Serious Moonlight, page 26
“That’s my mom,” I said.
“Jesus, she was gorgeous. Is that Mona . . . and a toy monkey?”
“That was her Frida Kahlo stage.”
“And this one,” he said, pointing to the other photo of my mother by herself. “She was a waitress? Wait. Is that the Moonlight?”
I nodded. “Worked there until I was five, I think? Then she started managing stores at Westlake Center. Then she worked at Macy’s . . . Then she was unemployed for a while. She sort of bounced around a lot.” I pointed to another photo of her, when she was a year younger than me—seventeen. She’d gotten her first job behind the counter at the cinnamon bun café near the harbor. In this photo, she smiled at the camera, showing off her apron, her name embroidered at the top. This was the last picture of her taken by my grandmother, and you could almost feel her sense of pride from behind the camera. Oh, how that changed.
“My mother was already pregnant with me when the photo was taken, but she didn’t tell them until much later, when she started showing,” I told Daniel. “The only person who knew was Mona.”
He squinted at the photo and then turned to me, a strange expression on his face. “Your mom’s name was Lily?” he said, eyes flicking to the stargazer in my hair.
I nodded once.
The lines on his forehead softened, and he looked at me with so much tenderness, my chest became hot and constricted. Without warning, tears brimmed, stinging the backs of my eyelids.
“I’m sorry,” I managed to say, talking around the knot in my throat. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s been eight years. I should be past all this.”
And I was, sort of? When I thought about my mom too much, my mind went into a horrible loop, because the thing was, I couldn’t remember a lot about her. She was pretty and had a dry sense of humor, and she smelled good. She was always working, never around enough, and I remember always wanting more of her. More of her attention and time. But the rest of my memories had been trampled under everyone else’s opinions of her. Grandma said she was rebellious and stubborn and never thought about consequences; Mona said she was loyal and determined and always tried her best. Maybe both of them were right.
“I can barely remember the real Lily anymore,” I said. “My strongest memories from back then are of Mona. How is that possible? How could I forget her?”
He didn’t say anything. He just wrapped his arms around me. I laid my head on his shoulder and clung to him. It felt like holding sunshine in my arms. As if I was starving and he was nourishment. It felt like forgiveness. Relief.
Warm hands cupped both sides of my head. I cleared my throat, sniffled, and then laughed, as if I were some sort of malfunctioning cyborg. “I seriously don’t know what’s wrong. Ugh, I’m so embarrassed. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not,” he said, eyes shining. He swiped beneath my eyes with his thumbs. “You’re a little bit of a disaster, Birdie,” he murmured, but not unkindly.
“You have no idea.”
“I don’t mind. It takes a disaster to know one. And I’m a grade-A disaster.”
“Daniel?”
“Yes?”
“What are you doing here? I mean, I’m happy you’re here. Really happy. It’s just . . . I thought everything was okay with Cherry.”
“It is. Did I not just lug a bucket of apricots on a ferry across Elliott Bay?”
I huffed out a soft laugh and then said, “We haven’t talked much the last couple of days. . . . I worried maybe you’d had second thoughts.”
“About us?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve had thoughts. Not second ones, though.” He swiped at my cheek again. “I just realized some things.”
“What things?”
He blew out a long breath. “All of this has happened so fast, and it’s not like any other relationship I’ve been in before. And I didn’t expect any of this at all. When we started, I just liked you, in the diner that first night. And then I just wanted to spend time with you. And then something changed.”
That didn’t sound good. I tried to pull away, but he gathered me more firmly against him. “Listen. I need you to listen to me, okay? Before I lose my nerve. Sometimes I feel a little sick to my stomach when I can’t see you, and then when I do, I get so nervous, I worry I might vomit.”
“You . . . never act nervous.”
“I guess I’m good at hiding it.”
“You are?”
“It’s a skill.” He rested his forehead against mine. “What I’m trying to say is that I didn’t expect this to happen. I didn’t sit around wishing for it. I didn’t even realize what was happening until it had. It’s like you walk into a convenience store to get bread and you hear a song playing over the speakers, and you’ve never heard it before, but it’s so good, it blows your mind. And all you wanted was bread, but now it feels like you’ve just seen the face of God, and how did this even happen?”
“You haven’t been eating more of those gummies, have you?”
He lifted his forehead from mine and shook his head. “Not a one, Birdie.”
“Sure?”
“So sure,” he said, sighing. “No one tells you about the yearning. I’ve never yearned in my entire life—not once, Birdie. But here I am, yearning. It’s awful.”
Longing-pining-aching.
“Because of a metaphoric song you heard in a metaphoric convenience store?”
“Yep. It was one of those big moments in life that completely changes your head. And I know the exact minute it happened, too,” he said, studying my face as if he were looking at me for the first time. “That’s the weirdest part. It happened about thirty seconds after I hung up with my mom. She called on Monday to tell me you’d come to the dance studio, and I was happy—happy that she was happy and that we weren’t fighting anymore. And happy that you cared enough to do that, and then . . . Then my entire brain just lit up.”
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me,” I whispered.
“I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
“What to happen?”
“You’re the song in that convenience store, Birdie. Do you understand? I’ve accidentally fallen in love with you.”
Everything fell out of my head at once. My fingers started trembling. Then my arms. My internal organs were melting together, and a blazing wildfire spread through my chest. My frightened-rabbit heart tried to tear a hole through my flesh and escape.
“You don’t have to say it back,” he assured me. “But I had to tell you. That’s why I came out here.” He leaned in and whispered in my ear, “See, the funny thing is, though, I think you feel the same way.”
I opened my mouth, but weird noises came out instead of real words. His confessional thrilled me . . . and terrified me. I didn’t know how to answer, and I wasn’t sure why. All I could do was cling to him like the floor was disappearing beneath my feet and I’d fall into a bottomless pit if either of us let go. All I could say was, “Kiss me.”
And he did.
We kissed like we were desperate, separated for years and had only minutes to spare until the world ended, rushing, breathless, all roaming hands-teeth-tongue, and I was clinging to his neck, trying to pull him underwater with me. When I stopped for breath, he said my name against my open mouth, hips swaying against mine. And a dark, drugging heat spread through my limbs like a slow fire.
I didn’t even care that he pressed too hard against me and made me jump—“Sorry, sorry, sorry”—or that I accidentally bit his lip and tasted blood—“Are you okay?” None of that mattered. Not until I felt my knees giving out. I pushed him away, worried I was going boneless again, waiting for the telltale feeling, that between-heartbeats moment when I knew I was going down.
“What’s happening?” he said in a rough voice, sounding like he’d been chasing down a freight train. “Are you having an episode?”
My quiet room filled with the sound of our heaving breath. I waited to be sure, then shook my head. “I’m okay,” I assured him.
“Sure?”
“False alarm. You made my knees turn to jelly.”
“Yeah?”
My gaze lit on his bottom lip and the dot of blood there. I wiped it away. He held my hand there and kissed my fingers. Then he said, “Wanna take a nap?”
“Not tired,” I said.
“Me either.”
We both laughed as joy rushed through my chest.
“Just a nap,” he said, letting go of me to take off his socks.
I did the same. “Sure. Just a nap.”
We took off our shirts. Jeans. His eyes all over me and mine on him.
He tentatively took my hands and pulled me toward my canopy bed, where we crawled on top of the covers together. “This is a small bed, Birdie.”
“Big enough.”
He snorted. “Better than the back seat of my car.”
“And no creepy forest mural.”
“Just this weird old bum staring out from this pillow. Is this Columbo? You have a Columbo pillow?”
I did. Beneath a screen-printed photo of the famous detective was his catchphrase, JUST ONE MORE THING. I yanked it from beneath Daniel’s head and threw it on the floor. “Better?”
“Much. God, you feel good,” he murmured, hands roaming over my hips.
“So do you.”
“If you ignore it, it will go away. Maybe. Eventually. Jesus, that’s . . . not helping.”
“Should I not . . . ?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“I forget?” He half smiled at me, eyelids heavy and blinking like his lashes were trapped in honey, until I stopped touching him. “Oh, that was mean.” He shifted, half on top of me, pinning a leg to the bed with his. “Okay, listen, Birdie.”
“Listening,” I said, squirming against him.
“I propose a new plan. It’s called the Nick and Nora Go Wild plan, and it involves us solving mysteries, eating pie for breakfast, and putting our hands all over each other.”
“Sounds risky.”
“It’s completely risky, and I can’t promise it won’t fail. But before you say yes or no, I want to try something. You tell me to stop if you hate it.”
What was not to like? He was kissing my neck again and then lower, moving down the bed to my stomach. His long hair was a curtain around his face, tickling my skin as he slid down my body, and then—
Oh.
Oh.
“Give it a chance, okay?” he said from a million miles away. And then I nearly blacked out. First from embarrassment, then from pleasure. If my body was going to pick a time to go cataplexic, it sure as heck better not be now! But it didn’t, and the only thing interrupting the greatest thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life was Daniel, stopping to ask me questions. I tried to answer, but couldn’t, so I was relieved that he seemed to understand what I only had a vague idea about.
And I was doubly relieved that after he made his way back up the bed, he reached for his jeans—and that the condom he managed to pull out of his pocket, after three tries and a cry of anguish, was not glow-in-the-dark.
“Do you want to try my Nick and Nora Go Wild plan?” he asked.
“I thought we just did,” I said in a dreamy voice that didn’t sound like it belonged to me.
He chuckled, and it was the most erotic thing I’d ever heard. “There’s more.”
“Is that right?” Frankly, if he’d asked me to bomb a building, I’d have asked which one.
“We can stop now. . . .”
“No, thanks,” I said.
“No to stopping or no to continuing?”
“To stopping.”
“You sure?”
I’d never been so sure about anything.
It was slightly awkward and fumbling. Certainly not bad for a second try. But it was the third try a little later that was—
Intense. Emotional.
Light-years away from what it was in the back seat of his car that first night. Those people were strangers. We were not. And what do you know? That made all the difference.
• • •
When we were done being wild, we lay side by side, all tangled up in each other. Daniel picked up my hand and placed it over his heart. Its powerful rhythm was unhurried and strong, pounding in time with mine. It felt like we were inside an invisible cocoon. As if everything we’d just done together somehow created a safe space that was just big enough for the two of us.
I exhaled a long breath and sank into the mattress.
“Hey, Birdie?”
“Yes?”
“Something fuzzy and purple is jammed between your headboard and the mattress. It has one eye, and it’s staring at me.”
I reached above his head and pulled out a stuffed animal. “It’s just Mr. Flops.”
“Mr. Flops is super creepy. Oh God, he only has the one eye.”
“He’s had a rough life,” I said. “I’ve had him since I was a kid.”
“Did your mom give him to you?”
I shook my head, petting the bunny’s ear.
“I’m sorry you don’t have a lot of good memories of your mother,” he said.
I sighed. “It’s okay. Mr. Flops is still a good memory. The Easter before my mom died was super rainy. My mom was gone—I can’t remember why. Maybe she was seeing someone, I don’t know. But I was upset about the rain because Mona was supposed to take me to an Easter egg hunt. Instead, Ms. Patty and Mona hid a bunch of clues around the diner in those pastel plastic eggs that break apart. Like, the first egg had a piece of paper inside that hinted where I could find the next one.”
“A treasure hunt for young Detective Birdie,” Daniel said, smiling. “A mystery hunt.”
I smiled back. “Exactly. And I loved every second. And at the end of the hunt was Mr. Flops and a crapload of candy. I felt like I’d won the lottery.”
“I love that,” he said, then told the bunny, “Sorry I called you a creep, Mr. Flops. You’re a fine bunny.”
I smiled, and then said, “Hey, Daniel?”
“Yes?”
“I just realized. We don’t have to work tonight.”
“Nope.”
“And we have the house to ourselves. Maybe you should just stay here.”
“All night?”
“You could just text your mom and tell her you’ll be home in the morning.”
“Oh, she’d love that.”
“Really?”
“That was sarcasm, Birdie.”
“But you’ll stay anyway, right? I’ll let you sleep on Columbo or Mr. Flops. Gentleman’s choice.”
“Well, then. How can I say no?”
I closed my eyes, completely blissed out.
“Hey, Birdie? Truth or Lie. Do you believe in second chances now?”
I ran my fingers through his hair. “I believe in us.”
“I do too,” he whispered back.
“Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them.”
—Agatha Christie, “The Witness for the Prosecution” (1933)
27
* * *
“The video of Darke in the hotel!” I said as the tub drained, tightening a damp towel around my chest.
“Oh, shit.” He paused in the middle of a vigorous hair-drying. “I knew we forgot something.”
It was well past midnight. Over the past few hours, we’d napped—for real, this time—used up the rest of the condoms, listened to old jazz records, set off the kitchen’s fire alarm when we accidentally burned grilled cheese sandwiches, and now bathed. That two people could comfortably fit in our old claw-foot tub was news to me and possibly the best idea we’d had all night.
Honestly, it was a miracle I even remembered Raymond Darke.
“The woman who was with Darke in the hotel,” I said. “Can’t we grab a still from the video and run some kind of reverse-photo-scan thingy on it? See if we can search for her online?”
Daniel’s head popped out from a floral-print towel that had seen too many years. His dark hair was a chaotic mess. “Do you even know how to do any of that?”
“N-o-o-o,” I drawled, giving him a guilty grin. “But it sounds easy.”
It wasn’t.
In the wee hours of the morning, we spent far too long searching, sitting cross-legged on the rug in my room, laptop propped on the Columbo pillow. We tried multiple stills, multiple ways. But it wasn’t until we narrowed our photo search down to Seattle—duh—that we stumbled across an article in the newspaper.
Fran Malkovich, interior designer. There she was, showing off, standing in her own kitchen, in her historical home in the Queen Anne District, which she shared with her new husband, vaguely described as a writer named Bill.
“Bill Waddle,” Daniel murmured. “That was the name he used at Tenor Records.”
“Does it indicate where the house is? That’s a big neighborhood.”
He read the article out loud. No mention of an address, naturally. But what it did provide was a slide show of several rooms she’d designed in the home . . . and one photo of the exterior. We didn’t even bother reverse-searching it. There was an entire website dedicated to historical homes in Seattle, and this eight-million-dollar pale-pink Victorian was right there, for all the world to see.
It was three blocks from Kerry Park.
“Got you, asshole,” Daniel said, flicking his finger against the screen. “Good work, Nora. Looks like you and I need to return to Queen Anne and take a little stroll.”
• • •
We couldn’t go the next day. Daniel needed to get home and change, as he hadn’t planned for a sleepover at my house and was still wearing yesterday’s clothes. And then we both had to work, which was a little . . . nerve-racking. Not in a bad way. It was just that everything had changed between us in one night. I was positive every single one of our coworkers knew what we’d been doing.
Joseph knew for sure. Every time I saw him, he had a funny look on his face and gave me a little lift of his chin. And don’t get me started on Chuck. First he asked me if I’d won the lottery because I was suspiciously “in a good mood.” Then he made a joke in front of Mr. Kenneth about me having a look on my face as if I’d “spent the weekend in Las Vegas with a bunch of male hookers and a bag of cocaine.”
