2. That Never Happened

A nose ring and a medusa lip piercing. Long, thick hair, the dramatic coloration of which almost distracted from the fact that it hadn’t been washed for too many days. A chaotic combination of elements of nature inked all the way down the right arm—a sunflower on the shoulder, dramatic ink splatter across a portion of the artwork. And something that was possibly an exploding star encircled by a crescent moon on the right side of his neck.

Beautiful. Unrealistically beautiful.

Sevan still couldn’t decipher any words from the neon lettering on the stranger’s dark sleeveless shirt, no matter how hard he tilted his head at it.

“Do you think he was just drunk or actually suicidal?” Rick took a long sip of his freshly brewed coffee and leaned back against the wall.

Sevan’s eyes scanned the figure lying asleep on one of the motel room beds. He took a sip of his own coffee and shifted against the wall so Rick had more space.

“What do you suppose we do with him?” Rick asked quietly. His morning voice made the words crack a little. Sevan glanced at Rick’s mussed reddish-brown hair, then briefly down his shirtless torso. “Ain’t nothin’ gonna change now that I know,” Rick had promised that very turbulent night six months ago when Sevan finally came out to him. Then, immediately after: “And before you have to ask, no, I won’t tell your folks. In fact, I won’t tell anyone.” He had paused for a long time. “Does Lacey know?”

“Maybe we should just leave him there,” Sevan murmured.

“Seriously?” Rick shrugged. “After he tried to hurt himself like that?”

“We have work tomorrow,” Sevan muttered. “Drive is like sixteen hours.”

Rick took a sip of his coffee. “We should get someone he knows up here.”

“So you want to wake him up?”

Rick was silent for a long moment. “That’d hurt a bit. Looks like he’s gettin’ a good sleep.”

“We could also just call the police,” Sevan whispered. “Like we probably should’ve last night.”

“Nah.” Rick grimaced.

“If he needs help—”

“Man, you told me you hate cops.” Their eyes met for a moment. Rick shrugged again. “It don’t sit right with me. I swear, when Lacey was institutionalized, those quacks just made her worse off.” He abruptly pushed off the wall and set his coffee aside. Rick approached the sleeping figure on the bed, then lifted the phone off the nightstand beside him. He tapped on the screen a few times, then cautiously slid the stranger’s blanket back a little.

Sevan grimaced and glanced away. But then he was looking back, watching as Rick pressed the phone screen to the sleeping stranger’s thumb tip.

“Ha,” Rick grunted. He straightened. Then he was pacing back over to Sevan, the stranger’s phone in his hand.

“What are you doing?” Sevan asked skeptically.

Rick grinned. “Gonna call someone in his contacts. Don’t think Supernova will mind too much under the circumstances.”

Supernova. Sevan glanced at the exploding star tattoo on the stranger’s neck.

“Well, what do you make of that? ” Rick whispered. He turned the phone to face Sevan.

The Contacts app was open on the screen. But there was nothing listed on it. Not a single saved number.

Sevan sipped his coffee. His eyes tracked back to the stranger sleeping on the bed. “He wiped it, I guess.”

Rick turned the phone back to face himself and swiped across the screen a few times. A moment later, he started shaking his head. “He still got browser history on here, though. ‘Miami bars.’ ‘Buses Tallahassee to Miami.’ ‘Grocery store near me.’ ‘Is lace—’” He broke off so suddenly, Sevan glanced at him.

It was a slow change: the color draining out of Rick’s face. His jaw loosened, then simply dropped. “What the…What the actual…” His voice drained away. “Sevs.” He put the screen in front of Sevan again, this time displaying a search history.

Rick’s thick forefinger indicated one in the list of searches: “Is Lacey Kang missing.”

Sevan’s lips parted, paralyzed for several seconds. He took the phone from Rick as if to get a better look at what he could already clearly see. “Could he…Could he have heard us talking?”

“What? No way!” Rick breathed. His hands pressed into his pockets, and he paced away, glanced heavily at the stranger on the bed, then turned back to Sevan. “No way, with that last name? Shit, was he the one we came out here to meet?” A harsh whisper.

Sevan glanced stiffly at the sleeping stranger. “He didn’t approach us. He wouldn’t…Didn’t…I mean, that’s too coincidental, isn’t it?” He looked down at the phone in his hand, then silently touched the home button.

“I have no idea! ” Rick’s hands shot out in exasperation. “Why else would he have my wife’s name in his search history? Lacey isn’t famous! I doubt anything even came up when he searched that—cops wouldn’t even file a missing person’s report for her! Not to mention, her last name ain’t ‘Kang’ no more—hasn’t been for—”

“But your Instagram post mentioned her current and both past names,” Sevan whispered. Instagram. It was the only app on this phone that didn’t look pre-installed. Sevan touched it, then watched almost blindly as an Instagram account loaded. An account he had seen before, many times. No posts, no followers, no accounts followed—exactly as it had been when Rick received the anonymous tip from it, asking to meet in Miami.

“I did that in case she was goin’ by one of her maiden names,” Rick responded tensely. He started pacing again.

Direct messages. Sevan tapped on the icon. Only one conversation came up, and it was with @RickTheCutts.

“Now, I got an itch to wake him,” Rick breathed, and he sounded like he was close to seething.

“Get some breakfast.” Sevan pressed the stranger’s phone blindly back into Rick’s hands, his eyes pinned on the sleeping figure on the bed. “Get us some breakfast, and when you get back, let’s wake him and see what he knows. If he knows anything. Okay?”

Rick looked like he was on the verge of exploding. His face had gone an exasperated cherry color. Breathing like he was exuding fumes, he walked over to the bed he and Sevan had split the night before and swiped a T-shirt off the edge of it. He put it on, then took his wallet and phone from the nightstand.

“Be back soon,” he told Sevan gravely before exiting the motel room.

And it was with the not-so-quiet slam of the door behind Rick that Supernova flinched awake.

For several seconds, he lay there motionless, staring straight in front of him at the blank wall, like he was trying to remember where he was. Then, slowly, he turned over onto his back and looked up at the ceiling.

“Hey,” Sevan greeted. His hands started shaking, and he gripped his coffee mug tighter.

Supernova flinched at the sound of his voice, then abruptly sat upright. He looked dizzy for a moment—several seconds—before his brown eyes met Sevan. A whole spectrum of emotions flashed across his attractive face in swift succession.

Sevan felt a confused knot form in the pit of his stomach. This man was so impossibly attractive. He didn’t fit. And if he really knew something about Lacey—

“Where am I?” The question was quiet, nervous. He had a youthful voice that was well controlled considering how he must actually feel if he really didn’t remember coming to this motel room the night before.

“White Palm Inn,” Sevan responded in a forced voice. “South Miami, about thirty minutes outside downtown.”

“And you are…?” One of the shorter strands in his layered haircut slid across half his face, but Supernova seemed too petrified to brush it aside.

“Sevan,” Sevan responded.

“Did we fuck?”

Sevan’s brow flinched. A joke. That was a joke.

It didn’t sound like one. “No. You—Do you remember what happened last night?”

Supernova raised his hand to his forehead, then slowly combed his hair back with parted fingers. His hand dropped from his hair. “Um.” He frowned at the floor.

“You almost took a dive off the top of an eight-floor parking garage,” Sevan filled him in stiffly. “My friend, Rick, and I saved your life last night.”

Unexpectedly, Supernova’s face pressed with a small, uncertain smile. That expression was gorgeous on him. His pretty mouth, his almond-shaped eyes. “Did we fuck” like someone like him—wildly attractive and equally eccentric—might randomly become entangled with a basic, edge-of-poverty, blue-collar worker like Sevan.

“That never happened.” A small scoff escaped Supernova’s throat.

And still, Sevan was motionless, wordless.

“What, you’re suggesting I jumped?” Those brown eyes lifted again to Sevan’s face.

Sevan’s lips pressed. “Guess it’s a good thing we caught you, then.”

Silence.

Sevan shifted a little against the wall. “Do you know where Lacey Kang is?”

Every fiber in Supernova’s body froze in the same instant. His brown eyes lifted, blank and expressionless, to Sevan’s face.

“You’re the one who sent Rick that Instagram message. You said you know where she is. So, where is she?”

Supernova broke eye contact. He glanced at the nightstand. Shifted on the mattress. “Where’s my phone?” Quiet, a whisper.

“Rick has it. He’s getting us breakfast,” Sevan responded.

“Fine.” Supernova stuck his feet out from under the blanket and dropped them to the floor. He stood up. “Fine, he can keep it.” He walked around the bed like he was searching for something else he owned, then spotted his ankle boots by the door and started toward them.

“Sure about that?” Sevan asked, quickly setting aside his coffee cup. “It looked like an expensive phone.”

Supernova paused, mid lacing up one ankle boot. “Merry Christmas to Rick,” he murmured.

Sevan took several swift steps toward him. “You told us to come down here. We drove sixteen hours for this. Where the hell is she?”

Supernova’s brown eyes tracked up at Sevan before he abandoned the laces on his left boot and abruptly pulled on the right. “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

Before Supernova could answer, loud knocking erupted on the door. Supernova startled away from the door so fast, he tripped on his loose laces and fell. Sevan moved to catch him, but Supernova had already staggered back to his feet, and like he couldn’t get away fast enough, he ran to the window. There, he hesitated, one hand planted to the windowsill, trembling with adrenaline, to look back at Sevan. “Who is that?” he breathed.

“I don’t know, it’s probably—” Sevan began. But his voice drained away with the realization that Rick had a keycard.

The heavy knocking came again, and Supernova flinched a second time. His hands moved suddenly to the latches above the lower windowpane, and he opened them. Seconds later, he was sliding the window open.

Sevan darted across the room in an instant, catching the neckline of Supernova’s shirt before he could attempt to break through the screen on the other side of the glass.

“The hell are you doing? ” Sevan gasped, pulling Supernova forcefully away from the window. “What the hell is it with you and trying to catch a broken neck every chance you get?” He glanced out at the third-floor view of the parking lot below before abruptly slamming the window shut. He dragged Supernova a safe five feet away from the window before he finally turned and looked down at him.

Petrified. There was fear thrumming through every inch of Supernova’s body. He was trembling, pale, skin turning clammy.

Is he on a drug comedown? Sevan wondered—before the thunderous knocking came again, still louder.

This time, it was accompanied by a voice: “Avis, we know you’re in there. Just come out. Don’t try anything.”

Sevan’s eyes met the terrified brown ones staring up at him. “Are you Avis?” Sevan whispered.

Supernova’s lips parted with weak, frightened surprise. “You didn’t know that?”

Goddamn, this fool is running from the police, it finally clicked in Sevan’s head. Yes, he should’ve called the police the night before. It would’ve saved about half an hour of deliberation this morning, a truckload of potential liability surrounding his own probation, and all of last night awkwardly trying to share a bed with Rick—Rick, who was one of only two people in the world who knew Sevan was gay.

“How the hell do you know Lacey?” Sevan breathed. “Where did you see her? Where is she?”

Supernova pulled slowly away from Sevan’s grip. He had a look on his face like he was about to explain. And then he unexpectedly stepped backward. His back hit the door. Eyes pinned on Sevan, his hand dropped to the lock latch, and he turned it, then opened the door.

Supernova stepped backward into the group of uniformed men standing on the other side. His eyes were still on Sevan, even when one of the uniformed men took his shoulders and started to turn him away from the doorway. Bullet proof vests, black clothing, guns. They were police officers, Sevan was still convinced.

“Fuck you,” Sevan breathed right before Supernova broke eye contact. One of the men behind that riveting stranger put his arm out like a barrier between Supernova and any escape. And then they were starting away.

They were police officers, Sevan was still convinced as he watched the uniformed men lead Supernova away.