by Jenna Mills
The Truth About Research
He went down on one knee, skimming his index finger along a cluster of bright yellow flowers.
I watched him. I watched him clinically, observing, absorbing as much as I could. I watched him even as the eight words from the matchbook echoed through me.
Uncle Nathan. Aidan. And Sloan. They were the only three I'd been close to at the party. They were the only ones with access to my purse.
Uncle Nathan who loved Aidan.
Sloan who hated him. Who'd loved his wife. The wife who was dead.
Sloan who'd tried to warn me.
Sloan who I needed to talk with, as soon as I could slip free from Aidan.
If I could slip free.
But for that moment, alone in a deserted field east of town, I had the reason I'd come to New Orleans all to myself. I took in the way he kneeled there, his faded jeans and slim-fit t-shirt, both black, the charcoal skull cap pulled low on his head, the camera slung over his shoulder—the only obvious sign of the research he said he was conducting.
"Come here."
Maybe it was the quietness to his voice, or the way he suddenly twisted back to me, searching, as if he were the one trying to figure me out, and not the other way around. Or maybe it was something else, the sight of him down on one knee, him so dark, with his sea blue eyes and the stubble shadowing his jaw, there against the green, green of the grass and the blue, blue of the sky.
Only a few feet separated us, but I did as he asked, moving to stand beside him.
"Where I am," he instructed, his voice rough against the rush of the wind. "On your knees."
I bristled. The reaction was automatic, and it was instinct. It was his voice and the words and the way he was watching me. It was being alone with him in the middle of nowhere, nowhere that used to be somewhere. There was this murmur inside me, this rush of resistance, that said no, no way. Don't go down on your knees for this man. Not here, not anywhere—not ever.
But I did. I went down on my knees, there in the overgrown weeds, lowering myself until the tangle of grass and dandelions swarmed my chest.
"Now close your eyes."
I was looking at him, watching him. He was doing the same, looking at me, watching. His eyes. The unrelenting glare of the sun turned the blue to more of a cobalt, and before I could talk myself out of it, I let a slow smile curve my mouth. "You first."
It was crazy, and even as the words left my mouth I knew it. This was Aidan Cross, New York Times bestselling author—and a once-suspect of murder.
I was no one.
But that wasn't totally true.
I was once the little girl who watched him play basketball through the window of my uncle's bedroom, the one he'd tried to teach how to make a basket. Years ago, yes, and it meant nothing, but those long ago moments made him feel less like a stranger, and more like...someone I used to know.
Even if I never really had.
Except in the way of a ten-year-old girl.
But even then, even that, had only been a handful of times.
Maybe it was the sun, the way it gleamed in his eyes, but I would have sworn a light sparked ever so briefly, before he did as I asked, and lowered his lids.
And then I was the one who had Aidan Cross kneeling beside me in the weeds, with the tall grass blowing around him and the blue sky stretching forever behind him, the levee rising in the distance. I was the only one of us with my eyes open, for those few moments—and the urge to lift my camera and quickly—quietly—capture the moment, capture him, set off a low hum deep, deep inside me.
And I did. I lifted my camera. And I looked through the viewfinder. And I took the picture—fast.
And I'm pretty sure he knew, because his mouth, I would have sworn there was the faintest, amused curve of his lips.
"Okay," I said, and then I lowered the camera and did as he'd asked to begin with. "Eyes closed."
The feel of his hand to my face shocked me, his fingers fanning up to find my lids—shut.
"Good girl," he said. Then, "Now tell me what you feel."
My mind blanked. It was dumb and ill-timed, but for a second there, everything just kinda stopped, the wind and my breath and even the frenetic pounding inside me, and all I felt was the heat, the warmth, soaking from his fingertips and into me.
"Kendall."
His voice rough but quiet, velvet maybe, but that was ridiculous and I knew it. Voices weren't like velvet. They weren't like sandpaper or black magic or any of the other words that come to me when I think of that moment, and the moments that followed, that day and the days beyond. But his voice, it jarred me from that strange veil of surreality, and pulled me back.
"What do you feel?" he asked.
So much. Too much.
Excitement. Intoxication. Caution.
And with that, the urge to open my eyes was strong, to see if he'd opened his and was watching me—cheating—or if his hand to my face was the only connection that bound us.
But I didn't. I didn't open my eyes, and I didn't cheat. Not then, not that day, anyway.
"Desolation." It was the first word that came to me—and not one I could remember using before. "Isolation." Slowly, I pulled in a breath of thick humid air. "Alone."
"Good," he said, sliding a few fly-away strands of hair behind my ear. "What else?"
Vulnerability.
The word surprised me. "That if I screamed, no one would hear me."
He laughed. "More likely they just wouldn't care."
I opened my eyes—it was fast and abrupt and one hundred percent automatic.
His were still closed, his arm still outstretched toward me, his hand tangled in my hair.
"That's why I chose this place," he said, and then his eyes were open, too, and from one breath to the next, he was standing and offering me a hand to help me to my feet. "Because of everything you just said, and about a thousand other reasons. It's too alive to let it stay dead."
I swallowed hard, looking around through new eyes—his. Violent gusts of wind swept along the nothingness, lashing the overgrown tangle of grass and bramble, whipping the branches of the few trees standing. Oaks, I thought. But not graceful like the ones sprawling through the Garden District. These were sparse. Emaciated.
"What will happen here?" I asked.
"You tell me," he said. "Tell me what should happen here."
Something bad. That was my first thought. A chase. A murder. A...discovery. But that was too obvious, too trite. Bad things in bad places, good things in good.
Real life rarely followed such a neat, linear pattern.
"A turning point," I murmured. "Something unexpected."
He moved away from me, toward a bright yellow iris. But then I realized it wasn't one flower, but a row of them, four rows actually, tidy and in a perfect square, stretching up from overgrown shrubs.
"A house used to be here," he said, angling his camera to frame a shot of two crushed beer cans at the base of a flower.
His attention to detail fascinated me. "Do you always do this much research?"
"Usually more." He changed his angle, took another shot. "What else?" he asked, moving in for a second, this one of a pale blue tennis shoe, the size worn by a young child.
Dreamlike, I lifted my camera and captured the image, not of the faded shoe, but of him. Of him standing there, so preternaturally still, recording the smallest detail.
"What else what?" I asked.
He went down low, not caring about the filth as he stretched out on his stomach to bring himself eye-level with the shoe. "What else do you want to know?"
Everything.
Everything about the books he wrote and the characters he created. About the life he led, and the one he'd left behind.
About the man he was.
And the man he wasn't.
What he wanted, and didn't want. What he dreamed about.
His nightmares.
"You do have more questions, don't you?" he asked, pushing bac
k to his feet. "Or were you just planning to wing the next eight days?"
He knew how to choose his words. One day in, and that was obvious. "I definitely have questions." More by the minute.
"Then hit me." Squinting against the glare, he slid on a pair of aviators. "Unless you can't do your thing without a desk and a chair?"
I cut my eyes at him. "I don't need props to do my job."
His smile was slow, something else I was coming to realize he did really well. "Too bad."
"Now if you need them..." I offered, lifting my phone and opening my Notes. "If that will make you more comfortable—"
"You really think comfort is important to me?"
I resisted the urge to look up, instead scanned the list of questions I'd categorized by topic.
"When did you first know," I began, returning to the basics, "that you wanted to be a writer?"
Silence.
Utter silence.
No traffic.
Only the wind.
And the distant cry of an unseen bird.
I looked up, and found him standing there, his mouth a tight line, his body so, so still.
"When did you know?" he countered. "When did you first know you wanted to write exposés?"
There was something in his voice, a rough edge, almost broken. Sad. But before I could analyze it, before I could decide whether I should answer or repeat my question, he turned and walked away, toward a cluster of young trees.
I followed, realizing I hadn't seen any older trees, the enormous, century-old oaks with the swooping branches and Spanish moss that dominated the city. Here there were only remains, stumps, saplings struggling to grow, and—
I stopped, lifting my camera toward the vine-shrouded structure rising up from the overgrowth, lopsided and falling down, looking very much like it could fall down if the wind blew too hard.
"There wasn't a moment," he surprised me by saying, and then he was turning back to find me lowering my camera.
And somewhere nearby, the brush rustled.
"It was a person—your uncle. He told me."
I started to tap in his answer, then decided that was futile and switched to my recorder. "You were in one of his classes," I prompted, because that much I already knew.
Years before, while he was still working to establish a career in publishing, my uncle taught high school English and creative writing. That's where their paths crossed, and he met Nicky Ramirez.
"He told me I was a storyteller."
"Did you write much before that?"
He looked away, toward a boat steaming downriver. "You mean make stuff up? Always. But there wasn't much writing involved."
My uncle changed that. My uncle changed everything. He tutored him, shaped him, pushed for more.
"And now you get paid for it," I murmured. "What's that like?"
The change was subtle, a slight tensing of his body as he looked past me, toward the tall grass where I'd heard the rustling.
"What is it?" I followed the direction of his stare. "Is something wrong?"
A bird cawed against the silence, the stillness fractured only by the whisper of the wind. Looking beyond me, Aidan absorbed it all.
The change came over him like a page ripped from a book. One breath he stood there, and the next he was sliding his hand to my lower back and we were moving again, away from the tall grass and toward the gangly trees and dilapidated old building.
"I don't let myself think much about what I do for a living," he said, veering back to my question. "Thinking—over-analyzing...they only take you to bad places."
"But aren't bad places what you like best?"
Sunglasses hid his eyes, but I knew they met mine. "There's a difference between what people want from me, and what I want for myself."
"You think that's what they want from you, bad places?"
"Isn't that why you're here?"
The question stung.
No.
No.
That wasn't what I wanted, bad places.
I wanted truth.
"Tell me then," I said. "Tell me what you want—what Nicky Ramirez wants."
His mouth twisted. "Nicky Ramirez hasn't existed in over a decade."
I heard it again, the scrape in his voice, the broken edge he tried to hide. "I'm not sure I believe that," I said. "I think he's still there—"
"Just because you want something to be a certain way, doesn't mean that it is."
I knew that well. "And just because you don't want something to be that way, doesn't mean it's not."
A muscle in the small of his cheek thumped.
For weeks I'd planned my story, jotting angles to explore and themes to play. Aidan the writer. Aidan the lover, the widow. Aidan the suspect.
But in that moment, a new angle began to form.
But calling it an angle felt wrong.
Because it was more of a truth.
Aidan the pseudonym.
The name that was really a mask.
A wall.
"Okay, so what do you like most?" I detoured. "What do you like most about being a writer?" A few answers rushed to mind, but I held them back, wanting his words.
He picked up his pace, his stride lengthening. "Exploring."
"Exploring what?"
"Human nature. Fear. Desperation."
My chest tightened—it was hardly the working in my pajamas answer I'd read so many times before from other authors.
"How far you can push someone before they break," he added, still walking, walking straight ahead, without looking back.
I had to hurry to keep up.
"...what happens then, when they shatter, if they can ever be the same again..."
"Can they?" I asked more breathlessly than I intended—but in the blink of an eye, we'd gone from surface to down deep. "Can people who break ever be the same again?"
He stopped and looked down at me. "What do you think?"
My mouth curved. "I think you're the one being interviewed."
"And I'm not allowed to ask you anything?" he shot back. "Does that scare you? Take away your control?"
"Not at all."
"Then tell me—or if you don't want to tell me, tell yourself." A moment's hesitation filled only by the roar of the wind before he lowered his voice and knifed even deeper. "Have you ever been broken? Shattered into so many pieces, you knew there was no way you'd ever find them all again, much less put them back together exactly as they'd been before?"
Something inside me twisted, twisted hard. "No." It was only a partial lie.
"Have you realized you didn't want them to go back the same way? That you didn't even want all the pieces back?"
Yes.
I lifted my chin. "Have you?"
"That you can't go back," he said hoarsely. "You can't live in yesterday, because yesterday is gone. There's only now, and if you're lucky, tomorrow."
Answers. He was giving them to me, whether he meant to, or not.
But there was so much more, I knew. So much more to everything he said and did, to what he wrote.
And I wanted it. I wanted it all, even if he didn't want to give it to me.
Especially if he didn't want to.
"What about the least?" I asked. "What do you like the least about writing?"
A corner of his mouth curved. "You mean besides playing twenty questions with nosy reporters?" And then he was walking again, and I was left to stay where I was, or follow.
I followed. "What do you do when you're not working?"
From the levee in the distance, a tugboat horn wailed against the wind.
"You mean like a hobby?" he asked.
"Anything." The question was lame, and I knew it. Barely twenty-four hours before my lists had seemed perfectly professional and organized. But that was the problem. They were basic, generic questions anyone could ask anyone. But Aidan Cross was not anyone, and basic seemed like wearing jeans and a t-shirt to a costume party. "When you're not in your office working on a b
ook, what are you doing?"
The second that question left my mouth, an unexpected streak went through me. Of heat—awareness.
"You really want me to answer that?" he asked.
"Yes." No.
Yes.
He kept walking. "Isn't that something you should observe for yourself? Because I could tell you anything, whatever I wanted. Doesn't mean it's true. I could tell you if I'm not working on a book in my office, I'm working on a book somewhere else."
He was so toying with me. "You could," I conceded. "But right now I'm asking you." I had the next eight days to observe. "When you're not working on a book—"
He stopped, this time turning to lift his phone toward the levee, where over the top, a boat could be seen drifting—above us, driving home how low we were.
He wasn't going to answer. But then, maybe that was his answer—he was always working.
"Is your life what you thought it would be?" I asked, taking in the way the sun was pouring down from the sky to lengthen the shadows against the tall weeds—and deepen those around him. "Back when you were still Nicky," I rushed to fill in, more quietly this time. "Shooting hoops in my uncle's driveway. He told you you were a storyteller—but did you ever imagine this?"
A rough sound broke from his throat. "You know the answer to that."
I did.
No. Absolutely not. There was no way he could have. "What about when you sold your first book and hit the New York Times list? Did you let yourself imagine—"
"I imagined a lot. That's all I've ever done. Imagine. But I've learned not to get too far ahead of where you actually are."
"Why not?"
Sunglasses hid his eyes, but I knew. I knew without seeing. I knew that they were hardened. I knew the blue had gone flat.
Because of the way he stood there.
The way he stood without moving against the frenzy of trees behind him.
And the cold.
The quick slap against a world on fire.
"Because it's like painting with water," he said quietly.
I realized it too late, the answer to my question, that I'd moved too fast, gone there too soon, where he didn't want to go, to where his wife was. Where she died.
Where he broke.
Into pieces he couldn't find, didn't want to.
He walked away. Without another word. He walked away, twenty or thirty feet, went down on one knee and lifted his camera to something I couldn't see.
