Secrets (PsyCop 4)

“You don’t need the futon,” Jacob called from the living room. My living room. The one he’d been sharing with me since an incubus exploded in his swanky Lakeview condo last fall. I was in the kitchen at the time, trying to determine exactly how attached I was to the corkboard next to the phone, the one where I stick small pieces of paper until I forget what the notes scrawled on them were supposed to mean. “I have a living room set,” he said.

I vaguely remembered Jacob’s living room set. I’d seen it at his old condo maybe twice before it’d gone into storage. I’d been too busy ogling his naked body to pay much attention to his décor. When I wasn’t busy shooting at the incubus who’d followed him there, anyway.

I worked the yellow sticky note I was holding between my thumb and forefinger, rubbing it, creasing it down the center. It was so damp with sweat, it molded to the shape of my palm. I shook it loose and it landed on the countertop. I scrubbed my palm against the leg of my jeans, and wondered if I’d managed to leach all the sticky out of the note. Stupid of me. I’d made a deal with Jacob that I’d only keep the things I marked with a yellow paper tag. It had seemed like a big stack of stickies, at the time. But my stack had grown awfully thin. There aren’t as many sticky notes in a pack as you might think.

It was the week of my thirty-ninth birthday, and there I was, poised to move out of my bright white apartment and into the old brick loft building, a turn of the century cannery, that I now owned with Jacob. I’m not sure which part was weirder—that it had taken me so long to find someone I was that serious about, or that it had even happened to me at all. I’d always figured I was too screwed up to do the whole long-term relationship thing with anybody. Ever.

“Vic? The futon.”

I looked down at the soggy paper square on the countertop. Maybe Jacob was right about the futon. Almost-forty-year-olds didn’t generally have cheap futons as the focal point of their living rooms. Especially not when there was actual furniture around they could be using. Besides, it would free up that sticky note so I could mark something else I wanted to keep.

I touched the seat of the barstool under the kitchen counter. Vinyl and chrome. I liked my barstools. Did I need to put a sticky on each of them, or was it understood that they were a set?

Jacob appeared in the doorway, flashing his washboard abs. He wasn’t trying to seduce me; he was mopping sweat from his face with the hem of his black T-shirt. Still, he was distracting, to say the least. “Bedroom’s packed,” he said, tugging his shirt back down. “Where are those barstools supposed to go?”

“The…kitchen?”

He frowned. It was more of a thinking-frown than a cull-your-shit-already-frown. I think. “Maybe. Or maybe we can put a bar in the basement.”

If we did put a bar in the basement, Jacob would be drinking at it alone. Not because I don’t drink, which I don’t, but because I don’t do basements. They’re creepy. Even the ones that’ve been finished with paneling, indoor-outdoor carpeting and dart boards.

But I didn’t argue. I don’t do confrontation any better than I do basements, or shots of Jägermeister.

“Why don’t we just take it all and sort it out once we get there?” I suggested. Jacob hadn’t thought it was a good idea the night before, but it couldn’t hurt to try one more time and see if I might wear down his resolve. “There’s plenty of room.”

Jacob went to the sink and held his hands under the tap. He splashed cold water on his face and performed another ab-flashing maneuver that would bring any card-carrying queer to his knees. “How many times do you want to end up carrying this stuff?” he said. “We don’t need two of everything.”

And my furniture was all cheap pressboard crap, while his was real. Yeah, I knew that. But still. I had a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that the hundred-year-old cannery, a bizarre student attempt at Egyptian revival, was my new home. I pressed a sticky note onto a narrow white plastic end table in the corner and heard Jacob sigh.

“What?” I said. “That’s where I keep my keys.”

Jacob stepped back from the sink and eased his way toward me. Sweat made his fitted black T-shirt cling to his body, and his deep olive skin glistened in the greenish light cast by the fluorescent overhead fixture. He kept on coming at me until he’d backed me into the wall, where the plastic table threatened to warp under the weight of my thigh. The smell of new sweat was heady, and it turned my furniture frustration to thoughts of sex. I felt a warmth deep in my belly. No, lower. Damn him. Neither one of us needed to resort to arguing. We each had our ways of trying to get what we wanted.