Chapter 25
25
Elliot Crane
Are you coming over after work?
Seth Mays
Not sure.
Running like three cases right now, and everyone else is out on other things.
It might be late.
You can come over late.
I also need to do laundry.
I’ve been wearing the same pants for two days.
:)
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go over to Elliot’s place—I really did need to do laundry, and somebody was going to notice that my pants were filthy and wrinkled soon, although I personally didn’t want to wear them three days in a row, either.
There was also the complication caused by Elliot. Specifically, the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about him. About us. About the fact that there was an us .
I still wasn’t entirely sure where we were going—what he wanted long-term. But it had only been three days, so I guess talking long-term was probably a bit premature. Especially given that I’d waited six months for a first date and then another month for a second.
And on top of that, I had the three active cases I was trying to juggle. Case One went all the way back to my first solo case after being hired—the burned dead man in his car. It was a case of arson, but the accelerant was different than in the barn-and-arson case (Case Three). And then there was Colfax’s bonfire, which wasn’t mine, but was making me suspicious given the fire-plus-shifter combination wasn’t really a common one, even though two of the five dead bodies in the barn hadn’t been shifters, but an elf and a missing Arc-human. At least her family had been contacted to collect her body so that they could find some kind of closure, paltry as that had to have been.
Case Two was Elliot’s. Or, rather, the dead badger and the dead dog that had been left on Elliot’s property. And that was also producing complications, at least in my head, because I wasn’t sure what the appropriate protocol was on the fact that I’d just started dating the victim of an ongoing case. I felt like that should mean that I now had a conflict of interest, but given the fact that Smith had called me even though he knew I knew Elliot in the first place, I wasn’t sure where the line was for personal relationships getting me removed from running evidence. Because it wasn’t like I was the person who would be doing the arresting or interviewing or any of that.
The three older unidentified bodies from the barn had been sent off to a lab in Green Bay to see if they could give us a better time of death that might help us to identify them. I was pretty sure that whoever Colfax was working with in Gresham on the case was trying to match them to family members of missing persons, but that was definitely none of my actual business. I provided the DNA and the chemical tests, and somebody else did the detecting and running down of relatives.
Case One had stagnated—but I was hoping that there might be something in the particulate evidence from the car that might match something we could actually identify. From the barn, I had samples of dirt from the floor, some sand, salt from a blue plastic bag that was labeled ‘Road Salt,’ straw, some sort of seeds that might have been alfalfa or something else that was grown as feed. I also had samples of at least three different gages of rope, some twine, and some fabric scraps, as well as swabs from a few gas cans, several oil cans, and some other things whose labels I hadn’t been able to read.
And when I finished with that, there was still Elliot’s case. It had fallen down the priority list—even though I didn’t particularly want it lower down—because the other cases involved murder. Dead animals always went lower on the list than dead people, even when those people were shifters.
I’d worked straight through lunch, and it was past four by the time I got all of the particulates in Case Three processed, catalogued, and logged. Several would go out for spectral analysis or other testing so that I could determine whether exact matches if we compared them to other samples—for instance, from another open case, a cold case, or some future case that I actually hoped never happened.
I probably should have gone home—or at least to Elliot’s—but I wanted to actually do the work on Elliot’s case so that we could catch the assholes who were threatening him, and tomorrow there might be a new case that would push it back down the list again.
So I pulled the box and got to work.
I had no idea how long I’d been working when my phone buzzed.
Are you still at work?
Yeah.
Trying to finish up this case.
Did you eat?
My stomach rumbled loudly, and that made me actually look at what time it was.
Well after seven. Oops.
I did not.
I’ll do that as soon as I finish this up.
Can I bring you something?
That question worked to distract me more than anything else that had happened that day. Because it meant that Elliot cared enough about me and my well-being to want to bring me food. Maybe it was the proverbial glow of a new relationship that people talked about, but the fact that he actually cared enough to do something for me made me smile.
You don’t have to do that.
Will you eat it if I do?
Yes.
I’ll be there within a half hour.
It would be unconscionably rude not to eat whatever he brought me, assuming I actually could, which Elliot always made sure was the case. My stomach growled again, and now that I wasn’t hyperfocused on work, I could actually tell how hungry I was. I really needed to not skip lunch. And dinner.
Next to me, the fancy new PurePrep beeped.
I pulled the sample code, swabbed from the body of the skinned dog, and punched it into the county crime database.
And then I got to work cataloging the other things that had been swabbed off the dog, checking them against samples taken from Elliot’s driveway and the badger, hoping that if I could stay focused on work, I could ignore the hunger until Elliot showed up with dinner.
The computer chirped, and I glanced over, expecting it to tell me that it had no matches.
Except that it did.
The DNA came back as Charles Lee Buettner, who had a record that included two counts of reckless driving and a DUI.
I immediately called Smith.
“Mays. To what do I owe the pleasure?” He sounded surprised. Of course, I was working well after business hours, so maybe that was why he was surprised to hear from me.
“I just got an ID on DNA pulled off the dead dog,” I told him.
“Send it to me,” he said, his low voice tight with urgency. “Immediately.”
I obliged. “Does that mean you can pick him up?” I asked him.
“It gives me a reason to talk to whoever it is, at least. But there might be a reason for his DNA on its body that wasn’t that he killed it. It might be his dog, for instance. Or it maybe bit him.”
“One can hope,” I remarked darkly.
Smith snorted. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” he told me. I suppose it wouldn’t look good if I seemed biased against a suspect. Although in my defense, I wouldn’t have thought the least negative thing about him if he hadn’t been IDed by a dead dog left as a threat. “Any human DNA come back on the badger?” Smith asked me.
“No,” I replied. I’d tried going over every inch of its body and hide, but every sample swab I’d run had only come back as taxidea taxus .
“Too bad. The dog could be excused as coincidence.”
“Coincidence?” I spluttered.
“It could just have been dumped,” he pointed out. “Given how close it was to the highway.”
“A second skinned animal?”
“If you’re thinking like a defense lawyer, it introduces doubt.”
“Fuck that,” I muttered under my breath.
“Say again?” Smith asked. Given that I hadn’t really intended for him to hear it, I wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t.
“Nothing worth repeating,” I replied, trying to force myself back into professional cheerfulness. Or at least make my bitter anger less obvious.
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I’m just frustrated.”
“Understandable,” Smith said. “And you’re not the only one, for what it’s worth. Send me those results, and thanks—and Mays?”
“Yeah, detective?”
“Don’t work too late.”
I snorted, thanked him, and we both hung up. I quickly wrote up the report on the DNA results, then sent it over to Smith’s email.
I was running a couple more swabs through the PurePrep, trying to find any other scrap of DNA that wasn’t either canine or mustelid, when my phone buzzed—Elliot letting me know he was here.
My stomach felt a little fluttery as I went to sign him in to the office—a mix of excitement to see him and hunger.
Ronda, our front desk admin, was chatting amiably with Elliot, who was wearing jeans, a black turtleneck, and an olive-green cardigan, heavily cabled with wide wood buttons under his open coat. His earrings were heavy silver teardrops that swung slightly as he moved. He held a grocery-size paper bag with the Farm Inn logo stamped on it in red ink. My stomach rumbled at the smells wafting out of the bag, and I grinned behind the mask I’d pulled on to walk out to the front.
Elliot’s expression was a little wary, and I wasn’t sure why.
“Hey, Ronda,” I said to her, and her eyes crinkled a little as she smiled at me. “Can I sign Elliot in?”
“He’s going back?” she asked, confused.
I frowned. “I thought we could have spouses and significant others come back?” I said. It was one of the things I thought Lacy had said during my rather rushed orientation after they’d hired me.
Ronda’s eyes went wide, and I immediately understood what had happened.
Shit .
She’d seen an Indigenous man with a food bag and assumed he was just here to deliver an order. And I’d just outed both of us. I figured it would take a day, tops, before the whole of the Sheriff’s Office knew I was gay and dating an Indigenous shifter—because Elliot wasn’t wearing a mask, and it was pretty clear that people probably knew who he was, given the media circus that had to have accompanied his dad’s death last year.
I glanced over at Elliot out of the corner of my eye to see whether or not he looked angry with me for having said something, but I couldn’t read his expression.
“Oh! Um. Yes, yes, of course,” was what Ronda said once she managed to stop gaping (I’d seen her jaw move as she closed her mouth, despite the mask). She looked over at Elliot, then, pulled some papers out of one of the drawers. “We just need you to fill these out, please, sir.”
Elliot frowned. “What are they?”
Ronda’s eyes turned up at the corners as she smiled at him, although there was strain there, too. He made her nervous. “Well, we need to make sure that we can trace anyone who comes in. It’s just your name, birth date, and contact information.”
Elliot’s expression was flat. “In case anything goes missing.”
Ronda’s face flushed. “It’s standard procedure for secure areas,” she said, flustered.
Elliot grunted, but set the bag down on the counter and picked up the pen on its little chain and started to fill out the paperwork. I decided that now probably wasn’t the time to mention that Ronda would be using this to run a full background check on him. All of us had been run, too, of course. You had to be in order to work in any capacity for the Sheriff’s Office, from lab tech to officer to front desk admin to janitorial staff.
It probably wouldn’t really make much of a difference, anyway, since I was pretty sure they would have done a comprehensive dive into his background last year—statistically, family members were always the most likely suspects in cases of homicide or suspected foul play. Once they’d decided that Gregory Crane hadn’t killed himself, Elliot would have been the first place they looked. And if he physically couldn’t have done it, they would have checked his finances, contacts, everything.
While Elliot wrote, Ronda handed me the form I had to sign saying that I would be responsible for supervising him while he was here, making sure he didn’t do anything or go anywhere that would be problematic. Mine was a lot shorter—my name and my Sheriff’s Office ID number, along with my signature. Not that I was worried Elliot would do anything to get either of us in trouble.
I waited for Elliot to finish his paperwork—punctuated by a few sighs and a very emphatic signature at the end—and Ronda hit the button to let him through the mag-locked half-gate. It wasn’t really that much of a deterrent, since you could jump over it fairly easily, but I didn’t think that was really the point.
Elliot picked up the bag containing our dinner and came through.
“Hey,” I said, feeling oddly shy. My stomach growled loudly, expressing its greeting, as well.
“Hungry?” Elliot asked, the corner of his lips twitching.
My neck felt hot. “I did not successfully remember to eat today,” I admitted.
“Seth—”
“I know, I know.”
“And yet, you don’t do ,” he remarked in a tone that was at least trying to be lighthearted.
“I know.” I held open the door to what passed as my office, shared with Lacy and Roger, of course, and Elliot walked inside, looking around.
“This is…” I knew he was looking for something positive to say.
I pulled off my mask and set it on the table near the door. “Nineteen-seventies chic,” I said.
Elliot snorted. “Nineteen-seventies shabby chic,” he offered.
“The carpet is a bit… threadbare,” I admitted.
Elliot turned to look at me. “Where can I put this?” he asked.
I picked up a stack of papers off the in-progress table and moved them over to my desk—they were the report sheets I’d have to fill out for the next thirty swabs from the dog, with a stack of papers for all the particulates from the badger that I was also going to compare against the dog’s. “Here,” I told him. “We can use the office chairs.”
I rolled one of them over for him—we had four, so I didn’t even have to take Lacy’s or Roger’s—then snagged my own.
Elliot unpacked several boxes, and I could smell fish. “Perch,” he said.
The same thing we’d had on our first date.
My box full of fried fish came with a huge pile of thick-cut steak fries and a little cup of coleslaw, while Elliot had gotten mashed potatoes and gravy, along with a container of baked beans that smelled like they’d been made with ham or bacon.
“It’s good,” I said, taking a bite of the perch.
Elliot nodded, quiet.
“What?” I asked him. Something was clearly bothering him.
“Do your coworkers not know you’re a shifter?” he asked me, and there was an odd edge to his tone that I didn’t understand and couldn’t quite read.
“Some do,” I replied. “Why?”
“You wore a mask,” he said.
I shrugged. “It’s mostly habit,” I told him. “You should wear one while doing lab work and at crime scenes anyway—because of other pathogens, but mostly so that you don’t inadvertently contaminate the evidence by sneezing on it.”
“Ah,” he said, and he sounded less stressed.
“Also, Smith warned me that the police chief was not… supportive of shifters,” I admitted. “And while I’m not going to lie about what I am, I don’t need to borrow trouble.”
Elliot’s lips pressed together slightly as he chewed.
“That bothers you?” I asked him.
“It’s your choice,” he replied flatly.
“But?” I didn’t want to fight with him. But I also didn’t want him to keep things from me. And I didn’t want to keep things from him. Lying, whether overtly or by omission, wasn’t a good basis for a relationship.
He let out a long breath. “I—don’t like it when people conceal who they are,” he said slowly, and I got the impression there was something important behind this. “Although I understand why you might not want to advertise it, given the… circumstances.” His fingers pulled at a piece of fish. “It’s your life,” he said softly. “You should be the one to decide who to tell.”
“Noah feels the same way,” I said, my voice just as soft and serious. “He wears his Hands and Paws shirts to the grocery store, even. I never understood why—honestly, I still don’t. But, as you say, it’s his choice.”
“It doesn’t bother you that people don’t know who you really are?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know who they really are, either,” I pointed out. “If they’re shifters, maybe, or Arcs. Or if they have kids or spouses. Their hobbies. I don’t know anything about them, really, other than what they bring here.”
He blinked. “That—is a good point.”
“Like I said,” I told him, scooping up a plastic forkful of coleslaw. “I don’t lie about who—what—I am. I just keep it to myself until it becomes relevant.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” he said slowly. “I—guess I have an advantage, working for myself. I don’t need to please a boss or avoid bigoted coworkers.” Then he looked up at me. “Did I force you to out yourself?” he asked me, a furrow on his forehead.
I shrugged again. “Like I said, I’m not going to lie about who I am,” I replied, then I wondered whether I’d just done something he didn’t want me to do. “Is that okay?” I asked him, fear rising in the back of my throat that I’d done something to damage our barely-there relationship. “We didn’t—we haven’t talked about whether we were going to tell other people.” And now I felt guilty about telling both Noah and Quincy.
Elliot looked startled. “No—that’s not what I meant,” he said, and I could see color darkening his cheeks. “I’m pretty sure the whole town knows I’m gay. And I—” He squirmed a little. “—I do want people to know… about us, I mean.”
“So that was okay? That I told Ronda?” The fear was subsiding.
“Of course,” he replied, reaching out and covering one of my hands with one of his. “I—I want to be your boyfriend.” I could tell it was hard for him to say it.
I offered him a weak smile. “I don’t have to tell?—”
“I want you to,” he interrupted me. “I do. I just—” He ran a hand over his hair, pulled back in a short braid. “It’s just been a long time,” he said, his voice a little hoarse. “A really long time.”
“A long time?” I asked.
He sighed, poking at his beans. “I haven’t actually dated anyone since—” He swallowed. “—since college.” He grimaced. “Although Val shouldn’t count, since we were both just lonely and stupid, so it didn’t take.”
I went very still.
How I responded was important—I knew that. I just couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t going to sound either awkward or ragingly jealous. “You dated Hart?”
He looked up. “I’m not even sure I’d call it dated ,” he said, and he sounded embarrassed. I deliberately tried not to fill in the blanks. “We were both lonely and stupid and thought why not . It didn’t take us long to figure out the answer to the why not , so we went back to being friends in less than a month.”
It shouldn’t have bothered me, because it wasn’t like it had been recent and Hart wasn’t here to even be a distraction, but I was still envious of the fact that they were as close as they were. It was stupid, but I couldn’t help it. I decided it was probably wiser to keep any additional thoughts about Hart and Elliot to myself.
“So, really,” Elliot said, clearing his throat. “It’s been even longer. My last romantic relationship—my only romantic relationship, really, was in high school.”
As someone who had essentially just jumped from one relationship to another for most of my adult life, it was hard for me to understand how you could spend almost twenty-five years without one. This was its opposite—refusing to share instead of sharing with all the wrong people. I wasn’t sure which was the better choice. Mine certainly hadn’t been all that great.
The important part wasn’t that he hadn’t had a romantic relationship since high school—and it wasn’t that I had. The important part was that whatever had stopped him from having one was no longer stopping him. That he’d chosen me to be the one person he was willing to end that solitude for.
I turned over the hand under his so that I could thread our fingers together. “So why me?” I asked him.
He tilted his head slightly to the side. “What do you mean?”
“Why choose me?”
Now he frowned. “I—didn’t,” he said.
It was my turn to be confused. “What do you mean, you didn’t?”
“I didn’t choose you—you chose me, ” he replied.
I blinked. “I—” I swallowed, my stomach having fallen somewhere around my feet. I stared down at my food, suddenly not hungry anymore, despite the fact that I still hadn’t eaten even remotely enough.
His hand—still in mine—squeezed. “I’m glad you did,” he said softly.
Except I didn’t want this to have been about me. Me wearing him down until he finally gave in, which meant that it wasn’t about what he felt, at all. He probably didn’t even feel what he thought he did, which he’d figure out soon or later, and either start resenting me or, if I was lucky, just dump me.
“Seth.”
I pulled my hand out of his, then closed up my box, not bothering to pretend that I was going to eat anything else. I’d save it, if he didn’t want to take it with him, and have something tomorrow, at least.
“Seth.” His voice was harsher this time.
“It’s fine, Elliot,” I said, trying to keep moving because if I stopped I’d have to face the fact that I’d just manipulated someone else into a relationship that didn’t?—
“Seth!”
I froze as he stepped in front of me and grabbed my face in both his hands.
“Stop.” His voice was more gentle, although he didn’t let go of me.
“I don’t want—” I tried to pull away from him, not wanting him to see the emotion I was attempting to quash.
“Seth, listen to me.”
“I—”
“ Listen to me .”
I swallowed, but stopped fighting him, although I still tried to keep from meeting his gaze.
“Look at me, please.”
I couldn’t refuse him, not when he used that tone. So I lifted my gaze, meeting the fractured crystal green and gold in brown of his hazel eyes.
“Seth,” he said gently, his fingers loosening, but not letting go. “I didn’t have the courage to choose you when I should have. I was afraid of letting you get too close.”
“Too close to what?” I asked, my voice thick.
He took his hands off my face, one held on to my shoulder, and the other took my hand and placed it against his chest. “This,” he said softly.
“And you didn’t choose me,” I managed, my voice breaking, as hard as I tried to keep it steady.
The hand holding mine to his chest tightened. “Seth, I didn’t choose you, because you chose me, ” he said softly. “You made yourself an essential part of my life, and I was stupid for taking that for granted or thinking that it wasn’t the most important thing in the world. But then I realized that if I didn’t do something, I was going to lose you. And I couldn’t live with that.”
I didn’t know what to say, my stomach in knots and my chest tight.
“Baby,” he said, and the sound was rough and raspy, as though there were emotion clogging his throat. “You might just be the most important thing that’s ever happened to me.”
I couldn’t stop the tears from sliding down my cheeks and into my beard, and Elliot moved the hand off my shoulder to brush away the moisture with his thumb.
“Please don’t,” he whispered. “I don’t ever want to make you cry.”
I’d shed so many tears for him at this point, alone and in the dark, that it was almost funny. I didn’t have it in me to laugh, though, so I sniffled, instead, trying to swallow the lump in my esophagus. “Sorry,” I mumbled, dropping my eyes again.
He lifted my hand from his chest to his lips. “Don’t be,” he murmured against my fingers. “It’s my fault for being very, very out of practice.”
I sighed. “It’s not your fault,” I told him.
He kissed my fingers again. “I strung you along for far too long,” he said gently. “I made you follow my stupid rules, even when I knew I was falling for you.” Another kiss. “And I kept you at arm’s length because I was afraid of my own feelings. And then I took you out and was an absolute fucking ass, and then I spent a month missing you so much it gave me indigestion.”
I stared at him.
“I meant it when I said I didn’t expect you to forgive me,” he said softly.
“El—” I couldn’t help but feel guilty, since I hadn’t meant to make him feel responsible for my emotional state.
“Do you believe me?” he asked me, then.
“Believe you about what?” I asked, frowning.
“That the only thing I regret about us is the fact that it took me so damn long to get there,” he replied. “That I want to be with you— you , specifically, and just you.”
I swallowed, then nodded.
He kissed my fingers one more time, then let go of my hand. “Good,” he said firmly, although his tone was still gentle. “Will you finish having dinner with me?”
I tried to smile a little, but I wasn’t sure I succeeded. “Okay.”