Page 36 of Bent, Not Broken

Chapter 10

Madden

Squinting at my laptop screen against the morning sunlight that poured into the room, I tapped my pen on my desk. If I hadn’t fucked off for part of yesterday, today might have been the day to call in sick. There was no way I was going to be able to pay attention.

All I could think about was Slater thundering off in the biggest, most horrible huff and puff I’d ever been party to, and that was saying something. My mother was a Southern queen. I’d never had anyone unload on me quite so spectacularly outside of a courtroom. Groaning, I dramatically flopped my forehead to the desk. I peeked at West across the small aisle between our desks, and he diligently ignored me. In fact, his dismissal of me was so thorough, it was very clear he’d made the choice not to notice. He tilted his chair so I was farther at his back. I sat up and flopped again. When that got me no response, I lobbed a pen at him that smacked off his back.

He sighed. “So now we’re committing assault?”

“What’s wrong, Madden? Are you okay, Madden? I like you, Madden, so why don’t you tell me,” I whispered to him. “Those are your lines. Go ahead.”

Casually he turned his chair toward me and stretched out his legs. He took his time, crossing one ankle over the other, and settled into his chair with his hands behind his head. Cute wrinkles appeared between his eyebrows and he puffed out a long breath. “What’s wrong, Madden?”

“What do you do when there’s something you’re really curious about, and you know this thing that’s driving you around the fucking bend into Crazytown’s not your business, and you should for real drop it, but it’s such a mystery, and all you can do is think about it?” Excitement at having someone to word vomit toward had me leaning so far over the edge of my chair that it almost tipped over. My stomach jerked when I settled back into my seat.

West grunted. “Easy. Leave it alone. It’s not difficult. Mind your business. Done.” He turned toward his desk to go back to his work.

“But—” I stretched my hand out toward him imploringly and then let it drop. “—I don’t want to.”

“What’s this about?” He glanced over his shoulder and narrowed his eyes. The tone of his voice let me know I was getting him close to the point where he’d tell me to knock my shit off and soon wouldn’t think I was adorable anymore, but I needed someone to be my Jiminy Cricket right now.

“I’m sleeping with a guy.”

West’s eyes ticked in the barest of rolls. That had to be good, I hadn’t inspired a seizure-level reaction. “I assume there is more to the story than that.”

“He has an issue.”

“Obviously,” West drawled.

My fingers twitched to throw something else at him. “I could help with said issue. Potentially. Thing is, I don’t really know enough about the problem, and he said to stay out of it. He yelled. A lot.”

West covered his mouth with his hand for a second and let out a long breath while he stared at me. “What you’re telling me is there is something the man you’re sleeping with has going on in his life, and it’s not your business, and you’ve been explicitly warned away from involvement?”

“Yes.”

He dropped his chin and stared at me over the top of his glasses.

“What?”

He spun around and firmly slid his chair into his desk, facing away from me again. “I’m not an ethics professor. Obviously it’s driving you nuts. Are you a lawyer or not? Dig into it.”

Jerking to attention, I grinned. “That’s what I was hoping you’d say.”

“It’s the worst idea.” He took a second to glance back over his shoulder at me again and shook his head like I was a puppy pissing on an authentic Persian carpet, and what a shame it was that I’d likely be put down. “Absolutely a horrible idea. You’re on a one-way track toward fucking up whatever booty call you have going on.”

“Yeah, yeah.” All at once, I was a lot more interested in my computer. I pulled it to the edge of the desk, sat up straight, and got to work sifting through the internet, completely ignoring the file I should have been working on. I should have been elbow deep in Westlaw, but instead I attacked Google like it owed me money.

Two hours later, I let out a whistle as I read an old article from the digital New Gothenburg library archives about Archer Allan Slater, who had apparently stabbed not only his wife, presumably Slater’s mother, but a slew of other women as well. Five of them.

“Holy shit.”

“What?” West asked.

Staring blankly at the screen, I sat up straight. I had no idea how long I’d been hunchbacked in front of the screen, sometimes I just drifted down as I worked, but I ached between the shoulder blades. “The dick I like to hop on? His father is a serial killer.”

West dropped a folder, a real one, because he liked paper for some godawful reason, and then wheeled himself over to my desk, chair squeaking like a mouse the whole way. The screen glinted in his glasses, hypnotic and slightly creepy. I shivered. Maybe my skin was crawling from the very graphic late-nineties news articles that were so much more vivid than anything I’d read recently. I pointed at the article. West elbowed me aside and whistled as I scrolled down the screen. We read the bad slasher thriller together in a shocked silence punctuated by gasps from one or the other of us every now and again. He rested his arm against mine and sent me a long look.

“You really do it up good when you do it.”