“Anything,” I answered. “Everything.”
Once I’d gottenoff the phone with Noah, I’d spent the rest of the day cleaning—with a break to haul the mattress upstairs with the help of the nice Habitat volunteer named Carlos. I wasn’t sure, but I thought he’d even flirted a little, but I wasn’t going to go there. Carlos seemed nice enough, and he was pretty cute, but I’d lost the will to even think about trying to date anyone. I assumed that would come back to me in a month or two or ten. Once I stopped thinking about Elliot every five minutes.
It was amazing just how much grime built up around human life—and how much grime you could scrub off of something that you thought was fairly clean and just needed a little bit of shine.
It felt like some sort of fucked up metaphor for my life.
No matter how much I scrubbed, there always seemed to be more caked on grease and dirt and stains—blood, sweat, vomit, shit. I was starting to wonder if maybe that was all there was to me—just layer after layer of grime without anything of substance left once you’d scrubbed all the filth away.
It wasn’t a pleasant thought.
An even less pleasant thought was the idea that I’d never lived on my own because I’d been secretly afraid that I would discover that without someone else in my life, I didn’t have anything. No purpose, no motivation, no actual substance. That I wasn’t even a person.
Now that I had my own extremely sad and slightly-less-grimy apartment, I had nothing but my own thoughts and a laptop for company.
The laptop was fine. My thoughts—not so much.
I kept thinking about how the more people at work who knew I was a shifter, the more precarious my job was. About how I’d almost certainly ruined any chance I might have had to develop a relationship with Elliot by pushing things too quickly. About the fact that Noah was still pissed at me for moving out here.
About how I’d decided I wanted to do everything by myself, and now that I was in my own apartment and had my own job, I was half a country away from everyone I loved who actually loved me back—and I was deeply lonely.
I didn’t do well by myself. It was why I’d spent the better part of the last fifteen years clinging to one person or another—Noah, then Clay, then Enrique, then Devin. Then Elliot. And in between the boyfriends had always been Noah.
There still was Noah, of course—he was a thousand miles away, not dead—but it was different when I wasn’t sharing his apartment or pretending that I was just crashing on his couch for a couple days. It had always been too easy to just let Noah hold me up when I felt like I was drowning. But it meant that I never learned to swim.
So I’d decided to throw myself into deep water—and either sink or swim.
I honestly wasn’t sure which I was doing.
13
Elliot Crane
Do you need anything?
Seth Mays
No thanks.
I couldn’t decideif I liked the fact that Elliot was still texting me, or if it just made things harder.
It meant he didn’t hate me, which I suppose should have been a good thing. But it wasn’t helping me to stop thinking about him—to stop wanting him. To stop wanting him to care about me the way I cared about him.
I liked how being with him made me feel—and I hated the way I felt without him. But if I went back, it wouldn’t be what I wanted, and it wouldn’t be what he wanted, and I was too tired to keep pretending that sex was enough for me.
It wouldn’t be fair to either of us.
I let out a long sigh, then deliberately turned my phone over so that I would stop checking to see if I’d gotten another message from Elliot.
Fool.
I forced myself to go back to comparing tire tracks taken from the side of the road beside the burned-out car. It was probably a futile effort—we had no way of knowing when the various sets of tracks had been made or whether or not they had anything to do with the car.
It was a matching game—checking makes and models of tires against the pattern, trying to eliminate certain treads and lock in others, then find the vehicles that might fit that tire. Smith would be the one to chase down vehicles, check with local garages and tire shops to see who had bought a certain type of tire or whose car had a particular kind of tread.
It wasn’t exciting, but it could prove to be useful, if I was able to come to any conclusions.
The real problem was that there wasn’t one set of treads to match, but at least a half-dozen. And most of them probably had nothing to do with the case. Just someone who’d pulled over to have a pee in the bushes, to help a turtle across the road, to pick up a piece of luggage that had fallen off the roof.
