Chapter 8
Surprise, surprise, I didn’t sleep well. I dozed, sure. I may have napped. There was some resting. But absolutely zero slumber. No repose. Nothing even close to the coma-like torpor that was the sign of a good night’s sleep.
(It’s not a good night’s sleep unless you don’t have to get up to pee, don’t toss and turn, and don’t have that weird dry mouth thing—sometimes it makes me wonder if sleep is steam-powered; like, where does all the water in my body go?)
Bobby was up at the crack of dawn, as usual.
I woke again when he came back from his run.
Because today was the first full day of the conference, I stirred—it involved flopping around, moving my legs back and forth, scrabbling for my phone on the nightstand.
Waking up outside my normal sleep cycle was a whole process, and I was still working on it when Bobby came out of the shower.
No towel, by the way. Bobby wasn’t bothered by casual nudity, unlike the rest of us mere mortals.
On the other hand, if I looked like Bobby, I probably wouldn’t be bothered by casual nudity either.
“You didn’t sleep,” he said as he padded over to the bed.
“I might have had one snooze somewhere in the middle of the night.”
He bent to kiss my hair. He smelled like his soap, and he was warm from the shower. “How are you?”
“Okay.” And then I said, “Is it weird they were all so enthusiastic about the show? I mean, they don’t even know if it’s a good deal.”
A fraction of a second passed, and Bobby said, “Of course they’re excited for you. We all are.”
“You are?”
“Of course I am, silly.” I wasn’t sure the last time Bobby had called me silly—if ever—but before I could latch onto that, he settled on the bed next to me and grabbed his phone. “Look at this. What do you think?”
This was a listing for a studio apartment in Silverlake.
I blinked blearily—from what I could make out sans glasses, it had a brick accent wall and a lot of smeary somethings.
A powerful squint brought the rent into focus, and I said a few words that you probably weren’t allowed to say in Silverlake.
“I know,” Bobby said, “but this is an investment.”
“Bobby, this is a college education.”
“We can afford it,” he said with a slightly-too-forceful laugh. “A Work in Progress is still selling well.”
“For now.”
“And if something changes,” Bobby said, “we can revisit it.”
“There’s got to be a cheaper neighborhood. Wait, what am I saying? Bobby, I haven’t even signed the contract, and even if I do, I’m not moving to L.A.—”
“Silverlake would be a great spot,” Bobby broke in. “It’s very LGBTQ friendly. Or if you wanted to be closer to the studios, there are some places in Culver City I looked at.”
“What is happening right now? When did you look at them? You did research?”
“Last night,” Bobby said, his tone offhand. But he got up and moved across the room. “I was excited.”
“Uh huh.”
“And there are a lot of great nonstop flights between Portland and LAX, so it’d be easy for you to come back for the weekends.”
“Bobby.”
“Honestly, they’re way more affordable than I realized.”
“Bobby.”
“A lot of these places go fast, though, so we should probably see about putting down a deposit.”
“Bobby!”
He jolted like I’d startled him. And then, running a hand through his hair, he smiled.
“I haven’t decided anything yet,” I said. “And this is my home. Here. With you.”
“I know.” He took a breath and said again, a little more convincingly, “I know, Dash. I’m just happy for you.
And I wanted to, you know, help. In fact, I wanted to—I was wondering if we could go out to dinner tomorrow.
To celebrate. I know you’ve got your conference, but I thought it would be fun if it was just us. ”
All this delivered with an intensity and a painfully bad attempt at casualness that suggested—what? That it wasn’t about having fun; that much was obvious.
“Um, yeah. Sure.”
“I know you’re busy.”
“Bobby, I have to eat dinner. We can get dinner.”
“And everything with Vivienne.”
“God, I don’t even want to think about that.” But then I immediately said, “Everyone at the conference knows she’s dead. Did you get that? That’s why Julian showed up here last night. He was too polite to say he wanted to see if I’d been arrested.”
Bobby came back to the bed. He rubbed my leg through the blanket. And he said, “You want to investigate.”
“I don’t want to.”
He nodded. The soft whisper of his hand moving over the blanket filled the space between us.
“I know you heard what the sheriff said to you last night. And I know you understand why she said that. But I also know that you’ve been through this before, and you have legitimate reasons for believing you need to be involved. ”
“It’s not—” I tried, and then I stopped. “I know the sheriff is a good person, Bobby. But I feel so helpless. And it’s Vivienne. And I keep thinking there’s going to be a trick or a trap or something because everything about Vivienne is always such a mess.”
His hand fell still. Outside, far off, a gull cried.
“Okay,” he said. “What are we going to do?”
“Well, first I—oh no.”
It wasn’t exactly a smile, but the expression on his face gave me a glimpse of what a young Bobby Mai must have looked like when he got up to trouble.
“You can’t,” I told him. “You’re a detective.”
“Exactly.”
“But the sheriff told you to stay away from it.”
“And I will. I’ll take a couple of personal days, and I won’t do any police work. I’ll hang out with my boyfriend. Spend time with him. Follow him around and make sure he’s okay.”
“No, Bobby. The sheriff will be so mad.”
He shrugged. “I’m not going to let you do this on your own.”
“I’ll be fine—”
“Dash, you went through this by yourself once already. Being a suspect. Being accused.” He did smile now, but it was soft and small. “I told you: it’s not going to be like last time.”
And what, ladies and gentlemen, was I supposed to say to that?
“Thank you” seemed like a pretty good place to start.
Bobby bent. His hand curled around the back of my neck, and he kissed me. It was a serious kiss. Not playful. Not flirty. Intense. And a promise.
Let me tell you, it did something to me. I’m surprised my pajamas didn’t pop off like they were spring-loaded.
“Nope,” Bobby said.
“It’s still early—”
“We have a conference to get to. And we’ve got Keme’s surf competition this afternoon.”
“There’s some wiggle room in the schedule.”
“Great. Maybe later.”
“But you’re naked!” It was practically a wail.
Here’s the thing: Bobby isn’t the smirking type.
He’s smart and observant, so he knows how attractive he is.
But he doesn’t care about it. And if you’ve ever known somebody like that, somebody who is heartbreakingly beautiful and somehow kind of…
careless about it, you know it’s ten times as powerful.
Which was why I decided to treat myself to a show, and I lay there and watched Bobby get dressed: jeans, polo, jacket.
“If you’re not out of that bed in five minutes,” he said as he combed his hair, “I’m turning the shower to cold and shoving you in.”
“How dare you?”
But you’d better believe I hopped in the shower two minutes later.
After a quick breakfast in the kitchen—oatmeal for Bobby, oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for me—we hit the road.
I drove.
That statement might not sound all that exciting.
But trust me, it was. Because for over a year, ever since I’d been forced off the road while doing some light snooping, I’d been without a vehicle.
Most of the time, it had worked out all right—Bobby had let me borrow the Pilot, and he’d either gotten a ride with coworkers, or I’d dropped him off at the station, or occasionally he’d been able to bring a cruiser home.
But recently, we’d made some changes as—
Well, I almost said as a family.
Which was interesting. And I filed that away to think about later.
We’d made some decisions as a couple. In a moment of extreme generosity, Bobby had given Keme the Pilot.
The SUV was in great condition (of course it was; Bobby had been its only owner, and he always made me pick up my straw wrappers, so it was essentially spotless, inside and out).
And we’d both known that while Keme was still figuring out what he was going to do with his life, he needed some help that his mom couldn’t provide.
Anyway, if you’ve never seen an nineteen-year-old die from happiness, let me know, and I’ll send you the video of Keme when Bobby gave him the keys.
Bobby had done the responsible thing and bought himself a Dodge Ram, black, low mileage, and—somehow—gotten an amazing deal on it.
It was an upgrade from the Pilot. It had reasonable payments.
And let’s be real: Bobby had always wanted a truck—he’d gotten the Pilot because he’d somehow convinced himself it was more practical.
I, on the other hand, did not do a responsible thing.
Thanks to the miracle of self-publishing—and the unexpected success of A Work in Progress—for the first time since I’d stopped getting an allowance from my parents, I had money.
(For the last year and change, I’d been making do with what little I could earn teaching creative writing courses at Arcadia College, which was awesome and fun and paid less than being a bag boy at the Keel Haul.) And thank God that Bobby is an understanding and patient and loving boyfriend, because he didn’t even blink when I told him what I wanted to buy.
It was a 2008 Jeep Wrangler X. It had a manual transmission.
It was loud as, um, heck. And it had over a hundred and twenty thousand miles on it.
It was bumblebee yellow with black trim, and Keme refused to ride in it after a bunch of kids he knew from high school asked if we were playing Transformers.
I loved it. I loved everything about it.