Page 24 of Power of the Mind
“Lovers?” He wiggled his brows and almost lost the hat again.
“We’re not—”
“D, we’ve been fucking sporadically for months. Call a spade a spade and move on. Why don’t youdofriends? You’re a nice guy with a charming-ish personality.”
“Because… I don’t have a… I’m not… One week, Tallus. Why are you like this?”
He chuckled. “Okay. One week. We won’t be friends after, but we can still hook up whenever the urge strikes, so long as we don’t refer to it as being lovers. Correction. Whenever the urge strikesyousince I’m not allowed to initiate booty calls.”
I winced. “Tallus—”
“It’s fine. I have thick skin. Besides, I can always find someone at Gasoline if the mood strikes when you aren’t around.” He shrugged. “Or call Memphis.”
My blood boiled at the suggestion, but before I could retort, Tallus tossed the fedora aside and rooted through a desk drawer until he came up with a notepad. Any hints of flirtatious behavior were gone as he hovered a pen over the paper.
Was he upset? God fucking dammit.
“Tallus—”
“Where should we begin the investigation? I think we should find out if Madame Rowena is still married and where her husband is, or we could try to locate Amber’s brother and get more details about how she was acting before she died. He seemed convinced it was the psychic. We could talk to Allan’s neighbor or family. Thoughts?”
Tallus was skilled at elastic-banding from one topic to the next, always leaving me with whiplash. His slap-in-the-face comment about his sexual prowls was on purpose. The jab about Memphis was meant to sting. It was meant to unbalance me. Piss me off. How many times had he tried to say he and Memphis weren’t fucking around? I still didn’t believe it, but shoving it in my face ignited my rage, and he knew it.
I didn’t own Tallus. We weren’t dating. We owed each other nothing. I was along for the ride until the day he tired of me. When that happened, I would slink back to my hovel and pretend I wasn’t disappointed.
I didn’t know how to address the conundrum of our hookups.
Tallus doodled while I wondered for half a beat if he thought I was using him.
Which I was. Selfishly.
But he’d never turned me away. He’d never asked for more.
Until now. Was that what he was doing? Implying he wanted more from me?
I couldn’t do that. If there was one thing I knew about myself, it was that Diem Krause was not dating material.
“D? Your thoughts are so loud they’re going to give me a migraine. Can you focus?”
The case.
“Rowena got divorced in ninety-one.” I grabbed a chair from the waiting room and pulled it to the desk, sitting uncomfortablyon the edge of the seat. “William Hilty went to school and became a licensed psychologist and hypnotherapist. He’s working in an office in East York. No further record. The man doesn’t have so much as a parking ticket.”
“Huh.” Tallus wrote it down. “I wonder if he’s been in contact with his ex-wife.”
“No idea.”
“Should we talk to him?”
“I don’t know. It’s your case, Tallus. I don’t give a fuck. One week.”
He sat a little taller, clearly thrilled at the prospect of leading a case. “So I’m in charge?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“I get to boss you around and tell you what to do?”
“No.”