Interlude (The Snow & Winter Collection #1) - C.S. Poe

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In order to best enjoy Interlude, please begin with reading the first book in the Snow & Winter series: The Mystery of Nevermore.

Dopamine: Take Only as Directed

—

After The Mystery of Nevermore

POV: Sebastian Snow

—

“You’ve got the flu, boss,” Max said.

I lay facedown on the bed, my cell on speaker beside my head. “It’s not the flu,” I weakly protested.

“You have a fever?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Chills?”

“I guess.”

“Have you barfed?”

“Max—”

“How many times?” he demanded.

“I don’t know. Do dry heaves count?”

“I’m calling your dad.”

“Do not call my father,” I said, doing my best to sound authoritative, but even I could hear that particular note of pathetic in my tone.

To be honest, it probably was the flu. It was January—well, it’d be January in about fifteen hours—the season of illness. And don’t doctors say stress can weaken your immune system? In the last two weeks, I’d broken up with my boyfriend of four years, found my former boss murdered, gained a stalker, and was shot at. Oh, and had fallen head over heels for an older, newly out-of-the-closet cop who I’d heard very little from since Christmas.

That all might have had something to do with these sniffles.

I shifted in bed and stared at the nightstand. I had a full fucking pharmacy in action: a half-empty bottle of cough syrup, torn-open packages of a few different cold medications I’d been using over the last twenty-four hours, tissues everywhere….

“—run the Emporium myself,” Max was saying.

I raised my head from the mattress. “What? No.”

“I can, Seb.”

“I know you can, but you don’t have a security code or even any petty cash. Take the day off. Don’t worry, I’ll pay you.”

“Sure, but—”

“Happy New Year,” I interrupted.

“Fine. I know when I’m not wanted,” Max concluded. “But promise if you get any worse, you’ll call your dad or Calvin, yeah? It’s hard to pick up a paycheck when you’re in the city morgue.”

I laid my head down again, frowning at the mere suggestion that Calvin Winter and I were now close enough that he’d be in my Top Three Contacts to whine to when I felt like human excrement. I mean, sure, I had this roller-coaster sensation in my gut whenever I saw him. The indescribable feeling that the personification of home was smiling at me. And he’d spent Christmas with me and Pop too, which I had assumed at the time meant… something. Confirmation that he felt about me the way I did him, I guess. Honestly, though, for someone who identified as a guy and had been exclusively into other men his entire life, I really didn’t seem to understand jackshit about them.

“Uh-huh,” I agreed. “I’m hanging up now.”

“Get some rest.”

“Thanks.” I tapped the End button, turned off the phone screen, and shut my eyes. I welcomed either breathing out of both nostrils or sweet death.

Whichever came first.

I’d probably taken a bit too much cough syrup prior to Max’s cross-examination phone call, because when I woke to the sound of my front door opening, I immediately chalked it up to Neil coming home from work. And then the facts, delayed though they were, fanned themselves out for my feverish brain to take in.

I had ended things with Neil. It’d been messy, and he’d moved out just before the holidays. Then, in an attempt to warm Calvin up to the idea of dating—something he had pushed back on during the Nevermore case—I’d given him keys to my place. But he’d not used them once.

“Kiddo?”

That’s when the quiet shuffle of steps in the front room finally made sense. It wasn’t Neil, who had a quick, almost agitated pace, like he was late and stuck walking behind tourists in Times Square. It wasn’t Calvin either, who was heavier on his feet, slow and methodical, but always sure in his destination.

“In here,” I called around the marbles in my throat. “But put on a hazmat suit.”

Pop opened my bedroom door. “Max called me,” he stated.

“That traitor,” I mumbled, unmoving.

“He said you were simmering in your own juices.”

“I’m a little underdone. Another hour, tops.” I pulled the comforter over my head.

Pop sighed, and then the blankets were yanked from the foot of the bed and I was exposed like a newborn baby.

“Dad,” I whined, adding a few syllables that didn’t otherwise exist in polite society.

Pop finished tugging the tucked-in blankets free and dropped the bedding into a pile on the floor. “You smell, Sebastian.”

“I definitely do.”

“Go take a shower and I’ll make your bed.”

I sat up, grabbed my glasses, and put them on. “I’m a grown man.”

“You’re