He walked over and opened up the door to a supply closet. “I’m thinking that the agent who sent you the threats was here tonight and they left right through this window. Maybe they knew we were babysitters. It could be that they’re either a sleeper or operating naked—could even be a swallow.”
“Of course. I hadn’t considered that, um, possibility,” I responded somberly. I had no idea what half of the words he’d just used meant, but he used them as if he thought I did.
It wasn’t like he was going to suddenly demand, “What does operating naked mean? What’s a sleeper, Hayden? Tell me, damn it!” I was a writer of thrillers. Obviously, I already knew those things.
And, if he did ask, I would just say that the villains in my stories operated clothed and didn’t like swallowing. Easy peasy.
“Classic E&E. I kept up surveillance and found Chuckles here harassing the staff—”
“Harassing the staff or harassing Aaris?”
He gave a heavy sigh. “Does it make a difference?”
I nodded wisely. “It does, actually. Because if it’s just some random staff member, then it’s like a Good Samaritan act. If it’s Aaris, then that changes things.”
“How?”
I groaned loudly, startling Groping Greg out of his dazed stupor. “How? You took her home and, instead of leaving your number, you left her with the contact info for AA.”
Max rubbed at his chin, obviously lost in thought. “I use burners, so my number’s always different and she does drink too much. Plus, people spend way too much time attached to the damn things. I fail to see how any of that relates to this though.”
I threw up my hands in frustration. “You made her think you liked her and this!” I pointed at Greg. “This is just confusing things!”
“Who said I didn’t like her?”
“But you… you just left,” I finished weakly.
“Does Jake know you’re here?”
I shook my head. “No. Does he know you’re here?”
He cocked his head to the side with a frown. “Who do you think called me? I was already on surveillance, so he reached out to me as soon as he got the door unlocked—”
I held up my hand. “Wait. You’re trying to tell me that Jake called you down here?”
Max nodded nonchalantly. “Yeah, he wanted to stay with you, so he had me keep watch here…see what intel I could gather.”
“But, then why the hell did he make me feel like I hallucinated the entire thing?” My mind raced like I’d missed some crucial point in the conversation.
Max shrugged as he knelt next to Greg. “I don’t know. Maybe he thought you’d freak out if you knew that someone attempted to kill you. Some people react poorly to that, I guess.”
I shook my head. Assassins were weird.
Had he really believed I was in danger? If so, then why try to convince me that it was all in my head?
“I’m, uh, I’m just gonna walk out the, um,” I paused, trying to rein my thoughts into something resembling sentences.
Max stood up quickly and faced me. “Okay. Just keep your focus on the door.” Having issued his strange warning, he turned his attention back to the unconscious man on the floor.
I bit my lip, debating whether or not to ask him to elaborate before deciding that it was better to just leave. I had to still be in shock. A normal person would’ve been rocking on the floor by now.
I sucked in a gasp as I passed the mirror. The middle section of glass had been shattered from one end to the other in a perfect line.
The crunching and scraping I’d heard had been this; I was certain of it. This was what Max hadn’t wanted me to see. I’d missed it before; with Jake rushing to get me downstairs.
Jake.
I stumbled out of the bathroom and fell into the wall of the small alcove, struggling to hold myself up like a drunk. And maybe I was; because suddenly Jake ‘I only care about myself’ Hopkins was keeping secrets in an attempt to protect me.
My head spun with nonsensical images as I clung to the wall. Jake and yoga bendy pretzel shapes. “Don’t let me down, wall. Keep me up just a little bit longer.”
Using it for support, I managed to make it to the staircase. The man dominating my thoughts stood at the bottom with a panicked look on his face. Once he saw me, he visibly relaxed and without my trusty wall there to support me, my knees gave out.
“Jake couldn’t be less interested in me—all we talked about was you.”
He cared about me; maybe not in a, ‘let’s get married and have a house full of cats together,’ kind of way, but it was still a step up from, ‘if you get dead, I can’t get back in the story.’
He knelt next to me, not even winded from his jog up the stairs. “Are you okay? Did something happen?” He brushed the hair back out of my face, and I wanted to weep at the contact.
Why couldn’t he have been real?
“I—” I choked. “I think I want to go home now.”
I’d find Aaris first thing tomorrow and apologize, but right now I needed my bed and a plan that got Jake his story without me losing my heart in the process.
“I’m ready.”
Jake turned away from the Angel of Death manuscript. “Do you have anything that doesn’t have a goddamn cat on it?”
“Why, what’s wrong with my shirts?” I pulled the material away from my body and looked down at it.
Calm Your Kitties.
It was adorable and I didn’t see the problem.
“Because in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re trying to solve a fucking investigation and your shirts are distracting.”
“So, stop staring at them.”
He’d been like this all day; snapping at me over the smallest slights.
“Is it typical for you to throw your used tissues on your desk?” He’d examined the pile with the same look of horror and revulsion that one might have if they found a cockroach on their dinner plate.
It wasn’t my fault that my nose ran due to allergies. And really, I was being environmentally conscious by conserving my tissues for future use.
Of course our ceasefire after the club incident had only lasted for the night. By the next morning, it was back to business as usual. As if his hand hadn’t rested against my knee for most of the drive home, squeezing every so often just to make sure I was still with him. As if he hadn’t continuously asked me how I was doing or offered to stop and get some food.
Where I’d gone to bed completely convinced that he had feelings for me, I woke up in a completely different world. One where Jake was just a detective who wanted to get home and I was nothing more than a means to an end.
He clenched and unclenched his jaw. “You stick out like a flashing neon sign. I’m trying not to draw attention to us everywhere we go, okay? No cats. You with me now?”
He turned to the computer and I mouthed the words at his back before flipping him off.
“I saw that,” he responded dryly. “Instead of wasting more of our time, you could be changing.”
And we were back to being enemies. I briefly wondered if Max had told him that I’d gone back to the bathroom last night. Maybe that was the cause of all of this. He’d told me to stay put and I hadn’t listened.
“And what’s with Jessa?” He pointed at the screen. “It’s like she’s seconds away from slitting her damn wrists—”
“What do you mean? She’s grieving the loss of her brother and trying to figure out what happened,” I protested around the lump in my throat. I’d thought the story was starting to come together.
He pushed the laptop screen down to the keyboard with an ominous click before dragging his hand through his hair. “That’s just it. You’re so presumptuous—thinking you know everything there is to know about the Hopkins clan. Here’s a newsflash: I haven’t spoken to Jessa since I joined the department.”
“But, you knew what she was doing and you said how she was as a person; it just seemed like you two were close.”
He’d said that, hadn’t he?
His hand dropped from his hair down to the back of his neck. “I keep in touch with my parents. They give updates, but it’s not like I need to reach out to her, you know?”
I felt like a child; one who’d spent too much time playing make-believe. I’d made a major mistake by assuming I knew their family dynamic.
Once upon a time, I sat down and wrote what was in my head, researching the details as they came up. Now, I no longer knew the rules to a game that I’d mastered since I was a kid.
How was I supposed to write a novel when the major characters were keeping crucial details from me?
“I… I just thought—” I began.
He cut me off. “What, Hayden? You thought that after spending a week together that you’d somehow have the whole story? That we’d have a few drinks and I’d forget why I was here? Can you please just go change so we can leave?”
He growled the last part and the lump in my throat grew until it stretched against my skin painfully. Because he was right. I’d hoped that after some time together, he’d see that I wasn’t out to destroy anyone’s life. I’d stupidly thought that he’d eventually want to be my friend.
“Where are we going?” I managed softly.
He massaged his forehead with his thumb and middle finger. “Dinner. I need some air. I can’t stay cooped up in this apartment. So, if it’s alright with you, I’d really like for you to change clothes so that we can get the hell out of here. Bring your notebook, I’ll give you some plot tips.”
I dug my fingernails into my palms, leaving little crescent moon shapes of anger embedded in the skin. I was going to be convicted of murder before this book was done.
“Oh, I've got just the thing,” I bit out.
I pulled the black blazer from the back of my closet and dusted the shoulders off, deciding to pair it with the dark skinny jeans and leopard print stilettos.
Now, there’d only be a fourteen-inch difference between us. Just to level the playing field.
I hadn’t planned on wearing makeup or styling my hair, but knowing that he was anxiously waiting to leave in the other room suddenly left me with the desire to make him wait as long as possible.
I frowned at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and began the arduous task of digging through my makeup bag for the products that had all but guaranteed to take me from sleepless zombie to a red carpet ready A-lister.
My eyebrows looked like angry caterpillars who’d been woken up before they could transform into beautiful butterflies. I grabbed the tweezers with a sigh and tweaked out a few hairs until they resembled something seen on humans again.
I carefully applied eyeliner and mascara, taking my time to add loose curls to my long chestnut-colored hair. I slipped my glasses back on to observe my handiwork.
Maybe Jake saw me as pathetic for flirting with the bartender, but as I pushed my lips into a pout and coated them in blood-red lipstick, it hit me. He was so obsessed with proving that I didn’t know anything about him when in reality, he knew nothing about me.
I was a goddamn catch.
Deciding that my look was complete, I fired off text number eleven to Aaris. None of them had been read and even though her car was in the parking lot, she hadn’t answered the door when I’d gone over earlier today.
This was worse than the fight we had in high school when she’d insisted that the Mona Lisa had been painted by Leonardo DiCaprio; or the time we went to a concert and I spent all of our extra money buying each of us a shirt from the nice man hanging around outside the bathrooms.
Shirts that had half of the concert dates and locations cut off on the back.
I buttoned up the blazer and checked my phone again. I’d just go over there after dinner and bang on the door until she let me in.
“Hayden, sometime this century!” Jake growled in his Batman voice.
“Coming, Satan,” I muttered under my breath.
Fifteen
The drive to the restaurant was silent, which suited me just fine. Jake flipped through radio stations while I tried to distract myself from the fact that Aaris still hadn’t responded to my texts.
I checked emails, scrolled through all of my social media accounts, gagging when I saw my brother’s smug face in yet another random city. It didn’t help. I still had this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that I may have gone too far with what I said.
“This place seems casual,” I noted dryly, as Jake parallel parked in front of a large glass building with stone columns flanking the front doors. Two stone lions glared straight ahead, daring us to try to enter their fine establishment.
“That’s because it is. You eat too much fast food; I thought it’d be good to get something good into you.”
I bit down on the corner of my lip and turned back to my window with a grin. I’d been trying to get something good into me since he’d shown up.
“What?” he demanded. “What did I say?”
“Nothing. Let’s eat. I’m starving.”
He helped me down from the truck and handed the keys over to the valet before leading me past the beasts of the apocalypse. I tried to ignore the heat from his hand as it pressed against the small of my back and the way it made me want to rub my head against him like Bootsy did when she was marking her territory.
The hostess gave me a polite smile before her eyes moved up to rest on the mountain of a man behind me. I had to admit that he was impossible to miss in the charcoal gray suit that had to be custom made to fit him the way it did.
And I was clearly underdressed.
Her eyes turned feral as they moved back down to me, clearly sizing me up for a fight. I crossed my arms and stared her down.
“Just two?” She looked up toward Jake, dismissing me.
“Just two,” he replied with a smirk, as she led us past cloth-covered tables to a booth in the back.
I determined that, along with citrus and spice, there appeared to be a distinct undertone of ménage à trois layered into his cologne.
“Your server will be right with you,” she said while giving him what was probably her best seductive pout.
I waited until she gave up and walked off before rolling my eyes and pantomiming jacking off into my hand. Jake pretended not to notice as he looked down at his phone, but I was certain I saw the corner of his lip turn up.
“Is it warm in here, Jake?”
He looked up with a frown. “No. Why?”
“I’m feeling a little warm.” I stood up and unbuttoned the blazer and his eyes turned murderous.
“What. The. Fuck?” he bit out through a clenched jaw.
“Is something wrong? Are you hot too?” I grinned before slipping back into the booth.
I pointed at my Detective Claws: Solving Mysteries with Purrfect Precision shirt. “Oh, do you have a problem with this? I thought it was purrfect for solving investigations. Isn’t that what you said we were doing?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose and picked his phone up again. “I thought we agreed that you were going to pick something without a cat on it.”
“That’s the thing. The only things I have without cats on them are cut down to here.” I ran the back of my hand down the center of my chest, stopping in between my tits. “And that just doesn’t seem appropriate for a professional dinner, does it?”
He shifted in the booth and picked at the sleeves of his suit jacket, suddenly doing everything in his power to avoid making eye contact with me.
“Hello there. How are you doing this evening?” our waitress asked before placing a hard-backed menu in front of Jake. She didn’t even spare me a glance as she dropped a paper menu and crayons in front of me.
I stared down at it in confusion. It was a kid’s menu, which was puzzling on multiple levels. This didn’t seem like a place that catered to the twelve and under crowd and I had passed the cut-off fifteen years ago.
“Uh.” I held up my hand. “What is this?”
She looked down at me with her highly glossed lips
turned up into a condescending grin. She’d probably applied it specifically for Jake’s benefit. “Is there a problem? Would you like some different crayon colors, sweetie?”
I watched Jake, waiting for him to intervene. He was a decent human; surely he wasn’t going to let her get away with talking to me like I was three.
Sensing my stare, Jake looked over his menu at mine and smirked. “You know, I think we might need a booster seat. She can barely reach her water glass.”
I ground my molars together and growled, “Martini. Top shelf. And an adult menu if you think you can manage such a difficult task.”
“Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry,” she purred. “But I’m going to need to see some ID.”
Jake chuckled and brought the menu back up over his face with a whispered, “Good luck,” as I dug around in my purse for my driver’s license.
“Here.” I slapped it into her palm.
She frowned and brought it up to her face. “Five-one… wow. And what about you, big guy?”
He gave her a panty-melting smile. “I’ll have the Pappy’s, on the rocks. Thanks.”
She handed me my ID and disappeared. Meanwhile, I continued staring daggers until he gave up any pretense of looking over the menu.
“What?” he grunted.
“Why—” Wet anger crept into my voice and I paused until it seemed to pass. He wasn’t worth my tears. “Why did you do that? Why would you go along with her?”
He shrugged. “I thought we were just having fun.”
“Oh, silly me. Fun. Of course.” I looked down and began rifling through my purse. I needed a distraction before I launched my probably expensive water goblet across the table.
“Hayden, I wasn’t try—”
“Oh, it’s fine. I get it. We’re not friends.”
I waited in vain for him to apologize, but he didn’t say another word. We sat in silence until our drinks arrived and I immediately ordered another before draining the glass in front of me. “Just keep them coming.”
After everything I’d done for him, he was just going to let people talk down to me? So, maybe I’d thrown him off a building. That was in the past.
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