Chapter 12

Walking down the stairs to my bedroom with Harlan at my back felt surreal, like the years between the last time we’d done this and right now had only been a dream. The otherworldliness of the moment was broken only by the mundaneness of the vacuum cleaner thumping against each stair as I dragged it down.

Harlan wanted me back. It was just like him to think he could stroll back into my life with an apology on his lips and I would welcome him with open arms.

Not that he’d actually apologized for anything. I wasn’t looking for that anyway.

As much as I’d been dreaming about this moment, my feelings were somewhere beyond mixed now that the moment was here. I’d imagined it going a hundred different ways. In these fantasies, I did everything from kicking him out of my office/room/life forever to ripping his clothes off before he had time to get a word out. Cursed necklaces and glitter bombs had featured in exactly zero of the scenarios.

When he’d confessed he was here to get me back during dinner, my heart had stopped and then started with such a jolt, I was sure everyone could hear it. (I owed Camelia a big one for asking what I’d been too cowardly to ask.) It had been hard to keep my feelings off my face. I’m not sure I succeeded, but at least no one had called me on it.

What was I looking for? I wish I knew.

(Lie. I knew. I just didn’t want to admit it to myself.)

My heart and my brain were sending me warning signals, telling me it all was going to end in tears. My body, however, was screaming at me to grab him with both hands and not let go. I was dying to see if he felt as good as he had all those years ago. I had a suspicion it would be even better now that we were all grown up.

As hot as the flame of young love could burn, a love between two people who had both survived the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune had a depth, a weight, that those early relationships couldn’t match. The years were written on both of our faces and bodies.

Life had, I hoped, made me a more interesting, thoughtful person. I wasn’t the same kid I had been back when we started at eighteen. Neither was Harlan.

I’d grown more cautious and more cynical. Harlan had gotten more reckless, more willing to damn the torpedoes.

He’d come to my home and faced my family, knowing they might hate him. He hadn’t had to agree to move in with me. Though I did actually feel better having him where I could see him, it wasn’t necessarily safer. It was clear, given the attack with the stupidest bomb in history, that whomever we were dealing with knew where we were.

My breath caught when I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and surveyed the damage. Thank the universe that the bomber had chosen to make some kind of statement rather than try to cause serious injury. It could have been so much worse.

Harlan stopped behind me and put a hand on my shoulder. “When I think of what could have happened, it makes me want to vomit. All those kids upstairs. I shouldn’t stay here. It’s not safe for your family.”

“No. It’s fine. For tonight anyway. This was just some kind of weird message. If they’d wanted to hurt us, that would have been a real bomb, instead of whatever bullshit that was.” I walked into the room, Harlan on my heels.

“What about tomorrow?” he asked.

“We’ll deal with tomorrow, tomorrow. Let’s just finish cleaning up and have that talk we’ve been putting off for the last two days.”

Harlan flinched. “Sure we just can’t get bombed again?”

That surprised a sharp laugh out of me. “I hear that. But I don’t think I can handle any more glitter. When we find whoever this is, I’m going to punch them in the face once, just for that.”

The street my parents’ house was built on was far from level. The right side of the house was a good four feet lower than the left. As a result, there was a flight of stairs to the main entrance above the garage and a street-level door led into my room on the lower level. There was only a small window in my room. The thrower had to have been close to the house to get the brick and then the box through the window. It was a bold move in broad daylight.

“I can vacuum,” Harlan offered. Luckily, the tempered glass had simply exploded into dull pebbles the way it was supposed to.

“It can wait. We can’t vacuum and talk at the same time. I don’t know about you, but I’d really like to be on the same page going forward about this. About us.”

“Okay. I do, too.” He stood awkwardly in the middle of the room. “Should we sit?”

What were our options? The bed was right out. There was a table against one wall that I used as a desk. The two chairs and coffee table under the front window had been directly in the trajectory of the flying glass. Going for a walk was out of the question. That deadly idiot could still be out there, waiting. Plus, we knew they didn’t have to be physically present to try to kill Harlan.

No, inside was safer.

“I could vacuum off the seats,” Harlan offered. “We could sit there?”

Before I could answer, there was an odd thwapping sound and a large toad hopped down the last two stairs into my room.

I heard my sister yell. “Winnifred Jeanine, get back here right now. Leave Uncle Dash alone.”

“But I want to show the nice man my new frogs!” Freddy was not even a little cowed by her mother’s ire.

“Now is not the time.”

“Are they fighting?’ one of my nephews asked. “I don’t remember that guy. Is he really Uncle D’s ex-boyfriend?”

My sister yelled down the stairs. “Sorry, Dash. I swear they won’t get away from me again.”

“This isn’t going to work,” Harlan muttered to himself. He looked around the room, his gaze stopping on the door between my room and the garage. “Does that go to the garage?” I nodded. “This may sound crazy, but do your parents still have that car?”

“That car” was my parents’ 1985 Oldsmobile Delta 88. Harlan and I used to sneak into the garage and sit in the giant back seat to talk and fool around. I’m sure my parents knew, but they had a Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. I’m also sure they used it for the same purpose. “Yeah, it’s still in there.”

He raised his eyebrows.

I nodded. “Let’s do it.”

He followed me into the garage. Out of habit, I didn’t turn the light on.

Big question, front or back seat? Front seats. The back seat had too many memories. Not that it mattered; the Olds’s front bench seat was almost as spacious as the back seat.

I opened the driver’s door and the dome light turned on, cutting through the dark. I watched Harlan walk around to the passenger’s side and get in.

After the interior car light shut off, the only illumination came from the faint glow of the security light leaking around the through the seams of the garage door, turning the spacious front seat into an intimate sanctuary. It was almost too much for me to deal with. Needing some space, I put the armrest down as a barrier between us. “Should I turn the light back on?”

Harlan took my hand as I reached up to the light and gently guided it down to the arm rest. “The things we need to say might be easier in the dark.”

“Okay.” I yanked my hand away from Harlan’s warm, strong palm. “I’ll start. I read your letters.”

“Oh. Really?” He sounded cautiously please. “You never wrote back.”

“I didn’t read them until five years ago. Didn’t seem much point in writing back. I didn’t even know where you were. It’s your turn to say something now.”

Harlan graciously refrained from pointing out how easy it would have been to find him. He turned, resting his back against the door and pulling his legs up onto the seat. His slippered feet pressed against the armrest. If I lifted it, we would be touching. “Okay, okay. God. You know, I rehearsed what I was going to say when I saw you again a thousand times over the years. And now, when it really counts, I can’t find the words.”

I had more than enough words for both of us. “Then I’ll keep going. First of all, I don’t want to hear ‘I’m sorry’ one more time. You said it when you broke up with me, I read it in the letters, and you said it again not an hour ago in my room. I get it. You’re sorry. The question is, what are you sorry for?”

“For…”

I held up my hand to stop him. “No, I’m not done. I have a few questions. That’s just one of them.”

“What are the others?”

“In no particular order. Why did you do it? The real reason, not the bullshit you gave me then. Did you achieve whatever it was you hoped to by staying in? Was it worth it?” I wasn’t going to ask the next questions until I was ready to hear the answers. Have you loved anyone else since me? If so, did you love them more than you loved me?

My hands ached for the 8-Ball, but outside of telling me I was going to marry Harlan, it had never been useful for anything between us. This was something we needed to talk out by ourselves.

He hung his arm over the seat, fingers drumming on the rich Corinthian leather upholstery. “Okay, the first one. Why I did what I did. It’s kind of a convoluted story. Can you let me get it out without interrupting?”

“Even if you say something really stupid?”

His eyes glittered in the low light, and he gave a tight grin with no humor. “When I say something stupid. It was stupid. I was a stupid, scared kid. And I thought I was the only way to keep you safe.”

“Safe from what?” We’d been stationed stateside most of the time. The hardest thing we’d had to fight was boredom.

Harlan took a few seconds to answer, and when he did, it wasn’t a direct answer. “It was after that thing with the lieutenant in charge of the motor pool in Virginia. The one who was making fake purchase orders. He’d sell the new parts and then either not do the repairs he was supposed to or use parts he’d scrounged from junkers. Remember?”

Like I could have forgotten.

The brass had launched an investigation. Since we were already in intelligence, Harlan was ordered to act as if he wanted in on the action and to collect as much hard evidence as he could. The months had been nerve-wracking. Harlan sucked up to the douchebag and pretended to be just as mercenary and cold-hearted as the lieutenant while trying to ensure the safety of anyone having to drive the potentially dangerous vehicles.

Eventually, it had ended up with the lieutenant and his minions being court-martialed and sentenced to jail. Our separation from service was back on. To my complete and total disbelief, Harlan had chosen to stay. It was first, and last, major fight.

And he had the nerve to ask me if I remembered it? Jesus. The only thing keeping me from punching him was the promise I’d made thirty seconds earlier not to interrupt. All I said was, “Of course, I remember.”

He nodded. “Yes. Well, after that all went down, I got contacted by people from the Pentagon and SPAM.”

“What?” I stiffened, smacking my knee into the bottom of the steering wheel. “Fuck. You never told me that.”

“I couldn’t. I wasn’t allowed to. It was all classified. But in the end, they stop-lossed me.”

I reached up and clicked the dome light on, making us both blink. I needed to see his face. “What the fuck, Harlan? Why you? What did they want?”

The stop-loss policy in the military basically said that they didn’t have to let you go at the end of your contract. They could force you to stay however long they wanted.

He sighed. “It’s a long story and complicated and I never did get the full picture. I only knew my little part of it.”

To quote Luke Skywalker, I had a bad feeling about this. Based on what I knew about what Harlan had been doing since then, which wasn’t much, and what I’d learned about SPAM and other alphabet soup agencies, some of the pieces were starting to come together into a picture I didn’t much like. “Give me the Cliffs Notes.”

Harlan drew his left leg up as far as he could and hooked his arm around his knee. “They thought I had some kind of power to sniff out corruption and they wanted me to help on a top-secret investigation they were doing at some of the highest levels of SPAM and the military.”

My stomach dropped. “Holy shit. That’s what you were doing? You could have been killed!”

To my surprise, he gave a little laugh. “It wasn’t that dangerous. I didn’t have to go undercover. Not then anyway. They just assigned me to some lower-level people to ‘see what I felt’ and seconded me to SPAM. It was only supposed to be for a few months, but it turned into a few years.”

“Holy shit, Harlan. Holy shit.” I was blown away. In a hundred years, I never would have predicted this. I disagreed with his assessment of the danger. People who got power or money or influence through nefarious means tended to hold on to them the same way.

Harlan spread his hand. “And then it was over, and I was free to go on with my life. But what life? You know my parents didn’t want me. I wrote to you, obviously, but you weren’t answering my letters. Where was I supposed to go? What did I have waiting for me when I left? I didn’t want to stay in the military, and SPAM made me an offer, so I took it.”

“Shit, Harlan.” I reached out, not sure he’d want my touch. He should have had me. I could only imagine how alone he had felt. Couldn’t I have answered one damn letter?

“So that sheriff’s department in Alabama? That was a SPAM operation?”

“Yes. There were police officer supes using their powers for petty evil. They needed to be stopped.”

I smiled. That was the Harlan I knew and loved. “Okay. That makes sense. But I still don’t understand why not telling me kept me safe.”

He sighed. “They, meaning Pentagon brass and SPAM, were very interested in you. Somehow someone had found out about your 8-Ball.”

I got chills. Everyone knew SPAM was interested in anyone with any kind of divination or oracular powers. If there was a way to get any kind of insider information on matters of national security, they wanted to check it out, no matter how minor it appeared.

And if the government didn’t get to them, corporations and billionaires would pay big bucks for an actual fortune teller, for want of a better term.

But that had been over a decade ago. Back then, I hadn’t used the 8-Ball as much more than a fancy coin flip to make silly decisions, like to see if I would regret eating a fourth burrito or if I’d get caught skipping PT. Shit like that.

“That was… that’s ridiculous. Why in the world would they have been interested in me? Even I didn’t know how to really use the thing back then.”

He shrugged. “I know. And I told them that. But they seemed to think you were, or it was, more powerful than you and I knew. People with your kinds of power are very desirable. And I didn’t want them to get their hands on you.”

It wasn’t as if I wanted to sell my soul to the government again. Being my own boss was one of my favorite things about being a self-employed PI. After I’d gotten licensed, my mentor had wanted me to come work with him in his agency. I’d agreed, but after year I had already grown tired of being at someone else’s beck and call. But the decision to join or not should have been mine.

Harlan wasn’t finished. “I told them the only way I would work with them was if they left you alone. I’d go AWOL, go to the press. I didn’t care.”

“And they agreed because they needed you more than me at that point.” That made sense.

“Yes.”

Wow. The things Harlan had just revealed had rewritten the entire story I’d been telling myself about the last ten years. I shut the overhead light back off. I scrubbed my face with my hands, feeling the thick stubble against my palm. If I wanted to, I could have shaved twice a day. I didn’t. Once was enough.

Harlan reached for me, but I pulled back and held up a hand to stop him. “Give me a second. It’s a lot to think about.” All my thoughts jumbled together, bumping and shoving until one rose to the surface. “You should have told me.”

“I couldn’t,” he said immediately.

That was bullshit. I knew how confidentiality worked. “You couldn’t tell me the details, but you should have told me about SPAM, about the stop-loss. Hell, you should have told me they wanted me, too.”

“Dash… you had a family to go home to. People who loved you, who wanted you back. If you’d stayed in, there’s no telling where you could have been deployed, been used. There wasn’t much chance they’d let us stay together anyway. I figured, better to break up and know you’re safe than to be forced apart with both of us under their control.”

He wasn’t getting it. I turned to face him. “No. I understand your thinking about that. What I don’t understand is why you thought it was your decision alone? I wasn’t a child. We’re the same age. If you could make that decision, so could I. You decided for me, and broke my heart and changed my life in the process, because you, what? Thought I was too dumb to understand the consequences? Too helpless?”

“No.” His answer came quickly, but there was something less than certain in his tone.

I stared at him until he gave in. “No. Not dumb. Never that. But I was scared you would say yes.”

Ass hole. “Honestly? I probably would have. But you should have given me all the information and trusted me to make the decision. You owed me that.”

He nodded and turned away to stare out into the darkness of the garage. “I did. And I fucked it up. At the time, I thought it was the right thing to do. I was young back then, too. And scared. And scared twenty-five-year-olds don’t make good decisions. I made the wrong call. But I still don’t want you on SPAM’s radar. I’ve worked hard all this time to keep you off it.”

He what? Great, more mysteries to unravel. Whatever they were, they were in the past and dealing with them could wait. This day had already been too much. “You can’t protect me by keeping me in the dark.”

“I won’t anymore, I promise. Whatever happens, I lay all my cards on the table and we’ll play the hand together.”

My brain was whirling, pulling all these threads together. Harlan. SPAM. Me. My powers. I tapped my fingers on the dashboard, the rhythm helping me think. “Do you think you have some kind of power to detect corruption in people or organizations?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I mean, how would you test for that? Plus, you can’t throw a rock in any organization without hitting someone who’d sell out their own grandmother for the right amount of money.”

I wasn’t as sure about that as he was, but like he said, how could you test for something like that? The darkness no longer felt comforting. I needed to see Harlan’s face. Reaching up, I clicked the dome light back on.

“Okay. Let’s say you don’t. Someone think you do, correct?”

He turned back to face me, scooting closer. “Yeah.”

I mirrored his pose, and then lifted the wide armrest so our knees could touch. “You said you got a surprise transfer here. Not through the usual channels?” He nodded, mouth in a grim line that told me he’d already gone down this road. “It doesn’t seem like you being in the city is a coincidence, does it?”

“No. It does not.” Casually, he lifted his arm and stretched it out along the dashboard, his fingers reaching out toward me.

“Right.” Might as well put it all out there. “So, there’s a chance someone thinks there’s something shady going on in the SPAM field office here?”

He flipped his hand palm up and then back again. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. The worst part of it is that outside of a small handful of people, I don’t know who I can trust in the field office or at SPAM in general.”

“Awesome.” I banged my head gently against the window. “Outside of you being the subject of an assassination attempt, my favorite part of all this bullshit is how fucking vague your job is. If I’m interpreting everything correctly, how it works is that someone at SPAM gets in touch with you and indirectly implies that somebody, somewhere, might be doing something bad. Then they tell you to go figure out who it is, what they are doing, and then put a stop to it.”

He nodded. “It’s more complicated than that, but, basically. Yeah.”

I laid my hand on the dashboard so our fingers were almost touching, and drummed on the vinyl while I considered the few pieces of the puzzle we had.

The thing about investigators, private or otherwise, was that our entire job was to construct a narrative around the person we were investigating. Why were they doing what they were doing? What were they hiding? Were they lying

We built that narrative piece by piece, and although we needed hard evidence to support our eventual conclusion, very often it was a gut feeling, combined with years of observing human nature, that formed the skeleton of that narrative. Right now, my gut was telling me that the answer to Harlan’s present dilemma lie in his past.

“Question. Do you think these murder attempts are related to why you are in San Francisco, now? Are they related to why SPAM recruited you in the first place?”

He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Possibly? I don’t know how, but you know as well as I do, there are rarely such things as random coincidence. So, I think they must be. But I’ll be damned if I can fathom how, or who. They whole thing, every attempt. The necklace, the manhole, the fucking eel! It’s all so…”

“Stupid? Cartoonish?” I suggested when he trailed off.

“Yeah. All that.” He laughed. Quietly at first, then louder. I couldn’t help but join in. The whole thing was fucking ludicrous and all-around unbelievable.

After we both quieted down and found our breath again, I slid my legs out until my feet were pressed against him. He smiled and wrapped a hand around them. “We sound like conspiracy theorists.”

He rolled his eyes. “Don’t you think I know that? Why do you think I have no friends? I need you, Dashiell. For so many reasons. To tell me if I’m being crazy. To center me and keep me sane. I’ve been so lost without you. So. Fucking. Lost. I’ve been surrounded by bad faith actors for so long that I don’t know who to trust. I think I’ve forgotten how to trust.”

“You can trust me. You have to know that.”

His hand tightened on my foot. “Of course I do. You’ve never lied to me.”

“And I never will. So you don’t lie to me.” Enough with the case. Together, we would figure this out and take care of whatever bozo was trying to kill him. Hell, for all I knew, whoever it was had a different agenda in mind and all the near-death experiences happened because the person was an idiot.

“I won’t. I promise. As me anything.”

Before we could go any further, we needed to both be on the same page about us and what we would be to each other. For fucks sake, if the damn ball could be believed, I was supposed to marry Harlan and right now I wasn’t sure we were even friends. “What do you want from me?”

“I want you to trust me, too. I want—” His voice caught and he looked away, then back at me once more. His eyes shined in the low light. “I want you to love me again.”

Damn, I wished I had hadn’t turned the light on. Then maybe I could have hidden from the pain in his eyes. I had to turn away for a minute to buy some breathing room. I could drag this out, make him beg, tell him we should take it slow. Hell, we probably should take it slow. But fuck it. We hadn’t taken it slow when we were eighteen, and I didn’t want to now.

When I looked back, I dropped my legs off the seat and scooted as close as I could get to him. I laid my hands on his thighs and looked straight into his eyes. “Fuck, Harlan. I never stopped loving you, no matter how much I wanted to.”

He reached out, hesitating before wrapping his head around my neck the way I knew he wanted to. “Dash.”

I grabbed his hand. “One question. Was it worth it?”

His laugh sounded like a sob. “God, no. If I could go back in time, I would do everything differently.”

“Me, too.” I didn’t know what exactly I would change, but there had to have been something more I could have done.

“Please. I have to kiss you. Can I kiss you?”

There was nothing in the world I wanted more. “Yes.”

His hand slipped around the back of my neck, his long fingers sliding to the base of my skull and his thumb pressing against the hinge of my jaw. When he tugged me to him, I went willingly, rising up on my knees and bracing myself with one hand on the dashboard and one hand on Harlan’s shoulder.

It has been said that “since the invention of the kiss, there have been five kisses that were rated the most passionate, the most pure.” This was not one of them.

It was a awkward, a little cramped. We were larger and less flexible than we’d been the last time we’d sat like this in the car. We both tasted of my mother’s stew. Harlan’s mouth was strange and new, yet at the same time so familiar that I wanted to cry.

It was the best kiss of my life.

After a long, perfect moment, we stopped kissing but kept our foreheads pressed together. Harlan stroked my neck. “Good?”

I nodded, laughing. “Yeah. Good.” As I sat up, my head brushed the dome light, plunging us back into darkness.

“Are we good?” Harlan asked.

We’d shared one heartfelt conversation, one tender kiss. It couldn’t repair the past, but it could be the beginning of a whole new future. “We will be.”

Emotionally and physically worn out, we made our way back to my room. Upstairs, the house was dark and quiet. My family had gone to bed, gone to their respective homes, or just plain gone, depending on their plans.

We talked and joked over nothing as we took turns in the bathroom, brushing our teeth and putting on t-shirts and boxers to sleep in. Someone had made up the air mattress on the floor for Harlan to sleep in. It wasn’t one of the fancy self-inflating ones that were firm enough you could sit on the edges. No, this was old twin air mattress my family had used for camping for decades.

Maybe I was still feeling a little bit raw, because I didn’t offer to sleep on the floor and let Harlan have my comfortable queen bed. Whatever. I never claimed to be a perfect person.

As we lay in the dark, neither of us sleeping, I heard a quiet hissing sound. It grew louder and higher in pitch. I clicked on the lamp on my nightstand and pushed up onto my elbow to confirm my suspicions.

Harlan’s smiling eyes met mine and held as he sank lower and lower on the slowly deflating mattress. Neither of us said anything until the laugh I’d been trying to suppress forced its way out of my mouth as an inelegant snort.

“Oh, nice. Laugh from your comfy bed. It’s all good. I’m fine.” Harlan crossed his arms behind his head and stared at the ceiling. “Comfy even.”

I laughed. He laughed. Then, like we both knew I would, I tossed back my blankets and scooted over. “Get in.”

“Really?”

“Hurry before I change my mind. And get the light.”

Harlan scrambled less than gracefully to his feet and stumbled over to my bed. After turning off the light, he slid in and pulled the covers up over both of us.

Our years apart fell away when he rolled onto his side and faced me. We were nineteen again and kings of the world.

“Did you mean it?” Harlan whispered. “Do you still love me?

“Let’s ask the Magic 8-Ball.”

Harlan snatched it from its resting place on the nightstand and handed it to me, eyes wide with hope.

Holding it in both hands, I shook it. “Do I still love Harlan?” I checked the window. Yes. Definitely. “Guess I do, god help me.”

Harlan broke into a big and slightly smug smile.

I shoved the 8-Ball at him. “Don’t look so smug. You love me, too. Jerk.”

Harlan chuckled softly as he rolled over and put the ball back on the nightstand.

To keep myself from doing anything I’d regret in the morning, I rolled on to my side, facing away from him. For a long moment, we both lay still, just listening to each other breathe and feeling the connection between us rebuilt.

Finally, Harlan lifted his arm, and I felt his hand hovering above me. “Dash.”

Goosebumps rose on my skin at the feel of his warm breath. Why fight the inevitable? With a sigh, I reached back for his hand and tugged it over my waist. He plastered himself against me, his other arm bent behind his head and his big palm spread over my chest, so he could feel my heartbeat. It had been his favorite way to fall asleep.

I covered his hand with me. “Harlan,” I whispered almost silently. “Jesus.”

His head touched mine, then I felt his lips in my hair. “I know, baby. I know.” His fingers dug into my chest and then relaxed.

Baby. God. Get it together, Bucur. I cleared my throat around the lump in it. “Don’t get any idea about getting in my pants, Harlan Dean. I’m not that kind of boy.”

He snorted because we both knew I was full of shit. I loved sex and it hadn’t taken much effort for him to get me naked the first time around. But things changed. I wasn’t as fearless as I’d been at eighteen. He’d only been back in my life for two days. Even without the 8-Ball’s promise, I knew what we had was something special, something precious. It deserved to be treated with care and consideration. Sex could wait until we knew we were solid beyond the shadow of a doubt.

We weren’t there yet, but we would be. I had faith in us.