Perhaps she should’ve been flattered but her first instinct was to leave the office. She loved him, she did, but she did so quietly. On her own terms. He did not yet know she reciprocated those feelings and feared surrendering the knowledge of that love to him. The admission would become another weapon in his arsenal.
She managed a level tone despite the elixir of emotions rearing to alter it. “I’m going home. Pay me for the rest of the afternoon or don’t. I don’t care.”
The Rusted Monkey was busier than usual. Louder. People were crammed into the galley-style establishment, either ignorant or uncaring that they had a fire code.
Too many yet somehow not enough ‘excuse me’s and ‘I’m sorry’s were tossed around as patrons continuously bumped into Nathan and Dayton at the bar. The place had become a macabre tourist attraction since Lacey’s strangled corpse was found in the dumpster. There was nowhere to go to get away from the girl’s death. It had left a permanent mark on the town.
And he was at the decaying center of it all, evidenced by Detective Reynolds stationed at the opposite end of the bar.
His lingering presence in their sleepy town raised a number of red flags. The investigation was ongoing but their efforts had shifted toward locating and extraditing Shane Sanders. So why was Reynolds hanging around when all of his law enforcement cronies were exhausting every possible resource in what was quickly turning into a national manhunt?
No one else would’ve known he was a detective. He was just an average guy, having a drink. He could have held any number of jobs with his suits and sleek vehicle. But Dayton knew there was a gun holstered across the back of his dress shirt, a badge within his pocket, and a searing hatred behind his steely gaze. Reynolds nodded at him, raising his glass of cheap domestic beer.
Dayton forced himself to look away, redirecting his attention to his friend. Staring at the detective who wanted to see him strung up by his ankles like a slaughtered animal wasn’t in his best interest.
Recently, Nathan had his old, electric green frames fitted with new lenses, in the hopes they’d entertain the baby during the many sleepless nights that were in his and Charlaine’s not so distant future.
It was hard to take him seriously with all of that neon contorted around his eyes, but it transported him to those early days when he had so openly taken Dayton under his wing. When he was new to the university and had no one. He found himself thinking of that often, although anyone was bound to turn nostalgic when fearing their home may be stormed by the FBI while they slept.
“Who’s that guy?” Nathan asked.
“Some asshole,” he muttered into his club soda, watching the drink fizz with disdain.
His first attempt to give up alcohol had been shattered when Kenna returned at summer’s end. His second, and current, stint of sobriety was threatened on a daily basis ever since he was forced to live in the shadow of a homicide detective.
Nathan glanced between him and the soda. “You aren’t drinking. What’s up with that?”
Dayton looked his friend, his only friend, in the eye and contemplated telling him what he had kept hidden their entire relationship. Coming out and saying it seemed too dangerous. Too real. That descriptor was beginning to fit too many things in his life.
“I’m dying, Nathaniel.”
“That’s pretty dramatic. You do seem down, lately, though.” He drained the rest of his bottle and Dayton watched in envy as the last of the hops disappeared. “You need to come back to St. James, that’s what you need to do. Kenna shows up to Mass every week without fail, and you? You treat God like a tramp on a street corner. You go into that box and take an hour of their time and then you go back to pretending neither of them exist.”
“Church is the last place I need to be.”
“Just trying to help.” Nathan held up his hands but swiftly transitioned to pulling something out of his pocket. “Hey, take a look at this.” He unfolded a piece of paper. A sonogram. “It’s a boy.”
“That’s really great, man. Congratulations.”
The well wishes were acid on his tongue.
He looked at the grainy photo, that new life, and it reminded him of what he could never have. Not that Kenna was in a position to consider having a family with him, even if they were able. They were stuck in a cycle of emotionless sex and dead-end conversations; not to mention the fact that she had yet to reciprocate his love. He placed the blame solely on Audrey. Before Kenna had left for California, they were in a reasonably good place, building brick by brick toward a healthy relationship. She may have been disinclined to put that label on it but he’d long ago come to the consensus that she didn’t know what was good for her.
Dayton threw back the last of his drink and slid the empty glass toward the inside of the counter. He rose unceremoniously from the stool. “I have to piss.”
“You want me to order another round?”
“Hilarious, Nate.”
He all but shoved his way through the crowd but found no solace in the men’s room. Footsteps trailed behind him, crashing his party of one. The owner of the noisy shoes claimed the neighboring urinal and he was far from surprised upon uncovering his identity. A mix of hate and irritation slithered in to fill the space between them.
Detective Reynolds side-eyed him, violating an unspoken rule of public restroom etiquette. “Here for trivia?”
“Michael keeps canceling recently. He thinks it isn’t practical to play with all of the extra foot traffic from these true crime junkies. I come every week in spite of it.”
What possessed him to speak to Reynolds at all, he did not know. Dayton was agitated beyond belief, and judging by the tone he had taken with the detective, he was doing a piss-poor job of hiding it. The decorative neon wall signs blinked mischievously, as if they were his brain, shutting down, and the room felt like it was losing square footage by the second. Squeezing his insides, thieving the oxygen.
His only thought was getting out of there.