Page 31 of Long Way Down

She thought he sensed it, the way he wet his lower lip with a flick of his tongue and fiddled with his empty coffee cup. “Can I ask you something…Melissa?”

Belatedly, she remembered she’d told them to use her first name.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “If that’s – if I should say ‘Detective’–”

“Melissa’s fine.”

“Okay. Melissa.” A flicker of something like hope touched his smile, there and gone again. Then he grew serious. “Can I ask you to give Lana a message? From all of us?”

That wasn’t the question she’d been expecting. “Sure.”

“Can you tell her that I know she’ll feel awkward when she sees us next, since you’ve talked to us. Now that we know what happened.” Not all of it, she thought. The wordrapehadn’t come into the conversation, not with Jason and not with them. “Can you tell her that we care about her, and we’re thinking about her, and that she doesn’t have to feel embarrassed around us?”

It struck her as childish.Make sure she knows we don’t think she has cooties.

But she remembered the natty fabric of the sofa edge beneath her clenched-tight fingers, the way her feet jangled and wouldn’t hold still in her uncomfortable Mary Janes. Recalled the looks the adults had skated her way, as they glided between the closed coffin and Melissa’s perch on that awful funeral home couch. She and Ivy had always been together, riding their bikes down the sidewalks, Melissa struggling to keep up with her training wheels. Shimmying over fences and flashing through backyards like dappled young foxes, snagging strawberries from Mrs. Brewer’s raised beds and splashing through Mr. Soto’s goldfish pond. Sitting on the front steps of Melissa’s house, popsicles turning their tongues blue, bored and overwarm in the late July afternoons, children eager for a distraction, close because of blood, but not because of love. Now one of those children sat swinging her feet in a starched dress, and the other lay in a lily-topped coffin, too jellied and bloated and fish-eaten for an open-casket viewing. Always together, until they weren’t. Was it her fault? Had she abandoned her to her fate? Why hadn’t they both been taken?

Questions a child of six had seen lurking in the eyes of neighbors and fellow churchgoers.

Melissa blinked the past away and forced the phantom scent of florist carnations from her nose, the beeswax of the funeral home pillars. She understood. Nothing was ever the same after something ugly came to your house; any friendly face afterward felt like a gift from above.

She nodded. “I’ll tell her.”

Tobias smiled softly, and nodded. “Thanks.” He grabbed a left-behind napkin and a pen from his bag, and jotted a series of digits. “I don’t know if I can be of any more help, but if you think of anything” – he slid the napkin over as he stood – “let me know. It was nice to meet you.” His parting smile hit her right in the solar plexus, and settled somewhere low and heated below her naval.

Shesoneeded to get laid.

A tall, steaming to-go cup landed at her elbow. “You two looked cozy,” Contreras said, mildly, and she tipped her head back to shoot him a frown.

He looked entirely too serene as he sipped his own coffee.

“He’s worried about Lana,” she said, a touch too defensively. A tone that wouldn’t have worked on a stranger, let alone a detective.

“Uh-huh.” He maneuvered around the head of the table so he could sit across from her. “Or,” he said, head tilting, “maybe he was worried about the way that top fits.” He gestured vaguely with his cup.

Her frown deepened. “What’s wrong with my top?” She glanced down at it, plucked at the front. It was a simple, black v-neck long-sleeve, tucked into black jeans. She’d polished her belt and boots recently, and with her long, classic wool coat, she thought it was all very casual-professional.

“Nothing,” he said, “if you’re a boob man, which your boy Tobias clearly is.”

“What?”

He held up his free hand, playing defenseless. “Hey, I’m not judging. But I noticed him while you were busy trying not to notice him, and let’s just say he’s got a wandering eye. An eye that wanders south, specifically.”

She could feel her face darken, and cursed her coloring. It had been giving her away emotionally her whole life. “Well. So what?” she ground out. “So he’s a creep. There’s a ton of those. Spit and you’ll hit one.”

He chuckled. “You sound so Southern right now.”

“Fu – screw you, no I don’t.”

He laughed, a bright punch of sound, and then reined himself in. “Sorry, sorry.” One last chuckle. “I think it’s cute.”

“Now who’s being inappropriate?” she huffed, flopping back in her chair and folding her arms tight over her breasts. A mistake, because now she couldn’t reach her coffee.

“Look, we’re adults. We don’t have to be weird about it. He’s a good-looking guy. Hot, even – is that what the young women are saying these days? Is ‘hot’ still in?”

“Hot’s always in,” she grumbled, and reached forward enough to snag her cup. She swore the first sip sanded the edges off her headache.

“Okay, cool. He’s hot. You’re allowed to look. And he’s allowed to look back.”

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