Page 6 of The Grave Between Us
For three days, Cole had glanced at Noah’s ring finger every chance he could, checking to see if Noah was still wearing his engagement band. Was his avoidance a sign? Was he going to hand Cole his ring back?Sorry, it just got too real.But, no, the ring stayed on. Cole actually caught Noah playing with it, spinning the ring around and around as he stared off into space, his hands held in front of his heart.
“I’ll have to ask him what he’s found.”
“Shouldn’t you guys be doing that together?”
“You know your dad sometimes keeps his thoughts to himself for a while.”
Katie snorted. She rolled her eyes and popped a piece of chicken into her mouth. “Mm-hmm,” she hummed as she chewed. “Well, what doyouwant for your wedding?”
He shrugged. Twirled chow mein around his chopsticks. “I’m not sure. A year ago, I never imagined I’d get married. It wasn’t something I ever thought much about.”
“I can see it perfectly. You guys in tuxes, white roses in an arch over your heads. Everyone is there, and everyone’s crying, because you guys are so disgustingly happy. Dad’s definitely crying.” She grinned. “I’ve got an indoor and an outdoor version. Want to hear both?”
Cole’s gaze caught on a man sitting alone across the food court, staring their way as he sucked on the straw in his Sbarro cup. Open-front plaid overshirt, cargo pants, a stained football shirt: the uniform of a hundred thousand middle-aged men from the Midwest. Nothing remarkable about him at all.
Except he was staring at Katie. His eyes lingered on her profile, traced the ski-jump curve of her nose. Followed the wisps of hair that slipped free from the knot on top of her head. He hadn’t blinked in the past twenty-three seconds.
Cole’s heart jackhammered, his knuckles going white as he gripped his chopsticks. He eyeball fucked the man, boring his own stare into the man’s skull.Look at me, asshole. Look atme. Don’t look at her.
The man’s eyes skittered sideways, landing on Cole for a half second before moving on. He stood, grabbed his empty food tray, and headed for the trash cans.
Cole let his breath out slowly. There was a roar in his ears, like the crashing of waves against a pebble beach. Katie’s voice broke through the receding noise, coming at him like he was underwater. He snapped his gaze back as she twisted, staring over her shoulder at the empty table where the man had been.
“What is it?” she asked. “Did you see something?”
“No.” He forced a smile to his face. “No, sorry. I’m sorry. I got distracted.”
Her arched eyebrow called him a liar. But she didn’t press, and she let him pick at his food as his hand trembled.
There was knowledge he wished he didn’t have inside his brain. He’d amassed a library of facts, statistics, case studies, and biographies, all dedicated to the evil people were capable of inflicting on others. He’d dedicated his life to trying to understand how a man went from laying eyes on someone to deciding to wrap his hands around their neck. How the switch flipped in a man’s mind as his gaze traveled the lines of another person’s body. What he thought as his eyes drank in the pretty face of a stranger and a vision of her death bloomed like virus cells growing under a microscope slide. And everything that came after. What pliers did to flesh. The definition of piquerism. What skin looked like from the inside.
He was haunted by the things he knew.
Dirt sliding through his fingers, cold fog sliding into his lungs. A paper crane in the center of his palm—
“Tell me about your wedding plans.” He tried to smile at Katie. “What are you imagining?”
“Okay, so…”
* * *
“Da-ad! We’re home!”Katie called as they came in from the garage. Shopping bags, her duffel, and her backpack bounced off her arms and ricocheted in the doorway. She entered the house with all the grace of an elephant, and Cole stayed well behind, out of the crash zone.
Noah twisted around on the couch, one arm over the back, smiling at them as they walked in. He’d undone the top two buttons on his dress shirt and ditched his tie, and there was a beer bottle on the coffee table. His iPad was in his lap. “How was it?”
“Great! I had to get new shoes, too. Cowboy boots.” Katie dropped all her bags in a heap next to the kitchen table and undid her combat boots, toeing them off and kicking them under the chair. “Then we went to Panda, and then I remembered I needed mascara, so we stopped at Sephora for a minute.”
“More like forty minutes,” Cole said, winking.
“It wasn’t that long!”
“The mall was about to close.”
“Look, Urban Decay just released their new line, and you saw how cool that new Morphe palette is, right? God, that was amazing.”
Noah’s gaze bounced between Katie and Cole, bemusement filling his eyes and turning the corners of his lips up. This was all a foreign language to Noah, Cole knew. Noah tried, he really did, but the one time Katie tried to explain to him why she really, really needed all those makeup brushes and dozens of eye shadow palettes, he’d told her that they all looked the same to him, and Katie had shut her bathroom door in his face.
“It’s amazing how many different variations on a primary color palette they can put out, yes.”
