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I gave my forearm a little nibble and winked. “All right, I’m done. Send him in.”
Darien disappeared with a laugh, opening the door and letting my new client in.
“Elijah,” I said, standing up, a toothy grin spreading on my face. There he was. The drag queen extraordinaire, who had the brightest green eyes and a smile you had to work for and one you could just never forget. He wore a long T-shirt with the pink Power Ranger in ass-kicking mode on the front, his light blue shorts frayed and stopping mid-thigh, revealing a colorful tattoo of what appeared to be peonies and hummingbirds.
“You were stress peeing in here?” he asked, concerned, thin brows creeping together.
“Stress preening. It’s a joke. It’s about— don’t worry about it,” I said, laughing and sitting back down. Elijah took my lead and grabbed the seat across from me with a chuckle. I cleared off my desk and settled in to hear about Elijah’s case, making sure I didn’t get lost in his eyes at any point of this meeting.
Fuck. That’s going to be difficult.
6
Elijah King
I woke up determined to put everything behind me. I walked around my house sometime after lunch, barefoot and groggy, my crusty wig poking out from the overflowing trash can. I poured myself some coffee and pushed the wig in deeper, closing the bin and padding back into my living room. This was only my third month of me living on my own, and boy was it an adjustment. I typically talked myself awake with a chatty Sam or a grumpy Charlie (who always hated mornings, no matter how hard we tried to get him smiling before ten). Amira would likely have some quippy response to whatever dumb shit I had to complain about, and then we’d disperse to our separate rooms and get ready to face the day. Maybe Amelia, my bestie, would have slept over and been getting ready with me, talking up a storm about the last girl or guy she had seduced and sucked the life right out of.
The cartoon succubus tattooed on her ankle wasn’t for shits and giggles.
Now, all I did was flick on my television, set it on The View, and let the ladies fill my room with lively conversation. I sipped my coffee and smiled, but not because of anything that was said on the TV.
I smiled because I remembered the ridiculous imprint of my face on Ryan’s shirt last night.
That thought quickly careened into a depressing canyon of darkness. Last night’s only spark of light had come from Ryan and his electric smile, but that was it. Everything else about yesterday was abysmally shitty. A murder, a stalker, and a dying drag queen career—the holy trinity of fucked-up nights. Seriously, I half expected to be crowned the saint of “what the actual fuck” since that was really the only response I had to any of it.
Ryan’s ocean-blue eyes broke through the dark of my memories.
Gah damn it, why did I keep thinking about him? Why couldn’t I get his voice out of my head? Or the way I felt when he put his arms around me? Like I was safe, like someone finally had my back. In that flash of an instant, I momentarily let down all my guards and just cried. I ruined his expensive-looking shirt and my flawless makeup and likely freaked him the hell out, but I didn’t feel weird about it at all. His reassuring smile made everything a little easier to swallow.
And he was a detective.
…
No. I had made up my mind. I was quitting drag and moving on. My stalker would quit, too.
Probably.
…
…
But what if they didn’t?
Ah fuck. I turned off the TV and chugged the rest of my coffee. This wasn’t in the plans, but then again, nothing in my life had recently been in the plans. If I were really following any kind of plan, then I’d have been a world-renowned drag queen right now, headlining my own sold-out tours and traveling with my handsome and humble husband, who might have enjoyed the occasional threesome or two.
Yeah, none of that happened or was happening. Instead, I worked a dead-end job at the local grocery store and had zero prospects in regards to the “handsome husband” department, even though I had kissed plenty of frogs in trying to find the prince. All of those frogs were exactly what they first appeared to be, none of them lasting longer than a couple of months. I was crossing the border next month from early twenties to late twenties and was already close to giving up on my hunt for a man.
It didn’t help that someone out there had an extremely unhealthy obsession with me. It only took two messages from my stalker to delete all my dating apps and shutting my legs tight for the foreseeable (and sexless) future. I just couldn’t imagine putting my life on the line for any kind of dick, regardless of how good it looked in the floor-length mirror pic every gay guy seemed to have saved on their phone.
