Shaw was still talking. He sounded different when he talked to his parents. Nothing easy to pinpoint. It wasn’t like his vocabulary changed, or even the content—sophomore year, when Shaw had been living at home and recovering from being stabbed, North had walked in on Shaw and his mother debating dildo lengths, girths, and materials. With samples. But maybe a slight shift in manner, a hint of education and money that Shaw had dropped early in freshman year—one of the things, North remembered, that had made him hate Shaw at first sight.

  Now, he burrowed deeper into Shaw, smelling the cigarette smoke from the bar and the slight musk of his hair product, Shaw’s arm warm and comforting and possessive around him. Shaw’s voice rumbled in his chest as he talked. North ran his hand over Shaw’s ribs, tracing them, then pushing up the shirt to caress the wiry muscle and the dusting of auburn hair. He turned his head just enough to kiss Shaw’s bare skin. In spite of his own best efforts, North was hard again. Really hard.

  When Shaw ended the call, his hand came up to the short mess of North’s hair, playing with it. North rolled onto his stomach, kissed Shaw’s belly again, and pushed the shirt higher. He followed it with another kiss, leaning down to rub himself against Shaw’s leg. Then he realized Shaw was soft.

  He let out a slow breath, rested his chin on Shaw’s abdomen, and looked up the length of that slim body. “You ok?”

  “What? Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”

  North stroked bare skin in slow, calming movements. “What’s up?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “Great.”

  “Yeah,” Shaw mumbled.

  North crawled up the length of his body and then let himself drop, flattening Shaw against the mattress.

  Shaw’s breath whooshed, and he grunted under North’s weight. Then he slapped North’s hip. Then he tried to buck North off. Then he tried to shove him.

  “North, come on.”

  “What?”

  “Will you get off me?”

  “I’m comfortable. I might fall asleep.”

  “This is so juvenile.”

  North took slow breaths that alternated with fake snores.

  “You are a child. Do you realize that? You’re a teenager at heart. A delinquent.”

  More fake snoring.

  “A…a hooligan.”

  “Could you keep it down, please? I’m trying to get some shut-eye.”

  “I’m fine, ok? I’m totally, perfectly fine. It was just a bummer of a conversation. My mom is really stressed about these students in her studio, and I still haven’t figured out what to get my mom and dad for their thirtieth anniversary, and they won’t stop talking about—” Whatever he’d been about to say, he changed it at the last moment. “—the party, and then I had to hear about how my great-aunt’s chemo port keeps coming out.”

  North turned his head, scruff dragging on Shaw’s cheek, and kissed his jaw lightly. “What’s the one you’re worried about the most?”

  “My aunt, I guess. She’s eighty-three.”

  “Are you close?”

  “Yeah. She’s always been so nice to me. And now she’s sick and miserable and nothing has gone right with the treatment.”

  Sliding onto his side next to Shaw, North said, “Maybe you should take a couple days off and spend them with her.”

  “I don’t know.” Shaw shook his head, staring up at the ceiling. The next part burst free, although he seemed to try to stop it. “And why can’t they just drop it about the party? I don’t—I don’t know why I have to keep hearing about it. It’s their party. It’s for them. For their anniversary. Why am I involved at all?”

  “I don’t know. Why are you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How are you involved?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Ok, ok.” North considered the stubborn-as-a-fucking-mule set of Shaw’s jaw, prayed inwardly to whatever saint protected fools who got involved with complicated, beautiful men who owned an entire drawerful of assless chaps, and tried a different angle. “Should I be expecting an invitation? Delivered on a silver platter of course.”

  Shaw rolled off the bed. “I’m going to brush my teeth.”

  “Hey, I was just joking.”

  “I know.” He delivered the words while walking, without looking back.

  “Will you tell me what the fuck is going on?”

  The answer was a slammed door.

  Whatever the hell coconut oil-pulling involved, it apparently took a lot of time. North finally turned off the lights, crawled under the blankets, and closed his eyes.

  Soft steps. The blankets being drawn back, the whisper of cool air, and then a warm body. One arm across North’s waist. Shaw’s head on his shoulder.

  “I want you to go to the party with me.”

  “Great.”

  “It’s a week from Saturday.”

  North didn’t say anything about the preparations, about how long a family as rich as Shaw’s might have spent planning and ordering and inviting and arranging. More than a couple of weeks, that was for sure. All he said was “I’ll get my day planner.”

  “I’m sorry I’m being a pill.”

  North grunted. He had kept his eyes closed through this whole exchange, but now they opened. In the faint light from the window, the room was blue-black, bruised. He didn’t mean to say it out loud. He definitely didn’t want to say it out loud. But it slipped out anyway: “You know I’ll be on my best behavior, right? I’m not going to get drunk and make a scene or pick a fight with your Uncle Al or look down your Aunt Suzy’s dress. If you promise me treats, I bet I could even do some nifty tricks like use the right fork and drink out of a glass.”

  The silence had a heartbeat pulse to it.

  “My Aunt Suzy got really good implants,” Shaw finally said, his tone suggesting a joke to smooth everything over. “So, if you’re into that thing, you actually probably should look down her dress.”

  North bit back the swear words. He bit back the reply. He couldn’t help the rest of it, though: he rolled onto his side, his back to Shaw, and closed his eyes.

  Chapter 3

  IN MOVIES SOMETIMES—the kind North watched, the kind North made Shaw watch, even when there was a perfectly good four-hour QVC spot on empowerment gemstones—a guy stepped on a landmine, and then he froze because he knew if he moved at all, if he even scratched his nose, he’d get blown to Kingdom Come.

  The next morning, Shaw knew how the poor bastard felt. Unfortunately, he couldn’t seem to stay still.

  The bed was empty when Shaw woke. It was a Monday, so Shaw found North downstairs, in their office, but North would only reply in grunts and monosyllables. He refused the coffee Shaw brought him. He ignored the slice of cherry danish. When Shaw tried to kiss him, he stood abruptly and left the room. When he came back, he moved his chair away from the desk, under the pretense of kicking up his heels and reading a sheaf of documents. When Shaw moved his own chair back as well, so that they were sitting side by side again, North made a noise and rolled his chair closer to the desk. When Shaw followed him, North looked over, wild-eyed, and dumped the cherry danish in the trash.

  “Now you’re making me mad,” Shaw said.

  “Good.”

  “I know I hurt your feelings last night, but you won’t talk to me, and I want to apologize, and that was a perfectly good slice of danish!” Shaw lost it a little on the volume at the end.

  North stood and pushed back from the desk so hard that the chair caught an uneven floorboard and tipped over. He stomped out of the room; when he came back fifteen minutes later, he smelled like cigarettes. Shaw caught his eye and opened his mouth, but the look on North’s face made him reconsider.

  It might have gone on like that all day, except Pari rapped on the door. She used what Shaw considered her professional voice (in contrast to her normal, I’m-going-to-harangue-you-into-an-undeserved-raise voice), which meant that a prospective client was in the reception area.

  “There’s a Mrs. Chittenden here to see you.”

  “We’re not doing walk-ins today,” North said without looking up. “And if it’s your fault because you forgot to put her on the fucking calendar, you can apologize to her and find a better time for her to come back.”

  Stepping into the office, Pari shut the door behind her. She lowered her voice and said, “If the two of you could pull yourselves out of whatever high-school-relationship drama you’re tangled up in for fifteen seconds and act like professionals, you might be interested to know that Mrs. Chittenden is a state senator from central Missouri—Maries County, Pulaski, Dore. That area. In other words, a fairly important person. And she wants to hire you. Although God only knows why; she’d be better off hiring the cheer squad.”

  North didn’t exactly look at Shaw, but his voice was gruff when he said, “You’d probably better send her in, then.”

  Pari didn’t reply; the look on her face said it all. A moment later, she was ushering a blond woman into the room. Shaw’s first impression was of a waxwork Kim Novak—and not at the best point in her life. The short, tousled curls. The dark eyebrows. The high cheekbones. Her real age was most visible near her ears—and, of course, in her hands. She wore a navy suit under a scarlet jacket. A dark-haired young man pranced at her heels; Shaw had seen pieces of toast with more personality.

  “Mrs. Chittenden,” North said, coming around the desk to shake her hand. “And—”

  “We’ll have espressos,” Mrs. Chittenden said, shrugging out of the jacket, which the young man caught like a relic. “Gavin, hold my calls.”

  “We actually don’t have an espresso machine,” Shaw said as he approached, “because North decided that only ‘rich twats who have never done an honest day’s work’ own their own espresso machine, which was a jab at me because I had two in my dorm room.” North’s eyebrows were arching sharply now, so Shaw hurried to add, “We don’t even have a Nespresso machine because the pods are so bad for the environment. But we do have coffee, if the coffeemaker isn’t broken again, and we have a thistle tea that I brew, and—”

  “Actually,” North said, “we don’t have thistle tea.”

  “No, we do. I picked all those weird, white twigs off the bush in the backyard, and if you pack it into a tea infuser, it tastes just like thistle tea.”

  “Oh my God,” North whispered. In a stronger voice, he managed to say, “Coffee?”

  Mrs. Chittenden gave each of them a long look. “Gavin, take their girl and get us some espressos. A double for me. For you?”

  “Well, I like mine unicorn style—” Shaw began.

  “A double is fine,” North said, shooting Shaw a look.

  Gavin, who Shaw now noticed wore a headset, was whispering furiously into the microphone as he pranced out of the room again. He pulled the door shut behind him, cutting off his words as he snapped at Pari, “Come on, I don’t have all day.”

  North winced. Just barely.

  “He’s going to be lucky if she only rips out all his hair,” Shaw whispered.

  They got Mrs. Chittenden settled, and when they were seated behind their desks again, North said, “How can we help you?”

  Mrs. Chittenden was examining the room. Success had made it possible for North and Shaw to update the office: comfortable chairs for clients, accent tables, a muted landscape painting they’d bought at the Francis Park art fair together. North’s desk, as usual, was perfectly organized: the chrome in-out trays with their neat stacks of documents, the high-def monitor, the organizer with individual compartments for paperclips and binder clips and tacks and staples. North had shouted himself hoarse the one time Shaw had dumped it out to borrow it for his antique button collection. Shaw’s desk, on the other hand, had a less traditional organizational system. Today, for example, was day seven of his exploration of metal racking and shelving systems, so he had a spread of trade magazines and sales catalogues spread across the desk. On top of those was the homemade kilt he was still working on, for which he had used a combination of black vinyl and rayon that was a color North described as “grandma’s stirrup pants.” The one bare spot on the desk was where Shaw had set a copy of the Kama Sutra, but when North had looked at it and then looked at Shaw for fifteen seconds, Shaw’s whole face had caught fire, and he’d shoved the book in the bottom drawer.

  Eyebrows drawing together, Mrs. Chittenden bent over the accent table next to her, picking up a figurine of dried pasta to examine it.

  “That’s elbow-macaroni Emery Hazard,” Shaw said. “He’s my best friend.”

  North pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Not the elbow-macaroni version. He’s not a real person. I know that.”

  “Now,” North muttered. “After fifteen conversations.”

  “I mean the real Emery Hazard. He’s basically my best friend in the whole universe. He’s got a boyfriend who’s really sweet, and his name is John-Henry, and I was going to make an oatmeal-cream-pie John-Henry because, well, Emery is so stiff and prickly, and John-Henry is so sweet and gooey, but North told me I couldn’t. North is always telling me what I can and can’t do. But I just go along with it. I thought it’d be really nice to give elbow-macaroni Emery Hazard a boyfriend, but North said no, and I always do what North tells me to—”

  “For fuck’s sake, you said you were going to, quote, ‘cream-pie John-Henry,’ and when I said absolutely not, because God help me if I understood what you actually meant, you sulked for three days and then made the damn oatmeal cream pie anyway. And then you ate it.”

  “Oh,” Shaw frowned. “Huh. I forgot about that.”

  “Are you the ones who caught the West End Slasher?” Mrs. Chittenden said, leaning forward, clutching the elbow-macaroni figurine without seeming to realize it.

  “Yes,” North said. “We had help, of course. And the police—”

  “And that man who ran the youth shelter, the one who went missing?”

  Shaw nodded.

  “And there was something recently, an author who was murdered?”

  Elbows on the desk, North leaned forward. “The official charge was manslaughter, I think. Mrs. Chittenden, are you in danger? Because—”

  “The job is simple. My son, Philip, made a mistake. As a result, he is required to report for weekly drug testing. Since he has proven himself unreliable, you will pick him up at his school, accompany him to be tested, and take him home. I understand you typically require a retainer, so I’ve already written a check for five thousand dollars. Gavin will give it to you when he comes back.”

  Shaw glanced at North. “We appreciate the offer,” Shaw said slowly, “and we recognize that you’re placing a lot of trust in us.”

  “Unfortunately, we currently have a full case load.” North tapped a key on the keyboard. “I’d be happy to refer you to—”

  “No.” The word was brittle. Color mottled her cheeks, red patches climbing her neck. Her knuckles were white around elbow-macaroni Emery Hazard. “I’m hiring you. I’ve researched your agency extensively. I’m impressed by the work you’ve done.” A big, white smile broke out across her face; that was the politician, Shaw knew, poking her head out for the first time in this conversation. “My son means everything to me, and I’ll be happy to pay your priority rates or whatever you believe is necessary.”

  “Mrs. Chittenden—”

  “Celia.”

  North took a breath. “Celia, what you’re asking us to do, it’s not our specialty. If you want transportation, there are car services, luxury ones, who will do what you’re asking and do it well. We’ve used a couple in the past, and I can recommend them.”

  “Unless it’s more than that,” Shaw said softly. “Unless you’re worried about Philip for some reason. Do you believe he’s in danger?”

  “Don’t be stup—” The smile slipped, and Celia plastered it back on. She was still white-knuckling the pasta figurine. “Don’t be silly. Philip is perfectly fine. He attends The Gouverneur Morris School, which I’m sure you’ve heard of.”

  “It’s very small, isn’t it?” North asked. “Very exclusive?”

  “Very rigorous,” Shaw added. “All the students there still learn Latin and Greek.”

  “It’s also very safe,” Celia said. “I’m not worried about trouble finding Philip. I’m worried about Philip finding trouble. He’s a good young man. He’s…he’s almost perfect, in fact.” The iron rigidity of her voice flexed. “I don’t want to see him mess up his life. I don’t need to hire a bodyguard, and I don’t need to call him an Uber. I want you.”

  “Why?” Shaw asked.

  The waxworks chill was back in her face as she turned her full attention on him. The silence dragged out a moment. And then another. Then the sound of the front door opening broke the stillness, and a pair of footsteps moved through the reception area.

  “I’m sorry you’ve wasted your time,” North said, “but you’re asking us to babysit. That’s not our specialization, and it’s not the right fit for us as an agency. As I said, I’d be happy to put you in contact with—”

  Her cry began wordless and low, but it climbed to an earsplitting pitch. Celia’s hand tightened around elbow-macaroni Emery Hazard until the figurine cracked and broke. The bottom half fell and shattered against the floor, a starburst of macaroni spinning across the boards. Then Celia’s shriek ended, and for a moment she sat there, shoulders hunched, chest rising and falling as she sucked in air.

  The change, when it came, reminded Shaw of those stupid Transformers that North liked: twist a piece here, push this that way, fold that. Celia’s back straightened. Her shoulders rolled back. Her chin came up. She opened her hand, shaking out the broken pieces of pasta that still clung to her flesh.

  “I seem to have cut myself,” she said. “Do you have a tissue?”

  Both North and Shaw were frozen for a moment. Shaw moved first, grabbing a tissue from the box he kept in his desk. Celia accepted it, dabbing at the blood. She fixed her senator smile on them. Forget Transformers, Shaw thought. Forget landmines. This was Shark Week.