Vanishing Girls (Detective Josie Quinn #1)(28)

Laughing softly, he grasped her hands and held them between his large palms, like he was warming them on a cold day. “Not so fast,” he murmured. “I heard about what happened at Rockview. Is your grandmother okay?”

“She’s fine,” Josie replied. The last thing she wanted to do was talk about what happened at Rockview. She could still see her grandmother standing in the doorway of June’s empty room, open-mouthed and white with shock like the rest of them. Josie had felt terrible leaving her there, and felt even worse now, remembering.

Pulling her hands from his grip, Josie pushed Luke until his back was against her foyer wall. Her hands returned frantically to his belt.

“Josie,” he said, and she felt a stab of annoyance at the tone of his voice. Was that pity?

“Shut up,” she said as she finally released his belt and snaked a hand up, behind his head, grabbing a fistful of his hair and pulling him down to her hungry mouth. He didn’t fight her.

He broke the kiss and looked at the steps. “Should we go upstairs?”

She pulled her shirt off. “No,” she said. “I want you now.”

He brushed her cheek gently with the back of his hand. “We can slow down, you know.”

But she didn’t want to slow down. She didn’t want tenderness, or a slow burn. She needed a raging inferno that would burn up every anxiety twisting and turning inside her head. She needed the heat, that fire they’d achieved in the woods.

She dropped to her knees before him. “No,” she said. “We can’t.”



* * *



Josie picked up the clothes she had strewn all over the floor and put them back on. The numbing effect of the Wild Turkey had burned away, leaving her feeling as though she had downed a pot of coffee. Her mind felt clear, her anxiety eased for the moment. Luke sat bare-chested at her kitchen table. He had, at least, pulled on his boxer shorts and watched as she went back to work on the late dinner she’d been attempting to make for him before he arrived.

“I brought you something,” he said, eventually.

She smiled at him. “Oh yeah?”

“It’s in my truck.”

“Are you going to bring it inside?”

“Yeah, it’s a door. You know, for your bedroom closet.”

Josie froze, the knife in her hand poised over a piece of grilled chicken breast. The buzzed feeling she’d had since she took him in the foyer drained out of her. “My, uh, my bedroom closet?”

“Yeah. There’s no door.” He laughed. “You didn’t notice?”

She laughed along with him, hoping he didn’t hear the high note of nervousness in her voice. “I, uh, kind of like it without a door,” she said. “It’s more open, airy.”

It was a lie, but it was the best she could do in that moment. What could she say? Nothing that wouldn’t lead to questions she didn’t want to answer.

When she and Ray first moved in together after college they’d lived in a tiny apartment with a huge bedroom closet. Big enough for her to walk in and out of, but not quite a walk-in closet. She’d been moving things around inside of it when Ray had closed the door without thinking, not realizing Josie was still in there. The click of the latch, the sudden darkness, broke something in her and caused an unexpected, furious panic attack. Paralyzed, she had started hyperventilating. It had felt like the walls were reaching for her, the dark space getting smaller by the second. She had nearly passed out.

Ray had felt terrible. Once he calmed her down, he’d taken the door off the hinges and thrown it out for trash. It had come out of their security deposit when they moved but Ray said it didn’t matter. In each one of the string of crappy apartments they’d rented, and then, finally, in the house they’d bought together, he routinely removed all closet doors. It became their normal.

It was only natural to then do the same in her own place. It helped her sleep at night. But she couldn’t tell Luke that. She couldn’t tell him the truth. He couldn’t know that Josie.

“Airy?” Luke said. “But it looks terrible. I mean, all your stuff is just there. Josie, closets are where you shove all your unused stuff. They’re meant to have doors.”

The knife clanged onto the counter, startling him. “Not all of them,” she replied, through gritted teeth, then took a deep breath and reminded herself that he was trying to do something nice for her.

Luke was a fixer. That was one of the things that had initially attracted her to him. If he saw something in disrepair, he quietly fixed it. He’d been mending things around her house for as long as they’d been together: touching up the paint, replacing the leaky faucet in her bathroom sink, patching a hole in the drywall in her kitchen left by the previous owner. She had always appreciated it—until now. This time it felt like he was trying to fix her, but she didn’t need to be fixed. She wasn’t broken. She was fine.

But he means well, she told herself. He wasn’t attempting to control her. He didn’t understand what putting that door up would mean. She forced a smile onto her face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I meant to say that I want to paint my bedroom. It was really wonderful of you to go out and buy a door for me, but let’s just put it in the garage until I paint the room, okay?”

“Oh, I can paint it for—”