by Ella Frank
Xander groaned, and when he opened to me there was no gentle tease, no tentative touches. This time I dove inside and took full advantage of what he was offering.
As the taste of him filled my senses, a rumble of pleasure hummed out of my throat. It’d been so long—too long—since I’d had him in my arms.
Then suddenly, he pulled back and asked, “I’m not hurting your side, am I?”
I smiled. “Let’s just say, it’s not my side that’s throbbing right now.”
Xander chuckled and shifted back to his side of the bed. “I’m serious. We can’t do anything that might set you back, and that includes—”
“Don’t say it.” I laid an arm across my eyes, my frustration warring with my common sense. “When you say it, it’s real, and I’d rather live in a fantasyland where I can delude myself into thinking I have a shot with you each night you’re in my bed this week.”
“Get better for me, and you’ll have more than a shot.”
I sighed and turned my head so I was looking him in the eye. “You drive a hard bargain.”
Xander’s eyes wandered down to where the sheet was draped across my lap. “So I can see. But I’m here to help you, not set your recovery time back.”
“Okay, but come back here.”
As Xander scooted back in to my side, a feeling of belonging settled over me, a feeling of peace.
It was amazing that in all these years I’d never realized that the person who would change me for the better had been right in front of me all along.
11
Sean
“YOU’RE GOING TO wear a hole in the floor if you keep pacing like that.”
It’d been two days since Xander had brought me home from the hospital, and in that time I’d managed to convince him to have that sit-down with Nichols and go over everything they’d learned about the man who’d been stalking him.
I knew he’d already told my buddy everything he remembered from the night, but now it was time for him to try to understand how this had all started. Maybe then he’d be able to stop blaming himself and try to work through it so he could finally get a decent night’s sleep.
“I think better when I’m standing.”
“Then you should sit for sure. That brain never stops.”
Xander paused and looked back over his shoulder at me.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” I said. “I’m just saying it might do you some good to relax a little.”
He took in a deep breath and ran a hand through his hair. “I wish it was that easy.”
I was about to tell him that eventually it would be when there was a knock on the door. Xander startled, and I frowned. I hated that he was still so jumpy, but there was nothing that was going to fix that but time.
“I got it,” he said, and walked down the hall to let in Nichols.
“Good morning, Mr. Thorne,” I heard Nichols say. “It’s nice to see you again.”
I tried to remember the last time I’d heard Nichols be so formal and couldn’t. But then again, Xander was the kind of guy that made you feel like you needed to step up your game several notches.
“It’s nice to see you too,” Xander said as he led Nichols through to the living area. “I just wish it was under better circumstances.”
“Well, it kind of is. That lug over there is out of the hospital, so that’s a step in the right direction.”
Xander nodded. “You’re right. That is definitely a good thing. Please, come in.”
As Xander stood aside and Nichols walked in to greet me, I suddenly realized how domesticated this all seemed, how…couple-y, and my palms started to sweat.
Would Nichols suspect there was more going on between Xander and me than a friend helping out a friend? Would he wonder where Xander was staying, since there was only one bedroom?
But as soon as that thought entered my mind, I shoved it aside as fucking stupid. Nichols had never been to my house before, so how would he know there was only one bedroom?
“It’s good to see you looking a little more alive today,” he said. “Last time I saw you, you were knocked out and drugged up on a pretty awesome cocktail, I’m told.” I chuckled and went to stand and shake his hand, but Nichols waved me off. “No, no, don’t get up on my account. You keep your ass planted in that recliner.”
“Fair enough.”
“Can I get you anything to drink?” Xander asked as he walked into the kitchen, and again I was struck by how comfortable I was with him in my space, surrounded by my things—as minimal as they might be.
“I wouldn’t say no to a coffee.”
Xander nodded and then looked to me. “Water? Juice?”
“Coffee. Two sugars and a little milk?”
Xander’s lips twitched. “You wish. Water or juice.”
I rolled my eyes. “Water, I suppose.”
Xander winked at me, and my stomach did what it always did whenever he was near: it flipped over on itself and lodged my heart somewhere in the back of my throat.
“So, how you feeling these days?” Nichols asked as he sat down on the loveseat, his forearms resting on his knees, his hands clasped between his legs. “You really gave us all a scare there for a minute. I wasn’t lying when I said it’s good to see you looking more…alive.”
“Yeah. It’s been a rough week for sure. My side hurt like a son of a bitch at first, but it’s feeling a lot better these days.”
“I bet. It’s not every day someone tries to gut you like a fish.”
“Isn’t that the truth?” I could hear Xander rattling around in my kitchen and thought I’d take the opportunity to ask Nichols a favor. “Hey. Take things easy with him today, huh? He’s still trying to work his way through everything, and I think he’s finding it a little more difficult than he expected to.”
Nichols glanced over his shoulder to Xander. “No problem. I get it. It was a traumatic night. You probably don’t remember much of it, but what he went through? I wouldn’t wish that on any of my loved ones.”
“So I heard.”
“Yeah. We’ve found out a lot since then. Some of it’s gonna be rough to hear, but I think what I have to tell him will help bring him some closure. Eventually.”
“I hope so.”
“You hope what?” Xander asked as he handed over a steaming mug of the good stuff to Nichols, and a boring old glass of water to me.
Nichols blew on the coffee and took a sip. “This is great, thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” Xander smiled and took the spot next to Nichols, and I almost wanted to kick myself in the ass for not thinking ahead and sitting on the loveseat. That way I could at least touch Xander in some way, even if it was just thigh to thigh.
“I was just telling Sean here that we have a lot of new information for you regarding your friendly…follower.”
Xander’s fingers tightened around his coffee mug, which I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been watching him so closely.
“You do?”
“We do.” Nichols put his cup on the small end table by the loveseat. “It took us a little while because your admirer was using a fake ID. Not only that, he was living out of a van that we found parked at the back of the Fairmont Hotel. It seems he was quite the drifter, something that worked well for him and his extracurricular activities. That’s one of the reasons it was so difficult to pin him down—he was sending those emails and tweets from public locations.”
Well, that made more sense. It’d pissed me off something fierce to hit all of those dead ends. But this transient lifestyle Nichols was describing explained the suspect’s ability to hide in plain sight.
“His DNA wasn’t in CODIS, so he was careful about what he did and how he did it, but luckily for us, he’d gotten some dental work done as a teenager, so we got a name.”
12
Xander
A NAME… THEY got a name?
As I stared at Nichols, I knew he was waiting for some kind of response, but I had nothing
. I’d known they’d been looking into this—of course they had. Just because the guy had been a lunatic didn’t mean his family didn’t deserve to be notified of his passing—if he did, in fact, have any family—but that didn’t mean I wanted to think about it, think about…him.
For the most part, I’d been able to block him from my mind. Who he was, why he’d decided to fixate on me, and with everything else that’d been going on, I’d been thankful to push that aside for the moment. I’d been happy to deal with it another day.
Now that that day was here, though, I was starting to wish it’d all been boxed up and put away on a shelf back when it first happened.
“Xander?”
Sean’s voice cut through my thoughts and had me looking his way, and those intense eyes of his were locked on me. The question are you okay? was right there for me to see. “Sorry,” I said, and turned my attention back to Nichols, who was patiently waiting beside me.
“Don’t be sorry. You’ve been through a lot, and this won’t be easy either. But maybe it will help put things into some kind of perspective for you.”
I wasn’t sure how that was possible, but I also knew I needed to hear whatever he was here to say. “Okay, I’m ready when you are.”
Nichols picked up the file he’d brought in with him, opened it up, and placed it on the coffee table in front of me. A DMV photo was pinned to the top.
“Meet Kyle Gates. Twenty-nine-year-old loner, who for the past eight years swapped out his identity like one might a pair of jeans. His parents died when he was four, and with no immediate family, he entered the foster system before running away at age fifteen.” Nichols paused and looked at me. “You good?”
So far, yes. But then, we hadn’t really gotten into the meat of things yet. “Yes, I’m fine. What else did you find out?”
“Okay. So, first things first, we don’t believe you were his first victim.”
“He’d done this before?”
“We believe so,” Nichols said. “In amongst his belongings, we found photos of two other men. We ran the date stamp of the images through our system, searching for missing or deceased John Does, and came up with two exact matches. Both men are still reported as missing. But both are now presumed to be—”
“Dead.”
“Yes.”
Bile rose in my throat. The what might’ve beens running through my head, and then my stomach lurched with guilt over how selfish that was, when these two other men hadn’t been as fortunate as I.
“You’re telling me that this psycho had done this shit before?” Sean said.
“Looks that way. But no bodies have ever been recovered. That’s another reason we were hoping to sit down with you, Mr. Thorne. Not only to help bring you some closure by telling you everything we know, but to ask you what you might know. To see if there’s anything you remember after looking through some of his belongings.”
“But I’d never talked to this Kyle guy before,” I said. “I didn’t even know his name.”
“I know, but if we talk, something might come to mind. And that could help us establish a pattern between the time he meets his victims and the escalation of his behavior. It could help us find these missing men and bring closure to their families as well.”
How was this happening? I could barely believe my own ears. This man, this Kyle Gates, had not only stalked me, but might’ve killed two men?
I was going to be sick.
“Xander? You need something stronger than that coffee? I think I might have some scotch.” Sean…that was Sean asking me that.
I shook my head. I didn’t need a drink. I needed a bucket so I didn’t mess up his floors.
“No. I’m fine. This is just…a lot. I wasn’t expecting it.”
“I know.” Nichols rubbed a hand over his chin. “Do you want to take a minute or keep going?”
“Keep going.” If it meant helping find these two men, I’d do whatever it took to push through to the other side.
“Okay. So this guy was a master at blending in. He was so everyday normal that you wouldn’t have even thought twice about him being in the same space as you, unless someone sat down and pointed him out to you at each encounter.”
“Something I’m assuming you’re about to do.”
“We know some of them now, yes. Maybe you’ll remember more as we go along.”
My stomach clenched as I continued to look at Kyle’s face, trying to place it in any situation other than the awards night. But all I could see was him asking me what wine I’d like and then him lying on the ground, a blank stare in the place of wild eyes, murderous eyes.
“I…I don’t remember him. Other than at the awards.”
“That’s okay.” Nichols looked to Sean. “You remembered him from Xander’s building, correct?”
I turned to see Sean studying the picture and nodding.
“You do?” I asked.
“Yeah. I recognized him when everything started going to shit. Or, at least, I thought I did, and let the captain know last week when I called in. Seeing this photo confirms it. He was cleaning the lobby doors of your building the day we came home from the coffee shop with our pastries.”
I tried to think back to that day, tried to place the man by the doors. Nichols suggested, “Close your eyes,” and I did.
Sean had taken me in a new direction from my usual route. We’d gone west, and I’d discovered that lovely little boutique bakery, and on the way back I’d been so caught up in my new feelings that I hadn’t been paying attention to anything around me. I could see no faces, could see no man washing the lobby doors. All I could see was Sean, and all I felt was…happy.
Frustrated, I cursed.
“Hey…” Sean said, his voice calm and soothing. “This isn’t a test.”
It sure felt like one. “Okay, so, he worked at my building. That’s how he knew about the video surveillance? It’s how he got into my place?”
“Yes,” Nichols said. “But that was toward his end game, not where he first met you. We believe that happened nearly two months earlier.”
“Two months?” I could feel the blood drain from my face, and my head begin to spin. “He’d been watching me for two months?”
“As far as we know. Yes.”
“Fuck.” Sean rubbed a hand over his face, and I had the fleeting thought that he looked very similar to how I felt right now: equal parts shocked and pissed off.
“When we recovered his van, we got our first glimpse into how deluded this guy was. He had photos, news articles, real estate printouts of your place plastered all over the inside of his vehicle. The first piece of evidence we recovered was a photo dated two months ago. We’re not sure if that’s the first time he saw you, but it’s the first documented sighting.”
My breathing started to come fast now, and the walls of Sean’s living room seemed to be closing in. I couldn’t see, couldn’t think, and when I put a hand to my forehead, I heard Sean saying my name.
“Huh?”
“Do you need a break? Maybe we should take a break.”
“No. I want to do this.” I blinked and refocused on Nichols, knowing the sooner we got through this, the sooner it would be over. “Please, keep going.”
“Okay. The photo, it was at a coffee cart in the park. You were in running clothes and were talking to the barista—”
“Eddie.”
“Eddie?” Nichols repeated.
“Yes. He owns the cart. He’s there every day except Mondays.”
“Very good. Now, close your eyes again and think back to when you were in the park talking to Eddie, back to any day you were there in the past two months, and tell me what you see.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to picture the coffee cart, trying to picture Eddie. “I see lots of people out exercising…runners, walkers, people with dogs and strollers.”
“Good, that’s good. What about people relaxing, people maybe sitting on a park bench? Someone reading, or…on their phone.”
I concentrated a little harder on the vision in my mind and nodded. I remembered a woman who liked to sit under the large maple tree near Eddie’s cart. She read every morning, whenever the sun was out, and then there was…
“Wait a minute, there’s a man. He’s wearing headphones—”
“Is it Kyle?”
I tried to make out the details of his face but couldn’t. They were just a blur. “I don’t know.”
“That’s okay. Can you see what color hair he has?”
I rubbed at my left eye, a headache forming somewhere behind it as I tried to see more than a blank face. “I see nothing.” Annoyed at myself, I let out a sigh and opened my eyes. “This is hopeless. I don’t remember anything.” Frustrated, I got to my feet and started pacing.
“This happens a lot. It’s normal not to recall every single detail about a moment. The thing about Kyle is that there’s absolutely nothing remarkable about him.”
I stopped and looked down at Nichols, caught off guard by his casual dismissal of the deceased, even though he had been a nutjob, and more than likely a murderer.
“I don’t say that to be mean or cruel,” Nichols added. “In fact, in Kyle’s case, it worked in his favor. His lack of distinction made it easy for him to blend into the background. He was average height, average build, and didn’t stand out in any way.”
“You see,” Sean said as he got to his feet, “we interact with hundreds of people during our everyday life and workweek, and most of us don’t pay any attention if someone overlooks something we said or accidentally ignores something you did. But for people like Kyle…”
“Every slight is personal.” Nichols took the photo from the file and handed it to me to take another look. As I studied his features, again trying to place him somewhere I might’ve overlooked him, Nichols added, “You might’ve done something you didn’t even realize that could be taken as a rejection or snub. But to him—because he’d locked in on you in a sexual way—he obsessed over it.”