Page 180 of Things We Hide from the Light
On a sigh, I dropped the brush. “Now what’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what it means. I’m glad to see you returning to the land of the living. I was worried. I think we all were.”
“Yeah, well, I guess it takes some of us longer to bounce back. So what’s with you and Lucian?” I asked, changing the subject and stabbing the brush into the deepest part of the gouge.
“Don’t you mean Nolan? Who, by the way, is currently sitting in my office eating all my candy.”
“No, I mean Lucian. You and Nolan might be havin’ a few laughs, but he’s not Lucian.”
She was too quiet. I looked up and saw she’d carefully rearranged her face into a mask.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“You’re not supposed to lie to a cop,” I reminded her.
“Is this an official interrogation? Should I get a lawyer?”
“You know my secret,” I said, nodding toward the wall.
The tension went out of her shoulders and she rolled her eyes. “It happened a long time ago. Water under the bridge,” she insisted.
Piper tiptoed around me to sniff tentatively at Sloane’s sneakers. The librarian crouched down and offered her hand to the dog.
I went back to the wall. “You know what I remember from back in the day?”
“What?”
“I remember you and Lucy sharing these long, meaningful looks in the hall between classes. I remember him ripping the helmet off Jonah Bluth and putting him on his ass during football practice because Jonah said something about your body that I as an adult man with great respect for women won’t repeat.”
“It was about my boobs, wasn’t it?” Sloane quipped. “The price you pay for developing early.”
I gave her a long, steady look until she flinched.
“Did Lucian really do that?” she asked finally.
I nodded once. “He did. I also remember driving home after curfew from some particularly heavy making out with Millie Washington and seeing someone who looked a hell of a lot like Lucian climbing the tree outside your bedroom window.”
Sloane had been a sophomore and next-door neighbor Lucian a senior. They’d been as much opposites then as theywere now. The broody bad boy and the pretty, peppy nerd. And as far as I knew, neither had ever officially acknowledged the other beyond “hey” in the hallowed halls of Knockemout High School.
But outside those halls was another story. One neither of them had ever shared.
Sloane focused on coaxing Piper closer to her hand. “You never said anything.”
“Neither of you seemed to want to talk about it so I left it alone. Figured it was your business,” I said pointedly.
She cleared her throat. The noise sent the dog scampering back to the safety of my reach. “Yeah, well, like I said, that was a long time ago,” she said, standing back up.
“Doesn’t feel good to have people shoving their noses in your business, does it?”
She gave me a chilly librarian glare and crossed her arms. “If I stickmynose someplace, it’s becausesomeoneisn’t doing what they need to be.”
“Yeah? Well, from where I sit, this animosity between you and Luce isn’t healthy. So maybe I should start inserting myself into that situation. Help you two come to a resolution.”
She blew out a breath through her nostrils like a bull facing off against a red flag. The stud in her nose twinkled. The standoff lasted all of thirty seconds. “Ugh, fine. I’ll stay out of your business and you stay out of mine,” she said.
“How about this?” I countered. “I respect your privacy and you respect mine.”
“Sounds like semantics to me.”
