch to do just that. What he needed was a distraction.

Now Starsky cursed the lack of clutter he had earlier blessed as he looked around for something to throw. It had to be heavy enough to make a good, loud clatter when it landed, yet light enough for him to heave it well away from his position. Finding nothing in the immediate environs, he backtracked the way he had come, finding, as he had observed and noted in the “just in case” part of his brain, a pile of paint brushes and cans tucked between two stacks of crates. He grabbed a couple of the brushes and hurried forward once more. Hutch, he knew, would be becoming impatient with the cat and mouse game.

Once again reaching the last line of cover before no-man’s land, Starsky scanned quickly for a target and to ensure that the scene hadn’t changed since he last peeked. Jackman had to be holed up somewhere inside the office where he had a clear view of all that glass. Starsky wanted to play a little knock-knock. Startle Jackman with a tap on his front door, but didn’t want the bastard to see where it came from. Up and over, he decided, was his safest course of action.

Grasping the paintbrush by its handle, Starsky swung once and then twice, straight up from the shoulder, retaining his grip until the third time his arm reached its zenith. He released his improvised missile, then watched it arc up and over the crates beside him, sailing on a trajectory that concealed it until a second before it hit the glass.

All hell broke loose then, the chatter of an automatic preceding the crash and tinkle of shattering glass by so narrow a margin that there seemed to be no pause at all. The noise was almost deafening enough to make him miss the distinctive boom of the personal cannon Hutch carried.

For a brief, terrifying moment, Starsky froze, then training and instinct and his need to protect his partner took over and he charged, aiming for the last half pile of crates, now covered in shattered glass, across the no-man’s land. Running for all he was worth from a standing start, the heated rush of deadly projectiles passing close enough to singe his skin, Starsky flung himself the last few feet, sailing through the air, landing with a shout of pain as his knee connected with concrete and glass, and…

“Oh, my God.”

Starsky returned to the quiet of the interrogation room, his recital stuttering to a halt. Automatically, he jumped to his feet, hands reaching out toward Hutch who was also on his feet, staring at him in horror. Face bleached so white that his blond mustache stood out in stark relief, Hutch swayed, seemingly unaware of the world around him. And yet, he couldn’t have been that far gone because he neatly sidestepped Starsky’s hand. His gaze turned once to the DA sitting in stunned silence behind the table and then came back to Starsky.

“Hutch?” Starsky said, cautiously reaching out again, reading an imminent bolt in the taut lines of Hutch’s body.

Again, Hutch evaded his hand, but this time he didn’t stop at one step, long legs eating up the short distance to the door that he wrenched open and bolted through.

“What was that all about?” Kyle demanded.

“I’ll be sure to let you know,” Starsky tossed back over his shoulder, fumbling at the handle with shaking fingers. “As soon as I find out myself.”

Hutch was already out of sight by the time Starsky reached the outer room. A silent inquiry of the uniformed officer on duty gained him a shrug of non-comprehension from the woman and a finger that pointed at the just-closing corridor door. Starsky grabbed the handle before it caught and yanked it open, looking fast both ways.

Elevators to the left. No sign of his partner, but there were stairs just past them. More cubbyhole offices to the right, and, at the very end of the corridor, the men’s room door, also just sighing closed. Starsky remembered that Hutch had looked pretty sick, and that prompted him to choose the second option.

For a second time, Starsky pushed on a door a moment before it would have fallen flush with its frame, his headlong rush halted by the sight of Hutch. He stood with his back to the door, the tall body bent over one of the sinks, hands braced on the porcelain as if they were the only thing holding Hutch upright. His head was bowed, almost hidden by the hunch of his shoulders, and Starsky stepped farther into the room, sidling sideways in hopes of getting a look at Hutch’s expression. The screen of fine blond hair hid what he had hoped to see, but he knew by the twitch that passed through the long back that Hutch was aware of his presence.

“I remember,” Hutch muttered, the flat delivery unable to disguise the horror in his voice.

Starsky opened his mouth and then closed it when he realized he had no voice with which to acknowledge the simple admission. It was trapped in his throat, or maybe tucked into the scar tissue of his damaged lung, by the certainty that Hutch was about to yank the security of his love right out from under his feet. Unconsciously, Starsky spread his legs, taking up a defensive stance in preparation for that tumble.

“You gonna puke?” he asked, instead of the jumble of pleas that scattershot through his brain.

Hutch made a choked sound that might have been a laugh or a sob, but shook his head, raising haunted eyes to meet Starsky’s in the mirror. The need there wouldn’t let Starsky remain in his self-protective withdrawal, but sent him forward to lay one hand on Hutch’s back, palm pressing firmly into the curve of the spine while his fingers spread out toward the taut shoulders on either side. Anger was a pitiful thing compared to his love for Hutch. A petty, spiteful emotion that wouldn’t let him withhold the comfort he knew only he could give.

“I remember,” Hutch repeated.

“Day before yesterday?” Starsky whispered, clinging stubbornly to the hope that it was some overlooked detail of the case that put the writhing horror in Hutch’s eyes, and not the all-encompassing love the two of them had found together.

“And the day before. And the year before,” Hutch chanted as if he had learned the words by rote, the blank expression that surrounded the suffering eyes becoming bleak as he spoke the last sentence of his personal catechism. “And the dreams.”

Starsky’s fingers drew into claws, trying to sink into the hard muscles beneath them as if they could secure a grip on what he feared was slipping away.

“Like fucking Simon Marcus, I saw my dreams come true.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

Startled, both of them jumped and spun to face the intruder who stood uncertainly in the half-opened door. Starsky’s hand dropped to his side, finding a grip on the seam of his jeans to prevent it from reaching out to Hutch when his partner started to move away from him. People had been talking about them for years, and they had both laughed it off. Once the idle gossip and speculation had become true, however, they had become more cautious, more guarded. Starsky hadn’t even realized how much he had resented that until just now.

“All yours,” Hutch told the man, another of the many uniformed clerks assigned to this area, in a tone so casual it was almost convincing. Would have been, had the lips that formed the words not been held so tight they barely moved in a face still drained gray beneath its healthy tan.

The officer sidled clear of the doorway, his wary gaze on them.

How ironic, Starsky thought bitterly, as he followed Hutch out the door and along the corridor. He had no doubt that gossip would be circulating through the entire building before end of shift. Speculation surrounding their names again. And all, he feared, just as the truth of it was about to be no more.

When Hutch didn’t slow down as they approached the small group of people waiting for the elevator, Starsky kept pace with him, following in the fast-moving wake as they pushed through the door to the stairs and started to descend. He felt as if his brain was on hold, fixated by Hutch’s reaction to the return of his memory, desperately holding on to hope, and leaving barely enough of his wits to negotiate the rapid rush down each successive flight of stairs until they burst through into the garage.

Instinctively, Starsky paused at the door, as he always did now, sending one quick, suspicious glance around this place whose safety and surety had been proven so painfully to be nothing but a sham.

Aware of the reaction, Hutch always hesitated with him, adding a second pair of cautious eyes to the perusal. But not today, Starsky saw, as Hutch continued on. Several steps, but then the long stride faltered, hesitated finally, as if the intangible ties that bound them together were being stretched by the physical distance he was creating between them. Hutch half-turned, glanced back over his shoulder, then completed the turn and came back to take up station at Starsky’s shoulder.

“Sorry,” he apologized softly, his eyes scanning the rows of parked cars, lingering, just as Starsky’s did, on the black and whites.

The panic that had been driving Starsky since Hutch had leaped to his feet in the interrogation room reluctantly retreated, driven into jabbering submission by this proof that there was still something alive and strong and cherished by Hutch between them.

Satisfied that no threat lurked in the unmanned cars, Starsky took the first step toward where the Torino was parked, Hutch beside him and matching his stride exactly, until they separated at the car—Starsky going to the left and Hutch to the right. One lesson he had learned was to never lock his car here, so, in a few seconds, they were both inside the illusion of safety the Torino represented.

Still, Starsky’s hand trembled as he pushed the key into the ignition and turned it to fire the engine, the sudden rumble almost shocking as it filled the silence of the car. Forcing his concentration onto his driving, Starsky pulled out of the station onto Main Street and took the first right.

“Starsk? Where are you going?” Hutch asked.

“Taking you home,” Starsky said, swallowing hard against the tightness of his throat. “Out to Venice,” he added as they pulled up to the red light and hit the signal indicator for another right. Four blocks up, and then the exit to the highway…

Starsky’s undivided attention was fractured when he felt the warmth of Hutch’s hand settle on his arm. Reluctantly, he turned his head, and found Hutch watching him. There was still the echo of horror in those clear blue eyes, but there was also the love that had become the mainstay of Starsky’s life.

“Venice hasn’t been my home for a long time now,” Hutch reminded him gently, his grip tightening, a small shake giving emphasis to the words that his soft tone withheld. “You know that as well as I do.”

“Do I?” Starsky asked, reluctant to relax into this slow climb back up for fear of what the next rush down this emotional rollercoaster might mean.

“Yes. It’s all a fucking mess in my head right now. But I remember,” Hutch repeated, some of the terror washed away from his voice in this third repetition. His hand slid up Starsky’s arm, coming to rest on the side of his neck, his thumb brushing a gentle caress into the Adam’s apple Starsky knew was bobbing erratically, giving away his suppressed emotions.

“I love you,” Hutch whispered in the same awed tone that he had first given those words to Starsky a year ago. “I don’t know yet how I ever could have forgotten that, forgotten us. Don’t know how to explain it to either one of us. But, oh God, Starsk, I do love you.”

And now Starsky remembered why he had always loved rollercoasters. The rush down a two-story drop might knock the wind out of you, but the view from the top could be worth the ride. He didn’t understand, but he believed, just as he had believed Hutch the first time he had said it. “Home?” he asked, tears clogging his throat even while he thought his heart might burst with joy.

“Oh, yeah, babe. Take us home,” Hutch agreed, but the quiet anticipation in his voice wasn’t quite enough to disguise the fear that still lived in his eyes.

Miles to go yet, before they found their way to the end of the road Hutch had placed them on, but Starsky no longer feared they wouldn’t reach the end of that road together.

***

With a soft sigh, Hutch put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. A torrent of memories, both treasured and loathed, swirled in his head, but still he noticed the little details when Starsky canceled the turn indicator and the slower acceleration when they began to move again. Reassured that Starsky was taking him home, Hutch forced himself to stare into the face of the demon that had tried to make him deny his love.

Hutch heard the soft click of the warehouse door as Starsky closed it behind him, surprised that he could hear the negligible sound above the pounding of his own pulse in his ears. The sensual teasing of only a moment ago was relegated to a corner of his mind by the adrenaline rush of fear. This was it, he thought, aware of the sudden clamminess of his palm wrapped around the butt of his Magnum. He forced the fear out of his mind and ran an assessing gaze over the situation.

“It’s a fucking maze,” he reported disgustedly when he felt Starsky move in close enough behind him that their shoulders brushed.

“And Jackman’s the sewer rat that knows all the ins and outs,” Starsky cautioned them both.

There was tension in Starsky’s voice. More than the normal, senses-alert wariness, reminding Hutch that, though they had done this hundreds of times in the past, it had been a year since he and Starsky had danced this synchronized ballet together.

“And we’re the tough alley cats that are gonna flush him,” Hutch cautioned in his turn. A year ago, it might have been cocky bravado, but not today. Now it was more of a prayer, a supplication, that they could see his prophecy through unscathed.

“I’ll take the right,” Starsky agreed.

Hutch felt the little bump to the back of his right shoulder that Starsky gave him with the front of his right, and tried to let the silent communication settle him. He couldn’t seem to find that balanced place inside himself when his courage and his caution planted him rock solid on both feet and ready for action. Couldn’t seem to banish the feeling that the fulcrum was swinging wildly out of control.

“Starsk!” he hissed before Starsky could ghost away, and saw his partner swivel back toward him, seeking clues to the sudden tight urgency, expecting, perhaps, that Hutch had already ferreted out their quarry’s lair. There was none of the uncertainty in Starsky’s expression that Hutch felt in the face of this first test of fire of their re-born partnership, only a determination to get the job done. Hutch forced himself to push aside his fear, cage if not conquer it, and draw down a professional mask.

“Be careful,” he demanded, knowing that, like it or not, he had to let Starsky do his job and get on with his own.

Silently, Starsky laid a hand on his shoulder and squeezed once, then turned away and slipped from Hutch’s sight.

Somehow, Starsky’s going made it easier. Now that the commitment was made, there was no way to recall him that wouldn’t alert Jackman and bring the confrontation that much sooner. Better on their terms than the rat’s.

Neat, tall rows of crates made uncluttered alleys for Hutch to traverse, silent, seeking ahead for the quarry, but his senses also attuned to the partner on his right. Aisle to aisle, Hutch prowled silently, gun held tight between both hands, muzzle toward the ceiling lost in the shadows above him. Until he reached the blank face of a solid intersecting wall of crates that stretched for yards on either side of him, further to the right than to the left. If he wanted to go any further forward, and all his instincts told him Jackman wasn’t far away now, then he would have to cut one way or the other. Starsky was to the right, and Hutch wanted to go that way, nearer his partner, closer to protect him, but the distance was at least double.

Hutch tipped his head back, eyeing the crates, visually judging their stability that he might scramble up and over. And expose himself. Reluctantly, Hutch dismissed both right and up and hurried to his left. It seemed to take forever to circle the obstruction and double back, while a clock ticked in his brain, counting the minutes since he and Starsky had separated. Starsky, he guessed, as the mental total rose, would be growing impatient with the cat and mouse game, and Hutch feared he wouldn’t be in position to cover his partner when Starsky made his move.

Unconsciously, he increased his pace, lengthening his stride dangerously in the unknown territory, driven by the certainty that time was running out. That his terrier of a partner was about to flush the rat and Hutch wouldn’t be there to protect him.

Moving too fast, Hutch reached the end of the aisle before he expected, an open no-man ‘s land of concrete floor stretching between him and the glass-fronted office where Jackman, he feared, had gone to ground. He put on the brakes, threw out his left hand to catch at the nearest crate, slowing his headlong rush into that open killing field, but skewing his balance. He hardly felt the solid smack of wood against the side of his head as he stumbled and caught himself barely within cover.

Hutch had only a second to blink the pain stars from his vision and realize that the spinning arc, catching the light as it tumbled toward the office glass, wasn’t one of those stars. It was a projectile, launched by his partner, whose shadowy form Hutch glimpsed crouched on the opposite side of no-man’s land.

“Goddamn you, Starsky,” Hutch cursed, just before all hell broke loose. The chatter of an automatic preceded the crash and tinkle of shattering glass by so narrow a margin that there seemed to be no pause at all. The shadow that was Starsky was gathering itself, ready to run straight into the teeth of that fire.

“No!” Hutch bellowed, and added the distinctive boom of his personal cannon to the confusion. The recoil juddered through hands and arms and shoulders and into his soul as Hutch pulled the trigger over and over, running clear of cover as he saw Starsky charge, praying he could draw the bullets spitting through the air to his own body.

Not again. Please not again. The mantra chanted through his brain in a hopeless prayer for salvation even as he saw Starsky leap for the lesser cover of the half-stack of crates directly in front of the gaping office window, heard the high sharp cry of pain torn from Starsky as he disappeared, convincing Hutch that his prayers had gone unheard. Again. Again. He had failed again.

“Noooo!” Hutch heard the despair in his own soft denial as the memory receded. For a moment, he wished he could expel it as completely as he had yesterday, snatch back the ignorance that he now saw as a blessing. Drive the memory of watching Starsky go down, the certainty that this time there would be no miracle, no love, no life together, back into the recesses of his brain where it had hidden, just as unremembered horrors had hidden from him except in his dreams.

“You okay, Hutch?” Starsky’s voice drew Hutch back from that black pit of nightmare into the here and now. “Almost home.”

Home. The small apartment, barely big enough for one, that had housed them both quite comfortably the past year. Hutch hadn’t even missed the more open concept of his own place in Venice, more than content to be crowded together with his new lover and old friend. Perhaps it had been that closeness, always having Starsky somewhere easily within sight or sound or touch, that had allowed him to hide the truth even from himself. Or, at least, from his conscious mind. His subconscious hadn’t been so easily fooled, sending him dreams he now remembered in all their lurid details. A terrifying dreamscape of new horrors and recalled images worse even than the reality had been.

Hutch had, in the course of his adult life, pursued the study of many things. Some fleetingly and some in more depth, while smugly congratulating himself for broadening his horizons with each new interest. One of those brief interests had been psychology, and he had delved deeply enough into the subject to recall that what the human mind could not deal with, it often chose to forget, or at least tuck away behind barriers that could be difficult to breach. It embarrassed him to realize he could have hidden from himself. But he had also hidden from a trained and experienced expert, who had been unable to penetrate the defenses his mind had raised. What hope, then, did he have? Nevertheless, self-forgiveness came hard, as it always had.

“Hutch? You okay?” Starsky repeated, the concern in his voice pulling at Hutch, easing him a little further away from his personal nightmares.

Silently, Hutch pushed his hand along the seat until he found Starsky’s thigh, slid up the muscular slope and just let it rest there. In a few minutes, inside the privacy of the home they had made of Starsky’s apartment, he would need a multitude of words. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, to try to explain to himself and Starsky how he could, even without intent, seek to deny all they had become to each other. He could reinforce those inadequate words with actions, touches, and tone, that, hopefully, would secure belief and acceptance from both of them. For now, however, he needed the silence and the physical expression that had so often served them in the past. With relief, he felt Starsky’s hand cover his and allowed himself to once again revel in his lover’s touch.

They stayed that way the last few blocks, and even for a minute or two afterward, sitting at the curb, the engine idling. Hutch let it go on, let the not-quite-patient expectancy seep into him from Starsky until he felt the restless shift of the muscles beneath his hand. Smiling at the predictability of it, he turned his hand then, squeezed Starsky’s once, and then withdrew. He opened his eyes and looked at the building, the long staircase, and that stupid tree in the landing.

“Home,” he murmured, listening as Starsky put the car in park and the engine’s rumble died away. In the oddest way, he felt as if he had never been here before, or at least not in a long time. Perhaps because a part of him never had moved on to the life and love he and Starsky had created here, but had remained uncomfortably hunched before a viewing window in ICU, waiting for his reason for living, instead of simply existing, to die.

He turned his head to look at Starsky, seeing that, though he had managed to calm the worst of his lover’s fears, wariness remained in the familiar, beloved face. His grace period was over, time for both of them to face what Hutch had run from too long. Abruptly, Hutch straightened and opened the door.

They remained silent as they climbed the stairs, but Hutch noticed that, once the door was unlocked, Starsky stood back to let Hutch precede him and that he lingered near the door. Hurt and wary, the longing to simply forgive and forget was in Starsky’s face, but the fear of new pain, the expectation of a crippling blow, obviously still lingered.

The thousand words he had evaded in the car were crowding in on Hutch’s mind as he turned to face his wary lover, robbing him of even one coherent sentence. Actions would have to speak for him, Hutch decided as he closed in on Starsky, heartened when Starsky didn’t retreat but stood his ground and allowed his face to be taken between hands that shook ever so slightly. Hutch lowered his head and laid a kiss on taut lips into which he poured all his love and sorrow for the pain he had caused them both with his blindness. And he didn’t let up until he felt Starsky’s lips soften beneath his, felt the hands that hung uncommitted at Starsky’s sides, find a grip in his hair.

Only then did Hutch lift his head, open his eyes, and try to read what lay beneath Starsky’s acquiescence. Caution, pain, fear. Flitting in eyes, teasing around lips and brows. Hutch closed his eyes against the uncertainty he had caused, felt Starsky’s curled fist press gently against his lips and forced himself to look again.

“I ought to pop you one, you son of a bitch,” Starsky said, but softly, no true threat in the words, but a promise that retribution still might slip past the love and relief in Starsky’s eyes if Hutch couldn’t make him understand. “You forgot us, Hutch.”

Still bereft of words, Hutch kissed him again, wishing that the telepathy so many accused them of possessing was truly a gift they shared. That he could offer the horrors painted in his mind in the terrifying form he lived them, without the necessity of words that would never be adequate to convey the depths of his terror. Again, Starsky responded, his mouth suddenly opening, becoming as fierce as the fingers that tangled in Hutch’s hair.

By the time their lips parted a second time, Hutch found he had a few words, enough at least to give Starsky his deepest truth and his greatest fear. “I love you, Starsk. And I can’t watch you die again,” he whispered and felt the shock of it jolt through the man in his arms.

“Die?” Starsky echoed, a world of uncertainty in his voice and his eyes.

“In the warehouse. When I saw you go down, I thought…” Hutch had to stop then, gain control of the memory and force it to be no more than a memory. It couldn’t hurt him now, but it, and the truer memory that had preceded it, were going to haunt him forever. Along with all the new ones they would make. Only Hutch knew now that he couldn’t live with that ever again. “I thought Jackman had shot you. I thought you were dead. That’s what the dreams have been all these months.”

Perhaps they really did possess some sort of ability to hear the unspoken because there was understanding in Starsky’s face now. No, not simple understanding, but sympathy, reminding Hutch that Starsky had come almost as close to the chasm of loss. Hutch, however, had slid into that abyss when Starsky’s heart had stopped beating, and he still wasn’t sure how he had clawed his way out again.

“Why didn’t you say, for Christ’s sake, Hutch?” Starsky demanded. It was said gently, but it was still a demand.

Carefully, Hutch let his fingers trace so familiar features, the joy of it filling up the spaces that only a few hours ago had quaked in fear of this very same intimacy. “I swear I didn’t know. I’ll do whatever it takes to prove that to you. Call Richards or the shrink Walker wanted to send me to. Let him hypnotize me. Sodium pentothal—”

“Goddamnit, Hutch, cut it out,” Starsky protested the litany and tried to pull away.

Hutch held him fast for one minute longer. “I mean it, Starsk. Whatever it takes to make you believe me.”

Starsky sighed and shook his head. “I believe you, Hutch. I don’t understand it, but I believe you. Now leggo, ya big lug. Let’s at least be comfortable while we figure out what the hell is going on in that blond head of yours.”

Reluctantly, Hutch did as requested. He no longer feared that Starsky might bolt or just disappear into thin air as so often happened in the dreams he could never recall upon wakening, he simply did not want to let go. Yesterday, the thought of holding Starsky like this terrified him; now the warm body within his arms felt like the only safe haven in the world. His hands lingered a moment longer, then slipped away.

When they were seated on the couch, jackets discarded and only a little space between them, it was once again Starsky who prodded them along.

“Okay. I think I get it,” he said uncertainly, working through it aloud, step by step, as they so often did on the job. “In the warehouse, you thought Jackman shot me. Now that I think about it, you were acting funny when you came flying out of cover. You looked like the Green Avenger or something, babe.” Starsky paused, his expression becoming thoughtful. “In fact, you were looking a little green. That’s why I was glad you didn’t raise hell about running into County. Thought you might’ve had a concussion or something.”

“Starsk, I still don’t remember all that much about right after,” Hutch admitted, some of the memories still feeling jumbled like a pack of cards that had been scrabbled together back to front and then indiscriminately shuffled. “I remember you cursing about your jeans, and watching you cuff Jackman.” He paused, rifling back through what he did recall of the hours immediately following the firefight. There wasn’t much, just disjointed moments and phrases until he and Starsky had arrived home. He remembered their lovemaking now. The feeling of desperation that had consumed him, once they were alone, to claim his love and somehow keep him safe from harm.

“I remember making love,” he admitted. His eyes met Starsky’s, and he was grateful to feel the remembered joy fill him now. The fear that had plagued him at the thought of such unremembered intimacy only hours ago was now the false intruder that had no right to a place in their lives.

“Back at the station, you said something about Simon Marcus,” Starsky reminded him. “That was a long time ago. You trying to tell me that nutcase had something to do with you not remembering?” he asked suspiciously.

Hutch shook his head before he leaned it against the back of the couch. He stared at the ceiling, then closed his eyes when remembered dream images began dancing in grotesque contortions across the unmarred screen of white.

“Remember how Marcus claimed that whatever he dreamed came true?” he said, his gut clenching as the desperation of twenty-four frantic hours, years in the past, revisited as if it were yesterday. “In the warehouse, I saw my dreams come true. Dreams I couldn’t remember then, but I remember them now.”

“The Gunther hit?” Starsky asked.

Hutch shuddered, welcoming the fingers that Starsky managed to tuck into the small space between his neck and the material of the couch. He hung onto the reality of that strong, vital, alive grip as he forced himself to look at the images that had haunted so many of the nights he had spent in this man’s bed.

“That and more,” he confessed. “I couldn’t protect you then, and every dream was the same. Sometimes they were things that actually happened. I watched you bleed to death in that Italian restaurant. Arrived too late to stop Marcus’ crazy followers from hacking you into bloody pieces. Couldn’t choke the truth out of Jennings no matter what…”

“Shhh, sweetheart,” Starsky brought an end to the horrified recital with silencing fingers pressed to Hutch’s lips. “I’m here. You saved me. Every time, you saved me.”

Hutch rocked his head against the back of the couch, pressing hard into the cushioning, compressing it until it seemed the wooden support would flatten his skull. “But not that day,” he insisted when Starsky’s silencing fingers slipped away with the movement of his head. “Or in any of the dreams.” He was possessed now, with the horror that had gripped him so many nights, even though he had never known the cause. He had found comfort and peace in Starsky’s arms each time, but it had all been an illusion, a self-deception made possible by the guilt-ridden workings of his own mind and the growing strength of the man who held him.

“The dreams started up again when I decided to try for re-qualification,” Starsky said in a tone that Hutch, a master of self-inflicted guilt, recognized immediately.

“Don’t,” Hutch warned, opening his eyes and seeing the sorrow in Starsky’s. “You couldn’t fix what you didn’t know was broken.”

“But—”

“And I couldn’t take away what you wanted so badly,” Hutch objected, working it all through even as he gave it to Starsky. “What you worked so hard to get back. The life we’d shared. The job that meant so much to you.”

“Damn,” Starsky swore, his head shaking slowly in disbelief.

“I’m so sorry, Starsk, but I can’t live with it. I know that now,” Hutch admitted, shamed by his failure, but now no longer able to hide from it. “I knew I was scared of losing you. I never was too fond of the idea,” he said with a wry smile that almost hurt his lips as much as the memories hurt his heart. “But now… now, when I love you so fucking much…”

“So now what?” Starsky asked bluntly.

Hutch opened his mouth and then closed it when he realized he didn’t have any answers to offer.

“No more us?” Starsky pursued relentlessly, although Hutch could see what it cost him. He had seen Starsky take a punch in the gut and show less pain on his face.

“God, no,” Hutch breathed. It was both a promise and a plea. “There has to be a way. Maybe Richards can—”

“No more…” Starsky interrupted and then paused. Hutch watched as the question was considered from all angles until, when it was finally spoken, he knew Starsky was still struggling for acceptance. “No more cops?”

All Hutch could give him was the truth, a truth he had been hiding from even himself for too long. He reached out and wrapped his hand around Starsky’s. “I know now I can’t protect you, and I love you too much to risk you every fucking day of the week.”

Starsky turned his hand, completed the embrace of fingers that held on with strength desperate enough to fracture delicate bones. “So, no more cops?” he repeated, his eyes meeting Hutch’s and holding on just as hard as their hands.

It took a moment, but Hutch finally realized that the repetition was deliberate. That, this time, Starsky needed a clear and definitive answer. The answer Hutch hadn’t been able to give him with any true honesty when Starsky had first mentioned re-qualifying. The answer, the decision, Hutch still didn’t think he had the right to make.

“You worked so hard,” he mourned. “Wanted it so bad. How the hell can I ask you…?” He couldn’t say it, couldn’t bring it to his lips because, one way or another, however Starsky responded, it was going to change their lives forever.

Gently, Starsky freed his hand from Hutch’s, and brought it up to settle on his face in what Hutch now remembered was one of his favorite gestures of affection. Small wonder his skin cells themselves had retained the feel of it. Those cells gave up the details to him now, sent sensory recall to blend and enhance the meagre, pitiful thing memory was without them, to burn sharp and clear and so very dear through Hutch’s soul.

“Ask me to give up the job, Hutch?” Starsky completed the question for him. “The lousy coffee and the missed meals. Getting shot at and nearly pissing my pants because one of those fucking bullets might take away the only reason I ever got out of that hospital bed in the first place?” he asked, revealing doubts that Hutch had never dreamed existed, or if he had, those dreams had gone as unremembered in the light of day as the nightmares that had haunted him.

Hutch hesitated a moment longer while understanding of the offer possessed him. “Are you sure, Starsk?” he asked, wanting to snatch the words back as soon as they were spoken, grab Starsky’s agreement and rush to act upon it before Starsky could realize all he would be giving up and the reprieve be withdrawn.

“I love being your partner, Hutch,” Starsky reassured him. “And it was enough, always was, to make up for the shit. But I found out the past couple of days it isn’t enough anymore. I need to be your lover.” A small shrug and a rueful twist of his lips acknowledged how willfully he too could hide from himself. “Maybe you aren’t the only one who’s been wearing a blindfold.”

“You’ll quit?” Hutch asked, awed by it and still afraid he asked too much. “And never regret it?”

Starsky shrugged, ran his hand to the back of Hutch’s hair and tugged him forward until their lips almost met. “Never’s a long time, babe. Let you know if we ever get to it. Deal?”

Hutch gave his promise in his kiss and gloried in the way Starsky’s lips returned it to him. Vows and commitments reaffirmed that had already been made on many levels, no less real and vital to them because they could not admit them to the world.

The phone was on its third ring before Starsky let him go, and even then, it was all Hutch could do to care if the thing rang until doomsday.

“You know who that is,” Starsky said, voice husky, as uncaring of the caller’s identity as Hutch knew himself to be.

“Uh, huh,” Hutch agreed, and let the next strident summons draw him away. “Dobey. Wondering where we are and what the hell is going on.” Very deliberately, he ran his fingertip around the just beginning to swell outline of Starsky’s lips, watching the resulting shudder and wanting to taste it. “What do we tell him?” he asked, almost certain of the answer, but needing to hear the words, see the certainty in his lover’s face.

“Tell him we’ll be in in an hour,” Starsky commanded. “With our badges and our guns, if that’s what you want, if he doesn’t want to come up with some way to keep us that keeps us safe.” He held up a hand to delay Hutch’s reach for the phone. “But you know that won’t be enough, don’t you?”

Just as the ringing hadn’t been able to break his focus on Starsky’s kiss, the cessation of it failed to make an impression on the sudden fear that gripped Hutch. He settled back on the cushion and waited, unable to ask what Starsky meant for fear it meant an end to them, the spoken promises, even the kisses and the reality of Starsky in his arms, unable to completely exile his fear.

“Whatever we do about the job, Hutch, isn’t going to fix what took you away from me these past couple of days,” Starsky insisted with understanding of Hutch’s nature grown over a decade together. “You can’t live every day in fear. You can’t protect me. I could walk out that door right now and get hit by a bus. Getting off the streets isn’t going to cure what ails you. You’re gonna need help. The same kind of help Richards gave me.”

Hutch sighed softly. “Don’t supposed you’d settle for a promise to take up meditation again?” he asked, just to watch the stubbornness spread over Starsky’s face, then disappear as he realized Hutch wasn’t serious. “Okay,” he conceded. “If it means I get to keep you until that mythical ever you were talking about a minute ago, I can learn to spill my guts.”

This time, when the phone rang, it startled neither of them. It was still Dobey, still wanting to know what was going on. But he wasn’t going to like the answer.

Eyes locked with Starsky, Hutch picked up the receiver.

The End