I want to take full ownership of this moment and acknowledge that I am not a particularly bright man, because it didn’t occur to me until exactly that moment what was happening.
Then I said, “Bobby, are you okay?”
He jerked out a nod.
“Are you sure? Because you don’t seem like you’re okay. And someone very wise and much, much older than me once told me it was okay not to be okay.”
“I, uh—” The way he stopped broke my heart, but it was worse when he tried to smile again. He sounded like he was setting up a joke when he said, “The guys took me in. I had to call West from the station.”
“Oh God—”
“It’s fine. They didn’t arrest me.” The pause that came after had a numb quality. “But West told me not to come home tonight.”
I waited, but no punchline came. Where the ambient light caught his eyes, his gaze was blank and unprocessing.
“Oh God,” I said. “Bobby, I’m so sorry.”
“He’s really mad.”
“It’s going to be okay. Come inside.”
He didn’t move, so I took his arm and brought him into the vestibule. I hadn’t bothered with the lights, so we stood together in the shadows. A part of me was aware that I was still holding his arm: solid, dense with muscle. A part of me was aware of the heat of him. And a part of me was aware that he was trembling.
Deputy Bobby put his free hand to his forehead and held it there like he had a headache. “He’s so mad.”
“I’m sorry, Bobby.”
He shook his head, barely more than an impression in the gloom.
“He’ll get over it,” I said. “It’ll all work out.”
“He’s right to be angry. He should be angry.” The only reason I knew he closed his eyes was because that hint of reflected light was extinguished. Despair tilted his voice as he said, “Oh my God.”
I should have known better. After that conversation with Indira, I definitely should have known better. But it didn’t matter; he was in pain, and he was my friend, and his heartbreak was so intense it felt radioactive. I slipped my arms around him and pulled him against me.
His body was stiff at first, his muscles tense, joints locked into stiff angles. I always forgot I was taller, and it was disorienting how he fit with me, his head resting on my shoulder, his face turned into my neck. His breath was hot on the sensitive skin there. With every breath, I could smell his hair.
The thing you don’t learn writing mystery novels? Romance. When Will Gower was a rough-and-ready private eye, he had sex—lots of sex. (Too much sex, if you asked Phil, my parents’ agent.) And when he was a jaded cop with a drinking problem, he had sex. And when he was an icily intellectual FBI profiler, he had sex (in one manuscript that will never see the light of day, with the serial killer he was trying to profile). Will Gower got his heart broken by the systemic cruelties of a corrupt world. Will Gower, the white knight who never knew when to give up, lost people he cared about. But he didn’t fall in love. And the part of my brain that never turned off, the part of my brain that turned everything into stories, the part of me that recorded details and saved them for the next time I needed them, thought: the way I’m holding him, his shirt is slightly rucked up, and I can feel a hint of bare skin low on his back; the way his hair tickles my nose and I want to sneeze; how he splays his fingers against my ribs, like he’s not sure if he’s pushing me away or grabbing on. My heart, I thought, like I’d come apart from my body. How fast my heart is beating. And I wanted to turn it into a story, to make it safe and manageable, sewn up from beginning to end. But I didn’t know how, and even if I had, I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to do it. To take this, all of it, and make it...less.
By degrees, his body softened until he felt real again. And my heart slowed down. A little. Like, there wasn’t an imminent risk of a cardiac event. He stirred. His fingers flexed against my side and drew back. I relaxed my arms, and he retreated a step. He tried to look at me, but his eyes were fixed on something behind me, and he rubbed his jaw.
“Let’s get you something to eat.”
He shook his head.
“Let’s sit down, then.”
He swallowed, and it looked painful. “I should go.”
“Bobby,” I said.
And now he did look at me. I didn’t know exactly what to call what I saw in his face. A plea, maybe. Asking me for—what?
I changed what I’d been about to say. “Where are you going to spend the night?”
“I don’t know. The Rock On.”
The Rock On Inn was adorable, but I said, “No way. Cheri-Ann will put it on Facebook two minutes after you check in.”
Deputy Bobby rubbed his eyes.
“You can stay here,” I said.
“No.”
“Yes, it’s perfect. There’s a million bedrooms, and they’re all haunted, plus secret passages for easy murdering, and all those taxidermy birds to stare at you while you try to sleep.”
He stopped rubbing and just pressed his fingers against his eyes. “Dash, I can’t—”
“You can. It’ll be fine. Do you—I mean, did you have, like, a bag or something?”
He nodded.
“I’ll grab it,” I said. “Be right back.”
“No, I can—”
I squeezed past him and jogged out into the night.
