by Jill Orr
“What’s wrong?” I asked, breathless.
“Riley, are you sure about this?”
“Yes,” I said without thinking, and grabbed his T-shirt and pulled him back down. I lifted his shirt over his head at the exact moment the doorbell rang. We froze in place—which for the record was me pinned underneath Ash, whose entire head was inside his T-shirt. Coltrane ran to the door and started barking.
“Who is that?” Ash whispered.
“No idea.”
The knocking came again, followed by more barking. Ash reached over to get his T-shirt off the floor. He sat up and put it on; I smoothed down my hair.
“Riley?” Knock, knock, knock. “Are you home?” It was Holman.
Are you fricking kidding me? What the hell was Holman doing at my house at nine p.m. on a Wednesday night?
“Yeah,” I called out. “Hang on.”
“Who is it?”
“Holman.”
As I turned to go open the door, Ash pulled me close. “Get rid of him.”
My stomach fluttered in the best possible way, and I leaned in for one more kiss. Then the knocking started again. I was going to kill Holman.
“Hey,” I said, opening the door just enough for him to step inside. The icy sleet was coming down sideways thanks to the brisk wind. “What’s up?”
Coltrane stopped barking once he saw Holman. I’m pretty sure Holman had never once petted him, but Coltrane was nothing if not an optimist. He wagged his tail and tried to nudge Holman’s hand with his nose. Holman raised his arms up by the elbows to get them out of reach. “I tried calling but didn’t get an answer.”
I glanced over at my phone sitting on the breakfast bar. “Sorry—we were just, um, having dinner.”
Holman looked over at Ash, blinked, and then focused his attention back to me. I knew Ash wasn’t Holman’s favorite person in the world, but this was a cool greeting, even for him.
“My power’s out,” he said. “From the ice storm. My whole building is without power.”
“Oh.”
“And my laptop is at approximately eight percent.” He paused, presumably waiting for me to react to this information. When I didn’t, he said, “And I have a lot of work to do tonight.”
“Oh.” The good Southern girl in me knew I had to invite him in, but the girl who had been on the couch with Ash a minute ago resisted.
“And it was starting to get really cold in my apartment.” Holman’s voice moved one standard deviation above his usual calm tone. “And I have Raynaud’s disease—it’s not advisable for me to get too cold.”
“What’s Raynaud’s disease?” Ash asked, looking somewhere between grossed out and concerned.
“It’s a condition in which the blood vessels in my hands and feet narrow in response to cold or stress, causing a restricted blood flow to my appendeg—”
“—it’s fine, Holman,” I said, cutting him off. His medical explanation broke the lust-induced trance I’d been in. “Come on in. You can work here.”
Holman, who was carrying his laptop and had a cross-body bag full of files slung across his slender frame, looked relieved. “Thank you.”
Ash widened his eyes at me as I led Holman to the kitchen table. Sorry, I mouthed.
As Holman busied himself with setting out his files and notebooks and plugging in his laptop, Ash tried to make conversation. “I read your story on the new laws regarding medical marijuana in last week’s paper.”
Holman looked up but didn’t offer a response. I knew him well enough to know this was because Ash’s comment was merely a statement of fact—neither a compliment nor an insult—therefore Holman did not feel obligated to respond. (This wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone make this sort of comment to Holman.) But Ash seemed hurt by his lack of response. He looked at me for help.
I tried to grease the wheels. “So, what’d you think?”
“It was great. Really insightful.”
“Thank you, Ash.” Holman seemed genuinely pleased. I hoped this was the beginning of a warmer relationship between the two of them. “Riley, do you have any green tea?”
“Sure.” As I went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, Ash threw me a look, then said in a slightly stilted voice, “Hey, do you want to watch that movie in your room, so we don’t bother Holman while he works?”
Smart boy. “Um, yeah, sure,” I said. “Great idea!”
“What movie are you guys going to watch?” Holman asked.
I said, Little Women, at the same time that Ash said, John Wick 3.
“I guess we’ll have to negotiate!” I said, then forced a laugh. Ash faked one too.
Holman, who never faked anything, just blinked again, twice. “Good luck settling on a genre.” He put in his earbuds and started typing. Ash and I hurried toward my room.
A second later, Holman’s voice called out, “Hey, Riley?”
We were halfway down the hallway and out of Holman’s line of sight. “Yeah?” Ash playfully pushed me up against the wall and started nibbling at my neck. I tried to bat him away. Sort of.
“I’m in communication with one of my neighbors who decided to stay at the apartment complex, Joseph in 3F—he doesn’t have Raynaud’s,” he said. “And if the power isn’t back on by eleven, would it be all right if I spent the night on your sofa? If I don’t get the proper amount of sleep, my performance at work will be less than optimal.”
Ash had worked his way up to my ear. “Sure. Fine. Whatever.”
“Thank you.”
We started toward my bedroom again.
“Riley?” Holman called again.
I hung my head. Never had this fifteen-foot hallway seemed so long in all my life. “Yes?”
“Are you going to take Coltrane with you?”
“What? Why?”
“He’s doing that thing where he stares at me again. It’s very unsettling.”
It was true, Coltrane did like to stare at Holman. My theory is that Holman was probably the only human Coltrane had ever met who would simply not pet him, talk to him, or interact with him in any way, and he found this unacceptable. For the record, I agreed.
“Um, I’m sure he’ll settle down soon and lie on the couch. Don’t worry.” There was a pause and I felt like maybe we were home free. For a second.
“I think he wants something from me,” Holman said. “I am not sure I can work under these conditions.”
I sighed. “Fine. C’mon, Coltrane!”
Coltrane trotted down the hall and the three of us went inside my bedroom. The second the door was closed Ash took a step toward me. “Are we actually alone again? Finally?”
“Oh no,” I said, pushing him away. “No way.”
“What?”
“Not with him here.”
“He can’t hear anything—he has his headphones on.”
“Him.” I stepped back and pointed at Coltrane, who had jumped onto my bed and was turning around in circles, a habit he always did before he laid down.
“Are you serious?”
“Yes! I can’t possibly…with my dog in the room. That’d just be weird.”
Ash looked over at Coltrane lying comfortably among my pillows. “He looks to me like he really needs to go out.”
I laughed. “You think?”
A second later, as if on cue, Coltrane let out a big exhausted sigh and rolled over onto his side. He looked as though he might never move again.
“Asshole,” Ash said to him playfully.
“All right,” I said, a smile on my lips. “Now for the most difficult decision of the evening: What movie should we watch?”
Daily Astrological Forecast
Scorpio
The full blood thunder moon is moving into your eighth house, creating a most unusual planetary alignment. On the one hand, this brings a new and promising social element into your life! At the same time, however, intense focus will be required at your place of business. This could be the hallmark of your short-term future, being
torn in two directions, and the name of the game is balance. Strive to achieve it at all costs.
As fickle Gemini begins a three-month retrograde, you will start to see duality where before you did not. Pull back the curtain, Scorpio, as frightening as it may be. Dig deeper than you think you need to go. What you find is not likely to be what—or who—you expected. Remember: Sometimes it’s the devil you know that you must fear most.
Tonight: Relax with a fun face mask or hot bubble bath!
CHAPTER 25
Tuttle Corner was officially in the midst of the polar vortex. The roads were covered in ice and sleet, the wind had ratcheted up to a steady twenty-five miles per hour, with gusts up to forty. Temperatures dropped to the twenties overnight, and the sleet changed over to snow. The news was warning everyone to stay home, stay inside, stay off the roads. Holman ended up spending the night on my couch, even though I offered him the second bedroom.
“But then where is Ash going to sleep?” he asked, giving me a look like I had just wandered out from under a bridge. “After all, he was here first.”
So, Ash slept in the guest room, which was best considering my bed wasn’t big enough for three (Coltrane fell asleep before the movie ended and basically played dead so he didn’t have to move). In the morning, Holman made waffles as we watched the big, fat snowflakes pile up outside. It was kind of fun, actually, like an old-school slumber party.
Over breakfast, we chatted about the upcoming party.
“So, what did Camilla send you to wear?” I asked Holman.
“A black tuxedo. It’s very elegant,” he said. “It used to belong to my father.”
Holman didn’t talk much about his father, but I knew he hadn’t seen or talked to him in years. Camilla told me that Nicholas Holman had left her and Will after it became clear to him that “Will was never going to be the son he imagined.” The cruelty of that took my breath away every time I thought about it. I wondered how Holman felt about wearing his father’s tux.
“I’ve decided to dress as a newsie instead,” he said, settling the question.
Ash looked confused. “What’s a newsie?”
“A newsie, you know?” Holman repeated the word, as if saying it a second time might force understanding. Ash’s blank face proved that it did not. “They were young men, boys actually, around the turn of the twentieth century who used to buy up copies of the newspapers and spend all day and night trying to resell every last copy because the newspaper companies refused to buy back their unsold papers.”
“Okaaaaay,” Ash said.
Holman was getting agitated. “Surely you’ve heard of the Broadway musical Newsies? It tells the story, albeit the Disney version, of the famous newsboys’ strike of 1899.”
“Kind of, but tell me why you’re going to a Gatsby party dressed like a newsie?”
Holman sighed. “Some credit that strike with the ultimate reforms of the despicable child labor practices, which by the 1920s had vastly been improved. And The Great Gatsby is set in the 1920s, so naturally you see the connection.”
I tried to communicate to Ash with my eyes that it was best to drop it. Holman was his own man, and if he wanted to spend all night dressed as a newsboy, repeating this esoteric explanation to everyone at the party, that was his choice.
I saw Ash open his mouth, probably to say that he did not see the connection, and I decided to seize the moment to tell Holman that Lindsey was coming to the party with us. “Maybe you should see if she wants to go as a newsie with you?”
“Why?”
“Well,” I started to explain, “Ash is going as Nick Carraway and I’m going as Jordan Baker—and since we’re all going together, maybe you and Lindsey could coordinate too?”
Holman blinked at me. “But she’s a female. Newsies are male.”
“Yeah, but it’s a costume.”
“Yes. A costume for a male.”
“I don’t think gender roles really apply to costumes,” Ash said.
Holman looked at me, then Ash, as if we were speaking Farsi.
“Never mind,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll look great.”
By about nine-thirty, Ash said he was going to try to brave the roads to see if he could get home. I walked him to the door.
Holman was doing the last of the breakfast dishes and probably couldn’t hear us, but Ash lowered his voice to a whisper anyway. “Thanks for letting me spend the night,” he said. “I had fun.”
I smiled. “Me too.”
“So, I’ll see you tomorrow night?”
“Uh-huh.”
He leaned in to kiss me goodbye, which felt like anything but a farewell. As he pulled back, a self-conscious laugh bubbled up out of me.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Liar.”
“Nothing,” I repeated, lowering my voice. “It’s just thinking about last night and what almost happened…it’s just kind of weird, that’s all. Everything looks different in the daylight, I guess.”
“You don’t,” he said. “You look every bit as amazing as you did last night.”
My cheeks instantly flushed. I pulled the middle-school move of hitting him on the shoulder. “Stop.”
“Stop. Go. Stop. Go…make up your mind, Ellison,” he said, laughing. Then he gave me another kiss, this one sweeter than before.
I watched him shuffle across the icy driveway and get into his car, then I floated back to the kitchen where Holman was loading the last of the plates into the dishwasher. I knew I was probably still blushing and wondered if Holman had picked up on the change in status of me and Ash.
“Is Ash your boyfriend now?”
“No,” I said quickly, then added, “I mean, I don’t think so—or um, I mean, I don’t know exactly what we are right now.”
“You’re smiling.”
“I guess I am.”
Holman carefully folded the tea towel and set it next to my sink. “It’s nice to see you happy, Riley.”
That made my smile even bigger. I refilled my coffee cup from the pot and topped off Holman’s mug. “Should we call Kay and see if she wants us to try to come in today?” I asked, looking out the front window at the mounting snow.
Holman leaned against the countertop next to the sink; he was looking out the window on my back door. He didn’t answer.
“Holman?”
“Is it worth it?”
“Well, if it’s too icy out, we just won’t go—”
“No,” he said. “I mean, is getting close to someone worth the risk of getting hurt?”
There was no one who could surprise me quite the way Will Holman could. I was seized by a visceral desire to hug him, but I knew better—Holman was not a big fan of physical displays of affection. So instead I took a couple of moments to think about what to say. Holman didn’t ask questions like this often, and I felt a responsibility to answer truthfully.
“Most of the time.”
Holman stared at me his patented wide-eyed way and after a beat he said, “Maybe Lindsey would consider dressing up as a newsie?”
And that comment brought about my biggest smile of the day so far.
CHAPTER 26
The consensus of most of the Times employees was to stay home and work remotely. Holman and I decided that’s what we’d do, and if temperatures warmed enough to start melting some of the ice, we would try to go in later that afternoon. From my makeshift workstation in the living room, I filed an update on the post office food drive and did a final edit on a piece about the effects of frost on local farmers. Once finished, I went back to my online research about Claremore Ministries. Holman, having already caught up on his work the night before, was searching the Times obit archives for references to Claremore and Oakwood Christian Church.
I found little information that I felt could be connected to my grandfather or Flick. Specifically, I was looking for any press mentions of the church and/or Claremore himself around the time Granddad was killed. I found nothing sus
picious or even out of the ordinary. I was able to find an old edition of the Claremore Ministries newsletter from the week of Granddad’s death and learned that Wyatt had gone on a mission trip to Haiti for two weeks, while Shannon stayed behind to care for Megan Johanning, who had suffered a fall. They asked for prayers for her swift and complete recovery. That was it. I didn’t know what I’d expected to find, but I was disappointed all the same. I couldn’t find one single thread tying Claremore Ministries to Granddad or Flick, other than the doodle in Flick’s notes.
My phone started to vibrate on the couch next to me, pulling me out of my thoughts. I answered and a robovoice came through the phone, “This is a collect call from—” the line crackled and then came the signature sneering tone: “Joe Tackett.”
“I’ll accept.” I put the phone on speaker and motioned for Holman to come listen in.
“Riley?” Tackett’s voice set me on edge. I didn’t like hearing him say my name.
“Yes.”
“You made any progress getting me a deal yet?”
I wasn’t sure how much to reveal. I didn’t want him to think I was running around doing his bidding, but I didn’t want him to think I was doing nothing either. I needed the information he had, and I didn’t want to lose the chance to get it. “We talked to the prosecutor. She said she needs to be sure you have credible information before she can do anything.”
I heard him mutter something under his breath but couldn’t make it out. “Well, you better tell her to hurry her ass up. I’m getting some pressure in here.” He sounded agitated, impatient.
“What kind of pressure?” Holman asked.
“Who’s that?” Tackett snapped.
“It’s Will Holman.” He paused, then added, “Lurch.”
Tackett sighed, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “When it got out that I had official-lookin’ visitors a few days ago, people started talking. Damn inmates are worse than a room fulla old women. Rumors started that I’m ratting out the Romeros. If the wrong people believe that, I could be in trouble—as in the dead kind of trouble.”