AllFreeNovel
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2024
When Rae woke up, the Saturday-morning sun filled her bedroom with a warm peachy glow. She felt her thick mattress beneath her and vividly recalled crawling into the bed with Dayton sometime during the night when they’d had sex again. Afterward, they had talked for what seemed like hours until they fell asleep in each other’s arms. She turned onto her side, ready to kiss him awake, but the sheets were cold and empty next to her. Then she heard someone moving around in her kitchen and knew it had to be him. Lily never got up before noon on weekends.
Rae used the bathroom and threw on a robe. As she left her bedroom, she heard her coffee bean grinder, and she hurried to the kitchen to stop the racket before it woke up her daughter. But Lily was already up, standing next to Dayton and showing him how to use their fancy espresso machine. They both turned to her at the same time as if they had choreographed it to creep her out.
“Good morning, Mother Dear,” Lily said with a sly grin. “Yourfriendwoke me up banging around.”
“Morning.” Rae wanted to evaporate. Lily would never let her live this moment down.
Dayton looked thoroughly sheepish. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you all up. I was going to make us coffee, but I’ve never used a professional machine like this. I’m used to a Keurig.”
“K-cups are horrible for the environment, you know?” Lily said to him.
“Oh, I know,” he said, smiling at her. “My daughter said the same thing, so I switched to the reusable kind.”
Lily made a humph sound like she didn’t believe him. “So, you stayed the night? Working on whatever it is you all are working on?” Her daughter dragged out the last words.
Dayton looked at Rae like she was the life jacket to his drowning man. He had a teenager, too, so she didn’t feel the need to school him on how to respond. There were no secrets with Lily now, so she would know the truth eventually either way.
“Uh, yeah,” Dayton said. “We, uh, were up pretty late ... doing work.”
“Is that what adults call sex now? ‘Doing work’?” Lily said without a hint of sarcasm. Rae was in awe and a bit terrified of her.
Dayton looked like he was about to melt into a puddle of embarrassment.
“I think we can take it from here, honey.” Rae shot her daughter her best mom glare, and Lily scurried off to her room upstairs.
Dayton appeared relieved. “Glad I handled that well.”
Rae smiled. “With Lily, the truth is always the best way to handle things.”
“And we’ve been so good at that?”
“I don’t know about you, but I’m trying to be better at it,” she said as she came up to him, feeling a bit unsure of how to be around him yet. The first morning after sex was always awkward. Do you hug withoutasking? Kiss? Technically, this wasn’t their first time, but it felt like it since they weren’t high out of their minds on ecstasy.
Unlike Rae, Dayton didn’t seem to have any reservations about what to do, and he kissed her lightly on the lips while his hands found her ass.
“Here,” Rae said, “let me show you how this thing works. Lily begged me for it and never uses it.”
After she made them both lattes, they went to the living room. She knew they had a lot to discuss, and she needed all the caffeine to process it.
They talked about how they’d received the link and opened it when they realized who’d likely sent it.
“I was about to delete it,” Dayton said, “but the next text read ‘woof,’ and I knew it was from them.”
“Can you trace the texts? Find out exactly who sent it?”
“We can try, but my guess is it was sent from a burner phone. That will make it more difficult. But I’m more concerned about them knowing our real identities.”
Rae had thought of that, too, the idea making her queasy. She took a sip of her coffee, trying to clear her head. She caught Dayton staring at her.
“They’re warning us to stop digging,” she said. “They can use this as leverage, especially if they know you’re a detective, and here we are having postsex coffee.”
He set his mug down on the coffee table. “Do you regret last night?”
She glanced down at the mug in her hands. “No.” She looked up again, seeing the relief on his face. “Do you?”
“I was thinking a hundred things at once when I saw the video. One, that they would send this to everyone at my precinct, and I’d be fired and how that would affect Carli. And that I would never be able to get justice for her mom or Cierra Martin. Or find Thomas Highsmithand the other missing women. But mostly, in the moment, I thought of you. So, no, I don’t regret it at all.”
