Page 49 of The Grave Between Us
“I was following your lead. You weren’t subtle about your lust for the grave site. Was that why you gave him up? And why you volunteered to go with us to the lake? So you could get one last look at one of your graves?”
“One of many reasons. The payoff was worth it, don’t you think? I got everything I wanted, including you, smelling like death and coming to share yourself with me. That went better than I imagined, if I’m being honest. You, oh… You smelled absolutely divine.”
“The man in the grave, Ian.” Cole picked up his pencil and waited.
“Did you see my drawings?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“And I think you think too highly of what I’ve got between my legs. Sorry to disappoint, but your drawings have veered far away from being lifelike.”
Ian tipped his head back and laughed. “Oh, Cole, a narcissist you are not. It’s charming, it really is. If someone drew those kinds of pictures of me, I’d be the first to tell them they’d need to size up. Use a hula hoop for girth reference. But the way you keep pushing me away.” He shook his head. His dark eyes flashed, raking down Cole’s body. “It’s intoxicating.”
“The man in the grave,” Cole repeated. He tapped the tip of his pencil against the yellow paper.
Ian sighed. “His name is Brenden Roundhouse,” he said. “I took him five years ago, from a trailhead in North Carolina.”
“Tell me.”
Ian did, in explicit detail. Brenden’s last day, from when Ian spotted him on the trail, hiking alone, and made the decision to come alongside him. How they spent hours together, bird-watching and sharing the lazy summer afternoon. Brenden thought he’d met a wonderful, intriguing man, someone worldly and suave, someone he could look up to. Ian had dazzled him, uncovering bits of Brenden’s psychology in the course of their conversation and tailoring his own identity to appear to be exactly what Brenden wanted.
The moment he struck, seizing Brenden, bringing him down and under his control.
“I waited for him to come back to consciousness. I wanted him awake and aware of everything that was going to happen.”
Ian narrated Brenden’s final hours with his voice pitched toward ecstasy, his stare searing the side of Cole’s face.
Cole stayed hunched over his pad, taking notes, writing up the horror in moment-by-moment details.
“Do you need a break?” Ian asked, his voice cutting off in the middle of describing one of Brenden’s screams. “You look a little tired.”
“I’m fine.” Cole flipped to a new page without looking at Ian.
“Are you sure? I still have several hours of description left.”
Cole blanched. He reached for his coffee. He’d finished it half an hour ago, though, and now his stomach was churning. Bile rose in his throat. “Go on. You were busy with Brenden Roundhouse.”
“You want to know me, don’t you?”
He held Ian’s gaze and said nothing.
“I have an offer for you. I’ll trim my retelling, shave it down to the most important details, the parts most relevant to your investigation, and I’ll write down for you in bullet points all the extraneous things that I did to Brenden.”
“And in exchange?”
“Sit beside me as I write. Let me speak softly to you, whisper to you what I’ve done. Let me be near you. Let me take your delicious scent inside me.”
He wanted to bolt from the room. He wanted to race outside, shed his clothes, dive into a shower and scrub himself raw. He wanted to shave every hair from his head and his body, rip out his fingernails, scrape the top layer of his skin off. His palms were soaked, a cold sweat rising all over him. His heart pounded. There wasn’t enough oxygen, it seemed. No air that didn’t stink like death and darkness and Ian.
What would Ian gain from Cole moving closer? He was shackled, his hands in cuffs, not the long chain, his reach limited to fourteen inches. His feet were bound. He was restrained to the chair. Cole could sit fifteen inches away, and Ian wouldn’t be able to reach him. But he’d be able to smell him. And his eyes would roam all over Cole’s body.
Would this lead to Ian being more cooperative in the future? Would they find more of his graves if Cole gave in, let Ian get his jollies? Was excavating and identifying his victims worth giving a murderer orgasmic delight? Everything was a calculation with Ian, an exhausting back-and-forth. What was Ian gaining here? What was Cole giving up?
Did he care that Ian sat in his cell and fantasized about him, got off on his scent, when Cole could walk away, leaving Ian in isolation? Ian was trying to dominate Cole in so many little ways. Unnerve him, unbalance him. Overpower his equilibrium.
But Ian was the one in chains, and Cole was not, and the real imbalance was that Ian was a prisoner and Cole was free. Cole was not a murderer.
