Chapter Eight
Raina Myers was a nice, fair woman. She wasn’t unkind or abusive, didn’t cuss or yell.
Paid full price, donated to charity, and always drove the speed limit.
Her grades had been good, her friends happy, and even though her parents had died young, she had been old enough to cherish them.
Most everyone who knew Raina even believed that the love she’d shared with her parents would transfer to her future children after she had married.
So it took longer than it would have otherwise for most to admit—in hushed waves of gossip—that those people were wrong. Raina might have been a nice, fair woman, but when it came to being a mother, she’d decided she didn’t have time for it.
That’s why the smallest Myers was still outside long after the sun had gone down the first time she met Darius Williams.
The then-seven-year-old had been trying to run away and had been horrible at it. Something that the six-year-old Eve had had to point out.
“You’ll hurt your leg if you do it that way.”
Her voice had been small but easy to hear in the side yard between their houses.
She had a bat in one hand while the other should have held a softball had she not lost it.
She had decided to play golf with the two and had realized quickly that the porch lights and streetlamp in the distance weren’t doing the best to illuminate her makeshift golf course.
It had been quite the shock to see the neighbor’s window slide open and a boy around her age start trying to climb out.
He, on the other hand, seemed to be much more shocked.
Once her voice broke through the quiet of the night air, his backward climb out of the window turned into more of a downward spiral.
It wasn’t that far of a drop, but the angle was all wrong, and Eve knew all too well that it was the angles that got you most of the time.
She’d once jumped from the back of a pickup truck with ease but had misstepped on the porch stairs and landed wrong enough to twist her ankle.
She’d cried for a long time after that.
Now she knew to watch for angles.
The boy was going to hurt himself if he fell the way he was going, so Eve dropped her bat and closed the space between them just in time to become a pillow.
She tried to stop his fall but instead met him as he fell backward. They hit the grass with a little more than a thud. Eve had her arms wrapped around from his back to his chest and kept her hold a few moments after everything had stilled.
He wasn’t heavy enough to knock the breath out of her, but the book bag that he had thrown out of the window before his scurry down looked like it would have done the trick had he been wearing it.
Eve glanced at it as the boy rolled off her to the side and sprang up to his feet. His eyes were wide and dark as they were finally about to take her in.
“You—you’re the girl—” he pointed to her house “—you’re the neighbor.”
Eve laughed and stood, dusting off her jeans.
She pointed to the window opposite the one he had just fallen from.
“Eve Myers. That’s my room.” She gave him a questioning look. “Who are you? I haven’t seen you before.”
The couple who had moved into the house next door had done so while Eve had been at school. Or maybe when she was out at the park. Maybe it had been when she was trying to sneak onto the Becker farmland that wasn’t too far from where they were now.
Either way, she hadn’t known the new owners had any kids.
Suddenly, she found herself extremely excited at the prospect.
The boy was shy in his nod.
He rubbed at his arm.
“I start school next week. My name’s Darius.”
The rising excitement was too much for the small Eve. She dropped her bat and jumped up and down in place.
“Finally, I can have someone to play with,” she exclaimed. “I get so bored here by myself! What are you doing now? Do you want to play golf?”
She scooped the bat back up and held it out like a queen presenting a knight with his sword.
“I’ll let you go first,” she added. “We just have to find the ball. I was hitting it in the front yard, but it rolled to the street, and I think I hit it a little too hard to get it back, and it sounded like it might have hit that gutter…”
Eve rattled off all the possible trajectories she believed her ratty softball had gone, half expecting him to stop her and half expecting him to ignore her if she managed to finish her train of thought.
However, the boy who had just fallen out of the window turned those wide eyes and their dark gaze around to the unexplored space between the houses. Eve followed him as he walked over to the tall parts of the grass toward the back corners and bent over slightly.
By the time she realized he was searching for the ball, he had found it.
Darius presented the surrogate golf ball to Eve without comment.
Eve was grinning ear to ear as she took it.
“This is going to be so much fun!”
The next few minutes she explained her rules, gave Darius some tips and challenged the boy to a new game.
And that’s what they did for next hour or so.
Chatted and played. Eve didn’t ask why he had been trying to leave, and Darius didn’t ask why no one seemed to notice that Eve had already been gone.
It was only when Eve yawned out big that she decided her bed was calling her name.
“Do you need me to help you climb back in?” Darius asked, pointing to her bedroom window.
Eve shook her head.
“I can just go through the front door,” she said. “No one will notice.”
Eve nodded to the window across from hers.
“Want me to help you climb?”
Darius seemed tall enough to be able to do it himself now that he wasn’t going backward.
“I can pull myself back in,” he said.
Eve was so excited that the boy had chosen not to complete his plan of running away that she threw her arms around him in a quick hug. He stiffened in her embrace and still looked uncomfortable after she let go.
But Eve didn’t care. She finally had someone to talk to.
She tossed the bat and ball into the grass and pointed once again to her window.
“I’ll open my curtain when I get inside so you can see me!”
And that’s just what she did. After running through her house, slowing slightly at her mother’s door, and then bounding into her bedroom, Eve flung open her bedroom curtain and looked out.
Darius sure was impressive. He was already back inside his room. His window was still open. Eve was impatient as she opened hers too.
“Do you want to play tomorrow?” she asked, trying not to be too loud.
“I’m grounded for the weekend,” he called back. “I can’t leave the house.”
Nothing was going to—or could—stop the excitement that Darius’s sudden existence had unlocked in her. Not even his parents.
“Don’t worry,” Eve yell-whispered. “I’ll come to you.”
The next night that’s exactly what she did. When his parents went to their bedroom, Darius unlocked his window to find a green-eyed girl staring up at him. He pulled her and the bag of toys up the wall and over the windowsill with relative ease.
After that, it became a routine. Darius kept his window unlocked, and whether it was daytime or not, there was always an Eve who eventually crawled on through.
Sometimes they would play, sometimes they would just talk.
As they got older, the foot of his bed became their dedicated homework-and-study spot.
When things at their respective homes became difficult, the time spent in his room became longer.
Then, one night, Eve hadn’t left.
A storm had made her empty house seem terrifying for once, and Darius had done what he did best and knew what she needed without asking. He’d given her his bed and made a pallet for himself on the floor next to it. Eve had fallen asleep to the sound of his voice while the storm raged on outside.
That was how Eve realized there was only one thing in her life that was certain, and that one thing was Darius Williams.
HER HAIR WAS WILD, thrown across his pillow and arm like an escapee finally sensing freedom.
Her clothes were a little more restrained.
She was wearing jeans, a black tank top and socks with rainbows printed on them.
Darius only knew this because the side of her that wasn’t touching him was partially uncovered.
Eve was a kicker in her sleep.
But he only knew that from having seen her thrash around from a safe spot on his floor when they were kids.
He’d never experienced it in his bed.
With him in it.
Eve’s little movements turned into a big stretch and yawn. Darius, unsure of exactly what to do, waited until her eyelids slowly opened.
She blinked a few times before angling her head to the side to look up at him.
When the green met his dark, he reacted instinctually.
“What the hell, Eve!”
Like some shy teenage boy, he bolted upright.
The sheet and blanket slid down his bare upper body.
He clutched at them, pulling then back up.
The memory of him silently trying to decide what top to wear after his shower the night before—and ultimately deciding not to wear anything at all—flashed through his mind.
Thank goodness he’d opted for bottoms, at the very least.
Eve also sat up but with way less effort and concern. She rubbed at her hair and then motioned to the closed bedroom door.
“What the hell right back at you, Darius,” she said. “I almost climbed into the wrong dang room with another whole man in it! Since when did you change rooms?”
Darius couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“Since I bought the house after Dad moved to Montana—Wait. You tried to get into Theo’s room? Did he see you?”
Eve was fast with that. “No! Once I realized the window was locked, I finally really looked through the gap in the curtain and realized he was too young to be your grumpy butt. Who is he?” For the first time since waking up, she finally showed some form of panic.
“Wait. Is he your kid? You’re not married! I checked!”
Her voice had gone high. On reflex Darius slapped a hand over her mouth.
“Stop crowing so loud, woman,” he hissed. “And no, not married, and no, not my kid. He’s Sheriff Weaver’s boy.”
Darius had enough muscle memory in him to know that he better let go quick before she bit him, so he dropped his hand with a warning look thrown her way for good measure.
To her credit, she adjusted her volume.
“The sheriff’s son? Why are you living with the sheriff’s son? Is the sheriff the one who moved in next door?”
Darius held up his hand in a Stop gesture.
“Theo just graduated college and is interning,” he explained.
“He has a lot of young siblings at home and wanted a little more quiet when he came back to town. I offered my spare room until he could save a little more money for his own place. And no, the sheriff isn’t the one who bought the house next door. ”
Eve flopped back in the bed like she owned it.
“Well, if there’s one thing you’re good at, it’s being quiet,” she said. “Playing hide-and-seek with you as kids was harder than any waitressing job I’ve had since.”
“That’s only because when it was your turn to hide, you couldn’t stop giggling,” he pointed out. “I didn’t need to be good at hide-and-seek. I just needed to wait for you to give up because you were bored.”
She tapped her feet together and didn’t disagree.
Then Darius came back to his senses.
He turned to face her completely. The top sheet and cover fell again at the movement. This time he didn’t bother with them.
“Eve,” he said, voice stern, “why are you here? In my house. In my bed?”
She sat up in a flash, clearly offended.
“What?” She pointed to the floor beside the bed.
“Did you expect me to sleep on the floor like when we were kids? Not to point out the obvious, but this bed is gigantic compared to your old bed. There’s plenty of room for like three of me to fit here.
” She swept her hand over her lap and toward him to, he assumed, show all the space there was around them.
However, there were two problems with that.
One, there was no space between them. Or, at least, there hadn’t been when they’d first woken up. Two, her hand paused in midair. Her gaze did not.
It was as obvious as the moon in the night sky that Eve had just put together the fact that Darius wasn’t wearing anything above the waist.
“Wow. I guess you turned into one of those guys who exercises, huh? Look at all these muscles. And here I thought I was in good-enough shape.”
She reached out her hand, and he knew with every bone in his body that her intention was to feel said muscles. Because she was Eve and he was Darius and, a long time ago, they were Eve and Darius. She was comfortable with him; he’d built a door in the wall that always was around him for her.
Being this close was nothing for them.
Yet, just as he could see the old scar along the side of her hand, Darius could see the engagement ring on her finger.
Both were quick reminders that time had indeed separated them.
Darius caught her hand before she could make contact with his chest.
When he spoke, his words had a warning carefully carved into the tone.
“Eve, tell me right now why you’re here.”
Her hand was warm in his.
The rest of her went tense.
With one look, Darius knew she had finally come around to being serious. Talk of their past, of their friendship, of the years between then and now all went to the back burner.
Eve sighed out sharply.
Her words came out steady.
“I think I know who killed Gary Whittaker.”
Darius’s eyebrows rose.
“Who?”
Eve didn’t flinch.
“Me,” she said. “I think it was me.”