Love in the Time of Serial Killers(32)

“It was a no-bake, my dude,” I said. “This is checkers, not chess.”

I turned to leave, but he called my name.

“Why don’t you come in for a slice?” he asked. “You can share a slice of yours later if it means that much to you to keep it even.”

Eating together with him now, with a rain check to eat together again, was a lot of commitment. But there was something about his open expression, something about the memory of him saying I’m also not great at parties. I shrugged, and followed him into the house.

“So what exactly does Judgment Ridge mean?” he asked as he grabbed two plates from a cabinet, two forks from a drawer.

Sometimes I didn’t know half the shit that came out of my mouth. “It’s this true crime book I read when I was a teenager,” I said. “About the Dartmouth murders. Basically, these two kids pretended they were doing an environmental survey for class, and knocked on the door of these two professors. It just so happened that the guy taught geology and earth science, and he thought it would be a great opportunity to educate some teens, so he invited them in. And then . . . well, you know.”

Sam paused in the middle of dishing out a piece of the Nutella pie. “Jesus,” he said. “That’s really sad.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And also the reason I jump a mile if someone’s at my door unsolicited. That never ends well in these types of books.”

“And yet you’ve come to my door three times now,” Sam said. “Once, for the package, twice, for the party, thrice . . .”

“Okay, okay,” I said, cutting off the rest of that little nursery rhyme. “No need to thrice me. Why don’t you slice me instead?”

I held out my hand for the plate of pie he was holding, before realizing what that had sounded like. “Oh god,” I said. “I meant give me the pie. Not attack me with the knife. It was supposed to be like when people say beer me, although come to think of it I’ve never said that in my life, and slice rhymed with thrice, so . . .”

I needed to stop talking. I took a quick, greedy bite, more as a way to shut myself up than anything else. But damn. I still got it. I didn’t care if the pie was five ingredients and took as many brain cells to create, it was delicious.

“I can’t believe I said that,” I said. “I totally thought you were a serial killer when I moved in, you know.”

Sam had been taking his first bite, but choked on it at my pronouncement. He kept coughing until he had to set the plate down, filling a glass with water from the fridge door dispenser. He sipped it for a long time, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“What,” he said finally. Either his throat was still too raw to get the rest of his question out, or that was the question, because he just looked at me.

“Not really,” I said. “Or not much more than the general way I believe everyone capable of the darkest shit. But that first night, you came out of nowhere!”

“I came from right here,” he said. “My house. Where I live.”

“Well, I didn’t know that,” I said. “And you were always doing mysterious stuff. Banging around in your soundproofed garage—you have to admit that sounds creepy—and coming and going at the most random times . . .”

I should really stop. I hadn’t intended to ever tell Sam any of this, and certainly not in this stream-of-consciousness way that made me sound completely unhinged.

“So on a scale of one to ten,” he said, “one being your grandmother and ten being H. H. Holmes, how much did you actually think I was a serial killer?”

I pointed my fork at him. “That is a bad example. My grandmother had it in her to be a black widow, for real. But that first night, I would say I was at a . . . six?”

“Holy shit.” It was almost cute, how shocked he looked by my answer.

“The scale is broken,” I said. “Being a serial murderer is a binary situation. Either you are or you aren’t.”

“When you came to my party.”

I didn’t pretend to misunderstand what he was asking. “Down to maybe a four?”

“When you asked for my help with your car?”

“Three point six.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Living on the edge, accepting a ride from someone you thought was a three point six. Now?”

I looked at him. Really looked at him. Swept my gaze from the top of his messy hair—true bedhead this time, I suspected—to his blue eyes, sparked with amusement and something else. His T-shirt looked thin and soft and clung to his arms and chest in a way I didn’t hate, and he was wearing actual jeans instead of that neutral-professional garb I’d seen him in so much lately. He was leaning back against the sink, holding his plate of pie, which was already half gone.

There was something intoxicating about being able to survey him so openly. What was it about his kitchen that seemed to bring out this heat?

“Two,” I said finally, sliding another bite of pie in my mouth.

“What would get me to a one?” he asked. “This house doesn’t have a crawlspace, you know.”

“But you do have a garage,” I pointed out.

“You think I’m hiding something in my garage?”

I shrugged. There was no way I was telling him about the one night I’d observed him, the suspicious liquid on his hands, the dropcloth, the paranoid call I’d immediately made to Conner. “It’s another mystery,” I said. “Solving it could bring down your number, I’m just saying.”