Asher huffs a laugh. “Where’d you get that? The year 1700?”
I give a mock laugh back to him as I start to comb through papers on the coffee table. “Just look around. Like you said, wouldn’t want anothertrunk situationif he comes back early.”
“If he comes back early maybe we’ll just have to do a murder ourselves,” he says casually.
I look at him incredulously. “Do murder? It’s not something you justdolike homework. Hey, wanna go grab a bite to eat and do murder on the way home?” I say mockingly.
Asher laughs, looking through the papers on the kitchen island. “Or we could hide in one of his closets until he falls asleep. Pressed up against each other again, after drinking, who knows what would happen then.”
It plays out in my head. We’d hear the door unlocking in the midst of our search, and we’d run into the kitchen pantry, which has barely enough room for two. Our hearts would beat wildly against each other as we watched Miles put his keys on the counter through the slats in the door. He’d go into the living room and put something on the TV and Asher’s hands would start to roam idly over me. His thumb would brush over my bottom lip and—
“You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?” he teases.
I stand up abruptly, my cheeks reddening. “No.”
In the low light I can see the white of his teeth when he smiles, goading me. “If you want to fuck me, Sloane, just say so. We can do it here in your ex’s house.”
My mouth opens and closes again at his boldness, but he’s just playing games. Being an ass. “There’s nothing down here. I’m going to look upstairs.” I leave him in the kitchen and go up the stairs with Moose still trailing behind me. The landing opens to a small bathroom and a bedroom. Miles’s room is a little tidier than downstairs and it smells like his cologne. It’s nauseating. Suffocating. I start to pull open the drawers to his dresser and dig through them. Asher comes in saying there’s nothing in the kitchen and starts to look through the closet, carelessly tossing things around. When I’m done rummaging through the last drawer I stand up and run into Asher with a Darth Vader helmet on.
He presses the button on the side that changes your voice as he says, “Sloane, I am your killer.”
“Not funny.” I push past him.
He takes the helmet off. “This thing is pretty cool. I feel like I saw someone wearing one like it last year for Halloween.”
“You did,” I say, starting to dig through the closet.
“Wait a minute,” he says, connecting the dots. “That was the professor with you at the Halloween party last year?”
“Yep, wearing that exact helmet.”
“Huh, funny. Wes ripped that guy apart for being weird as hell after you guys left. Said he asked if he could try out the voice changer and the guy refused to take the helmet off. Guess now we know why.” I ignore him as I stand on my tiptoes trying to feel around the top shelf of the closet. “Can’t believe you got this guy to go to a college house party with you and risk being seen.”
“Don’t worry, he was rewarded after the party for his bravery.” I’m reaching for the lip of a box in the corner and I almost have it.
Asher puts the helmet back and comes up behind me to help. “What kind of reward?” he asks close to my ear just as I manage to tip the box, and its contents come falling down around us.
I turn and look up at him. “Use your imagination.” I bend down to start grabbing what fell from the box and he does too.
“I don’t have to. I remember exactly what kind of costume you were wearing that night, considering it was hardly anything at all—”
I gasp, cutting him off. “Oh my god.” Everything in the box is... me. There are photos of me, tickets from shows we’ve seen, a paper menu from a diner we went to where I drew us as stick figures, copies of my schoolwork for his course, and a few paperback versions of books I annotated for him. We dig through the pile, Asher giving a quiet “What the fuck” while picking through the mementos.
“I’ve never even seen some of these photos.” I hold one up of me shot from outside the window of the Bean. There’s one of metalking to Annica in front of the English building, another of me in my car. “When the hell did he take these?”
“This is like some creepy shoebox shrine of you,” Asher says, then clears his throat, handing a photo to me. It is me asleep on the bed, topless. I gasp and snatch the photo from him, ripping it up and putting it in my pocket. “I’ll let you sort through the rest of those.”
I scour through them looking for more nude photos and that’s when I find a picture of my journal. No pictures of the contents inside of it but just of the leather journal sitting on the countertop of his old apartment. Likely from the day I came back upset over Tristan and wrote his eulogy there. It was before Miles and I were really serious, and he was more curious about the journal than upset that I had been talking to someone else while messing around with him. I told him what it was and he asked to read it. If he took a picture of the outside, who’s to say he didn’t take more of what was inside.
Headlights shining through the bedroom window catch Asher’s attention.
“That’s him,” he says. “Let’s go. There’s a back door in the kitchen.”
I scramble to put everything back into the box aside from the photo of my journal. “We didn’t find the journal, though—I don’t have the evidence.”
“We can come back. Come on.” He pulls me up before I can toss the box back into the closet.
We rush down the stairs and to the back sliding door just as we hear the keys at the front door. I give Moose a goodbye pat on the head before closing the door behind us and running into the night with Asher.
