Adrien English Mysteries: A Dangerous Thing & Fatal Shadows by Missy J Cat Page A

currently live alone. Your former roommate, Mel Davis, has since moved to Berkeley where he teaches film studies.”
    Clark Kent had certainly done his homework on me -- and I didn’t care for it. “Am I right or am I right?”
    I gave him a perfunctory smile. “I’m impressed.”
    He regarded me. “Actually, you’re pissed. Why?” He seemed hurt. “I’ve told you I’m not doing the story. This is off the record. Just you and me.”
    I finished my drink. Bruce beckoned imperiously to the waitress. The minute she was out of earshot he said quietly, “I don’t want to do or say anything to bitch this up.”
    I nearly said, “Bitch what up?” but he seemed genuine. I shrugged. “Okay.”
    After a moment his gaze fell. He said awkwardly, “Am I coming on too strong? I feel like there’s kind of a connection between us. I felt it that first day. At the funeral. Is it just me?”
    I opened my mouth, couldn’t think of anything intelligent and, for once, closed it.
    Bruce chinked the ice in his empty glass. “It’s been long time since I felt this way.”
    “I’m flattered.” Mostly. Also vaguely alarmed. It had been a long time for me too. Mel hied off to his ivory tower five years ago. Hell, I hadn’t had a date in eight months.
    “But --?”
    “No buts.”
    He laughed. After a second it clicked and I laughed too.
    “Not on the first date anyway,” agreed Bruce.

    * * * * *
When I meet someone I always want to know who and what they read. A writer’s natural curiosity. Bruce said he read strictly nonfiction. Mostly biography. Right now he was reading Auden in Love, which he offered to loan me when he finished.
    54
    Josh Lanyon

    Can this marriage be saved? I read mysteries. For one thing, it’s my job. For another, it’s what I like to read. One of my favorite crime writers is Leslie Ford. Ford was just one of the pen names of Zenith Jones Brown, an American who wrote prolifically from the ’30s through the ’50s. Her Grace Latham series is one of my never fail “comfort reads.”
    For some reason the fact that my favorite mystery writer should be a heterosexual woman irritated the shit out of Rob.
    Not just a heterosexual woman, Adrien. A white, rich, Republican heterosexual woman.
    Republican? Where do you get that?
    You know what I mean.
    No, I didn’t a lot of the time.
    Rob’s own favorite mystery writer was Michael Nava. But any gay writer would do.
    Maybe he read my attitude as disloyal. Maybe having spent years of playing Happy Families, of pretending his square peg was comfortable in a round hole, Robert just didn’t have any patience left. He was militantly gay: We are at war, Adrien. We are under siege.
    I was thinking about it that night as I lay in bed skimming Ford’s Date with Death. I looked across to the empty half of the bed and sighed. I laid the paperback aside -- carefully, because the browned pages were fragile -- and folded my arms behind my head, thinking again about Robert.
    When I told Chan and Riordan and Claude and everybody else that Robert and I were never lovers it hadn’t exactly been the truth. It hadn’t exactly been a lie either. You couldn’t call the panting, fumbling first sexual explorations of adolescence a love affair. But whatever you called it, Robert and I shared a lot of history, and the fact that we had matured into adults who couldn’t understand each other didn’t change that.
    Robert believed no one could ever really know anyone else.
    Come off it, Rob. Doesn’t that depend on the person?
    No. Because people don’t see you. They see their perception of you. They see what they want to see.
    Another cosmic rift between us. But maybe Robert did have more experience there than I. If Tara had really never suspected ...?
    I considered what I knew of Tara. Not much. She had simply been an ever-present accessory of the teenage Rob. Like his Datsun B210. Or his fake ID. Always in the background, like in the yearbook photo. Thinking back, I was