Page 7 of Trust my Heart

I shook my head, slow, my hands finding his hips because they had nowhere else to be. “You don’t understand yet what it does to you. Standing in the middle of it. I’ve done this a long time, the hiding, and I’m still barely used to it. You’ve been in love with a man for a very short time. You haven’t felt a whole room look at you and decide what you are and treat you like it.”

“Then I’ll feel it, and I still won’t move.” His arms tightened around me. “I won’t be bullied, Luke. And I am damn well not going to sit here and watch the man I love get bullied either. Not by a ghost with a camera. Not by Saunders. Not by anybody who walks back into that building thinking he gets to pick up where he left off.”

Something in me let go. Not far. I didn’t believe him all the way down, not yet, but I wanted to, and the wanting was further than I’d let myself get in a long time.

Then his certainty slipped. Just for a second, and he looked younger for it.

“Unless.” He said it and then couldn’t seem to stop himself. “We are new and fresh together Luke, you said so yourself, and now he’s back, walking around 51 like he never left, and I’ve watched you go still every time his name lands in the room, and I’m not blind, I know what old feelings look like when there’s still a coal under them somewhere, and if what you actually want is a chance to go back and find out whether there’s anything left there with him, then I’d rather you told me now than had me find out later I’d been standing in the middle of something you were trying to get back to, and I know that’s a lot to put on you tonight of all nights, but I’d rather say it wrong than not say it, so.”

He ran out of words there, a little breathless, watching me like the answer might go either way.

It was the most unsure I’d ever seen him, and it went straight through me, how much he’d just handed over without any idea what I’d do with it.

So I kissed him.

He went still against my mouth for half a beat, surprised, and then his hands were in my hair, and he was kissing me back like he’d been waiting all night for the excuse.

I pulled back just far enough to say it.

“It has been years since Adam and I were anything. Years. Whatever goes through me when I see him now, it isn’t that. It’s an old wound with his face on it, and I have no intention, none, of opening it again. Not with him. Not with anyone who isn’t you?” I got a hand to the back of his neck, the way he’d once put his to mine. “You were never the man I kept waiting to turn into him. You’re the reason I finally stopped waiting.”

He let out a long breath, one he’d clearly been holding a while, and rested his forehead against mine. For a while neither of us moved.

The air between us was clear. First time in years it had been, and I let myself have it.

But clearing the air between us hadn’t touched the rest of it. Whoever put those pictures through my door had never been found. And Monday morning Adam Wright was going to walk back onto our floor in a sergeant’s stripes and that easy smile of his, and sit down a few desks from the man who was holding me now like he’d never once thought about letting go. Nothing I’d said tonight changed a single piece of that. I held onto him anyway, and let the rest of it wait for Monday.

Chapter 3: Ghost Story

Ryan

The manager was waiting for us in the parking lot of his own store, hugging a clipboard to his chest, and the first thing he said, before names, before anything, was that the ghost had struck again.

“Struck how,” I said.

“The beds.” He said it the way other men say fire. “Come see the beds.”

Murphy had dropped the file on my desk an hour earlier. The owner of Farnsworth Furniture on Queen East had called the division four times in two weeks about an intruder that no camera could find and no lock could keep out, and the complaint had worked its way down through the building until it landed on us. “You two are good at weird,” Murphy said, and left. It wasn’t a compliment, exactly. It also wasn’t wrong.

The manager’s name was Perlman, and he walked us through the showroom at a pace that suggested the beds might not keep. Farnsworth sold floor models and liquidation stock, sofas in long rows, dining sets with laminated SALE tents on them, a wall of recliners facing a dead television. It smelled like carpet and lemon spray. At the front window sat a queen bed made up with pillows and a folded throw, the display kind, meant to look like somebody could live there.

“Every morning for five months,” Perlman said, “somebody has slept in a bed. Not the same bed. It rotates. And here is the thing nobody believes me about.” He stopped and put his hand out at the queen like a man presenting evidence to a jury. “Whoever it is makes the bed after. Better than my staff make it. My senior salesman has worked here eleven years, and he cannot produce corners like these.”

“Anything taken?” Luke said.

“Food. Lunches, from the staff fridge. And this is the other thing nobody believes me about.” He lowered his voice. “They leave money taped to the fridge door.”

I looked at Luke. Luke did not look at me, because one of us had to stay professional at all times and it was never me.

“Your alarm’s never gone off?” he said.

“Never. No broken window, no forced door, nothing. The alarm company sends me a report every week that says all clear.” Perlman’s voice went up. “All clear. Meanwhile a ghost is in here every night making beds and buying sandwiches, and two of my staff won’t work evenings anymore, and my wife has started sending me articles about spirits with unfinished business.”

“And the radio,” said a voice from the recliner wall. A big man in a Farnsworth polo, arms crossed, the look of a man who had been waiting to be interviewed his whole life. “Tell them about the radio.”

The radio in the office got retuned overnight, every night, to a big-band station. The big man was Dario, the senior salesman with eleven years and inferior corners, and he had opinions about that too, and about the cold spot by the loading dock, and about the one-star review the store had gotten last month from a customer complaining that the mannequin they let sleep in the window bed was in poor taste. Farnsworth did not own a mannequin.

The night janitor, Denny, had gone further. He’d left a voice recorder running in the showroom overnight and played us the result on his phone, holding it up with both hands. Forty seconds of hum, then a long low moan.