If Jacob were here, he’d rib me about the hot mess I’d managed to step into, but not without somehow making me feel like he had my back, a hundred percent. Not by what he said or did, but the way he looked at me. Like he knew I was capable of great things, even when I wasn’t quite sure myself. If I set my mind to something, whether or not I was particularly suited to the task, Jacob swallowed the urge to step in and show me how things should be done—usually—because when he told me he believed in me, it was more than just lip service. He really did. This may have resulted in us eating blackened, crunchy grilled cheese sandwiches that somehow ended up with non-melted middles, and I’m not quite sure what I actually learned. Just that I wished I could look out over the sea of rickety chairs and see his earnest eyes on me.
Listening to the first guy speak was torture. I didn’t catch half of what he said, mainly because I was busy checking my phone to see if there was any update from Bly. There wasn’t. But I did inadvertently reinforce the stay-at-home douchebag’s character by making him look like he was too important to pay attention.
History guy finished his reading to a smattering of applause from the handful of aging queerfolk with nowhere better to be on a Friday night, and then Cleghorn took the podium, and with gleeful enthusiasm, introduced award-winning columnist, Victor Baine.
“From the Zeitgeist Journal.”
The crowd murmured as if that meant something.
Given that I lived my life in a perpetual state of anxiety, you would think the dread that came with public speaking would be nothing new. Apparently, though, my capacity for discomfort was even greater then I realized. I took the tablet from Cleghorn—the font size was enormous—and wondered if I should spin some bullshit from my FPMP-created backstory to introduce myself. And then I realized I was drawing a total blank.
A carrot-in-the-headlights moment if ever there was one.
Jacob wasn’t there, Bly wasn’t there, and unless I wanted to fake a seizure, the only thing left for me to do was read. Since I would probably rupture something flailing around on the floor in those skinny jeans…I read.
“It’s high time to explore the dialectic between masculine archetypes and the homosexual community, with the understanding that gender is a dynamic, as is community and, indeed, sexuality in general.”
As I caught my breath, I glanced up at the crowd, fully expecting someone to stand up, point their finger in accusation, and declare me the biggest fraud since Enron. But no. There were a few mildly furrowed eyebrows and one or two glassy stares, but nobody seemed to notice I had zero idea what I was even reading.
I carried on, spooling out a shitshow of ridiculous twenty-five-cent words.
“To contextualize the critical-practical perspectives of the gay discourse and the prevalent theoretical framework of male sexuality, I propose a potentially innovative model that draws on empirical observations curated through a gender-sensitive lens.”
Any minute now, someone was bound to call my bluff. I checked in with the audience again. More furrowing of brows. But no one was checking their phone. Apparently, no one else was as big of an inconsiderate dickhole as Victor Baine.
The essay went on. And on. And on. A deluge of words. So many words. But I managed to say them. Yes, I did.
“Going forward, the organic growth of this road map to the pathologization of masculinity and the aggregate alienation from the natural state has led to a virgin field pregnant with possibilities that offers a fruitful avenue for further consideration.”
I jabbed at the tablet’s touchscreen a few more times before I realized that was the end. Was I supposed to announce “the end?” Or was that as bad as beginning something with once upon a time? I looked up to get a feel for the room, not that I’ve ever had any success with that, and locked eyes with a certain someone who’d just whisked through the door with a blast of cold air and a whirl of frosty snowflakes: my fake husband.
I was buffeted by relief. I could pretend to be in a tense relationship a heck of a lot easier than I could bluff my way through the pretentious lingo of the world’s most unfathomable writer. “Well, you missed it,” I announced. “I hope you’re happy.”
I might not be an empath—but I could tell by the widened eyes and alert postures that the audience was now getting a much better show than they’d bargained for. I gave Bly a look, then indicated Hale with a tilt of my head. Bly gave a subtle nod, then said, “Traffic was crazy. Look, I’m here now.”
“Are you? Or are you still worrying about losing that client?”
Unwilling to let his big intellectual reading devolve into a domestic melodrama, Cleghorn edged me away from the podium and announced, “Victor Baine. From the Zeitgeist Journal.”
Normally, I’d make an ineffective attempt at a gracious departure, but my obnoxious persona had no qualms about walking away and going to ream out his beleaguered spouse. I cut my eyes to show Bly which way I was going to walk—hopefully not too cop-like—and he veered the opposite way so we could corral Hale between us and loop him into a conversation, whether he liked it or not. But just as if they’d been choreographed to run interference, a trio of older gay guys in nice shoes and expensive winter overcoats sprang up and surrounded me.
“I was intrigued by your notion of the toxic heteronormative narrative,” one of them said, while the other two murmured their assent. And as they all thoughtfully sipped their boxed wine, Sylvester Hale somehow managed to slip around Bly and hobble right out the door.
20
Every time I’ve spotted an FPMP agent in the field and felt smug about it? I take it back. All of it. Pretending to be someone else is really freaking hard.
I was fully aware how lucky I was to be paired up with someone as well-versed in undercover work as Bly, and even he was getting frustrated with Hale. Together, we walked the few blocks back to the murder house with our hands jammed in our pockets and our heads bent against the cold. “How did the old guy outpace us?” Bly wondered.
“He probably hopped a cab.” I sighed, and my breath gusted out in a cloud of February frost. “God, that was excruciating. I’m glad you showed up when you did and saved me from having to try to talk about the thing I supposedly wrote. Bad enough trying to get through the reading. I pity the poor schlub who had to write it.”
“I randomly generated those things based on a few lists of keywords.”
I shot him a “Seriously?” look.
“What do you want from me?” he sniggered. “If you’d looked at them yourself, you would’ve figured out some way to get out of the reading.”
We trooped up the front walk and Bly held open the storm door as I fit my key into the lock. Those gay intellectuals at the bookstore weren’t the only ones moving in sync. Bly might abandon me to the tender mercies of our neighbors during the day, but we’d still spent a fair amount of time in each other’s company lately, and the two of us were starting to coordinate our movements like a real couple.
These days, I was definitely thinking about him less like the random empath at work—one who’d taken a serious volley of ectoplasmic spewage from Jennifer Chance—and more like an actual…what? “Friend” was a bit presumptuous, but “colleague” seemed awfully dry.
I handed off my coat since he was closer to the coatrack, and realized it was the same type of casual action I would’ve taken with Jacob. Not a particularly splashy move, just a nod to pragmatism—a dropping of the inconvenient please-and-thank-you you’d use with a co-worker.
The best term for what Bly had become for me over the past few days was a partner. It might be a loaded word. But it fit.
We headed off to the kitchen to eat our skimpy dinners and talk in low tones beneath the camouflage of music. He’d endured a stressful day. Something about sorting out a stockbroker leveling an accusation of undocumented unethical precognition at one of his competitors. It sounded complicated. Probably because I was still leery of the FPMP’s purported mission. And also because I’d never had much to do wi
th civil litigation.
As he spoke, I considered how deep he was in with the Program. Pretty damn deep. He was the pet empath of the last director. He must’ve been given a stunning amount of info on Con Dreyfuss’s projects—one of which had been me. Heck, he’d even admitted that he’d recently seen my file. If we really were partners, it didn’t make sense for me to hold out on asking what he knew. I was trying to come up with a smooth way to segue into the topic when he pushed away from the table and said, “Time to go do my penance for the donut I scarfed down at the Stock Exchange. And the damn thing was stale.”
Crap. Bly and me, we’d had a moment there—sort of—and I didn’t want to let it slip away. I trotted up two flights of stairs behind him. He’d paused in the middle of the home gym to thumb through his workout app. I wondered if I could claim I wanted to join him in his exercise routine. He was no lie detector, after all, but I had yet to determine what his empath brain saw in my fifty shades of anxiety.
I decided against the lie, since I’d already dodged a bullet that night reading that phony article. I’d need to stop tempting fate and just be direct for a change.
“So, listen,” I said softly, just in case Hale was lurking at the other side of the wall with his ear pressed up against the flimsy plasterboard, “despite the fact that I’m not really delivering on our primary objective—”
“Undercover work takes time.” Bly peeled off his tasteful charcoal gray sweater as he spoke, and hung it carefully over the treadmill. “You really never can tell, especially in this line of work. Once in a while you get lucky and score a hit right away. But you can’t count on it.”
He pulled on a baggy T-shirt, then unbuckled his belt. The merino wool slacks dropped and he draped them beside the sweater, and then stepped into a schleppy pair of track pants. I tried to imagine anyone at my old job willingly stripping down like that, but there really was no comparison. For the most part, they didn’t know I was gay. And the few who did had never disrobed in my presence.
One good thing about Bly’s acute empathy. He knew I wasn’t perving on him.
Watching Bly get comfortable made me realize my skinny jeans were cutting painful furrows in my hips and belly, and I checked to see if I had anything less constricting in my wardrobe. Hallelujah, I found another pair of sweatpants—this one with some artfully deconstructed inside-out seams, a random non-functional zipper and a drop crotch—but at least it would let my lower half decompress.
I changed into them—was there seriously no happy medium between jamming my scrotum against my taint and having the crotch hang halfway to my knees? Bly didn’t notice. He was loading up a barbell. “Since you’re up here, why don’t you spot me?”
“Sure.” I tried not to feel too relieved…since, empath.
He assumed the position on the weight bench and I helped him lift off. Talking was off the table for a moment. You don’t want to distract a guy who’s benching enough to squish his vital organs—Jacob taught me this without being the least bit condescending. Damn, I missed him. Hard. And doing things with Bly that I used to do with Jacob was bringing out the sentimental goof in me. I would’ve thought kissing goodbye or casually touching my fake husband in public would’ve rung those bells, but it didn’t. Because I’d developed a different vocabulary with Jacob, a specific language of touches and kisses that wasn’t anything like the dialog I was sharing with Bly. No, it was the mundane stuff that really stung. Handing him my coat. Spotting his bench-press. Of all the ridiculous things to get schmaltzy about….
Bly paused with the weight halfway up and said, “Do you smell that?”
We both froze, then I carefully helped him rack the heavy barbell. Once it was up and out of the way, we both gave a long, apprehensive sniff. It smelled like a weight room to me. Iron and new carpet, and laced through that, the smell of my hair goop and Bly’s deodorant.
“Specifically—where did our victim die?” I asked.
Bly gave me an odd look. “Victim?”
I waved it away. “Homicide habits. The last owner, I mean. Where’d they find her?”
“I’ll double-check.” Bly pulled out his phone and started swiping. “According to the report….” He gestured toward a stretch of floor space currently occupied by an elliptical. We both backed away a few steps. “So, murders. They tend to stick around?”
I gave a resigned nod. “And suicides. Accidents, too. But those mostly leave harmless repeaters.” Visual, usually. Audible, occasionally. I didn’t know if there was such a thing as a repeater smell. We both stared at the carpet with the sort of furrowed brow usually reserved for a Zeitgeist Journal column.
“It’s late,” Bly said. “But we’ve got a few options. We can chalk it up to a random smell in the floorboards and ride it out—you’re the expert, and like I said, if you say there’s no ghost, there’s no ghost. Or we get Laura on the phone and pull the plug.”
A great way to land in my own bed that night—but something wasn’t quite adding up. Not a haunting. But something definitely felt off. “I don’t want to cry wolf in front of Laura—she’s wound up tight enough as it is—especially over a rumor I heard from a kid with an overactive imagination. We’ve scanned this place again and again, and I haven’t actually seen any spirit activity.”
Bly nodded. “Your call. Like I said, this is your specialty. Not mine.”
We’d been sleeping in the townhouse nearly a week, and I hadn’t woken up with a ghost under my skin. Not yet, anyhow. And I hated to sound the alarms over a little stink. Especially when there was a perfectly logical reason for a foul odor to linger. Not a very palatable reason, mind you, but a logical one. “I want to finish what we started. But just to be safe…let’s break out the secret FPMP gear.”
At the very least, the frankincense would cover up the smell.
Bly made a pretty good exorcism partner. He must’ve studied up on my methodology before the assignment. In a pinch, I can throw some salt and spritz a little Florida Water, but if I’ve got enough privacy for the whole enchilada, I light candles at the cardinal points and put myself through the paces of a full-on ritual. Especially when I know I’ll be sleeping right downstairs.
It was a decent ritual. Even so, once the candles were snuffed, we still moved our bed to the opposite side of the room so it wasn’t directly below the place of death.
I woke up at my usual crack of dawn and shoved my way into yesterday’s skinny jeans. If there was another spirit riding around inside my body, no way would the both of us manage to cram our way in. As a precaution, I took a fresh look around the third-floor home gym. No ghosts. No smells, either—other than the ritual incense, which was still pretty strong.
All clear. At least, as far as I knew.
But I wasn’t sure.
A lack of certainty was a constant presence in my life—from whether or not I’d missed daylight savings time again to a certain bafflement whenever I encountered a ratio that four out of five high school dropouts clearly understood way better than me. In this case, though, I wasn’t willing to just ignore my niggling doubt.
I headed back to the bedroom to check in on Bly, and was momentarily startled to find him curled up tight on the edge of his side of the bed. Jacob never slept that way, not unless he had food poisoning. And that restaurant was now firmly on our “no” list.
But Bly wasn’t Jacob. And just because he was the big, strapping lunk I climbed into bed with at the end of the day—at least for the moment—I really couldn’t afford to let the boundaries blur. Bly wasn’t spirit Teflon, not like Jacob. If I was wrong about the ghost situation, it wouldn’t just be myself I was putting at risk.
“What’s eating you?” he mumbled into the sheets.
I did a guilty flinch. I hadn’t realized my worry was strong enough to wake up an empath. “As much as I don’t want to call in the cavalry over a little stink—I think it can’t hurt to double-check my work…with a little enhancement in place.”
Bly pushed up on one elbow
and rubbed sleep out of his eyes. “Laura doesn’t keep an undocumented stash of pharmaceuticals lying around. Not like Con used to.”
No, Laura was way more by-the-book than Dreyfuss ever was. “Not with psyactives. I wouldn’t take one of those nasty horse pills unless we were in some serious hot water. I was thinking something more like…yoga.”
If Bly were actually like Jacob, he wouldn’t have let that suggestion go without some playful ribbing. Bly, however, most definitely was not Jacob. “Since it’s Saturday, I’m assigned to you for the day. You think yoga’s the way to go? Then let’s hit the gym.”
21
When we trudged into the gym and asked about the next yoga class, the kid behind the counter said, “You’re in luck—there’s one starting right now. You’ll just make it if you skip the locker room and leave your coats and shoes by the door.”
I was sure the instructor would be really thrilled about that, but it would be better than barging in late.
No doubt there was more than one yogi at the gym. And so, of course, it was the one who gave me dirty looks as she tied me up in knots who was teaching. Yoga Lady’s look of general annoyance over my last-minute entrance morphed into one of pointed disdain as she recognized me.
She came striding over with great purpose. Her voice was low, even mild, but it was no less irritated when she told me, “Terri-Anne isn’t here.”
Thank god—I didn’t say that out loud.
Her voice went colder still. “And this is a couples class.”
From behind me, Bly said, “Good thing he brought his husband.”
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