Ledger dropped the mattress in surprise. It caught his thumbnail on the way down and bent it back, right down to the cuticle.
“Fuck,” he swore at the sharp, vicious pain that spiked all the way down into his joint. He shook his hand, as if he could flick the injury away, and turned to look at Wren. “What?”
Wren unfolded himself out of the chair, all easy muscle and quick grace.
“You heard me,” he said as he stuck the pennies into the pocket of his jeans. “You. Me. Goodnight kiss. Deal?”
Ledger didn’t put himself in positions—professionally or personally—where he could be caught flat-footed. So this felt new. He stared at Wren for a moment as he tried to catch his balance. It didn’t help. His brain kept derailing over the firm line of Wren’s mouth and the fragments of dirty dreams that Ledger remembered.
“Can’t we just fuck?” he blurted out.
It was probably a joke. At least, Ledger was pretty sure he could convince himself of that later.
Wren stood hipshot, one hand in his pocket, and considered that.
“No,” he said. “Date or nothing.”
A sharp mixture of anger and frustration caught in Ledger’s throat. This was the sort of shit the unnatural pulled. Insulated from the world by power, age, and their natures, it never occurred to them that other people didn’t have that luxury. That for Ledger, defaulting on this contract would not just be inconvenient.
Life was easy from the other side of it.
“OK,” Ledger said. That was what all that irritation and emotion squeezed down into. OK. Ledger couldn’t explain it. “One date. Dinner and a kiss.”
Wren smirked, deep smile lines carved into lightly stubbled cheeks.
“You’re buying,” he said as he walked over to the bed. “Since you asked.”
He grabbed the mattress and lifted it without any help. The movement released a musty, meaty smell that Ledger’s mind immediately anchored to “sickness.” It was the smell of slow, failing sickness, of what leaked out of a body as it hollowed out like a rotten log.
Ledger made a soft noise of disgust in the back of his throat, but it was only going to get worse. He covered his mouth and nose with the back of his hand and leaned in to look under the mattress. There was another book, a crease pressed permanently into the cover, and a photo shoved in at the top of the bed. He pulled them both out and glanced at them.
Neither of them were new. The book wasThe Corpse Wore Satinby Harry Stein, with yellow dog-eared pages and patches of the cover peeled off. The photo was in only slightly better condition, creased in the middle until the ink had peeled off and faded.
It was of the whole family, back when they thought they were normal. They were down at the lake, posed in front of the cabin with smiles on their faces and a blurry stranger in the background as he cut through behind them down toward the lake with a cooler in hand.
Ledger stared at it for a moment. He knew his own face, which was pretty much the same as Bell’s, but he was taken aback to realize how much he’d forgotten what Abigail and their mom looked like. He’d thought he had a pretty clear memory of them, but as elements from the photo were stitched back into his mind, it was obvious he hadn’t.
He waited to feel something—grief, regret, anything—but that brief internal “Huh” of surprise at his erratic memory was all he got. Whatever emotional bandwidth he had for childhood trauma had been used up over a decade ago.
Mostly he was just surprised that Bell had kept the photo. He’d never been a sentimental man.
It was a puzzle, but Ledger supposed he wouldn’t get an answer to it. Maybe Bell had genuinely repented and wanted some nostalgic comfort before he died. Or he’d pretended he had to keep the church ladies on the hook.
“Can I put this down?” Wren asked. “Or do you want to check inside it? My knife’s in my pocket.”
He nodded down at his hip. Ledger followed the gesture down to the lean hips and thick thighs under tight, worn-to-gray-at-the-seams denim. He had the bandwidth forthat, he guessed.
“No,” he said after a moment. “That’s OK. This is it.”
Wren dropped the mattress. That released more of the stench that had soaked into the fabric since Bell had been released from prison. Ledger picked up the basket and shoved it at Wren.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”
Wren looked like he was going to revisit his “I don’t work for you” stance, but he let it slide this time. He hitched the basket up in both hands to stop anything spilling out and headed to the door, hooking it open with one booted foot.
“So what next?” he asked.
Ledger closed the door to Bell’s room behind him with a firm click, as if that would keep the ghosts locked in. He followed Wren down the stairs. It wasn’t that he didn’t have any ideas. He had plenty. What he didn’t have was the luxury of time to implement them all.
