55. Eli
FIFTY-FIVE
ELI
“new questions tonight about the district attorney’s decision not to prosecute two men accused of gang rape after a break in the chain of custody. The woman says their matching confessions prove what she reported all along—”
I turn the volume down a notch. Just low enough that it won’t carry upstairs.
Tuesday became Wednesday almost two hours ago, but the coverage is still running.
The anchor is young, trying to look grave about something she has a prepared script for. Behind her, a graphic shows Dave and Andrew beside the words DOUBLE SUICIDE REOPENS FAILED INVESTIGATION.
The report has spent half the night circling the same facts: the suicides, the compromised rape kit, and the prosecution that never happened. Dave’s ex-wife spent months being called a liar. Now the two men are dead and their matching notes say she told the truth.
Milo’s forgeries really are art.
I watch for another moment, glad their sins are finally out in the open and their corpses are rotting.
Sometimes I think these guys get it too easy—that we should take their lives as violently as they harmed their victim.
But at the end of the day, the goal is to make the world safer with every kill.
If that means doing it quietly and cleanly to keep the heat away from us, that’s a compromise I can accept.
I much prefer it when we get to see the fear in their eyes, though.
The front door opens as I lean back on the couch.
I know who it is without looking. The latch has a particular give, and the way Micah handles it is different from anyone else’s entry. Careful. Deliberate. He’s aware the house is sleeping.
He comes around the corner of the living room and stops. Sees me on the couch in the dark, TV lighting the room.
“You’re still awake,” he says.
“And you’re just getting home.” We left the carnival hours ago and he went straight to his shift at Unholy Desires.
He’s still in his work clothes—black jeans, black shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, collar open.
He looks tired in the way that’s different from my tired.
His is physical, earned, the good kind. Mine is the kind that doesn’t know how to stop.
He drops onto the other end of the couch, eyes going to the TV. “These our guys?”
I nod. “Everyone around them is doing the ‘no one had any idea’ routine. Dave’s ex-wife released a statement. The matching confessions have put the rape kit and the decision not to prosecute back under a microscope.”
Micah’s face hardens. “I hope they’re rotting in hell.”
We watch for a bit—not because we need to, but because neither of us wants to move. The dynamic between us has changed a lot lately. Before it was just sex—somewhere to put the pain and the wanting. Now it’s something I don’t have a name for.
Micah tips his head back against the cushion and exhales through his nose. On the screen, a field reporter stands on the courthouse steps where Dave and Andrew once laughed for the cameras. I mute the TV.
“How was the shift?” I ask.
“Odin came through the club with Thor around midnight. They didn’t stay.” He rolls his head toward me. “How’s our girl?”
“Sleeping. She and Milo spent an hour arguing about where Frank should live before Knox put him in a glass vase and fed him cracker crumbs.”
“Guess that means we should add fish food to the grocery list.”
“Holden already has.”
Micah huffs a quiet laugh. “Of course he has. Probably researched the best brand available too. Frank will have a fully decked out tank and his own shelf by Friday.”
“Don’t give him ideas.”
“Holden doesn’t need ideas. He’s a provider. He just does.”
The laugh that comes out of me is small but real, and it loosens something behind my ribs that’s been wound tight since Saturday night. Since I stood in a dead man’s hallway and listened to our girl open a stranger’s wrists with the steady hands of someone who’d been doing it for years.
Micah turns his head on the cushion and studies me. He’s always been the one who reads rooms. Reads people. Right now he’s reading me, and I can feel it like a hand on the back of my neck.
“You’re going to destroy your back sleeping on this thing,” he says, gesturing to where my pillow and blanket are still folded over the arm.
“My back is fine.”
“Your back is sixty percent spite and that has a shelf life.” He reaches over and prods the cushion under my shoulder blade. “This sofa is decorative, Eli. It was not built for sleeping.”
“I’ve been managing.”
“There’s a queen bed downstairs that you’ve been ignoring for weeks.”
“I don’t like the guest room. All those unsolved case files make it feel like I’m surrounded by ghosts.”
He settles back against the couch. “Then come sleep in mine.”
I lift my head. Look at him.
“I’m not even in there half the time,” he says, as though this is a logistical matter. “When I’m on close, I don’t get in until morning. It’s a good mattress. You look like death. This isn’t a complicated offer.”
It is.
We’ve shared beds after sex and after operations, when exhaustion made the decision for us. This is Micah asking before either of us is bleeding, fucking, or falling apart.
Something about the straightforwardness of it makes me want to fight. Old habit. I’m better at penance than mercy. “You don’t have to—”
“I know I don’t have to.” He tilts his head. “Eli. It’s a bed, not an engagement ring. You can accept lumbar support without needing the prelude of fucking.”
I laugh before I can stop it. It surprises us both.
Micah grins, satisfied. Flicks a glance at the TV and then at me. “Try it for a night. Worst case, you hate it and go back to self-flagellation in the morning. But I’m betting you’ll sleep through an earthquake.”
I want to protest. Old habit again. But he leaves the meaning of the offer untouched and waits for me to choose.
“All right,” I say. “I’ll try.”
“Good.”
I sit up. Run both hands through my hair and try to remember what normal feels like. It keeps sliding out of reach. “How was your shift?”
“Long. Good tips. Some newbie asked me to make something ‘adventurous,’ and I gave him a Last Word and charged him for the premium gin because he was wearing a fleece vest with a yacht logo.” He pauses. “He tipped twenty percent.”
“Blessed are the fleece vests, for they shall inherit the earth,” I say.
Micah flashes teeth. “Let them try.”
The anchor moves to a panel discussion about trial by social media, the chain-of-custody fuck-up, and whether the matching confessions vindicate Dave’s ex-wife.
The panelists nod gravely, as if they haven’t spent the entire evening feeding the story.
A former prosecutor argues that once the rape kit became inadmissible, the chances of the victim getting justice plummeted.
The survivor advocate beside him asks why the burden is still on victims to prove something happened to them.
I watch the chyron instead of the panel. Four days ago this was a local story. Now it has a graphic, a hashtag, a panel. Stories are supposed to peak and die. This one keeps compounding, and I can’t decide what’s feeding it—which is a sentence I would circle in red if a student wrote it.
Micah stretches his arms above his head, then tips his head back against the sofa and closes his eyes. He has the ability to rest in any position, which I’ve always found slightly infuriating. “You want a drink? I’m getting water.”
“Water’s good.”
He gets up, joints clicking, and heads into the kitchen. The fridge door opens. He takes down the glasses.
The stairs creak.
When Micah reappears with our water, Sage is behind him.
“Found her snooping in the hall,” he says, handing me a glass.
She’s in an oversized shirt that’s mine, actually—one I thought I’d lost, a soft gray Henley I’ve owned for years that disappeared sometime during my first week here. Her hair is in a messy knot.
“I wasn’t snooping,” she says. “I was just—” She points vaguely toward the kitchen. “Tea.”
“Sit,” Micah says. “I’ll make you tea.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Chamomile or the mint. Which one?”
She considers. “Chamomile.”
She pads farther into the living room while Micah disappears back into the kitchen, and stands at the edge of the couch.
“Have you slept?” she asks.
“Not yet.”
“Knox is up there snoring up a storm.”
“Is that why you’re awake?”
“No. I don’t mind it. It’s comforting in a way.” She folds herself onto the couch and tucks her feet under her. I pass her my blanket. I’m aware of the distance between us, which is exactly one person-width—both more and less than it’s been at various points.
“Bad dream?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “No dream. Just awake.” She looks at her hands in her lap. “I keep doing that. Going to sleep fine and then waking up at two and not knowing why. My brain just decides it’s done.”
“Mine does the same thing.”
She glances at me sideways. “Your brain decides everything’s done and then argues with itself about it.”
“Accurate.”
“You should stop.”
“I’ve tried.”
“Try harder.”
I feel the edge of a smile. The strange, tentative thing that’s been showing up lately that I don’t know what to do with. Like a window that got stuck shut for years and is now opening a crack. Not all the way. Just enough for air.
Micah comes back with the tea and sets it on the coffee table. Then he folds himself into the armchair, legs over the side, and looks at the two of us on the couch like he’s trying not to look satisfied.
“You okay, baby girl?” he asks Sage.
“Racing brain.”
“Maybe the tea will help,” Micah says, leaning forward and passing it to her.
She thanks him and takes a sip, looking between us. “Did I interrupt something between you two?”
“Not at all,” Micah says.
“Are you sure? There’s a tension.”
“Not that kind of tension,” I say, nudging her lightly with my foot when she pouts. “You have a dirty mind.”
She laughs. “I have five boyfriends. Of course I have a dirty mind.” She uses her foot to nudge me back. “And stop deflecting. What did I interrupt?”
“Nothing much. I asked him to sleep in my room,” Micah says. “He said yes.”