Page 60 of Manner of Death

Also, not your boyfriend.

Not yet.

Sawyer sighed. He wanted the answer to Bashir’s question to be “nothing.” He wanted to be asleep, wanted to let the euphoria of an orgasm with the guy he had a huge crush on send him off to sleep before he had to reengage his brain. Naturally, given how his life had been going lately, that didn’t happen.

On the other hand, if Sawyer was going to be awake, he might as well be talking to Bashir. He’d been dreaming about having more time to spend in Bashir’s company, not even necessarily doing…well, this—each other—although that had featured rather heavily in his mind. But just being able to be with him was a gift, and he wasn’t going to reject it. Kurt would—

Sawyer swallowed hard. “Some about Kurt,” he said after a second. “Which, trust me, isn’t what I want to be thinking about while we’re in bed together, but I don’t think I can stop yet.”

“You don’t need to.”

“Mm. I’d like to, though.” He hitched his arm a little farther around Bashir’s waist. “How do you do it? With your work, I mean? How do you keep the things you see during the day from haunting you at night?”

Bashir shook his head. “Years of practice, and even then it doesn’t always work. But this wasn’t exactly a normal day for either of us.”

“No.” Not even close.

“What about you?” Bashir asked. Sawyer tilted his chin up to look at him. “When you were an actor, I mean,” he said. “How did you disengage from the act?”

Sawyer chuckled. “I never quite managed to,” he said ruefully. “I started acting when I was six, and all I heard from my parents—especially my father—over and over again was how important it was to be present. To listen to the director, listen to the other actors, mind my lines, get it right the first time. It became an obsession for me. I got to the point where I was afraid to break character for the entire time filming was going on.”

“Very method of you,” Bashir commented.

“Less ‘method’ and more ‘unhealthy mental fixation’ in a child,” Sawyer said. “I think that’s what broke me, in the end. My last movie was…really hard. I was seventeen, but I was playing a younger kid, and the whole film revolves around the kid’s slow death. It was thirteen weeks of filming, and by the end of it I had stopped eating, I was hardly sleeping…even the director told me I needed a break, but I couldn’t disengage. Not until the film wrapped. After that my dad finally got me checked out by a doctor, and I ended up being admitted to the hospital for malnutrition and anemia.”

If the way Bashir’s arms tightened around him was any indicator, he disapproved of his father’s methods. Yeah, me too. “Why didn’t your parents do something for you sooner?” he demanded. “Isn’t that—aren’t there laws against that kind of thing?”

“Parents have a lot of leeway when it comes to their minor children and acting,” Sawyer said. “And our family was already a little infamous because my sister had just been admitted to a hospital the previous year for an eating disorder. Plus the fact that my mother had been completely checked out for years at this point, and there was nobody to stop my dad from treating us like the tools he’d made us into.”

Sawyer felt Bashir’s chest rise and fall, his breath regulated despite the speed of his heartbeat. He’s angry for me. It was sweet, if unnecessary. “Why was your mother checked out?”

“This was her blackout-drunk period,” Sawyer said dryly. “Post-kidnapping. She didn’t recover enough to actually engage as a parent until both my sister and I were out of the house. Eventually she separated from my father over it, but by then…eh, it was too late to do any good.”

“I forgot about the kidnapping,” Bashir said.

“It made all the papers for a while.” Sawyer shrugged. “It all worked out in the end. I won an Oscar, quit acting, emancipated myself, and got access to most of my money thanks to having a damn good lawyer. By then my sister was married to another up-and-coming actor, with a baby on the way, so my father accepted that I was a lost cause and focused his publicity machine on Jessica instead. She was actually on a couple of different reality TV shows, and—”

“Wait, wait.” Bashir got up on one elbow and stared at Sawyer. “Back up. You actually won an Oscar?”

“Yep.” Twenty years ago now, but hey, it still counted. “Best supporting actor in a drama. I was the second-youngest person at the time ever to win.”

“Oh my God, you were in—”

“Yeah.” Sawyer cut him off before he could say it—not because he was afflicted by flashbacks anymore, but the title was just…so dumb. One of the most brilliant production teams in the business, and they’d almost shot the project in the foot with that ridiculous title.

“I remember when that came out in the theatres,” Bashir marveled, settling back down beside Sawyer. “I only went to see it so my friends and I could poke holes in the hospital scenes—we were med students at the time, we thought we knew everything—but most of the audience was crying by the end of it.”

“Including you?” Sawyer asked archly.

Bashir chuckled. “Maybe…just a single, manly tear or two.”

“Of course, of course.” They were silent for a bit, and Sawyer thought he might even be able to fall asleep, but then Bashir asked, “So how did you go on to become a cop?”

A logical follow-up. It was also a question that Sawyer had gotten used to ignoring, but for Bashir he’d make the effort. “I’m still not entirely sure how I came around to it. I spent a few years,” more like five, but who was counting, “not really doing much of anything at all at first. I had money, and I was just…tired coming out of acting. It really felt like a retirement, after more than a decade in the business, and I was tired by it. I bought a condo and lived alone and ignored the world for a while, and then eventually I decided I was done with that. So I went to college.”

“Someplace small where no one knew you?” Bashir asked, and Sawyer grinned.

“Or as close as I could get. Yes. I bounced from major to major for a while,” another five years, but whatever, he’d learned a lot, “and finally got a bachelor’s in Criminal Justice. My first serious relationship was with a cop, too, and I liked hearing about what she did. She was the liaison officer with the local school district, and she did a lot of early outreach with kids, and it was just really interesting to me. So I decided to go that route too.”