Page 26 of I Did Something Bad
“Why?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. When I look over, there’s a faint smile on his lips. “What?” he asks when he catches me looking at him.
“You’resmirking,” I say.
He lifts a brow. “Am I?”
“What is it? Why are you going second? Do you have some master plan to listen in on my conversation? Have you planted a bug in my earring? If I turn on you, are you going—”
“Are you always like this?”
I do a double take. “Like what?”
“So…” He squints up at the sky. “Antagonistic.”
“Antagonistic?”
“Distrustful.”
That makes me pause. I swallow the lump in my throat before it can solidify. “And you’re not?”
“I meant what I said earlier. I trust you,” he says, gaze dropping back down to mine, that faint smile returning.
“Tell me why you were smirking then.”
He sighs and rumples his hair, seemingly forgetting that he still has a movie to shoot. “Youarea journalist, aren’t you?Alwayson.”
“I—”
“I was smirking because I was imagining your face if I told you why I think I should go second.”
My interest is piqued. “Tyler,” I say, more out of annoyance than anything.
But he halts as though I’ve said something much more damning than his name. When his body rotates to face me, I’m conscious of how close we’re standing, how the sunlight is making him look like he’s walking around with an Instagram filter slapped on. “Yes, Khin?” he asks, voice angelic.
I school my face into as stern of an expression as I can pull off. “Why do you want to go second?”
“Because frompast experience—” He sighs and rolls his eyes. “People tend to be… excited. To talk to me. Clamoring, even.”
I snort. “God, you really think you’re the shit, don’t you?”
He rolls his eyes again. “See, I knew you’d react like that. But if we’re lucky, the police will rush throughyourquestioning so that they can… talk to…” He trails off with a shrug.
I bark out a laugh. “Oh my god, youdothink you’re the shit!”
With a third and final eye roll, he pivots and resumes walking. “Please, just… do it,” he says.
“Why does it matter if they rush through my questioning?”
He slows down his pace and stretches out the last few feet between us and the main entrance. “Because it would appear that one of us isslightlybetter at being under pressure than the other.”
Offended, I stop walking and scoff. “I’m having anoff day—”
“And that’s okay,” he says, stopping, too. “But it means it’s better if I take the lead.” My scowl deepens and he adds with a chuckle, “Just for today. And then you can fight me on mynextsuggestion, whatever the hell it may be.”
He turns out to be right. Other than the questions that we’d prepared for—“It was the second day,” I’d explained, and although I wasn’t sure how much the two male detectives knew about the second day of your period, I’d hope that two adult men would know enough—they didn’t ask me much else. Of course, that could very well be because they didn’t have much to go off of (yet): no ID, no motive, not even a definitive time or cause of death. But itcouldalso have had something to do with one of them asking, “How many selfies did Chief say we could each have again? Five?” before I’d even left the makeshift interrogation room (which was, yes, prop storage).
We had fallenwaybehind by the time Tyler was done with his interview, and, cursing under her breath, Yasmin rushed everyone through the rest of the schedule.
