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“What were—”
A door opens down the hall somewhere, and I nod toward my loft door. I unlock it and we move inside. I take off my jacket and go into the kitchen.
“Want something to drink?”
He stays where he is in front of the door and shakes his head, laughing.
“What?”
“Love what you’ve done with the place, brah.”
“You want to talk about my place when you just lost your job for shit I did?”
“Are you tense?” he asks, moving in behind me. “Just take three short sharp inhales, and then let it out slowly, just like Elsa—”
“Fuck off, man,” I hiss as I punch his shoulder.
He laughs, then nods when I raise a water glass. He crosses the expanse to the kitchen and leans against the concrete countertop as I pass him the filled water glass. He takes a long sip, his eyes roaming the large, lofted space.
“This looks the same as it did the last time I was here.”
“Yeah, so?” I ask, filling my own water glass. “You want to tell me what the hell you were thinking?”
“Did you get fired?”
“No.”
“Then what difference does it make?”
“You got fired for lying about whose phone you had. Unless it was a mistake?”
“No mistake,” he says, pulling out a leather barstool and sitting. He leans over his elbows onto the counter.
Freddy’s phone had been flagged in a sweep of our department’s technology. It had received a handful of phone calls and texts from Hirschfeld, as well as containing contact information for an escort service in town and one in Las Vegas. When they said they’d found the source of some lewd images on his phone—images that had somehow been uploaded to the university cloud—I understood. I don’t know when it happened or how, but they mixed up our phones. Except an investigation like this one? There was no mix-up.
“Fuck, man. What am I supposed to do here? I can’t hire you back.”
“Derek, calm down. I’m fine. I will find another job. I’ve already had a couple of interesting offers.”
“What kind of offers?”
His mouth curls into a puckish smirk and he shrugs a shoulder.
“If they pan out, you’ll be the first to know.”
I scrub my hand over my mouth and shake my head, leaning back against the counter opposite the island where he’s sitting.
“You swapped our phones?” I ask.
He nods.
“When?”
“At The Space Room bar. You were shit-faced. Our phones look the same. Didn’t think they’d pay attention and think our phone numbers being switched was a bookkeeping error.”
“That was a risky gamble.”
“What you were doing was a risky gamble. And you were gambling with more than just your future.”
