Sweet Talk by Cara Bastone
Chapter Fifteen
Eliot
The next morning I swing by my local police precinct. Unfortunately, over the last two months, this has become a habit for me. Gloria, the receptionist, knows me by name now. I step into the main lobby and her face falls when she sees me, and correspondingly so does my stomach. Because that means that they’ve made no progress on my case. If they’d made progress, she would have lit up. She buzzes back for the detective assigned to my case and a few minutes later, Detective Cabela emerges from the back hallway, her hands tucked into her trousers and her badge on a chain around her neck.
She has a glum expression on her face and just a touch of a flush in her brown skin. Her dark hair is braided back today and she looks pretty. If she didn’t sort of represent one of the worst nights of my life, I might have asked her out when we first met.
“Hi there, Mr. Hoffman.”
“Detective.”
She knows exactly why I’m there and she doesn’t waste either of our time. That’s one of the reasons I like her. She’s got a real down-to-business vibe. “I’m sorry to tell you that we haven’t made any progress on your case.”
I sigh and look down. It’s not a surprise to me. My case was nonviolent, had only my eyewitness account, and very few other leads. It’s small potatoes and pretty much only important to me. But as someone who hasn’t gotten a good night’s sleep since it happened, I’ve been kind of clinging to the hope that apprehending the guy who did it might provide me with a little peace of mind.
“I figured,” I tell her. “Just thought I’d check in.”
“You know,” she says with a cock of her head, “you could always just call me to check in on the status of the investigation.”
“I know. I was just passing by anyhow.”
Her eyes are kind with understanding. “And you don’t want me forgetting about you.”
“I know my case is low on the totem pole. I just want to stay on your radar.”
“Mr. Hoffman,” she says, and I can’t help but notice the little bit of gravel in her voice. “I’m not going to forget about you. We’re working your case as hard as we work any other.”
A colleague of hers calls her name and she waves at me as she gets back to work. I leave the precinct with my hands in my pockets and my eyes on the sidewalk. I halt halfway down the block and look back at the police station.
I’ve kind of been thinking that if and when I happen to see JD in person, after all that time talking to one another, I would just kind of know it was her. Not anything as cheesy as a bolt of lightning. But maybe like a low-level surge of awareness. I’ll see JD and everything will just make sense. Right?
I pull my phone out and search for Detective Cabela in my contacts. There’s nothing there. Did she mean that I could call the precinct to contact her? Or was she implying that at some point we exchanged numbers? Is it possible that she’s a mislabeled contact in my address book?
I start walking again, cursing myself for not asking Detective Cabela to call me by my first name. I’m positive that if I heard her say Eliot, I would know whether or not she’s JD. Or, hell, I could have just asked her straight out.
“Hey . . . any chance that you’re JD?” I practice, asking the air in front of me with a casual flip of my hand, as if it doesn’t matter to me either way.
“No. But any chance you’re a crazy person?” my sister asks from beside me, appearing out of thin air and basically scaring me into the next dimension.
“OH MY GOD.”
“Hahahhahahaha. Wow. You should see yourself right now.” Judging from her reaction she’s never seen anything funnier than this.
“I imagine my hair is sticking straight up?”
“That jump-scare pretty much blew the eyebrows off your face just now.”
“Were you walking home from the train?”
“Yup.”
It’s then I realize that she’s shlepping an armful of shipping materials and that I should probably give my baby sister a hand.
“Thanks,” she says, quickly handing off 90 percent of the stuff in her arms. “Why were you talking to yourself?”
“Oh, I was just practicing something.”
“Practicing asking someone who they are?”
I feel a flush rising from under my collar. I tell Vera about almost everything in my life, but over the last two months, I’ve been keeping a fair amount from her. Should I just tell her about JD? Eh, I don’t exactly feel like getting teased about it at this particular moment. “Something like that.”
I’m four steps past her before I realize she’s stopped walking. “Wait. Eliot . . . are you dating?”
“What? What makes you say that?”
“Well, you were practicing asking someone if they were who you thought they were. And the only times I’ve ever done that have been when I’ve met up with Tinder dates.”
“Ah.” Because it’s not exactly a lie, I go along with her story. “Yeah. I’ve been sort of starting something up with someone? I think? But we’re still just at the phone stage and anyway it’s probably nothing. To answer your question—yes. I’m a crazy person.”
My house is closer than Vera’s and I want to get her off this topic so I jump in with a suggestion. “Wanna come over for dinner?”
“Oh. Sure!”
She’s never passed up a home-cooked meal in her life. But as we walk up to my apartment building I see a scrum of my neighbors all standing out on the front sidewalk and a firetruck parked in the middle of the street. It’s got lights on but no sirens.
“What’s going on?” I ask John Matley, a neighbor who lives two floors up from me.
“Oh, nothing. The building-wide fire alarm got tripped, but there’s no fire or anything. They’re just doing a quick check of the building before they let us all back in.”
“Let’s just drop this stuff off at your place,” I suggest to Vera. “We can either order takeout there or come back to mine afterward.”
We get to Vera’s and order burritos, but when I walk back over to my house a couple hours later, the alarm is still going off inside my building. The fire truck is gone, but the neighbors are still mostly outside. Half of them look exhilarated and the other half look exasperated. I can see our super pacing halfway down the block on the phone with someone. And man, she looks pissed. I’m more than relieved to not be whoever is on the receiving end of that phone call.
Frida, my downstairs neighbor, sees me and makes a beeline. If there’s news, she’s going to want to be the one to deliver it. In fact, I’m sure she was devastated to find out that John Matley had filled me in on the rest.
“Electrical issue with the alarm, apparently.” She doesn’t even bother with a casual hello. Her eyes are alight with excitement. This is easily the most thrilling thing that has happened to her in months, I can already tell.
“The new super’s on the line with the alarm company but they’re telling her that it’s an electrical issue so apparently she’s also got the old super on the line with the electrical company. But they don’t think they’ll make it for a few hours at least.”
“Are we allowed to go in?”
“Sure, if you can stand the noise.”
I quickly call Vera and confirm that I can spend the night on her couch before I jog into the building and plug my ears as I head up the stairs to my apartment. This alarm is no joke and it almost brings tears to my eyes when I have to drop one hand to unlock my apartment door. There is definitely something screwy with the electricity right now because my security system has been knocked out and the lights I normally leave on in the apartment are off.
I take one step inside and freeze. It’s the first time since I had it installed two months ago that I’ll be entering my apartment without having to disable the alarm first. Which means it’s the first time in two months that I’m not completely certain there’s no one else in here with me.
A chill tightens the skin all over my body, and I bounce on my toes, hesitating on the threshold.
“This is my apartment,” I tell myself, trying to ignore the eerie way the bright, strobing light from the fire alarm is making everything alternate between a ghostly white and then shadowy black. “This is my house.”
I have to go in and get some stuff. So I take a deep breath and jet straight toward my bathroom. The first thing I do is scramble through my medicine cabinet for some earplugs. Once they’re in place I feel better. Now I have two hands at the ready for whatever might come and the earsplitting shriek of the alarm has been dulled down to a manageable degree.
I’m sweating and not because of exertion. My hands are shaking as I drag an overnight bag out of my closet.
“There’s no one else here,” I reassure myself, and turn around all at once, knowing that if I turn in degrees, I’ll freak myself out even more. The only thing I see is my empty apartment, bathed in light and then bathed in shadow.
I head to the bedroom and grab clothes at random. Next is my toothbrush and last is all the equipment I need for work. I’m breathing a huge sigh of relief as I lock my apartment door behind me.
The worst part of what happened two months ago is that it turned my apartment into enemy territory. I shouldn’t be more relieved to be in the stairwell than I was to be in my own home. But here we are.
I take the stairs two at a time and I’m huffing for oxygen by the time I skid back out onto the street.
The group of neighbors out front all look up at me in a mixture of surprise and confusion. Probably because I’ve got my hands on my knees while I gasp for air and there’s a half-zipped backpack slipping off one shoulder.
Suddenly there’s a firm hand on my elbow and I quickly straighten. I’m standing ten inches away from my super, looking down into her concerned face. From this distance I notice that in addition to the septum piercing she actually has a small eyebrow piercing I’ve never noticed before. I probably notice now because her eyebrows are pulled forward into a tight knot. She’s lined with concern for me.
I see her lips form the words, “Are you all right?” but there’s no sound that accompanies it.
“Oh. Earplugs,” I say, surely way too loud. I go to remove them but before I can answer her question her phone lights up in her hand and she turns away to answer it.
I put the earplugs in my pocket and wave to my neighbors as I start the walk to Vera’s. It’s almost ten o’clock, but the walk is brightly lit and almost cheery. It’s a warm enough night that every few houses there are people sitting on their stoops, smoking or talking or just watching the night pass by.
I’ve always loved this city. I’ve been living here since I was eighteen years old. Which means I’ve lived here almost as long as I lived in my hometown. April and May are by far my two favorite months. When people are just starting to poke their heads out of the ground. When they’re happy to be out in the world, but still sleepy after a long winter. When everyone is just relieved that, yup, in fact the seasons do still change after all. In my mind, it’s the most relaxed time of year. Everyone is looking forward to the summer, but no one is grumpy about the hot weather yet.
This is the time of year when the streets in my neighborhood almost feel like an extension of my home. I usually feel comfortable. But right now I can’t ignore the clammy sweat at my back. I think messaging with JD has been so fun this week that I was starting to think things were turning around for me. But now, I realize that this has all just been a distraction. I’m not moving on. I’m just pretending it didn’t happen.
I’m standing on the sidewalk in front of Vera’s apartment building, but before I buzz up to her apartment I have one more thing I have to do.
I pull out my phone and call JD.
It rings five and a half times before she answers.
“Eliot?”
“Hey. I didn’t think you were gonna answer.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Are you jogging?”
“Huh?”
“You sound super out of breath.”
“Oh. Yeah. I’m jogging.”
“At ten p.m.?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay. Well, I’ll let you get back to it. I was just calling to say that I’m staying at my sister’s house tonight because of some stuff going on at my apartment, so I probably wasn’t going to be able to talk anyhow.”
“Oh . . . Is everything okay?”
“Yeah. It’s just an electrical issue with the fire alarm. No big deal.”
“Eliot?”
“Yeah?”
“You sound a little . . . off.”
“Are you this perceptive all the time? Or have we just gotten to know each other pretty well?”
“Both? Maybe?”
“JD, I wish . . .”
“Yeah?”
“I wish that I could drop my stuff off at my sister’s and then invite you out for a beer.”
“That . . . sounds nice.”
“I wanna sit on a barstool and look up and see you walking through the door and feel that . . . thing people feel when they’re sitting in a room full of strangers and then someone they know walks in. You know that feeling, JD? It’s somewhere between relief and . . . and . . . joy? I don’t know. It’s like when you’re in a room full of people you don’t know, somewhere in the back of your head it starts to feel like maybe that room is the whole world, but then the person you’re waiting for comes in and you remember that you’re not alone in the world? That you have that person right there. And that they came all the way there to sit next to you? Do you know that feeling?”
“Yeah. I know that feeling.”
“Well, I want that to happen. I want to cheers with you and . . . and . . . know who I’m talking to. I wanna know who I’m talking to, JD. Is that too much to ask? You know me well enough to hear in my voice that something isn’t right but I don’t even know your name.”
“Eliot—”
“Look. I’m sorry. Don’t mind me. I’m low-key freaking out and it has nothing to do with you or this conversation. I’m sorry. I’m making this about one thing when it’s probably about something else. Just forget what I said. I’m sorry. I think I’m triggered or something. I feel dizzy.”
“Eliot, where are you right now?”
“I’m out front of my sister’s place.”
“Does she know you’re there?”
“She’s expecting me.”
“All right. Listen to me. In a second, we’re gonna hang up, and you’re gonna go up to your sister’s apartment. You’re gonna tell her you’re really tired, and then you’re gonna curl up, tuck yourself in, and watch a Disney movie. Okay? No cutting corners. I mean an actual Disney movie. Pick one. And tomorrow, we can talk about all of this. I promise we’ll talk about all of it, okay?”
“. . . Okay.”
“And send me a selfie once you’re inside so I know you didn’t get abducted by aliens between the time we hang up and you walk inside, okay?”
“I can’t believe you’re angling for a selfie at a time like this.”
“Eliot!”
“Just teasing you. Okay. You’re right. I’ll go inside and take care of myself. You finish your jog. I’ll send you the pic.”
“Sleep well, Eliot.”
“Sleep well, JD.”