“Don’t let her—” Darby barely gets out before I’ve hit the buzzer. Then Maggie flings open my door, panting, and any possible hope I had of a quiet Saturday is dead.
“Kiera! Your booty call is affecting me positively in the following ways! Jana Aston pays so much more attention to me when I tell her all your stories. And once she finishes stealing the good parts, she said she’ll dedicate the book to me. Oh, I’d have a gin.”
“That’s so typical of you, only thinking about yourself, Maggie,” says Darby, apparently having forgotten her own list of grievances. “What about Dylan’s feelings?”
“Wait a minute. You’ve been forwarding all my sex stories to your writer friend? I thought you were living vicariously.” I hand her a gin.
“Oh, no, she is. You know Jana.” I actually don’t, though. “Anyways, it behooves me for you to keep on having anonymous sex with the D.”
I have to sit down for a minute and process all of this.
The D has never required a Yelp review for his services, he was just interested enough to call the next day. It’s entirely possible, knowing this, that my objectifying nickname for him is a little rude. And maybe all of my behavior, actually. Darby has an excellent point that I haven’t thought much about him in any of this, except for the parts about how I really like my booty call bringing me coffee and always letting me pick what to watch.
I’d been extremely reluctant to date this winter. But when I think about what I was thinking when I made that decision, it had a lot to do with not having any energy. When you can’t clean your house or wash your hair, you probably aren’t going to make a good impression on any potential suitors. Assuming you even show up to make your bad impression at all.
The D—Dylan—already knows what a mess I can be, because it didn’t occur to me that he was a real person.
The devil on my shoulder, Maggie, isn’t even really dissuading me here. She doesn’t care if he gets humanized to me, as long as I keep sending her the highlights to pass along. Humanizing is the process, as all true crime fans know, by which you try to get a potential murderer to see you as a person and not a victim.
Which is how I know I’ve been wrong all along.
I have been the psychopath, not Dylan.
All this time. And I have been the bad guy. I heave myself down on the couch, but it isn’t enough so I melt down and flip until I am upside-down with my head on the carpet. How could I have been so wrong about everything? I guess pretty easily. I’ve never been known for my great choices. But still, this feels like a new low.
“Wait, what do you mean Jana Aston likes to live vicariously?” I ask Maggie.
“Well, she hates parties and going out and most things that aren’t cats or coffee. So it works out nicely for her that I have so many weird stories about us doing what we do.”
She hates parties? So much for my tarot reading. Everything I have believed is a lie. This is a truly sad realization. Because I don’t think there’s any way around it. I’m going to have to do the thing that all Riley girls hate more than anything in the world—apologize.
Acceptance
You can come over tonight
Sure, the text doesn’t sound like it’s coming from a girl ready to make things right, but I don’t want to startle him with sudden kindness. Anyways the whole point of a Valentine’s Day surprise is that it’s a surprise. And this gives him no indication that I even remember what day today is.
He sends a thumbs-up emoji a few minutes later, which is good, because if he’d said no I would have to come up with a whole new plan and we all know that’s not likely. All the vitamins and sunlamps in the world can’t fix lazy.
Then I set to work, because there’s a lot to do and only a couple hours until he gets off work. Knowing what he does and where he does it has made my life a lot simpler just in general. I don’t know why I was so resistant before. I guess because I just assumed he was off spreading happiness to the other lonely women of Kansas City and I didn’t really want to spend much time dwelling on that.
Once everything’s arranged to my satisfaction, I pour myself a gin and wait.
By pure luck, I’m looking out the window when he pulls up. The luck is helped a little bit because I’ve been looking out the window the entire time. His long, lean body unfolds from the car like a present being opened just for me. Then he reaches back inside and pulls out a box. Interesting.
It’s not flowers, which is a good thing because of my allergies. I don’t even think I’ve mentioned that to him, so either he’s been investigating me through Darby again, or he’s just made a good guess that I’m not the kind of girly-girl who thinks much of dying vegetation as a present. I buzz him in, open the door, and wait for his scent and then his face to appear. He greets me with a kiss. It makes my heart swell a little bit. Kissing him still feels a little bit novel, since we didn’t do it the first few times. So I kiss him again, until there’s a real danger that we’re going to end up humping in the hallway, then I break away to pull him in.
“I made dinner,” I say. He looks appropriately shocked. I can cook pretty decently, thanks to all of Maggie’s lessons, but he would have no way of knowing that given that most of our interactions take place nude. And that’s not a safe way to be in the kitchen.
He follows me to my little dining table, which I have covered entirely with butcher paper. It’s a trick I learned from the only Facebook group I’m in that isn’t related to true crime. On said paper, I have drawn body outlines and filled them in with things like very rare steak, roasted beets, and various charcuterie. Charcuterie by definition is cured meats, so most of it looks like a crime scene already. I’m really proud of this table, even if I seem to have inadvertently created a romantic cannibal scene.
“How very criminal,” Dylan remarks. He grabs one of the steak knives I’ve scattered around and spears a steak tip. Then a beet. “Will the paper hold all the… blood?” he asks as juice drips copiously down.
“Who cares? I lost my security deposit the day I told my sisters where I live.” That’s dead true, too. “Blood orange?”
He accepts, with a little smirk on his face that somehow makes him even hotter than when he has his straight-face on. I am the most repentful ex-psychopath there ever was. How could I ever have discounted this clever, quiet man as a mere vitamin?
Although.
The D is absolutely something to write home about.
Or to your local romance writer, as it turns out. Still can’t believe how wrong I read her.
Instead of gin, I have red wine, in keeping with the general bloody theme of things. I’m pretty sure Dylan is liking it, based on nothing but the fact that he hasn’t left yet. He truly is inscrutable. Very attractive, now that I’m almost entirely positive he isn’t planning to kill me. Okay, I’m entirely positive, but the idea of him chasing me around still seems like a good time, so the one percent is just there for funsies.
Holy Mary, he isn’t wrong, though. There is red stuff just like—everywhere. This might have been a terrible idea. Or a perfect idea but the wrong location. Like so many murderers later discover, I suppose, I should have done this outside somewhere. Luckily, bleach is a thing. It even fools Lumisol, I hear.