Unhinged by Onley James

The restaurant was nothing fancy, but it was one of Noah’s favorite places. An old school diner with black and white checkered floors and where everything was red and chrome. He’d been frequenting Moe’s since the year after his father died. The wait staff used to give him free food after school because they knew it would likely be his only meal. In all the time he’d been going there, he’d never once set eyes on the man whose name glowed in the window in red neon. He suspected there was no Moe.

The scent of maple bacon and buttermilk pancakes hit Noah the moment they walked in the door, making his stomach growl comically loud. Noah was sure everyone could probably hear it over the clanking of forks on plates and the animated conversations of the patrons.

Adam was glued to Noah’s back, his hands on Noah’s hips and his chin resting on his head, like they’d been dating for a decade instead of having met less than forty-eight hours ago. Noah felt himself leaning into the reassuring heat of Adam’s torso but hated how comfortable he already was with him. Hated how much he liked the feel of his hands on his body.

He flushed as he thought about their kiss that had turned into orgasms just ninety minutes ago. Noah had had a dozen meaningless hookups in his time, each with the understanding that it had meant nothing; they were just scratching an itch. But kissing Adam in that warehouse had sparked something deep in Noah’s core, something that seemed to smolder within until Adam had pinned him to the mattress and kissed him like he was dying and Noah’s lips were the only thing that could save him.

Noah had never experienced that kind of combustible chemistry. Adam was a match and Noah was gasoline-soaked paper, and that was a volatile combination that could easily blow up in his face. Still, he would have let Adam do anything to him, had wanted to let Adam do dirty things to him.

But Adam—despite his weird intensity—had seemed so comfortable letting Noah set the pace. He seemed to be this strange mixture of brute force and childlike possessiveness, like Noah was his new favorite toy and he’d smash it before he’d let anybody else play with it. That shouldn’t have been hot…but it was. Noah had never been anybody’s favorite anything.

Before Noah could fall any further down the rabbit hole of existential crisis, Cindi ‘with an i’ swayed her ample figure towards them, loudly chomping her gum. Moe’s really leaned into their retro aesthetic.

Cindi had on a red polyester uniform the same color as the red vinyl booths. She wore horn rimmed glasses and her hair in a sky high rat’s nest. Noah knew she was in her sixties and had eight grandkids, but she honestly didn’t look a day over fifty. She had good genes.

She smiled warmly when she saw Noah, smacking a kiss on his cheek. “Hey, doll. Haven’t seen you here in forever. I was starting to think you’d abandoned us for that new age place with their wheat grass shots down the block.”

Noah grinned. “Like I could ever give up the cinnamon roll pancakes here.”

She flicked her gaze to Adam, smirking when she noted the way he clung to Noah. “Who’s your friend?”

Noah craned his head up and back to glance behind him. “Cindi, this is Adam. Adam, Cindi.”

“Hi,” Adam said, not releasing Noah’s waist.

“Hey there, yourself. You look really familiar,” she said. “Are you an actor?”

“No. Definitely not,” Adam said with a laugh.

That wasn’t entirely true but hardly anything Noah could voice out loud.

Cindi grabbed two menus and led them to a back booth. Adam slid in across from Noah, but his long legs quickly entangled with his beneath the table. “What can I get ya to drink, cuties?”

Coffees ordered, Adam snagged Noah’s hand. “You have freckles on your fingers, too,” he mused.

“You’re obsessed with freckles,” Noah teased.

Adam flicked pale blue eyes upwards, snagging Noah’s gaze. “No. Just yours.”

If he didn’t stop saying things like that, Noah was going to do something stupid like fall in love with a murderer.

Cindi returned with two mugs, and Noah watched as Adam dumped enough sugar into his coffee to stand a spoon in. “That can’t be healthy,” Noah said, smiling when Adam took a sip and sighed deeply.

Noah drank his black. Mostly because he usually couldn’t afford anything but powdered creamers, which gave him the creeps. All those lumps just floating around, waiting to be dissolved in boiling liquid. No, thank you.

Once they had their food—cinnamon roll pancakes for Noah and a Belgian waffle buried in syrup and powdered sugar for Adam—the real conversation began. The one they’d put on hold in the trailer until they could get some sustenance.

They could talk freely. The restaurant provided the perfect amount of white noise to keep their conversation private. Still, he kept his voice low, leaning in just a bit to talk in-between mouthfuls.

“Okay, what’s step one?” Adam asked.

Noah was tempted to play dumb just to put off the inevitable for a while. But this was why they were there. To solve a mystery. “I stole Gary’s backpack and made copies of all his keys. He gets to the club at seven each night and doesn’t leave until ten or eleven in the morning. I swapped shifts with another dishwasher so we have the whole night to look through all of his shit.”

“You want to break into his house and look for…” Adam prompted.

“If he’s got the same…tastes…in porn as my father, then there’s a chance, maybe, he kept souvenirs of his time with my dad and these other men. If I can find those tapes, I can possibly find them.”

Adam nodded. “Makes sense. I can have my people deep dive into his internet history, bank statements, background?”

Noah gave him a flat stare. “You have people?”

“Yeah. Doesn’t everybody?” he asked, tone teasing.

Noah still didn’t quite understand who Adam worked for. It had taken years just to identify Adam in the first place. If his father hadn’t been so paranoid, he might not have even had a place to start. He hadn’t known about Adam working for a group of people until the night he confronted him and he’d made the phone call that had shattered Noah’s fragile existence. Would Adam tell him the truth?

“What is this group you work for?” He dropped his voice. “Who hires a—what?—sixteen year old to kill people? That’s how old you were when you did my dad, right?”

Adam nodded, looking impressed, Noah wasn’t sure why. “I wasn’t hired. I don’t get paid. Community service, remember? I’m a mandatory volunteer.”

Noah scoffed. “You can’t make it mandatory for somebody to volunteer their time.”

“Tell that to my father,” Adam muttered.

The pieces began falling into place for Noah. In the trailer, Adam had said ‘we were raised for this.’ It had sounded like some Batman level vigilante bullshit last night when he was half asleep and fully high. But maybe Adam was serious.

“Wait…your dad? Thomas Mulvaney is a…murderer?” Noah whispered.

Adam snorted a laugh; then took a long drink of his coffee before saying, “Please, my father would never get his hands dirty like that. No, my father trained us to be murderers.”

Noah sat on that sentence for a minute. “Us? Like…your brothers?”

Adam shrugged, seemingly unbothered by the conversation, like they were discussing traffic. “I mean, you can’t fault his logic. My brothers and I are uniquely qualified to do what we do. And honestly, we turned out better than the doctors could have hoped, given our initial diagnoses.”

A finger of unease ran along his spine. “Which was what?”

Adam smiled softly, shaking his head. “I told you, I’m a psychopath.”

Noah choked on the bite of pancake he’d just forked into his mouth, sparking a coughing fit that drew far more attention than he wanted.

When it was over and the others went back to their eggs and toast, Noah managed, “Yeah, but when people say that, it's a joke or exaggeration.”

Adam raised his hand to get Cindi’s attention before pointing to his cup with a sweet smile Noah found laughable considering the conversation.

When he looked at Noah again, he shrugged. “When I say it, I mean I had a team of board certified psychiatrists who determined I lacked the emotional capacity to feel love, regret, guilt, remorse. Psychopath or sociopath is relative, I suppose. They don’t know if I was born this way or if my trauma created my eternally broken psyche. The outcome is similar either way.”

Noah’s brain snagged on the unable to love part, trying to ignore the stabbing pain that shot through him. It figured Noah would be attracted to a man who couldn’t love him by design. He really was hopeless. He tried to push the thought away. “So, are all your brothers like you?”

“Psychopaths, you mean?” Adam asked. “Yeah, that’s why he chose us.”

A thought suddenly occurred to Noah. “Am I going to get merced for knowing this information?”

Adam’s face grew serious. “I would never let anybody hurt you.” The rawness in his declaration almost made Noah teary despite its absurdity. Nobody had ever protected him. Ever. He’d always told himself he didn’t need it. But now, here was this dangerous stranger swearing to protect him from his family. Adam threaded their fingers together on the table. “Besides, are you planning on telling anybody?”

Noah gave a humorless laugh. “And proclaim that a group of billionaire vigilantes killed my pedophile father? They’d either think I was certifiable or they’d throw you a fucking parade and build a statue in your father’s honor.”

Adam nodded. “You’re probably right. But you don’t have to worry about my family. Like I said, I’ll keep you safe.”

Noah’s heart did a little dance behind his ribcage. Adam was so fucking intense. He was like one of those characters in a teen romance novel where the naive girl ignores every instinct with catastrophic consequences. Except, in this scenario, Noah was the naive girl. He liked the attention. For better or worse. The catastrophic consequences were likely to follow but it was so hard to care. Was it wrong that he wanted somebody to love him and look at him with movie level fuck me eyes?

Except, Adam didn’t have the capacity to love anybody. He’d said so himself.

So, what the fuck were they doing?

Before he could formulate a response, a shadow descended over the table and a teen girl stood gazing at Adam like he was Beyoncé. “I’m sorry,” she said, face bright red. “But are you Adam Mulvaney?”

Adam grinned, and the girl looked like she might faint. “Yeah. Hi.”

Noah tried to untangle their fingers, but Adam tightened his grip, his gaze never leaving the girl in her white shorts and crop top.

She glanced back over her shoulder at a group of girls gawking at them before telling Adam, “I’m such a huge fan. Can I get a picture with you?”

Adam glanced at Noah. Was he asking his permission? Only after Noah shrugged did Adam say, “Sure.”

The girl slid into the booth, pressing her cheek to Adam’s, snapping a selfie before extricating herself quickly. Adam never once let go of Noah’s hand. When she spotted this, she giggled. “Oh, my God. Is this your boyfriend?”

Adam looked at him. “Yeah. This is Noah.”

Was Adam his boyfriend? After two days? Why wasn’t Noah more alarmed by that? Instead, his whole body flushed hot until he was sure he was redder than Adam’s biggest fan. She looked between the two of them, then said to Adam, “He’s so cute,” as if Noah wasn’t actually sitting there.

Adam gave Noah a knowing smirk. “The cutest.”

“Anyway, thank you so much.”

With that, she was gone, racing back over to the table where her friends were now all babbling excitedly, crowding together to look at the girl’s coveted selfie with the Adam Mulvaney.

With the girl now gone, it was like somebody had flipped a switch and Adam’s superficial charm disappeared, replaced by that piercing look he seemed to save just for Noah.

“Does that happen a lot?” Noah asked.

Adam seemed to ponder the question. “Nah. Most of the people uptown don’t give a fuck about a hack model with a trust fund.”

“Why did you tell her I’m your boyfriend?”

Adam frowned. “Because telling her that you’re the son of one of my murder victims and we’re together because I happened to get off with you this morning sounded like a mouthful.”

Noah shook his head. “You could have just said friend?”

Adam’s brows furrowed. “But then she might think you’re available.”

Noah’s brain stumbled. “But I’m not? Available?”

“No.”

“Do I get a say in this?” Noah asked, not even mad, just feeling like he’d definitely slipped into an alternate universe.

Adam tilted his head. “Yeah. Did you not want to be my boyfriend?”

Noah laughed at the genuine confusion in Adam’s tone, like the notion was preposterous. Maybe it was.

“I hate to keep harping on this one point because it's starting to feel a little mean to keep bringing it up, but we don’t know each other.”

“You know me,” Adam insisted.

“But you don’t know me,” Noah countered, voice a harsh whisper.

“I don’t need to know everything about you to know that you’re what I want.”

“That makes no sense.”

“It will eventually,” Adam promised. “But if this is too much for you…if I’m too much for you, I get it. I’m…a lot.”

“Why would you want to be in a relationship if you can’t love somebody?”

Once more, Adam pondered the question. “What does that word even mean? Lots of people throw the word love around without actually treating the people they supposedly love like they are loved. I don’t have the same signals firing in my brain that you do. I have to rely on instinct. My instincts tell me you’re the one. What do yours tell you?”

That you’re going to rip my heart out some day, maybe literally.“My instincts have really never done anything for me. If you give me two choices, I make the wrong one every time.”

Adam leaned in. “Instinctively, what do you think you should do?”

“Run fast and far away from you,” Noah said without thought.

Adam grinned like he’d just somehow put Noah in check mate. “Then, by your own logic, you should do the opposite. And stay. With me.”

“This is crazy.”

“All the best things are.”