Page 27 of Love at First Sighting

El

By the time we Uber back to the Nest, it’s drizzling.

We don’t talk about the kiss the entire time.

The Uber driver asks us what we do for a living.

We talk about the weather, what’s playing on the radio.

Words feel dull compared to weaving my fingers between Carter’s in the back seat of the Uber.

He squeezes my hand whenever the driver makes a sharp turn and slips his jacket over my shoulders now that it’s grown colder.

His grip is unshakably firm and his eyes are so crystal blue and look only at me.

If I were to say anything honest at all, I’d be telling him how much I desperately want to kiss him again as we get Carter’s car and reach the PIS office.

The office stands alone on the block, with big windows blacked out by ratty shades.

There’s no inscription on the front of the building, but it looks like it should be a police station.

Carter doesn’t use the parking lot, keeping a safe distance away for security purposes.

He parallel parks his boat of a car and hops out, only to hit me with a simple tsk as I reach for the door.

I wait for him to round the car and let me out, trying to hide my smile.

He takes my hand as we dash through the sprinkling rain to the door, which he opens with a set of keys on his key ring, then goes in first, instructing me to stay outside.

I wait patiently outside with his jacket bundled around me.

There’s a smudge of my lipstick on the collar from earlier. I want to make him even more of a mess.

When he returns, interrupting my yearning, I feel like I’m sneaking into Area 51. Is this more or less classified than the little alien bodies I saw at the archive?

“Turned off the security cameras.”

“Ah,” I say. “It’s like you run this place.”

“Actually, no,” he says, guiding me inside. “Our security cameras are jerry-rigged Ring doorbells.”

“Clever.”

“Thank you, invented it myself.”

“A natural Nikola Tesla,” I laugh.

The inside smells like burnt coffee and printer paper, and I now know where the smell of crisp pages and fresh ink on his clothing comes from.

The office is silent except for the hum of machinery and a rotating ceiling fan.

It’s a cool night, but the air in here is stagnant and warm enough to clog my pores on contact.

We step into a bullpen full of desks, surrounded by a perimeter of private offices, like something straight out of Angel City Noir .

“Here are the agents’ desks. A couple of private conference rooms. Marcus’s office in the corner,” Carter explains.

I turn to a locked steel door at the bottom of a set of stairs. “What’s that?”

“Fallout shelter.”

“You…you have a fallout shelter?”

Carter nods. “PIS was started in the forties, right after the birth of the atomic bombs and the Roswell incident. So much UFO paranoia comes from this threat of being hit by an unknowable power from the sky. Government buildings are easy targets. It’s mostly storage now. Storage and impending asthma attacks.”

“Right. That’s charming.”

I turn to Carter. Looking at him makes me feel like I’m slipping into another era, and the indelicate smirk on his lips reminds me of a frame from a black-and-white movie.

Something quiet, sexy, that’d break the Hays Code.

We approach a corner office with large, frosted windows and the name Marcus Pearson, Chief Agent stenciled over the glass in gold.

Carter flips through keys on his key ring, then slides a silver one into the door.

“You have a key to his office?”

Carter pushes open the door. “He’s always losing his keys or forgetting them at home, so I have a backup.”

“Sneaky.”

“No, I just don’t want to have to go to Home Depot to cut new ones every three weeks.”

Carter lets me step inside first. He holds up a hand to stop me from entering as he turns to what I infer is his desk, where he opens up a small first aid kit and brings us two sets of rubber gloves.

“ Very sneaky,” I say.

“It’s so Angel City Noir ,” he says with a wink, and snaps his pair of gloves on his hands.

“Make fun of me, why don’t you?”

“I wouldn’t dare tease your new favorite show.”

As we enter, Carter’s gloved hand slips around my waist. It’s a gentle intimacy that makes my chest feel warm and the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Marcus’s office has a wall of glass-doored bookshelves, various histories and biographies lining them, a couple of spooky Everett Hargrove novels.

There are folders full of papers haphazardly stacked on the shelves, too.

The floors creak beneath my heels, and it feels deafening.

I skim Marcus’s desk for signs of what little family I hope Carter has, but it’s empty.

There are accolades and awards spread across the desk, a badge scanner in the corner, but no signs of the kid he helped raise.

There are no graduation pictures of Carter or photos of them on…

I don’t know, fishing trips or some shit.

Carter tightens his fists at his sides, his nose twitching at the harsh scent of smoke in the room. Yet, he doesn’t pop a fresh piece of gum. I eye the ashtray that sits on the corner of Marcus’s desk.

“An indoor smoker,” I say.

Carter nods. “Yep, smokes like a chimney. Growing up, I felt like no matter what I did—no matter how much laundry or how many showers I took—it still lived on my skin. My hair. I could always taste it on me.”

Our eyes meet across the desk. “The gum chewing come from that?”

“Yeah. It’s a turn-off for some people.”

“I don’t care,” I say, sliding a gloved finger under one of his suspenders. “ I think you taste good.”

Carter stares back at me with an intense gaze, but my brain is still in the dressing room, where his hands wandered up my body, his lips were on my neck, and I was ten seconds away from reaching into the fishbowl full of Terra-branded condoms in Ian’s dressing room.

I’m testing the waters to see if he was as into it as I was.

The muscles in his throat tighten and he runs his tongue along the inside of his bottom lip. Now that the cat’s out of the bag, do we have free rein to touch each other in all the ways we want to and start checking off items on the dirty list I’ve been writing in my head for weeks?

Instead, he clears his throat and breaks away from me.

“I don’t know where to start,” Carter finally says.

“Well,” I say, rounding Marcus’s desk. I kneel beside the drawers and tug at each one.

Carter looks afraid to start breaking the rules, but after a moment, he approaches the desk and starts sifting through it.

He flips through pages and pages of case files in a file holder on the desk, thumbs through a folder of receipts.

“Ugh, I have to do his expenses this week,” he grumbles. “Any luck?”

I shake my head but reach into my bag and whip out another bobby pin. I work on the lower drawer on Marcus’s desk until it slides open.

Carter’s busy looking through the books on the shelf behind Marcus’s desk, but inside the drawer I find a box of Parliament cigarettes, two lighters, and a single plastic desk organizer full of pens and paper clips. And a small spiral-bound book.

The front cover is dinged and frayed, but as I flip it open, I realize it’s a planner. This is exactly what we need. I stand and catch Carter’s attention. He turns and joins me at the desk. One of his hands rests on the small of my back and I shiver, but try to hide it.

We begin to move through the pages. Meetings. Doctor’s appointments. Calls to make. When we’re up to the present, the meetings and appointments are sparse, but as we move into the future, one sticks out.

Ian. Brazel Airfield.

I glance up at Carter, who looks like he’s had the wind knocked out of him.

His teeth sink into his bottom lip. It was possible Ian knows more than one Marcus, despite Carter’s confirmation that it was his Marcus’s handwriting on the note with the cigar box.

But a Marcus who plans to see Ian in a few weeks?

It’s connective tissue—one that ties the only family Carter has to the family he lost. I’m quiet, waiting for him to say something first.

The last trace of anything his father worked on had to do with Howard Forte, and there are files missing. Something happened in the time between the photo of the three of them and his death.

There’s a feeling of dread in my gut, and I hope Carter’s not about to learn something he’s not ready for. I don’t know Marcus, but I have heard of Occam’s razor. In my mind, Marcus is holding the knife.

Carter doesn’t speak.

“Brazel Airfield,” I say. “I know that place. That’s the place Sam’s—sorry, Buster’s —”

Carter laughs and it’s a nice reprieve from the fear that was weighing him down moments ago.

“It’s the airfield his family has a hangar at. We flew to it for Coachella.”

“So it’s near Palm Springs?” he asks.

“Yeah. Driving distance from LA. I’m…familiar with it.”

Granted, I was halfway drunk and covered in body glitter by the time we got to the hangar and I don’t remember much of the trip, but I’d know it if I saw it, and that’s more of an advantage than we had a few minutes ago.

“Okay, so do you think we could go there for that meeting in a few weeks?”

“Absolutely,” I agree. “We’ll have to be stealthy again, but we can do it. If Marcus and Ian are up to something, they might discuss it when they’re alone, right?”

Carter shifts uncomfortably.

“Don’t you want to know?” I ask.

“Maybe.” I wait for him to say something else, but he sighs and rubs his hand over his face first. He was gung-ho suggesting it a moment ago, but the suggestion means he might find answers he doesn’t want. “El, Marcus is the closest thing to family I have.”

If he loses Marcus, he has no one. I can fill in the rest from there. I tilt his chin up and lock eyes with him. In my heels, we’re close to the same height. He finds my hand and holds on tight, brushing the back of it.