Chapter 31
“ Let’s go back to the kitchen and grab something to eat,” Darby suggested, as soon as Tristan disappeared.
“We’ll order takeout, you can’t cook, in your condition,” Eli said.
“‘My condition’ makes it sound like some kind of Victorian disease that can’t be spoken in mixed company,” she said, nose wrinkled. “Besides, I’m not in the mood for takeout. I want real food.”
“But you shouldn’t cook. You’re recovering from major surgery.” Eli bit his lip, thinking. “I wonder if I could pick something up from my mom. She always has real food on hand.”
Darby laughed. “You’re only a pretend grownup, if your mom is still feeding you.”
“My mom warned me a girl would say that, to try and get me away from her. I’m going to text her, let her know she was right about everything.” He took out his phone and pretended to text.
Darby chuckled and tugged his sleeve. “Lucky for you, I also always have food on hand. I’ll pull something from the freezer.”
“At least let me heat it up for you,” he offered.
“Okay,” she readily agreed. In truth, she felt exhausted. Her body was nowhere near recovered from surgery, and it had been a long day. As comfortable as Eli’s uncle’s house was, she hadn’t slept well. Darby was a homebody, and all she wanted was to go home, especially after being in the hospital.
She sat at her kitchen table and motioned toward the freezer. “Why don’t you pick, there are a few things up there.”
Eli stuck his head in the freezer and whistled appreciatively. “Wow, this is a lot of food.”
“I know,” Darby groaned. “I guess I never acclimated to being single, after Ham. I kept cooking for two and socking everything away. I should toss it all.”
Eli made a pained sound. “No, that would be so wasteful. Think of all the starving people in our apartment building, like me.” He reached for a brown package marked “roast beef,” mouth already watering in anticipation. Roast beef was one of his favorite foods, and he only ate it when his mother took pity on him and made a Sunday dinner kind of meal.
Darby watched him shuffle her cupboards for an appropriate bowl to warm the food and felt a strange mix of peace and an unnamed ache. It was nice to have him in her kitchen, and she couldn’t discern if she was so lonely that it was nice to have anyone, or if it was specifically nice to have Eli. She thought maybe it was the latter, and that terrified her more than a little.
Ham had been a big presence. Loud and boisterous, he took up almost all the space and air in their house. Her life had revolved around him. At the time, she hadn’t known better, had believed that was the way marriage was, that women lived to serve at the whim of men. But Eli wasn’t like that. His presence didn’t crowd her out of the kitchen, and neither did it compel her to get up and serve him. He was just there , so very there, filling the space with warmth and good cheer. It was cozy to have Eli near her, and she liked that coziness, so much that it made her blush when he tossed her a little smile.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“Ish,” she answered. “What happened to all the girls you were seeing?”
He froze a few beats before slowly beginning to stir again. “That makes me sound much more popular than reality. I had a few various dates. Most of them didn’t work out.”
“Most?” she asked, propping her head on her arm. He was very cute, she thought, standing at her stove, stirring the little pan of pot roast. He gave her a feeling she couldn’t pinpoint and then, to her extreme embarrassment, she realized what it was: Eli set her biological clock aquiver. It was all too easy to see him as husband and father material, and she didn’t think she’d ever had that thought about someone before, not even the man she married. But Eli was so paternal. He would be that dad who coached his son’s teams and didn’t care if they actually won, who watched YouTube videos about how to braid his daughter’s hair. He’d be a helpful and patient partner, a solid provider. All in all, he was a walking life goal.
“I’ve had a couple of dates with someone, but…” He let that trail off, frowning as he stared at the melting contents of the pan.
“But what?” she asked, and her heart thumped. Why did her heart thump like that?
He turned down the stove and faced her. “If I really cared about her, would I be here with you?”
Her heart thrummed harder. “Oh,” she croaked.
He faced forward and turned the stove back up. “It’s fine, don’t worry about it, you don’t have to respond to that. I’m tired and hungry and probably blurting things I shouldn’t. Do you want to know my bank password? I’ll probably tell you.”
“Depends on how much is in there,” she joked, but he didn’t take the bait. She stared at his tense back a while, trying to figure out how to proceed. Did she want to proceed? She had sworn off men, possibly forever. Shouldn’t she stick to that? Shouldn’t she maintain her safe little life, free from encumbrances? The girl he was seeing was probably so nice , so sweet, so normal, so safe. It was a sure bet she’d never had a tumor that made her break into his house in the middle of the night, never accidentally involved herself in a murder, never passed out in a puddle of blood in his bedroom.
Yes, she should definitely let him go. It was the nice thing to do, the safe thing to do, the best thing to do. Why couldn’t she find the words, though? She opened her mouth and it hung there suspended, no sound coming out. She closed her mouth, took a deep breath, pressed her palms to the table, and tried again, “Eli.”
He turned to look at her, reluctantly, she thought, and then his eyes widened and his jaw slacked. “Darby,” he croaked.
Wow, okay, he wants to talk about feelings even less than I do. There was some comfort in that. Maybe he didn’t want to hear her rejection. Maybe she shouldn’t reject him.
“Isn’t this cozy,” a female voice said, and then the barrel of a gun pressed to Darby’s temple.
“Sheena,” Eli said.
Sheena? Who was Sheena? Wasn’t Sheena the name of a warrior princess? But when Darby peeked out the corner of her eye, she didn’t see a warrior; she saw a slightly chubby woman, holding a revolver in her shaky right hand.
“Didn’t expect to see me here, did you?” Sheena demanded, voice high and manic.
“Here in my landlord’s apartment?” Eli said. “No, no I did not.”
Darby resisted the hysterical urge to laugh. Was he trying to be funny in this tense, terrible situation, or could he not help it?
“I think there’s been some mistake,” Darby said. She tried to make her tone gentle and soothing, but it must not have worked because Sheena thumped her in the head with the end of the gun and OUCH.
“Shut up, just shut up. Of course he’d cheat on me with you. Of course he would.” She started to cry and used her free hand to wipe her tears, leaving a streak of mascara across her cheek, as if she needed to add a visual to the I’M CERTIFIABLE vibe she gave off.
Eli and Darby made eye contact. Darby wondered if they were thinking the same thing, that it would go well to do or say whatever necessary to placate Sheena. “Look, Sheena, you’re not my girlfriend,” Eli declared.
Darby winced. So, that was a no on keeping her placated.
“I saw you,” Sheena screamed. “I saw you kiss her.” She reared up like a wild mare. Somebody was about to get pawed by her sharp hooves, and it would likely be Darby, not Eli, who stood helplessly by. He opened his mouth, but before he could say whatever he was about to say that might make Sheena stabby, Darby intervened.
“He didn’t kiss me,” Darby blurted.
Sheena bestowed crazy eyes on her, a warning that whatever she said next better be good, or else. She put up her hands in surrender. “ I kissed him , I swear. And I didn’t know he was seeing anyone, until just now, right before you walked in. Obviously I wouldn’t have kissed him, if I knew he had a girlfriend.”
“I,” Eli began, but Darby snapped her fingers at him to get him to stop talking. Now was not the moment to declare his singlehood, not when the bunny boiler was in her kitchen with a gun. He took a breath, as if coming to his senses at last. “That’s right. She kissed me. I didn’t even like it. Icky.”
Both women looked at him, and he shrank back under their combined disdain. Darby had no idea what Crazy McButterpants thought at that moment, but as for her, she didn’t exactly relish hearing that her first kiss in five years was “icky.”
“I should probably kill her, then,” Sheena said reasonably, as if they were discussing what to do with the mouse she’d caught.
“Here’s the thing, though, we’re sort of in the middle of tying up another murder, and my friend is actually a former cop. He’s definitely going to be suspicious if someone else gets killed,” Eli said. He was doing a good job of mimicking her tone, crazy and absurd. It would have been funny, if it weren’t so terrifying.
Sheena huffed, annoyed. “Fine. I’ll take her out into the country and get rid of her, keep your name out of it. That way it won’t leave any evidence here. Get up.” She motioned toward Darby with the gun.
“It’s going to take me a minute,” Darby said weakly. She pressed a hand to her abdomen. “I just had abdominal surgery. I’m very sore, can barely move.”
“Wah, wah, wah,” Sheena said, rolling her eyes.
Painstakingly, Darby rose to her feet and then, in a blur of quick movement, sucker punched Sheena in the nose. Sheena screeched, in shock this time, and dropped the gun as she reached for her bloodied nose with both hands. Darby lunged for the gun, wincing now, as she secured it and turned it on Sheena.
“You said you could barely move,” Sheena accused, her voice muffled by blood and her hands.
“Wah, wah, wah,” Darby returned. “That’ll teach you to ever trust a southern girl.”
“Am I disturbed or impressed?” Eli wondered aloud.
“Can’t you be both?” Darby returned.
He grinned at her and held up his phone. “The police are on their way, I was secretly pocket texting them.”
“You can do that?” Darby asked.
“Kind of. If you look closely at the text it actually says Helf mu vravy gurf id hebe , but they must have some kind of situational translation software, because they texted back that the officer is on his way.” At that moment, someone knocked on the door. “This neighborhood gets prompt service.”
“I pay a lot of taxes,” Darby told him.
The reality was that Tristan was at the station handing off Rogan when the call came over the officer’s scanner, and he was the one who realized something was amiss and dispatched the officers, emergency status. He showed up a couple of minutes behind them because, no longer an officer, he went the speed limit the whole way and didn’t use a siren.
Sheena was soon cuffed and would be medically assessed after she was booked. Eli and Darby gave their statements. Tristan disappeared wherever private detectives go, when cases are finished. “Probably to the gym,” Eli guessed. There was a whole lot more he wanted to say to Darby, unresolved things he felt hanging between them, but by the time it was all over, Darby was flagging. She excused herself to bed, almost as soon as the officers left.
Eli ate supper, tidied the kitchen, and then lingered, feeling like an idiot. What did he expect? For the beautiful woman to emerge from her bedroom and tell him she was madly in love with him? Right. His life didn’t work like that. For consolation, he texted Josie.
Can’t computer date anymore. He didn’t elaborate, guessing that Tristan would fill her in on the night’s events. Not because Tristan was naturally chatty, but because Josie would pry it out of him.
New idea: prison dating. Seriously though, I’m sorry, it stinks. We’ll keep looking for Mrs. Eli, I promise.
Eli’s glance darted to Darby’s closed bedroom door. I think I’m ready to be done for a while, he texted. When Josie sent a broken heart instead of an answer, urging him to change his mind, he knew she agreed. He let himself out of Darby’s apartment, taking care to lock the door behind him.
Once back at his own apartment, he showered, crawled into bed, and almost immediately fell asleep. The previous days had been draining and eventful; his bed had never felt so good.
“Eli. Psst. Eli.”
Eli sat up. Darby sat on what had become her usual spot on the edge of his bed. “Darby?”
“Yeah. Hi.”
“Are you okay? Is this another tumor situation? Because I don’t know how many more pieces of you can safely be removed.”
She puffed a soft laugh. “You’re so funny.”
“Thank you. Seriously, though, are you delusional right now?”
“Maybe, we’ll see how it goes. The thing is that, um,” she paused and swallowed hard. “I missed you.”
“When? Since you’ve been asleep?”
“Yes. Since you left. This is weird, I know, but what’s weirder is that I didn’t really miss Ham. I was shocked over his death. I grieved and mourned, but when that process was over, I picked myself up and went on. For a long time, I thought that meant there was something wrong with me, that I was defunct.”
“You did have a pretty massive tumor,” Eli interjected.
“I don’t think it was tumor related. I think he was forty years older than me. It was only ever going to be a certain way between us. I didn’t know that then, didn’t understand how it could be any different with someone my age.”
“So this is an age thing, a proximity thing?” he tried, feeling confused but hopeful.
“No. All the other guys in this building are almost the same age, and they live close. I think…I think it’s a you thing.” She glanced down at her laced hands, suddenly shy, and Eli thought his heart might rupture out of his chest. He could only glimpse pieces of her in the moonlight, but she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen in real life. And she was shy, sweet, sincere, a little uncertain, an amazing cook, funny, fun, smart, good with money, faithful, basically everything he’d ever hoped to find and never thought possible, in one little package. The only flaw he could find was her propensity to wake him up at the most unexpected times. He could work around it, he supposed, as he reached for her hand and held it.
“Would you maybe want to go out with me sometime? Like on a date? I have a lot of dating experience now. We could talk about small rodents, I could burn a rent payment on steak, you could stalk me. I’ve learned so much that I’m anxious to pass along to you.”
She laughed and edged closer, tipping toward him a little. “Yeah, I kind of think I’d like that. Maybe a lot.”
He tipped closer and touched his fingers to her neck. She smelled as good as she looked and felt, and how was that possible? “I’m not hallucinating you, am I?”
“Hallucinating is my thing, don’t take that from me,” she returned.
He kissed her. She kissed him back, and it was a long time before either of them got any more sleep that night.
T hank you for reading Fluffed and Folded, the third book in the Private Spies series.