AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Levi takes a long sip of his drink, watching me.
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” he says formally, a little bit too loudly. “How have you been?”
Ah, so this is what we’re doing, I think, and try not to laugh.
Levi’s a terrible liar. Maybe the worst liar I’ve ever met. He saw me this morning, because I was naked in his bed.
“I’ve been well,” I say. “Still the same. Looking for a job. Bumming around town.”
He clears his throat, shifts his stance slightly.
“Do you want to sit?” I ask, gesturing at my table’s other chair, currently across from me.
“Thank you,” Levi says, and then glances around in a pretty unsubtle fashion before moving the chair around the corner until it’s next to me, then sitting.
“Extremely un-suspicious,” I tease.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Levi deadpans, still drinking his drink.
Under the table, our knees touch. My heart pumps a little bit faster. I fight the urge to reach under the table, touch his leg, put my hand on his. I like touching him, even casually, even after four weeks — five? I can’t keep track — with lots and lots of touching.
“He’s meeting me here in twenty minutes,” I say, pushing my laptop away, taking my own nearly empty drink in one hand. “To congratulate me on a hundred official job rejections.”
“He’s celebrating that?” he asks, his eyebrows dipping slightly and very skeptically.
“He’s not being a dick, it’s some motivational thing he read… I don’t know, somewhere. You know how Silas is,” I say. “I guess the idea is that if you try for a certain number of rejections, along the way somewhere you’re bound to get an acceptance.”
“Shoot for the moon, and even if you fail, you’ll land among the stars,” Levi says, taking another drink.
“Now you’re a motivational poster too?”
“Well, it’s patently untrue,” he says, and there’s the smile again. “The moon is tens of millions of miles closer than the closest star, so if you shoot for the moon and miss, you’ll either fall back to Earth as a pile of flaming wreckage, or you’ll float forever through the vacuum of space.”
“I’m so inspired right now,” I deadpan, and he nods at my computer, where my email is still open.
“Interview?” he asks, and I glance at the screen, instantly wishing I’d closed it when he came over.
He’s not even being nosy. It’s all right there in black and white letters, and have you ever tried to not read something that’s directly in front of your face? It’s impossible.
“Tuesday,” I say. “Just a phone interview, it’s this editorial position at a newspaper that I’m not even qualified for, they must just be reaching out to everyone who applied or something.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” he says, keeping his voice low. “You’re good at what you do, June. Don’t forget that. They’d be lucky to have you, technically qualified or not.”
He glances at the screen again before I reach forward and shut it, but I’m certain it’s more than long enough for him to read Bluff City Herald-Trumpet.
“Okay, quit snooping,” I say, and I try to sound light, teasing. “Why are you drinking fancy coffee? What happened?”
“It’s decaf,” he says.
“It’s still got whipped cream,” I point out. Levi doesn’t drink regular coffee ever, and only occasionally indulges in coffee-adjacent beverages like this one when he wants to feel better about something.
“There was another murder,” he says. “Further north than the others. Right where we thought the next one would be.”
Then he frowns.
“And we still didn’t catch them,” he says, tapping his thick fingers on the cup, still clearly frustrated. “One of the junior rangers we posted said that he saw two people coming out of the woods and onto the road right at dusk, and it looked like the man was carrying some kind of machinery, but of course, before he could catch them they got into a black SUV and drove off.”
“Dammit,” I hiss. “What he was driving, a skateboard?”
“He was on foot,” Levi says, like it’s obvious. “It’s hard to be quiet and sneaky when you’re in a Forest Service vehicle that sounds like an angry bear every time you rev the engine.”
He has a point. And he does, after all, know more about this than I do.
“It’s very easy to hide from a vehicle, and vehicles are very bad at pursuing through the forest,” he says. He takes another sip. He glances one more time at my closed laptop. “But I do have good news.”
“They left their name, address, and a signed confession nailed to the tree stump?” I ask.
“The camera traps finally arrived,” he says. “That’s why I came to town, actually, because I got a phone message from FedEx that the delivery address didn’t exist, so they just left them at Bob’s Mailboxes and More.”
