A guy with a nice ass, on display in skimpy Union Jack briefs, was digging through the ice. He stood, glanced over his shoulder, and did a double take. Then he smiled. His teeth were white against his dark brown skin.

  “I was hoping I’d see you again,” he shouted over the roar of the party. He had a swimmer’s build, every muscle cut clean.

  Play it cool, Tucker had said.

  Shaw leaned against the wall, doing his best impersonation of nonchalance, and offered a reserved smile.

  Then he slipped.

  He caught himself, but by then, he’d gotten tangled in the bunting, which disoriented him. He took a few more steps, lost his balance again, and went down hard. He pulled the bunting with him. The bunting pulled the fairy lights. Like some terrible, Fourth-of-July domino set, the decorations came tumbling down, first on one wall, then the next, then the next. People screamed. Then they stopped screaming.

  The music continued to pound, but the party had fallen strangely silent.

  Union Jack was frowning, obviously torn between helping Shaw and getting the hell out of there.

  Shaw felt a draft.

  “You know what?” North said, standing over him and pausing to take a pull from his beer. “One of them is definitely bigger.”

  Shaw groaned and willed the earth to swallow him.

  “Like,” North said with a frown, “see-a-doctor bigger.”

  Chapter 2

  “SLUT!”

  Shaw ducked his head and walked faster through the reception area.

  Not fast enough, though, because Pari, their office manager (a promotion she had given herself), caught the strap of his tank and spun him around.

  After a killer had burned down Shaw’s home a few months before, Borealis Investigations had needed a new base of operations. A number of factors had led to their new digs, located in an aging Benton Park strip mall well off the beaten path. The main factor had been North McKinney’s cheapness, which explained the cinderblock walls; the peeling paint that was the color, as North had once remarked, of old man dandruff; the mustard-colored shag carpeting; the warped wood-grain paneling peeling away from the studs; the threatening ceiling fan (which Pari insisted was possessed); the weird stain in the hallway (which Shaw insisted was Our Lady of the Pestalozzi Street Shopping Plaza (ALDI COMING SOON!!!)); and the french-fry smell (which North insisted Shaw was imagining, and which Shaw now believed might be psychic evidence of a crime).

  Currently, Shaw was sending a prayer up to Our Lady of the Pestalozzi Street Shopping Plaza (ALDI COMING SOON!!!), asking that the murdered french fries manifest, or that the ceiling fan make a few ominous swipes, or that the building collapse on top of them.

  “You. Are. A. Slut.” Pari wrinkled her nose. “And you stink. Like sex. Go take a whore’s bath in the sink.”

  “First of all, both slut and whore—”

  “Oh my God!” The words were one unbroken squeal. “Are those hickeys?”

  Shaw tugged on the tank. “No.”

  “They are!”

  “No, I was doing something with a vacuum.” Shaw scrambled. “Something auto-erotic.”

  “Those are totally hickeys.” Pari perched on the desk, knocking over several stacks of papers in her excitement, and adjusted her long, dark hair. Today, the bindi was gunmetal gray. “Ok, what’s his name?”

  “Well, it’s rude that you assume that it was a guy because, as I told you, I’m pretty sure I’m bisexual now because I was watching that cologne commercial, and there was a lady in it, and I had a physical reaction.”

  “Your thing,” Pari said, wrinkling up her nose, “did its thing because North came in from a run and was wiping his gross, sweaty, hairy chest with his shirt.”

  “That cologne lady had a bikini on! Like a…like a temptress!”

  “No,” North muttered from the front door, only halfway across the threshold. He was wearing dark sunglasses and rubbing a spot between his eyes. “No fucking way. I am too hungover for this shit.”

  “Shaw is a slut.”

  “As I was saying,” Shaw tried, “slut isn’t a word we use anymore because—”

  “Of course, you’re a man-whore,” Pari said to North. “Or a fuck-boy. I’m not sure which yet.” She shrugged. “I’m not sure which is better, actually.”

  “Fuck-boy,” North said.

  “Man-whore,” Shaw said.

  “I’m going home,” North said, shouldering open the door again. “We’re closed. We’re closed forever.”

  “That’s good, right? So I can shred all those papers on your desk—”

  “Don’t go anywhere near my fucking desk.” North leveled a finger at Shaw. After a moment, when it seemed like he’d made his point, he growled out some grumbling subvocalizations, pushed his way past the two of them, and disappeared into the back office.

  “Did you see who North went home with?” Pari whispered.

  Shaw shook his head.

  “Come on, you had to have seen.” She leaned closer. “I mean, I know he’s still in love with you, but if this new guy has good equipment, you might need to move a little faster with your plan.”

  “What plan?”

  “Your plan to win back North and prove that for some reason—you have to fill in the blanks here because I honestly have no idea what you’d say—he should get back together with you, even though you’ve got those bushy pits and sometimes you don’t brush your teeth and still think pig Latin is cute and—”

  “Ok, ok, ok,” Shaw whispered furiously. “I’m working on it.”

  “You’re serious? You didn’t see his new guy?”

  “No!”

  “What about your new guy?” Pari’s expression grew concerned. “Is it serious?”

  “What? No. Of course not. He’s just—it was just fun.”

  Pari made a face. “You really do smell like sex. Whore’s bath. Now.”

  After scrubbing the most important parts in the tiny bathroom—a lady-of-the-night’s bath, Shaw decided was the best name for it—he checked on North. The blond man had his head on his desk, a bottle of ibuprofen next to him, letting out a whistling snore. Shaw shut the door gently, went back to the reception area, and began sorting promotional materials.

  While North’s cheapness extended to picking a new office in an ancient strip mall with half its storefronts empty, it apparently did not include promotional materials. New business cards. Window decals. Banner stands. Flyers. So many flyers. The original design—North’s—had featured a picture of North and Shaw standing back-to-back with their arms folded, like they were posing for a ’90s hip-hop album’s cover art, or doing a bus ad for a law firm. After Pari had laughed so hard that she had fallen over, North had redesigned the flyers to feature text only. They’d arrived on Wednesday, the day before yesterday, and Shaw guessed that his afternoon assignment was going to be wandering in the brutal Midwestern heat, stapling these to every utility pole he could find.

  “Shaw.” North’s voice was a growl from their office door. “I need your help with this new parabolic mic.”

  Shaw hid a smile by digging deeper in the boxes. “Why do you need my help?”

  “With the instructions.”

  “You can read them yourself.”

  “Shaw.”

  “I don’t understand why you need my help.”

  “Because I do. Right now.”

  “I better work on these flyers. You told me on Wednesday that they were top priority. You went on and on about it for like an hour.”

  “Like two hours,” Pari said, eyes still locked on her monitor.

  North grunted something and shut the door.

  Five minutes later, though: “Shaw, get your ass back here.”

  “I told you: I’ll help you with the mic—”

  “Not that. The numbers on the Pasco invoice are fucked to shit.”

  “You can fix it.”

  “It’s your invoice. You typed it up. Get your ass back here and fix it.”

  Shaw extracted himself from the boxes long enough to direct a soft smile in North’s direction. “You know I’m not any good with numbers. You go ahead and fix it. It’ll be faster anyway.”

  “No, I want you to—”

  “Oh my God,” Pari said. “Fix it yourself, North, so I don’t have to hear about Shaw’s alternative mathematics where one plus one equals three.”

  This time, there was some definite snarling.

  Seven and a half minutes later: “I need to show you something.”

  Shaw glanced up. North’s messy thatch of blond hair was even more mussed than usual, and red circles marked his cheeks. His eyes were narrow and promising some serious payback for this bullshit.

  “What?” Shaw asked, head down again to hide his grin.

  “That’s what I’m going to show you.”

  “Can’t you tell me?”

  “Motherfucking son of a bitch—” North cut off. “No, I can’t tell you. That’s the whole reason I want to show you.”

  “It’s not about that parabolic mic, is it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not a bug, is it? Because if you want me to kill a bug, I’m not going to do it. We’ve got enough ghosts in here already.”

  “I can kill a bug by my own goddamn self, thank you very much. Get your ass up. Walk your ass back here. Right now, Shaw.”

  “Ok,” Shaw said, letting doubt creep into his voice as he set aside the stacks of promotional materials. As he gathered himself up, he shook his head. “No, wait. I just remembered. I’ve got to call the power company because we keep getting that electric bill from the ethereal plane, and—”

  North’s voice had come unraveled, and it rose into a shout. “For the last fucking time, it’s not the ethereal plane, it’s for the goddamn last tenant!” Then the door crashed shut.

  Pari flicked a look at Shaw. “He’s grumpy for a guy who got some last night.”

  “He’s North,” Shaw said with a shrug. “He’s always grumpy.”

  Half an hour later, Pari stood, stretched, and grabbed her purse. “I’m taking my break. Do you want anything from Shameless Grounds?”

  “Actually, yes, they have this vegan pita—”

  “I didn’t think so,” she said as she flounced out the door.

  No sooner had it shut behind her than the inner office door flew open, and North stood there, chest rising and falling with huge, labored breaths.

  “You son of a bitch,” he growled as he launched himself across the room.

  Trying not to laugh, Shaw let North manhandle him into their office. North shut the door and pressed the thumb lock. Shaw, grinning, backed away.

  “Why,” North cast his sunglasses on the desk and tugged off his shirt, “do you have to be so fucking difficult sometimes?”

  “I don’t like feeling objectified.”

  “Get those stupid shorts off right now,” North snapped as he shucked his jeans.

  Shaw wriggled out of the hot pants but said, “I don’t like feeling like a cheap trick.”

  Hopping out of his boxers, North made an aggravated noise. Then, naked and hard, he advanced. Shaw gave up and started to laugh.

  “What the fuck is so funny?” North asked as he caught Shaw by the arms and settled him in a chair. For a moment, his dick bobbed inches from Shaw’s face, and then he lowered himself to straddle Shaw’s lap. Shaw whimpered when their erections slid against each other. North had a wicked grin as he grabbed the cropped tank and gave Shaw a light shake. “I asked you a question.”

  Shaw opened his mouth to answer, but North rutted against him, and all that came out was garbled noises.

  North bent, kissing Shaw’s mouth, his jaw, his neck and collarbone and shoulder. He sucked and bit at the marks he’d left the night before.

  “Fuck yeah,” he whispered. “Walking around half-naked, my marks all over you.”

  Taking both of them together in one hand, Shaw began to pump.

  “Fuck,” North groaned. “I never should have let you out of bed this morning.”

  The thin paneling, the distant noise of traffic, the unfamiliar setting, even the knowledge that Pari could walk in on them at any moment—they all combined to set Shaw on fire. But it was more than that. It was this change in North, the sudden lack of inhibitions, his seemingly insatiable need.

  “Yeah, yeah, you got me there, oh shit.” North rutted into Shaw’s hand and came, the strain of controlling his volume outlined in his face. When he finished, he slumped forward, forehead on Shaw’s shoulder.

  Shaw let his head fall back and finished. As he was coming down from the orgasm’s crest, he felt North’s mouth moving gently across his throat, kisses and murmured words that he couldn’t assemble into anything meaningful.

  “Well,” Shaw finally croaked. That was all he could come up with.

  “Yeah,” North said with a chuckle. “God, sometimes I feel like I could get off just looking at you. Especially when you play so fucking hard to get.”

  They were both quiet for a few minutes, North’s face against Shaw’s shoulder again, the bigger man’s body still. Come was cooling and drying on Shaw’s belly. He ran his hand down the bumps of North’s spine, pressed his palm against the small of North’s back, a position that was almost an embrace. North settled against Shaw’s hand with a contented noise.

  “This is fun,” Shaw whispered. He had to stop because his mouth was so dry. He tried again. “Sneaking around like this, it’s hot.”

  North made a pleased noise.

  “But don’t you—I mean, maybe if we told a few people, so they didn’t keep trying to set us up—”

  North’s head came up. His ice-rim eyes were unreadable. “Tell them what?”

  In the storefront next to them, the Jonas Brothers were wailing about being suckers for you.

  North leaned back, tapped Shaw’s arm, and tugged the tank up and off. He used it to clean up Shaw’s belly and then held it, crumpled, in one hand.

  Shaw focused on an ominous-looking bulge in the acoustic tiles. It suggested water damage. Maybe a serious structural problem.

  “Come on,” North said, and the friendly tone couldn’t hide the irritation in his voice. “We talked about this. We’re friends.”

  “Friends with benefits,” Shaw said. “Will you get off me, please?”

  “I don’t get why we have to have this fight over and over again. We’re so good at this, Shaw. We’re good at being friends. We’re good at giving each other shit. We’re good at working together. We’re good at fucking together.”

  “You weigh a ton.” He pressed on North’s chest. “And I want to clean up before Pari comes back.”

  “Look, every relationship has its natural level. This is ours. Best friends and fantastic sex. When we tried it without sex, we had problems. When we tried to make it more than friends and sex—”

  Shaw moved, rising fast enough to dump North on his ass.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  Moving around the desk, Shaw shrugged. “I asked you twice.”

  “Damn it, Shaw. I’m going to have bruises on my ass.”

  In the bottom drawer of his desk, Shaw found a change of clothes. “That’ll give you a good story for all your other hookups.”

  “For fuck’s sake.” North gathered himself, but Shaw was already moving toward the door. “We broke up. We agreed that if we were going to do this, add sex to our friendship, we weren’t going to get weird about it.”

  Shaw threw open the door. He huffed, trying to get close to laughter while being a hundred miles away from it.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you.”

  But Shaw was already out in the hall. He shut himself in the bathroom.

  North hammered on it once. “Open the fucking door.”

  Shaw stared at the yellow tiles, the yellow sink, the yellow toilet. Chartreuse, he thought. Maybe someone had called this color chartreuse instead of old tennis ball or moldy orange.

  With a muttered “Fuck this,” North moved away from the door.

  Warm water. Soap. Paper towels. Then Shaw pulled on the clothes: a sailor-collar shirt of peach-colored linen, and cutoffs. Cold water for puffy eyes. In the reception area, the bell jangled, which meant Pari was back from break and it was now safe to exit. North wouldn’t press the issue while Pari was around. At least, Shaw hoped he wouldn’t.

  When Shaw opened the bathroom door, though, North popped out of their office like an angry Norse jack-in-the-box. He was dressed again, and the t-shirt was tight around his biceps.

  “You know what? When we’re having a fucking conversation—”

  “North?”

  The voice was older, cultured, self-assured. Shaw turned.

  He recognized the man: Mr. Laguerre. Tucker’s father. Which, in some nightmare logic, made sense right now. Why wouldn’t he be here, Shaw thought, when everything else is so awful?

  “Dick,” North said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know—” He shook his head. “Are you—is Cathy—” He laughed and rubbed his mouth. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “I need to hire you,” Dick Laguerre said. “Tucker’s been arrested for murder.”

  Chapter 3

  THE WORDS ECHOED IN North’s ears, and for a moment, they were gibberish. Tucker’s father stood in front of him, here, in the Borealis office. Dick Laguerre, talking about murder. The summer sunlight coming in through the front windows was too bright; North wiped his eyes.

  “Why don’t you come back to our office?” Shaw said. “North, do you want me to—”

  “No.” North’s head bobbed as though on a loose string. “I mean, yes. Come on, Dick. Let’s sit down. This has got to be some kind of misunderstanding.”

  Impossible, back in their office, to miss the smell of sex. Impossible to miss the faux-walnut paneling peeling back from the studs. Impossible to miss the water-damaged acoustic tiles and the rusty bleed-out from the drop ceiling’s grid. Impossible to miss Shaw’s desk, it’s usual insanity: the Five Below wall clock he had disassembled, turning the second hand into a “phallic gnomon to represent the sexual dimension of time”; the charcoal-stained toothbrush being used to clean a coach-pitch trophy that had once belonged, according to the plaque, to a girl named Seema Naidu; an uncapped Speed Stick; a rubber band ball that Shaw had once spent an entire afternoon trying to saw through with an eight-and-a-half by eleven printout of Adrienne Rich poems; and a boxed set reprint of The Little House on the Prairie books. Impossible to miss, in other words, the fuckery of North’s life.