Page 39 of The Whisper Place
I shrugged it off, but she wasn’t done. She caught my face in both hands. “And I see you, Jonah Kendrick. You were upset when you got here tonight. Something happened with Max.”
I hadn’t brought up the argument about Max’s under-the-table funding. I didn’t want to think about it anymore, even though his presumption kept eating at me. He’d always been good at keeping his thoughts and emotions in check. I just had no idea how much he was hiding underneath that blank veneer.
“How did you know that?”
“Observation and analysis. You picked up dinner from Cedar Rapids, which meant you needed a long drive to work off excess input.”
“Excess input?” My hands had found her back again. She leaned into them.
“Yes, too much data from the world. Your street racing expels the excess, probably through a combination bath of adrenaline and dopamine. But it didn’t completely offset the incident, because you were still upset when you got here, which meant whatever happened was personal—not a random encounter with a stranger. You repeatedly ran your hands through your hair while we set the table, which yes, looks sexy when you wear these black T-shirts. And when Earl mentioned Max, you reacted to the name in an anomalous way.”
I stared at her, mouth open, and her voice dropped to barely more than a whisper. “This entanglement goes both ways. I thought you knew that.”
I did and I didn’t. Eve was a gift I didn’t know how to accept, and being with her was as terrifying as it was inevitable.
“I’m tuned to you, too. My methods are different than yours, but some people find them just as invasive.”
“They’re not.”
“My students would disagree. I’ll admit I was surprised when you put me on the counter, but I wasn’t exactly unhappy about it.”
She pulled, slow and steady, until our foreheads pressed together. “Next time, ask. And I’ll tell you if I do or don’t want something.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It never is. But we’ll start there. Right or wrong, you have to choose a methodology for your data set.”
Her lips found my throat and it became difficult to think, let alone talk. “I knew I would end up in your lab someday.”
She hummed and wound her legs around my hips, pulling me in hard. I lost track of time until the bathroom doorknob rattled, bringing us up with a start.
“Shit.”
Eve barely made it back to the table before Earl opened the bathroom door. I rearranged random things in the fridge until it felt safe to join them.
Neither of us paid much attention to the footage. We shot glances at each other and she thought about what happened in the kitchen until I had to leave the room entirely. She laughed as Iescaped to the porch, which is when I realized she was reliving it on purpose. To torture me. Goddamn, this woman was going to kill me.
While I stared desperately at weather instruments and tried to think about nothing but rain and lightning, Earl startled both of us by banging on the table.
“What?”
He pointed at the screen and I felt excitement churn through both of them before I even got back to the table. Eve backed up the footage as Earl typed on his iPad.
You would’ve seen it if you weren’t too busy making googly eyes at each other. Ask her out already.
“Good idea.” I clapped Earl on the back and we both turned to Eve, who blushed until her skin matched her hair.
“I wanted to, um, talk to you about that first,” she stammered.
Just get on with it. You two are driving me nuts.
Earl shook his head at both of us, eyes twinkling as he jabbed at the screen.
On the grainy footage, Blake was taking the trash out. She opened the gate then stopped, dropping the bags. Pulling her phone out to take a call, she wandered away from the fence, and Earl—schooling us all in investigation—paused the shot.
We had a dead-on view of the license plate of Kate’s car.
Darcy
