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It was beyond frustrating. I clenched my hands tight underneath the table and felt my nails digging into my palm. Why? Why couldn’t I just remember his face? His eyes? His touch?
His kiss?
Fuck!
I stood up abruptly, the napkin on my lap drifting down to the tiled floor.
“Sorry,” I apologized quickly before excusing myself for the bathroom. I hurried to the back of the diner, ignoring a few friendly “hellos” on the way. Everything sort of funneled into my frustration, and all I could think about was how fucking broken I felt. Something had to have happened between Austin and me, and there was nothing I could do about it except ask, as if I were a gossiping schoolkid and not one of the directly involved participants.
When I got back to our table, the food was already there and waiting. Austin didn’t touch his burger, only picking it up once I sat down and started picking at my fries.
“Sorry,” I said again. “I needed a minute.”
“That’s totally fine,” Austin said. “We can talk about our past later. Right now, we should talk about your case.”
I froze with a fry inches from my open mouth. “Huh?”
“I was thinking while you were in the bathroom. About your accident. It may have been just that: an accident. But if there’s even a chance that something else is going on, then I want to be the one to figure it out.” Austin cocked his head, his earring catching the light in the same way his pearly white teeth did. “Looks like you’ll be Stonewall Investigations’ first case.”
I ate my fry, chewing through the smile, wondering if this was the (re)start of something magical or if our seemingly fucked-up history was about to repeat itself.
5
Austin Romero
Retrograde amnesia.
I was fucking floored when he said it. A part of me really had thought this was all a joke. Some kind of fucked-up coping mechanism that let Charlie move on after all the shit he said to me.
I would never have thought he really forgot about me. It felt like such an impossibility. After everything we had been through together, after all the secret evenings we spent tangled up and sweaty with each other, after the fistfight we almost got into on the day I left Blue Creek. After all of our history.
And it was all gone. I was looking across the table at a man who didn’t remember a second of it. He couldn’t remember all the ways I’d opened up to him and all the ways he opened to me.
He couldn’t remember the way he hurt me, even though I vividly remembered every shouted word and pained heartbeat I felt as I drove out of Blue Creek for what I thought would be the last time.
Little did I know I’d end up back in this small town, staring at the man who once held my entire heart in his hands after running away from the death of a man who owned my entire heart.
Life. What a fucked-up joke it could be sometimes.
“All right, so you really think you can figure out what happened?” Charlie asked, setting his cheeseburger down on the plate and leaning back into the booth. He looked much different from how I remembered back when we were freshman kids in college. He was always a solid-built guy, standing a few inches shorter than me but with shoulders that were broader than mine. We were never strangers to the gym, but it was clear he had been spending more time lifting weights and eating his macros than he ever had before. His workshirt hugged his muscular chest and biceps in a way that made it slightly harder for me to focus on his question.
Instead, I dropped my attention to the Philly cheesesteak sitting on my plate. I took a bite of the familiar cheesy sandwich, throwing me back to all the times Charlie and I would come here after class and just talk shit until we got bored. Then we’d go off to Charlie’s parents’ house, where we’d go upstairs and lock ourselves in his bedroom, blasting the sound of video games to cover the sounds of other things.
I drank a gulp of soda and tried clearing my head, focusing back on his question. “Yes,” I answered with confidence. “If something’s up, I’m going to figure it out.”
He smiled so that a lone dimple appeared in his cheek. It made me want to shout and punch the table and jump over and tackle Charlie to the ground so I could kiss him until he remembered everything that happened between us.
“Were you always a sexy Sherlock Holmes, or is this a recent development?” he asked.
“I always had a knack for solving problems. I double-majored in psychology and criminal justice in college, and I was usually the one people went to with problems.” Like that one time you came and asked me to figure out if anyone knew our secret. “When I moved to New York, I found a job as an assistant at Stonewall Investigations. I worked there for about four years before I got my license and my own office.”
