Page 68 of Murder Most Actual

Her eyes closed, Liza felt her breathing slide into an easy rhythm and listened to the night sounds of the hotel. It was an old building and its timbers creaked in the dark in ways she was beginning to find familiar, almost comforting.

“Do you remember,” Hanna whispered into empty space, “the weekend we spent camping in Cornwall?”

“It rained for three days straight and we had to sleep in mud, and the campsite toilets backed up, and so we had to walk twenty minutes to the nearest pub every time we wanted to use the loo?” Liza remembered it. She remembered it very clearly. It had been utterly miserable, and she would probably have left before lunch on the Saturday if Hanna hadn’t insisted they see it through. And if the engine hadn’t fallen out of their old car.

“That’s the one. I’m just trying to work out if that’s still our worst ever holiday, or if this one just beats it.”

“Well, on the one hand,” said Liza, “our lives were never actually in danger in Cornwall.”

There was a shifting in the dark as Hanna rolled over, fishing the USB key out of her pocket and staring at it for a moment before handing it over to Liza. “You say that, but we could have drowned if it had rained much harder in the night.”

Letting herself relax just a fraction, Liza laughed. “I told you we should have gone home.”

“And miss all that beautiful scenery we could barely see?”

“Or that lovely romantic walk down Widemouth Bay in the pissing rain.”

Hanna moved closer, facing Liza in the darkness. “You know it was kind of romantic. We shared an umbrella, got mildly fetishising comments from surfers …”

“Oh, that was the worst. Like, we were already wet to the skin, what did they want us to do?”

“Kiss, I think,” said Hanna

Memories were drifting back to Liza in fragments. “And we did that too, didn’t we?”

Reaching out, Hanna traced her fingertips up Liza’s arm. “Well, I wasn’t going to not kiss my then-girlfriend-now-wife just to spite some surfer bros.”

“Good call.” They were closer now, and not thinking about the hotel or the murders or that the risk of joining the victims was getting easier. Although easier wasn’t quite the same as easy. “And then we found that little cafe and decided to stay there until the rain eased up.”

“And it just got worse and worse, and we were trying not to spend too much, so we just shared one cup of hot chocolate for hours and the owner got really hacked off with us.”

Liza moved herself closer still so that they lay body-to-body. And it felt … good? She thought so, anyway. Natural. Like it used to be. Like it had always been that way. She leaned towards Hanna and kissed her, and for just a moment it was as if they were back on that beach in Cornwall, with surfers watching them while they held each other in the rain.

They had been together so long that the rhythms of intimacy were second nature. It was just that, in the last year or so, they’d lost the habit of following them. But there in the dark, in a dead man’s room, they flowed into each other like waves on the sea. Like snow in flurries. Like blood into earth.

This was wrong. Or if not wrong, at least a little creepy. Liza pulled back, the taste of her wife’s lips still on hers. “We shouldn’t,” she said. “I know he didn’t die in here, but this is still …”

“Yeah.” There was a hunger in Hanna’s expression that Liza hadn’t seen in a long, long time. “Yeah, it’d be … disrespectful.”

“Very.”

“And being disrespectful”—Hanna slid her hand up from Liza’s hip to the small of her back to the nape of her neck—”is bad.”

“Extremely bad.”

They kissed again, more hesitantly. For all that they could make a game of it, there was still death in the air, and whether that was an aphrodisiac or a mood killer was very much a matter of perspective. “Okay.” Liza pulled back again. “We should really stop.”

“I know. It’s just—we could be in actual danger here, and—”

“And you wanted to do the Hollywood cliché thing and doink just as we’re about to do something that might get us killed?”

“It’s a classic for a reason. But really, I think I just want something to—I don’t know, distract me?”

“And here I was feeling flattered.”

Hanna sighed. “You’re also a beautiful, talented, incredibly sexy woman that I desire intensely.”

“And so are you. But we’re in a dead man’s bed.”

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