Page 21 of Again with Feeling

Boy,I realized on a second look, might not technically be accurate. After a longer look, I pegged him somewhere in his early twenties. He had creamy skin, a mop of blond hair, and thin eyebrows that were a darker blond than the hair on his head. A narrow jaw made his face interesting rather than classically handsome. He wore a cardigan with a tee and jeans, which wasn’t exactly traditional cat burglar attire, but that didn’t slow him down as he pulled the topmost drawer out of the nightstand and dumped it into a cardboard box. Then, without missing a beat, he grabbed the cardboard box and started toward the door at a jog.

I scrambled down the hall to the secret door that led into Bobby’s room. On my side, it looked more or less like a standard door, with slightly unusual dimensions. But the other side, which faced the bedroom, was a mirror in a gilt frame. Which, I assume, made it even more dramatic when I flung the door open, jumped out of the secret passage, and picked up the closest thing at hand—based on a brief fling with historical fiction, I was fairly sure it was a coal scuttle—and shouted, “Stop! Thief!”

The young guy’s head whipped around, and he ran straight into the door. The box he was carrying flew into the air, and he stumbled backward. Then he fell. Then he did this weird, backward half-somersault. And that’s how he ended up on the floor, staring up at me, with a bloody nose. In a dazed voice, he mumbled, “You must be Dash.”

“Uh, yes?”

(I know. It wasn’t supposed to be a question.)

But the fact that he seemed to know me and didn’t appear to be trying to run away (didn’t even appear to be trying to sit up) made it hard to stay amped up. Just for good measure, though, I brandished the coal scuttle and asked, “Who are you?”

Pinching the bridge of his nose with one hand (apparently, he was an experienced nose-bleeder), he sounded slightly nasal as he extended one hand. “Kiefer Smith.”

Uh oh.

In that instant, I realized why he (now, too late) looked slightly familiar—because this was the same guy I’d seen Bobby with outside the apartment building the night before.

“Oh my God,” I said and bent down to help him.

And, in the process, I managed to almost clobber him with the coal scuttle.

“Oh my God,” I said again, and after ditching the scuttle, I tried again. “I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”

He had a bewildered smile as he let me help him into a sitting position. “I ran into a door.”

“I know. Oh my God.” That was three times, and the writerly part of my brain suggested that was enough. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you—well, I mean I did, but not because—I mean, I didn’t know it was you—I mean, I knew it wasyoubecause I saw you, but I didn’t know who you were—” I could hear myself unspooling verbally. But when I stopped, the only thing I could come up with was “Oh my GOD!”

(Millie would have been proud.)

Kiefer only laughed, though. It was wet and, yes, a bit nasal because of the bloody nose, but it sounded surprisingly free of rancor. “It’s okay. It’s my dumb fault for not watching where I was going. Do you have a tissue? Bobby’s going to kill me if I ruin this rug.”

I caught myself about to explain that Bobby didn’t care about rugs. Bobby didn’t care about floor coverings of any kind, although hewasreally proud of the new bath mat he’d purchased. (He seemed to think that it was a real coup that he’d found one made of memory foam, which only further supported my theory that Bobby was a straight guy who had been switched at birth.) Instead, I hurried into the bathroom and got the whole box of tissues.

Kiefer accepted them with a smile and wadded them against his nose.

That was when I noticed the red mark on his forehead. At this point, I figured I might as well give into it, and I blurted, “Oh my God.”

“Huh?”

“Your head!”

He touched his forehead, winced, and gave another smile. “Doesn’t feel broken.”

“Kiefer, I amsosorry.” And then, before I could stop myself, I asked, “What were you doing?”

“Please don’t tell Bobby.”

I hadn’t been expecting that. “Tell him what?”

“It was supposed to be a surprise.” But the real surprise was when the tears started. “He’s going to be so mad.”

Which didn’t make any sense because Bobby didn’tgetmad. I mean, sure, he wasn’t thrilled when you told him you were going to do your writing for the day, only you had to use the bathroom, and then you needed a snack to keep your bloodsugar up, and when he came back from his run, you were up to your ears in Indira’s Black Forest cherry cake. And he definitely didn’t like it if you got yourself accidentally, unfortunately, totally by chance caught up in a murder investigation, even if it wasn’t your fault. Like, at all. But angry? That wasn’t a word that came to mind when I thought of Bobby Mai.

Before I had to press for answers, words spilled out of Kiefer. “I just wanted to help him, you know. And I thought it would be cute to spend our first night there together, even if it was, you know, kind of rough.”

He tentatively peeled the tissues away from his nose. They were crimson where they’d soaked up his blood, and his nose looked puffy. His eyes were still watery with some mixture of tears and pain, and I thought again that he looked like a boy. I looked at the box that he’d dropped and noticed, now, what had fallen free: Bobby’s phone charger; his earbuds; his clock; a bottle of hand lotion. Everything, my brain registered, from his nightstand.

“Your first night together where?” I asked.

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