“Yeah, but I don’t care,” he said.
She let out a little laugh. “Most guys don’t.”
“I mean, I don’t believe it.” He sucked in a breath. He felt out of whack, like the classroom was a little askew. He desperately wanted to get up and run back to his desk and erase this entire conversation from ever happening. But he couldn’t. So, he stayed where he was.
She tilted her head. “You don’t?”
“No,” he said.
She laughed again. “You’re sweet, Classic Rock, but—”
“Are you going to Pike’s party?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I’m going,” he said. “Or, I mean, I’ll go if you go.”
She laughed again, and this time, her laugh didn’t seem as world weary. “Oh, yeah?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what it is you think I’m going to—”
“I just want to hang out with you,” he said, shrugging. “Like we used to, back when I didn’t dress for gym and your art class was stuck on the bleachers. You remember that?”
She grinned. “Sure, I do.”
“Okay, so…” He took a deep breath. “So, we should go to the party. Say you’ll go.”
“Okay,” she said. She shrugged. “I’ll go.”
He smiled. “Excellent.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if parties at Pike’s house ever turn out that well.”
“We won’t drink the Kool-Aid this time,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Nash awoke to pounding. Someone was knocking on the door to his room.
No, wait.
He wasn’t in his room. He was in his car. Someone was pounding on the window of his car, because he’d fallen asleep watching Edward Carston’s house.
Nash was completely awake in seconds. He blinked away sleep to see that the person pounding on his window was none other than Edward Carston himself. Carston was tall, with muscular arms and curly black hair. Nash rolled down the window.
Carston bent down to look at him. “Hey, there.”
“Hey,” said Nash. “There a problem?”
“You’re sleeping in your car outside my house. That’s kind of a problem. Go be homeless somewhere else.”
“I’m not homeless. I was, uh, actually, just waiting to see Siva.”
“What do you know about Siva?” said Carston.
And then there was a female voice from behind him. “Eddie! What are you doing out here, Eddie?”
Nash opened the door to his car. He didn’t care that it would push Carston out of the way or that it might anger the man. He needed to see—
And there she was.
She was running across the street, her blond hair streaming out behind her. She wore a blue-flowered dress and a simple silver bracelet. She hurried over and then when she saw Nash, she came to an abrupt halt.
Nash smiled. “Siva.”
She blinked, tossed her head, and recovered remarkably quickly. “Oh my God, it’s you. It’s been ages.” She pushed past Carston and gave Nash a brief hug, one in which she barely touched him. “What the heck are you doing here?”
“Who is this?” said Carston.
“Siva and I went to high school together,” said Nash.
“Really,” said Carston, who didn’t look as though he believed that for a second.
“Nash was Natasha back then,” said Siobhan smoothly. “You were so brave to go through the surgery. I know I’m proud of you, and I’m sure everyone back at Simmons Girls Academy is too.”
Nash winced. She’d said she went to an all girls’ school? Hell.
Carston looked Nash over. “You used to be a woman?”
“No,” said Siobhan, shaking her head at Carston. “Nash has always been a man. Always.” She nodded at him.
Nash tried a smile. He really deserved this, he supposed. “Well, yes, it’s been a bit of a transition,” he said. “But, uh, I’m through all that now, and I’m here because I was hoping to have a chance to talk to you, Siobh—Siva.”
“Well, sure, at some point,” said Siobhan. “But Eddie and I are a little busy right now.”
Nash raised his eyebrows. “You’re always busy.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” said Siobhan. She took Carston by the arm. “Come on, Eddie.”
“Wait,” said Nash. “Can’t I get your phone number or… when can I talk to you?”
Siobhan held up her own phone. “What’s your number? I’ll call you.”
THE PAST
The night of the party, Nash realized he had no clothes that he actually liked. He wanted to wear something special to the party, something to show Siobhan that this wasn’t just any old night for him. But he didn’t want to look dressed up or something. He wanted to look cool. He owned nothing but t-shirts and jeans and some weird polo shirts. Oh, and one suit, for special occasions. He tried on every article of clothing he owned and nothing seemed to work.
In the end, he just put the clothes he’d worn to school that day back on. If he couldn’t find anything to wear, then he’d just wear that. That would make him look casual and cool, as if he’d been so disinterested in the party, he hadn’t even bothered to change.
Which, now that he thought about it, was clearly the way to go.
People would notice if he’d changed his clothes, anyway. This was better.
But then he found a stain on his shirt from where he’d spilled gravy at dinner that night.
So, then he needed another shirt.
Annoyed and frustrated, he yanked something out of the pile of his clothes on the floor—because that’s where they all were after he’d tried them all on—and put it on.
Good enough.
He looked at himself in the mirror.
What the hell did he think he was getting himself into tonight? Man, maybe he shouldn’t even go. But he had to go. He’d asked Siobhan. They were going together. Except they weren’t really, because it wasn’t as if he was picking her up or something. Man, he wished he had her phone number. He could call her up and ask her if she wanted a ride or something. Why, in the name of all that was holy, had he never gotten her phone number? It was like he was incredibly dense or something.
If he didn’t go, she’d hate him.
But, hell, maybe she hated him already. She ignored him all the time. If she liked him, actually liked him the way he liked her, she wouldn’t act the way she did around him.
At least, he didn’t think so.
Granted, he didn’t know a damned thing about girls.
Eventually, he just left his room and went downstairs, where his mother was sitting in the living room, reading some paperback novel with a picture of cupcakes on the front. It was about murder. What murder had to do with cupcakes, he didn’t know.
She looked up at him. “Hey, there, you going somewhere?”
“I told you about this,” he said. “When I got home, I asked if I could take the Subaru tonight.” The Subaru was the third car in the household. He shared it with his sister Megan, who was a year younger than him.
“Did you?” His mother marked her place in her book and gave him a long, hard look.
“Mom, you’re not going to take it back, are you? You said I could go.”
“And where exactly are you going?”
“I told you, my friend’s house.”
“Which friend?”
“Pike.”
“Do we know Pike?”
“Mom, seriously?”
She shrugged. “I’m sorry, Stevie, it’s only that I was reading an article today that said that the best way to prevent your kid from doing drugs is to ask questions.”
“I’m not doing drugs.”
“You’ve never done any drug? At all?”
He shifted on his feet. “No.”
She furrowed her brow.
“Seriously, Mom, I’m not going to go do drugs. I swear to God. There’s sort
of a… a group thing. There’s this girl—”
“Why didn’t you say that first?” She smiled. “That’s why you look so nice.”
“I do?” He panicked. He was supposed to look casual, as if he hadn’t made any special effort.
“Your hair.” She pointed.
Damn it. He ducked into the bathroom and ran his hands through his hair, trying to mess it up.
“Stevie?” His mother appeared in the doorway to the bathroom. “What are you doing?”
“I’m not supposed to look nice. I don’t want her to think I’m trying really hard or something.”
“Ah.” She nodded. “You really like this girl, then.”
“No, she’s a friend. It’s not like that.” He glared at his mother. “You don’t understand anything.”
She held up both hands in surrender. “You’re right. I’m cursed with the ability of not understanding due to my advanced years.” She sounded amused.
Nash was ticked that she was making fun of him. He glowered at his reflection in the mirror. “Whatever. I can take the car, right?”
“Sure,” said his mother. “But your curfew is midnight, no exceptions.”
He sighed.
CHATPTER TWENTY-THREE
Siobhan called him later. She asked where he was staying. He told her the name of the hotel and his room number. She hung up.
He had her number now. He tried calling her back.
She didn’t answer.
He thought about dialing her again and again until she picked up, but he figured that might backfire. It would only annoy her. She’d be just as likely to never pick up if she was annoyed.
So, he told himself that he needed to stop thinking about her. He needed to try to think of something else.
He turned in a circle in his hotel room. What to do?
The hotel room seemed frightfully small. The bed had a green coverlet on it, and it took up the whole room, so that there was only a narrow strip of carpeted floor around it. There was a curtained window on one wall, a TV bolted to the wall at the foot of the bed, and a door to the bathroom on the other side of the room.
He sat down on the bed.
He reached for his computer. He did what he always did when he felt idle. He checked the rankings of his podcast. He’d slipped in the overall iTunes charts. Needed to get a new podcast out. One was due two days from now. He had it all ready to go, so it was just a matter of uploading it. He thought again about how he was going to package this story about Siobhan and her victims. He’d make a separate limited edition podcast for this, but would he suspend production on his other podcast? He had enough material to keep going on it for nearly three months, but he’d lose a lot of time putting out this podcast on Siobhan.
When he had an intern, it might have been feasible to do both, but with Zoe gone, he wasn’t sure now.
Thinking of Zoe made him feel a little queasy. He didn’t like what she’d said to him, that he was a different kind of man than she thought he was. For some reason, the fact she’d said that bothered him. It bothered him a lot.
But the thing was, Zoe was a kid, no matter how much she protested that she wasn’t one. She was young, and she saw the world in black and white. She didn’t understand that there were lots of areas of gray, that it wasn’t quite as simple as she was making it out to be.
There was a knock on his door.
Who the hell was that?
Nash got up and crossed the room to the door. He opened it.
It was Siobhan. She was still wearing the blue dress from earlier. Her long hair was pulled into a sloppy bun on the top of her head. She looked just the same as she ever had. The years had been kind. She had a few fine lines around her eyes and on her forehead, but she seemed just as fresh-faced and young as she had back in high school.
Nash’s throat was dry.
“Not going to invite me in?” said Siobhan.
“No, of course, I mean…” He stepped aside.
She swept past him.
He shut the door.
Her gaze swept the hotel room. She shrugged and then settled down on the bed. She looked up at him expectantly.
He took a deep breath, and then sat down next to her.
“Well?” she said.
“Well, what?” he said.
“You’ve hunted me down here,” she said. “There must be some reason for it.”
“Uh… yeah,” he said. “But we don’t have to get into all of that right away. How are you? It’s been years.”
“Come on, Classic Rock,” she said. “You’re here for a reason. Does it have to do with your podcast?”
“You know about that?”
“I’ve kept tabs on you a little,” she said.
“Wow,” he said. “Because I had no idea about you and the Etsy thing.”
“Obviously, you do now. What changed? Why did you suddenly start looking into me?”
“I got called by the children of Bart Martin. They wanted me to do a podcast about their father. My podcast is about unsolved crimes, you know. Sometimes, I even solve them.”
She sighed. “I knew someone would find out from a thing like that at some point.”
“Well, they wanted me to drop it once they found out he was the Blue Lake Stalker,” said Nash. “But I’d already seen your picture, and I couldn’t let it go. I had to find you.”
She laughed. “Funny, Nash, you didn’t seem that interested in finding me before.”
“Well, I wasn’t thinking about you. We all went our separate ways after graduation.”
“Before that,” she said. “We went our separate ways before that.”
“I guess,” he said. He set his hands in his lap. “Are you angry about the past?”
“Sure, who isn’t? The past is one thing everyone wants to change, and no one can.”
“I mean, are you angry with me?”
She arched an eyebrow. “You think I should be?”
“Jesus, Siobhan, I never meant to hurt you. I was a dumb kid, and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”
She turned away, studying the pattern on the bedspread. “I know.”
He didn’t know what to say.
She got up from the bed and walked around him. She opened the window curtains. “So, are you doing an episode of your podcast about me?”
“More than an episode. A whole series.”
Her shoulders sagged.
Damn. Maybe he shouldn’t have admitted that. “Okay, look, that’s negotiable. I just want to interview you. Can I interview you?”
“What do you know?”
“A lot,” he said. “But not everything. I mean, we found your invitations and we went and talked to a good bit of people—”
“We?”
“Me,” he said. “I mean me. I guess I get used to saying we on the podcast, like I’m part of some actual organization or something.” For some reason, he found he wanted to keep Zoe out of this.
“You talked to Charity, then?” said Siobhan. “I guess you’re the reason she’s leaving me those awful voicemails.”
“Sorry,” said Nash. “Hey, speaking of Charity, I never knew that you were, uh—that you liked girls.”
“Probably a lot of things you don’t know about me,” she told her reflection in the glass. “But we were talking about the things you did know.”
“I guess I know that you’re a black widow killer who marries bad men—killers, abusers, and rapists—and then you, um, get rid of them, usually by drowning. What I don’t know is why. That’s something I’d like to ask you about.”
“I bet you would.”
“In high school? The disappearances of Farrah and Heather and Ginger? Did you kill their killer? Did he try to kill you?”
She laughed a little. “So, you don’t know everything.”
“No, there’s a lot I don’t know. Let me interview you.”
“You want me to allow you to record me, and you want me to bare all my secrets? Not just to tell you, bu
t to tell the world?”
“If you’re worried about exposure, there are things I can do to minimize—”
“I’ll have to think about it.” She turned away from the window, and she came back over to him.
He stood up.
She gazed up at him, and then she reached up and placed the tips of her fingers on his jaw, feather soft. Her voice was soft too. “Everyone wants something from you. Men and women, it’s the same. They come to you because they’re needy. They take and take.”
“Siobhan, I’m not trying to—”
“But the difference between men and women is that men just come out and ask you for it. Women don’t do it overtly. It allows you to give yourself the illusion that you’re choosing to help them out of the kindness of your heart. I like that about women. I like that about Charity.”
His lips parted. He wasn’t sure how to respond to that. She was still touching him, and her fingers were warm on his face. He wanted to touch her too. He wondered if it would be the same to touch her now as it had been back then.
“But I always did like you, Nash,” she said, smiling. “God, I liked you so much back in high school. I don’t think I ever had such a huge crush on any other boy.”
“What?” he said, shaking his head. He seized her fingers. “That can’t be.”
She snatched her hand back. “Stop that.”
“Sorry,” he whispered. “It’s only—”
“I have to think about the interview,” she said. “I’ll let you know.” And then she strode out of the room, gliding over the carpet like a dancer.
THE PAST
When Nash got to Pike’s house, he made sure not to be so early this time. He arrived nearly an hour after Pike had told everyone to arrive. Nash was hoping that would mean that Siobhan would already be there. But he was disappointed, because he was still practically the first person there. The only consolation was that people started to show up immediately after he did, so he wasn’t there with only Pike. Last time, that had been incredibly awkward.
But it was still awkward, because there were massive amounts of people there, and he had no one to talk to. He wished that he’d invited Matthew to come. Matthew probably wouldn’t have come, though. Matthew didn’t like to mingle with the hoi polloi, as he called everyone in their school. Nash liked Matthew, and the guy was basically his only close guy friend—well, friend of either gender—but Matthew was weird. Nash was weird too, but…
The Feminine Touch Page 18
