Page 12 of Haven't Killed in Years
“Sure, yeah, I’ll come with you.” I didn’t see myself leaving his side anytime soon.
Porter was talking to Jake and the kitchen people like they were best friends for life and didn’t seem too concerned with being my wingman anymore.
I removed my cardigan, leaving only a white tank top I would consider an undershirt in any other circumstance.
Dominic slid a bottle of Bombay Sapphire off the counter between two of the guys without disrupting their conversation. His eyes matched the blue of the bottle. He held it out to me as a question and I nodded.Why not?
He led me away from the bar, looking as eager for personal space as I was. “Did you enjoy the tour?” he asked as we sat down at the kitchen table. He poured the liquor into two shot glasses. Shots of gin—an unusual choice, hipster gone wrong, but it would get the job done.
“Honestly?” I asked.
“Yeah, honestly.”
“I did,” I admitted, but he could never know why or how much.
“Good.” He beamed. “Tell all your friends.”
He handed me my shot. We clinked the glasses together and threw them back. It burned as it went down my throat, craving to be mixed with tonic, a fire that said a buzz would be coming soon if I kept this up. I wanted to get him drunk. Then I would pick his brain, see what he’d talked to my father about, see if he would slip and reveal that he knew more than he was letting on. I had been so patient. My father would be proud.
“Another?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, letting him do all the work for me. “I can’t tell you the last time I went to a house party like this.”
“Do you spend most of your free time hanging out at prisons?” he asked.
“You’re one to talk.” I smiled. “You’re the one hanging out with a serial killer. How do you even know him?”
“Kind of random actually. I was always interested in behavioral psychology. I tried minoring in it when I was in school. But anyway, a couple of years ago I started reading a lot, probably too much, about him. I went through a rough breakup and started writing him letters. Eventually he let me visit and now I’ve been going for almost a year. I guess we just hit it off.”
I opened my mouth, but he cut me off.
“I know, it sounds insane. It’s not like I thought writing to a serial killer would help me get over my ex-girlfriend. It was more like I was trying as many things as possible to distract me and that one stuck. I also tried golf, for the record.”
He smiled and I laughed because he was attempting a joke, but I was more focused on how a malleable young man with a broken heart had fallen right into my father’s lap. It was oddly convenient and maybe the whole story was a lie.
I brought my glass to my lips. I batted my eyelashes. So flirty, no ulterior motives here…“What’s he like?”
He thought about it for a second, then slid his hands off the table and leaned back in his chair. “I feel like I should tell you something…”
I paused my eyelashes, leaving my eyes wide open.
“I’m not being presumptuous or anything…” He hesitated. “But given the context, it feels like a purposeful omission to not let youknow that I recently got out of a serious relationship. I was engaged, actually.”
“Okay…” I stalled.
“Just because…I said I first reached out to Abel Haggerty when I was going through a breakup, and now I’m going through one again, but that’s not why I visit him,” he insisted.
“What happened?” I asked. He had gone and changed the subject, and now I would have to dance back around to my real questions. Gwen Tanner would care about his failed engagement. At least I had some context clues to confirm he was old enough for me to be associating with him.
“Eh, you know. Got together right out of college. I can admit now that it probably started as a rebound for me. We followed what we thought were the right steps. Realized in time that it wasn’t working. Not too interesting.”
“Okay, robot,” I teased.
He laughed.
That was easy. When people share something emotional with you, the sooner you get them to laugh, the faster you can move on. I didn’t mean to be insensitive; it just felt more pressing to find out if he was chopping off men’s arms than whether he was sad.
“What about you?” he asked.
