by G. G. Andrew
After finishing her shift at the coffee shop, she drove to her twice-weekly appointment with Dr. Park.
Her psychologist’s small office was housed in a shopping center, and on the sidewalk outside, she knew for sure the universe was conspiring against her. Taylor Stiles strolled her way, her highlighted blond hair smooth and perfect, a shopping bag slung over her shoulder.
“Hey, Taylor,” Kim said, because they were going right past each other, and she didn’t see any boulders to hide behind.
She and Taylor had gone to private school together, but there was no love lost there. They’d never gotten along, but Kim had cinched that when she’d hooked up with Taylor’s prom date senior year. In her defense, she didn’t realize they were on a date together, and she’d been blitzed out of her mind. Still, ever since, Taylor took every opportunity to remind Kim of how she felt about her in the most creatively passive-aggressive ways.
“Oh, Kim! Hi.” Taylor smiled broadly. “I didn’t realize you were out of jail.” She raised her voice louder than necessary, and Kim’s eyes bulged from the effort of not rolling them.
“Yeah, well,” she laughed, “they can’t keep me all the time, you know?”
Ugh. Taylor Stiles.
Taylor nodded. “I’ve been out doing some shopping,” she said, though Kim hadn’t asked. “It’s so crazy lately. I’m so busy being a mom, I barely have time to do my nails.” She held out a hand to Kim, but her fingertips were painted red and perfectly manicured.
“Uh-huh.”
Taylor shrugged and gave her that fake smile again. “Oh, well, I guess you probably won’t ever understand.”
God help her, Kim flinched. She didn’t have a man or a plan to have children, but Taylor pointing out that she might never have either stung more than she expected.
“Nice to see you, Taylor.” She brushed past the woman, shaking her head.
The waiting room at the psychologist’s was empty and quiet, and Kim found the door to Dr. Park’s office open, dim with that low lighting she’d experienced in various mental health professionals’ offices through the years. Was that intended to be calming, or did it mean they couldn’t afford the electric bill? At least it made tantalizing knickknacks harder to see.
“Hello, Kim,” Dr. Park said as he looked up from his desk, where he was shuffling papers. “Come on in.”
“Hey.” She crossed the threshold, shut the door, and sank into an armchair across from his desk. The room smelled like lemon-scented wood polish.
Dr. Park was a fortysomething Korean-American man, incredibly clean-cut and, in Kim’s experience, hard to rattle. He put aside a stack of papers and intertwined his fingers atop his desk. “How are you today?”
“Okay. I mean—” She paused. So much had happened in the past twenty-four hours, she didn’t know where to begin. It was ironic. How many times had she sat in this chair, been asked how her day was, and had hardly anything to say, just Fine or I almost took a Twix bar at CVS. The past day had been drama-filled, between finding her apartment trashed, the note, the stuff with Scott, and Hutch showing up. Plenty to fill a couple of sessions. She should use this material for all those times when she almost fell asleep in the chair.
“Someone broke into my apartment.”
Dr. Park tilted his head. “I’m sorry to hear that. Are you alright?”
“Yeah, well.” She put her legs over the arm of the chair and swung her feet as she stared around his office. “It’s fine. Well, I guess it’s not fine, but I’m dealing.” She studied the small animal figurines on his bookshelf and ran her fingers through her hair, pulling hard at the roots.
“How is your stress level, on a scale of one to ten?”
“I don’t know…” Kim looked back at him. “…Maybe a seven point five?”
Dr. Park nodded.
For some reason, she didn’t mention the note. When she thought about it, her number was more like eleven. She tugged on her hair. The uncertainty, the threat of violence…Even though she’d been thieving off and on for a decade, she’d rarely felt quite like this, like someone meant to do her physical harm.
She shook the thought off and glanced away. “So my parents have this cop neighbor who’s looking into it, trying to see if there are other incidents in the area.” She left out the part about Hutch and his invitation to the party. Dr. Park would not be down with that. It seems as though once you fall in with your old crowd, you pick up old patterns, he’d once told her. Boy was that ever true. Last summer, the final time she’d hooked up with Hutch, she’d felt relieved, almost giddy. It’d been like wrapping herself in an old, familiar blanket. But the next day, in a flurry of excitement, she’d nicked three nail polishes from the drug store. Violet, turquoise, and cherry red. She’d never returned them, but she’d never used them either.
“We’ve talked about this before, but the first step is to be aware of how you’re feeling,” Dr. Park said. “I know you’re aware that any strong emotion can make you more susceptible to your addiction. Did you notice yourself eyeing anything today? Anything you were tempted to take?”
Her eyes drifted to the diploma on his wall. Yale. Of course. Now this was something she should be tempted to steal. The doors it could open…
Dr. Park interrupted her thoughts. “Kim. Are you with me?”
“Hmm?” She looked back at him. God, she was so exhausted.
“What are you not telling me?”
“Um…” She didn’t want to tell him about Hutch, and she didn’t want to think about that note, so she blurted the first unsaid thing that came to mind.
“I’m attracted to a police officer.”
Dr. Park raised his eyebrow—the most reaction she usually got from him.
Shit. In avoiding telling him about the note, she’d revealed something probably worse. She put her feet on the floor and straightened in the chair. The office was so quiet she could’ve sworn she could hear Dr. Park’s watch ticking.
“Is this—” he began.
“He’s the cop helping me out. The neighbor of my parents.” She hadn’t told him about meeting Scott in the fall, the way she’d flirted with him to distract him from his search for her sister’s crush. The way she’d stolen his badge. She’d admitted to Dr. Park that she’d slipped and taken something, because it was the first time in months. But she hadn’t said what and he, bless him, hadn’t asked.
“So he’s helping you out, and you feel yourself developing feelings for him,” Dr. Park said.
God, this was embarrassing. “Well, not feelings maybe—or not feeling-feelings…” She wanted to dry-hump him, was more truthful. Feelings? She shook her head. “But he knows about my record, since he works at the station, so obviously that would never work.”
He unclasped his hands. “What do you think this is about, these feelings—”
Dry-humping.
“—you’ve been experiencing? It seems like this is unusual for you, to develop attraction for a man who, hmm—”
“Isn’t a total dirtbag? Doesn’t have a police record himself?”
Dr. Park nodded in assent.
“Search me.” She laughed, but it wasn’t funny. Dr. Park probably thought it was a step forward, a move towards a healthy relationship, but Kim wasn’t cut from that cloth. The healthy-relationship-with-a-healthy-guy ship had sailed long ago. Insert a thousand other clichés here that meant it wasn’t going to happen. Men like Scott Culpepper, tempted as he’d seemed to kiss her that morning, didn’t date women like her. Any feelings she may or may not be developing for him wouldn’t go anywhere.
She ran her fingers through her hair and tugged again, this time so hard she almost winced. Then she answered the question Dr. Park had asked a minute ago, the one she hadn’t responded to.
“I almost took something from the coffee shop today.”
Chapter Eleven
Scott
As Scott squeezed his daughter’s hand and walked down the sunny sidewalk the next morning, he wondered wh
y it was so difficult to find someone to watch an incredibly adorable five-year-old girl. With her fair skin and golden blond hair waving down her shoulders, Lily was a fairy princess twirling beside him, like she was on loan from heaven. Of course, she could be hell on wheels at home, but they didn’t know that. But apparently his neighbors all had dinner plans or tennis dates or boating that evening—what had he gotten himself into, moving into a neighborhood he’d only been able to afford with his inheritance, one where people went boating?
Which was how he found himself walking to the Xaviers’, because all paths surely led to his ruin.
Maybe the Xaviers would be boating too, but he’d planned on coming by this morning anyway, to update them on Kim’s unofficial case. He’d already put on his policeman’s uniform to remind everyone, himself included, that he was a professional.
The dark uniform he wore attracted the sunshine, warming his body. Along the Xaviers’ walk, Diane had planted yellow daffodils in a row and the air smelled earthy, like soil and mulch.
When the door opened to his knock, Lily shrieked, “Kim!”
His neighbors’ black sheep of a daughter wore a black cotton sundress, the material cinched around her waist and thin enough to accentuate her curves above and below. Her hair was damp, like she’d come from the shower.
The weather was warming up, and Kim was just dressing appropriately. Not that it stopped the parade of inappropriate thoughts that raced across his mind in the second before she spoke.
He’d made a huge mistake coming here.
“Hey,” Kim said. She bit her lip and smiled at him, and he smiled in return automatically, the look on her face heating him up as sure as the sun had. Then her gaze travelled down to Lily. “Good morning, Lily!”
Lily beamed.
“Good morning,” Scott said.
Diane’s voice carried from inside the house. “Who is it, Kim?”
“The 5-0,” Kim shouted over her shoulder. She turned back, one hand clutching the doorframe. “Um, how are you?”
She was oblivious as to why he was there, in uniform and with his daughter. The first wouldn’t be unusual, but he wasn’t the type of father to let his daughter in on the crimes that befell their neighbors. While Scott blanked on what he needed to ask—it’d been so easy to get started with the other neighbors—the confusion on her face grew until Lily asked, “Are you going to watch me while my grandma gets her knees fixed?”
“What?”
“Lily,” Scott said sternly, cursing himself before turning to Kim. “Sorry, we’re actually in a bit of a bind. Lily’s grandmother is having some trouble with her knees, and she’s going to have to do some physical therapy and get shots off and on for the next few weeks, including at times I need to work. We don’t have any other babysitters.”
“This is our fifth house,” Lily offered unhelpfully. “Daddy said we’d go to all the other neighbors we knew first.”
His face flushed as Kim’s lips twisted in a way that, he realized with relief and embarrassment, meant she was trying not to laugh.
Scott cleared his throat. “I thought maybe your mother…”
Kim glanced behind her and lowered her voice. “She’s not really good with kids,” she said. “Trust me, she raised me.” She knelt down to offer her palm for Lily to high-five, which she did. “I can watch Lily, no problem.”
“Are you—sure?” He was the one who wasn’t sure, but his words got away from him and his mouth became dry. The way she was kneeling, he could see down the cleavage of her black sundress. She had on a black lace bra. Her breasts were perfect.
Kim stood up. “I’d loved to.”
Diane Xavier opened the door behind her, a pair of glasses perched on her nose, and he shoved all non-PG thoughts back into a black box in his head, where they should’ve been anyway.
He had his daughter with him. Jesus.
“Hello, Scott.” Diane was eager a moment, thinking he was bringing news about the case, but her eyes fell to Lily. “Oh, hello, Lily,” she said.
Lily hid behind Scott’s legs.
“They need a babysitter,” Kim explained to her mother. “I said I’d be happy to help.”
Diane smiled. “That’s a great idea.” She looked at Scott. “Kim’s very good with children. She worked at a preschool until”—she paused—“there was a change.”
Had she stolen diapers? Baby toys?
“Oh. Well.” Scott considered. “You sure it’s okay?” He was addressing Diane, which was pretty ridiculous given that her daughter was a grown woman, but he was afraid that if he looked at Kim again, he’d permanently lose the ability to speak.
“Of course,” Kim answered. “If it’s okay with you, Lily.”
Lily’s blue eyes were bright as she tugged on his hand. “I want Kim to watch me,” she whispered.
He smiled. “Okay.”
Beautiful women were obviously his kryptonite.
“So when do you need me to watch her?” Kim asked.
“Um…this evening?” He darted a glimpse in her direction, then added, “If that’s okay. Bette’s been ordered off her feet for tonight at least.”
“I can do this evening.”
His smile back to her was a sloppy mix of relief and embarrassment and gratitude and dress-drunkenness.
“Good,” Diane said crisply. “Scott, have there been any updates?”
He took a quick look at Lily, who had released his hand to bend over and poke at one of Diane’s daffodils. “There’s a lead I’m pursuing,” he said to them both, his voice deepening, “with a detective I trust on the force. It’s related to an open case from a few months back. I hope to know more this evening.”
He glanced quickly at Kim before addressing Diane. “In the meantime, I suggest Kim remains here until we determine it’s safe.”
“Of course,” Diane said, her voice tight. “Thank you, Scott.”
She disappeared back into the house, and as Lily played with the flowers a few feet back, he stepped closer to Kim and lowered his voice. “Have you remembered anything? Anything that would help me figure out who did this?”
She shook her head. “No. Nothing.” She looked away and ran her fingers absently through her hair. He was so distracted by a whiff of her orange-jasmine scent that he almost missed it. The too-quick way she spoke, the avoidance of eye contact.
Kim Xavier was lying to him.
Chapter Twelve
Kim
She showed up at Scott Culpepper’s at three-thirty, dressed in her best babysitting outfit: skinny jeans and a shirt with a picture of a unicorn vomiting a rainbow.
Scott answered right away, back in his police uniform. Shirt pressed, duty belt slung on his hips, badge in place.
“Hey.” He glanced down, and Kim wondered if he was looking at her unicorn or her breasts. Then he shook his head and met her gaze. “Come on in.”
She stepped over the threshold. This was her first time in his home, and as she took in her surroundings, she was honestly disappointed to discover that it wasn’t decked out in the all-American, Boy Scout way she’d envisioned: American flags, a former military photo, a cookie jar in the shape of an eagle. Instead it was decorated like most single mens’ homes, which was to say not at all. A comfy couch, wide-screen TV, a dining room table that probably got zero use, and nothing on the walls.
“Not even a softball trophy,” she mumbled.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Ever since Scott had come by that morning, she’d been wondering about his ex, Lily’s mom. She’d heard her own mom say in passing months ago that she was still alive, just elsewhere, but what was the deal there? Kim was never good at leading up to stuff, so as her mom had sat at their own dining room table at lunch surrounded by tax paperwork, she walked up and asked, “So what’s the deal with the ex-wife?”
“Scott’s?”
“Yeah.”
Diane had set down the sheet she’d been examining and took her glasses off
to rub her eyes. “I don’t know, but she never comes for a visit. At least we’ve never seen her. But Lily’s grandmother Bette is apparently the woman’s mother, not Scott’s. It’s all very odd.”
“That is weird.” If Kim had a daughter like Lily, all blond and exuberant and adorable, she couldn’t imagine not wanting to be in her orbit as much as she could.
Something must have shown on her face as she thought this, because when she looked at her mother, a strange expression had come over her features. Diane Xavier had an impenetrable poker face by nature and trade, but sometimes, in fleeting moments, Kim got a glimpse of the emotions she kept in check. Diane’s blue eyes flickered with something that was like both fear and hope.
“Relax, Mom,” she’d quickly said. A fleet of butterflies beat their wings inside her stomach. “I’m not looking to be the wife of a cop.” She’d turned away and glanced out a nearby window at the professionally-landscaped lawns and expensive hybrid cars of the neighborhood. “God, can you imagine? Me standing around at the annual police force potluck?” She laughed.
Diane didn’t say anything, and after half a minute Kim heard her shuffling papers like she’d gone back to her taxes.
Now at Scott’s single dad pad, Lily came running into the room and hugged her father’s knees as she eyed Kim shyly at first.
“Hi, Lily!” Kim said.
His daughter still attached to his legs, Scott grabbed his wallet from the mantle above his fireplace and slid it into his back pocket. “Lily, can you say hi to Kim?”
“Hi, Kim,” she mumbled.
Scott cast a half-smile Kim’s way that made her chest warm. He was more comfortable here, in his own home, than she’d seen him before. She smiled back.
Scott looked down and said, “Lily, do you want to ask Kim the question you asked me earlier?”
Lily stepped away from her father’s legs but remained close. “Um, do you know how to play princesses?”