Chapter Eleven
REPEATERS ARE TRICKY. You can’t talk to them, you can’t reason with them, and if their death was jarring enough, you can’t scrub ‘em out without a fight. Every once in a while, a repeater is useful in closing a cold case. But usually, they’re just a disturbing reminder that everybody dies.
If I was dealing with a repeater in the Boswell apartment—a big if—no amount of coaxing would do me a damn bit of good.
But since I was lacking an audience for once, I figured I should try anyway.
Just in case there was a consciousness behind the flicker.
I took in the soulless white walls, the bent mini blinds, the scuffed floor—then centered myself, and spoke.
“So…this is one hell of a place to spend eternity. If you’re stuck—say, something bad happened here, and nobody bothered to notice—I can’t fix it if you don’t help me out.
You’ve been staring people down, right? Well, newsflash.
None of them are in any position to look back.
And that’s where I come in. So why don’t you show yourself and tell me your story?
Or at least let me see you clearly enough to know I’m not just chasing shadows. ”
I scanned the room.
Nothing.
I scowled. The bus stop repeater might have been a coincidence.
Okay, that was stretching plausibility…but still.
If Boswell saw surveillance everywhere, then the presence of the repeater could’ve been correlation, not causation.
The room felt empty to me, and if it weren’t for the flicker I thought I’d seen, I’d have to chalk it up as a false alarm.
But I was pretty sure I’d seen a flicker.
Wasn’t I?
My hand drifted to my pocket, where I kept some salt packets and a mini spray bottle of Florida Water on me, just in case. But those were for getting rid of ghosts. Not amplifying them.
I pulled out my phone instead and slipped in my earbuds.
Blip bobbed up on my screen like we were best friends. A banner floated above him: “Ready for Match-a-Mood?”
I wasn’t, but I tapped it anyway.
A new mini game appeared. Little emoji faces scrolled across the screen—happy, tired, embarrassed, bored. I was supposed to tap the one that best matched my current “brain state.” I picked the frowny face. Then I was prompted to choose the one I wanted to achieve.
Emojis suck, I never know what they’re supposed to mean. All I wanted was alpha waves, and that used to be as easy as picking the word Relaxed from a list. Now I was supposed to navigate these dumb smileys.
I stared at the one with the half-lidded eyes and the tiny smile. Was that supposed to be calm? Sleepy? Stoned?
There was another one with stars for eyes, but that seemed like overkill. I didn’t want to become ecstatic. I just wanted to not be all keyed up.
I sighed and tapped the one with the little puff of air by its mouth and hoped it was sighing in relief, not exasperation.
Blip clapped his articulated hands together. The background changed to some glittery nebula and the music started its fake-calming loop. A rocket blasted off and hovered there among the stars. I held my breath for a moment and it juddered forward.
While I drifted into the bedroom, the app chirped and buzzed in my ears, distracting me. No cold spot. No flicker of motion. No pressure behind my eyes. Nothing.
I let the rocket crash into an asteroid and just stood there for a minute, staring at the closet door.
The app blared a sad trumpet and flashed: “Ouch! Let’s try again, Space Explorer!”
I locked the phone.
Mood Blaster wasn’t going to help me. Maybe nothing would.
I trotted out every last tool in my toolkit, from white light visualization to a downward dog, and still came out with a bunch of nothing.
Intellectually, I thought the apartment might be haunted.
But my sixth sense was not in agreement.
Especially when the recurring sensation of “someone’s looking at me” turned out to be the nosy stray at the back window.
It saw me watching and bolted, just like before.
At least one of us knew when to cut our losses.
It was late by the time I headed home. I was tired, I was frustrated, and I was working on that particular headache that comes from staring at a blank wall. Jacob was already home when I got there, and I found myself dreading the part where I’d have to tell him exactly how poorly I’d performed.
Jacob might treat our place like a breeding ground for lost socks, but he doesn’t skip workouts, he doesn’t let the gas tank dip below a quarter, and he definitely doesn’t come home empty-handed after a day in the field.
Maybe he wouldn’t mean to make me feel like I’d dropped the ball—but somehow, he always managed to phrase things in a way that sounded constructive while still leaving me twitchy. “How about…?” “But what if you tried…” “Have you considered…” Yeah. I’d considered. All of it.
But when I walked into the cannery expecting to field some well-meaning suggestions, something was different.
I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. Just a subtle shift.
A sort of… spaciousness. Like the place had taken a deep breath and was holding it, waiting for me to notice.
The clutter was gone. No socks, no scrap paper, no junk mail.
The recycling bin, usually bursting at the seams, had been emptied.
And the dining room table—which normally served as a dumping ground for bills, half-sorted case folders, and the occasional crusty coffee mug—was completely cleared.
Set, even.
Two plates. Silverware. Actual cloth napkins. And the smell of homemade marinara.
Jacob had cleaned the whole house…and now he was cooking me dinner.
Not because it was a special occasion. But to make me happy.
I found him in the steamy kitchen looking especially tasty in T-shirt and sweatpants with a sheen of sweat on his brow. “Good, you’re home. The water just came to a boil.”
I stared at him for a moment, forgetting to answer.
He turned and looked at me shyly (for him.) “What?”
I slipped my arms around his waist, pressed into his side, and nudged my forehead against his temple, thinking that I could already feel myself unwinding—and this was all so much better than trying to pick the right emoji so as not to crash my rocket ship. “Nothing. Just feels good to be home.”
I’d only meant to catch and release…but then paused to check the hard plane of his abs, simply to remind myself how nice they felt.
Jacob chuffed out a laugh. “You must be starving.”
“Guess so.” I slid a hand down his waistband.
I hadn’t intended to start groping. But, hey, I’m only human.
His glutes are firm and round and perfect, in a way you might miss beneath the structure of a suit.
But when there’s nothing hiding his ass but a stretch of jersey knit, it’s hard to notice anything else.
As I fondled he went still, considered, and then casually reached over to turn down the burner so the water couldn’t all boil off.
He turned to face me, and the heat of the kitchen clung to his skin. His hands settled at my hips as he kissed me, slow and deliberate.
“I needed this,” I said against his mouth.
He didn’t answer. Just kissed me again. Less thoughtful. More driven.
A fork clattered to the floor as he cupped my jaw and backed me against the counter.
I took a firmer handful of ass. His tongue pushed into my mouth, hard and hot and eager, and I felt his cock stir against my thigh.
I loved that I could still get a rise out of him, even after all these years.
Guess we just pushed each other’s buttons.
I almost felt guilty—almost—for being relieved when Jacob had stayed behind at HQ today. But I cut myself some slack. The way he was grinding his thigh into my crotch was nothing if not evidence of exactly how distracting he could be.
The case of the empty apartment was like a ball of string with no beginning or end, just one big, tangled knot. And I, for one, was good and ready to stop picking at it for the time being.
Instead, I focused on Jacob: the chafe of his short beard against my jaw, the salt-sweat taste I tongued off his neck, the sureness of his hands as he unhitched my belt and left my slacks pooling at my feet.
When he found me stiff and eager, he sank to his knees.
It should be me doing penance, I thought, for leaving him at the office and venturing out into the field myself.
Jacob loved combing through a scene as much as I did.
Our boss had given him a chance to escape the cubicle farm for a few days, and I’d blithely traipsed off alone.
But I was probably reading too much into things, and really, Jacob was just taking up where he’d left off a few nights back, before work had so rudely interrupted. And besides, he was just so good at giving head.
I let my fingers rake through his hair, and for a few seconds, the only sound in the kitchen was the gentle ebb of pasta water coming off its simmer and the catch of my breath. And some hot, wet sucking.
Jacob’s mouth was hot and eager. He wasn’t just going through the motions—he was on a mission. I let go of his head and gripped the counter’s edge, knuckles white, as he took me deep. No teasing. Just pure, unadulterated skill.
“God, Jacob,” I breathed. He glanced up, eyes locking onto mine, and the intensity in his gaze sent a shiver down my spine. He wasn’t only doing this for me…he was doing it for us.
Every flex of his cheeks, every bob of his head, was a declaration. We were in this together, partners in every sense of the word. He knew what I needed before I did, and he always delivered.
“You’re—” I started, but words failed me. He was everything—my compass, my rock. And it went without saying, he was the best damn thing that had ever happened to me.
I could feel the pressure building. But it wasn’t only about the physical release. It was about the connection, the understanding that passed between us without a single word spoken.
Jacob wasn’t just going down on me, he was proving a point. We were a team, a unit, two halves of a whole.
When I came, I tried to pull out. Not from any sense of courtesy, but because I know Jacob gets his jollies from watching the money shot.
What better way to erase any mere “satisfactory” ratings than with an unequivocal spurt that acknowledges his fine achievement?
But tonight he had me mashed into the counter, gripping tight, and he deep-throated a gut-wrenching climax out of me.
It left me so lightheaded, I suspected my brain was filled with alpha waves.
Where were those brainwaves when I really needed them?
If only I could say for sure what was in Boswell’s apartment. If only I were better at controlling my own talent. If only they hadn’t upgraded my stupid app.
Ghosts fall over themselves telling me about whatever fixation is keeping them earthbound…until they don’t, and I’m stuck wondering if I’m just being a headcase.
At my feet, Jacob hummed in self-approval and nuzzled the crook of my thigh.
I traced the backs of my fingers along his cheekbone as he stood, and I nudged him toward the living room so I could reciprocate.
But he shook his head and gave me an easy smile, then eased me away from the counter.
“Later. I could hear your stomach rumbling.”
Luckily, I know him well enough to know he wasn’t expecting me to come up with a sexy protest about the meat between his legs being all I needed. Because who could say something like that without rolling their eyes and ruining the whole effect?
After dinner, we curled up on the couch, half-watching some rerun Jacob swore he hadn’t seen before.
During a lull in the action, I decided that he didn’t seem put out by whatever did or didn’t happen at work earlier.
And besides, if anyone shared my frustration about our talents’ lack of an owner’s manual, it was him.
I said, “I did everything right today and still came up with nothing.”
Jacob considered. “Nothing doesn’t always mean nothing. Sometimes it means not yet.”
I hated not yet. I’d rather get a hard no than a maybe that left me standing there in the middle of a depressing apartment, talking to myself and feeling like an idiot.