Page 49 of The One Decent Thing

Since I’d gotten out before rush hour, it was forty minutes from my door to the parking lot of the diner where Nissa, the reporter from theCarterville Herald, had told me to meet her.

I hated Carterville. I’d had to pass within a block of that bus stop, and I’d shuddered and forced myself not to rubberneck and try to catch a glimpse of it. This diner was everything I disliked about my hometown: a little run down, with trash littering the pavement around it, but with a bright new paint job that was trying to make it look like more than it was. The town had a shipping facility for a big online retailer on its outskirts, new since my mom had won the mayoral election three years before. Getting it to come to town had been one of the big planks of her platform, along with some tax she was going to get them to pay to offset carbon emissions, or something.

Whatever. Carterville was still a low-wage, low-hope kind of place, with a few clusters of gated communities in the foothills to the north of town and one really extravagant golf course, where my father and the Carterville DA liked to practice their swings together and enjoy being the biggest fish in a small pond. It made me want to puke again. Instead, since I wasn’t going to be driving for a while, I swallowed another quarter of a Xanax with a mouthful of tepid water from the bottle I’d left in the cup holder, and headed to the diner.

Inland, the chill was chillier but the sun brighter, without the coast’s ever-present haze. I blinked and shivered all at once. Bells rang as I pushed the diner door open, and a waitress stuck her head around the pass-through leading back into the kitchen.

“I’m meeting someone,” I said, and she nodded and disappeared again.

Past the foyer there were two ways to go: one side had booths looking out on the parking lot, and the other had tables arranged on the street side. The diner was three-quarters full of people grabbing breakfast on their way to work, with a few kids scattered here and there. A little boy near me was chattering away and spilling cocoa on himself, while his mom tried to get a word in edgewise.

The cocoa made me think of Aidan, and my heart gave a pang. He’d given me space, exactly like I asked. Was overprotectiveness really the worst thing? I still wanted him to grovel, probably because I was a bad person, but I’d already forgiven him. I just hoped he’d forgive me for what I was about to do. It was a huge invasion of his privacy, looked at from a certain direction. If I’d asked him first, though, he might’ve talked me out of it, or I might have lost my nerve.

No. It had to be this way.

Nissa had told me she had blue hair so I’d know who to look for, but when I spotted her way down at the end of the row of booths the reality still took me by surprise. It wasn’t just blue. It was neon turquoise. Her nose ring was a nice touch, too. The silver jewelry and the turquoise curls against her umber skin made her look like a mermaid.

“Sebastian?” she said as I approached the booth. “It’s nice to meet you.” She rose to shake my hand. I hoped mine wasn’t too clammy.

“You too. Um, sorry if I’m late?”

Nissa shook her head. “No worries. I’m early. I like to prepare.”

She had her laptop and a constellation of papers on the table in front of her, along with a half-drunk cup of coffee and the remains of a croissant, obviously neglected in favor of the geometrically arranged and obviously color-coded Post-it notes on her documents. A fellow obsessive, I recognized with approval. Nissa had been the right choice, I was sure of it, even if I’d picked her out of the line-up of newspaper staff based on no more than thinking her name was pretty.

“So,” she said as I sat down. “Do you want some coffee before we get started?” Her barely-suppressed eagerness had me ducking my head to hide a smile. At least I was making her day. She’d tried to press me for more details when I’d called her the day before, but all I would tell her was my name, my relationship to the mayor, and that she ought to pull the records of Aidan’s trial before she met with me.

That had been more than enough to have her setting a first-thing meeting for the following day.

“I’m good. I’m not sure where to start, though.”

“Well.” Her dark eyes gleamed, and she shot me a smile that was predatory in all the right ways — more shark than mermaid. Oh, God yes. She was perfect. “Obviously this shit-show of a trial wasn’t all it seemed, so how about you fill me in on the backstory? Do you mind if I record our conversation?” Her hand hovered over her laptop.

“Go ahead.” I took a deep breath while she pressed a button and then gestured at me to continue. “I wasn’t kidnapped. I ran away from home, and Aidan Morrison helped me out. Okay, actually, let me start a little earlier than that…”

It took nearly an hour before I ran out of story, breath, and coffee. The waitress had dropped by twice, the first time to bring a refill for Nissa, and the second time to bring me a cup and set a carafe on the table for us both without a word. This clearly wasn’t the first time Nissa had used a booth here to get work done. I was going to leave such a huge tip.

Oddly, telling the story didn’t make me panic. The opposite, actually. As it poured out of me, it felt like draining a wound, or maybe more like sinus pressure clearing after months of pollen allergies: like something bad I’d hardly noticed because I’d carried it with me for so long was dissipating at last.

Nissa took it all in, occasionally prompting me when I went off-track, but otherwise simply nodding along, her face impassive.

“And now Aidan’s your roommate?” she asked me, as I drained the last few drops of coffee from my cup to try to soothe my parched throat. My slight hesitation might have gotten by someone who wasn’t as sharp as Nissa, but she cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. “Not just your roommate, maybe?”

Crap. My being gay had been an integral part of the story, of course, but I’d been careful not to label Aidan. Maybe too careful.

“We’re friends, too,” I hedged, but I was pretty sure my blush gave me away. “Can we turn off the recording now?”

Nissa smiled, nodded, and tapped her keyboard, closing the lid of the laptop for good measure. “That way you know I’m not still recording you secretly.”

My eyebrows shot up. “Isn’t that, like, totally against reporter ethics or something?”

She shrugged. “Yes, but a lot of reporters don’t have any ethics.” She didn’t sound all that concerned about it either way. Someday, when I grew up, I hoped I could have half her sang-froid. Nissa took a sip from her own long-cold coffee. “Sebastian, I’m not taping this or writing it down, and we can go off the record for a minute. Just for my own information, and so that I can protect you and Aidan from any attention you don’t want: is he more than a roommate, or a friend?”

I took a deep breath. Would Aidan want me to out him like this? He’d said he didn’t care what people thought, but letting his coworkers see him kissing me was miles away from making a statement to the press. I saw her point, though. It would be helpful if she could write her story in possession of all the facts, even if she didn’t print them.

“Really off the record?” Nissa nodded. “Okay. Yes. But — it’s new. I kind of don’t want it to be a thing. And our relationship is — like, a red herring, right? It’s not relevant. It doesn’t matter what we are to each other.”

“I agree, and that’s not going to be the focus of the story at all,” Nissa said evenly, and then her face broke into a mischievous grin. “Full disclosure? Hearing that story, I was totally shipping you two. I’m so glad I was right.”

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