After Midnight Read online

  Miles shook his head. “It’s too complicated.”

  “What’s complicated? I saw you kissing her. It didn’t look complicated at all.”

  No, it hadn’t been complicated. It had been the simplest thing in the world, totally primal. A straight hit of sex to the brain, a hard-on so hard it still hurt. A craving he’d have to shut down as soon as he could get on top of it.

  “I’m not exactly God’s gift to women right now. Being suspected of a felony isn’t, you know, chick catnip.”

  “Chick catnip,” snickered Owen. “Man, you could sell that shit for, like, a million dollars.” He sobered up. “You’d just tell her you didn’t do it, man.”

  If only that worked. A month ago, Miles would have believed it, too, but he was on the other side of one of those life lines you crossed where you never saw the world the same way again.

  “If Deena didn’t believe that, why should some woman who’s never met me before in her life?”

  “Because she’s not a shallow bitch?”

  Owen had met Deena only a couple of times, but they’d never hit it off. Deena was too serious for Owen’s tastes, not inclined to laugh at herself or find humor in, say, the idea of chick catnip.

  “Deena’s not a shallow bitch.” As hurt as Miles was, as much trouble as he was having understanding her actions, he hadn’t reached the stage of hating her—at least not yet. She had been a big part of his life for many years, and during those years she’d been sweet, affectionate, and loyal.

  Although it did raise the question: If you never tested someone’s devotion, how could you possibly know how they’d behave when the chips were down? Could you call someone loyal if their loyalty was just the everyday kind of showing up?

  “I don’t understand why you feel the need to defend her. What kind of despicable human being deserts her fiancé when he’s under suspicion for a crime?”

  “One who believes he committed it, I guess.”

  Owen looked as if he would have spat if they hadn’t been in the subway. “Or one who was already looking for a way out.”

  Miles stared at an ad overhead. Are you between the ages of 18 and 38? Do you suffer from anxiety?

  Yes, thought Miles. No. And then, Maybe. Just a little. Since my world got pulled out from under me like a cheap rug.

  “People aren’t all like Deena,” Owen said. “You must have some friends who’ve been supportive of you.”

  Miles had told exactly three people what had happened: his lawyer, Deena, and Owen. None of them had asked him if he was innocent or guilty. His lawyer had explained that, as a matter of policy, Miles was innocent in his eyes, and he didn’t want to know anything more than that. Owen—well, Owen was Owen. He had a sealed juvie record and a lifelong battle with shoplifting impulses, and if he hadn’t asked whether Miles was guilty, it was probably because he didn’t give a fuck if he was. But Deena?

  She hadn’t asked whether he was guilty, because she’d assumed he was. She’d looked at him with accusation, with blame, with betrayal in her eyes. How could you do this to me?

  Miles shook his head.

  “You’re telling me that out of all the people you’ve told, no one has taken your side?”

  “I’m telling you I haven’t told anyone.”

  “People at work?”

  Miles shook his head. “It all happened so fast. Board calls me into a meeting, and blam! Suspicion of embezzlement, police involved, unpaid leave. I’m apparently lucky they didn’t fire me.”

  “But surely you’ve sat down with your staff and talked about it . . . ?”

  That look on Deena’s face. As if he’d slapped her. Then the worst part. He’d drawn a deep breath, down to his toes, because who could have told him, before he’d experienced it, how much balls it would take to claim your own innocence? Who knew how much it would feel like a confession of guilt?

  “I didn’t do it,” he’d told her.

  There had been a split second after the words came out of his mouth when he’d believed they’d make a difference. That she’d trust his words when she hadn’t been able to blindly trust his character.

  She’d looked down at her feet, and he knew: It would always sound like too much protest, too late.

  “The first time I sat down with my lawyer, he told me, ‘Innocent until proven guilty is a legal concept, not a guarantee that the average Joe will give you a fair shake.’”

  “Maybe she’s not the average Joe.”

  They both knew Owen was talking now about the woman at the New Year’s Eve party. There’s nothing average about her, Miles thought, and then, I spent fifteen minutes with her. That doesn’t make me an expert on who she is.

  “Okay. Maybe she’s not. Seriously, though: I’m going to pursue this girl when I have nothing to offer her except a long-distance relationship and a criminal investigation? That’s appealing.”

  “Can’t you let her be the judge of that?”

  Miles crossed his arms. “Can you leave it alone?”

  Owen clamped his mouth shut and leaned back in his seat.

  Miles felt bad. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. And I’m sorry because I know you were probably going to go home with that blond woman and I blew it for you.”

  “I’m not worried,” Owen said serenely. “I have her phone number.”

  A group of travelers hanging off one of the poles broke into “Sweet Caroline.” It made conversation nearly impossible, which was not such a bad thing, because it gave Miles a few minutes to think. Mainly about the feel of her mouth against his, soft and yielding and then not yielding at all. Hot and wet and aggressive as hell, which he liked, along with those roaming hands. Christ, he was getting hard again.

  “I wouldn’t be ready for anything, anyway,” he told Owen when “Sweet Caroline” had run its course. “Deena moved out only two weeks ago. We were together for more than five years.”

  Owen just looked at him.

  “That’s a long time. We lived together, our possessions mingled. Everything I did was all caught up with her.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why are you being such a dick about this? It would obviously be a rebound thing.”

  “Maybe I think you need a rebound thing. And you’re punishing yourself by not letting yourself have one.”

  “I’m not punishing myself.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “What would I be punishing myself for?”

  “Letting this embezzlement thing happen on your watch.”

  Fucking Owen, who knew him too well. “Look. The point is, I don’t have her name and number, and it’s probably for the best.”

  “I can get it for you. I can find out.”

  “How?”

  “I’m sure Erica knows someone who knows someone who knows who she is.”

  “No,” Miles said.

  “Come on, dude.”

  “No.”

  Because she was too nice to do that to. Too nice to drag her in, drag her down. Make her a quickie stop on the Miles-deals-with-his-pain train.

  You don’t even know her. How do you know she’s nice?

  He thought of the way she’d chosen to give her smile, to give her self, to the people in the room who needed her most. To him, too. I just know.

  The fact that he was arguing with himself, the fact that he was claiming intimate knowledge of someone he’d exchanged a couple hundred words with, danced with for less than a minute, and kissed once, was more proof that he was totally irrational where this woman was concerned and that staying away from her was the best thing for both of them.

  Owen sighed. “I’m worried about you, man.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ve got a good lawyer. That’s what matters.”

  “That’s not all that matters, is it?”

  He could take the feel of her, the strawberries-and-salty-arousal scent of her, the quick smile and flippant humor of her, the goodness of her, and pack it into a mental box. Shove it on the highest shel
f of some attic, behind the humiliation of having his board tell him they thought he’d steal from the nonprofit he’d founded—from hungry kids, for Christ’s sake. Behind the pain of having his fiancée tell him, if not in so many words, that she didn’t believe in his innocence. He had that kind of mental control. He could do it.

  “It’s all that matters right now.”

  Nora had just received yet another email, the gist of which was that her friend Selena had racked her brain and contacted everyone she knew but couldn’t figure out who the hell Nora was talking about.

  Nobody knew who he was.

  Nora found it implausible that in this day and age of total connectivity, at a moment in history when she could track down the girl she’d played with on the climber in elementary school with about ten keystrokes, she couldn’t find a guy she’d publicly swapped spit with at a legend-quality New Year’s Eve party.

  She’d posted it to Facebook. She’d tweeted it. She’d emailed her sister, her sister’s roommate, her sister’s roommate’s friend.

  Nada.

  Well, no, not nothing. She’d gotten back a bunch of messages and tweets and emails from horny guys who’d apparently gotten a little too much enjoyment out of her (brief, safe-for-work) description of the interaction she’d had with the Sad-Eyed Guy.

  I wasn’t the guy who danced with you at the New Year’s party, but there’s always next year.

  Heya, hot stuff, New Year’s Eve isn’t the only night of the year where you can kiss at midnight.

  My dick is 9 inches long and I can make you forget him.

  So much for the power of social media. Scratch the surface off the Internet, and once again it would prove that it was porn all the way down.

  Oh, and she’d also gotten a few Puritanical wrist slaps, because apparently people had waaaay too much time on their hands.

  Serves you right for making out with someone you didn’t know.

  That’s vile that you didn’t ask his name before you rammed your tongue down his throat.

  It was testament to the shape and size of her desperation that she’d been briefly thrilled by that last one, because it had raised her hopes that the critic had seen them kissing and just needed to be persuaded to tell her who the mystery guy was. She’d emailed back and asked, but she hadn’t gotten a response. And then she’d realized the email writer had probably been extemporizing. “Rammed your tongue down his throat” was social commentary, not a description of what he or she had witnessed.

  She hadn’t rammed, anyway. Neither of them had. There had, admittedly, been a lot of tongue involved, but he had great technique—rare, she thought, or maybe it was simply another irritating aspect of Henry she’d put up with too long, the way his tongue filled her mouth, all wet and blobby.

  Sad-Eyed Guy’s tongue had this way of being in exactly the right place, with the perfect slide and caress, the advance and retreat, at exactly the right time. As if he were anticipating what she needed. As if they were psychically linked.

  Ah. Psychically linked kissing.

  She was officially insane. It was probably what happened when you were on the brink of having hair-raising, toe-curling, mind-numbing rebound sex with a hot guy but then were abruptly deprived of the opportunity just when your body had kicked into high gear. Inopportune-sex-cessation-induced psychosis.

  She could open her own sex-ailment clinic, where they would treat inopportune-sex-cessation-induced psychosis with psychically linked kissing. She would be the first patient. The doctor would say, Nurse, this patient presents with the severest of symptoms. We’d better act quickly. They’d make her change into a thin slip of a hospital gown behind an inadequate curtain hung on a half circle from hooks and chains. She’d step out of the curtain and there would be a knock on the door and Sad-Eyed Guy would step in, in a white coat. And nothing else.

  Yep, insane.

  Mostly, her social-media campaign had yielded dead ends.

  Sorry, can’t figure out who it might have been.

  Did you say his friend had long red hair?

  Did he have a guitar with him?

  She had chased them as far as the elevator, taken another car down, and lost them. It was as if they’d never existed, like some kind of crazy Cinderella transformation where the form they’d taken when they stepped out of the elevator was unrecognizable. Pumpkins and mice. Or, you know, Clark Kent. She guessed they must have somehow beaten the rush and run straight into the backseat of a waiting cab. Vanished into thin air.

  She held out some hope that he’d be looking for her, too. He’d said that his friend Owen was the friend of a friend of a friend who’d gotten some Facebook invitation that had been passed along. Surely . . .

  But if he’d wanted to be found, wouldn’t he have asked her name before he fled? Wouldn’t he have found some way to wait for her? Or to come back and find her?

  The thing was, even if those fifteen minutes had felt like a lifetime, they’d only been fifteen minutes. She was probably deeply delusional, the result of bad rebound juju and too many pink and blue drinks. And even assuming she’d felt what she thought she had, there was no reason to think he’d felt the same way. What was she basing her convictions on, anyway? Lustful stares, wry glances, tidbits of conversation whose content she couldn’t remember—only the sparkle and joy she’d felt, which could very well have been the result of seeing things through girly-drink goggles.

  Could she remember anything he’d said to her?

  “Mother of God.” When he’d tasted the cheese. Although the words were kind of secondary to the look on his face: total abandon. The thought had crossed her mind, of course, that she would like to put that look on his face for other reasons.

  “You’ve got that part dead wrong.” Again, the expression, not the words.

  “You looked great to me.”

  “Wow.”

  “Really hot.”

  Hardly William fucking Shakespeare.

  Had he said anything else? Or had she just talked? Had she babbled at him, all high on Blue Lagoons and Cotton Candies or whatever the bartender was calling those things?

  Possibly she’d manufactured the whole experience—certainly the whole buzz—off nothing at all.

  So Nora moved the email into her Sad-Eyed Guy folder and gave up.

  4

  Almost a year later

  On a perfectly ordinary Friday night right after Thanksgiving, unexceptional in every other possible way, Nora’s phone pinged with a Twitter notification. That, too, was not unusual and brought with it no hike in adrenaline or sense of urgency. She picked her phone up from the coffee table where it lay. Swiped it open and had a look.

  Her heart processed the tweet before her brain did, a rush of excitement off “friend” and “midnight” and “New Year’s Eve,” and she had to reread it several times before she understood that the scruffy blond guy, Owen, the one who’d been at the party with the Sad-Eyed Guy, had somehow found out who she was.

  @Noramal This is going to sound psycho, but is there any chance you kissed my friend Miles at midnight at a New Year’s Eve party in a 1/2

  @Noramal in a twenty-second-floor apartment down by the Charles in Cambridge? 2/2

  She sat down on the well-worn couch in her living room and tried to catch her breath.

  She supposed a more careful person would probably not respond to the tweet, especially given the barrage of awfulness that had resulted from her last attempt to use social media to solve her New Year’s Eve mystery. But it had been a long eleven months. She’d gone on many insufferable dates. Her friends had fixed her up with a musician who appeared not to have any notion of dental hygiene and an English professor who was an aggressively bad kisser. She’d gotten pizza with a disheveled-but-cute guy who’d picked her up in the T, but he’d gone to the bathroom before the check came, and he never returned. She’d gone on several Match.com dates. Nice guys, no chemistry. Or smart guys, too much ego. A few nice, smart guys who weren’t interested in a sec
ond date.

  When dates went wrong, she sometimes missed Henry, but more often she missed the guy whose name she didn’t know. She missed his minimalist conversation style, the intensity of his eyes on her, his dry sense of humor, and his kisses.

  She missed liking him. In fifteen minutes, with no good reasons at all, they’d actually enjoyed each other’s company. It was shocking how hard that was to achieve in dating. She tried to think whether there’d been another fifteen-minute interval, on all the ten-plus dates she’d been on in eleven months, when she’d believed that she and her date were both having a good time.

  Nope.

  She wrote:

  @OwenYouSomething Yes.

  His reply was almost instant.

  @Noramal Follow me and I’ll DM you.

  @OwenYouSomething Done.

  And then, because her fifth-grade teacher had been fond of saying that discretion was the better part of valor:

  D OwenYouSomething How do I know you’re for real? I’ve heard from some serious weirdos.

  D Noramal He shoved another guy who tried to kiss you, after. And we ran like bats out of hell and he never asked your name.

  Because he didn’t want to know your name, a little voice in her head reminded her. And he probably still doesn’t.

  D OwenYouSomething How did you figure out who I was?

  D Noramal A friend just tweeted me to say she’d gone on FB after a year off it and seen something about it.

  D OwenYouSomething That’s crazy. I put stuff out on Twitter and FB but no one knew who he was.

  D Noramal He’s my friend Miles. Good guy. Can totally vouch for him.

  Miles, she thought. Nice name. But I have promises to keep. And Miles to go before I sleep.

  She recognized that the surge of excitement she was feeling would translate as desperation in a tweet, so she kept her response low-key.

  D OwenYouSomething I’d like to see him again.

  D Noramal Call him. Miles Shepard, 216-555-2760.

  D OwenYouSomething Seriously?

  There was a long silence at the other end, and she wondered. Whether Miles knew that Owen was tweeting her. Or whether Owen was acting on his own recognizance. The silence seemed ominous, either way.