Stray Fears - Gregory Ashe Page 0,41
a few hours. You can text me when you’re ready to talk.”
“I have work today.”
“Oh shit.”
Dag rolled his eyes. “Ok, I don’t. But what if I did?”
“Point taken. I’m an entitled asshole.”
He pushed open the screen door and smiled. “A privileged, entitled asshole.”
When I stepped inside, Dag’s mom and dad were waiting.
“This is my dad, Hubert,” Dag said, and Hubert and I shook. “He’s currently rating you on a ten-point scale.”
“I think my main competition is someone called Jackson,” I said.
Dag groaned. “And this is my mom, Gloria. She thinks I should run a train on you.”
I choked on my spit.
“Come on,” Dag said, grabbing my arm and steering me down a hallway. “Before they start talking.”
“It’s very nice to meet you,” Gloria called after us.
“Remember to close your door, son,” Hubert said, “if you boys are going to pleasure each other.”
“Are they for real?” I asked.
“No, my mom doesn’t know what running a train means. She keeps using it like she thinks she does, though.”
“No, I mean, um. Pleasure each other?”
“Oh, yeah. Rule of the house: door closed.” Dag rolled his eyes. “They think they’re hippies or something.”
“Were they hippies?”
“God, no. They were barely alive for that. They just wish they had been.” Dag shut the door behind us. Then he frowned. “Don’t get any ideas.”
I smirked and looked around. My first impression of his bedroom was that it was dirty: clothes stacked on the dresser, books on the floor, a tangle of charging cords on top of the nightstand. But after a moment, I realized the room wasn’t dirty; it was just . . . cluttered. The floor had recently been vacuumed. The furniture was dust free. The books on the floor were in neat stacks, and they’d obviously been placed on the floor because the two bookshelves were already full. A small LED was directed at the wall, projecting a rippling blue light that gave the room an underwater atmosphere, and on the back of the door, he’d hung a poster for the 2008 Braxton Bragg Memorial High School basketball team. A teenage Mason stood in the middle row.
“Sorry,” Dag said, grabbing a stack of boxers and shoving them into a drawer that was already bursting. “I didn’t know you were—I mean, I don’t know what I mean. They gave me something at the urgent care last night, and it knocked me out when I got home.”
“So you did go?”
“Yeah, of course. I said I would.” A desk and a chair took up one corner of the crowded room, and he pulled out the chair. “You can sit here if you want. I’ll sit on the bed.”
Instead, I moved to the bookshelf and began running my finger along the spines. A lot of books about whales. Books about marine life. Books about ocean exploration. Books about ships and sailing. Books about tide patterns. Books about silt and river deltas.
“What’s your real name?” Dag asked as he sat on the bed.
“Elien.”
“No, it’s not. I checked you out. You have a few social media accounts, but there’s not much on them. And I hired a private investigator to look into you, and he couldn’t find anything.”
“Why didn’t you look me up in the police databases?”
“I’m on paid leave.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“I wouldn’t have done it anyway. It’s not right. This isn’t an official investigation; it would be an abuse of power.”
“Why do you have so many books about whales?”
Dag blew out a breath. “Fine. If you don’t want to tell me your real name, I guess it doesn’t matter. We should probably talk about last night.”
“I’ll tell you my name. But I also want a little information. It’s like a trade. Why do you have so many books about whales?”
“I asked first.”
“Eli.”
“Martel?”
“Martins.”
“Why’d you change it?”
“That’s a new question,” I said.
“I just think they’re interesting.”
I raised my eyebrows.
A faint blush dusted his cheeks. “Ok, I think they’re really interesting,” he said. “They’re complicated animals. They’re smart and social and some of them can be incredibly dangerous. Why’d you change your name?”
“Because Eli Martins sounds like I invented the cotton gin.”
“Seriously.”
“I am serious. I don’t know. Eli Martins is so basic.”
“It’s a nice name.”
“Where’s all the rest of it?” I asked.
“Rest of what?”
“You know: action movie posters and your gun collection and your football jersey.”
He furrowed his forehead. “Huh?”
“Come on. This is cute.” I tapped the spine of a whale book. “But where’s the rest of it?”
“This is it. There isn’t anything else.” He frowned. “What happened between you and Mason?”
“Oh, we’re getting