Chapter 19

When we got home, it was the small hours of the morning. We walked through the house in the dark. Our steps whispered on the heirloom rugs. I paused at the top of the landing—to say good night, I guess. (Okay, I was hoping for a goodnight kiss at the minimum .) Bobby surprised me by putting a hand at the small of my back and guiding me into my room. He shut the door behind him, and then his hand found the small of my back again, and he walked me to the bed.

I opened my mouth.

“No monkey business,” he said before I had a chance to ask what was happening. His voice almost sounded back to normal, and there was even a hint of playfulness. Then he hesitated and said, “I want to be near you tonight. Please?”

Well, how was I supposed to say no to that?

By the light of a single lamp, we changed into sleep shorts and tees. It was different, now, getting to appreciate those glimpses of Bobby without a shirt—the defined chest, the strong arms, the wide shoulders. And, of course, it’s hard not to appreciate a gentleman who knows how to fill out a white tee and a pair of mesh shorts.

“Unh-uh,” he said when he caught me looking. He nudged me toward the canopy bed. “I told you: no funny stuff.”

“We’re adults.”

He made a mmm noise that suggested this was up for debate.

“Nobody would know,” I tried.

Bobby gave me a look that reminded me—pointedly—of the Deputy Bobby I had first met.

“It gets pretty hot in here sometimes,” I said. “You should probably take that shirt off.”

He put his hand over my mouth, which was good because I couldn’t stop laughing. When I did, though, he peeled his fingers away, kissed me, and looked at me for what felt like a long time, his expression earnest and searching and serious, before he finally said, “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” I whispered.

It had been a long time since someone had touched me. And—not trying to take a dig at the previous men in my life—it was so different with Bobby. There were so many other emotions, deeper emotions, layered into the experience. Which is one way of explaining that even though I was exhausted, I was sure I’d never sleep. My, er, situation didn’t improve when Bobby rolled onto his side, pulled me against him, and proved, immediately and without any trace of doubt, that he was the single best big spoon in the history of the world. His breath felt good on my neck. I liked the faint rasp of a day’s worth of stubble when he repositioned his head. His arm was solid, draped over me. My tee had ridden up, and his thumb scratched pleasantly at my bare stomach.

Look, I was never going to get to sleep.

“It’s not that I don’t want to,” Bobby said.

“Oh good,” I said, “because I definitely want to.” His slight pause made me realize I’d misread the meaning of his sentence. “Uh, I mean, go on.”

“I want to…talk.” He took a deep breath. “To tell you.” His silence lasted longer this time, broken by those deep breaths that made me think of the movement of the sea. “God, why is this so hard?”

I rubbed his arm. “There’s been a lot going on the last few days. Talking about that kind of stuff is already scary and hard because we’re making ourselves vulnerable.”

“It didn’t seem hard for you.”

“I was in a weird headspace. And things have been extra stressful the last few days—Arlen did try to kill me twice, so they’ve definitely been stressful for me.”

“When I saw the Jeep at the bottom of that hill, I thought—” His voice frayed until he couldn’t go on. When he spoke again, the words were wire thin. “I wanted to tell you. Right then. I thought about what could have happened to you, and I knew I needed to tell you. And as soon as I opened my mouth—”

A second passed. And then another. I said, “Panic attack?”

He nodded into my shoulder.

I made shushing sounds and rubbed his arm some more.

“And then tonight, you were being so brave.” His voice still had that brittle tension. “I wanted to tell you how proud I was of you, because I knew how hard that was for you. I wanted to tell you—” But he stopped again. He was vibrating against me, in the throes of those warring emotions.

I shushed him again and said, “I know, Bobby. You don’t have to tell me. You definitely better not tell me tonight, or that prohibition on monkey business is going right out the window.”

His laugh was wet and unsteady.

I brought his hand to my mouth and kissed his knuckles. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”

He didn’t say anything to that, but he kissed the back of my neck, and let me tell you , after that, it was official. I wasn’t going to get any sleep. Probably ever. I was going to die like this.

(The word unsatisfied comes to mind.)

And then, of course, I pretty much immediately passed out.

When I woke up, Bobby was gone, which made me suspect he might be part ninja. The quality of the light filtering in around the curtains made me think it was still early, and the sound of the waves was steady. I lay there awhile. I mean, the house wasn’t on fire, and there was no reason to jump out of bed. Especially if the alternative was to stay snuggled up in bed, remembering how a certain deputy-slash-ninja felt when he was pressed up against you. (Did you know if a guy has muscles, like, real muscles, he is surprisingly not squishy. I mean, not that I mind.)

I was still in that state where my brain hadn’t fully woken up yet, and my thoughts had a lucidity that was relaxed and somehow not quite logical, when Hugo popped into my head. (Let me tell you: if your ex flashing through your brain doesn’t put any and all romantical thoughts on ice, nothing will.) Even worse was when I remembered I was supposed to write with him today. I was supposed to have finished my scene of The Next Night . That ugly, cowardly little episode when Dexter Drake hid in the bushes and waited for the police to finish arresting his lover. As he had before, of course, so many times. And as he would again. Because for Dexter Drake, the next night would be the same as all the ones that had come before: dark, long, and lonely.

(That was pretty good, and I was definitely going to tell Hugo.)

But I also needed to tell him that I didn’t like the story we were writing. Maybe it was too late to change it. Maybe not. But I needed to tell him because, once again, I hadn’t been honest with him, and I was starting to suspect that there was more of Dexter Drake in me (or was it the other way around?) than I wanted to admit.

The problem, of course, was that Hugo knew what he was doing. Hugo had an artistic vision. Hugo was a published author. A successful author. And he was doing me a favor—a huge one, actually—by bringing me on as his co-author. What was I going to suggest instead of the story we’d been working on? One of the million different versions of Will Gower? Will Gower the lion tamer? (He solved mysteries with a traveling circus in the 1930s.) Will Gower the professional water slide tester? (Hear me out: lots of people die at water parks.) Will Gower the spy on the run? (He definitely didn’t have a squishy body.)

And it wasn’t only the fact that I couldn’t decide on a version of Will Gower—although, in my defense, I’d been making progress, and I had an actual manuscript with an actual story. Kind of. The bigger issue was that the more I experienced the world, the more I found myself (against my better judgment, trust me) caught up in real-life mysteries and crimes and murders, the more I realized that the mysteries I’d been writing were too…small. Maybe that wasn’t exactly the word (I mean, it’s not like words were my job or anything), but it came close. The mysteries I’d been writing seemed so limited in scope, in complexity, in humanity. No matter how convoluted the puzzle, no matter how richly drawn the characters, in the end, the story only lived for ninety thousand words or so. In real life, tragedy didn’t end. It just kept unspooling across lives. And generations.

And what about stories like Richard’s and Jane’s and Neil’s and, yes, Vivienne’s? And even Arlen’s and Candy’s? The promise of a crime novel was that the truth would be uncovered and justice would be served. But was that justice, what I’d done for Richard? Vivienne would know the truth, and that was something. But that same truth had broken an old man’s heart, shattered his vision of himself and his son. Maybe Arlen got what he deserved, but if that was justice, it tasted like ashes. I thought of the strange conversation I’d had with Jane when I’d first visited her. How brash I’d been, insisting that the justice I offered was worth any price, and the way her silence had swallowed my words. I should have suspected, then. But, of course, I hadn’t.

The thought, though, made something stir at the back of my head. A hint of an idea. I tried to chase it down. Maybe I’d been spending too much time with Bobby, because an earnest, serious voice inside my head told me that I was thinking about it all wrong. Yes, one aspect of justice was that wrongdoers were punished. And that was an important part of it. But justice was more than that. Had to be more than that. Because punishment didn’t undo the wrong that was done. Punishment couldn’t bring back a dead son, a dead lover, a dead brother. Sometimes, there was no one to punish. Because, in other words, in the end, punishment didn’t change anything.

But there was another aspect to justice. More to it, I guess, although maybe even that wasn’t the right way to say it. Justice wasn’t only about punishing people who broke the law. Justice was…a promise. Maybe the fundamental promise, the one we made each other when humans first agreed to share their fire as a shield against the night. The promise to care for each other. To protect each other. The promise that if evil came for you, you would not be alone.

And in that half-waking lucidity, my brain drew a line from justice to stories. Because wasn’t that the fundamental promise of a story, as well? For the storyteller, it was the promise that the storyteller wasn’t speaking into the void—that there were other people out there, people with the same dreams and hopes and hurts, and they would hear and understand? And that promise worked the other way as well. Because the real magic of a story—as anyone who loves books can tell you—happened when you read something on the page that you thought only you had ever known and felt, and in that instant, you were connected to someone who might have lived thousands of miles away, who might have died hundreds of years ago, but who was, nevertheless, like you. That was the promise of a story. The promise of knowing and being known, mind to mind, heart to heart.

The story came to me the way my best ideas always had: a series of lightning strikes, and then everything cohering into something that felt bigger than me, electric, alive.

I bolted out of my room, down the stairs, and as I spun toward the den, I almost crashed into Indira and Fox.

“Dashiell—” Indira said, but then she caught a look at me, and her tone hardened into something serious. “What happened?” And then, in an even unhappier tone, she demanded, “You didn’t cock it up, did you?”

“I just had—” I stopped. “What is happening with everyone’s language?”

Fox was studying me with an interest bordering on the scientific. “Did you honestly use an extremely ambiguous quote from a mystery novel to tell Bobby you loved him?”

“How could you possibly know—I don’t have to answer that.” I drew myself up with as much dignity as I could muster, considering (I realized at that moment) I was wearing nothing more than a white tank and black trunks with a rainbow-colored Xbox controller in, um, a certain spot. “I don’t have time for this. I just invented cozy noir.”

“What is that?” Indira asked.

“Well, I don’t know entirely. I invented it, like, two minutes ago.” The idea had started to lose some of its charge, although I thought some of that might have been because I was standing around in my skivvies. “Also, I have no idea if it’s even possible.”

“Anything’s possible if you’re willing to make enough mistakes along the way,” Fox said, and to my surprise, they turned me toward the den and gave me a shove. “So if anyone can do it, it’s you.”

“Uh, thank you?”

But they just kept pushing me into the den, and they shut the door behind me.

Since I was now a prisoner in my own house, I decided I’d better get to work. I found a hoodie that I’d forgotten in the den at some point and zipped it up. I got settled in my favorite chair with my favorite blanket. I grabbed my laptop. When I touched the track pad, though, I hesitated.

I mean, would it be the worst thing in the world if I took a quick—like, super quick—peek at Crime Cats? Ideas needed time to…percolate. And I definitely didn’t want to rush into anything—

My phone buzzed with a text message from Hugo. You up?

All of a sudden, I knew how today was going to go. I was going to make excuses. I was going to find a way to weasel out of all the decisions I’d made in that warm, sleepy safety of my bed. I wouldn’t tell Hugo about the book. The idea of Will Gower in some sort of cozy noir story would fade farther and farther away. I might not have been in exactly this position before, but I knew myself, and I could feel it happening.

A rap at the door made me burst out, “Oh thank God,” in a way that sounded marginally unhinged.

Bobby stuck his head in, his expression quizzical, before coming the rest of the way into the den. “I don’t want to interrupt—”

“No, God, you’re not interrupting.” I was scrambling to my feet before I remembered my current state of dress, and I barely caught the blanket before it fell. But then, Bobby had slept next to me in these clothes, so it wasn’t exactly new to him. He, of course, looked perfect: a crewneck pullover, jeans, and an absolutely hideous pair of retro Air Jordans that he had paid an ungodly sum for and, I kid you not, treasured. My indecision about the blanket warped into another, even more intense uncertainty. Was I supposed to kiss him? Or hug him? Or shake his hand like I was president of the Chamber of Commerce? A nervous giggle tried to escape me.

“What’s happening right now?” Bobby asked, appraising me.

The giggle tried to slip out. I didn’t trust myself to speak, so I shook my head.

“Are you upset?” Bobby asked. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No. No, don’t leave. I just didn’t—am I supposed to kiss you?”

A distant part of me recognized that Bobby had not, perhaps, realized what he was getting himself into, and he was clearly, at this point, in way over his head.

“Do you want to kiss me?” he finally asked.

“Pretty much always. But, um, not if you don’t want me to. I know yesterday was—”

“Yes.”

I adjusted the blanket. “Do you want to think about it?”

“No. The answer is yes, you’re supposed to kiss me.”

“But, like, if—”

“No ifs.”

“There are always ifs.”

He flexed his hands at his side, and in the tone of a man who knows he’s sinking fast, he said, “Dash.”

“What if you’re a mummy and your face is covered in bandages? What if your lips get burned off in a horrible, um, molten-lava-cake-related disaster? What if we’re in public ?”

The wind stirred the pine and spruce outside, and even through the window, I could hear the creak of their branches.

“Okay,” Bobby said, with that same tone.

And he came across the room and kissed me.

(In case you’re wondering, somehow in the last few hours, he’d gotten even better.)

“Any more questions?” he asked when he finally let me breathe.

“I know this is hypothetical,” I managed breathily, “but what if—”

He kissed me again. One arm was tight around my waist. The other hand was steady on my back. And I wondered if he could feel my heartbeat.

When he stepped back, he shot me an interrogatory look.

By that point, though, I didn’t have any questions. I didn’t have any brains, as a matter of fact.

Bobby settled me in my favorite chair again. He pulled the hassock over and sat. He was so close that our knees touched, and they bumped again when he raised himself slightly to retrieve something from his back pocket. A packet of folded paper. I recognized his script.

“Oh no,” I said (because it turns out when kisses turn to terror, you can’t help yourself). “That can’t be good.”

“Dash,” Bobby said, and his voice was strained with emotion I couldn’t pin down. “Please.”

That didn’t do much for my panic, but somehow I managed to nod.

Bobby unfolded the paper and smoothed the sheets against his thigh. His knee began to bounce, and the papers whispered against each other. A furrow creased Bobby’s forehead, and his jaw tightened, and a flush climbed his throat and into his cheeks. Deep inside me, a traitorous voice told me this was what he had looked like before he had broken the bad news to West.

Voice rough, he said, “I want to start by telling you that I broke up with Kiefer this morning.”

He stopped, clearly waiting for a reaction.

“Um,” I said. And then, “Okay, that’s good. I mean, is it good? I mean, what about—” Saying the fact that you told me you’re in love with him didn’t seem like the right move, but what came out instead was, somehow, even worse: “—the security deposit on the apartment?”

Although not the eye-rolling type, Bobby looked sorely tempted. His voice, though, was still unsteady when he spoke again. “I also want to apologize. I should have done this a long time ago.” He stopped. The pages rustled, and his heel beat a tattoo against the floor. “I told you once how hard it is for me to talk about the things that matter most to me. When I told you that, I couldn’t believe how…how easy it was. I just said the words, and I knew you’d understand. And when that happened, I thought it was because you were the exception. I thought you were special. And you are special, Dash. I’ve never met anyone like you. You care so much about other people. You’re gentle and kind, even though you’re so hard on yourself. You make the world a better place by being in it, and the worst days of my life are when I don’t get to be around you, and see your smile, and hear your voice.

“But I also need to apologize, Dash, because you aren’t the exception. The truth is, it’s still hard for me to talk about—about how I feel. I want to. I know I need to. But it’s hard to explain how—”

He stopped there. His throat worked soundlessly on the words, and his eyes glistened as he blinked rapidly.

“Bobby, it’s okay,” I said.

Shaking his head, he cleared his throat. After another moment, he said, “How scary it is. And after I broke up with West, when I wanted to tell you how hard things had gotten, it was like everything had changed between us. I couldn’t tell you anything. And I thought maybe I’d been wrong.” He turned the page, and the papers rustled like dry leaves. “It took me a while to realize that I’d felt so safe with you at the beginning because, at the time, West had been there. Between us. And as long as West was there, I didn’t have to deal with how I felt about you, or the fact that I found myself spending time with you instead of my boyfriend, or that the more time I spent with you, the more I realized I wasn’t in love with West, and I was making a terrible mistake. So, I’m sorry that I let my fear keep me from talking to you.

“You were right about how hard I’ve tried to run away from my feelings. I’m sorry for that, too. I’m sorry that I used you as one of those ways. That wasn’t right. And it wasn’t fair to you. I knew you weren’t ready, and I still tried to—to control things. To make things be what I needed them to be so that I didn’t feel so insecure. The same way I did with West.” He had to stop again. His breath was harsh and quick. “The same way I was doing with Kiefer.”

“Bobby,” I said. “You didn’t do that with West. This isn’t the same.”

He pressed his fingertips to the page, but I could still see them trembling. His eyes met mine. “No,” he said quietly. “That’s true. This isn’t the same. Nothing is the same.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say. I couldn’t think of anything, as a matter of fact, except how brightly his eyes were shining.

“I need you to know I’m sorry,” Bobby said, his voice wobbly now, his face strained with the effort to check his emotions. “I need you to know that it’s terrifying for me to feel out of control, and nothing makes me feel more out of control than…than feeling this way. How much I feel for you, that scares me. And the thought that something bad could happen to you, that I could lose you, it terrifies me. When I saw the Jeep at the bottom of the hill.” He stopped. The pages shivered in his hands. “When I stepped into that house and saw that old man pointing a gun at you.” He had to stop again, blinking frantically. When he spoke again, his voice was so thick I could barely understand the words. “I can’t promise that I’m going to be a different person overnight, but I promise I’ll work on this, Dash. On talking. On communicating. On being vulnerable. On making sure you know that you’re the most important person in the world to me. I’ll do whatever you want, Dash, if you’ll please give me a chance.”

I was nodding before he’d even finished. And I was crying, although I didn’t know why. Wiping my cheeks, I said, “I’ll help you. We’ll help each other.”

He nodded. “I know.”

I thought I was done, but fresh tears spilled down my cheeks. I was smiling so hard my face hurt, and the most I could manage was a whisper: “You wrote it down.”

“Someone much smarter than me told me it might help,” Bobby said. “And he was right. But I didn’t write down all of it.”

He folded the sheets of paper again and returned them to his pocket. And then he got to his knees. His hands came to rest on my legs, and he looked up at me, and his hands were trembling, and I could hear his breath high in his chest, and a long way off, the ocean was a low, slow song.

“I love you,” he said, and his hands tightened around my legs like he was holding on. And then, more slowly, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” I said, but it came out small and tangled because of the knot in my throat. I started to stand, and I got tangled in the blanket, and then Bobby had to jump to his feet to keep me from falling on him.

And then we were standing again, his hands on my arms, his grip strong and steady.

“I love you,” he said again, and he kissed me.

The warmth of his lips. The taste of his mouth. His hand finding the back of my neck.

Sometime later, I was blinking at him through my glasses, trying to decide if I still had legs. And Bobby had that beautifully goofy smile stretched across his face. And then it changed to something else—an expression I hadn’t seen on his face before. His hand slid up my chest, and he caught the tab of the hoodie’s zipper, and the smile on his face was like a fire about to catch.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.

He was looking at me, and that look was new too.

“You’re the detective,” he said, and I heard the echo, when he had said those words before and meant something else entirely. The zipper stuttered down an inch. “Figure it out.”