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I stepped inside, and the human lighthouse almost knocked me over with that smile of his. It reached his eyes, crinkling them at the corners, making the crystalline blue in them shine even brighter. He sported a fresh hair cut, his tan skin working to highlight the gleaming smile and shining gaze. His black polo fit snug around his arms and chest, and his khakis fit even tighter around another area altogether. He had the same disarmingly cheery demeanor as he had last night, and on anyone else, I probably would have rolled my eyes and said it was too much.
Not for Ryan, though. I had a feeling nothing this man could do would be considered “too much.”
“How ya feeling after yesterday?” Ryan asked, the carefree attitude flickering into clear concern.
“My sleep was all fucked-up, but I’m okay. I’m going to stop by Kyla and Jen’s later, see if there’s anything I can do to help. Maybe we can set up a memorial for Julius… Jesus. How long is shock supposed to last?”
Ryan frowned, his eyes scanning me. Even though I was fully clothed, I felt stark-ass naked for a moment. “Hours, days, weeks. It’s different for everyone.”
“Great,” I said, slumping in my seat.
“If you ever feel like you need to talk, I always answer my phone. I also have the number for a really great therapist here in town. She’s helped me process quite a lot.” He smiled in a way that said he had never been hurt in his entire life. What the hell did Ryan need help processing?
“I’ll take that number,” I said.
“Mine or the therapist’s?”
“Why not both?”
Ryan chuckled at that and wrote down both numbers on a sticky note, handing it to me. Our fingertips touched for the smallest slice of time, sending massive sparks shooting out from the point of contact. I folded up the note and tried not to think about the sudden heart arrhythmia I had developed.
“All right, so l take it you aren’t here for therapist recommendations.” Ryan opened a dark blue notebook to a blank page and wrote my name across the top. I couldn’t help noticing how small the pen looked in his hands.
“No,” I said, peeling my eyes off his hands and back up to his piercing eyes. “Fucking hell, I’m not even sure where to start.”
“Start at the beginning,” he answered, gaze reassuring.
“Okay… um, well, I was born in a hospital, to a mom, and she named me Eli—”
“We can fast-forward a little bit.”
I laughed at that and settled into my seat, shoulders no longer slumping and heart no longer skipping beats. Ryan’s presence was a reassuring one, and he made it extremely easy to talk to him. I had to remind myself that I wasn’t sitting across from a long-lost friend, but instead a man I’d only just met the night before, someone I was hiring for a job.
A man with the most captivating grin and bonfire-bright eyes and welcoming aura…
Hmm. Maybe I should have asked for a different detective.
And then Ryan shifted, his woodsy cologne wafting in my direction, hypnotizing and intoxicating, almost making me lose my train of thought.
Actually, I think I’ll keep this one.
7
Ryan Diaz
Elijah captivated me on every level. Not only was his case a fascinating one, but everything about him made me want to bring out a microscope and just analyze him. He had a way about him, a sparkle that he seemed to keep purposefully dimmed for some reason. He talked with his hands and kept solid eye contact, although on a few occasions, I seemed to catch him staring at my lips. His voice had a certain melody to it, a kind of tone that drew me in with every word he spoke.
Which was good since he was speaking quite a few of them.
He laid out his case from the beginning, starting with the first-ever message he received on his Instagram. It had come from a freshly created account without any identifying information attached to it, and it simply said, “You’re going to be a star.” After that, the messages grew increasingly more worrisome, until they escaped the confines of a screen and started appearing in person, meaning the stalker wasn’t someone a couple of countries away. They were here, in Blue Creek, and they had their fucked-up sights set on Elijah.
“Did you ever get any messages or notes when you weren’t in drag?”
“Only in the beginning when they were being sent online. But even then, they were still about me in drag. Here, I have all of them saved on my phone.”
He set his phone on my desk and pushed it toward me. It was open to a screenshot of a message dated a year and a half ago, the first one he ever got from a username titled “DollWorshipper6.” It told him about becoming a star, just like Elijah had explained, but there was also something else interesting in the message. An emoji of a bumblebee as a signature. I would have assumed a heart or a star would have fit better, but a bumblebee struck me as odd.
