North strode the length of the kitchen. Shaw was doing something with the sink, and North left him behind. Walk with purpose, he told himself. Walk with force. Walk with speed, like you’re on a job site and somebody’s about to drop an I-beam. But not too fast.
North wished he didn’t feel so desperate. About the prospect of a client, sure—the way his heart jumped, fucking leaped, when the bell rang. The way he was practically scurrying toward the front office. But about Shaw too. And the desperation about Shaw didn’t have an easy name or shape to it. It was just there, eating away at North. If Shaw could just hook up with somebody. If Shaw could just get boned. Like, crazy boned. The kind that would leave Shaw crawling for a week. That was the only part of it that North could articulate to himself. If Shaw could just hook up with anybody. But North scratched out that last part. He wasn’t quite that desperate for Shaw, not for just anybody. Not yet.
For a client, though—yes, for a client, he was that desperate. Things had been bad. North and Shaw had been licking their wounds. But now they were ready to work again, so please God, let it be a client.
He paused in the front office. The boy—he looked barely eighteen—stood in the doorway, his hand still on the knob, his gaze moving over Pari’s desk, the empty chair, the row of filing cabinets with a terracotta pot and ivy trailing down almost to the floor. Something about the way the boy looked at everything made North aware of the dust, aware of Pari’s dirty plate sticking out of one desk drawer, aware of the chewing gum some dickwad had thumbed onto the outside jamb of the front door.
“I’m looking for Kingsley.”
North studied him a minute longer. Pretty. Beautiful. The unruly wave of blond hair tumbling into eyes that would have given Liz Taylor envy. The faintest blush in smooth, white cheeks. Soot—or was it dirt—on his jaw, in the dark shadow under one eye, and on his surprisingly boyish hands gave him a truant look. A choirboy that had just finished wrestling on the playground. Shaw was probably going to fall out of his fucking Lululemons for this guy; North hated him on sight. He eyed the street and wondered, if he timed things right, if he could toss their client out there and get him hit by a passing garbage truck before Shaw made it out of the kitchen.
But they needed work. So. “Can I help you?”
“Are you—are you Mr. Aldrich? Kingsley Aldrich?”
From the galley kitchen came an enormous clatter, like a mountain of dishes avalanching. North squeezed his eyes shut. They had like three plates total, but that had sounded like a dinner service for twenty.
“Aldrich.” Shaw came panting out of the kitchen. “Did somebody—North, did you—”
“Shaw, he’s looking for you.”
“Oh. Hi.” He was wiping his hands on those outrageously expensive yoga pants—North wasn’t sure when Shaw had purchased them; clothes came and went pretty easily for Shaw—and then he jogged forward, shooting out for a handshake. “Shaw Aldrich.”
“Kingsley?”
The back of Shaw’s head was to North, but he didn’t need to see Shaw’s face to know the look that was there. It had been there since their first year together at Chouteau College.
“Just Shaw will be all right.”
“I’m Matty. Matthew. Fennmore.” He pumped Shaw’s hand without managing to look at him.
North of the building, on Gravois, the sound of traffic washed in and out steadily. Matty shoved his hands in his pockets and stared at his feet. Shaw smelled like pine sap for some reason, and he kept looking at North and then looking back at Fennmore as though waiting for North to do something.
North crossed his arms and watched.
“Can I—” Shaw began. Then, “Do you want some coffee? Mr. Fennmore, do you—”
“I really need to talk to you. I—I want to hire you.”
North didn’t like it, didn’t want to admit it, but the words sent a frisson up his spine. Hire. Hire meant a client. A client meant a job. And North McKinney lived for this kind of work. He was good at it, too. Had been good at it. Had been very good at it until he was six blocks deep in Clayton and been forced to make a tough decision. He had shot a man; he had done it to protect Shaw. After that, it had been a long, hard road to this: North McKinney, the private dick with a suspended license. Only suspended, though. And with an appeal in the works. But for now, North McKinney, the private dick who had to let his partner run the show.
“Yeah, of course. Come here. Step into our office.” Shaw bumped the inner door with his hip, beckoning Fennmore to follow. North followed Fennmore a step.
Fennmore shot him a glance and then, to Shaw, said, “Maybe your—your secretary, or whatever, maybe he could get us some coffee.”
A cat yowled outside, followed by the clatter of trash cans toppling. North managed to keep his arms across his chest, but he couldn’t keep his fingers from curling into fists.
“Oh no,” Shaw said.
“Coffee,” North said. And he almost said, Cream and sugar?
Fennmore nodded. “Two creams, please.”
North felt the smile growing on his face. This time, he said out loud, “Sugar?”
“No.”
“Mr. Fennmore,” Shaw said, “he’s not—”
“Thanks, though,” Fennmore said.
Shaw groaned.
“Two creams. No sugar. Anything else?”
“I’d just like to talk to Mr. Aldrich, please.”
Shaw was practically melting down the door.
“Sure,” North said. The smile stretched his lips to splitting. “Talk to the detective.”
With another groan, Shaw slunk into the office, and Fennmore trailed after him. North made his way back to the galley kitchen, and he found the coffee pot, and he poured a cup and found a container of hazelnut Coffee-Mate, and he eyeballed two creams worth of it. Then he took the back stairs to the second floor.
The old house had originally been a duplex, and Shaw’s remodeling had been half-hearted at best. The stairs from the kitchen led directly to Shaw’s bedroom. A second entrance on the front of the building, with a separate staircase, led to a living room on the second floor at the front of the house, connected to Shaw’s bedroom by a hallway. North couldn’t remember anyone using the front door or stairs; Shaw always used the kitchen stairs, and North followed his example.
North passed through Shaw’s bedroom, with the comforter and sheets balled at the foot of the bed and a sock hanging off the standing mirror and two translations of Goethe’s Faust propped up on the dresser, where for all North knew Shaw had been comparing them or composing a prose poem about them or brainstorming an article that he wanted to mail off to Newsweek about the contemporary influence of Goethe on theories of elemental genesis. For all North knew, Shaw had read some motherfucking article on the motherfucking Huffpost about the nutritional value of books and he was deciding which one to cut into strips and boil into tea. North took in the chaos in one glance and dismissed it just as readily; this was standard Shaw chaos; Shaw’s desk downstairs made the bedroom look like the pinnacle of order and organization. North had even caught Shaw tossing the leftover silly string from his birthday into the same drawer as his pepper spray, and that thought made North smile.
Two creams. No sugar.
That wiped the smile off his face. North found the bathroom. Toothpaste smeared a crescent smile along the mirror, and the sink looked like it was beyond cleaning—it was entombed in calcified spit and petrified dental floss and long, shiny reddish-brown strands of hair. North jiggled the medicine cabinet open, keeping the remaining hinge on the broken door from creaking, and found the bottle of Miralax and measured out a triple dose into the cap and carried it downstairs. He mixed it into the coffee. He even found a saucer. And he carried it into the office.
Shaw was sitting behind his desk, a tower of books threatening to collapse on him at any moment. He rested his chin on both hands, watching Fennmore, who was crying softly.
“Two creams. No sugar.”
Fennmore accepted the coffee, sipped at it, and set it aside. “Oh, I don’t like hazelnut.”
“You don’t like hazelnut.”
“That’s ok,” Shaw said, shooting out of his seat. “Mr. Fennmore—”
“Matty,” the boy whispered.
“Matty, this is Mr. McKinney. North McKinney. He’s the founder of Borealis Investigations. We’re both going to be working on this case. And he was just being nice—” Shaw actually stuttered through this part, those hazel eyes shooting toward North, and North smiled and gave him a double thumbs-up. “Getting you that coffee, he was just being nice. He’s not a secretary.”
Another thumbs-up. After all, it wasn’t Shaw’s fault this kid was an entitled asshole.
“I thought this was your business.” Matty drew a nail around the saucer’s rim. “Your name is on the website. On the door.”
“That’s . . . complicated. Just trust me: we’re both going to be working your case, and you’re lucky to have North. He’s the best. The best in the whole business.”
Shaw’s eyes were begging North not to eat the kid for breakfast.
North ignored Shaw for a moment. Shaw was like that; always picking up strays. North was trying to reserve judgment on the kid—Oh, I don’t like hazelnut—and he wanted another look. With another quick look at Matty, North crossed to his own desk. The desk had been shunted off into a corner; it might as well have been covered in a drop cloth like some ancient, forgotten Victorian piece. But North wheeled the chair to make the third point of a triangle between Matty and Shaw, and he reassessed Matty Fennmore. The unruly wave of blond hair. The amethyst eyes. The dirt on his jaw, under his eyes, on his hands.
“Mr. Fennmore—” North began.
“Matty, please. I just want you to call me Matty.”
“He was just about to tell me how I can help him,” Shaw said.
North shifted his attention to Shaw, trying to gauge how hard his partner had already fallen. It was bad. Shaw’s refined features—the thin brows, the slender nose, the cheekbones and jaw that, in bad light, bordered on foxish—were already open in sympathy. The hazel eyes already had slightly red rims. The boy hadn’t even said anything yet—Two creams, please—he’d just cried, and Shaw was just about to cry alongside him. That was bad enough.
What was worse was the way yoga had left a smudge of dirt on Shaw’s nose, and North had to wrap his hands around the chair’s seat to keep from wiping it away. For a moment, North could only think about what he’d seen ten minutes before in the kitchen: Shaw with his ass in the air, the yoga shirt sliding down to expose the wiry muscles of his back. North could see, in his mind’s eye, the serpentine white J of the scar on Shaw’s hip glinting in the light. North wasn’t a praying man, but he still said a prayer of thanks that the bastard who had done that was in prison now.
North tried to focus. What was worse, way worse, was the sweaty strand of chestnut hair that that had worked free of the bun and curled along the side of Shaw’s face. Somehow the universe had conspired to make Shaw oblivious to how every ridiculous, soy-boy idea that went through his head only made him more eminently fuckable. North’s gaze flitted to Matty long enough to see the amethyst eyes openly appraising Shaw. The universe might have made Shaw oblivious to his own fuckableness, but the universe had done no such thing to Matty Fennmore. North soothed himself by imagining garbage trucks. There was one bound for their street this morning.
“I need your help,” Matty said, chin dipping, the tears rolling harder. “I can’t—I’m not even supposed to—” He took a choked breath. “Sorry. I just, I’ve never even said it out loud.”
Shaw produced a box of Kleenex and slid it across the desk, but Matty ignored it.
“What?” North said. “What haven’t you said out loud?”
Matty dropped his face into his hands, his shoulders jerked once, twice, and then he managed to spit out, “I’m gay.”
Shaw nodded, those hazel eyes wide and brimming.
“Well, duh,” North said.