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I nodded, aware that my smile may be giving away how excited I was at the thought of spending more time with Gabe. “Sounds good to me.” I tried to tamp it down, but my cheeks wouldn’t listen, so I turned away instead, disappearing down a hallway I assumed would lead me to one of the bedrooms, finding it about fifteen minutes of wandering later.
* * *
My mind started to drift.I’d been staring at this laptop screen for what felt like years. The text swam around the screen in little rivers of black against white, none of it making much sense. I felt like I was out of my league. I enjoyed tech, and I liked code—it felt like such a departure from the words I usually worked with while still being familiar—but I didn’t have the skills I needed to figure out how that video got on my screen.
Which is where YouTube and wine came in. I clicked over to another educational video and leaned forward for my glass, taking a heavy chug as I pressed Play.
We were sat in the living room, surrounded by beautiful landscape paintings dotted with bright and surreal colors. The mirrored windows allowed us to see out toward the infinity edge pool and fire pit in the yard without any worry of someone being able to look in. Gabriel was on the other end of the couch from me, wearing a pair of black basketball shorts and a white tank top with Nike socks that went up past his ankle. He had one leg up on the couch and the other planted on the floor, his attention pinned to a file of police reports he collected on the most recent Midnight Chemist murders.
Damn. How the hell did that man manage to look that sexy while he flipped through pages of bloody crime scenes?
I took another (heavier) chug of the wine, nearly finishing my glass. I could feel that pre-buzz warmth settle into my bones. My shoulders relaxed, my toes wiggling against the plush white rug.
“How’s it going?” I asked, pausing the video and setting my laptop aside. “Because I’m starting to hallucinate over here.”
“Are you tired? You can go to bed, Trist. It’s been a long-ass day.”
I tried to ignore the tingle that spread through me at the sound of my nickname on Gabriel’s lips. I glanced at my watch, seeing that it was only eleven. The day certainly had been long, but I wasn’t ready to call it just yet. Not when Gabriel sat a couple of feet away from me looking the way he did, the shorts falling down the leg he had up on the couch, revealing quite a bit of muscular and hairy thigh—and a tattoo.
“Hold up,” I said, leaning forward. “I didn’t know you had tattoos.”
“Just this one,” Gabriel said. It was high up on his thigh. A black-and-white sketch of a hummingbird, its wings appearing to be in motion, its beak stretched up as if toward the sun. “Hummingbirds are my favorite animals. I’d get called out for it when I mentioned it. Something about a big guy like me liking something so delicate made people raise an eyebrow. It’s dumb, but I hated it, so I decided to get one tattooed on me.”
“It’s not dumb at all,” I said, admiring the intricate line work that made up the feathers. “I love it. You took something people tried to hold over you and made it yours. It’s beautiful.”
Gabriel smiled as he stretched out his leg, giving me a better view of not only the tattoo but also of his muscular thigh. The definition in his quads nearly made me drool.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’m proud of it.”
“Why hummingbirds?” I asked. I tried to get my mind back on track, but all I could think of was those damn turkey legs at Disney World. The ones that were the size of your head and you carried around for the majority of the day. Not that I wanted to bite into Gabe’s thighs, but they still had the same mouthwatering effect.
“Because it’s like they defy everything about the real world. In the way they fly, the way they hover, the way they eat, how incredibly fast their hearts beat. Plus, they’re just these beautiful little comets of color shooting across a garden—what’s not to love about them?”
Damn. And here I was thinking I was the wordsmith. “I’ve never really thought about it, but you’re right. They are impossible little birds, aren’t they?”
“Very. And I live for the impossible.” His grin was an easy one to throw back. I didn’t think I’d smiled this much in a while, definitely not since my whole ordeal started. And for all intents and purposes, after the shitshow that tonight had been, a smile should have been the hardest thing to muster.
But it wasn’t. Not with Gabe around. Smiling was easy, forgetting about the world was easy. Everything felteasy, even though there was someone out there who wanted me dead. How did that work? What kind of magic was Gabriel working on me?
“How about yours?” Gabriel asked, leaning in to look at the tattoo on my forearm. It was a black-and-white line-drawn image of two palm trees side by side.
“I found out I got my first book deal when we were on vacation in Miami Beach, so I got these two palm trees to commemorate it. The leaves touching there look like anMfor ‘Miami’ but also for the title of my first book:Mad Love.”
“It’s beautiful,” Gabriel said, doing something that surprised the fuck out of me.
He traced it. With his finger. Only briefly, but enough to make me swallow a massive lump of… something. Nerves? Lust?
“So,” I said, clearing my throat, my thoughts steering back to the issue at hand, “what have you figured out? Anything yet?” I glanced over at Gabe’s lap, where the case files sat.
He looked down to the files, acting as if I had snapped him out of something. “Yeah, actually. I’m honing in on the chemical this person is using to make his kills. It’s rare, and it’s not something you can just order off of Amazon.”
“What is it?” I asked, perking up and leaning over to get a closer look at the files.
“It’s a type of poison found only in sea anemones. One particular sea anemone, to be exact: Rhodactis howesii. It’s so toxic that just eating it uncooked will send the person into a paralytic shock, where they later die from pulmonary edema.” I gave him a blank look. “They drown in their own fluids.”
I winced. That part I understood. “Shit… a sea anemone? What the fuck?”
“It’s not the only toxin they use, but it’s the primary one.”
