Chapter 17
17
ELLIOT CRANE
Doing any better?
SETH MAYS
I am so sorry about that.
And a little.
The case is still ongoing.
So you can’t really be done with it.
Yeah.
I hate when it’s kids.
Cases.
Kids are fine.
Other people’s kids are fine.
Not planning on fatherhood?
I wasn’t planning on it.
I wouldn’t say I’ve totally ruled it out, either.
You?
I’m not adult enough yet.
I might be old enough to retire before that happens, though. :)
Ditto.
I’d gotten a lot of DNA evidence off the kids. Enough to make me nauseous, but also enough that they’d have no problem arresting and convicting the asshole when they caught him. He had a record—and thanks to the police state, that meant his DNA was on file. Now it was just a matter of tracking him down. And probably figuring out how many other kids he’d done this to. But those weren’t my cases—and now, neither was this one. I’d done my job, and it would help to convict a monster. It was why I did what I did, but even when things worked out—sort of—it never really made me feel good . Not when the case was like this one.
But talking to Elliot reminded me that I should call Quincy. Not because I thought about Quincy and kids at the same time, but because it was starting to feel like Elliot was a friend—and Quincy definitely was a friend. Earlier this week, she’d gone for two days without texting me, which had been making me extremely worried, but then yesterday she’d finally texted me back, saying that Aaron had called an ambulance because she’d been semi-delusional, but they’d gotten her fever to break and sent her home.
She’d then texted me that hospitals were the most boring places ever, especially if you were in Arcana quarantine. But they’d said she was probably through the worst of it, and so they’d let her go home. I wondered if that meant that they’d decided she wasn’t going to transform, or just that it wasn’t going to happen soon, so they wanted to free up her hospital bed for someone else who needed it more.
You busy? I texted her.
Being bored out of my skull , came the reply.
So I hit the little phone icon.
“You’re my hero,” Quincy croaked. “Everybody wants to text me, but I haven’t seen or actually talked to anybody other than nurses and the EMTs and a glimpse of Aaron as they wheeled me out.”
“You’re not seeing me, either,” I pointed out. “Although it’s damn good to hear your voice.”
“Oh my God, yours, too,” she replied, a little of the croakiness getting worked out as she spoke. “I’ve started muttering to myself because I haven’t talked to anybody for days. Aaron doesn’t like yelling through the door—even he’s texting me and sending DMs.”
“How’s that… going?” I figured that she wouldn’t have mentioned him by name if things were really bad. Arcana had been responsible for more than a few breakups and divorces over the last three decades, either because somebody didn’t want to stay married to or dating an orc or a vampire, or because having to wait on someone through a closed door for weeks on end make the carer—or sometimes the caree—realize that this wasn’t a person they wanted to spend this much energy on. Kind of depressing, but true.
“Okay,” came her reply. “He doesn’t like talking through the door, but he’s been really sweet about putting little notes on my dinner and bringing me snacks and drinks, and he even ordered flowers and is slowly sending them in with meals a couple at a time so that I end up with the whole bouquet. ”
That was almost disgustingly sweet. “That’s very romantic,” is what I said out loud.
“Right?” Quincy let out the most feminine sigh I think I’d ever heard outside a rom com. “I don’t blame him for not wanting to yell through the door. It’s not in a good place to sit down, and he can’t do anything else if he’s standing there. We message constantly, and last night we co-watched the same movie at the same time.”
“He seems like a keeper,” I told her.
“Yeah,” she agreed, and, despite the sickness, she sounded happy.
I was happy for her. Something like a bout with Arcanavirus was a relationship test—if you made it through that without wanting to strangle each other or without getting dumped, then you might just be in it for the long haul. Not that you wanted to have that kind of thing happen to you, but sometimes I wished that something like that had happened early on in my relationship with Devin. Because we’d only stayed together because nothing serious had ever challenged us. If it had, I would have learned a lot earlier that Devin was a complete shithead.
I was glad for Quincy that Aaron was not a shithead.
I’d talked to Quincy for almost three hours, which, more than anything else, told me that she’d been absolutely losing her mind out of boredom. Even when we worked in the same room, I don’t think we’d exchanged that many words in a single day. Especially not about things that weren’t work. We’d talked about movies, what we’d thought we’d be when we grew up, Aaron, Noah, Lulu. And Elliot.
I hadn’t given her all the details—I wasn’t quite comfortable enough sharing that stuff with literally anyone… except Elliot, of course. But that was different. What I had told Quincy was that there was this guy that I liked, but that he didn’t seem to be interested in anything more than casual friendship. I skipped over the bit about the really hot sex.
She’d been encouraging—suggesting that plenty of people had long-distance relationships that could work. It was sweet.
I’d also not mentioned any of Elliot’s Rules—especially not Rule Two. Because that pretty much killed the whole possibility of anything more happening between us. Except for the fact that he kept talking to me, texting me, and so on. If he really didn’t want anything to do with me, with us , would he keep doing that? Was he humoring me? If so, why?
But it wasn’t like Quincy would have been able to answer any of those questions, even if I hadn’t been too humiliated to bring it up.