“I love you,” Bobby whispered as he nuzzled my ear. His tongue darted out, and I made a sound you can’t make in church.
My own voice was decidedly breathy as I said, “I love you too.”
Bobby hesitated, and then he said, “I love you so much, Dash. I’m so happy with you.”
Until then, my eyes had been half-closed as I focused on letting myself feel the attention Bobby was lavishing on me. Now I opened them.
By his own admission, Bobby had never been good at talking about his feelings. And he’d told me enough, dropped enough hints, that I figured a lot of it had to do with his parents, and with how he’d been brought up. One of the things he’d been working on—we’d been working on—was putting those feelings into words. So, for him to say it again, and to say more, was Bobby taking a risk. And I had to blink to clear my eyes.
“I love you too,” I said. It came out scratchy, but it was the best I could do. “I love you more than anyone I’ve ever known.”
He smiled. Only a hint of a tremble at the edges. His hands stroked slowly up and down my thighs. “You’re so beautiful. Sometimes I look at you, and I can’t understand how I got so lucky. Everything about you turns me on. I was going crazy today, watching you, thinking about how long I had to wait until I got to touch you like this.” He bent and kissed my knee. “I want to keep you in bed all day and kiss every inch of you.”
My first, automatic reaction was to laugh. Somehow—barely—I swallowed it. For a few seconds, the volume on my innermonologue went all the way up. I’m not beautiful. I’m skinny, except where I’m not. I’ve got a bunch of moles. My skin is pasty white—blindingly white, as a matter of fact, when I take my shirt off. My hair alternates between angry hedgehog and the junior lesbian guild. And in contrast to all of that, Bobby is, well, perfect—the perfect body, the perfect hair, the rich, earthy bronze of those eyes. I swear to God, in the year plus that I’d known him, Bobby had never once had so much as a blemish.
After a few deep breaths, though, I cranked the volume down. I smiled up at Bobby. This was about him, I told myself. This was really about him. Because he was being so brave. I mean, he was always more communicative when we were intimate, but this was clearly Bobby stretching himself, working at putting into words the things he wanted to tell me.
But the urge rose up inside me to laugh—or to say something silly that would defuse the tension, a joke, something that would box up everything he’d said into nice, conveniently disposable packages. Something likeI guess I’m lucky you’re into zombie chic. Or better,If you like this,you should see me with my shirton.
I didn’t, though. I let the urge pass through me. And then I gave a wobbly smile. I sat up, kissed Bobby, and said, “You’re perfect. Did you know that?”
He opened his mouth to say something, but I kissed him again, turned him out of his shirt, and—
Well, the rest, as they say, is history.
One of the perks of being an author (and there aren’t many) is that you get to set your own hours. Which means you get to set your own schedule. Which means nobody can tell you that one o’clock in the afternoon is an irresponsible wake-up time because you are an author, and your schedule is dictated by the muse. (It’s also dictated by how many episodes ofBelow Deckyou stream before Netflix self-destructs.)
All of which is to say that I woke up a little past noon. (One o’clock is only a tiny bit past.) Bobby was already long gone to work, and the house was quiet. I showered and dressed—joggers and a Dungeons & Dragons T-shirt that showed a twenty-sided die and the words NATURAL TWENTY. (I bought it in a bubble of unregulated self-confidence, which Fox and Keme had immediately popped by telling me all the ways I wasnota natural twenty—apparently, they had objections about my calves.)
Indira wasn’t in the kitchen or the servants’ dining room. There was no sign of Millie or Fox. I snagged a cardamom roll that Indira had left for me (okay, I snagged two), and headed back upstairs.
Over the past year, Keme had not-so-secretly moved into Hemlock House. None of us had made a big deal out of it because: a) we were all terrified of Keme, and b) we knew he’d stonewall us if we tried, and c) honestly, it was better than what he’d been doing before I’d come to Hastings Rock, which was sleep on Indira’s floor occasionally, and otherwise spend the night God only knew where. The timber yard was apparently one of the places. Home—with his mom—was not.
Keme’s makeshift room was located in one of the old house’s turrets, and it was only accessible via a secret passage. A few months ago, when I’d realized he had nothing but a sleeping bag on the floor, I’d started coming up with reasons to “store” furniture in the attic. So, now Keme had a bed and sheets and matching nightstands and several lamps. He had a desk, he had two pairs of slippers he’d stolen from Bobby, and he had a set of plastic drawers—the kind college kids put in their dorms—to store his clothes. (Those were definitelynotoriginal to Hemlock House. I’d bought them and then lied and stuffed them in the attic.) Industrious wasn’t exactly a word I’d used to describe Keme. As a matter of fact, he’d once bullied me into getting hima glass of water because he was deep into Fortnite and didn’t want to get up. (Also, because he’d eaten a million of my Takis.) But to judge by how much furniture the boy had moved on his own, there was a little worker bee inside him waiting to, um, get out. (That was definitelynota saying, but I just made it one.)
All told, I was actually kind of jealous of Keme’s room. It was snug, tucked up under the roof with a sloping ceiling, and it had a beautiful view out the turret windows of the waves breaking against the cliffs. The sound was muffled up here, barely more than a whisper. It was nice, to feel like you were so high nothing could touch you. Maybe he liked that, feeling like—for a few hours every day—he was above it all.
A quick check told me Keme wasn’t in his room, and there was no indication he’d come home overnight. I went back downstairs and ate another cardamom roll.
That little part of me that never stopped worrying—okay, thathugepart of me that never stopped worrying—couldn’t stop worrying about Keme. Part of it had to do with him not coming home, but I knew (or at least I wanted to recognize) that he’d been taking care of himself long before I’d come here. And while the October nights were cold, they weren’t freezing, and he wasn’t in any danger of anything except the usual perils of roughing it. (Which, for me, included the possibility of spiders. I am not. a. fan.)
But it was more than that. I was worried about Keme, and it was bigger than the fact that he’d spent a night away from Hemlock House. I was worried his heart was broken after seeing Millie with Louis. And I was worried, because he was a boy, he wouldn’t know what to do with all that hurt, and so instead of dealing with it in a healthy way, he’d do something stupid. (Yes, I am speaking from experience, thank you for asking.) And there was something else, something I still couldn’t put into words. Something about Keme. And what it meant for him to loseMillie. I mean, for heaven’s sake, it mademesick to my stomach to see this rift between Millie and Keme—how much worse would it be for him? (The sick-to-my-stomach thing had nothing to do with my fifth cardamom roll. Sugar is a natural vitamin.)
Finally, I ended up in the den. It had all of Hemlock House’s usual features—damask wallpaper and wainscoting, polished wooden floors, crystal sconces, a cavernous fireplace. It also had built-in bookshelves, the comfiest of chairs, and a secret passage. Over the last year and change, my temporary office had become not quite so temporary. My personal touches were the laptop, the tangle of charging cables, stacks of paper on every available surface, and a super cozy blanket.
After getting myself settled (coffee!!), I went to work. Over the last few months, I’d been drafting a mystery novel. Like, a real one. That I was actually writing. Not just something that lived in my head. It featured Will Gower, a private investigator in—Portland? My original thought had been not to use Portland, but now I had it back in the rotation. Seattle was also a possibility. Or would Vancouver make more sense? I mean, I was basically trying to invent a new genre (cozy noir). Would that be more of a Canadian thing?
And while I had a good chunk of my plot figured out—Will Gower was in pursuit of something, um, valuable. Like the priceless statuette fromThe Maltese Falcon. Only not that. I mean, was it too on the nose to have everybody in the story looking for a priceless statuette of, say, a crow? Would a raven be better? Did anybody like jays?—I was also still trying to work out more about the characters. Their relationships, in particular.
This is your official spoiler alert.
One of the things I loved best about Dashiell Hammett (hey, my namesake!) was the constantly shifting web of relationships in the story. It made it feel real. It made the characters feel human. It starts in the backstory, when femme fatale BrigidO’Shaughnessy allies herself with a bodyguard to steal the falcon. Later, she uses her feminine wiles to seduce and then to kill. Detective Sam Spade’s own backstory isn’t any neater. He was having an affair with his partner’s wife, which is part of why he’s a suspect for his murder. Sam and Brigid’s relationship is even more complex. There seems to be genuine affection between them, but at the same time, Brigid is using Sam to get the statue, and Sam turns Brigid over to the police for the murders she committed (also, he weirdly promises to wait for her, but not if she ends up being hanged, which must have sounded a lot more romantic back then—the ’30s were a different time). And that was one of the things noir did for the mystery genre: it blurred the lines of who was good and who was bad. And that was so much closer to reality, right? So much closer to beingtrue.
So, I wanted something like that. I mean, motive usually ended up being cut-and-dried in a story. Somebody wanted money. Somebody wanted drugs. Somebody wanted revenge. But cozy noir—if that was even a thing, or if I could make it a thing, if it was even a possibility—had to be more than that. It had to be about what it meant to be human. And it had to be about the nuances of the terrible things people did. Those nuances didn’t make the terrible things any less terrible, but they made them comprehensible. They shaded in that human element. And, of course, cozy noir had to be about exploring what it meant to be just in a world where we all inherited the trauma of living in a broken world.
Maybe, I thought, Will Gower should have an evil ex.
Okay, there was nothing nuanced about that. But it did sound kind of fun.
