The Next (14 page)

And then down the hall we heard the hollow metallic cocking of a rifle…

“What cha doin’ out here, Demi Moore?”

I heard Marzoli’s voice above me.

I opened my eyes, confused. My hands, feet, face and limbs were blue with cold. I was shivering violently and breathing in rapid, short pants.

“Don’t give me that look,” he continued with a smile, “Did you think I was too young for
St. Elmo’s Fire
?”

What was he doing climbing out of Ruben’s window? What was I doing like a popsicle on this balcony?

I was confused as shit…falling…anchored…spinning…frozen…

Where’s Paul?

I felt Marzoli’s arms around me, dragging me, hoisting me. I tried to open my eyes, but the snow on my lashes seeped into my eyes. My eyeballs felt they were being slivered by icicles. I tried to swallow, but my throat felt raw and tight and painfully dry.

Was I inside my apartment or outside?

I felt Marzoli’s strong hand press against my upper back. I could not feel any of my numbed extremities, but I could feel the hardness of the wooden floor against my shoulder blades as I was lowered down onto it.

The whiteout blackened.

Chapter Fourteen

“You’ve the constitution of a sixteen year-old virgin in a Jane Austen.”

I felt the vibrations of his deep rich voice without even opening my eyes. I inhaled deeply through my nostrils as I regained some kind of mental equilibrium.

Cedar and nutmeg.

Control yourself.

“Two things are completely at odds with each other,” I began with my eyes shut, “One, what the fuck kind of Puerto Rican Sicilian uses words like
constitution?
Two, what the fuck kind of Puerto Rican Sicilian reads Jane Austen?”

“You don’t have to be politically correct around me, asshole. Drink this.”

I felt the hard lip of a glass click on my teeth lightly. Warm liquid swirled around my tongue. Ginger…lemon…tea. Where’s the shot of whiskey a New York detective is supposed to be giving a swooning damsel?

I finally opened my eyes.

Marzoli’s ridiculously handsome face came into focus, every pore a breathtaking symmetry of ruggedness, street tough urbanity, Italian hotheadedness, and Latin smoothness. The black hairs of his five o’clock shadow slanted southward, and I imagined running my fingers against its grain. His full blushed lips appeared all at once strong and soft, perfectly delineated by an eighth inch smoothness of bare skin before the forest of his facial hair encroached. His brown eyes looked into mine with all the clinical concern of Francois Sagat in a white overcoat in a hospital scene.

Goddamn.

When did two plus two start adding up to this motherfucker? When did I stop caring about the borderline that distinguished the sexes? Did I really need to be knocked down to the bottom of a black housebound misery to realize I didn’t give a flying fuck about the plumbing of the person I wanted to tongue from heel to hairline?

As I registered Marzoli’s presence, the truth inexplicably surfaced. I had no control over my visceral yearning for his strength, his certainty, his muscularity, his friction, his hardness, his solidity, his weight, his drive, his forcefulness, and his competence. I wanted everything he had on me and in me and part of me. I wanted to absorb it. To have it. To become it.

He took me in deeply with his eyes, his pupils cemented to mine. But…I couldn’t tell…did he feel anything for me? Was he even open to feeling anything? I’d been so far removed from connections to other humans, I had no confidence in my ability to interpret what I felt anymore let alone what he felt.

I felt a warm firmness against my neck. He was massaging me with his left hand. He smiled, his dimples pitting either side of his face.

Fuck…must…not…drool.

“Forty minutes,” he said, “That’s how long you’ve been outside.”

“Oh.”

Here I was drifting in a Jacuzzi of brainless teenage pining, and he slaps my hand with the sharp edge of a hard fact, calculated from the time I ignored his call to now. I tried to move my arms but was in the tight cocoon of a blanket. Marzoli motioned to the pile of clothes on the arm of the couch. My underwear was peeking out of the bottom of the pile.

“They were soaked so I took them off,” he smiled. “I tried to put you in dry clothes, but…honestly…I couldn’t tell what was clean, and um…”

He winked. The fucker loved his jokes.

Then it hit…

He’d taken my clothes off and seen me in all my gorgeousness. Not the most requested stop on the tour. Trust.

And yet he was still willing to sit here stroking my neck—a completely unnecessary but entirely intimate act between two men who were practically strangers. He had to be working me for information. His neck massage was not an act of caring. It was calculated. He needed my defenses lowered in order for me to slip him some tidbit of information that may or may not be relevant. He needed to seduce me into full disclosure. After viewing this lump of clay naked, how could I expect him to have any alternate impulse?

I looked away from him in irritation. This did not go unnoticed. Marzoli immediately withdrew his hand from my neck.

Put your hand back, damn it!

He stood up and took my glass to the counter, which was so covered with unattended dishes and trash and books and papers that I was surprised he could locate the sink.

He emptied the glass then turned to me with a cocky grin, which shot blood down to my groin like a drone strike. “Would you be offended if I cleaned this glass?”

Bring it on, asshole.

“What were you doing out there on the fire escape in the snow?”

Wham—the fucker switched subjects without a heartbeat of transition. I forgot I was in the same room with a brain that leaped like an escaping gazelle.

“What were you doing in Ruben’s apartment?” I challenged.

“This.”

He held up a box of matches and paused, looking at me as if I actually had the faintest fuck what he was talking about. His answer was such a non sequitur I immediately felt like I had in sixth grade: the galumph left alone with my brother in the classroom as the accelerated grade school students went on a field trip.

“Matches. I see,” I lied.

“I returned your call, but you didn’t answer. So I came over. But your door was locked. So I lit a match and held it at the bottom of the door. Air was blowing out into the hall. Cold air. Your window had to be open, so I knew something was wrong.”

“I could’ve gone out for some Cheetos.”

“But…” He hesitated. “No, you couldn’t.”

I never told him any of my shit, but…

He knew.

It’s one thing to air your dirty laundry defiantly to a stranger in order to get him the fuck out of your life. It’s another thing to try to hide your personals because you’re holding out for the slightest possibility that he might get the fuck
in
your life. I felt humiliated and as worthless and undesirable as a smear on a toilet seat. All I could do is stare at Marzoli, waffling between sadness at how insurmountably pathetic I was and piss-ass anger at having my shit exposed to this stranger. A tightly wrapped ball of barbed wired expanded inside my throat until I could barely swallow let alone utter anything.

I looked over at Marzoli next to the sink. With his jacket off, I could see his narrow waist with not a centimeter of overhang over his belt. I followed the outline of his beautifully round and upright ass to the sensual s-curve of the small of his back, snaking out to his broad muscular shoulder blades, and then rounding back to his thick smooth neck. His shoulders were as large as coconuts, bookending his fucking granite pumped pecs.

None of that would ever be mine.

Marzoli continued, “I went upstairs to ask your new neighbor to let me through his window to the fire escape.”

“But he wasn’t home,” I croaked.

“But I had a copy of Nathan’s key from the landlord, so I entered. And his window was open. And there you were below, sunbathing.”

Ruben was not in his apartment after all!

For the first time, I noticed the black lump hooked on Marzoli’s belt. He had a gun, holstered and available. He’d come straight from wherever he’d been working to my apartment with lightening speed—even for New York standards—just because I failed to answer his phone call. Did his speed indicate he thought that highly of me and my stunted existence? Or merely that he happened to be nearby? Or something else entirely? Was it evidence of his eagerness to obtain from me any slightest nick of evidence to solve Nathan’s murder? And if so, what really was at stake for Marzoli to solve it?

I strained all these bits of information through my colander and pushed out a question.

“How many violations of investigative protocol did you violate by entering Ruben’s apartment without him home?”

“Too many for you to ever tell a colleague.”

I had to know why he took that risk. To investigate what was at stake for this dark and distant man in solving this particular inconsequential. To force him to detail the extent to which he identified with Nathan’s unfortunate abandonment, subsequent survival in the city, and neglected death. To identify anything else that drew him to this mystery. It was the perfect moment for me to get beyond my own self-focus and direct some sympathy toward this gilded specimen. But I could barely figure out which words to use, let alone an appropriate way to approach the subject without making him defensive.

“Are you going to tell me why you were on that fire escape?” he asked again, his voice low and resonant.

“Would you help me out of this cocoon?”

Everything in me wanted to avoid answering his question. How could I explain that the simplest act of attempting to spy into Ruben’s window had paralyzed me into a moronically inept ice sculpture? How could I possibly spin being a basket case at the mercy of the sneak attacks of memories into something exotic, edgy, and oh so damned desirable?

He sat on the edge of the couch, placing his hand behind my back to lift my body up. The strength of his arms around my waist took my breath away. His jaw neared mine and the heat of his skin reddened my cheeks. I closed my eyes and froze. He pulled me into an upright position and unwrapped the blanket from behind my back.

“I…I…I…” I stuttered.

Oh boy, this’ll be fun.

“I…thought something happened to Ruben.”

“Your new neighbor? Why?”

He reached around me to release another layer. His solid, developed chest brushed against my arm.

Oh, hell. I’m hard.

“I saw him in Mr. Perfect’s bedroom,” I said, “having sex.”

“Who’s Mr. Perfect?”

“Mr. Layworth. The married guy in the big apartment with kids.”

“What kind of sex?”

He wasn’t surprised at the fact that they were having sex; his curiosity immediately leaped to specifics which had no relevance as far as I knew. Odd. Obviously, he’d already thought about Perfect’s proclivities. But I lived across the courtyard for years, and I never knew. How could Marzoli have known?

“Why?” I inquired.

“Kissing? Blowing? More?” he asked clinically.

“More.”

“Did they finish?”

“No.”

Why did he want to know if they’d finished?

I proceeded to detail the specifics of Mrs. Layworth’s entrance, Ruben’s escape, and Johanna’s interruption, but I closed the curtain on the farce before the final act. As I was speaking, I realized why he wanted to know about the type of sex they’d engaged in to begin with. With that one question, Marzoli could measure what kind of pervert I was by the extent to which I would spy on a neighbor having sex. He could also measure how interested I was in male-on-male action across the courtyard. After all, would the average straight man spy on a guy through the window as he greased and dick-dove into another man? But why did Marzoli want to know this about me? To determine what angle he could work to pump me for more information? To determine how much of my involvement with any of the neighbors was reliable versus fantasies of lust?

My thoughts washed away as Marzoli reached around my back to unwrap the final layer of the quilt from my body. My member was ridiculously stiff, and my pelvis unintentionally jolted at the friction of the wool quilt slipping across the sensitive hole of my head. I realized if he continued pulling the cover away, I would be completely naked in front of him with a raging protuberance pointing his way.

“I got it from here,” I interrupted.

Marzoli stopped, looked me in the eye, and nodded. He released a breath, and I felt the mugginess of it hit the side of my neck. He backed away and turned around to stare out the window. I got the strange impression he was behaving as if being scolded by a teacher. I’d be a clown to think this polished Puerto Rican Sicilian, built like a gleaming gold shithouse, actually wanted to see me in the buff one more time.

“Were you on the fire escape trying to see if Ruben was home?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Specifically, you were trying to verify that he was
not
home?”