Chapter 30
Chapter
Thirty
FADE
It isn’t until we’re climbing out of Erez’s car at the coffee shop that I remember what I’m wearing. For a split-second, I freeze in my tracks and look around. Is it just my imagination, or is everyone looking at me?
I startle slightly when Erez stands beside me and grips my hand with a reassuring squeeze. “Okay?”
My instinct is to glance down at what I’m wearing self-consciously. I begin to bow my head but stop myself. “Yep. I’m fine. Just been a while since my legs have seen this much sun. They’re probably super ashy.”
Erez chuckles. “You have sexy legs, Fade. Let them drool.”
I’m momentarily distracted by my internal panic when he says my legs are sexy. Well… damn.
Though the sun isn’t shining in the coffee shop, I keep my sunglasses on. It still feels like everyone is looking at me. Even when I look in their direction and their attention appears to be elsewhere, it feels like they looked and are now whispering about what that man is wearing.
I’m so caught up in my thoughts that we’re back in the car again before I truly have a minute to work myself out of the insecurity. Erez hands me an iced coffee and a breakfast sandwich, then he puts two to-go cups into the cup holders.
“Is there a third person that I don’t know about?” I ask.
“No. Alice loved their hot cocoa, so I’m going to bring her some.” Erez gives me a shy smile as he pulls onto the street.
We’re quiet as we drive. I stare at my bare legs while I eat my breakfast sandwich. Honestly, I should have stuck with Erez’s breakfast being enough. It was sweet of him to cook. This undermines that effort.
I grip his hand when we’re at a stoplight, and he looks at me. “Thank you for breakfast.”
He grins. “Had to get rid of the drab grub I fed you.”
“No.” I shake my head. “I mean thank you for making me breakfast. It wasn’t as bad as you think it was or as I might have led you to believe it was. I’m sorry.”
His attention turns back to the road as the light turns green, and I release his hand so he can drive with both. “It wasn’t great,” he says, shrugging. “I’m not a cook. I’ve never had a lot of interest in cooking.”
“Which only emphasizes that I was kind of a dick when you cooked for me.”
Erez gives me a crooked smile. “I didn’t take it personally, Fade. Not a big deal.”
“You could accept or not accept my apology. Just throwing it out there.”
He laughs. “I forgive you for calling my bland meal bland and needing to eat something with more flavor.”
I huff but let it drop as I sip my iced coffee. Just the way I like it. There’s some syrup in there. Caramel, I think. There’s a sweet tone that gives the entire drink a different flavor profile, and I really enjoy it.
The cemetery we drive to is outside of Flagstaff. It’s large with a lot of big trees and tall cacti that stretch long, shadowy fingers across the ground. We park in a visitor lot, and Erez takes the cup of hot cocoa he bought for Alice.
It’s still relatively early, so the sun isn’t high and blistering hot yet. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still hot. The desert goes from cool to hot within minutes. But it’s not bad. There’s even a slight breeze.
I haven’t been to Alice’s grave before. I didn’t even know Erez visited it. It’s a single headstone under one of the desert trees with a fence around it. There are desert flowers following the fence perimeter, and on the stone is a picture of Alice.
I don’t join Erez inside the enclosure that belongs to his sister. I bow my head respectfully at the stone then stand a few feet away in the shade to give Erez a little bit of privacy. It’s difficult not to watch him, though I try not to invade.
Erez sits on the stony ground facing the stone.
“I brought you a drink,” he says, holding it up then setting it down to the side of the stone.
“Matty insists you’re not a ghost, and I go back and forth on whether I take comfort in that.
It’s always been said across religions and over the centuries that the only reason a spirit might hang around is if there’s something they haven’t done yet.
The movie with the friendly ghost that you loved called it unfinished business.
I guess I’m glad you don’t have anything tying you to the world that hurt you. ”
The scratching on the ground makes me shift, and I find Erez digging a little hole just in front of the stone with one of those gardening tools. Is it a spade? No, that’s a suit on a deck of cards.
“On the other hand, I’m a little irritated that you’re not here to have pointed me to all the things you left hidden. I understand why you didn’t. You never wanted me to see them. Did you? You didn’t want me to know.
“Well, I know now and…” Erez’s voice trails off.
He takes the hot cocoa again and pours a little into the hole he’s dug.
“We’ve tracked down the people who had you, Alice.
Dadaz has enjoyed torturing them. I’m not sure whether you’d take comfort in that or not, but they are being punished.
Truly punished. Not the joke punishments that the government likes to dish out.
Sitting behind bars when you tortured little kids isn’t punishment. ”
I nod, though I know this conversation isn’t for me.
“Anyway. It’s not completely over. We rescued the kids, but there are a ton of questions like what happened to them when they got too old for the sick fucks who abused them? And obviously, where is Trumpstein? That fucker is probably on a remote island somewhere, isn’t he?”
He pours a little more cocoa into the hole and watches it absorb into the ground.
“I really wanted you to leave me a goodbye. As angry as you’ve always gotten with me for not saying bye when I just went to the store, I feel like this is a situation where you should have left me something. Anything at all. Even an unsent text would have sufficed. Was that really too much to ask?”
Erez slowly pours the rest of the hot drink into the ground then sets the cup down.
“I thought I knew you well,” he says quietly.
“I feel stupid for not realizing there was so much that you kept to yourself. I wish I could have changed that. But anyway, I wanted you to know that I found your memories and we’re rescuing little kids.
It’s probably just beginning. There are so many questions and different legs of this operation that we don’t have answers to, but we’re working on it.
I hope that we’ll shut it down entirely and expose it to the world one day.
Maybe it’s too late to appreciate this, but you should know that these little kids are free now because of you.
The bad men involved are being punished for real because of you. ”
Erez covers the hole again then gets to his feet. He grumbles as he wipes off his legs and ass. “I should have brought a cushion. The rocks are hard.”
I chuckle.
He rests his hand on Alice’s stone, and for several minutes, he’s quiet. Eventually, he looks up at me and smiles before looking at the stone again. “This is my best friend, Fade. You’d have adored him.”
My heart jumps and squeezes simultaneously. I’m always going to be just his friend. It doesn’t really matter what happens between us, does it? Forever friendzoned.
Erez steps over the flowers and fence with the empty cup, and we walk back to his car in silence. We slowly drive around the cemetery before pulling onto the street and heading to his brother’s house.
“It’s weird that people talk to gravestones,” Erez says, “as if the dead hang around their grave or something. I think I do it because it gives me somewhere to focus my conversation. Her ashes are there which means her body is there, but whatever makes a human live isn’t there anymore.
So I’m essentially talking to an empty corpse. ”
I’m not sure what to add to this, so I choose to just listen. Death makes me uneasy, and I’m confident I’m not alone in feeling that way.
He sighs. “Thanks for coming with me.”
“I’ll go wherever you need me.”
Erez grins in my direction, though he doesn’t take his eyes from the road.
“Do you still think there’s something left to find?” I ask when he doesn’t speak again.
He doesn’t answer until we’re parked in the lot outside Zephyr’s apartment and the car is off.
“I don’t know,” he says. “The same war rages inside me on that. I don’t believe she would intentionally leave like this and not give me a goodbye.
I cannot tell you how upset she’d get every time I left without saying something.
As if she were always preparing for me not to return and needed that little bit of closure.
So my brain says, maybe it was an accident.
But then there is the obvious evidence that states it’s absolutely not an accident.
So… which is it? It can’t be both, right? ”
I twist in my seat so I can grip the back of his neck. Erez leans into my touch and closes his eyes with a sigh.
“I think you’re right. I know you’ve torn that house apart, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t missed it somewhere.”
“What if we didn’t recognize it for what it was and it’s been thrown away?” he whispers.
Okay, I truly don’t know how to answer that. It’s a horrible what if. It means they’d have accidentally disposed of this last piece of Alice. The one thing that would give Erez peace.
“How about we don’t believe that’s possible?” I suggest. “I can’t imagine it’s possible anyway.”
He nods. We sit in the car for several minutes until I think he realizes we’re both sweating. There’s that Arizona heat. It’s barely eleven, and it’s ready to scorch.
I really love the building Zephyr’s apartment is in.
There’s nothing better than seeing old factories being converted into usable space again, and they did such a great job on these with the mix of modern and industrial, preserving the memory of what the building had once been and giving it new life at the same time.
Zephyr lives in a very large studio apartment with his three boyfriends.
Exposed duct work is painted black to blend in with the tall ceiling overhead.
But the showstoppers are the enormous windows that line one wall.
It’s beautiful. I’m not sure a studio apartment, no matter how big, is large enough for four grown men to live comfortably, but they seem to be handling it well enough.
“Okay,” Matty says as soon as he opens the door. Excitement shines in his eyes. “Guess what?”
“You’re not going to let them inside first?” Darwin asks as he steps beside Matty and wraps his arm around Matty’s waist to guide him away.
Erez grins. He seems to always shed some of the weight he’s carrying when we visit his brother and partners. I love that for him. I love to see it.
Liam gestures for us to come inside and shuts the door behind us. Darwin has already pushed Matty onto Zephyr’s lap—probably to stop him from bouncing off the walls.
“You fed him too much sugar, didn’t you?” Erez teases.
“I know you’re joking, but he did make his way through half a tray of brownies for breakfast,” Liam says, giving Matty a fond smile. “He’s going to throw up if he doesn’t stop bouncing around.”
“Hush,” Matty says, waving Liam out of the way so he’s not blocking Matty’s view of me and Erez.
We take a seat on the couch, and Zephyr gestures for Matty to tell us his exciting news.
“So, there’s this really old, really big stone church in the middle of town. It was a Lutheran church. Do you know the one I’m talking about?”
I shake my head, but Erez nods. He grew up here, so I’m not surprised he knows it.
“Well, Darwin’s parents bought it. I’m not going to tell you what his one dad called it, but they’re going to de-uh… debaptize it.”
That’s not the word. I’m not the only one who chuckles.
Matty doesn’t give anyone the chance to correct him though because he barrels on. “They’re going to turn it into a huuuuggeee house, and we’re going to live there with them.”
“In a church?” Erez asks, raising an eyebrow at his brother.
“You think we’re going to tell Matty no?” Zephyr asks with a bemused expression. “Spoiler: we don’t tell Matty no.”
“When my parents mentioned moving out here—which I warned them would happen since I’m their only kid—Matty started sending them listings, and I think he was so excited about the church that my parents decided that was the one.
They were going to buy it for us and remodel it.
They figured they’d move into this place while we lived in the old church, but when we went to tour it with my parents on video, Matty insisted that it was big enough for all of us,” Darwin says.
“This might come out a little… unsupportive, and I don’t mean it that way, but do you really want to live with your parents forever?” Erez asks.
Darwin gives him a lopsided smile. “I was already living with my parents before moving here. I use this word loosely, but the house I grew up in was probably half the size of this particular building so it wasn’t like I had to see them often.
The church isn’t that big, but it’s big enough that we’ll still have separate lives and really…
” He shrugs. “I’m glad they’re moving here. I miss my dads.”
“It’s going to be so damn cool!” Matty exclaims. “Look. I got these old blueprints already, and I’ve drawn over them to make a layout. This is version 854 and probably won’t be the last, but it’s awesome.”
He bounds off Zephyr’s lap to squeeze himself between me and Erez so he can show us what he’s drawn up on this tablet. The background is obviously the blueprint, and he’s drawn over it with the digital pen.
To be honest, there are so many rooms and halls and extended parts of the building, Darwin isn’t wrong. It’s certainly big enough for them all. Hell, I’d live there.