29. Lance
Chapter twenty-nine
Lance
Jonny is in the bedroom when I get home, unpacking the last of his stuff from Shelley’s.
His smile lights the room and I have to lean on the doorframe to steady myself, because the sight of this man putting his clothes into my drawers is something I have imagined so many times that seeing it in the flesh feels like a hallucination.
Then he unzips a suitcase, and it’s all I can do not to sink to my knees in horror at the shittiest packing job I’ve ever seen. I watch, mute, as he grabs bundles of underwear and drops them into the drawer I’ve cleared out.
“You can’t bear this, can you?” he says, carelessly flinging an odd sock on top of his boxers.
“It’s fine. I’m fine,” I say, but my voice comes out strangled.
He laughs and stops taunting me. “You want to do it for me?”
“Oh, thank God.” I fall upon the suitcase like a hungry animal at a buffet table. “There’s a trick to this,” I say, picking up a pair of his underwear. I take him through the basics of folding according to regulations. “See? It takes up almost no space now.”
“That was the least sexy handling of my underwear I’ve ever seen,” Jonny says.
“It’s not supposed to be sexy,” I say.
“Isn’t it?” He drops his voice and takes another piece of clothing out without looking at it. It’s a pair of pants. “Try with these.”
I grab them out of his hand, trying to maintain my dignity and not laugh. He leans over and kisses me mid-fold. “I missed you,” he whispers. “Sometimes when I was lonely, I would think of you and imagine that I had gotten your email.”
“What would you have written?” I whisper.
“I would have asked you to come get me.”
“I would have. You know I would have, baby,” I say.
“I know. That’s why I couldn’t ask you.” He turns to me.
His eyes are bright but steady. He lifts his hand to my face and traces my jaw with the back of his fingers, his gaze modestly lowered, and something about the gesture is so deliberate and practiced that I understand he’s giving me something he’s been preparing. “Main tumse pyar kartha hoon,” he says.
“What was that?”
“It’s Hindi for I love you. I’ve always wanted to say that, and I’ve been saving it up for you.”
Holy shit.
He’s been saving it up for me. For me. Every inch of my skin aches with longing. I pick him up in a full-on bridal carry and even though he’s heavy as fuck, I don’t care. He’s been saving that up for me. I deposit him on the bed and kiss him until neither of us can breathe.
When we surface, he’s laughing and wiping his eyes. “I want to take you out,” I say. “On a proper date. Celestina’s. I’ll make a reservation.”
“Celestina’s?” He raises an eyebrow. “That’s the nice Italian place on Magnolia, isn’t it? With the candles and the tablecloths?”
“You deserve candles and tablecloths.”
“Lance Broussard, are you courting me?”
“I am courting the hell out of you.”
We shower. We dress. He puts on a blue shirt he’s borrowed from me and rolls the sleeves to his elbows, and the sight of him in my clothes—chosen this time, not borrowed out of necessity—makes me feel like I’ve swallowed the sun.
I put on a clean button-down and check my hair three times, and he catches me and teases me, and I don’t care.
Somewhere in the middle of checking my hair, I catch a sound in the stairwell—a scuff, a footstep, a pause.
The back of my neck prickles. I go still and listen for a second before I dismiss it.
Just the building settling, or a neighbor.
I tell myself I’m being paranoid. I fix my collar, and I don’t think about it again.
He opens the front door first and stops.
I see it over his shoulder. Someone has taped a printout to the outside of our door.
It’s the Excelsior photograph—the one of us on the gymnasium cot—but someone has drawn vivid red X’s over our eyes in something heavy and waxy, like lipstick.
There’s a slash across Jonny’s neck in the same red, like someone’s taken a virtual knife to it.
I’ve got a matching slit throat. Underneath, in letters cut from magazines: YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO WARNINGS.
I stare at the words. YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO WARNINGS. I have heard those exact words before. Not on a printout. In person, in Nash’s voice, late at night in our kitchen, when he’d had too much to drink and wanted me to understand that my disobedience was going to have consequences.
Jonny reaches for it. I grab his hand before he can touch it. “Don’t. Fingerprints.”
“What the fuck!” he says. “What kind of—”
“I’m calling the police,” I say.
“Is this—do you think this is about Alice?” Jonny asks. “About Rex? Someone warning us to stop digging?”
He’s thinking about the murder. Of course he is. That’s the most recent threat in his life. But I know exactly who wrote that, and it has nothing to do with Alice Cadwalader or Rex Harlow or the fires.
“We’ll talk about it inside,” I say. “Come back in. Don’t touch the door.”
Inside, I lock the door and throw the deadbolt and go window to window, checking the latches.
I hear myself doing it out loud. Front approach covered.
No line of sight from the street. Secondary exit through the kitchen fire escape.
It is the flat, clipped inventory of a man securing a position, and I can’t make myself stop.
It’s a studio apartment. There’s no place for a hard cover position unless I move the fridge enough for him to wedge himself on the far side of it from the door.
I turn to him. “The gun safe’s in the closet, behind the winter coats,” I say. “Combination’s one-one-zero-four. You need it, you rack the slide, you point center mass, you don’t hesitate. If anyone breaches that door who isn’t me, you don’t ask questions, you don’t negotiate—”
“Wait.” He stops me with a hand on my chest. “Eleven-oh-four. That’s my birthday. Since when do you have a gun?”
“Every Marine is a rifleman.” I say it the way you’d say every car has an engine. “Doesn’t matter what your job is. I enlisted at seventeen and I have requalified with a rifle every single year since, whether I was in a firefight or doing payroll in an air-conditioned office in San Diego.”
“And you keep one. In the apartment. Where we live.”
“In a safe, with a lock on it, unloaded, magazine stored separate.” I go back to the window. “It comes out twice a year at the range on Corliss Road and the rest of the time it sits in the dark and does nothing at all.”
He is quiet for a moment.
“Corliss Road,” he says. “Would you take me sometime? I could learn.”
I stop with my hand on the latch and look at him. He’s standing very straight. His jaw is set. He is absolutely terrified.
I cross the room and put my arms around him.
“I don’t want you to have to do this,” I say into his hair. “You are carrying enough. I love you, and I’m asking you to give me this one job that I’m good at, so that you don’t have to be.”
“You think I’d be that bad at it?”
“No. I think you’d get scary good at it, because you get scary good at everything you put your mind to.” I hold on. “Let me have this one. Where you still need me a little bit. Please.”
He doesn’t say anything for a second. Then his arms come up around my back.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay. You can have that one.”
He takes a deep breath. “Okay. So tell me the actual thing. If I’m here on my own and somebody comes through that door, what do I do?”
“Phone first. Nine-one-one, this address, stay on the line, don’t hang up for anybody.
” I turn around so he can see my face while I say it.
“Then the safe. Then you put something solid between you and the door and you stay behind it. You let them come to you and you let the police find you exactly where you said you’d be. ”
“Okay.”
“Say it back.”
“Phone, safe, something solid, stay put.” He almost smiles. “You’re very good at this.”
“I’m very good at this,” I agree.
He watches me check the second window.
“Have you ever killed anybody?”
“Yes.”
I don’t stop moving and I don’t dress it up, because there is no version of that answer that gets better with decoration.
“Was it…” he starts.
“I can’t tell you about it. Some of that’s classified and some of it I’m not legally free to discuss, and that’s going to be true for the rest of my life.
” I check the latch, and it holds. “What I can tell you is that if somebody comes into this apartment meaning to hurt you, I will not hesitate. Not for a second. I love you. You are safe with me, and I need you to actually hear that part.”
“I hear it.”
“Good.” I move on to the kitchen window. “I’ve never given that combination to anybody. Not to Nash. Not to my father.”
“Lance.” He steps in front of me, hands up.
“Lance. Look at me.” His voice has gone very careful, the way you talk to someone standing on a ledge.
“You’re doing the thing. The voice. The one from the kitchen, the night I had to tell you to stop.
” He searches my face, and I watch something in his own go tight and scared.
“You just called our bedroom a hard-cover position. Come back. Please. You’re scaring me about as much as that thing is. ”
I hadn’t noticed. That’s the part that lands—I hadn’t noticed I’d left. I make myself breathe, unclench my jaw. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just—stay with me.” He lifts my hand off the deadbolt, where I’ve apparently been resting it.
“Talk to me like a person. I know there’s a murderer in this town.
But I can be at risk anywhere. The other day a guy slammed into me on the sidewalk like a freight train, sent my roses all over the pavement.
That could’ve been your murderer, sending me a message. ”
Everything in me goes still. “What do you remember about him?”
“Nothing. I didn’t have time. But that’s the point—if somebody wanted to send a message, they’d have stopped and said it.
Back off. Something. And if they wanted me dead, they’d have done it right there, not taped a warning to a door.
” He shrugs. “He was just a rude guy in a hoodie, probably on his phone.” He gestures at the door.
“You know, this feels personal,” he says.
“If it was about Alice, why come after both of us? Who hates us as a unit more than they’d hate me on my own? ”
“I don’t know,” I lie, and take my phone out of my pocket. I call the non-emergency number Van Hoek gave me.
He answers himself before I can. “We got a lot of ugly press after the fires. It was a hell of a way to get outed. Maybe somebody resents that the two queer kids ended up being the face of the wildfires instead of somebody less”—he makes a face—“controversial.”
I stare at him and make myself breathe, because that’s plausible. A stranger, a coincidence of timing. It’s a door I could walk through, and God, I want to. Nash left town. I told him what I needed to say and he left. He must have.
I let myself believe it for almost a full minute.
Then the obvious truth pushes it aside. Strangers don’t know where I live.
“Fairhaven Police Department,” a man at the other end of the line says.
“I’d like to make a report,” I answer.
Strangers don’t warn you like that.
Nash always warned me first.
And then did it anyway.