“Fine,” she said, standing up, stretching until her t-shirt lifted just enough to flash that little pudge in her stomach. Shit was kinda cute.
“Where we going then, bossy ass?”
I grabbed my keys and smirked at her. “You’ll see.”
To my surprise, she didn’t ask any more questions, just ran upstairs, grabbed a purse and who knows what else, and let me lead her to my car and to the nearby city.
The newly-opened True Crime Museum was quiet when we got there. It was also way colder than outside. I watched her rub her arms in the sudden chill as we walked, our feet echoing across the new tile. There were glass cases everywhere, lit with soft illumination. Black-and-white mugshots lined the walls, all the faces of people who thought they were better than others, smarter than the system. As soon as we stepped in, her whole face lit up. I liked that for her… and for me.
“This is crazy!” she exclaimed.
I didn’t bring her there to impress her. That’s what I told myself when we walked in. I was just bored and didn’t want her ass to go stir crazy. The fact that she was studying forensic psych was coincidental. If I were honest, I might admit I brought her because I wanted to see her eyes light up about something that didn’t end with my being cussed out in her sassy little drawl. I wanted to see what made her mind move when it wasn’t snapping at mine.
Farrah stepped ahead of me eagerly and then thought about it. She slowed, as on guard as I was, not wanting me to see her excitement. She tried to pull off a disinterested look, and I smiled inside. If my little thug could pretend, I could, too. I pretended I wasn’t waiting to see her reaction, pretended my hands were in my pockets because I was bored, not because it kept me from reaching for one of hers. I had never been a hand holding dude and one little ginger upstart wasn’t about to take me there.
“This is crazy,” she said again. “You really brought me here?”
“You acting like I flew you to Paris, Little Thug,” I said. “It’s just a museum.”
She glanced at me over her shoulder, a look that was part attitude, part awe. “Just a museum? Boy, you know what I’m studying! Mekhi, this is like… Disneyland for me.”
I smiled. “Yeah, that shit kinda concerning.”
“It’s called academic interest.”
“Right. Whatever makes you feel normal, shorty.”
She side-eyed me, then leaned in close to a case filled with raggedy-looking case files and an old Polaroid camera. I watched her read the placard, lips moving like they had when she was reading back on my couch.Fuck, those pretty ass lips. I don’t even think she knew she did that. She reached up, pushed curls behind her ear, exposing the soft curve of her jaw. I watched it alllike the simp she was making me into, even as I told my eyes to mind their business.
“Look at this,” she said, tapping the glass with one purple-polished nail. “They used this to profile one of the first serial offenders in Louisiana. Imagine being the one who had to figure that mind out.”
Her voice was soft, thoughtful. In that soft, my teasing her would’ve felt too loud. I let it go and stood beside her. She smelled like chocolate, always like chocolate, and the way my dick started to harden, I wondered if it had a sweet tooth.
“So,” I said, as casual as I could manage with a hard ass dick and a weak ass mind, “you really think studying killers all day ain’t gon’ mess with your head?”
She didn’t take her eyes off the placard. “Understanding stuff doesn’t mean you turn into it. It means you can stop being scared of it.”
“That’s from a psych book or something?”
“Nah,” she said, finally turning to look at me. “That’s just life, Mekhi.”
I wore a smirk to keep from letting whatever her words did to me show. “You always talk like one of them books?”
She frowned at me, a challenge in the cute little wrinkle between her eyebrows. “You always run from real talk?”
I paused for a moment. So, she was trying to read me, too.
And succeeding.
“Touché,” I said finally, and I felt the smile curve my mouth before I could stop it.
We moved along the exhibit, pretending again, this time, like we weren’t two people walking together. She read everything. I read her. She’d tilt her head at a detail and hum in agreement, or she’d bite her lips when the words got interesting to her. Every time she reacted, I held onto it. I don’t know why I needed tobuild this inventory, just that I did. She was into this. She looked passionate, smart... and so damn beautiful.
Her curls slid forward again as she leaned down, and she repeated her earlier actions, pushing them back, showing the soft line of her jaw. I looked away before she caught me half-ass daydreaming about kissing her right there.
We kept walking. Eventually, our usual bickering started. She called me “impassive” about the exhibits; I called her a nerd for being so into them. But underneath all that taunting, something felt different, like the tone between us was changing, something new under the sarcasm and one-upping.
We came to a section with reconstructed interrogations—audio you could listen to, clips about body language and manipulation. Farrah slid the headphones on and became very still. I watched her be still, not just because I pissed her off or she was dismissing me, for once. The stillness here wasn’t defensive. It was her careful focus, a look into how she thought, how she took things apart.
