Page 22 of The Best Worst Thing
Heat Waves
On Saturday morning, a relentless heat wave—the first of the summer—crept over Los Angeles County, leaving almost every inch of it scalding.
By midafternoon, the temperatures inland had reached triple digits.
And that, of course, was precisely when Nicole Speyer found herself standing a few hundred yards off Wilshire Boulevard, a couple of feet from Logan Milgram, and way too close to a steaming reservoir of liquid asphalt.
“Okay, so,” Nicole said, wiping the sweat off her forehead, “what, exactly, is the appeal of this place again?”
“I’m sorry. Are you bored? Are you complaining about our adventure? Would you like to find a nice tree to sit under and read?”
“Is that an option?”
Logan poked her with the pointy edge of a brochure about the Ice Age. “Open your mind, will you? Try one new thing.”
“Sorry!” Nicole said. “It’s just, I hate it.”
“For now, you do,” he said. “But the Tar Pits are more of an acquired taste. I promise, after I make you stand out here for five, six more hours, you’ll really start to appreciate it. Plus, if we stick around after sundown, they’ll maybe even fish out a dead body.”
Nicole snickered as she pulled her hair—soaked at the scalp and stuck to the nape of her neck—into a topknot high off her skin.
The heat clung to her like a film, thick and wet and close.
Logan, almost mirroring Nicole, ran a few fingers through his hair, taming his flyaways with the sweat that had collected on his brow.
When his hand reached the crown of his head, the hem of his shirt crept up a few inches.
Nicole tried not to stare. Despite his steady diet of frosted animal crackers and microwaved chicken tenders, Logan looked … good.
He still looked really good, didn’t he? Easy and rugged and kind of damp and—
“Eyes on the exhibit, Speyer.”
“Screw you.”
Logan raised an eyebrow at her, then went off on an unsolicited, fifteen-minute soliloquy about fossils and isotopes and radiometric dating that Nicole could only assume was accurate.
Mostly because Logan was very convincing, but also because she had no intention of ever fact-checking a word he’d said.
When he paused for questions, Nicole rolled her eyes.
“I used to wonder,” she said, taking a sip of the iced coffee he’d bought her at some record-store-turned-noodle-shop tucked onto a backstreet nearby, “why you could never find a nice girl to settle down with. It’s all so clear to me now. It’s your brain.”
Logan chuckled, then bit into his bottom lip. For a few minutes, they just stood there underneath the hazy, scorching sun, watching those filthy elemental pools of crude oil simmer. They just stood there and watched them stew.
“Logan?”
“Yeah?”
Nicole raked her forefingers along her collarbone, then stared into her nearly empty plastic cup. She sucked down the last few drops of melted ice.
“You’re not actually a virgin, right?”
He glared at her. “No, Nicole. I am not a virgin.”
She burst into laughter. “Just checking.”
A second passed.
“Was—”
“Yes, Nicole.” Now he was laughing too. Really laughing. “The sex was with real people. Sometimes, even more than once. Sometimes, for years.”
Nicole was beet red. The heat made for a good cover, though. Maybe. Hopefully.
“When?” she said.
He turned to her, head tilted. “Are you drunk again? Am I under investigation?”
Nicole was stone-cold sober. A little dehydrated, sure.
But really, it was simple. She’d never known a thing about Logan’s love life.
Yeah, they’d made jokes—almost always at his expense.
And she knew he went to bars, to barbecues, to bachelor parties.
And that, according to him, with no additional context provided, he’d once almost moved to Wisconsin for a woman.
But how he swiped right or spent his Saturday nights or swept a girl off her feet? She never asked, and he never told.
That was, until today.
“Sorry,” Nicole said. “I just … I don’t know.”
“You want me to tell you all the times I’ve had sex, ever?”
“No, um …”
“Oh.” Logan was wearing sunglasses, but it didn’t matter. He’d still found a way to narrow his eyes. “You’re trying to ask me if I’ve been seeing anyone, aren’t you? There were so many normal, inoffensive, straightforward ways for you to ask that question. And yet …”
Nicole peeled her shirt off her torso an inch, as if the motionless air could provide any relief. Sweat was dripping down her sternum in warm, wet beads. Everything was sticking to her. The heat, their day, this whole damn summer.
“Sorry, it’s so nosy, I just—”
“There was Danielle,” he said. He was just telling her. Like it was nothing. All she had to do was ask. “We were together for almost three years. We broke up, like, four years ago? Since then, there was Andrea. That lasted nine or ten months.”
“And then what?” Nicole was fiddling with a glossy pamphlet. She studied the schedule of live excavations. If they hurried, they could catch the three o’clock at the Observation Pit. “You killed them?”
“That’s exactly right.” Logan pointed at a pulsing bubble of tar a few yards away. It gurgled right on cue. “That, over there, is Lena. They’ll never find her.”
“And you didn’t want to … ?”
“Marry them?”
Nicole shrugged. “I’m sorry. I just always wondered. That’s all.”
“No, it’s fine. And I don’t know. I guess not, right?”
Logan motioned her toward a picnic table not far away.
Nicole kept talking as they walked the twenty-five or so feet, knowing just how weird the whole thing was.
The texts, the standing on each other’s stoops, the seemingly pointless excursions.
The bursts of conversation. The buzzy silences she kind of wished she could bottle up and save for later.
“What were they like? Before you killed them?”
“Honestly, they were great. Especially Andrea.”
Nicole shoved the schedule in the pocket of her cutoffs, then took a seat on the hot concrete bench.
Logan sat right next to her; his body, twisted.
Their knees, angled at each other’s like arrows.
His face, flushed. His hands, fidgeting.
His lips and eyebrows and the tendons in his neck, tensing just a little when he talked or listened or laughed.
“What was her deal?” she said.
“She was a teacher. She lived in Santa Monica, she—”
“Wait, you drove to the Westside? For a girl?”
Logan shrugged. “Reverse commute.”
“Disgusting.”
He pricked her knee with the brochure. “Get your mind out of the gutter.”
“Sorry! Sorry!” Nicole said, both hands up as Logan poked her with the pamphlet twice more. She was lucky he hadn’t thrown her over his shoulder and tossed her into that radioactive lake or whatever the hell he’d said it was. “Seriously, tell me. What was she like?”
“You know—pretty, smart.” He wiped his sunglasses with his shirt, then looked right at her. “Oh, and I almost forgot. She didn’t talk back.”
Nicole inhaled sharply. She begged her brain to breathe or make a joke or ask a follow-up question. Whatever a normal person would do, please.
“Why didn’t it work out? With her? With any of them?”
“I don’t know,” he said, rolling his brochure into a tight little tube. “It just never did.”
Nicole nodded. They were just sitting there, boiling on that bench. Full sun, 101 goddamn degrees. Nothing left to drink or eat or see or do. Their bodies, damp and hot and tired. Their little outing, quite obviously, coming to its natural end.
And still, they lingered.