Page 23 of ILY
I sigh and rub my fingers around my mouth. God, my lips are dry, and my fingers still smell a little like Leaf’s cum, even after I washed them. That’s jerk-off material for later.
I give them another good sniff before setting my hand down because I’m not a teenage boy, god damn it. Even if I feel like one right now.
I turn my attention back to the records on the screen. Leaf’s got a handful of parking tickets from when he was an early driver and one drunk and disorderly that was thrown out when the cop admitted to not understanding that Leaf was interpreting for his Deaf friends, not drunk.
Not something that surprises me, unfortunately.
The rest of his report makes him look like every other average person I’ve ever met. His credit is pretty shitty, and his debt is high, but he’s also just come into an inheritance. That’s…interesting. And suspicious. He inherited both liquid and non-liquid assets—mostly property, it seems, and a few grand in declared cash—from a deceased aunt.
The aunt was the one who used to own that property.
I make a note of her name to look into that too. Her death is currently listed as natural causes, but that can be faked.
Though…by Leaf? That’s a stretch. Unless he’s an amazing actor. But like I said, I’ve spent my entire career learning how to see through lies, and he doesn’t have that kind of murder in him.
Biting my lip, I stare at the screen until all the words blur together. I have no idea what to make of all this. Or him. He’s so different from anyone I’ve ever met before. His chaos is weirdly charming, the way he talks to himself is cute, and his big eyes and pouty lips are addicting. It might be weird to other people, but to me, it’s so fucking attractive.
And, I can’t lie, he fucks like a god. Or, well, he probably does because that hand job straight up changed my world. I feel my dick get hard again and stare down at it. I haven’t had a refractory rate like that in years. Nothing has excited me as much as this possible criminal.
I palm myself, then sit back, and my eyes fix on the little thumbnail image of Leaf’s face. It looks like an employee ID. But it’s definitely him, with his deep-set eyes and sharp eyebrows, those fucking lips. And there it is, a freckle under his left eye.
For a moment, I thought I’d imagined that.
I wish I’d gotten to do more than touch him. The kiss he planted on me was so fast I didn’t even get a proper taste.
I palm my dick a little harder, remembering his half-naked body on mine, those nipples, the hairless chest. He’s smaller than most men my age, but I liked it. He fit perfectly against me, his narrow waist, his lean musculature.
Fuck it.
I pull my cock out and stroke, my head falling back against the computer chair, lolling to the side to keep looking at Leaf.
I let out a soft moan as my wrist twists against the tip of my dick, swiping up the precum that’s beaded there. I still have him on my hand, I think as I stroke faster. That, coupled with the memory of the way he sounded as he came, has my breath picking up. My hips shift up, my mouth parted in a moan.
My orgasm comes quickly, barreling down my spine and through my balls. I feel them tighten and then gasp as cum spills from the tip. I don’t stop stroking until the orgasm fades, my body jerking from the sensation.
And then I sit there, sprawled out in my computer chair, staring at Leaf’s picture on the screen, and sigh.
I am so going down with this ship.
Leaf’s little farmhouse looks entirely different in the daylight. It’s almost picturesque with the way it sits on top of a hill. There’s not enough of a slope for a vineyard, but it is perfect for the apple orchard behind the house. The entire place is one of those cute little structures more prevalent on the East Coast with the wraparound front porch and sloped roof.
In the daylight, I can see it’s in desperate need of paint, and I notice farm equipment in the field beyond that nature’s started taking over. Some of it is covered in vines, and all of it is rusted. If someone were to snap a picture of this, I bet one of those images would probably win a prize in a photo contest.
It also doesn’t really look like the home of a killer, but my guard is up when I pull into the spot where I parked my car the night before. I have zero invitation to be here now. I’d left Leaf in a rush last night—he was still breathing heavily from hisorgasm when I shut the door behind me and practically ran out the front door.
When I glanced back at him as I left the bedroom, he didn’t look upset. He looked resigned, which was the biggest gut punch of them all. The poor fucker seems dead set on hating himself, which isn’t uncommon when it comes to killers with a conscience.
Those are the hard cases. The ones that make me lose sleep at night because they know what they were doing is wrong. They feel fucking bad about it, and yet they still let themselves turn into a monster and do monstrous things.
One of the cases that haunts me most is a serial kidnapper my team worked on nearly eight years ago. His compulsion to take women, tie them up, blindfold them, and leave them in a ten-by-ten room for weeks at a time had been uncontrollable. But every time they cried, he cracked and let them go.
He scared them into never going to the police, but one time, it went too far.
One time, he slipped.
When we found the body, we found the evidence. That single strand of hair led us to his front door, and the one image I will never get out of my head was the relief on his face when we put him in cuffs. It was like he’d been waiting his whole life to be restrained—for someone or something to put a stop to him.
Fuck, all I can do now is pray to a god I’m not sure I believe in that Leaf isn’t that kind of man. That this really is some big misunderstanding.
